She glanced back at the street behind her, empty, no sign of the man at all, and she slumped behind a parked car, catching her breath. She stared at the house, at the fading blue shudders and the dead vines swallowing up the entire west face. That’s when she saw it. The window. It was open again, a dark silhouette climbing out.
Rani jumped behind a parked car and watched as the boy from the beach lowered himself down onto the fence, teetering there a moment before jumping down into a run toward the end of the street. Rani couldn’t believe he’d come back, that he’d risked her killing him, and all for a rosary.
When he disappeared around the corner Rani ran for the back of the house, slipping in through the unlocked gate. She peered through the window next to the backdoor, searching the shadows for another member of the cartel, their girth swelling against one of the dark walls. She waited, listening for the boy’s footsteps to approach the gate again, for someone to step onto the linoleum floor of the empty kitchen. But there was no one.
She left the door ajar as she stepped into the house, her hand clutching the knob as she examined the empty space. Sunlight past through the covered windows, the morning cutting the room in translucent shards. It pooled there on the floor, highlighting the soft angles of something abandoned in a small heap. Rani eyed the fabric, tattered and twisted on the floor, something familiar running along the stitching.
She knelt down, fingers running along the sleeve of her sister’s sweater, the other hand gripping Nadia’s coat and pulling it into her lap. She pulled a blouse to her face, inhaling until her chest sputtered from the proximity, from the sudden assault of her sister’s ghost. But she wasn’t a ghost. Not yet.
Rani sifted through Nadia’s things, every brush of her hand igniting her sister’s scent until she was swaddled in it and her things were tucked safely in her coat. Then Rani stepped back onto the empty street, shivering as she carried Nadia’s things back to their dilapidated hideout through the paltry paradise she still wanted so desperately to cling to.
Chapter 6
Rani
For the last drop, the drop that was going to change everything, Nadia was expected to complete the transaction as usual, take the money to be delivered to the drug lords in Colombia, and then board the plane home. But she didn’t. She ran. She was shuttled back to the airport, the driver’s eyes lingering on her until she slipped out of view between those sliding glass doors, and then she vanished.
They’d had a plan, vague for the sake of their safety but also completely intact. They were to meet Nadia in a park across the bridge where they would take one of the city buses to the local train station before buying five tickets to some cornfield in the Midwest where the sky was everywhere and the cartel didn’t exist.
They could buy a house in the middle of nowhere, the only semblance of a road trodden by their bare feet instead of tires, and they could sit outside, watching the sun blink out over the horizon, unafraid of the dark. That was the plan. Only Nadia wasn’t waiting for them when they landed and she hadn’t been at the motel where she’d told Rani she might be staying.
Rani mulled over the calculations. Nadia’s flight back to Colombia wasn’t set to land until early the next morning. There was no way the cartel had already known she’d fled with their money. Unless something happened. Unless…the boy. He had her clothes, her things. She must have been back with them at some point. Maybe she still was.
Rani remembered watching her sister leaning over the kitchen sink, fingers biting into the counter as she swallowed an entire bowl of grapes, her tongue and jaw working slow and synchronized as she tried not to break the thin peel. She stood there practicing, stretching every part of herself for months. But sometimes being careful isn’t enough. Because sometimes things just break—plans, bones, thin latex capsules—sometimes things just break. And what if Nadia was broken?
“Why would he do that?” Max said, one of Nadia’s jackets spread across his knees.
He was still avoiding Rani’s eyes and the dark welt that was rising there. Just some bum, she’d said, lost his mind for a minute, that’s all. She bit at her jacket sleeve, covering her torn lip. It was easier for Breezy and Enzo if they just acted like nothing was wrong; it was easier for Rani too. So Max held his tongue, his gaze shifting from his hands to Nadia’s things, but never to his sister’s face.
“I threatened to kill him,” Rani said.
“More than once,” Max scoffed. “Do you think he knows something?”
Rani thought about the boy trudging up that street of foreclosed homes, pastel colored fabrics and a box of cassette tapes clutched to his chest as he scaled through a second story window. She thought he’d been thinking of the rosary, of maybe making a trade somehow. But what if he was thinking of something else? What if he was thinking of Nadia, of her body strewn across a cold, dark floor while a faction of narcos eyed her swollen belly like a pack of wolves?
“We have to talk to him,” Max said.
“No,” Rani stopped him. “I mean, what if he told them we’re here?”
“What? Do you think they’d want to—”
“I don’t know what they’d want,” Rani cut him off, nodding toward Breezy and Enzo. “But I know it wouldn’t be good.”
“But are you sure? I mean about that guy. You really think he’d be sleeping on the beach if he were working for them?”
“We saw him there,” Rani reminded him.
The streets there existed on a sloping grid, everything sinking toward the bay. Nadia hadn’t seen anything beyond the shifting route to and from the airport, street signs she couldn’t pronounce warped within the cab’s soiled window. But she remembered the Hancock building, sharp angles jutting up into a pale grey sky. No matter where she was in the city or which route one of the cartel’s drivers decided to take that day, it always hung there, suspended from the smog like some mechanical beast.
