Yes, abducted her, right in front of the rape crisis center. Most of the volunteers and staff on her shift were gone, had driven off in their cars and trucks or walked down the street to the bus stop, so there was not one witness when he, skinny as he was, malnourished as he was, delirious with living mostly on prayer and cigarettes, got her into his truck.

Not physically, you understand. He would never have won that struggle since Esmeralda was no kind of wimpy woman. Her brown belt in judo and her first-place trophy from the Southwest Women in the Martial Arts Annual Competition would surely have caused her to make a neat stack of toothpicks out of that scarecrow of a man. No, it wasn’t with muscular force but with the power of words that he was able to drive away with her. But what those words were, nobody will ever know.

“We’ll call the police,” Maria said to Esmeralda that night when Francisco dropped her off in front of her house. Maria had been pacing the living room, smoking a joint, half out of her mind that Esmeralda had not called to say she would be late and suspecting the worst, and the worst was what had happened. Well, maybe not the worst, that would have meant that Francisco el Penitente would have left off a dead body.

Maria had never seen Francisco el Penitente. She had not had even a glance to guess what he was capable of or not capable of. She only knew that Esmeralda should not have trusted him. Or maybe Esmeralda hadn’t trusted him, maybe he had pulled her into his truck biting and screaming. Esmeralda said nothing or did nothing but look up at her occasionally with an expression on her face that also said nada.

So Maria did not try to stop Esmeralda from going that day, even though her heart wanted to fold itself over, she just gave Esmeralda a little peck and with a “See you later, honey, I’ll wait for you guys to have dinner, okay?” she just watched Caridad’s old truck go off down the road toward 1-40.

Then Maria threw her lead pipe protector back under the seat, saying to herself that she was on her way to get a massage, but really because she already knew that she would not see Esmeralda again and she wanted to be at doña Felicia’s so that she could say what she had to say when it was time to say it.