Since then, there’d been no more talk about retirement.
Ever since Francesca’s death almost a decade before, when Navarro had begun pulling back in the Spanish underworld, the rival organizations began pecking away at the void like pigeons pushing into a seed pile. At first it had seemed that Lima’s group from the south might emerge, before the fateful explosion on that yacht at the Port of Santa Maria. Then it had been the originators of the Santa Marian fireball, the Italians, but their reign had only lasted a cup of coffee before they were sent away in a Neapolitan cargo ship loaded with body bags. When Los Leones had followed the flood of Italian blood, bringing with them the brutality they’d dominated the prisons with since the mid-century, Navarro had known his time was coming to an end. And he’d stepped aside gracefully.
In most areas.
For five full years he’d negotiated with Los Leones’ leader at the time, Severo Santana, “Sevi the Knife,” his moniker depicted by the twin daggers on the backs of his hands. Navarro had only angled to keep a few of Los Soldados’ best moneymakers. For a hardened criminal, Sevi had been a decent man. While he was a ruthless negotiator, he was at least practical, until that day five years ago when he’d been disemboweled by his top lieutenant. The lieutenant, Xavier Zambrano, a lean, chisel-faced ball of contempt, had arrogated the mantle and never looked back. He’d ceased all discussions with Navarro, sending word of a one-week truce before he declared war on Navarro’s entire operation.
That had been five years ago.
As the salty breeze pressed in, Navarro pulled one last drag from his Dunhill, pressing it into the planter at the corner of the patio. The sun was now behind his enclave, descending, adding comfortable, eastward shadows to the patio. Pressing his thumb and forefinger to his closed eyes, he recalled his initial indignation at the threats from the largely unknown León, Xavier, who’d spent the majority of his adult life in prison. For three days Navarro had sat awake, smoking and thinking, watching the sun and the moon travel across the sky, waiting as rival factions warred in his own mind. At the end of his patient cogitation, Navarro had summoned Valentin telling him what to yield and what to protect.
Now, rather than live under the shroud of a large guard force, Navarro had chosen to live independently, in anonymity. He prepared his own meals, or sent Valentin to retrieve them. When he desired entertainment, like the young woman who currently lay nude in his bed, Valentin delivered it in the blind rear of the Mercedes.
No one outside of his tight inner-circle knew exactly where Navarro’s three retreats were. Sure, there were rumors. People had seen him in places like Cadaques. But he only went there, or to a place like Tossa de Mar where he’d met Gage Hartline, under the watchful eyes of multiple guards.
He lived a very private, secure life.
Before Navarro told his dogs to stay and stepped back inside, he glanced southward down the beach, staring at the ribbon of sand and red rock that disappeared into the belly of Spain. The thought of the initial meeting with Hartline made him go back to what Hartline had said on the phone, about someone tracing his call. If that were true, Navarro thought with a measure of satisfaction, he could just imagine Xavier’s anger when he was told that, for whatever reason, the phone on the other end of the line wasn’t a regular cellular phone, it was a satellite phone and untraceable to a specific location.
But Navarro’s good humor slid away from him, bringing back the vinegary taste as he remembered what Hartline had said about Cesar. Why would Hartline lie? Unless the Leones had somehow turned him, he wouldn’t. And Cesar…he was just stupid enough to be taken in by Los Leones, who probably promised him all manner of shiny objects in return for his papa’s head. Cesar was certainly gullible enough to believe them.
As he crossed the bright white sitting room, an encouraging thought struck Navarro. This situation, as bizarre as it was, might work to everyone’s favor. Cesar knew nothing. Since he and Navarro had become estranged, which was before Xavier took over Los Leones, everything had changed. Navarro’s three retreats had all been purchased through an untraceable shell company. Cesar had no knowledge of anything other than Navarro’s previously jettisoned narcotics operation so, as long as Los Leones felt he was worth keeping around, even if Hartline decided to pull out, Cesar might be kept alive for the balance of his sentence.
