Solid Gold

by Stephanie Andrews

  “I’m going to cut that rubber suit off and see what’s underneath.”

  “Not much mystery about that, with the way it fits her.”

  “Still, it’ll be fun.”

  I pulled hard on my chains. They seem to have forgotten I was there, which was fine by me; I didn’t like the direction the evening was taking. I felt some give on the left cuff: my half hand. Either they hadn’t noticed in the hubbub, or they didn’t think it would matter. I pulled harder and felt a bit more of my hand slide into the wide cuff. I tried to focus my mind on my hand, visualizing it, but my attention was broken by the sound of fabric ripping.

  “Alta,” croaked a voice. It was raspy and violent sounding, with a slight Darth Vader respiratory hum to it.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but she deserves it.” The guard said, but it didn’t quite sound like he believed it himself.

  “You need this? All the free access to the women you have.” The voice was like a cement mixer. A quiet, dangerous, Latino cement mixer.

  “She killed Garcia and Baker, Stone and Danny!”

  “Yes, she is quite the specimen, I admit.” He paused for a moment, and the only sound was the slow in and out of his respirator.

  “Jesus Christo,” said Selena. “I thought you were dead, Luis.”

  “Some days it feels that way, when I have to come to a shit city like this to deal with these pissants.”

  Oh my God, it was Alejandro Luis! He was a high-ranking member of Negron’s organization, and I had shot him in the neck with a rubber bullet in the Art Institute. I felt a cold sweat run down my spine and begin trying to pull my hand through the cuff in earnest. If we weren’t in trouble before, we certainly were now. Negron would know for sure that it was Selena causing trouble for him, and he would kill or torture her sister. When Luis took the bag off my head and realized it was me, I would probably be wishing I had drown back in Lake Michigan. They say drowning is the best way to go.

  “Where is my sister!” Selena grunted, and her chains rattled.

  “She is somewhere you will never find her. Me,” his voice rattled, “I don’t even know. Only Antonio knows. But don’t let it bother you, I’m sure she will be dead soon, I just called him and let him know who our visitor was.”

  Selena made another grunting noise, and the men laughed.

  “She really does think she’s a superhero,” one of them said with apparent glee. “Gonna break them chains and give us all a whooping.”

  “Where are the women?” Luis asked, his voice cutting darkly through the mirth.

  “They are in the back of the big truck, outside,” one man answered. “They were hiding there, we just closed the door and locked it. No problem.”

  “All of them?”

  “Ahh, yes, I think so.”

  “You think so? Did you count them?”

  “No, they were all together, I just—”

  “Go. Bring them back upstairs.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I fought to control my breath, empty my mind, center myself. I pulled slowly and steadily on the cuff, willing my hand to fold in a little more, a little more, until finally it slid free! The empty cuff swung on the chain, scraping lightly against the wall.

  I yanked the hood off my head with my freed hand. I was standing in semi-darkness against the side wall of the warehouse, my right hand still secured tightly in it’s cuff. In the center of the large space, Selena Salerno stood in a pool of light, her arms stretched out at forty-five degree angles, as mine had been, the chains secured through metal hoops bolted to a large wooden beam that ran the entire width of the building.

  Her back was to me, and I could see that her white jumpsuit, now filthy, had been ripped from the neck all the way past her waist, revealing the upper half of her butt. Her arms were straining against the chains, the muscles jumping.

  I reached awkwardly across the front of my body to slip my fingers into my right front pocket. There it was! The lock pick I had borrowed from Selena to open the cell door upstairs. I went to work on the lock holding the shackle on my right hand. It was an awkward reach, as my wrist was above my head height.

  Luis was talking to his men when I tuned back in.

  “...I’m not against it, per se, but only when all the work is done. Distraction,” he croaked, “will cost you every time. But this one, you cannot have her, she is special for the boss.”

  The shackle on my hand sprung loose, the cuff and the chain swinging away from me and clanking loudly against cinder block wall. They all turned toward the noise, including Luis, who’s eyes widened when he saw my face.

