Dark Passages 2: Pilar & Elias

by Reinke, Sara

  Although they were modest by comparison to her surgically endowed fellow dancers, Elías considered Pilar’s breasts to be perfect; generous C-cups at the most, they were sweet swells of caramel-colored skin capped with rosy nipples that stood at erect, aroused attention. Resisting the urge during her dance to reach out and cup them in his hands, to slip one of those hardened nubs between his lips, had taken extreme physical restraint on his part. Her ass was equally tempting, generously curvaceous; her waist miniscule, her legs lean and long—the kind of body Elías could easily spend a lifetime envisioning exploring with his mouth, hands and hips.

  In the bathroom, with a gasp and a sudden jerk, he came hard, splattering noisily against the toilet seat and into the bowl beneath him.

  What are you doing here, Pilar? he wondered, as he had countless times, even though he felt fairly sure he knew the answer. Considering she was bumping and grinding in disguise at a strip club owned and operated by the man who Elías suspected had organized not only the murder of her father, but had raped her on the same night, he didn’t have to use his imagination too much. She was here for the same reason he was—Pepe Cervantes.

  She’d never admitted to having been raped. Not to him or to Sam Mueller, the detective in charge of homicide investigations with whom Elías was consulting on Enrique Ramirez’s murder. She’d told the police that she’d hidden through her father’s attack, that the three assailants had never known she was there, but Elías had suspected differently all along.

  Her father had been the head of a small local gang known as Los Guerreros. They’d been mainly small-time from Elías’s understanding, with few of their members involved in significant illegal activity. Ramirez had a relatively unimpressive rap sheet, all charges stemming from his youth; to Elías’s observation, the man had seemed to go out of his way to encourage the younger men in his association to pursue legitimate and legal endeavors. In fact, gang might have been a misnomer for them altogether had they not rallied somewhat upon Pepe Cervantes’s recent encroachment.

  When Pepe’s faction of Los Pandilleros migrated north to Bayshore from Miami, territory markers had shown up around town, symbolic or antagonistic graffiti used to indicate the growing circumference of Los Pandilleros’s boundaries. Outbreaks of violence had soon followed—shootings, stabbings, fist fights. After Enrique’s murder, these had briefly escalated, not out of retaliation for the crime but, Elías believed, because male members from Ramirez’s group were being “rolled in,” or violently initiated into the ranks of Los Pandilleros.

  He’d investigated Pepe Minoza Cervantes and Los Pandilleros long enough, both in Miami and now in Bayshore, to realize that if Pepe had found Enrique’s beautiful daughter hiding in the motorcycle repair shop, he never would have let her leave sexually unscathed. That he’d left her alive had frankly astonished Elías—and demonstrated to him that Pepe had meant Enrique’s execution-style murder to be a message to Los Guerreros. A warning.

  Pepe obviously had no idea who Pilar was in her disguise, mistaking her for just another set of tits at his borderline pimp-like beck and call. Stupid pendejo, Elías thought with a scowl.

  Pepe was El Jefecito, the “little boss,” of his gang. His youthful impulsivity and reputed hot temper made him dangerous, but the real threat came from his brother, El Jefazo , “the big boss,” Tejano Cervantes. At least twenty years his brother’s senior, Tejano lived in Miami, where he served as the undisputed leader of the Los Pandilleros gang.

  Unable to pin any criminal charges directly on Tejano, federal law enforcement officials had instead gone after him for tax evasion, a move that resulted in his imprisonment. However, little more than a year later, he’d been released when the convictions were overturned. A purported drug dealer who also dabbled in human trafficking, prostitution and illegal gambling, he’d apparently socked away enough money to afford the services of a very high-priced, powerful attorney.

  During his incarceration, Tejano had entrusted control of his criminal empire to Pepe. And because Pepe hadn’t fucked things up too badly in his absence, as a reward, Tejano had shipped him north, up the Gulf Coast to Bayshore, where he’d made him the official head of a newly established branch of Los Pandilleros.

