A man walked into her apartment, closed and locked the door behind him.
“What …?” Cessy started, thinking about Hector’s heavy guns, wishing she hadn’t sold them to a pawn shop. “Who are you?”
The man walked past her, calmly sat on her couch. He was medium height, with short, thin blond hair. Muscles pushed through his long-sleeved shirt, as if his shirt was too tight, as if any shirt would be too tight. Tight line of a mouth, squinted blue eyes.
“Cessy Castillo?”
“Yeah?”
Cessy was trying to appear less worried than she was, but her mind raced. She had no idea who this man was, what he wanted, why he was here. She stood uncertainly, legs tensed, ready to dart to the door.
“Don’t run,” he told her. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”
The sentence hung in the air.
“Who are you?” Cessy asked.
“I worked with Hector.”
She folded her arms over her chest. Tried to put some strength in her voice. “Hector didn’t work.”
“Oh, he worked. You just don’t know about it.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant, but had an idea.
Cessy thought about the pictures she’d found the day before, the photos of the executions.
“But he also borrowed,” the man continued. “Especially from the people he worked for.”
Cessy felt cold inside.
“What was he doing?”
The man just regarded her. Didn’t respond.
She tried again. “How much was he in for?”
“Fifteen grand.”
Dammit, Hector.
The man glanced around her small apartment. “Doesn’t seem like he shared the money with you, so you probably didn’t know about it. But he owed it. Still does.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Hector’s dead.”
“You’re not.”
Cessy kept acting like she didn’t know better. As if there was a chance this man had only come into her home to tell her about, and then excuse, Hector’s debt. “I’m just a bartender. I don’t have that kind of money.”
He draped his left arm out over the couch, as if over an invisible girlfriend sitting next to him.
“I have an idea on how you can pay it back,” he said.
Cessy looked warily at him.
“You could do what your mom did,” he went on.
Cessy’s left hand tightened into a fist.
The two of them stared at each other.
“I know all about you, Cessy Castillo,” he said. “Hector told me everything. I even know why you’re here, what brought you to Baltimore. What you’re running from. What’s in your blood to do.”
Her eyes burned. “Fuck you.”
“Exactly.” He stood up from the couch, walked over to her. “Come up with the money soon, or you’d better take that idea seriously. And don’t try the cops. We have the cops. Hector’s not the only one who kept a foot in each lane.”
“I can’t pay you.”
He looked her up and down, the gaze as violent as hands clawing her.
“You can.”
Cessy locked the door after he left.
Her phone was in her hand before she realized it. She glanced down at her brother’s number, thought about calling.
This was the first time Cessy had felt afraid since Hector’s death.
But she wasn’t ready to run.
Especially not to her brother.
Moments of sadness had hit her, occasionally stopped her cold, motionless, lost in some conflict of memories of when Hector had been loving … and then his face contorted in rage, his fists fast and everywhere. Cessy would be lost in those thoughts until a stranger’s concerned voice woke her, in a store, on the street, at the bar, and she’d come back to the realization that Hector was gone, that those parts of her life were over.
That she was safe.
She’d escaped, freed herself from his violence and unpredictable anger. Walked away from his corpse without looking back.
But it turned out Hector could still hurt her. The visit from that blond man was like Hector’s cold hand breaking through the earth, grabbing her wrist, forcing her to stay with him. Hector still making sure Cessy stayed in the shadows, keeping their darkness stretched over her.
* * *
Cessy spent the next few days looking over her shoulder, dreading a knock on the door, wondering how she could possibly pay the debt Hector had left. She took inventory of everything she owned, found it hard to see how anything in her apartment would come to more than a few hundred dollars.
She went back to work, still worried, hoping the bar was a good place to distract herself from these concerns. And, fortunately, regulars at the Fells Gate Tavern had realized they didn’t need to tiptoe around Cessy about Hector’s death. She was grateful for that. She’d hated the pitying looks that first week, the way voices softened when they talked to her.
Especially because no one had been nearly that concerned when Hector was alive and bruising her.
Not that they knew, Cessy reminded herself as she strained a whiskey sour, set it down next to a seven and seven. She picked up a twenty.
At least, probably not.
“Keep it,” a regular named Michael Thompson, a former St. Francis high school football star, said.
Cessy looked at the twenty, surprised. “You sure?”
“All you,” he said, and turned toward his girlfriend, Stacy Griffith, a cute short blonde. “Watch my drinks.”
He headed to the restroom.
“I need to get him to be that generous with me,” Stacy said.
Cessy could tell Michael felt sorry for her, which explained the large tip. It lingered in men, that sadness. The women felt it too, but they paid attention to Cessy, could tell she didn’t want condolences.
“Is that new?” Stacy asked, and pointed at Cessy’s shoulder.
It was a Japanese-style tattoo, showed an old man staring at a lake and a small rowboat docked on the shore.
“Couple of months? I might have been wearing something that covered it when you were in here.”
Stacy leaned over the bar to get a closer look. “I like it,” she announced. “Lot of nice detail for a small space.”
“What about you?” Cessy asked. “Any new ones?”
Stacy didn’t have any visible tattoos, but Cessy knew her back was inked. “Another dragon on my right leg. The tail curves around my thigh.”
“Sexy lady.”
“Mike likes it.” She drank from her seven and seven, set it down, pulled out her phone, and glanced into it. “You okay, hon?”
Cessy reached down, scratched her knee. “Did you guys know about Hector?”
Stacy was using her phone to check herself out. She adjusted her shirt. “What about him?”
“That he—that he had a temper.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Silence between them, the pause pregnant.
“I mean,” Stacy said uneasily, “all guys have tempers.”
Michael walked back, took his whiskey. “Thanks again, Cess.”
He and Stacy went back to their table. She didn’t talk to Cessy again.
Cessy walked home after work, fall and twilight in the city. She’d worked the afternoon shift and it wasn’t quite dark yet, and the city held a pinkish-purple glow. It was nice, not enough to distract her, but nice. Cessy’s favorite time of the year was late afternoon summers, when she’d leave work and walk among people happy about ending the day, excited about their evenings. The way apartment windows stayed up without concern for weather, high enough not to be worried about rats or robberies. That was when she’d first come here from Arizona, when she lost herself in Fells Point’s cheerful embrace.