Five Midnights

by Ann Dávila Cardinal

  “Yeah, no. No ‘ladies-first’ crap with me.” Besides, no force on earth was going to make her go first so this guy could get the hi-def view of her ample ass.

  “Ah, right. Feminist.” He smiled and took the stairs two at a time. And the view of his butt wasn’t bad at all.

  As Lupe lifted her leg to the first step, she noticed a small blue car idling behind the large ad for Bacardi on the bus stop. Lupe paused. That car hadn’t been there a minute ago, had it? She shook her head and pulled herself the rest of the way up the stairs.

  July 7, 2:05 P.M.

  Marisol

  SO HOLIER-THAN-THOU JAVIER was hanging with the gringa. Marisol saw them get on the bus together. It made total sense. She swore her blood reached a rolling boil as she got out of the car and walked down the underground parking lot ramp.

  She’d seen the limousine making its way down the same ramp a few minutes earlier. If he wouldn’t answer her calls she would find another way to talk to him.

  The basement door to the building’s elevator opened with a ding and released a flock of people who headed toward the idling black limo. And there, at their center like the eye of a hurricane, was Carlos Colón.

  Big man and his entourage. They didn’t know him like she did.

  Marisol walked to intercept him before he got into the car.

  “Don’t take calls from old girlfriends now that you’re a big shot?”

  He jumped at the unexpected voice, like he was afraid of something. When he realized who it was, he regained his star attitude and smiled. “I wouldn’t exactly call you a girlfriend, Marisol. We went to the movies when you were, what? Twelve? We hung out for a week, maybe two.”

  “Yeah, you should have some respect. From what I hear it’s the longest relationship you ever had.”

  The leggy girl in a micro dress next to him chuckled. Marisol turned her attention to her. “What are you laughing about, Barbie? Better get him to buy you some more plastic surgery before he dumps you, too.”

  The girl lurched toward Marisol. “Oh yeah, bitch? I’m gonna take off my earrings and you’re the one who’s gonna need some plastic surgery!” Carlos held the woman back as she stepped forward and, to Marisol’s amusement, literally took off her earrings.

  Marisol laughed and pointed. “Oh look! It’s Gangsta Barbie!”

  The entire entourage laughed but stopped as soon as Carlos turned around and gave them a look.

  “What do you want, Mari?” Carlos asked with a tired and way-too-old voice.

  “I want to know what killed my brother.”

  His face got serious then. Even he knew this was not a joking matter. “What? Or who? I loved Vico, you know that, but—”

  “Did you? Did you love him, Papi Gringo? Or were you so busy buying Lamborghinis and jewels for your cheap girlfriends”—Marisol continued to speak as the Gangsta Barbie strained against Carlos trying to get to her—“to notice that your old friends, los cangrejos, were dying?”

  Carlos’s face fell. “Look, no one’s more sorry than I am—”

  Marisol started to yell then. “No one? Really, Carlos? Vico was my brother! Don’t you think that makes me more sorry than you? Huh?”

  Carlos said in a tired voice, “Mari, why are you here? Really?”

  “Why? Because I know there’s more to why your cangrejo ‘brothers’ are dying, one by one, and I think you know more than you’re letting on.”

  “If I knew something, I would tell you. What would I have to gain?”

  Marisol put her hands on her hips. “I don’t know, maybe another hit song? That’s all that matters to you anyway. Not people. Not your people.”

  There was the thunder of feet coming down the driveway, and three men in security uniforms, hands on the guns at their belts, appeared at the mouth of the garage entrance behind her.

  Carlos put up his hand and they stopped. Marisol hated how his badly written rhymes gave him the power to control people like that. Leadership shouldn’t be about popularity.

  She really hated it.

  “Don’t worry, I’m going. All dangerous five-feet-nothing of me.” She turned back to Carlos. “I’m going to figure out why my brother died, and if I find out you had something to do with it, you’ll be wishing you were next!”

  The entourage broke out in a chorus then.

