Felix Ramón Duarte, the Sinaloa drug lord known to law enforcement as “El Pescado,” paused during his morning ablutions, stared into the mirror, and let the hatred boil up inside him just as it did each time he was forced to encounter his own image. The deformed features of his once handsome face were now frozen into something that resembled those of a landed fish, gasping for air. He had seen the similarity as soon as the doctors had removed the layer of bandages that had covered his wounded face. There in his hospital bed, staring at his terrible visage, Felix himself was the first to give voice to the moniker that had followed him ever since—El Pescado, “The Fish.”
He splashed cold water on himself and then turned away from the mirror. There was no need for him to shave. Hair follicles don’t grow in scar tissue. But each morning when he came face-to-face with those terribly defiled features, he couldn’t help but recall how they had come to be.
Early on, Felix Duarte and his younger brother, Ricardo, had been rising young lieutenants in the complex Sinaloan drug cartel family originally headed by their uncle, Manuel “Hondo” Duarte. Vying for their uncle’s favor and with each of them wanting to be ordained as Hondo’s successor, Felix and Ricardo had gone to war with one another, brother against brother. Ricardo had drawn first blood by masterminding an acid attack that had destroyed Felix’s movie-star good looks, leaving his face permanently and horribly disfigured. Felix had retaliated by burning his brother’s house to the ground with Ricardo, his wife, and their two children trapped inside the burning dwelling.
Felix was never charged. After a few well-placed bribes, the official investigation, conducted by law enforcement officers in Sinaloa, had determined the fire to be accidental, but everyone understood what had really happened. Felix’s single-minded ruthlessness had appealed to Hondo Duarte’s distorted sense of right and wrong. Shortly after Ricardo’s death, Felix was designated as the old man’s undisputed successor. When Hondo died a few years later—in his bed, of congestive heart failure—Felix had assumed complete control of the family’s drug trafficking enterprise.
These days Felix had plenty of money. He could have gone to any number of plastic surgeons and paid out of pocket to have his damaged face repaired, but he chose not to do so. Because his appalling looks terrified the people around him, he wore his damaged face as a badge of courage, using his appearance and his reputation for utter ruthlessness as tools to build his organization. Over time El Pescado had expanded Hondo’s relatively small-time operation into what it was now—a vast drug dealing and money laundering powerhouse.
There was a lot of unrest among competing cartels these days, and the old order seemed to be falling apart. Some of the biggest drug lords had been arrested and hauled off to prison. Others had been murdered—occasionally by the authorities but more often by their own people, or else by upstart competitors. In the face of all this splintering and in hopes of maintaining his own supremacy, El Pescado had turned to his daughter for help, a daughter who didn’t bear his name and whose existence he kept hidden from most of the rest of the world. Still, with her US-based education and advanced business degree from the Wharton School, El Pescado felt Lucienne Graciella Miramar would be uniquely qualified to take over where he left off.
Limping over to the table by the window, the one that overlooked a spacious patio alive with bougainvillea, he sat down to drink his morning cup of coffee. At eighty-one years of age, that was all he allowed himself these days—a single cup. Just then the door to his bedroom opened and Lupe, his fifth wife, stormed into the room carrying a phone.
“It’s for you,” she snarled, dropping the phone unceremoniously onto the table next to his cup and saucer. “It’s a woman,” Lupe added. “She says she must speak only to you. She says it’s urgent, but then, it always is, isn’t it.”
Lupe’s snide implication was clear. Over the years, El Pescado had had too many wives and far too many mistresses, a situation Lupe tolerated because that was the price of admission and it allowed her to live in opulent luxury inside an armed fortress. Despite his appallingly scar-ravaged face, Felix had never had any trouble finding willing women—except that one time, of course—the one time when it had really mattered. Now, though, seeing which phone Lupe had brought him, his heart gave a lurch. This was an encrypted phone, programmed to accept calls from one number only, from another encrypted phone—the one he’d had delivered to Graciella, a daughter from whom he was careful to keep his distance. They worked together these days, but seldom came face-to-face.
“Hola,” he said.
“She’s gone,” Graciella said tersely.
El Pescado knew who “she” was—Graciella’s mother, the beautiful Christina, the only woman in Felix’s life he had ever truly loved. The first time Christina had seen him after Ricardo’s vicious acid attack, she had opened the door, taken one look at his damaged face, and recoiled from him in horror. Fueled by rage at what had befallen him and infuriated by Christina’s reaction, he had taken her by force that day, tearing off her clothing and mounting her right there on the floor in front of the doorway.
Afterward he had walked away from her and out of her life with no idea that the violent attack had left her pregnant—with his child, with Graciella. Eventually Christina had married another man, Sergio Miramar, a Panamanian lowlife whose name was on Graciella’s birth certificate but who had taken himself out of the picture before mother and child even made it home from the hospital.
“I’m sorry,” Felix said into the phone. “When is the funeral?”