And that’s how Rani found the Chinese restaurant the cartel used to launder their money. After four days of exploring the city on foot, the skyscraper her sister had told her about always just a glance over her right shoulder, the city that had swallowed Nadia whole suddenly began to merge with the Americana architecture, brick paved roads, and flashing neon lights that she’d spoken of, a yearning lilt to her voice.
Rani’d lingered by the bus stop across the street for days, feet hiked up on the wooden bench, or leaning against the weathered glass enclosure while men and their mules filed in and out of every storefront on the block.
Men in suits entered through the door of the Chinese restaurant and exited down the street from a buzzing record store wearing a different set of clothes, everything about them altered except for the way they watched the street and the tattoos bleeding from the edge of their hairline.
She watched them, waiting for Nadia to come stumbling out after some thug, his knuckles blanched around the back of her neck as he pushed her into an unmarked car. There were other mules, their eyes low, their hands gripping the collar of a jacket too thin to warrant a long stay. And she’d seen the boy too, making his way toward the alley, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. But she never saw Nadia.
Max looked down at his hands and tried to wring the cold from his fingers. Even inside the trailer it still managed to seethe up from the floor, swaddling them as they tried to sleep. And yet she’d found him there—in the dark, in the cold. Why would the boy be sleeping on the beach if he had a number of gang member’s couches he could crash on?
“He knew where we were hiding. He followed you there. He had plenty of opportunity to turn us in and he didn’t,” Max said.
“It was dark that night on the beach. He didn’t recognize me until he broke into the house. What if he was going to tell someone about us but we left before he had the chance?”
“That still doesn’t explain why he would come back to leave us her things and you said you saw him there alone right?”
Rani nodded.
“He obviously hadn�
�t expected us to be long gone by then but he still came alone.”
“Or maybe he’s just stupid.”
“I think he knows something,” Max said, his hands still gripping Nadia’s jacket.
And he was right. This boy, this stranger, he did know something. But that wasn’t the question. The question was could they trust him.
“Tonight,” Rani said. “I’ll go.”
“Not alone.”
“Yes, alone. It’s not safe.”
“Exactly.”
Rani reached for Nadia’s jacket, freeing the zipper before slipping it over Breezy’s shoulders. She watched her sister, arms burrowing into the large sleeves. Then she looked at Max.
“I’m going alone.”
Rani waited until it was late and she was sure he’d settled somewhere. She hadn’t expected him to be curled up beneath that lifeguard stand again, exposed and so close to the water that was now churning onto shore. But as she made her way down onto the beach, there he was, his silhouette trapped behind a dark, fluttering shadow—a plastic tarp he’d hung between him and the cold spray. She waited, looking for movement. But he was still.
She crept closer, not sure how to approach him. The cold may have numbed his body but not his instincts and even though he was still, she knew he wasn’t sleeping. She moved toward him, fingers grazing one of the beams as she tried to steady herself. She thought about putting her hands on him, shaking him awake, but she didn’t want him to think she was attacking him again. So she hung back, peering at him from behind one of the beams, and then she called to him.
Her voice fell, shallow and stilted, the wind pulling it to pieces. She called again, louder this time and he sat up, hands raised, examining the empty air. He blinked, eyes adjusting to the dark and when he saw Rani, he scrambled to his feet.
“Shit, what the hell do you want from me?”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Rani started. “I won’t if you answer my questions.”
He took a step back, his hands still raised and roaming the darkness. “I don’t appreciate being threatened,” he said.
“Please.” She’d tried to swallow it but the word came out anyway.
He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “What do you want?”
Rani lowered her voice, trying to steady it. “What do you know about my sister?”
She felt him staring at her face, at the new shadows that had bloomed there. But when she looked at him he turned, staring down the beach.
“I don’t know what happened to her.”
“You’re lying,” she said, her jaw tight. “You had her things and I saw you with them.”
“I’m not with them,” he said, his voice hard and raised.
“I saw you,” Rani pressed.
She watched his hands move to the hem of his shirt, his fingers wringing the thin fabric. The moon swelled against his skin, climbing his torso, and then she saw it rising along his ribcage, spreading across his chest—bright red welts, some of them scabbed over, the dried blood glowing angry against his skin.
“Did they do that to you?” Rani whispered.
“I don’t know where your sister is. She got away from them somehow.”
“And you?” Rani said.
“I’m working on it. This,” he said, gesturing to the wounds now hidden beneath his shirt, “was for not cooperating. Probably would have killed me if I wasn’t family.”
“Family?”
He shook his head. “They think it means something. But it doesn’t.”
“It means everything,” Rani said.
“Not to me.” He slumped against one of the beams, hands reaching for his pockets again.
“Did you see her?” Rani asked.
“No. I’d just heard about her.”
“Heard what?”
“That some mule had taken their money and ran, didn’t pay the supplier in Colombia, hadn’t even landed.”
“And her things?”
