Image by Mario Texeira from Unsplash

Manta ray fondling was in full swing when Suzi came to a panting stop at the basin, a good fifteen minutes after the agreed time for the date. Okay, to be honest, it was more like twenty. Public transport had conspired against her and engineered a breakdown of the one bus that ran past the Oceanarium. To dump the cherry onto the icing, the accident happened at the farthest point of the line, right before it swung back in again.

No chance of getting home and taking the car. No chance of taking an Uber either. Before she had even realised her plight, others had drawn their phones, and sucked all cars from the area, leaving her to trudge mile after sweaty mile to get to this blasted place, her feet smarting from the strap sandals.

Story of my life.

Of course, there had been a queue at the ticket booth. And of course the bastards would charge the full price despite it being so late in the day. 

What a stupid place for a date. Choosing the manta ray basin as meeting point was even dafter. Even when standing on tippy toes the densely-packed crowd blocked her view. 

Dang!

She got moving, wove in and out between the visitors, using her elbows and scattering apologies like confetti.

The manoeuvres earned her plenty of dark looks and the occasional jab to the rib cage. Not once did she get close to the frothing, seething mass of leathery sea critters begging to be petted. Not that they were her target.  The whole set-up was just pathetic. Why would the graceful beasts suffer the sticky touch of chocolate-besmirched kid whose high-pitched squeals echoed of the tiles of the atrium and added to the pressure building in Suzi's head. 

Sweating, Suzi emerged from the crowd. Not one young man among them. Nobody had been wearing a red carnation, either. 

Where the heck was Bud, her date for today? 

At the time, the idea had sounded cutely retro, exactly the sort of adventure to be found in the lonely hearts columns. Right now, the varnish had come off the idea and seen under the bright spotlights mounted on the hi-tech ceiling, today's date struck her as downright stupid.

Time to vamoose. But she had paid a bloody fortune to get in.

Suzi stepped away from the crowds and scanned the basin once more. Still no carnation-sprouting Bud.

More fool, she.

But he had looked so cute in the picture he sent her and, his voice, a mellow baritone, had sent delicious tingles down her spine. So here she was. 

Without Bud.

Did the chap not get the increasingly frantic messages she had texted first from the snarly mess traffic had become, the stricken bus and finally during her trek to the meeting place?

She pulled out her Huahgay and checked. No response to any of her cringeworthy texts, rendered almost unintelligible by the autocorrect.

Perhaps, that was it. Bud got the texts, decided she must be gaga and scuttled to safety.

But he had been the epitome of polite when they talked. A guy with manners was rare these days. Surely, he would give her the benefit of the doubt?

Suzi pivoted on the high heels of her strap sandals and lost her balance, teetering about like a drunken starfish. The sandals had been an afterthought. To match the vintage theme of the meeting, she had donned her latest treasure, a shift dress from the Sixties. Part of a haul from the latest garage sale, it featured pink dots on white and the sandals sort of rounded things off. The distress signals sent by her feet told her the shoes had been yet another mistake. Somehow, they kept piling up. She bit down on the pain and scanned the crowds one final time.

Still no red carnation. Still no Bud.

Suzi sighed. She should just turn around and walk away, but that would be a waste of money. Plus, the last bus was only due in an hour. No way would she be able to walk, not on those feet. While she was here, she might as well check out the otters everybody kept raving about. That would at least give her something to chat about.

The stars of the show most of the time, the otter habitat on the other side of the atrium lay deserted. As Suzi limped past the far end of the manta ray basin, the turquoise water glittered and rippled under the spotlights, running in a funny cross current as if something large stirred the shallow depths.

Born on the wavelets, a blurry red blotch headed toward her.

Suzi stared. Not a blotch. A red carnation.

If Suzi needed any proof Bud had been and gone, here was it. He must have got fed up and tossed the flower into the water.

"Blast it all to hell." She kicked aside a wadded ice cream wrapper and winced as sharp pain lanced into her tortured feet.

It must have been the movement that shifted her perspective. She spotted a second red blotch. Two carnations? How odd. She scrunched her eyes, staring into the sparkly over-brightness of the basin that hid whatever went on underneath. No, that second bit of red was below and it wasn't a blotch. A tendril, rather. Suzi's gaze trailed the hazy trace that thickened, joined others and became a cloud.

A cloud of red.

Below it, at the bottom of the basin, lay a dark mass. Suzi's stunned brain was slow in processing the images it was being fed, but eventually her grey matter spat out a result.

At the bottom of the Manta basin lay a human body. The reddish clouds it was sending up could only be blood.

