Love and Theft by Stan Parish

Author:Stan Parish [Stan Parish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571356393
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2020-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

The northbound side of Highway 307 looks like a three-lane parking lot. Newspaper vendors, window washers, and children selling bags of chicharrones wander the maze of idling cars, their bodies blurred and shimmering through heat waves and exhaust. A fat man in a “No Fear” shirt sprays water onto Alex’s windshield, but Alex waves him off. He’s edgy, irritated. Maricel does not like to be kept waiting.

Her Mediterranean-style mansion sits on three acres of secluded coastline, between a five-star resort and a rock formation that looks like an oil tanker run aground. Maricel and her husband were regulars at the resort’s restaurant and fell in love with the site while strolling down the beach one evening after dinner, trailed by bodyguards. The lot that Maricel envisioned was made up of beachfront owned by the resort and jungle held in trust by a national preserve. The resort’s VP of real estate laughed when Maricel asked whom she might speak to about purchasing the land. Her builders broke ground six months later.

Her husband never saw the house completed. Roberto Sandoval was a gregarious, impatient man who never left a restaurant without coffee, dessert, one last drink, and one more for the road. When he passed away at seventy-one, the tabloids joked that colon cancer was an unnatural cause of death for a man who fed America’s coke habit with an avalanche of product in the ’70s and ’80s. Roberto died a very wealthy man.

He was a lanky, handsome twenty-one-year-old when he spotted Maricel at the packed bar of an Acapulco nightclub. Alex heard the story of their first date from her and, later, from him. Maricel was struggling to flag down a bartender when Roberto, who never suffered for attention, sent her a glass of Champagne. After asking where the drink came from, she approached the young man in polished Chelsea boots, white jeans, and a loud print shirt unbuttoned to his sternum. He had six inches on her but was unnerved by her unblinking stare.

“This is nice,” she said, “but I came to get drinks for my girlfriends, not to drink with you.”

The bartender was in the middle of an order when Roberto summoned him and sent a bottle to the table of young women in the corner. He turned to Maricel. “Your friends have drinks now,” he said. “You can drink with me.”

She was on Christmas break from Wellesley College, the all-women school outside Boston where she studied English literature with the understanding that she would move back to Acapulco and marry her high school boyfriend after graduation. She laughed when Roberto said he worked in real estate. They’d attended the same Catholic high school until Roberto was expelled for selling drugs, a youthful indiscretion that quickly became a career. He sensed that she was attracted to him in spite of his notoriety, which was not usually the case, and could not have said what drew him to her given his weakness for tall American blondes like the one whose bed he had just left.

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