Across from me hung a painting. Maybe eight or ten feet tall and half as wide. It was old, cracked, and had been poorly repaired. It depicted a slave market where a naked man, bloody with the stripes of a scourge, stood on a block, the auctioneer next to him. A bloody spear hung horizontally above his head. It dripped into the dirt at his feet. Around him, angry men shouted bids while he stood helpless. At the bottom, a plaque had been engraved: SOLD UNDER THE SPEAR.

I lay on the bench. Another painting hung above me. Below it, some words had been carved into the massive stones: YOU HAVE SOLD YOURSELVES FOR NOTHING. AND YOU SHALL BE REDEEMED WITHOUT MONEY.

I closed my eyes and shook my head. I could not wrap my hands around that. Couldn’t see how that was possible.

Leena shook me some twelve hours later. A priest was mopping the floor nearby. She was smiling. “He’s asking for you.”

Zaul was sitting up when I walked in. His face was still puffy. He spoke when I walked in. His voice was ragged. “How’s Maria?”

“She’s better. Been asking for you.”

“How’s her face?”

“Your dad said Shelly did a really great job. Can hardly tell.”

I stood next to him, letting him speak, not pressing him. He looked away and tears cascaded down his face. “You tell her I’m sorry?”

“You can tell her yourself.”

“I’m not going home.”

On the surface, Zaul was a muscled, tough-talking seventeen-year-old. Inside, he was still very much a kid. I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket. “Little over a hundred years ago, some really smart guy invented a thing called the phone. It’s been through a few versions but I have one here. It allows you to talk to people who are a long way away.” I pointed to the earpiece. “When you put your ear here, it sounds like they’re sitting right next to you. And when you talk in this part”—another point—“you can tell them things like you’re sorry and that you love them…That you hope they’re okay.”

He nodded, laughed, nodded, wiped the tears on his sheet. “Guess I made a mess of things.”

I rolled the stool up next to the bed and sat. “You did.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “But if we’re comparing messes, mine’s bigger.”

As tough as he liked to pretend to be, Zaul had his mother’s heart. He tried to mask it with steroids, tattoos, piercings, and four-letter epithets, but all that had been exposed for what it was. Just a cover. Something to mask his own insecurity. The kid sitting before me was none of that, and his hard shell had been cracked. Exposed for what it was. He was like the kid who walked into the living room wearing his dad’s robe and slippers. It just didn’t fit.

He shook his head, exhaled, and clutched his ribs. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck.”

“Want to tell me what happened?”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“How about the beginning. After I made the drop.”

Zaul glanced at Leena, not knowing how honest he could be.

“She knows about me. I told her.”

Zaul explained how he’d been tracking my drops through his dad’s phone. Learning where, when, how much, etc. I made it a lot easier for him one afternoon when he saw me lift the SIM card out of my locker in the back hall of their house and then drop the old one in the trash can. I’d never known he was there. Since then, he’d been following me, trying to learn how I did what I did. He was also trying to figure out where his dad kept the bulk of his drugs, so he could skim a little off the top and make some money on his own. He thought, after all his many screwups, that his dad would appreciate his entrepreneurial efforts. He also explained how when his losses mounted and he realized he wasn’t all that good at poker that he started hanging out with some guys who ran a dogfighting operation. Hence, pit bulls. Easy money. Thought he’d pay one gambling debt with another sure bet. So he bought a dog and paid some guy to train it, but when he put it in its first fight, it lost badly. As did he. He’d bet a good bit at bad odds. Poker losses compounded with dogfighting losses meant they’d come to collect. So on the night he took Maria for what he told her and us would be a moonlight stroll, they’d followed him and caught him off guard. The dog was meant for him. He called 911, then waited until Life Flight landed in the street, afraid to look at his sister’s face. Zaul paused here a long time. He said his mom and dad had bailed him out so many times that he couldn’t face them again, so he fled to the only place he could think of. When he landed in Costa Rica, he called some guys he’d met the summer prior. Career surfers. Things soon spiraled out of control, and before he knew it, there were two hundred people trashing his folks’ house. Again, trying to be like us, he thought he’d buy and sell and try and make good on all he’d lost, which took him to León. He actually had visions of walking back into his parents’ home in Miami with enough money to repay all they’d spent to bail him out. Once in León, he heard about the poker game and flashed around enough money to get invited. He quickly lost, and when he tried to run, the foreman unleashed his bouncer on him. Low on funds and without a vehicle, he and his surfer “friends” began living in hostels and a few resorts, which they left in worse condition than when they arrived. Somewhere in there he got in a drunken fight with a man wielding a knife, which explained his stomach. When he ran out of money and wouldn’t call his dad for more, his friends turned on him—which explained the cuts above his eyes and broken ribs. Like a pack of wolves, they’d attacked when he was wounded and literally kicked him when he was down. The result was what we saw before us. They took what little money he had left, left him in a ditch, and he crawled his way to the highway, hitchhiked south, and then walked once the truck entered Costa Rica. He said he knew I’d be looking for him, and sooner or later, I’d either find him or his body at the house.

When he finished, he was tired. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The telling had exhausted him. Leena pulled up a blanket, and I told him to get some sleep. We’d talk more later.

He was asleep before I left the room. Leena met me outside the door. “He’s weak. Needs another day here.” She held her hands behind her back and rocked back and forth on her tiptoes. “Don’t you think a chocolate-filled croissant would be really good right now?”

I needed some time to process. “Be right back.”

*  *  *

The day passed and Zaul slept through most all of it. Late in the evening, after all the priests had shut the huge doors of the cathedral and gone to bed, Leena found me napping on my pew. She shook my foot. “Got a second?”

I sat up. “Sure.”

“Not to be overly pushy, but what’s your plan?”

A shrug. “He doesn’t want to go home. I can make him, but I’m not sure how long that’d stick or what it would accomplish. I can take him to the house in Costa Rica and let him recuperate, but that’s a constant reminder of where he’s messed up, of the ongoing tension with his folks, and there would be no one there but us. I think we’d get cabin fever once he got healthy. I can get a room at the hotel here, but once he got up and about, we’d run into the same problem. Not to mention that he’d be more likely to bump into some of his friends around here, which neither he nor we need. I can take him with me back to Bimini, but I think that would just reinforce the whole drug runner thing. Plus, I’m pretty sure I don’t need that, either.”

Leena sat next to me. “What about spending a few weeks in Valle Cruces? With us? We could add a bed to the chicken coop. You and Paulo could fix it up a bit. I’ve seen what you can do with wood. Maybe you could make it less…” She laughed. “Barn-like.”

“I paid you to help me find him. Not nurse him back to health.”

“I’m not asking you to pay us.”