Next Time You See Me (15 page)

We pulled to a stop in front of a yellow stucco mansion fronted by a shaded portico. Huge potted hibiscus trees stood in the sun at the edge of the shade, their open-fisted red flowers drinking the livid heat. Together the gunman and driver hustled me out of the car and stood me beside a windowless black van that was parked off to the side. In the distance behind the mansion—newly built to look venerable, as if it had sat there for hundreds of years—you could hear the roar of the ocean, smell the salt air, feel the sharp snap of a commanding wind.

The second car pulled up behind ours and Mac was dragged out as roughly as I had been. He spoke to the men in Spanish, addressing them by name.

A young man in jeans and a white shirt stepped out of the house. He also had the tattoo on his neck, a bit larger than the others and in a brighter shade of violet, and he wore a large gold crucifix. But unlike the other men, all of whom possessed some variation of the squat, muscle-bound stature of their Mayan forbears, this one was taller, leaner, and lighter, with brown hair that was not quite as dark as his cohorts, and blue eyes. It was not his looks, though, as much as his confidence and tone that made his authority so clear;
he
, I was sure of it, was the lord of this mansion—and beyond.

“Felix!” he snapped at one of the men, rattling off something in Spanish that specified Dylan.

“
Sí
, Diego,” Felix answered, grabbing Mac’s arm and tugging him forward.

So here, to these people, Mac
was
Dylan.

At the same moment my gunman grabbed and tugged me.

Mac defiantly pulled his arm away and walked straight over to me. He took my hand in his, causing my gunman to bristle but that was it. None of them made a move to stop Mac from joining me. They all had guns, even the leader, Diego—or, as I was starting to suspect, the kingpin—had a gun stuck into the belt of his jeans, yet they allowed Mac surprising latitude. It was the strangest thing: as if the closer we got to the house, and more profoundly with each step as we entered the white marble foyer and were enveloped by its shadowy coolness, Mac seemed to gain power over the men. Just a minute ago I had been convinced that Diego was the big boss here. Now I was starting to wonder.

Chapter 10

I
n the center of the mansion’s foyer was a gleaming wood table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and on the table sat a vase holding dozens of peacock feathers. As we passed, Mac surprised everyone by plucking a feather from the vase. Diego glanced sharply at him but didn’t object. The other men took his lead, bristling but doing nothing. Mac held the feather loosely in his hand as we were taken through a door at the back of the foyer and led down a wide staircase, Diego in front with two henchmen, then me and Mac, with the last two thugs and the rifle at our back. Small shelves holding Mayan artifacts staggered downward along one wall. The staircase turned twice, landing us in an unlit hallway with a door on the far right that appeared to lead out of the house and another directly in front of us on which Diego knocked, listened, knocked again, and finally opened.

He said something in Spanish to Mac, who nodded and followed him in, pulling me along by the hand. The other men stayed outside in the hall.

It was a large room, whitewashed from the floorboards to the ceiling, furnished and decorated in rainbow colors: a mix of traditional Mexican weavings, more artifacts, and blatantly modern, expensive pieces. Someone collected glass candlesticks; they were everywhere. A wood desk with ornately carved legs stood in front of a huge window overlooking a private beach (not a single sunbather on such a summery day) and beyond it, the ocean. A hint of cinnamon hung in the air.

Diego pulled a cell phone out of the back pocket of his jeans and speed-dialed a call. He spoke in rapid, excited Spanish, listened, and hung up. He then issued an order to Mac and left us alone in the room. The door locked from the outside and it was unnecessary to ask if the cadre of armed guards were standing in the hall; you could hear them shuffling restlessly around.

Mac and I turned to each other simultaneously. He reached for me. I stepped back; what I needed now was answers.

“Why are we here?”

“It’s such a long story.”

“Just start
anywhere
.”

“Okay.” He took two quick steps toward me and forced me into a hug. Then he whispered: “I’ll start at the end. No: almost the end. These are the people who killed my parents, but there’s no proof, and it’s more complicated than—”

I interrupted: “These very people?”

“She’s got cells, these little groups of them, all through Mexico and the States.”

“She?”

“Ana.”

Ana Maria Soliz. Soliz Enterprises
.
Of course.

I pushed him away so I could see him. “The woman in the photo with you.”

“Photo?” But as he asked, he seemed to know the answer; he knew I would have turned every possible stone to find him.

