Dark horse, p.29
Dark Horse, page 29
“You’ll have your pick of my vehicles.”
“No,” Evan said. “Not with the Gulf Cartel waiting out there. Going in one of your cars is too conspicuous. I saw a Hertz at the edge of the city. Have one of your men drop me there. I’ll handle the rest of my arrangements.”
“Fine. When will you leave?”
“As soon as I’ve showered off Jovencito’s blood.”
At this, Montesco smiled that wide, loose smile. “You and me, we are carnales!”
He offered Evan a hand to clasp and yanked him in for a one-arm embrace. The stench coming off him was powerful, but Evan, covered with dried sweat and blood, wasn’t one to talk.
As they pulled apart, Evan said, “Can I have my gun now?”
Montesco considered this a moment. “I thought you might ask.” He reached into the back of his waistband. Held out the ARES 1911 to Evan. As Evan took it, the muzzle swept across Montesco’s chest for a moment. Short-term temptation. Long-term disaster.
He knew his pistol like it was a part of his body. He felt its heft and understood right away.
Pretended to check and notice for the first time.
“No bullets,” he said.
Montesco tapped Evan’s temple a few times, hard enough that his fingernail pinched the skin. “You just said I can’t know who to trust.” He reached out and took the gun back. “I trust you, Caballo Oscuro, because you are like me. This is also why I don’t trust you. You see?”
“Fair enough.”
“Bring me the head of the third shooter. Then we will see about allowing you a weapon under my roof.”
He slapped Evan not so gently on the cheek and withdrew.
* * *
The sun was setting as Evan stepped out onto the portico. He wheeled a hard-shelled carry-on suitcase with each hand, the most valuable luggage he’d possessed in some time.
The chauffeur named Raudel waited in one of the SUVs. Spotting Evan, he hopped out and loaded the suitcases into the cargo hold, then held the rear door for Evan.
He climbed in. Gazed across at the jailed row of human beings, another commodity waiting to be shipped out. Soulful eyes, gaunt cheeks, bruised arms from rough handling. They had a few more days of captivity before being moved along the assembly line. At the next stop, they’d be treated like product, like possessions, like meat. Used once all the way through or thousands of times until they wore out. He had to wrap this mission up before the shipping date that would consign them to an unknown fate.
As the chauffeur walked around the SUV, a voice called out from the blind spot. “Hold on!”
A form flashed past the tinted window, and then Reymundo got into the driver’s seat. “Mind if I drive you?”
Evan shrugged.
Raudel tapped the driver’s window with a knuckle, and Reymundo rolled it down.
The chauffeur took Evan’s measure. He was a squat, barrel-chested man with a manicured beard. Even from here his breath smelled of chewing tobacco. He spoke in heavily accented English. “I don’t think you should be alone with this gabacho.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.” Reymundo drove off, leaving the chauffeur standing in the quartz stones, head tilted, looking befuddled.
Evan called up the white-noise app on his phone, placed it on his thigh.
Reymundo took note, his eyes flashing in the rearview.
“Gabacho,” Evan repeated. “He’s one of Darling Boy’s buddies?”
“Most of them are,” Reymundo said. “My father has relied on Darling Boy for many years.”
“Why are you driving me?”
“I wanted to tell you.…” Reymundo hesitated. “I’m grateful. To you. For what you are doing for Anjelina. She told me about the hospital. Not just that you protected her. But that … you comforted her. I haven’t—” His voice wavered, and he paused to regain his composure. “I haven’t been able to. Protect her. Not like I should.”
“How about the other women? In the chicken coop?”
Reymundo’s voice came low, like a little boy’s. “I haven’t been able to protect them either.”
For a time they drove in silence.
Wind howled through the rock walls, an ungodly sound, the force strong enough to blow the SUV around on the road. At last they spit out onto the valley, the highway stretching ahead like an arrow pointing to the broken city of Guaridón. The air-conditioning blew cool and steady against Evan’s face. He tasted stale cigar smoke seeping up through the leather upholstery. Everything the Dark Man touched carried his scent.
