Blind Date

Sometimes, no matter how much you love and respect your relatives, you should just say, "Are you crazy?" and run like the wind.

Instead, I had said Okay. As a reward, I was now lying someplace dark as pitch, in funny-smelling dirt, on Halloween, with a guy who obviously had excruciatingly bad taste in friends. My head felt like a small elephant was sitting on it. My hands, for some reason that I couldn't figure out, were completely non-functional.

"Where are we?"

I heard small sounds that I hoped were those of my date stirring around near me - the leather jacket I had admired earlier sliding against wood, possibly? - and not of some creeping lower life form.

"Best guess?" He spoke softly. More sliding sounds. A masculine grunt. "On the back of Steven Pico's estate in Paradise Valley."

"Steven... Pico."

I sounded like a stupid idiot because I felt like a stupid idiot. I had been walking with my blind date through the Arizona Center after the Suns game (Suns won), trying to decide whether to get yuppie pizza or upscale barbecue, when something approximately the size of a '57 Buick had hit me in the side of the head. The sidewalk, I think. I still had the vague memory of some kind of ruckus taking place above and around me before the lights went out. That made sense. My blind date was six-foot-five if he was an inch, and had the kind of arms often associated with tattoos and cigarettes in a rolled-up tee-shirt sleeve. It would probably have taken something more the size of a Mack truck to make him cooperative.

"My head," I said comprehensively. Someone was jabbing it with an ice pick, or possibly a sharpened telephone pole.

For a moment the darkness was completely silent. Then my date said, "I'm sorry. I should have seen this coming. It's possible I could have prevented it."

"How?"

"Are you hurt anywhere else?"

The noises and the rather breathy quality of his voice made me think he was very busy. He had not answered my question. I decided not to answer his. Fair was fair.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying...." Some small thing fell over in the darkness with a little chink. "To get loose." Silence hovered as the obvious occurred to him. "You are tied up, too, aren't you?"

So that's why my hands hadn't been cooperating. "No. I just like lying with my head wedged under a shelf, or whatever this is, and my knees jammed up against something with a little wheel on it - a lawnmower, maybe? Yes, dad rat it, I am tied up! What is this place? It smells like - bug spray."

"It probably - is. It's a garden - shed at the back - of Pico's estate." He was busy again, his words coming in spurts with his efforts. "There's - herbicide, etcetera, in here."

"How do you know?"

"I poked around in here a couple of weeks ago. I recognize the smell."

Wait a minute.

"Could we back up and start over, because I'm extremely confused - and I don't think it's this headache that's causing it." I paused, giving him a chance to start on his own. He didn't.

"Who is Steven Pico?"

"Steven Pico is...." He stopped, and I'm not entirely sure it wasn't for dramatic effect. This tall, somewhat unknown quantity near me had been well behaved all evening, but there was something - the dark hair almost long enough for a pony tail, maybe, and the black motorcycle jacket and boots - that seemed a bit theatrical. Of course, he did ride a motorcycle, a not-small, not-inconspicuous, not-cheap one. My brother, Matthew, who knows about these things, calls it a "bitchin' Hawg."

"Steven Pico," he finally continued, "is a drug distributor. A major drug distributor. Of the Columbian variety."

For some stupid reason, I hadn't really been afraid until that moment. I suppose I thought it was some big Halloween prank, something cooked up by Matthew The Matchmaker. Up until that moment, my primary emotion had been a profound hankering to commit fratricide. At the words "drug distributer," it suddenly felt as if a couple of Civil War re-enactment groups were rehearsing inside my chest.

"A - drug distributor?"

"Yeh." He was panting a little. Something he was doing kept making a metallic bump.

"And you were here, at his house - assuming, of course, that that's where we are, at his house - recently."

"I was."

"And you were here - why? Never mind," I said immediately. "I don't need to know. What you do is your business. I don't want to know. What?

He'd said something, but I'd been too busy babbling. He repeated it, but very, very softly.

"I'm a cop."

"What?"

"You heard me," he said.

A cop. My brother had set me up on a blind date with a cop. I was locked in a shed behind a drug dealer's house with a freakin' cop.

"I'll. Kill. Him," I said succinctly.

"Sure you - want to say that - in front of a cop?" He was grinning obnoxiously. I could hear it.

"I'll kill Matthew for this. He knows how I feel about cops. It wasn't enough that I had to be engaged to one for a miserable year, but now I have to die with one in the line of duty? Not even my duty, but your duty!"

"You aren't going to die. Neither am I."

It sounded very nice, I have to admit - and it sounded just too darned easy.

"Wait a minute. You can't be a cop."

"Why?"

"The department wouldn't allow an officer to have long hair like yours. And, you don't work. You lie around the pool all day, looking-"

Like a bronze Greek god, was the appropriate completion of that sentence, but I managed to shut my mouth before that came shooting out of it. If I had lingered at my brother's kitchen window a time or two, admiring his view of the apartment-complex courtyard, and the reflection of sunlight dancing around the sparkling pool, so what?

There was a sudden ripping sound as if something like denim or canvas had suddenly given way.

"There," he said calmly.

"What? What 'there'?"

"My hands are free."

"Great!"

"Would you please shut up?"

"Why? It's like a tomb in here."

"Maybe you'd like it to be just that?"

I detest a smug man.

I lowered my voice. "I take it you think there's somebody close enough to hear us?"

"I don't think. I know."

"X-ray vision?"

"I also know why Matthew refers to you as 'my smart-mouthed sister.' There's a guard posted outside."

"And yet the question lingers - how do you know?"

"Just before you came to, I heard him sneeze."

