Sweet Mary

by Liz Balmaseda

  I tore off my headphones and pulled hers off as well.

  “I went to Key West,” I said, pitching my voice over the din of the pistol range.

  “What?” she yelled.

  “I went to Key West with Joe Pratts and we had sex,” I yelled into her ear before I adjusted our headphones once more. I raised the rental Glock and took aim at the heart of the target. For a moment, it looked just like Tony. I pulled the trigger and hit it spot-on.

  I turned to glance at Gina. She was speechless.

  Moments later, she scurried down the corridor after me.

  “I want details. But I need a cigarette first,” she said. She fumbled for a pack.

  “That’s all there is. That’s all I’m going to say about it for now,” I said.

  “I must be a fricking psychic, because I knew it,” said Gina. She took a long drag of the cigarette. “You’re in love. Boy, did I ever call it, or what?”

  “We’ll talk about it later. Promise,” I said. “I’m headed to Cocoa today. I’m checking out a few leads up there.”

  “So, where’s Joe?”

  “Still in the Keys,” I said. “I had to do this alone.”

  “Shit, Mary. You have to tell me what happened,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you later. I swear. Right now I need to find an address in Malabar,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t be too hard,” she said, giving up her line of questioning with another drag of the cigarette. “It’s a tiny place.”

  About three hours later I was in Brevard County, buying a street map and a bag of Mr. Piggy fried pork rinds at a gas station mini-mart.

  As I filled up the gas tank, I leaned against the car and made two phone calls: one to my parents, and the second to Tony. I told my parents I had been called away to meet a real estate client in Cocoa Beach, and I asked them to swing by my house to pick up the mail and water the plants. They thought nothing of it and wished me a good trip. I think they were relieved that I was traveling and quietly hoping that I’d grab a vacation day or two, just to unwind.

  Tony, on the other hand, was not as gracious.

  “Why are you calling again?” he said in that nasally voice of his. “You know you can’t speak to him.”

  “Who’s going to know? I’m his mother. I should be able to talk to my kid,” I said, not even attempting a civil tone. “Put him on the damn phone.”

  “Not possible,” said smug Tony. “He’s at tennis camp today.”

  Our ongoing conflict aside, Tony sounded unusually rushed and overly hostile. I couldn’t help but think there was truth to those reports Gina had mentioned about trouble brewing in Victoria’s campaign. But, truth be told, I didn’t want to hear about Victoria or her campaign. So I didn’t ask.

  “Just tell me one thing: Is Max okay?” I said.

  “He’s more than okay. He’s fantastic,” said Tony.

  I said nothing else and hung up.

  Back in the car, I studied the map for the best route in Malabar, and I drove off to find Surrey Court. The route led me past a couple of strip malls, stretches of farmland, and several boatyards. Even though it was close to the sea, this particular stretch of Brevard County felt strangely landlocked. Despite the boats, it was a place that could have been carved out and plopped down anywhere, the middle of Kansas or western Georgia or northern Texas or southern Illinois. There was a dull sameness to the landscape of megastores and megachurches, where the weekend masses flocked to be further neutralized and sanitized. There were the usual food franchises disguised as “homey” and “original,” the overpriced coffee shops fronting a bohemian-chic vibe amid their canned music and premixed frappes. This seemed not like a place where life was lived, but a place where it was rehearsed and mimicked.

  Following the map, I turned into a warehouse area and traveled several blocks before finding Surrey Court, a rather desolate street in a remote corner of a sprawling but virtually empty industrial park. It didn’t look like the kind of place anyone would call home, not even a drug queen on the run. And the only sign of life I found at the building marked “251” was a collapsed sign that read PROPERTY FOR SALE, INQUIRE WITHIN.

  “I think I will,” I told myself as I walked toward the building, which housed an abandoned warehouse of some sort. I tried to pry the front door open to no avail, so I walked around the back. I came to a door with a blackout tint on the glass window, but it also was locked.

