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Diego couldn’t pick out the words. He watched in silence as Cari clambered to her feet, then padded in her rubber-gripped socks to a small green sofa at the far end of the back room. A boxy little TV faced the sofa. Cari turned it on.
Cartoons. More unicorns. She scampered back to the sofa, pulled her little legs into her body, snuggled into herself, was immediately lost in the rainbow-colored world of prancing magical creatures.
Mercy was still squatting down, taking her time gathering up the crayons and putting them back into their cardboard sleeve. Diego ran his fingers through his unruly hair, pulled at his beard to straighten it best he could. He was tempted to sniff his underarms, but there was no need. He’d been in these maintenance-man overalls for three days, and although he showered twice a day, he still smelled a bit ripe.
“Sorry for that.” Mercy stood and turned to him, her cheeks still burning with embarrassment and perhaps something else. “Cari just started kindergarten. There was something in class yesterday aboutwhat do your parents do, that kind of thing. She heard the other kids talk about fathers.” She placed the coloring book and crayon box on a neat shelf against the wall, then curled a strand of hair around her left ear, glanced shyly at Diego, and shrugged. “It must be from the kindergarten thing. Because she has never asked a man that question before.” Her eyes widened for a flash, blood rushing to her cheeks again. “Not that there has been any man. Any man here in the back room, I mean.” She closed her eyes and quickly turned away, but not fast enough for Diego to miss the silent inward curse that slipped past her lovely red lips.
Diego had felt his cock move at her disarmingly clumsy self-consciousness. But along with the thickness in his trousers came a warmth in his heart, a buzzing in his head, a smile on his lips that felt different from his usual sneer.
“The faucet,” he’d managed to say, trying to break the awkwardness but instead feeling the tension rise up his throat, making it hard to speak clearly. “You said there is a leak.”
“Oh, yes.” Mercy hurried past him, gesturing towards an adjoining room which was a combination pantry and kitchen, with a stainless-steel counter-and-sink combination along one wall, shelves of neatly stacked foodstuffs in cans and bottles and jars and boxes along the opposite wall. A large industrial fridge stood at the far end, a flat standalone freezer tucked into an alcove beside it. Everything was neatly arranged and spotlessly clean. “Here, it starts leaking when you run the tap.”
Diego nodded, walking to the sink and turning on the water. The leak was beneath the metal sink. It wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t just a matter of tightening a joint. “That section of pipe needs to be replaced. I can stop by a hardware store after work today, bring the new fitting over this evening. Or tomorrow, if you close early.”
“I stay open till midnight.” Mercy swallowed, a flash of worry in her eyes. “How much will the new pipe cost?”
Diego swiped away her question. “You can pay me in tamales. It’s no problem.”
Mercy had blinked and looked away, trying to hide her relief. She touched her hair, then glanced back at him and smiled. “That will be a lot of tamales. I had better start paying you back soon. Will you . . . will you eat dinner with us tonight, perhaps?”
Withus?
Diego had gulped back a rush of some unnamable emotion, his gaze darting to where Cari was giggling and clapping along with the unicorns. Something inside him whispered a warning, that he needed to walk away from this right fucking now, before he got involved in something that couldn’t possibly end well.
Especially not for Mercy and Cari.
After all, Diego was a hunted man, on the run and on a mission. He’d been very careful to stay in the shadows these past few months. Only a select few trustedhermanosknew he was in the United States—and of those none knew where he was at any given time. Diego had a clean alias, enough to get past a traffic stop so long as they didn’t run his prints. Diego couldn’t be sure what the CIA had in his file, but he distinctly remembered being fingerprinted all those years ago when the Zetas and CIA were on the same side.
Back when the CIA hadcreatedthe Zetas.
A paramilitary organization trained by CIA-sponsored American ex-Special Forces killers. The plan had been to use the Zetas as a proxy for American behind-the-scenes intervention in the Cartels’ narco-empires that stretched from Guatemala to Colombia, moving Mexican-grown heroin and marijuana at first, then progressing to Colombian-grown cocaine, now evolving to what was by far the most profitable drug ever transported across the vast USA-Mexico border:
Synthetic Fentanyl.
Cheap as dirt, thanks to Chinese bulk chemicals shipped directly from Beijing and Guangdong to secret ports on South America’s eastern coast, then smuggled into Mexico, processed and packaged into pills and powders, shipped across the border at crossings controlled by the various Cartels.
The Zetas no longer controlled any major border-crossings, but the new Zeta-Nation owned one of those lucrative ports on South America’s eastern seaboard where Chinese ships docked under cover of darkness, unloaded their poison cargo of fentanyl precursor chemicals. It was good money and would get better, but the Zeta-Nation port was still tiny compared to what the Colombian Cartels owned, which was why Diego still desperately needed the U.S. “aid” money that Northrup Capital—and now IMC Corp—was diverting to groups like the Zetas and Urzis and Kendos.
“No,” Diego had said that afternoon, shaking his head perhaps more vigorously than necessary, like he was trying to get that buzzing out of his brain, stop that humming in his heart. He was finally building something big back home, laying down roots in the blood-soaked land of his ancestors.
Of course, some of that blood had been spilled by Diego himself as leader of that CIA-created Zeta-monster that had long since been cut loose and disavowed, all connections severed.
Plausible deniability.
The CIA’s only inviolable rule.
So long as they could deny it straight-faced to the American people, everything was fair game to those forked-tongued snakes.
Snakes like John Benson, whom Diego had briefly met decades ago, then seen on theRivingtona few months ago, and now outside Senator Robinson’s townhome that very morning.
“No,” Diego had said again, backing away from the faucet, retreating from the hurt in Mercy’s eyes at his almost violent rejection of her invitation. “I cannot come tonight. I will bring the pipe tomorrow during the day.”
He’d turned and walked out of that back room, stormed through the store, hurried to his van so he could get the hell away from what that woman and her child had opened up in him.
But once opened that old wound did not close. Diego had spent the rest of the afternoon staring at the walls of his tiny apartment just a few blocks from that warm bodega with doe-eyed unicorns and hot tamales that smelled like family, smelled like freedom, smelled like home.
And before he knew it the sun had set and he’d gone to the hardware store and now he was back here, atMercy’sbodega, in that warm cozy back room.