Stolen Prey

simple equation where she came from: you could be a young Einstein, but that wouldn’t keep you from getting beaten bloody, or worse, if you said something unwise to the wrong narco. She learned to keep her head down.
    When her father went to the U.S. to work, her mother moved them to a slum in Ciudad Juárez. Drugs were everywhere, and gangs. She got back into school, drawn by one belief: that if you could graduate, you would “have it made.” She worked, kept her head down, a pretty young woman who was raped one Friday night by a low-ranking narco named Bueno Suerte, and then, for a while, was passed around the gang, beaten regularly, raped even more often.
    Still, she was good at math, at numbers, at bookkeeping, and a year before she graduated, went to work as an accountant of sorts, for a mid-level marijuana exporter, a fat man named Chanos. While Chanos raped her occasionally, he protected her from anyone of lower rank. Sometime after she started with Chanos, she confessed to Bueno Suerte that she desperately missed his attentions. She would like to slip back in his bed, but if Chanos or anybody else found out…
    Bueno Suerte was transfixed by the possibility of putting the horns on Chanos, and they conspired to meet one night when Chanos was traveling. She went to Bueno Suerte’s bed, and when he was done with her, and asleep, she took a hammer out of her purse and smashed his head with it. She was told later that someonehad hit the boy twenty or thirty times with a pipe, or something, and that his head had looked like a pizza. She didn’t remember hitting him that often, but she did remember how purely wonderful it felt, as she did it.
    She stayed with Chanos, and did well enough that the narco had a word with the school principal, and when graduation day came, she walked across the stage with the few of her schoolmates who’d gotten that far, and got the precious paper.
    Later that year, Chanos committed suicide by cutting off his own head and putting it on his chest, and she was inherited by the new boss. Seven years later, when she was twenty-five, a narco named Cabeza de Madera, a member of the Criminales, suggested that she might have another potential. She listened to his suggestion and applied for a job as a clerk with the Federales. The skids had been greased, and she got the job, a short, quiet, pretty, head-down young woman.
    Two years after that, at the suggestion of the Big Voice—Cabeza de Madera had had an unfortunate encounter with
un bate de béisbol
—she took some law enforcement courses, learned to shoot a pistol, and became, in name only, a policewoman. In reality, she was a secretary and a bookkeeper, paid a little better than the other female secretaries and bookkeepers.
    She’d become a person of some value to the narcos, a chunky, humble, almost unnoticeable spy at the center of a Federale headquarters. And she continued taking classes, increasing her value to the Federales. She moved into a decent apartment, went to better restaurants, even signed up at a health club, where she did the stair-climber, became an exerciser-dancer, and went to yoga classes.
    All of this taught her one great lesson: money was everything.
Everything.
Safety, privilege, a roof over your head, good clothes, decent food.
    With the payments from the Criminales, she could even have afforded a car, although she wasn’t allowed to buy one—her Federale pay wouldn’t support it, and the purchase of a car might be looked upon with suspicion. Still, she took driving lessons and was eventually approved to drive government cars.
    And one day, the Big Voice said to her, “There is an inspector, named Rivera. You know him. He is an unhappy man, we hear, with a loveless marriage….”
    She allowed herself to be seduced. The sex meant nothing to her—she’d become numb to it as a teenager. Rivera, as it turned out, was an intelligent man, but harsh, and sometimes foolish. He deluded himself into believing that she loved him, or at least regarded him with great fondness. In fact, she disliked him, and that feeling grew over the years.
    She had no trouble concealing that from Rivera. He believed, with great certainty, that women admired him without reservation. By the time she killed him, she was very, very tired of Rivera’s whole act.
    I N HER ROOM , Martínez sat up and let her eyes and mind readjust to the world. Five minutes later, she was reporting to the Big Voice. He said, “I will talk with the