Blood Lies - 15

by Richard Marcinko

  I was in such deep thought contemplating how we would proceed that I barely noticed the two sawed-off runts lurking near the exterior door to my room. In fact, I might have ignored them completely had I not caught sight of the suspicious bulges at their waists.

  The sawed-off shotgun they brandished would have been difficult to ignore, though.

  “What is this about?” I asked as one of the men pointed it at my face.

  “You will come with us, senor,” said the nearest runt. His English was heavily accented, but no worse than the average lawn care worker’s in the States. “You will be quiet or your family will never hear from you again.”

  “You didn’t have enough this afternoon?” I growled. I took a side step to the right, angling close enough to grab the other goon.

  He made a strange face. “What do you mean?”

  “You want what your boys got?”

  “Who are you talking about?” said the man closest to me.

  “You are mixing us up with someone else, senor,” said the runt with the shotgun. “But it is of no consequence. You will come with us now.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  He pointed the shotgun at my face.

  At that, I threw up my hands and said, “Oh my, oh my. Please don’t hurt me. Oh, my.”

  * * *

  Honest, I did.

  I recognized the man from some of our background material IDing the possible kidnappers. In fact, he appeared to be one of the men who had been following Ms. Reynolds in the marketplace the day she was kidnapped. The surveillance footage we pulled from one of the town video cameras was grainy as hell, but the ID was cinched by a large scar that ran down the man’s right cheek. His name was Hector Lopez, the ostensible number two of the Archuleta group.

  “Take my wallet here,” I told him. “It’s yours.”

  “We will take your wallet and your passport,” said the runt. “But it’s your friends who will pay. You’ll see.”

  “You’re kidnapping me?” I said with mock surprise and horror. “I’m not worth your while.”

  “You had better hope you are, senor,” said the other man. “Or it will not go well for you.”

  “Now, now, do not worry. We do these things all the time,” said Lopez. “You will cooperate and it will not be very bad. It will be like a vacation for you. You’ll see.”

  They took me down the stairs. At this point, Trace came out of the bar and saw me down the street. I had to make an instant decision. Were these guys really from a different organization—the one that we had been hoping to get kidnapped by? Or was there only one organization, and did it want to kill me?

  Surely, the odds favored the latter: how many people in the world hate my guts enough to want to kill me?

  Don’t answer that.

  I decided that if they had been part of the gang from earlier in the day, they surely would have shot me by now. And their whole approach now jibed well with the modus operandi we had sussed out for the Archuleta group, certainly much more closely than the bozos from the afternoon.

  My gut said take a chance. My head said something else.

  I went with my gut. I reached my hand up to my face and gave Trace the high sign indicating I was OK. She backed off; as soon as we passed, she went and alerted the others and they began tracking me. I still had my tracking device and the hidden phone, which made things a little easier.

  My abductors led me down to a VW van parked around the back. They didn’t bother tying my hands, and once we were in the truck they became even more friendly, telling me to call them Juan and Geraldo. Juan was actually Hector Lopez; Geraldo was probably a fake name as well, though I never actually found out what the right one was. But I was already thinking of them as Garlic Mouth and Fish Breath, respectively, for the obvious reasons.

  Garlic and Fish were clearly in no hurry. They asked for my wallet and I handed it over; then they decided they wanted my watch as well. I told them it had great emotional value: it was a $15 job that I got on sale at Target for $13.99, and you don’t get deals like that every day. They chuckled when I offered them my pocketknife instead.

  “Oh, you keep that,” said Fish Breath, laughing. “Maybe you need it for food.”

  I was beginning to think that I’d done a little too good a job prepping my cover as a wimp when Garlic produced a black hood.

  “You’ll put this on while we travel,” he told me.

  “And if I don’t?”

  “That would be very bad for you,” he said. “I will leave you untied, but if you give us any trouble, you will be beaten. And worse.”

  I complied. I spend half my life in the dark anyway—another half hour wasn’t going to hurt.

  * * *

  We drove into Juarez—pretty obvious from the turns and traffic congestion—then farther west. Neither Garlic nor Fish Breath said anything; they were too busy listening to insipid Mexican hip-hop, the sort of stuff you wouldn’t let your daughter listen to even if she didn’t know a word of Spanish. We eventually stopped out in the countryside, a good twenty miles southeast of Juarez according to Doc, who by now was back at our base camp watching my movements thanks to the tracking device. I was taken into a ranch building with two rooms; Garlic brought me into the back room, sat me on a chair, and told me I could take off my hood once I heard the door close.

  “Remember, if you give us trouble, there will be pain,” he said. “No trouble, no pain. Very easy to understand this is, no?”

  “Sure.”

  The rest of the night passed without incident or conflict. Garlic Mouth and Fish Breath sat in the front room drinking beer and watching Mexican wrestling. I amused myself in the back room by using my penknife to fend off rats. They were fast little buggers; I only managed to get three.

  I nodded out for a short while, then woke when Fish Breath brought me some greasy eggs for breakfast.

  “Morning already?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, morning. Here is your food.”

