by Mark Wheaton
“Someday our baby will be in here,” he emphasized, placing his hands gently on her hips and pulling her close to kiss her just above the belly button. “I’ll kiss it just like this every single day. And there won’t be a day you or it won’t feel loved. I promise.”
Odilia knew she was meant to be placated by this. She was supposed to remember how wonderful and understanding he was for letting her back into his life after she’d committed such an unthinkable offense against him. That he loved her more than anyone else ever would or could. That to know that and still do what she’d done was so cruel, so evil.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He looked up, eyes all gratitude. But she knew him. He needed more.
“I’m sorry I ran away,” she repeated. “You were right to punish me.”
His body relaxed as if for the first time in days. He moved his hands around to her ass, where he kneaded the soft flesh he found there. She could see he was getting aroused again.
“No, it was my fault,” he sighed. “I wasn’t paying enough attention. I didn’t know who else you’d been talking to. Your acting out was a response to my failings. But I’m telling you. We are days away from all this changing for good. There’s a contract that will mean no more hiding. No more going around my family’s back. It will be worth it. I promise.”
Half an hour later she was in an SUV on her way home.
There’d been no shower afterwards this time, as Jason had to get back and didn’t want his driver to have to wait for her. He’d kissed her, told her again how much he loved her, and said he’d see her in a few days.
She wondered if he was crazy enough to believe what he said. He made such a big show out of trying to satisfy her both physically and emotionally with all his talk of their future together. Maybe going through those motions allowed him to sleep at night, knowing that after he was done with her she was being sent back to squalid conditions to perform the exact same services on dozens of other men.
Or maybe the irony was lost on him.
Given her treatment out in the desert, she’d determined he was a psychopath. One with enough pull to keep a smart woman like Annie Whittaker from authoring her salvation. She’d promised Odilia she’d be safe with her. That no one in the States was above the law. How could she have been so foolish to believe that? Anyone who’d managed to accomplish what the Marshak family had hadn’t done so without knowing all the angles, legal and otherwise. She’d witnessed the breadth of it firsthand. She should’ve known.
It was a fifteen-minute drive from the motel back to the Blocks, but it always felt like she crossed borders to get there. Her home was on the inland side of one of the wealthiest enclaves in the state. It was a spot where multimillionaires could spread out their wealth, draping their compounds over rolling hills.
But only a few miles and a turn down a gravel road away was a compound of a different kind, one much larger than even the largest of the lavish estates. Rather than housing an elite family, this one had been constructed to house over a thousand workers.
Odilia found it hard to believe that no one had ever taken a wrong turn and found themselves in front of this great wall of cinder-block apartments tucked within the neighboring hills. Had no one seen the doors with sliding locks on the outside or convoys of trucks arriving at dawn or returning at dusk to transport the workers to and from the fields like cattle?
Odilia decided they all knew. It was the theory that upset her the most but felt the most likely. She’d seen how locals stared right through them.
The SUV turned off the main road and bounced along the gravel path that bisected the fenced-in graze land. A barbed wire fence ran along either side, with “No Trespassing” signs every few dozen yards. A few head of cattle roamed free but seemed only for show. After rolling over a cattle guard, the SUV stopped at an unmanned metal gate. The driver hopped out, unlocked the chain, pulled the SUV through, then relocked it behind them. Half a mile later the road became paved again, widening into two lanes.
A hundred yards past that was the Blocks.
To Odilia, the Blocks looked like images she’d seen of Pueblo Indian villages carved out of the sides of mountains. There didn’t seem to be much of a plan, new units built on top of old when they needed room for more workers. After an entire second level had been added, a third level sprang up just as randomly. Steps ran up the sides at odd angles. In some cases there were only ladders.
The nickname came from their resemblance to uneven stacks of children’s blocks pushed together. Each unit contained a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen and housed around a dozen workers, who were locked in every night, brought out every morning, and packed into trucks to be taken to the fields.
The SUV pulled in front of the apartments, mostly empty, except for a handful of women who were tasked with cleaning.
“Let’s go,” the driver said.
Odilia followed the driver up a flight of stairs to a third-floor unit. Before she’d escaped, she’d been the only person in the Blocks who had a unit to herself. Her status as Jason’s pet granted her this privilege and earned her the enmity of every woman who shared her lot. Following her time in the desert, she was back in a unit surrounded by other women who understood they were to make sure she didn’t run away again. They hated her, but at least she wasn’t alone anymore. In a life turned upside down, that counted as a win.
Following his conversation with Whillans, Luis spent the rest of Saturday preparing for the Sunday service. The familiar ritual of these simple tasks provided the comfort that he needed after the one-two punch of Whillans’s news the night before.
Cancer? Possibly only weeks to live? What was God thinking? Pastor Whillans was one of his most faithful servants. Or was this some sort of punishment linked to his relationship with Bridgette Gildea? The Lord as Luis knew him was not petty. No, this was bad luck, pure and simple.
