“Do we know any more details about the liberation group?”
“We will shortly. Brujos who have seized priests are returning soon with a report.”
“Then why did you sound so agitated?”
“Because they’re still pushing this idea about launching a massive attack on everything north of Río Palo. They feel we’d be in a stronger position by launching an attack rather than by just fortifying the city. They seem to be gathering support.”
In other words, Pearl and Rafael were stoking the fires of insurrection. “What did you tell them?”
“That you haven’t issued orders about attacking, so we stick to the plan.”
Was he lying or was she paranoid? He could be hiding information from her in the same way that she hid her encounters with Wayra from him, by locking the information away so deeply that no other brujo had access to it. Even brujos had a right to privacy.
“You’re not telling me everything,” she said.
He gazed off into the distance, at the lakes and volcanoes beyond the porch, rolled his lower lip between his teeth. “Pearl said they’ve gathered support from nearly half the tribe, Nica. They’re already planning how to launch the attack.”
I knew it. “Shortsighted assholes.”
“Look, I told her we need three days to find the transitionals and eliminate them. I asked her to give us at least that long.”
Three days? With the way things had been going, she would be lucky to accomplish anything in three months. “You don’t have to ask her anything. She’s not in charge. I am.”
“Then maybe you need to speak to the tribe. Explain to them what’s going on, why the death of the transitionals is so important.”
“I don’t know why because I don’t know why they were allowed in to begin with. Diversion? Distraction? What? But since the chasers have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect them—as transitionals and now that they’re back in the physical—I have to assume that some significant shift will occur if they’re able to return to Esperanza. So it’s imperative that they die. Their deaths will end whatever plan the chasers have. Then we can attack Esperanza. But until their deaths our defensive measures have to be our priority.”
“It didn’t work in San Francisco. We descended on the city by the thousands, in the fog, and Ian still escaped.”
“We were working against restrictions and rules in 1968 that we don’t have in 2008. This time, Ben, it will be just you and me. We’ll seize two morally compromised individuals and use them to kill Tess. Then we wait for Ian to return here, do the same thing, and kill him.”
“If you’re assuming he’ll be in 2008 by then, how’s he going to move forty years forward in time?”
She didn’t know. Even brujos had trouble moving back and forth in time. “When Esperanza was still a nonphysical place, transitionals came here from many different times. It wasn’t a problem. Perhaps that’s what the chasers are banking on now.”
Ben stood there for long, uncomfortable moments, uncharacteristically contemplative, his thoughts hidden from her. Then he flashed that smile that had won her over from the first time she’d seen it nearly a century ago. “I’ll ask Marla next door to come in and look in on the critters, then we can leave.”
As though the animals were alive, in need of cat litter, fresh food, water. Ben’s primary concern—and hers—was the love part of the equation, the reason these animals had found their way to them to begin with. So while he went next door to talk to Marla, Dominica remained on the porch with the cat and the bird. They usually didn’t name their animals. That made it easier not to become emotionally attached, not to mourn them when they mysteriously moved on. But she’d secretly named the cat Shelley and the bird, Shriek. So she addressed them by name and asked them to please stick around for a while, that she and Ben loved them too much to lose them. She promised that the retriever pup—whom she had named Mole, for her ability to burrow deeply into the heart of a brujo—would be back.
When Ben returned, happy that Marla would look in on the animals, he slipped his phony arms around her phony virtual form. His warm breath against her neck felt nearly real. “We’ll conquer because that’s what we do,” he whispered, and then she thought them to South Miami Beach, the best place to find killers.
Seventeen
Too uneasy to wait in the dark, Tess moved to the front of the house and paced beneath the glow of the security lights. She called her mother, but Lauren didn’t answer, so Tess left a voice mail. She felt fragmented and strange, and as soon as she disconnected, couldn’t remember exactly what her voice mail had said. She kept hearing that cold, wretched voice: . . . you are shielded somehow . . . I can seize any of them . . . if you try to find Esperanza.
