The Kings Of Cool

189

Perhaps Elena’s greatest sorrow is that Magda will always associate her birthday with her father’s death.

A harsh fact for a girl who loved her papa so much.

Elena sits and looks at the closed casket, white, draped in flowers.

Armed men stand in the back of the room and at the doors, waiting for an attack that could very well come.

She had to tell Magda that she could not attend her own father’s funeral tomorrow.

Too dangerous.

In a world bereft of decency.

Are the armed men sentries or vultures, she wonders, ready to pounce on the carcass of the Sanchez-Lauter family? They are all wondering what she is going to do.

Still beautiful, still relatively young, she could go away to Europe, find a new husband, a new life. Certainly the option is attractive-she has enough money to live well forever, and raise her children in peace and comfort.

Or will she step into her dead brothers’ and husband’s shoes and take charge of the family?

A woman.

There is already grumbling about it; she has heard it. How they will not serve under a woman.

Do you have a choice? she thinks.

A woman is all that’s left.

She lifts a black-gloved hand and Lado appears at her side.

Lado, the policeman now openly in her employ.

A killer-his black eyes as cold as the obsidian blades the Aztec priests used to disembowel their sacrificial victims.

“Lado,” she says. “I have a job for you.”

“Si, madrone.”

She’s decided.