The vibration in the pool was no longer subtle, and had again shifted in frequency: to the slower, more evocative beat known as “Theta”. Around the circle, legs were spreading open, nipples and erections were stiffening, membranes moistening, limbic systems reacting, anuses unclenching, breathing slowing, muscles moving in a rolling rhythm, third eyes blinking.

A sound could be heard, but only to those in the pool: an inner sound like a thin, piping whistle or piccolo. Tuan automatically classified it as an artifact, a “beat” created by wave amplitude interference of the deeper frequencies. Which was more or less his last coherent thought on the subject. The pulse dropped lower and their bodies started rising, abdominals fluttering, inner visions seeing a long tunnel with a watery, golden light at the end.

Copper, veteran of hundreds of acid orgies, took it in her proprioceptive stride, opening herself to the beginnings of white waves of orgasmic release. Her lips grew cold and trembled, seeming to whistle a simple air like that of a piper.

Xchab, a virgin emotionally if not technically, had no vocabulary of stimulus or response to refer to. As wavelets of energy lapped at her mind she retreated into the stolid non-here of an Indian, then to the unreasoned purity of childhood. Her body floated upward, her mind sank into a vortex. She felt good. She felt. She…………

Winston, another inveterate shocktrooper in the campaigns of sex and psychedelia, had long since hung a Gone Fishin’ sign on his brain and surrendered serenely to what was happening. Which, judged by the storms and tsunamis his mind/body had weathered previously, was shaping up to one hell of a blow. He felt his legs spreading wider, his feet brushed the toes of Xchab and Charity on either side.

The vibration was slowing even more, and nobody involved would have, at that point, described what they were experiencing as due to pulsing water pressure. It was inside them, around them, all over and about them. They were strings being strummed, chants being hummed.

Bannock was on alien shores, but nothing in him resisted it. His spread feet touched MeiMei’s, then Loris’ and he was profoundly conscious of being in the right place, among the right people, at the right time, of the right stuff. He wasn’t really aware of his body floating slowly up in the water, of the tip of his straining penis breaking the surface like a periscope seeking visions and orientation.

Beside him, MeiMei felt her left foot touch Bannock, and a second later her right foot contacting Tuan’s. But she really had nothing to do with any of that. She was a disembodied point of view ascending a molten staircase of golden light, her arms spread wide to embrace the source of that light, which seemed to radiate from all around her, from an invisible bird calling above her head. The bird’s song was as sweet as a gold flute. She no longer climbed, she drifted up like a bubble in a tall flute of champagne.

The beat of the night had slowed further, hovered at about one hertz. The frequency was fixed in each person in the tub, their hearts synchronized at sixty beats a minute, the blood in their arteries lub-dubbing in unison. Once a second: one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus, four. The inner circuitry of their brains was also firing as one, running subprograms that released treasured molecules into their brain fluid and blood. They vibrated like insistently plucked harps, shook like the columns of wind twelve-toned saxophones.

Ganzo was almost completely horizontal at this point, his dick poking out of the water like the other guys’, one of a ring of standing members moving to inner fluctuations of blood pressure. He could feel Curtsy and Xchab touching him, could feel the music of inner tides and currents, the neaping and seeping that made him. He was alone in the dark except for that black, compelling littoral music. Then a star shone above him. As he looked at it, it widened. A comet, a moon, a distant sun. He lay as limp as he had very laid on a beach recovering from a deep dive. And the sun rotated, sucking his gaze into it, pressing down on him in a rhythmic massage. As he stared into that single light, something happened in him, as abrupt and definite as the flick of a switch. Ganzo woke up.

Seagull had felt like a third wheel when he first slipped into the water between Copper and Aphra, a useless membrane between them. But as his feet touched theirs, and as his fingers clutched around their necks and he felt other twined fingers on his own, that changed. He felt as though he stood between them on a high platform, singing while they harmonized, cosmic backup singers stepping up to do a trio turn as the piping grew stronger and the vibration shook deeper down. It was a shell, like the Hollywood Bowl, or more like Red Rocks. And in the darkness in front of him, as he sang his cellular choir, little points of light were coming on. A dozen flames out there in the night, a hundred flares held overhead by an audience of everybody who’d ever lived, a million, million stars that claimed him as their own. His mouth came open and his teeth stopped chattering. He ran to the edge of the stage and dived into the light.

