by JD Dutra
Mei Lin felt violated. Her home was completely turned upside down. Her elegant vases were shattered on the marble floor, which now had several cracked tiles throughout her living room. Her ornaments and decorations had been tossed from one side of the room to another and a large replica statue of a Chinese terra-cotta warrior had been shoved into the wall head first, the feet and base were sticking out sideways from it. Her home looked to be have been completely ransacked, but two things weighed on her mind more than anything. She was worried about the cache being gone and about someone being murdered in her home. She chose to find out about the person first.
“Have you been to the kitchen?” Asked Mei Lin, switching to Mandarin as she carefully watched where she was stepping.
“Yes, your alarm tech has been murdered,” said Ping with no emotion in his deep voice as he followed her.
They made their way into the kitchen and the iron smell got stronger. Two Chinese men were coordinating in Mandarin the best way to place the corpse into a body bag. The alarm tech had been dragged out of the nearby bathroom by his legs and he was a bloody mess. His blue shirt was heavily stained and his hair and face were caked in dried blood. His lifeless eyes still open, staring at the ceiling.
Ping walked past the men, careful not to step onto the broken kitchenware on the floor and then he squatted down and pulled a pair of latex gloves from an inside pocket of his suit coat. He snapped them on and then began to work his way over the alarm tech’s pockets; two fingers reached into the dead man’s pants and pulled out the van’s keys. He wiped the blood off of them on one of the tech’s sleeves.
“Ju-long!” Yelled Ping, and a tan and muscular Asian man appeared at the doorway. Ping tossed him the keys.
“Take the alarm van to Rus’ and have Bao follow you and bring you back,” Ping ordered while slicing open the alarm tech’s shirt with a knife, his gloved hands covered in blood; the tech’s torso had been sliced, pierced and raked with a sharp object at least thirty times in all different directions.
“They savaged him,” said Ping, his narrow eyes focused on reading the trauma. “There are no defense wounds on his hands and also there isn’t any blood splatter on your walls. There is just a pool of blood around him, which tells me that these cuts were made after he was already dead.”
Mei Lin shook her head, not believing that Oneita and Raymond were capable of such brutality; perhaps it was the other man? Ping turned the tech’s face aside, to reveal a large bubble of hematoma on the side of the man’s head, just above the ear.
“They tried to knock him unconscious with a blow to the head, but whoever did it shattered the temporal artery. He was knocked out and the blood leaked into his brain, killing him instantly,” said Ping, getting up and directing his men on how to pick up the body without spilling too much more blood on the marble floor.
Mei Lin had one hand tucked under one elbow, the other played with a pendant on her neck. Her eyes stared, but her mind wondered about her future.
“Mei Lin, check the cache,” Ping ordered, balling up the latex gloves into one another and tossing them into the body bag before it was zipped up.
Fear immediately struck her again and she turned around, the corpse forgotten as she ran quickly towards the top floor of her home, praying to her god that what had been entrusted to her was still in place. Members of her organization were picking things up throughout her house, sweeping, cleaning and reorganizing what they could; most of it was going to be nothing more than garbage. Her mind wondered what would happen if the very reason for her being in Arizona was missing.
When she got upstairs to her bedroom, her enormous bed looked like someone had jumped on it for hours, her luxurious throw pillows were scattered everywhere. There were papers on the floor, her Mac desktop computer was thrown against her brand new curved screen TV and her clothes were scattered and torn among her books. She started to tremble when she realized her worst nightmares were coming true.
The false wall above her desk had been torn open after an emerald dragon statue had been hurled against it. It must have gone straight through the thin part of the drywall that served to hide what had been entrusted to her care. Her long manicured fingers dug into the wall, pulling chunks from it that fell into the flat of her desk, moving the pieces of the shattered dragon statue around, clinging to hope that maybe it was still hidden there. But it was gone.
“Are you sure these people are just low life thieves?” Asked Ping, having arrived silently beside her.
“Yes.” Said Mei Ling, her voice fluttered with anger and anxiety.
“If you are right, then they will not know what to do with what they took. We’ll find them, and they will disappear,” said Ping with his hands behind his back, almost seeming to admire the destruction inside Mei Lin’s bedroom.
“I have their home address at the office,” said Mei Lin before a female voice interrupted their conversation.
“Excuse me, but we have visitors,” said a fair skinned Asian woman in her early 30’s. She kept her eyes down in respect and her multiple ear piercings shone through the darkness of her hair.
Mei Lin went to her bedroom window and parted the heavy curtains slightly. Two police cars were at the front of her house where the Hoplite Security and Alarm van had once stood. They were chatting with the two Asian men who stood guard at the front, one officer taking notes and another talking into a radio on his shoulder.
“Get rid of them, Mei Lin,” ordered Ping, his tone of voice letting her know he would not tolerate any more failures.
Not worrying about Ping’s presence, she quickly stripped to just her panties and changed her clothes, putting on a provocative black dress and no bra; she put on some perfume and went down the stairs. Her home was almost back to normal, except for all the decorative pieces which were now in the trash, a huge hole in the wall and cracked marble tiles everywhere.
