Be Good
Ortiz
The next day, Maribel’s sitting on the edge of the bed with the red shirt still in the bag beside her. She hasn’t taken it out. She’s got her hands between her knees. The shark is on the pillow behind her with its face on wrong. I stand in the door and make myself ask the only thing I need to know.
“What did he do?”
She doesn’t pretend not to understand me. She looks at the bag for a while.
“I asked him to let me go once.” Her voice is steady. It costs her, and she pays it. “He came to bring the plate. I got up off the floor, and I asked him. I said please. I told him I wouldn’t say who. I just wanted the door.”
“And.”
“He laughed.” She looks at me. “I told him I couldn’t take it anymore. I begged him to let me out.”
Everything inside me goes quiet. “What did he say?”
“He said Santo wasn’t finished with me. That my only job in this world was to please his brother.”
I don’t move.
“Then he grabbed me and put me back in the room. I fought him. I screamed. I told him I would rather die than let his brother touch me again.” Her voice catches, but she keeps going.
“Cristo told me that could be arranged. That girls like me disappeared in Miami every day and nobody bothered looking for them. That Santo would love throwing me in a ditch like a stray dog.”
Fuck.
“Then he shoved me inside and said, ‘Be good, Mu?eca. My brother will be back tonight.’”
“And locked the door?”
“Yes.”
I don’t say anything, because anything I say is going to come out of me wrong, and she’s the one who has to sit in this room after. I stand there and understand it all the way down until it settles in my bone marrow.
He wasn’t just Santo’s brother. She stood up off a floor and asked him for a door. He laughed at her. He told her what she was worth. Then he put the lock back on knowing exactly what was going to come through it next.
I knew what happened to her. I knew who did it. But I haven’t let myself follow the road all the way back to the beginning. She came to Miami looking for me. She walked up to the wrong men wearing cuts and asked for Ortiz.
Some Los Muertos prospect looked at a beautiful woman alone in a city she didn’t know, heard the name of a Black Flag brother, and saw something he could hand to Santo.
If she’d been looking for anybody else, she never would’ve been in that room.
She came here because of me, and they used that to put her in a cage.
“Okay,” I say.
“Mateo.”
“I’m here.”
“You look like you’re not.”
I cross the room and put my hand on the back of her head and hold her against my stomach, and I stand there until she lets out a breath. She doesn’t ask me what I’m going to do. I think she knows I’m going to lie to her if she does, and she doesn’t want that from me.
Torque listens to all of it in the office with the door shut. He doesn’t interrupt. When I’m done he sits back and looks at the wall for a long time, and when he looks at me again there’s something in his face I don’t see often.
“I believe her,” he says. “Every word.”
“Then—“
“No.” He says it before I’ve got the sentence out.
“You want to know why. I’m going to tell you why, once, and then you’re going to hear it.
” He leans forward. “He stood in a parking lot and put his face in front of you. He wanted you to take that second step. He’s been sitting on our street night after night with his brother’s bikes waiting for one of us to cross it.
Santo doesn’t want a war. Santo wants us to start one, so he can call it self-defense to every club from here to Tampa when he burns this building down.
He’s choosing the ground. I don’t fight on ground another man picks for me. ”
“He laughed at her, Torque.”
“I know what he did.” His voice doesn’t go up.
“And when we go, and we’re going, Cristo Vega is the first door we knock on.
You’re the one who knocks. But we go when I say, with every man at this table, with a plan and a way home.
Not tonight, and not you alone.” He looks at me. “You don’t touch Cristo.”
“For how long?”
“Until I fucking tell you.”
I sit there. I know he’s right. That’s the part that’s hardest to hold.
He’s not scared and he’s not soft and he’s not wrong.
He’s our prez. He’s thinking about Rook on the gravel, Mess behind the bar, and Hendrix with a rod in his leg.
I’m thinking about one woman on a floor whose only sin was asking for me.
“Ortiz.”
“Yeah.”
“Say it.”
“I don’t touch Cristo.”
“Go upstairs. Be with her. That’s the job tonight.”
When I get up there, she’s got the red shirt on. She’s standing at the little mirror on the back of the door turning to see the side of it, and she’s asking the shark on the pillow what he thinks. She sees me in the glass and doesn’t stop.
“It’s too red.”
“It’s not too red.”
“You’d say that if it was.”
“I don’t lie to you, Pluma.”
