Magnolia by Carolina Garcia-Aguilera

Author:Carolina Garcia-Aguilera [Garcia-Aguilera, Carolina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-625675-45-3
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE ENCOUNTER:

“Magnolia, this is going to be a first for you,” Anita declared. “Jairo wants you to come to the Miami Fronton to watch him play before the encounter with him.”

Jairo would not be the first client to request that I meet with him where he played. Most of them wanted to meet either at the sports facility or at a hotel, but he’d be the first to ask that I be there in the stands cheering before we got together. Usually, I kept up with sporting events by watching them on TV and through the sports pages like everyone else. I had decided early on that not being there, observing my athletes as they competed was one more way to keep from getting involved in any way with them. But going to watch this one game wouldn’t hurt anything. It just meant more hours to bill to Oona, more money for me. Plus it just might be fun. “When?”

“Tonight. He’s playing both singles and doubles,” Anita informed me. “Doors at the Fronton open at seven.”

I’d never been to the Miami Fronton before, so I wasn’t familiar with the layout of the building or the rules of the game for that matter, but I was confident I could figure those out. The more I thought about it, the more I decided I was going to have a good time with this.

In any case, I was already having fun: Oona had promised to give me the equivalent of combat pay and a bonus if I succeeded in keeping Jairo out of trouble until the hearing for his green card, which, I guess, was fair enough. The kid must have been really important to Oona for her to lay out so much cash on his behalf. God only knows what the marriage must have cost. Green card spouses are expensive; they put dowries to shame.

Oona told me that Jairo had made it to round two of the Florida Cup, apparently quite an achievement, and the fact that he had done this before his twentieth birthday had made it all the more meaningful. A player named Joey had long been considered to be the greatest American jai-alai player ever, and now people were starting to refer to Jairo as the next Joey.

Just as Oona had advised, I tried to put out of my mind the circumstances surrounding Jairo’s marriage, but somehow I kept coming back to it. A marriage like that was illegal, and it was best that I had as little knowledge about it as possible, especially since I suspected Oona had been instrumental in facilitating it. For this much risk, Jairo had better be the Muhammad Ali, Lance Armstrong, Michael Phelps, and Babe Ruth of jai alai; otherwise, it sure as hell was not worth it. After 9/11, Homeland Security, understandably, did not fool around.

It was a well-known fact that such a marriage was extremely risky for all concerned. To begin with, if it were judged by the authorities to be

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