"It's part of the job."
"The job." She loads the word with contempt the way you load a magazine, one round at a time, each one placed to kill. "Is that what you call this? A job?"
I lean against the doorframe. I've already decided how this conversation will go. Professional. Direct. No cruelty, because cruelty is wasteful, and no sympathy, because sympathy gets you sloppy.
She's a variable to be managed, a problem to be solved. If she cooperates, she lives. If she doesn't, I do what I've always done.
I keep her fed and functional for the same reason I keep my tools clean, because a damaged asset is a useless asset. The fact that she's a person, a woman with a mother who's expecting her for Sunday dinner, is information I've bleached from the equation the way I bleach blood from concrete.
"I need you to listen to me," I say. "What happens next depends on how well you hear what I'm about to tell you."
"I'm listening."
"You are going to file a motion to vacate the conviction against Alejandro Reyes. You're going to cite newly discovered evidence, prosecutorial overreach, whatever legal mechanism works. And you're going to make sure jeopardy attaches so they can't come after him again. I don't care how you do it. I care that it gets done."
She stares at me for a moment. Then she does something I don't expect. She laughs. Not the laugh of a woman who's amused but the sharp, incredulous laugh of a professional watching someone misunderstand her field so fundamentally that it borders on comedy.
"That's not how federal court works," she says. "I can't file a motion to vacate my own conviction. Post-conviction relief is initiated by the defendant through his attorney, not the prosecution. Even if I wanted to help your brother, the mechanism you're describing doesn't exist. Whoever told you this was possible doesn't know the first thing about the legal system they're trying to manipulate."
The certainty in her voice is absolute. She's not arguing. She's correcting.
"Then what can you do?"
"Nothing. I can do nothing, because your brother is guilty and the conviction is sound. But even in a hypothetical where I wanted to intervene, the process you're describing is a fantasy. Your cartel sent you here on a fool's errand."
"Then consider it a different kind of conversation. If you can't undo the conviction, give me a reason to believe he deserves it."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then this gets harder. For both of us."
She tilts her head and studies me. She's testing me, probing for information the way she probed witnesses on the stand, looking for tells, for hesitation, for the gap between what I say and what I mean.
"I don't want to hurt you," I tell her, and it's the truth. "But the people I work for don't share my preferences. If I can't deliver results, they'll send someone who will."
"So, you're the good cop."
"I'm the only cop. If someone else comes, there won't be a conversation."
She processes this. I can almost see it happening, the way her eyes move slightly as she sorts through the implications, assigns probabilities, maps outcomes. She's doing exactly what I would do in her position. What I did do, at fifteen, sitting in a strange apartment in a strange city with no money and no language andno options, calculating which of my limited choices would keep my brother alive.
"Your brother is guilty," she says. The same words as last night, but with a different delivery. Last night they were defiance. This morning the words are a foundation she's building on.
She recites the evidence without notes and without hesitation, as if the case files are tattooed on the inside of her eyelids. I've met a lot of formidable people in my line of work, men who kill without hesitation, who operate criminal empires spanning continents, who hold the power of life and death in casual hands. Sofia Navarro, sitting on a double bed in a farmhouse with torn stockings and uncombed hair, is more dangerous than any of them.
Which means she's more dangerous to me. If she won't break, if her defiance outlasts the timeline Diego gave me, then the calculus simplifies to something ugly and final. I've killed people for being problems. She is becoming a very large problem.
"People lie on the stand," I say. "Witnesses are coached. Evidence can be manufactured."
"It can be. It wasn't." She swings her legs off the bed and stands. She's shorter than I expected, maybe five-six in the heels she's no longer wearing. Without shoes she barely reaches my chin. She stands anyway, squaring up to me like height is irrelevant, like the locked door and the isolation and the fact that I could break her in half are details beneath her consideration.
"Let me tell you something about your brother, Mr. Reyes." The formal address is deliberate, establishing distance, establishing that this is a negotiation and she intends to conduct it on her terms. She walks me through the financial discrepancies in my brother's businesses, the auto body shopreporting forty cars a month while servicing a fraction of that, the utility bills that don't match the revenue claims.
I push back. She pushes harder.
"Surveillance footage can be doctored," I say.
"It can be. But it wasn't. We corroborated with utility records. A shop servicing forty cars a month uses a specific amount of water, electricity, and supplies. Your brother's shop used roughly a third of what those numbers would require. The math doesn't lie, Mr. Reyes. Even when people do."