“For as long as I can remember,” Reymundo said, “I prayed to God to take him away. Not kill him but just … take him away. My hands sweat every time he walks into the room. My heart rate jumps when I hear his voice. Even when he’s not there, I hear it thundering in my head. To fear the person who is supposed to protect you most, the person who brought you into the world—” His voice was rising, but he caught himself. “Now I no longer pray to God to take him away. I pray to God that he will die.”
“If I can figure out how to give you a fresh start, are you ready to do anything you need to do to protect Anjelina?”
“Yes.”
“Even if that means leaving and never coming back.”
“Especially if it means that. But…” The tires rolled across the gritty asphalt, and then the SUV bounced off the exit, burrowing beneath an overpass, the cavernous space crammed with homeless encampments. “What if I screw this up? She loves me now. But she’s giving everything up. Everything.”
“You are, too,” Evan said.
“What if she decides it wasn’t worth it? That I’m not worth it?”
“Make it worth it. Every day.”
“How do I do that?”
“Pay attention.”
“To what?”
“Everything.”
The city was desolate, decrepit high-rises, few cars on the street, sporadic packs of roving boys. They stopped at a red light, the Hertz rental place waiting across the intersection. Chain-link and barbed wire protected the collection of shabby vehicles. Evan would refuse the first two they offered in case El Moreno had made arrangements to bug them, and then he would chose the ugliest vehicle on the lot.
An elderly blind man stood at the sidewalk, tapping his walking stick along the edge of the curb. He tentatively stepped down into the crosswalk, brown polyester pants tugging up at the ankles to show black socks and strips of dry, cracked skin.
“No one ever taught me,” Reymundo said. “How to be a good man. I grew up with killers and whores.”
When the light changed, he didn’t roll off the line, though there was plenty of time for him to clear the intersection. Instead he waited for the old man.
In slow motion the elderly man tapped along in front of them, feeling his way with the walking stick, avoiding a pothole and then a spill of shattered glass. He wore dark shades, his skin sun-burnished, the color of walnut. Evan couldn’t help but think of Belicia, all those wrong turns that led to her sight’s being robbed. And how she and Aragón, despite all their suffering or because of it, seemed to have discovered deeper places within themselves.
Evan leaned forward, pointing past Reymundo’s shoulder at the blind man. “What’s he doing?”
Reymundo watched a moment. “Seeing where to walk?”
“No. Seeing where he shouldn’t walk.”
From the other side of the crosswalk, the blind man turned his face back to them, doffed an imaginary hat, and kept on his instinctive way.
“That’s where to start,” Evan said. “Sometimes that’s all we have.”
45
Up in Smoke
After two days inside the torture palace, a lethal brawl in a surgical suite, and the three-and-a-half hour drive back to Eden, Evan was in no mood for security theater.
Special Ed and Kiki, manning the front gate of Aragón’s compound with a few PMCs, alerted as Evan pulled up in an overheated Chevrolet Matiz. He’d hidden the suitcases of cash in the spare-tire compartment, crossing the border tensely but without incident.
Slinging their AR-15s, the two men ambled up on either side of the cramped hatchback. “Ah, look who came crawling home,” said Eduardo. “Thanks to you, Patrón is burning more product at the northeast end of the compound. Day and night he destroys his business. Un chingo de lana, up in smoke. Wait here while we—”
Evan said, “Open the gate.”
Something in his face made clear he needed to see Aragón immediately.
The men stared at him a moment, and then Kiki lifted a radio to his face and mumbled into it. The gate retracted behind the concrete-block wall, and Evan accelerated into the compound. A few shouts behind him as the two lieutenants hopped into a Jeep to follow.
The sky was a confusion of dark and light, the fallen sun throwing a cold gray glow from below the horizon, illuminating the firmament. After the tacky extravagance of Montesco’s estate, Aragón’s land seemed downright homey—dirt and generators and a normal suburban residence plopped down in the center.
