Arturo Perez-Reverte - Queen of the South

"Your man had been tempting fate a long time, Teresita. It had to come sooner or later."

"Is he really dead?"

"Of course he's dead. They caught him up in the sierra… It wasn't soldiers, or Federales, or anybody. It was his own people."

"Who?"

"What difference does it make? You know what kind of deals Guero was doing. He got caught playing both sides. And somebody finally blew the whistle on him."

The cigar's ember glowed red again. Don Epifanio opened the notebook. He held it in the candlelight, turning pages randomly. "You read what's in here?"

"I just brought it to you, like he told me. I don't know anything about these things."

Don Epifanio nodded, reflectively. He seemed uncomfortable. "Poor Guero got what he'd been looking for," he concluded.

She was staring straight ahead, into the chapel's shadows, where ex votos and dry flowers were hanging. "Poor Guero my ass," she suddenly said. "That pig never thought about what would happen to me."

She'd kept her voice from shaking. Still staring into the shadows, she sensed that don Epifanio had turned to look at her.

"You're lucky," she heard him say. "For the time being, you're alive."

He sat like that a while longer. Studying her. The smell of the cigar mingled with the fragrance of the candles and the cone of incense burning slowly in a censer next to the bust of the sainted bandit. "What do you plan to do?" he asked at last.

"I don't know." Now it was Teresa's turn to shrug. "Guero said you'd help me. 'Give it to him and ask him to help you.' That's what he said."

"Guero was always an optimist."

The hollow feeling in her stomach got worse. The waxy smell of candles, the flickering lights before St. Malverde. Humid, hot. Suddenly she felt an unbearable sense of anxiety, and of trepidation. She repressed the urge to

jump up, knock over the burning candles, get out, get air. Run again, if they'd still let her. But when she looked up, she saw that the other Teresa Mendoza was sitting across from her, watching her. Or maybe it was she herself sitting there, silently, looking at the frightened woman leaning forward on the pew next to don Epifanio, with a useless pistol in her lap. "He loved you," she heard herself say.

Don Epifanio moved uneasily in his seat. A decent man, Guero had always said.

"And I loved him." Don Epifanio was speaking very softly, as though he didn't want the bodyguard at the door to hear him talk about emotions. "And you, too… but those stupid runs of his put you in a tough spot."

"I need help."

"I can't get mixed up in this." "You have a lot of power."

She heard him cluck his tongue in discouragement and impatience. In this business, don Epifanio explained, still speaking softly, power was relative, ephemeral, subject to complicated rules. And he had kept his power, he said, because he didn't go sticking his nose in other people's business. Guero didn't work for him anymore; this was between him and his new bosses. And those people mocharon parejo-they took out everybody, wiped the slate clean.

"They don't have anything personal against you, Teresita. You know these

people. But it's their way of doing things. They have to make an example

when people fuck with them."

"You could talk to them. Tell them I don't know anything."

"They already know you don't know anything. That's not the issue… and I can't get involved. In this country, if you ask for a favor today, tomorrow you've got to pay it back."

Now he was looking at the Double Eagle on her lap, one hand lying carelessly on the butt. He knew that Guero had taught her to fire it, and that she could hit six empty Pacifico bottles one after another, at ten paces. Guero had always liked Pacifico and liked his women a little tough, although Teresa couldn't stand beer and jumped every time the gun went off.

"Besides," don Epifanio went on, "what you've told me just makes things worse. If they can't let a man get away, imagine a woman… They'd be the laughingstock of Sinaloa."

Teresa looked at his dark, inscrutable eyes. The hard eyes of a norteno Indian. Of a survivor.

"I can't get involved," she heard him repeat.

And don Epifanio stood up. So it was useless, she thought. It all ends here. The hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach grew until it included the night that awaited her outside, inexorable. She gave up, but the woman watching her from the shadows refused to.

"Guero told me that you'd help me," she insisted stubbornly, as though talking to herself. "'Take him the book,' he said, 'and trade it for your life.'"

"Your man liked his little jokes."

"I don't know about that. But I know what he told me."

It sounded more like a complaint than a plea. A sincere and very bitter complaint. Or a reproach. She was silent for a moment, and then she raised her face, like the weary prisoner waiting to hear the sentence. Don Epifanio was standing before her; he seemed even bigger and more heavyset than ever. His fingertips were drumming on Guero's notebook.

"Teresita…"

"Si, senor."

He kept drumming. She saw him look at the saint's portrait, at the bodyguard at the door, and then at her. Then his eyes fell again on the pistol. "You swear you didn't read anything?" "I swear to you."

A silence. Long, she thought, like dying. She heard the wicks of the candles at the altar sputtering.

"You've got just one chance," he said at last.

Teresa clung to those words, her mind as keen as though she'd just done a line of coke. The other woman faded into the shadows. "One's enough," she said.

"Have you got a passport?"

"Yes, with a U.S. visa."

"And money?"

"Twenty thousand dollars and a few pesos " She opened the gym bag at her feet to show him, hopefully. "And a ten- or twelve-ounce bag of snow."

"Leave that. It's dangerous to travel with it Do you drive?"

"No." She had stood and was looking straight at him, following his every word. Concentrating on staying alive. "I don't even have a license."

"I doubt you'd be able to get across anyway. They'd pick up your trail at the border, and you wouldn't be safe even among the gringos… The best thing is to get away tonight. I can loan you the car with a driver you can

Trust – I can do that, and have him drive you to Mexico City. Straight to

the airport, and there you catch the first plane out."

"To where?"

"Anywhere. If you want to go to Spain, I've got friends there. People that owe me favors… If you call me tomorrow morning before you get on the plane, I'll give you a name and telephone number. After that, you're on your own."

"There's no other way?"

"Heh." The laugh was mirthless, flat. "It's this way or no way. You get led by the rope or it hangs you."

Teresa looked around the chapel, gazing into the shadows. She was absolutely alone. Nobody made decisions for her now. But she was still alive.

"I have to go." Don Epifanio was growing impatient. "Decide."

"I've already decided. I'll do whatever you say."

"All right." Don Epifanio watched as she put the safety on and stuck the pistol into the waist of her jeans, between the denim and her skin, and then covered it with her jacket. "… And remember one thing-you won't be safe over there, either. You understand?… I've got friends, but these people do, too. Try to bury yourself deep enough so they don't find you."

Teresa nodded again. She'd pulled the coke out of the gym bag, and she set it on the altar, under the statue of Malverde. She lighted another candle. Santa Virgencita, she prayed a moment in silence. Santo Patron. God bless my journey and allow my return. She crossed herself almost furtively.

"I'm truly sorry about Guero," don Epifanio said behind her. "He was a good man."

Teresa had turned to hear this. Now she was so lucid and cool she could feel the dryness of her throat and the blood running very slowly through her veins, heartbeat by heartbeat. She threw the gym bag over her shoulder, smiling for the first time all day-a smile that registered on her lips as a nervous impulse, unexpected. And that smile, or whatever it was, must have been a strange one, because don Epifanio's expression changed-that smile gave him something to think about. Teresita Mendoza. Chale. Guero's morra. A narco's old lady. A girl like so many others-quieter, even, than most, not too bright, not too pretty. And yet that smile made him study her thoughtfully, cautiously, with a great deal of attention, as though suddenly a stranger stood before him.