Copper spun at the center of the sun. Surrounded by fire, warmed like soft wax in its radiation, buffed to metallic glory in its scarlet light, ignited with the proximity of all she had ever sought, she gave herself to the fire that moved upon her. It exploded into her eyes and she burst into flame like a bird bursts into song, like a shell bursts into a hot white flower of final flame. She was burning now, smoke coming off her in twisting, Sanskrit patterns, Tibetan flames layering out of her darkening skin, as her pubic hair rose above the surface of the pool, her nipples shed water like an emerging helldiver…she burned up and was gone. Finally rid of that. All gone. All gone.

The piping sound grew faster, louder, more piercing. It was an icepick now, sixty hertz buzz drawn out into a white lance that ran them all through.

Townsend had fought against what he had no wherewithal or reason to fight off. And seen his inhibitions blown to smithereens, his defenses flattened. He was taken and squeezed flat, kneaded like a tube of toothpaste, forced into a constricted passage of darkness. He was massaged through that black tunnel for centuries, knowing no time or space but the eternal, prodding pressure toward something he couldn’t imagine or anticipate. He felt himself longing to be there, to emerge from this bowl of blackness into something open and light. And finally a time came when he could see it, somewhere in the distance or future. He squirmed toward it in vain, but was pumped on towards that light by the constrictions around him. He stop fighting to be born and let himself flow out into the world. He slipped into blinding light, light that burned him clean and dry, polished him like ivory. He looked up at the lights above and realized he was held by hands. And the hands lifted him upwards and the light became a face. This was where he came from, he realized in exultation. This is my source! And he felt the love of it. It was not familiar to him, so it came over him like twilight, but it was The Love. He loved his parents for giving him life, he loved the children to whom he would some day return it. He loved the world for coming into existence, and for going back to nothing. For the first time since he was born, Townsend felt the motes of rock-deep, unbound, star-high love. His tears blew back out of his eyes, fell the ground and sprang up as small beings of light.

Aphra, head lolling back on Townsend and Seagull’s laced hands, legs spread open to receive the subtle but insistence pulse in the water, thought she saw something forming in the steam cloud the hot water generated in the moist night air above it. There was a swirling in the mist, then a bunching and compounding, then it was as though a shaft of mist–or light, or impulse or hallucination, or something–flared up into the sky; a column of quivering vapor that lanced as far up as she could see. Damn, she thought before she moved way past thoughts, ET calling home for real. Hope he isn’t on roaming rates. Then her eyes dropped shut under the onslaught of internal sensation, the rhythm in the water deepening and spreading up through her body, down through her nervous system, out through her mind. Her head flopped back into cradling, shuddering hands, her long flat stomach muscles fluttered, then convulsed into a running throb. Her head filled with colors, with boomings, with sparkles and spangles and the wide pounding of oblivion.

Loris stood on top of a hill, looking up the Milky Way, which extended from the center of her eye to the end of the universe. She raised her hand towards the glow of it and her hair was blown back by an almond-scented breeze. The rising wind plucked the pure white cotton robes off her, blew them away behind her. The wind was caused by her own movement: she moved steadily up the causeway of stardust, led by the light of the center of All. The rising wind blew off her hair, then teased away her skin, which rippled back and away from her. The rest of her flesh was also blown away by the rising sirocco of her own acceleration. She was lying horizontal now, flying like a harpoon into the center of the center of the center. Her bones turned to dust, more dross to curl way into her wake. She elongated as her velocity approached that of light, she was expanding, becoming the only object in the universe, streaking forward pulling an infinite cone of change towards the point of her death and birth. She was beam, a ray just one point wide and infinite points long, motion no longer meaningful. As she pierced the eye of the cosmos… she bloomed.

All six men in the pool ejaculated at once, a tiny Vegas fountain in the glowing water. All six women orgasmed as they had never before, blasted into that sweet death as though lashed onto big rockets. They all shook and spasmed, arching up out of the water as though it had been electrified.

Then they went limp and subsided, slowing sinking back down, their feet touching the bottom, their butts drifting down onto the benches. But they continued to embrace each other, their eyes still closed. Their lips parted. Their throats loosened. In some cases, their balls descended.

From the window of his bedroom in the Lodge’s highest room, Francis Ford Coppola looked down at his jungle hot pool. It looked like a carnation, like a fractal star, one of those Esther Williams musical numbers. Twelve people he didn’t know from Adam, naked and arranged around the pool with their legs forming a Moravian star in the center. They seemed to be doing some sort of dance or exercise, kind of throbbing. He opened the mosquito screen for a better view through the dome of glowing mist over the pool… just in time to see it spring upward as though somebody had turned on one of those opening night searchlights under the pool. The shaft of golden light, the same diameter as the pool, leaped up, shone into the night sky, didn’t diminish as it shined out of sight, had no end.