As Evan blazed to the house, a number of other vehicles came visible, raising trails of dust in the gloaming. They vectored toward him from the perimeter, spokes of a wheel converging.
Clearly the alarm had been raised—the Nowhere Man returning with news of the imperiled daughter—and all the manpower of the compound was assembling for the update.
Evan reached the front of the house, the other vehicles irising in on him, and parked by the driveway. A Jeep careened up, Aragón hopping out while it was still moving, nearly stumbling as he ran for Evan.
“Where is she? Is she alive?” Aragón’s shirt was unbuttoned at the top, showing off the sunburned skin of his chest.
“She’s alive,” Evan said. “But there’s more. And you’re not going to like it.”
Aragón stormed to Evan even as the other vehicles slanted into place, headlights skewering them, the front of the house. Men unpacked, doors slamming, breath huffing in the semidarkness. Across the manicured front lawn, the door clicked open, La Tía visible behind the screen. The air carried a tinge of acrid smoke, probably from whatever haul Aragón was incinerating at the periphery.
Aragón charged as if to barrel straight through Evan, but he halted just in time, chest heaving. “What? What is it? Tell me where she is!”
“She is with Reymundo, El Moreno’s son. She went there by choice. She is being held captive now. And…”
Aragón looked confused, the meaty flanges of his nose flaring. That thick shock of black hair looked grayer, though it had been less than seventy-two hours since Evan had seen him.
“What?” Aragón snarled. “What?”
“She’s pregnant.”
Aragón staggered as if shot, one hand clamped to the spot where his shoulder met chest. The screen door banged, and then La Tía drifted across the lawn, nightgown fluttering about her ankles, not walking toward them so much as gliding.
Aragón’s voice came low now, little more than a growl. “What did you say? What the fuck did you just say?”
“Anjelina is pregnant. With Reymundo’s child.”
“No. No!” Fury cut with disbelief, even a hint of pleading. “It’s not true.”
Headlights stabbed Evan’s eyes, but he did not look away.
Aragón’s gaze was feral, murderous. Baring his teeth, he doubled over as if heaving, and a bellow escaped him, more a roar than a yell. His cheeks trembled.
The others had gathered around them in a loose circle, giving them space. Special Ed and Kiki were a half step in front but frozen in their boots, locked to the ground, stunned by the sight of their boss in this state.
Aragón straightened back up. “She lied to me? She staged this? That ungrateful—” His face looked to be tearing itself apart. “With them? The Leones? El Moreno’s son? She has his bastard seed in her belly?” He flung a hand toward the rise of black smoke to the northeast. “For her I’m burning down my kingdom?”
“For your daughter, yes.”
Aragón thundered at him, teeth clenched, veins popping in his neck, “This is worse than if she was dead.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what I mean right now.”
“Your daughter—”
“She can be anything she wants to be. Anything. Except this.”
“You’d rather she were dead?”
“Yes. Yes. I’d rather my daughter was dead than a fucking whore.”
Evan cuffed him.
Openhanded but hard, a thunderclap to Aragón’s left cheek. It caught him off guard, toppling him. He landed on one knee, head lowered, hair shielding his eyes. His shoulders heaved with his breath.
For a moment there was no sound save Aragón’s labored breathing. The men around them were paralyzed, in absolute shock. For once Special Ed and Kiki held their tongues. Their eyes were shiny, and beneath the facial hair and acne scars and cover-up and rawboned glares of killers Evan could see the boys they had been, and for a single bright moment none of them were killers and cartel leaders and private military contractors and ex–government assassins but just men beneath an open sky enacting an ancient ritual they could comprehend but scarcely understand.
Eduardo reached for his pistol and started to step forward, but Kiki caught his eye and gave him a slight shake of the head. This was not for them.
Aragón rose with dignity, wiped his mouth.
He walked quietly out of the ring of men. They parted, and he passed his aunt, standing barefoot in the grass.
He opened the door, closed it gently behind him, and the night was still.
