Esperanza (39 page)

“Why?”

“You’re important to the survival of Esperanza. And to the chasers. They’ve gone to great lengths to protect you.”

“Chasers? I don’t know what you mean.”

“You will.”

“Get up,” Tess barked.

“I can’t. You shot this body in the knees.”

“Roll onto your back.”

Dominica severed the connection to Lew’s pain centers, forced his body to roll, then to vault forward and lunge for the horrible woman. Tess leaped back, but too slowly, and Lew fell onto her, all two hundred and twelve pounds of him. He knocked her sideways into the bureau, air rushed from her lungs, her gun skittered across the room, and Lew crashed to the floor.

Dominica seized control of Lew’s limbs, forcing him to his feet again, forcing him to grab the lamp. The cord jerked from the socket and he staggered toward Tess on his injured knees, swinging the lamp like a baseball bat. But Lew’s legs were in such bad shape that he lurched like a cripple, the lamp whistled past Tess, and she dived for the gun and squeezed off a shot that ripped into Lew’s thigh. Dominica didn’t feel it, but Lew did, and he shrieked and went down, crushing the lamp with his body.

“Tess Livingston, you’ll wish you had stayed dead!”
Dominica shouted.

Because Lew’s body was beginning to lose consciousness, Dominica leaped out of him and through the roof, into the darkness. Wind swept her through the night. She called repeatedly for Ben, called just in case she was wrong that instantaneous death of the host body could obliterate a
brujo.
Where had she heard that? Who had told her? She didn’t know. Among her kind, there were certain things that you just knew. But because you
knew
them, did that mean they were true? She kept calling to him, but he never answered.

Distraught, directionless, she wandered aimlessly, struggling to come to terms with Ben’s annihilation, with the gaping dark hole it had left inside of her. She didn’t understand how she, dead for nearly six hundred years, could feel this kind of despair and loss or why she had felt it for most of her life as a
bruja.
Despair over Wayra, Ben, the animals that came and went through her town house. Wasn’t death supposed to be the end of suffering?

Awhile later—minutes, hours, she didn’t know—she found herself back
inside Tess’s mother’s house. The rooms were empty, someone had cleaned up the crime scene, a dreadful silence suffused the air. She listened to this silence, hoping she might hear Ben whispering to her, laughing, urging her to follow him to wherever he had gone. The silence, so vast and deep, mocked her. She screamed and shrieked, but because she was formless, the noises she made didn’t register in the physical world. Only the silence remained, the air shaking with its soundless laughter.

Enraged, she tried to turn on a stove burner so the gas would seep into the air and she could strike a match and blow up the goddamn house. In Esperanza, it wouldn’t be a problem. Here, it was impossible. She couldn’t make her hand solid enough to touch the knob, to pick up a match. Here, she was nothing, powerless.

Unable to retaliate against the bitch for what she had done to Ben, unable to get even with her, to make her suffer, Dominica left the house, uncertain about where to go, what to do. Should she mobilize her tribe? She imagined it, thousands of her own kind descending on the Florida Keys, sweeping across this miserable string of islands, seizing every person in sight. Another San Francisco feast, but larger and minus the fog.

A car pulled into the driveway and she paused, hopeful that it would be Tess, whom she could follow to wherever her mother and niece were. But Dan Hernandez got out. Good. She could take him, injure him, kill him. She could use him to extract her revenge, to make Tess suffer.

He stood outside his car for a few moments, looking around furtively, checking out the dark street behind him, the yards to either side of him. There were no people around, no other cars, windows were dark. He climbed the stairs quickly and walked right through her. No reaction. Dan tore away the crime tape, turned the knob, flicked on a light switch and only then did he enter.
Afraid of the dark, Agent Hernandez?
Curious about why he was here now, in the hours before dawn, Dominica followed him into the house.