Then it went out and the whole pool plunged into darkness. Great, Coppola thought. Now they’ll have to drain the pool to change the bulb.

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Francis Coppola emerged slowly from the hot pool and stood for a moment savoring the jungly scent of the night and the sounds of the waterfall into the pool. He was the last one out, the others slipping away to let him enjoy his soak.mayancalendargirls.com He didn’t understand why these guys would get into hot water to relax, then get all stressed-out jabbering about projects and budgets and agents and residuals. Especially those two latecomers. God, they were insane: talking about directing a film by séance if he got their drift. What I need up here, he suddenly realized, is a steam room.

Definitely. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? That was an offer to relax nobody could refuse. There was something really East Coast and borough about steam. Guys with Yawk accents sitting around naked in the mist, walking around in rough Turkish towels. This whole hot tub thing was so California by comparison.

He rubbed down with a soft, fluffy towel and shook drops from his beard into the hot water. Thinking, kind of like me, maybe? Gone California? Or have I just disappeared into some global stratosphere, a tower in The Cloud?

Chuckling at himself, he turned to head to bed and almost walked into a half dozen really beautiful young women, also wearing only towels or shifts. His eyebrows raised as he smiled at them appreciatively and waved them towards the pool.

“Aqua termal,” he said in his best Corleone rasp. “Prego.”

The girls laughed. All except the stone-faced little Maya girl, who was starting to fascinate him. What a face she had, really. He couldn’t help framing her whenever he saw her.

“Mr. Coppola,” the tall brunette said, “We really appreciate your hospitality here. It’s such a beautiful, serene place.”

“You’re fairly beautiful and serene yourself, my dear,” he told her. “You do massage, I understand?”

“I do. And I’d be honored to give you one any time you like.”

“I’ll take you up on that. Maybe tomorrow after breakfast.”

“Any time. I just love your work. I saw Goodfellas six times.”

He almost laughed his towel off. “Good one. Thanks for the laugh. You ladies are taking a really late soak tonight.”

“We need to cleanse her skull,” Copper offered as she shed her towel and slipped into the water.

He looked at Loris’ hair a little differently, hoping it wasn’t infested. “Please don’t put any soap in the water.”

Loris smiled, held up the towel-wrapped object she’d been carrying, and let the towel slide away from oXo, grinning at the director with eyes aflare from the mosquito torches on the deck. “He doesn’t need soap, just running water,” she said. “And love.”

He fought the impulse to cross himself. “Okaaaay.”

He backed away towards the lodge. As he walked off he heard the girls all giggling, a sound as bright and clean as windchimes. But he didn’t even consider going back to bask in their beauty and youth. There were plenty of attractive young people who weren’t nuts. Turning, he saw them all shedding their wraps and slipping into the hot water like sirens of many colors. He called back, “Just don’t leave a ring.”

Xchab was the last into the pool, even with the other girls teasing her and beckoning her in. She looked balefully at Aphra, timidly at Copper and Curtsy. But when MeiMei smiled and waved her in, she stepped down to the stone bench that ran around the perimeter of the pool, standing there thigh-deep in her cotton huipil, frozen. Finally Loris walked the length of the pool and looked solemnly into her eyes, holding that spooky glass skull between her breasts. Slowly, gently, she reached up and rolled one shoulder strap down the Mayan girl’s shoulder, then the other. Xchab didn’t try to stop her shift from sliding down into the water and when Loris held up her free hand, she took it, stepped out of the floating garment, and lowered into the water. Loris beamed at her, turned and moved towards the other end of the pool.

She waded back across the pool to the waterfall that animated its narrow end, the other girls watching as she marched towards it holding oXo in front of her like a sacrament. She extended her hands and the glassy skull slipped under the little cascade, water flowing around the smooth contours rather than splashing off. She stood motionless, head bent forward and eyes closed, as oXo luxuriated in the wash of moving water.

Aphra was playing a little submarine footsy with Copper, and wouldn’t have minded sitting within hands-on range of the redhead, who it turned out contained a sexuality as wild and fiery as her own. But for whatever reason, the girls were all sitting a little too distant to touch, evenly spaced around the pool, heads leaning on the rim, watching Loris and oXo. So Aphra bided her time, and watched with them.