“I’m telling you because I won’t be able to tell everyone,” Whillans had said. “I need you to watch out for me in case, in my deteriorating state, I should start to unintentionally disclose it.”
“But why?”
“Because there are others—yes, even in the church—who would use this to their advantage. They’d remove me before I could finish my work, put me up in some hospice, where I’d die just to avoid everyone’s pity. Will you help me?”
When night fell, this was what Luis prayed over most of all. He opened his heart, prepared to listen to God’s explanation. Nothing came. The following morning he tried again.
Silence.
He was entering his second hour of prayerful communion when there came a light knock on his door.
“Visitor,” Father Territo said through the door in a hushed voice.
Luis said his amens and exited.
Maria waited for him in the courtyard. A concrete statue of Saint Francis stood on a pedestal in a shaded area just off the main path that wound from the rectory to the chapel.
“Ms. Higuera?”
She looked up in confusion, taking a moment to recognize Luis in his Roman collar.
“You really are a priest,” she said.
“I am.”
“Isn’t deception a sin?”
“Of course. But there are instances even in the Bible where it’s done in service to a greater cause.”
“Uh-huh. Like when?”
“Exodus 1:15–17,” Luis offered. “Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill all newborn male babies. They didn’t and lied to Pharaoh, for which God blessed them.”
Maria took a moment to let this sink in.
“I’ve had an offer on the farm,” she said.
“Are you going to take it?”
“That’s just it. It was way too much money, like somebody who knew what was up trying to cover their ass. Pardon my language.”
Luis shrugged.
“But I had almost talked myself into it when I decided to take a look at the account statements from Santiago’s bank. It was all normal stuff. Like clockwork, you could tell when he paid the workers, when he paid the mortgage, when he bought food and supplies. But there was one transfer between accounts, an error that showed up on a statement only to be corrected on the next one.”
“An error?”
“I thought so, too, but my son was helping me. He’s a whiz with computers and, well, he did his version of investigating”—she let this hang in the air long enough for Luis to understand she meant hacking—“and discovered that the transfer was legit. It was just for a tremendous amount of money. I know how much he was paying people. This would’ve paid thousands. No way he had that many people working there. No. Way.”
Luis’s mind raced. It was a complicated scheme. That much was obvious. Somehow the piece of paper Odilia had brought with her was the key.
“Do you know where your brother had to file employment forms like the one I filled out?” he asked.
“No idea,” Maria said. “But I’m pretty sure I could find out. What do you think this is?”
“Right now it could be anything,” Luis said. “But so far two people may have died and another been kidnapped to keep it a secret.”
Maria glanced to the front of the church. Parishioners were beginning to trickle in for the early service. She watched their progression from the parking lot to the church steps, then turned back to Luis.
“I’m afraid I’ll look back on this moment as when I got in over my head,” Maria said.
“We may be well past that,” Luis said quietly.
Oscar’s conscience was bothering him. It had been a week since he’d deposited Luis on a dead man’s farm a few miles up the coast, and two days since he’d heard through the grapevine he’d been found out and ejected. This was troubling by itself. If he’d found out, who else might know? There were some hard hitters up that way, likely the same men who’d drawn Luis’s attention in the first place. They didn’t fuck around worrying about the cops the way Oscar had to. If they didn’t like you, you got a bullet to the head and a shallow grave in the desert.
Was that what he’d earned for Luis?
“BMW 7 Series,” came a quiet voice over Oscar’s phone.
“Pass,” Oscar whispered back.
Maybe it wasn’t his conscience. Maybe he was just bored.
He was sitting in a tow truck behind a half-built house buried deep in Laurel Canyon. The person on the other end of the line was at a valet station up on the ridge. Parking was a nightmare in the hills, so residents had taken to hiring valets to park their guests’ cars when they threw parties. As Laurel Canyon was hardly Bel-Air or Beverly Hills, they usually picked the cheapest valet agency, not knowing they crewed up from a pool of temp labor. On this night Oscar had managed to get one of his own guys on the crew.
“Bentley Mulsanne,” the voice whispered.
“That’s the one,” Oscar said.
Moments later a pair of headlights appeared on a nearby fire road. Oscar hopped out of the cab and met the silver car on the half-poured driveway. A young man climbed out, all nervous energy.
“You remember where the signs are?” Oscar asked.
The boy nodded quickly.
“Down on Brier. By the white two-story place.”
A few well-placed counterfeit “No Parking” signs were part of the scam. The valet will have seemingly made a regrettable mistake, and calls to the city tow yards would occupy the car’s owner the next few hours. By then the car would be sealed in a cargo container on its way out to sea.
Long gone were the days when stolen vehicles had to be chopped and stripped. Globalization had seen to that. Oscar would have a buyer for the Bentley in Asia before it had even crossed the International Date Line.
