The Ghost Who Guarded Me

Five Years Ago. El Paso, Texas.

The compound sat three miles from the Rio Grande.

Catarina Salazar had crossed that river as a child, hand tight in her father's, his wedding ring pressing bruises into her knuckles. She remembered the water. How it kept moving even when everything else stopped.

Tonight, the river might as well have been a thousand miles away.

She stood at the head of the long table in the main room of the Cantos del Diablo clubhouse. Devil's Songs.

Her father's name for them. He'd believed in music, in loyalty, in honor among men who sold sin across state lines.

He'd been dead eleven months. Heart attack in the garage, engine running, radio playing Vicente Fernández. They found him with his tools still in his hands.

No one touched his bike. No one touched his daughter.

Until tonight.

Catarina kept her spine straight. Her black dress was the same one she'd worn to his burial. It hung loose now. The men at the table didn't notice. They never noticed anything that didn't bleed or pay.

Thirteen of them. Patched members. The ones who voted.

At the far end, Elias Vela rolled a quarter across his knuckles. New president. Old cruelty. He'd waited eleven months to make his move.

"We have a problem," Elias said.

No greeting. No acknowledgment that she'd once called him tío. That he'd bounced her on his knee at compound barbecues while her father grilled carne asada and laughed with his whole chest.

That man was gone. Maybe he'd never existed.

"The FBI task force has a source." Elias placed both palms flat on the table. "Internal. Someone's been feeding them manifests. Delivery windows. Routes we've run clean for six years."

He didn't look at her.

No one did.

Catarina understood then. The way you understand a bullet has left the chamber before you hear the shot.

"We need a traitor," she said.

Her voice sounded like someone else's. Steady. Almost bored.

Elias's quarter stopped rolling.

"We need".... he corrected slowly.... "the traitor."

She should have ran when her father died. Should have taken the cash he kept in the freezer, the spare registration for the truck, the road atlas with routes circled in pencil. Should have crossed back over the river and disappeared into the interior where the Devil's Songs had no reach.

But she'd stayed. Because this was her home. Because her father built it. Because Marcos Salazar had believed in redemption, in second chances, in the possibility that men who dealt in darkness could still hold light in their hands.

Foolish man.

Dead man.

"You need a body," Catarina said. "Someone to feed the task force. Someone to convict in the court of public fucking opinion so you can keep running your loads north."

Hector Fuentes shifted in his seat. Sergeant-at-arms. Her father's closest friend for thirty years. He stared at the grain of the wooden table like it contained the names of his children.

He wouldn't meet her eyes.