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“Tell me you want that too,” I say with a groan. “Tell meforeverback, and I’ll kill for it. I’ll kill for you.”
“Forever,” she whispers. “It’s what you’re fighting for now. Ours. Mine and yours. Black magic can never compete with white.”
“Forever… I fucking swear it to you, Ella.”
I feel her lips on me one final time. I hear the distant roar of the ocean, and then she’s walking away from me with Dog by her side.
Neither is looking back.
For once in our lives, we’re all looking forward.
31
ELLA
Two Weeks Later…
It’smy phone that wakes me at three a.m., not the noisy Chicharras outside my bedroom window.
I blink, trying to shake off the cocktail of nighttime meds that are muddying my thoughts, as my device keeps vibrating away on my nightstand and lighting up the dark. Rolling over, I find my bedsheets are damp with sweat. The air con has been hissing away all night, but Leticia’s fierce jungle humidity has still found a way into my room.
Disturbed by the noise, Dog jumps onto my bed and flops down next to me with a resentful grunt.
I never went back to the private island with my father. I negotiated with him for two hours straight to have the jet deviate to Colombia instead. I wasn’t prepared to fly away from Edier completely, neither was I prepared to sit around and let my brain decay while I waited for the chemo to calm my body’s immune responses down. I wanted to go to Leticia to try and piece together the broken pieces of his history for myself, and I knewTíaAnna would jump at the chance to help me. Plus, there’d be hundreds ofTíoJoseph’ssicariosthere to protect me.
I’m not quick enough to catch the call the first time around, but my device bursts into life again after a couple of seconds.
The number isWithheld, but there are only two people who know of its’ existence. That’s the rule we made inThe Eagle’smeeting room that day.
“Hello?” I croak.
“Ella, it’s me! I’m a genius. Just tell me I’m a goddamn genius.”
“Ivy?” I lean over to the nightstand and switch the light on, willing my brain to move a million miles faster to catch up with my friend’s.
“I got them!”
“Got what?”
“The toxicology reports. For those three men who died in the bar last month.”
Now, I’m wide awake. Rob put me on a sabbatical after I told him about my lupus treatment, and we’d reluctantly agreed to shelve the story until I returned. Besides, after Gutierrez vanished, all the other leads had gone dead.
“And?”
“Don’t ask me how I got them. It was completely unethical and maybe a little illegal too, but your hunch was right. They’d been buried. The originals were destroyed, but some dope in the lab made a copy and forgot to file it… I’m staring at it right now. And don’t ask me to explain the sciencey bits, either. I just have the name of the poison they found in their system.”
I close my eyes in relief.
There wasno black magic in the bar that night. It was just a dirty trick by a twisted magician.
“Does Rob know?”
“I’m going to meet him at the diner later. Listen to this… It’s some weird hybrid drug called scopolamine, better known as ‘Colombian Devil’s Breath’. On its own, it incapacitates you, gives you hallucinations, that kind of thing. Butthiswas mixed with something else to make it more lethal. That’s what made those men vomit blood like vampires before they died of respiratory failure.” She breaks off to curse at a cab driver, and I imagine her darting across a busy street in New York, throwing up sparks from her neon-pink heels. “There’s another reason I’m calling. I did some digging into Mr. Houdini from that night too. Turns out, thereisno ‘Mr. Gutierrez’ who works at the forensics lab, in this state or New Jersey. It was total bullshit.”
Damn.I was hoping she’d forget about him, but it was a stupid wish to make.
“All the security footage was wiped already, but I managed to snap a picture of him as he was leaving. I’ve spent the last couple of days digging the dirt. My fiancé’s an ex-cop, and it only cost me thirty-six blowjobs to get him to help me…” She sighs loudly. “Anyway, his real name is Quito Moreno, and he used to be a dealer and sometime racketeer in Brooklyn until he got charged with a storekeeper’s murder. The evidence was stacked until some newly qualified lawyer stepped in at the last minute and got him off.” There’s the slam of a car door in the background, as another one creaks open in my mind. “This is the best part, Ella… I saw a picture of this lawyer… It’s only the same snooty red-leather-wearing bitch we saw inHelioswith Edier Grayson, and again atThe Eaglethe day he took control of the company.”