He turned on an overhead light, studied the floor where the lawn man had fallen, looked around the room, obviously inspecting the cleaning job. He proceeded into the kitchen, opened a door under the sink, brought out a bottle of Pine Sol. He wet a hand towel, wrapped it around the bottom of a sponge mop. In the living room, he splashed Pine Sol all over the floor and started mopping, long, vigorous strokes that threatened to scrub away the color of the tile.

Intrigued, Dominica just watched him. The house had been cleaned professionally, so he wasn’t here for that. She had the distinct impression
that the cleaning symbolized something he hoped to eradicate within himself.

Dan tossed the dirty towel into the washing machine in the utility room, reached under the sink again, removed more rags and bottles of cleansers. Then he went to work in earnest, cleaning counters and windows, tabletops, even the ceiling-fan paddles. He stacked dishes in the washer, started it. He scrubbed the double kitchen sinks, ran the garbage disposal. A one-man cleaning service.

The whole episode was so strange that Dominica decided against taking him right now. Better to accompany him for the time being, to observe, allow her grief to take her in some new direction. So when he finally shut the front door and went downstairs to his car, she was beside him, settling into the passenger seat.

Right now, she didn’t give a shit what happened to Esperanza. It could fall, collapse, be conquered. It didn’t matter. The only thing she cared about was revenge.
You were her lover before Esperanza. And now you’re mine, Dan, whenever I choose to seize you.
He would be her conduit and her ultimate retribution against Tess for what she had done to Ben.

One man dead, the other a raving maniac, and the local cops didn’t have a clue what was going on. Until they wised up, Tess’s federal badge was all that stood between her and an arrest warrant.

The cops and forensics team finally left her suite just before dawn and she checked out of the resort shortly afterward. Tess drove her mother’s Prius south, her exhaustion extreme, her mind blank. But in the back of her head, that eerie voice looped through her thoughts.
I promise you this, Tess Livingston. I will take everyone you love as much as I loved Ben and will make sure their deaths are excruciating.

Tess lowered the windows and the warm air that blew through the car smelled thickly of summer, ocean, salt. But she felt vulnerable with the windows down, worried that the
bruja
who had threatened her might come through the windows, might . . .
Stop it.
The mark on her wrist didn’t burn, the discoloration had nearly faded. That meant there weren’t any
brujos
nearby. She would be sure to share that little tidbit with Dan, the Bureau shrink, and her boss.

She called her mother’s cell and didn’t even reach the voice mail, a sure sign her phone was dead. When she tried Maddie’s cell number, her niece answered on the first ring.

“Tesso. Are you all right?”

“I am now. Where’re you and Mom staying?”

“Tango Fritter Inn, northwest part of the island, about half a mile outside the town of Pirate’s Cove.” She ticked off the address. “Enter it into the GPS. It’s tricky finding this place. We’re in room thirteen.”

Bus 13. Cottage 13 . . . fear of the number 13 is called triskaidekaphobia . . .

The number 13, the wrist mark an alarm system, talking to ghosts, attacks by spirits. It was as if her life had collapsed into a whole new paradigm and she didn’t have any idea what the rules were. She braked for a stoplight just short of the Tango Key bridge, rubbed her eyes. “Unlock the door. I’m nearly there.”

“Unlocking door now, Tesso. See you in a few minutes.”

Tess plugged the GPS into the cigarette lighter and typed in the address for the Tango Fritter Inn. The light turned green, she continued on toward the bridge. By any standard, it was an engineering feat, crossing the twelve miles between Key West and Tango. It had been badly damaged in the category five storm that had devastated the island several years ago. For months, residents had come and gone only by plane or boat. The bridge finally had reopened last July 4 to great fanfare. She remembered because she and Dan had attended the massive celebratory street fair and fireworks display.

She fully expected that in a few hours she would be unemployed and perhaps sought by the police for the man she had killed in the suite. Then there was the other guy with his shattered kneecaps, and the man she had killed in her mother’s house. She knew how guilty it made her look.