A sudden flurry of activity from his neck of the woods was encouraging. Shortly, I felt his hands on my leg. They worked their way upward and one of them gave the hip pocket on my Wranglers a friendly pat. A lingering rub, actually.

His fingers began working at the knot at my wrists.

"You never answered me," he said, still speaking in what might have been, at any other time, a low and sexy voice. "Are you hurt anywhere else?"

"No. Ow! Make that Yes."

"Sorry. Stop wriggling."

"I'm trying to help!"

"Don't help."

My arms were so numb that I didn't even realize he'd untied my wrists and moved on. He felt all over me, then, looking for injuries, or maybe just enjoying himself. With a man, you can never tell. Then, he proceeded to slide one set of fingers under my belt and the other under my jacket collar, and yank me up into the air.

When someone flings me into unknown darkness, I generally squawk. I squawked. The next moment, I was circled by his arms and something was over my mouth. It was not his hand.

It was not a hard kiss. It did not last very long. He took his mouth away, turned his head, and I heard him spit.

"Well, thank you for that," I said bitterly.

He grinned again - I could hear it. "Sorry. Nothing personal. I got dirt in my mouth."

So my face had not exactly been in a refreshing herbal bath. Was that my fault? Sounding like a breathless 1940s B movie heroine, I gasped, "You - you - you kissed me. Isn't that very - unprofessional?"

"Probably." His hands began massaging one of my wooden arms, "I've been wanting to do it for weeks, though. Kiss you, I mean. I just thought, what the hell, I might never get a better chance."

My arms were beginning to prickle, getting that weird, detached tickling feeling that comes with returning circulation.

"But - but-" I never sounded more half-witted in my life. "But, we only met tonight."

"But - but-" he echoed, "I've seen you come and go at Matthew's apartment for months."

"Matthew. I really will kill him, now. How he could risk his own sister's life by setting me up with a cop who is in the middle of some ridiculous - drug - sting of some kind-"

"Will you keep your voice down?" He gave me a little shake. "If there's something going down tonight, it's nothing to do with my U.C. operation. I think this is personal. Pico's never- Let's just say he's never particularly been fond of me."

How reassuring.

"Anyway, I asked Matthew to set us up."

"Lovely. Now I have to kill you, too."

He gave a little gust of laughter. "I love your legs. Did I tell you that? All summer, I've been loving your long, beautiful legs."

Which, at the moment, felt like overcooked linguini.

"I love that little pink one-piece of yours. You know. The one with the black piping. I love the way it hugs your sweet little backside...."

He wasn't even pretending to rub my arms back to life anymore. He was just holding me in the darkness, his hands quiet on my back, his mouth nuzzling my ear.

"What I love the most," he breathed softly, "is the way Matthew laughs when you're at his place. You light him up."

Stunned, I was trying to decide whether to be flattered that he'd been paying attention or insulted by the fact that he'd been masquerading and spying on us all summer long, when there was a sharp sound from somewhere uncomfortably nearby. A deep thud-thud-crash. Wood splintered. Aggressive voices shouted over each other.

"Police! DEA! Executing a search warrant! On the floor! Down! Everybody on the floor!"

"What in the-" I managed to say before, even closer, I heard a male voice say, "Police! Put the weapon down! Put it down - now!" Something went ca-thunk against the side of the shed. "Okay - I've got him." A lot of male panting. Wheezing, anyway. Somebody needed more time in the gym. "Gimme your cuffs, will you?... You're under arrest for playing with drugs, my little friend. You have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say will be...."

Etcetera.

I think, if my blind date hadn't been holding me closely, I would have dropped in a heap on the floor from relief or fright, I'm not sure which. Weapon, I was thinking. There was a guy out there with a weapon. And it was personal.

Blind Date was murmuring in my ear.

"I'm staying under cover, you hear me? These guys won't know me."

"They're cops! Of course they'll know you!"

"No - I'm on special assignment out of El Paso and I'm not finished with my job, yet. Somebody in local law enforcement is dirty. That's why they brought in an outsider." He rubbed my hip pocket again. "How would you feel about living in El Paso? Plenty of sun there. Swimming pools. A natural environment for a pink one-piece and lovely legs."

"Oh, shut up. Seriously."

"I'm just your blind date and you don't know why in the world anyone would want to lock us up in this shed. Stick to that."

"Look, I really don't think-" I started to say.

"Good. Because, if you blow my cover," he breathed, "I swear I'll never kiss you again. And you will never again be able to ogle me by the pool."

"Ogle? Listen, mister, I don't ogle any-"

Knuckles rapped sharply on the door.

"Trick or treat!"

"Oh, that's funny," I said loudly. "Hey, could somebody get us out of here?"

"Keys?" somebody outside asked. "Any keys around? Has that guy over there got keys?" Then it sounded as if they were beating the padlock off with an anvil. The door swung open. Concentrated LED light shone in on us.

"Awwww, looky," said a prosaic masculine voice, "we got lovebirds! Hands behind your heads, lovebirds!"

A narcotics officer with a hell of a sense of humor.

"Remember," my blind date warned softly before trying to identify himself - sort of.

Shadows seemed to accumulate and peer at us from behind the flashlight. Badges and guns flashed reflected light. The guys in the Kevlar vests started making more demands - hands against the wall, spread your legs - cop things. I stole a look up at my blind date, actually able to see him for the first time in hours. He had dirt on his face, too, and a magnificent bruise on one handsome cheekbone. As I turned, something - I'm not saying what, but something - pinched my backside.

"So," I said, my cheek caressing the shed wall, one foot braced against a motorcycle boot, "where did you guys rent your cool Halloween costumes?"