The Beasts of Juarez

by R. B. Schow

  She opened her Uber app and within a few minutes a very nice North African man picked them up in a 3-series BMW. He did a double-take at this beautiful blonde, but then he frowned as he looked at Atlas—the bald-headed thug in the back seat.

  Instead of going to the prison, however, Cira gave the Uber driver a different address, one Atlas didn’t recognize.

  When they arrived, Cira said, “Get out.”

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  “Hurry up or you’ll miss it,” she said while handing him the phone they had recovered from Keegan White’s house.

  He was just about to ask for clarification when he saw a familiar car driving toward them. Only when he saw the driver did his heart started thumping again. God, he couldn’t take much more of this.

  The driver started to slowly pass by him but then she saw him and stopped. She rolled her window down, the look on her face priceless. “Atlas?” she asked. “Is that really you?”

  “Hi, Jade,” he replied.

  “How…?”

  “I can’t stay but a moment but I want to show you something, and then I want to tell you something.”

  She couldn’t seem to speak, so he opened the phone Cira had given him, found the photo of Alabama that had become his favorite, and showed it to her. Seeing her daughter so clearly, she broke into tears.

  “Our little girl,” she said with a shaky voice. Tears drained onto her cheeks and her hands trembled.

  “She’s alive,” Atlas said. “We don’t have her yet, but this is real, and it’s recent.”

  “How did you get this?” she asked.

  “This one’s a little tough to look at, but you’ll appreciate the nature of it after your stomach settles.” He scrolled to the most recent photo and showed it to her. It was the photo of Keegan’s head split in two.

  She turned away fast. “What the hell, Atlas?”

  “This is the man who took her. For all that he has done to destroy our family, the life Alabama could have had, the life we could have had…he deserved this.”

  “What if they catch you?” she asked.

  “I’m in solitary confinement at this very moment, Jade. Besides, I’m already in there for three life sentences. What are they going to do, give me a fourth, fifth, or sixth life sentence?”

  “When you said you were resourceful, I didn’t think that…how is this even possible? How are you out right now?”

  “I told you before I’m going to find her. I meant it, Jade. Come hell or high water, dead or alive, I’m going to find her.”

  She looked him over and he knew he was beaten pretty badly. “I have to say, I actually like this new look of yours.”

  Grinning, rubbing the stubble on his head, he said, “That’s because you’ve been with a pretty boy for too long now.”

  It was her turn to smile. Before he knew it, she reached out of the car and pulled his head toward her. Slowly, passionately, she kissed him on the lips. When she pulled back, she said, “There’s too big of a place in my heart for you, Atlas Hargrove. I still love you, even after everything you’ve done, and even after everything I’ve done.”

  “Just keep that heart of yours open,” he said, worried that Cira had now seen him kiss two other women in the last twenty-four or so hours.

  “Even if we don’t know what the future holds for us?” she asked.

  He scrolled to one more picture, a photo of Alabama in the backyard eating at a picnic table. The photo looked like it was a few years old based on Alabama’s age. In the picture, she was sitting by herself, smiling slightly for the camera the way she did when she was shy. The first time he’d seen it, the sight of her like this just about broke his heart. He needed to see it, to hope that one day—if he could get her back—she could smile again. Jade needed to see this, too. She needed to know it was time to start fighting for her again.

  Jade started to cry, and then she said, “She’s really alive.”

  He nodded, solemn, not judging, just hoping.

  “Do you really think you can find her?”

  “I know I can.”

  “When you find the person who has her, make them pay the way you made the other guy pay.”

  “I plan on checking that box, love.”

  She looked up at him, something in her gaze changing. “I’ll come to see you, Atlas.”

  “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it,” he said. “Because one day of waiting, feels more like a week when you’re in the joint.”

  “I mean it,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “Are you headed back now?”

  He nodded, a sad smile breaking over his face. “Remember to keep your heart open, Jade. Please, this time, keep it open.”

  She tried, unsuccessfully, to forestall the inevitable rush of tears. Speaking in Russian, she looked him deep in his eyes and said, “A heart only really knows one other heart.”

  “That’s why my heart will forever belong to you,” he said in the same language.

  After she wiped her eyes, said goodbye, and drove off, he climbed into the car with Cira who promptly said, “I’m officially jealous of her.”

  “She has that effect on other women,” Atlas said, emotional.

  “Are you ready?” the driver asked.

  “Yes,” Atlas replied.

  “You still love her, don’t you?” Cira asked.

