The Age of Embers Read online

  “When Mom said you were a badass, is that still true?”

  This question stills me.

  “Yes,” I say.

  I’m thinking of the way I took those guys apart last night. I’m thinking how good it felt to finally just hit something. To finally beat something awful to a dead, bloody pulp.

  “Are you a good guy, Dad?” she asks.

  “Good morally or good capably?”

  “Morally.”

  “I don’t think so,” I confess. “Not anymore.”

  She appears to think about this for a minute, her eyes not once leaving mine. Then: “Are you and Mom going to work things out?”

  “No.”

  Suddenly her tears are starting to dry up, as are mine. I’m not sure where she’s going with this line of questioning, but it has me feeling the effects of last night, of Adeline’s texts, of Brooklyn’s confession.

  “What’s the worst thing you ever did?” she asks. “I won’t tell. Ever.”

  I hesitate, then remind myself I’ve never lied to Brooklyn. If there’s one thing I have left that’s of any value, one thing that’s worth preserving, it’s this honesty. But what will be the cost of telling her the truth? And will it even matter after I come clean with Xavier?

  “My cover got blown and it came down to me or three drug dealers.”

  “Did you beat them up?” she asks.

  “I killed them.”

  “When did that happen?” she asks, not as moved by my confession as I expected her to be.

  “Last night.”

  Now she shows surprise. “How did your cover get blown?”

  “I screwed up.”

  “How?”

  “It’s not your fault,” I tell her knowing when she learns the truth and turns it over a few times in her mind she might try to blame herself. “This is all on me. I just want you to know that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I brought my emergency phone with me to a drug buy instead of my deep cover phone. I’ve been really tired, and mad, and I’ve been missing you guys like crazy. My attention to detail has been slipping lately. It slipped last night at the worst time.”

  Her expression falls flat with the realization of what happened.

  “You said you did this last night?”

  I tap my head a few times, try to keep my composure. “I think I might be losing it.”

  She gets up and hugs me. For a long time we stand like this, and then she says, “Are you going to be in trouble?”

  “Yeah, I think.”

  “This is my fault,” she says.

  “I told you not to think that,” I remind her.

  “Are you going to go to jail?”

  I pull back, look at her. No lies.

  “Yes.”

  “For life?” she asks again, now looking like the little girl she used to be and not like the young woman she’s become.

  “I think so.”

  “Just for this, right?”

  “Triple homicide? Yeah. That’s kind of a big one.”

  “These guys…”

  “The dregs of society, honey. I did this city a favor, but still, I’m not a court of law, let along a judge, jury or executioner.”

  “Then I want you to do something for me,” she says. This is where I hold my breath, because I knew something was coming. I could feel it the second she started asking me how much trouble I was in.

  “What’s that?” I ask, feeling like I’m falling deeper and deeper inside myself. The only way I can describe it is like I’m tumbling backwards down a long hallway and I’m getting so very, very far away. Maybe it’s because I don’t know how I fit in here anymore. Or maybe I’m just terrified of what she’s about to ask.

  Then she says it, and the dread sets in.

  “I want you to hurt those boys,” she said, my little girl again. “I want you to hurt them really bad.”

  Chapter Three

  Guatemala, three months ago…

  If there is one thing that defined the life of a poor Guatemalan living in Guatemala City, one of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world, it was the abundance of both poverty and violence. Fear could also describe such an existence, but fear could be managed.

  Poverty and violence…not so much.

  Eliana Gutierrez had been a dangerously cute child and was now an extremely attractive woman. Her father told her that her looks would leave her vulnerable to the whims of greedy, perverted men. He was right. He’d said, “You’re going to be raped one day and it will change your life.”

  Of all the wonderful things a father could say...

  All throughout her teens, Eliana listened to her father speak such despicable things because to talk back or to ask questions was to be met with a ferocity her father kept tucked just below the surface. This anger wasn’t there for others as much as it was on tap for his son and two daughters. If there was one person Arcelio Gutierrez never meted out such discipline to, it was Eliana’s older sister’s eleven year old daughter, Carolina.

