Caged:Reclamation

Chapter 16

The two men ate their breakfast among the sisters in the dining hall, the tables scratched and ancient and well-used, the chatter light and easy. The sun shone through the windows along the side of the hall, falling on Jedediah who charmed the sparkly-eyed sisters, young and old, with his smiles and good nature. The Spanish and English flowed together, his deeper voice and male presence striking.

Raquel sat across from Todd, watching him in her usual motherly manner.

"Eat," she clucked, pointing to his untouched huevos, the toast, the now-cold café con leche. He eyed her dispassionately, picked up the fork, and scooched the egg around the plate, returning to his silent study of his son at the next table over. He sipped the café to satisfy her.

It had been a week since Jed had arrived at the convent and Todd had hardly spoken two words to anyone, flattened by Jed's excoriation of him, more flattened by what his Delgado was doing back home. He couldn't wrap his head around it, couldn't picture it. It had been difficult enough to grasp when Pedro presented what was happening but it was more than he could bear when Jed laid it all out.

Look at me! Only me!

And he did. He heard every goddamn word as he looked into Jed's light eyes full of darkness and for once in his life, he had nothing to say at the end of the truth-telling tirade. Shock stilled him, silenced him.

First, there was Jed's understanding that Todd was a monster. Hands down, no question. It wasn't hypothetical. The awareness was so deep that the kid planned on letting Todd's usual bullshit ride until some to-be-determined point when he'd let the truth-guillotine drop. From the moment he'd laid eyes on his resurrected Pops, he had every intention of laying reality out in just the way he did. Todd kept thinking back to Jed's patient, quiet gaze when Pedro gave the MK update on that first day. He knew more but wasn't gonna share just yet because the monster, while definitely a monster, was also a predictable fuck that needed managing. Even following a surprise return from the dead…

You're still you!

And in that lived another truth, a pathetic one. When Jed promised redemption by returning home, Todd realized he still had hope for such a thing even though, yes, he had committed to the convent on the very basis that there was NO redemption possible. Except as soon as he felt renewed hope for his cursed soul, he saw in his son's eyes that Jed was lying, that his son knew, of course, there was no redemption, ever. That he could never make up for what he did in Havana… but also Llanview… Statesville… Llanview University… and Chicago. Escrow had closed and he got the house!

He now OWNS it.

And damn it, the last death rattle of hope… hurt.

But the overriding slam was Delgado's absolute and undeniable madness.

The Mad Queen.

No, no, she'd never be mad like him because she could never be that, but there still was a madness in becoming a singularly focused slow-marching Grim Reaper. She grabbed a gun and went after Moreno with precision and coldness. She drew his soldiers to her, took away their weapons and fed their hunger, and then watched Pedro Moreno die in his castle, alone, forever deprived of his beloved MK subjects. Two bullets at his heart. Yeah, a madness he was intimately familiar with. She was mad like fully-dressed Rico standing next to chopped up Manuel Caro, bits of his heart in his belly, standing in that basement just the same as if they were in a paladar with two drained beer bottles between them and asking...

What is the matter?

Todd had looked up at his son staring him down and pushed the wheelchair back a foot or so with his feet. Kick...kick. He had carefully and painfully stood, shuffled into the bathroom, and shut the finely sanded and painted white door behind him. There, he had eased himself onto the floor in the dark and held his aching head in his hands and closed his eyes.

Ohhh Delgado. Oh god. What have you done?

Outside, he had heard a soft rapping of knuckles on wood, "Dad… talk to me."

When he hadn't answered—he couldn't answer because nothing was getting out of the tunnel that night, too many bodies in the way—Jed had sighed loud enough to be heard and said, "Good thing there's no dope here. I'd be worried. You and bathrooms are always a bad mix."

A joke. Hahaha... fuck you.

When there was still no answer, Jed twisted the door knob and opened the door, light coming in from the room and revealing Todd in his favorite depressive pose.

