Sweet Mary

by Liz Balmaseda

  “Drop the knife,” I said.

  “No,” she said, trembling still.

  “Drop it now,” I said, shoving the gun closer.

  “If you want it, come and get it, bitch.”

  And I did. I whipped the knife out of her hand with the gun, and I grabbed it off the floor. I must admit, I had a hard time believing that I was the one left standing—with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other. She, on the other hand, was slumped on the floor. But I knew I couldn’t afford to be too cocky or confident. A woman like Maria Portilla always has a plan B.

  “You’re a psychopath idiot. I don’t know what you want from me,” she said. Slowly she climbed onto a chair.

  “I want it all back,” I said in an almost clinical way. “My job. My reputation. But most importantly, I want my son.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  She lifted her chin and said nothing, as if trying to engage me in a game of chicken. Browbeating was the only weapon she had left within her reach, for I had the Glock and I had the butcher knife and I had checked the drawers and cabinets to find no other firearms or explosives. So she was determined to browbeat both weapons out of my hands. Fine, I thought, game on.

  But there came a very distinct moment in our tense little standoff when she realized she had been outplayed. It was the moment when, the Glock in hand and the knife guarded at my side, I swiped one of her cigarettes and fired it up, taking a long, slow drag. I pulled up a country-style kitchen chair and sat down, propping my feet up on the kitchen table. Truth be told, I didn’t recognize the woman who took possession of my body that night. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t throw my feet up on tables. I didn’t sit with my legs open, an elbow angled on a knee. But in a rush of adrenaline, I became a horrid imitation of what I imagined a bad chick to be.

  Bad Mary straightened her shoulders and narrowed her eyes with a swagger I had not yet seen, and for the first time that day I glimpsed the thug in her.

  “Get out of my house, puta,” she said.

  I swung around in my chair and aimed the gun at her again.

  “No,” I said, pointing it at her heart. “You get out of mine.”

  I kicked a country-style chair toward her.

  “Sit down,” I said, rising to my feet.

  She obliged.

  “Your name is not Sofia Villanueva,” I said, pacing, stopping every so often to linger over her. “You’re not a cookbook author at all. You’re a drug dealer. You were born the sixteenth of July in 1969 in Cali, Colombia. You entered New Mexico on the twenty-seventh of December, in 1998. You vanished one month later. Were you in Colombia? Were you in Key West? Were you in New York? Who knows? But what the feds do know is that you’ve been on the run ever since. Now, aren’t you tired of running, Maria Portilla?”

  Bad Mary glanced off without a word.

  “Thirty days ago, federal agents crashed through my front door,” I said. “They ransacked my house. They took me away in shackles. They did this in front of my son. And do you know why?”

  “I haven’t the slightest clue,” she said, glassy eyed from wine and rage.

  “Because they thought I was a drug queenpin,” I said.

  “Well, Angela, maybe they’re right,” she said.

  “My name isn’t Angela. It’s Mary. They thought I was a drug queenpin named Maria Portilla. La Reina of the Cardenal crime family. They thought I was you,” I said.

  “You’re a fucking liar,” she said.

  “And you’re La Reina.”

  “That’s not me,” she said.

  “Prove it.”

  “That’s not who I am.”

  “Right.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I don’t know what happened to you, but it’s not my fault,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “As long as you’re out there, I have to live under a cloud of suspicion. As long as you’re on the run, I have no life. People will always think of me as a lowlife drug dealer. They’ll think my life, my nice, upstanding life, is just a disguise. They’ll think my business is a front. They’ll think my family is immoral. They’ll think my son is better off with his father. So I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’m going to have to turn you in, so I can go on with my life. My original life.”

  She gave me a look of disbelief, then collapsed onto the kitchen table in heaving sobs.

  “You think I’m running away from the feds?” she said with a snort. “The feds are nothing. The feds are easy.”

  “Good. So you won’t have a problem when I take you in,” I said, trying to detach from her hysterics.

