Taming Cross

by Ella James

  My heart leaps. Guadalupe Victoria is where Priscilla and Jim Gunn took Lizzy and I. “You’ve heard of her? You’re pretty confident she’s there?”

  He shrugs. “Most people have heard of this Missy. The Cientos Cartel is nothing to play with.”

  I nod, trying to match my expression to his reverent one, but I’m too worked up. I tap my foot under the table. “Can you tell me anything about the convent?”

  Carlos glances behind me, and then he slowly smiles. “Yes. You are never going to see it.” I grunt as I feel the air shift behind me, and something glass breaks over my head.

  Sometimes I think about writing a book.

  How to Wreck Your Life in Two Years or Less, by Meredith Kinsey.

  As Wednesday afternoon shines hot and sunny down on the convent, and I do my paperwork for the last time, I can't help but think about what happened to me. What I did to myself, and what other people did to me.

  How much of the blame is mine, I wonder. If I die tomorrow, will this fate be one I chose, or was it chosen for me? I remember the quandary from high school Sunday school class. Predetermination. If God knew our lives before he made them, how can a good and loving God choose only some people to be his chosen ones, the ones who go to Heaven when they die? And if he didn't choose, how is he all knowing? All deciding?

  It just can't be.

  I only know one thing for sure: I wasn’t chosen. There's no way I am. So if I die, I guess I'm on my way to Hell. It doesn’t matter how many Hail Marys I said here.

  The pain of the blow shoots me up out of my seat. I round on the guy behind me as I reach into my pocket for the Taser. Before I can pull it out, the goon socks me in the jaw, and I see stars. I feel hands on my shoulders, the hardness of the bench under my ass. Something glints in the low light, and Carlos’s face is stretched into a big grin.

  “Priscilla told me to expect you.”

  I blink my eyes a few times, still clutching the Taser, and I realize the glint I saw was Carlos’s gun. He’s holding it out toward me, his hand resting on the table as he points the nose at my chest.

  “You can come with me to meet Jesus, or I can kill you now.”

  I cough a little, tasting blood. “You’d really kill me in the middle of a club?”

  “It’s my cousin’s club.” He shrugs. “Sometimes people die here.”

  My heart speeds up like I’ve been hit with an epi pen and I glance around behind me for the other guy. He’s gone.

  I can’t see where, but I bet he’ll be back. For now, it’s just me and Carlos and his gun. I’m probably going to die here, I realize. Then an image of my last few months flits through my mind, and I vow that I won’t. I didn’t suffer all that shit to die in a sleazy Mexican strip joint.

  Carlos is giving me his poker face, still pointing his gun my way, when I lunge forward and smash my Taser into his throat. As I move, I twist out of the line of fire, but his fingers jolt along with the rest of him; he never even pulls the trigger. He slumps face-first over the table, his gelled head landing in an ash tray.

  I grab his gun, then glance around. No one seems to have noticed. The girls are still dancing. Men are still smoking, laughing, and cat-calling.

  Carlos twitches once more.

  Fuck.

  I inhale, exhale. Focus on the feeling of the floor below my feet and try to ground myself, the way Akemi taught me during that long, long week when I first learned to meditate. Then I stick Carlos’s gun and its huge magazine into my pants and glance around again. No one watching me. Carlos is still twitching a little, moaning. He looks like he drank too much, not like I just shocked the shit out of him.

  I need to get out of here, fast. There’s an exit over to my left, beside a bathroom sign. I could run right now, but first…I kneel under the table, heart pounding in my ears, and reach inside Carlos’s pockets until I feel something hard and square. My hand is shaking as I work it out, then drop the phone in my pocket beside mine.

  “Thanks,” I mutter.

  I get up and walk quickly to the exit door. When I feel a rush of dry air on my face, I lunge into a run and don’t stop until I mount the bike—left leg first, the way I do it fastest. For once, it actually works.

