Was she afraid of me, as if I were some sort of stranger?
She had lots of makeup on, new clothes. She was someone else.
I blurted out my speech about how I forgave her, how everything would be better from now on. We’d finally leave Denver and it would be the two of us again, the way it was meant to be, the way it had always been; all we’d ever known.
“Santiago, I can’t come with you. I don’t want to.”
“They’ve got you confused. Don’t you see? You’re their prisoner. For what? For their money? Their attention?”
“They’re good to me.”
“Good to you? No. They’re not good at all.” I grabbed her arm. “Let’s go, Inès. Come on.”
“Stop it. Let go of me.”
“I can’t!” I spit out, shuddering. “I can’t.”
“Yes you can. You have to!”
“No.”
“I’m pregnant.”
A punch landed in my chest. My head spun. “What?”
“I said, I’m pregnant.”
I grabbed her hands to steady myself, to feel that connection to her again, especially now. But her hands were cold, and she yanked them from my grip.
I stumbled. “Is it mine? I mean, it could be mine, right?”
“I don’t know, Santiago!” She raised her voice, her face a bitter sneer.
I’d asked her an odious, vile question that she never wanted to answer. I was annoying her.
Fuck her.
“You don’t know?” I repeated, my soul getting sucked out of me, my heart thundering in my chest, blood rushing in my ears. “You don’t know? You don’t know! Why don’t you know?”
The salesgirl in the store backed away from us, her face pale.
Tears filled Inès’s eyes, her head fell to the side. “I don’t know!”
“We gotta go, man. Just take her, and let’s go!” Jake yelled from the doorway.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Her face tightened, and she folded her arms.
Clack, clack, clack went her high heels on the polished floor of the boutique as she stepped away from me.
I shook from the inside out. My body swayed.
I tore my shirt up. The angry red scar hadn’t healed. It still sizzled on my skin. “This is what you did to me. Look at me! You cut me. Why? Why?”
“No, no.” She shook her head, her hands stretched out. “I didn’t. I couldn’t. No.”
“You did this to me.” My voice seethed. “You. What have they done to you?”
Her back straightened, she blinked. “You don’t understand, Santiago. You never will because you’re a boy. They’re men. People listen to them. People look up to them.”
“People are afraid of them, you little fool.”
She raised her chin. “I’m not afraid of them. I love them, and I don’t want to leave.”
Love. The word we’d used together, for each other. Now, it wasn’t ours anymore. Not anymore. She had tipped a cauldron of molten tar over me with that goddamn word.
“We’ve got to go!” Jake yelled.
“Go, Santi. Please go.” Inès said, her voice suddenly soft, pleading, her hands twisting at her sides. “If they find you here, they’ll kill you.”
“You already did,” I breathed.
Jake grabbed me by the arm, and we tore out of the back of the shop and down the street to the corner.
The fucking Coronet glided to a halt in front of the store.
That night, I got my crowbar from its hiding place in the basement of my old rathole building. “You in?” I glanced over at Jake as I pulled the iron bar from behind the brick shelf, my limbs lightening at the familiar weight in my hands. “I get it if you ain’t.”
“I’m in. Sure as fuck,” he said, those odd light-brown eyes of his gleaming like tarnished gold coins in the glare of the flashlight he held for me.
“You take this.” I tossed him my 9mm.
I slid the plastic baggie with my mother’s rosary and the photograph of us out of its hiding place behind a loose brick and tucked it in my jacket pocket.
We found Julio, and he suggested a junkyard that was one of the Executioner’s new domains. Felipe was lingering there at about four in the morning with a flunky who was out taking a piss.
Jake got the bodyguard from behind with a knife to his side as I garroted him with a wire cord. His thrashing in our hold, his struggling, his helplessness made me high. Grunting, we finally dropped his lifeless body to the ground.
I approached Felipe, and I didn’t even have to say a word. He raised his gun at me, and Jake shot it out of his hand. The crowbar was alive in my grip, conforming to my palm like the soft and unbending iron it was for me. The weeks away hadn’t changed that. It propelled me forward—again and again and again through Felipe’s howls, through the splintering cracks, through the thuds. The force of my hate and the fury of my rage empowered me. The authority of my anger was so loud, it made me wild.
Inès’s voice saying “love” fueling me.
“Enough!” Jake dragged me away. “Jesus!”
I hurled that fucking iron crowbar on Felipe’s broken, mangled body.
I was covered in blood, bone, gunk, sweat, and grief.