Down Among the Dead Men

101

When she got back to the Great Chamber, much of the crowd was gone, but several people were huddled over El Santo, who lay still near the altar, looking like something fresh off a Labor Day barbecue spit.

Beth battled a savage stab of nausea as she pushed past them, looking around the cavern, seeing no sign of Jen or Marta.

Which meant they couldn’t have been around when this all happened. They must have left shortly after Marta had hijacked Beth. Otherwise, Marta would be at the center of that huddle, sobbing her eyes out.

And Beth knew there was only one place they could have gone.

The High House.

The house was a large multi-roomed mansion that stood near the edge of a cliff overlooking the Sea of Cortez. It was the center of the La Santa Muerte compound-the center of La Santa Muerte itself-where El Santo had sat like a king, overlooking his criminal enterprise.

The clarity with which Beth remembered all this was shocking to her, and she wondered if one of the bullet fragments in her brain had shifted somehow, taking pressure off the section that had been causing her memory loss.

She knew that the room behind the altar held another curtained doorway, this one with a set of steps that led upward to the High House.

Slipping into the room, she found the stairs, then took her flashlight from her pocket, flicked it on, and started up them.

As she reached the top, Beth hung back, hearing the sound of running footsteps, car engines starting. The party had been ruined and El Santo’s so-called followers were fleeing the scene, skittering back to the holes they’d come from.

The house was usually heavily guarded, but as she peeked past the doorway at the top of the stairs Beth saw no sign of any guards now, figuring they’d fled, too, or were still down in the tunnels, looking for Vargas and Ortiz.

And her.

Beth stepped through the doorway and quickly made her way down a corridor to another set of steps-a wide stairway that led to the second floor. Marta and Rafael’s suite was up there, and Beth had no doubt that this was where Marta had taken Jen.

She heard sobbing when she got to the second-floor corridor, a sound muffled by walls and doors, but she knew exactly where it was coming from. She had been in that room more times than she could count, playing her charade as she had dreamed of escaping this terrible place. Of taking Jen and Andy far away from here.

Back in Playa Azul, when Beth had complained of always being forced to play the mother, Jen had told her that it was a role she had chosen for herself. And Beth now knew that Jen was right. She was Beth the Dutiful, and it had been her nature to do whatever it took to protect her cub.

But she had failed. Despite her own narrow escape, the Santiagos had won, simply by virtue of the fact that they had managed to steal Jen’s soul.

But maybe the deaths of Rafael and El Santo would change all that.

Marta’sprivate room was at the end of the corridor. Beth quietly approached the door, listening to Jen’s sobs, and felt her heart break. What they’d done to her, what Jen had done to herself, was unspeakable. Unforgivable.

Beth reached a hand out, slowly turned the knob, and pushed into the room.

Jen was on the bed, facedown, sobbing into a pillow, Marta sitting next to her, her back to the doorway, rubbing Jen’s shoulders.

Beth spotted Vargas’s pistol lying on a nearby chair. It was almost, she thought, as if God had been expecting her.

Destiny, you might say.

Marta continued to rub Jen’s back. “It’s all right, cielito. You’ll see.”

“You lied to me,” Jen said. “You all lied to me.”

“No, my darling. We told you only truth. But I could not bear to let you go. You can understand that, si?”

“How true can it all be, if you can bend the word of God to suit you? If I was meant to give myself today, why am I still alive?”

“The fact that you are alive must mean that it is God’s will, no? And in the end, El Santo will surely bless you.”

“El Santo won’t be blessing anyone,” Beth said.

Both Jen and Marta looked up sharply, staring at Beth, who now held Vargas’s gun in her hand.

Marta’s eyes narrowed. “How could you still be alive?”

Beth nodded toward the bedroom window. “Look outside. The rats are abandoning ship.”

Marta frowned and climbed off the bed, moving to the window. She parted the curtain, staring at all the activity below, then turned and looked at Beth again.

“What happened? Where is El Santo?”

“He’s got a bit of a sunburn,” Beth said. “I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

Marta’s face went through several different expressions, most of them involving some form of disbelief.

“No,” she said, moving back to Jen. “You lie. It is not true.”

“I’m afraid so, sweetie. Your lecherous, murderous, drug-smuggling, daughter-fucking asshole of a father is dead and headed straight to hell, exactly where he belongs.”

She raised the gun.

“Now do me a favor and get away from my sister so I can send you there, too.”

And as the truth sank in, Marta’s look of disbelief slowly turned to sorrow, then anger, then rage. And with a bloodcurdling scream, she launched herself at Beth like something straight out of a vampire movie, her teeth bared, a crazed, feral look in her eyes as she went for Beth’s throat — and Beth squeezed the trigger, putting a bullet in Marta’s brain, dropping her right there on the bedroom floor.

Jen screamed then and scrambled off the bed, moving to Marta, who now lay wide-eyed, blood leaking all over her carpet. She stood over the dead woman, tears filling her eyes.

Beth was trembling. Lowered the pistol. Not quite believing she’d just done what she’d done.

But she’d had no choice, right?

“Come on, Jen. We need to get you out of here.”

Then Jen looked up at her, the tears now streaming down that hideous face. There was a clarity in Jen’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. The drugs had worn off.

“What about Andy? Is he…?”

“He’s fine,” Beth said. “He’s with my friends.”

