But I have to know. I pause, turn back, and go to the corner of the building, half-hidden, watching the door to the shop, watching for the man to come after me.
I raise the phone to my ear. “Ben,” I tell him. “I made it outside. He hasn’t followed me yet.”
“Fucking just go home now. Or I’ll call Dad to make you.”
“I’m going, I’m going, I just have to see.”
And I stand there and watch for at least another minute as my heart rate returns to normal.
Finally the door opens and the man steps out.
“There he is.” I shrink back against the wall and peer out.
The man looks up and down the street then slowly starts walking up Haight toward the park.
“What’s he doing?” Ben asks.
“He’s walking up to Golden Gate Park. It took him forever to leave the store. He doesn’t seem to be looking for me anymore.”
“So maybe the whole fucking thing was in your head again?”
“Maybe,” I admit.
But thinking that doesn’t make me feel any better.
“I’m going home now.”
“Good,” he says. “I’ll see you this weekend. And I need to talk to you some more…in person.”
“Okay,” I tell him. “See you Friday.”
I hang up and take in one long inhale as the fog starts up again, sliding past me down the street like a ghost.
I’m in no mood for this film noir atmosphere.
I go straight home and try to push the last fifteen minutes out of my head.
I think of Vicente instead.
And smile.
Chapter Ten
Vicente
I’m dreaming.
I can’t remember the last time I dreamed.
It feels so long ago.
Maybe I was a child.
Twelve years old, tossing in my bed, welcoming dreams to take me away from the days where I yearned to hold on to my childhood while learning how to shoot a gun.
But like in those dreams, I’m fully aware. Not in control, just an observer who quietly watches the world crash and burn.
In this dream I am in a safe house, one of the many I was shuttled into growing up. For a while there, things got pretty bad. My father didn’t know who he could trust around his family.
So Marisol, my mother, and I were under watch of a family friend, Diego. Diego was the closest thing I ever had to a father. He was always old, always had a swoop of thick grey hair and a mustache I used to liken to a caterpillar. He’s dead now, passed away from cancer, which in a way seems like a rarity when so many die at the hands of another. Sometimes I wonder if it was better to go like Diego did, old and in pain, having lived a long life, or to die younger with a bullet to the head.
My father was visibly upset after Diego died—he was one of his most trusted friends and certainly the one who stuck around to the bitter end. But even then, I remember my father put his hand on my shoulder and told me it was better to live like a king and die young than to die at an old age without having lived.
I always thought that was an odd thing to say, especially as my father also taught me how important family was, and how without it, a man truly had nothing.
Just another thing I’ll never understand about him. Family, blood, was everything, and yet he sometimes acted like it would only get you killed in the end.
In my dream, a bare lightbulb hangs in a dark room, swinging, casting harsh light on our faces. We all sit with our backs against the wall, hands tied. Normally the safe houses are nice places, but this one has no furniture, no windows. It barely seems to be a room—it stretches into black infinity.
We are waiting for something horrible. We are no longer hiding. We are no longer protected.
Diego starts murmuring a prayer to Santa Muerte, the Saint of Death. When I look over at him he starts crying blood, shaking his head so it flies everywhere. It lands on my cheek with a hiss.
Then the shape of a door slowly appears, a glowing white outline, like someone shining a spotlight from the other side.
The light turns red.
Violet.
The brightest purple.
The door opens and I have to shield my eyes.
A figure walks in, taking careful steps. The light blinds everything except the silhouette. Tall, in a long robe that drags as the figure walks.
It stops right in front of us. Diego’s prayer fades into nothing.
This is Santa Muerte.
I stare at her feet in black combat boots before I slowly gaze upward to where bone-white skeleton legs disappear under a purple gown.
I blink into the light until I see Santa Muerte’s face.
I wish I hadn’t.
Though her face is just a skull, blackened with ash, with long thick black braids that hang down on both sides, her eyes glow within their dark pits.
I can feel them on me, burning through.
These are Violet’s eyes.
She has become the Saint of Death.
Tonight, she has come for my family.
With revenge from her family.
“You caused this, Vicente,” my mother hisses to me, and when I look at her, she’s nothing but skeleton too. “You caused this.”
“You caused this,” says the skull of Marisol.
“You,” says Diego. “For what purpose?”
“For love,” I say, looking back at Death. “I did this for love.”
Santa Muerte leans over, her heavy braids swinging forward until her ghoulish face is right in front of me. My eyes are locked on to her sockets, where I know Violet is, where I can feel her radiating outward like damaging rays.