The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online

Rivas, Washington, D.C., lawyer, socialite and Mexican-American rights activist, leaving only a core of ice too numb to care for much of anything.
    Her gaze shifted to her reflection in the window.
    The woman looking back at her was gentle, kind, sweet. She wore silver hoop earrings and a light mineral makeup, a powder, with a cool, muted red lip gloss. Her black hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail that draped over the shoulder of her tweed suit jacket. It was a good look for her, professional and stylish, bespeaking of old money and cultured tastes.
    But Monica Rivas was a lie.
    Like everything else about her, Monica Rivas was a cold, cruel, carefully constructed lie. And in moments like this, as she faced the transition from Monica to Pilar, she felt so bitter. For all her struggles, all those years spent clawing her way out of the gutters of Ciudad Juarez, of fighting against the gangs that tried to turn her into a common whore, that for all that, she had achieved little more than a sort of pointless circularity, a racehorse going ’round in circles at full speed, never getting anywhere. There was so much hatred inside her, so much resentment at the world that had created her. Had she not learned to bury all that rage over the years she probably would have put a gun in her mouth and ended it all. Instead, she stared at her reflection and let the walls come up around her heart, one after another.
    From beside her, she heard a sharp intake of breath, and turned from the window.
    In the seat next to her was an old Hispanic woman, short and fat, her dark complexion indicating her Indio heritage. The woman was gripping the armrests of her seat, her teeth clenched, eyes shut hard.
    Pilar reached over and took the woman’s hand in hers. It was the kind of thing Monica would do.
    Surprised, the woman looked at Pilar.
    Then she smiled.
    “Thank you,” she said, breathing a little easier now that she had someone to lend her strength.
    “Taking off is always the hardest part,” Pilar said in Spanish.
    The woman’s smile brightened. “Oh, are you from San Antonio?”
    “Yes. Well, years ago. I haven’t been back in a long while.” The lie was practiced. It came easily.
    Speaking Spanish seemed to relax the older woman, for the tension was gone from her face now. She even turned toward Pilar, as though they were sitting on a porch swing together rather than roaring steadily up to altitude.
    “Are you going home then?” the woman asked.
    “To your family?”
    Automatically, at the mention of family, Pilar thought of Ramon Medina. It was hard to hold the smile on her face.
    “Yes,” she said. “I still have some connections there.”
    “How nice,” the woman said.
    She went on talking, that old woman, but Pilar, for the most part, tuned her out. She was nodding politely, offering vague noises of encouragement now and then, but in her mind she’d turned back to darker times. She was thinking uneasy, alone thoughts, the kind of thoughts that kept her awake at night, staring up into the darkness, even when she was playing at being Monica Rivas.
    She remembered a time, twenty years ago now, when she was in the back of an eighteen-wheeler with a boy she knew only as Lupe and fifty-three other migrant workers trying to get across the border into Texas. She had to have been eight, or possibly ten, because she’d been small enough to cower behind a field box that had recently been used to transport onions. She could smell them even now. And Lupe, he would have been younger than that, for she’d been able to shield him with her body when the old woman—an old woman much like the woman sitting next to her now—had gone into cardiac arrest from the heat and died.
    She collapsed right next to them, and when Lupe saw the old woman was dead, her face slack and powdery white in the daylight that slipped through the cracks in the trailer’s walls, he’d gone still. Even after all these years, she could still hear his