Power and Empire

34

The thing Magdalena Rojas first noticed about Ernie Pacheco was his teeth. This would have pleased him had she mentioned it, because he’d paid a lot of money for them. She remembered that her father had had a nice smile, but this man they called Matarife was different. His perfect smile was starkly mismatched to the rest of his craggy, misshapen face. She’d heard he was injured in a bar fight, but whatever the cause, his flat nose looked like it had been melted and then smeared above his lip. An asterisk-shaped scar puckered the sunken flesh under his left eye. The ear on that same side was a mass of scar tissue. He kept his dark hair pulled back in a thick man bun. He seemed to believe the style anchored him to a more youthful appearance, but Magdalena thought it just called attention to the severity of the mess that he called a face. Oddly, while all those who followed him were adorned with images of La Santa Muerte, Matarife, the self-professed leader of her cult, did not have a single tattoo on his body.

Magdalena had met the man many times, but he never paid for her, even when she’d belonged to Dorian or Parrot. He took her just the same, always pretending like it was all her idea and that she should be happy because he was saving her from the other guys. It pissed off Parrot, but he never said anything. He just chopped her when Matarife left.

He sat across from her now, naked, chewing on a bite of rare steak and gesturing at her with his knife as he spoke. He liked to eat dinner without his clothes. Magdalena didn’t care. Like most things that had to do with sex that didn’t cause her too much pain, she’d grown numb to it. But he hit her if she didn’t giggle and raise her eyebrows up and down and pretend she was impressed. She had seen many naked men, and apart from the black hair that covered his body like a wild ape, there was nothing impressive about him.

He nudged aside a small silver cross and picked a bit of fallen meat from his matted chest hair, looking at it for a moment to see what it was before popping it between his perfect teeth.

He pointed with the steak knife again. “I should tell you of Matarife’s trip to Colombia,” he said. “It was very dangerous.”

He boasted a great deal for someone who didn’t care about impressing her. She supposed he was bragging to himself. He liked to speak of things that made him seem handsome and tough and smart. Magdalena thought he was none of these things, except perhaps tough, considering the scars on his face. Well, maybe he was a little bit smart, or else he would not have been so rich. He wasn’t smart enough to take her straight to Zambrano’s like he was supposed to, that was for sure. Ernie Pacheco was a cruel man, but Zambrano was crueler, and would kill him for disobedience. Probably.

He looked at her with his narrow pig eyes, the left one even narrower because of the scar. “You not gonna eat? You haven’t touched anything.”

She faked a smile. “I am not hungry. You want another beer?” She hoped he’d eaten so much meat and drunk enough beer that he’d just fall asleep. Guys did that sometimes, so she always asked them if they wanted more.

He pushed back from the table and clapped his hands, rubbing them together like a housefly. The man bun, the strange eyes. He looked a lot like a fly, she thought.

He rubbed his hairy belly and gave a long sigh. “Hey,” he said. “I got an idea that will help us get in the mood.”

Magdalena groaned inside, struggling to keep up the fake smile.

He put his hand behind her back and gave her a shove. It didn’t knock her over, but there was no doubt that she had no choice about going to the bedroom.

“We’ll watch one of my movies,” he said, chuckling a little. He gave her another shove, harder this time. “It’ll be fun. You might even know some of the stars.”