I don’t know.
I tape the key back where it was before and start putting things away. Weighted and sluggish, like I’m underwater, I gather handfuls of pens, rubber bands, paper clips, and drop them back into the drawers. My halfhearted attempt to organize them only lasts for a few minutes, because I can’t remember how anything looked before. And what does it matter now?
I finish with his office and move to the bedroom. According to the clock, it’s three thirty. If Emilio walks in now, I’ll have to explain the mess, but dreaming up a story that makes sense of this wild rampage seems impossible.
I replace the contents of his bedside table, pausing at the unframed photograph I’d thrown on the ground without even looking at it. I examine it now. It’s him beside an older woman who could only be his mother, and three teenage girls. His sisters. They remind me of my sisters, the way their arms are hooked around one another’s waists. That’s how Lola holds on to us when someone points a camera in our direction, like she can cement us together with her skinny arms and a flash.
Emilio’s sisters are beautiful. I’m not sure why I never tried to imagine them before.
I slip the photo back into the drawer, but those hopeful smiles and hooked arms are burned into my mind forever. I wish I hadn’t seen them. They weight one side of the equation, and choosing between Emilio and Papi is already wrenching enough. All those lives combined, though—are they more important than Papi’s? And those girls are innocent. Papi is not.
I close the drawer, refusing to believe what I might have been considering for one second, and move on to the bathroom. I only glanced under the sink before, but that was when I was looking for change. Toilet paper, a leather toiletries bag, cleaning supplies. I reach for the toiletries bag, suddenly needing to smell his aftershave, like that will make my decision any easier. It’s unexpectedly heavy. I place it on the countertop and unzip the black leather bag slowly. No aftershave. No cologne. Just a small silver box with a tiny slot for a key. Trembling, I hurry back to the kitchen, dig the packing tape out of the drawer, find the key, and take it back to the bathroom.
I know it’ll fit, even before the key slides easily into the hole. I turn the key, lift the lid, and there lies a tidy stack of bills. Hundreds. The pile looks thin, but when I thumb through the crisp bills to count them, there are forty. Four thousand dollars. I smile. I was wrong—Emilio is squirreling away cash. It’s taken so long because he has to be careful about it, and maybe the watch was a gift from my father that he has to keep wearing. That makes sense. I put the money back, relieved and giddy and nearly laughing out loud at myself. There’s no reason I should believe Emilio would hurt Papi. He must know it would change everything between us if he did.
I pick the bills up and count them again. Still forty. I wonder if this is all. Maybe he’s already taken care of his family and this is just for us. Or maybe he’s stashing it in more than one place. It doesn’t matter, though, because he said that after tomorrow we’ll be set, so whatever he has planned must be yielding enough cash to take care of everything.
I put the stack of bills back again, noticing this time how shallow the tray is. The box isn’t tall, but the tray only goes down about halfway to the bottom. I grasp the edges and pull up. It doesn’t take much force. The tray pops and I pull it out. Staring up at me from the bottom of the tray are two passports, and something else. A wallet?
I flip through the well-worn pages of the first passport, the Colombian one, stopping to inspect the photo page. It’s a good picture. Emilio Samuel Diaz.
I pick up the second. American. The pages are stiffer, waxier, and it doesn’t open naturally to the photo page. Same good picture. Carlos Ernesto Garcia. My eyes dart back and forth: photo to name, name to photo. That picture is better than good. It’s perfect.
So Emilio has a fake American passport.
All the questions swarm at once. Did Papi get this for him? He must have. Or does Emilio use it when he doesn’t want Papi to know where he is? That makes sense if Marcel was right about Papi having someone in customs on his payroll. Maybe Emilio got this passport just so we can disappear together, but if that’s true, don’t I need one too?
I reach for the final item, rubbing the black leather with my thumb. It looks like a wallet, but it’s too heavy. I open it.
