- -
- 100%
- +
He carefully stretched his hands up. His head itched. He had fleas but it was worth it because at least Torres had a plan. That wasn’t true, he had always had a plan, since the night he woke up in the jungle of Colombia, but now he had the means to execute his plan, thanks to a mangy flea-infested dog.
The bitch pushed her wet nose into his side.
“I don’t have anything for you tonight,” Torres apologized. He strained to stroke her but his hands would not reach. “Sorry, girl. I’ll save something for you tomorrow.” The dog seemed to understand. She lowered her head again, rubbing it along Torres’ face.
“That’s my good girl. You’re a clever girl, aren’t you?” The dog looked up at him with sad eyes. Torres moved his head back and forth so he was effectively petting her. “Good girl.”
Torres hadn’t given her a name. She was just “Girl”. He couldn’t give her a name when he knew what was going to happen to her.
She was his way out.
If he wanted to, Torres could have broken through his rusted chains, but there was nowhere to go. The cocaine fields were surrounded with landmines. They weren’t the kind he had seen in Iraq. These were more primitive but just as effective. The bombs here were loaded with shrapnel and human feces. If the nails didn’t get you, the shit would, days or weeks later when your wounds turned septic and poisoned you from within.
That is why he needed Girl. It had taken months for her to learn to trust him. It had happened slowly, excruciatingly so, a single scrap of food at a time and then a pet or stroke along her matted fur. And then, he was able to train her, all it took was time. Lucky for Torres, he had plenty of that.
After the dog had come, the guards had brought another prisoner.
Torres looked over at the whimpering boy chained to the tree across from him. He looked like he was about eighteen, twenty at the oldest, just a boy.
Torres had been alone for a long time, for over three years, he knew because he kept a tally carved on the trunk of his tree. Three years with no one to speak to but the guards and the mangy dog.
The guards always kept him separate from the other prisoners. Everyone else slept in a clearing at the other side of the fields. He couldn’t see them but he preferred it that way. When he was well enough to work the fields he saw the other prisoners, poor miserable fuckers, all of them, with all their crying and praying and promising Christ they would be better if they ever got out.
Torres wanted to tell them all to shut up. Moaning just made it worse. But he didn’t because that would mean speaking to them and he wouldn’t. He wanted no part of them, the guards or the prisoners. He hated them both equally, the guards for the sadistic pleasure they took in beating prisoners until they pissed themselves and the prisoners for giving them the satisfaction of crying out when the lashings began.
The boy cried out again. Torres lifted his head. He wished the guards would take him back to the clearing. He needed to be with the other prisoners, where he could scream and cry.
“Please!” the boy screamed. “Please! Come back!’
Torres clamped his mouth shut to keep from telling him to shut the fuck up. No one was coming for him, or any of them.
“Please! Come back,” he screamed. A sob tore through his body, like an axe through a rotting carcass. His slim body shook with it. “Please!”
Torres closed his eyes and focused on the sound of the frogs. He could pick out the individual sounds, like an amphibian orchestra, the low resonant bass, reedy croaks, and then a higher silvery timbre.
But he couldn’t hear them tonight over the screams.
The screams turned to sobs and then finally a whimper.
*****
The boy was screaming again. Every night for a year it was the same: pleading screams that turned to tears and then finally an exhausted sleep.
If Torres could reach him, he would kill him.
He would do it when the boy finally lost himself to sleep. He would lay his forearm against his throat and press until the life drained out of him. The boy wouldn’t know it happened, he just wouldn’t wake up. There would be no more screaming then, no more suffering.
“Please!” the boy moaned.
Torres closed his eyes. He could feel his arm on his scrawny neck, pushing down until his frail body gave itself over to death. Five minutes, that is all it would take. If the boy knew, he would probably thank him, for giving him the only freedom he could hope to achieve.
The boy thrashed against his chains. A year and the boy still thought he could break free. Where the fuck did he think he was going to go?
“Stop pulling, you’re going to wear away your skin and you’ll never get back to the fields.”
