And I learned. Approximately one month earlier, a fight broke out in the yard, and the prison immediately went into lockdown. Everyone was supposed to get on the ground. When one of the inmates, a large childlike man Reyes had befriended, got confused and didn’t go down, a guard in one of the towers prepared to fire a warning shot. Reyes saw this and tackled his friend to get him down, thinking the guard was going to shoot him. Instead of burrowing harmlessly in the dirt as intended, the bullet found Reyes’s skull and pierced his frontal lobe. He’d been in a coma since.
I glanced up and refocused on Neil’s question. “Just from that one incident when I was in high school,” I said. I’d told him about the night I first saw Reyes, the physical abuse he’d suffered at the hands of the man he supposedly killed. Neil didn’t seem surprised. I closed the file and looked into his gray eyes. “Just between us,” I said, leaning forward to make the statement more intimate, “between old friends,” I elaborated, “what did you know about him? What did you think of him?” I tapped the file with my fingertips. “What’s not here?”
Neil sat back in his chair, adjusted his collar, and dragged in a long, deep breath. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
That was promising. “Bet I would,” I said with a wink.
He stared at me a good minute before he spoke. And when he did speak, it was with a reluctance I understood all too well. He truly doubted I would believe him. If he only knew …
“Something strange happened when Farrow first got here, about a week after he’d been released into gen- pop,” he said, glancing down to study the clasp on his watch. “South Side sent three of their soldiers to kill him. Why, I don’t know, but when South Side attacks, people die. Period.”
My chest tightened and I ground my teeth together, trying hard not to react, not to show what the thought of Reyes in that position did to me.
“It ended almost the minute it began,” he continued, his face growing dark as he reconstructed his memories, pieced together what he knew. “I was just a guard then, fresh out of training, positive I was hot shit. I almost pissed my pants when I saw those men heading toward Farrow, not that I knew who he was at the time. I called for backup, but before I even finished the request, three South Side members lay on the ground in pools of their own blood with this twenty-year-old kid … I don’t know … crouched on a table, ready to spring at anyone else who came near him, eyeing the inmates with absolutely no emotion, no fear whatsoever.”
I sat stone still, barely breathing as I watched the events unfold in my mind.
Neil shook his head and looked up at me, his expression a mixture of relief and reverence. “He wasn’t any more winded than I am now. I just barely caught a glimpse of what happened, but…”
“But?” I nudged, barely able to contain my curiosity.
“But … he didn’t move like a normal man moves, Charley. He was a blur, so fast it was impossible for my eyes to follow him. Then he was crouched on the table like an animal, powerful, dangerous.” Neil shook his head again, as if still not believing his own eyes. “That’s how he got his name.”
“His name?” I asked, even more intrigued.
“No one ever touched him again,” he continued. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s a legend to these men, almost godlike.”
I scooted closer to his desk, almost drooling. “You mentioned a name?”
“Right,” he said, snapping to attention. “They call him El Aliento del Diablo.”
“The devil’s breath,” I echoed in English.
“Told you it’d be hard to believe,” he said with a heavy sigh, clearly expecting me to balk at his story.
“Neil, I don’t doubt a single word you’ve said.” When his expression turned to one of surprise, I added, “I saw something similar the night I met him as well. The way he moved. The way he walked.”
“Exactly,” Neil said, pointing at me repeatedly. “Not quite … not quite…”
“… human,” I finished for him.
He glanced at the file in my hands. “I guess he’s human enough, though.”
I couldn’t help but hug the file to me, to hold on to every nuance that was Reyes Alexander Farrow. “I guess.” He was such an enigma, surreal and mystical.
“You know, I never really liked you in high school,” Neil said, pulling me back to the present.
Um, okay. Least he was being honest. “I know,” I said apologetically. “I didn’t really like you either.”
“You didn’t?” He seemed shocked.
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me, too. I used to think you were such a nutcase.”
“And I thought you were an arrogant bastard.”
“I was an arrogant bastard.”
“Oh, right,” I said, suppressing a sad giggle.
“But you weren’t a nutcase, were you?”
I shook my head, grateful for the validation.
“I can let you see him, if you’d like.”
My heart skipped a beat and seemed to rise physically in my chest.
“But I have to tell you, Charley, he won’t pull through. He’s brain-dead.”
Just as quickly, it plummeted to my toes and the floor seemed to slip out from under me. Brain-dead? How could that be?
“He has been since it happened,” he added. He stood and walked around the desk to put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but the state plans to terminate care in three days.”
“You mean pull the plug?” I asked. A wave of panic washed over me. I tried to swallow, but my throat was suddenly parched and raw.
Neil’s lips thinned in regret. “I’m sorry, Charlotte. With no relatives to contest it—”
“But what about his sister?”
“Sister? Farrow has no living relatives. And according to his file, he’s never had any siblings.”
“No, that’s not right,” I said, reopening the file and tearing through the pages. “He had a sister that night.”
“You saw her?” Neil’s voice was filled with hope. He didn’t want Reyes to die any more than I did.
Knowing there would be nothing about his sister in the file, I stopped and closed it again. “No,” I said, trying not to let disappointment swallow me whole. “The landlady told me.”
With a disappointed sigh, Neil collapsed into the chair beside me. “She must have been mistaken.”
As I drove to the Guardian Long-Term Care Facility in Santa Fe, where they were keeping Reyes, my head swam in a sea of information, trying to fit each piece into neat little folders, to organize what I’d learned. Reyes had continued his education, and one year after his conviction, he’d received a degree in criminology. Then, surprisingly, he’d switched to computers. He had a master’s in computer information systems. He’d bettered himself. He would have been a productive, taxpaying member of society when he got out.
Yet now they were going to kill him. Neil had explained that the only way to stop the state would be to get an injunction, but I’d have to have a damned good reason. If I could just find his sister …
As I picked up my phone to call Cookie, it rang with her personal ringtone, Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”
I flipped it open, and Cookie asked, “Well?”
“He’s in a coma.”
“No stinkin’ way.”
“Stinkin’ way. And they’re going to take him off life support in three days, Cook. What am I going to do?” The emotions I’d held at bay in Neil’s office threatened to break free. I fought hard to tamp them down with the deep- breathing techniques I’d learned on my
“What
“I need to find Reyes’s sister. She’s really the only one who can stop this. Not that I’m giving up. I’ll blackmail Uncle Bob. Maybe he can do something.” I was not going to lose Reyes without a fight. Finding him after all these years … there had to be a reason.
“Blackmail is good,” she said.
The world turned green as I pulled my car into a parking lot that resembled an English garden. Before hanging up, I gave Cookie yet another job. According to the article I’d read the night before, Reyes had spent three