  “You don’t understand. Whatever they do to me, it’s nothing compared to what my ex-husband will do to me if he ever finds me. And he can find me anywhere, even in federal detention,” she said.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I said aloud, but only to myself. “I’ve got one of those myself.”

  “But my ex is not just any ex. My ex-husband is Juan Cardenal,” she said, letting the name resound in a theatrical pause. “He said he’d kill me if I ever tried to leave him.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t believe you,” I said, although I did in fact believe her. But I wanted her to tell me more. “If that’s true, why are you still alive?”

  “Because I’m very good at hiding,” she said, rather proud of herself.

  “Hate to break it to you, but if a novice real estate agent from Miami can find you, you’re not that good,” I said.

  “You have no idea how ruthless this man is. He is so controlling of everything,” she said, undaunted by the slight. “Example: He’s the kind of man who goes to your house, and he doesn’t like your furniture. So he buys you new furniture. He goes into your closet and he doesn’t like your clothes, so he buys you new clothes. He looks into your eyes and he doesn’t like your face…”

  She broke down again, then she flipped over a section of her hair to reveal a ghastly scar.

  “So he buys you a new one,” she said, heaving. “And the worst part is…”

  But she couldn’t finish the thought.

  “What?” I said, growing impatient with all the sobbing and husband talk. “What already?”

  “I let his son come with me. He begged me—he promised to help me. Stupidly, I believed him.”

  I should have connected the dots of the Cardenal crime family much sooner, but I was too busy zeroing in on Bad Mary. Her business associate was, indeed, a Cardenal. He was the one Fat Gus had referred to as “some rich junior.” When I overheard the fight in the kitchen earlier that night, I had glossed over El Flaco’s threats. I realized, in retrospect, he was talking about Juan Cardenal, and that Juan Cardenal was his father. If his threats were real, he had already sent a message to the kingpin, disclosing Bad Mary’s whereabouts. And it all made sense now as I thought about it. With the flashy car and the shopping sprees, El Flaco was living the life of someone who wanted to get noticed, someone who didn’t want to hide anymore, or, perhaps, someone working for the other side. El Flaco had flipped on her. And if this was true, her life truly was in danger.

  “Francisco Jose Cardenal,” I said, remembering the name from the court documents.

  “Yes,” she said. “El Flaco. He hates me. He knows I have his father’s money, so he hounds me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He hounds me for stupid things. Expensive things. Clothes, jewelry, expensive toys,” she said. “He wants everybody in the world to know he’s a millionaire, swine that he is. He doesn’t give a shit if they find us.”

  “So where’s the money?” I said.

  “I don’t care about the money,” she said. “Seriously, I don’t care.”

  She gave me a pathetic victim look that peeved me to no end. She didn’t care about the money? As a woman who had walked away from a wealthy man without a dime of alimony, I found her contention to be pretty lame. She wasn’t trying to mak
e it on her own, the way I did after my divorce. She was still sponging off the old geezer’s money, financing her big adventure in suburbia—the spa treatments and crafting blitzes and culinary dabbling and late-night addiction to the Home Shopping Network—with stolen riches.

  If there was something in life I despised more fiercely than a liar or a poseur, it was a woman who couldn’t stand on her own, a woman who refused to handle her business. A woman like that gave the rest of us a bad name.

  “You don’t care about the money,” I said, tossing her words back in her face.

  “Seriously, I don’t,” she said, attempting to sound earnest.

  “Then why did you take it?” I said in a hardened tone.

  “I had my reasons,” she said, glancing away.

  “Why did you take the money?” I said, narrowing my eyes on her.

  She stiffened up a bit and met my stare.

  “Because I wanted to take his power,” she said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “His money is his power.”

  “You’re rationalizing.”

  “It is—the money is his power,” she said, pounding a fist on the table.

  “The cartel is his power. The drug trade is his power. The thug violence is his power. Power is his power. The money is replaceable,” I said.

