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He didn’t answer.
‘Guillermo.’
He white-knuckled the steering wheel. ‘What?’
We drove along the freeway, windows down, my hair flying around my face wildly in the breeze. It was the weekend and the I-5 was relatively clear, a small mercy.
‘I’m going in,’ I declared boldly.
Guillermo ripped his eyes from the road and stared at me until I was squirming in my seat, wishing he’d pay attention to where he was driving.
‘To Emilio?’
I shook my head. ‘With the . . . baby.’
‘To the crematorium? No fucking way.’ He slapped his hand against the wheel, agitated. ‘My life was never this complicated until you turned up. You got a way of pissing people off, you know?’
I might have grown a skin of steel, but his words found chinks in my armour and sliced deep. I sagged back in my seat, deflated, feeling the last bits of my strength bleed out through the cracks.
I squinted against the bright sun, a sun that sat bloated and accusing in the sky. I’d forgotten my sunglasses. The sunlight hurt. Everything hurt.
I rested my elbow on the sill of my open window, feeling warm air as it whipped past us. Any other day and this might be an enjoyable outing. Sunday was normally the one day when I could do something outside of the cartel. Go to the beach. Swim. Or, more frequently, lie on my bathroom floor and stare up at the exhaust fan as it turned lazily in the ceiling, for hours, as I recounted every single moment of Murphy’s death. The moment he took his last breath, exhaled it, and breathed into me the reality that I was a killer. As the tiles chilled my skin, I’d think about how much blood he’d had inside him, the way it had soaked into my sheets and the carpet on my bedroom floor, his life force, gone, because of me. About how it would look to be slid into an oven, a bloodless corpse, and now I was about to see just what it looked like.
‘How could anyone do that to a child?’ I whispered.
‘He didn’t just do it to no child,’ Guillermo said. ‘He did it to you.’
I leaned forward in my seat, pressing my palms against my eyes until it hurt. The physical pain was a welcome relief from the way my heart was shattering into a million bloody pieces inside my ribcage.
‘You know,’ Guillermo said, ‘maybe it’s better this way. That kid, he’d be put to work in a fucking kiddie porn house, or worse.’
I took my hands away from my eyes and sat up, facing Guillermo. ‘There’s worse?’
He fixed me with a stare. ‘There’s always worse.’
I sagged in my seat, wiping more tears from my cheeks. My pores hurt where the saltwater had seeped in. I’d only been awake a few hours, but I was exhausted. One look at Guillermo told me that he looked how I felt.
* * *
It took too long to get to where we were going. I counted three police cruisers on our journey and wondered each time if we’d be pulled over. Guillermo’s car was nondescript, a late-model Nissan that looked more like a soccer-mom vehicle, but the window tint wasn’t quite dark enough to hide the gang tattoos that had been etched across his neck and all over his arms for the world to see and judge. He was like a magnet for attention, and so each time I saw a police car I cringed and waited for the flash of lights to tell us to pull over.
But of course, nothing happened. Nothing ever did when you were expecting it to. It was only when you were caught off-guard that the nightmarish realities happened.
I thought about calling John. Realised that would mean Guillermo would hear. Decided that was too risky.
Shit.
Guillermo pulled into the back of the funeral home and cut the engine, neither of us saying anything for a moment. I kept having paranoid thoughts that I could smell the death that sat on the backseat, encased in a plastic sarcophagus, but it was just my mind playing tricks on me. I think.
‘Wait here,’ Guillermo said finally, opening his car door and slamming it again.
Like hell. I got out, getting exactly three steps before Guillermo had rounded the car and backed me against it, effectively pinning me in place.
‘Am I speaking Chinese? Wait. Here.’ He stepped back enough for me to open my door again, but I didn’t. Emboldened by grief and rage, I reached into my purse and pulled out the handgun I always carried.
‘I’m going in,’ I said grimly. ‘So grab the suitcase and let’s go, ese.’
Guillermo stepped back, shaking his head as he eyed the gun I was pointing at him. ‘Gotta say, my feelings are kinda hurt,’ he said, patting his chest with his palm. ‘I ever point a gun at your head?’
