drug addict Fiona had known was, during the course of his life, always quick to admit some other damning piece of information at a moment’s notice. And then the ones who were clean always wanted to tell you about how they got clean, or how much they’d used, or how many people they’d slept with to get to this new enlightened version of themselves. It wore Fiona out most of the time, but in this case, with this poor girl, Fiona couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for her. She’d clearly been through a lot, and now she was going through something else, too. She was probably lit to pop with guilt.
“Have you ever just put vitamin E oil on your scars?” Fiona asked.
“That doesn’t really work,” the girl said. “I’ve tried everything. But I’m going to get surgery one day. So, yeah, it’s all good.”
It’s all good. If there was ever a sentence young women uttered that meant the direct opposite, it was that one. No one said it when things actually were all good, only to deflect what was clearly a bad situation.
Fiona thought that if she abducted this girl, tied her up and began questioning her, within minutes she’d get every secret she’d ever been told or ever uttered.
“Are you saving up for it?” Fiona said.
“No. I work at Honrado. Down the street. And they’ve got doctors who volunteer to remove tattoos and fix things. So I’m just waiting on that to come through. It’s a good job, right?”
“Right,” Fiona said. She kept trying to get a feel for the girl, get some insight into why she’d be in business with Junior when she had such a good deal with a person like Father Eduardo. Fi decided the best way to bridge that gap would be to set that bridge on fire. “How’d you get a job there? When I got out, I would have killed to get to work with someone like Father Eduardo.”
The girl looked shocked. “You did time?”
“Five years,” she said.
“For what?”
Fiona decided to keep it as real as possible. “I robbed a bank,” she said.
“And you only did five?”
Fi leaned in to the girl, close enough that she could smell the girl’s cheap perfume and an underpinning of sweat. The girl leaned, too, sensing that they were about to tell some secrets. “I gave up my ex. He was the one who got me into it. No sense letting him off easy if I was doing real years.”
“You didn’t feel any guilt about that?”
“No,” Fiona said.
The girl bit down on her bottom lip and seemed to be thinking about something. “You wanna get some coffee or something?”
The honest truth was that Fiona really did not like hanging out with other women. They were usually so… girlish. Always concerned about who was talking about them, what they were wearing, who had the bigger whatever. Now, certainly, Fi liked wearing nice things, and she didn’t like people talking about her and could appreciate big things; she just didn’t require the requisite estrogen-fueled drama that went along with those desires when women got together to discuss them.
But sitting with this girl-whose name was Leticia, she’d learned-wasn’t so bad. Leticia was twenty-three and had a seven-year-old boy that she still called a baby. And, unfortunately, the father of the baby was a Latin Emperor whose nickname was Killa.
“Killa?” Fiona said.
“He got it on the street,” Leticia said, “and it just stuck. Now whenever someone gets killed anywhere near him, they bring his ass in. It’s stupid.”
“You call yourself Killa,” Fiona said, “it’s bound to cause suspicion.”
Leticia took a sip of coffee. They were sitting outside at Cafe Flordita, a Cuban coffee shop just a few blocks from the Orange Bowl. They’d been there twenty minutes, and in that time Fiona had learned everything she really needed to know to understand why Leticia was snooping for the LE: Either she did their bidding, or Killa told her he’d take their son and she’d never see him again. This wasn’t a custody battle, just the basics of street life, which Leticia understood even if Fiona couldn’t wrap her mind around it entirely. Different rules for different streets, she supposed.
“I wanna get away from him, from this whole life, you know? I did time. I got this shit all over my face and you know, for what? It’s stupid. I just want to take my baby and get out of Miami.”
“Then you should do that,” Fiona said.
“Father Eduardo? He’s got me training to be a dental assistant starting in the fall. Paying for it and everything. So I need to be here for that. I couldn’t pay for that out of my own pocket.” Leticia sighed, and Fiona saw that her eyes had welled up. “I just, you know, I got this thing to deal with first, and then I can do whatever I want. It’s not even illegal, and, you know, Father Eduardo is LE from back in the day, so I think that, you know, it’s all good.”
If anything was patently not all good, it was certainly this situation. Fiona wanted to tell Leticia that she was going to help her out of this situation, that there was a way out of it all that wouldn’t involve her working with the Latin Emperors. But Fiona also knew that the poor girl was unsteady on her feet right now, giving up all of this information to a perfect stranger, which meant she’d give up even more to people who really had hooks into her.
Women. Fiona just didn’t get most of them. She was, she had to admit, annoyed by many women. Leticia wasn’t weak-she had those scars, after all, and was out in public doing her thing, even if her thing was filled with regret, and that took a spine and a will and Fi respected that, God knows-but she compromised emotionally. She probably loved Killa, too, even if she said she didn’t. Or loved him enough not to run to the police and tell them she was being blackmailed by him. Though for a girl who’d done time, just being around… Killa… probably constituted a violation of some kind. The poor girl had made a series of bad choices in her life, or made a series of no choices whatsoever, and now here she was, about to be in the thick of a criminal conspiracy, too.
“If I were you, you know what I’d do?” Fiona said.
“Rob a bank?” Leticia actually smiled when she said that, which made Fiona happy. Somewhere was a person inside there.
“No, I’m not doing that anymore,” Fiona said. “I’d pick up your son from school tomorrow and I’d just keep driving. Don’t stop until you get to Atlanta or Charlotte or New York or Canada. And then when you get to wherever you are, you call Father Eduardo and tell him that Killa was making you do things you didn’t want to do and that he threatened to take your son and that you’re not coming back until he’s gone.”
Leticia nodded and then welled up again. “That’s my dream. But that takes money, and I don’t have enough to even get gas in my car to make it to Sarasota.”
“If I could get you money,” Fiona said, “would you go?”
“Why would you do that? You don’t even know me.”
“I was you,” Fiona said. That wasn’t strictly true, but it was for the role she was playing, and it was also what life could have been like if she’d been the type of woman who let other people rule her.
“Anyway, I got a parole officer,” she said. “I can’t just relocate like that. It would take a lot of paperwork. And you know Killa? He’s got visitation rights. It would be kidnapping, wouldn’t it?”
That someone named Killa had any rights made Fiona sick. But the reality of the situation made Fiona sicker. She needed to do something for the girl. She’d just have to tell Michael that she’d picked up another client for him.
“Let me talk to some friends I have,” Fiona told the girl.
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Someone has to be.” Fi reached into her purse and pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper and scrawled out one of her safe numbers. “This is my cell,” she said. “You find yourself in a bad position, you feel like you need help before I can get you the help you need, I want you to call me.”
“This is crazy,” Leticia said. “You don’t even know me.”
“We tough girls have to stick together,” Fiona said.
Leticia smiled faintly, and for the first time she looked to Fiona like the young girl she absolutely was. She took the piece of paper with Fiona’s number on it and slipped it into her own purse. “I better go or I’ll be late to get back to the phones,” Leticia said. “I don’t like to disappoint Father Eduardo if I can avoid it.”