"Oh Dad… look, you can fix this," Jed had said. "I have an idea as to how. In the meantime, I'll help you get back to your old physical shape. I'm gonna research exactly what we need to do. And then you're going home. You don't have ANY choice in this by the way. I am not leaving Cuba without you. Now, whether you show yourself to cops or FBI or anyone who'd turn you in, THAT is your choice. But going home isn't."

Jed then did his best at consoling, trying to counterbalance the shitty attitude, saying, "I love you, Dad. Forever. Maybe even because you're a monster. After being raised by grandparents who did nothing about their missing daughter, my mom, your Michelle, after years of them just accepting she was dead and moving on… I needed someone who would never stand still when bad shit happened. And that was you. I'm no different. I don't stand still."

True that, baby boy.

Todd had heard Jed leave after a few agonized minutes, heard his frustrated flip-flop shoes go down the stone steps, getting fainter and fainter until the secret door behind the Savior opened and shut, the quietest closing possible. He had no cigarettes, no heroin, no alcohol, no knife. Funny how that was his instinct, funny how he wanted those things not from any organic desire but more because he should have wanted them. Instead, he had truth-pain to disrupt the chaos in his head and that was always the worst kind of pain but it was also what drove him all his adult life to take action. Good and bad. And just like always, he knew the truth-pain would get him home so he could wrap his arms around Téa and protect her from the world once again. If he could. If she'd let him.

And he would need every ounce of strength he could get.

Well…shit.

He then made his way to bed and jumped like a suffocated fish into the sea of sleep. Never heard Jed return to the room. And morning eventually did come.

Okay, I got a workout plan for you, Pops. Did you know Beatrice has internet access in her office? Who knew such tech existed in this old isolated place? Anyway, you don't have to talk to me or even look at me. I don't care. Doesn't bug me. But you do have to get out of bed. So get up, get in the shower, and no, you're not gonna skip meals. Three square. Every day. And vitamins and whatever pills the doctors say you need. So Pops, let's go, come on, move, move, move.

Reluctantly, Todd had opened his eyes to a too-bright room, to a too-chipper kid who transformed himself into a fucking prison guard. All he needed was a billy club. But Todd knew it had to be done so without a word, he got up, showered and dressed, and in that same brooding, pissed-off silence, he followed his son down the tower steps for breakfast, slow walking all the way. Painful as fuck. After eating, they then trekked through the jungle with Abram leading the way to the winery where they did sit-ups, push-ups, and pull-ups. They then returned to the tower room for a siesta and then back down for dinner. At night, they trudged back up to the room for té con leche and to listen to music either by the sisters singing and praying in the courtyard or the songbird or the classical music albums on a rickety old record player that had been used while Todd had been in his coma. Or reading. Jed found a library on the grounds and he sometimes read aloud the English history books. When the sisters sang, Jed would sit on the wide window sill and watch them and Todd could see how moved he was by their voices rising upwards into the heavens. And it was to whatever music played or whatever long passages Jed recited that Todd climbed into bed and knocked out into a sleep of the dead, exhausted by the work to get him to traveling-shape.

And in that sleep, he'd barely move, flying in a dreamless night sky, his only escape.

Such was their routine.

Pedro had visited two of the evenings, had taken the long climb up the stone steps, both times sitting with the two men to listen to the music, studying the silent Todd who refused to even look at him, and engaging in talk with Jed about Cuban history or MK history or other bullshit until Todd got up from his wheelchair-throne to get on the bed, to go to sleep. On the second night, right after Todd got in bed, Pedro told Jed that the reporter had returned to Havana, but hadn't stopped his search for corruption.

"I believe he will no longer bother with me as a focus. Or your father."

Before he left, Pedro looked at the back of Blanco on the bed and cried, "I am here, my son, always."

Todd had rolled over at that and glared at the retreating Pedro and then hawked and spit in the man's direction. Still saying nothing. Returning to his heavy sleep.

