Shutter(65)

I dialed 911.

“Bernalillo County 911.”

I gave the address. “We need to get some units over. There’s been a shooting.” I hung up the phone.

The ghost started to approach me. “You can see me?”

I tried not to react—tried to pretend I was looking past him. I recognized him, even with his eye blooming from his skull. It was Ignacio Marcos—the much-feared second-in-command of the Zambada drug cartel.

“Did you see what happened to me?” He wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand. “It was Garcia, wasn’t it? Who else would do this to me?”

I needed out of this place as quickly as possible. I called Shanice’s cell.

“Listen to me, you bitch,” he screamed as I held the phone to my ear. “That fat fucker Garcia isn’t getting it all. That wasn’t the deal. They will kill us all.”

His form lunged out, but his ghost fingers passed through my skin. Shanice’s phone rang and rang, eventually rolling over to voice mail. I hung up and dialed again.

The ghost kept at it, limbs swinging through my body. “I know you see me. I can feel it. I can tell you are listening to every word!”

Finally on my third call she picked up.

“Hey! Philip said you’re up there with the greaseballs!” She sounded so happy.

“Shanice, come and get me now,” I begged. I could hear the approaching sirens.

“Rita, I’m not going anywhere tonight. Oh, and by the way, I’m at your apartment right now. I need to stay for a couple of days.”

“If you don’t come and get me right now, I will break your neck when I get home. Now, Shanice!”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “What’s the address?”





CHAPTER THIRTY

f/32

AS IWAITED for Shanice, I hid from the awful ghost in the shadow of the stone wall that surrounded the mansion. While out of view, I watched a man with a blunt, straight jaw and giant shoulders come out of the oak door and walk straight to a limousine. As he popped the trunk, I recognized his face: Garcia’s new partner, Detective Vargas. Another man in a tux stepped out of the limo and walked toward the bushes. The two men lumbered over and picked Ignacio Marcos’s body up from behind the bushes. They clasped his arms and legs and easily threw him into their trunk with a thud. Both paused to look around for witnesses—for me. I crouched against the wall, ducking from shadow to shadow as quickly as I dared, trying desperately to put distance between myself and the scene of the murder.

By the time Shanice rounded the corner, I had run almost halfway down the hill. Her aging Mercedes wheezed to a stop.

“Hey, I thought we were going to the party.” Shanice’s red lips pressed together in disappointment. Her dress was the color of panic buttons.

I threw my cameras and bags into her backseat and slammed the rattling doors. “Just get us out of here. Don’t go up to the house.”

“What’s going on, Rita?” Shanice turned her car into a bus stop and drove us back down the hill, tagging the curb with her tire. “What did you do?”

“I just need to get somewhere with a computer.” I looked back at the gate again, wondering if the ghost might still be trying to follow. I could only hope that the two men hadn’t seen me either. I was in trouble.

Shanice pointed to her backseat. “My laptop is back here. Will that work?”

“Perfect. Let’s get somewhere with Wi-Fi.” I dug my phone from my pocket, hoping I’d saved Declan’s number. The phone was dead.

There was a Satellite Coffee up on the north side of town, right as we came down from the foothills. The café was basically an adobe box with a giant neon coffee cup and a UFO on its sign, but they had free, semi-fast Wi-Fi and decent coffee and stayed open all night. I snatched Shanice’s laptop out of the backseat and turned it on the moment we parked. I needed to put these images somewhere besides the original cards as soon as possible. It would be too easy to destroy this evidence if I carried the only copy.

“I need caffeine,” Shanice said, reaching for her purse. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

“Can you get me something to go? I’ve got to sit here and pirate some Wi-Fi.”

“Suit yourself.”

Once the Wi-Fi was connected, I took the card out of my camera and clipped it into the laptop dock, bringing up 1527 images. I bypassed the handshaking and backslapping of the Benavidez event and opened the last twenty-seven, which were so clear I had to look twice to make sure that my eyes were telling the truth.

They were.

The first was Garcia coming out of the party in a group of seven men, including Ignacio Marcos, the soon-to-be ghost. He was walking right behind Garcia, his arms and mouth in motion. Shot 1,527, the last shot, was a perfect photo of Garcia looking straight up at the camera and the blinding flash, right into the lens. That was the one that was either going to save me or kill me. I looked around, wondering if Garcia could be watching me right now. He couldn’t be. Otherwise, I would be dead too.

I highlighted all the photos of the incident and pulled them to my Flickr account, then attached them to emails I’d send to three different accounts I maintained for alternate backups. The upload bar ticked slowly. Too slowly. I dug in my photo bag for Declan’s card and composed an email to him with the relevant photos attached. I needed to get the photos to Angie and to Samuels—I needed to stop Garcia from taking this any further, and I needed to prove I wasn’t insane. But would that be enough? These people were dangerous, and the police offered no protection. The emails finally went through. I popped the card out, put it back into its sleeve, and stared at it.