Curtsy luxuriated in the hot water, which almost seemed to be rhythmically palpitating her body. She played with the underwater sealed-beam floodlight beside her, trying to make shadow puppets in the water, her hands starting to move in time with the beat she felt in the water. The whole pool started to flicker in a slow, sure rhythm. She spread her thighs, then pushed them together. Her nipples tingled. She closed her eyes and for some reason had an image of Puch Pop, standing on top of a pyramid at Cobá, just looking at her.

MeiMei was feeling the same insinuation in the water and “decided” to just lay back and like it. It figured that wealthy directors would have devices like this in their hot tubs. She wriggled her hips around on the smooth tier, watching Loris’ careful laving of oXo, but caught movement from the corner of her eye and looked back towards the buildings. And saw Tuan and Winston strolling down the path, in quiet but intense conversation. She was glad to see OB, but wondered if he was crashing one of those “all-girl moments.” Then she saw Townsend and Bannock behind them, also talking with interest. And behind them, that “Seagull” character chattering to Ganzo, who regarded him with a serious gaze. Tuan saw her and smiled and she giggled, “Company, girls.”

Aphra opened her eyes and saw a group of males arriving, ringing the far side of the pool. They stood watching the women for a moment, probably impressed by the general tableau. Breaking the calm, she said, “Damn. There go the neighborhood.”

Everybody but Xchab laughed: she was eyeing the men a little nervously. And suddenly the big indio that had come up with the blonde just stepped in the water right beside her, took off his wet towel, and tossed it back on the deck. Curtsy, on Ganzo’s other side, smiled at him and reached out to stroke his hair as he settled down between them. Faced with the typical hot tub dilemma of what to do with his hands, he chose the usual approach and spread his arms along the rim of the pool. Curtsy leaned her head into his left hand, smiling happily. His other hand brushed the back of Xchab’s torrent of black hair but she didn’t shy away, for some reason. She looked sideways at him and he was looking back at her, his expression as blank and noble as a dog’s. One thing she realized at that moment: whatever else there was about Ganzo, she knew she would never have to fear him. She sunk a little deeper in the water, also feeling the beguiling pulse in the water and reluctantly starting to respond. A few minutes later she put her own arms on the pool rim, her left hand slipping behind Ganzo’s head, the other laying on the nape of Winston, whose other hand was buried in Copper’s cuprous curls.

Curtsy hadn’t been the only mermaid getting an eyeful as Townsend and Bannock, standing side by side, peeled off their trunks and eased towards the pool. Couple of major swinging dudes, was the way she sized things up. Classic match-up: showy class versus brute power. It was hard not to linger on the sheer beauty of the slide of Town’s abs and pecs, but the scars and welts made a tour of the big lug’s torso rather interesting as well. She wondered what they’d look like out swimming. She watched Townsend move around and slip in beside Aphra, and the look she gave him. Something going on there, for sure. Didn’t think that muff-mistress swung that way. He also laid his arms along the rim as he unwound and Aphra gave him a “Oh, please, whitebread” look, but didn’t move away from his hand on her shoulder.

Bannock moved in between MeiMei and Loris, who smiled at him as she continued facilitating oXo’s brain scrub. Mei felt his hand brush her left shoulder at the same time that Tuan slithered into the water like an otter, ducked his head, then shook it off before settling beside her and placing his left hand under her hair to caress the down on her slim neck. She extended her arm to give him a friendly Dutch rub, before resting it on his hard deltoid. His right hand moved behind Curtsy, who reached behind his neck to twine her fingers with MeiMei’s.

Loris, who had been standing a few inches from oXo as she held him under the waterfall, had been exposed more heavily to the pulse that the skull was emanating. She moved slowly and dreamily as she turned around to face the circle of faces ringing the pool. Her nipples were tight, her aureoles puffy, her thighs tender, her face muscles slack and creamy. She moved to the center of the pool and bent forward to gently place oXo on the bottom. For a moment she appeared to everyone else as a sleek form on the surface, an hourglass of buttocks, fluted back and wide shoulders riding above the water like an island.

She straightened up and looked around, noticing the slackening and loosening going on around her. The Love, she thought, is the ultimate massage. Then she had another thought, which she knew she should share. “We are about to hear something,” she said. “It’s called the First Tone. There will be four Tones before this is over.”

As she backed away from oXo, towards her place by Bannock, MeiMei asked, in a voice so relaxed she could barely articulate, “Tones? Like the Calendar? What does that mean?”

