Page 23 of South of Justice

It was possession.

“I should go back in,” she said quietly.

He stepped aside, just enough for her to pass.

She did. But as she reached the door, he said softly behind her, “Watch the company you keep, Lucía. Not everyone is who they pretend to be.”

She turned. He wasn’t looking at her anymore, just at the skyline.

The moment hung there like smog. Then she stepped through the door and let it close behind her.

SIXTEEN

The roadto Punta Prieta had crumbled in places, eaten away by years of salt wind. Ryan drove the borrowed pickup with the headlights off for the last mile, navigating by moonlight. The Pacific stretched black and immensely vast to the west, nothing but water and shadow all the way to the horizon.

He pulled off onto a gravel turnout and killed the engine. The wind came off the sea in gusts, thick with brine. Surf pounded the rocks below the cliff like a slow, angry heartbeat.

He checked his mirrors. No lights behind him. No sign he’d been followed. Still, he kept his hand near the pistol at his side as he got out and shut the door.

The path to the boat launch curved downward in loose gravel and coastal scrub. Crickets chirped in the underbrush, but otherwise, the night was still. The kind of stillness that pressed against your ribs. That made you feel like you were being watched.

He rounded a bend and saw the glow.

A single LED lantern lit up the small concrete dock that jutted like a broken finger over the cliff’s edge. A battered skiff bobbed in the swell below, tied to a steel ring half-swallowed bymoss. On the dock, a man sat cross-legged, his laptop open on a folded military blanket, a cigarette burning between his fingers.

Lázaro hadn’t changed much. Skinny, black-eyed, wiry in a way that suggested coiled tension more than fragility. His beard was longer, peppered with grey now. He wore a ratty soccer jersey, faded jeans, and canvas shoes held together with duct tape.

He looked up as Ryan approached.

“You look like shit, Marshal,” Lázaro said in heavily-accented English.

“I’m not a marshal anymore.”

Lázaro’s eyes flicked over him, boots worn down to nothing, road dust on his jeans, the tension in his shoulders that said he hadn’t slept right in days. He took a drag, then exhaled. “Maybe not by title. But you’ve still got the look. The posture.”

Ryan didn’t answer. He crouched beside him, eyes scanning the screen. Lázaro’s interface was minimal—lines of code, ping logs, node trees branching like veins.

“What are we looking at?”

“A ghost net echo. Something crawled out of the dark.” He tapped a line. “Alias tied to a defunct crypto wallet. Dead for two years. Then it lit up. A ping from the Oaxaca subnet. Rural node. Hill country.”

Ryan frowned. “Could be anyone.”

“Sure. Could be a fluke. But the metadata signature matches a packet I saw back in the Sinaloa dumps. And the routing obfuscation is…elegant. Not cartel. Not amateur either. This is a woman who doesn’t just hide. She vanishes and makes you forget she was ever real.”

“So it’s her.”

“It’s someone like her. And she wants people to find her.” He raised an eyebrow. “Or she wants them to try.”

“Can you trace the node?”

“Best I can do is region. It’s dirty, rural. No direct coordinates. But she slipped. Just enough. Might’ve been on purpose. That’s the thing about bait—you gotta leave it bleeding a little.”

Lázaro typed something and the map zoomed in on a band of mountains east of Oaxaca City. Remote. Sparse.

“She’s up there?”

“I’d bet money. Which I don’t have, so you know I’m serious.”