  “With every fiber of my being,” he said, way too tired to lie.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  LEOPOLD WENTWORTH

  The jet made a slow descent into Blacksburg, Virginia, the private landing strip clear except for the black Range Rover waiting nearby. He expected to see the usual driver when he walked down the jet’s stairs with Kiera, but instead, he saw Isabelle waiting outside the sleek SUV. To his surprise, Savannah Swann occupied the driver’s seat.

  “Why did you bring her with you?” he asked Isabelle while looking at Savannah. Savannah was looking at him, too.

  The older woman smiled a wicked grin. “I just wanted to see you squirm.”

  “Well, it’s working.”

  “What I can’t figure out is if you’re terrified of her, or if you’ve discovered love at first sight.”

  Still looking at the amethyst-eyed girl, he said, “I think it’s a mixture of both.”

  Kiera went and got in the back seat, rolled down the window, and looked at Leopold with that same dead-eyed stare.

  When he glanced from Kiera to Savannah and back to Kiera again, the bald-headed assassin did something that floored him completely, something he never expected—she winked at him.

  He stood there, dumbstruck, but feeling good all of a sudden.

  Isabelle turned and looked at Kiera. “What has your cheeks blushing so bright, Leopold?”

  “I think Kiera just smiled at me,” he replied.

  “Don’t bond with her,” Isabelle said, which Kiera heard clearly. The statement prompted in the girl a shallow frown followed by a look of sadness.

  Leopold managed to pull his gaze away from Kiera long enough to tell Isabelle, “I’ll do whatever the hell I want with her, thank you very much.”

  For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t worried that Kiera would get the job done. He was worried that he wouldn’t see her again. Maybe he was developing a fondness for her. That would be unexplainable but fine by him.

  “Whatever she was today,” Isabelle warned, “she won’t be that way the next time you see her.”

  “You should let her talk freely next time I get her,” he said. “This crap about her not being able to speak…I’m all done with it. She has a voice and she should be able to use it.”

  In the driver’s seat, he thought he saw Savannah smile.

  “She has had those permissions for months now,” Isabelle said. She reached up and kissed Leopold’s cheek. “You look like a little boy when you’re stymied. It’s almost cute. Almost.”

  “Is it too late to ask you to be a mother figure to me?” he asked, knowing she g
ot a rise out of him because that’s what she wanted.

  “No,” she said, looking back. “Ask me again next time.”

  And with that, she got in the Range Rover and the three women drove away. Once he was back on the plane, Leopold said to the pilot, “Wake me when we get there, please.”

  They landed at San Francisco International later that day. Leopold picked up a car in short-term parking, something a lot less flashy and much slower than the Audi S6, and then he drove it to the address set into his phone.

  Before he arrived, he put on dark sunglasses, a black balaclava, and a skater’s hat—the kind of hat that had a flat bill that concealed everything from the top of his sunglasses upward.

  Darkness fell upon the neighborhood and that’s when he got out of the car, went around the back of the house, and quietly broke a window. When no alarms were set off, no dogs began barking, and no neighbors started snooping around, he made his way inside.

  He sat at the kitchen table and waited. Forty minutes later, he heard the garage door open, a car pull in, and then the garage door closed. Moments later, a door opened into the house and Leopold heard the man he was waiting for walk inside. This same man flipped on the kitchen lights and looked directly at Leopold. By then, Leopold had taken off the hat and the glasses, and he’d let the balaclava puddle down around his neck.

  “You,” Warden Dicampli hissed.

  “I warned you, Fabian,” Leopold said, a gun with a sound suppressor in his hand. “I warned you and I spelled out the consequences, did I not?”

  “You think that just because you have money, power, and a gun you can pull everyone else’s strings to suit your needs?”

  “I looked into your kid, your wife, even your dog, and do you know what I found? They’re all better off without you. You messed with Cira and Atlas. People’s lives were at stake and you cost us half a day. In that time, a sixteen-year-old girl was taken to another country, killed for a snuff film using a chainsaw, and then stuffed into garbage bags and dumped at the front entrance to the US Embassy in Prague.”

  “Jesus,” he said, shocked.

  “We might have been able to stop that if you would have just done what I told you to do, but you got cute. You suddenly thought that what you were about was far more important than what I told you we were about.”

  “You can’t put that crap on me,” Dicampli hissed.

  “I just did, you fucking dick.”

  Leopold then pulled the trigger twice, both bullets crashing into Dicampli’s chest. The warden staggered back, put a hand out to grab something that wasn’t there, then fell down and landed on his ass.

  Leopold stood up and said, “My team wanted me to get my hands dirty.” He put the gun to Dicampli’s head and pulled the trigger a third time. “Well, now they’re dirty.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  ATLAS HARGROVE

  One month later… As Atlas sat in his cell contemplating his life, his future, and all of the successes and failures he’d had since he first entered prison, a package arrived for him. This particular package didn’t come through the regular channels. Charles brought it to him when he was passing out books.

