by Ryan Schow
“Jorge was grooming me.”
“For what?”
“Jorge, he told me to come here if something happened. He said things were going down, just not like this. Everyone’s turning on each other, jockeying for all the turf when these birds settle down.”
“What birds?”
“The drones, homeboy. Aren’t you listening? They’re laying waste to everything. Do you even know what the hell’s happening out here?”
“I do,” he says, perfectly apathetic. “Pull up your shirt to your armpits, hold it there while I see what’s what.”
“Just stay off my junk, bro,” I say, lifting my shirt. “It’s been burning when I pee. Now I can’t even think about it that’s how bad it’s hurting.”
Shaking his head, the guy pats me down. I don’t make it obvious, but I’m looking at this thug, wondering what he’s got. There’s a blade at his side, eight inches easy in an open sheath. It’s not the kind that folds. It’s the kind you can gut a hog with.
“Lower your shirt,” he says. When he’s done, he adds, “Who worked you over?”
“I took out the guys who did this.”
“Three you said?”
“Two.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, turning that unfeeling gaze on me. “You aren’t one of us yet, maybe never.”
“Yeah, but strange as this sounds, you’re the only family I have.”
“That’s sad,” he says. “Follow me.”
He strolls into the mansion, which is huge, but it seems everyone is in the front room kicking it. The air is a fog of pot smoke, and one of the four guys chillin’ here, he’s in the corner shooting up.
“Sergio,” the guy says, “this clown just came from Jorge’s place. Says MS-13 killed everyone, burned the joint down.”
“That true?” the lieutenant asked, his face torqued, his eyes squinted as he blows out a puff of smoke he’s been holding.
“Yeah.”
“Show him your stomach and back,” he says. I do. “This cat got rocked, ese.”
Sergio offers me a hit of the joint he’s holding.
I take a hit.
“If you’re looking for a place to stay, this ain’t it. We got bedrooms, but the beds are full and we got mouths to feed. Comprende?”
“Simóne, ese. Still, maybe you could throw me a bone, at least point me in the direction of friendly territory.”
“Things are changing, homeboy. You know that, right?”
“I do.”
“Pretty soon, turf lines will be redrawn. We’ve just got to survive, then we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. You feel me?”
“I feel you, dawg.”
And with that, the guy who brought me in—the juicer with the knife big enough to gut a hog—he drives a punch right into my stomach and everyone laughs as I buckle forward. I try to stand back, catch my wind, but he really drove that shot in hard.
Not stopping, the guy grabs the back of my hair, jerks my head up and says, “Why are you really here?”
“I told you, pendejo,” I growl.
He hits me again, staggering me, then shoves me into a bunch of furniture I can’t help falling over.
“Get that piece of mierda off my floor,” Sergio says.
The lieutenant takes another hit from the joint, holds it, blows it out and takes a sip from a tumbler of what looks like expensive tequila.
I stand, feeling the hit, but also playing possum. Or am I? Damn, this guy really is hitting to win. Just then, outside, I hear a loud, winding noise and some commotion. I manage to get to my feet and think, it’s about time, X.
He was supposed to be doing recon of the place while I got inside. “Wait for my signal,” he’d said. Is this his signal? A full frontal vehicular assault?
I step backwards, knock into the big guy, who shoves me aside. I fall into a decorative chair and we both tumble over—me and the chair.
Time slows because I know Xavier is coming.
What drives through the side of the house though, what blows like hell through the wall and the big picture window with the lowered blinds, is not the Tahoe, but an old import coupe, red.
Is that a Honda Civic?
The whole side of the house crumbles inward, the assaulting car shoving couches and chairs deep into the room. The Civic comes to an abrupt stop in the living room, hammering the big guy right as the rear axle hooked on something sturdy.
All I can think is this must be one DTO ending another when I scramble to my feet and go after the big guy with the knife.
He’s not exactly out cold, but he’s definitely taken the hit. I get close enough to swipe his knife, but he’s shoving me back and getting up. Fortunately, he doesn’t realize I just swiped his blade.