Loris smiled as she moved away from oXo, to the edge of the pool. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Nobody else asked why she had done what she did or said what she said, nobody spoke. Nobody even really thought. oXo had begun to “broadcast” his pulse of live, whole, movement stronger and at a slightly lower frequency. A frequency that those who give names to such things call “Alpha”. She moved back to the edge and sat down. Immediately Bannock cupped the base of her skull. He extended the thumb and finger of his huge hand to rub behind her ears, like you’d do to a big dog. She closed her eyes in pleasure. Nobody ever thinks that massage people like to be rubbed, too. But this guy did.

She put her hand behind his head, as well, idly ruffling his short, wiry crop. She extended her other hand behind Townsend, then removed it to lift his hand behind her own head, then replaced it at the base of his skull. All twelve people were now touching, a dozen heads woven together by intertwined arms and hands. And in the water, an intimate pulsation was throbbing stronger and deeper, a righteous somatic dub that synchronized twelve heartbeats into a single chorus.

Kenny and Gareth discovered that somebody had walked off with their all-important director and spiritual leader and immediately spun into frantic, mostly ineffective motion. They blasted around the dark lodge, pushed into empty rooms–even Bannock and Loris’ room, which would have scared them green to intrude on in other circumstances. They burst out onto the side deck and looked down at the pool, where they could make out people lounging around in a gold mist suffusing the air above the water. They tore along the porch until they hit the stairs, then stopped as if they’d run into an invisible fence. Kenny was at the point of tears as he wailed, “It has to be down there. That bitch took it down there to play with in the fucking water.”

“I guess,” Gareth said, feeling extremely strange and out of place.

“Well, why don’t we just march our perfect butts down there and seize it?” Kenny demanded.

“Nah,” Gareth demurred. “You go ahead if you feel like it.”

Kenny stared at the mist, which seemed to be vibrating in some way, his mouth working. “Well,” he finally said, “As long as they bring it back.”

“It’s not like they can go anywhere,” Gareth hastily added. He turned back and headed for bed. After a few tortured seconds staring down at the pool with fists clenched, Kenny followed.

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It wasn’t easy sorting it out, and Aphra was about to give up when one of those thunderbolts of luck hit. Most people in espionage had an almost superstitious belief that all success came from hard work, training and, well… superior intelligence. But she’d always seen a heavy streak of crap-shoot in it all and felt like you won most if you were ready to go with the roll. Which was good, because she was getting absolutely nowhere trying to get into the blonde’s scrambled head.

“So you saw the jade thing?”

“Yeah, yeah. And all these heads and gold and coralcaturas…”

And off she went, babbling to her beach hunk about coral. Aphra shook her head and knocked back some more brandy. She looked around the Paraiso and scowled. It was going to be a long night, and it looked like it would be right here in this beachbum dive. Where the seashell-wailing chick had split and now their idea of fun was some wispy hippy playing drums and this retro-hip/goth/vamp redhead spinning fireballs around. In a place with a thatch roof. Fairly foxy redhead, though.

She tried once again to corral Curtsy’s exploded attention. “Did you see a skull on the jade?”

“Yeah. How’d you know? MeiMei took pictures…” Then she plummeted off the re-recognition buzz into another weeping fit. “MeiMei. They… those fuckers! They…”

“When did you last see MeiMei?” Two steps forward, one step back.

“They stripped us, then they dragged her off. The guy, the yacht guy… Oh, man is he an asshole. He was going to rape us!” She touched her head and went ballistic over another memory fragment. “He shot me! He must have thrown me in the water. Those assholes!”

She was practically screaming at that point, and her boyfriend didn’t try to calm her down, just watched her like she was a circus act. Aphra tried to think of how to play her, then she veered off again, California smile breaking out through the tears. “But they came for me! They saved my life. It was so beautiful.”

“Not the same ‘they’ as the assholes who shot you?”

“Of course not!” The very idea offended her. She smiled and simpered like a middle-schooler in love. “The guys. My guys came and got me and brought me home. Oh, wait, I fucked that up, though.”

“Your guys?” Aphra didn’t mind admitting to being totally lost at this point and was starting to wonder if the head injuries Curtsy had apparently been piling up over the past week had done permanent damage. Hard to tell, though. How do blonde brain cells die? Alone.

“Yeah. Bongo and Bruto and Pinoccio and Caruso and Mayab. Well, Mayab isn’t a ‘guy’, really, but she’s cool and…”

God only knew what that rant was all about. What she had to show for this whole fuckup was that MeiMei had seen the skull, had gotten pictures, last seen in captivity by some guys who didn’t mind raping and shooting girls who took pictures of their skull collection. And she just couldn’t think of any further ways to pursue questioning without the blonde’s wackness getting contagious. She took another sip of brandy and went rigid when there was one of those sudden lulls in bar chatter and she heard somebody at the table behind her say something that snagged her attention like a number ten triple-snelled fishhook.

