Next Time You See Me (16 page)

Behind us, I read Ana’s silence as agreement, or at least a lack of disagreement. I wondered if it meant anything to hear him talk this way, or if she had heard it all before. In the past five months, what kind of conversations had they had? Had they been lovers again? Or had he been her prisoner? Or something in between? Lucky Herman had photographed them together at the Collins Bar, I reminded myself, and my gut did a flip.

“We worked the beaches together. She made money in different currencies, but the big buyers were Americans. I knew where all the money was stashed, mostly in our room.
Ana—I’m sorry
.”

“I don’t want to hear that now! Go on, tell her what kind of a man you really are.”

“About three weeks into it, I realized I was making a big mistake. I was starting to imagine what was going through my parents’ minds after I didn’t return with my friends and they had no idea where I was. I was living under a fake name. The police had come looking and Ana got rid of them pretty easily; she told them she hadn’t seen me for two weeks, and she tipped them. It was easy to buy them off. So no one was really looking for me here anymore, and I started to get scared. I needed to get home in time to graduate if I still could. I needed to get to college. I needed to make my parents proud of me. So, when Ana was out one day, I took my passport and my ticket . . . and all of Ana’s American money . . . and left for the airport.”

“You took
all
her money?”

“Just the American.”

“Which was most of it, you already said.”

He nodded, ashamed. “She had saved about two thousand dollars. And I took it.”

“Why?”

“I had the cheapest ticket and I’d missed the flight; I didn’t know if it was still any good. I didn’t know how much a new one would cost buying it at the airport. I was a stupid kid.”

I had to absorb all that. It was one thing to think he’d fallen in love with a beautiful girl on a tropical beach, and wholly another thing to have robbed her of her earnings, regardless of whether those earnings had been illegal. It was
her
money. I’d be pissed, too.

“I left her a note, explaining. I promised to repay her.”

“And did you?”

“I could never figure out how to do it without tipping her off about my real name or where I was. I was already learning to be afraid of her, three weeks into it. She was powerful, even then. I didn’t want her to find me.”

Behind us, another
click
.

“Go on,” Ana said.

“That’s the whole story.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“How many times do I need to admit that I stole your money? How many times do I have to offer to pay you back however much you want?”

“You’re still a fool. Can’t you see it’s too late to repay me with money?”

That sent a shiver through me.

“Tell me what you want, Ana.
Please
. I’ve been asking for months—
tell me
.”

“And for months I’ve been deciding: What do I want from Dylan? From
Mac
? You’re not the boy I loved back then, just as I’m not the girl you thought you loved. At our age, now, we understand that, yes?”

“Of course.”

“With the passage of time, memories are distorted. Values change. We grow.”

Mac nodded.

“And yet, looking back, we can so clearly remember what we believed at the time. Your story to your wife proves that, doesn’t it? You can look back and remember why you did the things you did, right or wrong—really
why
you did them.”

Behind us, I heard her pace. She was upset, breathing heavily. Mac’s evocation of their brief past together had stirred something in her.

“
Mac
—you remember the price of real estate twenty-five years ago in Playa del Carmen?”

“It was dirt cheap.”

“Three thousand of your dollars to buy an inn, to get started in business, to stop selling drugs. It was all I wanted and I was so close . . . until you took most of what I had.”

“What I did was wrong.”

“It was worse than wrong. You have no idea.”

“Ana, did I force you to keep selling? You told me yourself that you’d earned that money in less than a year. You were the biggest earner of all the dealers, and the market was just getting better.
You
told me that.”

“Yes!
But who buys drugs from a pregnant girl?
”

It landed like a bomb. An explosion of voices and shuffling behind us. Ana ordered her men: “
Silencio!
”

I couldn’t help turning around. Mac also turned now, looking shocked. I was sure of it: He hadn’t known.

“Pregnant?” he asked.

Please
, I prayed,
don’t ask if she’s sure it was yours
. It was the kind of question that made any woman want to kill a man, and I could only imagine how Ana would take it. She had been sixteen. A girl. Left pregnant by a callous thieving gringo boyfriend whose real name she didn’t even know. My heart broke for that girl.

“I didn’t . . . Ana . . . I . . .” Reduced to stammering, there was nothing Mac could say.

“Only a coward runs.”

“How could I run from something I didn’t know?”

“I was going to tell you that night, when I came back and found your note. I followed you to the airport—there I was, pathetic girl, hoping you might have changed your mind about me. I sat in that airport for hours, first waiting, then thinking: What was I to do? In spite of how you saw me—the drugs, the sex—I was a Catholic, and in my world a girl with child marries the father.”

“But I didn’t
know
.”