  I paced around the back lot in disbelief. I had driven six hours to arrive at a deserted warehouse. I wasn’t about to get back in my car and go home empty-handed. I scoured the littered yard for some kind of heavy object. Next to a few hubcaps, I found a tire iron in some overgrown weeds. I used it to shatter the back-door window of the warehouse. I rationalized the act by telling myself that this was not simply a random warehouse but an empty warehouse, an empty warehouse that belonged to a known felon, and, not to mention, a warehouse with no surveillance cameras. Besides, no one was around for miles. Who would know?

  I reached in and unlocked the deadbolt on the door. Inside, the cavernous space had been swept clean. An efficiency-style kitchen stood nearly bare in a corner. Only a roll of paper towels and a stack of red plastic cups remained. In another corner I found six empty boxes. I checked the labels on them—all were addressed to the same person.

  SOFIA VILLANUEVA, 251 SURREY COURT, MALABAR, FL 32950, read the address labels.

  The return addresses only intensified the mystery. Three of them had been shipped from the Home Shopping Network in St. Petersburg, Florida. The three others had come from some place called A Flair for Crafts in Murphy, North Carolina. They were stamped with signs that read: AS SEEN ON TV! But there was nothing from Colombia, New Mexico, Key West, or any other location referenced in the drug trafficking case against Maria Portilla.

  I locked the door on my way out of the warehouse and walked over to a row of mailboxes. I flipped each of them open—all were jammed with junk mail addressed to the other empty warehouses. All, that is, except for the one marked “251.” It was empty.

  I went back to the car and drove it to a shady spot, settling in for a stakeout. If the mailbox was empty, it could only mean someone was coming by to pick up the mail. I pulled out the crossword puzzle from Florida Today and went to work on it.

  Twelve-letter word for “hard metallic shade.”

  Pass.

  Nine-letter word that means segments of equal length.

  “Congruent,” I said to myself, jotting the letters in the boxes.

  I must have been there for a good hour by the time the mailman came around. I saw him stuff a bundle of mail into the box marked “251.” About a half hour and a deadlocked crossword puzzle later, someone pulled up in a silver Toyota Corolla. I studied the driver as he got out of the car. He was a tall, skinny man with careless wisps of flaxen hair and Ray-Bans. He walked over to mailbox 251, flipped it open, and grabbed the wad of mail.

  In belted jeans and a striped polo shirt, he cut an oddly familiar silhouette. Where had I seen him before? I thought for a minute, then reached for the Portilla case file on my passenger seat. I leafed through the file and fished out a black and white photograph. I studied the man in the photograph and then studied the man in the silver Corolla—it was the same guy. He was the lanky man from the surveillance video, back at the DEA interrogation room. The man in the silver Corolla was none other than El Flaco.

  I squinted to read his license plate: NTA-114.

  I scribbled the number on the case file folder as El Flaco started to drive away. I waited one prudent moment before pulling out behind him. Not that he would have known who I was anyway. The story of my “murky” release had not been picked up outside Miami. Still, to be on the safe side, I kept an ample distance from the Corolla. I meandered through the industrial zone and into the surrounding neighborhood at a somewhat breezy pace, even allowing a random car or two to cut in front of me. All the while, however, I kept my eye on the silver Corolla. The scene reminded me o
f the time Gina and I tailed one of her boyfriends, a mysterious dude who had claimed to be a black-belted martial arts phenomenon and a movie stuntman, most notably in True Lies, the Schwarzenegger film partly shot in Miami. With Gina hiding in the front seat of my car, I followed the guy’s beat-up Firebird to a storefront jujitsu gym. We watched from a nearby parking lot as some skinny teenager gave Gina’s boyfriend the smackdown of his life. Of course, it wasn’t as bad as the ego bruising he took later from Gina over the phone. I’ll give him one thing, though—he did drive like a wannabe stuntman.

  And so did El Flaco. He didn’t make it easy for me to keep up with him once we left the neighborhood surrounding the warehouse. He managed to confound me as he zigzagged across town on a tour of the absurd. He stopped to check out the gear at a scuba shop. He stopped to test golf clubs at Sports Authority. He swung by a fine jewelry shop to examine the Cartier watches. El Flaco, it seemed to me, was not only excessively rich—he was bored out of his flaxen mind. As he lingered over the jewelry counter, I typed his license plate number into a premium reverse directory to which I had a subscription.