A pleasant breeze kicked off the water, stars popped out against the black skin of the sky. Everything out here looked normal, ordinary. But inside her mother’s house a man lying in a pool of his own blood had been possessed by something that had known her name and threatened to kill her mother, niece, and Dan. If she divulged this fact to anyone, she would find herself locked up in a padded cell.
She replayed what had happened, slowing the events down, examining them more closely. She remembered how the underside of her wrist had burned in the moments before she had entered the house and until the mist or smoke or whatever the hell it was had left the man. She rubbed her fingers across the skin there. It felt warm and tingled slightly, but the burning sensation was gone. In the glow of the security lights, it looked as if a bruise had formed.
That’s some nasty bruise on your arm.
Some guy outside grabbed my wrist and told me I was an intruder here.
Tess struggled to follow whatever this was—memory, auditory hallucination, derangement—and suddenly recalled being outside a building, in fog, and stumbling over a dead man, a Quechuan, covered in blood. He looked exactly like the man on the floor, as if he had bled out. The memory seemed no stranger than what she had experienced inside the house or earlier today with the ghosts at the turnpike wreckage. But it couldn’t be her memory. She was certain she’d never seen a dead Quechuan.
The shriek of sirens intruded and within moments two county cop cars sped into the driveway. Tess recognized one of the three men, Frank Cerlane—burly weight lifter, father of two young boys, wife was a teacher. They’d worked together on a case a couple of years ago.
“Tess,” Frank said, shaking her hand. “It’s great to see you. When that call came through . . . I mean, the last I heard, you were still on leave.”
“Got my clearance today, came home, and found the house trashed and the perp still inside. He tried to run, I shot him in the leg, and then he . . . I don’t know, Frank. He went into convulsions and started bleeding out.”
“You sure he’s dead?”
“Yes.” Something drifted out of him.
He gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “Stay right here, we’ll take a look. The medical examiner is on the way. Send him up when he gets here.”
He and the other cops moved past her. Tess sank to the lowest step on the stairs and was still sitting there when two more cars arrived—her mother’s Prius and Doc Brian’s VW Jetta. Lauren bounded out of her car as though she were being pursued and threw her arms around Tess. “Christ, Slim,” she whispered. “Are you all right?” She stepped back, eyes searching Tess’s face the way only a mother could. She looked as if she had aged fifteen years since this morning. “Did he hurt you?”
“I’m fine, Mom. Just rattled.” And you called me “Slim,” again. You channeling Dad?
“My cell didn’t work in the restaurant where Brian and I were having dinner. I didn’t get your message until we were getting ready to leave. Who is he?”
“Was. He’s dead. And I’ve never seen him before. He trashed your house.”
Doc Brian stood behind Lauren, a thin man whose body hummed with excessive energy. He paced like a caged animal and stabbed his fingers through his thick, gray hair. “If you’re h
urt, Tess, we can get you over to ER ASAP.”
“I’m fine, Brian, thanks.”
He eyed her skeptically, as though she were a life-form he’d never encountered before. Hell, maybe she was.
“I called Dan.” Her mother. “He’s on his way.”
“Dan? Why’d you call him?”
“It was the only thing I could think of doing. Brian and I will find out what’s going on.” They slipped past her, up the ramp.
Tess was reluctant to follow, to enter the house again, but terrified that if she didn’t, the thing that had spoken through the man might seize her mother. How could she protect Lauren and Maddie when they slept?
None of them would be staying here tonight. She went up the ramp, her thigh no longer aching, the burning itch in her wrist now gone. Inside, in the blaze of lights, the floor glistened with the dead man’s blood and everyone stood well clear of it and the body. Her mother was saying, “. . . he’s part of the lawn maintenance crew that works in this neighborhood.”
“No ID on him,” said Frank. “Do you know his name, Mrs. Livingston?”
“No. But the woman who lives across the street will know. He does her lawn.”
