Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(72)

Jose stared at her. I was sure he was going to shoot us, but finally he said, “I remember.”

Imelda closed her eyes. A tear traced its way down her cheek.

“Why did you come?” Jose murmured. “I’ll have to kill you both now.”

“The third trimester is brutal,” Maia said. “But sometimes you feel the baby move, and there’s nothing like that in the world. Did you put your hand on Imelda’s belly and feel that? Did you speak to your babies before they were born?”

“We need time to get away.” Jose’s voice sounded ragged, almost apologetic. “We can’t have anyone tell.”

“Let them go,” Imelda begged.

Jose shook his head. He watched as Maia placed her hand on her belly.

“There it is,” Maia said. “A kick.”

Her smile was as astonishing as the storm, or the way the lighthouse had crumbled after one hundred and fifty years.

“The killings didn’t stop the hurt, did they?” Maia asked.

Jose didn’t answer.

Imelda knelt at his side. “Please, mi amor. Don’t.”

She tried to take his gun. He raised it so she couldn’t, but he didn’t push her away, either.

“Imelda knew what she was doing,” Maia said. “After those girls and their mother died…there really wasn’t anything for you to do except turn yourself in. You’d arrived right back where you started. Pain. Grief. The death of children.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Jose said.

“Perhaps the death of your children wasn’t your fault,” Maia said. “Everything you’ve done since then is.”

A new sound cut through the surf. It sounded like a small engine, something fast. Too soon for civilian watercraft to be back on the waves. Police, perhaps. Or a water ambulance.

“We can’t get away if you live,” Jose said.

“You’d have to kill us,” Maia agreed. “You were prepared to do that last night. You planned on destroying the entire hotel, hoping everyone would be in it. Was it hard, knowing that would include a family, an unborn child?”

“I told you to get out. I tried…It would have been all right if you hadn’t come here. Alex Huff—”

“Alex would’ve taken the blame as Calavera,” I said. “Even in the end, he didn’t give you up. He would’ve let you go. Despite everything, he cared about you two. He believed everyone on this island deserved a chance.”

Jose shook his head. His eyes were red now.

“You’d have to kill us,” Maia said. “But that would be the wrong choice, Jose. It would be starting all over again.”

She made it sound so sensible. All I could see was the gun and a distraught killer. I had been here before. The odds were terrible. I had seen too many people die. Everything I’d seen in my life told me that I had only one chance—to overpower Jose.

But Maia held my hand, gently restraining me. Maia’s voice was calm, confident.

“Mi amor,” Imelda said. “You would have to kill me too. I can’t go through this. Please. No more.”

Jose focused on her, as if seeing her for the first time.

She held out her hand.

Jose’s jaw tightened. His eyes were as turbulent as the water in the slip. He pointed the gun at his wife’s chest. Then he crumpled, kneeling next to her while she held his head against her breast, and he let out a sob that had been trapped inside him since the death of his children.

For a long time, the four of us sat in the boathouse. The only sounds were the waves against the hull of the sunken boat and the crackle of the fires dying on the hill.

44

Imelda waited for someone to confront her, but no one did.

They treated her like a sick child—someone to be checked on occasionally, spoken to gently, sheltered from the others in case she was contagious.

Jose was taken from her. A last kiss, and he whispered in her ear, “Say nothing.”

His only wish: to protect her from what she had done.

She sat on a tarp and wrapped herself in a shawl that smelled faintly of candles and altar incense. She thought about the day Peter Brazos had visited the island.

He had questioned Señor Huff, yes. But mostly he had questioned her.

The lawyer’s eyes had been like a falcon’s, dark and without mercy. I know Jose was involved. Tell me how, and you could save him.

She had no idea how Brazos found them: a confession from someone, a deal to betray Jose. They had been so careful, and yet someone knew who they were. After their children were murdered in Laredo, they had moved north, hoping to escape. Jose promised to stop working for the drug lords, but he still built his devices, still used the workroom Señor Huff had given him to plan occasional jobs. Bomb-making was in his blood like a drug. He could not leave it behind completely.

After Peter Brazos found them, she told Jose what they must do. She located his home in Corpus Christi, his other house in Port Aransas.

We should run, Jose told her. We have enough money.

But Imelda had run too many times. She loved Rebel Island. She wanted to grow old here with Jose, tending the hotel rooms, listening to the ocean. When she thought of Peter Brazos, threatening to take her husband away from her, her hands trembled. She lit a candle at the altar of her dead children, and made a promise.