46
Another Arrogant Gringo Pendejo
La Tía stood glowering at Evan, her nightgown rippling around her in the breeze. Then she turned and followed Aragón inside. The instant the door closed, the sound of their shouting carried outside. Rapid-fire Spanish, too fast for Evan to understand.
The others looked at him, unsure what to do.
After a few minutes, the door hinged open. La Tía skewered Evan with a glare. “Get in here.”
Not a request.
He went.
Slack-jawed and stupefied, the men parted for him as well. The house smelled of onion and cilantro, a pot simmering on the stove. Aragón was pacing around the ground floor like a raging bull, heat emanating off him. Muttering low to himself, sweeping his shiny black curls off his forehead again and again.
La Tía’s arms were crossed, head drawn back. Somehow, miraculously, she was wearing makeup. With her nut-brown skin and white hair, she was as imposing a figure as any Evan had encountered.
“You disrespect my sobrino,” she said. “On his land. In front of his men.”
“He disrespects himself.”
“You know nothing of our family. Nothing of our culture. Another arrogant gringo pendejo, sticking your nose into something you scarcely understand.”
“I understand that right now his image of his daughter is more important to him than she is.”
In the kitchen Aragón cursed and swept his arm, knocking the cast-iron pot off the burner, caldo de res splattering the wall. He slammed the heels of his hands onto the counter, shoulders pinching up into his neck, a pained guttural noise escaping him.
“His daughter—my granddaughter—has standards to live up to. A family name. This decision she made, it’s unconscionable. Those people, the Leones, are animales. And she chose to go to them. To be unsafe. To have relations before marriage. And above all the lying. To us. Putting lives at risk. Inviting them here, into Eden, to raid our very own community—”
“I don’t disagree.”
“And yet you dare to lay hands on her father?” La Tía came at Evan, jabbing a manicured finger. “He has every right to put you six feet in the earth! He should—”
“Stop!”
A low feminine voice from the top of the stairs, clear as glass, sharp as a scalpel.
La Tía halted.
Belicia stood at the landing, toplit by a recessed overhead. Despite the hour she was fully dressed. Evan imagined her up there hearing the commotion, pulling on her jeans, buttoning her blouse, brushing her hair by feel alone. Her bearing was erect, shoulders pulled back and down, the picture-perfect posture of a gymnast or a drill sergeant.
She reached for the railing, her fingers wavering over the wood before her palm cupped the top. She descended. In the full light, she was radiant.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she halted, hand on the newel post. Her ghostly eyes took the measure of the room. She turned to La Tía, her angle only barely wrong. “Enough.”
La Tía said, “If you’d heard the tone this man took with—”
“I heard everything,” Belicia said.
“Then you have to know—”
“I don’t have to know anything. This is between me and my husband.” Those sightless eyes turned to Evan, and he could have sworn she saw him as well as anyone ever had, if not better. “And the Nowhere Man.”
La Tía’s mouth pursed, etched lines contracting. Then she dipped her chin deferentially and walked past Belicia and up the stairs. All this time, in violation of the First Commandment, Evan had assumed that La Tía was the materfamilias. He’d assumed wrong.
Belicia drifted into the living room and sat in the leather armchair Aragón had commanded a few nights before. She nodded at the couch, and Evan crossed the small room and sat. Aragón stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, his fuming palpable.
“Aragón,” she said quietly. And then, a touch louder, “Mi vida.”
Aragón flew into sight. “Don’t you dare try to talk me into accepting this. That child—your daughter—she had everything. Everything. She lived a perfect life!”
In the face of Aragón’s fury, Belicia’s calm demeanor was even more pronounced. “Behind these gates.”
“She had everything she could possibly want. Every freedom in the world. Every luxury. Wake up in the morning in a soft bed. Turn on a tap and fresh water pours out. Come downstairs, drink coffee with beans picked where? Kenya? The shaded pinche slopes of Guatemala? Shipped here. To our house. Our normal fancy house.” Aragón paced before her on the carpet, reminding Evan of Montesco’s caged lion. “How many bars of soap do we have under the sink? How many boxes of pasta in the pantry? You don’t know, do you? Neither do I. Because we don’t have to. Because we are living the actual dream.”