“Thank God, thank God. I can’t believe I almost killed him tonight.”

“It’s not your fault, Jen. They warped your mind. Drugged you. Manipulated you. Took advantage of your vulnerability. It’s what they do.” She paused, gestured. “Now, come on. Let’s go.”

“No,” Jen said. “My whole life I’ve been a burden to you. I can’t be that anymore.”

“You’ve never been anything but my little sister. And no matter what you’ve done, I’ve always loved you and I always will.”

“Then let me go.”

Beth frowned. “What are you saying?”

“Look at me. Look at my face. Look at what I did to myself. And to you. I could spend a hundred years trying to heal, trying to forgive myself, but I’ll never be whole again. I’ll never be what I was before.” She paused. “I was willing to give my life to God tonight. And that hasn’t changed.”

“What do you mean?”

Jen stared at her, intently. Beth could barely stand to look at her face, so she concentrated on the eyes instead, remembering the laughing girl on board that ship who just wanted to get laid.

“Send me to God,” Jen said. “Help me do what I should have done when I climbed that clock tower at school all those years ago.”

“Stop, Jen, you’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I? Think about it, Beth. Would you want to look like this for the rest of your life? Could you live with yourself knowing that you had almost sent your son to his death? If you have any mercy at all, if you love me, you’ll do what I ask.”

Beth shook her head, not wanting to listen to this, but some small part of her knew that Jen was right. If she were in the same position, she wouldn’t want to live, either.

“What about Andy? He needs his mother.”

“You’ll be a better mother to him than I could ever be.”

“That’s crazy talk.”

“Please, Beth. If you truly do love me, if you have any mercy in your heart for the girl who tried to kill you…”

Beth continued to stare at Jen, thinking about all their years together, all the laughter and pain and grieving and frustration-and this was what it had come down to. A damaged soul, asking to be set free.

“Please, Beth. Please…”

And as Jen stared up at her, Beth the Dutiful raised the pistol again and pulled the trigger.

Patient’s Journal

Day 92?

11:00 A.M.

They say that time heals, but I’m not quite sure that’s really true.

Time may lessen the sting, may allow you to relegate the pain to another part of your mind, to box it up and store it away, only to be brought out on special occasions-those melancholy moments that remind us of who we are…

But we can never be truly healed.

That’s the thing about memories. There is so much we wish we could forget. We go through our lives wanting to erase the data banks, to start anew, but even if we could, what would we lose in the process?

I cherish the memories I have. Both the good and the bad. I remember them clearly and in great detail and do not regret that.

I’ve done things. Horrible things. But I know down deep that they were justified. That they needed to be done.

And I know that at this very moment Jen is in the loving arms of our parents. Which, in truth, is the only place she ever wanted to be.

After I said my good-byes to her that night, I found Nick and Cristo waiting for me in the tunnels, ready to guide me back to the church. But I didn’t need a guide. After so many months of traveling through them, I knew those passages as if they’d been etched into my brain.

In the days that followed, Nick’s detective friends, both here and in Mexico, were able to rally together and put a stop to what was left of La Santa Muerte.

The brothels were closed, the smuggling operation shut down, and before we knew it, the so-called believers were turning on one another, exposing a network of criminals and corrupt law enforcement agents that spread not just through Mexico but all the way into the United States and even parts of Canada.

There was a brief investigation into the shooting deaths of Marta and Jen, but with no witnesses and little evidence, the Mexican police hit a dead end.

The man who shot me in Albuquerque-Rojas-was stripped of his job and thrown in jail.

Peter has been arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy. He’s scheduled to be arraigned in a few days, and I’ve been asked to testify.

Cristo and his young friends were reunited with their families. And after Nick and I bid Ortiz good-bye and returned to the United States, I decided to check myself back into the clinic, to be kept under observation until Dr. Stanley tells me I’m ready to go.

That should be any day now.

Little Andy has been taken into temporary foster care here in Los Angeles. I’ve filed for custody, and my attorney thinks that, given my steady progress, the judge will grant it. The foster parents regularly e-mail photos of Andy, and I can’t help seeing Jen in his eyes.

He is her legacy. Her gift to me.

Nick comes to see me every morning, and brings me new pages of his book. I may be biased-no doubt about it, in fact-but I think he’s got something there. A real stab at reversing some of the damage he did to his career.

My own career is still waiting for me. After the scandal of Peter’s arrest, the DA decided it would be good publicity to allow me to return to my old job, with a substantial bump in pay.

But I haven’t decided whether I’ll return. I’m not sure I want to go back to a world so full of darkness. I would be content to live my days alone with Nick, listening to him read his words to me.

This isn’t a realistic prospect, of course. Merely a dream. I know that when I walk out of here I’ll have to find something to do with myself. Something to help me push away the pain. To help me move forward.

There is, however, in the back of my mind, one small concern. It’s probably nothing, but I’ve lived with it every day-a mild but constant bit of paranoia that just doesn’t seem to want to leave me alone. And what it stems from is this:

When the Mexican police found the crumpled Jaguar on the side of the road, Rafael was not inside. All that was left was a bit of blood on the seat.

And sometimes, late at night, I wake up in the darkness of my room and feel as if someone has been watching me.

Watching and waiting.

So a few days ago, I asked Nick to bring me one of the pistols Ortiz gave him.

And I keep it under my pillow.

Just in case.