Fearless

Rodrigo looked thoughtful. His eyes narrowed. “All right, then. Have him come and talk to me tomorrow.”

Consuelo’s dark eyes lit up. “You mean it?”

“I mean it.”

“I’ll call him right now!” She put down the bowl of unfinished batter and left the room, wiping her hands on her apron as she went.

“Is he as nice as she is? Her son, I mean?” Glory asked.

Rodrigo seemed distracted. “He’s a hard worker,” he replied. “But he has some friends I don’t like.”

“I’ll bet I have some friends you wouldn’t like,” she retorted. “It’s the boy who’ll be working here, not his friends.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Outspoken, aren’t you?”

“From time to time,” she confessed. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he replied, finishing his coffee. “I like to know where I stand with people. Honesty is a rare commodity these days.”

She could have written a check on that. She was lied to day by day on the job, by criminals who swore innocence. It was always somebody else’s fault, not theirs. They were framed. The witnesses were blind. The arresting officers were brutal. They weren’t getting a fair trial. And on and on it went.

“I said,” Rodrigo repeated, “will you and Consuelo have enough jars and lids, or should we get more?”

She started. She’d been lost in thought. “Sorry. I really don’t know. Consuelo brings them out. I haven’t really paid attention to how many we’ve got.”

“I’ll ask her on the way out. If Castillo gives you any more lip, tell me,” he said, pausing in the doorway. “We don’t allow harassment here.”

“I will,” she promised.

She watched him go into the other room, heard the murmur of his deep voice as he spoke to Consuelo. He really was a handsome man, she thought. If she hadn’t been carrying so many emotional scars, she might have looked for a way to worm herself into his life. It was odd that a man like that would still be single at his age, which she judged to be mid-thirties. It was none of her business, she reminded herself. She only worked here.

TWO DAYS LATER, A late model SUV pulled up in the driveway. A slender, pretty blonde woman got out and darted up the steps. She was wearing blue jeans and a pink tank top. She looked young and carefree and happy.

Consuelo was busy washing jars and lids before they started on the next batch of peaches when there came a knock at the door. Glory went to answer it, leaning heavily on the cane. She’d had a bad night.

The young woman grinned at her. “Hi,” she said in a friendly tone. “Is Rodrigo around?”

For some inexplicable reason, Glory felt her heart drop. “Yes,” she said. “He’s at the warehouse overseeing the packing. We’re stocking it with fruit preserves and jellies for the Internet business.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

If it had been anyone else, Glory would have gone back to the kitchen. But the woman fit the description Consuelo had mentioned, and she was curious. She watched as the other woman approached the big warehouse out back. Rodrigo spotted her and his whole face became radiant. He held out his arms and she ran into them, to be swung around and kissed heartily on the cheek.

If Glory had needed reminding that Rodrigo was handsome enough to attract almost any woman he wanted, that proved it. She turned and went back into the house. It hurt her that Rodrigo wanted someone else. She didn’t dare question why.

He didn’t bring the visitor into the house. They stood together under a big mesquite tree, very close, and spoke for a long time. Glory wasn’t spying. But she was looking out the window. She couldn’t help it. That those two had shared a close relationship was impossible not to notice.

Finally Rodrigo took the blonde’s hand in his and led her back to the SUV, helping her up into her seat. She smiled and waved as she drove away. Rodrigo stood looking after the truck, his smile gone into eclipse. His hands dug into his jean pockets and the misery he felt was evident even at a distance. He looked like a man who’d lost everything he loved.

Glory went back to her canning, pensively. She wondered what had gone wrong for Rodrigo that he and the blonde woman weren’t together.

She asked Consuelo, against her better judgment.

“Who is that blonde woman who comes to visit Rodrigo?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

Consuelo gave her a stealthy look. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s obvious that she means something to Rodrigo.”

“I noticed,” Glory replied. “She seems very nice.”

“He’s fond of her, you can tell.” She set the timer on the pressure cooker. “But if you look close,” she added gently, “you can tell that it’s only fondness on her part. She likes him, but she isn’t in love.”

“He is,” Glory blurted out.