I moved closer to the window—away from him, whoever he was—and sat on a narrow ledge. “How do you know she had your parents killed?”

“It’s what she does.”

I looked at him, waiting for him to explain. It all sounded so fantastical: a spider woman with far-reaching deadly webs . . . and then I thought of Ethan, confronted in the elevator by the same man who had held a gun to my forehead.

“I knew her a long time ago,” Mac began, looking at me from across the room, allowing me my distance. “She found me when she read the
Times
article about my promotion. She contacted me, wanted me to come here, and when I didn’t . . .” If he had been anyone but Mac, tears would have filled his eyes; instead, sadness stilled his face, a nearly invisible emotional shift you could only read when you knew him well.

“Your parents?”

He nodded. “My parents were murdered. Danny was in jail. Rosie and I were fighting. Everything was falling apart.”

“Why the fake suicide? Why didn’t you just tell me you had to go?”

“The flowers that came to the house that day?”

“The dahlias.”

“They weren’t from me; they were from Ana—a threat. And I got the message. What she had done to my parents, she wouldn’t hesitate doing to you and Ben. I wanted you to think I was dead so you wouldn’t try to find me; I thought you’d be safer that way. She had shown me how serious she was, though she wasn’t always dangerous. I never would have—”

Just then, the lock turned. Diego flung open the door and walked in followed by Felix, the rifle strapped over his shoulder, and the woman I recognized from the photograph taken at the Collins Bar.

In person, Ana Maria Soliz was quite beautiful. She was slender, with shoulders that were broad and open like wings, accentuating an appearance of strength. She was barefoot in a tight-fitting white dress, her long black hair pushed together over one shoulder, just as it had been in the photo, allowing me to see the gold chain at the back of her neck. She was wearing a gold necklace now: a simple lariat whose longer end dangled a diamond crucifix into her cleavage. She was gorgeous in a way that intoxicated men and made women suspicious. Everything about her, from the way she looked to how she moved to the intensity of her black eyes when they appraised you—and she was looking right at me, her attention staking itself into me as she entered the room and stopped in front of me and Mac—
everything
about her reeked of power.

Without saying a word, she answered the question of who was in charge. It wasn’t Mac. And it wasn’t Diego. The longer she looked at me, boring into me with her dark eyes, the more I understood something crucial, and terrifying, about her: Beneath the heat her body and face would obviously generate in men, she was all icy calculation.

She said something in Spanish that made Diego and Felix laugh and Mac clench his jaw.

“You are not a beautiful woman,” she said to me in a soft but steel-edged voice, “and yet you inspire such love in Dylan.”

“What do you want?”

“Ah! Right to the point.”

“Karin,” Mac said in a tone soaked with warning, “don’t say anything.”

Ana’s eyes slid to Mac. “What could she possibly say that would interest me?”

Mac glanced at Diego and Felix, then back at me, and didn’t answer.

“Go ahead,” Ana said to Mac. “Talk to your wife. The truth of why you’re here. If I like what you say”—she shrugged—“I’ll let you decide which one of you will die first.”

Mac hesitated, appeared to decide something, and then held the peacock feather toward Ana. “You remember the first time we met?”

“Don’t even try. I’m no longer such a fool.”

“You were never a fool, Ana. But you remember.”

A slight smile lit her face for just a moment before vanishing. “I sold you a feather. You sold me a lie.”

“I told you you were more beautiful than a peacock feather. And it was true.”

She approached him with the smoothness of silk, almost floating, plucked the feather lightly from his hand, and ran its lustrous soft eye along the side of his face.

“But not anymore,” he said. “You changed.”

She stopped, her eyes hardening. “
You
changed me.
You
are responsible for this.” Holding the long stalk of the feather with both hands, she snapped it in half.

“Whatever you have against me, you’ve blown it way out of proportion.”

“You think I loved you?”

“I don’t know what to think. You’ve become a stalker and a killer.”

My heart nearly exploded when he said those things to her; it was so unlike him to take that kind of risk with an obvious psychopath who would be happy, to say the least, to strike back.

Ana laughed, her eyes flashing at me. “Dylan knows I like it rough.”

“Why does she keep calling you Dylan?”

“Tell her,
Mac
.” Ana walked across the room, toward Diego and the other man, dropping both halves of the feather onto the floor. “Felix, let me.”

He handed her the rifle, which she strapped over her shoulder. She kept her finger looped inside the trigger and crossed the room, stopping right in front of me, close enough to smell her spicy perfume.

