Gabriella #2
“What are we checking out?” she asked, feeling bold in her questions now that they were alone. The question came easier without the weight of watching eyes and cocked ears.
Mateo's voice spoke over the crunching of vines and leaves beneath the tires, rain beginning to patter softly on the hood in the light, in the exploratory way of a sky deciding whether it was committed to the idea.
“Just confirming the safe house is still clear to use and that there isn't anyone we want to avoid stationed.”
“You mean like the US military?”
He glanced over to her and paused for a moment before he said, “Yeah. Like the US military.”
She sat with that for a moment, watching the green walls of the jungle slide past the rain-speckled windscreen. She hadn’t thought they could enter countries like this without repercussions. The jungle ended abruptly.
One moment they were swallowed by green walls—the dense, pressing cathedral of the rainforest with its multi-story canopy and its permanent twilight and its smell of rot and life inextricably bound together—and the next they stood at the edge of civilization.
A dirt road stretched before them, rutted and overgrown but recognizable as the work of human hands rather than natural accident.
Buildings clustered in the distance—small, ramshackle structures of painted concrete and corrugated iron that marked the outskirts of a nameless Panamanian town, their colors faded by sun and rain to the washed-out palette of places that had never had enough of anything.
Gabriella's heart swelled at the sight with a force that surprised her.
She braced her hands on her knees, leaning forward, sucking in air that didn't taste like rot and vegetation—air that tasted of dust and diesel and the faint ghost of cooking fires, which was not clean exactly but was different, was human, was evidence of a world that continued to exist beyond the green walls that had held her for days.
“We made it,” she breathed, the relief in the words so raw it embarrassed her.
“Indeed, we did,” Mateo said, and when she glanced at him, she caught something in his profile—a fractional softening, quickly contained—that told her the sight of it meant something to him too.
They approached the town with caution, with an understanding that reaching a destination and being safe at a destination were not the same thing.
Mateo kept one hand near the gun tucked into his waistband, his eyes moving in a continuous, methodical sweep—rooftops, windows, doorways, the dark spaces between buildings where threats arranged themselves and waited.
The town accepted their arrival without ceremony, the streets carrying on their quiet mid-morning business around the slow roll of the vehicle.
A small market operated at the edge of town where the last of the buildings gave way to open ground, its stalls clustered together in a loose, improvisational arrangement that had long since calcified into permanence.
The stench hit her through the open window before they stopped—overripe fruit sweating in the heat, its sweetness tipped past pleasant into something fermented and cloying; dried meat hanging from hooks above a stall, dark and desiccated, buzzing with the attentions of fat black flies; unwashed bodies and sweat layered thick as grease in the press of the midday crowd.
The staccato percussion of haggling voices cut through a wall of sound built from buzzing insects and the tinny, distorted music bleeding from cheap radios balanced on crates and window ledges.
Dust ground beneath her boots as they moved through it, fine and pale and persistent, working its way into every crease and seam.
The press of hostile stares from vendors and locals crowded tight around makeshift stalls followed her movement through the market like a physical pressure, a current running against her.
Gaudy plastic goods gleamed in the harsh, flat afternoon light—children's toys in colors so bright they seemed aggressive, plastic kitchen implements, knock-off sunglasses laid out on velvet cloths—the flotsam of manufactured goods washed up against the base of genuine need.
The stench of rot and desperation. This is where people end up when the world forgets about them. And why men join operations like Mateo’s.
Mateo moved through it efficiently, the tourist performance stripped away now, replaced by something more clipped and purposeful.
He bought supplies—water in plastic bottles fogged with heat, protein bars, and ammunition from a seller three stalls back who accepted the transaction with the blank, professional neutrality of a man who had never once asked a question that could get him killed.
Gabriella stood beside Mateo, hyperaware of the weight of attention that settled on them both like a second layer of the afternoon heat—too many eyes, too much interest, the particular level of scrutiny that this kind of place reserved for outsiders who arrived with money and urgency.