Kenny had done nothing but bitch ever since they came in the place–quelle surprise–and was starting to get on everybody’s nerves. “This hovel is deader than those ruins,” he whined loudly. “I thought you said the beach scene here was, you know, active.”

“Meaning, of course, cruisy,” Gareth replied. “Look it’s a cheap place to kill two days until the workshop starts. And there are some lovely women here, get a load of the table behind me.”

Kenny’s petulant gaze skittered past the knockout ebony/ivory pair and lit on Ganzo. “Not bad, I guess,” he pouted. “But he’s just…”

Loris, who’d been watching Copper’s fire-spinning with interest, turned to him and said, “We’re here, Kenny. Who could be more interesting than that?”

Kenny, confused, stopped to sort it out, and shot yet another covetous glance at Bannock, who had tuned him out. Xchab couldn’t even understand English and she was ready to slap him silly if he didn’t shut up.

“Okay, let’s talk about this trip to Jungleville,” he bitched to Gareth. “What are we really going to accomplish?”

“Maybe get greenlighted for a real feature, not another one of these dorkploitation reels.”

“But how? is what I’m asking.” His voice raised as the real source of his recent vapors came to the surface. “What we waltz in there with a stone skull and tell him it can talk to us? If it would really talk instead of all this stone innuendo, we could at least figure out where the bottom line is. Get a picture of the ending. Get a budget. Take out insurance.”

Which affected Aphra in the manner already mentioned. She turned slowly as if scoping out the scene and took a look. Two flitty-looking chipmunks in resort wear, very tasty-looking white girl in a white linen shift, DeNiro-looking cat coulda been the collection department for a loan shark, possibly yummy lil Injun gal, and a sixties burnout. Quite the crew, all right. And she remembered now that they’d come in with the little drummer boy and his tres lappable redhead fire-thrower.

She excused herself, walked past the washrooms that she wouldn’t have set foot in on a bet, and eased into the crushed shell lot where she’d parked. Didn’t take a rocket surgeon to spot the white passenger van with rental plates so she sashayed over, slipping one of her new tracers out of her purse. One-day Fed-Ex to Cancun, cost somebody bucks, delayed her a day to pick them up, but she didn’t see any way Hardley or the White House was going to have their numbers. She squatted quickly to click the sender under the fender of the van. As she walked back into the Paraiso, she did a quick check on her receiver. It lit up, tossed blips and digits around it’s touch screen, and basically told her, “Follow that car.” Don’t mean shit getting a wild break unless you’ve got it together to follow your shots.

Curtsy stood in the dark parking area fidgeting and chewing a fingernail. First they follow a yacht, now Aphra wants to follow a van. She’d been seeing Ganzo as provider and protector ever since she could remember. But now she could remember a whole lot more, and he suddenly seemed inadequate to the task. Aphra could swing about anything like magic. On the other hand, her last trick had played out pretty ugly.

Finally Aphra leaned over. pushed the door open and patted the seat. “Come on, girlfriend? Where else you got to go?”

Curtsy dithered a few seconds more then jerked the back door open, prodded Ganzo into the tiny back seat, and slid in after him. She looked at Aphra in the rearview mirror and said, “Okay, what the hell? Get us out of here.”

Aphra bobbed her head as she turned the ignition. “Oh, yowsuh, right away Miss Daisy.

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People who didn’t know who Ganzo was might have thought of him as a good foil for the cute blonde he’d been showing up with in the bars and cafés on the beach and the restaurants along the glorified highway strip that Tulum thought of as the town of Tulum. Striking, if odd, couple. The oddly vacant young artisan and his red hot jewelry model.

Those who knew of Ganzo didn’t know quite what to make of it. The first time the question came up in the bar at the Paraiso one wag said, “He probably found her washed up on a beach,” and got a mild round of laughter out of it.

The blonde was kind of drifty too, in her own way. Don’t try getting her life story, that’s for sure. Even the total sharks around the cabanas had quit hitting on her. She was like a million dollar house that hadn’t had the electricity connected yet.

Women found her congenial, though, and Ganzo charming enough in a closed-circuit sort of way. She was in Paraiso talking to this American girl with glasses and frizz, a studious geek type, looked like Velma from Scooby Doo. The blonde animated and perky as usual, like a high school cheerleader who spaced out graduation. Saying, “Hey, it wasn’t just me who couldn’t believe it: those mariachi guys last night about fell out of their sombreros when you started jamming with them like that.”