  “The new warden would never allow this, but sometimes things slip through the cracks,” the Ohio native said. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

  Atlas looked at the package then said, “Yeah, for sure.”

  “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither of them,” Charles grinned. “Chickens and eggs don’t have dicks.”

  After belting out a worthy laugh, Atlas asked, “So do you have any word on my new celly?”

  “Nothing so far,” he said.

  With an appreciative nod, Atlas said, “Thanks for always having my back.”

  “Anytime,” he said with a wink. “Be you, brother.”

  When he was gone, Atlas opened the package, saw the cell phone, and smiled. He turned it on and saw only one icon: an Images file. He opened the file and found only one folder: Alabama.

  Seeing this had his heart racing. He took a breath, his finger hovering over the screen. And then he pressed the icon.

  Inside this folder were dozens of pictures of his daughter, all pictures that had him falling into his bed, weeping, unable to speak. He looked through each and every photo, his eyes sopping wet. Seeing her as she progressed in age had him falling in love with her all over again. She was so sweet, so innocent, so broken. Never before had he loved anyone more than he did this young girl, his only child.

  At the end of the photo album, however, there were a couple of photos he didn’t expect to see—pictures that shouldn’t have been there. Their very existence meant that he’d been caught on someone’s surveillance camera.

  One of the pictures was of him kissing Jade. The other was her face just before she said goodbye. This was perhaps the most beautiful picture of his soon-to-be ex-wife that he’d ever had. Leopold hadn’t found Alabama just yet, but in a way, the man brought him his family, and that being the case he couldn’t be that bad.

  Somewhere inside of him, Leopold Wentworth had a big heart he kept hidden from others. But he’d shown Atlas compassion and generosity, and for that, he had Atlas’s loyalty as well as his respect. This, of course, had him thinking of Kiera and the thing she had said to him just before leaving.

  “The only thing more important than freedom is human connection,” she had said, her breath warm upon his ear. “I will miss you, Atlas Hargrove.”

  “I will miss you, too,” he said as he wiped his eyes.

  And with that, he started thinking about how he could get out of prison, not just for another job, but for the rest of his life.

  Chapter Fifty

  SYDNEY FOX

  Sydney Fox walked into her bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the bed with Santiago’s camera in hand. She had taken the camera from the house when they went back for whatever things of value they could find. Sitting on the bed beside her was her favorite picture of Callie. She cried as she looked at her daughter, and though she had come to loathe Camden for what he’d done, she cried for him as well. Leopold told her the entire truth about Camden and the Secretary of State. He even told her the fate of every single person who orchestrated this vile nightmare. She needed the closure. It helped to know why this occurred, but her family was still broken, the scars too deep to ever properly heal. One day at a time, though.

  After linking the camera to the large TV on her dresser, she swallowed hard and pushed PLAY for the fiftieth time. On the TV, she watched herself being violated by that foul, loathsome creature, Santiago Cardenas. Then she watched Atlas break in, shoot the cretin twice, and then cut her free. When she and Atlas dragged Santiago’s bleeding body around the front of the bed, her heart began to race. Moments later, she watched as she cut Santiago’s dick and balls off.

  When the Sydney Fox on the TV turned around and walked toward the camera, the Sydney Fox watching her hit pause so that she could study herself. There was a quiet rage in those eyes, a look of cold vengeance. She had slaughtered the man and it felt good. She was a murderer. She was an avenger.

  Inside, when she felt that hardened part of her wanting to go soft, to yield to the terror that had festered inside of her, she instead turned to that strong vengeful woman she had become and she embraced her. This was who she had to be for her two daughters now. This was who she had to be to never let something like this happen again.

  The men who did this to her, these beasts of Juárez, had awakened in her a ferociousness she had never known before. At first, she hated this new part of her, but then she came to embrace it.

  A knock on the bedroom door startled her. She shut off the TV and said, “Come in.”

  Maisie walked in, her big eyes wet and red. “I had another nightmare.”

  “Do you want to sleep with me again tonight?” Sydney asked.

  She nodded her head.

  Moments later, Zoey came in, too.r />
  “Would you like to sleep in here as well?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Smiling, she said, “Turn off the light, then.”

  Her daughter turned off the lights, and moments later, Sydney felt that second little body find her, curl into her, cling to her for dear life.

  As she lay in bed with her two children tucked safely against her, she reminded herself that she was safe with them, that they were together, and that no one could take them away from her again. With that soft reassurance, she closed her eyes and finally let herself drift off to sleep.

  THE END

  Join Atlas and the team on their next adventure in The Betrayal of Prague...

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