  A look of panic flashed in Bad Mary’s eyes. Her greed had not allowed her to look past the money, to consider the ramifications of her theft.

  “When you took the money, you declared war. Not because it was his power or because he couldn’t live without it, but because you stole from him. Plain and simple. You fired the first shot,” I said. “So what happens now if he finds you?”

  “I’m dead.”

  “Exactly. Where’s the money?”

  By now, Bad Mary was a sniveling mess. The truth is I didn’t expect her to answer me. I was simply stalling, checking my cell phone every few moments for a sign of life from the outside. As annoying as I found her to be, I feared she could be right. What if Cardenal was, as we spoke, on his way to kill her? She may have been called La Reina once upon a time, but now she seemed to be anything but the poster girl for the drug queens of the world. She was just another woman trying to shake a hateful ex-husband.

  I didn’t expect her to answer me. But she did.

  “It’s in an offshore account,” she said between sobs.

  I don’t think she noticed when I flinched in surprise. And, certainly, she didn’t know that I had not planned for this. In the scenario of her capture I had planned, the possible retrieval of stolen funds from offshore accounts never entered the picture. But I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “Where’s this account?” I said.

  Bad Mary couldn’t answer. She wept inconsolably beneath the jarring fluorescent light of the kitchen interrogation room. As she did, the headlights from a slow-moving vehicle pierced the shrubbery outside, along Sunset Terrace. The vehicle came to a stop outside Bad Mary’s house and its driver got out with a slam of the door. Moments later, the black-gloved hand of the unseen stranger reached for a pistol-grip shotgun and a munitions satchel.

  I neither saw nor heard any of this. I didn’t know there was anyone there until I heard someone kick the front door open. My thoughts raced through the worst possible scenarios of abduction and murder. Panicked, I threw an arm around Bad Mary’s neck and pressed the revolver to her cheek.

  “Walk,” I said, trying to hide my nerves as I thrust her forth as my shield.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered, scared out of her mind.

  “I don’t know,” I said in a similar murmur—and, unfortunately, I was telling the truth. “Walk.”

  We inched along the wall to the great room, turning a corner to find only vacant shadows along the corridor. Tightening my grip on her, I slid along the wall until I reached the corner just before the living room. Whoever it was, the invader was standing on the other side of that corner. I clutched Bad Mary tighter and charged around the corner into the living room with an uncharacteristic, guttural scream.

  “Who’s there? Identify yourself,” I said, roaring the words. “I’ve got a gun.”

  I gasped as I came face to face with the barrel of a Remington short pump shotgun. TacStar rear pistol grip and a twelve-inch ported barrel. Serious heat.

  “I’ve got a gun, too,” the invader said, half-amused.

  After one look, I dropped my arms and released the grip on my hostage, who gave the invader a curious once-over: the short black skirt. The black knee-high boots. The tight black gloves.

  “What the hell took you so long?” I said.

  “Traffic was a mother,” said the invader, plopping herself on a sofa as only Gina could do in the middle of a hostage crisis.

  “Who’s she?” said Bad Mary.

  “My business partner. Go sit over there while I talk to her,” I said, motioning to an armchair in the living room. I held up the Glock to remind her I was still in charge.

  Keeping an eye on the captive, I pulled Gina aside and quietly brought her up to speed. The late hour and the possibility that El Flaco or Cardenal himself could be on the way to find Bad Mary added a layer of urgency I had not planned for. I had planned to corral the woman and call the authorities, stand guard over her until they arrived to arrest her. But the fact that Agent Green had not called, coupled with my fear that no other law enforcement officer would believe me—one look at my unregistered firearm and my heat-packing accomplice and they’d haul us both in for sure—forced me to change my plans.

  “We have to find a way to get her out of here,” I told Gina. “I don’t think she’ll go voluntarily, and I don’t want to drive all the way to Miami with a gun on this woman.”

  “Why not?” said Gina.

