Esperanza (36 page)

Ready?
he mouthed.

Dominica slung her designer bag over her shoulder, stood. The bald driver seemed surprised that they were leaving so soon. Dominica found the man’s name. “Jim, could you bring the car around back?”

“Sure thing.” Jim looked at Tattoo Man. “Lew, get the bill, okay?”

After Jim left, Lew signaled for the bill, paid it, then guided them around the dance floor, through the pounding music and the stink of booze, sweat, and hormones to the rear of the club. As they stepped outside into the alley, the dark Ford Expedition drove up, Jim behind the wheel.

Ben opened the door. “I’ll drive, Jim.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, man, it’s cool.”

Dominica leaped out of the woman, into Lew with his snake tattoo, and instantly was immersed in the violent undercurrents of the man’s personality. Ex-gang member, ex-con, ex-employee of a private security company in the Mideast, loved his guns. She zipped herself up inside him, seized control of him so swiftly and smoothly that he never even flinched. His essence shouted and swore but she shoved him down into that metal room and that was it.

The model sort of stumbled forward, as if startled awake. “Holy shit,
that
was weird. I felt, like, I don’t know, like . . .”

“Something just left you?” Dominica asked in Lew’s voice.

“Yes. That’s it exactly, Lew.”

Dominica summoned all the violence inside this man and slammed his elbow into the bridge of the woman’s nose. Shrieking, she wrenched back in shock and agony. Her hands flew to her face, blood poured through her fingers. Dominica grabbed the sides of her head with Lew’s large, powerful hands, and snapped her neck. She crumpled to the ground.

Dominica urged Lew to pull the body into the darker shadows in the alley. She was aware of music hammering against the walls and hoped no one stumbled out the rear door. She couldn’t deal with anyone else right this second. But the only person who appeared was Ben as Jim the driver, pulling the photographer’s body along behind him, the man’s legs thumping across the old cobblestones in the alley. No question they had chosen the right two men for murder.

They deposited the model and her photographer between garbage cans heaped with trash, relieved them of their wallets, phones, iPods, BlackBerrys, and ran to the Expedition. The SUV peeled out of the alley, Ben at the wheel. “Where to, Nica? Where is she? Tess has that mark on her arm, so that should make it easier for you to pick up her signal, right?”

“It may take a little while. It’s harder to hear when I’m in a body. But head south to Key Largo, to her mother’s house. The closer we are to where she has been, the more likely it is that I’ll be able to pick up something.”

“We need a map,” he said.

Dominica opened the glove compartment. No map, just an odd gizmo with a little screen and a plug for the cigarette lighter at the end of it. “Do you have any idea what this is?” she asked, removing the object.

Ben glanced at it, shook his head, then: “According to Jim, it’s called Magellan.”

“Magellan? What’s that mean? Magellan was an explorer.”

“I don’t know. Jim shut down. He’s laughing at us.”

Dominica stuck one end into the cigarette lighter, pleased that she at least knew how to do this. She and Ben had taken enough tourists in Esperanza to have quite a bit of knowledge of the twenty-first century. But some of the finer nuances escaped them.

She turned on the Magellan and a pretty blue screen came up with three symbols on it. She pressed
menu,
then
calculate route,
and suddenly understood how this little marvel functioned. “Ben, it’s pegged to satellites. It knows exactly where we are.”

“Satellites? Satellites are watching us? What, like Sputnik?”

Sputnik. He was stuck back in that Kansas life and didn’t seem to be quite as knowledgeable as she’d assumed. “Ben, Sputnik was launched in 1957. A Soviet satellite. It was maybe the size of a goddamn beach ball. It’s fallen out of the sky since then and bounced down on some beach.”

“Very funny. I know there’s a space station, that there’re spy satellites, that in January of this year, a disabled spy satellite was shot down. Some people are saying the military shot it down so the enemy wouldn’t be able to nab its secrets. Others say it was shot down because it got photos of genuine UFOs and an alien base on the fucking moon. Don’t talk to me like I’m a moron. We have access to high-speed Internet, you know.”

