“Move!” Alejo yelled, pushing the gun harder against Lázaro’s skull.
Wara forced her fingers to close around the feathers and lift the dart. With all the strength she had left, she drove the thing into Alejo's bulging jugular vein.
She could only imagine the look on his face, because at that second the poison claimed her.
The Dark Side
THE LIGHT SUCKED AT WARA’S CONSCIOUSNESS and she resisted it with everything she had. But sometimes reality cannot be denied, and Wara finally had to admit she was awake and in the land of the living.
The sheets under her body were crisp and smelled like lilacs. Her ear registered the soft sound of jazz, somewhere far away.
Wara really, really hated jazz.
She forced her eyes open and saw the cream pin stripe sheets on the double bed and a heavy maroon brocade comforter, both pulled neatly up to her chin, sealing her against the mattress. She just lay there, blinking at the carved wood posts on the bed. Dusty gold velvet curtains filtered the sunlight and the ceiling was circled with old colonial crown molding. Her chest heaved because she knew right away what she had done.
Oh my God!
What had she done?
Wara kicked feebly at the suffocating comforter until she freed her legs. She was still wearing the same black pants and tank she’d been sleeping in, thank God. She swung herself over the edge of the bed and just hung there, trying not to gag.
What had she done?
She had no idea where she was, but Lázaro had to be here.
How long had it been since Alejo tried to save her from him at the mission compound?
Wara clamped a freezing hand over her mouth and lurched, nearly choked.
She could have killed him.
She had no idea if the stuff that had been on Lázaro's dart at the mission compound was one of his poisons that needed an antidote, like whatever he gave her in Montana that had stopped her heart.
She hadn't even thought of that, had only thought of stopping Alejo from blowing Lázaro's brains out.
If she hadn't killed Alejo herself with the poison, what was to stop Lázaro from shooting him after he dropped from the poison?
Nothing.
Lázaro said he wanted Wara alive. He didn’t need Alejo.
Wara felt absolutely nauseous. She stumbled to the tile floor in bare feet and pushed aside the dusty curtains, dizzy as hell. The wooden window frame wouldn’t budge, and all she could see outside was a darkened concrete wall and a long drop down.
She hung on to the wall for support and ripped open the door in the corner of the bedroom. It was just a bathroom. Wara pushed towards the other door and found a hallway, complete with dark wood paneling and moldy burgundy striped wallpaper. She stumbled down the hall, wiggling the door handle on every door she passed.
They were all locked. There were stairs, though, and Wara leaned heavily on the railing and wound her way down to whatever was waiting on the lower level.
She found a sunny sitting area, carpeted in lush maroon with creamy white walls. Mismatched bookshelves lined the walls, circling a table with a fancy silver Moroccan tea set and square, black plates of pale cookies.
Lázaro was sitting on a red velvet armchair in the middle of the room, feet up on a matching footrest with bronze tassels. He was studying a little paperback and glanced up at her over wire-rim glasses as she staggered into the room.
He had one of those hats on, the wool Irish caps he always wore when she knew him in Bolivia. This one was gray tweed and it covered up the crazy hair she didn't recognize at all. He had on a black sweater and black pants with brown plaid old man slippers.
It was too much to hope that it had all been a nightmare. She was really here with Lázaro Marquez.
"I need some water," Wara croaked.
Lázaro's eyes shifted towards the ornate wooden coffee table. A crystal pitcher of water shot prisms of color over the black plate of cookies and a matching one with velvety figs. Two glasses sat next to the pitcher, one squatty crystal tumbler, totally empty. The other was a long-stemmed glass of wine.
"Well, hello. Do come sit down." Lázaro raised an eyebrow at her. She made it to the other red armchair and flopped into it as he poured her a full glass of water from the pitcher. Ice dinged discreetly against the crystal, swirling in a lazy dance.
"When you're feeling better," Lázaro told her, "I can offer you some wine. Now, I think you'd better stick to water."