“No!
I
didn’t know. I didn’t know
who
you really were. I didn’t know
where
to find you. Well, it was you who taught me my most important lesson in life: I would always be on my own.”

He stared at her, obviously afraid to ask the next question. So I did.

“You had a child?”

She turned to look at me, her eyes full of hatred. “Your husband has
two
sons.”

“I don’t believe this,” Mac whispered, struggling to come to terms with something too huge to digest quickly.

“You don’t
believe
?” Ana wheeled toward him, enraged.

“It’s not what I meant.”

“But it’s what you said. You are a man who says what he doesn’t
mean
. What don’t you
believe
? You don’t
believe
your son is as real as the money you stole from me?” Her gaze turned toward Diego and Felix, both of whom stood in front of the door looking astonished. Suddenly Diego’s physical differences from the other men came into sharp focus: his taller stature, lighter skin, brown hair, blue eyes—and for the first time now I noticed he had a cleft chin exactly like Mac’s. He was half American, as he appeared to be. Half Mac.

“He is my father?” Diego asked.

“If you can call him a
father
. He abandoned us. He left us to become what we are: We are wealthy, we are powerful, but we are outlaws. He is why every day is a fight for our lives.”

She picked up a glass candlestick from her desk and threw it against the window. Both shattered. A gust of wind from the ocean rushed into the room.

“The papers, they call me a
queenpin
, they say I am helping to run this country into the ground—but whose fault is that? I was sixteen, left alone with a baby. Disgraced. No one would hire me. What was I supposed to do but return to what I already knew to survive?”

“Ana, I—” Mac said.

“No! There’s nothing you can tell me to change my mind. I’ve held this secret in my hand all these months, wondering when and how and if I would tell either one of you. I’ve tried threatening you. I’ve tried bringing you into my business. I’ve tried loving you. Now I see it makes no difference. What’s done is done. History cannot be unmade.” She looked at Diego, her son, and her tone softened. “But I look at you, and how can I regret anything?”

“So my father was not killed by Medina’s people?”

“Ruben Medina would take everything I have if he could,
everything
. But no . . . I’m sorry.”

Diego’s handsome features darkened. As he stared at his mother for a long, thoughtful moment—reprocessing everything she had ever told him about his parentage in a brand-new context, doing the math—I took him in: the beauty he shared with her, melded into a masculinity so similar, I saw now, to Mac’s; his surprise at his mother’s announcement. I could hardly fathom what was going through the young man’s mind now. And who was Ruben Medina? Assumedly another Mexican drug lord jockeying for power.

“I can’t stand seeing you in pain,” Ana told her son. “It is too much for me. This was a mistake.”

“Another mistake you cannot undo,” Diego muttered.

“You were not the mistake,
mi amor
. Bringing this stranger here was the mistake. We must send them away.” Ana turned to Felix. “Bring me the visitor’s tray.”

“
Sí
.” He left the room.

“Are you sure?” Diego asked her.

“What choice do we have?”

Felix returned with a red lacquered tray holding a fancier, cleaner version of the works I’d seen at drug busts when I was on the beat: syringe, spoon, lighter, and the kind of rubber lariat nurses used to prepare a vein for injection. She had called it the visitor’s tray but I knew she didn’t plan to treat us to a friendly little high.

She was sending us away. And it would be to the farthest possible place she could send us: death.

I reflexively reached for Mac, held him, and whispered, “What about Ben?”

Mac pulled me close as Ana, who had heard, leveled her answer: “
Why should your son have a father when mine did not?
”

It was her answer not just for this, but for all of it. And implicit in her answer was another question, addressed to me:
Why should your son have a mother, either, now that you are here?
I had delivered myself stupidly, blindly, directly into Mac’s fate. And delivered Ben to something worse, and lonelier, than Diego’s.

Chapter 11

F
elix set the tray on Ana’s desk, which was covered in shattered glass, then stood back with his hands in his pockets.

“Murder the parents, I always say.” I spoke before thinking but didn’t regret it; if I was going to die, I wanted to hear the truth from its source. Wanted to hear her say, out loud, that she had been responsible for Hugh and Aileen’s brutal murders. Wanted her to reveal herself, in plain words, for what she really was.

Her eyes snapped to me and a grin ignited ripples from her eyes across her cheeks, betraying her age, consuming some of her prettiness. “I don’t think about family lineage when I decide how to . . . restructure.”

“You
only
think about lineage. You’re obsessed by it. It’s why you brought Mac here. It’s why you need to punish him. It’s why you think you have to get rid of us now.”

Mac stared at me, silently beseeching me to
be quiet
, stop angering her further. If he thought we had a way out of this, he was delusional. There was nothing to lose by speaking my mind or asking questions. This close to death, risk no longer frightened me.