  “You,” he shouted, and reached inside his blazer. The right half of his cheek and neck were heavily scarred, and he had one of those creepy respirators attached to his Adam’s apple, a hose running to an oxygen tank on a little trolley by his side. He took a step toward me as he removed an automatic pistol from a shoulder holster.

  A gunshot rang out, but it wasn’t from Luis’s gun, it came from the office on the other side of the warehouse. There was a man’s shout, and then another gunshot, and I dove sideways from my position, rolling and jumping to my feet, heading for cover behind a nearby pillar.

  At the same time, Selena growled ferociously and with a splintering snap she pulled one of the metal rings free of the wooden crossbeam above her head. She raised her arm again quickly, and swung the chain like a whip, snapping it at the end so that the metal cuff hit one of the three men in the face. His head snapped back, and he went over backwards, his rifle clattering to the ground.

  Luis looked back to see what was happening, and I changed my trajectory, ignoring the pillar and launching myself at his back. We both went down, face down, but with me on top. I put my knee against the back of his neck and put all my weight on it, grabbing the wrist of his gun hand with both of mine and pulling straight up and back until it popped out of the socket. His gun fell to the ground and I rolled off him to pick it up, coming up on to my knees and looking for someone to shoot.

  More automatic gunfire erupted, bullets caroming off the cement to my right. One of the guards screamed and fell to the ground. At the far end of the warehouse someone had come out of the office, dressed in a ragged grey dress. It was the woman from upstairs, the one that had been assaulted on the cot. She sprayed more bullets at the men in the middle of the room, but they flew everywhere. The two remaining guards turned toward her and returned fire. The noise was deafening.

  I leapt forward and ran toward the closet man, trying to keep him between me and the incoming bullets. I ran past Selena who still had her left arm shackled to the beam above her. I took aim at the back of the man, only a few feet in front of me now, but both he and the remaining guard collapsed to the ground.

  It was suddenly silent, but the noise continued to echo in my brain. I looked across the room to see that the woman had also collapsed to the ground. I took a step toward her but stopped when I heard a groan behind me. I spun around, gun raised.

  Selena hung limp from her left wrist, her hair obscuring her face. From her navel down her white bodysuit was streaming with red.

  “Selena!” I leapt to her side, dropping my firearm, looking around frantically for a key before realizing it must be on the body of one of these men. I didn’t have time for that. I leapt into the air and grabbed the chain with both hands, bringing down my full weight. Once again the wooden beam splintered, and the metal ring sprung free. It happened so quickly that I didn’t have time get my feet under me. I landed hard on my back, the wind pushed from my lungs.

  Rolling over, I saw Selena crumpled on the ground a few feet away. I still couldn’t breathe, but I crawled over to her and rolled her on her back. She was unconscious. A stray bullet had hit her just below her right breast, and another had struck her in her upper thigh, on the same side.

  “Oh my God,” I wheezed, and put my right hand over the wound in her stomach. I put my left hand on top of my right and pushed down, determined to stop the bleeding. I looked to
the left to see the wound in her leg. It was bleeding, but not pumping blood. It hadn’t hit the femoral artery.

  My vision started to cloud, and all sound telescoped down to the pounding of blood in my head. I tried to inhale, but it still wouldn’t come. I was going to pass out. I couldn’t let that happen, I had to maintain pressure!

  Sometimes willpower just isn’t enough. In a desperate attempt, I stretched myself out across Selena’s torso, face down, using my bodyweight to trap my hands beneath me, still pressed against her warm, wet wound. Everything went black.

  Twenty-three

  When I woke up, the first thing I saw was the face of Caleb Carter looking down at me, concern etched on his face.

  “Riley, you okay?” he asked.

  I was lying on my back, somewhere soft. A scratchy blanket was irritating the backs of my bare arms. I turned my head and sat up with a start.