Wara snatched the glass from him and drained it, wondering if it was all about to come right back up. All over the plush Moroccan carpet.
So this was what it felt like to be on the dark side.
Right now it wasn't feeling very good.
Alejo.
Lázaro poured more water into her glass and sipped burgundy wine. Wara slumped shakily into one arm of the chair and drained another glass of water.
"I suppose you're pretty thirsty," he said. "You've been sleeping for a day and a half. We had some driving to do, and then you took a nice long nap upstairs." Wara blinked back tears, focusing on the water in her glass. "If you think you could eat, please help yourself." Lázaro motioned towards the tray on the table right between them. "Depends how sick you're feeling. I do apologize about the poison. Again."
Wara was feeling plenty sick. "Did you kill him?"
Lázaro lay his copy of The Pillars of the Earth carefully on the table next to a jade-colored bottle of wine. "Nope." He popped the cork on the bottle, flicked it to the table and trickled more wine into his glass. "Hope you weren't expecting me to."
"What?"
"I figured out that he wasn't from our organization. But the guy was just trying to help you, and you were obviously attached to him."
Wara felt like Lázaro was speaking ancient Bulgarian.
"He's still alive?"
"Of course. Trigger-Happy Boyfriend would have woken up six to eight hours later back in Timbuktu with something like a hangover." He eyed Wara carefully for the first time and must have seen the horror in her expression. Lázaro sighed and slid the wine glass to the heavy wooden table. He got out of the chair and moved over to an old-fashioned rolltop desk along one wall. He was obviously favoring one leg.
Lázaro yanked a sleek little cell phone from a drawer and made his way back to Wara, sat down on the arm of her chair. She swayed as far as possible towards the other side. Lázaro peered at her over the reading glasses.
His eyes were just the same as when she thought she really liked him, but wilder.
Wara worked hard to stuff the panic.
"In case you don't believe me,” Lázaro said, dryly holding up the phone. He tapped the screen and Wara blinked at the shadowy image of the monk cell with puke green walls. There she was, sprawled there on the bed, snoring towards the ceiling. The camera panned to Alejo, face down on the tiles. Wara could see her turquoise Teva sandals right there on the floor next to his head.
"He tried to haul me away from you so he could still shoot me," Lázaro explained. "But we didn't get very far before the poison made him pretty easy to take down."
In the video, there was a scuffle, then Wara could see that Lázaro had hauled Alejo over onto his back. Lázaro produced a scrap of paper and held it over Alejo's nose and mouth, focusing in to show the paper was flickering up and down.
Which meant Alejo was still breathing.
The image blackened again, then Wara recognized the leg of her black pajama pants at the edge of the camera. Her foot dangled at the bottom corner of the screen, bare and painted with henna.
Alejo still snoozed on the floor in the background.
"I had to carry you out of there," Lázaro told her, sounding a little cross. “After Boyfriend left me with some nasty sore ribs and missing a back molar.” The video showed Lázaro slowly leaving the room, probably with Wara slung over his shoulder.
He left Alejo on the floor. Alive.
"Now if you expected me to leave him all nice and cozy in the bed," Lá
zaro raised an eyebrow Wara's way, "I apologize. Your boyfriend was a millisecond away from putting a hole in my head. I wasn't about to throw my back out hauling him off the floor."
Wara released a shaky breath, more than relieved that Alejo seemed to be fine.
Of course, Lázaro could have faked the whole thing. To try to win her cooperation.
But he already had that now, didn't he?
“I still don’t know how Trigger-Happy Boyfriend figured out you were in danger back at the compound,” Lázaro went on. “My plan was to carry you out of there nice and easy, sleeping like a baby. Johnny Boy was passed out on the front lawn, too, courtesy of my special potions. When Boyfriend came back for whatever reason, seeing Johnny Boy there must have caused him to hurry into your room. Where he found us.” It was like Lázaro was talking to himself. Wara felt her eyes bugging out and she drained yet another glass of water.