“Man, there was a Spyder and an SLS coming up when I got the Bentley,” the parker, whose name Oscar thought was Ricardo, said. “I even saw a Vanquish in a driveway on the way over. If we had four tow trucks, we’d have over a million in cars.”
“Yeah, but nobody notices one tow truck carrying a fancy car. Four? That shit attracts attention. Then you go to jail.”
Kids these days. Too fucking eager.
Ricardo’s features softened. He looked just on the border of chastised and humiliated. He might be a kid, but Oscar knew better than to let it go too far to the latter. He took two envelopes from his pocket and handed them to Ricardo.
“These’ll be at the shop for you.”
Ricardo found stacks of cash in both.
“Why two?”
“One’s to pay you for tonight. The other puts you on retainer for a job I’ve got Tuesday night in Arcadia. You free?”
It didn’t look like Ricardo knew precisely what “retainer” meant, but he nodded quickly at his unexpectedly benevolent boss.
Oscar hauled the Bentley to his shop, where an empty cargo container waited. Once the car was inside, one of his boys would run it down to the Port of Long Beach on the back of a tractor-trailer. His thoughts turned to Luis. Why didn’t he make his old friend an offer?
Come work for me, bro. You’re the only smart person I’ve ever met. We’ll take over this city.
But he knew what it was. This Luis Chavez truly was a changed man. A holy man. It was as if he could see right into Oscar, and what he found there hadn’t impressed him much. Was that why Oscar drove him to certain death?
Fuck. That.
He pushed all this out of his mind. It was Sunday night, and he wanted to get laid. And not with some local puta, either. He wanted one of those gentrified crazy white bitches out looking for strange. They weren’t always on the prowl, but he knew where to find them if they were.
But it better not take all night, he thought, checking his watch.
He had a goddamn criminal empire to run.
XVII
“I’ll be back by tonight, but I want you to come home right after school. Mrs. Leñero will check in and give me a call. Understood?”
“No prob,” Miguel said. “But you’ve got me worried. Why are you going back up there today? Is this about those guys in the truck?”
“Estate stuff,” Maria lied. “I want to be done with this as much as you do.”
She kissed him on the forehead on the way to the driveway before doubling back and kissing him on both cheeks and giving him a hug as well. She meant it to be reassuring, but Miguel looked more troubled than before.
“Be safe,” he said.
“Of course,” she called back.
He’s too perceptive for his own good, she thought as she made her way through Monday morning rush hour to St. Augustine’s.
But there was something else she’d noticed in her son that weekend. He’d seemed more grown up, but after enduring the murder of his uncle and the possible threats against his mother, what had she expected? He was more protective of her and more confident in his ability to be that protector. She hadn’t expected that. It made her feel like a bad mother for making her son be the parent.
Regardless, without his help it would’ve taken a lot longer for Maria to figure out how her brother’s financials worked. It was simple really. He paid them weekly, kept strict records, made the proper deductions, and sent out W-9s at the beginning of the year. Since there was a large and ever-changing pool of workers, keeping it legal could mean submitting employment forms to the county assessor as often as two or three times a month. If there were gaps in Santiago’s paperwork for whatever reason, Maria figured the forms on file with the county might provide the most accurate picture.
Truthfully, it wasn’t much, but it gave them a place to start.
Luis was in the parking lot chatting with a St. John’s student when Maria pulled in. He nodded to her, sent the boy on to class, and climbed into the passenger side of
the Camry.
“A student of yours?” Maria asked, indicating the boy.
“I actually don’t start teaching until the fall,” Luis admitted. “He just had a question about the priesthood.”
“What kind of question? If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”
“He’s thinking about becoming a priest. He wanted my opinion.”
Maria looked surprised. Luis had expected this. In the minds of many, priests were old men. The idea of anyone in this day and age joining the priesthood seemed antiquated, if not downright odd.
“What did you tell him?” she asked.
“I told him to pray, but that it wouldn’t be a yes or no answer.”
“That’s it? Pray?”
“How else do you hear the voice of God?”
“You didn’t just ask him why he wanted to be a priest?”
“Answer a question with a question?” Luis joked.
“You know what I mean,” said Maria.
“Well, it’s not what he asked. Ask them why, and they’re opening themselves up to be judged. ‘Is my reason good enough? Is it worthy?’ And if it’s a surface reason, you know them already. They see the respect priests get. They’re young men from broken homes looking for fathers. Spend enough time listening for God’s voice, and the yearning falls away. That’s the only voice you need to hear. Have you ever heard God’s voice?”
“I think I did once,” Maria admitted. “But that went away with puberty. How do you know whether it’s God talking to you and not a figment of your imagination?”
“You have to know what you’re listening for, and that takes practice,” Luis said, hoping his answer didn’t seem too esoteric. “You often pray when you’re at your most vulnerable. That’s when it’s easiest to accept the first reasonable answer that pops in your head. You have to know the difference between what’s of the world and what’s of God. You have to want to know what he has to say. That’s why it’s best to pray in silence. He waits for you.”