  The entire time I’m trying to get my left arm in that damn band, I’m sweating bullets. I glance up once more before I gas the bike, going almost sixty before I even leave the lot. I don’t slow down until I’m near Ejido Choropo, a rural area south of Mexicali. I pull over in the shelter of a small, scrubby tree and ask Carlos’s map app how to get to Guadalupe Victoria.

  I wonder if Missy King is even there.

  In less than two hours, I’ll finally know.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sean was ambitious, but he was raised by a drug addict father and he didn't have any money when he got to Athens Technical College. I think he planned to try school, but it wasn't long before he realized he could exercise his entrepreneurial spirit dealing pot.

  Sean and I started dating around the time I graduated, and at first I thought what he did for a living was awful. It wasn’t especially dangerous—he was selling to college kids, after all—but when I stayed at his place at night I used to have nightmares about the police kicking his door in and shooting us as we startled awake.

  After a few months, I got used to it. I even started to think of myself as some kind of outlaw by association. He enjoyed the way I saw him: some renegade/freedom-fighter mash-up. When Sean insisted on paying for my apartment in Atlanta while I tried to get my freelance writing career going, I let him. The job market sucked, and my aunt and uncle were already helping Landon. By the time Sean needed to move in because there was too much heat on his place, I had started to get weary of his lifestyle. But Sean was paranoid, and he needed me. That’s what I told myself.

  A few weeks later, Sean decided he wanted to move to Vegas and deal drugs there. I thought of Vegas as a sleazy, gross kind of place, but I knew I would go with him if he asked. I thought I might get some good freelance stories out of it. Maybe I could do something on some of the girls. Something for a national publication. Or if worse came to worse, one of the Atlanta-based magazines that I had worked with.

  Finally, at the end of February, we decided it was time to try Vegas. I had packed his car, a brand new black Corolla with shiny rims. He was in one of his paranoid moods, convinced the cops were coming to get him, and I remember I had offered him a handful of my Skittles as we got into the car.

  “Everything is fine.”

  I can still hear myself saying that, half a second before the squeal of tires.

  They shot him with rubber bullets and came for me, but Sean had another car, a sleek white Mustang he kept parked two streets over, as a getaway car. I had the keys; I was going to drive it to a trucking company that would ship it across the country.

  As I raced away, clutching Sean’s key ring and aiming for the Mustang, he was screaming for me, screaming my name like the selfish jerk he was, I guess—but I kept running. I got the keys into the ignition just as a rubber bullet hit the side of the car. Somehow I made it off the one-way side street, out of downtown, onto the interstate.

  I got some money at the first ATM I saw and drove straight to Vegas, only stopping for bathroom breaks and gas. I wasn't sure where else to go. Later, on the AJC online, I read about the bust. The police were searching for me. They wanted to ask me questions.

  I ditched Sean’s Mustang immediately. He had ten thousand dollars in a gym bag, plus two bricks of marijuana. A lot to have in a gym bag, but not enough to last me. I ended up at the Starry Night Brothel and pretended to be reporting. I guess I didn't know what else to do. I liked the girls, and they liked me. It was a reputable-seeming place. I met the owner, a woman named Tess, and I told her what had happened. She offered to sell the weed for me, but she wanted something in return. She wanted me to service a client of hers. Drake Carlson—the governor of California.

  “He only does blow jobs,” she told me. “Thinks it'
s not really cheating if it's not sex, but they say he's impotent.”

  I remember sitting on the leather couch in Tess’s suite, looking at my hands and wondering if I could give a blow job to a total stranger. To someone kind of…old.

  But Tess thought she could get a lot of money from the weed, and I needed money. I was terrified of going back to Georgia, terrified of prison—even though I’d never done any drug dealing myself—and terrified that maybe Sean was crazy enough to try to pin the whole thing on me. I didn't know what else to do, so I agreed.

  It was weird. Not what I’d ever imagined for myself, but I tried to pretend I was a character in a book. We had dinner. Wine. Drake was charming. Funny. Even protective, in a way that Sean had never been. I felt an element of safety for the first time since landing in the city. He said he wanted to see me again, and proved it by pre-paying the brothel. It was a lot of money—and he hadn’t been so bad. The next time he was in town, I went down on him. He wasn't impotent, but it was hard to get him off.

