Chapter Ten
Javier Pereira was not an introspective man – if he had been, he likely would never have gotten into his chosen profession, or at least not stayed in it for long. But on those long, lonely, sleepless nights at sea, sitting on his bunk with his arms draped over pulled-up knees, or up on deck tucked into a perch out of the wind staring out across the moonlit ocean, he couldn't help but raise the hood on his psyche and start gingerly poking at the morass beneath. And inevitably, painfully, he came to some realizations.
The first, distressful even though it was a no-brainer, was simply put: he was done with contract killing. It had been a long time coming, and wasn't just because the FBI had apparently at long last caught up with him. Since he had gotten together with Letty, he'd had it in the back of his mind that if he could just get her past her squeamishness, as he saw it, they could team up and really rake it in. But as he watched her fall completely apart after killing Teo and the security company guy, he'd been forced to realize that dream would never work. Quite simply: if she had "gotten over it", she wouldn't be the woman he'd fallen in love with. She'd be changed, so drastically, that they just wouldn't work any more. It was her very vulnerability and fragility that held him so close, that made him want to simply take care of her.
And at the same time, he realized that she'd been working on him all that time, and it had borne fruit. She'd finally wrenched him around to her way of thinking, of viewing his profession. What was it about his upbringing that had left him with that odd blind spot in his otherwise well-developed code of ethics, about the intrinsic value of human life? No need to search far for that answer. His monster father, Oscar, had never believed in it, nor passed it on. But that was a whole other can of worms, one he still couldn't face just yet.
And finally, there was that last, horrific job. He'd never taken a contract where the client wanted to witness it, and it should have thrown up huge red flags, but he'd been too blinded by his intense desire to give Letty a home of her own, where she could be safe and secure always, and raise Jacob, and he could take care of them both. So he had charged the man a cool million cash, and gone ahead with it, instead of walking away.
Listening to the couple – he'd forgotten their names by now – bicker and snipe at each other as he did his final preparations, he'd wanted to bash their heads together and yell, "just get a divorce and walk away already!" But of course it was already far too late: the man was already close to death from the poison she'd been feeding him, and just wanted to watch her go first. So Javier had carried out his wishes. That had been different from every other time, too: he'd never before used any method that had required such close, intimate contact with the victim for so long. He could still feel her struggling underneath his hands, feel her lose, feel the life seep out with her last gasping breath. It had sickened him in ways he'd never expected.
But the final straw had come after, as he walked out and was getting into his car, when he heard the gunshot with which the dying husband had ended his own suffering. You fucking COWARD! Javier had screamed at him in his head. If you KNEW you were going to do that, and you had the guts to do it, you should have had the guts to kill HER yourself! Why the hell did you drag ME into it? But of course there was no answer, never would be. Javier was left with the nauseated feeling of having been damnably used and then thoughtlessly tossed aside, another ugly first. Returning home to find Carlos' lifeless body and the taunt from Teo had only cemented his uselessness – which was then reconfirmed tenfold when Teo did the end run around him and forced Letty to kill him, utterly ruining their beautiful dream home for both of them. What the fuck are you good for, then? Javier had asked himself over and over while he cleaned up the house and disposed of the bodies, never getting a good answer in return.
No, he forced himself to admit now. He was done with that profession, and would never return. He would never take another life for money or other gain. He still felt it a point of sick pride that he had only ever accepted contracts to enact justice denied to the victims or their families by the official legal system, never any for political or business reasons, or personal enrichment. It was true that, as he'd told Letty one night, he hadn't always listened closely to the stories, but he listened enough to know the category, if not the details. Oscar was the political killer, and Teo the one for personal, monetary gain. Not Javier. Not that it made any difference any more. He was done.
The pain from that decision came from the fact that he knew he could get the money he needed for the dark web search pros to find Letty with just one or two quick jobs. But he just couldn't do it. Nor could he face Letty and tell her that was how he had found her. She would never be able to accept it, and it would taint their relationship all over again, perhaps irrevocably. And he wouldn't be able to hide it from her. He had wrestled with the problem all that first night ashore in Singapore, even picking up his phone a few times to look online for jobs, before putting it down again. By dawn, he knew he wasn't going to do it. He was going to have to get the money some other way - and the only one available was what he was doing now: ship's cook.
