“Where are we going?”
“Central Park.” They headed west on Fifty-seventh, pushing through the thick, humid air, passing groups of people on their lunch hour. “Okay, so I don’t know what Andy told you,” said Tiffany, “but I’m gonna guess he said my mom caught Warren nailing me on his dressing room couch.”
Steve turned and gaped at her. “Uh . . . actually, Andy wasn’t that specific.”
“Whatever.” They moved past a group of skinny women wearing tight T-shirts and velour sweats and enough heavy jewelry to cause injury. One of them called out to Tiffany, asked for her autograph. Tiffany plastered on a smile, signed the woman’s Saks shopping bag. “Make it out to Teena. With two e’s.” She slipped her sunglasses down her nose, took a quick glance at Steve. “Is this your father?”
“No.” Tiffany handed the woman back her bag, grabbed Steve’s arm and began walking even faster. Steve could have sworn he heard the woman clicking her tongue, and he almost said, It’s not what you think, as if he cared about the moral opinion of some Saks-shopping plastic surgeon’s wife who couldn’t even spell her own first name correctly. “What happened,” Tiffany said, “was my mom walked in on us in Warren’s dressing room, and my shirt was off, and—”
Steve cut her short. “Look . . . this is probably embarrassing for you.”
“It’s not.”
“Well, it is for me. And it’s not important. I’m sure Andy told you I’ve got a friend who went down to Mexico with Warren. What I really need to know is what SPLV stands for, and if you know anything about a black cross with a red dot in the middle.”
She cleared her throat. “That was really . . . that was really in the notebook of . . . that guy? Jordan whatever?”
“Yes.”
She stopped walking. “Warren gave me a pendant—a black cross with a ruby in the middle.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, but he took it back when . . . Look, Steve. I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, but I really have to tell you what happened in the dressing room.”
He sighed. “Fine.”
“All right.” She started moving again, faster. “How can I put this? I’m an early bloomer.”
“No kidding.”
“My mom walked in on me and Warren, yeah. But . . . let’s just say she’s walked in on me with guys Warren’s age plenty of times, and all she usually does is say ‘Whoops. Excuse me.’ ”
They were at Central Park now. “So,” Steve said slowly, “what did she see this time that made her . . . ?”
“That’s what I need to show you.” Tiffany grabbed his hand and pulled him past the statue of General Sherman, to the line of park benches along the brick walkway that led to the zoo. Thick, shady trees arched over their heads. It was cool here, breezy despite the heat. It always was. On slow days at work, Steve would bring his lunch, eat alone on one of the benches just to breathe some natural air. He thought about that as Tiffany pulled him to the last bench, sat him down and eased next to him.
“SPLV,” she said, finally, “stands for Sangre Para La Vida. Blood in exchange for life.”
He stared at her. “Blood?”
“My shirt was off when my mom walked in, but we weren’t screwing.” Her voice went small and shaky and very young—a grade schooler reciting a poem. “Blood for life, blood in exchange for life. Young blood, to keep the world alive . . . past when it’s supposed to end. Will your friend be under thirty-five at the start of 2012?”
Steve peered at her. “Uh . . . she’s thirty now, so . . . yeah.”
“He needs her blood.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Warren . . . he has this . . . beautiful black knife. . . .” Tiffany glanced both ways, then leaned closer to Steve and yanked down the neck of her T-shirt. She held it there for a few seconds, exposing herself just long enough for Steve to see, to understand. . . .
“My mother saw him . . . doing this.” Between Tiffany’s breasts were a series of thickly scabbed wounds, forming the shape of a cross.
Steve inhaled sharply. “Oh, my God.”
“He told me I’m special,” she whispered. “He was going to take me to Mexico.”
EIGHTEEN
Vanessa showed up at El Borracho shortly after Warren. She was wearing a sheer white sundress and would have looked angelic, except that her hair was a mess and she was breathing hard and her eyes were sharp with panic. “Oh, thank God!” She rushed to Naomi and hugged her tightly, practically lifting her off the chair.
