KILLING SARAI(31)

The only way I’m anything like poor Cordelia is that I can’t find the will to speak. I just sit here, letting the time pass and being completely incoherent to it, numb to its efforts to cause me discomfort. Fifteen minutes could be two hours and I truly wouldn’t know the difference.

Unlike Cordelia, I’m aware of everything around me. I just don’t care.

Sometime later, Victor emerges from the building and opens my door on the SUV. He just looks at me for a moment as if waiting for something, I guess for me to get out.

I look over at him, letting my head fall sideways against the seat. “You didn’t have to leave her there.”

“Yes I did,” he says and takes my hand. “She’ll be found soon, if she hasn’t already. You have my word.”

I take Victor’s hand, but glance over at Cordelia before I get out.

“What about her?”

Victor turns his gaze on Niklas in the driver’s seat.

“No long stops in-between,” he instructs. “Meet Guzmán at the waypoint we discussed. The money for his daughter. Inform him of the turn of events and that we could not control Javier’s absence, but the job will be done.”

“Whatever you say, Victor,” Niklas agrees flatly, his words tinged with bitterness and disappointment.

Victor tugs on my hand and I get out of the SUV.

As we are walking away, Niklas stops us:

“Where will you go?” he asks, hanging partially out the window with his arm resting on the door.

“For now,” Victor says, “Tucson. Await my contact for the rest.”

Niklas drives away.

As Victor walks alongside me toward a shiny new dark gray car, I fall back behind him for a moment.

“Why are we going to Tucson?”

He stops mid-stride and turns around to face me.

“I’m taking you home.”





CHAPTER FIFTEEN





When I see ‘home’ on the horizon many minutes later, it doesn’t affect me the way that I always dreamed it would. I don’t even lift my head from the passenger’s side window to look at it as we roll by. Because I know there’s nothing for me here.

Instead of gazing out at the city, I watch the black asphalt move rapidly as we coast over it.

“Where do you live?” Victor asks.

Finally, I lift my head and turn to face him.

“Why are you doing this?”

Victor sighs and puts his eyes back on the road.

“Because I think you’ve seen enough.”

He pulls the car into a roadside convenience store parking lot and puts it into Park. It’s starting to get dark outside.

“You need to tell me where to take you,” he says and I detect the faintest hint of discomfort in his face.

“Your father?” he urges when I don’t answer.

Absently, I shake my head. “My father could be one of a hundred men in Tucson. I never knew him.”

“A grandmother? An aunt? A distant cousin? Where would you like to go?”

I quite literally have no family. Since I don’t know my father, I don’t know any of my family on his side. I never had any siblings; my mother got her tubes tied after she had me. My grandparents both died when I was a teenager. My aunt, Jill, lives somewhere in France because she could afford to move there and she disowned my mom when I was thirteen-years-old. And in-turn, she disowned me, accused me of being just like my mom even though I was as different from her as night is from day.

Not wanting to give Victor any reason to believe that he owes me anything else, I say the only person that comes to mind so that he can drop me off and leave me to whatever kind of life I can make for myself.

“Mrs. Gregory,” I whisper quietly, lost in the memory of the last time I saw her. “She lives about ten minutes from here.”

I catch Victor’s eyes staring at me from the side and mine meet them for a moment. What is he waiting for? He seems to be studying my face, but I don’t know why.

I look away and point in the direction he should go next.

Victor puts the car into Drive and we head for the trailer park where I used to live.

It looks exactly the way it did when I left, with broken toys scattered around in side-yards, old beat-up cars parked in various spots with grass grown up around the flat tires. Window unit air conditioners hum a racket into the early evening air and dogs bark from their short chains wrapped around trees. When we drive by the little blue trailer I lived in for most of my life, I barely look at it. But I do wonder, just for a moment, who lives there now and if they ever managed to get rid of the incessant cockroach infestation that my mom never could.

“Right here,” I say quietly, pointing to what I hope is still Mrs. Gregory’s home two trailers down.

But seeing the bright red Bronco parked out front, I’m beginning to think that it’s not. After nine years I wouldn’t expect it to be.

I go to get out, but Victor stops me.

“Take this,” he says, reaching into his inside suit jacket pocket.

He pulls out a thick wrapped stack of one hundred dollar bills and hands them out to me. I glance to and from him and the money, hesitant only because it’s so unexpected.

“I know it’s blood money,” he says, putting it further into my reach, “but I want you to take it and do whatever you need to with it.”