His recitation shocked her. She always had believed that longevity meant you knew more. Her six hundred years made her his elder, a revered
one, practically a
fossil
. “Well, hey, you make this stupid remark about Sputnik, what am I supposed to think?”

“Think what you want,” he said. “Enter Tess’s address.”

She glared at him.

“What?” he said. “What the hell’s the problem now?”

“Whenever we take bodies of the same gender or bodies that don’t appeal to us physically, we end up talking instead of having sex and this is what happens. We argue about the stupidest things.”

He gripped the steering wheel harder.

“Did you hear me?” she snapped.

“I’m not deaf. Check out one of the BlackBerrys. Find out if there are any more entries on that liberation blogspot.”

How quickly he changed the subject, she thought, and brought out a BlackBerry, one of her favorite twenty-first-century toys. It was the equivalent of carrying a world of information in the palm of your hand. She quickly navigated to the liberation blogspot, clicked on the top entry.

“Read it out loud,” Ben said.

“ ‘It has come to our attention that the parasites may be on to us. We’ve gotten reports of priests being taken in at least four different cities. They weren’t killed, merely used, scanned for information about our organization. The parasites are trying to determine our plans. For the sake of safety, further entries will be posted only on our mirror site. Group A will inform B about our URL. B will inform C and on down the line. We must, from this point forward, be vigilant and exercise great caution.’ ” She paused. “That’s it. The
brujos
should’ve killed the goddamn priests, Ben.”

“As soon as we’re done here, I’ll return to Esperanza and talk to Rafael and Pearl. They’re debriefing the
brujos
who seized those priests.”

“One of us could enter the Internet, Ben, and find that mirror site.”

Horror filled his eyes. “The last time we attempted that, we lost five
brujos
.”

Yes, they had. The relentless assault of a digital stream had fried them, consumed them, or taken them into itself forever. But those
brujos
had been relative newcomers. She felt certain that if she or Ben attempted it, or even Rafael or Pearl, they wouldn’t succumb to what had taken the other
brujos.

“First things first,” she said. “Tess.”

After dinner, they moved out onto the wide veranda behind the restaurant. Tess could see the moonlit beach, wind whipping the sand into tiny dervishes that spun furiously along the water’s edge. Waves crashed rhythmically against the sand, the tall, graceful sea oats that grew on the nearby dunes swayed like hula dancers. Oddly peaceful. And they weren’t alone out here. Families and couples strolled the beach, swam in the tremendous pool off to their far right, the laughter of children rang out. Tess felt the spot was sheltered and safe enough to play the recording. If she lost her job over this, so be it. She could always bag groceries at the local Publix.

Dan ordered a platter of desserts and a round of cappuccinos. Once everything was on the table, Maddie got right to the point. “So, Tess, what’s this recording you want us to hear?”

“It explains what killed that man. I didn’t realize my phone recorder was on. Listen to what the lawn guy said after I shot him.” She pressed a button on her iPhone and Dan, Lauren, and Maddie leaned forward simultaneously, as if they were controlled by the same brain.

While the recording played, she watched their faces—her mother frowning, Maddie growing paler by the second, and Dan listening intently but obviously baffled. She tuned out the words, the voice, the horrid reality of what had happened in her mother’s living room, but the images ran in an endless loop in her mind. Inescapable evidence. Something had followed her back from the dead.

When it was done, Tess turned off the recording, started to delete it, then decided to save it as proof that she was threatened. In the subsequent silence, the crashing of the waves and the mournful whistles of the wind seemed disturbingly loud. Maddie broke the silence first.

“Why is it coming after
me
? What the hell did
I
do?”

“What’s Esperanza?” her mother asked.

And from Dan: “What’s he talking about? Shielded from what? And why does his voice sound so different when he’s pleading for help? It sounds like two different people.”