“What?” The boy’s voice was pierced with shock. Torres never spoke to him, not even to tell him to shut up, so the boy had stopped trying to talk to him after a few weeks.
“Don’t pull on your chains. If your skin rips you’ll get an infection. Just lay still.”
“I can’t,” he whimpered. “I want to go home.”
Torres closed his eyes. The boy wasn’t going home. But Torres wouldn’t torture him further by telling him that. “Just close your eyes and think about your home. Think about everything waiting for you. Think about what you are going to do.” The boy was going to die here, either at the hands of a soldier, or an infection, or, if he were lucky, Torres would do it himself. Torres would provide him the only humane ending out of the three so he hoped for the boy’s sake he had the chance.
“I can’t,” he cried. “I can’t remember.” He started to cry again, sobs tearing through his slim body.
Torres adjusted himself so he would see him but it was too dark to see anything beyond a dark shadow. “Yes you can. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. You just got home. Who is there waiting for you?”
After a moment the boy responded. “My grandmother is there. She waited for me. She knew I would come home.”
“Good,” Torres encouraged. “She hugs you. Feel her arms around you. Everything is fine now, you are home. Feel it. She is happy you’re home and she makes you a big meal. What does she make you?”
“Pork with chili and fresh tortillas.”
“Good. Taste them. The meat is tender. Feel it melt in your mouth. Taste the sting of the chili. It is hot but it doesn’t burn it just makes your mouth warm. Can you taste it?”
“Yes,” the boy answered. His voice was eager, almost frantic with the need to believe.
“Good. Think about your grandmother. Think about being home.”
The boy was quiet for a long time. Torres thought he was finally asleep but eventually he asked. “What do you think about?”
Torres did not answer right away. The place he went to in his mind was private; it belonged to him alone. The tastes and smells were his. Sharing them would taint them, make them part of this ugliness. He wouldn’t do that. “Home,” he said simply.
“Who is waiting for you?”
Torres’ gut clenched. That was a question he only asked himself when he was strong enough for the answer. He wasn’t sure who was waiting, maybe no one, but he lied to himself and let himself see her. He saw the deep crevice between her eyes that appeared when she frowned. He felt himself rub his thumb over the deep ridge and felt it smooth as her face relaxed into a smile. He smelled the apple scent of her shampoo. He felt her arms wrap around his neck and heard her voice saying “welcome home”. He closed his eyes.
“Are you awake?” the boy asked.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think about?” he asked again.
This time he did answer because the boy would be dead soon. “My woman,” he answered.
“Is she pretty?”
Torres smiled. “She is beautiful.” He vaguely remembered that there was a time when he didn’t think she was pretty. He thought she was plain, now he could not remember for the life of him how he had been so blind. How had he not seen it all along? She was beautiful. Even when he tried to be objective, he could not think of a more beautiful woman.
“What is she like?”
His smile deepened, requiring muscles he had not used in a very long time. “She’s not very tall but you wouldn’t notice because she is strong. Pound for pound she could take most men. You wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of her. She has a right hook that could shatter a jaw.” He warmed when he remembered her punching him square in the face, or more to the point the frantic needy sex that followed.
“What’s her name?”
Torres hesitated. That part he wouldn’t share. That was his. She belonged to him alone. He wouldn’t share her. “I call her Gatita,” he said instead. “Because she reminds me of a wild cat.”
The boy seemed satisfied. No more questions followed and no more crying, just the cacophony of the nocturnal jungle coming to life.
Torres closed his eyes and thought about Beth, about holding her, about her smile, about her laugh. If he were lucky, he would dream about her. He didn’t very often but every night he thought about her and hoped he would.
It was almost time to make an escape. Girl was trained. He had one chance.
Tomorrow.
*****
His skin burned. The sun sat directly above him, radiating heat across his shoulders. Torres willed the sun not to move. Once the morning capitulated and let itself be conquered by the afternoon, his time in the fields would be over for the day. Coca leaves were supple in the morning when they were still wet. As the day wore on they dried and it became harder to pull them from the branch without tearing your skin in the process.