Right then, a woman with two pistols pops out of the Civic’s broken sunroof and, in Spanish, she screams, “You move, you die!”
No one moves.
The driver’s side door is kicked open and the man behind the exploded airbag gets out of the car. He’s rugged looking, handsome, punched in the face by the airbag, but alert.
My heart stops. Suddenly my legs won’t hold my weight.
I wobble a step or two, then straighten up the second the woman’s eyes and pistols swing my way.
“You think I’m joking, pretty boy,” she says, “you move again, it’s over for you.”
I nod my head, hold her eyes.
She turns her weapons on the rest of Sergio and the crew and I drop the knife on the edge of the chair behind me, out of view of the woman, but within reach.
My gaze falls on Isadoro, my brother, the ghost that did not die.
He’s looking right at me.
How is he alive?
My head is filled with so many questions; his eyes are hiding a million little lies. The lie he can’t hide, however, is that he still cares for me, because when he got out of the car he was calm. Now I see the telltale signs of a man who stepped into the deep end of a wet turd and knew it.
I’m under no illusions here. I’m in real trouble.
Ice isn’t telling this crazy woman we’re brothers. She thinks I’m one of Sergio’s guys, someone she’s clearly itching to kill for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom. And these guys I’m with can’t know Ice and me are brothers because then they’d turn on me and World War Three would start right here and now.
Xavier, I’m thinking, I could really use you right about now.
“Everyone, toss your weapons to my partner here,” the woman says, “then stand shoulder to shoulder with your hands in front of you.”
No one moves. They all just look at her.
Sergio turns his head to the slightest degree right. The guy who was doing the heroin, he swings his pistol up to take her out. The woman sinks two rounds in him and whips the weapons back on Sergio.
“You’re next, pisado,” she snarls, switching to English. “Now give me the weapons!”
The three remaining men toss their guns toward Ice, but they don’t take their eyes off the woman. Not only is she incredibly good looking, she’s feisty as hell and pulling her weight. Where in the world did Ice find this one, and where in Jesus’s name has he been?!
“You, too,” she says, looking at me with dark, unfeeling eyes.
I suddenly buckle under the weight of her gaze and the threat becomes real. Ice isn’t telling her anything, and she’s clearly not afraid to start a body count.
“I’m unarmed,” I say, lifting my shirt.
“Turn around.” I do. She says, “Unbuckle your pants, pull them down.”
“What kind of a stick up is this?” I ask. I’m in fresh boxer briefs, but this isn’t fun.
“It’s not a…what did you say?” she says.
“Stick up. A hold up,” I tell her. She’s looking at me funny. “A robbery.”
“Oh, this isn’t a robbery.”
“What the hell do you want then, puta?” Sergio says. Ice suddenly pulls a gun on Sergio and the woman drops down in
to the car before getting out on the passenger side.
“You trigger happy, too, pendejo?” the big guy who once had the knife says to Ice. He’s still favoring his hip where the Civic hit him.
“I prefer to take my time. She just wants to kill everything in sight.”
Xavier told me to wait for his signal. He said it would be clear. I think someone driving their beater Honda through the side of the house is signal enough. So where is he? Surely he saw this all go down. What’s his signal now? Or is he just going to burst in here taking out clowns with his shotgun? Who knows? At this point, maybe Isadoro and this crazy-eyed huntress killed him already. Or maybe he’ll come in and shoot both of them, not recognizing my brother and not caring that he’s killing a woman.
Our plan wasn’t great, I admit. We knew the takedown would be sloppy, that we’d be risking everything in a house full of unknowns for a bunch of kids that may or may not be here, and that our chances of making it out unscathed were somewhere between slim and none.
Before I got here, before all this craziness unfolded, Xavier had said, “The second you hear me, just go. I’ll mow through whatever bodies are in my way to cover you. You got it?”
“This plan sucks,” I told him.
“I know.”
