Chapter 28: Paying the Piper

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

March 12, 2005

Jake drifted up toward consciousness the way a man might drift toward the surface of a lake while still debating whether drowning would be the better option. Awareness came in slow layers. The first layer was sound—faint, distant, barely there. A bass line thumping through walls, floors, and whatever structural integrity remained in Matt Tisdale’s mansion. The party was still going. Of course it was. Somewhere out there, in what Jake privately called the Forbidden Zone, chaos still reigned.

He didn’t open his eyes. He wasn’t ready. Instead, he reached for the second layer of awareness: touch. Skin. Warmth. Limbs. He realized he was naked. Laura was naked. Celia was naked. They were all tangled together, one soft, warm, living pile of Kingsley domesticity, smelling unmistakably of sex, sunscreen, sweat, and somebody’s margarita that had escaped containment at some point.

It was definitely real sex and not a drunken dream. No dream had ever gotten the scent profile that accurate.

He tried to remember specifics—hands, mouths, positions—but nothing came in clearly. His brain offered him a few disconnected flashes and then shrugged, completely unhelpful. So he retreated further back in time, rolling the reel backward until he found the last thing he genuinely remembered.

Tif screaming. Owen holding her up in the surf like a Baywatch lifeguard who’d lost his manual. The jellyfish. The absolute clusterfuck that followed. And then Owen, poor bastard, standing in front of thirty strangers with his schlong in his hand while Tif, crying and panicked, tried to salvage his dignity by assuring the crowd he was usually much more impressive when conditions were favorable.

Jake winced at the memory. He felt that one deep in his soul. Grower solidarity.

He forced himself to keep going, pushing into the foggier part of the afternoon. Matt and Coop stripping naked and barreling into the ocean like a couple of drunk sea lions. Janelle and Kim shrugging and joining them a few minutes later, the four of them splashing around like it was a coed summer camp run by pornographers. Jake vaguely remembered some Mexican cops showing up, uniforms crisp and expressions baffled. He remembered Matt marching straight up to them, balls swinging in the breeze, holding a snorkel mask like a diplomatic offering, and having what looked like a very serious conversation. Whatever Matt had said apparently worked, because the cops left, the naked swimmers went back to whatever they were doing, and a sizable portion of the beach decided they had seen enough and quietly evacuated the area. And those that didn’t ease on down the sand? Most were female. Most stripped naked and joined the unofficial skinny dip. He remembered seeing Matt and Kim both fondling a delighted naked college girl on her lounger. And then...

Everything after that dissolved into static. Jake had absolutely no idea how they had gotten from Playa Chileno to the mansion. He sat up slightly, stomach tightening, suddenly terrified that he might have driven them. That was the kind of mistake you didn’t come back from. But no—no, he wouldn’t have. Not even blackout drunk. Not even in Mexico. He wasn’t that far gone.

Except ... if he hadn’t driven, who had? Tif had been annihilated. Owen had been traumatized and half-frozen. Laura and Celia had been so plastered that his last coherent image of them was the two of them holding hands and wading into the ocean to pee while debating ecclesiastical urination practices. Nobody in their group had been sober enough to operate heavy machinery. So how in God’s name had they—

Taxi? They must’ve taken a taxi.

But if they’d taken a taxi ... where the hell was the rental Expedition?

He tried to picture it—sitting alone all night in a public beach lot in Mexico. A nice, shiny American SUV. No supervision. No sober humans. No nothing. In Jake’s experience, that was basically tossing a steak into a kennel full of hungry dogs and hoping for the best.

By this hour, the Expedition could be on blocks. Or stripped. Or burned. Or repurposed for someone’s cousin’s girlfriend’s cousin as an unofficial municipal taxi. Or already rolling toward La Paz with three guys in the back and a bale of something that definitely wasn’t alfalfa.

Jake scrubbed a hand over his face, stomach tightening.

They were absolutely not getting their deposit back.

He groaned and covered his face. He didn’t even want to know. Not yet. Not before coffee.

Laura stirred beside him, murmuring something that sounded like “Stop thinking so loud.” Celia pulled a pillow over her head and announced, voice muffled, that she required at least five more hours of unconsciousness before rejoining the mortal world.

Jake sighed and let his head fall back against the pillow. Saturday had begun, and it was already shaping up to be a long one.