“Aunt Vanessa,” Naomi said, “I’ve only been out for a couple of hours.”
Vanessa stepped back, her eyes calming. “That’s a couple of hours too many. I specifically told Soccoro . . .” She glanced at Warren and Zoe, offered a slight, embarrassed smile. “We’ll continue this conversation on the way home. By the way, Zoe, either your cell phone is turned off or your battery is dead. Warren was trying to call you.”
Zoe pulled her phone out of her purse, looked at it. It had been holding a charge for shorter and shorter periods of time, and sure enough . . . “Dead battery.” She turned to Warren. “Sorry.”
He didn’t answer.
Vanessa slipped a stack of pesos out of her embroidered handbag and dropped it on the table. “See you both at Rafael’s party.” She gave Naomi a punishing glare and said, “We’re leaving now.” Zoe half expected Vanessa to yank her seventeen-year-old niece out the door by the ear.
After they left, Warren took Naomi’s seat. His mouth was tight, his jaw forming a right angle. His eyes were dry blue stones.
“What’s wrong?” Zoe asked.
“You went into my safe again.”
Zoe looked at him. She’d forgotten all about falling asleep with the key in her hand, and at this moment, nothing seemed more irrelevant. She heard herself say, “Yeah, I did,” in the same tone of voice she might have used for I took out the garbage.
Warren seemed a little taken aback. “Zoe, we’re never going to work if you don’t start trusting me.”
“Warren?”
“Yes?”
“Are you completely insane?”
His eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
“Ever since I’ve been here, you’ve disappeared more often than you’ve been around. I found a cross in the guest room armoire exactly like the one in your dressing room closet, and I don’t know what the hell either one of them means because you won’t tell me.”
“Why were you in the guest room?”
“Oh, my God, I can’t believe you just asked me that.”
“I . . . I was asking because Guadalupe said—”
“Guadalupe. Did she tell you I now know your gardening secret?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
“And you are honestly telling me I should trust you? Jesus Christ, Warren. You’ve got more bizarre secrets than Dracula. I uncover a new one every five minutes without even trying, and you have the absolute balls to bring up trust?”
Warren’s gaze dropped to the table. “I wasn’t planning on keeping those secrets forever.”
“Really?” said Zoe. “When were you going to tell me you encourage your maid to bleed herself out into the potted plants? Next Tuesday, over lunch?”
“You don’t have it right,” he said, softly.
“What is right?” she said. “Tell me, Warren.”
“Some things, you need to see in order to believe.” He looked at her. “Some things you need to feel in your heart.”
“I’m asking for a simple explan—”
“Last night. What Rafael did, with your wrist.”
“Yes?”
“If I were to just explain that to you . . . if I were to describe that in words and you hadn’t felt it for yourself, you would have thought I was crazy, wouldn’t you?”
She thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I would’ve.”
“Lots of things are like that. La Cruz, déjà vu . . . the way the sun can turn so many different colors in the course o
f one day.” He gazed at her. “The way the body works. The way our bodies work . . .”
“But—”
He lowered his voice. “Sangre Para La Vida is like that. It’s better than an explanation.”
“Sangre—”
“Sssh.”
“Is that your . . . Is that some kind of . . . secret group?”
“I thought it was weird, too, Zoe, but then I saw it—I felt it for myself. Rafael showed me. Ten years ago.”
“Rafael? Is that what this party is about?”
Warren reached across the table and took both of Zoe’s hands in his. He stared into her eyes and she felt that healing gaze, and despite everything that was going on in her mind—the confusion and the anger and this nagging, nameless fear—something within her began to give way. “When I met Guadalupe,” he said, “she was afraid to look anyone in the face. She was married to a violent son of a bitch who made her think she was a failure because she wasn’t able to have kids. She couldn’t read, couldn’t speak a word of English. Look at her now, Zoe. Look at how straight she stands. She left him seven years ago. She is strong and proud and happy.” Warren took a breath. His eyes were as warm as his hands. Señor Clark is a wonderful man. “It’s not bleeding into potted plants, Zoe. It’s so much more. . . . You’ll see. You’ll feel it, and you’ll know. You will be fixed.”
She shut her eyes tightly. Focus, focus. . . . “Your gun,” she said.
“Yes?”
“It just turned up in front of your house with that note: Para tu protección. You have no idea who gave it to you, no idea who owned it before.” She opened her eyes. She sensed nothing in his face but confusion, and when she asked him, “Is that the truth?” he did not look up and to the left before answering.
“Of course it’s the truth.”
Zoe said, “I ran a check on the serial number. It belonged to Garrett Christopher.”
“Who is that?” Not the slightest hint of recognition. Yes, he was an actor, but in her five years at Headquarters, Zoe had jolted secrets out of enough of them to know that even the most experienced actor couldn’t hide true feelings that well.
“He was the father of Carlos Royas’s best friend.”
Warren went pale. “Oh, my God.”
“Garrett Christopher died ten years ago in a car crash— around the same time Nick Denby disappeared, and around the same time . . . whoever it was . . . gave you the gun.”
“You . . . you think this person may have caused the car crash, stolen the gun?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . Carlos Royas would have been too young. He was only nine or ten years old when—”
“Yes.”
“So . . .”
“Someone who knew Carlos, his friends . . . maybe someone who knows them, still.” She looked at him. “Do you know them, Warren?”
“No.” A new emotion filtered into his eyes. He blinked it away and breathed deeply, and it was gone as if it had never been there. But Zoe had recognized it, and she knew it was real. Fear. The same fear as her own.
“I will bring the gun to the police tomorrow morning, as soon as the station opens,” Warren said, and Zoe believed him. Then he said, “Will you come with me?”
“Yes, Warren. Of course I’ll go to the police with—”
“I mean tonight,” he said. “Will you come with me, to Rafael’s?”
She swallowed hard. “To learn.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“I would never do anything that would hurt you, Zoe. I only want to make you strong.”
She stared at his face. “All right,” she said, because she wanted to believe that, too.
On the way back to the office, Steve phoned Zoe’s cell, and again, he got her voice mail. “Call me,” he said. “It’s very, very important. It’s about Warren Clark.” If he had to leave messages, fine. Steve didn’t care anymore. After seeing what Clark had done to Tiffany, he was pretty much convinced: The guy was a werewolf.
When he got to his desk, Steve signed on to his computer. He ignored e-mails from Debbie Cohn, Padmé and the mayor’s spokesperson and wrote one to Zoe. Please call me whenever you get this. It doesn’t matter when. It is urgent!! He didn’t want to be any more specific than that—what if Clark was checking her e-mail? What if the whole cult was?
God, there was a cult. Zoe—Zoe, of the poorest judgment known to womankind—had gone down to Mexico with the high priest of a bloodletting cult and had actually told Steve to let her enjoy her vacation.
He called her again, yelled at Zoe’s voice mail: “Would you just charge your goddamn battery?!”
“You okay?” asked Mike Grady.
“I’m fine!”
“ ’Cause that was kind of a self-defeating message you left there. I mean, if the battery is dead, then how can she hear—”
“Get bent, Mike.”
“Jeez, sorry.”
Steve called up Google, ran a search on Sangre Para La Vida. Nothing. Of course there was nothing. It was a secret cult. Zoe was down in Mexico with a secret cult whose members believed the world would end when the Aztecs said it would, in 2012—unless they fed their own blood to the energy force beneath the earth. The younger you were, the purer your blood, the more you gave.
Tiffany had explained it all.
Giving makes you stronger, she’d said. The more blood you pour into the earth, the more cleansed you are. It’s like you’re taking that bad part of yourself—whatever part of you that is weak or scared or mean—and you’re giving it back to nature, which transforms it to good energy. Like . . . spiritual recycling. Does that make sense?
It hadn’t made sense to Steve at all. Because he was sane.
Sitting at his desk now, staring at his screen, he could only think of the gleam that still shone out of Tiffany’s eyes in spite of everything—even her fears that the cult might have been to blame for what happened to Jordan Brink. That gleam had scared Steve to death, made him feel for Tiffany’s mother. It made him so worried for Zoe he could barely breathe.