“No,” Evan said. “Not with the Gulf Cartel waiting out there. Going in one of your cars is too conspicuous. I saw a Hertz at the edge of the city. Have one of your men drop me there. I’ll handle the rest of my arrangements.”
“Fine. When will you leave?”
“As soon as I’ve showered off Jovencito’s blood.”
At this, Montesco smiled that wide, loose smile. “You and me, we are carnales!”
He offered Evan a hand to clasp and yanked him in for a one-arm embrace. The stench coming off him was powerful, but Evan, covered with dried sweat and blood, wasn’t one to talk.
As they pulled apart, Evan said, “Can I have my gun now?”
Montesco considered this a moment. “I thought you might ask.” He reached into the back of his waistband. Held out the ARES 1911 to Evan. As Evan took it, the muzzle swept across Montesco’s chest for a moment. Short-term temptation. Long-term disaster.
He knew his pistol like it was a part of his body. He felt its heft and understood right away.
Pretended to check and notice for the first time.
“No bullets,” he said.
Montesco tapped Evan’s temple a few times, hard enough that his fingernail pinched the skin. “You just said I can’t know who to trust.” He reached out and took the gun back. “I trust you, Caballo Oscuro, because you are like me. This is also why I don’t trust you. You see?”
“Fair enough.”
“Bring me the head of the third shooter. Then we will see about allowing you a weapon under my roof.”
He slapped Evan not so gently on the cheek and withdrew.
* * *
The sun was setting as Evan stepped out onto the portico. He wheeled a hard-shelled carry-on suitcase with each hand, the most valuable luggage he’d possessed in some time.
The chauffeur named Raudel waited in one of the SUVs. Spotting Evan, he hopped out and loaded the suitcases into the cargo hold, then held the rear door for Evan.
He climbed in. Gazed across at the jailed row of human beings, another commodity waiting to be shipped out. Soulful eyes, gaunt cheeks, bruised arms from rough handling. They had a few more days of captivity before being moved along the assembly line. At the next stop, they’d be treated like product, like possessions, like meat. Used once all the way through or thousands of times until they wore out. He had to wrap this mission up before the shipping date that would consign them to an unknown fate.
As the chauffeur walked around the SUV, a voice called out from the blind spot. “Hold on!”
A form flashed past the tinted window, and then Reymundo got into the driver’s seat. “Mind if I drive you?”
Evan shrugged.
Raudel tapped the driver’s window with a knuckle, and Reymundo rolled it down.
The chauffeur took Evan’s measure. He was a squat, barrel-chested man with a manicured beard. Even from here his breath smelled of chewing tobacco. He spoke in heavily accented English. “I don’t think you should be alone with this gabacho.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.” Reymundo drove off, leaving the chauffeur standing in the quartz stones, head tilted, looking befuddled.
Evan called up the white-noise app on his phone, placed it on his thigh.
Reymundo took note, his eyes flashing in the rearview.
“Gabacho,” Evan repeated. “He’s one of Darling Boy’s buddies?”
“Most of them are,” Reymundo said. “My father has relied on Darling Boy for many years.”
“Why are you driving me?”
“I wanted to tell you.…” Reymundo hesitated. “I’m grateful. To you. For what you are doing for Anjelina. She told me about the hospital. Not just that you protected her. But that … you comforted her. I haven’t—” His voice wavered, and he paused to regain his composure. “I haven’t been able to. Protect her. Not like I should.”
“How about the other women? In the chicken coop?”
Reymundo’s voice came low, like a little boy’s. “I haven’t been able to protect them either.”
For a time they drove in silence.
Wind howled through the rock walls, an ungodly sound, the force strong enough to blow the SUV around on the road. At last they spit out onto the valley, the highway stretching ahead like an arrow pointing to the broken city of Guaridón. The air-conditioning blew cool and steady against Evan’s face. He tasted stale cigar smoke seeping up through the leather upholstery. Everything the Dark Man touched carried his scent.
