At least he died quickly. It was a thought playing on a constant loop in his mind since he and his wife, Josefina, had been captured by Moreno and his goons.
He refused to give the sadist any information about Letty, and he needed to hold out if he could give her and Azul as much of a head start as his waning life would allow. It was a long ride to Vera Cruz, where one of Ernesto's connections had run down Letty's mother. Through the grapevine, she had expressed her gratitude and excitement at the prospect of seeing her daughter again, who'd she'd given up for dead since three long years had passed since she disappeared.
Mexico was a big place, but it can become very small when somebody like Hector Fuentes decided they needed to find you. There are few rocks one can hide under. Unable to use his right shoulder, Ernesto leaned to the left, dipping his cheek to it, and clearing away some of the blood leaking from someplace he couldn't see or differentiate from the other wounds he'd sustained since making Moreno's acquaintance. His right shoulder had been dislocated and they'd spent countless time twisting it into unspeakable positions, using a tire iron as a fulcrum.
He'd heard his wife's screaming die out ten minutes ago. They were torn from each other the moment they entered the building, a dingy place smelling of day-old fish, that Moreno and his men were using as an impromptu torture chamber.
Ernesto's last image of his wife was that of her tear-soaked face as she spoke the last words he feared he'd ever hear pass over those lips, por siempre nunca es suficiente, forever is never enough.
Her words left her lips, those same lips he'd shared sixty years of conversations with, spoken over sixty years in the home they shared for the entirety of those sixty years of love that blossomed some sixty years ago with a simple kiss…on those lips.
He called out his response, repeating the words spoken before the end of every day. This being their last, Ernesto held onto the memory of the first time he’d laid eyes on his beautiful Josefina, and not the bloodied image hauled away by their captors.
He remembered the first time they'd held hands, replacing the snap of his finger when he refused to answer any question regarding the whereabouts of Hatch, Ayala, Angela, or Letty.
Ernesto thought of the time when he tried to impress his Josefina with his horse-riding skills having never ridden one in his life. As Ernesto tried to leap onto the saddle, he overestimated the amount of effort and had launched himself onto the saddle and over the other side landing awkwardly on his ankle and spraining it. He called that memory forward to erase the moment of Moreno plunging a hot poker into the bottom of his left foot.
He held the last memory the longest. His body numbed to the abuse. Ernesto felt himself above it all. The last memory had been holding back the emotionally crippling pain of the building probability that his beautiful wife's beautiful heart stopped beating ten minutes ago.
Refusing to accept it and wanting to stay with her for as long as forever took, he called to mind what happened to the young seventeen-year-old-Ernesto after he fell off that horse. Because it had been in that moment, sitting in the hot midday sun while rubbing his sore ankle near a pile of hay that smelled strongly of horse manure, that Josefina had come to his side.
He remembered, to this very breath, the electric sensation passing from her lips to his as she leaned in for their first kiss.
He remembered breathing her breath as their mouths worked awkwardly, as teenagers experiencing their first romance.
He remembered everything and held onto it all for as long as humanly possible while he waited for the answer to the question he refused to ask. Is my Josefina gone?
"Ernesto, my friend, we are going to continue our little conversation, you and me. You're going to tell me where you shipped Mr. Fuentes' property, so that he can properly recover it."
Ernesto heard the words but could no longer make out the mangled face of the man speaking them. It was to start again. The knife was in Moreno's hand again. The last time he'd used it, Ernesto nearly bit off his tongue while he endured it. He could not endure it again. And so, Ernesto Cruz asked the question that came out as a final declaration.
"I can't hear my Josephina anymore, and I fear that you have taken her from me. If this is true, then there is nothing further for us to discuss, for it is you that has taken something. You have stolen my purpose for living. You ripped out my heart, the moment you touched my wife. When the fires of hell lick at your feet, know that my wife and I are sailing high above, where we can no longer smell the stink of the world that you have poisoned."
Moreno coughed up a smile that was more a sneer and played with the knife in his hand. Ernesto could no longer make out the blade's sharp point.
"I free you to go be with your wife."
The blurred image of the knife dancing in front of Ernesto's face disappeared. A second later, the stinging in his hands and the pain in his body disappeared completely, as Juan Carlos Moreno used the same blade that killed Raphael Fuentes and buried it in similar fashion.
Moreno wiped the blood from his blade on Ernesto's shirt, before picking up his cell phone and making a call. "It was just the two old ones."
"Make the call." Hector Fuentes coughed into the phone and then hung up.
Thirty-Six
Jose Machado walked through the front door of his small ranch-style home set on a ten-acre plot of land in the countryside, forty miles south of Juarez. It had once belonged to a tobacco farmer and his wife before Jose’s employer acquired both the farm and farmhouse after being slighted by the couple in a business deal. Machado, one of his employer's most trusted employees, was given the keys to the house so that he could oversee the land and its harvesting. Or better yet, that's what he told anybody who asked.
It's what he told his daughter, although it was a lie she had begun to silently question recently, noticed by Machado in the looks she gave when he added his money to the stack behind the false wall in the pantry.
To most, Machado was known as Fumar, Smoke. He was given the moniker on account of both his profession and his light-skinned complexion. To others, he was known by another name, one whispered on the breaths of dead men. To those who had met him at their life's end, Jose Machado was known as El Vibora, The Viper.
He dusted the top of his hat and hung it on the coatrack near the door. The smell of eggs and peppers greeted him, and it pleased Machado to know Maria was awake. At seventeen, she tended to him more as a wife than a daughter, but only in the platonic sense of domestic responsibility. It was initially why he'd taken the girl. But over time, he'd come to see her as more than a servant girl.
The girl he'd saved from the hellhole of a life that she was destined for five years ago had become in time as much a daughter as any flesh and blood ever could be. Machado, unable to father a family of his own, found himself a bachelor, but Maria completed him, gave his life a purpose beyond its purpose, and a new perspective.
He rounded the corner of the short hallway and entered the kitchen where the smell intensified. He was pleasantly surprised by the plate of Chorizo cooling on the stove. Maria cracked an egg into the pan just as Machado walked in. She breezed across the kitchen floor as if walking on air. Then, with the grace of a prima ballerina, simultaneously dropped the eggshells in the trash and laid a kiss upon his cheek before pirouetting her way back to the stove.