Free Legally Dead by Edna Buchanan Page A

that Danny go with her to see something in the garage.
    Tanya and Venturi made small talk. As their hosts returned he heard Luz ask, “Why is an organized garage an impossible dream?”
    Venturi smiled. Tanya smiled back. She smiled a lot, he thought. She was friendly, had a hard, lithe body, and offered to show him around Miami, but his heart wasn’t in it. Somehow he and Danny wound up watching the news in his study, while Luz and Tanya talked in the kitchen.

    Danny assured him in the days that followed that the Miami media focused only on Castro, Cuban and Haitian issues, and the city’s constant public corruption scandals. And he was right. The distance between Venturi and the headlines the Salvi case still generated in New York, middle America, and Washington, D.C., was a relief.
    Luz persisted in her efforts to find him a mate. She and Danny invited Venturi on family outings to parks with pony rides, to the Children’s Museum, and to an oceanside picnic where Mirta, another of her friends, demonstrated a tracker’s skill by finding them on a crowded beach. She wore a black thong bikini, a thin gold chain around her waist, and a demure gold cross on a chain that dangled deep into her decolletage.
    She and Luz greeted each other with glad cries.
    â€œOh, man,” Danny muttered, nudging Venturi, “she’s the one I was telling you about. Boobs out to her elbows.”
    Luz gave them a look then pretended to ignore them.
    When Venturi mentioned fishing, Mirta wrinkled her nose.
    â€œPlease,” she said, “do me a favor. Do not kiss them on the mouth.”
    â€œExcuse me?” What was Luz telling her friends about him?
    â€œYou didn’t see the show?” Her long red fingernails slowly brushed sand from her inner thighs.
    â€œThe show?” Where did Luz find these women? He found it difficult to focus on her face and not her skimpy bikini top. When she suddenly darted off to help Luz chase down Javi, who had plunged headlong into the surf, he and every other man on the beach could not help but gape at her even skimpier string bottom.
    â€œDon’t fight it, amigo,” Danny said. “Miami’s Matchmaking Queen never fails.”
    Mirta returned out of breath, chest heaving, water dripping, breasts struggling to escape the confines of her bikini top.
    â€œWhere were we?” She tossed her long thick hair and smiled, her teeth flashing.
    â€œThe show?” He licked his lips.
    It was a national cable television series starring sportsmen devoted to wildlife and the environment, she explained. As cameras zoomed in for close-ups, the TV anglers would kiss the fish they caught on the mouth, then release them.
    That symbolic signature gesture caught on and was emulated by viewers and sportsmen. Advertising writers seized upon it. Resort and tourism ads urged vacationers to “kiss a fish,” among other idyllic experiences.
    Nationwide warnings were issued after an unfortunate rash of incidents received much less coverage. Yet the shows still aired, and the ads were still being published.
    â€œSnook and leatherjackets have teeth,” Mirta explained. “The bites are very nasty.”
    Only yesterday, she said, another angler had been rushed to surgery, “ Plastic surgery ,” she said, on his upper lip and right nostril. Mirta was an emergency-room nurse.
    â€œNever kiss them.”
    Venturi vowed he wouldn’t. He had never thought about kissing a fish. Now, like a child warned not to lick a frozen pump handle, he wondered what it would be like. Bemused, he went as far as asking Mirta for her phone number but never called.
    He felt most at home—at peace—in the Everglades, where time slows and ancient instincts awaken. He loved to see the congestion of the city give way to vast open spaces at the end of the road. He liked it so much that he leased a house with an option to buy. It had once been a remote fishing camp