“There was no funeral,” Graciella said. “She took her own life. She was cremated.”
El Pescado could barely believe his ears. An unexpected spasm of grief shot through his body, leaving him momentarily breathless and unable to speak. He had walked away from the once vibrantly beautiful Christina more than thirty years earlier, but from the pain he felt that morning, it could just as well have been yesterday.
Abandoned by Felix and pregnant with his child, Christina’s life had fallen into a desperate downward spiral. Eventually she had scraped out a meager living by working the streets where, several years later, she was attacked again. This time she was the victim of a brutal gang rape that had left her beaten to a pulp and bleeding her life away in a darkened alley where she had been discovered by a passing Good Samaritan who had summoned help. It was a miracle that she had survived at all, but the incident had left her permanently damaged and with a broken face that was almost as horrific as El Pescado’s.
When Felix heard what had happened and discovered the existence of his child, he had stepped back into their lives, quietly orchestrating Christina’s care and overseeing Graciella’s life. He had summoned one of the world’s leading plastic surgeons to repair her face. The surgeon’s deft skill had reversed the worst of Christina’s disfigurement, but repairing the surface damage didn’t fix the real problem. Christina was left with ongoing mental and emotional afflictions that defied easy remedy and eventually led her into a complicated labyrinth of opioid addiction.
• • •
When El Pescado reentered Christina’s life, she had been hospitalized in grave condition. With Christina in no position to object, he had taken it upon himself to oversee Graciella’s education in addition to facilitating Christina’s living arrangements. The condo Christina now shared with her daughter was in Graciella’s name, but it had been purchased by a shell company that could, with some difficulty, be traced back to El Pescado, as could the regular deposits to the bank account that covered their utilities, homeowner’s fees, groceries, and any other incidental expenses, including the salaries of a long line of housekeepers and caregivers who came in on a daily basis to look after Christina while Graciella was at work.
Curious about their lives but not wanting to draw undue attention to their connection, El Pescado had managed to find a way to spy on them. He had gifted Christina with a new flat-screen TV. At his direction, the set had come equipped with a top-of-the-line video surveillance system, one that allowed him an insider’s view of life behind their closed doors. As long as the television was plugged in, it gave Felix a bird’s-eye view of the living room where his former mistress seemed to be fading away to almost nothing while his industrious dark-haired daughter went about the process of living her day-to-day life.
In her heyday, Christina Andress Miramar had been a breathtaking beauty—a photogenic blonde. Once a promising Hollywood starlet, Christina’s career had been derailed by getting on board the Duarte brothers’ drug-fueled party circuit. Much as he hated to admit it, Felix realized that Christina had been all beauty and no brains, whereas her daughter was exactly the opposite—someone who was all brains and not at all burdened with her mother’s good looks.
In fact, as Felix observed Graciella’s comings and goings on his secret video footage, he thought she resembled his own grandmother far more than she did Christina. Juanita Duarte, Felix’s mother, had died of a brain aneurysm in her mid-thirties when Felix was only eleven. That was when Nana had come to Sinaloa to live with them, caring for Felix and ten-year-old Ricardo in the same way Graciella now cared for her temperamental and often difficult mother—coming and going and doing whatever needed to be done with a kind of brisk efficiency but with a noticeable lack of love.
When the TV set was first delivered, Felix had binged on the surveillance feeds, watching them greedily, day after day. Over time, however, the novelty had worn off, and he found himself observing them less and less. It pained him too much to see Christina as she was now—a slovenly empty shell of what she had once been—sitting in the living room playing endless games of solitaire, watching her soaps, and drinking, of course.
Drinking too much had been part of the Christina equation for as long as Felix had known her. Wherever she was, there had always been a partially filled glass nearby. Strangers might have taken the clear liquid for water with a slice of lime, but Felix knew better—there was always vodka with that slice, vodka and nothing else. It sickened him to know that by the end of most evenings, when it was time to go to bed, Christina would often be so out of it that she’d be unable to make her way into the bedroom unassisted.
El Pescado thought back to the last occasion he checked in on them. Was it a week ago, maybe, or was it longer than that? At the time, Christina had behaved in a totally normal fashion—normal for her, that is. There had been nothing in her demeanor to indicate any kind of impending crisis, much less one serious enough to cause the woman to consider taking her own life.
At last El Pescado managed to find his voice. “When,” he asked brokenly, “and how did it happen?”
“Last Thursday,” Graciella responded. “It happened overnight sometime. When I found her in the morning, she was already gone. She apparently overdosed on a combination of prescription meds and vodka.”
How could this have happened? El Pescado wondered. Wasn’t Graciella supposed to be watching Christina? Wasn’t she supposed to be keeping her safe? And how could she not have told him what had happened until more than a week later?
Instead of screaming accusations, El Pescado exercised incredible restraint and kept his voice steady. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” he asked.
“Because there was nothing you could do,” Graciella answered. “There was nothing anyone could do.”
