The app pinged at 2:12 p.m., a ride out of Barra Funda, drop-off in Pinheiros. I'd been parked for ten minutes in the shade of an overpass, eating a cold pastel I'd bought three blocks back, and the ping caught me mid-bite. I took it anyway. A slow Monday is a slow Monday.
The pickup address was right in front of the Criminal Courthouse. That didn't surprise me — people flow out of that building all day: lawyers in badly cut suits, defendants' relatives with that look of someone who spent the night in a plastic chair, a reporter working the courthouse beat, smoking on the sidewalk. What isn't common is a passenger who doesn't say a single word getting in.
She got in through the back door, sat in the middle of the seat, seatbelt on, everything by the book, except her face belonged to someone who wasn't there. Wasn't anywhere, really. Eyes open, fixed on the headrest in front of her, hands one over the other in her lap, like someone praying without praying.
It took me a second to place the face. Then another second to be sure. It was her — Isadora's mother.
It had been about eight months since the case had dropped out of the news, but in my head it had never really left. A sixteen-year-old girl, robbed and stabbed to death at the entrance of the building where she lived, in Pinheiros, by two young men who, it later came out, had never been arrested for anything before. First-time offenders. And that, as it happened, was what saved them: first offense, clean record, plus the lawyer their family hired — one of those guys who shows up on daytime TV talking about "due process" in a voice genuinely offended by the existence of prison. The result was a sentence that barely covered the time the two had already spent in pretrial detention. They walked. I remember the headline: "Teen's killers walk free after sentencing." I remember it because I was furious, and I didn't even know the girl.
"Good afternoon," I said, quietly, more to test whether she was awake than out of politeness.
It took her a moment to look at me. When she did, there was a nod, almost imperceptible, the kind you give when you don't have the energy for anything more.
I should have left it alone. If there's one thing I've learned driving for Uber, it's that a quiet passenger wants to stay quiet, and I've always respected that, because I don't like passengers who insist on conversation when I don't want it either. But something about her silence was different from ordinary silence. It was a heavy silence, the kind that seems about to crack.
"Are you..." I started, and stopped, because I didn't know how to finish the sentence without it sounding intrusive.
"I'm Isadora's mother," she finished for me, without my having asked the name. As if she were already used to being identified that way, by her dead daughter's name, and had decided it was easier to just say it than wait for someone to guess.
"I remember the case," I said, and regretted it instantly, because "I remember the case" is the kind of thing you say about a soccer match, not about someone's daughter. "What happened was outrageous. The sentence, I mean."
She didn't answer right away. I watched the traffic on the Marginal crawling by in the mirror and thought maybe she'd closed the conversation for good. But after a good thirty seconds, she spoke, in a voice strangely neutral, like someone describing the weather:
"Did you know there's a service called Vengeance, Inc.?"
I thought I'd misheard.
"Sorry?"
"Vengeance, Inc.," she repeated, slowly, as if trying the words in her mouth again to see if they still had the same effect. "A man approached me outside the courthouse this morning. Well dressed. Didn't look like a criminal at all. Gave me a card. Just a cell number and that name on it. He said that, if I wanted, the two men who killed my daughter would 'stop being a bother.' That was the phrase he used. Stop being a bother. For a price he called 'modest.'"
I turned the radio down a little — it was on one of those instrumental stations I play when I don't know who I'm about to pick up — and stayed quiet for a while, trying to decide whether this was a tasteless joke, the delirium of grief, or the truth. São Paulo had already taught me not to rule out any of the three.
"And did you believe him?" I finally asked.
"I don't know." She looked out the window. We were passing Pacaembu, the white, empty stadium on the right. "I walked around all morning. Went into a diner, ordered a coffee, didn't drink it. Went to São Geraldo church, sat inside for forty minutes staring at the altar, not praying anything. Then, I don't know why, I went back to the courthouse. Called the Uber."
"And the card?"
"It's here." She opened her purse, took out a small white rectangle of paper, no logo, no address, just a phone number printed in a plain font, like it had come out of some corner print shop, and underneath, in block letters: VENGEANCE, INC. She held the card between two fingers, turned toward me, but didn't hand it over, the way someone shows evidence in a courtroom without letting go of it. "He said I had until tomorrow to decide. After that, the price goes up."
There was something of a scam about it — it smelled like a scam — but it also had a perverse logic that made too much sense to be only that. I'd heard, vaguely, in a driver's WhatsApp group, someone talking about "people who disappeared" after cases like this one, defendants who walked free and later turned up dead, and nobody could ever quite explain what had happened. I'd always figured it was just bored-driver folklore, the kind of story that grows bigger from car to car like a snowball. But there, with the card in front of me, it took on a different weight.
"Do you think I should call?" she asked, suddenly, watching me in the mirror.
That's not a question you expect from a passenger. I went a good five seconds without knowing what to say, eyes going from the traffic to the mirror and back.
"I don't know if I'm the right person to answer that," I finally said, with a sincerity that surprised even me.
"No one is," she answered. "That's why I asked you. A stranger. Someone who won't judge me tomorrow, and won't be in my life after today."
There was a cruel, correct logic to that. I'm a confessional booth for a lot of people, driving for Uber — I've heard confessions of infidelity, bankruptcy, a jailed son, a mother with Alzheimer's. People tell strangers things they wouldn't tell their own husbands. But no one had ever asked me if they should have someone killed.