  And the rest, as they say, is history, Elías thought drily in the nightclub bathroom as he shook the last droplets from the end of his dick, then shoved himself back down into his pants. He flushed the toilet, washed his hands and left the bathroom. On the way, he spared a glance toward a VIP area of the main club floor. This was Pepe’s spot, a lounge where he and his compadres would hang out during their visits to the club. They seldom stayed long and had apparently left while Elías had been indisposed tossing off.

  Momentarily indecisive, he frowned. He could leave the bar and try to continue his surveillance, but hesitated because, in truth, he wanted to see Pilar again. And not just because he wanted to find out what the hell she was up to. Ultimately, it was his body, not his mind or heart, that decided for him, however. He’d felt the beginnings of a headache stirring even before Pilar stepped out onto the stage. Although he’d tried to dismiss it as a result of the loud music, he knew it wasn’t.

  Goddamn it.

  He’d been diagnosed with Type I diabetes when he’d been fourteen years old, and by now he’d come to easily recognize his body’s cues when his blood sugar was out of whack. He’d had a couple of beers—a stupid decision on his part, considering he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast—and the high carbohydrate content had infused his system with a sudden surge of uncontrolled sugar. In addition to the headache, he also felt fatigued, a heavy and incessant weariness.

  He kept an insulin pen in his coat pocket and a spare glucose meter in the console of his car. As he stepped out of the dark interior of the club and back into the dazzling, bright light of midday, he paused, blinking stupidly, pawing in his pocket for his sunglasses. Even though the sun was at its highest and hottest in the sky, inside, it could have as easily been midnight or four in the morning, and it took his eyes a moment or two to adjust. Time seemed to have no meaning once he paid the cover charge and walked past Melaza’s foyer.

  He crossed the parking lot to his charcoal gray Dodge Challenger, thumbing the alarm switch on his keypad to unlock the doors. Inside the car, with its tinted windows, black upholstery and matching carpet and dash, it had grown stuffy with the seasonal spike in afternoon temperature. He keyed the ignition and fired up the air conditioner before leaning across to reach the glove compartment. From inside, he withdrew the small vinyl pouch that contained his testing supplies: a handheld monitor, which he then turned on; test strips—one of which he then inserted into the monitor—and lancing device. Using the latter, he speared a sharp, fast pinprick into the tip of his ring finger, drawing a drop of blood that quickly swelled to pearl-sized diameter when he gave a slight squeeze. With an unconscious, practiced ease, he brushed the blood against the notched end of the test strip; the monitor obligingly beeped.

  Elías’s blood sugar fluctuated throughout the day because unlike most people, he didn’t naturally produce insulin. Through diet, exercise and regular supplemental injections, he was able to live a fairly normal, unencumbered life. In the event he did something careless—like drinking the beers on an empty stomach—a shot of fast-acting insulin would usually carry him through until his next regular dose.

  After adjusting the administration amount in his insulin pen, Elías leaned back in the driver’s seat, raising his hips so he could pull his shirttails out from beneath the waistband of his slacks. Unbuttoning the front, he lay the shirt panels wide, leaving his stomach bare and exposed. He also tugged his pants down a bit, loosening his belt to give him unrestricted access to the lower quadrant of his abdomen. He pinched the far side lightly with his hand, then pushed the needle point into his skin. He’d done this so often—tens of thousands of times in his life—that he didn’t even notice the pain anymore.

  When he finished, he recapped the syringe and set
it aside, then leaned his head back against his seat and closed his eyes. The medication’s effects were never immediate enough, and for the moment, at least, that heavy weariness remained. It felt good just to rest there, however briefly, with the air-conditioning blasting directly into his face.

  A sharp rap against the window beside him startled him, and he sat up, eyes wide. To his surprise, he saw Pilar Cadana on the other side of the smoky glass; with the push of a button, he rolled the window down.

  “Hey,” he said, bewildered and surprised.

  “Hey.” She still wore her wig but had changed into street clothes and carried a backpack slung over her shoulder. She had on oversized sunglasses—the “Jackie O” variety, as his mother might have said—and he couldn’t discern her eyes at all through the glossy black lenses. “You…uh, you all right?”