Consuelo glanced at her curiously. “You’re perceptive.”

Glory smiled. “He seems like a good person.”

“He’s the best. We all like him.”

“I noticed that he seems…”

Before she could finish the sentence, the back door opened and a tall, handsome young man with wavy black hair, dark eyes and an olive complexion came in through the back door without knocking. He was wearing jeans and a pullover shirt, and broadcasting gang colors and tattoos.

Glory didn’t dare voice that summary. She wasn’t supposed to know about gang symbols. But she did. This young man belonged to the infamous Los Serpientes gang of Houston. She wondered what in the world he was doing in the kitchen.

Before she could ask, he grinned and hugged Consuelo, swinging her around in a circle and laughing the whole time.

“Hi, Mom!” he said in greeting.

Consuelo hugged him back and gave him a big kiss on both cheeks. She turned, her arm around his muscular waist. “Glory, this is my son, Marco!” she announced.

4

CONSUELO’S SON? GLORY had to hide her consternation. The young man was good-looking and personable, but he was unmistakably a gang member. She was worried that Rodrigo might not know. He came from Mexico, from a ranch in a rural area that probably didn’t have any gang activity.

“This is Glory.” Consuelo introduced her son to the younger woman.

“Hi,” he said, smiling. “Nice to meet you.”

“Same here,” Glory replied, and tried to smile normally.

“Where’s the boss?” he asked Consuelo.

“Out in the warehouse,” she told him. “You be nice,” she added firmly.

“I’m always nice,” he scoffed. “He’ll love me. You just wait and see!”

He winked at his mother, gave Glory a brief glance and went out the back door whistling.

“Isn’t he handsome?” Consuelo asked. “He looks just as his father did, at that age.”

Glory had been curious about Consuelo’s husband. She never mentioned him.

“Is his father still alive?” she asked delicately.

Consuelo grimaced. “He’s in prison,” she said bluntly, watching for Glory’s reaction. “They said he was smuggling drugs across the border. It was all lies, but we had no money for a good defense attorney, so he went to prison. I write to him, but he’s in California. It’s a long way, and expensive even to take the bus there.” She sighed. “He’s a good man. He said the police had him mixed up with a man he knew, but he got arrested and charged just the same.”

Glory sympathized, but she wasn’t convinced. The state had to have a certain level of evidence before it proceeded to charge anyone. No prosecutor wanted to waste taxpayer money pursuing a case he couldn’t win.

“Marco looks just like him,” Consuelo continued, smiling as she washed more canning jars and lids. “But he trusts people too much. He was arrested last month in Houston and charged with trespassing,” she added curtly. “Stupid cops! He was just lost, driving around a strange neighborhood, and they assumed he was involved in a drive-by shooting, can you imagine?”

Drive-by shootings and gang wars over drug turf were commonplace in Glory’s world, but she didn’t dare mention it. As for the police mistaking a lost motorist for a drive-by shooter, that was unlikely. It was obvious that Consuelo thought her son was the center of the universe. It would do no good to point out that an innocent boy wouldn’t be likely to sport gang paraphernalia and tattoos. It was fairly obvious that Consuelo didn’t have a clue as to her son’s true nature.

“He’s very good-looking,” Glory said, feigning innocence.

“Yes,” Consuelo said, smiling absently. “Just like his father.”

Glory had lost track of the good-looking muscular boys who’d passed through her office on their way to prison. The whole culture of low-income teens seemed to glorify doing time, as if it were a status symbol for young men. She recalled a social crusader who went into the poor sections of town trying to convince gang members to give up their lives of crime and become useful members of society. In other words, give up the thousands of dollars they made running drugs or manufacturing them to work behind a counter in a fast-food store for minimum wage.

Someone who had never seen the agonizing poverty that produced criminals had no idea how difficult it was to break out of the mold. She’d lost track of the number of poor mothers with absent husbands trying to raise multiple children alone on a minimum wage salary, often with health problems as well. The older children had to help take care of the younger ones. Frustrated by their home lives, when they lacked attention there, they found it in a gang. There were so many gangs. Many were international. Each had its own colors, tattoos, hand signals and methods of wearing clothing to express their particular affiliations publicly. Most police departments had at least one officer whose specialty was the gang culture. Glory knew the basics, because she’d had to prosecute gang members for drug peddling, homicides, burglaries and other felonies. She never stopped feeling rage at the conditions that produced the crime.