She shaded her eyes from the sun as she walked out and she noticed the officers sucking in their stomachs and puffing out their chests subtly, probably in response to the thin dress that hugged her curves and exposed her firm thighs and bra-less breasts.
“Hi officers, what can I do for you?” said Mei Lin with a flirtatious smile on her lips, her soft hand extended in greeting.
“Excuse me, Ma’am, but do you live here?” Asked one of the officers, a middle aged man who apparently had the roots of his hair died by an eight year old child.
“Yes I do.”
“Well we received a call from one of your neighbors, claiming some unusual and suspicious activity around your home. Is everything okay?” Asked another officer, a young African American man with a notepad and pen; he almost looked too young to take his job this seriously.
“Yes, my friends are just throwing me a surprise party after I made the front of the ‘40 Under 40 Magazine’, they want to help me celebrate; that is all,” Mei Lin said, her flirtatious gaze trying to pierce the professional barrier of both officers.
“So nothing unusual is going on?” Asked the middle aged officer, turning around to look at the line-up of cars parked around her house.
“Nothing besides a party and if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to it,” said Mei Lin, slowly bending one of her hips aside.
“There were reports of three people, two men and a large woman, leaving with heavily filled bags. Do you know who they were?”
“Oh that’d be the caterers and I presume they were taking away garbage, cartons and so on,” she replied, wondering what it was Oneita and Ray had taken; she’d had no time to do any kind of inventory.
“We also got a call just before we pulled up from a…” The young officer read his notes on the yellow pad, “Hoplite Security and Alarm. They’re worried about one of their techs, his last appointment was at your home. He keyed in a distress signal into your keypad, then erased it, entered it again and erased it several times. They tried to reach him over the last 30 minutes, but the tech is not responding.”
“Oka
y…” Said Mei Lin casually, as if she wondered what that had to do with her.
“It’s their policy to involve us when something seems to have happened with one of their techs. They carry a lot of equipment that we don’t want to see in the wrong hands,” said the young officer; his dark eyes on Mei Lin seemed full of suspicion.
“Well, he left just a few minutes ago,” said Mei Lin.
“You wouldn’t mind if we went in and looked around a bit, would you? We need to locate and secure his keyless entry device, and the GPS on it says it’s still here,” said the older officer, his eyes gazing behind Mei Lin at the windows of her home.
“I’m sorry, Officers, but I’m right in the middle of a party with some very important guests. Is this really necessary?” asked Mei Lin, trying to sound as flirtatious as possible without being so obvious.
“Yes ma’am. We need that keyless remote entry to be secured right away,” said the officer before scribbling something on his notepad.
“I apologize Officer, I’m afraid I must say no. Could you come back in an hour or two when my guests will have left? I assure you nothing will happen to whatever gadget the tech forgot here.”
“We really do need to find it, Ma’am. If it’s just a party, we’ll go in, find the device, say hello and leave. We’ll be out in a few minutes hopefully,” said the older officer, now looking very suspicious, his intense gaze letting Mei Lin know her seductive tricks wouldn’t work on him.
Mei Lin laughed nervously and said something in Mandarin to the two Chinese men who casually chatted and smoked nearby. They nodded at her and went inside the house. Both officers gazed at them with mistrust.
“Where are they going?” Asked the younger officer.
“They’re going to warn the guests you two will be coming in,” said Mei Lin with a smile.
“Very well. Nice home, eh. What’s your name again, Ma’am?” He asked.
“Mei Lin,” she said then her eyes gazed down to his name tag. “And it’s nice to meet you, Officer Johnson,” she said with a pleasant smile.
The middle aged officer spoke a brief update into the radio on his shoulder and the crackling voice that responded was almost too hard to understand.
“They have another unit going after the alarm van. The GPS on it says it’s somewhere in the industrial area of the city,” he said, updating the young officer.
One of the Asian men came back, walking briskly towards Mei Lin and the policemen started to walk slowly up her driveway without asking for permission.
“Wait!” Said Mei Lin before quickly trading words in Mandarin with the man who approached them; he had something in his hands which he gave to Mei Lin.
“Here it is officer, the keyless entry remote. Is that it?” She asked with a smile.
Officer Johnson grabbed it and looked at it suspiciously as if he might have been given a fake. Then he gave her a smile. “Okay. Thanks for getting it for us, we appreciate it.”
“Well enjoy the rest of the party ma’am,” said the older one, still looking somewhat reluctant as the two officers headed back to their car.
Mei Lin waited at her gates, making casual conversation about the weather with the Asian man who brought the remote, trying not to look like she was waiting for the officers to leave. Once they’d turned the corner out of sight she headed back into the house.
The blue body bag sat waiting to be collected by the door and a two Asian women were putting the finishing touches to restoring her home; a tall cabinet had been moved in front of the hole in the wall. Ping was sitting down on a large and comfortable leather chair, gazing at a black handheld radio clutched by his white, spidery fingers.
“They are gone,” said Mei Lin.
“They may be gone from your house, but you are not gone from their minds,” Ping said as he turned up the volume dial on the handheld radio and a familiar voices filled the room.