Mateo moved with confidence. But confidence didn't equal competence.
He'd gotten them this far, and she was grateful—genuinely, viscerally grateful in the way you were grateful for things that stood between you and the specific darkness that had been reaching for you—but Panama wasn't safety.
Panama was just a different kind of maze.
They were nearing their vehicle when the voice arrived.
Deep. Male. Dripping with a brand of arrogance that knew he was the largest, most dangerous presence in every room he'd ever entered and had simply stopped pretending otherwise.
“Well, well.”
A man emerged from the jungle edge behind them as if the vegetation had simply decided to produce him—stepping out of the green wall with the unhurried ease of someone for whom dramatic entrances were a personal minimum standard.
Built didn't begin to describe him. He stood at least six-three, his shoulders broad enough to block out the sun behind him, casting a shadow that arrived before he did.
Muscles corded his arms, his chest, his neck—not the decorative muscle of vanity but the dense, functional kind that came from putting a body through years of genuine violence and surviving it.
His hair was dark blond, close-cropped, and his eyes—when they found hers—were the flat, pale blue of a winter sky that had decided against warmth.
He moved with a fighter's grace, each step deliberate and controlled, his weight distributed with the unconscious precision of a body used as a weapon.
Gabriella could tell all of this because the man reminded her so much of Mateo. And as she learned recently, she had been a terrible judge of character. This man was dangerous. She knew that now.
Mateo drew his pistol and aimed.
“Easy there, friend.” The stranger raised his palms, showing empty hands the size of dinner plates, a smile curving his mouth—entirely unbothered by the threat of a gun pointed at him. “I am here to talk.”
“Then talk,” Mateo said.
The man's eyes flicked to Gabriella. The assessment was instantaneous and complete—a single sweeping glance that took her apart and catalogued every component, that made her skin pull tight across her shoulders in visceral discomfort.
Not sexual. Clinical. A surgeon examining how to amputate a limb.
He's already decided what I am, she thought. He's deciding what to do about it.
“My name's Gil,” he said, returning his attention to Mateo with an affable calm. “I figured we should have a conversation before things get messy.”
The implication of that word raised the hairs on her arm as Mateo responded. “Messy?”
Gil nodded. “Oh, yes. Quite.”
“A conversation about what?” Mateo asked, clearly on edge.
“About the girl.” Gil jerked his chin towards Gabriella—a gesture so dismissive it almost impressed her with its economy. “She's got half the US military looking for her and now I have the Mafia breathing down my neck. Black ops teams, CIA, the works. They want her back.”
Gabriella's stomach dropped through the ground as she whispered, “What?”
The word came out thin and small, swallowed by the market noise around them, and she hated it—hated the smallness of her own voice in the face of what he'd said.
US Military? Mafia? The phrases landed in her mind like stones into still water, sending rings outward through everything she thought she understood about her situation.
Why? The question sat in her chest like a splinter, too small to see, too sharp to ignore.
I am a marine biologist, she thought, the absurdity of it acute and almost physical.
I study sea turtles, attend departmental meetings, fight with funding committees about grant allocations, and I have some strong opinions about sustainable fishing practices …
why do either of them even know my name?
“Someone important wants you alive,” Gil continued.
“I don't know why, and I don't particularly care.
All I know is an Italian Mafia offered to give up some juicy information to the US in exchange for their help and they jumped on it.
But they're tearing through Central America in a mad panic trying to find you, and they're not being subtle about it.”
Italian Mafia? Her heart sped faster as her thoughts drifted to her last conversation with her cousins before she left.
Both of them complained about their deals gone wrong.
The marriage offers and their pride being stung at how other families were looking down at them.
There’s no freaking way that’s related to her cousins.
But something about that bothered her, and in the back of her mind, she was almost afraid to know why.
Before she could follow up, Mateo’s voice broke between them. “What’s your aim?” His jaw clenched, a muscle leaping beneath the dark stubble of his cheek. “Why tell us this?”