She glanced at Consuelo. “Is Marco your only child?” she asked suddenly.

Consuelo hesitated, just for a heartbeat, before she turned. “Yes,” she replied. She noted Glory’s curiosity. “I had health problems,” she added quickly.

Glory smiled convincingly. “He’s a very nice young man,” she replied. “He doesn’t seem the least bit spoiled by being an only child.”

Consuelo relaxed and returned the smile. “No. He certainly wasn’t spoiled.” She went back to her canning.

Glory filed the conversation away. She didn’t know of one single family among the immigrants who had less than three children. Many deplored contraception. Perhaps it was true that Consuelo had health problems. But it was curious that she had only one child, and that she seemed so intelligent when she was working at a job that didn’t require much education.

That went double for Rodrigo, the educated bit. Glory couldn’t figure him out. He seemed the least likely person to be working as a manual laborer. It disturbed her that he’d given jobs to men like Castillo and Marco. Neither of the young men looked like farm hands. They were too savvy.

What if, she asked herself, Rodrigo was himself on the wrong side of the law? The question shocked her. He seemed so honest. But, she recalled, she’d prosecuted at least two people whose integrity was attested to by a veritable parade of character witnesses. But the criminals were only adept at putting on an act. A very convincing act, at that. Very often, people could be the exact opposites of their assumed roles.

Rodrigo might even be an illegal himself. Glory’s stepbrother, Jason Pendleton, was sympathetic to all sorts of people. He might have felt sorry for Rodrigo and given him the job out of sympathy.

What if Rodrigo was illegal, and mixed up in drug trafficking? She felt sick inside. What would she do? Her duty would be to turn him in and make sure he was prosecuted. She, of all people, knew the anguish drug dealers could cause parents. She knew the source of the drug money as well—upstanding, greedy businessmen who wanted to make a fortune fast, without putting too much effort into it. They didn’t see the families whose lives were torn apart by the effects of crystal meth or cocaine or methodone. They didn’t have to bury promising children, or watch their loved ones suffer through rehabilitation. They didn’t have to visit those children in prison. The money men didn’t care about all that. They just cared about their profit.

Could Rodrigo be one of those businessmen? Could he be a drug dealer, using the farm as a cover?

Her heart sank. Surely not. He was kind. He was intelligent and caring. He couldn’t be mixed up in that terrible business. But what, her conscience asked, if he was? If she knew, if she had proof, could she live with herself if she didn’t turn him in? Could she do that?

“My, what a long face!” Consuelo chided.

Glory caught herself and laughed self-consciously. “Is that how I look? Sorry. I was thinking about all that fruit waiting for us in the warehouse.”

Consuelo rolled her eyes. “Isn’t it the truth!”

They returned to casual conversation, and Glory put away her suspicions.

THAT EVENING, SHE SAT in the porch swing listening to the musical sound of crickets nearby. It was a sultry night, but not too hot. She closed her eyes and smelled jasmine on the night air. It had been a while since she’d been in a porch swing. She tried not to remember sitting beside her father on long summer nights and asking him about days past, when he was a little boy going to local rodeos. He knew all the famous bull riders and bronc riders, and often had invited them to the house for coffee and cake. Her mother hadn’t liked that. She considered such people beneath her station in life and deliberately absented herself when they came to the house. She felt her father’s sadness even now, years later…

The screen door opened and Rodrigo came outside. He paused to light a thin cigar before he turned toward Glory.

“The mosquitoes will eat you alive,” he cautioned.

She’d already killed two of the pesky things. “If they’re willing to sacrifice their lives to suck my blood, let them.”

He chuckled. He walked toward her and paused at the porch rail, looking out over the flat landscape in the distance. “It’s been a long time since I had time to worry about mosquitoes,” he mused. “Do you mind?” he indicated the empty place beside her.