“Do you think my shot killed him, Frank?” Tess could barely bring herself to look at the man. “It hit him in the left calf. That was the leg he was clutching.”
Frank, now wearing a pair of latex gloves and rubber boots, moved closer to the body and rolled up the left leg of the man’s jeans, turned it slightly. “What do you think, Doc?”
Brian inspected the injury without touching it. “The shot took out a chunk of skin. But it looks like a clean shot. It didn’t penetrate into the leg. And it certainly didn’t cause all this.” He opened his hands, indicating the unspeakable damage to the man’s body.
The forensics team arrived shortly afterward and Tess and Frank moved outside, onto the back patio where an outside light shot a bright beam from the patio to the beach. Moths and June bugs fluttered and flitted through the air, the breeze rustled through the tall sea oats. She didn’t sense anything threatening out here.
Tess typed up her formal statement on Frank’s laptop, sent a copy to her own e-mail. When she returned to the front of the house, Maddie was standing in the driveway, talking to Dan Hernandez. The three people that thing had named were now all gathered in one place. Tess looked around uneasily, and wondered how she could protect anyone from something that could possess another person.
Brujos are ghosts who are stuck . . . they are able to seize us, our bodies, to step into us with impunity and use us. Few have survived this possession. It is too violent, too alien . . .
Had that conversation happened? And if it had, why were these memories coming to her in sound bites? Why not in images, complete with characters, names, a plot?
Hungry ghosts. Possession. Was that what she had seen leaving the dead man? A brujo?
“Tess?”
Dan Hernandez stood there in the spill of light from the house, a Cuban anomaly with blond hair and blue eyes, some recessive gene that dated back centuries to his European roots. Before she had died, she thought she’d loved this man. Right now, she felt only fear that a brujo would enter him, possess him, kill him.
“Dan. Mom shouldn’t have called you, but I appreciate your making the drive.”
“Hey, I was in Homestead. It’s not that far.”
He hugged her a bit too closely. She breathed in the familiar smells of Dan, the mint of his aftershave, the summery scent of the detergent he used for his clothes, and then the deeper, more complex odors that led her quickly into the memories of the intimacy of their relationship.
“I’m sorry you had to go through this, Tess, on top of everything else,” he said.
She quickly disengaged herself. Yes, she feared for him. But that fear wasn’t inviting him back into her life as a lover. “This afternoon, I got my clearance to go back to work, but that may change now.”
“Look, I just talked to the ME and to Brian. Yeah, you shot this guy, but both docs are ninety-nine percent sure that your shot didn’t kill him. They concur that the guy had, at the very least, a cerebral hemorrhage. But the autopsy will tell us for sure. Regardless, you shot him in self-defense.”
“I shot him because he was about to run out the door.”
“After he broke into your home. By the day after tomorrow, you’ll be cleared. Forensics will be here for hours yet, then they’ll bring in a cleaning crew. So I got the three of you a suite over on the beach at the Key Largo Resort.”
“Thanks, Dan, but that’ll cost you a fortune.”
“The owner’s a friend. I’m getting it for next to nothing.”
Of course. Dan rarely paid full price for anything. He took advantage of the fed, state, and county perks. The thought immediately made her feel guilty and ungrateful. “Then let us buy you dinner.”
“You’re on.”
The way he said it, so quickly and enthusiastically, caused her to regret the invitation. He might get the wrong idea. On the other hand, she didn’t want any of them to stay here tonight and she at least owed Dan a dinner for facilitating their accommodations elsewhere.
Her iPhone jingled, and when she slipped it from her pocket, the message read: Your recorder is full. She either had forgotten to turn it off after she’d sent her voice message to Maddie or the recorder button had gotten pressed when it was inside her pocket. Did that mean that the voice of that thing, the brujo, was on here? “I need to get some clothes and stuff, Dan. And drag my mother out of there.” She pointed at Maddie, who paced back and forth in front of her car, talking on her cell. “Could you let Maddie know she should pack a bag?”
