Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(9)

Only Mictlantecuhtli put a little extra bite into the knife and made it so it wouldn’t just kill people and let you take their skins, it would kill gods, too. Why? Fuck if I know. At a guess I’d say he was thinking he might need to use it on the other gods.

And then there’s his wife’s side of the story.

Santa Muerte didn’t deny what was happening to me. That I was slowly turning to jade, that I was going to take his place as a piece of statuary if I didn’t do something about it. She knew it was going to happen when I took her deal. She tells me the same thing he tells me about Mictlan. It needs a king and a queen. Two halves to make it whole.

But, and this is where the stories diverge, she wants me to be that king. She wants me to be by her side in Mictlan. Mictlantecuhtli is old news. There’s bad blood there. But in order to take his place I need to be more than just her husband. I need to break this bond Mictlantecuhtli and I have and take his place at her side. The only way to do that, she tells me, is to kill him once and for all. No sleeping in stone beneath Mictlan. He needs to be dead dead.

And this is where their stories reconnect, because to kill him, like her, I need to use the obsidian blade. I’m stuck between two Aztec death icons in a domestic squabble. One’s telling me one thing, the other’s telling me another. To complicate things they both deny that they arranged to get the blade into my hands. One of them has to be lying.

I’ve seen meth-head marriages that were less dysfunctional.

If Santa Muerte is telling me the truth the only way to save myself is to kill Mictlantecuhtli. If Mictlantecuhtli is telling me the truth, my only way out is to kill her. I’m being played, but I’m not sure which one is playing me.

So I’m going for Option C, which, let me tell ya, I’m a big fan of. Kill them both.

What I don’t know what to do with is Tabitha. When I saw her last she showed me that she was Santa Muerte, but I’ve been wondering if that’s true ever since. The story is that she died years ago and had a piece of Santa Muerte’s soul inserted to bring her back.

If she’s just an extension of Santa Muerte then she’s just as responsible for killing my sister as Santa Muerte herself. She’s just a limb of Santa Muerte and killing her won’t be any different from pruning a tree.

But what if she’s not? What if she’s just Tabitha Cheung with a piece of a death goddess in her head? What if she got stuck with Santa Muerte the same way I’m stuck with Mictlantecuhtli? Some things she said have me thinking things might be more complicated. But part of me wonders if maybe I just don’t want it to be simple.

Either way I need to find her. I probably need to kill her. But before I do that I want to be really goddamn sure.

___

I’ve got one eye on the road ahead of me, the yellow lines of the highway zipping out of the darkness, and one eye on the rearview mirror. The road stretches ahead of me, dark blue beneath a thin slice of moon. No other cars on the road. At some point Bustillo’s men will discover that he’s dead and either a) celebrate and choose a new leader like drunken buccaneers or, much more likely because this isn’t Pirates of the Caribbean, b) hit the road and come gunning for me.

They saw my car pass the gas station. At least some of them will remember it. And they’ll realize that there’s only one road out of Tepehuanes, and it’s the only one I could be on. They’re a bunch of murdering thugs, not idiots.

Whether they come after me really depends on how pissed off they are. I’m in contested territory, now. From what I understand Los Zetas and Cártel del Golfo are fighting for dominance over this particular patch of dirt. But the players in this game change depending on who’s got the bigger budget, so fuck knows who’s really running things. The only sure bet is it’s not the government no matter how many soldiers they send down here.

This highway is a main thoroughfare for transporting marijuana and heroin up to the border. Bustillo was working for the Sinaloa Cartel. The Zetas and CDG might not take it too kindly if they find his men down here. Or they might help them shoot me. Could go either way.

Behind me I can see headlights, cars rumbling down the road. Only they don’t look like those trucks I saw in the gas station. They’re too big, too wide. They’ve got lights on the roofs. Police? No. A military convoy.

Doesn’t mean it’s not Bustillo’s men, of course. Whether they have any particular loyalty for the man doesn’t matter. They’re sure as hell going to have loyalty to Sinaloa. The guy who brings in my head is looking at a promotion.

That’s, well, not worst case, but close enough to. It could be one of the other cartels, or actual soldiers or police working for them. A lot of the cartels have gotten their hands on some heavy hardware, and they’ve managed to buy a fair number of cops and politicians.

I could gun the engine, but where the hell am I gonna go? It’s a straight shot down to Zacatecas and the next turn off isn’t for another fifty miles. Better to meet them here in the open, where I have more options, than have them run me off the road.

I pull over to see if they’ll pass, the engine still running. The convoy’s a good twelve or thirteen cars long. Trucks, APCs, a goddamn tank. They’re not cartel, they’re army. Or if they are cartel, this country’s more fucked up than I thought.

Behind me one of the trucks pulls over and stops. A soldier jumps out of the back with a flashlight and an assault rifle. I make sure the Browning’s good to go and hide it behind the door. I scribble “CONFíA EN Mí” onto one of my stickers and slap it on my chest. “Trust me.”