Power and Empire

by Marc Cameron

  At her mother’s prompting, Magdalena opened her kitchen four months before she turned thirteen. She didn’t look any older than she was. In fact, people often thought she was younger than her ten-year-old sister—but the men who hired her seemed to prefer it that way. The age of consent in Jacó was sixteen, but the authorities were more interested in catching speeders and they made it clear that they would leave the girls alone unless they were under twelve.

  Magdalena looked like she was ten—and no policeman ever bothered her.

  Opening her “kitchen” for business turned out to be grueling work, and she spent the first three weeks in constant tears. But a lot of money was coming in, and her mother told her she’d get used to it in time. That is what women did. They got used to it.

  Magdalena entertained many men—but instead of a pimp, she had her mother to contend with. Where other girls went to the hair salon every two weeks and had someone else to do their nails, Magdalena’s mother insisted she paint her own nails and do her own hair. Other girls shared apartments and ate at cafés, but Magdalena took her meals at home and tried to sleep during the day while she listened to her sisters argue over their lessons or the handsome boys who talked to them at school.

  Then Dorian had come to Jacó. He was a businessman with a kind smile. Magdalena was hanging out at a place called the Monkey Bar when she saw him. It was a slow night and he was handsome. He wore no wedding ring—she always added fifty dollars to her price if they had a wedding ring. She offered him an hour for a hundred American dollars. He made a counteroffer of five hundred for a three-hour date. She told him he was foolish, so he raised his offer to one thousand dollars a night—and they ended up spending the entire week together. She told her mother about him, but passed along only five hundred dollars to her each morning and kept the other five hundred in her shoe until she got to her room. At the end of the week, Dorian surprised her by asking if she wanted to go to the United States. She was beautiful enough to be a model and he would be willing to buy her some better clothes and be her manager. He said she could make a lot more money in the United States standing in front of a camera than she did in Jacó lying on her back.

  Her mother smelled a fortune in the deal and signed a letter to the American immigration authorities allowing Magdalena to accompany their family friend, Dorian, to the United States on a short vacation. She made Magdalena promise to write every week and, of course, send a remittance home to help take care of her little sisters.

  All had seemed fine on the airplane. People were still watching. But Dorian put on his wedding ring as soon as they reached Dallas. He hardly spoke to Magdalena at all, instead keeping her prisoner in a hotel at the edge of the city, while he did lines of cocaine and Oxy he bought from some guy in the next room. He took back the money he’d paid her in Jacó and never bought her any nice clothes. The only camera she ever saw was hooked up to the Internet, and he put her in front of that—a lot.

  Dorian sold her to another man a week later, for enough money to pay for his entire vacation, including the money she’d given her mother, and then went back home to his wife.

  Magdalena Rojas changed hands three times before being sold to Parrot, who already owned Blanca. She knew Parrot reported to someone else and probably gave him a piece of the money his girls brought in. He was mean, all right, but he didn’t seem smart enough to run a business by himself. Whoever that other person was, Magdalena never saw him. She was too busy staying alive.

  The girls spent their days trying to sleep, and their nights bouncing between a biker bar and a couple different massage parlors in South Fort Worth.

  Magdalena was nowhere near strong enough to give a decent massage, but she went through the motions for the guys that came to get massages—mongers, they called them. They got their fake massages, and then pretended the rest of it was all her idea.

  Parrot or Reggie took them to the doctor every other Wednesday, where they got checkups and antibiotics. The doctor was old, with very cold hands, and Magdalena hated him even worse than she hated the stinking bikers or the mongers who came to the massage parlors. The doctor was supposed to be nice and only pretended to be.

  Every so often, Parrot would get a call on one of his mobiles, and they would take a road trip in his Chrysler. Magdalena and Blanca had been to the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras and even the State Fair . . . well, cheap hotels near the Super Bowl, and Mardi Gras, and the State Fair. The ceiling of one cheap motel room was much like any other, but at least she got a road trip, and sometimes they got to meet a few other girls.

  Tonight, Parrot had set up a private event with a bunch of Asian guys somewhere south of Dallas. The event had gone long, and there was no traffic to speak of on the roads. Reggie was starting to get twitchy and drove slower than the limit. He kept his eyes glued to the road so he didn’t appear to be drunk.

  Magdalena hoped he didn’t get them all arrested. She didn’t want to get stabbed with a sharpened toothbrush—especially not tonight.

  She didn’t mind Asians, but her last guy of the night was an odd one. She’d been so tired, and incredibly sore by the time she got around to him. He must have noticed, because he said he only wanted to sleep. He’d paid for two hours and just talked to her until he fell asleep, ten minutes into his time. Sometimes guys all but passed out when they finished with her, and she would usually just be still and try to grab a little rest until Parrot banged on the door.

  This guy was weird, and she wondered what he’d want her to do when he woke up. He’d talked about all kinds of stuff—the places he’d been, the dangerous stuff he’d seen—like he was a spy or something. Magdalena had been carried away by his fantastical stories. She’d lain there beside him staring at the ceiling until his breathing became more rhythmic and she knew that he was asleep. She began to wonder what it would be like to be a spy, and once the man began to snore, she slipped out of the bed and snooped through his small backpack. The pack contained some wadded clothing, a camera, and a bunch of papers she couldn’t read—messy for a spy. She wrinkled her nose when she saw the loose toothbrush among the dirty clothes, covered in hairs and tiny bits of lint. That was just nasty.