Yeah, yeah a petulant spiteful hypocritical monster.

Physically, he wasn't doing too badly, he admitted. He wasn't even using a cane. He wasn't quick but he was getting stronger.

Jed laughed at a pretty nun, teasing her on an English pronunciation of something, and she blushed, and Jed repeated the words, promising her his Spanish was far worse. The women then turned the tables on him and he failed their tests spectacularly and everyone laughed as if nobody had a care in the world. He caught his dad looking at him, expressionless, still refusing to talk to anyone.

Stubborn old man, Jed thought, fucking asshole, always.

Beatrice had asked Jed the previous day why the shut-down? "He has stopped talking," she had noted. "He will not speak to me or María or Anna or Raquel or even Joella, the one he likes to look at..."

Jed chuckled at the idea of his dad staring at a hot nun, turning to Beatrice, "He uh… are you serious?"

Beatrice smiled, a small one, "He is a human being whose brain injury affects his ability to hide his feelings."

He got that but still. Convenient excuse. What Beatrice didn't know was that his dad had no shame without a head injury. No goddamn sense. They're NUNS, he wanted to yell. Though he never was surprised at who his dad stirred to the point where they wanted to answer his unspoken interest. Yeah, he wouldn't be surprised to find a nun in his dad's bed now that he thought about it. To be honest. What an asshole. Good thing there's no hot priests around.

Beatrice and Jed had been on a noontime walk with Abram while Todd napped, and she was still obviously concerned. "It's what he does, Madre," Jed mused, trying to lessen her worry, "he disappears into his head, working on the next means of attack." He shrugged. "He's also pretty depressed, feeling hella sorry for himself."

"Has he hurt you, child? You speak to him… roughly. As a warrior might with a difficult captain in a difficult war."

Jedediah had laughed, harder than was appropriate, pulling his hair back and squatting down to pet the dog to give him a good belly scratch.

"Where do I begin?"

Then he gazed into the darkening jungle, the trees shadowy, moving in the humid breeze, Abram happily on his back.

"I didn't meet him until I was 16. I hunted him until I found him. Ended up a careful-what-you-wish-for kinda thing. First time I talked to him, he threw me against a window to make a point."

Beatrice's eyes widened at that. Jed only chuckled.

"It's okay, it was a reinforced window in a psychiatric hospital. He doesn't do that anymore—mess with me, that is."

"You became an equal."

"Yeah, I guess. I could never match him physically… so I pulled a gun on him, a knife, I punched him when he was down... always to stop him from doing something he'd regret. God, I was… so disappointed… at who my dad was. Drugs were his world, insanity his food. He was an actual criminal. But then… he saved my life. Saved ME. Used his crazy, his addictions, his criminality, to lift me up and walk me outta hell into safety. Literally."

"That sounds like a story."

He stood up, looking at kind, wise-looking Beatrice with the soft brown eyes. He then told her what happened with Phillip Manning, how he'd been taken and abused and was going to die in that wet dark subterranean room under the city but that his heroin-high father had found him and rescued him. That it was his badness that allowed it to happen.

"Had he followed the rules, I wouldn't be here."

"Yes, that is a story, isn't it?"

"Sure is. This though…" He looked around, motioning to the entirety of the convent. "This is a new story. I really thought I lost him. It's been the hardest… seven months of my life. Yeah, I lost him for good. For real. Forever. We had nothing but ashes. I can't tell you how it feels to see him again, to touch him. Over and over, I had dreams where I was so relieved to see him alive. I never thought it could be true. So I'm relieved. But…"

"What?"

"I know… this is it. This is… the last time... I will find him." He sighed. "Cats only have seven lives. He is gonna die eventually and it ain't gonna be peaceful in bed at 100. I know… this is the last lucky break. It's like… another kind of grief."

