Page 59 of Assassin Anonymous

The blood. The screaming.

“Alone,” I tell her.

Valencia appears at the end of the block. She pauses when she clocks us, then resumes her pace. She’s wearing a flannel jacket with a fur collar and hood hiding her face, carrying a grocery bag. I put up a hand and wave. She stands at the bottom of the steps and says, “Hey, Astrid.”

“Hey, Valencia.”

I look back and forth between them. “You two know each other?”

“Of course we do,” Astrid says. “How’d that GSW heal up?”

Valencia’s hand drifts near her left thigh. “Pretty good. Minimal scarring. You did nice work. Now, why are you both here?”

“Can we go inside?” I ask her. “It’s important.”

She walks past us and opens the door, and we follow her up the creaky staircase to her apartment. We get inside and drop our coats. She takes her bag to the kitchen and unloads meats and vegetables into the fridge. “You can free the cat,” she says.

I open the carrier and P. Kitty waddles out, taking small, tentative steps around the living room. Poor guy has lived his entire life between a bodega and my apartment and now he’s been halfway around the world. I pick him up and hold him, try to comfort him, but he squirms out of my grasp and sets about exploring the space.

“Fine,” I tell him.

Valencia steps back into the living room. “I’m guessing we should talk in private. Astrid, help yourself to anything in the fridge. Mark?”

She leads me down a long hallway to the bedroom, and she closes the door behind us. The room is pretty simple: a queen bed with a crushed green velvet comforter, a vintage dresser, a nice standing mirror.

And a bulletin board, on which there are pictures of several men.

There’s not much in common between them. Ages, races, and body type all vary. Each photo has an index card underneath with neat handwritten notes in Spanish, which, like a lot of languages, I can speak pretty well but have a tough time reading. My assassin brain says this setup looks like a series of targets. Before I can ask, Valencia says, “Don’t worry about that. Did you kill Rubén Espinosa?”

I turn to find her laying into me with a razor-blade stare.

Espinosa. It takes me a second. Is that sad, that it does? Probably.

A compound in some sand-swept section of Mexico. Sneaking through at night to deliver a dose of ricin into the cocktail of a rebel seeking to destabilize the housing market. He was recruiting followers to destroy new developments and had orchestrated the killings of a dozen security personnel.

“I guess you saw the video,” I tell her. “Yeah, that was me.”

Her mouth is a flat, furious line. “Figured.”

“Look, I don’t know who he was to you, but he was a bad guy—”

“No,” she snaps, taking a step toward me. “The bankers and government officials inflating the Mexican housing market by thirty percent were the bad guys, Mark. Espinosa may not have been perfect, but he was on the side of the people.”

“And why do you care?”

“Because I was trying to protect him.”

“I thought you were into cartel stuff.”

She squints at me. “You think because I’m Mexican that I was affiliated with the cartels? That’s a hell of a stereotype, Mark. I was Special Operations Group. You know what that is?”

Oh shit. “The covert paramilitary arm of the CIA.”

“Yeah.” She turns away from me and sighs with her whole body. “That housing scheme screwed over a lot of people. Kept them in poverty. All so some asshole could afford a second yacht for when his first one broke down. We got the assignment to stop Espinosa. I was feeding him intel, keeping him a step ahead. Because whatever he did, he was doing for the right reason. I guess I did too good a job because they brought you in.”

“Look, I was just doing my—”

She turns back to me, nearly shaking with anger. “Don’t say you were doing your job. Bunch of brown people get uppity, try to fight back, so they send in the white Terminator to take care of them. Though I guess that’s a tale as old as time.”

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