Private L.A. (Private 6)

“Get back or I’ll kill you,” the kid snarled. “No matter what my orders are, I’ll kill you if you make one more move.”

Chapter 124

AT TEN PAST ten that evening, we drove past the wall that surrounded El Panteón de Belén cemetery in Guadalajara.

“Park here,” the boy said, rubbing at his knee where the door had hit him. He said his name was Roberto. He sat in the passenger seat of one of the panel vans, his pistol in his lap, lazily aimed at my waist as I drove.

We’d come to something of a Mexican standoff back there in the house and had negotiated a truce that allowed me to keep my weapon and my life in return for going with him and his two friends. Justine came along too. The others had been forced to remain behind, which didn’t sit well with Cordova or Cruz. But that was the deal if we wanted to find out what had happened to the Harlows.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Inside,” Roberto said.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“What do you usually find in cemeteries?” he said. “Get out.”

“Who sent you?” Justine asked from the back, where two other armed teenage street urchins watched her.

“That’s right, we’re not getting out until you tell us who sent you, Roberto,” I said. “De la Vega? Gomez? Fox?”

“I do not know these men,” he said, opening his door. “And I don’t know who you are. And I don’t care. This is a business transaction. Understand?”

Chapter 125

JUSTINE WALKED WITH Jack toward the entrance to the dark cemetery with the armed kids walking behind them. For reasons she wasn’t quite sure she could identify, she felt none of the terror she’d endured during the attack inside the jail. Indeed, she felt strangely calm as they passed through an arched wrought-iron gate and she smelled the faint odors of incense and Jack.

What do you usually find in cemeteries?

Roberto clicked on a flashlight and aimed it ahead of them. There were gravestones, monuments, and tombs everywhere. Many were coated in red wax, which Justine guessed came from candles that had burned in the cemetery during the two Days of the Dead.

“This cemetery is haunted,” the boy said.

“By who?” Justine asked.

“Vampire,” Roberto replied. “He hunted the citizens of Guadalajara two hundred years ago. It started with small animals, dogs and cats, found all over the city drained completely of their blood. Later, human babies were found dead and exsanguinated as well.”

“Exsanguinated?” Jack said.

“That’s what I said,” the boy replied.

“Where’d you learn to speak English so well?” Justine asked.

“Arizona,” Roberto said. “Lived there until my parents died two years ago. Then I came back here. Take a right there onto that path.”

Very smart kid, Justine thought. How did he come to this?

Roberto, meanwhile, was going on with his story about the vampire. “Everyone lived in fear. They stayed indoors after dark and prayed for their lives. A group of citizens who were tired of living in constant terror decided to end the daily nightmare and track down the vampire. They eventually found him and when they did, they drove a wooden stake through his heart.”

“I like it when that happens,” Jack said. “Reassuring.”

“But this was not over,” the boy replied. “The morning after they kill the vampire, the townspeople bring his body here. They bring many rocks too and bury the body beneath them, hoping he will never return from the dead.

“You see this big tree here?” Roberto asked, shining his light through a wrought-iron fence that surrounded a massive live oak tree. “They say the vampire is buried under this tree. They say that if the tree is ever cut down, he will rise from the dead and hunt again.”

Chapter 126

OKAY, I ADMIT it, walking in front of an armed hypersmart fourteen-year-old kid through a graveyard haunted by vampires had me more than a little unnerved. I could see scores of ways this could turn out wrong, and more than half of them had me and Justine never going back to Los Angeles again.