Free The Queen of the South by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

candlelight, turning pages randomly. "You read what's in here?"
    "I just brought it to you, like he told me. I don't know anything about these things."
    Don Epifanio nodded, reflectively. He seemed uncomfortable. "Poor Güero got what he'd been looking for," he concluded.
    She was staring straight ahead, into the chapel's shadows, where ex votos and dry flowers were hanging. "Poor Güero my ass," she suddenly said. "That pig never thought about what would happen to me."
    She'd kept her voice from shaking. Still staring into the shadows, she sensed that don Epifanio had turned to look at her.
    "You're lucky," she heard him say. "For the time being, you're alive."
    He sat like that a while longer. Studying her. The smell of the cigar mingled with the fragrance of the candles and the cone of incense burning slowly in a censer next to the bust of the sainted bandit. "What do you plan to do?" he asked at last.
    "I don't know." Now it was Teresa's turn to shrug. "Güero said you'd help me. 'Give it to him and ask him to help you.' That's what he said."
    "Güero was always an optimist."
    The hollow feeling in her stomach got worse. The waxy smell of candles, the flickering lights before St. Malverde. Humid, hot. Suddenly she felt an unbearable sense of anxiety, and of trepidation. She repressed the urge to
    jump up, knock over the burning candles, get out, get air. Run again, if they'd still let her. But when she looked up, she saw that the other Teresa Mendoza was sitting across from her, watching her. Or maybe it was she herself sitting there, silently, looking at the frightened woman leaning forward on the pew next to don Epifanio, with a useless pistol in her lap. "He loved you," she heard herself say.
    Don Epifanio moved uneasily in his seat. A decent man, Güero had always said.
    "And I loved him." Don Epifanio was speaking very softly, as though he didn't want the bodyguard at the door to hear him talk about emotions. "And you, too ... but those stupid runs of his put you in a tough spot."
    "I need help."
    "I can't get mixed up in this." "You have a lot of power."
    She heard him cluck his tongue in discouragement and impatience. In this business, don Epifanio explained, still speaking softly, power was relative, ephemeral, subject to complicated rules. And he had kept his power, he said, because he didn't go sticking his nose in other people's business. Güero didn't work for him anymore; this was between him and his new bosses. And those people mocharon parejo —they took out everybody, wiped the slate clean.
    "They don't have anything personal against you, Teresita. You know these
    people. But it's their way of doing things. They have to make an example
    when people fuck with them."
    "You could talk to them. Tell them I don't know anything."
    "They already know you don't know anything. That's not the issue ... and I can't get involved. In this country, if you ask for a favor today, tomorrow you've got to pay it back."
    Now he was looking at the Double Eagle on her lap, one hand lying carelessly on the butt. He knew that Güero had taught her to fire it, and that she could hit six empty Pacifico bottles one after another, at ten paces. Güero had always liked Pacifico and liked his women a little tough, although Teresa couldn't stand beer and jumped every time the gun went off.
    "Besides," don Epifanio went on, "what you've told me just makes things worse. If they can't let a man get away, imagine a woman.... They'd be the laughingstock of Sinaloa."
    Teresa looked at his dark, inscrutable eyes. The hard eyes of a norteno Indian. Of a survivor.
    "I can't get involved," she heard him repeat.
    And don Epifanio stood up. So it was useless, she thought. It all ends here. The hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach grew until it included the night that awaited her outside, inexorable. She gave up, but the woman watching her from the shadows refused to.
    "Güero told me that you'd help me," she insisted stubbornly, as though