  For his granddaughter, Arcelio had a gigantic soft spot.

  Eliana was ten years Carolina’s senior, but they could be sisters, and they were far closer to each other than Eliana was with her older sister, Maylin. Maylin was not a disciplined girl. Arcelio had no problem telling Maylin to keep her legs closed to the boys in town; Maylin was equally as proficient in not listening. The way Eliana’s father was disappointed in Maylin when she was found to be pregnant was the same way Arcelio raised Eliana to be both tough and virtuous.

  Just like Maylin and their mother before them, Eliana was entirely too easy on the eyes. The boys in town were moved by their hearts rather than common sense, and too many of them tended to fall head over heels in love with her. One such boy made the mistake of trying to court her.

  Eliana’s older brother, Welmer, was quickly dispatched by Arcelio to take care of Eliana’s first boyfriend, a sweet young soul whose only desire was to be with Eliana. To this day he walks with a limp, and people try hard not to look at his now lazy eye, or to even make mention of it. Arcelio was big on leaving a mark. His message was clear: stay away from his girls. Fortunately for the other boys in town, but unfortunate for Eliana, the young girl had no more suitors.

  Eliana’s brother, Welmer, eventually became a policeman, but the police in Guatemala City were underpaid and more often than not, corrupt. Many of them turned to the other side of the law to supplement their pay. Welmer joined the Las Zetas cartel when he was twenty-seven and was found in the gutter beaten to death in Zona 1 just two days shy of his twenty-ninth birthday. Both his arms had been ripped off.

  Her father never did find his only son’s limbs, but a day later he received a visit from the head of the Las Zetas cartel, Omar Treviño Morales. Morales was simply known as Z-42. This was two weeks before Morales was arrested by Mexican security forces in a suburb in Monterrey, Nuevo León. At the time, Morales suspected he was in trouble, but he had not yet been arrested, and he made little mention of it to Arcelio.

  Morales sat in Arcelio’s favorite chair inside the modest Gutierrez household and told everyone that Welmer had an issue with sexual philanthropy.

  “He has a hard time keeping his hands to himself,” Morales said with not an ounce of decorum. He lit a cigarette in the house, drew deeply, blew a cloud of smoke into the small living room, stinking it up. “So we took his hands for him. Sadly, the arms were still attached. As I am sure you know by now, his penchant for touching things that aren’t his is no longer an issue.”

  Arcelio had no idea what to say, so he sat there, stoic, mute, horror-struck but not showing it. The man responsible for having his only son killed was sitting in their living room, smoking like he owned the place. He was the same man who ordered his boy’s arms be removed from the shoulders down.

  “If his behavior ends up costing me my freedom,” Morales continued, “then I will make sure someone finds your daughters and cuts them into bite-sized pieces. After that, we
will promptly feed them to the swine.” Then, with the wave of a hand, his smoke permeating everywhere, he added: “You know pigs. Always hungry, always eating.”

  The threat was not lost on Eliana’s father, for he was a man who spent his youth delivering such threats to people in positions just like his.

  Two weeks later, after Morales was captured, a congenial man named Roberto came to the house to collect Eliana and Arcelio’s granddaughter, Carolina, for work.

  It seemed the man was not there to cut them up and feed them to the pigs, which in itself was a relief, but still, this was not good news. Arcelio had no idea what the cartel’s plans were for his Eliana and Carolina.

  Roberto, this ugly horse of a man with high cheekbones and hair so thick it seemed to encroach on his bushy eyebrows, politely told Arcelio that Eliana and Carolina would live, but only in the employ of himself in the way of ongoing domestic services. For that, the Gutierrez family would not lose their lives.

  According to Roberto, this was quite the bargain.

  When Arcelio showed Roberto attitude and a loaded weapon, Roberto merely smiled and said, “My cousin Omar was quite serious about your options. It is either this, or I have ten men outside and about thirty hungry pigs resolve the…issue.”