  “Let me off of here!” I shouted. I was in the same little room where the guard had been raping that woman. On the same goddam cot. I leapt across the room, lost my balance and fell into the opposite wall. Strong hands grabbed my upper arms.

  “Let go!” I shouted, trying to wrench away.

  “Okay, okay,” said Carter softly, releasing me. I sank down the wall until I was sitting against it. “Keep it down, please,” he added.

  “Selena!” I shouted.

  “Shhh! Keep it down. She’s going to be okay, I think. She’s gone to the hospital with the other victims. No one else knows she isn’t one of them. That little trick she did in Windsor worked so well, I thought I’d use it myself.”

  What the hell was going on? I looked around the room again. We were the only ones here, but I could hear voices drifting up from downstairs.

  “Alejandro Luis,” I said.

  “I know who he is, or was. He’s dead.”

  “The women?”

  “All the ones that were locked in the truck are fine. The one in the warehouse here is dead, I’m afraid. Honestly, it’s a bit hard to tell who shot who.”

  “Whom.”

  “I thought you hated whom.”

  “I’m delirious.”

  He laughed, and then I laughed, and then I started crying hard. Through bleary eyes I saw him reach for me, then change his mind and pull his hand back. Then his hand came forward again, this time offering a white handkerchief.

  “Who the hell still uses these,” I said between sobs. “What are you, eighty years old?”

  He didn’t answer, just knelt in front of me, his blue eyes continuing to study my face.

  “Listen,” I said, “I know what you’re going to say, but you’ve got to let me go. I have to get Negron, now.”

  “I—”

  “He’s going to kill Selena’s sister now that he knows she betrayed him. He’s in Mexico, there’s nothing you can do there.”

  “I—”

  “But I can. I don’t expect you to understand, but—”

  He held up a hand to shush me. “You can go.”

  “What?”

  He stood and extended his hand down to help me up. I reached out my own hand but recoiled when I saw that it was covered with Selena’s blood. I rolled over on to my side and up to my hands and knees and then I threw up on the floor. In my peripheral vision I could see Carter’s shiny shoes step quickly out of the way.

  I used his handkerchief to wipe my mouth, and slowly made my way up to my feet. I started to hold the handkerchief out to him but thought better of it. I tossed it onto a nearby cot and turned to look at him.

  “I can go?”

  “You can. I need you to.”

  I looked at his strong, handsome face. His regulation haircut and his sharp black suit, and suddenly the truth dawned on me.

  “You called me Riley!”

  “Sshh. Crosby police don’t know you’re up here. Only Albert and I do.”

  “You used me!” I hissed and punched him in the shoulder. “You used me to do the work you can’t legally do.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” Carter replied, rubbing his shoulder. “But I think we need to get you out of here quickly if you are going to take that trip to Mexico.”

  He stepped to the door and stuck his head out, looking up and down the hall. He came back in. “There’s a fire escape at the end of the hall.”

  “I’m well aware.”

  “Right. Anyway, my car is at the bottom, next to the trucks. The women should all be gone by now.” He took a blanket off one of the cots. “Pop the trunk. The latch is next to the driver’s seat. Get in.”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “Oh,” he added. “Is there anything downstairs that belongs to you? Maybe has your prints on it?”

  “Someone’s got my phone. IPhone in a blue case with the Cubbies logo on it. Also, a black telescoping baton and a set of brass knuckles.”

  He raised his eyebrow at that.

  “What? I don’t like guns. That’s right, I touched a gun, too. Luis’s. Pretty sure it was a Glock. I didn’t fire it, though.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to go down and see what I can snag. Get in the trunk without getting seen and I’ll get us out of here.”

  “This is crazy.”

  He grinned. “Yup.”

  “I feel like this is the bit where you offer me the blue pill or the red pill.”

  He patted his pockets. “Sorry, forgot my pills. How about this?” He pulled back his shoulders, and in a terrible Schwarzenegger accent said, “Come with me if you want to live.”

  “Oh, my, God. You are a dork. Let’s get out of here.”

  And we did.

