Hunt looked at the traffic light. Still red. He sighed.
“You know the doors were already locked, right?” he said to Anna.
“Sorry,” Anna said sheepishly. “It’s an old habit.”
With a horrid roar, the man smashed the wooden end of his board into the driver’s side front window. The window cracked but didn’t break. The light turned green. Hunt slowly accelerated away just as the man lunged again; the SRT’s side mirror clipped his shoulder. Hunt looked behind him and saw the man give him the finger.
The exhaust sound of the SRT V8 echoed over the nearby buildings as the car picked up speed. Hunt made a left on a street parallel to Ocean Drive.
“Tony lied to you,” Anna said bluntly.
“About what?” he asked, even though he was pretty sure what her answer would be.
“Why my dad had a file on Valentina Mieles.”
Hunt just grunted a noncommittal hmm-hmm.
A car pulled out of a parallel parking spot half a block away, and Hunt hurried to take its place.
“Don’t you want to know why?”
He turned off the engine and looked at Anna. Shadows shifted in her eyes. Whatever she was keeping bottled up inside her, it was about to come out.
Anna was just a little girl when it happened. She didn’t understand what her father did for a living. She knew people were scared of him, though, and that he commanded respect, because nobody bothered her at school. She had good grades, and the teachers never yelled at her. Her brother, Tony, was the most popular kid in the entire school. Everybody wanted to be friends with them for a chance to get invited to the next birthday party at the Garcias’ mansion. Birthdays and Christmases were a big deal when she was growing up.
More often than not, her family vacationed at their large Colorado estate, less than a fifteen-minute drive from the Vail Ski Resort. Anna and Tony spent most of the days with their ski coaches while Vicente and their mother, Graciela, stayed behind doing whatever adults did.
One cold February weekend, her father had invited four friends from Mexico to spend a long weekend with them. The four men were well dressed and looked important. There was also a teenager with them. Anna still recalled how beautiful she was. An argument had flared up during dinner, and voices were raised. At some point, her father had sent her and Tony to their rooms with one of his bodyguards. Even from their rooms they could hear the yelling from the grand dining room. She remembered Tony holding her in his arms and how afraid she was. Then she heard the first shot. Three more followed in quick succession. She was screaming by then, terrified.
The bodyguard opened the door and told them to stay there, before running down the stairs with a gun in hand.
After he left, Tony had looked at her and said, “Daddy is in trouble. He needs me.”
“Don’t go, Tony,” she pleaded. But he was already gone.
“So what happened next?” Hunt asked.
Anna was crying now. “I didn’t know. He just . . . Tony just told me before we left.”
Hunt searched for a box of tissues but didn’t find one. “Tell me, Anna.”
“Vicente, he . . . he forced the girl to set fire to her dad with her own hands,” she finally said before bursting into tears.
Hunt was appalled. Of all the worst ways to die, this was the cruelest. He couldn’t even begin to understand the damaging psychological effect this must have had on the young woman. No wonder the Black Tosca was a twisted witch.
Things were starting to fall into place in Hunt’s mind. He was now convinced that even if Tony were to commit suicide, the Black Tosca would murder Leila and Sophia. It wasn’t the Garcias’ criminal organization she was after—though that was a nice bonus. She wanted revenge.
His throat had turned dry; finding the girls soon felt more urgent than ever. He grabbed his backpack from the rear seat and pulled out his 9 mm Glock. He screwed a silencer onto the end of the barrel and chambered a round. The bottom of his backpack had a sizable pocket, and Hunt used it to slide the pistol in, silencer first, before he unlocked the SUV’s doors.
“Get in the driver’s seat, Anna,” he said, climbing out of the SRT.
At this point, Anna was going through the motions like a preprogrammed zombie. She exited the SUV and walked around to join Hunt next to the driver’s door. Her eyes were puffy from all the crying. Small lines of tension creased her forehead.
“We’ll get through this,” Hunt said, even though he was barely holding himself together.
He put the Jeep’s keys in her hand. “I’ll let you know where to pick me up.”
He was already across the street when she called his name.
He turned to glance her way.
“I’m glad you couldn’t save my father,” she said. “I’m happy the son of a bitch is dead.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT