“We’re being followed,” Zoe said. She and Steve turned around. The Bug was actually close enough you could see the driver—a fat teenage Mexican boy.
“Christ,” said Steve. “I know him.”
“What?” said Robin.
“I . . . I mean, I . . . I don’t know him. I’ve seen his picture. That’s Carlos Royas’s friend.”
Zoe said, “Jesus Christ.”
“Why is he following us?” said Robin.
“Don’t ask me.”
They were nearing Las Aguas now.
“Drive past it,” said Steve. “Lose him.”
Robin put her blinker on. “No, Warren needs our help.”
“Well, at least don’t put your freakin’ blinker on!”
Robin pulled into the driveway, her tires shrieking, the Bug close behind. She pulled up next to the entrance, opened her door and ran out, taking the key with her. “I need to help Warren!”
The Bug pulled in right behind them. Its door opened. “Where are the fucking police?” Steve said. He leapt out of the back of the car, Adele barking in protest. “Stay in the car,” he told Zoe. The fat kid jumped out of the Bug and started toward the Wrangler. Zoe saw the glint of a knife in his hand, but Steve caught him by the shoulder and threw him up against the side of the Bug, the knife clattering to the pavement.
“No way am I staying in the car,” Zoe whispered.
After text messaging Zoe, Warren had come up with an idea. Why stop at Zoe? he had thought. He could text Celia and Avery and Mariposa and the rest. He could invite all of his followers and create an impromptu ceremony, right here in the sacred place. He had his knife; he always had his knife. He could consecrate the ground with their blood and his own. He could take over from Rafael here and now. On his own time. Whether Rafael wanted him to or not.
Warren had almost done it—he’d even gone so far as to type in Avery’s number. But then he remembered Robin’s message—the one about lying low and not calling the police, whatever that was supposed to mean. He always listened to Robin because she always had his best interests at heart, and so he’d stayed and waited for Zoe, lying on the grass, holding his knife and feeling like an animal in captivity. Xavier wasn’t here, but Warren heard Pio the hawk flapping in the trees and smaller birds chirping like schoolgirls. He listened to the water and gazed around at all the lush, perfect plants and imagined the voiceover: Man. In his natural habitat.
He was beginning to get anxious now, though. What if Zoe never showed up? What if someone had told her what he’d been doing in the mornings? What if she didn’t understand that it was for the good of the church and acted like a typical woman and left him?
Then what would he do?
He cared for Zoe, deeply—especially in recent days. No other woman had ever made him feel quite this way, like she could leave him if she felt like it, and she would be fine. He liked that, her independence. She would be a wonderful addition to the church, his church. If she stayed.
He heard footsteps on the pavement and the rustling of leaves, and then a woman was moving toward him, some sort of sheer black veil over her head. He sat up on the grass. “Zoe?” he asked. “Why are you wearing that?”
No answer. She moved closer.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m so happy to see you. You know, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve never said it in so many words, but, Zoe, I . . .”
“Love you,” the woman said. It wasn’t Zoe. She was taller, with a sturdier build.
“Robin,” he said.
“I do love you. I will always—”
“Stop.”
Robin moved closer. She knelt next to him, brought her veiled face next to his. “You love her, don’t you?”
“Zoe?” he exhaled. “I think I might.”
“You mustn’t. She doesn’t love you. Not anymore.”
“You . . . Did you tell her . . . about us?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t to tell anybody. You were never to tell—”
“Stop telling me who I should and shouldn’t tell.” Her voice was louder. The veil quivered with her breath. “If it wasn’t for me . . . you would be . . . you’d be nowhere. I’ve saved you so many times, and still I have to keep quiet. Still I have to be hidden. . . .”
“Robin,” he said, “why are you wearing that veil?”
“Because,” she replied, “I am your guardian angel.” She placed a hand on his neck and lifted the veil and kissed him deeply on the lips. He didn’t want to respond, didn’t think he should. But then her tongue was in his mouth, and Warren’s body acted on its own; it always did. She pulled away for a moment. “I have something I want you to see.”
He felt her hand on his inner thigh, moving, and his breathing hitched. Well, maybe just this one time . . . “What do you want me to see?”