How did Lázaro know Johnny’s name?
Lázaro returned the phone to the desk and sat back in his red chair, slinging his legs up and taking a sip of wine.
She was sitting here with a bad guy, someone who killed for money and was good at it. She had knocked out Alejo and left him to the mercy of a killer like that.
Wara breathed through the nausea and poured herself more water. Lázaro was holding out the tray of food towards her. "I think you should try a fig," he said around a mouthful of something. "You need the sugar. You're weak."
She grabbed one and forced herself to choke it down. If she was going to get out of here, she needed to be able to walk like a sober person.
But what reason was there to get out of here?
Where would she go?
Wara felt like the whole room was starting to shimmer, like this just could not be real.
She could not have done what she did to Alejo.
Be here with Lázaro now.
"So," Lázaro drew the word out, cutting through the haze. "You should have just told me at our encounter in Montana. That could have saved you and me a lot of trouble."
Wara blinked at him. What had he remembered? Most of the possible options made her feel queasy.
"If I'd known we were with the same organization," Lázaro said, "I would have treated you a little nicer. If the boss wants to off his own people, he should hire someone else. I don't believe in hits on my own. At least, I don't think I do. Just plain bad ethics."
"You think I work…for the same people as you?"
Lázaro grinned lazily at her. "I kind of figured it out when you took my side in the little altercation in your bedroom."
The squishy sweetness of the fig was helping to clear Wara's head just a little. There was a long hallway that led off into darkness behind her chair. The only door was heavy wood, carved and painted red. She wondered if it was locked like the ones upstairs.
"That's…crazy," she told him.
Lázaro frowned. Wara clunked the heavy glass onto the table and drew her knees up into her chest, bare toes curling over the edge of the red velvet. Lázaro narrowed his eyes at her and pulled off the reading glasses.
“I hope you’re being truthful with me, love,” he said gravely. “I believe I already told you I don’t remember a thing about you, except for the golden cats and the coffee. You’re going to tell me what you know.”
Wara felt herself breathing faster. It would be great if Lázaro remembered who he was, that he wasn’t the kind of person who killed people for money. But if he did remember everything, he would just kill her, wouldn’t he? In Bolivia when Lázaro saw her again, five years after she’d stood him up at the airport, he’d been so angry.
Lázaro was not looking happy. "So I couldn't really say for sure whether you're big on conversation,” he said. “If you'd rather, we could spend the afternoon making out. Maybe the smooching would bring back my memory. It worked during CPR."
He smirked when he saw her pale. Wara felt her toes dig violently into the velvet.
Time to start talking. About anything.
Even if she could get away from Lázaro and out of this place onto the street, who was she going to call? She'd betrayed her whole team.
She could never go back.
Wara couldn't stop blinking back the shock.
“When you realized I know who you are,” Wara finally managed, “why didn’t you make me go with you then? In Montana? Or in Fez?”
Instead of leaving me the creepy paper flower.
Lázaro looked like he’d rather be talking about his past life, but tolerated the question. “The truth is, I like to play,” he said lowly. “The first time, in Montana? I honestly came just to kill you. I really wasn’t prepared to haul you away for questioning. But then I saw in your eyes that you knew me and I changed my mind. Brought you back to life.”
Wara blinked at the way he said it, so…casually. He’d planned to just let her die there, never give her the antidote.
“And then in Fez,” Lázaro went on, “I needed to make sure you would be useful to me before I made another play along this path, keeping you alive instead of saying Yes Sir to every errand my boss sends me to do. You confirmed you do know who I am, and that you’d cooperate. I knew you were headed to Timbuktu.”
Wara blinked at him in confusion. He knew she was going to Timbuktu? It must be because of the plane tickets and visa. He could have seen all that info online just before Wara and Alejo showed up at the Western Union.