“I found her bag at the clubhouse and took it with me when I ran off. I was kind of in a hurry; figured it might have something useful in it.”
Rani narrowed her eyes, staring at her feet. “Wait.” She looked up. “So she was never with them again after they dropped her off at the airport?”
“They never drive mules to and from the airport. It’s too much of a risk. They always send them in a taxi and pay off the cabby to make sure they get there on time and in one piece. No detours aloud.”
“No. She told me they were picking her up. I was on the phone with her as they were pulling into the airport. She said she could see them coming.”
“That’s impossible. I’m telling you, they would never do that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive. Never.”
Rani felt the air sputtering in her chest. She shook her head. “Then who picked her up?”
“Maybe she took a taxi.”
“But her bag. Why would she leave it? Her passport was in there.”
“She was probably in a hurry.”
“No.” Rani turned up the beach, the wind tugging her hair loose as she tried to slip on her hood. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” he said. He dug inside his coat pocket and pulled out a cheap plastic cell phone. “This was in the bag too. I forgot to leave it the other night. I was just going to sell it, but here,” he said, handing it to her.
Nadia didn’t have a cell phone and this one rested cold and grotesque like a sliver of bone in Rani’s hand.
“You knew who I was that night on the beach,” Rani said. “I thought you hadn’t realized until last night when you broke in looking for your rosary. But you knew. That’s why you stopped fighting me and let me take the bag.”
“I let you take it because you were willing to kill me for it.”
“That’s not why you brought me her things. No one was threatening you then.”
Rani thought of her sister’s passport picture, of their mother’s dark hair curling over her shoulders, their father’s jaw line and thick eyebrows. People had always thought they were twins, until Rani outgrew her older sister and Nadia had chopped off her long hair. But even now, faces paled by grief, the echo of that resemblance was still there.
“Fine, I recognized you. When I finally got a good look at your face.”
“When you had me pinned down,” Rani finished for him.
“Like I said, I thought you were trying to kill me. But you looked so much like the passport picture I’d found in the bag, I decided to just stop fighting you and let you have it.”
“And the rest of her things, where were they?”
He shook his head. “I threw them away. I really didn’t need a bunch of some girl’s clothes, especially not a dead girl’s if…” He grew quiet. “I left them in a dumpster somewhere.”
“In a dumpster?”
“I went back for them didn’t I?”
“Why?” Rani took a step toward him.
He crossed his arms, not intimidated. “Look, I’m tired.”
“Why won’t you just answer my question?”
“Because I don’t know. I don’t know why I did it. Why can’t you just say thank you and leave me the hell alone?”
She felt the words on the edge of her lips, she felt him waiting, but instead she just bit down hard, cold lips numb between her teeth, and strode off toward the pier.
Chapter 7
Jax
Jax hadn’t felt himself nodding off. He thought the cold would keep him awake but suddenly he was on his knees, someone else’s blood on his hands.
“Èl es tuyo,” Pascual had said. He’s yours.
Jax felt the trigger under his finger, his wrist slumping under the weight. It hung there, the barrel skewed against the man’s chest, limp and shaking. Jax tightened his grip, narrowing his eyes at Pascual’s shadow bleeding beneath his own.
“Entre los ojos.”
Jax lifted the barrel, eyes drifting from the man’s to the ground as
he squared it against his temple. He felt Pascual’s hand on the back of his neck, gripping him hard as he held him steady.
“Mira,” he said. Look.
Jax blinked, eyes settling on the man’s face, on his own reflection warped and dark behind the faintest film of tears. A familiar sting crept toward the edge of his lashes and he clenched his jaw. Pascual’s fingers slipped from Jax’s neck and he hung back, waiting.
But Jax was still.
“Jax.”
He felt his brother’s voice, his rage hot against his back. But he couldn’t move. He was fixed there, his face still pulsing in the man’s eyes. He looked at his hands, at the metal glinting between his fingers, trying to make out the dark outline of his own flesh, as if his reflection there would be different, as if the one he’d been drowning in wasn’t real; wasn’t right.
There was a soft click and then something brushed the back of Jax’s scalp. He felt the fear and inhaled, cold air cutting between his teeth. Then he watched himself, round and rigid within those glinting green irises until he was the only thing left in them.
When Jax opened his eyes that same pale face tore from the darkness, washed in the shadows he’d left there, that same reflection churning behind cold, numb eyes. But a shadow twisted into the night, strands of her dark hair spilling out from a tattered hood. He blinked and the man was gone, though the shadows still lingered—rising above her torn lip and pooling just below her right eye.
She’d hung behind the beam, her voice low, her eyes flitting to every subtle motion in the dark. He’d watched her face; her eyes—the moon careening off flecks of green. She wasn’t the same as that first night on the beach or that early morning when he’d followed her to that empty house. This time she was afraid. He could feel it rising from her skin and slipping down over his own—gnawing at him.
So when she disappeared on the other side of the pier, her long silhouette the only thing moving up that dark empty street, he followed her.
Orphans of Paradise Page 4