  “So, what happens next?”

  “Next, your friends get money and everything’s happy. Eat. You must keep your strength.”

  He put the plate down on the floor. The eggs were the color of dried nicotine stains on year-old cement. I’d rather have skinned the rats and swallowed them whole.

  “Have you kidnapped many people?” I asked.

  Fish Breath gave me a quizzical look, as if he didn’t understand.

  “I’m interested in it as a business model,” I told him.

  “Your English is hard to understand.”

  Ordinarily I would have annunciated a little more clearly by using my fists, but the need to display my passive side harmed my pronunciation. Fish Breath left without saying anything else; possibly he wouldn’t have known the answers to my questions anyway. I thought I might have better luck with Garlic—he had a slightly less retarded look in his eyes.

  But I never got to ask. Fish returned a short while later with a black hood.

  “We’re going for another ride,” he told me, holding it up. “You come?”

  How generous—it almost sounded like I could opt out. His grin, though, indicated that wasn’t an option.

  Over the course of the next few hours I found myself transported in the back of a van. We moved from point A to point B, D and F, stopping briefly each time to pick up a passenger. The procedure was extremely businesslike, given the circumstances. We sat on the floor, each silent except for an initial grunt in greeting and the occasional curse as the truck bottomed out on a pothole.

  There were five of us by the time we stopped for good. The rear doors of the van flew open. A pair of thuggish Mexicans leaned in and began roughly grabbing us, one by one. Someone started to object; he was quickly thrown to the ground.

  “You will obeys, or you will be sorries,” said one of the men. His pronunciation was clear, but obviously he hadn’t mastered noun-verb agreement.

  I kept my reaction in check—barely—and moved along with the others, sh
uffling my feet as one of the guards tugged me into a large building. I was the next to last inside; the door closed a few seconds later.

  “It’s OK,” whispered someone several feet away. “They’re gone.”

  I took that as my cue and pulled off my mask.

  I was at the front of a large, dimly lit warehouse. The people I’d been in the van with, all still wearing their hoods, were standing in a clump around me. Another half-dozen people stood near blocks of hay about fifteen feet away at the side of the building.

  I helped a few of the others take off their hoods, then started playing Mr. Congeniality, introducing myself using my cover story of course. Most of my fellow prisoners were white Americans; there were a few Mexican-Americans, all citizens, mixed in. While everyone’s background was varied, their stories all had a common thread: they had been in Juarez or the nearby area, were on their own, and while far from rich had enough wherewithal in the family to afford a modest five-figure ransom. There was an older couple from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who had decided to spend a few days in Juarez sampling tourist trinkets for their small shop back home, and a born-again Christian thinking of starting a church who had been viewing possible locations. I knew immediately which real estate agent had been “helping” him: the same one as mine, whom I’d already flagged as a scout for the gang.

  I worked my way around the building, introducing myself and nodding in sympathy when they said they weren’t sure if they could hold out much longer. They were all pretty calm, given the circumstances. Most had been held for a few days though two had been prisoners for nearly a month. Their kidnappers had kept them in a variety of places; a few had been beaten, but most had been treated relatively benignly. Not that any of them were likely to buy roses for their guards or captors anytime soon.

  The longer the prisoners had been detained, the more resigned and even philosophical they seemed about the situation. A middle-aged woman stood with her fingers against her temple, talking about all the work she had to do for her daughter’s wedding, interrupting herself every few minutes to say that maybe it was good she was missing some of the confusion. A man said he’d been exercising and if he stayed in captivity another week or so, he’d be in the best shape of his life.

  In two or three cases, trembling lips and shaking hands betrayed dim hopes of being ransomed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said a man who had worked as a fishing guide in Colorado. “If you get sprung before me, could you go to my brother-in-law and ask for a loan to get me out?”

  While in theory any of them could have been a plant, their body language and the way they talked convinced me otherwise. Victims hold themselves a certain way—shoulders down, head slightly bent. Not one of them looked me in the eye when I spoke to them.

  With one exception.

  “I know exactly who you are,” said Melissa Reynolds when I finally found her toward the back of the warehouse. “Don’t give me a bullshit story like you’re giving the others.”

  She folded her arms and twisted her mouth in an expression that said don’t mess with me.

  It was a pretty mouth. The arms weren’t bad either, though my eyes were drawn to the chest behind them. She was wearing a pair of khaki pants and a Texas Longhorns shirt—I know there’s a lewd pun in there somewhere, though I can’t seem to find it. She was a little too short to be a model at five-four, but her body was classically proportioned. Her curves were definitely curves, without being top or bottom heavy.

  Her face?

  A shimmering white opal.

  Her hair?

  Blond. Probably natural, though I wasn’t at liberty to check.

  “I assume my father sent you,” she said with a sneer.

  “Something along those lines.”

  She displayed her gratitude, both for her father and for me, by screwing her face into a deeper scowl.

  “How do you know who I am?” I asked.

  “My father is your biggest fan. I should have known you’d come. Where’s Trace Dag-her?”

  “You mean Trace Dahlgren.”