“I wanted to interrogate you here,” he said, “because it’s so much nicer than some little hotel in Fez, and Timbuktu is just not private enough. You have to admit this house is quite nice.” Lázaro took a swig of wine and repositioned himself in the armchair.
This house was freaky as hell.
“So I just let you continue on with your plans to travel to Mali,” Lázaro went on. “I also had to meet my boss here. To pick up a package. And now you’re going to tell me everything you know,” he said crisply. “No more stalling.”
Wara felt herself gulp. “I don’t really want to tell you everything I know, because when I’m done, what’s to keep you from tossing me out in the desert with a bullet in my head?”
Lázaro looked pissed. The bridge of his nose had begun to simmer beet red. “We’re not in the desert,” he said. “We’re in Bamako.”
Wara was surprised that he offered up that little tidbit. Bamako was a huge city, full of pay phones and a US embassy. She'd have a much better chance of escaping him here than in Timbuktu.
She decided to give him something in return. If she didn’t, she was thinking Lázaro was probably serious about his threat to try to remember by kissing her again. After all, that was what triggered his memory in the first place.
Wara felt herself shivering. “Ok. Well. The truth is, we definitely don’t work in the same organization. I work with CI, which sends people around the world to work with education.”
Lázaro nodded. “Which is why the people you work with, like Boyfriend, walk around armed. Every teacher should carry a large weapon.”
He was being sarcastic. “You can’t try to help kids in a place like Timbuktu without a little security,” Wara shrugged. “The only time I’ve worked in the same organization as you,” she added, “was when we worked at church camp, Lázaro.” He was so not going to believe this. Lázaro would probably just shoot her now. “You were the lead counselor for the fourth graders. You were good at it, because you knew everything about the outdoors. The kids loved you.” Wara’s voice grew hoarse.
Lázaro blinked at her and she saw his scarred fingers dig into the armchair. “You’re lying,” he said in that blasted British accent.
Wara snorted. “Uh-huh. As if I could even make up a story like that."
“And where was this church camp.” He tasted the words “church camp” like someone might say “underground nuclear test facility run by aliens.”
“Bolivia. I was working as a missionary there.”
Lázaro lowered his legs from the footrest and crossed one knee over
the other, regarding her, paler than usual. The smugness that always dominated his face was smudged into something crooked and less confident. The gray cap slipped down a little lower, almost covering one eye.
“And am I from…Bolivia?”
“No,” Wara clipped. She was going to hold out telling him where he was from and how to find his family. She had to hang on to something until she made a plan, because like Alejo had told her back in Morocco, once Lázaro had his information he had no reason to keep Wara alive.
Plus, the more information he had, the more memory Lázaro might get back. And when he remembered Wara and what she did to him, she was toast.
In many ways, she would totally be ok with the bullet in the back of her head out in the desert right now. But there was another part of her that was just plain scared by the thought of facing that here, now, with Lázaro.
Self-preservation and all. Even when self totally, utterly does not deserve it.
Lázaro was waiting, not very patiently. “You were studying tourism in Bolivia,” Wara told him. “I don’t know where you learned English, but when I knew you we always talked in Spanish. You had just started going to church, wanted to ‘turn your life around.’”
She couldn’t help it. Wara snorted and rolled her eyes.
A bead of sweat snaked down Lázaro's temple, rode down his cheek and bumped over the scars below his jaw line. There was a long pause. Lázaro was doing that thing where his eyes darted back and forth, just like he was reading the past off the freaking wall behind Wara’s chair.
"Santo Dios!" he finally groaned. “Mierda!”
Lázaro pushed the wool cap up out of his eye and bit off a few more Spanish curses. "I really do speak…Spanish? They wouldn’t tell me anything. Even my name.” He was speaking Spanish now, haltingly. Lázaro hunched over and dug his fingertips into his chin. “I think I remember something…it’s about church. Wood pews and loud singing and a dirty red carpet down the center. Damn it! I think I remember walking down the aisle and giving my heart to Jesus!”
Burn (Story of CI #3) Page 19