  The third time, a hot weekend in May, he wanted to touch me. After that, he always touched me, but he never asked for anything except blow jobs.

  Soon I was going to dinners with him. He started introducing me as his mistress. I was living there, with Tess, and I wasn't an escort. I was a blow job queen. He named me Missy King, and that's who I was on Tess's roster.

  Months passed, and I was making more money than Sean had with his pot. And I was saving every penny of it. Once I got a hundred thousand dollars, I wanted to move to California, to San Francisco, and start a new life.

  I didn’t get there, obviously.

  Drake’s Las Vegas body guard started dropping by to see me sometimes. His name was Jim Gunn, and I always thought he was a creeper. He used to stare at me like he wanted to eat me for dinner. But the first time, he told me Drake wanted him to take me out to dinner, to see how I was doing. It had been three weeks since the governor was able to make it my way, so I took Jim at his word. He was on Drake’s payroll, after all.

  After that, Jim took me out to dinner once a week, every week, always asking me personal questions and questions about my past. So the governor could “do damage control” if anyone ever found out he was seeing me. I hated going out with Jim, but I did what I was paid to do. Not once did Drake ever mention my outings with Jim, and it wasn’t my job to mention things to Drake.

  One week in August, just after Drake had been in town for a ‘celebrity’ poker tournament, I starting hearing things about this porn star named Priscilla Heat. How she wanted Drake. How she thought I wasn’t worth his money. Just a few days later, the rumor started that I was cheating on the governor with Jim Gunn.

  Drake never asked me about it. He came to Vegas one more time, and we went to a fancy casino restaurant with some of his friends. He went home on a Sunday, but on Monday, Jim Gunn called and told me he’d decided to stay. He wanted me to meet him at his penthouse at the Wynn.

  Jim picked me up at six sharp in a big, black SUV I’d never seen before, but I didn’t question it. When I got into the back seat, Priscilla Heat was there, and then I started freaking out. The two of them wanted me to quit seeing the governor. Priscilla told me he was hers, and I needed to go back to Georgia. I wondered how she knew I came from Georgia, but then I remembered: I’d told Jim.

  “Are you guys working together?”

  Priscilla laughed, and they explained how I was going to call Drake and ask him for more money.

  “He already knows your plan, my dear.” Priscilla grinned. “How you’re actually an undercover reporter. How you’ll tell everyone about what a lying, cheating bastard he is if he doesn’t pay your price.”

  I was so young and stupid, it took me a minute to understand: This was blackmail. We were on the highway, then, and when Jim Gunn turned around from the driver’s seat, he held up a pistol.

  “I think you want to do what we’re asking, darlin’. We’ve got some fun things in store for you.”

  I was so young. So stupid.

  I never even had a chance.

  Hopelessness washes over me now, as I think of walking out of here to meet Jesus.

  Maybe I should run. Maybe running would be better than walking into yet another trap.

  Instead, I pack my bags in the attic—where no one will find them for a while; so they will assume I ran away—and when the sun comes up, I'm prepared to face my last day of freedom.

  I go to breakfast. Eat my rice and beans as if it's not the last time I'll ever spoon them out of these metal bowls. The hardest thing, I think, is Sister Mary Carolina. She pulls me into a hug after my first appointment and whispers in my ear, “No worries. God will take care of you.”

  It's all I can do to hold back tears.

  I'm sitting in a tiny office, filling out paperwork to order more menthol back cream for a little boy named Fernando, when I say the only prayer I will ever say for my own fate.

  Whatever happens, please help me to bear it. Please don't let any of the children get hurt—or anyone at all. Please don't let the Sisters see me walking out tonight.

  That's the last thing that I pray before the door swings open, and Sister Mary Carolina tells me that I have a visitor.

  I’m surprised by how pretty Guadalupe Victoria is. It’s a small, flat city surrounded by rising hills that might be mountains, and in comparison to the dusty haze of Mexicali, it’s green. Not so much of a waste land, even though I know that technically, it’s got to be poorer than shit.

