“What did she say?” Jackson looked hungry for more information.

  Luckily the waitress showed up to take their drink order. It gave Maya time to think because she would have to lie to avoid sounding like a nutcase.

  She was ignoring the fact Jackson was good looking. She saw so many faces of men day after but never really looked at them, even when she was staring into their eyes. They were apparitions, ice sculptures she had to melt with her sex. Looking at Jackson, talking to him fully clothed, with just a cup of coffee felt good. She appreciated his sensitivity towards Tyson and the victim. His large hands, like his ass in jeans, were difficult to ignore. On one he wore an A & M graduation ring, the bulky kind with an obnoxious colored stone in the center. Either he was the first to graduate in his family or came from a long line of graduates from that school. No wedding ring on the other, but she wasn’t naïve enough to think that meant anything. Still. Her mind wandered off thinking what those hands might feel like on her hips as they guided her body to a rhythm that would bring her to climax.

  “She didn’t say anything.”

  “You have a gun?”

  “Fuck no! You are more likely to get killed by your own fucking gun.” She gave him a sour expression.

  He tapped his ring against his mug while he looked off in thought. “Can you take time off until this blows over?”

  “Can you take time off? I have bills to pay and a mouth to feed. Don’t you have a family to provide for?”

  Jackson’s mouth tightened. “Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. It’s just me, by the way. I take care of my mother. She is a… Would you mind coming to the station and describing this woman?”

  Maya frowned at his quick change of the subject.

  “Also, I’d like to hang around the club. Not to look at you though. Not in that…way. I’ll bring a book.” He blushed.

  Maya had to laugh. “A book? To a strip club? You trying rat yourself out? You need to talk to management. Let them clear some space for you. Sometimes people don’t appreciate cops around. Bad for business, you know?”

  “Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll do that.”

  She didn’t want to leave. “Hey, I got to look out for my sister. It’s just us now.” There was a silence between them. Maya felt like he got what he wanted and was probably eager to get on with work elsewhere. “I’ll get the coffee. And I guess I’ll see you around.” She stood to leave, but he remained seated.

  “Wait, do you have to go? I mean we haven’t finished the coffee. Are you hungry? I mean, if you want. If you have time.”

  He had a perfect set of teeth that would have looked great with her G-string between them. His desire to want to talk was a surprise. This was unrelated to her jaguar musk. Her temperature didn’t feel elevated, even with the dirty thoughts playing like ‘70s porno in the back of her mind; she couldn’t sense the pheromone secretions making her skin slick, which it would have in a sweatshirt.

  She came down quickly, knowing what was coming. The next question would most likely be how such a nice girl got dancing. They all wanted to know that down to the smallest detail. Was she abandoned? Daddy issues? Addictions?

  “I don’t mean to pry, but you said you take care of your sister. Can I ask what happened to your parents?”

  She had never spoken to anyone about that. Ever. Maybe she needed to. Before she would tell him about the moment that changed her life, they both ordered omelettes with home fries.

  —

  Magdalena had a track meet in New Braunfels after school. It wasn’t far, but both their parents couldn’t leave work in time to make the warm-up. Maya agreed to go. As always, Magdalena was the star.

  The coach pulled Maya aside to inform her they should really start thinking about colleges, she was sure Magdalena was good enough for a scholarship, but there were all the other expenses they should plan for. That girl was special. Maya knew this. She also knew at the age of eighteen she would endure pain like she had never experienced before. It was an agony her grandmother said was like giving birth, but without medication, to five babies in a row. Maya didn’t know about birth yet, but the pain of that first transformation was indeed excruciating. It brought both her and her mother to tears as it happened the first time. The plan was to tell Magdalena as a family when she turned seventeen. She would have a year to get used to the idea that she was more than a woman. They would allow her to watch Maya transform.

  As they drove back, just after 8PM, both of their phones began to ring. It was their neighbor followed by another number they didn’t recognize. They were told to go to St. Mary’s hospital where the police were waiting. Their father was shot four times and their mother twice. She was alive and they could speak to her, however, they had to hurry because she was not going to make it.

  Her mother lay in the hospital bed attached to noisy, blinking machines. She looked like an apparition just passing through this realm. Her eyes filled with tears upon seeing her daughters. “Mijas, come here. Tell me all about the competition.”

  “Mama, we don’t have time.” Maya was angry she wanted to talk about sports and not something important. Last wishes, anything.

  “Nonsense, tell me.” She tried to say cheerfully to conceal the strain beneath.

  Magdalena sat next to her mother, recounting every detail of the competition. She ended with pulling out the winning medal for her mother to touch.

  “You both make me so proud. I want you to always stay close to each other.” She turned to Maya with a stern expression and a choked voice from withholding tears. “Keep her safe. Survive. Do whatever you need to do to survive. God will understand and so will I. I love you both. Find others. I’m very tired now. Let me rest, then we will speak more.” She never opened her eyes again.

  Magdalena was too distraught and young to understand her mother. Maya understood every word. When DPS arrived, they separated them, questioned them like they were criminals. They had distant family in Mexico, but the girls were citizens. There would be a hearing and if Maya wanted custody, she had to prove she could provide. She had one month. Maya didn’t hesitate to do what she needed to do…the memory was broken by Jackson’s voice.