“I don’t think those guys even read music, frankly. They just learned the parts for each song: no clue about improvisation. Trumpets are pretty simple when you’re used to tooting tubas and sousaphones.”

“That is just so cool, Celia. I never even knew any of those girls who played in the band.”

Because you were out there shaking your pom-poms and booty and nailing all the cool guys while we band geeks got the chess club dorks, Celia was thinking. But this dumb blonde didn’t really seem like that. Nice, not a “Heather” or anything. “Those guys were here again, earlier. But they didn’t let me play with them again. Too bad, I had this sort of Souza meets Gershwin riff that would have fit right in on top of that Cielito Lindo number.”

“I wish I could do something like that. You’ve really got it going on.”

Celia was floored. Here was Scarlett Johanson’s stunt double calling her cool? Whoa! And now she’s pulling out that gym bag, probably got more of that darling jewelry her Rain Man boyfriend made. But wait, what the hell is that?

“I almost forgot. I brought this for you.”

“What is it? Oh wow, it’s a seashell on steroids!”

She laughed and brandished the big conch, eighteen inches long even with an inch of the tip sawn off and polished smooth by Ganzo. “Yep. It’s a caracol. Ganzo did the hole in the end there.”

Celia moved the conch around in her hands, but when she pointed the cut-off end at her mouth, it fell into place. She could hold it up with one hand and blow into it. “Unbelievable! He reamed out the embouchure there and polished it.”

“Yeah, you know. You put your lips on it.”

Which is what Celia did. The big shell was surprisingly easy to play, with an open chop and exponential expansion like a flugelhorn. She did a few exploratory notes, ran some quick riffs. The conch had a unique, mellow sound and was hilariously easy to play. She did a line of Brahms, a quick hook from Herb Alpert. Everybody in the place was looking at her. She stood up and nodded, headed into a luminous, soulful take on Night In Tunisia. Curtsy stared at her with her mouth half-open and eyes shining: Ganzo watched with what might have been a smile. She did American Patrol, a sort of medley from The Music Man and nobody seemed tired of it so she started screwing around.

The conch was a natural for a muted, post-bop cool so she went into a sort of Virtual Miles thing, then started stutter effects and tonguing. She put her hand into the huge, flaring bell of the horn and moved it around, experimenting. Pulled her clenched fingers in and out, messing with bent notes and falling tones. Did a wah-wah riff with her hand moving in and out at an increasing frequency.

The blonde was delighted, clapping her hands and laughing. Get a kick out of fisting, do you, Goldilocks? But Celia felt bad at the thought: this girl was a true fan, open and alive and buying every bit of it. She blew out her cheeks like Gillespie, went way blue.

Aphra had been solidly pissed off for over a week. She’d figured out that her bug was giving such intermittent pulses because it was moving so slowly it had lapsed into a totally lackadaisical refresh rate. So yeah, she was pissed. She just couldn’t figure out why those bitches were cruising so slow. Or where or why. She’d come to the conclusion that the boat was adrift. No power, maybe nobody really at the wheel. But who the fuck knew?

So she’d been moving down the coast in a truly stupid little rental Volkswagen called a Bora. More like Boring. Like it mattered when she couldn’t go anywhere. Get a reading, head down the weird multi-lane highway south of Cancun, drive off on some wretched little road to the ocean and look out there and see nothing. And nobody else had seen anything, either. She knew better than to be asking about any blondies or chinkies, but had managed to figure out nobody she was looking for had been through. Once, just south of Puerto Morelos–odd little dump with a great Chinese restaurant, of all things–she’d gotten a possible scan about a hundred yards out, middle of the fucking night. Maybe saw some sort of boat out there, just at the edge of the beam from this bizarro lighthouse, tilted over like the Leaning Tower of Pizza. Since then, nada.

She’d been around Playa Carmen and that whole tourist trap, Riviera-wannabe scene for almost three days. They were out there, but she couldn’t close. It was driving her out of her ever lovin’ skull.

And now Tulum. What a pit. All about Mayan ruins. Near as she could tell the new stuff they’d slapped up along the highway was just ruins that hadn’t gotten around to being totally ruined yet. On the road to ruins, so to speak.