  As Eliana was preparing to leave, Arcelio took his youngest daughter by the arm and whispered into her ear: “This is the time I warned you about. You do not have those scarred knuckles and those violent feet for nothing. Protect yourself. Protect my granddaughter.”

  Yes, her father taught her how to fight dirty, and how to kill. As a former mercenary working for Arturo Guzmán Decena, the founder of Las Zetas (Z1), Arcelio in his earlier years was not one to trifle with. He was very clear that his daughters, specifically Maylin, were cause for his departure from Las Zetas and that girls were the weakness of families, which is why their mother was no longer among the living.

  “Beautiful women have cursed me,” he was fond of saying in times of great anger and despair. “You two girls are a curse because you are not boys!”

  He often told Eliana that if he was punished by God with two pretty daughters instead of blessed with boys as fine as Welmer, then Eliana was going to be as close as humanly possible to being a boy, just without the appropriate parts.

  Maylin proved to be weak. She did not take to Arcelio’s discipline the way Eliana did. Arcelio was not easy on Eliana and Eliana hated him for it. Privately she swore she would kill him in his sleep the day she could fight as good as him. Arcelio, however, was not looking for his daughter’s love as much as he was looking to preserve what dignity remained of the family name.

  Twenty-one year old Eliana and eleven year old Carolina—two of Guatemala City’s most beautiful girls—were collected in a manner that both crippled and enraged Arcelio. Fortunately Maylin was not home at the time, but sadly, Arcelio was older now and quietly bearing the injuries he’d sustained in the final years of his training with Eliana. He could certainly put up a good fight, but Arcelio was close to sixty, and Roberto was a much younger man. If Arcelio knew anything, it was when to give up ground, for this was a young man’s game, and he was long past his prime.

  After Eliana collected hers and Carolina’s things, they said good-bye to Arcelio and left with Roberto and his men.

  Arcelio could not have known that Roberto was lying. Or that Omar Morales was not his cousin.

  After the arrest of Morales, the last obvious leader of the remaining Las Zetas structure, no one knew what the cartel would become, if it would fall to its adversaries or if new blood would step into the shoes of all those men (the Z’s) who had fallen before them.

  Several failed offshoots of Las Zetas formed between Morales’s capture and the new leadership of Z43, José María Guízar Valencia, but what did not change was Eliana’s and Carolina’s responsibilities as domestic workers in Roberto’s household.

  That continued for years.

  Every day that Eliana worked for Roberto and his hideous, demanding wife, Velvet, was one day closer to Eliana murdering these people. Roberto was a low level lieutenant for Las Zetas who was always on the phone discussing shipments. Just last year Eliana learned this precious cargo he was always discussing was in fact boys and girls, and occasionally young women.

  “Are you sure he’s a sex trafficker?” Carolina once asked Eliana in broken English when they found a second to whisper openly.

  Roberto and Velvet gave them rooms on opposite ends of the house and were told they could only talk at the dinner table if both Roberto and Velvet were present. The girls, however, found that every so often they were able to steal a word or two.

  This in itself kept them sane.

  “Yes,” Eliana replied in more fluent English, eyes and ears alert.

  “Do you think they’ll take us?” Carolina asked.

  It had been four years since they were taken and only once did Roberto drink too much and get too frisky with Eliana. She hurt him “on accident” after taking a beating for fighting to keep her blouse and bra on.

  Velvet kept strict watch on Roberto and Eliana after that day. Apparently Velvet wasn’t so dense of a woman that she failed to understand her husband’s proclivities.

  “I don’t think Velvet will let Roberto sell us,” Eliana said. “She loves bossing us around too much to have that joy stolen from her.”

  There were two other servants in the house—Yancy and Yoseline, fraternal twins of slain parents and children as ugly as both Roberto and Velvet were as adults. Both of the servants were fifteen. Yancy had a crush on Carolina, but Yoseline was smart enough to warn her brother off every time it was required.