  “Did they ever find out who did it?”

  “No. Home invasion gone wrong. My mother’s jewellery was gone, but none of it was worth anything significant. My father’s gun was used on him, and was left next to his body as well as the car keys. They didn’t bother with anything else in the house. I can’t even remember the last time there was a breakin in our neighborhood. It felt off. Lazy detective work. No offense. The guy assigned to the case stopped returning my calls.”

  “No offense taken. This job burns you out after a while. I’m sorry you went through that so young. You are doing great by your sister. Be proud.”

  Maya tried not to blush. No one ever said she was doing a great job. There was no one to tell her well done or offer encouragement when she lacked the will to get out of bed. The few friends she had before had either stopped coming around or moved away. There was no time for friends except the ones she made at the club.

  “And Tyson? What is his story? He didn’t seem to like me at all. I thought he was going to blind me with hair pins.”

  “I think you would feel the same if you had a degree in chemistry, then one fine day were wrongly charged with a crime for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and kind of matching the description of the real criminal. Charges were eventually dropped, but he still has to put that down on every job application. He is smart as hell with the devil’s hands when it comes to hair and make-up. He makes his own stuff. Smart and good looks.”

  “He’s not the only one.” His tone was soft, a little trembling, like an adolescent first kiss.

  Maya looked away to get the attention of the waitress. As much as she wanted this to be more than panty talk, she would pretend like she didn’t hear what he just said.

  Jackson lifted his finger to tap his ring against the mug. He stopped short and bit his lip. Instead his hand reached halfway to touching Maya’s slender, but muscular forearm. “Oh, no. Sorry. That wasn’t appropriate. It’s just, this has been a great date. Not date.” He squeezed his eyes and shook his head. “Conversation. And not that great because you told me something really personal and sad. But you’re great. Great company.” He said this to his mug.

  She loved the awkward, shy guy thing. He liked to read, and his car was clean. It probably smelled like his cologne and carpet deodorizer. This was her cue to leave before she said or did a stupid thing, like give him her phone number. “Thanks for the food. I better get back. It’s been nice.”

  He was now staring at her with a smile on his face, looking at the way her lips pulled away from her mug, it was the kind of smile that suggested they didn’t need to know more about each other because the chemistry was as strong as the black coffee they drank. “Let me walk with you.”

  Maya spent the rest of her shift avoiding mental images of Jackson. The thought of him made her crazy wet; no bueno, it would show through the white silky triangle she wore as she danced.

  Chapter 5

  Bad shit happens to good people all the time. You can’t help natural disasters, but people were the worst kind of disaster, hands down. Jackson’s job was proof of that. The daily news was a video diary of that. He found the story Maya told him about her parents as very odd. As much as he couldn’t stop thinking about her, he couldn’t stop trying to fit the pieces of her parents’ deaths together either, add the fact someone had followed her. Sure, it had been years since the break in, but sometimes reality was stranger than fiction.

  No one gave him any pushback when he requested the files on a closed case. Maya was right. The neighborhood had no history of breakins or car thefts. Families and retired folks living quietly near a strip mall: Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, and hipster coffee shops. Not far was an elite Catholic high school. Then there was the timing. It was early for a breakin. The incident occurred at around seven at night. The guys walked right in because the door was unlocked. You didn’t keep your doors unlocked if it’s a dangerous place. Most of the time these things happened in the middle of the night. The only people in the house were the parents. They’d left both cars in the driveway. The neighbors had nothing valuable to add. The only one to say anything was an elderly lady across the street. She said a fancy car she had never seen before passed by very slowly the week before. There was a strange woman inside, had the eyes of a bruja. The word unreliable was scrawled next to the woman’s name. He would go speak to her if she was still there.

  What tipped him over was a small, pink sticky note with the word deceased and a case number next to the detective assigned to the breakin. After requesting the case file on the unsolved murder of the detective, Jackson knew something was wrong. The detective was found in a dumpster behind an adult peep show center with all valuables still found on his person. He was missing his eyes, tongue, and ears. The rest devoured by rats.

  The peep show had lasted an hour, which put him walking to his car about midnight. No cameras in the customer parking lot or the side of the building where the dumpsters were located. The area surrounding the warehouse-sized building was either highway or scrubland. Nobody heard a thing. He was only found when the trash was collected a week later. His widow didn’t want the details released, for obvious reasons, and the dumpster was full of liquefied garbage, no evidence for the techs. They could only determine he was killed and dumped at the same spot.

  Jackson called in a favor to have two guys keep a tail on the home of Maya and Magdalena Ramos. Maybe they would get lucky and this woman with white hair would show up again.

  He loaded a steel travel mug from the bottomless pot at the station on his way out. Two Splendas, no milk. He nodded to the patrolmen doing him a favor—one he would repay with an open bar tab—and climbed into his jeep. The city was its usual hurried normal of backed-up freeways from maintenance that never seemed to end. The city groaned with jackhammers and cement trucks as it expanded. Soon it would be Austin’s twin. Nothing but big name restaurants, shops, and the giant ostrich skin cowboy boots at North Star Mall that greeted him every time he crossed the city.