“A sacrifice. For you. I have brought her to you so you can see it yourself. You can see what hard work it is. How much energy it requires to take the offering from the chest. . . .”
Warren went completely cold. “What are you saying?”
He heard Zoe’s voice, “Help!” and something about the parking lot, and horror overtook him and his veins froze. “Robin, no!” he said, and he hoped she would obey him, hoped she would, please. . . . And then the needle in his neck put an end to all hopes.
“I need your help!” said Zoe. “I don’t give a damn what you two are doing, just give me the key to your car, Robin!” Warren was silent. Not so much as a word.
She ran up to them. “Look, go ahead and stay here for all I care, but I need the key to your fucking car because Carlos Royas’s buddy is attacking Steve in the parking lot.”
Robin pulled away from Warren. He fell straight back, stiff as a fence, his mouth closed, eyes staring up at the sky. “Oh, my God . . . ,” said Zoe. She heard his shallow breathing and then Robin was saying something about muscle relaxants and Zoe remembered Dave telling Robin they were low on muscle relaxants. She remembered the needle prick in Patty Woods’s arm, and Robin came at her, as fast as a bad thought, and drained a needle into her neck.
“Do you have your Xanax, honey? Is it in your purse? Nod yes or no.” Naomi was aware of her aunt’s voice, but she couldn’t respond. She was having one of those panic attacks, the worst one yet. . . . It had started just before Zoe, Robin and Steve had left, and it just kept going. . . .
“I want to go, too.”
“No. You’re safe here.”
Naomi didn’t know how many times that simple exchange between her and Robin had been repeating in her brain, but it wouldn’t stop—like a DVD stuck in a player, the top menu announcing itself again and again in a continuous loop.
“I want to go, too.”
“No. You’re safe here.” Naomi was on her back in the desert now, that awful sound track still running through her, but it was ten days ago, and she had run away from Jordan and passed out in the desert and now she was asleep. “I want to go, too.”
“Honey? Should I call Dr. Dave?”
“No. You’re safe here.” She was asleep. She was dreaming, and that angel was standing over her. You are safe. The angel was wearing a hood, only she wasn’t wearing a hood. Not really. It was . . . it was a black veil. She said, You are safe, and it was the same voice, and it wasn’t a dream. It was . . .
It was Robin.
Naomi was back at the dining room table, her aunt staring at her, asking what she should do. . . . “Robin killed Jordan,” she said. “I saw her that night, in the desert.”
“What?”
Naomi’s eyes widened, the vision melting away as real fear took over. “We need to tell the police,” she said. “We need to find her before she does the same thing to Zoe.”
TWENTY-SIX
Royas’s friend was stronger than he looked. Steve didn’t want to hit him—he never thought he’d resort to punching some short, fat kid—but it was getting harder and harder to subdue him, and he wasn’t answering Steve’s questions. He wa
s trying to act like he didn’t speak English, but Steve wasn’t buying it. He caught a flicker of recognition in his eye when he asked the kid if he knew Carlos Royas and, for that matter, when he asked him if he knew Warren Clark.
“What are you doing here?” Steve said. And then the big kid’s hands were up and around Steve’s throat, and he was strangling Steve. Strangling . . . Steve saw bright flecks of light in his eyes, and the thought shot into his minds: Oh, no. I refuse to be strangled to death by some teenage boy in a goddamn T-shirt that says Cannibus U. And his arms shot up. He caught the kid in the weak part of the forearm, the part that always made you lose your grip and drop your hands if you were hit just right. And then, for good measure, he punched him in the eye. The kid fell to the pavement, clutching his face. “Listen,” said Steve, “I’m sor—” but the kid was up, and lunging at him again. He put his face right up into Steve’s—got up on tiptoe to do it—so that Steve was staring at the half-closed eye, at the bruise he’d just caused.
“You don’t understand. You must stay away. I serve somebody evil.”
“Warren Clark?”
He shook his head. “Master.”
“The Master? You mean Rafael?”
The kid shook his head again. “Maestra. Robin.”
