by Alex Segura
They reached a door midway through the hall. Mariela rapped on it, then turned the knob.
Pete followed her into a well-lit, small room. The space was empty aside from a small table and Emily. The woman who’d pretended to be Beatriz de Armas and Daniela Burgos sat, arms folded, eyes on Pete.
“You found me.”
Pete sat down across from her. He felt Mariela hovering behind him. “Harras is dead.”
“I didn’t want this,” she said, her expression stoic, unaffected by the news. “I didn’t want you or Harras to come after me.”
“Why did you come here?” Pete asked. “You’re right in the heart of Los Enfermos, Em. The people that killed Rick. That tried to kill me. They sent that man—Novo—to kill you—”
“You don’t know that,” Emily said “I wish you’d just left it all alone—now it’s getting more and more difficult for me to—”
“What?”
“You don’t know who sent Novo,” Emily said. “You have no idea what’s going on, Pete. Just go home.”
Pete waited a beat. “You were in Osvaldo Valdez’s house,” he said. “The night he was murdered. Why?”
“I—I was …” she hesitated. “I needed something. Something he had.”
“What?” Pete asked. “What did he have that you needed?”
Emily didn’t respond.
“My mother’s dream book,” Pete said. “You took the last pages, didn’t you? What’s on them? Where are they?”
“Not here,” she said. “But yes, I took them. I have them. I had to—”
“Emily,” Pete said, leaning forward. “What the fuck is going on? Who are you trying to protect by stealing those pages? At first I thought you were running—running from the Silent Death, from Los Enfermos … but I’m not sure anymore. Are you here to meet La Madrina? There’s still time to get out of this, Emily. Come with me. Let’s go back home. We can figure this out, okay?”
He heard the door click open a second before the realization hit. But by then it was too late. The footsteps stuttered into the room—four, maybe five men. The clicks and clacks of guns being cocked and loaded, certainly pointed at Pete’s head. He felt a barrel—it had to be the barrel of a gun—connecting with the back of his skull. His eyes stayed on Emily.
“I’m sorry, Pete, but I can’t let you fuck up what’s going down tonight,” she said, her voice a shattered whisper. “It’s out of my hands now.”
Then Pete’s vision went black.
“LEVÁNTATE, MIJO. GET up,” the voice, refined and breathy said in a familiar, stop-start English. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”
Pete felt his eyelids flutter open, but his vision was still coated in darkness. He felt rough hands on his arms, tugging at ropes holding them together. He was on a chair—a small, rickety one—and his head felt foggy and heavy, like he’d been sleeping for years but still not rested. The air was thick with dust and smoke. The last thing he remembered was Emily’s face. The expression of resignation that he’d already become familiar with, long before crossing the Florida Straits to find her again. She was gone.
“Muévete,” the voice said. “We have to go.”
He felt the ropes drop to the floor and arms slide under him, lifting him out of the chair.
“Tu amiga Beatriz me traicionó,” the voice said. “I don’t like that. Now I have to get my hands dirty. I might break a nail.”
Mariela.
“Where—where am I?”
“Cállate,” she said. “No tenemos mucho tiempo.” We don’t have much time.
“But, how?” Pete said, his voice slurred. “How am I alive?”
“Your friend, she did this. Ella te ayudó,” Mariela said. Emily helped you. “She had to—how do you say it—act tough for her people. There is a big meeting happening now. Todos están ahí.”
“She told you where I was?”
“Camina, Pete,” Mariela said, exasperated. “No tenemos suerte sin limite, niño.” Our luck isn’t unlimited.
She pulled-slash-dragged Pete for a few steps. As they reached the door, he stood more firmly, still not fully balanced, but able to carry most of his weight. She opened a door slowly, and light filtered into the room, which Pete could now see was a shed of some kind—light on carpeting, much less decorations. It was littered with tools and yard equipment. The chair where Pete had been tied was at the center of the cramped space.
“Who brought me here?”
“Los Enfermos, for sure.”
“Which ones?”