If you’ll be under thirty-five at the start of 2012, Tiffany had said, then you are eligible for nextlhualli.
What is that?
Debt repayment.
He’d had Tiffany write the word down for him on the back of one of his business cards. He pulled it out of his wallet now, typed nextlhualli into the seach bar. After he hit RETURN, he realized he’d accidentally run an image search, and soon, he was looking at a line of illustrations that made his skin freeze. This was more than bloodletting, this was . . .
Every one of the images was an ancient drawing of an Aztec priest standing over a mutilated human body. In one, the priest clasped an offering from the body, held high over his head. Steve read the caption: Nextlhualli, literally the repaying of debts to the gods, was the Aztec word for human sacrifice.
The offering was a heart. A ripped-out human heart.
No . . .
When Warren cut me, it was as if he was cutting out all the bad. He was fixing me. Does your friend feel guilty about anything she’s done? Do you think your friend feels like she wants to be fixed?
Steve grabbed his cell phone again, called Zoe’s number. He got her voice mail again and then threw the phone against the wall of his cubicle.
These cuts were just practice. Real Nextlhualli can only take place in San Esteban.
Mike Grady said, “You . . . you sure you’re okay?”
“No,” said Steve. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
Enid was away from her desk. Without giving the idea any more thought, he forwarded her the e-mails from Debbie, Padmé and the mayor’s spokesperson, explaining at the top of the first e-mail that he had a family emergency and needed to leave town, and suggesting Glen Campbell finish up the story. Then he switched screens and reserved the next possible flight for León, Mexico.
NINETEEN
Warren and Zoe enjoyed a leisurely dinner of chicken mole and rice with saff
ron—food so aromatic, it wasn’t eaten so much as breathed. They talked about Mexican cooking and the weather in San Esteban this time of year and their future job plans. Heavy, sensuous food and light conversation—with Warren, it was almost always the other way around. But what with everything that had been said—and with the uncharted night that lay ahead of them—Zoe craved the mundane. Warren seemed to sense that, just like he sensed all of her cravings.
After dinner, he ordered shots of aged Don Julio and sangrito. Zoe said, “I don’t know if I’m up for a tequila shot.”
“You’ll be up for this,” Warren replied as the waitress returned with two long shot glasses full of clear liquid and two more full of a deep, thick red. “Now this is the Don Julio,” he said, handing her the clear one. “This is sangrito—it’s like Bloody Mary mix, only a little sweeter. Start with the tequila, chase it with the sangrito, but remember to sip . . . savor. . . .”
Zoe sipped the tequila—it was surprisingly smooth, elegant even. . . . It blazed a warm trail down her throat, followed perfectly by the sweet tomatoey taste of the sangrito. “You like?” Warren asked.
“God, yes.”
He locked his gaze with hers. “I always know what you like.”
She smiled.
After Warren paid the bill, they walked out into the glowing purple twilight—Zoe’s favorite time of day anywhere, but here it was particularly beautiful. Warren put an arm around her and she leaned against him, loose and warm from tequila. She peered into shop windows at colorful Day of the Dead masks and papier-mâché animals and turquoise and obsidian jewelry and racks and racks of pastel shawls embroidered with bright flowers, and for practically the first time since she’d shown up here, Zoe remembered she was a tourist. She wanted to hold on to that feeling. “Let’s go shopping tomorrow.”
Warren smiled and said, “Of course,” and she smiled back. But that moment—that whiff of normalcy—was like a Styrofoam kickboard in the middle of the ocean. It might keep you afloat for a little while, but it was way too weak to save you. What was this party going to be like tonight? What was this strange group that Warren was involved with?
She started to tell Warren maybe she wasn’t up for learning about Sangre Para La Vida just yet (Blood for Life? Was that really what it was called?) and maybe he should go to the party alone, when she saw it just one door up. Patty Woods’s house. Around her shoulders, Warren’s arm stiffened.
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