“You don’t even want to make it out of there alive, do you?” I asked him.
“I do,” he said, unemotional.
“No you don’t.”
He said, “Okay, I don’t really care. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have your back. We leave one of those guys alive, preferably Sergio, since his name is the one on the storage unit lease paperwork, then we start pulling out toenails with pliers.”
“The kids.”
“Yes, the kids!”
“Don’t get me killed before that,” I’d said.
Now I’m standing here in the living room, waiting for a guy who might not come to save me from my dead brother’s girl, or at the very least, a three pack of swamp donkeys.
Ice’s girl walks up to the third guy, fearless, and looks right at him. He’s a quiet kid who’s super high right now and barely even standing still. She holds up a picture of a girl.
“Have you seen her?” she asks.
He hesitates, then shakes his head back and forth.
“What about you?” she says to Sergio, who’s drilling holes in her with his eyes. He doesn’t answer, doesn’t shake his head, doesn’t even blink. “We’ll come back to you.”
“How about it?” she asks the big guy next to me. He shakes his head, then gives her the same menacing look Sergio did.
“What about you?” she asks me, showing me a picture of a beautiful young woman. The girl reminds me of Brooklyn, not in the way she looks, but by how innocent she appears. If she’s gone, if this woman is willing to kill to find her, then the young girl’s innocence will surely be gone by now.
“What’s her name?” I ask.
This stops her. She doesn’t expect me to speak. I look right into her eyes, not a hint of malice, and find myself thinking that if she’s with my brother, he’s a lucky man.
“You have a daughter?” she asks.
A woman knows.
“Yes.”
“Tell me her name,” she says.
“Brooklyn.”
“Well this is Carolina and she was taken from my home several months ago. I have it on good authority she is at this home.”
“Why would you say that?” Sergio growls.
“Because the man who told me,” she snarls, turning to him, “was your supplier.”
“Whatever guy you saw, he gave you a fake address,” Sergio answers. “And why wouldn’t he? You’re just a dumb girl with anger issues and a lost kid.”
“She is my niece.”
“He still lied to you,” Sergio says.
“He would have no reason to lie to me,” she replies, walking down the line of men toward him.
I take the opportunity to look at Ice, who is looking at me. Neither of us give even a tick of expression, that’s how tight he’s running this. If I had telepathic powers, I’d tell him not to let the woman shoot me. Looking at him, though, I have to hope he’s already working on a plan.
“You are Sergio Villarreal, are you not?” she asks.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Yes,” she smiles. “Your eyes do not lie. Give me my Carolina and I will go.”
“I don’t have your niece, but I’ve got some downers to take the edge of that really bad attitude.”
She cracks him in the jaw with an uppercut he doesn’t see coming. Wobbled, he staggers backwards two steps, his legs soft and weak, his eyeballs rattled.
“Easy now,” Ice tells the guy next to me. My brother turns his gun on the big guy’s family jewels. “Not unless you want a stump where your little baby maker is now.”
The man’s gritting his teeth. For a second there, I think he might actually chance it.
“Where’s my Carolina?!” the woman roars into Sergio’s pain-stricken face. He sets his jaw, his eyes watery, his balance still wavering.
She fires the gun right next to his ear, then grabs him by his hair and jams the hot barrel in his eye before screaming the question again.
That’s when the tweaker who’s high on…whatever…turns and bolts for the door. Ice open fires, but ends up chipping the corner of a wall while the tweaker gets away. The big guy starts to move the second Ice’s gun is off him, but I’m grabbing the knife and burying it deep inside him the second I get the chance.
The big guy throws an elbow at me, but I saw it coming. Yanking the blade out as I duck under the shots, I turn this guy into a pin cushion just as a huge shotgun blast goes off in the kitchen.
Xavier.
“He’s with me,” I say to Ice. The woman is now looking from me to the dead guy now flopped face-down on the floor, then to Sergio, and then back to Ice.
“We’re good, Xavier,” I call out loud enough for him to hear me. “We’re with friendlies.”