  “She just threatened you, man!”

  “I heard it!”

  “I got a photo of it!”

  She stormed through the security guards and up the driveway, the thumping in her head returning like her very own soundtrack.

  Her phone buzzed with a text. Keno. At least he didn’t forget where he came from, didn’t pretend to be something he wasn’t.

  Meet me in OSJ.

  July 7, 2:15 P.M.

  Lupe

  JAVIER’S JEAN-CLAD THIGH was pressing against hers, just as she had imagined. She felt like she should move her leg, but that would make it seem like she cared that his leg was touching hers. She realized he was smiling at her again. “What?”

  “So, Lupe Dávila. You’re not from Puerto Rico, verdad?”

  “You figure that out yourself?” She could tone down the sarcasm a bit. He didn’t seem to care, though. He was just smiling at her still, waiting. “I’m from Vermont.”

  “Ah, Vermont. Lots of skiing there, yes? And maple syrup?” He smiled, and she hated herself for it, but she couldn’t help smiling back. She loved the way he pronounced “syrup,” not to mention “maple.”

  “Yes, and armies of cows.”

  “We have those here, too. But your name is Spanish?”

  “Yeah, my father’s from here.” Why was she telling him all this? The bus slowly made its way toward Old San Juan. Small talk really wasn’t her thing and she needed to know what this guy Javier had to do with her uncle. She baited him. “And his brother, my uncle Esteban, works for the police department here.”

  “Sí, I know. I was there when you got into the … discussion, with Marisol.”

  She let out a laugh. “‘Discussion,’ that’s what you call it.”

  “Well, with Marisol, that’s how most discussions go.”

  “What a bitch.”

  Javier paused, and Lupe wondered if she’d stepped over some ill-behaved gringa line. So what if she did?

  Finally, he spoke. “She’s very … troubled.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I don’t think I need to.”

  Lupe stared at him. Was that a joke? She got an answer when he smiled that smile that went all the way up to his eyes, crinkling the skin at the edges like fireworks.

  Lupe’s heart surged like she’d just plugged it into a charger. There was something wrong with her. This guy had something to do with the two murders, and might know what was going on with her cousin Izzy. They weren’t on a date. It was time to get serious. “What did my uncle want from you at the church?”

  Javier looked out at the buildings buzzing by the bus windows. “The funeral was for a friend of mine, from when we were children.” He paused. “Vico was into some bad things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Selling drugs. Doing drugs. But he wasn’t always like that.”

  Yep, so his friends were drug dealers. “And that guy Guillermo? Was he one of your friends too?”

  “Yes. Vico, Memo, we were all close. Carlos, too.” He paused, like he was wondering whether to say something. “And your cousin Izzy. The five of us were like brothers.”

  Lupe’s heart was tight. Hearing her cousin’s name in that crew scared the hell out of her. Especially since two of them were dead. “Is Izzy into drugs?” Was that the mystery? She braced herself, though she was certain she already knew the answer. Even though she hadn’t seen him in a few years, it just seemed to fit.

  “He was. To be honest, I haven’t seen him in a while. Nobody has.”

  Her chest tightened. “What? He’s missing?” That was what they were keeping from her? Trying to “protect”
her as usual? They obviously didn’t know her at all.

  “Yes.” He rushed to add, “But he’s trying to get clean. When I stopped using, I had to disappear from much of my life.”

  So he was clean. But she’d heard that before. Her father “stopped drinking” several times a year. “How long since you’ve used?”

  “Two years.”

  Not bad. Longer than her father ever made it.

  A woman bustled by toward the exit with handfuls of Amigo grocery bags. Javier jumped up and held the door open for her as she smiled and made her way down the stairs.

  This guy had the knight complex bad. Lupe noticed that they had already reached the Condado. In contrast to the ride out, this trip was going by quickly.

  He sat down next to her. “My apologies.”

  This guy was too much.

  “I’m trying to find your cousin Izzy.”

