Mona paused. Then she leaned forward and said, “But it’s not just that. You almost died in that boat. You want me to tell the judge you risked your life just to go to Hollywood?”
Mona watched Carmen closely. She really was very pretty, her black eyes gleaming beneath long lashes and attended-to brows. Mona was almost certain the girl had never seen the inside of a maquiladora. She was a pretty young woman in a coarsened world. Mona could see she was thinking hard.
“What do you want me to say?” said Carmen.
Mona put down her pen and took Carmen’s hands in hers. “You don’t have the hands of someone who works in a factory, Carmen.”
The guard said, “Hey. No contact.”
Mona let go of Carmen’s hands. “I want you to trust me.”
“I had a boyfriend,” said Carmen.
“He gave you the money?”
Carmen stiffened. Her voice got sharper. “I took it.”
Mona could tell she’d touched a nerve. “Where is he? In Tijuana?”
“Sometimes. I don’t know. He moves around.” Carmen rubbed the back of her hand.
“Why did you leave him?” said Mona.
No reply.
“Did he hurt you?”
Carmen put her arms across her chest. “He was … he was finished with me.”
“What do you mean, ‘finished’ with you?”
“I mean it was finished between us. You understand?”
Mona shook her head.
Carmen’s black eyes flashed. “If he finds me,” she said in a whisper, “he’ll put me in with the snakes.”
A moment passed. Mona realized she was holding her breath.
“That’s what he did to the last girl he was finished with,” said Carmen. “Put her in the box with the snakes. When they found her body, her flesh had turned black.”
“He threatened to kill you?”
Carmen nodded.
Mona made a note. “Carmen, this is important,” said Mona, her voice low. “Did your boyfriend ever hurt you?”
Before Mona could stop her, Carmen unzipped the front of her jumpsuit, pulled up her T-shirt, and showed Mona her breasts. Where her flesh should have been smooth and beautiful, it was burned, pitted, the color of rancid milk. Mona broke out in goose bumps, as though the rec yard had suddenly turned freezing cold. She couldn’t help but avert her eyes.
“In Hollywood, there are the best plastic surgeons in the world,” said Carmen, her black eyes glowing. “That’s why I took the hijo de puta’s money. He did this to me. He made me ugly. He’s going to pay to make me beautiful again.”
* * *
It was dark by the time Mona got back to Redondo Beach. The whole drive home, she’d replayed the scene in the rec yard over and over in her mind’s eye. She hoped Carmen hadn’t noticed her recoil when she had revealed her wound. Mona had never seen the effect of battery acid on human flesh before. Now it was etched so deeply into her memory that she doubted she would ever forget it.
She got out of the car and stretched the cricks out of her neck and back. Her lower back ached from the hours behind the wheel. She was grateful for the nearness of the sea and the distance from the desert.
Inside, Finn was at the stove. The rich aroma of roasting chicken filled the room. Mona put down her bag, put her arms around him, and pressed her cheek against his back. He smelled of garlic and grease. He had the TV on, watching a Lakers game. He turned around and kissed her.
“Hungry?” he said.
“Starving. But I want to take a shower before we eat. It was a thousand degrees out there.” She nodded toward the oven. “Have I got time?”
Finn pulled open the oven door and examined the bird. Mona could hear its juices sizzling in the pan.
“You’ve got time,” he said, taking it out of the oven. “You have to let it rest.”
Mona smiled. He always said that.
Ten minutes later, wearing comfortable jeans and a blouse, she was sitting at the table. Finn had brought the candles out. He’d turned off the TV, dimmed the lights, and tuned the radio to a smooth-grooves station. She watched him carve the bird, each piece coming away cleanly on his carving fork. He’d put a wineglass and a bottle of white wine next to her plate. Finn was drinking his usual iced tea. It’d been three years since his last drink.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Simple. Went for a run down at the beach. Went to a meeting, had lunch with some of the guys after. Then I went to the grocery.”
It was his day off, and he looked relaxed. There’d been a time in their marriage when Mona hadn’t known what to expect on his days off, and she’d almost left him because of it; but he’d worked to fix himself, stayed off the drink and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and now when she came home, she never had to think twice before opening the door.
“How’d it go with the girl?” said Finn.
The smile slid from Mona’s face.
“She grew up in a rough part of Mexico City. Left home young, at fifteen, and headed up to Tijuana, to work in a factory—or so she says. In TJ, she got mixed up with an enforcer for the Caballeros cartel by the name of Salvador Soto. She tried to get away from him, so he threw battery acid over her. She’s burned from the neck down.”
Mona picked up her wineglass and poured half of its contents down her throat. She didn’t add that Carmen had been tortured after U.S. border agents had returned her to Mexico. In the anger that had consumed her in the car, Mona had felt a need to blame someone, and the people she felt were most obviously responsible were the border agents at San Ysidro who had sent Carmen back to her horrific fate. But Nick was a border agent, and she knew he would hold the cartel thug responsible, not his colleagues at San Ysidro. He’d be right, of course; the border agents were just doing their jobs, enforcing the law. But right at that moment, Mona didn’t need him to be right.
After her shower, Mona had seen Finn’s dress uniform hanging in the closet, and for a moment had felt a rancor against him. Her work colleagues were always surprised when they learned what her husband did for a living, and when her job confronted her with the cruelty in the heart of people, as it had that day in the detention center, she was sometimes troubled by the notion that she had married the enemy. She reminded herself that it was Finn who had saved Carmen, and it was Finn who had asked her to help her.
“Know what a ‘herper’ is?” she said finally.
Finn shook his head.
“It’s someone who keeps snakes as pets. Carmen says that this psychopath, Soto, is a herper. Just loves snakes. Especially the venomous ones. He collects them from Australia, Thailand, all over. She says he has aquariums filled with cobras and rattlesnakes. She says he gets them out to impress his narco buddies, scare them a little. And she says when he wants to kill someone and make a point of it, he puts them in a box with the snakes. He threatened to do it to her.”
Mona took another sip of wine and made a conscious decision to relax and enjoy the remainder of the evening. Like any institution, the CBP had its good guys and bad guys. One thing she knew for sure, her husband was one of the good ones. “Anyway. Guess what she called you?” She smiled. “Her salvavida. Do you know what that means?”