“Don’t you get it?”
Maddie looked pointedly at Dan. “Something happened to Tess when she died and some sort of . . . ghost or demon followed
her back, killed that lawn man, and now . . .
we’re
targets. All of us. Right, Tess? Isn’t that what it’s about?”

“I think so. I’m starting to remember events that happened when I flatlined or from when I was in a coma. I went somewhere, to a town called Esperanza. For the last ten years, the people there have been battling these . . . ghosts, hungry ghosts that they call
brujos
—”

“Witches?”
Dan choked back a laugh and shook his head, making it clear he found the entire conversation a joke. “C’mon, Tess. Demons, ghosts, and now witches? Which is it?”

She ignored his derision. “That’s just what they’re called. But they’re spirits who’re stuck, dead but unable to move on. They’ve existed for centuries and seemed to have evolved into beings that are much more than what we think of as ghosts. They’re able to possess people, to manipulate them, force them to—”

“Possession.” Her mother looked ill. “Are we talking
The Exorcist
sort of possession?”

“Not by devils,” Tess said. “At least not the way we think of the word. But they seem to be able to move into a body and take it over. They do it to experience physical existence. But the lawn guy was used to show me what would happen to you all if I try to get to Esperanza. His personality, his essence, broke free of the
brujo’
s control long enough to plead for help, and then it tightened its control over him again. That’s why there was such a marked change in his voice. Then this
brujo
killed him.”

“Aw, for crissake,” Dan muttered. “This is such bullshit.”

Lauren shot Dan a dirty look. “Enough with the commentary, Dan.” Her voice was uncharacteristically sharp. “Tess experienced something, and even if you don’t agree with her interpretation of what happened, you can be courteous enough to let her talk.”

Chastised, Dan held up his hands. “Right. You’re right, Lauren. Sorry, Tess.”

His voice smacked of irritation, not apology. Tess let it pass, she couldn’t blame him. She knew how this sounded.

“What stuff do you remember?” Lauren asked.

“Being outside a bus terminal, thick fog. A man grabbed my arm and told me I was an intruder. Later, I saw the same man on the ground by a row of outhouses. He’d bled out, just like the guy in your living room, Mom.” She turned her arm, displaying the purple bruise, clearly visible on the underside of her wrist. “This is where the man grabbed me—”

“Wait,” Dan said. “A guy in this afterworld place grabbed your arm? And that’s what caused the bruise?”

“That’s what I just said, Dan. And as I neared Mom’s place earlier, the bruise started itching and burning.”

Dan, clearly agitated now, just rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, but this whole story is ridiculous. When you die, you don’t go to someplace called Esperanza, there’re no witches in the afterlife, and it’s physically impossible for an injury you supposedly sustained when you were dead to show up while you’re alive. It’s—”

“How the hell would
you
know?” Tess snapped. “Have you died and come back?”

“He’s Catholic. Their afterlife beliefs are complicated,” Maddie said.

Dan looked disgusted. “I’m not getting into a religious discussion with an eighteen-year-old.”

“How about a religious discussion with a thirty-three-year-old, Dan?” she shot back.

“Yeah, right. You’re the least religious person I know. There’s a perfectly plausible explanation for why that man died and it doesn’t have squat to do with possession or
brujos.
”

“Then how do you explain the change in his voice?” Tess snapped. “And the fact that he threatened the three of you? How do you explain that, Dan?”

“He was a psycho.”

“Hold on, just hold on,” Lauren said angrily. “Look, whatever happened to Tess when she died or was in a coma is
her
experience. We can’t say it happened or didn’t happen. But one thing we can all agree on is that the threat on that recording is
real
.”

“Yeah, fine.” Dan nodded. “And the guy who made that threat is dead.”

Such hard finality in his voice, Tess thought, and knew it was useless to pursue this. “Believe whatever the hell you want. I know what I experienced.”