Tony Guerrero had been sleeping with her. What did Emma Garcia think about that?

“So, who killed her?” I asked in a voice I hoped betrayed none of my confusion or fear.

“You! You fucking imperialista!” shouted Tony Guerrero.

“Me?” I screamed back at him. “You think I killed her?”

He waved the gun in my face. “One of you two. We saw you downtown.”

“¿Tu?” Emma Garcia spat at him. “You weren’t there. It was me and Raul who went downtown to meet her and told you we saw them there. We don’t know where you were.” Then she started rattling at him in Spanish again, but I understood puto.

Tony Guerrero must have killed her. That’s why he hadn’t gone downtown with them. He had been there ahead of them. Was it a crime of passion? Or was it cold and premeditated? An affair of the heart or political? They wouldn’t go to the police. They probably had a revolutionary tribunal to deal with him.

“Who do you think killed your compañera? Was it Tony?” I goaded Emma Garcia because I wanted her to lose control, to bust him, to lash out at him, to get him away from me and the gun out of my face.

All she did, though, was give him a poisonous look. “We don’t know. Certain subversive, reactionary forces.”

“Monica Fullbright?”

They looked at me blankly.

“The woman whose apartment you trashed?” I offered.

Tony Guerrero pursed his lips as he studied Emma, wondering what this was about.

My head was throbbing. There were two Tony Guerreros. “Admit it,” I said to him. “Cathy Vega was in the middle of a heroin deal you told her to set up, and it got botched.”

“Botched? What is ‘botched’?”

“Fucked up. Chingado,” explained Lupe.

Did she think we were at the United Nations? I glared at her. I wanted her to shut up and not draw attention to herself. I wanted them to forget she was with me.

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked, pushing at Guerrero.

Emma Garcia locked eyes with him again for a second. There was hatred in her eyes. Things were certainly far from smooth here. “Yes, when?”

He couldn’t help striking a pose and giving a great profile.

“The day before she went to Mexico,” he admitted.

Emma Garcia snorted in disgust when he said this. Probably something else he had lied to her about. Was she still in love with him? “We sent someone to meet her, but she didn’t show up. Our man waited a day for her in Mexicali.”

At the El Nido Motel. The book of matches I had found in the desk. I wondered if they had searched me while I was unconscious. Suddenly I felt cold and violated.