Page 6 of South of Justice

The silence in the room pressed in. He was a thousand miles from anyone who knew him, and even farther from anyone who gave a damn. He had no backup. No flag on his badge to fall back on. The brotherhood was gone.

He felt it then: the tipping point. The moment when his old life finally stopped being a resource and started being a liability. He stared at the phone on the table for another long minute, like it might ring on its own. But it didn’t.

The club was still quiet as he made his way back upstairs. Just the distant thump of someone restocking bottles and the low hum of the AC unit that never gave off any cool air.

He climbed the narrow back stairwell and unlocked the door to his room.

Inside: stillness. The mattress. The fan. He turned the bolt, slid the chain across, set the chair back under the handle.

Then he lay down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.

He didn’t have a plan, or even full understanding of the problem. He had the memory of a face on a screen, and a threat wrapped in silence.

And now he had one less person to call.

FIVE

The streetsof Puerto Escondido blurred into dust and shadow as the sun bled out behind the hills. The restaurant sat right on the shoreline, three cracked tables outside, salt-stained walls, the smell of frying oil in the air.

Lucía pushed the door open, relieved to find the place nearly empty. From the kitchen, the cook waved her in without pausing her dance between the burners.

“¡María!”she called, voice rough from smoke and years. “¡Entra aquí!”

Lucía ducked her head and stepped into the kitchen’s sweaty warmth. She’d been living under the name María Torres for eighteen months. Long enough for it to almost feel like hers.

She dropped her bag onto a milk crate. Pulled out her battered laptop. She wasn’t here to wait tables or clean dishes. She was here to keep the books.

The real ones.

Two sets of numbers lived in this restaurant: one for the tax officials who came sniffing around with greasy palms and badge-shaped threats. And one for the kitchen, for the people whocooked and scraped and survived. Lucía kept both balanced, neat and untraceable.

It wasn’t just a job, not least because it barely paid her anything. It was a way to make something clean, controlled. If she could keep the numbers straight, maybe the rest of her life would follow.

And it was also a small act of rebellion. A sliver of control in a world that had stolen everything else from her. And a way, however insignificant it sometimes felt, of repenting for her many sins.

On the street outside, a scooter backfired.

Lucía flinched before she could stop herself, fingers tightening around the laptop.

She waited for her heartbeat to steady. Then she opened the laptop, faked a smile for the cook. And got to work.

Hours later, she packed up her things, said goodbye to the cook, and stepped into the thick coastal night.

The sea was a black smear against the dark, the ocean’s breathing a low, restless thing at the edge of town. She turned east, the streets thinning as she left the coast behind. Music still bled from bars near Zicatela, bass thudding, tourists laughing too loud, scooters coughing past in tight packs.

But four blocks inland, the world shifted. Lights dimmed. Storefronts pulled their steel shutters tight. Dogs slunk through the alleys, their nails tapping against the broken pavement. The rhythm of the city slowed and turned in on itself.

Lucía kept to the sidewalk, steps quiet, head down. She took a shortcut through an alley, past cracked stucco and sagging wires. Every sound—laughter, a slammed door, a motorcyclebackfiring—seemed to hit sharper here, like it was stripped of cover.

A car crawled down the street behind her, music low but deliberate. As it neared, she dropped her head and hunched her shoulders, old instincts kicking in.

The car slowed, just enough to make her skin prickle. Then it jerked forward and rounded the corner.

She waited a beat.

Two.

Then she straightened, blowing out a shaky breath. She’d never been the kind of girl that men hollered at from car windows. She wasn’t unattractive, she knew that much. But nor was she the kind of pretty that stopped anyone mid-stride. That realization had stung when she was younger. Now, it was a blessing—one of the few she still counted.