  Sometime soon he would take that vacation his mother and sister kept bugging him to take. When the temporary light turned red, he thought of Maya, their bare feet in sand, warm waves surrounding their ankles and both of her hands tucked in his back pockets. An extended honk broke his fantasy. He regained his focus to a construction worker giving him a dirty look. His foot pressed hard on the gas.

  Get a grip, Jackson. This ain’t no Harlequin book. You’re in the middle of a real horror, he told himself. When he exited the freeway, to a quieter road, he pulled up the file and address on his dashboard computer. His first stroke of luck happened when he discovered the unreliable neighbor still lived across the street.

  The woman sat on her front porch in a rusted two-seater glider with a ball of fluff on her lap. She wore a thin cotton dress that could have been a nightgown, beneath a floral apron. Her hair was a wild, white mess, and matching wiry hairs poked from above a withered top lip. He could see why she might be dismissed as unreliable. She looked ancient. And grumpy. Her sight didn’t seem to be affected by age because she hawk-eyed him from halfway down the block and then onto her property.

  “Where are you coming from? You’re not from here,” she barked as he approached the stairs to her porch.

  “Are you Consuelo? I wanted to ask you a few questions. It’s about something that happened very long ago, so don’t worry if you don’t remember.”

  “The murder across the street?” Her eyes widened, flaring with memory.

  Jackson offered a single nod.

  “I remember and see everything here. I was born here, you know. Yes. I am on my porch most of the day. But when it happened, I was inside. My stories were on. I can’t miss my telenovelas.”

  He moved to sit next to her. “I’m listening.”

  “A peculiar woman was around here. I didn’t like her at all. Her eyes could hack you like a machete. Hair just as white as mine, but a face far too young for it. This stranger drove very slow past these houses twice. Who does that except the delivery guy? No, something was wrong.”

  “Anything else?”

  Her lips smacked gently as she sucked at her teeth before she shrugged. Wrinkled fingers with bulging blue and purple veins stroked her little dog that stuck its tongue out with affection.

  “Thank you. I appreciate you speaking to me.” When he stood to leave, the little Pomeranian jumped from his owner’s lap to happily hump away on Jackson’s ankle. He didn’t want to be rude and kick the puffy thing away.

  “Cheech. Come here! Bad boy. See, he likes you. You seemed okay when I first had a look at you.”

  Jackson didn’t need to hear anymore. There were far too many coincidences. The only questions were, why did a strange woman have such a vested interest in the sisters and was it the same woman both times? They were stalked and their parents murdered when the killer knew the girls wouldn’t be home. That was the only explanation he had for any of it. Why them? The other victims were the kind of women that people seldom acknowledge are missing, and with little family, and two being illegal. It only made the headlines because the bodies were piling up. That and the papers were selling out by sensationalizing the grisly murders. There hadn’t been an infamous serial killer in a very long time.

  He said goodbye to Consuelo, leaving his card with her. She gave him two Mexican wedding cookies to eat on the road for being a kind man, unlike the one years ago.

  His heart ached for Maya and her sister living such an idyllic family life one day and having to be completely uprooted the next by a senseless tragedy that was, in reality, not senseless.

  Before he pulled away, bite of cookie between his teeth, he picked up his phone. He had a message from his mother inviting him for dinner. It was almost as if she had ESP. He would accept the invitation because suddenly he wanted to see her and tell her he loved her.

  —

  Maya only worked the worst day of the week, Monday, because Christmas was in two months, and no way in hell she wanted to work on Halloween night. The club held a party every year that brought out the worst in the customers, as if the night was a free for all for possession. The customers were always drunker, louder, and more aggressive. Even worse, they were cheap as fuck, watching the costumes on stage like it was ComicCon instead of a place of trade. It was going to be a full moon, too. She would rather get drunk alone watching horror films, followed by a run in Espada Park in her Jaguar skin.

  Jackson sat at the back of the club to get a good view of the entrance. The poor guy’s discomfort was obvious with one leg bobbing up and down quickly in place. Both hands resting on his knees. Head up but his gaze on the door. She couldn’t help going back to peek at what he was doing before her shift. Maya never thought about what she would wear to work because it really didn’t matter if her G-sting was made of toilet paper or banana skins, as long as the customers got a get off shot for later. Tonight, she inspected every single combo, hating everything. Why did she even care? Knowing he was there made Maya nervous, self-conscious. And excited.

  Between lining her lips and blending lipsticks in front of the mirror, her mind wandered into a daze, wondering what he would think after seeing her work for hours in nothing but skin—never mind the other skin she had in this life, the skin that defied logic and science but still existed. She wished she could sit at a table next to him somewhere else with a wine glass in hand, talking the late afternoon and evening away.

  Her mouth tightened at the thought: you fuck the dancer, a nice college graduate with a respectable job don’t date the dancer.

  “Maya!”

  She looked to see Tyson handing her bottles of hairspray and deodorant. “Woman, you need to stop fantasizing about that detective and do something about it. Ask him out!”

 

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