Chapter 14
fourteen
RODRIGO
Barcelona El Prat airport has a smell to it I’d forgotten about— jet fuel and industrial cleaner and, underneath both, something warm and Mediterranean. I try to enjoy my homecoming for just a moment, but Melissa’s voice on the other end of my cell phone brings me back to reality.
“Billie believed me, but I told her to call me when she got home and she hasn’t! I’ve called Tyler but of course he’s not answering his phone. He probably fell asleep in front of a video game?—”
“Tyler?” I ask, trying to keep up.
“Billie’s boyfriend,” Melissa says, her tone implying this is obvious.
I stop walking for just a moment. Billie has a boyfriend. I should not care about this information, but for some reason, I feel— disappointed? Of course, it is my fault for daydreaming— for jumping ahead, thinking silly thoughts about a woman I just met. A woman I don’t even really know.
“I think I should call the police but I don’t know what to tell them— and I need to send them to Alana’s apartment and—” Melissa is talking a million miles a minute. It’s hard to follow her train of thought.
“No police,” I whisper, shaking my head.
My duffel is slung over one shoulder and my suitcase wheels behind me with a sound that echoes off the tile, and around me the arrivals hall is bustling— families reuniting in front of the sliding doors, a man in a black uniform holding a handwritten sign, a woman running because she is late for something.
I navigate through all of it with my phone pressed to my ear.
“Police will only make this worse unless absolutely necessary. You don’t want Alana to know that you know…
?entiendes? You understand? We are trying to avoid making her take the darkest path… ”
“I’ve been calling Billie for three hours and she hasn’t picked up once.”
I do the math without wanting to. Three hours is a long time. It is long enough for a great many things to happen.
“Maybe everything’s fine,” I say. “Maybe she couldn’t get away from Alana without making her aware. You told her not to tip her off, yes?”
“I did.”
“Alana is volatile, but she’s not—” I pause, rethinking this sentence.
“She’s not looking to hurt anyone without cause.
Maybe she has forced Billie into going on some wild adventure with her in Chicago, bar-hopping until the bars close, just to take instagram videos with men to make me jealous,” I say instead.
“She is very good at that. Making a point. Sending a message. She has done this before.”
“Has she?” Melissa asks. Her tone says wants very much for me to be right.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ve told Alana I’m coming back. That I’m coming home.”
“And what did she say?” Melissa asks.
I pause. “She said she would come to me.”
I watch a family of four walk past me, the youngest asleep across her father’s shoulder, one shoe off. I think about Alana’s text. The pink heart at the end of it.
“And the hit?” Melissa asks.
“Maybe it was a threat,” I say. “To scare me. Not a real?—”
“Rodrigo,” Melissa says my name like we are both too smart to believe such a thing.
I let out a heavy sigh. “If it was real, she’ll cancel it if she believes I will go back to her, which I’ve told her I will.
And if she does not cancel it, well, it’s been a good life and a pleasure knowing you.
” I smile dryly to myself— Alana has pushed me to the point where I no longer care, completely, if I live or die.
“I’m going to keep trying to call Billie,” she says. “I’ll give it two more hours and then I’m going to the Police.”
“Sí,” I agree.
“I’ll give you Billie’s number too,” Melissa adds. “In case you manage to get through to her when I don’t. Send Billie a text. See if she answers.”
I hear the ping of a message arriving. Melissa has sent me a contact card. One name: Billie Harper, followed by a phone number with a Chicago area code. This isn’t how I imagined getting Billie’s number, but I’m glad to have it anyway.
“I’ve got it,” I say.
“Good.” A beat. “Call me if you hear anything— from either one of them.” And then she is gone.
I stand for a moment in the middle of the arrivals hall and look at my phone. Around me, the airport continues its indifferent business. Someone is being paged over the intercom.
I look at Billie Harper's phone number.
What am I supposed to say to her? Alana sells weapons to people you don’t want to think about and may have put you in danger by being your friend?
I think about what to say.
I type:
Me
We don’t know each other well but I was trying to warn you at the baby shower. —Rodrigo
I read it back. It is, by any reasonable measure, a bad opening. It is the kind of text that a person receives and immediately shows to a friend with a concerned expression. It is also, unfortunately, the truth, and the truth is the only thing I have at the moment.
I send it.
Outside, the Barcelona afternoon is grey and cool and smells like sea-salt.
I request an Uber. The wait time says four minutes.
I stand at the curb with my duffel over my shoulder and my suitcase at my feet and watch the traffic, waiting for something— a response from Billie, a call from Melissa, a sign from the universe that I have done enough of the right things today to earn a quiet life.
The car arrives. A black sedan. The driver is a compact man in his late forties, a Barcelona FC scarf on the hook behind his seat, the radio playing something quiet. He confirms my name. I settle into the back seat and close the door. The airport recedes behind us.
I look down at my phone. Billie has not responded. I write the beginning of a follow-up:
Me
I know this sounds strange, but please call me. It’s about Alana.