“For as long as I can remember,” Reymundo said, “I prayed to God to take him away. Not kill him but just … take him away. My hands sweat every time he walks into the room. My heart rate jumps when I hear his voice. Even when he’s not there, I hear it thundering in my head. To fear the person who is supposed to protect you most, the person who brought you into the world—” His voice was rising, but he caught himself. “Now I no longer pray to God to take him away. I pray to God that he will die.”
“If I can figure out how to give you a fresh start, are you ready to do anything you need to do to protect Anjelina?”
“Yes.”
“Even if that means leaving and never coming back.”
“Especially if it means that. But…” The tires rolled across the gritty asphalt, and then the SUV bounced off the exit, burrowing beneath an overpass, the cavernous space crammed with homeless encampments. “What if I screw this up? She loves me now. But she’s giving everything up. Everything.”
“You are, too,” Evan said.
“What if she decides it wasn’t worth it? That I’m not worth it?”
“Make it worth it. Every day.”
“How do I do that?”
“Pay attention.”
“To what?”
“Everything.”
The city was desolate, decrepit high-rises, few cars on the street, sporadic packs of roving boys. They stopped at a red light, the Hertz rental place waiting across the intersection. Chain-link and barbed wire protected the collection of shabby vehicles. Evan would refuse the first two they offered in case El Moreno had made arrangements to bug them, and then he would chose the ugliest vehicle on the lot.
An elderly blind man stood at the sidewalk, tapping his walking stick along the edge of the curb. He tentatively stepped down into the crosswalk, brown polyester pants tugging up at the ankles to show black socks and strips of dry, cracked skin.
“No one ever taught me,” Reymundo said. “How to be a good man. I grew up with killers and whores.”
When the light changed, he didn’t roll off the line, though there was plenty of time for him to clear the intersection. Instead he waited for the old man.
In slow motion the elderly man tapped along in front of them, feeling his way with the walking stick, avoiding a pothole and then a spill of shattered glass. He wore dark shades, his skin sun-burnished, the color of walnut. Evan couldn’t help but think of Belicia, all those wrong turns that led to her sight’s being robbed. And how she and Aragón, despite all their suffering or because of it, seemed to have discovered deeper places within themselves.
Evan leaned forward, pointing past Reymundo’s shoulder at the blind man. “What’s he doing?”
Reymundo watched a moment. “Seeing where to walk?”
“No. Seeing where he shouldn’t walk.”
From the other side of the crosswalk, the blind man turned his face back to them, doffed an imaginary hat, and kept on his instinctive way.
“That’s where to start,” Evan said. “Sometimes that’s all we have.”
45
Up in Smoke
After two days inside the torture palace, a lethal brawl in a surgical suite, and the three-and-a-half hour drive back to Eden, Evan was in no mood for security theater.
Special Ed and Kiki, manning the front gate of Aragón’s compound with a few PMCs, alerted as Evan pulled up in an overheated Chevrolet Matiz. He’d hidden the suitcases of cash in the spare-tire compartment, crossing the border tensely but without incident.
Slinging their AR-15s, the two men ambled up on either side of the cramped hatchback. “Ah, look who came crawling home,” said Eduardo. “Thanks to you, Patrón is burning more product at the northeast end of the compound. Day and night he destroys his business. Un chingo de lana, up in smoke. Wait here while we—”
Evan said, “Open the gate.”
Something in his face made clear he needed to see Aragón immediately.
The men stared at him a moment, and then Kiki lifted a radio to his face and mumbled into it. The gate retracted behind the concrete-block wall, and Evan accelerated into the compound. A few shouts behind him as the two lieutenants hopped into a Jeep to follow.
The sky was a confusion of dark and light, the fallen sun throwing a cold gray glow from below the horizon, illuminating the firmament. After the tacky extravagance of Montesco’s estate, Aragón’s land seemed downright homey—dirt and generators and a normal suburban residence plopped down in the center.
As Evan blazed to the house, a number of other vehicles came visible, raising trails of dust in the gloaming. They vectored toward him from the perimeter, spokes of a wheel converging.