“Papo, ya debes saber que Los Enfermos no son pandilleras y nada más.” she said, pulling her along with him toward the light. Los Enfermos aren’t just a gang. “Your friend made it seem like you would be killed—had her men stash you in the room.”
Pete’s limbs felt rubbery, and his steps were hesitant.
Mariela seemed hurried but not panicked. The shed was tucked behind a medium-sized house on a residential street, its windows dark in the morning dusk.
Pete wondered how long he’d been out.
“Tienes que alejarte de esta isla. It is time to get you off this island,” she said as they reached the rusted, worn-down, off-white Ford Fairmont. She opened the door for Pete before scurrying to the driver’s side.
“No, no,” Pete said, more to himself, but Mariela heard him. “I need those pages. From my mother’s book—”
“Emily’s?” Mariela said with a grin. “Check the back seat.”
The trip to the airport was quick, Pete and Mariela silent in the rumbling car, the only sound coming from the pages as Pete flipped through the unexpected treasure trove Mariela had scored for him. It was more than he’d imagined—not just the remaining pages of his mother’s dream diary, but a small bound notebook that could prove much more valuable—a journal, of sorts, from what Pete could tell. Part scrap paper, part daily rundown. He wanted to immerse himself in the thing, to absorb his mother’s thoughts and quirks, but he couldn’t now. Not yet. He had to run. Run home.
“Thank you,” Pete said. “Thank you for this. How did you get it?”
“It was easy, mi amor,” Mariela said, her eyes on the road. “Your novia isn’t a gangster. Ella no sabe la calle. When she set you up, she left herself open. So, I acted scared. I cursed her out for double-crossing me—acted very mad. I knew she was heading to her meeting, so I left—headed straight for her place. The pages—were hidden there. Not very well, either. After that, it was just about figuring out where Los Enfermos were hiding you. I knew they had strict orders not to kill you—yet. So I had a little time. It just became a process of elimination.”
“You took a big risk,” Pete said, clutching the folder loaded with the remaining pages of his mother’s book. “Thank you.”
“Mijo, don’t you think I take a big risk here every damn day?” she said, turning to look at him. “¿Crees que es fácil vivir aquí? The old hates still exist, and we’re only as free as we want to be. Most people don’t know what it’s like otherwise, so we don’t push back. Estamos adormecido.” We are asleep.
Pete nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to say—anything to soothe the rough edges. Nothing that didn’t feel like a platitude or an outright lie. He felt the car lurch forward as the worn brakes creaked to a stop.
“Here we are,” Mariela said, as if the last few bits of conversation had never happened. “Don’t say my name. If they give you trouble, I don’t know if I can help you, but let me know.”
Pete leaned over and gave her a hug. A strong, forceful one.
She responded in kind, then pushed him back. “Adelante. Mourn your friend. Make his death mean something,” she said. “I know Emily is heading back there. She’s not made for this kind of thing, and she will have trouble explaining how you got away. She’s still running. Maybe you can find her and make some sense of it all.”
“Thank you,” Pete said. The memory of Harras jumped into his vision, jarring him. “Tell Angel—thank Padura for me. For his help.”<
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“I will,” she said. “But he won’t care. He just helps whoever is around. Like an old lady collecting stray cats.”
Pete tried to smile, then stepped out of the car into the brightening Cuban morning.
“YOU’VE BEEN MAKING a lot of trouble for us, Señor Fernandez,” Lidio Delgado said, shaking his head, a humorless smile on his paunchy face. “Big trouble.”
They were seated in the same tiny, stuffy office at José Martí Airport.
Pete hadn’t gotten far. A few minutes after reaching the ticket terminal to inquire about departing flights, he was tagged by two uniformed military men and ushered to the back room. Delgado came a few minutes later.
“Your friend is dead, as I am sure you know,” Delgado said, flipping through a stack of pages—what looked like printed out memos and records. “This is bad enough. An American dying on Cuban soil. But he is also FBI. Very bad.”
Pete didn’t respond. His hands clutched the folder Mariela had passed to him. Pages that might contain the truth about his mother’s killer.
