by Gary Sapp
was thinking of Chris. She made him a promise that she would return to him when she could—if she could once she settled some old personal matters. He didn’t argue at least that long. And she guessed that he needed the time to settle his own affairs with the FBI, this Serena Tennyson woman, and A House in Chains, especially after the murder of his brother Xavier. God, I want so badly to be there for you during this hard time you are facing, Chris. “Do these virtues mean anything to you, Victor?”
“Family causes us the most grief,” Victor answered quickly and honestly. “You know that better than I do, Senorita. Duty is always a subjective matter not easily interoperated by the naked eye. And as for honor…well, our kind don’t serve the most honorable men and women.”
Roxanne stood her ground—even on her one good leg.
“Christopher Prince is an honorable man. Serena Tennyson and Pandora spread lies about his relationship with his step daughter to discredit him at a critical moment with their war with A House in Chains and the FBI. They were ready to go on the offensive against the citizens of Atlanta. I was foolish enough to believe these lies…if only for a short time. I redeemed myself by defending Chris and his cause.” She cut her eyes at Victor. “But I’m sure that you know most if not all of this already.”
Victor nodded but held back a grin.
“I do. What I don’t know—what I want to know is this: Do you love him, Roxanne?”
“So you have been keeping even closer tabs on me than I already suspected, Victor Roxanne applauded his efforts. Her mockery echoed off of the nearby stones through the smoky air. Gonzales shifted in his stance tired of this game of words and innuendo. “How close have you truly been?”
“I’ve been close enough to smell the dirty stench of Joseph Champion lies every time the man opens his mouth.”
Roxanne’s dark eyes became slits.
And she a new revelation swam up to the surface in her mind.
“It was you in that black car that chased us down state,” She sneered more than said to him. “You tried to kill us.”
“No, If I wanted you dead you would be a corpse already.” Victor’s calm demeanor betrayed no need for deceptions here. He was in complete control and knew it. “I knew that you were getting some semblance of the truth out of Champion when you left for the state prison, so I thought I’d help you along.”
“By chasing my only lead away?”
“I know your instincts for survival, Senorita. But your business was with Erica Lovings and her family. Champion, I believe, is involved in something much more profound and dangerous. I think I know a truth about him that you or anyone else in this city only suspect and have yet to fully digest. If you have dove any further into him you would be dead right now, Senorita, and not by my hand.”
Roxanne heard the seriousness in his voice and worse than that—she suspected that he was right about Champion. Pride caused her to mask those feeling as best as her dark eyes would allow her. Victor had lost the privilege of seeing her like vulnerable like that long ago. Yet, it made her chest hurt nearly as badly as her ankle to know that she’d expended her time and energy seeking out retributions against Angel instead of staying on a larger threat: Joseph Champion.
How and when did I lose my objectivity? I should have kept this entire episode professional and not let the personal cloud my thinking and my judgement.
And in speaking of the personal—
“You unimaginable bastard,” She said but the lack of venom left everyone standing here unconvinced. “Where else have you been tailing me?”
Victor stood with his legs spread apart, enjoying himself.
“I’ve always thought that funeral were overly dramatic and anticlimactic event, especially for the deaths of people who vastly underachieve in life. I will admit this however, that in this one circumstance, I thought that the burials of Denise Prince and Erica Lovings were a picturesque and dignified service. And then you’re extended offer to the Doctor Seth Dupree to actually join you in as a coconspirator in the murder of his own wife is something so diabolical that even I wouldn’t have indulged in. You’ve told me before that you were a monster, Senorita. I believe you now more than ever.”
“I don’t take pride looking back on the many things that I’ve done, Victor. I can’t change the past. I’m going to move forward with whatever time that I have left. I’m not going back to the person that you met in Mexico, or even the woman that you knew that rose as the sun rose this morning. I’m not ever going back.”
“You are doomed if you do not, Senorita.”