That meant Navarro had twenty months to try to figure out some way to bring his son out alive. And twenty months was a long time. In that time, rather than try and protect Cesar with commandos like the American, perhaps Navarro would usher in a capable rival gang, teaching them of the macho Leones’ many weak points.
Yes, Navarro thought, his hand on the door of the bedroom, a flush spreading over his florid face. It will be much better to have a predictable enemy than a band of dishonorable convicts like Los Leones.
It’s a very good plan.
And now he would celebrate by letting the leggy young visitor bring him off before he ordered his evening meal. Reaching into his pocket, Navarro removed an erectile pill, biting down on it and letting it dissolve on his tongue so that it would work quickly.
The miracle of modern medicine.
He stepped into his bedroom.
* * *
“You’ve got a visitor,” the guard said to Gage. Gage had just come back inside from the yard, and still had the phone in his pocket.
“A visitor?” Gage’s right hand hung naturally, concealing the slight bulge from the phone.
The guard pointed to the cage-covered clock above the doors. “Yeah, and your twenty minutes started six minutes ago.”
His mind still occupied by what had happened with the satellite phone, Gage followed the guard’s instructions, walking ahead of him through a series of bright yellow doors. He was made to enter a holding cage and told to back to the bars on the left side with his hands clasped behind him. There his ankles and hands were shackled, quite tightly, before the far door slid open. A voice from the shadows told Gage to walk forward and to sit in the third cubby. When he did, the guard walked behind him and slid a musty curtain over the space. There was a screened hole in the thick glass in the front of the cubby and, on the other side, a gray stool inside of an identical space. Particles of dust settled slowly through the air, lit by the harsh light above the cubby.
One of Navarro’s people? Surely not Justina. Not yet.
After a minute of waiting, listening to snippets of muffled conversation from the adjacent prisoners, a light flashed on the other side of the thick glass and in she came. It was, indeed, his Justina, a lone peony in a field of scraggly weeds. For an almost uncontrollable instant, Gage wanted to scream a protestation over his inability to touch her. Instead, he bit his tongue and drank her in, feeling a tremor pass through his body. She was bronzed, wearing the same clothes she’d bought in Tossa de Mar, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. When his moment of agony had passed, Gage forced a smile, watching as Justina’s smile faded to concern, then something akin to horror.
“My God, your face,” she said, pointing. “And your shoulder, is that dried blood on your shirt?”
“Shhh,” Gage whispered, shaking his head. “Not here. Not here.”
“But what happened to you?”
“Remember my name?” he asked, arching his eyebrows.
“Gregory Harris.”
Winking, he lifted his chin. “I’m going to be fine, okay?”
Justina looked unconvinced, continuing to look at his shoulder.
“And…” he said, drawing it out, “I’ve told them to pull me out.”
Justina’s green eyes widened. Her lips parted and, though she looked very much the part of someone who wanted to be dissatisfied, glee overcame her as she clasped her hands. “Are you serious?”
“Quite.”
“When will that be?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. But I can’t do anything about the situation here. My being here is pointless.” He decided it best not to inform her of the threats against his li
fe.
“Will you make it until then?” she asked, looking at the blood.
“I went through a little trouble at first, but that’s been taken care of. Don’t you worry about it, okay?” Wanting desperately to touch the glass, Gage wrestled with his cuffs. “Would you want to go back home, back to where you’re from?”
“I’m not leaving here.”
He shook his head. “Not now…when I get out.”
“I just want to be with you.”
“Think about it, okay? Anywhere you want to go.”
“Anywhere?”
“Anywhere but here.”
They chatted about a number of things, mostly about what she’d been doing with herself, Justina growing more relaxed as the conversation flowed. She told him all about “Señora”, and how they’d spent nearly every evening together.
“Her daughter died and she goes on and on about how I act like her.”
“I’m glad you made a friend.”
The guard stepped behind Gage, sliding the curtain open. “Two minutes.”
“Have you gotten my letters?”