“Do you have any words in your defense, Pedrito?” Delgado said, eyebrows popping up. “Before we take you into custody? You might be spending more time in Cuba than you had planned, eh?”
“I’m an American citizen,” Pete said. “You don’t think this’ll create problems for you? There’s a dead FBI agent in Havana and his family will be asking about his body—not to mention what happened.”
Delgado shrugged. “Not my problem, hermano,” he said. “That is—what’s the saying? Above my pay grade.”
“I think it’s very much your problem,” Pete said, his eyes darkening as they locked on the middle-management stooge. “You might want to check the news. My guess is my little message in a bottle got out—and my hometown isn’t very happy. You may want to give me my phone and visa back. After that, you might want to get me on the next plane out of here. With my friend Robert Harras’s body.”
Delgado’s expression changed from one of smug victory to confusion. He collected his papers and dashed out of the office.
A few minutes passed. When he returned, he had Pete’s visa and cell phone in hand.
“Te crees genio, eh?” You think you’re a genius? Delgado spat. “Well, now you can leave. We don’t want your kind of trouble here.”
Pete said nothing. He had no quips. No witty retorts. He just wanted to leave.
Delgado handed Pete his visa and phone.
Under different circumstances, Pete would have smiled. He snatched his belongings back and walked through the door toward the ticket terminal. He turned his phone on and saw the expected barrage of notifications—texts, emails, news alerts, missed calls. But one stood out—from Kathy.
The subject line was terse: URGENT—RE: ALTER.
The email itself only confirmed a sinking feeling Pete had been denying for longer than he cared to admit.
THE PLANE REACHED cruising altitude before Pete even considered opening the tattered folder he’d been gripping since leaving Mariela’s car. It was creased and crumpled. It was time, though.
Pete unlatched the small tray table in front of him and opened the folder. Inside were four pieces of paper, edges torn carefully. Someone had taken great care removing them from what had once been his mother’s dream book. Whatever was inside was dangerous enough for Emily to steal, but not enough for Osvaldo to solve the case. But to Pete it could be just enough to get him onto the next step in his investigation.
The first page was a sketch—rough, in pencil and colored markers—of a long dock, rocks and waves in the foreground. At the far end was a lighthouse. Over the building his mother had cut out letters from magazines to spell something: HOME. Under the cut-out letters, in her shaky scrawl was something else: TOO FAR NOW.
In an open patch of space, to the left of the main image, was a litany of words that cut to Pete’s core. It read like a laundry list of regrets—which proved to be exactly what they were.
UNFAITHFUL TO PEDRO
BAD MOM—CALL PETE MORE??
DRUNK
DRUGGIE
GOING TO GET FIRED
TOO EASY TO KEEP GOING …
Next to the top item—“UNFAITHFUL TO PEDRO”—was a long black mark. Someone—Pete’s gut didn’t think it was his mother’s doing—had blacked out some words with a marker. He tried to flip over the page to see if he could find any clue as to what was written originally, but had no luck. He sniffed the page. It smelled faintly of permanent marker. He cursed under his breath. He hadn’t expected his mother’s own dream book to be redacted.
The next page was another drawing. Two figures—a man and a woman, the woman leaning into the man, her head tilted up toward him. Next to the man’s head were a few words, in a loose, sloppy word balloon:
IT’S A BIG ZERO, BABY
The faces were replaced by cutouts from magazines or newspapers—color close-up images of rodent-like creatures, perhaps bats, their mouths open as if screaming. Two rabid mammals in a deadly embrace.
Pete felt his left eye twitch as he looked over the image. His mother’s art was visceral and raw. Coupled with the mixed media, it made for a haunting image. Underneath the art was another jagged-looking line of text:
WAS IT WORTH IT???
The final page was barely one—torn in half, with only the top included in the folder. Pete wasn’t sure if Emily or someone on her side had kept part of it or his mother had ripped it herself. The page was a mess. Scratchy text, charcoal-fueled drawings of monstrous, demonic creatures surrounded by fire. At the center was a clear, empty circle, with only one word written inside it: PETE.