For all the pain and difficulty, however, he had better luck figuring himself out than his predecessor. Not even his shipmates could help; Miguel Perez had apparently kept so much to himself during the ten months or so that he had been on board that he was virtually not even present. Nobody remembered him talking much about himself, not even Jiho, who as his assistant had spent more time with Miguel than anyone. All the steward could add to the meager bits of information was that Miguel had apparently been married at one point, with a child, but that child had died of an illness, and the marriage fell apart soon after. Miguel had also alluded to being a line cook in a restaurant, but the Mariposa seemed to have been his first ship duty. The pages of his personnel file that Javier had received from the Captain contained only blanks for both next-of-kin and home address.
It was the double stack of porn magazines filling one of the drawers under the bunk that really took Javier aback, however. They seemed to be the only personal item the man had left behind – there were no letters, no pictures, no gadgets or trinkets. He flipped through a couple of the magazines, but they weren't to his taste. Besides, he felt distinctly uncomfortable even looking at them, constantly aware that he was poking through another man's private stash. It felt almost indecent. Javier had never been much of one for porn, anyway; and now his memories of Letty and their wild and/or tender times were infinitely more compelling than any glossy print could be – even if he did end in unacknowledged tears most times. He could not escape the agonizing questions: where was she? Did she even want him to find her? Or had she moved on, made good her escape from him at last, as Mike had blurted out? Her specter, and that of Miguel, hung over his shoulders like avenging angels, driving him out to run the informal jogging track around the main deck, around and around, until he had at last worn himself out enough to sleep.
He ended up leaving the magazines in a corner of the crew lounge unannounced. They were gone within a day.
He made it a point, however, not to copy Miguel's personal habits, and took to spending time in the crew lounge with his shipmates when he could. He had always been good at charming people; after all, he'd spent years ingratiating himself with his intended victims until he could get them alone to do the job. Now he turned that talent to a much different goal: simply making friends, and found he was even more successful at it than he had hoped. And then the inveterate loner surprised himself by discovering that he actually liked many of them, and enjoyed the late mornings and evenings shooting the breeze and playing cards and pool. He often thought of his "father-in-law" Rob, and how much he would have enjoyed it too.
The crew – all men – were a mix of Latinos from South America, and southeast Asians – mostly Koreans, like Jiho. Like everywhere in the international transportation industry, however, the most common lingua franca was English – everyone spoke at least a little of it, enough to get the job done.
The cameraderie of long voyages at sea made Miguel's aloofness even more mysterious. That might have been partially to avoid complaints, Javier told himself wryly; although minimally technically proficient, Miguel had not displayed any of the excitement or passion about food that a truly great cook like Javier brought to the kitchen. Indeed, he had been content with dishing up the same half-dozen quick, bland, boring meals to the crew in tight rotation.
Not so Javier. He took to the challenge of this unique situation with relish. An ordinary line cook, as he explained to an interested Jiho, was highly constrained by both time and the tightly-controlled menu of the restaurant, pushing out the same few dishes made to exacting specifications, in less time than they really deserved. There was absolutely no place for creativity in most restaurant kitchens – unless you were the head chef. That individual still operated under constraints, only different ones. He could experiment and design new dishes, but they had to fit in with the restaurant's theme, and be adaptable to mass production of so many dishes per shift – including figuring out what could be done ahead of time, to make the time between the patron ordering the dish and the moment he takes the first bite as short as humanly possible. An independent private chef, as Javier had been so many times, was only constrained by his imagination, and the desires and budget of his client.
A ship's chief cook was constrained in different ways: first of all by what was in the ship's stores, which on the Mariposa ran to the most basic of commodities, from sugar and flour to frozen or preserved meats and canned goods. The second constraint was volume: he had twenty-eight mouths to feed, twice a day at specific times. (The noon and midnight meals didn't count; they were mostly cold salad-and-sandwich buffets, or quick made-to-order items like hamburgers and grilled cheese.) He made a bet with Jiho, though, that he could go for two full weeks without repeating a breakfast, and two full months without repeating a dinner. He won both bets, and nobody complained.
It got even more fun when, after a month on board, Captain Frontera handed Javier a ship's credit card with a five grand limit, telling him he could pick up anything he wanted at the port markets – as long as it was destined to feed the crew – ALL of the crew. Fresh steaks and seafood, and exotic fruits and vegetables began making appearances immediately, to everyone's pleasure, and he started exploring exotic spices, too.
It was on his way back from one such excursion in Malaysia that he interrupted a crew member, a Korean named Lee Hyun, in a rather intense conversation with a small group of local men on the dock, in the shadows under the bow of the ship. They broke off as he walked by, ineffectually hiding the package that was being passed to Lee as they all stared belligerently at Javier, but he just waved a hand and kept going. He didn't care what the crew bought or got into on shore, he was nobody's minder. He'd forgotten about it by the time he reached the galley to put away his day's prizes.