Why? Claim?
Nerves forgotten, Lila scowled. Her fists clenched at her sides. Before she could snap at him to kiss her butt, the beach bum—Hawkins, she had to remember his name was Hawkins—touched her. Just a single finger to the small of her back for barely a second. But it was enough to warn her to reel it in.
So she gritted her teeth and tried to do that.
“Earlier this evening, I saw a man killed in the doorway. That doorway.” She pointed her still clenched fist toward the office. “Someone shot Chef Rodriguez.”
“How do you know Chef Rodriguez?”
“What difference does that make? I saw him fall to the floor covered in blood, right there in that doorway.”
The policeman held her gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment before he stepped around her and Hawkins and walked casually toward the office. Lila cringed, seeing in her head the body fall again, the blood splatter.
Wait.
Her eyes tracked the cop’s steps, not so much to note his progress as to check the walls. The floor. Where was the blood?
Where was the body?
“This is the office where you thought you saw a man fall, senorita?”
The policeman threw open the door and gestured inside. Unwilling to move any closer, Lila craned her neck instead and tried to see the body. But the floor was bare of a body. Nowhere to be seen was a hurricane of scattered papers or broken furniture.
Lila rubbed a hand over her trembling lips.
“There is no dead body. No blood. No evidence of any wrongdoing,” the cop enunciated in careful English. “Perhaps you are used to attention in your country, senorita. But we frown upon such fabrications here in Puerto Viejo.”
He gave the office one last look around, then swaggered over to shift his intimidating stare between Lila and her companion.
“I’m not making it up,” she breathed, shaking her head. Not sure why, since he hadn’t believed her either, Lila shot Hawkins a beseeching look. “I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“Why don’t you check on Rodriguez? Make sure he’s not floating facedown somewhere.” The suggestion was made to the cop, but Hawkin’s eyes didn’t leave Lila’s.
“Perhaps you should remember that we have no use for hotshots such as yourself here in Puerto Viejo, senor.” His beady eyes shifted between the two of them again before Montoya smiled.
Lila wanted to ask what the hell that meant. She clenched her fists, ready to demand to speak with the chief of police, the mayor. Whoever the hell was in charge.
But between his flat gaze and those small, sharp teeth, the cop reminded her of a shark. The kind of shark that’d chew her up and spit her out without so much as blinking.
So she kept her mouth shut.
“I will overlook your games this once, senorita. But only this once.” With that, and another sneering sort of smile, the policeman strode down the hall and out the door.
Leaving Lila with no dead body, a raging headache and a gun-carrying grouch.
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