  The owner of the car came back with a familiar ring: Guerra Group South LLC.

  I was no closer to learning El Flaco’s identity. But I was learning about his impulses. In the most spectacular of his pit stops, he walked into the showroom at a luxury car dealership, strolling between Bentleys and Lamborghinis, Jaguars and Rolls-Royces. He came to stop at an electric blue Tesla Roadster, and the color triggered a non sequitur in my head.

  Electric blue, I thought, mulling the phrase in my head. Twelve-letter word for “hard metallic shade.”

  But El Flaco moved on to the next toy. Purely on a whim, he test-drove a Ferrari F430 Scuderia. When he returned, pumped from the ride, he corralled a sales rep into a glass-enclosed cubicle, and he dove into manic shopper mode. From where I was parked just outside the showroom, I could see El Flaco was frothing up some kind of deal. His dramatic, jabbing hand gestures seemed out of place in that rarefied parking space created for the luxury vehicles of the crème de la crème. It seemed to take some haggling on his part, one very heated phone call to God knows who, and an almost comical display of angst, but El Flaco got what he wanted that day. He drove away in a canary yellow $220,000 special series Ferrari.

  To celebrate his purchase, he zoomed over to Sugarlump’s Burger Joint and feasted on a double-with-cheese combo. Then he headed for a nearby strip mall, where he entered a storefront salon called A Brand New You Day Spa.

  Once he got inside, amid the soft jazz, silk flowers, and pink-robed, suburban tranquillity seekers, it was evident El Flaco was that guy you never want to meet at a spa. He was impatient, obnoxious, and loud. He paced between the serenity fountains, barking insults into his cell phone.

  “Fuck your facial. I’m waiting two minutes, then I’m leaving,” he said, the veins on his neck protruding in outrage. “What do you mean—don’t you even want to see it? Then come out here. It’s parked outside—where else would it be parked?”

  I pretended to browse through meditation books at the spa gift shop as El Flaco continued to pace the lobby. He ignored the stares of several pink-robed ladies who sat in the lounging area sipping herbal tea and reading celeb magazines. Moments later, he was met by a woman in an oversized spa robe, her hair wrapped high in a towel, her face smeared with some kind of orange glop.

  From their body language, it seemed these two were not a couple. She treated him like a servant or a wayward child. She sniffed and talked down to him. Of course I wondered if this could be the woman in the video, the object of my pursuit. Could this be La Reina herself? But she seemed so much younger, more lithe than the Maria Portilla of the DEA photographs. She car ried herself with a rich-bitch arrogance and an almost regal air, like a woman who knows exactly what she wants. And, from the looks of it, she didn’t want a 510-horsepower, $220,000 luxury sports car. When she caught a glimpse of the Ferrari through the storefront window, she nearly had a conniption.

  “Are you insane?” she said in a loud hiss. “What are you trying to do to me?”

  “I couldn’t drive that piece of shit one more day,” said El Flaco, turning away from her, almost sulking. “It was embarrassing.”

  “It wasn’t embarrassing. It was a safe car. This is not safe. This is suicide,” the woman said in whispered staccato.

  “What’s the big deal? It’s not your money,” said El Flaco, jabbing a finger at her robe.

  “Correction: It’s not your money,” said the woman, lifting her orange-goop cheek in scorn. “You will take that ridiculous car back right now.”

  She zipped around to go back inside. As she was leaving, El Flaco called after her in a voice that was loud enough for all the lounging ladies to hear: “Hey! At least I’m not blowing my money on stupid crap from TV!”

  I dropped the meditation book I was pretending to read as I watched El Flaco storm toward the front door. Stupid crap from TV? It didn’t take a crack investigator to wonder if this stupid crap he was talking about had arrived at the Surrey Court warehouse in boxes stamped AS SEEN ON TV But even if it was true that this woman had ordered gratuitous merchandise from TV shopping channels, it was a comparatively modest over-shopping sin. The supposed TV crap came in brown cardboard boxes delivered to an empty warehouse, where no one could see it. A yellow Ferrari, on the other hand, didn’t simply scream conspicuous consumption, it Z-snapped it for the whole world to see.