  Carolina couldn’t be more disinterested in Yancy if she tried. It helped that they didn’t see much of Yancy or Yoseline, but the division of the servants was wearing on Eliana because she didn’t get to see much of Carolina either.

  Velvet insisted Eliana go to the market with her on Tuesdays and that Tuesday was no different. What they came home to, however, was very different. They saw Roberto’s body in the foyer right away. Blood was everywhere.

  Eliana found his head stuffed in the nearest toilet bowl.

  She called Velvet into the toilet room to see him. Velvet fell into fits of screaming, bawling rage at the sight of her husband’s lopped-off head. Eliana left for a moment then returned with a blade from the butcher’s block and cut Velvet’s neck from ear to ear the way her father taught her. She felt nothing. No hesitation, no remorse, nothing.

  Eliana then searched the large home, found Yoseline stripped and beaten to death in the bedroom, her skirt on the ground beside her and her underwear pulled down to her ankles. In the closet of another room, she found Yancy alive, but with a nasty gunshot wound to the stomach.

  He wasn’t going to last.

  “Who did this to you?” Eliana asked, eyes dry, concerned only for her niece. “Where is Carolina?”

  Yancy just sat there slumped over, his eyes pumped with fear, his face like the face of a fish pulled to shore and left to die in the open air. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a bloody coughing fit and one or two guttural words.

  “Just a name,” she said, not bothering with the warm spittle on her face and neck.

  He whispered something.

  She leaned her head next to his mouth and said, “Say again.”

  “Alfre…fredo.”

  “Yes, Alfredo?” she said, anxious. “Alfredo who?”

  “Valen…Val…zeula.”

  “Valenzuela?” she asked, pulling back to look at the boy’s face for confirmation. “Alfredo Valenzuela?”

  He started to open his mouth to speak, but his eyelids were bobbing shut. She watched as the pain drifted from his eyes and features. Finally his little body sagged with the permanence of death. She sat there looking at the boy. Stunned, mortified, she took it all in.

  “Yancy?” she said, patting his cheek.

  He didn’t move. His jaw merely hung low, his tongue and teeth stained wit
h blood, several of his back molars black with rot.

  Eliana double-checked the house for Carolina. Frantic, angry, her eyes were dry but her heart was pumped full of horror, and bountiful helpings of rage. She finally returned to the bathroom to look at what she’d done to Velvet. The woman was dead. Before leaving, she stared longingly upon the features of Roberto’s head in the toilet. And then, as hard as she could, she kicked Velvet’s body.

  She kicked it until she found herself out of breath and sobbing. For whatever reason, it felt good to get all that out. To empty herself of all that rage.

  For Velvet, Eliana knew there was nothing more pleasing for an ugly, rich woman than to push around two pretty girls. Velvet had bathed in such delights. But it seemed as though Roberto’s games with some very dangerous people caught up to him.

  These two deserved what they got, she thought. Then: Pull yourself together.

  Now armed with a name—Alfredo Valenzuela—and the belief that this man had taken Carolina, Eliana’s mission in life suddenly changed. She’d heard of Valenzuela before. She knew his reputation within Las Zetas. He was the one who oversaw the human trafficking end of the cartel. According to bits and pieces of conversation she’d overheard between Roberto and Velvet over the years, Valenzuela’s reputation was unquestionable. He was a revered man. For as long as she could remember, Roberto ached to serve directly under him.

  Perhaps he’d tried too hard.

  After searching the house high and low for anything she could convert to currency, Eliana found a stash of Velvet’s jewelry. The entire selection brought her enough money in a black market swap to barter for basic food and supplies, as well as reliable information on Valenzuela and his location. Before assuming control of Roberto’s house, Eliana dragged Roberto’s decapitated body into the bathroom and left it next to Velvet’s corpse. She cracked a window for circulation, then closed and sealed the bathroom door from the outside with some silver duct tape.

  Two long months passed, and she was still living out of Roberto’s house on scraps.