“I keep coming back to Walker,” she said. “He had ties to both Sheen and Bollinger. Plus, he keeps an airplane out at Montgomery Airport. I checked. He rents a hangar there. He would’ve had easy access to your airplane.”

She theorized that Walker had borrowed Sheen’s pickup and driven it to the airport that night.

“Trucks come and go at airports all the time,” Rosario said. “He figured a truck would draw less attention on the flight line than a car.”

“Walker paid me to fly down here and do some work for him. Why would he want to monkey with my engine?”

“No clue.” Rosario tapped some ice from her drink into her mouth and chewed it. “But I do know he would’ve had ample reason to want to shoot Sheen. Sheen was sleeping with his wife. Men have been killed for a lot less.”

Her dangly silver earrings sparkled seductively in the candlelight.

I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. Hub Walker was the last man I wanted to suspect of anything.

We sat for awhile without speaking.

“It would help if we recover a bullet,” Rosario said finally. “At least a shell casing.”

“It’ll be a relatively small bullet,” I said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because I heard it.”

“You heard Sheen get shot?”

“Pretty sure.”

Rosario was incredulous. “And I’m only hearing this now? I thought we…” She paused in mid-sentence as our grandmotherly waitress arrived with our meals.

“Muy caliente. Very hot. Please be careful.” She set two platters heaping with steaming Mexican food on the table. “Is there anything else I can get you? Another margarita for the lady? More club soda for the gentleman?”

“No gracias,” Rosario said.

“No, thanks.”

“Enjoy.”

Rosario watched me ladle an ulcer-inducing amount of salsa while ignoring her food.

“Did I hear you right? You say you heard Sheen get shot?”

“Single discharge, approximately 800 meters down range, approximately ten minutes after we parted company. Definitely sounded smaller than the .45 he was carrying. Nine-millimeter would be my guess.”

The burrito was excellent. I ate probably faster than I should have. It was impossible not to.

“For a flight instructor,” Rosario said, “you seem to know an awful lot about guns.”

“Like I said…”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re into TV.” She picked at her enchiladas, eyeing me suspiciously but also intrigued. “Ever used to watch Miami Vice back in the day?”

“Occasionally.”

“Best cop show ever.”

“I beg to differ. Andy Griffith was the best cop show ever.”

“Andy Griffith wasn’t a cop show,” Rosario said.

“Andy played a cop, did he not?”

“A little before my time but, yes, I seem to recall he did.”

“And do you concede that the word ‘show’ in the The Andy Griffith Show connotes that it was, in fact, a show?”

“I’ll concede that.”

“I rest my case.”

She smiled and watched me eat. “Unfortunately, I don’t have Andy Griffith. But I do have all five seasons of Miami Vice on DVD. You interested in maybe grabbing some ice cream at my place after this and checking out a little Crockett and Tubbs action?”

Airplanes rarely crash because of pilot error. They crash because of multiple pilot errors, small mistakes that become larger ones, until the only option left is to bend over and kiss your keester goodbye. The same can be said of monogamy. Drop your guard, surrender yourself to an extracurricular distraction, and before you know it, you’re grocery shopping for one and trolling the listings on Match.com. It was a mistake to say yes to Alicia Rosario’s invitation to dessert in the same way I knew it was wrong to have asked her out to dinner, but I did it anyway. Blame it on her sundress. I was dying to find out where she stashed her off-duty weapon.

She lit candles. We sat with our shoes off, on a buff-colored chenille sofa, in the living room of Rosario’s tastefully contemporary Pacific Beach townhouse, pounding down Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra while watching Miami Vice on a sixty-inch big screen. Armani-clad detectives Tubbs and Crockett were busting their humps trying to stop villainous arms dealer Bruce Willis (when Willis still had hair) from selling a shipment of stolen Stinger missiles.

The episode brought back fond memories of the time I flew into Zagreb with three other Alpha operators posing as Canadian arms dealers to meet with a former Croatian cabinet official who was offering to the highest bidder a batch of U.S.-made, Rockeye cluster bombs. The money exchange was to take place in the luxury suite of an über-stylish hotel built some eighty years earlier as a refuge for passengers from the Orient Express. Our orders were to take the Croat into custody and spirit him out of the country for criminal prosecution, but he had other plans. When he pulled a pistol and broke for the elevators, another go-to guy I’ll call “Barnes” snapped his neck like a chicken. We chucked the guy’s body out a sixth-floor window, left a conveniently pre-typed suicide note on his nightstand, and jetted home business class.

Good times.

I was thinking how fulfilling it felt, my mind drifting, when I realized that Bruce Willis was dead, Miami Vice was over, and Rosario was stroking my right thigh.

“Welcome back.” Her dark eyes gleamed. “Have a nice trip?”

She was exotic-looking and alluring, and I’d be lying if I said my neuronal impulses weren’t sparking with the kind of thinking that got Bill Clinton in big trouble.

“I’ve never been with a cop before,” I said.

“Then that’ll make two firsts tonight.”

She clicked off the TV, set my half-eaten bowl of ice cream on the coffee table, and softly pressed her lips to mine.

Time and reason quickly blurred in a frenzy of hungry mouths, groping hands, and clothing that seemed to shed itself. There was nothing romantic about it. It was foreplay in the same way Olympic wrestling is romantic. The stall warning horn inside my head was blaring and I didn’t care. My big head was on autopilot. And then, just like that, I came to my senses. Maybe it was the firmness of her touch, so different from Savannah’s, or the way Rosario’s skin felt under my own fingers — some nonverbal, subconscious something. All I knew was that I suddenly felt as if I had no business being there, on that couch, with Detective Alicia Rosario.

“I can’t, Alicia. I’m sorry.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

I stood, hiking my jeans back up, and re-buckled my belt.

She sat back, naked from the waist up, and stroked the back of her neck. Her breasts glistened in the candlelight. They belonged in an art gallery. I stooped onto one knee and tied my shoes.

“Was it something I said, or did?”

“No, nothing like that. I’m just dealing with some personal issues right now.”

She clutched a tasseled throw pillow to her chest.

“You mean ex issues.”

I didn’t respond.

Rosario sighed. “Story of my life,” she said.

“Let’s talk tomorrow, OK?”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever.”

I knew it wasn’t fine. I stood, pulled on my shirt, and leaned down to kiss her good night. She raised her chin and offered me her cheek. I could taste the salt of her tears.

“Thanks for dessert.”

“Thanks for dinner.”

The street was quiet, the chill night air a tonic. I sat in my luxury SUV outside Rosario’s place for a long time with the windows down and thought about how far I’d come from nights in my not-so-distant past when I would’ve made any accommodation, told any lie, to maneuver someone like her between the sheets. Chalk it up to maturity? Declining testosterone? Who knows? It dawned on me as I drove away that I never did determine where she stashed her off-duty weapon. I wasn’t sure whether to feel proud of myself or disappointed.