Here’s a sneak peek at VIVA ACAPULCO: Detective Emilia Cruz Book 9.
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The corrugated metal gate clattered aside as soon as Kurt spoke his name into the intercom.
Emilia drew a deep breath as he drove into the paved courtyard. Two vehicles were already parked in front of the long gray stucco building. She recognized Franco Silvio’s truck. The sporty car must belong to the realtor who would conduct the tour.
Kurt cut the engine.
“Be nice,” he said before opening his door.
“I'm always nice,” Emilia replied, still feeling testy. She reached for her handle but a beaming young man raced up and did the honors.
“Señor, Señora, it’s so good of you to come,” he gushed and introduced himself as Juan Meza, from the real estate firm handling the sale of the property. Meza wore a silk tee, shiny suit jacket and skinny jeans with silver rivets down each leg.
Maybe mariachi had been his first career choice,
Emilia thought sourly. Went into real estate instead and no one told him to change his pants.
Hands were shaken and Meza promptly attached himself to Kurt, obviously determined to make the most of this opportunity to rub elbows with a rich gringo. Her mood hardly improved by this chattering pup, Emilia drifted toward the
imposing gray collection of rectangles known as Casa de Plata.
Once a much-acclaimed piece of Mexican mid-century architecture, Casa de Plata was divided into four apartments, two on either side of the double height main entrance with massive wooden doors.
Emilia recalled walking through those doors into the murky atmosphere percolating inside. An involuntary shiver ran up her spine. The federales used the abandoned apartment building to handle their informants, sometimes as a safe house but mostly as a dead drop zone.
How many cut-outs and shell companies were needed to hide the fact that the federales were now trying to get rid of it?
If only Meza knew what he was really selling.
Behind her, the young realtor was telling Kurt about the friezes of glass tile mosaic that edged the bottom of each apartment's balcony as well as circling the roofline. They told the story of Spain’s flota de plata, the treasure ships that stripped Mexico of silver and brought it to Spain.
Hence the iconic Casa de Plata name.
Odds and ends of Spanish galleons sailed around the building on waves that disintegrated into gray cement pocked with mold where overgrown vines had retained moisture. Random patches of mortar and chipped cement block showed where
the glass tiles had broken off, cutting short the journey to Spain. The bits of mosaic that remained twinkled silver and blue in the sunshine.
A fountain centered in the courtyard bolstered the flota de plata theme with a bronze ship poised over a round stone basin bigger than a bathtub. No water bubbled up to speed the
ship on its way. Emilia peered into the basin. It was full of dried palm fronds spotted with white droppings. Flies buzzed angrily. The aroma of rotten fruit thickened the air, overripe and sickly sweet.
“You made it!
Emilia looked up to see Silvio and Mercedes emerge from the massive main entrance. Silvio wore his usual jeans, white tee, crew cut and granite-jawed scowl. Long hair spilling down her back, Mercedes was a vision in a strapless pink sundress that floated over her lithe dancer’s body like a cloud.
They were holding hands.
Nothing Emilia could do except pretend not to see.
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