She shook her head and he sat down, jostling the swing for a few seconds before he kicked it back into a smooth rhythm.

“Have you always worked on the land?” she asked him conversationally.

“In a sense,” he replied. He blew out a puff of smoke. “My father had a ranch, when I was a boy. I grew up with cowboys.”

She smiled. “So did I. My father took me to the rodeos and introduced me to the stars.” She grimaced. “My mother hated such people. She gave my father a bad time when he invited them to come and have coffee. But he did all the cooking, so she couldn’t complain that he was making work for her.”

He glanced at her. “What did your mother do?”

“Nothing,” she said coldly. “She wanted to be a rich man’s wife. She thought my father was going to stay in rodeo and bring home all that nice prize money, but he hurt his back and quit. She was furious when he bought a little farm with his savings.”

She didn’t mention that it was this house where they lived, or that the land which now produced vegetables and fruits had produced only vegetables for her father.

“Were her people well-to-do?”

“I have no idea who her people were,” she admitted. “I used to wonder. But it doesn’t make any difference now.”

He frowned. “Family is the most important thing in the world. Especially children.”

“You don’t have any,” she said without thinking.

His face set into hard lines and he didn’t look at her. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t want them,” he said harshly.

“I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I don’t know why I said that.”

He smoked his cigar in a tense silence. “I was on the verge of marrying,” he said after a minute. “She had a little girl. They were my life. I lost them to another man. He was the child’s biological father.”

She grimaced. His attitude began to make sense. “I’ll bet the little girl misses you,” she said.

“I miss her, as well.”

“Sometimes,” she began cautiously, “I think there’s a pattern to life. People come into your life when you need them to, my father used to say. He was sure that life was hard-wired, that everything happened as it was planned to happen. He said—” she hesitated, remembering her father’s soft voice, at his trial “—that we have to accept things that we can’t change, and that the harder we fight fate, the more painful it becomes.”

He turned toward her, leaning back against the swing chain with his long legs crossed. “Is he still alive—your father?”

“No.”

“Any sisters, brothers?”

“No,” she replied sadly. “Just me.”

“What about your mother?”

Her teeth clenched. “She’s gone, too.”

“You didn’t mourn her, I think.”

“You’re right. All I ever had from her was hatred. She blamed me for trapping her into a life of poverty on a little farm with a man who could hardly spell his own name.”

“She considered that she married down, I gather.”

“Yes. She never let my father forget how he’d ruined her life.”

“Which of them died first?”

“He did,” she said, not wanting to remember it. “She remarried very soon after the funeral. Her second husband had money. She finally had everything she wanted.”

“You would have benefited, too, surely.”

She drew in a slow breath and shifted her weight. “The judge considered that she was dangerous to me, so, with the best of intentions, she put me into foster care. I went to a family that had five other foster kids.”

“I know a little about foster homes,” he said, recalling some horror stories he’d heard from comrades who’d been in state custody, however briefly. Cord Romero and his wife, Maggie, came immediately to mind.

“I think life with my mother might have been easier, even if it had been more dangerous,” she murmured.

“Were you there a long time?”

“Not too long.” She didn’t dare say any more. He might have heard the Pendletons talk about their stepsister. “What was your childhood like?”

“Euphoric,” he said honestly. “We traveled a lot. My father was, ah, in the military,” he invented quickly.

“I had a friend whose father was, too. They traveled all over the world. She said it was an experience.”

“Yes. One learns a great deal about other cultures, other ways of life. Many problems in politics arise because of cultural misunderstanding.”

She laughed. “Yes, I know. We had a man in an office I worked for who was Middle Eastern. He liked to stand very close to people when he was talking to them. Another guy in the office was a personal space maniac. He backed right out a window one day trying to avoid letting his colleague get close to him. Fortunately it was on the first floor,” she added, laughing.

He smiled. “I have seen similar things. What a mixture of people we are in this country,” he murmured. “So many traditions, so many languages, so many separate belief systems.”

“Things were different when I was little,” she recalled.

