For a moment we just stand there. The lot smells like burnt powder and gasoline and the copper tang of blood on cold air. The SUV engines are still running, their headlights cutting through the haze of gun smoke that hangs in the still morning air. One of the fluorescent lights I didn't smash buzzes and flickers overhead, casting the scene in a sick yellowish wash.
My hands are starting to shake. Not during. Never during. But now, with the last target down and the adrenaline ebbing, the tremor starts in my fingers and works its way up my forearms. My right shoulder throbs where I hit the concrete during the roll, and my ears are ringing with a high thin whine that turns the world cottony and distant. I can feel every bruise, every scrape, every place where concrete fragments pepperedmy skin. The weapon is powering down, and what's left underneath is a man standing in a parking lot full of dead men, holding onto a woman because she's the only thing keeping him vertical.
"The FBI will be here shortly," she says. Her voice is remarkably steady for a woman who just dodged a bullet. "We need to get our stories straight."
"What stories?"
"The story where I explain why a kidnapping victim is defending her kidnapper to a room full of federal agents." She wipes the blood from her forehead with the back of her hand. "I'll figure it out. I'm good with narratives."
Despite everything, despite the bodies and the blood and the two rounds left in the gun and the sirens that I can hear now, faint and approaching from the east, something shifts in me. Not a collapse but an opening, like a lock turning after years of rust.
"Sofia."
"What?"
"I'm sorry. For everything. For the alley, for the van, for every minute of fear I caused you. I'm sorry."
She looks at me for a long time. The blood is drying on her temple. Her feet are bleeding on the concrete. The knife is still in her hand, my knife, the one I gave her because I wanted her to have a chance.
"I know you are," she says. "We'll deal with that later. Right now, put the gun down before the FBI gets here. I don't want them shooting you on sight."
I set the gun on the bench and raise my hands.
The sirens grow louder. Blue and red lights appear on the county road, cutting through the darkness. The cavalry is arriving late and finding a battlefield instead of a hostage situation.
Sofia steps forward and positions herself between me and the approaching vehicles, and she raises her hands too.
"Let me do the talking," she says.
She faces the lights with her chin up and her shoulders squared, a woman in torn clothes with blood on her face and a knife in her pocket, standing in front of a man who kidnapped her, shielding him with her body.
I lower my hands and stand behind her and let her, because Sofia Navarro walking toward a wall of federal agents with bare feet and a spine made of rebar is not something you interrupt.
13
SOFIA
The FBI safe house is a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building in Yonkers that looks like every other building on the block. The walls are beige, the blinds are slatted, and the space has the anonymity of government-furnished rooms, designed to be forgettable, which is entirely the point.
Jon drives us here directly from the gas station, bypassing the field office and bypassing normal protocol, because the situation, as he put it while wrapping my feet in gauze from a first aid kit and staring at the bodies in the parking lot, is'about sixteen levels above my pay grade and I need time to figure out how to brief this without getting every person in the building fired.'
He's right to be cautious. A missing federal prosecutor turns up at a gas station with a cartel operative and five dead sicarios, carrying a duffel bag full of evidence written on napkins. That's not a case report. That's a career-ending catastrophe for everyone who touches it unless it's handled with precision.
I intend to handle it with exactly that.
The emergency room doctor Jon brings to the safe house is a woman in her fifties who asks no questions and works with thequiet efficiency of someone who has treated federal witnesses before. She cleans and bandages both feet, gives me antibiotics and a tetanus booster, and tells me to stay off them for a week. I tell her that's not going to happen. She gives me a look that says she hears that a lot and it never ends well.
Mateo is in the other bedroom, being debriefed by an agent Jon trusts. I heard him shower earlier, the pipes groaning through the thin walls, and now I can hear the murmur of his voice, measured and even, telling his story the way he told it to me at the kitchen table. Every job. Every body. Every lie his brother fed him. The agent is recording everything for a case file that will eventually grow to thousands of pages.
I sit on the bed in my borrowed room in borrowed clothes, a pair of FBI sweats and a Georgetown sweatshirt that Jon must have grabbed from somewhere, and I organize my thoughts the way I organize a case: chronologically, systematically, without the emotions that would make this unmanageable.
The emotions are there, and they're enormous. They include fury at being kidnapped, guilt about what happened on the kitchen floor, grief for my mother's terror during the days I was missing, and complicated feelings about a man who drugged me and saved me and held my bleeding feet in his hands at a gas station. There's also a profound, disorienting exhaustion that goes beyond the physical.
I file them all for later.
Jon knocks and comes in. He looks like he hasn't slept in days, which is probably accurate. He sits in the chair across from the bed and rubs his eyes.
"Your mother is safe," he says first, because he knows that's the thing I need to hear before I can think about anything else. "She never left for Indianapolis. We found her at home. Two agents are with her around the clock. She's scared but she's okay. She knows you're alive."
