I put a bullet in his forehead and keep on toward the car.
Parked in the circular drive of Julio’s elaborate mansion, I pop open the trunk of the vehicle, exposing the man hog-tied inside with duct tape over his mouth. Julio breaks away from two other men accompanying him. One of them is an enforcer. The other, whom I’ve never seen before, stands off to the side, his form somewhat hunched, wearing black pants and a black hood that conceals his face. A number of tattoos, some of which bear strange symbols, as well as numbers, cover the pale white skin not hidden by the strange costume-like robe. Arrows and circles, whose meaning I couldn’t even begin to guess.
Coming to stand beside me, Julio tips his head and seems to examine Castellano, probably making sure I didn’t renege on my promise not to harm him. “You kept him in the trunk the whole journey?”
“Minus a piss break somewhere along the way.”
With a snort, he waves the enforcer over, who yanks the smaller man out of the cramped compartment.
As Castellano is brought to his feet, he sneers back at Julio. “I cannot wait until Javier gets his hands on you, cabrón. Gritaras como un cerdito. You’ll scream like a piggy.” He squeals and chuckles in Julio’s face, and I’m convinced the man has no self-preservation.
“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. I believe you might be familiar with him.” Julio steps aside for the robed stranger, tugging a kerchief from his pocket to daub the back of his neck that glistens with sweat.
Within seconds, Castellano’s face has turned a ghostly white, his eyes wide with fear.
“El Cabro,” he whispers, twisting his shoulder, his hands still bound behind him. The goat. “No, no, no, no. Déjame ir!” Let me go!
Frowning, I flick my gaze toward Julio’s mysterious guest once more, wondering if it is, in fact, the stranger having this effect on him.
Castellano shakes his head. “Lo siento. Por favor. Lo siento.” I’m sorry. Please. I’m sorry.
Seconds ago, he didn’t seem troubled to be at the hands of his enemy, perhaps even proud to die that way. Now, he looks as if he’s seen a ghost.
“Estás jodido, my friend.” You’re fucked. Julio chuckles around a cigar he shoves into his mouth and waves the enforcer on.
Castellano’s eyes turn to me, pleading, and back to the stranger. “No. No!” He wriggles in the enforcer’s grasp, but to no avail, as he’s dragged toward Julio’s house. “Por favor! Lo siento!”
The pale man follows after him, and I turn to Julio, still standing beside me.
“Who is he?”
Huffing an exhale, he stares off toward the three men making their way inside, Castellano’s screams trailing after them. “Men like Castellano tend to be very religious and superstitious. Even after all he’s done, he thinks he’s worthy enough to walk with God. To be forgiven and redeemed. It’s our culture, really. We are guided by spirits all the time. Everywhere.”
“The man’s a priest, then?”
“Yes. You could say that.”
“Santeria?” I’d become familiar with a few who practiced the religion, and understood the relation between their orishas and the saints.
“Men like Castellano don’t fear Santeria.”
They don’t fear Santa Muerte, either, evidenced by the most recent safe house, where a shrine had been arranged for the lady of death. “Voodoo?”
Instead of answering, Julio pats me on the back and smiles. “You’ve done well, Thierry. I’ll see to it that you’re paid in full. Thank you for doing this.”
7
Céleste
Eleven weeks later …
“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
The priest stands at the head of the gravesite, where Russ’s casket has been lowered into the ground. The burial itself was paid for courtesy of a benefit spaghetti dinner organized by Roy and Tammy, the owners of the camera shop where I work, which raised enough for the casket, the grave marker, and the priest, with a few hundred left over for anything I might need. There was no wake, or anything special, and I suspect that’s the way Russ would’ve wanted it.
He’d have probably forgone the priest, though, as I’ve never known him to be all that religious, but when I told Tammy I planned to bury him quietly in the cabin’s backwoods, her eyes went wide with horror, and she arranged this whole set up herself. I don’t even know if Russ would’ve wanted to be buried here, but the thought of me transporting a dead body in the back of that truck, all the way down to his home state of Louisiana, seemed sketchy, even for me. Just my luck, I’d get pulled over, and find myself on the front cover of some tabloid as the girl who drove around with a dead man’s body in the back of a Chevy pickup.
Besides knowing he lived on Chevalier Isle, I wouldn’t know where the hell to bury him there, anyway, if I was crazy enough to transport him.
The thought of that makes me chuckle, drawing a few stares my way. Russ would’ve appreciated it. He was definitely the kind of guy who’d laugh at his own funeral.
Only a handful of people have shown up to say their goodbyes, and after the priest finishes, a few of them approach me with their sorry’s and sympathetic pats on the shoulder.
All of them believing this man was my father.
Lost in a trance, I stare down at the casket. His death was relatively peaceful toward the end, with all the morphine he was given. There one minute, gone the next. He slipped away into a perfect eternal sleep.
A warm wrinkled hand slips into mine, offering a gentle squeeze, and I turn to Tammy beside me, whose red-rimmed eyes and tear-streaked cheeks show more emotion than mine. I’ve not cried, at all.
Not because Russ didn’t mean anything to me. The guy raised me for the last nine years of my life, but there’s such a vacuous emptiness inside of me, I can’t bring myself to feel much of anything.
“If you need anything, dear, Roy and I are a phone call away.” Tammy is the only semblance of a mother I’ve had these past few years. None of Russ’s regular hookups bothered to treat me as anything more than a nuisance to their pretend life with a man who scoffed at the idea of marriage. None of whom are even here today.
“Thank you.”
Long spindly arms wrap around me, and my whole body stiffens with the contact, but it doesn’t last long, and when she releases me, I exhale my relief. Russ and I didn’t do affection. He was the shitty roommate that I had to clean up after, and I was the belligerent teenager he had to put up with. Yet, somehow, there was an understanding between us. An unspoken bond that took a lot of years to build, and crumble, and build again. I knew he gave a shit, even if he never really said it.
A man doesn’t up and drop everything in his life to care for some strange kid he doesn’t know without some stake in the game. If it was money, so be it, but it couldn’t have been much, given the poor guy died penniless. Even if he wasn’t always perfect at raising me, he saw me to adulthood, and even taught me a few things along the way. And that’s saying something, because I was equal parts feral and neurotic. A hot mess that blazed through his lazy lifestyle like a wildfire.