Then he was up again, and racing across the parking lot, into Las Aguas, with Steve close behind him. He turned and tackled Steve to the pavement—surprisingly strong, his body coursing with rage. He slammed Steve’s head onto the hard ground as Steve looked up at that throbbing black eye, that Quasimodo face, thinking, I have to get to Zoe. He serves Robin. He slammed Steve’s head into the pavement again, and pulled something out of his pocket and Steve saw the gleam of a switchblade. As the boy brought it to his throat, he thought, At least I know why the fucking police haven’t shown up.
Ever since Alma had said Master to Zoe, one thought had been nagging at the back of her mind: Why would a woman who spoke absolutely no English suddenly use an English word? Why hadn’t she just said his name, Rafael? The answer came to her on the grass at Las Aguas as she lay paralyzed, with Warren at her side. She hadn’t said Master. She had said Maestra. Spanish for teacher. Robin taught those kids English at the biblioteca.
“Carlos was one of my favorite students—always so helpful. He may have had a little crush. Anyway, he completely understood my devotion to Warren. When I told him my plan, to offer up all those who had ever hurt him, he broke into the hospital for me, stole the pancuronium—that’s what was in the shot. It’s a muscle relaxant. And he got me cadavers from graves, so I could practice.
“Are you both comfortable?” Robin asked. “It shouldn’t take very long. I can’t leave Adele in the car forever, and besides . . . I only brought one shot.” Softly, Robin smoothed a lock of hair from Zoe’s face. “Thanks for being so understanding about. . . . You know,” she said, “this isn’t about that. It’s about betraying Warren.” She glanced at him. “She betrayed you, you know. Told everyone she thought you were responsible for the murders.” Zoe couldn’t see Warren’s face, but she felt his hand. For some reason, Robin had decided to place her hand in his. She wanted to squeeze it, to signal to him, to say, If we work together, we might live. . . . But how could either one of them live when they couldn’t even move?
“You know Xavier? I’m teaching him, too. Remember how I told you he was my buddy? Well, he was nice enough to tell the police he saw Rafael at your house.”
Zoe heard footsteps coming toward them and thought Steve, please let it be Steve. But it wasn’t. “Zoe, Warren, this is Alejandro Christopher, Carlos’s friend. He’s going to assist, aren’t you, Alejandro?”
He said nothing, just grabbed Zoe’s legs while Robin grabbed her arms, and together, they moved her a few feet away, to where she couldn’t see or feel Warren. Zoe thought, Christopher. “Alejandro and I became friends after his father died. When was that car crash, Alejandro? Ten years ago? You were such a little boy. . . . What happened to your eye, Alejandro? We’ll have to take care of that.”
Zoe looked at the boy. His right eye was mottled and swollen like a piece of rotten fruit. The left eye was wet. What have you done with Steve?
Zoe began to feel a loosening of her limbs. Her lips were able to move. Then more of the drug lifted off her, and she felt as if she were breaking the surface of water, but she tried not to let it show on her face. Robin regarded her for several moments. “Warren,” she said, “just so you know? This one doesn’t love you as much as Grace did. I told Grace she ought to sacrifice herself to you, and she did. This one, I have to be the one to do it. . . .”
Robin sighed. “I’m going back to the car to get my medical bag,” she said. “Watch her, please. Watch them both.”
As soon as she left, Zoe blinked a few times. Alejandro opened his mouth to shout, but Zoe was able to put a finger to her lips. “Listen to me, Alejandro,” she whispered. “Believe it because it’s true. Robin killed your father. She killed your father, Garrett.”
Robin returned from her car, a black bag in her hands. Zoe lay flat on her back, staring up at the bright yellow bloom of a century plant. Alejandro sat beside her, unmoving. Robin opened the bag and produced a gleaming obsidian knife and two thin maguey spines. Wordlessly, she flipped Zoe’s hands over, palms facing the sky. “I am your guardian angel, Warren. Watch what I do for you.”
Robin placed a maguey spine on one of Zoe’s palms, then the other. “Try not to be upset, Zoe Greene,” she said, as if by rote. “It’s only karma.”
Robin moved away for a moment to grab the knife, and Zoe thought, I’ll show you karma, you crazy bitch. She clutched the maguey spines with both hands. She sat up, and as Robin turned back to her, surprise washing over her face, Zoe raked the spines across her eyes.