And of course, some washed-out two-laner full of potholes and speedbumps in the middle of nowhere going down to the beach. Which didn’t seem to have any big powerboats sitting there with her little runaways waving welcome to her. Mostly had all these shacks full of European hippies running around naked and stoned to their eyeballs. Some of it not bad stuff, come to that. She saw two sets of tits there that looked pretty toothsome and she got the feeling that if they didn’t swing her way yet, they might be susceptible to the right swing vote.

Which would have been just copasetic if she hadn’t been too pissed off to get into it. It had been an hour since she caught a squeal on her little ElectroFink gadget and it sure as shit looked like those ‘ho’s were right here, right now. But she was stalking down a damn beach in the damn dark, in her bare damn feet, is what she was doing. Fuck it.

She’d decided she could use a drink or three, maybe see what kind of chickadees were in these little cabana bars along here when she heard this just other-world music. Coming out of little bunker over there with the cute candles in paper bags out front. Some unreal riffs, she was picking up. What was that axe, anyway?

And what’s the beat, there? Tropical bebop? Trop-bop? One minute sound like some Tibetan temple thing, next minute it’s like Freddy Hubbard trying to do Delta. She turned and walked up the beach to the Paraiso.

Huh, what it was, was some white chick with nerd glasses playing a conch shell. Figure that out. Nice, though. Defly diff. Crowd of euro-wonks getting into it, nerd girl doing a sort of reggae/calypso thing now. She shills seashells from the Seychelles.

Then she stops and takes a big corny bow and there’s some nice applause, Aphra putting her hands together, too. Gotta hand it to Four Eyes. And this blond groupie up front just jumping out of her well-shaped hide over it all, nice looking stuff. Wish she’d turn around.

Which she did. Holy fuckin’ shit on a stick!

Aphra practically ran across the room and faced the smiling blond. Who looked at her without a flicker of recognition. What kind of wack game is this? She leaned into her, scowled, “Hey homey, don’t you know me?”

Evidently not.

The blond was looking at her like some oblivious livestock of the cud-chewing food group. Slight smile, looking expectant. Aphra was about ready to slap this bitch, snap her out of it, call her play. Instead she slumped slightly, met the big blue eyes at their own level. Said, really loud, “Yo, Curtsy! You in there girl?”

Evidently not.

Fuck.

On an impulse, Aphra reached out and cupped one of those nice firm titties under the loose T-shirt, then stepped close and reached down to clench a tight buttock, long fingernail just barely like brushing the Promised Land, there. Aphra’s patented Full Nelson Mandala hold. Pushed her lips up to hers and started going all tonguey. There was a shocked hush in the room, then she got a bigger applause than the conch girl did.

She broke it off and rared back, looked into Curtsy’s face. “Bring anything back, girlfriend?”

“No, well, wait a minute…”

Aphra snorted through her flared nostrils. “Now I been called a lot of things, especially afterwards. But never forgettable. Meanwhile I coulda just sworn you and the little chinkette headed out of Isla on a boat I paid for and never saw again. Ring any bells? Wanna cut the shinola and play nice?”

She saw something pass inside the baby blues, a sort of flutter that got her thinking that whatever this was, it might not be an act. “Hey girl,” she said in a friendlier tone, “Give it up.”

She watched as Curtsy’s expression seemed to crumple, then fall away like loose stucco. Her eyes widened, then moistened, her lips started trembling. Suddenly she dashed herself into Aphra’s arms, shaking violently. She threw her arms around her neck and clung for dear life.

“What up, baby?” Aphra asked her softly, patting her shoulders in a sisterly way. Looking over the heaving shoulders she could see this decently cute Mayan guy staring at her. In a kind of impersonal way.

A quick spasm shot through Curtsy and she pushed away from Aphra and faced her, definitely all there and aware. And not one little bit happy about it. Her eyes filled and spilled and she started sobbing. “I killed those guys, Aphra! I shot ‘em and they’re dead.”

Aphra reached out for a soothing stroke on her upper arm. “It’s okay, honey. I’m sure they had it coming.” Whoever “they” were.

Curtsy’s sobs slowed down and lessened in volume. She held Aphra’s gaze, looking like a miserable little girl who totally knew her whole life is just ruined for the moment. Then it was like the sun came up behind the sky blue of her irises. Aphra had always noted (and coveted) the girl’s innocence and girlish enthusiasm, but at that moment she saw it go off the charts. It was Christmas and Birthday and First Prom in there. Curtsy beamed, wiping tears and laughing.

“But they came for me,” she almost yelled. “I knew they would.”

She grabbed Aphra’s upper arms in her powerful grip, practically jumping up and down. “They came, Aphra! They came and saved me.”

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