On one side is a badge, a gold crest, an eagle hovering on top, wings spread above the script: Federal Bureau of Investigation. I bring it closer to my face, unnecessarily because it’s perfectly clear. FBI.
The opposite side shows a different picture of Emilio, this one unsmiling and with the other name below. Carlos Ernesto Garcia. I read it over and over this time, letting my tongue curl over the r’s without making a sound. I stare at the signature below it.
“I wish you hadn’t found that.”
I twist around to see Emilio’s eyes burning through me. He’s standing with both hands raised over his head, gripping the door frame. It’s a pose of frustration but not submission.
“What is this?” I whisper.
He drops his hands but doesn’t move toward me. “This makes everything much more difficult than it has to be.”
“What is this?” I repeat, louder.
“You shouldn’t have come back to Miami.”
“Tell me what this is!” I shout, shaking it between us.
He reaches for the badge, but I rip my hand away, and he grabs a handful of the air between us. “Calm down.”
“Why should I calm down? Explain this to me! What is this?”
He folds his arms, content to let me hold it. “My credentials.”
“Your credentials.”
“Yes.”
“Your credentials.”
He doesn’t correct me.
“Carlos Ernesto Garcia.” The syllables tumble out, nearly nonsense, so I say it again. “Carlos Ernesto Garcia. You are an FBI agent.”
He nods.
I take a shaky breath. “Then who is Emilio?”
“Come sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down!” I scream, and he closes his eyes like my tantrum is exhausting him.
“At the very least, stop yelling, then. I’ve got neighbors.”
Without thinking, I hurl the badge at him, but it misses, slapping the wall and dropping to the tile floor. Neither of us reaches for it.
“I asked who Emilio is,” I say. “Answer me.”
“Emilio Diaz is an employee of Victor Cruz.”
“But not a real person,” I say.
He turns around and leaves the bathroom.
“But not a real person,” I call after him. He doesn’t answer, so I march past him, heading straight for the bedside table. I grab the picture. “And your mother? Your sisters? Not real people either?”
He sits on the edge of the bed, still not meeting my eyes. “You’re angry. That’s perfectly understandable. But now that you know who your father really is, it should make sense.”
“I only know because of you, and apparently everything you’ve told me is a lie.”
“Not everything.” He finally looks at me and reaches out, slipping his hand around my waist.
I step back and his hand falls away. “Don’t! You lied about everything!”
“I didn’t lie about your father.”
“I don’t want to hear about my father anymore! Not from you!”
“You wish I hadn’t told you? You’d rather not know?”
I don’t answer. I don’t know. No.
I put my hand up against the wall. I feel drained of blood, but I won’t sit down. “You killed a man. I saw you kill a man.”
“That man was going to die anyway. I wasn’t going to blow my cover over something that inevitable. The United States government has spent over a decade trying to bring down the Cruz cartel.”
“But you shot him!”
“Right,” he says calmly. “That’s something I’m authorized to do as an FBI agent working undercover as an enforcer in a drug organization.”<
br />
“Authorized to do?”
“It’s not something I enjoy,” he says. “But it’s not just Victor we’re bringing down. It’s the whole cartel.”
The room is spinning.
“Sit down, Valentina,” he begs, and his voice is gentle in that way that used to be so distracting.
I don’t move. It’s not that distracting anymore. “You’re telling me the FBI kills innocent people.”
“That man wasn’t innocent. He’d spent his entire life distributing drugs, dragging children into the drug trade, selling coke to dealers who sold it on the streets. Trust me. He had plenty of blood on his hands.”
Blood on his hands. Now I do need to sit, but not beside Emilio. Blood is on everyone’s hands. My father’s. Emilio’s. Maybe mine too. “What about Lucien?”
“What about him?”
“You killed him too, didn’t you?”
“Lucien killed himself.”
I shake my head. “Stop lying to me! I know he didn’t kill himself!”
“Does it matter?”
