Hugging myself to stay warm, I had no idea how it had gone so quickly from broiling hot to freezing cold -- or how much longer I could make it without any food or water. "Don't be digusting," I said. "Not every pretty girl starts acting like a little whore by the age of twelve."
"When are you going to wake up to the way things work in this world?" she sneered. "It's bad enough you couldn't solve my murder. I really think you're what they call terminally stupid.""Go away, Rita." My teeth were chattering and my tongue was so dry in my mouth I could hardly talk.
"Fine by me if you want to die alone." She got up and swiped at the pebbles sticking to her bare butt cheeks. "I've got stuff to do anyway." All she had on was a sheer camouflage wife beater and matching g-string that had been very popular at Starbutts among soldiers visiting Hollywood on leave. "Rita, wait. You really think I'm dying?"
"Probably," she said. "Sorry." She shrugged and turned to go. I reached out and grabbed her arm -- which felt surprisingly lifelike despite having been severed along with the rest of her limbs after she was killed. I got up to hug her -- for the first time ever, it occurred to me, even when she was alive. She was easy as hell, that Rita, but she'd never been much of a hugger. "Just tell me what it's like," I pleaded, blowing on my hands. "Death, I mean."
She looked around, lowering her voice. "Look, it's really not so bad," she said, taking off her mirrored sunglasses. "At first you're fighting it with all you've got, and of course there's all kinds of denial about this really being the way you end. And then..." Her voice trailed off as she tried to make sense of it herself. "It's like, you can't really pinpoint the moment you knew you were alive, right? You just kind of wake up to it and roll with the punches from there." I thought for a minute about what she'd just said and realized this might be my last chance. "Tell me who murdered you. Tell me why."
"I would if I could, you moron," she scoffed. "What I'm trying to say is you start to forget the details. After awhile, none of that stuff even matters."
"Okay, but wait. Stay with me now. It must have had something to do with the diamonds, right?"
"What diamonds?" she asked, cartwheeling off like a kid on the first day of summer.
"You had six million dollars worth of smuggled diamonds sewn into a bunch of bikinis," I prodded, trying to refresh her memory. When she paused to throw a handstand, I talked to her upside down. "You and I wore them crossing the border a bunch of times. You might have had some partner you double-crossed."
"That is freaking awesome," she said, stopping in front of me to stretch into a series of yoga poses. "But you shouldn't be thinking about that kind of stuff now. You should be thinking about regrets, final wishes -- maybe unload a deep, dark secret you don't want to carry to your grave."
"Oh, wow, okay," I said, pausing to give that some thought. "What was yours?""I wish I'd gone to rehab," she said, doing a downward facing dog with her perfect little rear raised toward the full moon. "Not some ghetto methadone clinic, either, I mean something with style -- like Promises Malibu or Betty Ford."
"I told you that a hundred times," I said.
"How was I supposed to know I was on a schedule?" she sighed. "I bet I'd have made a real classy old sober broad some day. Your turn."
I sucked in a breath. "Even the captain's wife doesn't know this," I whispered, eager to finally share the truth. "But I never did more than kiss the guy. And that was only once, after I slapped his face, so I'm not sure it even counts."
"Get out. You seriously never slept with him?"
"I never saw him naked in the dark, never felt his skin against my skin. I never breathed his breath in and out all mixed up with my own." Just once I wanted to lie back and surrender to the weight of him -- to take his face in my hands and wrap my legs like the leaves of a flower around the strong stem of his body. And we would look at each other and laugh, knowing this thing nobody else ever could.
Rita yanked me down beside her behind the rock. "I think we have a problem," she said. "One, you're not ready to die. And two, there's a guy with a machine gun headed our way.""Maybe he's coming to rescue us."
"You're an escaped prisoner," she reminded me. "I'm a dead stripper."
"What about me?" I pleaded. "Am I dead?"
"Not sure," she said, disappearing into the night. "Like I said, it just kind of sneaks up on you," she called back. "Either way, you're always on your own in the end. Did I explain that part?"No, she did not explain that part, the bitch -- but, like the rest of us out there lost in our deserts, barely clinging to life, not completely convinced of the point of trying -- somehow I always knew.