Maribel laughs. She turns around and does the thing with her hip that she did on the sidewalk in Little Havana.
She’s barefoot in new jeans that fit her at the waist. Her hair’s down.
She’s the woman who picks the movie, orders the coffee, and cheats at air hockey.
She’s standing in a room with a bolt on the door that she doesn’t use anymore.
And not using the bolt is a huge deal for her.
I sit down on the bed and I try. I sit there with her doing a turn in the mirror, and I try to stay in this room.
I can’t stop seeing the other one. I don’t know what it looks like, and I see it anyway.
Her on a floor. Her getting up. Her saying please to a man with a plate.
Him laughing. Him telling her what his brother still needed her for.
Him telling her about a ditch. Him saying that name, the one that isn’t hers, and then the lock going back on.
She’s safe. I know that. She’s across the room from me in a red shirt. Torque is downstairs with a plan, and every man in this building would put himself in front of her door and take a bullet.
None of that makes Cristo Vega less alive.
The bike across the street is still there. I watch it past Maribel’s shoulder. One man under the streetlight with his helmet on the tank and his arms folded, looking up at our building.
Looking at her window.
Maribel gets into bed with the shark against the pillow. She picks up the remote and looks at me. “You’re leaving.”
“I’m going downstairs.”
“To talk to Torque?”
“Yeah.”
That isn’t a lie. Torque will be downstairs eventually.
She studies my face. “Come back.”
“I will.”
I kiss her forehead. She catches the front of my shirt before I can straighten and pulls me down far enough to kiss my mouth too.
I leave her with the red shirt on and the shark beside her. Taking the back stairs, I go through the kitchen, and let myself out the alley door.
Torque told me not to touch Cristo.
The man across the street isn’t Cristo.
I come around the building from the other side. Rook is on the front gravel watching the strip, but he’s watching the bike. Nobody is watching me.
Four lanes. No traffic.
I cross behind the streetlight.
The man hears me too late. He gets one hand on his helmet before I take the back of his cut and pull him off the bike. His shoulder hits the pavement. The helmet rolls into the gutter.
I put him against the side of the bike. “Who’s on after you?”
He smiles with blood already starting at the corner of his mouth. “Thought you weren’t allowed across the street.”
I hit him, and his head snaps back. I hit him again and take the smile off.
“Who’s on after you?”
“Santo says you’re easy. Reckless. Maybe even stupid.”
I hear the car doors behind me. Two of them. A dark sedan at the curb with its lights off. One man comes around the front with a length of chain. The other disappears behind me.
The man on the ground was never the whole thing. Torque told me that.
I turn when the chain moves. It comes for my head. I get my arm up, take it across the forearm, and drive into the man before he can swing again. We hit the hood. I put my elbow through his mouth.
Something moves behind my right shoulder. Steel catches the wrist before the blade reaches me. I never saw the knife.
My brother turns the man’s arm until the knife hits the pavement. Then he turns it farther. Something breaks. The man makes a sound and Steel puts him face-first into the side of the car.
“Other one,” Steel says.
I turn. The man with the chain is coming off the hood. I hit him in the throat. He folds. I take the chain out of his hand and wrap it once around my fist.
The watcher is crawling for his bike.
I put my boot on the back of his cut and stop him. “You tell Cristo nobody sits outside her window again.”
He turns his face against the pavement. “Fuck you.”
I pull the chain tight across my knuckles.
Steel takes it out of my hand. “Message delivered.”
“I’m not done.”
“Yeah, you are.”
The man Steel put into the car is holding his wrist against his chest. The one with the chain is coughing on his knees. Across the street, Rook is in the middle of the road with his gun out, and the front door of Black Flag is open behind him.
Every light in the building is on.
Steel gets close enough that only I hear him. “You done proving Torque right?”
“No.”
“Be not done inside.”
The sedan leaves first. The watcher gets his bike upright with one hand and follows it. No helmet. Blood on his mouth. He doesn’t look back.
Steel and I cross the street. Torque is waiting at the edge of the gravel. Mess is behind him. Rook comes in from the road and stops off to the side, because he knows this isn’t his part.
Torque looks at the blood on my hands. Then at Steel.
“He walked into three,” Steel says.
“I had them.”
“The third one had a knife.”
Torque looks at me again. “You crossed my street.”
“It’s a public street.”
“Not tonight.” He points at the building.
Across from us, the curb under Maribel’s window is empty.
That’s what I wanted.
I should know better by now.