When he was first brought to the jungle, he had to wrap his hands in scraps of material to protect them. Even then, they blistered and bled but now he did it with his bare hands. It only hurt if he caught a branch the wrong way and it ripped off a callus, even then he rarely noticed until he saw the blood dripping from his hands.
It was worth it, the blisters and blood, just to feel the sun, but it was always over too soon and he was moved back into the jungle, under the dark canopy to continue the process of turning the simple coca leaf into the deadly white powder that entrapped millions.
A guard shouted that it was time for Torres to prepare yesterday’s leaves. They were dry now, ready for the powdered cement to be sprinkled over and then put into the 50-gallon drums and soaked in gasoline. That part wasn’t so different than his time in Los Zetas. They used 50-gallon drums and gasoline too – to burn bodies. At least the cocaine didn’t have the stench of burning flesh.
“El Capitan is coming. I think tomorrow. I heard them talking,” the boy said. He followed Torres around more closely than the dog. He couldn’t shit without the boy. He was by his side in the field, as they stood over the drums, and at night.
His name was Ignacio. Torres didn’t want to know his name, but he told him anyway. He also told him the name of his grandmother and his sister and the girl at the supermarket that Ignacio was sweet on. Torres didn’t give a fuck about any of it but he listened because the talking meant Ignacio had stopped crying at night. There was no more screaming just incessant talking. Occasionally Torres would nod but he wasn’t even sure that was necessary, Ignacio just wanted to talk.
“I think they’re scared. No one has ever seen him. What do you think he looks like?”
Torres shrugged his shoulders. There was always talk of El Capitan coming. The guards would get worried when a visit was imminent, the beatings would become more brutal, more frequent, but the time would come and go without an appearance. It was a cycle that played out every few months but Ignacio was too new to appreciate that El Capitan had the same chances of appearing as the Easter Bunny.
Like Ignacio, Torres had been anxious the first time he learned of an impending visit. He had not been able to sleep as he waited for the elusive leader to appear. Torres had waited a long time to come face to face with him. He knew him by another name: El Escorpion, but there was no doubt that it was the same man.
Torres wondered if he knew the DEA called him El Escorpion. He wouldn’t like it. He clearly had illusions of being a great military leader, that is why he called himself the captain and made his guards wear camouflage. They weren’t soldiers; they were gang members.
The time had come. All the other prisoners had been taken away to be fed. It was just Torres and Ignacio and the two guards that watched over them. Torres still wondered if he had made the right choice in asking that Ignacio be allowed to help him with the clean-up.
The job of dumping hundreds of gallons of toxic chemicals into the water supply belonged to Torres for no other reason than he was the strongest. He could lift the drums so he got to help destroy the fragile ecosystem of the Amazon. The chemicals had to go somewhere; making cocaine was a dirty business, so why not pour them directly into the river? It wasn’t like mothers got water for their babies out of the rivers, or farmers got water for their fields…but actually they did. And it was all poisoned thanks to a demand for an addictive white powder.
He hadn’t told Ignacio his plan, he had only said his back hurt and he needed his help to dump the waste. It showed just how stupid the guards were that they thought nothing of Torres asking for the scrawny boy to help him. The prison camp was full of men but he would ask for the runt to help him? Idiots.
When it came to Ignacio, Torres had two choices: he could murder him in his sleep or he could take him with him. He couldn’t leave him behind. Leaving him to fend for himself would require a cruelty he didn’t have. He could shoot people at point-blank range, but he wouldn’t leave anyone to suffer. He might very well get the boy killed in the process, but at least he wasn’t leaving him behind.
Torres took out a piece of meat from his pocket and fed it to Girl. Her time had come. He gave her a quick pat on her head. She was a good dog.
He shot a backward glance at the guards. They were sitting on the ground smoking cigarettes. Their machine guns were slung behind their backs, out of the way. Torres patted his pockets, making sure he had everything. There was no point in trying if he didn’t have everything.
He needed to be fast. Speed was the only thing that separated him from freedom, that and hundreds of miles of jungle and several dozen landmines.