She laughed, but it was hollow. “You think too much.”

“
Why
did you kill Mac’s parents? What exactly did that accomplish? Couldn’t you think of a more subtle way to get Mac’s attention?”

“
I
did not kill them.”

“You
had
them killed.”

“So I did.” A cold confession; though with her witnesses soon dead, it meant little. “But
you
are lucky. For you I will wave a magic wand that won’t be so . . . messy.” She picked up the syringe. “Would you like to do the honors?” she asked Diego in a cloying tone that made it clear refusal would be a disgrace.

Diego unplanted himself from the spot where he had stood like an old tree, enduring the winds of his mother’s revelations. A grin spread across his face with the studied poise and cunning of his mentor; as if “doing the honors” had been his own idea and nothing made more sense than to get right to it. They were so alike it was terrifying. But of course she would have groomed him in every way; it was what a tyrant always did. Their greatness and power was enhanced by their offspring. In time Diego would inherit everything she had so painstakingly built, and at such great sacrifice. He would inherit, broaden, and improve upon her accomplishments.

But Diego was part Mac; didn’t that count for something? They said that morality was partly learned, and partly given.

Who, though, was Mac
really
? And what aspects of him had his first son inherited? The impulse to break the law and ruin others, or to uphold the law and support others? I had only ever known the second Mac, the
good
one, while Ana was all too well acquainted with the first. Where did Diego fit in; which genes had surfaced in his makeup? He appeared to be all Ana and the first Mac as I watched him cross to the desk, tip white powder from a glass vial into the spoon, hold it in the air, and light a flame beneath it. When it had melted to a clear liquid, he angled in the tip of the needle and drew the drug into the syringe. Holding it upright, he tapped out the air bubbles, just like any street junkie—and that was when I knew that Diego Soliz was no better than his mother, if not worse.

“Who first?” Ana said, letting him decide.

Diego looked from me to Mac, where his gaze lingered a moment. I could see him thinking,
This is my father
, and wondered what that felt like to him, after all these years.
This is my father and I am going to take his life
.

He held the syringe between his teeth, picked up the rubber lariat, and turned to Ana.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“This one is for you, to give you the courage to let me do this in my own way.”

She appeared interested but not aghast . . . which told me that she partook, at least occasionally, of her own merchandise. But then any good proprietor should know exactly what they were selling.

“I am not afraid to watch them drift into oblivion,” she said. “Are you?”

“It disgusts me to think of them floating away on a cloud.” His hand caressed the air as he said this, conducting the melody of the ridiculous idea that Mac and I might enjoy our final moments in a stupor of heroin.

“What do you want, Diego?”

“I want my father to suffer at my own hand, as I have suffered at his.”

Nodding, Ana both understood and granted her son permission to destroy us in his own way. “Put it down. I am strong enough for whatever you decide. Your father, your vengeance.”

Diego set the filled syringe on the tray. From across the room, Felix stared at it hungrily. “I am going to take the van for a ride,” Diego said. And then he reached out to his mother, as if to bid her good-bye, but instead slipped the rifle’s strap off her shoulder.

W
e drove for what felt like hours but could have been any length of time, tied on our sides in the back of a windowless van that rattled with rakes, spades, buckets, and loops of hose. Diego drove and Felix sat beside him in the passenger seat, holding the rifle. They had gagged us so we couldn’t speak, and had left our eyes free to see but put us back to back so we couldn’t see each other.

Mac’s back, pressed against mine, felt warm and familiar. I concentrated on taking deep breaths in the hope that this might calm him—that he might sense my forgiveness. I understood now why he had left us: He had been trying to save our lives. The one remaining question I wanted answered, though, was why he hadn’t gone to the police instead. Wouldn’t that have been the logical reaction to receiving a threat from a drug lord exercising a powerful personal grudge? But the more I thought about that, the more I appreciated Mac’s effort to handle it himself, to just slip away and appease the nemesis he hadn’t even realized was lurking out there, ready to pounce on first sight. After all, for twenty years he had himself been the police, and he knew how hard it was to protect someone from even a garden-variety stalker, let alone one with overwhelming power and superhuman reach. He would have returned to us eventually, I told myself. I wouldn’t have lost him forever. And I shouldn’t have come here; my sudden appearance had shifted whatever balance Mac had managed to accomplish with Ana, shattering the groundwork of the escape route he was certainly building with his typical patience and care. Mac was a man who saw the whole picture, who worked steadily and patiently toward his goal; he had been looking for a way back to us. But now we were both going to die.