“What kind of question is that? You can’t possibly be allowed to kill just anyone who gets in your way.” I stop to swallow. I’m picturing Lucien’s purple lips, the foam dribbling down his naked chest. I’m out of breath. “And he wasn’t even in your way.”
Emilio shakes his head. “He would’ve told your father that he saw us together—”
“No! I’m so sick of that lie. He didn’t see us together.”
“Not at the gallery. After.”
After. My mind flies back to the last time I saw Lucien alive. I touch my lips, remembering that cold, sad kiss. “He drove off before I even saw you.”
“I thought so too, but when we left the café, I noticed him on foot.”
“He followed us to Soupe au Chocolate?”
“I think he was probably following you everywhere. He was more than a little obsessed.”
My skin prickles, remembering the chill of Montreal and thinking of being watched and tracked like prey.
“Lucien is incidental,” Emilio says.
“To you, maybe.”
Emilio smirks. “Are you saying you cared about Lucien?”
“No, but his brother did. He had a life, you know. He wasn’t just something incidental for you to crush.”
“Stop blaming me. Lucien decided to throw away his life when he got caught up with Victor. Nobody made him do that.”
I have no recourse. He’s right, but his callousness is so disturbing I want to grab his face and shake him. “How did you do it?”
“Insulin,” he says softly, but still without emotion. “He made it easy for me, already being half-drunk when I got there and having all those pill bottles around to empty out. Nobody looks for a tiny injection mark when it’s clearly an overdose.”
My stomach flips, and I sink to the floor, my hand trailing down the wall as I drop, drop, drop, until I’m in a heap. I see Lucien’s bloated body, then Marcel’s tearstained face, over and over, the two on a never-ending loop.
“There are things I wish I didn’t have to do,” he says.
I look up. “Like me.”
He’s staring at me. I pull my legs to my chest and his T-shirt over my knees. I hold his stare, daring him to say it, deny it, explain it. He doesn’t.
“So I’m a work assignment,” I spit. “I can’t imagine the U.S. government pays you to screw minors.”
“Come here,” he says gently, reaching his hand out to me again.
I stare at it, at the lines on his palms where I used to slide my fingers, pretending I could read his fortune. “No. Just say it.”
He drops his empty hand. “That I used you? Fine. Being with you gave me access to information I wouldn’t have been able to get any other way. I’m sorry. It wasn’t ideal.”
I turn and look back into the bathroom so he can’t see my face. My fingers curl into fists around the hem of the T-shirt, digging into the cotton. It wasn’t ideal. Something feral and impulsive bubbles inside of me, and I picture myself lunging at him, clawing tracks down his beautiful face with my nails. I wonder if he’d think that wasn’t ideal as well.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings for you,” he says, but I’m afraid to keep listening. I can’t stomach a declaration of love right now. He adds, “I didn’t expect to fall in love with you.”
“Don’t,” I say. I need him to stop talking so my heart can break in silence.
Emilio looks down, shamed but not really shamed. Not repentant. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I said we’ve been trying to nail him for over a decade. At this point, my bosses aren’t asking questions about things they don’t want answers to. They know sometimes things get complicated. Entanglements are necessary.”
It seems impossible that what he’s saying is true, but what do I know about what FBI agents are allowed and not allowed to do? “How old are you really?” I ask.
“Twenty-four.”
I snort. “You know, my sisters are legal and prettier than me too. I’m sure you could’ve had either of them.”
“They aren’t prettier than you.”
I twist my grip on the hem of the T-shirt, hoping I dig holes into it.
“And they’re idiots,” he adds. “They don’t go places with your father. He doesn’t tell them things. You were the one with the most potential.”
“Potential? I was clueless! I didn’t even know what my father really did!” I laugh in spite of the tightness in my chest that’s making it hard to breathe.