“Come, be close with your wife while you tell her
everything
. And then we will see.”

Jealousy
: She reeked of it.
Rage
.
Vengeance
.
Greed
. She wanted everything, not just material wealth and power but
everything
, including every thought and feeling Mac could scrape out of his depths. Having summoned him to her wasn’t enough; she wanted him to regurgitate his soul upon her order. Why? Watching him struggle to find the right place to start—and this time, I knew it had to be from the beginning—I felt the onslaught of his dread as his confidence wavered.

She pointed the rifle at Mac, directing him across the room with it as if he was her puppet. The sight of her controlling him was sickening. And yet she controlled me, too; I was terrified of her and how she controlled us all with the tip of a gun. No, not a gun: her willingness, her
desire
, to use it.

Mac stood beside me and gently took my hand.

“No touching!” Ana said. “This is not the scene of a reunion. This is a moment of truth.”

“Ana”—Mac looked at her—“what’s the point of this?”

“Turn around.” She released the rifle’s safety with a small but ominous
click
. “Face the ocean. And talk.”

Mac turned and instead of looking at me, as I knew he wanted to, gazed through the glass toward an ocean that broke wavy line after line of foam onto a blackboard of packed wet sand. I shifted to share his view—in the distant horizon, a blur of land—and listened.

“When I was eighteen, a couple months before high school graduation, I came to Mexico, to Cancun, for spring vacation. It was a big deal: A group of us worked for a year to save up for it. I met Ana on the beach. She was selling peacock feathers, but really she was selling drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?” I reflexively covered the battered inside of my right elbow.

“Mostly loose joints, that was the big seller to foreigners like us. She wasn’t the only one working the beaches; but she was the one who found us.”

“She became your dealer over vacation.”

Mac nodded, looking ashamed of his teenage self. “Well, I was an eighteen-year-old boy, and I was never much into getting high—other things were more compelling to me.”

Sex
. I could imagine Ana as a teenager, trolling the beaches for
turistas
to buy drugs, how her sexual charisma would have been her best selling point. I could
see
them, Mac and Ana, twenty-five years ago, teenagers ready to conquer the world, facing each other in a glimmer of heat.

“You bought one of her peacock feathers, and you and your friends bought some joints.”

“We invited her to share one with us, and that was how it started.” He breathed deeply, closed his eyes, continued. “Back then, I didn’t know the difference between sex and love. Ana was thrilling—all of it was: Ana, Mexico, being away from my family, the idea that they couldn’t reach me because I was so far away. Without thinking, kind of as a joke to amuse my friends, I introduced myself as Dylan. Bob Dylan was our hero; we listened to his early stuff all the time. So I told her I was Dylan, bought the feather, the joints . . . and the rest of it just rolled from there.”

It sounded like a standard bout of teenage lust mixed with teenage idiocy; you couldn’t hold that against anyone. Didn’t we all have embarrassing memories from those years that we’d prefer never to revisit? For the duration of one spring break when he was a teenager, Mac had been a jerk; it was an experiment he had certainly outgrown. So far, nothing he had said struck me as reason for the severity of Ana’s retribution.

“How long were you here?” I asked. “Those breaks last a week, don’t they?”

“They do. But when my friends left for the airport to go home, I headed in the opposite direction—I came here, to Playa, to be with Ana.”

I glanced at him, sensed Ana shift behind me with her gun, and returned my gaze to the window: In the distance a boat was passing, and scalloped waves broke in quick sequence on the shore.

“My parents had a plan for me that I didn’t want: I was supposed to go to college, not end up working in the store. It was very important to them. Therefore, I defied them. But of course I didn’t see it that way at the time. There were seven weeks left before graduation—and I decided to just ditch the whole thing and stay here because
here
I felt, you know,
alive
.”

He paused to breathe heavily in and heavily out, releasing a puff of anger at his inner teenager.

“It felt beautiful, even glorious, at the time.” Did he mean that or was it diplomacy—a gift for Ana? “It was like this dream we were living together. We shared the room she rented in town, just a bed and a dresser and a hot plate, but to an American kid it was, I’m embarrassed to say it,
romantic
. Now I understand it differently: Ana was only sixteen, she was poor, she was alone, she was doing what she had to do to survive in a town without much of an economy except for the tourism that back then was mostly up in Cancun.”