I also left sold on a similar little product called Lip Venom.

According to the saleswoman, this spicy, tingly gloss "plumps the natural shape of the lips by increasing circulation with a blend of essential oils including cinnamon and ginger. Great for shiny, bee-stung lips." I bought the color called "Love in the Mist."

"And the tingle effect is catching," my saleswoman added with a wink.

I was feeling the tingling effect already, but left cosmetics and next applied myself to a mall bookstore. They had what I wanted, English-Spanish dictionaries, but not the exact type I needed. Then a thoroughly pierced teen clerk led me to the "slanguage" section where I found a tiny red leatherette-bound book titled Street Speak in Spanish.

If Ric's sexy murmurs included any dirty words I was going to know them. Already, just browsing, I'd learned that hembra meant "tigress." Really? Of course it could also mean "nut of a screw," which wasn’t exactly complimentary. Or was it a different tense of embragar, which meant "to put in gear?" Ric had been doing a lot of embragar with both the Corvette and me last night.

Last stop was a shoe store, where I bought a pair of platform open-toed slides. I'd sometimes gotten a kick out of flaunting fire-engine red toenails while the videographers focused on my dead-serious face and stiff upper torso when I intoned my spiel for the camera. Maybe I'd always been a split personality.

Quicksilver was sitting by the car. I couldn't leave him locked inside and he liked playing guard dog.

Dolly approved of my new get-up. She was so anxious to get home her motor throbbed impatiently at the stoplights, which offered a low-rider next to us a chance to give a wolf whistle and shout a new phrase to look up. I wasn’t sure if it was for Dolly or me, though. Besides, I was interested in impressing a high-rider.

"Who're you foolin’, chica?" Irma's interior voice asked. "You are goin’for forcin’ that man into an insanity plea." Maybe "Erma" was short for hermana, or "sister," in Spanish. Who knew I had so much Latin blood in me?

Quicksilver's nose inspected the crotch of my new jeans, but didn't seem to register that they were low-rise and nicely set off the thin silver chain around my bare hips. Or that the off-the-shoulder crop top was red and had ruffle-tiered sleeves like a flamenco dancer's skirt.

Okay, maybe this outfit was a little slutty. I couldn't help it. For the first time in my life I felt happy and strong at the same time and I wanted more of what made me feel that way. Who.

One-two-three, arriba!

Of course everybody eyed me when I walked Quicksilver from the parking lot to the dog area. They always looked at me when I walked Quicksilver, so I couldn't tell if my new outfit had any pulling power of its own. I left him with a shelter lady, who was only too pleased to entertain him for a while, and worked my way up the Trail of Dead People's Trees to the picnic table area where I'd first met Ric.

He was sitting on it, feet on the bench seat, white-shirted, facing Sunset, expecting me to be coming from Nightwine's estate. Maybe he was contemplating the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sculpture eternally charging out of the bland stucco wall.

"Hi."

He turned at my voice. Ric had that law enforcement professional face down cold: blank, noncommittal, and unflappable. The moment he saw me it melted, did a 180-turn, although I couldn't quite name his new expression, other than stunned.

He jumped down to the ground, met me coming toward him, still stunned. Now I knew how those night-time soap opera queens felt. He walked into me, or me into him, I don't know which. He hooked his fingers through my belt loops, brushed a kiss over my lips, cheek, neck, just under my ear.

I'd heard of skipping stones, not kisses.

"Delilah," he whispered. "Muy tempestado. A pity I have to go away soon."

"Away?"

"South of the border."

"Down Mexico way?"

"Yes, where exactly I can't say."

"For a long time?"

"It'll seem long now. Two or three weeks."

"But I wanted to find out about the dead couple. Nightwine will pay me for a solved case he can fictionalize on CSI. You have police access-"

"Not with Haskell on the case. Can't you use your reporter's wiles to check into it?"

"Librarians rarely need wiles and that's where I'd find information on missing persons from decades ago- newspaper archives."

"Good, a library is a fairly safe place." He grinned. "Then there's the angle of the Inferno gaming chip. And, if needed, I do have one police contact you might try: Captain Kennedy Malloy. See? Lots to keep you busy while I'm away. When I'm back, we'll go salsa dancing. The werewolves won't leave if they see you in this."

"It's not supposed to mean anything to the wolves."

"And that, Querida, means everything to me."

We'd billed and cooed as much as I felt comfortable doing in public. My Irish genes still had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the arena of open emotion.

I pushed off enough to capture Ric's eyes again. Seriously. "One thing. Does it bother you that our being so…simpatico…started over a couple of dead bodies?"

"In Mexico, we celebrate the dead, we don't fear them."

"I know, 'Day of the Dead' and all that. But-" I lowered my eyes, not because I went for that flirtatious crap, but because I couldn't quite face some things. Like my own history. "I don't mean the impact of death. I mean the…sensuality that came with it. It's almost like it took us…me…over. I mean, I've never-"

"I know. But I've never either."

"You've never?"

"Not that intensely. I agree. We were borrowing from the dead. It was like their last bequest."

"Isn't that…creepy? Doesn’t it bother you?"

He ran his hands down my midriff to my hips. "You bother me. That's the way it should be, Querida."

Okay, I liked it. I'd been asking for it, in the shy honest truth of that phrase, not as an accusation. I'd trusted Ric to know and appreciate the difference, and he did. It was always so touchy for women to be sexual without being misinterpreted. Maybe that's why I'd never wanted to do it before. Or maybe Ric was why I'd never been able to do it before.

Or maybe the dead bones, the skeletal lovers buried in the limestone crypt, had been waiting for a couple of fools with our particular weird talents and my dicey personal history to be infected with their own lethal passions.

Maybe we were doomed to the same fate.

If so, I could only hope we'd enjoy getting there half as much as they apparently had.

The man-dog introduction was not as successful as the live-dead introduction in Sunset Park two days earlier.

When I escorted Ric to the dog area, Quicksilver's usual embarrassing crotch-sniff turned into a sudden snap. Ric's pelvis did an evasive maneuver as fast, skilled, and sexy as a matador's, but the fact remained that my dog had serious territorial issues.

"Bad boy!" the shelter lady and I shouted in unison.

“No!”

Quicksilver sat down and commenced to lick his privates while casting resentful glances at all concerned.

The shelter lady and I giggled. Ric was not amused.

"At least," he said, when he kissed me goodbye under Quicksilver's watchful ice-blue gaze, "I don't have to worry about your personal safety while I'm gone."

I was going to miss him. I forced myself not to look back as I led Quick back to Dolly at a trot, trying not to worry about Ric's personal safety on his vague quest south of the border. I didn't need to ask if it was risky; his tight-lipped dismissal of my questions said everything.