She reads the texts again. She scrolls back, and back. To Guadalajara. Eleven days ago. Lorenzo had sold them out, proclaimed himself finished with Los Jardineros forever, and insisted that this piece of intel was a parting gift for the jefe, a gesture of good faith. He’d sent Javier a surreptitious photograph of Lydia in profile. She was wrapped around Luca, the two of them squinting out from atop La Bestia. Tus amigos están en Guadalajara, Patrón, the text read.
Javier had been in the coroner’s office in Barcelona when the text came in, and his wife had admonished him for looking at his phone while they were there to identify their daughter’s body, and to fill out the paperwork that would allow them to bring Marta home. The contempt he felt for his wife in that moment was entirely new, and Javier didn’t even bother responding to her reprimand. He looked at her with mild disgust, and returned his attention to his screen.
You are not free until I am free, he typed back. Return her to me.
‘Ay, no,’ Lydia says out loud beneath the rosewood tree. ‘No.’
The phone battery is almost full, but there’s only one bar of a signal. Lydia holds it up overhead and swings it around. She emerges from beneath the tree, steps over Lorenzo’s body, and scrambles up the rock wall beside him with his phone. Here. Two bars, three bars. Before she can stop herself, she opens the contact for El Él and hits the video call button. Already it’s ringing. Lydia knows the ringtone. It’s Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’. Ridiculous. Pretentious. Pedestrian. He thought he was aristocratic because he wrote shitty poetry and listened to opera. He’s a murderer. He’s a scumbag. He’s bourgeois. But she is in his pocket, now. She knows. She is on top of a cave in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. She is standing over the dead body of his assassin, and now she has the upper hand, and he will not follow her into this next life. He will not haunt her, and she will not be afraid, no. She and Luca will be free. It ends here.
She hears his voice before she sees him.
‘Dime,’ he says. Anxious for news of her death.
‘Tell you what? That I am dead? That my son is dead?’
‘Dios mío, Lydia.’ He says her name. Lydia. And it sounds the same way it has always sounded coming out of his mouth. Lydia.
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we are alive. Estamos vivos.’
‘Lydia,’ he says it again, and it’s so confusing. Because her hatred of him is enormous. It’s the biggest feeling she has ever felt. It’s stronger even than the love she felt for Sebastián, the day they held hands and kissed in front of the altar at the Nuestra Señora de la Soledad cathedral. It’s deeper than the colossal, unnameable thing she felt the day she pushed Luca out of her body and into the world. It’s darker than the hole her papi left behind when he died without saying goodbye. Her hatred is a living succubus, vast enough and quick enough and wicked enough to crest up from her heart and take wing, to expand across the hundreds of miles between them, to engulf the whole city of Acapulco, to veil the room in which he’s standing, to overshadow him and overcome him, to slip into his mouth and choke him from the inside out. She hates him so much she can murder him from sixteen hundred miles away, just by wishing for it. But he is saying her name. ‘Lydia.’
His face is haggard. Skeletal.
‘I never wished for your death,’ he says. ‘Surely you know that, Lydia. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.’
She blinks. Pulls the camera away from her face. She closes her mouth and surveys the desert landscape. And suddenly she knows what he’s saying to be exactly true. All this time, all her planning, all her strategy and self-congratulations, it was all an illusion.
‘I could never harm you, Lydia.’
Her mouth opens with an incredulous gasp. ‘Harm! You could never harm me? You have harmed me, señor. You have tortured me. You have destroyed my whole world, everything.’
‘No, Lydia. I never meant—’
‘¡Cállate la boca!’ she shouts over him. ‘Do you think I care what you meant? Or how you justify your monstrosities? I’m calling only to tell you that this is over. Do you understand? It’s over.’
Javier sighs delicately on the other end of the phone. She sees him do this. A familiar mannerism, once beloved. And it tilts her psyche like a fun house.
‘But it can never be over, Lydia,’ he says sadly. ‘We have both lost everything.’
No.
‘That is horseshit, Javier. You have lost one thing. One!’
He pauses, lifting his wet eyes. ‘The only thing.’
Lydia’s heartbeat feels like a club, but her voice is lower. ‘The most important thing,’ she concedes. ‘But that gave you no right! No right!’
He’s in a comfortable sunbeam in Acapulco, in her homeplace. There’s a cup of espresso at his elbow. She is filthy and penniless and homeless and widowed and orphaned in the desert. He props his phone somewhere in front of him so his image becomes steady on her screen. He removes his glasses, cleans the lenses. His mouth is an impossible frown. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he says, blinking rapidly.
‘I will survive,’ she says. ‘Because I still have Luca. I have Luca.’
His mouth is a gash.
‘This has to be over now,’ she says.
Javier places the glasses back on his face, pushes them up his nose.
‘I killed the sicario you sent.’
‘You what?’
‘Yes. He’s dead. Look.’ Lydia scrambles to the edge of the little ridge and points her phone down at Lorenzo. Later she might feel guilt about this, about using his body to advance her own purpose, about celebrating Lorenzo’s death, even in pretense. Later she might ask herself why Javier’s last seven text messages had gone unanswered, unread. She might even wonder about Lorenzo’s extinguished potential for redemption. But not right now. She points the phone back to her own face. ‘So we can be finished now, yes? Or should we keep on killing people?’
Javier unleashes a noise that’s half sob and half laughter. He wants to plead not guilty by reason of grief. She knows grief is a kind of insanity. She knows.
Lydia is a beacon on that ridge.
The disgust in her mouth has a taste like bile. ‘Goodbye, Javier.’
She doesn’t bother hanging up. She tosses the cell phone into the dirt, and the camera yawns up at the vacant sky.
In front of the cave, in the hot height of the desert afternoon, three hours before they should safely set out with the dropping sun, the others are moving quickly down the slope and away into the valley below. Luca, with Rebeca, is waiting for her. Lydia takes his hand.