CHAPTER TWENTY

Jenny woke to shouting voices from downstairs, and the sound of a woman screaming.

It took a second to get her bearings—it was late, probably long past midnight. She'd gone to bed after a late dinner with Alexander, somewhere around nine or ten o' clock. Late dinners were common here. So was a fantastic thing called a “siesta” where people napped through the hottest part of the afternoon.

Jenny dressed quickly, pulled on gloves and boots, and ran out of her room and down the back stairs. She followed the screams out to the front hall, where the front door stood open. Alexander and one of his men, Raul, stood just outside. Raul had his AK-47 off his shoulder and in his hands, and he nodded while Alexander spoke in rapid Spanish.

“What's happening?” Jenny asked.

Alexander hurried inside and embraced her. “We have a security situation. You should go back upstairs. I don't want you to see this.”

“See what?” Jenny looked around his shoulder to the open door.

“They were on their way back from Zinacantan,” Alexander said. “Someone strafed their truck. We think one of Toscano's men.”

Jenny took a second to process this. Toscano headed the Juarez cartel, the chief rival to Papa Calderon's Tijuana-based cartel. And Zinacantan was the home village of Kisa and her family. She and her brothers had gone home to visit for the week.

“Did they hurt Kisa?” Jenny asked.

Alexander looked at her for a moment, frowning. “Jenny...”

“I want to see her!” Jenny pushed her way past him and ran for the open door.

“Wait!” Alexander shouted.

“If someone's attacking us, I can help,” Jenny said. She didn't stop running.

Outside, one of the trucks idled in front of the house, one headlight glowing. The windshield and one side of the truck were stippled with gaping bullet holes, and one tire was flat.

Noonsa leaned against the truck, staring into the flatbed. The old woman was screaming and crying. She had stayed at Alexander's compound instead of visiting home with her niece and nephews.

“Raul was barely able to get the truck home,” Alexander said. “By the time we found them, it was too late for a doctor.”

Jenny ran across the wildflowers of the front yard to the battered, slumping truck. She looked at Noonsa, who covered her face with her hands, sobbing. Then Jenny looked into the back of the truck.

Three bullet-riddled bodies lay in the pond of fresh blood in the truck's payload: Iztali, Yochi, and Kisa. The girl had died in mid-scream, eyes scrunched closed, mouth wide open. Most of her neck had been blown away, leaving only a strip of flesh connecting her head and shoulders.

“Kisa!” Jenny screamed. She shed a glove and took one of the girl's cold, blood-slick hands, finally able to touch her friend. One of the only friends she'd ever had. A pained wail erupted from Jenny's lips.

“I'm sorry, Jenny. This is what I didn't want you to see.” Alexander spoke in a gentle voice and touched a cool hand to the back of her neck. He drew her close to hug her, but Jenny pushed away.

“Who did this?” Jenny snapped.

“Manuel and some others are searching for them now,” Alexander said. “The shooters won't get far. But this could be the first step in an attack against this compound, so I'd like you to get back and inside. There could be gunfire.”

“If the people who did this come here, they're getting hit with worse things than gunfire.” Jenny looked at Kisa's body again, and her eyes burned with tears. She looked away quickly. “I mean it.”

Raul approached from the house with an armload of blankets. Jenny helped Alexander and Noona wrap the bodies. Alexander said he would have someone drive them back to their village in the morning. Noonsa embraced each of her young relatives, weeping, just before the bodies were wrapped. She came away with blood all over her dress.

They moved the bodies to the blind cavern under the main house, which served as a root cellar and storage. It was the coolest place to keep them from decaying in the tropical heat.

Everyone sat on the front porch, with blood smeared all over their hands, and they waited.

Manuel returned in the Jeep about an hour later, with two other Calderon men. A fourth man huddled in the back of the Jeep at gunpoint—beaten and bruised, hands tied, blindfolded.

Manuel opened the rear door of the Jeep, and the two other men kicked the prisoner out. He grunted when he hit the dirt.

Alexander and Manuel spoke in very rapid Spanish. Jenny was picking up some words of that language, too, but people usually spoke too fast for her to follow.

“There were two men,” Alexander said. “The gunner and the driver. This is the gunner.”

“Where's the driver?” Jenny asked.

“Manuel killed him and fed his body to the jungle,” Alexander said. “This man confesses. He was sent by Toscano to attack our people. A warning.” Alexander frowned. “This means Toscano knows we have an operation going here in Chiapas.”

Jenny looked at the man kicking and flailing in the dirt. “Why did they kill Kisa, too?”

“Because she was there,” Alexander said. “I told you, Toscano is a psychopath. He thinks nothing of killing women and children.”

“What are you going to do with him now?” Jenny asked. The man in the dirt was begging and sobbing, but she had little sympathy for the murderer.

“Put a bullet in his head and send him back to Toscano,” Alexander said. “That will be our message in reply.”

Jenny glared at the sobbing gunman. “That's too good for him. We can send a scarier message.”

“What are you thinking, Jenny?”

Jenny knelt beside the writhing man. She took her glove off again and pulled the blindfold down to his nose. When he saw her, he renewed his shouting and beseeching in Spanish.

“You killed my friend,” Jenny said.

The man wept. She doubted he could understand her, but she kept talking. He could understand her tone.

“I loved that girl,” Jenny said. “You shouldn't have done this to her.”

She reached a hand toward the man's face, and he stopped shouting and started blubbering, as if he thought she was granting him mercy. She wasn't.

Dark cysts popped up all over his face. Bloody abscesses opened at the corners of his eyes, nose and mouth. The infection traveled down his throat, out to his fingertips, his skin boiling and bursting open. The man cried out and struggled to inch away from her in the dirt, but Jenny moved with him, keeping her hand on him until he seized up and collapsed in the dirt, his face a corrupt, wet mass.

Jenny looked up. Manuel and his two gunmen gaped at her, and even Noonsa had stopped crying to stare in shock.

Alexander reached out a hand to Jenny, and she let him help her up. She'd been shaking with rage, but now the anger began to fade, replaced by sorrow for her lost her friend and the beginnings of guilt for killing yet another person. Even if he deserved it.

Alexander drew her against him. “You did the right thing,” he said.

Jenny looked at the contorted corpse of the man who'd killed Kisa. “I think I did.”

“Let's go inside,” Alexander said. “The men will clean this up.”

Manuel and the other two gunmen watched them leave and whispered to each other. One of the men bowed his head and crossed himself. Jenny understood. She was la bruja, the witch. And nothing she could do would ever change that.