Jake exhaled through his nose and forced himself to move. It took effort. Every joint felt glued in place. He eased one leg free, then shifted his hip, then braced an arm on the mattress and carefully climbed over Celia like he was navigating a sleeping tiger.

Celia muttered a string of Spanish that sounded suspiciously like a curse on his ancestors. She didn’t open her eyes. She simply rolled toward Laura and curled into her, draping an arm across Laura’s stomach.

Laura, half-dead, managed, “Not in my hair,” in a voice so faint it was practically telepathy. Then she drifted off again, mouth slack, breathing heavy.

Jake paused, taking in the scene. Laura’s exposed shoulder was lobster-red. Her back was, too. Angry, uneven patches of pink stood out against her naturally pale skin—skin that had been fair and lightly freckled since the day he met her. She knew better. She was religious about sunscreen. She reapplied more than anyone he knew. But at some point yesterday, in the chaos and tequila and naked stampede down the beach, she’d clearly lost the thread.

He glanced down at himself and felt a cold, sinking recognition. He was sunburned too. A wide red band across his chest, another along his thighs, and a bright pink nose that felt like it might detach if he touched it.

His mouth was bone-dry. His head throbbed. His bladder felt like it had been inflated like his shampoo bottles on the ‘incident flight’.

He staggered into the suite’s bathroom and relieved himself for what felt like an entire fiscal quarter. The stream was endless, relentless, punishing. When it finally slowed, he braced a hand on the wall, exhausted by the sheer logistics of urinating.

Finished, he opened his brand-new toiletries bag—the replacement for the one sacrificed to the decompression gods—and fished out the Ibuprofen. Four tablets. Then two Vitamin Bs for good measure. He threw them into his mouth and chased them with four full glasses of water, one after the other, swallowing hard and hoping to God something in that chemical cocktail would resurrect him.

He still felt like he had died sometime in the night and his soul just hadn’t received the memo.

He staggered back into the bedroom and located a pair of shorts on the floor that looked clean enough to pass for decent clothing. He pulled them on, then grabbed a T-shirt—white, soft, emblazoned with the tasteful logo CASA DE VULVA and a silhouette of a woman dancing on a pole. One of Matt’s stripper friends had insisted he take it during one of his passes through the forbidden zone because, “you look like a dude who needs more pussy in his wardrobe.”

Jake slipped it on and hoped none of the kids ever saw it.

He padded out of the bedroom and into the gathering room of their private wing. The Kingsley wing. The safe zone. The quiet zone. The zone where hangovers went to hide.

The room was cool, dim, and blessedly silent except for the soft hum of the coffee machine. It looked like an executive break room designed for rock stars—plush couches, a TV mounted on the wall, a counter stocked with Costa Rican coffee, a sink, a fridge, and a big ass water dispenser that guaranteed it was triple filtered and subjected to reverse osmosis. It most certainly had not been placed in the jug by an everyday garden hose at the distribution point. That was the hope he was banking on, anyway.

Jake stood in the doorway for a moment, savoring the stillness.

Somewhere beyond the heavy soundproofed door that separated their sanctuary from the rest of the mansion, the forbidden bass still thumped faintly. A reminder that the outside world—and Matt’s ongoing orgy—still existed.

But in here?

Peace.

Or whatever counted for it on a Saturday morning after hell.

Jake shuffled toward the counter and stared at the coffee machine like it was complicated aircraft machinery. It wasn’t, but his brain wasn’t exactly hitting on all cylinders yet. He filled the filter, slapped it into place, added water, and pushed the button. He didn’t bother with the pot—he slid his mug under the drip from the start, going for maximum caffeine-to-vein efficiency.

When the mug filled, he swapped it for the pot and let the machine finish its job while he hunched over the counter, head throbbing, mouth dry, soul desiccated.

He took the mug, sat on one of the couches, and stared blankly out the big picture window at the Sea of Cortez. The water shimmered too brightly. Sailboats dotted the horizon like lazy confetti. A few fishing boats rolled through gentle swells. A jet climbed away from Los Cabos International, its engines a distant hum.

For a moment Jake wondered if getting out of bed had been a terrible idea. Horizontal living had a lot going for it right now. Maybe consciousness was overrated.

He took another sip of coffee and closed his eyes.

