Visconti frowned up at her. “Are you a cop? How do you know all that?”
“I’m not a cop.”
“You want money? Is that it? I can get you money. Whatever you want.”
“Do you recognize the name Manuela Seiden?”
Visconti shook his head.
“She was one of your girls, your…whores.”
“I don’t know their names. Cortez handles the girls.”
“She wanted to come to America, try and build a better life for herself and the baby she carried. Your people in Belize promised her that better life, for her and her unborn child. Your people took the equivalent of ten thousand American dollars from her before loading her into a crate with three bottles of water and no food and attempting to ship her here aboard a container ship.”
“I don’t know nothing about any of that.”
“She died less than two days into the journey. After the water ran out. From the heat and lack of air. Her baby with her, of course.”
“I don’t know nothing about any of that,” Visconti repeated. A bead of sweat trickled down from behind his right ear.
Stella let out a breath, still circling, drawing closer. “The girls in the other crates…the other nineteen crates, they died, too. All but one, actually. The last one died at the dock—after you heard what happened, after you decided you didn’t want any witnesses, you had one of your men strangle that one, that last one. While she begged for her life, barely alive after such a horrendous journey, you had her killed to protect yourself.”
Visconti took this all in and said nothing. His eyes had grown narrow, his face pale.
“Can you imagine the pain they must have felt? The uncertainty that came with each moment after they ran out of water? When nobody answered their screams and the air began to thin? Did you bother to look at the inside of those crates before you burned them? At the scratch-marks in the wood? The blood? Traces of fingernails and bits of skin?”
“What do you want from me?”
Stella stopped circling. She knelt down in front of him. “I want you to understand their pain. I want you to feel all the pain you inflicted not only on them, but their families, their loved ones, all the people touched by their short lives. You stole these lives with the ease of a child stealing candy from the corner store.”
Stella reached up, and with the flick of her wrist, her right pointer finger brushed the man’s cheek. A quick touch, no more than an instant.
Visconti’s body tensed, his eyes popped wide. “What the fuck!” he shouted, his head jerking away from her hand.
I leaned in closer to the television monitor. A dark smudge appeared on Visconti’s cheek where she had touched him, a smear of black. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but the smear appeared to be growing.
Ms. Oliver stared at me, a subtle grin at her lips.
I turned back to the monitor.
Visconti grimaced and attempted to wipe at his cheek with his shoulder, his bindings holding him down.
Stella leaned back on her heels.
The smudge grew to about two inches long before stopping, the skin dark and crusty beneath. The sweat at his brow thickened, rolling down the side of his face.
“Do you know what life is?”
“I know exactly what I’m going to do with yours the second I get out of these ropes,” Visconti said.
“Life is a force, an energy. It never really goes away, not even when something dies. That life force just transfers from one entity to the next. A flower may die while a dozen just like it spring up at its feet. A river runs dry, the fish die, and a whale is born half a world away. When a person dies, a mother and her unborn child, for instance, their collective life force returns to that place in the universe where all life began, ready to be redistributed. There is a finite amount, always moving, always shifting. A careful balance, crafted, measured, maintained. Some give life, others take it away. You, Mr. Visconti, were never meant to take life. That is not your place, it is not your reason for being. That task is meant for others, and through your actions, you’ve upset the balance.”
Visconti’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Stella rose to her feet and stepped behind him. His fingers were working at the ropes. He had managed to loosen the one around his right wrist. She reached out and took his hand in hers, her fingers wrapping around his.
Visconti’s face grew paper white, and he screamed. He screamed unlike any man I had ever heard scream. She touched him only for a brief second, and I watched in horror as his fingers turned black, then the back of his hand. The blackness spread up and over his wrist before finally stopping just before the cuff of his leather jacket. His fingers stopped working the ropes, they stopped moving altogether.