Beatrice wore her usual habit, black work-pants and leather work shoes, a button-down shirt with stripes tucked into the belted pants. Similar to Raquel. They did not look like a nun and a doctor, they rejected all conventions of Cuban society. Like this boy. Just the same as his father. She gazed back at Jed, such a handsome young man who she could see looked so much like Angel.

"You're a strong man to come to the convent, to be his son, to still love him."

"He's my only dad, and strangely, ironically, a good one. From the outside, you just see a fu—" He caught himself. "You just see a screwed-up jerk. He fights me all the time… God, the level of fight... but he knows I'm right." He chuckled sadly. "It isn't the truth of him though. His being a jerk. It's not. Anyway, like I said, he's ok, Madre, don't worry about him. He'll come out of it. Then you'll wish for the days that he wouldn't talk."

Jed laughed brightly and Beatrice smiled, their walk continuing.

Beatrice had understood then the silence of Angel.

She now walked among the women in the dining hall, reviewing chores for the day, things to prepare for, assignments across the convent. She sat next to Angel, next to the man she knew would be returning home very soon. He had progressed much in the past few days, and even though Jedediah said not to worry, she did. She wasn't sure he was going to be ready to go when the day arrived.

"God knows you," she said quietly, getting Todd's attention. He jerked towards her but didn't quite turn to her.

"I have faith in your strength."

Raquel picked up the plates and left. Jedediah had gotten up, too, and helped the women clear the dining room.

"If He did know me," Todd rasped, "I'd be... dead."

Taking his hand into hers, happy to have gotten a response, Beatrice repeated her story to him that she'd been telling. "He has a purpose for you. I know this. Those men you killed were evil, truly. What you did was wrong, yes, but I believe you are forgiven. He forgives all, if you seek it."

He grunted, a harsh sound, disbelieving. But then he softened and said, "Thank you for taking care of me. I can't ever... repay you. I can send money, a lot. You'll always have a well-supplied…" He searched for the word. "... hospital-thing…" He huffed and the word finally popped into his head, "CLINIC. I'll make sure of it. But bringing me back from the dead… it's a forever debt. I don't know if it was worth it."

"Callings have no price tag. When I saw you in the helicopter that brought you to Baracoa, you were covered in soot from the bombing, blackened all over. There was a shine though, that I was told would be there. The shine was a silver necklace catching light. When I wiped off the medal hanging on that chain, our saint was there. I knew you had to be saved."

"I'm not Catholic, you know. I'm quite… un-godly."

"I know. It was a chance that your lover chose you to carry Santo Pancracio. But it was love that made you keep it, and God that allowed it to survive the bombing."

The room was quiet and he looked at his hand in hers. "That's a… stretch."

"No. It is not. It is God."

After a moment, he began to ask, "How do I live with—"

Everything.

"Focus on the good. On what you believe is right. Your instincts have served you well. You are alive because of them. Your son is alive because of them."

Todd turned to her, eyes confused. "My son...?"

"He told me your history with him. You rescued him from a terrifying place, from a kidnapper. He would have died if you were a… good… man. But because of who you are, your… sicknesses… you were able to reach him. No police could have done it. He is alive because of all those things you hate in yourself."

Todd closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose to stop any tears from coming. He was ashamed that the Mother Superior should know any of his ugly past. But he supposed his MK tattoos, all his scars, were ugly enough. She knew a lot. His body itself told the world just how undeserving he was of any grace. What was one more thing?

"Keep following your instincts," she said, smiling, releasing his hand and standing up. Proper and peaceful. The complete opposite of him in almost every way imaginable.

"I will pray for you every day," she said, "for as long as I live." She pressed a warm palm on his cheek, surprising affection, before leaving him alone in the large dining room that had served so many.

He groaned when he heard Jed behind him, "Get up, Pops. Let's go. Come on. Winery."

"Fuck you, you goddamn… Nazi."

Jed grinned and repressed a laugh. The self-imposed silence was over.

"I love you, too, Pops."

"Whatever."

Move.