  “Right. And what’s his name, the big guy who’s always eating?”

  “Shotgun?”

  “How fat is he in real life?” she asked, leaning over to look around me.

  “He’s big, not fat. And he’s not here.”

  “Just as well. For your information, I don’t need to be rescued.” She folded her arms a little tighter. “Thank you very much.”

  “You think your sugar daddy’s going to pay your ransom?”

  That earned me a slap. It had been a while since I’d been slapped by a pretty woman; it did my heart good to know I can still rouse emotion.

  “I don’t need your help,” she said. “I don’t want it. You’re nothing but a conceited SEAL.”

  The word “SEAL” was definitely a four-letter word in her mouth.

  “Your daddy was a SEAL.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “You don’t love your dad?”

  “I love my dad—it’s SEALs I can’t stand. They’re two-timing, loudmouthed know-it-alls, and you’re the king of the bunch.”

  “Just because you had a bad love affair—”

  “Two bad love affairs. And you’re not going to be the third. Believe me.”

  There was absolutely no possibility of that. My inclination at that point was to put her over my knee and give her a good spanking, something that surely would have benefited both of us. But at that moment the door opened and two large scruffy Mexican toughs came into the warehouse. Each carried a Styrofoam chest. They put them down about twenty feet from the door, snarled in our direction, then strolled back the way they had come, bodies rocking nonchalantly as if they were bankers taking their evening constitutionals after counting the day’s profits.

  A crowd of prisoners ran to the chests. They dropped to their knees and began scooping out the contents—rice and beans, mixed together, a hodgepodge. There were no utensils; they used their hands.

  “Better feed your face while you can,” said Ms. Reynolds derisively. “You’ll be hungry later.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’d rather starve than eat that shit. I’m sure it’s been pissed in. Or worse.”

  “Now I’m sure you’re your father’s daughter,” I said. “You talk just like him.”

  “Shove it.”

  She walked away from me, heading toward the corner of the building.

  I got the distinct impression that she was playing hard to get and wanted me to follow, but I had other things to do. I went over behind the bales of hay, made sure I was alone, then pretended I was Judy Garland at the end of The Wizard of Oz—I clicked my heels three times, activating the signal in the phone that told the team I had located our target.

  Now all I had to do was wait to be rescued, right?

  Sure. That sounds exactly like me.

  Rescue could take hours; Doc would have to assess the situation and come up with a plan. In the meantime, more intel of the target site would be extremely useful, and guess who was perfectly positioned for a recce?

  I started with a quick inspection of the interior. There were only two doors—the one that the food patrol had just used and a massive, garage-doorlike panel, both on the north side of the building. The floor was poured cement, relatively new and from appearances thick enough that it would take a jackhammer to get through. The walls were another story: these were thin steel panels strapped to the girders; they would be easy to cut through. A QuikSaw would take no more than a minute to slice a hole. Hell, I could probably use the can opener on my pocketknife if I wanted to take the time.

  There were two dozen vents along the roof. These were raised the way you see on some barns in the States; they looked like little rooflets standing on a pole at each corner. They appeared just big enough to squeeze through—a fact I took under advisement as I continued my survey.

  There was no furniture, aside from the hay bales. There were a few rags and some old Mex
ican newspapers, stained with oil, scattered on the floor, but otherwise the place was empty.

  You’re wondering where people relieve themselves?

  Pails behind the hay. There was a stack of newspapers near the pails, but otherwise it was as wretched an arrangement as it sounds. The building was pretty warm, and the smell …

  I went back and looked at the roof vents. If I could get through one, I might be able to poke out and have a look around. The problem was getting up there. I considered stacking the hay into a stairway, but the bales were damn heavy and I’d need a lot of them; I’d be exhausted by the time I got them in place. Even if I managed it, the stairway would obviously be noticed by the guards if they returned.

  The idea was good; it just needed to be altered. I stacked one bale on top of another pair, making a three-story stack. That gave me about nine or ten feet toward the roof. The rafters remained twelve feet away. But that wasn’t insurmountable. I took some of the rags and the rope holding the bale together—my trusty pocketknife helped again—until I had a line a little more than two dozen feet long. I tossed it up, missed, tossed it up again, then got enough of it over the rafter to tie it off. I started to climb.

  The line broke about halfway up. Luckily I landed on the hay.

  Melissa Reynolds was standing nearby, smirking.

  “Help me up?” I asked, extending my hand.

  She reached for the broken strands instead. Lashing them together, she spun the rope up over the rafter, tied both ends together, then began climbing hand over hand to the top.

  I have to confess that when I first took this assignment, I began with an entirely different mental image of the woman. I thought I was rescuing a well-spoiled princess, one of those girlie girls who dresses in pink and wears pearls to afternoon tea. Her personality would be somewhat similar to Pearl White’s (the damsel of distress in Perils of Pauline). Here instead was Lara Croft, the ball-busting heroine of Tomb Raider, come to earth not only climbing up the rope but scrambling across the thin rafter beams to the skylight and wedging it open with her back.