Her stomach lurched and her vision wobbled.

Panic so sharp it scalded her throat bubbled up and crested in a scream that pierced the hubbub in the atrium.

Then her world went black.

###

A distant roar reached Suzi's ear, came closer and closer, slowed down and shattered into words. The darkness lightened into funny halos that swam through her vision like playful beach toys. She sensed a pressure around her shoulders, warm and comforting, and she deduced the warm thing could only be an arm.

How grateful she was for that arm, that human touch.

"Pulse is still a bit high, but the sedative should have kicked in about now," a brisk voice said somewhere in her vicinity. "But you'll need to take it easy, Detective."

What was a detective...Oh. The blood. Bud.

It all came back to her.

The roaring returned.

"Whoa, take it easy. Everything's under control," said a second voice. Warm and deep, it belonged to a female, presumably the owner of the arm that released her the same moment.

A shame really, it had been a great arm. Strong and well-muscled it smelled of vanilla, musk and something else, something hard to identify. Ditchwater? Stale coffee? Traces of vaping?

Suzi blinked and the hostile glare of spotlights burned into her retina. "Where...What's happened?"

"That's what we're trying to find out," said the voice next to her, positively dripping with the the honey of the South. Georgia was her best bet.

Suzi blinked once more and her fuzzy environment finally solidified. She was lying on the floor on something silvery that crackled as she moved. To her left kneeled a beefy paramedic, to her right sat—a fairy.

Suzi wiped her eyes with the heels of her hand and remembered too late the make-up she had so carefully applied. Well, most likely it was already smeared to hell. A peep from between her fingers confirmed the fairy was still there, a vision from her more lucid dreams.

Tall, slim, with mocca-brown skin and a black cap of hair shorn so short a drill-sergeant would beam with pride, the fairy gave her a concerned look. Correction: not a fairy but a woman, a real human being, not a figment of her over-active imagination.

The woman's features were composed of angles and plains that somehow came together in something beyond beauty. Eyes, dark and viscous and fringed with beautiful lashes that needed no mascara frowned at Suzi with a dash of concern and what struck her as being a lot of mistrust. Behind the woman rose a cloudy pillar filled with a strangely ethereal mist, that pulsed and drifted and sparkled under the light, trailing long pearly strands like bridal veils.

How odd.

"Ms. Sparrow, do you think you you stand up?" the woman asked. "We need to talk and the floor is not the best place for that."

"Right." Suzi allowed the gloved hands of the paramedic to pull her up. The fairy...The beautiful woman never touched her, but rose from the silvery insulation blanket in one fluid motion. When she stood, she was at least a head taller than Suzi. Clad in a no-nonsense midnight blue pantsuit, she also was a lecture in elegance.

A model? But what would she be doing here. And where was here—ah the Oceanarium.

The pillar revealed itself to be a tank full of jellyfish, gently floating along in mindless oblivion, drifting, not caring.

So beautiful...

"Ms. Sparrow?" That sounded just a tick annoyed.

"I warned you," said the paramedic. "That sedative kicks butt. She'd be better off at hospital."

Hospital? No way. Not until she had found a job. "I'm fine, honestly. Just a bit woozy. What's going on here? I saw the carnation, then I saw that body..." This time tears clouded Suzi's vision.

Wordlessly, the tall woman slipped her a hankie.

"Thanks." Suzi did not dare to blow her nose, lest she sounded the trumpet. Instead, she dabbed her nostrils and sniffed.

"You're welcome. We need to talk about that body. How about if we sit over at the snack bar and I buy you a coffee. Could do with one myself. Coffee back at the cop shop sucks." The woman turned and stormed off. 

Cop shop?

###

"Who are you?" Suzi asked.

The woman folded herself into a plastic bistro chair unworthy of her graceful features and pointed at its twin on the other side of the table. "Take a seat, Ms. Sparrow, you're still as pale as a ghost. I'm Detective Tamara Montez." She fingered a black mini purse strapped to her belt, from the size and shape it might have housed a manicure set. Suzi doubted it would contain anything so mundane as nail files and clippers.

She sat. Detective Montez ordered coffee from a waitress who had appeared from the wings like a jinnie popped from the bottle.

The detective flashed a badge at Suzi. She nodded. The badge disappeared in the purse.

"We're investigating the murder of one Bernard Kaminski, Bud to his friends. I understand you discovered his body? I need you to run me through your steps before you found him." Though couched as a request, the detective's last sentence was anything but. Her dark, luscious eyes drilled deep into Suzi's soul. What should have scared her, would have had she been confronting another person, became a welcome intrusion that zinged from her head straight down into regions where ratio stopped and wonderful things began.

