“Where did you take his body, by the way?”
She’s watching me now intently, eager to learn where we buried the man known as El Diablo.
I say nothing.
With a shrug, Leila gathers the photographs and slips them back into the briefcase.
“On second thought, I don’t want to know. I like the mystery. It keeps things interesting.”
She closes the briefcase.
“Your friend—he’s a big, handsome man. We’ve tried finding him, too, but with no luck. He’s managed to do a better job at disappearing, it seems. You, on the other hand … you did pretty well, but social media got the better of you.”
She waits a beat for a reaction, and smiles again.
“You see, the people I work for are well connected, and they have a lot of money, enough money to pay the right people to scour social media for whatever or whomever we want. We gave them your picture, and they used their facial recognition software to start digging through social media. The way it was explained to me, it’s like a spider that skims the Web looking for somebody with the same dimensions as your face. For seven months they searched until they found a match. Somebody’s Instagram, a photo taken at your place of employment. You were in the background, but there was enough of your face that it gave an alert. Once we learned the location of the bar, we sent people down to confirm it was you, and we’ve been monitoring you ever since.”
“How long?”
She seems surprised I asked the question.
“What do you mean?”
“How long have you been monitoring me?”
“About two months. Don’t look surprised. It’s not like we had people sitting in a van outside your apartment. We just made sure to keep an eye on you until the day came that we would need your assistance.”
“I’m not helping you.”
“No? Come now, Holly, look at these pictures of your family. We know that Ernesto Diaz’s son threatened them. That’s why you killed him and his men, and why you went to Mexico to kill Ernesto.”
She’s right, of course. Javier Diaz did threaten my family, and because of that I did kill him and his men. I knew that once word got back to his father of what happened, his father would retaliate, and so I went to Mexico to kill him, too—and it was there that I stumbled into the war between Alejandro Cortez and Fernando Sanchez Morales.
Leila smiles again, clearly impressed with herself.
“The dots were always there. We simply needed a starting point. Don’t think Javier Diaz didn’t alert only his father that he planned to confront you. Others were aware. That’s how we’ve known about your family all this time. We just weren’t sure what to do with them, if anything. But like I said, we decided to keep an eye on you until we needed your assistance, and with those two ICE agents … let’s call it two birds with one stone.”
She laughs suddenly, a soft chuckle, and shakes her head.
“Now that’s an expression that makes sense. There’s something so simplistically barbaric about the idea of killing two things with one item, don’t you think?”
I don’t bother answering. I keep thinking about the photographs in the briefcase.
Leila snaps the briefcase shut, pulls it close to her.
“Obviously you aren’t taking this seriously. I guess you want your family to die. So be it.”
She starts to stand, but I tell her to wait, and she stands there, watching me.
I say, “What do you want?”
“Right now? I want you to know we have people watching your family. At any moment they’re prepared to kill your mother and sister, even your nephews. If you don’t want that to happen, you’re going to do exactly what we tell you to do.”
“And what is that?”
The small smile lights back on her face.
“That will come in time. For now, I want to make sure we’re on the same page. And I know what you’re thinking—that maybe you’ll try to get them to arrest me on my way out, see the photographs in my briefcase, but I wouldn’t advise that. If I don’t leave here in the next five minutes, your family dies. And in terms of phone calls, I’ve already made them aware you don’t want any phone calls. Besides, the U.S. Marshals will be here shortly. And once they take you into their custody, you won’t be in any position to make phone calls.”
Without another word, she heads for the door.
I watch her go, wanting to say something, wanting to lift the table and throw it at her and snap her back in half, but the afterimage of my mother and sister and my sister’s family stays in my mind. As long as they’re in danger, I can’t make any moves against this woman or anyone else she’s working with.
Leila knocks on the door to let the guard outside know that she’s done. She glances at the camera in the corner by the ceiling, at the cord she’d pulled, and shrugs at me. Not her problem.
She smiles again.
“We’ll be seeing you soon, Holly.”
The door creaks open, and she steps out into the hallway.
Twenty-One
For a solid minute, I don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t even blink. I stare at the door, at the space where that woman stood, and do everything in my power not to scream.
Those photographs Leila showed me are seared into my brain. Even with my eyes open, I can still see them. My mother at the grocery store. My nephews playing in a park. My sister and her husband standing together.
Everything I did after I killed Javier Diaz was to protect them—my trip to Mexico, to take out Javier’s father, and then returning to the U.S. and starting a new life in the middle of nowhere. Did I