— and hold my thumb over send. Then I look up, because we have pulled briefly to a stop, and I want to see the city, my city, after months away.
The driver's eyes are in the mirror.
He is looking at me.
My phone is still in my hand. The unsent text sits there— I know this sounds strange, but please call me.
It’s about Alana.— and I am aware that my thumb has stopped moving.
We’ve pulled over into an alley— one I don’t recognize, but then again, it’s been a long time since I’ve been home.
We’re out of sight, invisible to other vehicles, cradled by old stones that keep the buildings on either side aloft, in the company of only battered garbage cans.
I’m about to say we’ve taken a wrong turn, but then?—
The driver whips around.
In retrospect, a rope is a strange choice.
I say this not as a critique— I understand there are professional considerations— but simply as an observation made in the two-thirds of a second between seeing it and having it around my throat.
It is a short length of nylon cord, the kind sold in hardware stores, and the man is very fast with it.
He probably chose a rope because it’s quieter than a gun.
I register all of this with the clarity that arrives when the brain understands its owner is in trouble.
“Lo siento, amigo,” the driver says. The rope is around my throat, so I can’t answer.
He is applying genuine pressure, and his tone is apologetic, as if he wants me to understand this isn’t personal.
“Your girlfriend.” He says it with the resigned shrug of a plumber explaining a burst pipe.
He can’t help it. It’s just the job. “La Diabla— whatever she wants, she gets.” I pull at the rope as best I can, but the man has me at the perfect angle.
He has more leverage than me. A horrible choking sound fills the car, and I realize, quickly, that it’s my own voice.
This man is from the Twin Ledger.
So the hit was real. Alana wasn’t just trying to scare me. And, apparently, she hasn’t cancelled it.
The rope is at my windpipe and the man outweighs me by perhaps twenty kilograms. This is the thing I know from construction work and maybe also from painting: when you fight the constraint directly, you lose.
You go with it first. You find a different angle.
My left hand drops. My right hand finds the seatbelt buckle. Click.
The driver takes this as surrender and leans further in, which is what I need— because the extra inch of his movement over the center console changes the geometry.
I twist, hard and fast, dropping my left shoulder and driving my right elbow up and backward in the space between his forearms. It is not elegant.
It is not the kind of thing you would film.
It connects with the side of his jaw. He takes the full brunt of my rage.
I’ve spent six months being afraid and am, at this moment, done with it.
The driver makes a sound. His grip breaks.
The rope falls.
I have an opening, if not a brief one.
I grab my duffel bag from the seat beside me— it has my documents in it, my phone charger, the painting I was working on in the apartment that I folded carefully between two shirts because I couldn't bear to leave it.
Then, I find the door handle. The sedan is still parked in the alley— unnoticed by all— and the door opens against a garbage can with a scrape of metal.
I go through it anyway.
The pavement comes up fast. My shoulder takes the landing. I roll— not well, not like someone who has trained for this, but adequately. My duffel hits the cobblestones beside me. I grab it and get up.
The driver is already moving— I can hear the car door on his side— and I run.
Barcelona, when you are running through it in a state of genuine emergency, is not the city from the photographs.
It is narrower. The streets are uneven. The afternoon light, which looked golden and welcoming from the arrivals hall, is now just light— present, indifferent, illuminating nothing except the next corner and the one after that.
My lungs burn: they are not happy with me.
My duffel swings and slams against my hip with every stride.
I try to disappear into the city. I turn a corner and then another and then I am in a small square— a plaza, café tables, a fountain, pigeons— and I am not being followed.
Not yet. I press myself into the alcove of a doorway and breathe.
I look at my hands. They are steady. I find this annoying, because it means some part of me expected this, no matter how much I hoped the alleged hit was fake. Alana has calibrated me to her world, and I hate it.
My phone is still in my hand. I look at it.
The text to Billie is still there. Still unsent— the follow-up one.
I think about what just happened, and the fact that Alana deployed all of this within the span of a single flight, because she could, because she has the infrastructure for it, because that is the world she moves through and the one she was building Billie Harper into, one yoga class at a time.
Billie. Who has very likely been with Alana tonight. Who hasn’t responded to my text. Who, at last report from Melissa, wasn’t answering calls.
I am very still in the doorway. A pigeon walks past me without concern.
I hit send on the second text:
Me
I know this sounds strange, but please call me. It’s about Alana.
Then I write a third:
Me
I’m in Barcelona. I need you to tell me you're okay. My heart will not rest until I know. Please.
These texts are oddly personal, coming from a man she has met only once. I do not care. I have to know she is safe.
It strikes me that I’ve left my suitcase in the sedan, and all I have left to my name is the simple duffel bag slung over my shoulder.
There’s a strange liberation in the feeling.
Yes, I’m starting over— but without fear.
Alana may have taken out a hit on me— but I will, I must— make all of this right.
Not just for me. But for others like me— others like Billie, whose golden-brown eyes will haunt me if I cannot make sure she’s safe.