Machado was a perfectionist in all matters of his life. The letter he challenged himself to write was no different. It was also the only letter Machado had written or ever planned to write. He had finished before his last trip and it rested atop the pile of cash lining the wall of his pantry. The letter waited patiently, for Maria knew she was not to go into the pantry unless he was dead. She asked him how she would know whether he was dead. He answered with a number. “Two.” If Machado had not returned home within two days of his expected arrival, she was to immediately go to the wall behind the pantry.
She never looked to see what was behind the false wall. Machado had a thin piece of fishing wire hooked to the inside and in all the years she'd lived with him, Maria never looked inside.
Machado had grown weary of it all in recent years, but in his profession, retirement came in only one of two ways. Instant death, or a long, painful one. Machado had delivered both in equal measure over his years of service.
Machado knew well enough that he would probably never be able to enjoy a proper retirement but the money, nonetheless, accumulated to a sizeable rainy-day fund. And for Maria, his little flower, the three-hundred-thousand dollars resting underneath the letter would surely be sufficient to give her a bright future, should his life abruptly end.
She, of course, did not know any of that. She only knew that there was money if she needed it when he didn't return. He always wondered what her face would look like when she opened that pantry, knowing he would never get to see it.
Machado sat across from Maria as she delicately picked at her food. She looked at him and did not see what everybody else saw. To Maria, her father's tattered and sun-beaten suit, worn by Machado every time he stepped out to do his employer's business, didn't signify the coming of the Reaper's scythe. To the teenager across from him, Machado wore the wide-brimmed hat and suit of matching color to honor the man he loved most, in the hopes his father was indeed looking down on him from above and would one day keep his word, calling Machado home when his path had run its course.
And the item he revered above all others was the same one that had caused men to defecate themselves upon seeing it. Men died before intended, their hearts seizing at hearing its rattle. The snakeskin belt strapped to his wrist was the ungiven gift his father had planned to surprise him with on his ninth birthday.
Machado had never told his father he knew the secret, having caught sight of him working on it in the shed behind their home one night, the same night a murderous thief killed his parents in front of him. The masked killer took the turquoise bolo tie before the sound of a neighbor dragging a metal trash bin spooked him. The thief grabbed a shoebox set aside on the nightstand before disappearing into the night through the window he'd first entered. Machado's snake belt was in that box.
Machado spent three more hours inside that closet staring unmoved at the horror, unable to do more than breathe and blink. His eyes went back and forth from his dead parents to the open window. He imagined the slow breeze fluttering was the souls of his parents looking out the window and ensuring the bad man would not return. When the wind subsided altogether, Machado imagined their souls had deemed it safe, and he exited.
Machado spent his ninth birthday making his wish come true. He’d paid a man money he found in the back of a false door in the back of his father's dresser. It’s where Machado got the idea for the one in his pantry now. The amount of money in the Machados’ dresser enabled the young Machado to hire a man to do what he was too small and weak to do himself.
He sought the help of the local cobbler, who also doubled as a hitman hired to do the cartel's dirty work. Machado paid the assassin half up front with the demand that, upon finding the thief who'd murdered his parents, he'd wait to kill him until he could be there to watch.
On Machado's ninth birthday, he held a private party. Only three people were in attendance. The boy, the cobbler, and the thief. Machado stood over the man bound to a table and gagged with the same red bandana he'd worn the night he’d killed Machado’s parents. He continued to look, refusing to let his eyes blink just like that night in the pantry, and watched as the beady eyes of the person responsible for robbing him emptied of life. Machado took back what was his, both the turquoise bolo tie and the snakeskin belt.
The cobbler and his wife were unable to bear a child, so he offered the boy an opportunity to live with them. Machado accepted and, as time went by, Machado took an apprenticeship at his adoptive father's shoe repair shop. Machado proved himself a capable cobbler but found his true calling in the second profession to which he also apprenticed. His first contract came at the age of twelve. The list had grown through the years and he had long since stopped counting. In the criminal underworld he was revered as the Boogeyman.
Maria saw through all of that, because she was the only person Machado had shared that with. And so she was the only person who saw him for the boy he used to be and not the killer he had become.
Machado's chance encounter of meeting Maria had been a unique twist of fate, a crossroads of sorts. He'd been assigned to kill the girl's parents. They were low-level drug dealers who worked for Mr. Fuentes, but they had shorted him five-thousand-dollars on a transaction. Machado's expertise was sought to ensure the message would be clearly received by anybody else. Machado had a particular gift in sending those type of messages.
On the day he'd planned to handle the task, Machado had arrived early to do his reconnaissance, but was dismayed to learn he arrived too late. A team of Fuerzas Especiales, or FES, were Special Forces like that of the United States Navy's elite SEALs, were already walking out. Maria's parents had been killed during the raid.
The girl was never part of the contract, and so was not a target. He was preparing to leave when he saw her drift away from one of the military men absently guarding her. Maria's face was dotted with her parent's blood. She looked--as Machado had when first walking out of the pantry--shell-shocked and lost. She wandered away from the military man and he did not even notice. Machado did as was done for him when the cobbler opened his door to him.
In the five years of living, Machado prayed each night that Maria had accumulated enough positive to erase the horror of that day. In exchange, she had done the same for him.
He pushed his plate aside and took a sip of dark roast coffee. Dealing in death meant that Jose Machado was aware of his own mortality and thought of it often. It never bothered him before. He had always assumed that the bullet of another would find him someday. He'd killed too many people to think otherwise. He hoped it would be a quick death. Machado had been at the hand of too many long ones to wish the same end for himself.
"Maria, you know where I keep it and you know what to do if I don't come back."
His phone vibrated before she could offer a roll of her eyes which usually accompanied this conversation. She disliked talking about death and avoided it at all costs. Jose found that to be one of the things he loved about her.
The call came from the only number who knew it.
Hector Fuentes' right-hand-man, Juan Carlos Moreno was on the other end of the phone. In the brevity that only he could offer, he had explained that Rafael Fuentes had attempted to kill his father. And then Moreno had killed Rafael. Moreno went on to explain the bulletproof vest Hector Fuentes wore deflected but did not completely stop the blade. Then the call quickly switched to the business at hand.