  “Uh, yeah.” He sat up a bit more, realizing he might have unintentionally dozed off, at least for a minute or two.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said, her voice low and somewhat throaty, nearly a murmur.

  “Huh?” Surprised again, he glanced down at his fingertip and saw a small smear of blood. “Shit. Thanks.”

  She nodded once, watching wordlessly as he stuck his finger in his mouth and applied pressure with the tip of his tongue. It was only by the slight movement of her head, the cock of her chin as she redirected her gaze that he knew she’d taken note not only of the fact that his shirt was open, but also the blood glucose monitor and supplies left in an untidy heap in the passenger seat beside him. Because he’d dealt with people making the wrong assumptions about his needles and supplies before, he added swiftly, lisping around his fingertip, “I’m diabetic. Had to take my medicine.”

  She said nothing, just continued watching him, her entire body rigid as if she stood at military attention.

  He slipped his finger from his mouth and gave it a glance, feeling suddenly embarrassed, if not somewhat freakish, by her attention. “So…uh, you out of here for the day?”

  From behind them, a car horn sounded, a quick, sharp blat, and she glanced over her shoulder with a jerk, as if snapping out of a trance. “Yeah,” she mumbled; then, with another quick look his way, she said it again, more loudly. “Yeah. That’s my ride. See you around, guapito.”

  “Sure.” He nodded once, watching through the side mirror as she darted back across the parking lot, where an older model Toyota Camry idled, waiting for her. “See you.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  He was bleeding, Pilar thought as she sat on the passenger side of Chita’s car, watching the landscape roll past at fifty miles per hour, not really noticing any of it. Her attention still lay back in the Melaza parking lot, beside the dark gray Dodge Charger, and with the unmistakable mouthwatering scent of Elías Velasco’s blood.

  What the hell was he doing in there? He’d said something about taking medicine, but she’d only been half listening. Could that explain the scent of his blood? The Nahual as a rule didn’t feed from humans who were sick or had physiological conditions, not as much because it affected the quality of their blood as it—and whatever medications they might have been taking related to it—changed the smell of it and, most importantly, the taste.

  “Why do you think his blood smells like that?” she asked Chita, having vaguely mentioned Elías to her as they’d headed for home. She’d been struck by the scent as soon as they’d walked out of the employee exit and into the parking lot. It had floated in the air, a tantalizing hint, leading her unerringly, almost as if mesmerized, to his car.

  “I don’t know.” Chita shrugged, glancing in the rearview mirror as she mopped at her mascara with a wet wipe. Still driving with one hand, she leaned across Pilar’s lap and dug her cell phone out of the glove compartment. Dividing her attention between the road ahead and her touch-pad screen, she checked her messages.

  “Téo texted me,” she remarked, making Pilar stifle a groan. Téo Ruiz was Chita’s older brother and he’d been infatuated with Pilar for years.

  “He said Valien wants us to stop by the bike shop on the way home from ‘class’ today,” Chita continued.

  “No, thanks.” Six years earlier, Pilar had made the mistake of losing her virginity to Téo—more out of curiosity than any true emotion—and had compounded her troubles by letting him bed her a couple of other times since then, though not since her father’s death. Even so, this had apparently cemented in Téo’s mind the idea that the two of them were now madly, deeply in love. If he’d ever found out that she was stripping at Melaza, she imagined he’d brave even Pepe Cervantes—his family’s sworn enemy—for the chance at a lap dance.

  “He says it’s important,” Chita said, and when Pilar leaned down, reaching into the backpack at her feet for her own cell phone, she realized her brother, Valien, had texted her with pretty much the same message.

  “Jesus,” she muttered with a frown. “What now?”

  She hated going to the shop and usually, if she had to go, preferred to stay outside of the garage bays. Once upon a time, it had been one of her favorite places. As a young girl, she’d accompany Enrique there and watch with fascinated adoration as he’d work. In high school and up until his murder, she’d still come in two or three times a week, sometimes to help organize his filing or appointment book for him, other times to do minor bookkeeping, as had been the case on the night he was shot.