Clearly the alarm had been raised—the Nowhere Man returning with news of the imperiled daughter—and all the manpower of the compound was assembling for the update.
Evan reached the front of the house, the other vehicles irising in on him, and parked by the driveway. A Jeep careened up, Aragón hopping out while it was still moving, nearly stumbling as he ran for Evan.
“Where is she? Is she alive?” Aragón’s shirt was unbuttoned at the top, showing off the sunburned skin of his chest.
“She’s alive,” Evan said. “But there’s more. And you’re not going to like it.”
Aragón stormed to Evan even as the other vehicles slanted into place, headlights skewering them, the front of the house. Men unpacked, doors slamming, breath huffing in the semidarkness. Across the manicured front lawn, the door clicked open, La Tía visible behind the screen. The air carried a tinge of acrid smoke, probably from whatever haul Aragón was incinerating at the periphery.
Aragón charged as if to barrel straight through Evan, but he halted just in time, chest heaving. “What? What is it? Tell me where she is!”
“She is with Reymundo, El Moreno’s son. She went there by choice. She is being held captive now. And…”
Aragón looked confused, the meaty flanges of his nose flaring. That thick shock of black hair looked grayer, though it had been less than seventy-two hours since Evan had seen him.
“What?” Aragón snarled. “What?”
“She’s pregnant.”
Aragón staggered as if shot, one hand clamped to the spot where his shoulder met chest. The screen door banged, and then La Tía drifted across the lawn, nightgown fluttering about her ankles, not walking toward them so much as gliding.
Aragón’s voice came low now, little more than a growl. “What did you say? What the fuck did you just say?”
“Anjelina is pregnant. With Reymundo’s child.”
“No. No!” Fury cut with disbelief, even a hint of pleading. “It’s not true.”
Headlights stabbed Evan’s eyes, but he did not look away.
Aragón’s gaze was feral, murderous. Baring his teeth, he doubled over as if heaving, and a bellow escaped him, more a roar than a yell. His cheeks trembled.
The others had gathered around them in a loose circle, giving them space. Special Ed and Kiki were a half step in front but frozen in their boots, locked to the ground, stunned by the sight of their boss in this state.
Aragón straightened back up. “She lied to me? She staged this? That ungrateful—” His face looked to be tearing itself apart. “With them? The Leones? El Moreno’s son? She has his bastard seed in her belly?” He flung a hand toward the rise of black smoke to the northeast. “For her I’m burning down my kingdom?”
“For your daughter, yes.”
Aragón thundered at him, teeth clenched, veins popping in his neck, “This is worse than if she was dead.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what I mean right now.”
“Your daughter—”
“She can be anything she wants to be. Anything. Except this.”
“You’d rather she were dead?”
“Yes. Yes. I’d rather my daughter was dead than a fucking whore.”
Evan cuffed him.
Openhanded but hard, a thunderclap to Aragón’s left cheek. It caught him off guard, toppling him. He landed on one knee, head lowered, hair shielding his eyes. His shoulders heaved with his breath.
For a moment there was no sound save Aragón’s labored breathing. The men around them were paralyzed, in absolute shock. For once Special Ed and Kiki held their tongues. Their eyes were shiny, and beneath the facial hair and acne scars and cover-up and rawboned glares of killers Evan could see the boys they had been, and for a single bright moment none of them were killers and cartel leaders and private military contractors and ex–government assassins but just men beneath an open sky enacting an ancient ritual they could comprehend but scarcely understand.
Eduardo reached for his pistol and started to step forward, but Kiki caught his eye and gave him a slight shake of the head. This was not for them.
Aragón rose with dignity, wiped his mouth.
He walked quietly out of the ring of men. They parted, and he passed his aunt, standing barefoot in the grass.
He opened the door, closed it gently behind him, and the night was still.
46
Another Arrogant Gringo Pendejo
La Tía stood glowering at Evan, her nightgown rippling around her in the breeze. Then she turned and followed Aragón inside. The instant the door closed, the sound of their shouting carried outside. Rapid-fire Spanish, too fast for Evan to understand.
