I tell myself a lot of things as I climb into bed and pull the covers up to my chin.
The locks are checked. The door brace is in place. The pepper spray is on the nightstand. I've done everything right, everything the self-defense courses and the threat assessment protocols say to do.
It doesn't help. The feeling of being watched clings to my skin like a film I can't wash off, and sleep, when it finally comes, is shallow and full of shadows.
2
MATEO
The body is a problem, but not because it's a body. I've handled enough of those that the mechanics are routine, as automatic as breathing. Plastic sheeting. Industrial bleach. A hacksaw for the joints, because bone doesn't dissolve on any timetable that works in my favor. The problem is location. This penthouse in Midtown has floor-to-ceiling windows and a doorman who could have noticed the two men who came upstairs three hours ago and the fact that only one of them is leaving.
I work quickly. The bathroom is marble and white tile, which makes cleanup easier because blood shows on white. You can see what you've missed. Dark surfaces are the real enemy because they hide traces that glow like neon under luminol.
I strip the body methodically, bagging the clothes separately. Roberto Salinas was forty-six and ran a distribution hub in the Bronx until he decided that skimming from the cartel was a retirement plan. It wasn't. The man who killed him is already on a flight back to Mexico City, which means I'm here alone, scrubbing another man's death off Italian marble at two in the morning.
This is what I do. I'm the last one in the room. The one who makes it look like nothing happened, like Roberto Salinas simply ceased to exist. Tomorrow his wife will file a missing persons report. In a week, the detectives assigned to it will lose interest. In a month, she'll start to understand that he's never coming home, and she'll grieve a man who was dead the moment he put his hand in the wrong pocket.
I don't work exclusively for the Vega cartel. In this city, the five organizations that control the boroughs maintain an uneasy truce, and part of that truce involves sharing resources when it benefits everyone.
I've cleaned scenes in Brighton Beach for the Bratva, erasing the aftermath of a Russian assassin whose work is efficient but messy. I've sanitized a warehouse in the Bronx after the Irish had a disagreement that required resolution.
The Commission on Staten Island keeps a list of reliable specialists, and my name is near the top. It's the kind of reputation that keeps you alive and keeps you useful, and in this world, useful is the only thing worth being.
I don't feel anything about this. Somewhere along the way, the part of me that was supposed to react to death stopped functioning, the way a fuse blows to protect the circuit. I don't know when it happened. Maybe it was gradual.
Maybe it was the night I was seventeen and Carlos Vega handed me a mop and a jug of bleach and pointed at the garage floor and said'clean it up, kid, and don't ask questions.'
I didn't ask questions. I cleaned the floor. And then I cleaned another one, and another, and eventually the cleaning became the thing I was known for, the thing that made me valuable, the thing that kept me and my brother alive in a world that discards people like us without a second thought.
Mi hermano.Alejandro.
I peel off the latex gloves and bag them with the rest. Three hours of work and the bathroom looks untouched. Better than untouched. I've cleaned the grout lines more thoroughly than whatever maid service this building uses. If the NYPD ever processes this room, they'll find nothing. Not a hair, not a fiber, not a single cell that says a man died here tonight.
Roberto Salinas, divided into manageable sections, goes into two heavy-duty contractor bags inside a rolling suitcase. The luggage is expensive, the kind that doesn't draw attention in a building like this. I wipe down every surface I touched, scan the room one final time, and wheel the suitcase to the elevator.
The doorman nods as I pass through the lobby. "Have a good night, sir."
"You too."
He doesn't look at the suitcase. People in buildings like this learn not to look too closely at anything. It's a survival skill dressed up as courtesy.
Outside, the city is doing what it does at two in the morning, pretending to sleep while running full speed underneath. A cab idles at the corner. A woman in heels walks a tiny dog past a shuttered bodega. Steam rises from a grate like the street is exhaling.
My van is parked two blocks north. It is unmarked and unremarkable, the kind of white panel van that could belong to a plumber or an electrician or any other tradesman with a reason to be anywhere at any hour. I load the suitcase, drive to a facility in the Bronx that processes industrial waste, and by four in the morning, Roberto Salinas has truly ceased to exist.
I drive home to Queens.
Home is a two-bedroom apartment above a laundromat on Roosevelt Avenue, the kind of place that vibrates faintly when the commercial dryers run downstairs. I've lived here for more than a decade. The rent is reasonable and the landlord doesn'task questions, which are the only two qualities I require in housing. The furniture is sparse: a couch I bought secondhand, a kitchen table with two chairs, a bed that's just a mattress on a frame. Alejandro used to give me shit about it.'You make enough to live somewhere nice, Mateo. You live like a monk.'
Alejandro isn't giving me shit about anything right now. Alejandro is in a federal detention center in lower Manhattan, waiting to be sentenced to twenty-five years in prison because a prosecutor named Sofia Navarro built a case so airtight that even William Prescott couldn't punch a hole in it.
I shower. Hot water, then cold, the routine I use to reset after a job. The hot washes away the physical residue, the smell of bleach and copper that clings to skin and hair. The cold shuts down whatever's left of the adrenaline and brings everything back to baseline. By the time I step out and towel off, I am exactly what I need to be: calm, clear, controlled.
My phone is on the kitchen counter. There are three missed calls from a number I know and a text that says only:Call me.
I make coffee first. Black, strong, the way my mother used to make it in the small kitchen of our apartment in Sinaloa before everything went wrong. Before my father was killed by a rival crew when I was fourteen. Before my mother put me and Alejandro on a bus with two hundred dollars and the name of a cousin in New York and told us never to come back.
We never went back. Our mother was dead within the year. Cancer, the cousin told us when he finally got word, but I've always suspected it was something faster and more deliberate. Sinaloa is not kind to the widows of dead cartel soldiers.