  Twenty-four

  When I was sure we had exited the main gate, I sat up from my hiding place under the blanket in the back seat of Caleb Carter’s Ford Taurus.

  “Pull over at the corner of the fence.”

  He jumped visibly in his seat.

  “Seriously, Riley? I said the trunk!”

  “I’m not getting locked in a trunk. Nobody is going to see me. Pull over here.”

  He pulled over.

  “You’re going to get blood on my car. Your blood.”

  “I wiped my hands off on the blanket. Are you worried about DNA? Is that how you figured it out? The wig, in Chicago, right?”

  He reached into the glove box and tossed a package of sanitary wipes to me over the seat back. “Your face is covered, too.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, and proceeded to clean my face.

  “Can we go now?”

  “Hang on, I’ll be right back.” Before he could argue I jumped out of the back seat and opened the rear door of the taxi that Selena and I had driven to the yard. I grabbed my backpack and hers and threw them in Carter’s back seat. Then used one of the sanitary wipes to quickly clean the seats and dashboard. Better safe than sorry. I came back to the Taurus and started to open the front passenger’s door, but he shook his head. I slammed it shut unnecessarily hard and climbed into the back.

  “There are cameras,” he said, by way of explanation. “On the highway, and at the airport. Keep low.”

  Instead of hunching over, I slid down in the seat and put my knees up on the back of the passenger’s seat. I felt like a sullen teen. Exhaustion started to set in. I had a clear view of Carter’s strong jaw as he sat diagonally in front of me, his hands dutifully at ten and two on the wheel. He pulled back onto the road and headed us toward Houston.

  “So, how did you identify me?” I asked again.

  “Not DNA. In fact, I made sure that wig wasn’t found. It wasn’t that hard in all the chaos surrounding the explosion on the dock. On the off chance you had survived, I didn’t want to have an asset compromised if I could help it.”

  “I am not your asset,” I said, without sitting up.

  “Okay,” he said, without really sounding like he meant it. “Let’s just say it was in my best interested that you weren’t caught. We had similar objectives.”

  I slapped my hand on my forehead. I
was such an idiot.

  “So you accidentally mentioned Houston. Nice.”

  “I have my moments.”

  “Your ‘moment’ almost got Selena killed.”

  “Maybe. But I gave you exactly what you wanted. I had no idea how big the operation inside the warehouse would be, or how capable the two of you were, but I knew it would stir the pot, and sometimes that’s what it takes to get an investigation moving when it’s stalled.”

  “You’re not the utter Boy Scout I thought you were, Mr. Carter.”

  “You left a glove with two fake fingers in my car in Canada,” Carter went on, returning to the original subject. “I felt like I had seen you somewhere before, but at the time I just filed it away as one more weird thing in a career of weird things.”

  “Until?”

  “Until I saw you in Chicago, and then it clicked. We had been called out to the Carter Blalock bombing, because we investigate all domestic bombings. Once a local, Caucasian female was singled out as the prime suspect, we stepped back and let the locals handle it.”

  “I could’ve been an Islamic terrorist.”

  “Maybe, but demographics weren’t on your side, and we have a lot of incidents to investigate. The office let it go.”

  “But you didn’t.” I yawned involuntarily.

  “I did at the time, but I remembered reading the article when the case was solved, and you were pronounced dead. I read the police report out of curiosity, and some details stuck in my head.”

  “Like fingers.”

  “Exactly. They identified you from two fingers found in the blast.”

  “Everyone else bought it.”

  “I’m not sure they did. Having your entire body vaporized by a bomb is pretty unlikely. I think they just wanted to close the case, and you’d already been exonerated.”

  “Now I don’t feel so special.”

  “Boo hoo. Anyway, the fingers clicked in my head when I saw you in Chicago. Seemed a coincidence.”

  “And Selena?”

  “She’s a bit more of a cipher, until this news about her sister. We think she’s responsible for breaking up at least five different trafficking safehouses west of the Mississippi.”