“I was wrong,” he admits. “But by the time I figured that out, you were providing valuable access to everything happening in Key West, while Victor had me going back and forth between Miami and Bogotá. Once he found out about us, I didn’t need a good excuse to be in Key West. He just assumed I was trying to wiggle my way down there to be with you.”
“Wait, you knew that he knew about us?”
Emilio shrugs. It stings, another lie, another slap on my cheek. Making me fall in love with him, lying to me, breaking my heart—he answers to it all so easily with a shrug.
“You told him,” I say.
“Not exactly, but it wasn’t hard to give him just enough of a clue. It was a gamble. He could’ve flipped out. And it worried me that he never let on that he knew, but then it all made sense when he threw us together in Montreal, and I realized he was testing my loyalty.”
Those words dig through me like claws. So this is betrayal. I thought I’d understood it when I found out who Papi really was, but this is so much bloodier and irreparable. My whole body feels like torn flesh.
I stare at the familiar angles of Emilio’s face and remember looking up at him on the yacht’s upper deck. I was blinded by moon glow on cheekbones, and folk music, and the smell of the sea. He was too beautiful to doubt, or I was too stupid to see.
Not anymore.
“So you never planned on running away with me. You were never coming back for me. The money to steal, the family to protect—those were all lies.”
“They were necessary for my cover.”
“We were a lie,” I press on, leaning toward him. “Say it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re not sorry if you’d do it all over again.”
He doesn’t deny it. “There’s something you need to see. Stay here.” He stands and walks off, leaving me alone.
My eyes settle on his badge while I listen to him rustling around in his office. It’s lying open on the floor between me and the bed, the gold eagle shiny and frozen. It’s so patronizingly noble I want to grab it and hurl it at his head again when he walks back in. I don’t get the chance, though. He comes back holding a laptop, sees me staring at the badge, and scoops it up.
“I hate you,” I say. I don’t know if I mean it, but it feels good to say.
“Fine. If you want to hate me, go ahead, but there are a few things you have to see first.” He sits on the edge of the bed and opens the laptop. “Sit.”
&
nbsp; I don’t want to sit beside him. Cooperation feels like submission, and I’d rather chew broken glass than let him think I respect his authority. Plus, from this distance it’s easier to have him see just my rage. It’s louder. It’s surface. But if I sit beside him, he’ll know I’m being hollowed out by this hurt, and that would only make it more unbearable.
“Valentina, you can’t keep choosing to be ignorant. It’s time to grow up. Sit.”
I sit—beside him but not touching him—hating him, trying not to smell his aftershave.
He angles the laptop in my direction. “They’re in reverse chronological order. That took place last week.”
I barely hear him. I’ve muffled his voice, putting it behind the splashes of color on the screen. It’s a photograph. There’s a lot of blue. The sky is that hopeful shade of morning that appears after the fog has burned away. There’s much less green, only a patch on either side of the shot, but it’s a vibrant jungle green that brightens the whole picture—fat, shiny leaves under fuchsia blooms. They’re potted plants on either side of what looks like a driveway. In the middle of the driveway is a daffodil-colored dress, not too bright or that cold butter-pale, but the perfect in-between.
And everywhere else, there’s blood.
“That’s Bogotá, in case you’re wondering,” Emilio says.
I wasn’t wondering. I was examining the patterns on the death-smeared pavement. They’re not at all like the blood flower. There was a dripping elegance to that, gravity styling the gore into something graceful. This isn’t graceful. This looks like someone took a fat brush to her insides and wiped it clumsily around. Footprints here, long dashes there, and I can see from the stains on her upturned bare feet that she was walking in her own blood before she was dragging herself in her own blood before she collapsed in her own blood. The center of that perfect-yellow dress is scarlet and so is one side, though the top is miraculously spotless and her face is clean too. She is small-chested. Pretty. She’s wearing white flower earrings and a gold cross around her neck. Her smooth black hair is tied in a white ribbon. She’s young. Younger than me.
Kiss Kill Vanish Page 24