  She one-upped him. “Me, too, but I’m also trying to find out who’s killing the others.”

  “The others? You mean Vico, right? Memo fell in an abandoned building.”

  He said that, but she could tell from the way he covered his mouth when he said it that he was lying. He didn’t think Memo fell on his own. Another skill learned on DOA Newark. She shrugged. “If you say so. I’m not convinced it was an accident.”

  “Don’t you think that’s best left to your uncle? To the professionals?”

  She turned her body to face him. “Yeah, well, sometimes the ‘professionals’ don’t see what’s right in front of their faces.”

  For the first time, she saw the smile settle out of his eyes. “And you think you can find something we can’t?”

  “Look, I don’t know who ‘we’ represents in that sentence, but if you think you’re somehow better than me—”

  “That seems to be what you think. You come down to the island once a year and assume you know more than your uncle? Than me?” He stood, his lean body taut. “I’m surprised. This seems to be more of a typical gringa attitude than I would’ve expected from you.”

  “First of all, you don’t know me so how can you ‘expect’ anything? And second—” She stood and faced him, boring her eyes into his. “I. Am. Not. A. Gringa.”

  The bus lurched to a stop and she was knocked off-balance and into Javier. For one second he grabbed her by her upper arms and righted her on her feet, and she yanked her body away from him. “Hands off!”

  “Fine. Next time I’ll just let you fall.”

  She noticed that everyone seemed to be exiting, and she looked up and saw the Old San Juan bus depot.

  She turned and stormed down the stairs, ignoring the wet towel slap of the hot afternoon air, and marched toward the terminal exit. Lupe was certain the footfalls behind her were Javier’s, but she would work on losing him in the press of tourists in the old city. She yelled back over her shoulder. “I don’t need an escort.”

  She got to the corner, looked down, and stepped off the curb.

  The next thing she felt was Javier’s hands grabbing her arms, pulling her up and back onto the sidewalk.

  “What—”

  In that same moment there was a blast of wind in front of her, blowing her dress back against her legs as a beat-up blue hatchback blew by them, plowing through the exact spot she had just vacated. She watched the hem of her skirt brush the car’s dusty side in slow motion. Lupe stared vacantly as it careened around the corner in a rattling cloud of exhaust and disappeared. For one long second she froze, heart pounding. Then she stumbled and turned toward him.

  Javier looked into her eyes like he could see into her. “Are you all right?”

  She was so confused, so distracted. She had to consciously look elsewhere in order to speak. “Fine.” Lupe’s legs started to shake as her body caught up with what had just happened. “I could have…” What? Handled it? Not likely. Died? More likely. But Javier wasn’t listening anyway. He was staring in the direction of the vehicle that almost hit her. “That car. It looked familiar.”

  “It did? Yeah, it did. I saw one like that near the bus stop outside Carlos’s building.”

  “Really?” He was staring as if he could still see it. “I wish I could remember where I’d seen it before.”

  They resumed walking in the direction of the café, each lost in their own thoughts.

  “Lupe, I don’t want to argue with you. I’m not sure why I was.”

  ’Cause I seem to have that effect on people. She kept that thought to herself. Let him think it’s his fault.

  He stopped and held out his hand for her to shake, and did that smiling thing with his eyes. “Truce?”

  She stopped, looked at his hand, and just nodded.

  He dropped his hand and continued to smile at her, but in a tired way. “It seems we both have the same goals.”

  She crossed her arms. The shakiness was beginning to pass, though she still felt a bit out of body. “And what are those?”

  “To find Izzy. And with him, figure out who’s killing the other cangrejos.”

  “The can-who-hos?”

  “Cangrejos, the crabs. That’s what our group was called. We were all born in July—”

  Lupe nodded. “Got it, July, Cancer the crab. But what was that about ‘killing’? I thought you said Guillermo had an accident?”

  “Let’s just say you made me think.”

  Lupe felt particularly smug at that. They continued walking. The setting sun was painting the city orange, the bright colors of the buildings changing with the light.