“One. I loved it.”
“There should be more on the way. I’ve written one, two, sometimes three a day.”
“I will treasure every word. Now, listen,” Gage said, leaning forward and turning serious. “When you leave here, you make sure you aren’t followed, okay? Find a long road that gives you a view for at least a kilometer behind you, and make sure there are no other cars. If there are, you drive as fast as you can, never once stopping, to the police down in Manresa, okay?”
“I remember all that you told me,” she said reassuringly. “So what happened to your shoulder?”
Gage dipped his head. “When I arrived, two men tested me.”
“And since then?”
“No one has bothered me and I’m certain no one will.”
They studied one another for ten more of their precious seconds. Before the guard arrived, Justina said, “Be careful, Gregory. I feel like you’re not telling me everything.”
“I will make it out of here.”
Just then, Gage was lifted by his arms, watching as she touched the glass and mouthed her love. The guard jerked Gage’s cuffs and led him away.
* * *
Justina sat in the cubby until she was retrieved. She was numb on the walk back to the car. She didn’t even check the road when she crossed it, earning a blaring horn from a passing car. As Justina drove away, recovering her senses, she thought about her brief meeting with the man she loved.
Though his reassurances had comforted her a little, she was very much unnerved by his appearance. He’d said he’d gotten into a fight when he arrived, but some of the cuts and bruises on his face were fresh.
And the quantity of blood on his shirt was far too large to have come from a regular fight.
Justina was also unnerved by something else, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It was just something she sensed.
She was right to be unnerved.
* * *
Navarro pushed the bedroom door open. On the ocean side of the room, just as they had in the sitting room, the filmy curtains fluttered in with the sea breeze. The bed’s inhabitant, a young Barcelonan beauty whose name Navarro had unfortunately forgotten, lay prone and swirled in his Egyptian cotton sheets, her tanned rear end propped up by a pillow underneath her midsection.
“Mmm,” she said after hearing the door click. “Who says modeling is the easiest money for a mujer hermosa?”
Navarro undid the belt on his robe, allowing it to fall away as he drank in the young lady’s splendor, feeling a doleful quiver in the pit of his belly. There was a time, back when ETA was assassinating enemies in the streets—back when Navarro could win a woman like this with nothing more than his looks and charm. But now here he was, old and paunchy and drug-aided, forced to pay ten thousand euro for a few days with a young woman who surely was disgusted by his appearance.
At least her willingness seemed genuine, he noted with some measure of satisfaction. She went to all fours, moving to him as he stood at the bed’s end while she swept her hair back and went to work on him. He touched her shoulder, rubbing it, feeling the fine, taut skin of her back, briefly wondering if she’d ever even heard of him.
Probably not, he decided, satisfied as the crushed pill went to work, pushing blood into his dear old friend.
The dogs barked outside.
“Calla!” he yelled, irritated at his wolf shepherds’ constant barking at any small breeze. It was this house, for whatever reason—they always seemed on edge here.
Suddenly, the hair on Navarro’s neck stood on end. Hartline’s warning…
No, he reassured himself. Valentin said it was impossible, as did the aerospace scientist. You’re on edge. Relax.
Navarro took several steadying breaths, coming back to the moment.
The girl…Pilar! Sí, Pilar…she pulled back, sweeping her hair to the other side of her neck in a practiced motion.
Modeling, my ass.
Pilar smiled up at him, her lips glistening as she said, “That feel good?”
“Yes, darling,” he murmured, pulling her back into position, thinking back to his heady days as an up-and-comer in Barcelona’s El Raval, when he was in his early twenties, clipping rival hoods and banging nightly beauties.
Oh, to have it all back.
Underneath his right hand Pilar’s back suddenly tensed, showing the striations of muscle as her skin tightened over her ribs. She pulled away. Simultaneously, a piercing scream echoed through the room, making Navarro lose his balance. The erectile dysfunction tab he’d just taken elevated his blood pressure and the sudden shock was a violent spike to his system.
