“Do you think Ramon and Carlos are corrupt?”
She shrugs, staring out her window.
“I don’t know. Probably not. It’s impossible to say who in law enforcement is corrupt. And maybe they wouldn’t have raped and killed us—maybe they would have just taken us to jail—but once the idea entered my mind …”
She shakes her head again and turns to look at me.
“Do you think I should stop?”
“I have no clue. If you don’t want to keep doing this, then stop doing it. It doesn’t matter to me.”
In the flash of headlights from a passing car I see her eyes tearing up.
She says, “Don’t you ever get scared?”
“All the time.”
“How do you deal with it?”
The question gives me pause.
“I’m not sure. The truth is, I’ve never thought about it much. I guess I just live my life day by day. I don’t worry about next year. Or next month. Or even tomorrow.”
“But don’t you … have dreams? Like to someday get married and have children?”
“Honestly? It’s never really appealed to me.”
“But haven’t you ever been in love?”
I say nothing to this. Of course I’ve been in love. And just my luck, the guy I loved turned out to be one massive douche who faked his death along with my father and then came back, years later, to try to kill me.
My silence is enough to give Gabriela the hint. She slumps in her seat again and stares out her window. When she speaks next, her voice is just above a whisper.
“I’ve been in love too many times to count. It sounds silly, I know, and maybe it’s because I’m so young. But every time I go out with a guy I instantly fall in love with him. It sounds pathetic, doesn’t it? I don’t come on too strong—that’s not what I mean—but in my heart I instantly see myself living the rest of my life with whoever I’m out with at that moment. I think it’s because I want to get married some day, have children, all of that. I want to move away from Culiacán. I want to move to the United States where it’s safe. Where you can raise a family and not worry about getting killed in your sleep.”
Gabriela falls silent, wiping the tears from her eyes.
I ask, “Do you have much interaction with the cops around Culiacán?”
“Not really. I know of them, but I don’t know them.”
“Do you know where Ramon lives?”
This makes her pause. She watches me in the dark for a long time, studying the side of my face.
I say, “Relax. I’m not going to kill him.”
“Then why are you asking where he lives?”
“After what happened tonight with Ramon and his partner and those government men, I want to assure Ramon that I’m not the enemy.”
“Ramon is policía, so his information won’t be easy to find, but I’ll email the publisher of La Baliza. Maybe he’ll be able to track it down.”
“Also see if he can find Ramon’s phone number.”
She nods, already typing away on her cell phone. After a long moment, she hits a final button and sets the phone in her lap.
“Done.”
“Thanks. Now, about your story.”
Her voice becomes all at once guarded.
“What about my story?”
“Are you going to write it?”
Gabriela hesitates a beat.
“I might.”
“I think you should. And I think you should sleep on your decision to stop doing what you do. Like you said, if you don’t do it, who else will?”
Gabriela leans back in her seat, stares out her window as she answers in a soft voice.
“I’ll think about it.”
Ten minutes later, just as we see the city lights ahead of us, Gabriela’s cell phone dings.
I ask, “The publisher?”
She nods, reading the screen. Then she smiles at me.
“He found it.”
Twenty-Nine
Ramon winced at the touch of the rubbing alcohol.
His wife said, “Hold still. Don’t be a baby.”
“But it stings.”
They were in the kitchen, just the two of them, his daughter already in her crib and sound asleep.
His wife took her time as she dabbed the cloth soaked with rubbing alcohol on the side of his head. That was where Samantha Lu—or whoever she was—had kicked him.
“Were you there?”
His wife didn’t meet his eye as she asked the question.
“Was I where?”
She leaned back, inspecting the side of his face, and then tossed the cloth into the sink. Without a word she stood up and went to the sink and started washing her hands. Ramon watched her for a long moment, his beautiful wife, the woman he had known since school. As a nurse she spent her days dealing with people who needed their wounds stitched up, and now here she was at home doing it for her husband.
She rarely asked about his job. She had decided long ago that she didn’t want to know, that she didn’t want to face this reality. But now she had asked if he was there, and of course he knew what she meant. Not at La Miserias—she already knew he had been there earlier tonight—but at that abandoned brick building with the three charred bodies.
“I was, yes.”
She turned back to him, her face all at once pinched.
“What was it like?”
He had to actually think about it for a moment. Until then, he hadn’t really had a chance to process it.
“It was terrible.”
“But you’ve surely seen worse before, haven’t you?”
He had. Of course he had. Being an investigator in Culiacán presented him with awful things on a daily basis. He’d seen children lying dead in the streets. A man who had been skinned alive. A woman’s headless body propped in the doorway of a church.
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly.
“This was different somehow.”
She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.
“What do you mean?”
“Just … just the idea that it might be the work of the Devil”—Ramon shook his head—“I had a chill when I first saw the bodies.”
“And it was really her?”
Ramon nodded.
“Yes. I mean, it has to be her. She would have been the only woman in