“Yes. For me, too. Immersed in our own personal cultures, it is hard to see or understand opposing points of view, is it not?”

“It is,” she agreed.

He rocked the swing back into motion. “You and Consuelo are wearing yourselves thin on this latest picking of fruit,” he pointed out. “If you need help, say so. I can hire more people to help you. I’ve already asked Jason for permission.”

“Oh, we’re doing okay,” she said with a smile. “I like Consuelo. She’s a very interesting person.”

“She is,” he said.

His tone was personable, but there was something puzzling in the way he said it. She wondered for an instant if he, too, had suspicions about his cook.

“What do you think of Marco?” he asked suddenly.

She had to be very careful in answering that question. “He’s very nice-looking,” she said carelessly. “Consuelo dotes on him.”

“Yes.” He rocked the swing again.

“She said his father was in jail.”

He made an odd sound. “Yes. Serving a life sentence.”

“For drug smuggling?” she blurted out incredulously, because she knew how difficult it was to send a smuggler away for life without a lot of additional felony charges.

His head turned toward her. He was very quiet. “Is that what she told you?”

She cleared her throat, hoping she hadn’t given herself away. “Yes. She said he was mistaken for another man.”

“Ah.” He puffed on the cigarette.

“Ah?” she parroted, questioning.

“He was piloting a go-fast boat with about two hundred kilos of cocaine,” he said easily. “He was so confident that he’d paid off the right people that he didn’t bother to conceal the product. The Coast Guard picked him up heading for Houston.”

“In a boat?”

He chuckled. “They have airplanes and helicopters, both with machine guns. They laid down a trail of tracers on both sides of his conveyance and told him to stop or learn to swim very fast. He gave up.”

“Goodness! I never knew the Coast Guard worked smuggling cases,” she added with pretended ignorance.

“Well, they do.”

“But the product still gets through,” she said sadly.

“Supply and demand drive the market. As long as there is a demand, there will certainly be a supply.”

“I suppose so,” she said, her voice very quiet.

He rocked the swing into motion again. It was very pleasant out here with her, he thought. But he would rather have been with Sarina and Bernadette. He was lonely. He’d never thought of himself as a family man, but three years of looking out for two other people had changed his mind. He’d even gone so far as to think about having a child of his own. Pipe dreams. All dead now.

“Is this what you planned to do with your life?” she asked suddenly. “Managing a truck farm, I mean?”

He laughed softly. “At one time, I wanted very much to be a commercial airline pilot. I have a pilot’s license, although I rarely make use of it. Flying is expensive,” he added quickly, in case she had some idea of how much private planes cost.

She hesitated about probing further. He was a very private person, and she sensed some irritation in his tone that she’d asked about his goals.

She stared off into the distance. “I wanted to be a ballerina when I was young,” she said quietly. “I took lessons and everything.”

He winced. “That must have been a painful loss.”

“Yes. I’ll never get rid of the limp unless they can find a way to remake muscle and bone.” She laughed shortly. “I enjoy watching ballet productions on educational television,” she added. “And I’d probably have embarrassed myself with any serious dancing. I’m just clumsy. The first recital I was in called for us to hold hands and dance past the orchestra pit. I fell in, right onto a very big fellow playing a big tuba. The audience thought it was all part of the routine.” She grimaced. “My mother got up and walked out of the auditorium,” she recalled. “She never went to another recital. She thought I did it deliberately to embarrass her.”

“A truly paranoid personality,” he commented.

“Yes, she was,” she said quickly. “How did you know?”

“I knew a man who was the same. He thought people were following him all the time. He was certain the CIA had bugged his telephone. He wore a second set of clothing under his suits, so that he could duck into a rest room and change to throw his pursuers off the track.”

“My goodness!” she exclaimed. “Did they lock him up?”

“They couldn’t.” He chuckled. “He headed a very dangerous federal agency at the time.”

She was really curious now. “How did you find out about it?”

He hesitated, playing for time. He was getting careless. He was supposed to be an uneducated farm laborer. “A cousin of mine played semipro soccer with a cousin of his,” he replied finally.