Prudencio Rivera Martínez is parked in a Dodge Voyager with two of his men at the end of the street. He is half asleep but rouses whenever a car drives by. This is not a frequent occurrence, for Cortillo Avenue in the Gables is short and untraveled, except by those who live in the great homes that line it and those who had business there: guests, servants, contractors. None of the other houses on the street were guarded like the Calderón house. Instead, they had ridiculous little signs warning that if anyone did anything bad, someone would call the police. Martínez understood that things were run differently in America than in Cali, where he came from. In Cali, homes like this would have three-meter walls around them topped with razor wire or broken glass, and each would have a crew of guards on duty and there would be armored limousines and outriders whenever the family emerged.
He was not a thoughtful man as a rule, but he couldn’t help wondering what a couple of gangs of Colombians could do to such a street. It would be like scooping up a plate of beans, that easy. For this reason, he didn’t think he would have much trouble if this little problem of Hurtado’s was being caused by Americans. He personally agreed with his boss that it was a Colombian operation. He had seen the police photographs of Fuentes, supplied by Mr. Calderón from a source within the Miami cops, and he thought it looked like something a Colombian would do: an odd kind of patriotic pride. He himself knew people who liked to spray blood around like that. The eating part he wasn’t so sure about, although he had heard rumors from the south, where a civil war had been going on for half a century, about guys in the jungle who ate enemies. He himself was a more fastidious killer, specializing most recently in car bombs. He had people he used when wetter things were required, and he had brought several along on this job, in case of need.
Now the sound of a vehicle again brings Martínez up out of his doze to full alertness. A brightly painted van passes slowly by his window. The glass in his van is heavily tinted, but even so he can make out leaves, parrots, monkeys in the design, and some words in English he doesn’t quite get. But he can see the license plate as it rolls by and he records it in a little notebook. That is something he does on jobs like this, writing down license numbers. Obviously, if anyone is going to try something, especially if Colombian, they will use false plates, but still it is a good practice. The painted van slows to a stop before the Calderón house, pauses for a moment, and then moves slowly on. Martínez punches a button on his cell phone. It is answered immediately and he says, “Find out who that is.”
“Pick them up?” asks the voice in the phone.
“No, just follow them. I want to know who they are and where they come from.” He disconnects the circuit. At the far end of the street, another Dodge van with dark windows moves away from the curb and follows the painted VW around the corner.
Kevin and Jennifer drove across Rickenbacker Causeway to Virginia Beach, a relatively undeveloped strip of public land north of Bear Cut. Kevin took a terry cloth blanket and half of a bottle of Rupert’s wine out of the car, and they both walked out of the little parking lot away from the causeway down toward where the mangroves started. Kevin spread the blanket in a little sandy cove covered with the needles of the overhanging Australian pines. It was dark here, the strong moonlight blocked by the overhanging boughs, and cool. It had been a cool day, and the biting insects were hardly active. Jennifer knew why Kevin had chosen a dark spot. She walked on crunching hard sand toward the water.
“Where’re you going?” he called.
“To the water. I want a moon bath.”
This girl she once knew, Rosalind, had told her that the rays of the moon were healthy for women, that they strengthened the subtle energies and prevented menstrual cramps. Jenny recalled a tiny little straw-haired girl with lots of face piercings and dark bracelet tattoos, into crystals and astrology, too. She had done a horoscope for Jenny on a piece of notebook paper, sun and moon in Cancer, Scorpio rising, and Rosalind had explained what it all meant, you are probably attracted to the sea. Your home environment is very important to you, and you like to make it cozy. You may be very touchy emotionally, and need to hide in your shell sometimes. You are a strong defender of family and tradition. Although your temperament is changeable, people will come to you readily for nurturing and care. You look to your mother for protection and nurturing. That last part was a little off, also the touchy emotionally, but maybe what she was feeling now was some of that kicking in. Or maybe it was all bullshit, like Kevin said.
She slid out of her sandals and waded into the water. It was warmer than the air and had the feel of light oil. The creamy moon rode high, silvering every wavelet. She stood immersed to her knees and let the rays sink into her skin, and wished greatly that it was not all bullshit. She heard the squeak of steps in the sand. Kevin, coming for a little of her famous and astrally correct nurturing and care. “Hey…,” he said.
Without thinking, Jenny stepped back on the sand and in an instant was free of her T-shirt and shorts; then she dived into the reflected moon. The water was shallow here, less than five feet. She shot down to the sand and coasted just above the bottom. It was perfectly black, disappointing because she wanted it to be moonlit under the water, magical and strange, and she wondered briefly why it was not. She would ask Cooksey. She could hold her breath for a long time now because of all her practice in the fish pool, and she did, suspended in the utter dark.
There was a splash, heard faintly, and a disturbance in the water, a pressure of something moving. Did sharks come at night? she wondered, and felt a little tug of fear and self-contempt. Yet another thing she didn’t know. She kicked off from the sand and shot to the surface. But it was only Kevin, sputtering and thrashing a dozen yards away.
“God, Jenny, I thought something happened to you!”
“I’m fine. Were you going to rescue me?”
“Yeah, right,” he said, laughing, “my action-hero phase.” He drifted over and embraced her, squeezing her breasts against his chest, kissing her neck. This was a little new, she thought, it wasn’t only that he wanted sex. He almost always wanted sex, and just now, as a matter of fact, so did she. But even when they had first hooked up, it hadn’t had this feel to it, like he was afraid she was going away and wanted to be extra loving. If true, if she wasn’t just imagining it, then why did he act so shitty when they were going to make her leave the property? He had his hand inside the waistband of her panties now, the longest finger searching downward like a killifish after a crumb. She thrust away from him and paddled away on her back.
On the dry sand she stripped her clinging panties off and pulled shorts and T-shirt on, and found her sandals. She trotted to the blanket and used it to dry her face and hair. Kevin came trailing along, with a confused look on his face, which he was trying to hide behind his usual lopsided smile. She folded the blanket. “Let’s go in the van,” she said.
In the mangrove thicket, Santiago Iglesias put down his eight-byten night glasses and said to his companion, Dario Rascon, “Looks like the show is over. Let’s go back to the van.”
Rascon said, “That’s some piece of ass. I’d like to fuck that bitch. I’d like to fuck that bitch right up her white ass. You know something? I never fucked a redhead pussy before. How about that? I just thought of that when I was watching her flash her cunt at us. Not a real one, anyway. You want to know what I think? We should toss the littlemaricón in the woods and fuck her into the ground.” Here he made a sucking noise with his mouth and manipulated his genitals, indicating a high level of sexual interest.