As she crossed the bridge, the copper sun punched a hole in the horizon. Light touched the trees on the opposite shore, setting them on fire, and the flames burned across the placid silver waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She turned right onto the perimeter road that led around the island, the old road with its rich history, its landmarks, its meandering course that rose steadily from sea level to hundreds of feet above the gulf, along the perimeter of cliffs.

Cliffs, in Florida.

Tango Key was like no other island in the Florida straits. Even the geological structure was different—no limestone, few flat surfaces except to the south in the town of Tango, where the hurricane devastation had been extreme. Up here in the hills, nature appeared to have restored itself, with farms flourishing, wooded areas thickening, fruit groves bursting with new
life. As she approached the outskirts of Pirate’s Cove, she felt a glimmer of hope and optimism for the first time in months. Every time she came to this island, it was like that. If she arrived in a depressed mood, that darkness lifted within minutes.

As if to emphasize just how different Tango was from the rest of Florida, Tess suddenly spotted what looked like a flock of low-flying hummingbirds. The morning light washed over them and seemed to fill them until they were luminous, celestial. The flock angled east, toward Key West, and she lost sight of them Humming bird. Here. One more impossible thing. But it felt like a sign that she was doing the right thing.

Just beyond the town, the GPS directed her to take a series of quick turns. She finally followed a sparsely populated dirt road to the edge of a cliff. The hotel stood there like a crane with one foot anchored on land and the other tucked out of sight. Part of it jutted out over the cliff, some fancy architectural thing that would crumble away whenever the cliff did. But Florida didn’t experience earthquakes and the hard stone that comprised the island seemed capable of withstanding nearly anything. The hotel had not been taken out by the category five hurricane. It hadn’t suffered any damage at all.

Her mother opened the door, took one look at Tess, and slid her fingers through Tess’s hair. “My God, what happened to your hair?”

Her hair? “Windblown, Mom.”

“Never mind.” Lauren pointed at the bed. “If you don’t fall into this bed immediately, I’m going to knock you out with a punch to the jaw.”

“I’m thirty-three, Mom, not fifteen. But the bed sure looks inviting.” She crawled into it and the last thing that registered was her mother drawing the covers up to her chin.

As he slept, Dominica pulled up an imaginary chair and watched him—the REM movements of his eyelids, the constant shifting of his body, the way he ground his teeth. She drifted into him slightly.
Brujos
weren’t supposed to taste; they had to
take.
But she had traveled well beyond rules and restrictions. Dominica enjoyed what she tasted in Dan. She appreciated that he could come home from a really bad day, curl up like this and sleep. She liked his connection to Cuban mysticism through his father and grandmother, that his left brain fought it every inch of the way. It was why he made a good agent. Could she love this man? Maybe. She needed to love someone, anyone. It seemed to be her fate and the reason she suffered so deeply when the one she loved was gone. So be it.
Love the one you’re with.

Dan tasted a lot like Ben. But to love him, she could not take him. Another
brujo
would have to take him and there were no other men in her tribe whom she loved or to whom she was remotely attracted. Could the rules be bent so you could seize the one you loved?

His cell belted out a Latino song and Dominica rapidly withdrew from him. Dan groaned and rolled over. Groggy, groping around on the nightstand like a drunk, he scooped up the cell, pressed the speaker button. “Hernandez.”

“It’s Lieutenant Frank Cerlane with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department. I answered the call Tess Livingston made yesterday about the dead man at her mother’s place.”

“Right.” Dan sat up in bed, combed his fingers through his disheveled hair, turned on the lamp. “What is it, Lieutenant? What’s going on?”

“I, uh, understand that you investigated a double homicide last night in Miami Beach.”

“Yes, that’s right. A model and her photographer, Barbara De—”

“Yeah, I know who they were, Agent Hernandez. I know who the suspects are. I saw the security video from Club Martinique. And I’m calling to tell you we have one suspect in custody and he’s a complete nutcase, and Tess shot and killed the other man. They apparently broke into the suite where she and her mother and niece were staying.”