Jed and Todd had made their way to the beach. It had been weeks since Jed had found his father alive. They sat on the sand, eyes on the horizon, drinking from a shared thermos of water and eating carefully and lovingly prepared sandwiches. They had a date to leave. Another week and they'd be headed to Miami. There definitely had been no sign of Ian Correa and Pedro Moreno had gone home ostensibly to prep for the return of the King…

The sea seemed endless and the tide relentless. Not too long and the water would reach their bare feet. Strange how clear it was up close but so impenetrable from a distance. Todd smoothed the sand, lost in his thoughts.

"I have something to show you," Jed said quietly before reaching into his backpack. He pulled out a couple of pages, printed from Beatrice's office printer. Todd took them, eyes on Jed a moment before squinting and trying to decode what he was reading. Like his talking, he found words on a page sometimes needed time to unravel.

The article was from a regional paper in the states. It was about a neighborhood in New York City that had gotten new life thanks to mysterious bits of artwork that appeared all along a network of rundown alleyways. Red dancing stars. The "trail" ended at the community center in a massive burst of multi-colored stars, all filled in and whole. Same smiles though. Strange smiling simple stars. Kids followed them, groups of seniors, and now… frustrated police. Money poured into the community center, the world a little brighter for one of the more marginalized areas of NYC.

Todd shrugged, "What's this."

"It's Rico."

The name felt like a punch to broken ribs. Todd dropped the pages and huffed hard. "What…. why… I don't understand… why you saying his name, don't say his name to me…" He got up and walked to the water, feeling the coolness on his toes, his feet. Strange how painful it was to suddenly hear his name spoken out loud. Couldn't say why. He watched the clear water rush across his skin.

I love you like I love heroin, like I love the streets and that moment when the cold ocean washes my feet on a hot day.

He'd been high when he said those words to Rico, didn't have a specific recall of them. But they'd been memorialized in Rico's sketchbook, Todd remembering them now… scrawled next to drawings of himself, his own ruined body beautiful and strong and sensual… a vision he never could have imagined before Rico. The water rolled up again and he dug his toes into the wet sand.

Jed's voice broke up his thoughts, "He's alive… that's a good thing."

"How do you know… why? What makes you say—"

"The ledger."

Todd turned to Jed, not getting this, brow creased with too much information here, weird, surprising blankness. What ledger?

"That day Téa was taken, you gave me a book in the hospital, a ledger… it was Caro's. I got to know it… sickening shit… but… all over it were these stars. Same stars."

"But to find that article...how?"

"Téa told me about his artwork… that… um…he was good, like really good, the kind of good that won't stay hidden… and she said he actually painted stars in Cuba, up on buildings…and, and ever since we got back home, I look for news about the art world for clues about where he might be because I tried finding him once but he was given something like witness protection according to Bo and so he's impossible to find right now but I look anyway. It's just my habit." He paused, eyes on the horizon again, on the infinity of the ocean.

"Dancing stars." A flash of Rico spinning and spinning in front of Manuel Caro in the basement intruded and also little Alicia, injured and bleeding from Ivan's assault on her in the house, that awful evil house, asking if Todd was going to ask her to dance for him as he wrapped her up in a blanket and ran ran ran stand up don't fall Raquel help her help her and he promised she wouldn't have to dance ever for anyone again and he dug his toes deeper into the sand.

"Yeah," he heard, "They're exactly the same. They're red, kind of stretching, definitely moving. I could see that… but the article called them 'dancing' and it all snapped together, that's exactly what it is, they're dancing and smiling and I kind of figure he drew them after he stole that book."

Alone with horrors in his head, reading those words, pictures of kids, tied with stockings on bed posts, dancing like so many others… Violet too, she danced, too, and he sat with that book and drew stars over and over and over and over.