He managed to catch the bed as he tumbled down, striking his rear end on the hard tile floor. The sharp pain from his tailbone breaking was eclipsed by the scene from the doorway he’d entered only moments before. Standing there, propped up by two gloved men, was his trusted friend and asesor, Valentin. The entire front of Valentin’s clothed body was covered in thick red blood. Though he was dead, his eyes were wide open and his partially severed tongue hung obscenely from his mouth. Behind the threesome, on the white deck, Navarro could see the remains of his wolf shepherds.
The two men shoved Valentin’s corpse into the room with a thump as Navarro scrambled to get away. Pilar lurched from the bed, sprinting to the open balcony door as one of the men raised a pistol, his arm elevating mechanically. An arrow of flame burst from the pistol’s barrel as Pilar fell forward, striking the doorframe and lying motionless.
“What do you want?” Navarro demanded, his back against the sturdy bedside table, while his right hand climbed the side of the bed as if it were independent of the rest of his body. The men were Leones; he could see their hideous neck tattoos.
One man was brandishing a short shotgun, casually holding it on Navarro, watching as the other shooter moved to Pilar’s body. He clucked his tongue, telling the other one that he’d have loved to have screwed her before he killed her.
Their collective laughter could only be described as evil.
Enraged and stunned by their impudence, Navarro could find no suitable words. Instead, he chewed his lower lip to blood, craning his head to the side, viewing Valentin, his old friend. Navarro hated himself for the tears and shudders that had suddenly erupted from his body.
“Señor Navarro, we are here to kill you,” the one with the shotgun said. “Eventually.”
“How did you find me?” Navarro muttered, his mind currently too jumbled to remember Gage’s warnings from an hour before.
The man with the short shotgun said, “We’ve been waiting here in Cadaques for almost a year.”
“You knew where I was for a whole year?”
As the one with the pistol stepped back to Navarro, his thick black utility boots leaving marks with each step on the white floor, the one with the shotgun knelt down. Navarro got a good look at his face. First a
nd foremost was the cruelty of the youthful eyes, like a person who might kill tame dogs for fun. The man was quite ugly, his face round and dominated by heavy jowls, out of place for a man of his lean stature. Below his pronounced widow’s peak, which both men claimed, was a scar only a few degrees from vertical, starting at mid-forehead, creating a valley through his nose, over his lips and terminating at his chin.
He lightly rapped the single barrel of the shotgun, a tactical Benelli that Navarro would have once enjoyed shooting, on Navarro’s knee and said, “No, Señor Navarro, we only knew you had a home in this area. Other duos like us are stationed in other areas in Spain where you are rumored to have homes...homes that you hide in like a scared little niña.” He motioned to Valentin. “And, before I sliced that piece of shit’s tongue, he gave me just about all of the information I needed. Tonight, because of your death, Julio and I will be heroes.”
Navarro squeezed his eyes shut and arched his head back to the heavens. This was the end. Seventy-four revolutions around the sun. A poverty-stricken child taken advantage of by a perverted uncle. An anonymous escape into the military, followed by an awakening that revealed the world as a treasure box just waiting to be opened. After he came home and killed his uncle, the pesetas turned to hundreds turned to thousands turned to millions. Navarro had spread innumerable pairs of beautiful legs, all while raising a mostly-charming family. Three daughters went their own way before Cesar defied logic as he went his. Then Francesca, his doting wife, had died in a twitching, agonal breathing mess that Navarro had prayed daily he might someday forget. But he’d had an eventual, glorious rebound, followed by many enjoyable years. And now it had to end like this. Why did the ending have to be so awful?
A strange thing occurred, as the sadness and great melancholy was swept out with one blast of wind from the sea that had meant so much to Navarro in his seventy four years. It was a burst of joy, and resolution, over one final challenge. A chance to write a fitting ending to his story. Resigned to his death, recalling a spurt of his impassioned youth, his constitution crackled as he pondered the exclamation point he might place on his denouement.
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