"You're thinking about killing two men," I said, trying, without success, to keep any judgment out of my voice.
"I'm thinking about getting justice," she corrected, unfazed. "Justice, capital J, already had its chance. It gave the sentence it gave. I sat through the whole trial, you know. I saw the two of them laughing in the courthouse hallway, the day the most serious charges against them were dismissed. Laughing. One of them even took a selfie with the lawyer."
We were quiet for a while, the car heading down Rebouças, the sun hitting the glass buildings sideways. I tried to imagine what I would do in her place and couldn't — my imagination simply refused, like an engine that won't turn over.
"Do you have other children, besides Isadora?" I asked, steering the question elsewhere, not quite sure why.
"No. She was an only child." Her voice wavered for the first time, a small tremor that vanished as fast as it came. "My husband died three years ago, cancer. I was left with just her. And now I'm left alone."
I didn't say anything. Sometimes the right thing is to say nothing.
"You know what keeps me up at night?" she went on. "It's not the anger. I can manage the anger, more or less. It's thinking that if I call that number, I become just like them. I become someone who orders a killing. And if I don't call, I know I'll spend the rest of my life seeing those two men walking around free, maybe even living in my neighborhood one day, in line at the bank."
We reached Pinheiros. I stopped the car on the street the app indicated, in front of a gray-faced building with a glass lobby. She sat there one more second, looking at the card in her hand, then put it back in her purse, slowly, the way you holster a gun.
"Thank you for listening," she said, hand already on the door handle.
"I hope you make the right decision," I said, without actually knowing which one that would be.
She smiled, a short smile with no joy in it at all, and got out. She closed the door with excessive, almost delicate care, and went into the building without looking back.
I gave her five stars, out of habit, and moved on to the next ride. But I spent the rest of the day thinking about that conversation, turning it over, trying to decide if it had been the nonsense of a grieving woman or if there really was, hidden somewhere in the streets of São Paulo, a service that sold deaths to order for families desperate with a system that didn't work.
The next evening, I was eating dinner in front of the TV, half-watching the tabloid crime show, when the host announced, in that tone of urgency he uses even for traffic accidents, that two men had been found dead on a vacant lot on the east side. Shot. An execution, according to police. Then came the photo of the two of them — and I put my fork down.
It was them. Isadora's killers. I recognized them instantly, despite the beard one of them had grown, because I'd seen their faces splashed across headlines months before. The reporter said police were investigating a link to organized crime, "possibly a settling of scores," and moved on to the next story like turning the page of some ordinary book.
I sat staring at the screen for a good while after the news had already ended.
The next day, Wednesday, I was driving around Pinheiros again — good area for short rides, I always work it in the afternoon — when the app pinged again. Pickup two blocks from where I was. I went to get it.
When I stopped the car and checked the mirror to confirm the name, my heart jumped before she'd even gotten in. It was her again. The same woman. Isadora's mother.
She got in, sat down, and for a second we just held each other's gaze in the mirror, saying nothing, as if each of us were waiting for the other to say the thing we both already knew.
"You saw the news," she said, finally. Not a question.
"I did," I answered, and couldn't, no matter how hard I tried, keep the word neutral.
She opened her purse, took out a fifty-real bill, and held it out to me over the seat, even though the ride had barely started, even though the fare on the app was much less than that.
"Keep the change," she said, in a voice that trembled in a new way, different from the tremor two days before. That wasn't a tremor of grief. It was something else. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have talked to you like that, the other day. I shouldn't have put that in your head."
"You didn't put anything in my head that wasn't already there," I said, trying, without much success, to sound reassuring.
She didn't even let me finish the ride. She opened the door right there, in the middle of the block, far from the destination marked on the app, and got out almost running, without looking back, with the look of someone ashamed to stay one more second in the car. I sat there, hazard lights on, watching her disappear around the corner.
I canceled the ride on the app — she'd never reached the destination, no point charging her — and sat there a moment longer, looking at the fifty in my hand, not quite sure what to do with it, or with what had just happened.
That apology hadn't been an apology for having burdened me with a heavy conversation. It had been something else — the kind of apology you make when you're afraid you've turned someone into an accomplice without meaning to, just by having spoken loud enough near an ear that listened.
I put the bill in my wallet, without spending it, something I never did before or since with any other money I made driving. I kept it with me for weeks, like one of those objects you don't know whether to throw away or keep forever, because it had become proof of something — I just wasn't sure of what.
I never saw Vengeance, Inc. written on any card again. Never saw Isadora's mother again, either, though I'll admit that for a good while, every ride that took me near the Criminal Courthouse made me look twice at whoever got in.
Sometimes, driving at night, with the city in that strange silence that only exists after midnight, I think about her. I wonder if she really did call that number, if there really is such a company — if that's even the word for it — that sells that kind of service to people desperate enough to pay for it. I wonder if those two men died because of her, or if it was a coincidence, some settling of accounts among criminals that had nothing to do with Isadora or her mother.
I don't know the answer. I'll probably never know. But there's one thing I do know, and I've carried it with me since that Wednesday: there's a certain way of looking in the rearview mirror that only guilt can explain, and that was exactly the way she looked at me before getting out of the car, running, as if she were fleeing something that had, for a long time now, stopped being just a possibility.