“Here,” he said to Ignacio. “Help me pick this up.” He pointed to a blue drum filled with chlorine. The gas burned when it hit the lungs. He was careful to turn his head to the side so as not to breathe it in directly.
The boy nodded. Together they bent to pick up the container. Torres waited until Ignacio’s fingers were below the drum and then he dropped it, crushing his fingers.
The boy screamed. Now was his moment. As he hoped, Ignacio’s cries were enough to distract the guards.
He pounced.
In an instant he was behind the first soldier. He took the man’s knife and slit his throat. He tried to scream but there was just a strangled gargle. Before the other soldier could react Torres was behind him. With one slash of the blade, his artery was cut. Blood spurted from his neck in pulses. Every beat of his heart brought him closer to death, and Torres closer to freedom.
Torres wiped the knife on his trousers and then slid it into his waist band. He may need it later. He searched through the soldiers’ pockets, taking everything he could find. There was no telling what he would need.
Ignacio continued to scream. Torres had to shut him up or the other guards would come.
“Stop,” Torres commanded.
The boy’s eyes were wide. His jaw shook.
He thought Torres was going to kill him too. Torres lifted his hands, palm out. “I’m not going to hurt you. Stop screaming or the guards will come and they’ll kill us both.”
The boy nodded his head. His mouth remained open like his body was not sure what to do next. His hands were still trapped under the drum.
“I’m going to move this off you. It will probably hurt more as your blood flow returns. Don’t scream. If you scream, you’re dead. Do you understand?” Torres did not specify who would be killing him if he screamed but they both knew it would be Torres. The boy would be dead before the soldiers even registered his cry.
The boy nodded.
Torres lifted the drum off him. Ignacio whimpered but he didn’t scream.
“Good. We’re getting out of here. Stay behind me. There are landmines everywhere around the coca fields. Don’t make a move unless I tell you. Do you understand?” he asked again. And again the boy nodded.
For once Ignacio was quiet, no screaming or crying or incessant chatter. If Torres had known all it would take was seeing two men murdered to shut him up, he may have been tempted to do it long before now.
Torres reached into his pocket and produced a long piece of string and a bolt. He made sure the bolt was firmly attached before he turned to Ignacio. “Follow me. Come on, Girl.” He motioned to the dog whose ears went up when she heard her name.
Torres ran towards the coca fields. There was no need to need to tread lightly until they reached the far side. He only looked behind him once to make sure Ignacio was following him. If he did something stupid that would get them caught, Torres would pull out the knife and slit his throat.
They ran until his lungs burned, Girl beside them. Torres pulled out another piece of meat and gave it to her. “Sit.” Torres surveyed the land that lay ahead of him. The most treacherous part would be the hundred feet that surrounded the coca field. After that, they would hit jungle again, and the IEDs would be less of a fear.
Torres took the bolt and threw it, holding the end of the string so he would not lose it. Once it hit the ground, he slowly dragged it back to trip any wires attached to the landmines. Once he had pulled the bolt back they were ready to move. “Go,” he said to Girl.
The dog ran ahead, stopping in the exact spot the bolt had fallen.
“Good girl.”
Torres turned to Ignacio. “Stay behind me.”
“OK.”
The first step was the hardest, when Torres’ stride took him from the safety of the coca fields to the uncharted periphery, but after that he was committed. There was no question: they were going.
When they reached Girl, Torres through the bolt again, repeating the process. It was painstaking; they only gained another ten feet with each treacherous cycle.
“They’re going to come for us,” Ignacio whimpered.
Torres shook his head. “We have an hour. They won’t look for the guards until they don’t show up for the handover.” He had planned it. This escape had been months, no, years in the making. First was training Girl, and then he had to find the bolt and string. He would have preferred metal wire, but that was in short supply in the jungle. The hardest part of the plan was getting the guards to trust him enough that their guns were not always trained on him, that part had taken years.
They were right to be wary of him.
“But,” Ignacio began again.
“Shut up,” Torres snapped.
He pulled the string back slowly. Again the ground was clear. But just in case, he had Girl. “Go,” he said.
“I can hear them,” Ignacio whimpered.