  Valien had stubbornly refused to sell the shop after Enrique’s death, insisting that to do so would give Los Pandilleros yet another triumph. Their father’s bloodstains were long gone from the floor, as was the tape outline where his had lain, but pockmarks in the concrete where high-velocity rounds had been fired at close range—the last within lethal range of his head—remained.

  “What’s the matter?” While giving herself a final once-over in the rearview mirror, Chita cut her a glance and a grin. “Don’t you want to see your pareja today?”

  Pilar scowled, making Chita burst into laughter.

  “Your brother is not my pareja,” Pilar said. “Despite what he thinks to the contrary.”

  In Chita’s opinion—and in that of most every other Nahual female—a pareja was a man one was meant to bond with and belong to, to submit to emotionally and physically for the rest of her life. Chita viewed this as something wonderful and romantic, the sort of “happily ever after” that came straight out of a storybook.

  To Pilar, it was bullshit.

  “Oh, come on,” Chita said. “Would it really be so bad, being Téo’s girl? Then we could really be sisters, just like we always used to pretend.”

  As she’d told Elías Velasco less than an hour earlier, Pilar said, “I’m nobody’s girl.”

  Chita laughed again and Pilar ignored her, focusing instead on the passenger side mirror as she used a wipe to dab the eye shadow from her face.

  “Me, I can’t wait to find my pareja,” Chita said. “Mama says you’ll know it when it happens. You’ll feel it inside of you, a tingling all over. He’ll be all you think about. All you crave.”

  Her eyes had taken on a dreamy sort of cast as she spoke, her voice growing wistful, and Pilar frowned again. “You know what I’m craving? A chocolate milkshake. Stop off at McDonald’s on the way to the shop, will you?”

  Sometime later, as they pulled into the parking lot at Ramirez Moto, Pilar felt her entire body reflexively tense, her mind at instant war with her eyes, trying to prevent them from traveling through the main bay door and into the garage beyond, toward the back and the steel desk that, like the bullet holes in the floor, still remained. Her breathing began to quicken into short, anxious hiccups. Even in broad daylight, the interior seemed shadow-draped and ominous to her now; even though a year had passed, she could still smell Cervantes and his men—their breath and sweat—every time she walked inside.

  Thankfully Valien was working outside that afternoon, unwittingly sparing his sister a visit inside the garage. He’d glanced up upon their arrival, and as Pilar stepped out of the car, he rose
to his feet.

  “Come on,” Chita said, putting the car in park and cutting the engine. Unsnapping her seat belt, she threw open the door and bounded out. She had a long-standing crush on Valien. Despite being related—and thus, more annoyed with him than enamored nine times out of ten—Pilar could appreciate why.

  Valien was handsome in a movie-star sort of way that made women automatically take notice of him, even in a crowd. He had their father’s coal black hair, worn swept back from his face in thick, heavy waves. He was tall and lean, strapped with muscles, his arms adorned with intertwining tattoos, his hands perpetually grease-smudged and heavily calloused from his work.

  “Hey, hermanita,” he called to her—little sister—with a grin, which was another attribute he had that was generally guaranteed to make women swoon. Pilar fully expected Chita to come to a stumbling halt, mesmerized by the flash of his smile—because she usually did—and then make a fumbling, stuttering ass out of herself with attempts at clumsy idle conversation, because she usually did this too. She was surprised when Chita didn’t, instead beelining toward her brother, Téo, as he emerged from the garage.

  “Hola, Valien.” Pilar flipped him a wave, tucking her hands absently into the back pockets of her jeans shorts as she walked toward him. Another man had followed Téo from the shop, a towering, handsome black man, his bald head gleaming in the sun. “Hey, Jackie,” she called, offering a bigger, more distinctive wave for his benefit.

  “Hi, Pilar.” Jackson Jones—or “Jackie” as they all knew him—was deaf. Because he’d lost his hearing as a teenager, the result of a progressive deterioration, he was still able to speak with relative clarity, even though his words had a strong, flat, nasal-like quality to them. He was a human who worked for Valien at the shop. His mother lived next door to theirs, and he’d learned about motorcycle engine work and from Valien.