Todd didn't remember the stars. Rico had given him the book when they were still at the beach house, after they'd started sleeping together, showed him the details of the book, after Rico committed to Blanco, after the beating…and all Todd could see were the details and not those tortured stars pretending to smile for a monster about to tear them to pieces.

The two men silenced as they watched the colors in the water beneath their feet.

"Why'd you try to find him? Why do you keep trying to find him?" Todd asked in a soft voice. "You didn't like him too much, I thought."

Jed didn't answer for a bit, Todd turning to look at him. "Jed?"

"Just a connection to you."

The idea of Jed searching for Rico just to connect with his dead Pops kinda broke Todd. Too close to what he did when he lost his mother, how he'd look at the stockings tying his wrists to the bedposts… to connect with her. Digging deeper into his memory that now was easy as opening a toy box, he remembered sleeping with her blue-green sweater, tight, tight, holding it to him after his father would leave the bed, leave the room, going downstairs to get whiskey, sticky skin, wet skin, salt and bitter in his throat… that sweater he'd stuff under his mattress so Peter wouldn't find it, that sweater he'd sometimes jerk off with as a glove or as a soft thing to slide on and rub against until he was shaking with an orgasm all as further connection because Peter had so corrupted Todd's view of love and sex and his very own body and what a parent was supposed to be.

Connection with someone you would never see again, never touch again, never hear their voice again. Lost in the forever black.

He pulled Jed into a breathless hug, his mouth on his son's head, tasting his hair damp with sea air and sweat, a man he never knew as a child.

"I'm sorry," Todd said in a soft, grievous tone. "I am so sorry I hurt you, broke your heart that way, that you… needed to do that. I'm so so fucking sorry I put you through all that."

Another kind of grief, Jed thought, hiding in his father's grip, so aware of the miracle of him. Too close to Todd's being dead only a few weeks before today. Days and days they'd been having silly conversations as they huffed up the stairs and back down, as they swatted away mosquitos walking to the winery, making up dialogue that Abram would probably be saying if he could talk and foods they liked and didn't like and politics and books and discovering that they both hated amusement parks and both feeling bad that they never took the kids to roller coasters and shouldn't they because it's kind of metaphorical but no, no, who needs terror when life is so very terrifying… all the talks Jed had always wanted but that the crazy never allowed. This space, here in this convent, these days of getting him better were… magical.

"It's okay, Pops, it's okay," he said, tears coming anyway, a different kind of sadness because he knew that the grief would eventually come. That he absolutely would lose his father again one day. Life assured him of this. But Jed pushed that thought out of his head and was left with the reality of being in the midst of a powerful hug of a powerfully dangerous man about to return to a very dangerous place to bring his woman up out of hell into safety.

That his dangerousness was going to save another life.

They separated and Todd gazed at Jed, his hard hand still on his shoulder. "Thank you for finding me," he said. "For coming to the hospital when you did. For daring to talk to me. You are so brave in everything you do. That's your mom. Even today, living how she does…"

Jed laughed, "You mean being a militant prepper with a shitload of guns and canned foods?"

"Michelle is ready, man, for the zombie apocalypse."

Jed laughed aloud because Todd didn't change the serious tone but he was smiling now and rolling his eyes at the madness of Michelle who still lived in the off-the-grid camp up in the West Virginia mountains who still sent letters every now and again. Jed gazed back at his father who smiled without a single bit of sadness or brokenness or any of that brutal history that would never really stop haunting him. His hair was so short and glistened in the light and his face seemed young and the only indication of his history was that scar and the snake at his throat. Hardly anything in comparison to that expression on his face.

Just love. Just pure love.

They spent the rest of the afternoon at the edge of the sea, kicking at the waves and searching for fish and collecting shells and colored rocks and yelling freely at the miles and miles of blue and breathing the air of a place they wondered if they'd ever see again once they left.


Téa stood outside her new headquarters, Method Maker's Inc., her workers inside, moving things around and getting acclimated to the digs, everyone a little giddy. She wore yet another thousand-dollar suit, this one sea-blue and her blouse black as night and as always showed off her body that screamed… just you try.