Torres shook his head. “You don’t. That’s just your mind fucking with you. Stay focused. They’re not looking for us yet.”
Ignacio began to cry. It was a quiet pathetic sound like he was trying to swallow the sobs. Torres put his hand on the knife. The blade was already sticky with drying blood.
“Keep walking,” Torres commanded.
“I can’t.”
“We’re almost back to jungle. It will be safe there.” He was lying of course. There could be landmines anywhere. But he would tell Ignacio anything to shut him up.
“I hear them!”
Torres’ head snapped round. “You don’t.” He spoke as calmly as he could. He didn’t want to kill Ignacio; he was just a kid. But he would. “Keep walking. Follow my footsteps. Put your feet exactly where I put mine.”
Ignacio’s lip trembled.
“No. No. Focus. We are getting out of here. We are going home. We have people waiting that love us; that want us back. We need to get back for them. Your grandmother. Tell me what your grandmother is going to make for dessert.”
“I can’t.” His face crumbled.
“Yes you can. We have twenty feet left. Stay strong. Is your grandmother going to make flan? Or maybe a tres leches cake.” What Hispanic grandmother didn’t have a recipe for those desserts?
“I can’t.” Ignacio began to shake. “I can’t.”
Before Torres could stop him, Ignacio began running for the jungle.
“Fuck.” Torres should have killed him. He was going to die anyway and at least Torres would have made it painless.
Ignacio was almost back to the jungle when an IED exploded.
“Fuck!” Torres screamed again as he ran to the boy. Fucking idiot!
Ignacio’s screams reverberated through Torres’ chest. They were a guttural sound; unlike anything the boy had produced before and unlike anything Torres had heard before. Except in Iraq…
“Oh, fuck. What did you do?” Torres dropped to his knees. There was blood everywhere. Girl barked madly.
“Oh, fuck,” Torres said again. It was Ignacio’s leg. It had been blown clean off, just above the knee. No, clean wasn’t the right word, it was messy as fuck, bits of bone and muscle hung off him with nails and shit imbedded into what was left.
He screamed louder and the dog matched the intensity with her bark. They were going to get caught. Torres reached into his waist. In seconds he cut the dog’s throat before he turned to Ignacio.
The boy was as good as dead. The explosion hadn’t killed him; the human feces in the bomb meant the wound would be septic in days if he did not bleed to death first. Ignacio was going to die. How he died was up to Torres.
Chapter Three
The room was cold. It was August in Texas but Beth wished she had a coat. She could not stop shivering. Her whole body shook with it, even her fingers. She pushed her hands into the pockets of her suit pants to keep them still.
Was there a reason morgues were always in the basement? Like coroners’ jobs weren’t depressing enough, they got stuck in the icy bowels of buildings. This wasn’t her first morgue or her first body. She was somewhat of a professional at this point. When she first started at the DEA she could not even look at crime scene photos without flinching. She vomited when she had to identify her first body…and her second one…and all of them until she met Torres. She stopped flinching at photos when he left. She had no idea if the two events were related, but she no longer felt like she was going to be sick when she saw a dead body. She was hardened but not apathetic. She still wondered about their lives and the families they had left behind, she just didn’t feel anything any more.
“I haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?” Alan smiled at her over his bifocals. He had a clipboard in one hand and a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee in the other. Beth no longer questioned how he could casually have a cup of coffee amongst the corpses. She could do the same, honestly now it just reminded her she really wanted another cup of coffee.
“I’m good. I have been more focused on money laundering these days. How about you?”
Beth was at a morgue most months. Running drugs was a dangerous occupation, a lot of the men ended up here or in morgues in other border towns.
“Good. Good. My youngest just graduated.”
“Longhorn?”
“That’s right. Good memory.”
Not really. This was Texas, there was a good chance he would be a Longhorn. “Excellent. What are his plans?” Small talk, surrounded by dead people… She really had grown. Once upon a time she didn’t do small talk. She was in a hurry then, racing for a final destination. She didn’t have time for small talk then, but she wasn’t in a hurry any more. Days passing just meant Alejandra getting older and her mom’s condition getting worse.