I tried to stop my imagination from wandering to all the possible methods Diego might use to kill us; the nightly news had schooled us on the near-daily discoveries of Mexico’s gruesome drug war murders: tortured bodies lined up at the side of the road, execution-style killings, amputations, even beheadings. We would be just two more bodies to tally up in the overall count. I heaved at the thought of it, and in response felt Mac’s back breathe deeply, talking to me, telling me to
quit thinking
. He had once told me that my imagination got me into too much trouble, that eighty percent of what I actively tried to solve would solve itself in time. He had told me I was too impatient. He was right, of course; but I couldn’t help myself. It had made me a good detective, back when I was on the force, despite the implicit dangers.

Through a small blurry window separating the front seats from the cargo area, I could see the backs of our captors’ heads and a tiny bit of road in front of us, but that was all. Gradually day began to fade until finally, in a blue twilight, we stopped driving.

The van’s weight shifted as Diego and Felix got out, slamming their doors behind them. A moment later the rear doors opened.

“Get them,” Diego ordered.

Felix hopped into the van. His hands shook as he roughly untied my feet. I suspected he was an addict and needed a fix, and that worried me as much as Diego’s blood thirst. Felix pushed me to my feet so that, crouching, I could shuffle out. I jumped out of the van and stood on numb, tingling legs, yearning to walk, to run, but not wanting to take the chance before Mac was untied.

While I waited, I cautiously assessed our surroundings: We were at the side of a narrow but paved road in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, a tangle of low-lying bramble and palm trees that suggested we weren’t far from the ocean. A vast darkening sky loomed above us. Our bodies could be buried among the weeds, or dumped in the sea, or simply left right here. I wondered how far it was to the main road. If we made a run for it, how long would it take before we reached the relative safety of a highway? It would be perilous but there was no point not trying.

Mac’s legs must have been more rubbery than mine because when he reached the outside edge of the van he tumbled to the ground. Diego laughed, and so did Felix, taking his boss’s cue. Both men had a handgun tucked into their belts; they had left the automatic rifle in the car.
It would be a simple execution
. Mac rolled onto his side, hands still tied behind his back, and scrambled to his feet. It would take a couple of minutes for his legs to gain mobility. Did we have that much time?

“We do it here, boss?” Felix pulled his gun out of his belt, hands still shaking. I saw Diego noticing this and the disgust that crossed his face.

“Just a minute.”

Mac and I stood four feet apart, our eyes trying frantically to communicate. Mine attempted to impart the necessity of running, just going for it. What was
he
thinking? Mac was as careful as I was impulsive. But what other choice did we have right now?

Without removing his gun, Diego walked over to Mac and ripped the tape off his mouth. Felix, likewise, ripped off mine. It stung with such ferocity I felt my skin had come off, but Mac’s hadn’t, so neither, I assumed, had mine.

“What are you doing?” Diego barked at Felix.

“I thought—”

“Did I tell you to think?”

“
Lo siento
.” Felix attempted to replace my tape, his dirty, trembling fingers pressing into my skin. “It won’t stick.”

“Just forget it.”

The tape fell to the ground at my feet.

Diego wasn’t interested in Felix or in me. He stood in front of Mac and looked at him intently. “All these months . . . Why didn’t we know our bond?”

“I wish we had,” Mac said. “It would have meant a lot to me. We could have—”

“What’s done is done.”

“If I had known about you, I never would have left.”

I wondered if Mac meant that; either way, it was the right thing to say. He was going to try and negotiate our way out of this instead of inviting bullets to our running backs. As usual, he was taking the smart route, which carried its own set of risks.

“You had no real interest in my mother.”

“That’s not true. I was an eighteen-year-old boy, younger than you are now—I was immature, but not heartless.”

Diego seemed to consider that a moment. And then he grimaced and spat on the dusty ground.

“Kneel,” he told Mac, and then me, “You too.”

“Diego,” Mac said softly, paternally. “Please think this through. Think about how absolute this will be. You’ll never be able to change your mind.”

“
Kneel
. Felix, help them!”

Felix seemed to take pleasure in kicking the backs of my legs, buckling me down. My knees crashed onto the hard earth, sending bolts of pain straight to my head. Terror spiraled through me and I felt breathless, weightless. I sensed I was going to faint but somehow hung on to the edge of consciousness enough to hear Mac crash down beside me.

“Heads down!” Diego told us.

Felix kicked me forward so that my forehead hit the ground, and then kicked Mac, who pivoted forward beside me.

“Who first?” Felix asked Diego.

“No, I will do it. This is
my
vengeance.”

There was a click as Diego cocked his gun.

And then . . .
and then
. . . came the first shot.

He had made his decision: who to kill first; who most deserved his animosity.

And had chosen his father.

My mind lost consciousness as my body floated away, flying upward into the bruised sky, in pursuit of my beloved.