LIGHT ROSE IN THE GAP BENEATH THE DOOR. HER EYELIDS WERE swollen. She hadn’t slept. A rooster crowed outside. When they moved to New Orleans after the storm, she’d drifted with her father and Rodrigo from apartment to apartment, following the cheap rent, and in most neighborhoods someone had kept chickens. Roosters gone feral could be found everywhere. It was funny to see them strutting down the street.
She heard a door open and clack shut, and someone was whistling. Soon enough the chain rang against the far side of the door. The door squealed open. The flood of light was blinding, a rush of hot dry air. The man who ducked into the room was the one with the scar slashing across his face. He smiled, scar taut. The large knife hung from his belt in a leather sheath. He looked at the spot where she’d pissed but he didn’t say anything. Neither did he mention Luz’s hands, no longer behind her back.
He dropped to a knee in front of her and set down a plate and a tin cup, toast and water. She didn’t move. He crossed his arms over his knee and watched her. His eyes were dark and darting. From time to time he tongued the furrow through his lips.
“I need you to eat.”
Luz looked at the twine around her wrists, brown with blood, and didn’t answer. It was the same voice, the man who had hovered over her and grabbed her thigh.
“You will eat or I will take it away. Here.” He lifted the cup toward her. “Drink. It will be very hot in here today.”
She was indeed thirsty and the cup was cold in her hands, and she drank the water in several gulps, throat aching. The man said, “Good.”
“What’s your name?” Luz asked. He cocked his head and Luz realized she’d spoken in English. She asked him again in Spanish.
“I am called Cicatriz,” he said, tracing a finger along his scar. “That is all you need to know.” His grin was curious, and he tried some clunky English: “Where you from?”
Luz shrugged. Cicatriz nudged the plate with the toast toward her. It made an unpleasant sound against the tiles. He tried again: “You are American?”
The question felt somehow absurd. “I’m not from anywhere.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, and he returned to Spanish: “But you lived in America.”
“Yes.”
“And where were you going when we found you?”
“Home. Las Monarcas.”
“Does your father have money?”
A bitter taste leaked into her mouth. She understood. “He is a laborer.”
Cicatriz clucked with regret. He gestured toward some far-off place: “My father worked on a horse ranch. He did not own the ranch.” He said it as if they should understand each other. A black and viscous loathing whipped in Luz’s gut. She imagined she could kill him in that instant, if she were able, but then he drew his knife.
It was a silver-hilted thing with a leather grip. Symbols were etched into the blade, Chichimec designs perhaps, similar to the pictograms her grandmother branded into leather wares for resale at the Las Monarcas market. The symbols meant nothing more to her grandmother than business, and Luz didn’t know their individual significance, either, but she had always associated them with her mother’s stories.
“Do you like this?” Cicatriz asked, meaning the knife. “It is pretty, no? I got it when I worked for them—” With the knifepoint he tapped one of the plastic-wrapped packages. “When I was a sicario. Do you know that word?”
Luz shook her head.
“A,” he said, trying in English, “hit man. That is how I mean?”
“They are a cartel?” She meant the people he’d stolen from.
Cicatriz hummed, returned to Spanish. “A group affiliated, more or less, with the Cártel del Golfo.” He sat back and rested the knife across his lap. “I lived in Monterrey.” He told her that as a sicario he had lived alone in a nice place they bought for him and he would wait for cell phone calls telling him whom he needed to kill, and then he and his team would kill them and get paid. He had killed many. “I cannot remember them all,” he went on. He closed his eyes, seemingly in effort, shook his head: “Mere noise and shadow.” He picked up the knife. “But this one,” he said. “I remember his face. A rich man. A big house. I knocked on his door, and when he looked through the crack I shot him through the door with a shotgun. I went inside and shot him again.” He told Luz that the man died right away, which was not as common as one might think. In the hallway behind the man was a glass case full of artifacts. The knife was there. “It was beautiful. I knew I needed it. I needed it and I took it and now it is mine.” Cicatriz smiled, the white furrow rigid. “Anyway,” he said, tapping the packages again, “your home, Las Monarcas, is their plaza. Eat your toast.”
He stood, his boot heels rapping against the tile. Luz wasn’t hungry.
Cicatriz patted the stack of parcels. “A good haul,” he said. Nodding. With the knife he slit a package open and dipped his pinkie finger in, and then he held his fingernail to his nostril and snorted. He shivered. “I worked for them, now I rob them.” His smile was brilliant. “I am a Robin Hood.” He pointed with the knife and ordered her again to eat her toast.
Luz stood up. Her head was heavy and her limbs were loose, wobbly. Cicatriz was not much taller. She said, “I didn’t know Robin Hood kidnapped women.”
Cicatriz spun faster than she could react and he had her against the corrugated wall, a two-by-four crossbeam in the small of her back. The knife blade was to her throat and his other hand gripped her between her legs. His face was inches from her own and he squeezed, pushing into her groin. “I would,” he breathed, rancid. “I would. Just to take you.” The blade pressed against her larynx, threatened to puncture. Then he let go and backed away, and she collapsed, drawing herself into the corner.
His arms hung at his sides and he shook his head and seemed somehow disoriented. He sheathed his knife and picked up the plate and the cup, and he flung the bread from the plate onto the floor. “Eat your fucking toast,” he said and walked out. The chain banged against the tin, and Luz pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and cried.