  Magdalena had stolen things before, usually small amounts of money that the johns wouldn’t miss. She’d taken a watch once, but she’d been caught and Parrot chopped her bad for that. She’d never taken anything as useless as a thumb drive. She had no access to a computer, no way to know what information the device held. But she reasoned that if this man was indeed a spy, the contents of such a drive would be very valuable—and might keep the police from putting her in jail with the other whores if she got arrested. With her heart in her throat, she shoved the drive into the pocket of her short shorts and climbed back into bed. The odd man stirred, whispered something in her ear, and threw an arm over her shoulder. He woke from his two-hundred-dollar nap an hour later and shooed her out the door, pretending for Parrot that she’d been good at her job. Maybe he was nice, maybe he’d just been too tired to be cruel. Men were strange—and though she was only thirteen, Magdalena was old enough to know that she would never understand them.

  She’d told Blanca about her odd spy. She even told her about the thumb drive. The other girl was smart enough but could never focus on important things.

  Magdalena felt herself slide forward on the slick seat. Her heart lurched into her throat as the car turned off the main highway. Reggie got out and fooled with a chain a minute before pushing open a big iron gate. He sat behind the wheel again without speaking. The tires rumbled over a metal cattle guard.

  Magdalena peered over the back of the seat and out at the headlights as they played across the deserted gravel road. She rocked back and forth, about to jump out of her own skin.

  “Why are we stopping here?”

  Reggie shrugged. “Parrot told me to drop you off.”

  “And Blanca, too, right? You’re coming back?”


  “Nope, sweetheart,” Reggie said. “Just you. She’s too banged up for this job.”

  Magdalena could see the lights from the big house on the hill now. She’d never been here before, but she’d heard about it from Parrot when he was trying to scare her. If there was a spot worse than the massage parlors and biker bars where she worked, then this was sure as shit that place.

  She began to sob. “But for how long?”

  Reggie looked in the rearview mirror like he expected the tears. Every girl cried when they brought her here.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m just doin’ what Parrot tells me.”

  Blanca was awake now. She too began to sob when she realized where they were.

  “Are we . . . ?”

  Magdalena shook her head. “Not you,” she said. “Just me.” She took the thumb drive from her pocket and pressed it into her friend’s hand, careful not to let Reggie see what she was doing.

  She whispered directly into Blanca’s ear.

  “Take this.”

  “I can’t,” Blanca said. “What if they find it on me? I’m hurt bad. I can’t get chopped no more. It would kill me.”

  “Just take it,” Magdalena pleaded. “Stash it under my cot.”

  “You keep it.”

  Magdalena gave her friend’s hand a squeeze and nodded at the red-brick house. A dozen black lampposts fringed the circular driveway. The glow of pool lights illuminated the trees on the far side of the big garage. It was fancy, but that didn’t make what happened inside any less horrible.

  “They’ll take away all my clothes,” she said. Her throat was so tight she could hardly speak. “You have to help me.” She curled Blanca’s fingers around the thumb drive and patted the girl’s fist. “This is important. I’m sure of it. Maybe it will even save us.”

  Blanca’s mouth hung open as she stared at the huge house. The front door opened and a Hispanic woman in her early thirties walked out to stand under a brick archway in the porchlight. A white tank top barely concealed sagging breasts and a muffin top overflowed the waist of her skinny jeans. She held a twisted leather quirt made from a dried bull penis. The cruel thing even had a name, Ratón, or Mouse. It was as long as her leg, and it had the power to flay skin.

  The woman’s name was Lupe and she was the bottom bitch here—what Parrot called the senior girl of any operation, the one who’d been around the longest, survived all the chopping, and somehow kept enough of her teeth to hold on to the boss’s affections. Some men wanted innocence, but those girls never got to be in charge. They were just kids, used until they broke and then thrown away. There were always more kids. It was the girls like Lupe who became the bosses, girls who exuded equal parts danger and sex—just enough to be interesting. Though she was small, Magdalena was constantly on guard against giving off too much danger. Not physically, but because she was smart—and that scared men more than anything.

  Lupe leered at the car as they pulled up. She’d been through it all herself. She had to know how hard it was, but instead of understanding, she was vindictive and deceitful, enforcing the boss’s orders and using her position to keep the other girls in line. Fiercely jealous, she was known to apply her rawhide mouse with great effect to the back and legs of girls who didn’t obey her quickly enough—or simply for fun.

  Chest heaving, choking on her sobs, Magdalena cringed as Lupe tapped the cruel whip against her leg. The terrible woman would go hard on her, since the boss had apparently asked for her specifically. Bottom bitches were always the cruelest to girls they thought might pose a threat to their status. Magdalena had often thought that if her mother had joined the life, she would have been the bottom bitch.

  Blanca finally relented and took the thumb drive, stuffing it into her own pocket before Lupe could see. Sobbing in earnest now, she wrapped her arms around her friend, speaking without caring if Reggie heard her or not.

