And that brought her once again face to face with The Situation. At least five hours had passed since the telephone rang, and maybe two since that first shot fired into Gato Fierros' face. Her dues in horror and confusion had been paid; all the resources of her instinct and her intelligence were now committed to keeping her alive.
Which was why her hand didn't tremble. Which was why she'd wanted to pray, but couldn't. Instead she recalled with absolute clarity that she had fired five shots, that there was one in the chamber and ten in the clip, that the Double Eagle's recoil was very powerful, and that the next time, she needed to aim slightly below the target if she didn't want to miss. Her left hand was not under the butt of the gun, like in the movies, but rather on top of her right wrist, to steady it. This was her last chance, and she knew it. If her heart beat slowly, her blood circulated quietly, and her senses were on alert, it would make the difference between being alive and lying dead on the ground. Which was why she'd taken a couple of quick sniffs from the package in the gym bag. And which was why, when the white Suburban pulled up, she'd instinctively turned her eyes away from the headlights, so as not to be blinded. She looked over the top of the weapon again, finger on the trigger, holding her breath, alert to the first possible sign that something wasn't quite right. Ready to shoot anybody, no matter who.
The doors slammed. She held her breath. One, two, three. Hijole!-shit. Three male silhouettes standing alongside the car, backlighted by the street-lamps. Choose. She'd thought she could be safe from this, on the sidelines, while somebody did it for her. You just take it easy, prietita-that was at the beginning-you just love me, and I'll take care of the rest. It was sweet and comfortable. It was deceptively safe to wake up at night and hear her man's-any man's?-peaceful breathing. There was not even any fear back then, because fear is the child of the imagination, and back then there were only happy hours that passed like a pretty love song, or a soft stream. And the trap was easy to fall into; his laughter when he held her, his lips traveling over her skin, his mouth whispering tender words, or dirty words down below, between her thighs, very close and very far inside, as though it were going to stay there forever-if she lived long enough to forget, that mouth would be the last thing that she forgot. But nobody stays forever. Because nobody is safe, and all sense of security is dangerous. Suddenly you wake up with proof that it's impossible to just live-you realize that life is a road, and that traveling it entails constant choices. Who you live with, who you love, who you kill. Whether you want to or not, you have to walk the road by yourself… The Situation… What it came down to was choosing.
After hesitating a second, she aimed the gun at the broadest and biggest of the three silhouettes. It was the best target, and besides-he was the boss.
"Teresita," said don Epifanio Vargas.
That familiar voice stirred something inside her. Suddenly, tears blurred her vision. Unexpectedly, she'd turned fragile; she tried to understand why, and in the effort it was too late to avoid it. Stupid bitch, she told herself. Pinche fucking stupid baby. If something goes wrong, you had your chance. The distant lights from the street blurred and wavered before her eyes, and everything became a confusion of liquid lights and shadows. Suddenly there was no one to aim at.
So she lowered the pistol. All because of one fucking tear, she thought, resigned to what awaited. Now they're going to kill me, and all because of one pinche tear.
It's bad times." Don Epifanio Vargas took a long puff of his cigar and stood looking at the ember, pensive. In the semidarkness of the chapel, the candles and altar lights illuminated his Aztec profile, his thick, combed-back jet-black hair, his norteno moustache, all those stereotyped features that Teresa had always associated with Emilio Fernandez and Pedro Armendariz in the old Mexican movies on TV. He was probably somewhere around fifty, and he was big and wide, with huge hands. In his left hand he held a cigar, and in his right, Guero's notebook.
"In the old days, at least there was some respect for women and children." He shook his head sadly, remembering. Teresa knew that "the old days" referred to the time when, as a young campesino from Santiago de los Ca-balleros, tired of being hungry, Epifanio Vargas traded in the brace of oxen and the little field of corn and beans for marijuana plants. He'd screened out the seeds for a clean product, he'd put his life on the line selling it and taken the lives of everybody else he could, and finally he'd come down from the sierra to the flatland, settling in Tierra Blanca. That was when the networks of Sinaloa drug smugglers had first been moving north not just their bricks of Mexican gold but also the first packages of white powder that came in by boat and plane from Colombia.
The men of don Epifanio's generation-men who had once swum the Rio Grande with cargos on their backs-now lived in mansions in Colonia Chapultepec. They had pliant rich-kid offspring who went to high school in their own cars and to American universities. But they'd had their long-ago days of big adventures, big risks, and big money made overnight: a lucky operation, a good crop, a big cargo that got to the right place. Years of danger and money, living a life that up in that sierra would have been scarcely more than a miserable getting-by. Intense and short, because only the toughest of men managed to survive, make a life for themselves, and mark off the territory of a large drug cartel. Those had been years when the lines were still being drawn. When nobody held a place without pushing out somebody else, and if you fucked up, you paid the price.
But the price was your life, not anybody else's with you. Just yours.
"They went to Chino Parra's house, too," he said. "I heard it on the news a little while ago. Wife and three kids." The ember of his cigar glowed bright again. "Chino was found in the driveway, in his Silverado."
He was sitting beside Teresa on the pew to the right of the little altar. When he moved his head, the candles made patent-leather glints in his thick, stiff-combed hair. The years that had passed since he first came down from the sierra had refined his appearance and his manners, but under the handmade suits, the Italian ties, and the $500 silk shirts, there was still the campesino from the mountains of Sinaloa. And you could see that not just because of the norteno ostentation-pointed-toe boots, huge silver belt buckle, gold centenary medal on the keychain-but also, and especially, because of the eyes, which were sometimes impassive, sometimes distrustful or patient. They were the eyes of a race that for generations, hundreds of years, had been forced, time and time again, by a hailstorm or a drought, to start over again, from scratch.
"Apparently they caught Chino in the morning and spent the day with him, talking… From what the radio said, they took their time with him."
Teresa could imagine, and it didn't take much effort: Hands tied with wire; cigarettes; razor blades. Chino Parra's screams muffled by the plastic bag or the strip of duct tape, in some basement or warehouse, before they finished him off and went for his family. Maybe Chino himself had ratted out Guero. Or his own family. Teresa had known Chino well, his wife, Brenda, and the three kids-two boys and a girl. She remembered them playing, running around on the beach at Altata, the previous summer: their warm little brown bodies in the sun, covered by towels, sleeping as they drove back in that same Silverado their father's remains had been found in. Brenda was a petite woman, very talkative, with pretty brown eyes, and on her right ankle she wore a gold chain with her man's initials on it. She and Teresa had gone shopping together many times in Culiacan-getting expensive manicures, buying tight leather pants, spike heels, Guess jeans, Calvin Klein, Carolina Herrera… She wondered whether they'd sent Gato Fierros and Potemkin Galvez, or some other gunmen. Whether it had happened before or at the same time as they were coming after her. Whether they killed Brenda before or after the kids. Whether it had been fast, or whether they'd also taken their time with them. Pinche hombres puercos.