Salvador stood on the other side, backlit from the foyer, his ugly face cast in sinister shadow. He stroked along his mustache and gave me a smile that even a crocodile would be ashamed to wear.
“Luisa, my princess,” he said cunningly, opening up an arm for me. “Welcome home.”
I looked to the police officers, wondering if I had enough strength to turn back, to run, to plead for their help. But they were paid handsomely by my husband, and their job was about indifference to anything but money. There would be no help from them. There would be no help from anyone.
I was on my own.
I gave Salvador a stiff smile as I walked into the house.
He slowly closed the door behind him and shot me a sly look over his shoulder. “This took me by surprise. I must say I never expected to see you again.”
“I know,” I said, putting on the face of the scared yet sympathetic wife. “And I understand. When I saw I had a chance to escape, I took it. You’d be shocked at how immature Javier’s men are. They are nothing like yours.”
He smiled briefly at my compliment. “I’m surprised you came back here.”
“You are my husband,” I told him, hoping he bought the sincerity. “Where else would I go?”
He studied me for a moment, his jaw ticking back and forth. “I guess you’re right.” He took a large step toward me, his cowboy boots echoing on the floor. “It’s too bad that you’ll soon wish you hadn’t.”
My face fell. His lit up. “Sometimes,” he went on, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” He chuckled to himself. “I realized what I had wasn’t even worth bargaining for.” He shrugged and pulled at his chin as he looked my body up and down. “But that doesn’t mean you aren’t worth something. Get on your knees.”
I opened my mouth in protest and almost said something I’d regret. Talking back to Javier had become a bad habit, one he had encouraged.
“I said on your knees, cunt!” Salvador yelled at me. He grabbed me by my hair and thrust me down to the floor, my knees taking the brunt of the fall. I heard his zipper go down but I couldn’t make myself look up.
He made me look. He made a fist at the top of my head and yanked my hair straight up, my nerves exploding in pain. I looked past his rancid cock and right at his face. It was evil incarnate. He shook his head, clucking his tongue. “You hesitated, Luisa, and a woman never hesitates. Looks like I’m going to have to retrain you all over again.”
The next thing I knew, his knee came toward my face. There was pain and spots and all the world went black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Javier
The saying goes, if you love something, let it go. I always thought it was better to just shoot the damn thing so it’d never go anywhere.
But now I understood. Now that I didn’t have a choice.
I suppose I could have said something. I could have told Luisa what she wanted to hear. But that would have been a lie. I didn’t love her. I couldn’t. That was something that was no longer applicable to the person I’d become. There was no place for it in my life; it didn’t fit, it didn’t work. Love didn’t build empires, it ruined them.
What I felt for Luisa wasn’t love. But it was curious. It was something, at least. It was deep and spreading, like a cancer. Yet, instead of only bringing pain, it brought purpose in its sickness. Her lips soothed me, her heart challenged me, her eyes made me bleed. My bed was where we held our exorcisms. She brought me peace. I brought her fire. Now the flame was out—gone forever—and there was a war raging inside me.
I went a full week pretending that nothing had happened. Pretending that nothing was eating me from the inside out. I wore my mask every day. I worked with Este on our next targets, our next hand in this game. A trip to Veracruz was becoming more and more possible. But that city no longer stirred fear in my heart, no longer played on bad memories. Those memories meant nothing to me anymore. There was something so much scarier raging just below my surface.
One night I woke up from a nightmare. I think it was the same as I had before, with my father and I fishing, Luisa on the end of the hook. It was hard to remember; the dream shattered into fragments the moment I woke. But the feeling was there. The unimaginable fear. This was the sickness manifesting itself. This was the war coming. This was what happened to me when I no longer had her to placate me.
And then I realized with certainty that I had been a coward this whole time. I was in my bed, safe and comfortable in the life I had created for myself. I wanted for nothing. And yet she, she was with Salvador. She had been there a week already and I couldn’t imagine her state, if she was even still alive. She wanted for everything.
I didn’t go back to sleep. Even though it was the middle of the night, I slipped a robe around me and left the house. I went to sit by the koi pond, the lotus blossoms looking ghostly in the moonlight. I stared at their white purity until the sun came up. Then, in that glow of dawn, I saw more clearly. The flowers were magnificent, but they weren’t as the Chinese scholar had said. There were imperfections on their surface. There were stains. Their beauty didn’t come from the fact that they were untainted, their beauty came from their resilience. They were proud to have grown from mud.
Even if my beauty queen was already dead, I knew what I had to do. There would be dire consequences for my actions, but there already were. What was the difference if I stirred up a little more trouble? At this point, it was pretty much expected of me.
Later that day, I told the men I was going away on a business trip to Cabo San Lucas. Este, being my right-hand man and all, insisted he come along for the journey, but I told him I needed to do this alone. I would be safe and I wouldn’t be long—two or three days, at most. And if I happened upon the wrong people at the wrong time, then that was that. I knew Este would slide right in and replace me anyway.
I was a nervous flier. It was a quick trip across the water, but it still took a lot of composure to not drink all the alcohol available in first class. There was a man in the row across from me who stared at me like he might have recognized me. I only smiled back. Though this was risky, I also knew that most people would never do or say anything to me. Besides, my face might have been out there once or twice but Salvador was right—I wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
Though the airport was closer to San Jose del Cabo than it was to San Lucas, that wasn’t my first stop. I wasn’t lying to Este when I said I had business that needed attending to. This time, I wasn’t going to give an order and watch someone else do it. I was going to get my hands very, very dirty.
It was all for her.
And it seemed the more I did for her, the filthier I got.
Once in Cabo, I took a long stroll around the town. I hadn’t been here in a long time and was shocked to see how much it had changed. What was once a small marina was jam-packed with million-dollar yachts. Cruise ships hovered offshore while drunk teenagers on jet skis did circles in the azure surf. The beaches were filled with dance music and DJs announcing hourly body shots. The popular bars spouted Top 40 hits and celebrity-owned statuses.
The town had no soul. Perhaps this was good for tourists—indeed it was excellent for Mexico’s economy, as were my drugs. But I could never live in a place that catered to the other half. Sure, the town was safe and the drug wars hadn’t littered the streets. But where was the real Mexico? Where was the grit beneath the glamour? Where were the proud flowers rising from the mud?
I spent most of the day walking around, taking in everything. Despite all my misgivings toward the resort town, I still enjoyed myself. I was a tourist, just looking at all the sights. I was a man just looking for a bar, a place to get a drink.