Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(73)

If you will not, she told Jose, I will.

In the end, he had relented. But it had been her idea—her murder. The wife and children—if Imelda had not pushed Jose, if she’d given him time to plan…

Imelda had been coming out of the grocery store in Port Aransas when she heard two men talking about the explosion—the mother and the two little girls. Imelda’s knees turned to water. She collapsed in front of the IGA and her grocery bag split, oranges and soup cans rolling through the parking lot. The men had tried to help her, but she ran. She didn’t stop until she found a pay phone and called Jose.

They waited for Peter Brazos to revisit the island with an army of police. But nothing happened. At first Imelda did not understand why. Then she realized she had misjudged. Brazos knew less than he let on. He had no idea Jose was Calavera. He had simply been pushing on them as one of many leads to get at his targets in court. Brazos’s wife and children had died for nothing.

Something had broken inside Jose when he learned about the little girls. He wandered the hotel at night, muttering the names of his victims, the dates of his kills. His believed the police would come for them eventually. Or worse, the drug lords. They would resent Calavera’s botched, unauthorized assassination. It had caused them too much grief.

Jose made a plan. He would negotiate with the American Marshals Service, exchange information for immunity. Imelda pleaded with him not to, but Jose would not listen.

It is the only way to save ourselves, he told her. They will find us otherwise, wherever we run.

The marshal Jesse Longoria had arrived, but he did not want to negotiate. And everything had spiraled out of control.

Imelda watched another boatful of police come ashore. They brought black plastic cases, yellow tarps and cameras. They joked easily with one another, offering drinks from coolers as if they had come for a day on the beach.

Señora Navarre was talking to one of them. Her hands were cupped around a coffee mug. The señora’s eyes caught hers, and an electric charge passed through Imelda.

The señora paused in her conversation. She fixed Imelda with a strange look—almost like pity. Then she turned her attention back to the policeman. She did not look at Imelda again.

She knows, Imelda realized.

And yet…Señora Navarre would not tell the police. Imelda wasn’t sure how she knew this, or why the señora would keep silent, but she sensed it was true.

Imelda clenched a handful of sand. She was free, but she would never see Jose again. She had the blood of children on her hands.

I will pay the price, Jose had told her. You must not. Please, you are all I have. Please, my love, let me do this.

She wrapped her shawl around her. She would pay a price—only a different price than Jose. The world would be her prison until she answered before God.

She would go back to her cousin’s in Corpus Christi. From there…she didn’t know. She would find a new job, something to help people. She would add three candles to her altar and pray for the family she had destroyed.

Suddenly she understood Señora Navarre’s look of pity. Imelda needed no more punishment. She would live alone with her ghosts and her altar, struggling to make amends, knowing it would never be enough. The police could do nothing worse to her than that. Señora Navarre understood, as only a mother could.

A pilot fish jumped from the water—a silver spark like a camera flash. Imelda watched for it again, but the waves churned gray and empty. She would have to settle for that single splash—a tiny sign that the sea might come back to life.

45

I had some idea how the Taino Indians must’ve felt when Columbus and his men rowed ashore.

The three Coast Guard guys were only the beginning. An ambulance boat arrived next, followed by the Aransas Sheriff’s Department, followed by the ferry filled with FBI agents and marshals and FEMA personnel. By the afternoon, the island was overrun by strangers. White tents were set up on the beach. Forensics teams combed the wreckage of the hotel. Three bodies were found, photographed, bagged and removed.

Jose and Imelda were separated from the rest of us, led away somewhere. I never saw them leave the island.

I had a series of interviews, most of which I would not remember later. Maia was checked out by a doctor. Some interviews we had to do separately. Some we got to do together. I ate a doughnut and drank a cup of tepid orange juice. Later on, a homicide detective from Corpus Christi gave me a chicken sandwich. He told me something that had happened to him once at a barbecue for Peter Brazos. I don’t remember the story, or why he felt he needed to confide in me.

It’s strange how that happens. Being a witness, a victim, a participant in some terrible event seems to give you some of the qualities of a priest confessor. Instead of people comforting you, people look to you for comfort and understanding, as if you, by virtue of your trials, have gained some insight the rest of the world sorely needs. A capacity to endure.

Or maybe the guy just had a poor sense of social etiquette. I wasn’t in much frame of mind to judge.

A medic who didn’t know better told me all the gossip.

Jose had given a full confession to the police. He’d claimed responsibility for the murders of Jesse Longoria and Chris Stowall. He had cleared his wife of any knowledge or guilt. Imelda, I suspected, would go free. That was the only condition Jose demanded in exchange for telling the FBI all about his employers during the time he worked assassinations. Strangely, Imelda’s dream of relocation under a new name would most likely become a reality. She and Jose would disappear. But they would not be together. Jose would be in prison somewhere. And Imelda…I didn’t know where she would go. She would be swept out of our lives and gone.