El Pescado’s mind flashed back to an earlier time, to the old days of wild drug-fueled boozy parties. Back then he’d been a rich and handsome middle-aged man and Christina had been his much younger, eye-catching arm candy. Together they’d been part of Panama City’s “beautiful people.” Now she was gone forever.
Dragging his thoughts away from another painful snippet from his past, Felix focused on the present and on the voice on the phone—his daughter’s voice. Graciella seemed surprisingly dispassionate about what had happened, but then, she’d had time to adjust. Or was there more to this story than Graciella was saying? Had Christina truly taken her own life, or was it possible—remotely possible—that she’d had help along the way? Perhaps Graciella really was her father’s daughter—in thought, word, and deed. Even as El Pescado considered that terrible possibility, he hoped it wasn’t so.
“I would like to have her ashes,” he said at last. “I can send a courier to pick them up.”
“Don’t bother,” Graciella said. “I’ll have them shipped to the drop box in Mexico City. Someone there can deliver them.”
“Thank you,” he croaked. A brief silence followed.
During the past ten years, although they seldom met face-to-face, Graciella had come to play a key role in her father’s financial transactions. Over time he had arrived at the conclusion that she was destined to be his chosen successor. El Pescado fully expected that once Christina no longer required Graciella’s constant care and attention, his daughter would leave Panama City behind, come to Mexico, take up residence in his fortified compound, and assume her official role.
After all, Felix was feeling his age. Running the cartel was a young man’s game. He wanted Graciella close at hand so he could teach her everything she would need to know. At this point, she understood the financial end of his business far better than Felix himself, but he needed to be around long enough to school her in the blood-and-guts aspects of running the cartel—about dealing with rival gangs; about learning who could be trusted and who could not; and, if it ever came to that, how to put down a bloody insurrection arising from inside the ranks.
El Pescado had already informed his young lieutenants, including his forty-something sons, Manuel and Pablo, of his unorthodox decision. When it came to holding their own as street thugs, the boys were capable enough. They were good at wielding guns and muscle, but they were totally unsuitable when it came to running the whole operation. Pablo drank too much and Manny was too indecisive. Neither of them had the temperament or the brainpower to keep all the balls in the air, and when El Pescado had announced his succession decision, neither of them had had guts enough to object—at least not to Felix’s face.
“What will you do now?” he asked Graciella finally, hoping to disguise the naked hope in his heart. “Will you come home to Sinaloa?”
El Pescado’s expectation had always been that Graciella would jump at the chance to leave Panama City behind after her mother’s passing. That didn’t happen, at least not now.
“There are many things that are best handled from here,” Graciella said into the phone. “If and when that changes, I’ll let you know.”
She hung up then. El Pescado wasn’t accustomed to being dismissed in such an abrupt fashion. For a long moment he stared at the suddenly silent phone before putting it down. Then, remembering Christina—his once oh-so-lovely Christina—he buried his grotesque face in his hands and wept. Much later, after the next spasm of grief had passed and because he was who he was, Felix went into his study and scrolled back through all the video feeds, including ones he hadn’t viewed previously.
Try as he might there was nothing to be seen that was the least bit out of the ordinary. On Wednesday evening the television set was on for most of the day and stayed on somewhat later than usual. There may have been more comings and goings than usual, but there was no sign of an argument or any kind of dispute or disturbance. Graciella came and went several times after helping Christina out of the room, but eventually Graciella returned to the living room and settled down on the sofa.
For more than an hour she sat there, working on a laptop before switching off the set for the night. If that was when it had happened, Christina must have been in her bedroom dosing herself with booze and pills while her daughter sat working quietly in the living room, totally unaware. But that set El Pescado to wondering. Was Graciella really as innocent and unknowing as she appeared to be on the video or was she something else entirely?
He fast forwarded through the feed to the next day, where he saw Graciella, seated on the sofa and weeping uncontrollably while people came and went around her—the ambulance crew, various police officers, and even a few neighbors. At one point Arturo Salazar, Graciella’s boss from the office, made an appearance. After that El Pescado simply stopped watching. With Christina gone, there was no longer any point.
He did, however, have a number of sources inside the police department in Panama City. Just to set his mind at ease, he made a few calls. Yes, Christina Miramar had been discovered dead in her bed on Thursday morning of the previous week. The cops had found no suicide note, but there were also no signs of any kind of violence and no indication of forced entry, either. Unused portions of a variety of prescription meds had been found at the scene. Evidence suggested that the prescription drugs Christina had ingested had been self-administered. Those, combined with her elevated blood alcohol content, had proved to be lethal. It occurred to Felix that the medical examiner might just as well have checked the box marked “accidental” or “suspicious,” but he had not. Christina’s death had been declared a suicide, and the case was closed.
Taking some slight comfort in that news, Felix allowed himself to give way to grief once more, sobbing away while Lupe, listening from the other room, wondered what in the hell was going on.