The others looked at him, unsure what to do.
After a few minutes, the door hinged open. La Tía skewered Evan with a glare. “Get in here.”
Not a request.
He went.
Slack-jawed and stupefied, the men parted for him as well. The house smelled of onion and cilantro, a pot simmering on the stove. Aragón was pacing around the ground floor like a raging bull, heat emanating off him. Muttering low to himself, sweeping his shiny black curls off his forehead again and again.
La Tía’s arms were crossed, head drawn back. Somehow, miraculously, she was wearing makeup. With her nut-brown skin and white hair, she was as imposing a figure as any Evan had encountered.
“You disrespect my sobrino,” she said. “On his land. In front of his men.”
“He disrespects himself.”
“You know nothing of our family. Nothing of our culture. Another arrogant gringo pendejo, sticking your nose into something you scarcely understand.”
“I understand that right now his image of his daughter is more important to him than she is.”
In the kitchen Aragón cursed and swept his arm, knocking the cast-iron pot off the burner, caldo de res splattering the wall. He slammed the heels of his hands onto the counter, shoulders pinching up into his neck, a pained guttural noise escaping him.
“His daughter—my granddaughter—has standards to live up to. A family name. This decision she made, it’s unconscionable. Those people, the Leones, are animales. And she chose to go to them. To be unsafe. To have relations before marriage. And above all the lying. To us. Putting lives at risk. Inviting them here, into Eden, to raid our very own community—”
“I don’t disagree.”
“And yet you dare to lay hands on her father?” La Tía came at Evan, jabbing a manicured finger. “He has every right to put you six feet in the earth! He should—”
“Stop!”
A low feminine voice from the top of the stairs, clear as glass, sharp as a scalpel.
La Tía halted.
Belicia stood at the landing, toplit by a recessed overhead. Despite the hour she was fully dressed. Evan imagined her up there hearing the commotion, pulling on her jeans, buttoning her blouse, brushing her hair by feel alone. Her bearing was erect, shoulders pulled back and down, the picture-perfect posture of a gymnast or a drill sergeant.
She reached for the railing, her fingers wavering over the wood before her palm cupped the top. She descended. In the full light, she was radiant.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she halted, hand on the newel post. Her ghostly eyes took the measure of the room. She turned to La Tía, her angle only barely wrong. “Enough.”
La Tía said, “If you’d heard the tone this man took with—”
“I heard everything,” Belicia said.
“Then you have to know—”
“I don’t have to know anything. This is between me and my husband.” Those sightless eyes turned to Evan, and he could have sworn she saw him as well as anyone ever had, if not better. “And the Nowhere Man.”
La Tía’s mouth pursed, etched lines contracting. Then she dipped her chin deferentially and walked past Belicia and up the stairs. All this time, in violation of the First Commandment, Evan had assumed that La Tía was the materfamilias. He’d assumed wrong.
Belicia drifted into the living room and sat in the leather armchair Aragón had commanded a few nights before. She nodded at the couch, and Evan crossed the small room and sat. Aragón stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, his fuming palpable.
“Aragón,” she said quietly. And then, a touch louder, “Mi vida.”
Aragón flew into sight. “Don’t you dare try to talk me into accepting this. That child—your daughter—she had everything. Everything. She lived a perfect life!”
In the face of Aragón’s fury, Belicia’s calm demeanor was even more pronounced. “Behind these gates.”
“She had everything she could possibly want. Every freedom in the world. Every luxury. Wake up in the morning in a soft bed. Turn on a tap and fresh water pours out. Come downstairs, drink coffee with beans picked where? Kenya? The shaded pinche slopes of Guatemala? Shipped here. To our house. Our normal fancy house.” Aragón paced before her on the carpet, reminding Evan of Montesco’s caged lion. “How many bars of soap do we have under the sink? How many boxes of pasta in the pantry? You don’t know, do you? Neither do I. Because we don’t have to. Because we are living the actual dream.”