Robin fell back. “Alejandro!” she cried out. He did nothing. Then he picked up the knife and ran away. “Not so easy when we’re not paralyzed, is it, Robin?” Zoe said. “Not so easy when we aren’t afraid.” Robin lunged at her. Zoe slashed Robin’s face with one of the spines, her chest with another. Where was Warren during all this? Just watching? Some leading man. Some hero . . .
“You picked yourself a winner there, Robin. Warren’s twice my size. You don’t think his shot has worn off yet? I guess he couldn’t care less about either one of us, huh?”
“Shut up!” Robin shrieked.
“Probably running away.” Zoe slashed her again. “Waste of time, this whole guardian angel thing, don’t you—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Robin flew at Zoe, tackling her to the ground, biting and scratching her like a wild animal. Zoe tried to fight back, but she no longer had the element of surprise, and Robin was much bigger and stronger than she was. Robin picked up Zoe’s head by the hair, slammed it into the ground. Silver darts shot through her eyes. She couldn’t move her neck. Zoe was vaguely aware of sirens nearing the parking lot. She was aware of Robin rearing back to drive the sharp spike into Zoe’s heart. . . .
Zoe closed her eyes. But she felt nothing. When she opened them again, Robin was hovering over her, the spine still raised in her hands, as if she’d had a sudden change of heart. Then she went pale and stumbled and fell to her knees. Warren was behind her. He had plunged a knife, his knife, into her back.
Zoe closed her eyes, woozy from the blow to the head, surrendering to the pain. She heard people approaching, voices. . . .Was that Naomi saying Steve’s name? As the darkness crowded in on her, and her breathing slowed, Zoe thought about angels and birds. She thought about planes flying home.
EPILOGUE
TWO MONTHS LATER
Daryl Barclay’s latest appeal was denied. Zoe heard two people talking about it on the subway when she was going to work—If it happens, it’ll be New York’s first execution in thirty years—and sure enough the newsroom was buzzing with Barclay for the rest of the day. She was back at the Daily News now—she’d snagged a reporting job there a month ago, after writing them a first-person cover story on her Mexico ordeal,
which they’d headlined TOURIST TRAP. She liked it at the News, and troubling as it was today to hear Barclay’s name being repeated and repeated, to hear the morbid jokes about close shaves all over again, it wasn’t as upsetting as it would have been three months ago.
That was one thing Zoe could say about her experience with Robin, and Warren Clark—it had helped to put everything else in perspective.
Robin Little had rented the top floor of a house that overlooked Parque de las Lavanderas. After Warren had killed her, police had gone into it and found a more or less normal-looking apartment—neat, too, except for all the shedded dog hair. But then they’d opened the bedroom closet.
Once Zoe had gotten out of the hospital, Steve had taken her to the police station and Mateo had shown them the pictures: a single lightbulb, a black cross on the wall painted with a thorn-crowned heart, a large black-and-white head shot of Warren Clark set up on a small altar that contained two candles, a vial of Robin’s blood and offerings from each of her victims. The T-shirt Jordan had been wearing on the night of his murder had been placed on the altar, as well as Patty Woods’s diamond watch, the wedding ring Rafael had still worn twenty years after his wife’s death and a blood-encrusted lock of pale blond hair, which, after DNA testing, was determined to have belonged to Grace Newell, eighteen, reported missing four years ago by her parents in Shreveport, Louisiana. Garrett Christopher’s passport was on the altar. There had been something of Nick Denby’s, as well—a baseball cap from the show he’d just been cast on, The Day’s End—but, as Carlos Royas revealed after being released from jail, his Maestra from the biblioteca had given it to him as a gift. Watches, rings and scraps of clothing lined the base of the altar—taken from the corpses Carlos had stolen for Robin three years ago, corpses on which Robin had practiced the skills she’d learned during her brief stint in an Arizona medical school so that she might one day improve on what she’d done to Grace’s body. So that she might one day sacrifice all those with bad energy—anyone who aimed to do Warren wrong or to take him away from her, or both—and it could finally come true . . . the word she’d scrawled in her own blood across Warren’s glossy photograph: Mine.
Heartless Page 28