  “Because it’s a stupid idea,” I said. “What happens if I get pulled over? There’s got to be some other way.”

  “I brought Xanax,” she said.

  “Now you’re thinking.”

  But I stopped Gina as she reached into her bag for the pills.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  There was something else I needed to do while Bad Mary was still lucid: I needed to track down the money. Granted, I didn’t need to track down the money. But it certainly would score major points with the feds. If I could deliver that kind of money, or at least some rock-solid information leading to its retrieval, I wouldn’t go down in history as some random vigilante. I would be a hero. So, yes, I could have doped up Bad Mary and taken her in with minimal effort. But after she told me about the money and the offshore account, it was all I could think about. Where was it? How much was there? Ten million? Twenty million? How much was a drug kingpin worth? I came to view the situation not as a tangent I ought to ignore but as a puzzle I had to solve. I had come so far. I had cornered my suspect, broken her down, rendered her virtually harmless. Why not go all the way?

  Yes, I could think of many reasons why I should walk away from the proverbial money on the table:

  A) It could delay my mission.

  B) It was risky.

  C) It belonged to a notorious drug lord.

  But I could think of one convincing reason to track down Bad Mary’s stolen funds: If I recovered the money, I’d take her power. I’d take away her access to premium, highfalutin lawyers and cushy backroom deals and hired guns who might smuggle her to freedom.

  In the case of Juan Cardenal, that money was replaceable. His extensive drug trafficking operation would see to it. But Maria Portilla had no such operation. Her infamous title, La Reina, was honorary at best, as I was beginning to see. In truth, I would come to learn, she was a cog in the Cardenal machine—nothing more. Without Cardenal’s money, she had zilch. She had no job, no support system, no discernible skills or experience. She was a former cabaret dancer who teased and flirted and whored her way to the lap of Cali’s most distinguished gangster. And once she had secured her place in his bed, she aimed for the stars: shopping in Milan. Wine tours in the Loire V
alley. Concerts in Vegas. Berlitz courses in Miami. She polished her English and her table manners—somewhat, anyway—and eventually grew bored with the exquisite plateau that was life on Cardenal’s tab. Soon enough, she set her sights on something greater than that plateau: his empire. She gained his professional trust by running some moderate-level drug deals at first—enter Operation Colombian Snow—and later progressed to more lucrative and brutal ventures.

  I would learn days later that the nadir of her drug-running career had come just after midnight one January night some years earlier, when three of her bodyguards went missing during the Carnaval del Diablo in Riosucio, when the devil figure and his band of fallen angels spring through the town. She sent some of Cardenal’s men out to investigate, but they returned with sobering news: Her bodyguards had been taken hostage by paramilitary thugs demanding a ransom of one million dollars. It was chump change for the lives of three loyal servants. But La Reina, who just days earlier had blown a half mil on a Parisian shopping spree, refused to pay. Two weeks later, a box arrived at the gates of the compound she shared with Juan Cardenal. A housekeeper opened it to find three ripped-out human hearts.

  La Reina never took responsibility for precipitating those killings. She blamed the ransom messengers, the families of the bodyguards, the inclement weather, everything and everybody except herself.

  Now, in her living room, she fidgeted in the armchair as she tried to eavesdrop on my conversation with Gina. I pulled up a seat in front of her.

  “Where’s the money?” I said.

  “I told you already—offshore,” she said.

  “That’s not good enough,” I said, glancing over at Gina, who was quickly catching on. She strolled over to where Bad Mary was sitting and gave her shoulder a little tap with the barrel of the Remington.

  “Come on, Reina, you can do better than that,” Gina told her.

  Bad Mary bristled. She hated Gina, I could tell by the way she stared at her in disgust, her tanned legs; her tiny waist; the perfect, all-natural lines of her breasts; her smooth skin, untouched by any scalpel, needle, or laser; and her hair, the flowing, lustrous, jet-black mane that swept past her shoulders as she strutted in those boots, those tight killer boots.