  “Where are you meeting your uncle?”

  Lupe pointed ahead to Café Poético on the Plaza de Armas. “At the café.” She looked at her phone. “In fifteen minutes.”

  Javier stopped walking. “As I was saying, seems we both want the same things. Maybe we could work together?”

  Lupe examined this boy across from her, wondering why he was so insistent on spending time with her. What did he want? She shook her head. “Not a good idea.”

  He gave her a sad kind of smile. “Can I at least give you my number? In case you need someone to ride the bus with you again?”

  Lupe was staring at him. His number? His brown eyes were twinkling, actually twinkling, in the afternoon sun. What was this guy’s deal?

  He stepped closer to her, so close she could smell the clean floral scent of detergent from his clothing, could feel the heat coming off his body. She went to hand him her phone so he could enter his number, but instead he produced a pen from his pocket, took her hand, and she watched as he wrote his number on the back, the black ink bold against her pale skin, his warm fingers cradling her palm.

  Javier stepped backward and smiled. “Miss Dávila. I hope I hear from you someday.”

  He turned around and she was staring at his back. She liked the way his legs bowed slightly at the knee as if flexed to spring, and the way his wide shoulders alternately lifted as he walked. And his manner was positively old-school. It infuriated and fascinated her all at once.

  Then he turned the corner and was gone.

  She headed up toward the café, occasionally looking at the number written on her hand, each seven crossed with a line in the middle like her father did. As if to spite her, her heart was beating a rhumba on the inside of her ribs. Plaza de Armas was bustling with after-work traffic. Hundreds of pigeons pecked, rose, and settled again in one mass like a scarf. The rushing of the water in the fountain provided background to the hum of conversation from the people walking through the park.

  She stepped into the café and saw her uncle was already inside, sipping a dark cafecito as he spoke into his cell phone. He waved Lupe over to the table, not breaking from the conversation. Her favorites, an iced vanilla latte and a slice of guava pastry, sat waiting for her. How did he remember that from the year before? She started to feel bad for deceiving him about where she’d been all day. And spending the afternoon with a musician and then a recovering drug addict who might be tied to his case. Oh, and then there was the issue of almost
getting run over. She almost laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of it all. She put the hand with the number written on it under the table and shoved half the guava cake in her mouth.

  Her phone buzzed and she looked at the screen. It was a message from a girl she knew from her high school, Jessica. Lupe smiled. She was sure the kids from her school were abuzz from the photo of her and Carlos.

  Isn’t this the same guy?

  The message included a link to a news site. The image was dark, but it was a photo of Carlos surrounded by a group of people, including the girl she’d seen at his apartment. They were facing a girl with a bunch of police officers or guards behind her. Lupe almost choked on her cake. She enlarged the image so she could see the girl clearer.

  It was Marisol from the church.

  It was posted a half hour ago, right after Lupe left.

  What the hell?

  Just then her uncle’s conversation came into focus. “Yes. Isadore Rivera and Javier Utierre. We need to talk to Isadore by midnight of the ninth, Utierre by the eleventh. Uh-huh, right, see you then.”

  Lupe just stared as he pressed the End button with his big forefinger. She tried not to appear too eager. “What was that about?”

  “Nothing, m’ija. You done with your cake?” He took what was left of her piece, shoved it in his mouth, and stood. “We have to head out to Guaynabo soon to meet your aunt. I’m taking us all out to dinner since I left in the middle of the night last night.”

  “Um, Izzy and Javier Utierre … are they suspects?” Why hadn’t she thought of that? Were Vico and Memo really Javier’s friends? Or his victims?

  Had she spent the afternoon with a murderer? And her cousin …

  “I know we usually talk about my cases, sobrina. But this one … I don’t want you to know anything about it.”

  She scurried to catch up with him. “Why the hell not?”

  His eyelids lowered.

  “I know, I know. Language, but what is it with this case, tío? You always tell me about your work. Is it because Izzy’s missing?”