This confuses both Sergio and the woman. Xavier appears with a shotgun, assesses the situation, then looks back and forth from me to Isadoro and says, “Looks like the place is haunted.”
Yeah, we’re both seeing the ghost of my dead brother.
“Ice?” the girl asks, eyes still on Sergio.
“Eliana, this bearded monstrosity is my brother Fiyero. He’s an undercover DEA agent from what I understand. And this handsome fella over here is…”
“Xavier Reed,” I say.
To his credit, they only met a couple of times and it was never for anything formal.
“Gonna need clean up in the kitchen,” he says with a humorless grin. Then: “You want to tell me why you’re not dead, Isadoro, and how you came to be right here in this very instant? Because the chances of that—”
“Divine intervention,” Ice says. “That’s your one in a billion chance.”
“Save the Jesus stuff for Sundays,” Xavier tells him. “It’d be great if you could give me something more.”
“Pablo ‘Las Hacha’ Cubidero,” Ice says. “He started supplying girls to America. Trafficked them up through El Paso to here. The drug hub of America. Before the little princess over there did to Pablo Cubidero what Fire just did to the big guy here, he gave us this address and Sergio’s name.”
“That’s why we’re here,” I tell him, baffled. “We killed a bunch of low level turds, and maybe a lieutenant or two, and that led us to a storage unit with a bunch of dead kids in it. The paperwork had Sergio Villarreal’s name and address on it.”
Sergio tries to turn and spit on me, but Eliana flicks his Adam’s apple hard, causing him to gag.
“You saw the dead kids?” Eliana asks, hesitant, intense.
“Yeah, but they were all small,” I say, reassuring her. “Ten years of age and younger. Carolina was not among them.”
Eliana suddenly rears back and hits Sergio in the stomach so hard, she knocks the wind out of him. I’m not only impressed, I�
��m delighted. You don’t see too many women willing to do what this woman’s doing.
She hits him again, then she grabs him by the back of the hair and drags him into the kitchen. The dead tweaker, he’s laid out on the floor, a pond of red spreading out from him. There’s a meaty splat of red on the refrigerator. Beside the fridge is a bulletin board with all kinds of notices and pictures thumbtacked to the corkboard.
Eliana sits Sergio in the chair, shoves the picture of Carolina in his face and says, “Where is she?”
“Ice,” I say. “You and Xavier want to check upstairs?”
“Eliana,” Ice says. She looks at him, her face a mask of shaking rage. “He’s with us. Like I said, he’s my brother so you can trust him.”
“I know he’s your brother.”
“I saw your niece alright,” Sergio finally says. “Me and my homies took turns on her. Routed her out real good.”
Eliana cracks him on the head with the pistol so hard he flops backwards and almost tumbles out of the chair. Eliana goes to the bulletin board, plucks out a clear pushpin and returns to Sergio, who’s laughing, but barely, and spitting away the blood that’s now draining down his face and into his mouth.
“I burned that eye,” Eliana says, jabbing his orbital with the barrel of her pistol. “But this other eye is still good, yes? If not, perhaps this will help.”
She leans forward, turns her picture around and tacks it to his eyebrow as he bucks and howls in pain. She’s got control though. She’s really leaning into him, viciously driving the pushpin down into the bone.
“Where is she, Sergio?!”
He manages to shove her off, but his efforts are in vain. Eliana puts the barrel of the gun to his burnt eye and says, “My father did not think I would amount to much because I was not a boy.”
“Can’t say I disagree with him,” Sergio barks, “although you’d be a hell of an earner.”
“So he taught me to fight, taught me to kill, taught me how to do all this and feel nothing. But when I look at you, I feel everything. I feel like I need to shoot you.”
“Then go ahead!”
“Not here in the eye, but here,” she says, putting the barrel of the gun to his kneecap. She pulls the trigger, the report a sharp explosion in the kitchen. Sergio bellows out a slew of obscenities before screaming bloody murder.