Gloria joined her to admire the old triple-story American farmhouse.

"To think the civil war happened miles from here… and now it's a cannabis empire."

Téa chuckled and shook her head. "Not exactly an empire."

"We're doing amazing. I just saw our financials."

Our financials. Téa was so pleased Gloria had that feeling. Our. She did own stock in Method Makers, all the employees did. But to claim it… took a real leap of faith. Belief.

"I suppose." Téa sniffed and adjusted a large-brimmed tan hat she wore to keep the sun off her face. Her sunglasses hid her appreciative gaze at her friend. They'd spent the weekend in bed. Téa knew she should feel guilty. She didn't love Gloria, but she needed her.

A connection.

She reached out and held her hand, Gloria quieting at it.

"I shouldn't," Téa started but stopped at delicate fingertips on her lips.

"We talked about this. It's the least I can do for you. You have empowered me beyond words. You have given me the world. I might not survive these college classes you enrolled me in but…. I'm not under anybody anymore and never will be again. You need me to help you through this terrible grief? I am happy to do it."

"Don't you want love? A wife maybe?"

"No, Téa. I will live the rest of my life free and independent and taking whatever lover I want." She grinned proudly. Whispered in her ear, "And right now I am so enjoying you."

Téa didn't smile though, just turning and kissing her. "Thank you." Eyes on hers.

Victor came out into the sun, nodding at the other bodyguards who hovered nearby. "Are you ready to go?" He asked.

"Where are you going?" Gloria snapped. "I didn't see anything in your calendar?"

"Off the books, mí palomacita, a meet and greet with Eladio."

"No! What… why?"

"He's going to be our primary grower."

"The contract was that good?! I can't believe you! What does Rolon say! Téa!"

Téa let her rant and rage then stopped her with her own fingertips on her luscious full lips, lips that now knew every flaw and curve of Téa's body, lips that had drawn every gasp and sigh and moan that Téa thought she was capable of.

"All is under control," she said.

"Is it?"

She smiled at the thought of what they might do after the meeting, tonight, in her bed. The children were with Viki, increasingly a routine. Kids spending weekends with their only "grandmother." It wasn't that she suddenly preferred women but that she suddenly needed Gloria. Every sound Gloria made, every look Gloria gave, all her flaws and curves. She needed her like she needed air.

Because every time they fucked, no matter where, in her office, on the roof, at Gloria's cozy cottage, she saw the ghost. And she needed to see him because it wasn't Todd she saw, but Blanco.

You're wasting time, Delgado, fucking like that. Delicious as you may be, and I definitely like what I'm seeing, when are you gonna get Los Muertos to kiss your ring, to give you fealty? When are you gonna get off your back and get to the real fucking?

She climbed into the car and Victor looked at her in the rear view mirror as she removed her sunglasses. The others followed her in another sedan.

"We have a good picture now of everything Los Muertos has taken over," he said.

"Good. How's it look? Is MK securely in the ground? Dead and buried?"

"Yes, everyone believes MK is a blessed tragedy. And here, on campus, men are happy. Love you and everything you do. They call themselves the Method Men. Even the women have taken up the name."

"The world is run by men, Victor, why wouldn't the women claim themselves as men? We should all be the most powerful of beings."

Victor laughed. "What now, La Reina?"

"I think Los Muertos needs a new enemy, don't you think?"

"You mean…. arm the Method Men? They've been a little impatient."

"Arm the fuck out of them, Victor. We'll finish off Eladio and his jokers one corner at a time. Piece by piece. They have no idea what's coming."

Téa took off her hat and powdered her nose, her long dark-brown hair framing her face perfectly. She looked at the cracked mirror in her hand, at the image staring back at her. A line distorted the right side of her face, making her look monstrous, really.

"Let's stop and get flowers. Diego likes roses. Yellow ones."

To be continued….