  “What if you do not come back?”

  Reggie flung open the door, ready to drag her out if she didn’t leave on her own.

  Magdalena closed her eyes and whispered, “Then save yourself.”

  8

  Texas Department of Public Safety trooper Roy Calderon had already ended his shift and made it home once today. He’d just snuggled down against his wife’s pregnant belly at their small three-bedroom house in Mansfield when dispatch called his cell about an overturned cattle trailer at the 287/67 junction. The accident investigation and subsequent report had taken the better part of three hours.

  Now on the way home a second time, Calderon thought about calling his wife to tell her he was fifty minutes out—the baby was probably keeping her up, anyway—but decided he’d better not, just in case she’d been able to drift off. Thinking about her made him smile. He hoped the kid was a redhead like her.

  The trooper rarely had time to listen to the good-time radio during a normal shift. He preferred to keep his mind on the job between traffic stops, but there were no cars on the road this late—or this early, considering the fact that the sun would be up in a couple hours. The night was wonderfully cool, so he rolled down the windows on his Ford Mustang interceptor and turned up the volume on the AM to let Coast to Coast blast conspiracy theories into the darkness.

  He caught the glimpse of taillights fifteen miles south of the Mansfield city limits. Trained to be inquisitive when it came to vehicles on “his” highway, Calderon stomped on the gas. The Mustang’s V-8 roared to life, throwing him back into his seat like a good interceptor should. The other car was going slow—too slow, really—and the Mustang closed the distance in a matter of seconds. The trooper silenced the good-time radio out of habit and fell in behind the vehicle.

  The car, a maroon Chrysler 300, kept a constant speed of sixty-three miles an hour, two miles an hour less than the posted limit. It bumped the center line a couple times but didn’t cross it, and that could have been a function of trooperitis. Nobody could drive a quarter-mile without committing some kind of violation, least of all someone with a black-and-white staring at them in the rearview mirror. Still, there was a gnawing in Trooper Calderon’s gut that came from one part experience and two parts instinct—something about this particular vehicle—that made him want to do a little more investigation.

  He asked Ellis County to run the license plate, gave the dispatcher his location, then decided to follow it for another minute or so. This guy hadn’t really done anything wrong. Calderon was exhausted, and he wanted to get home to his wife’s pregnant belly.

  Then the face of a young girl popped up in the rear window. She hadn’t given him a long look. If fact, the face vanished as quickly as it had appeared, as if someone had ordered her away.

  Calderon had seven years on with the Texas Department of Public Safety. Way back during his field-training days, a senior trooper in the Highway Patrol had once told him that only three kinds of people were out during the wee hours of the night—cops, paperboys, and assholes. Thousands of violator contacts over those seven years—many of them after dark—had proven the notion.

  Ellis County came back over the radio and said the LP was registered to a guy named Carlos Villanueva, aka Parrot. The dispatcher was on the ball and had already run a triple-I, checking Villanueva’s criminal history as well as any outstanding warrants. He wasn’t wanted, but his record showed two convictions for driving while intoxicated.

  Calderon followed the car for another mile, thinking about the girl—and whoever it was that ordered her out of the window.

  “That’s too nice a car for a paperboy, asshole,” he muttered, and flipped on his red-and-blues.

  Troopers in the Texas Highway Patrol are endowed with buckets of swagger by the time they graduate the DPS Academy in Austin. But swagger could get you killed if it wasn’t backed up with good procedure. As tired as he was, Calderon was careful and precise as he prepared to make the stop.

  He g
ave Ellis County his new location and followed the Chrysler over to the right shoulder, stopping far enough back that the other car’s rear license plate was just visible over the front of the Mustang’s hood. He cheated the cruiser over a few feet to offer a little cover from traffic coming up behind him. Instead of walking up immediately, he flipped on the white, forward-facing halogens on the interceptor’s light bar. These “takedowns” flooded the back of the vehicle with bright light. Never one to engage in a fair fight when it came to his own safety, Calderon did one better and turned the dash-mounted spotlight so it hit the rearview mirror, effectively blinding the driver to his approach.

  Then, instead of going up on the driver’s side, the trooper skirted around behind the Mustang so as not to cross in front of his own headlights, and made his approach on the right shoulder. He thought the guy with the peach-colored polo shirt was going to crap himself, he jumped so bad when Calderon tapped on the window with the butt of his flashlight.

  Once the driver got over his initial shock, he blinked up at the trooper but kept both hands on the wheel. A lone girl was seated directly behind the driver. She was tiny—just a child, really—with long hair hanging down and obscuring her face. This was surely the girl he’d seen in the rear window. She pretended to be asleep, but her breath was uneven.

  One hand on the butt of his SIG Sauer pistol, the trooper motioned with his flashlight for the driver to roll down the window. It came down with a motorized whine.

  “Good evening, Trooper,” the guy at the wheel said.

  He didn’t look like a Parrot.

  “Morning,” the trooper said, getting a better view of the Chrysler’s interior with the periphery of his flashlight’s beam now that the window was down. He didn’t say anything else for a long moment.