  “Check. Me. Out,” said the yellow Ferrari.

  The fundamental question had grated on me since I saw El Flaco in that auto showroom: Why would a wanted man like El Flaco go on a balls-out buying spree in the first place? Why would he be so obvious?

  As he bolted out the door, he left me with a dilemma: If I followed him, I might lose track of this mystery woman. But if I stayed to check her out more closely, my afternoon could prove to be a bust, and I would have to stalk El Flaco at the warehouse all over again. I was convinced this woman was too young to be La Reina. Her English was too fluent—perhaps I was mistaken, but I imagined a Colombian national would still possess the lilt and syntax of her native tongue. This woman simply didn’t fit the profile of an undocumented drug queen from Colombia. Besides, what were the chances the real Maria Portilla would be out in public, getting facials at random day spas?

  But there was something about the woman that intrigued me just enough that day. As she headed back toward the treatment room, I walked over to the reception desk.

  “I want whatever facial that woman’s having. It looks exactly like what I want,” I said to the young spa attendant.

  “That would be the mango-papaya deluxe,” she said, checking her book for availability. “And it seems I can squeeze you in for a half-hour treatment right now.”

  “Good deal,” I said, taking a locker key and a pair of slippers from her.

  Within minutes, I was dressed in a pink robe, sitting in a foamy white recliner, next to El Flaco’s friend. Three aestheticians attended to her, a facialist, a manicurist, and a pedicurist. It was quite a ballet of swirling motions and lotions, and it kept me staring until I felt a tap on my cheek.

  “Honey, you need to relax,” said my own aesthetician, who rested my head against a small pillow. “This is papaya enzyme. Just a little sting now,” she said, as she smeared the orange paste on my forehead. “So, what’s your name?”

  My name.

  I had no idea. I knew it couldn’t be Maria or Mary. It couldn’t be Janet, either—what if the Key West gang somehow put two and two together?

  “Angela,” I said.

  “Oh—that’s my sister’s name,” said the aesthetician, her face lighting up.

  I closed my eyes in hopes this aesthetician would shut up and let me eavesdrop on my neighbor. It was hard enough to hear myself think with the Kenny G ambient noise streaming through the speaker system.

  I glanced over at the next chair, where El Flaco’s friend sat with her eyes closed in attempted b
liss. I could tell she was a woman of medium build, although I couldn’t see the shape of her body because her robe was too large. She had absurdly long nails, freshly painted by the manicurist a ginger frost shade, and her face looked hideous in that orange clay mask. Then again, who was I to talk? I could have been her twin just then, with my own face smeared in what the spa brochure described as “a deeply rejuvenating elixir made from natural botanicals and fruit enzymes.”

  “Relax, sweetie,” her facialist told her. “Don’t worry about him right now.”

  The glop on her face moved and cracked as the woman grimaced beneath it.

  “He’s an ungrateful, spoiled-rotten brat,” she said.

  “No, no, no—no frowning,” said the facialist, starting to peel off the woman’s orange mask.

  The facialist placed a damp washcloth on the woman’s face to wipe off the excess product and then removed the towel from her head. El Flaco’s friend shook her hair loose like the women in shampoo commercials.

  “Wow. Look at the glow on you,” the facialist said, handing the woman a gold-rimmed mirror.

  I tried to get a look at her, but the woman had sat up with her back to my chair. I could tell she demurred a bit before taking the mirror and giving herself a slow once-over. She tilted her head coquettishly as if she were looking into a camera on the red carpet.

  “Very nice,” she said, leaning back into her lounge chair.

  I couldn’t help but glance over at her. And when I did, I gasped to myself at the sight of her face. It was a face forever burned into my memory, the same face I had seen in the surveillance video and the police photos at DEA headquarters, the face I had seen in my nightmares. It was the same face, the face that had derailed my life. It was La Reina, in the newly polished flesh.