“The alarm wasn’t on. It should have been on,” he said, and there was a nervous quiver in his voice that made her wonder who he was with. She raced for the door and locked it seconds before the handle turned.
“You don’t have a key?” the unknown voice inquired.
“I’ve never needed one. It’s usually open.”
“Well usually isn’t gonna cut it, is it?”
“Hold on . . . let me see what I’ve got here,” Keegan grumbled. The soft jangle of keys accompanied the slide of a key in the lock. “That’s not it,” Keegan muttered.
Mercedes scrambled for a place to hide. Snagging her purse, she crawled beneath the nearest row of shelves as the lock released and the door swung open. She could hear Keegan feeling around for the switch, and suddenly light bloomed.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, Mercedes chanted silently. She could feel her purse vibrating against her chest. Someone was calling her. The setting was almost inaudible but not quite. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed her phone to cease. The two sets of feet stopped in front of her face.
“It’s in the towel bins.”
What was in the towel bins?
Keegan had waltzed in earlier in the week, carting bins overflowing with white towels, like he was delivering food to poor, starving children.
“We won’t need to buy new towels this year, Gloria,” he had bragged. “A local hotel chain was having a close-out. I got these for next to nothing. Solid white, just like we use here. They look brand new. There are close to one hundred towels in these bins.”
Gloria had clapped and congratulated him on his resourcefulness, even offering to pay him what the towels cost, plus a finder’s fee. He’d declined, magnanimous.
“This is my contribution to Maven and my thanks for hiring me back on.” Keegan had opened one of the bins to show everyone the quality. But he hadn’t opened all of them. He’d stacked them in the storage room, one on top of the other, in the space next to the door where they would be out of the way until they were needed.
“So all these bins, huh?” the stranger asked.
“Just the bottom two. The top two are just towels.”
“You got ten kilos hidden beneath towels?”
“Twenty. And it’s hidden inside the towels. All cut, mixed, and bagged. All we have to do is deliver it, and you’ll get the money I owe you, plus interest, just like I promised. Let’s get ‘em and go. That alarm should have been on,” Keegan worried.
Mercedes didn’t dare reach into her purse or pull out her phone, but it continued to vibrate against her chest, threatening to expose her. She needed proof. Something that she could take to the police. Something that would ensure that Keegan Tate wouldn’t be in any position to threaten Noah for custody. She had the suspicions of a homeless man and a conversation about kilos and towels. It would be nice if she had more. She listened, hardly breathing, as the two men moved the two top bins, brimming with towels, to the side and positioned the two bottom bins on a dolly.
“Is that your phone that keeps buzzing?” the man asked Keegan.
Mercedes stopped breathing.
“Nah. It’s not mine. I thought it was yours,” Keegan grunted.
“Check it,” the man insisted, and from her vantage point, she could tell when Keegan released the handle on the dolly, lowering the platform, to search for his phone. She couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t see anything but their feet, but she could imagine how it must have unfolded.
Keegan reached for his phone, looking down as he did. The other man reached inside his jacket, ostensibly to check his phone as well. Instead, he pulled out a gun, and without hesitation or second thought, he pulled the trigger.
The sound in the small space was deafening, and had Mercedes been a different type of girl, one who is prone to squeaks or squeals, she would have given herself away.
Instead, she stared, dumbstruck, into the sightless eyes of Keegan Tate who had fallen to the floor mere feet from where she was wedged, cheek against the linoleum, a paltry, plywood shelf separating her from a stone-cold killer. Keegan had died without pain or protest, a hole in his forehead and blood seeping through his golden locks like he’d suddenly decided to go red. Alive one moment. Gone the next.
The man with the gun leaned down and picked up Keegan’s phone. It had clattered to the ground when he fell, skittering away from his body toward the door. Mer caught a brief glimpse of dark hair and a brown leather jacket before the man straightened again. Then he propped open the stockroom door, pushed the loaded dolly from the stock area, and shut the light off behind him. No snide one-liner or cackling laugh like you see in the movies. He simply shot a man, shut off the light—gotta save electricity—and trundled off with his bins of cocaine.
Mercedes lay in stunned horror, afraid to move. In the darkness, she could smell the blood. It had found her hiding place, and when it touched her face, warm and wet, expanding in an ever-widening pool, she hugged the wall next to her and pressed a hand over her nose and mouth.
Maybe the man was simply quiet as he made his getaway, or maybe her ears were permanently damaged from the gun being fired in close quarters, but Mercedes couldn’t hear anything. Not her pounding heart or her labored breaths. And that scared her most of all. If she couldn’t hear, she wouldn’t know if he was gone. She wouldn’t know if she’d given herself away. She wouldn’t know if she moved silently.