He felt his temperature rise as he looked over the rest of the page. Two names written in stark, large red letters—followed by two crossed out in the same black marker.
MELTZER
FERNANDEZ
“Meltzer?” Pete asked aloud. The name was new to him. He assumed Fernandez was a reference to his father. He couldn’t make out the last name, but he saw just enough of the third one to make a guess. The top points of an “M” combined with the curved bottoms of a “U” and “J” could mean only one person: MUJICA. Alvaro Mujica.
But who was Meltzer? And who was the fourth, final name almost illegibly written on the last page of his mother’s dream book?
Pete fell back into his seat. He felt the darkness and despair starting to seep in through the edges, the dam starting to crack.
But he wouldn’t let himself be overwhelmed. He’d been through too much to get to this point. And, for once, he had people depending on him. A future. A chance to do right by someone in a way his mother never could.
Pete closed the folder and fell into a brief, fitful sleep.
“WHERE THE HELL is Pete Fernandez?” Kathy said.
The words bounced off the walls of the tiny kitchen nook at Caballero-Rivero Funeral Home on Southwest Eighth Street in Little Havana.
Dave Mendoza leaned back on a vending machine, his expression blank. Kathy’s lanky figure loomed over him, hands on her hips. They knew that Pete had been back for a little over a week, but beyond that, they knew little else. She’d been inundated with requests—calls, visits, casual run-ins while out of the house—from an alphabet soup that included the FBI, TSA, and some other acronyms she’d forgotten. and DHS, to name a few. But she had nothing to share with them. Pete Fernandez was in the wind, and even his best friend couldn’t tell them when he would surface.
She could easily rattle off a handful of questions the orgs would be jonesing to ask him. Why did Pete leave Cuba? Was he around when Robert Harras was brutally murdered? How had he managed to disappear for a few days while Cuban authorities were left to clean up the mess of his friend’s death? How did he avoid being intercepted at Miami International Airport?
She knew Pete had been through this before. Not in the same way, but he was no stranger to being questioned. No stranger to playing defense with authorities. But now he was completely off the grid, not even checking i
n at home or reaching out to Dave, who had often served as his “in case of emergency” glass case. That small, itchy feeling in the back of her mind—the knowing whisper she often ignored—was getting louder: “He’s dead.”
“Haven’t heard from him,” Dave said, shaking his head. “I know he was on the plane that came back with … Harras. With his body. Thought he’d at least be here.”
“You’d think, yes. I’m just trying to figure out why he’s gone dark on us,” Kathy said. “Why not regroup and try to figure out who did this to Harras?”
“It was Los Enfermos,” Dave said. “That’s the word. At least from what I can tell. The rest, well, we need to figure out.”
“We’d better work fast,” Kathy said, her eyes red and wet. “I don’t know how much more of this we can take.” She grasped Dave’s shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
“Fine, I guess,” Dave said. “Numb. Feels like everything’s falling apart in slow motion.”
“Any word on where Emily might be?” Kathy asked. “Did she get out of Cuba?”
“Nothing,” Dave said. “Tried asking around using all her known identities, but I’m not really talking to—well, most of the people who would have that intel.”
Dave was still sober. Working his program. Trying to keep on the right side of the street. However, he still had friends from his days running drugs and dealing with the Miami underworld.
Kathy couldn’t bring herself to pressure him. She knew well enough—from just being around Pete and from her own family’s demons—the risks that came with revisiting people, places, and things from a past, darker life.
“Nothing, like zero, or maybe a small something?” Kathy asked. “Give me a little hope here, Mendoza.”
“Nothing concrete, really,” Dave said, fidgeting, rubbing his left wrist. “Mujica’s making some moves. Arming up, apparently.”
“Maybe he’s feeling the heat?” Kathy asked.
“From whom?”
“From us? From Los Enfermos? I dunno,” Kathy said. “I can’t think straight. I’m exhausted, I’m living out of a suitcase, Pete is gone, and Harras is dead. I’m ready to hop in a car and have this baby in the woods.”
