Taming Cross

“You think I can help you find this girl.”

I nod. “The girl I’m looking for is named Missy King. I’ve heard she’s at a church.”

My neck feels tight, and my upper arm is aching. I grit my teeth and ignore it, focusing on Carlos’s face. He seems to be considering what I’ve told him, with his palms pressed flat on the table.

“You know…I have heard that a little bird is staying with the Sisters at St. Catherine’s Clinic in Guadalupe Victoria.”

My heart leaps. Guadalupe Victoria is where Priscilla and Jim Gunn took Lizzy and I. “You’ve heard of her? You’re pretty confident she’s there?”

He shrugs. “Most people have heard of this Missy. The Cientos Cartel is nothing to play with.”

I nod, trying to match my expression to his reverent one, but I’m too worked up. I tap my foot under the table. “Can you tell me anything about the convent?”

Carlos glances behind me, and then he slowly smiles. “Yes. You are never going to see it.” I grunt as I feel the air shift behind me, and something glass breaks over my head.

Sometimes I think about writing a book.

How to Wreck Your Life in Two Years or Less, by Meredith Kinsey.

As Wednesday afternoon shines hot and sunny down on the convent, and I do my paperwork for the last time, I can’t help but think about what happened to me. What I did to myself, and what other people did to me.

How much of the blame is mine, I wonder. If I die tomorrow, will this fate be one I chose, or was it chosen for me? I remember the quandary from high school Sunday school class. Predetermination. If God knew our lives before he made them, how can a good and loving God choose only some people to be his chosen ones, the ones who go to Heaven when they die? And if he didn’t choose, how is he all knowing? All deciding?

It just can’t be.

I only know one thing for sure: I wasn’t chosen. There’s no way I am. So if I die, I guess I’m on my way to Hell. It doesn’t matter how many Hail Marys I said here.

The pain of the blow shoots me up out of my seat. I round on the guy behind me as I reach into my pocket for the Taser. Before I can pull it out, the goon socks me in the jaw, and I see stars. I feel hands on my shoulders, the hardness of the bench under my ass. Something glints in the low light, and Carlos’s face is stretched into a big grin.

“Priscilla told me to expect you.”

I blink my eyes a few times, still clutching the Taser, and I realize the glint I saw was Carlos’s gun. He’s holding it out toward me, his hand resting on the table as he points the nose at my chest.

“You can come with me to meet Jesus, or I can kill you now.”

I cough a little, tasting blood. “You’d really kill me in the middle of a club?”

“It’s my cousin’s club.” He shrugs. “Sometimes people die here.”

My heart speeds up like I’ve been hit with an epi pen and I glance around behind me for the other guy. He’s gone.

I can’t see where, but I bet he’ll be back. For now, it’s just me and Carlos and his gun. I’m probably going to die here, I realize. Then an image of my last few months flits through my mind, and I vow that I won’t. I didn’t suffer all that shit to die in a sleazy Mexican strip joint.

Carlos is giving me his poker face, still pointing his gun my way, when I lunge forward and smash my Taser into his throat. As I move, I twist out of the line of fire, but his fingers jolt along with the rest of him; he never even pulls the trigger. He slumps face-first over the table, his gelled head landing in an ash tray.

I grab his gun, then glance around. No one seems to have noticed. The girls are still dancing. Men are still smoking, laughing, and cat-calling.

Carlos twitches once more.

Fuck.

I inhale, exhale. Focus on the feeling of the floor below my feet and try to ground myself, the way Akemi taught me during that long, long week when I first learned to meditate. Then I stick Carlos’s gun and its huge magazine into my pants and glance around again. No one watching me. Carlos is still twitching a little, moaning. He looks like he drank too much, not like I just shocked the shit out of him.

I need to get out of here, fast. There’s an exit over to my left, beside a bathroom sign. I could run right now, but first…I kneel under the table, heart pounding in my ears, and reach inside Carlos’s pockets until I feel something hard and square. My hand is shaking as I work it out, then drop the phone in my pocket beside mine.

“Thanks,” I mutter.

I get up and walk quickly to the exit door. When I feel a rush of dry air on my face, I lunge into a run and don’t stop until I mount the bike—left leg first, the way I do it fastest. For once, it actually works.

The entire time I’m trying to get my left arm in that damn band, I’m sweating bullets. I glance up once more before I gas the bike, going almost sixty before I even leave the lot. I don’t slow down until I’m near Ejido Choropo, a rural area south of Mexicali. I pull over in the shelter of a small, scrubby tree and ask Carlos’s map app how to get to Guadalupe Victoria.

I wonder if Missy King is even there.

In less than two hours, I’ll finally know.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sean was ambitious, but he was raised by a drug addict father and he didn’t have any money when he got to Athens Technical College. I think he planned to try school, but it wasn’t long before he realized he could exercise his entrepreneurial spirit dealing pot.

Sean and I started dating around the time I graduated, and at first I thought what he did for a living was awful. It wasn’t especially dangerous—he was selling to college kids, after all—but when I stayed at his place at night I used to have nightmares about the police kicking his door in and shooting us as we startled awake.

After a few months, I got used to it. I even started to think of myself as some kind of outlaw by association. He enjoyed the way I saw him: some renegade/freedom-fighter mash-up. When Sean insisted on paying for my apartment in Atlanta while I tried to get my freelance writing career going, I let him. The job market sucked, and my aunt and uncle were already helping Landon. By the time Sean needed to move in because there was too much heat on his place, I had started to get weary of his lifestyle. But Sean was paranoid, and he needed me. That’s what I told myself.

A few weeks later, Sean decided he wanted to move to Vegas and deal drugs there. I thought of Vegas as a sleazy, gross kind of place, but I knew I would go with him if he asked. I thought I might get some good freelance stories out of it. Maybe I could do something on some of the girls. Something for a national publication. Or if worse came to worse, one of the Atlanta-based magazines that I had worked with.