Eighteen minutes later the garage door opened. His car pulled in. Engine cut. The door from the garage to the kitchen opened and I heard his footsteps on the marble, unhurried because he thought he was coming home to his sick wife.
I moved behind LaLa and pressed the barrel of the gun against her temple. She whimpered and her whole body went rigid but she didn’t scream because I’d already told her what would happen if she made this difficult.
Mateo Rios walked into the living room calling out “LaLa, are you okay?” and then he saw us. His wife on the couch with tears on her face and a gun pressed against her head and me standing behind her looking at him with the expression of a man who’d already made every decision that mattered before he walked into this house.
His hand went to his waistband immediately.
“I wouldn’t,” I said. I pushed the barrel harder against LaLa’s temple and she cried out. “You pull that weapon and the last thing your wife sees is you making the wrong choice.”
“Quest.” His voice was controlled but his eyes were on LaLa and I could see the panic underneath the composure. “This is between you and me. She has nothing to do with this.”
“She has everything to do with this because she’s sitting here with a gun to her head because of decisions you made. Not me. You. You stalked my woman. You sent men to kidnap her. You killed my security guard. And now your wife is paying for it. That’s on you, Mateo. Not me.”
“I’ll fix it. Whatever you want. I’ll leave Dame CoCo alone. I’ll leave the country. I’ll disappear. Just take the gun off my wife.”
“Drop your weapon first. Kick it over here.”
He looked at LaLa. She looked back at him with mascara running down her face and her body shaking under my hand and I could see the exact moment Mateo Rios realized that he wasn’t the most dangerous man in this room. He’d spent years thinking his cartel connections and his money and his patience made him untouchable. But he was standing in his own living room watching another man hold his wife’s life in his hands and there wasn’t a single move on the board that didn’t end with her dead if he played it wrong.
He bent down slowly. Set the gun on the marble. Kicked it toward me with the toe of his shoe. It slid across the floor and stopped a few feet away.
“Please,” he said. “Take the gun off her. I’m unarmed. I’m not a threat. I’m sorry about Dame CoCo. I’m sorry about the security guard. I’ll make it right. Whatever it takes.”
Hearing him call my Peach Dame CoCo sent me into a rage. I hated that fuckin’ name because of what it was associated with — other men at her feet. She was mine and that name belonged to them. I wanted to murder everyone in this damn building.
But I kept my composure. I took the gun off LaLa’s temple. She collapsed forward on the couch sobbing into her hands. Rios exhaled and his shoulders dropped and for about half a second he looked relieved.
“I promise to leave her alone,” he whimpered like a little bitch. All that bravado he brought into my office a few weeks ago vanished in a blink.
“Oh I know you’ll leave her alone,” I said.
I raised the gun and shot him in the head.
The sound was deafening in the marble living room. LaLa screamed and launched herself off the couch and ran to his bodyand dropped to her knees beside him and grabbed his face and called his name over and over even though he was already gone. Blood was pooling on that expensive floor and spreading toward the family photos on the mantel and I stood there and watched her hold her dead husband and felt exactly what I expected to feel. Nothing for him. Something for her.
I picked up Rios’s gun from the floor and tucked it in my waistband. Then I crouched down next to LaLa. She flinched away from me, her hands covered in her husband’s blood, her eyes wild with grief and terror.
“Listen to me carefully,” I said. “You’re not going to call the police on me. You’re not going to tell anyone what happened here. If anyone asks, your husband had enemies in his business and they caught up to him. You don’t know names. You don’t know faces. You weren’t home when it happened.”
“You killed him,” she whispered. “You killed him in front of me.”
“And Paco gets out of school at 3:15 every afternoon. I need him to keep getting out of school at 3:15 every afternoon. You understand what I’m saying?”
Her face went white. Whatever fight was left in her eyes died right there. She nodded once and pulled her husband’s body closer to her chest and didn’t say another word.
I didn’t like doing that. Threatening that woman’s child went against everything I believed. I’d never hurt a kid and the thought of it sat in my stomach like poison. But Davis was dead because of Mateo Rios. And he tried to kidnap the love of my life. And if I left LaLa with the freedom to talk, the next men at my door would be wearing badges and the outcome would be worse for everybody.
I walked out the back door the same way I came in. The yard was quiet. Birds in the trees. A sprinkler running three houses over. Suburban Virginia on a Wednesday morning, peacefuland manicured and completely unaware of what just happened inside a colonial with a three-car garage.
I got in my car and drove home to the woman I’d just killed for. She’d never know the details. She didn’t need to. She just needed to know that Mateo Rios would never text her again and the motorcycles weren’t coming back and she could go to class and sleep at night without a gun on the nightstand.
35
Mehar
Mrs. Pak dismissed us early because half the class failed the practical on microdermabrasion and she needed a minute to compose herself before she said something she couldn’t take back. Her exact words were “I need to go pray for patience before I lose my license.” I respected it.
I was packing up my kit when I noticed Shayla at the station next to mine. She was pulling her sleeves down over her wrists but not fast enough. I saw the bruises. Dark and raised, the kind that settle deep into brown skin and don’t fade for weeks. Maybe four or five days. And the concealer under her left eye was good but not good enough because I’d spent years hiding the same marks with the same techniques and I could spot the blend line from across the room.
