Page 15 of Empire of Carnage
“All of the secrets Jamila refused to take to the grave with her,” he answered.
Celia was tired of secrets; I could see it on her face. The fact that her mother likely had a million more hidden somewhere only that little key would open was infuriating. How long had Celia been carrying that thing around her neck, too afraid to find out on her own? Or better yet, why had her mother kept this from her?
The thought briefly occurred to me that maybe Jamila had somehow been the better parent out of the two. Doing what she could to keep her daughter away from the violence even if it meant keeping her away from the money.
No matter how you looked at it, it was blood money.
And accepting it meant also accepting her father’s sins as her own.
“How do you know this?” she asked him.
“I’ve been here before, when I was just a kid, before Ignacio burned down the villa. Your mamá wasn’t a secretive person, but the few times she brought me here, something was just off. I’m betting my life that key opens up a box here. I saw it too many times in her hand to think otherwise.”
It was just a bank, nothing out of the ordinary and nothing suspicious about it. It smelled like old paint, and there was a single teller behind the counter.
“Nombre?” the clerk asked.
“Jamila Gomez.” She gave her the alias that belonged to her mother.
She shook her head and denied her request, so Celia tried once again with the Flores name instead, along with the rest of her identifying information she still knew by memory. The teller searched and searched until finally her face lit up with a match.
We walked through metal detectors, all of us setting it off and relinquishing our guns into plastic tubs. The clerk led us down a hallway filled with lockers and took out her own set of keys, opening up a small door with a 131 on the front. There was a single box inside, made of metal, big enough to hold a few letters.
We followed the clerk again, past the lockers, to another door which she unlocked with an electronic keycard before pushing open and guiding us inside. She told us in Spanish to take our time and to shut the door once we retrieved everything we needed from the box.
“I’m really fucking anxious.” She exhaled, holding the key between her index finger and her thumb, tapping it against the key slot on the small metal box the clerk placed on the table.
“Do you want to be alone?” I asked her, and she responded with a hard glare.
“Never again, I’m just… nervous.” She looked down at the box before looking back at me again. “What if there’s nothing there?”
César laughed. “I wouldn’t put it past Jamila.”
She stuck the key in the box, shaking out the last bit of her nerves with a little dance before she put her hand back on the key and turned it. She opened the lid and the four of us crowded around her, waiting to discover what should have been seen fifteen years ago.
There was an envelope and a torn piece of paper. Nothing else.
“Puta madre. She’s really going to kick me down one more time even in death, isn’t she?” She exhaled deeply before picking up the little piece of paper.
“What is it?” Mateo asked.
“It’s coordinates,” César said, reaching over his shoulder and grabbing it from her.
He plugged the numbers into his phone while her hands trembled with the envelope in her hand.
“I don’t want a letter. Someone else open it. There is nothing she could possibly say to me that I would want to hear right now.” She tossed it on the table, shaking her hands frantically like she was drying the water off of them.
Mateo picked it up, ripping the envelope open to reveal what looked to just be a bunch of documents. Santos picked one up and looked it over before handing it to her.
“It’s just birth certificates,” he told her. “This one is yours.”
She took it from his hand and set it on the table without a single glance.
“Whose is that?” she asked about the one in Mateo’s hand.
“Carolina’s. This one belongs to big brother here. I thought your last name was Villalobos?” he asked him, shuffling the papers around.
“It is,” he said, his annoyance obvious.