The door to the bedroom wing opened, and something shuffled into the room with the energy of the recently deceased. Tif. She moved like each step was a personal betrayal. Her purple hair was a tangled, chaotic bush of wind knots and salt damage. Her face was pink. Her shoulders were pink. Her legs were pink. She was basically a sunburned grape.

She wore an oversized T-shirt that hit mid-thigh, no bra, and absolutely no fucks to give about any of this.

Jake raised his mug in greeting. “Morning.”

She made a low, animal groan. “Water,” she said. “I need water. Like... all the water.”

Jake pointed toward the cooler. She staggered there, filled a glass, and chugged it. Then she filled another. And another. And two more after that, gulping them down like she’d just crossed a desert on foot.

Finished, she leaned against the counter, panting slightly. “I’m going back to bed. I don’t feel like I can walk very good right now.”

Jake nodded sympathetically. “How’s the jellyfish sting doing?”

“I dunno,” she muttered. “Take a look for me.”

Before his brain could even form a coherent protest, she lifted the hem of her T-shirt to just above her hip and upper thigh.

And—yep. No underwear. Absolutely none. Everything was out there in the cool morning air, not provocatively, not suggestively—just Tif being Tif, doing whatever the hell the moment required without the slightest awareness of modesty.

Jake’s face went hot enough to rival his sunburn. He forced his eyes downward—well, mostly downward—and made a quick, clinical, definitely-not-pervy inspection of the inner thigh.

The jellyfish welt was barely visible. A faint pink shadow where yesterday had been a road map of angry red lines.

“Yep,” he croaked. “Looks great, Tif. Incredible even.”

He wasn’t talking about the wound.

She let the shirt fall, completely oblivious to the fact that she’d just put several years on his life. “Okay. Good. I’m gonna go collapse now.”

She turned and shuffled back down the hall, T-shirt swaying, hair bouncing like it was trying to flee her head.

Jake exhaled slowly and took a very long sip of coffee, silently begging the universe to send somebody—anybody—who wore pants.

Jake drained the last of the coffee and felt himself inch up from “corpse” to “life support.” It wasn’t a dramatic resurrection—more like someone had slapped a defibrillator on his soul and gotten a weak blip of activity. It was something.

He pushed himself upright, joints protesting, and decided he needed to stick his head out of the metaphorical sand long enough to make sure the world hadn’t burned down in his absence.

He shuffled back into the bedroom, stepped gingerly around Laura and Celia’s sleeping forms, and dug through his baggage until he found his cell phone. He didn’t dare use the thing to dial directly—international roaming from Mexico was how you accidentally gifted your firstborn child to a telecom company—but he needed numbers.

He carried the phone back into the gathering room, dropped onto the couch, and found the contact he needed. The landline on the counter stared at him ominously. Using a Mexican phone system was basically volunteering as tribute in a bureaucratic Hunger Games.

Still, there was no other option.

He picked up the handset, dialed zero, and braced himself.

The operator came on—thick accent, polite but palpably bored. When she asked for his credit card number, Jake hesitated just long enough to vividly picture a dim back office somewhere in the bowels of the airport, lit by a single flickering fluorescent tube. He imagined his number being written into a ledger from the Nixon administration, then dutifully typed into a wheezing computer running Windows 98, and from there whisked straight into the Mexican criminal underworld—bounced from Nigeria to Kiev to Pitcairn Island within the hour.

He exhaled.

Fuck it. He read the number anyway.

There were beeps. Boops. A few clicks. And then, bizarrely, a burst of mariachi music so loud he jerked the receiver away from his ear.

Then—ringing.

He exhaled and waited.

Pauline picked up on the second ring. “Please tell me you’re Jake.”

“It’s me,” he said.

There was a long inhale from her end, the kind that conveyed relief laced with murderous intent. “Thank God. I haven’t heard from you since you took off for Cabo.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that,” Jake said, rubbing his forehead. “We needed to bury ourselves for a bit. Sanity maintenance.”

“You’re still sane?” Pauline asked dryly. “Miracles do happen.”

He huffed a tired laugh. “Depends on your definition. But the weekend ... uh ... it’s been something.”

He leaned back against the cushions and gave her the Cliff Notes. “Endless party at Matt’s mansion. College girls everywhere. Mexican strippers. Half a women’s futból team. Our wing’s been quiet, thank God, but the rest? Absolute carnage.”