“Sure thing.”
Tess slipped the iPhone into her purse and went upstairs again. Her mother, Brian, and the medical examiner had moved away from the body and blood and were debating the possible causes of a bleed-out this massive. Lauren noticed Tess gesturing at her and excused herself. They moved into the hall. “What is it, hon?”
“Mom, Dan got us a suite at the Key Largo Resort. Let’s pack and get out of here.”
“You go along. I’ll join you and Maddie later.”
“No. We go together. I asked Dan to have dinner with us. I know you guys just ate, so how about coffee and dessert? Invite Brian, too.”
Her mother seemed surprised by the forcefulness with which Tess had uttered that one word, “no.” “Uh, okay. Brian and I just ate, so he doesn’t need to come along.”
In other words, her dinner with Brian hadn’t gone well. “I’d like you and Maddie to hear a recording. Pack whatever you need for a trip.” Just in case the brujo returned and they had to leave for a few days. “Laptop, notes, passport, whatever.”
“Done.”
“We’re off to pack.” Maddie came up between them, slung her arms around their shoulders, walked them into one of the bedrooms, kicked the door shut. “Can someone tell me what’s going on? Please?”
Tess’s unease spiked to a new level. “At the hotel. We’ll talk there.”
The resort sprawled across ten acres on the Atlantic side of the islands, a make-believe world that tourists took as the true representation of life in the Florida Keys. Tennis courts, swimming pools, beaches, saunas, hot tubs, 24/7 restaurants and cafés, shops and a tourist office, high-speed Internet, satellite TV. Tess wished she could find a closet and duck into it with her mother and niece and Dan and play the iPhone recording for them. But first she had to make sure it was audible. The phone had been in her slacks pocket, she had no idea what the recorder’s range might be.
At her earliest opportunity during dinner, she excused herself and crossed the massive lobby to reach the ladies’ room. She locked herself in a stall, plugged in the iPhone’s earplugs, clicked to recordings, scrolled until she found music from the car radio. Apparently, the recorder had come on during the drive back to her mother’s place. She fast-forwarded to the slamming of the car door. Moments later, her voice rang out as she sh
outed for the intruder to stop or she would shoot. Then the shots sounded and she fast-forwarded the recording to the point after the intruder had pleaded for help. It is inside me, forcing me . . .
It. The recording captured his thrashing, the hard strangeness of his voice, the stilted formality of his English. It appears that I cannot seize you, Tess Livingston, that you are shielded. But I can seize your mother, niece, and partner. I can seize any of them, just as I have seized this man, and will seize them, one after another, if you try to find Esperanza.
Tess turned off the recorder, unable to listen to the last part, about how they would suffer. Suppose her mom, Maddie, and Dan couldn’t hear the voice? At the accident scene earlier, she was apparently the only person who had seen and spoken with ghosts. But this was recorded. Even if they could hear it, how could they be protected? It wasn’t as if they could arm themselves against whatever had spoken through the lawn man.
And it knew my name.
Dominica and Ben wandered through a crowd of tourists on Miami’s South Beach. People spilled off the sidewalks, music pumped from open doorways, the night scene in SoBe was a people-watcher’s wet dream. Dominica sought evidence of brujos inhabiting bodies around them, but didn’t see their kind anywhere. After a certain point, it didn’t matter. The beautiful bodies, the sensual promises, the possibilities enticed them even though they existed as nothing more than wisps of smoke, a blur of peripheral movement, a trick of light. That was only when they were perceived at all. Here, they were merely shadows hungry for form. At every turn, she was reminded of how paltry they were, how low in the scheme of things, how truly powerless.
This place, after all, was not Esperanza—no residual power here to help them assume virtual forms, no fog, no place to hide, nothing within which they could move rapidly from place to place. The air was like glass, the clear summer sky brilliant with stars. They were out of their element and knew it.
“Well?” he asked. “Have you seen anyone who fits the bill?”
Esperanza Page 25
