Israel Centeno
Snow poured down thick and steady, silencing sound, muffling the world. It should’ve been beautiful. It wasn’t.
Rubén Tenorio walked along the riverfront, the Monongahela before him an open wound, dark and frozen. He didn’t speed up. Didn’t look back. Didn’t run. He was not going to die winded and crazed, crashing on ice like a stampeding deer.
The puff-puff of footsteps in the snow behind him was even and steady. Three men. Maybe four.
He fingered the Glock at his hip. There was comfort in that. The weight of it. The surety of it.
He remembered the first time he’d seen snow. London, fifty years ago. He was a boy, standing in a street that he felt was too clean, too gray. The flakes were soft, almost warm in their buoyancy. He had seen them melt on his skin, disbelieving the cold.
This snow wasn’t warm.
This snow swallowed.
Juan el Cubano was in charge of the hunt, although he wasn’t Cuban. He was Dominican. Los Narcisos. A gang within a gang. Los Profesores sin Títulos—the Professors Without Degrees. A name that almost sounded respectable. Yet nothing respectable about them. They were men whose specialty was helping people disappear.
The order was clear.
Kill him. Make it clean. Dump him in the river.
The Monongahela River had been iced over for four days. The temperature hadn’t gone above -15 degrees Celsius. He didn’t need to calculate it.
Two minutes. That’s all it would take.
“Two minutes,” Juan el Cubano had once stated. “And you don’t come back.”
Rubén didn’t run. He trudged through the wall of snow, the bridge ahead appearing spectral amid the whiteout. His breath seared his throat. The Gates of Purgatory. That’s where he was headed. St. Patrick’s pilgrimage in Ireland, without shoes, walking in the way of penitents, with men who had done unforgivable things, men who walked through worse than this cold, with nothing on but rags, waiting for redemption.
If he could just get there.
If he could just—
But no.
Pittsburgh wasn’t done with him yet.
A voice behind him.
“Hey, Rubio.”
Rubén didn’t stop.
Juan el Cubano chuckled. It was a warm, rich sound, as if they were old friends running into each other at a bar.
“¿Para dónde, chico? No camines tan rápido. No hay apuro.”
Rubén slowed down, but only because it was necessary. He held his hand close to the Glock, but did not draw it.
Juan appeared, smiling beneath the streetlights. The snow fell, softening his angles, but not enough. He was a block of a man, small but muscular, bundled in a heavy coat, black gloves, boots thick as bricks. Three others, shadows in the haze, behind him.
“Well, this is a bad night for a walk, eh?” Juan smiled. “Too cold, too lonely.”
“I love the cold,” Rubén said.
Juan laughed, genuine. “Yeah? I don’t. Fuck this shit. Too much math. Celsius, Fahrenheit, whatever the fuck. I grew up with sol. Not this.”
Rubén gestured toward the river. “Well, then maybe you should go home.”
Juan’s smile stretched. “Maybe.” He cracked his knuckles. “But first we’ve got some business.”
Rubén’s hand clenched tighter around the gun’s grip. “You don’t want to do this.”
Juan sighed and shook his head. “Ah, but look, that’s where you’re wrong, mi pana. I don’t want to do this. But I have to do this.” He pointed to the men behind him. “They have to feel like I’m still leading. That I finish what I start.”
“You’re not in control,” Rubén said. “Maduros’s men are. And they’re using you like they use everybody.”
Juan didn’t blink. The smile remained, except something hardening inside it. “Doesn’t matter. In two, you’re gonna be part of the river. Maybe the Allegheny. Maybe the Thames. Maybe the fucking Styx.”
Rubén pulled the Glock.
Juan was faster.
A fist in the ribs, a grip like iron. The gun fell from Rubén’s hand and landed in the snow with a dull thump.
Juan shoved him.
Hard.
Rubén stumbled back. His foot landed on a patch of ice and then—
Air.
Cold.
Nothing.
He broke through the frozen river. Ice fragmented around him like glass, slicing his skin. Water consumed him, a vise squeezing his chest, a hunk of iron pulling him under.
Two minutes.
Through the water’s distortion, he saw Juan turn to his men.
“Ni dos minutos,” he laughed. “I’m telling you, I’m a professor of shipwreckology.”
They laughed with him, those chucklers in the snow. And then one of them patted him on the back, too roughly, too intimately.
Juan’s smile flickered.
Then, he was airborne.
Shoved, the same way he had shoved Rubén.
His arms flailed; his mouth opened in a curse or a scream—
And then—
Splash.
Two bodies now, sinking.
Two men lost to the depths.
Except—
Except—
Rubén was no longer in Pittsburgh.
He gasped and coughed and broke the surface of the water, pulling himself up onto a bank.
He sank to his knees and staggered back to his feet, soaked to the bone and the world around him shifting, spinning.
No city lights. No bridges.
Just mist.
And ahead, a long and winding road.
Men shuffling barefoot, soles torn and bloody, backs bent under unseen loads.
He knew this place.
He had dreamed of it.
St. Patrick’s Purgatory.
The other side of the world.
The other side of the veil.
And there at his feet, smiling and pointing to the walls around him, was St. Patrick himself.
They were covered in words.
No—
Not words.
Intentions. Promises.
The things men promised they’d do. The stuff men swore they would never do.
And the fire licking at the walls consumed them, one by one.
Juan el Cubano was gone.
The gang was gone.
The river was gone.
Only the path remained.
Rubén took a breath.
And he started walking.