  By the time I stop at a small, two-pump gas station on the outside of town, my shoulder is aching and my neck feels really tight. I sit on my bike for a minute rubbing the tendons in my neck before going inside to ask about the St. Catherine’s Clinic.

  “The sick kids’ clinic?” the man asks.

  I shrug, then nod. “Yeah.”

  He gives me directions to the north east side of town and tells me the building was burned.

  “Burned?” I put my hand to my chest, where my heart feels like it might have stopped. “So it’s gone?”

  He shakes his head. “Only part of it.”

  Shit. “What happened?”

  He leans close to me, so I can smell the food residue in his moustache. “The cartel,” he hisses.

  “They went after a kids’ clinic?”

  “They went after a woman. She belonged to Jesus Cientos. She left him and went to the convent. He wants her back.”

  I clutch the counter. “But he didn’t get her?”

  The guy makes a fish face and shrugs his slim shoulders. “How would I know? I work at a petro station.”

  Fuck.

  I think him and speed toward the area of town he mentioned. I was thinking of buying a hat or maybe even ditching my bike, but I’m so impatient, I just drive right to the clinic. It's not the only building in town that's half burned, but it’s the only half-burned building that smells just burned.

  What if she’s not here?

  Then I’ll find her somewhere else.

  What if I get shot when I walk through the door?

  I swallow. I’m not backing out now.

  I park my bike beside the charred remains of the left side of the stout, wide, stucco building and pull my bag into my lap, cursing myself for not doing this sooner. I slide Carlos’s gun—a black 9 mm Beretta—into the bag and check the clip. Completely full. That’s good.

  She's probably gone, I tell myself as I situate the gun in my pants. What kind of self-respecting Mexican drug lord would blow up half of a clinic and not claim the woman he came for? This is probably just a pit stop for me. I might have to chase Missy King all the way to Jesus Cientos's doorstep.

  Damn, that makes me feel tired.

  I pull off my helmet and look around. If anyone’s expecting me, I’d like to know before I get off my bike; but the parking lot is still and calm. There’s no sign of a threat. Beneath the helmet, my hair is matted damply to my head. In some spots, it's dried and sticking up at weird angles. I run a han
d over my face and wonder if I still look like hell. The look that was so convenient for the club last night will probably scare the pants off everyone in here. Assuming the place hasn’t been claimed by the cartel.

  With my teeth gritted, I stride toward the clinic. A willowy woman is pushing out the door with a tiny baby in some kind of sling. I give a weak smile, just to let her know I mean no harm, and she holds the baby a little closer.

  Two more steps and I find myself inside a tidy, worn-down waiting area, outfitted with your basic metal foldout chairs and a round wooden table piled high with dog-eared magazines. Beyond the waiting area, only a few paces behind the last of the chairs, is a simple school-style desk. A petite girl with braided hair sits at it, thumbing through a day planner and looking surprisingly prim in a plain navy blue dress with a large, brass cross necklace.

  When she sees me, her brown eyes widen. She audibly swallows, and I notice her left hand is clenched around a bunch of peanuts.

  “Did I interrupt your snack?” I ask her in Spanish.

  She smiles a little, but it's a nervous smile. She looks down at her hand, like maybe she's going to offer me some of her peanuts, but instead she draws the hand into her lap and looks me up and down.

  “Welcome to St. Catherine's Clinic. How may I help you?”

  I reach into my pocket for the photo I'm so used to carrying around, and I guess the girl thinks I'm reaching for a gun, because she jumps up, tossing up her hands. Her mouth is stretched wide in a scream I never hear. Instead her lips pinch shut and with a frenzied shake of her head, “I'll go with you! I won’t make any noise! Please, don't harm the children!”

  Holy shit.

  “You think I'm here to kidnap you?”

  She lowers her eyes, as well as her hands. “Y-you're not?”

  “I'm not with a cartel.” I had thought that didn’t need saying, but clearly I don’t know how things work. “I'm only here to find someone.”

  “You came here for…an American?”