But she did know one thing. If the man found her, if he heard her or saw her, she would die. So she laid in Keegan’s blood and begged Lady Guadalupe, Abuela, and Cora—whoever could hear her—for protection. Then she began inching forward beneath the shelves, trying to put some space between her body and Keegan’s blood, desperate not to make a sound, but knowing if she didn’t move, she would lose her mind.
She’d almost worked her way to the far wall, a good five feet from Keegan’s body when the door swung open again and light filled the room once more. He was back.
She froze again, praying she was still hidden, and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see the moment he discovered her.
He began pulling items from the shelves, stepping over Keegan’s body like it didn’t bother him at all. He upended a box of commercial toilet paper over Keegan’s body, the rolls individually wrapped in paper bouncing merrily over the dead man. One rolled beneath the shelf where Mer was huddled, and came to a stop. She prayed he wouldn’t care enough to retrieve it. He didn’t. He ripped open a ream of scratchy paper towels, the kind that stack inside a wall dispenser, and let them flutter over Keegan’s inert form. He emptied several packages, burying the body in paper products. Mercedes heard a snick and the smell of aerosol hairspray filled the air with an accompanying whoosh. Her hearing was coming back, but her eyes stayed glued to his feet, willing him to leave again. If he kept pulling things from the shelves, he would eventually find her.
He liked the hairspray. He doused the towering pile of paper products in a long, steady stream, emptying one can and tossing it aside before opening another. Mer’s throat started to tickle, and her eyes began to burn.
Don’t sneeze. Don’t cough. Don’t even breathe.
She didn’t see him pull out his lighter, but she saw the moment he dropped the burning ream of paper towels, and the whole pile whooshed into flames, a funeral pyre on the stockroom floor. Through the flames she watched him leave, flipping off the light once more, and pulling the door closed behind him.
Nineteen
1997
Carole Stokes had a green thumb, and when she wasn’t running the records department, she was digging in the dirt. Her yard was beautifully landscaped and big enough for a handful of guests, and she wanted to contribute to the wedding in some way. Everyone did. Carole was providing the location, Alma and Abuela were in charge of the food, Heather had hired a minister and a DJ, and Mercedes had done hair and makeup for everyone in the bridal party.
“You should wear your hair down,” Mercedes insisted. “I’ll weave the sides into the curls, but your hair beneath that veil is stunning, and Noah likes it down.”
The salon was quiet around them. Noah and Cora had chosen a Sunday afternoon to marry, and everyone else had already left to make final arrangements, leaving Cora in Mercedes’s capable hands. Cora had been jittery—teary even—most of the morning, and Mercedes had already redone her makeup once. They’d moved on to hair, but Mercedes would have to hurry if she was going to have time to get ready herself.
“I know I can’t make a better choice than Noah,” Cora said suddenly. “I’m lucky. He chose me . . . and I know how lucky I am.”
Mercedes met Cora’s eyes in the mirror and asked the question she’d asked three times already that day. “Cora, what’s wrong?”
“He will be a good husband. A good father too. The best. And I know him. That’s so important, to truly know who you are marrying, don’t you think? I know him,” Cora babbled, avoiding the question.
“And he knows you,” Mercedes said, her hands moving almost automatically while her eyes clung to Cora’s face. Cora nodded slowly, and Mercedes moved the curling iron up and down with the motion of her head.
“He does. But . . . how well do we ever really know someone, Sadie? Have you ever been in a dark room . . . a room so dark that you can’t see your hand when it’s right in front of your face?”
“Yeah,” Mercedes said, trying to follow along.
“Sometimes . . . I feel like I’m in a huge, dark room. There’s this space, endless space, all around me. I’m there, but no one could possibly see me. Not the real me. Because there’s so much . . . darkness and distance all around me. I’m a black speck on a black canvas. And only I know who and where I am.”
Mercedes had stopped curling Cora’s hair and was staring at her friend. “What’s going on, Cora? What’s wrong?” she repeated. “Do you want to postpone the wedding? Do you need more time?”
“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” Cora shot back, and her eyes filled with tears once more.
When Mercedes didn’t respond to the accusation but kept her gaze steady on Cora’s, Cora wilted.
“I’m sorry, Sadie,” she murmured.
“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to Noah. If you’re going to cower in the dark and worry about existentialism while an amazing human is waiting at the end of the aisle, ready to promise his life to you, ready to stand beside you, to be a light in your darkness, then have the decency to tell him. Otherwise, I better see some rejoicing. I better see you smile. I better hear some hallelujahs and some celebrating. Because this is a good day.”
“But . . . what if . . . I’m not enough?” Cora whispered.
And there it was. At the heart of everything, Cora was still the little girl whose dad had chosen death over her, and nothing would ever convince her otherwise.