Victor went for his cigar once again. He had his lighter out and had a good smoke going. Just another man and his vices, she thought. Gonzales looked almost bored as if rage and confrontation were normal human virtues and conversation and civility were alien concepts he could not understand.
“Perhaps I am doomed, Victor,” Roxanne found her voice. “Perhaps I am doomed at that. I’ve said my peace now. We need to get on with our business at hand. If you are ready to kill me then I am ready to die.”
“No, you are not ready,” He took a long drag off of the Cuban and played with the smoke. “None of us ever are ready, Senorita, not really.”
Roxanne only shrugged at his words.
“I don’t understand this. You’ve proven to me as well as yourself that I can’t outrun my past, Victor, you’ve shown me that I can’t outrun you. I am through running, Victor. Andre told you before I died that I’m not going anywhere and he was right. I’ve been running from one thing or the other my entire life. I’m done running. So like I said a minute ago—we have business with each other. You said that I would live just long enough for you to see me suffer.”
Victor took a long last pull from his cigar and then stamped the flame out on the post nearest to him.
“And I have seen you suffer,” He pulled a pair of shades out of another of his jacket’s pockets and cover his eyes with them gave her a long last look—and then turned to walk away. He stopped long enough to say: “My chase is over, Roxanne…but you are not through running, Roxanne. You’ve chosen a path that will keep you running as long as you continue to pursue it…as long as you continue to pursue him.”
“And what does that supposed to mean, Victor?”
He turned back to her.
“It means that you never answered my question about your love for Agent Prince? Your non answer told me all the truth that I needed to know. There is darkness within him—and I’m not talking about his skin tone, Senorita—that will keep you running, that will keep you suffering for as long as you are with him. I know the type, Senorita; I am the type so I damned sure can recognize my brethern when I see it. You deserve better than either one of us could give you, Roxanne.”
And then Victor Castillo turned and walked away.
“What,” Gonzales said as exasperation flowed through his Spanish almost making him impossible to understand. “You pursued her all of this way, spared no expense only to walk away from her? Do you remember how much Mexican blood has been spilled because of the actions of this woman?”
Victor stopped walking, removed his shades and fixed Gonzales with a glare that could have melted artic ice.
“She did not heed my words, Gonzales. I did tell her not to dip her hands into cartel business and did nonetheless. I did tell her that someday when the time was right, that we would stop what we were doing and find her.” And then Victor turned his attention away from his partner o Roxanne one last time. “I wanted to see you suffer for what you did down below and I have. I wanted to see you suffer before you end—and I have. But I expected to see you at the end of your suffering and not at the beginning of it.”
Victor Castillo walked back from the direction where he’d come without looking back at her. Gonzales flashed a momentarily look of confusion at this entire episode and his role in it, buttoned his jacket and mirrored his partner’s footsteps as he soon disappeared from Roxanne’s sight.
And in the second or third minute of
her solitude, Roxanne looked towards the fires that looked to consume much of Downtown Atlanta and wondered what hellfire that Victor had left her alive to face.
Serena
An inferno.
A city burning to the ground.
A whirlwind.
Whatever the media wanted to call it, it was occurring here, now, and there was no way to undo what had been done.
Serena Tennyson watched from her room on the highest floor that Raymond Rice had reserved for months, long before now.
She didn’t know how much time she actually had left to watch it all. She had no idea how long before the authorities descended on this hotel and took her away from all that she had labored and sacrificed much in her life to now see manifest itself in front of the one good eye she had left.
She’d lost half her face to bruises and burns when the driver of the runaway car plunged into the crowd when she was still at street level. She was still wearing a single cuff on her left wrist. The other cuff—and the officer attached to it—had been ripped away when the lethal combination of steel and velocity separated them from Oracle. She was still bleeding from her wrist and arm, from a hole ripped in her side and where the flesh itself was torn from the side of her face.
A service worker had approached her when she’d first arrived back at this hotel. He was spewing out warnings that barely calculated in her brain: He was advising her and any other