“That’s correct, copy. The keyless access remote has been recovered but I’m sure the woman was lying about the party; something was very wrong about it all, but I had no reason to force entry.”
“I guess we’ll find out later if there’s anything right about your suspicions,” another voice replied, “but right now I don’t have a good feeling about this as well. I’m on site where the alarm van’s last GPS signal was emitted and it was somewhere inside the Rus’ Pick’n’Pull, that shady scrap yard outside of town.”
Ping shut the radio off and stood up, gazing at Mei Lin with a pitiful smirk on his face. “It seems like your fairytale will come to an end sooner rather than later Mei Lin.”
Chapter 14
Big Bend Desert, Texas
Thursday, October 22nd, 2020
8:09 P.M.
After they had crossed from Mexico into the United States, the group of 36 people, all of whom looked like genuine illegal immigrants, slept during the daylight hours. They still had a way to go together and it was safer that way. The bright sun heated the dusty ground and they could all tell it was day even with their eyes screwed shut. Nathan, his men and the Iraqis were in better shape, but they were all physically and mentally tired from the careful walk and were glad to get across the border without incident.
No one had problems falling and staying asleep under the cooling shade of a large square made by 4 portable tents, just a few feet from a set of blue water tanks which a local nonprofit organization made sure was filled every week. When Nathan and Bill stood first watch, it was the early dawn after their crossing, and they chatted about their assignment.
Bill told him about an illegal immigrant couple he had spoken to, Cesar and Lupe, who were going back to America after being deported together for the third time. In the United States they had a humble but paid off home, a ten year old car, also paid in full, and a young family waiting for them. She was a maid at a hotel and he was the supervisor of a small cleaning company in Los Angeles. Their children were born American citizens, and were staying with his brother. When Bill asked them how they felt about living a clandestine life breaking the law in America, they answered that their only crime was being born in the wrong period of time, wishing they had the opportunity to immigrate in peace like the European pioneers did, after America was taken from the Native Americans.
Their greatest fear was to be sent back to a country that had turned their backs on them, burdening them with so many taxes and regulations one was meant to be bound by the chains of poverty from cradle to grave. They asked Bill why people should be punished for taking their productivity to a place that rewarded them for it. Bill didn’t know how to answer that, himself coming from a long line of Irish immigrants.
In turn, Nathan told Bill about Nazeer, and about how he had lost most of his family during the Iraqi war; three of his brothers died fighting against Saddam and his younger sister simply vanished after leaving to buy bread at the market one morning. He thought it was the organ traffickers who took her, to profit from the vital organ demands of warfare. His parents were too frail to go through the struggles of living in a society shattered by conflict, his dad died of hunger and his mother of lack of medication for some relatively minor illness.
Nazeer had also shared with Nathan his love for the American people, and how he was grateful that they were willing to come die in a foreign land just to free its people from a dictator. Nazeer had asked Nathan when he thought the US would invade North Korea or Cuba, or even start cleaning up Africa and freeing the people there next. The first watch ended before either of them could come up with intelligent answers to these questions.
The rest of the day went by without any issues greater than dealing with numerous blisters among the group and the men in Nathan’s team taking guard shifts as the sun made its way from east to west. It was about an hour after dusk before the preparations for the second night of walking were done. By morning, they should be at or very close to the final coordinates in the assignment.
Tonight, the evening’s sky was sealed dark with thick rain clouds, the des
ert was windy and the air smelled of wet earth; it was raining not too far from where they stood.
“Time to get going ladies and gentlemen! Vamonos!” Nathan shouted, but only loud enough for the group to hear. Everyone got up and they formed a loose line, Nathan in front holding a cheap flashlight. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but he now wished he had a better flashlight than the one he’d bought off the illegal immigrant he got his clothes from; night vision goggles would’ve been perfect. The feeling of walking in the middle of nowhere with only pistols for protection made him feel uneasy, even though Tom had assured him the trip would be free of surprises.
The first droplets of rain started to come down by the time they started walking, forked lightning lit up the sky and then the thunder cracked a few seconds later, quietening everyone’s conversations. As the dark night fell, Nathan began to flash the empty desert before him, trying to plan the best way to guide the group through the wet desert terrain in front of him. Only illuminated drops of rain and emptiness appeared before him, as far as the poor man’s flashlight would go.
The rain got heavier, soaking their clothes and drowning out any other sound of nature around them. That made Nathan even more nervous since his hearing was now limited as well as his eyesight. All he had was his GPS wristwatch, a tactical knife strapped down one of his shins and his pistol on his waist.
A few hours into the night, Nathan bent his arm at the elbow, his fist clenched in the air. It took a few seconds for the entire group to fall still in the darkness. His eyes desperately scanned the area in front of him, looking for something that had made the noise he thought he’d heard. He turned off the flashlight and the darkness was total; all he could hear was the sound of the heavy rain.
He wasn’t completely sure, but he thought he’d heard the sound of some type of engine accelerating in the distance, and the more he thought about it, the more he was sure. Someone was coming slowly from the line of people that stood very still behind him. Nathan looked back, the dark shape was Bruce.
