When we arrived, I pulled into the garage, walked Olivia over to the house, put Medallion’s M9 on the coffee table, and showed her the bedroom. After making sure she had towels and a fresh bar of soap and so forth, I headed back over to the garage to get my gun out of the glove box and cover the car. By the time I returned to the guesthouse, Olivia was asleep.
In the kitchen I poured myself a Scotch. I walked into the dark living room, put both the M11 on the coffee table next to Medallion’s M9, and sat down to think. I didn’t have much new information to consider. I tried to organize everything into actual facts, the possibilities and informed guesses, and the complete unknowns.
First, the facts. I knew Olivia was Alejandra Delarosa’s daughter. I knew she was a skilled mechanic with a good knowledge of high-end cars. I knew she was living under an assumed name. I knew she had been born in America and was a US citizen. I knew her father was a drunk and a civil engineer and was living in a cheap, virtually unfurnished apartment in a bad neighborhood in a city with one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world, while Olivia lived in a nice apartment just a few blocks from the beach and worked for a major movie star. I knew her mother was involved in a kidnapping and a murder and had claimed on camera to be a member of the URNG. I knew her father insisted that it wasn’t true. And I believed him.
I also knew there were two guys who wanted something from Olivia badly enough to torture her to get it, and they were the same two guys who had tried to kill me. I knew for a fact they were well-trained professionals. I knew they carried the kind of sidearms issued to US military personnel and soldiers from allied Latin American countries. I knew they were Latinos, or at least they looked like Latinos and spoke Spanish. Strangely, though, they hadn’t spoken Spanish when they interrogated Olivia.
I knew they had been following Valentín Vega when I first noticed them. Or had they? No, stick to the facts. For all I knew they had been following me from the start. So the exact nature of the connection between them and Vega was an open question. But I did know one of them had a thing for gold jewelry, and the other was trigger happy, since he had seemed ready to shoot me as early as our initial meeting at Crystal Cove State Park. I also knew they had stolen the Range Rover and my M11. I knew they had an affinity for large SUVs. I knew Doña Elena had reported seeing two men and a woman fleeing from her home on the night she shot Castro, and she believed the woman was Alejandra Delarosa. And that was about all I knew for sure.
I took a sip of Scotch and moved to the possibilities and informed guesses.
It was possible that Olivia Delarosa had indeed lived in Spain, received a degree in international banking there, and learned to work on high-end automobiles there. It was possible that she had been sending money to her father in Guatemala. But it was also possible the money in her father’s bank account had come from Olivia’s mother, who took it from Arturo Toledo just before she murdered him, since the amount in the account matched the amount delivered to the kidnappers. If it was blood money, and if Olivia’s father was a decent man, that would explain why he hadn’t spent it for seven years in spite of his miserable living conditions.
Moonlight slanted into the darkened living room. I looked at the way it fell on Medallion’s M9 on the coffee table and considered him again. For perhaps the hundredth time, I wondered if he and the Other One who had tried to kill me really were part of the old military junta that had once controlled Guatemala. I wondered if they were trying to protect themselves and their superiors from prosecution for past war crimes. If that was the situation, then they would see me as a threat, since there was a chance I might clear the URNG from suspicion in Arturo Toledo’s murder and Dona Elena’s kidnapping. If I managed to do that, it could cause Congressman Hector Montes to stop opposing US assistance for the URNG. The US might even support an international investigation into the genocide, the so-called disappeared ones during the Guatemala civil war. A lot of very powerful old men in Guatemala would be unhappy about that.
As for the complete unknowns, I still had no idea if Haley’s Guatemalan movie project had anything to do with all the rest of it. I had no idea why Olivia had gotten herself hired as Doña Elena’s personal assistant. I had no idea what she planned to do. I had no idea why Castro had been in Doña Elena’s house during the final moments of his life, and no idea if Alejandra Delarosa had been with him, or if it had been Olivia or some other woman. I also had no idea who the other two men were in Doña Elena’s house that night. I only knew neither of them had been me, and unless I found a way to prove it, I would probably spend the next decade or so in prison.
I finished off the Scotch, put the glass down on the table next to Medallion’s M9, picked up the weapon, and took it with me to bed. Sleep was a long time coming.
42
Sometime after dawn, I heard Olivia rattling around in the kitchen. At least I hoped it was Olivia. I rolled out of bed, wincing at the damage to my ribs, and slipped into a shirt and jeans.
“Good morning,” she said from the other side of the cabinets as I entered the living room. “I’ve got coffee going. Hope that’s okay.”
“Sure. Make yourself at home.”
“In that case, would you like bacon and eggs?”
“Sounds good.”
I sat at the little table in the corner and watched as she cooked. As always, she was well dressed in a pale-blue robe and matching pajamas and slippers. A memory came of Haley exactly in the same physical positions, in exactly the same place, doing exactly the same things. I had a fleeting whimsy that the only difference was time. I considered metaphysical coincidences, accidents of time and space, and possibilities that might include Haley still existing somehow as a collection of atoms and molecules among the other molecules and atoms in that same space she had once occupied.
A strange sense of distance began to creep into the room. The woman in my kitchen seemed to slide away, the entire room elongating away from me. Hard edges softened and blurred, with everything becoming translucent. Glowing, changing colors flowed into the air from everything I saw, new ideas appearing, drifting randomly across my interior landscape, enticing me to follow into chaos.
I shook my head one time, very quickly, like a dog emerging from deep water. I told myself to think of what was true. I turned away from Olivia. I looked out through the window. I saw Teru on the far side of the lawn, sending pipe smoke up into the clouds and watering a hibiscus that was in glorious full bloom. I thought about him and Simon searching for me on that lonely mountain road. With that memory of generous friendship, I felt the madness fading.
“Here you go,” said Olivia, setting a plate on the table. She sat across from me and started eating. Her eye was bruised but hadn’t swollen shut, which surprised me. The mark on her cheek where Medallion had slapped her was still there. Chewing seemed to cause her pain. I looked away from her again, took a bite of eggs, and went through the motions, moving my jaw up and down.
“How you feeling?” I asked.
“A little sore here and there, but I’m okay.”
“Any pain inside your stomach or chest?”
“No. It’s all superficial,” she said. “Who’s the painter?”
“What?”
“In my bedroom. The painting on the easel. Is that yours?”
“I dabble just a little. Used to, anyway.”
“It’s beautiful. I think you do more than dabble.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you sell them in a gallery?”