He can’t be any older than eighteen, twenty, Lydia thinks. How is it that he speaks like this, as if she owes him her name? ‘Araceli.’ She expels the fake name on her breath like a surfer riding a dying tide.
Lorenzo shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
Lydia bites the inside of her mouth. If she ever doubted herself capable of stabbing another human being, that uncertainty is no more. ‘Pardon me?’
‘You’re not Araceli.’
The only response she can manage is a soft snorting noise. Luca leans against her. When Lorenzo reaches into his pocket, she coils her body so tightly she begins to shake. She will thrust the blade into his neck. But no. She’s in a bad position; there’s no leverage. Would she be able to kill him? Or would she only injure him, incite him to repay her failed violence? It would be better to jump. To curl around Luca like a shell so at least he would survive this moment. The leap from the speeding train. But could Luca survive whatever follows that, once she’s gone? Lydia will get only one opportunity to sacrifice herself – then Luca’s on his own forever. Her body twitches with indecision. She turns the handle of the concealed machete, cold against her palm. But then Lorenzo’s hand emerges from his pocket with only a cell phone. No pistol, no blade. He clicks the thing to life and scrolls through the pictures.
Lydia’s breath shudders through her.
‘That’s you, right?’ He turns the phone so she can see. It’s a selfie Javier took of the two of them together at the bookstore. They’re on opposite sides of the counter, both leaning across, their foreheads touching at the temple. Lydia looks directly at the camera, but Javier’s face is turned slightly in, his eyes pulled toward her. Lydia remembers the day he took it, how he told her that Marta had instructed him thoroughly in the art of the selfie, how hard they had laughed together.
‘Lydia Quixano Pérez, right?’ the boy beside her says.
She tucks her lips inside her mouth and twists her neck once, but there’s nothing even marginally convincing in the gesture. Lorenzo holds the phone up beside her face to check her features against the likeness.
‘Yep yep. Good-looking folks,’ he says. And then, in a voice that sounds uncannily sincere, ‘I’m sorry about your family.’
What passes for silence on the train is the slow-motion roar of the engine hauling countless tons of chugging, clacking steel along the track behind it. The wheels shriek in their tracks, metal whines against metal, the couplers between the cars knuckle and grind and squeal. Several beats of that kind of silence pass before Lydia finds her voice.
‘What do you want?’
Lorenzo powers the phone off and puts it back in his pocket. ‘What do I want? Shoot.’ He whistles. ‘Same things as anybody, I guess. Nice house, a little bling, a good-lookin’ girl.’ He turns and smiles at Rebeca, who’s still sitting quite close to them, but doesn’t seem to be listening. She doesn’t meet his gaze, and Lydia doubts she can hear their conversation over the noise of the train. On her lap, Soledad’s eyes are still closed. Lorenzo examines his nails, looking for one to bite, while Lydia watches.
‘What do you want from me?’ she clarifies.
He finds a tiny, unassaulted white corner of fingernail and rips it off with his teeth. He spits it over the edge. ‘Nothin’.’ He shrugs. ‘Just being neighborly.’
‘Where did you get that picture?’ Lydia scrunches up her nose and uses her chin to point in the direction of the phone in his pocket.
‘Mami, I hate to tell you,’ he says. ‘Everybody in Guerrero got that picture.’
Lydia sucks in a breath. It’s not exactly news, but it does validate her fear. ‘For what purpose?’ She wants absolute clarity.
Lorenzo smirks at her sideways. ‘You for real?’
‘I need to know what we’re up against.’
Lorenzo pauses. Then shrugs. ‘Word was to bring you in.’
This is a surprise. Maybe only Hollywood gangsters say things like dead or alive, but that was what she’d expected. She tries to push this information into her internal hard drive, but it doesn’t compute. ‘Not to kill me?’ she asks. ‘To kill us?’
Lorenzo sighs. This isn’t how this conversation was supposed to go. She’s not supposed to be the one asking the questions. ‘Güey, I said too much already. I’m not trying to get myself killed, too.’
Lydia shifts uncomfortably beside him, the handle of the machete growing sweaty in her hand. ‘So that’s why you’re here? To bring us in?’
Maybe Javier wants only to kill them himself, to witness her suffering. She and Luca will not go with this boy. She will kill him if she has to; she’ll do it in front of Luca if she must.
‘Nah,’ Lorenzo says. ‘I left all that behind me in Guerrero.’ He waves his arm toward the south.
Lydia does not loosen her grip on the machete. ‘Okay.’
‘De verdad, new leaf.’ He grins. ‘I’m out.’
She feels unqualified to assess this claim. She makes no response.
‘How’d you get outta Acapulco, though?’ Lorenzo asks after a moment. ‘Everybody was looking for you. You got magic powers or something? You some kind of santera? ¿Una bruja?’
Lydia surprises herself with a laugh, but it’s only a husk of a sound. ‘I suppose fear has certain magical properties.’ She’ll never know how narrow their escape really was, that two of Javier’s men opened the door to their room at the Hotel Duquesa Imperial just as she and Luca were entering the lobby of the hotel next door.
‘So where you heading to now?’ Lorenzo asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she lies. ‘We haven’t really decided.’
Lorenzo pulls his knees up so his baggy shorts sag beneath. He gathers his arms around his legs. ‘I’m going to LA,’ he says. ‘I got a cousin out there in Hollywood, doing his thing.’
‘As good a place as any,’ she says.
And then the train silence returns, and in that thundering quiet, she wonders: Why? If he was well connected in Los Jardineros, if he was making enough money to afford those expensive sneakers and that decent cell phone? If he was okay with earning that first drop of tattooed blood, and the second, and the third, then what made him leave Guerrero? There are infinite possible answers, she knows. Perhaps he disliked murdering. Perhaps he felt that the acts of violence he committed had some undesirable effect on him. Perhaps he had nightmares, the faces of the people he’d killed floating up before him whenever he closed his eyes. Maybe he was haunted, hunted, ragged in his soul. Or maybe the precise opposite was true. Perhaps he was so entirely without conscience that he’d been unable, even, to adhere to whatever deformed excuse for a moral code Los Jardineros exercised. Maybe he raped the wrong woman. Or stole money from one of his jefes. Or maybe he murdered so gleefully that his depravity turned him into a liability. Maybe he’s running, too. Or maybe none of these things are true. Perhaps he hasn’t left Los Jardineros at all, and he really is here only for her.
Whatever the case, Lydia feels shriveled by Lorenzo’s presence. He’s a menace, sitting beside her, and now the threat feels urgent again. It’s all around her. She breathes it, and it’s the same as ever: senseless, confusing, categorically terrifying. Javier feels as close as the day she first confronted him in the bookshop. The Russian nesting dolls. He’d reached for her hand. She can feel his fingers pressing into the veins at her wrist. She can hear that sicario urinating into the toilet on the other side of Abuela’s green-tiled wall.