As if wrapped in a bubbly cocoon, Suzi sat and basked in the glory of the other woman's sensual eyes, deep and creamy like chocolate...

"Ms. Sparrow?" The detective mumbled something under her breath.

"Uh, sorry. My afternoon's been a bit weird."

For a fleeting second, compassion flitted over the detective's stark-featured beauty. "I betcha. Drink some coffee, it will help. No idea what that paramedic gave you, but if the stuff hits the street, we're in real trouble." A grin kicked up the corners of her mouth.

Suzi dutifully sipped the liquid that percolated the comforting aroma of freshly ground beans into her nostrils, clearing her mind. Which turned out not to be such a good idea, as Suzi's grey matter immediately spat out unwanted images of the carnation floating towards her, tethered to Bud's body by trails of blood. Nausea rose in her stomach and Suzi pushed the coffee away.

Detective Montez pulled a sleek black notebook from her belt pouch. Golden pen poised, she once more lasered her gaze into Suzi's soul.

"Okay, so what made you step away from the crowd, and how did you find Mr. Kaminski when he was lying all curled up in the far corner?"

Tears once more pricking her eyes, Suzi drew a deep breath and dragged the memories from her unwilling mind. She ended with the carnation, the agreed signal that had indeed done its job even after the death of her blind date. Her duty done, she reached for the coffee and downed the now lukewarm liquid in one go.

The detective tapped her pen against lips so luscious, they needed no lipstick to look great.

The lips parted. "Soooo, this was a blind date, right?" An inscrutable expression flitted over the detective's face.

"Well, yes. I know, in hindsight the arrangement seems a bit silly, yeah." Inwardly cringing, Suzy vowed not to blab about the rest of her recent and upcoming dates.

"It's not up to me to judge how you spent your past time," Montez said in a bland voice. "The truth is, that sort of thing can be dangerous." She snapped her notebook closed.

Something cold nipped at Suzi's stomach. "How do you mean?"

The detective hooked her thumb over her shoulder. "Mr. Kaminski here is a prime example of a predator. He used the lonely hearts columns to hook up with young women and men. Once he had wormed his way into their lives, he used his insight and their social media intel to catfish their identities for a high-class internet porn ring.  If his victims wanted their false identities removed, they paid dearly. We had a suicide recently, a student loan and the blackmail money simply was too much for that poor chap. Looks like one of his victims kicked back. I must admit, I wish I wouldn't have to hunt and arrest that person. Kaminski was a shark, a real bottom feeder."

Suzi repressed the urge to say "It wasn't me, officer."

The liquid gaze sought hers, sucked her in. "We're not suspecting you, just in case you worried. There's a boatload of people who saw you arrive and push your way through the crowds." The lips twitched. "Fortunately for you, you created quite a stir. Unfortunately, nobody noticed what was going on at the other end of the basin. They were too busy with the mantas."

Suzi sagged in her hard plastic chair, but rose when the detective did.

Montez held out an elegant hand, long-fingered, the nails polished and cut short. For as long as she dared, Suzi clung to the velvety grip, a lifeline to the world of might-have-been.

Pathetic of her to harbour foolish hopes, really. The detective was at least a decade older than her, a smooth business professional with professional visiting cards.

Back in the grubby comfort of her flat, Suzi stared at the creamy rectangle lying in front of her on the stained red tablecloth. Strangely enough, it mentioned neither a precinct nor a title. Just the name "Tamara Montez" and a mobile phone number. The detective had winked when she pressed it into her hand, her super-cool facade dropping for a moment, a strange expression gleaming in her eyes. "Just in case you need some more—talking," she had said. "Call me anytime you feel like it."

Talking about what? The case? She couldn't have meant that. What the heck did that woman mean?

Suzi's spoon wavered over her last pot of chocolate ice cream, rich, deep and tempting.

Was she imagining things? That drug had been rather strong, it still lingered and frazzled the edges of this afternoon's horrors and delights alike.

Perhaps, she should call and find out?

No, not now. Not today.

Suzi's spoon dipped into the gooey goodness of the ice cream and allowed sweet culinary bliss to melt her worries away.

###

Author's Note:

Image by Mark Grandcourt from Unsplash

This one-shot is part of the 31 Blind Dates anthology from more than two dozen Wattpad writers including members of the Stars program, published authors, Ambassadors and Wattys winners. If you want to start at the beginning, go to the profile of rskovach

You will find the next story in the collection on the profile of  jazzy1983

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