by M C Rowley
Then a hand touched the side of my face and pushed down. My cheek pressed against the mattress and I saw another person, for a second perhaps, before the jab hit my neck.
Another person on a bed like me.
A girl, tied up and knocked out.
Voices this time. I was frozen again, staring upward.
The sounds were too muffled to make out. I felt my heart thumping from the anxiety of being paralyzed and it was eating at my concentration.
Breathe, I urged myself. Breathe and listen.
I took a deep breath. How much time had passed? I couldn’t say. But it was days, not hours. That was for sure. How were they feeding me?
Then I remembered the girl in the same state I’d seen the last time I was awake.
The voices became clearer. A man, speaking rapid southern Spanish, and the female cop, her tone brusque and short.
“Three more weeks,” said the man.
“No, that’s not possible.”
“It fucking is. It fucking better be!”
“We need more then. Whatever. This was not the agreement.”
“Three weeks. And then we talk cash.”
My head swirled. Three more! Weeks?
The pain thudded and blunted the voices again. I strained to hear. But I got nothing. Just mumbling. And then, the slam of a door.
And it all went black, again.
Chapter Nine
Jairo allowed himself a few minutes to relax. It was a practice his doña had taught him as a kid. No matter the storm, you always have a space, inside of yourself, to which you can go and breathe.
He opened his eyes. From this vantage point, he could see the entire spread of the Badland. The village buildings, nestled into the thick, vibrant green of the jungle. The solitary cables running from them, and beyond, the canyon and the bridge.
The jungle of Oaxaca Sierra was as tangled and wild and insane as it could get, nestled into one of the biggest Mexican states with hundreds more municipalities than the average elsewhere. Even before the impeachment, and the subsequent slide into what felt like inevitable war, the Oaxacan Sierra had been dangerous. He had been lucky to find this community.
The place hummed and buzzed like the cables had failed and ruptured and poured their voltage into the dark-brown earth and up into the air. The temperature was over forty degrees, but that didn’t bother Jairo. He was used to the heat. And the pressure.
He knew she had arrived already. The leader of the village had told him they would let her enter and send her here to meet him. On the phone, she had protested. She had been angry even, but relieved that he had made it out of Lujano alive. Jairo knew his own value to her organization.
His father had failed miserably in reuniting his family. A family whose parts he didn’t even know entirely. But at least he’d tried. Jairo respected him for that. The Englishman. His blood.
And so he would try to save him. And finish the job Scott Dyce had started.
But resources were a problem, which was why he needed her.
He heard footsteps crunching foliage behind him. He stayed looking the other way.
Then her voice came from behind. In English. Short and snappy.
“Was this necessary?”
He turned and her black mask made him step back, as it always did. There was something deeply unnerving about speaking with a faceless person. Especially here. Especially in his line of work.
“I believe so,” he said.
“So what is it?”
“I know where they’re holding my father. But the people here think it’s a trap. To draw me in.”
“So?”
“I need to go.”
Her shoulders rose and slumped with her sigh. The eye holes and mouth holes on her mask were covered, albeit in a lighter net material.
“That will complicate things. You’re asking for too much,” she said.
“I know.”
“I can’t guarantee getting you out if you do it.”
“I understand,” said Jairo. “But I need to know one thing: If I can get him, will you grant us both safe passage?”
“Your father too?”
The term still grated on Jairo when someone else said it. He nodded.
“If it’s soon. Yes,” she said.
Jairo watched her walk back down the slope, into the trees, and back to the village.
Time was not on his side. But he was strong again, almost at full potential. And he had a little support.
Once he was sure she’d left, he walked back to the village. Each building had its door open, and he could see ladies washing clothes or preparing corns, still husked, over small fires built out of neatly stacked logs.
He walked through, straight to the leader’s house, and knocked.
The leader opened the door.
“And?”
Jairo nodded. “I’m leaving tonight.”
The leader shook his head. “It’s a shame, joven. I don’t think you’ll make it. You’d be a credit to us here. You should join us.”
Jairo placed his hands on the man’s bony shoulders. “Thank you, brother, for all you’ve done.”
Jairo waited for some hours, sleeping, relaxing, and planning. When the light faded from his small window, he rose and put on the uniform the leader of the village had given him: big black boots over black canvas pants, and a thick cotton shirt over his thinned torso. His muscles had not wasted, but he felt lighter for sure. Perhaps that was a good thing.
Then he holstered the Policia Municipal standard-issue pistol. He’d kept his beard, but trimmed it a bit, and shaved his head. Right now, he looked the part.
He left the cabin, walked in darkness to the canyon, and found the rope bridge. He stepped onto it and crossed, out of the Badland.
The town was called Miahuatlán. It lay a kilometer from the main Sierra highway, and about five kilometers from the Badland. Walking through the Sierra at night was arduous due to the uneven surface, and in places it was impossible. So he decided it was best to make it to the highway and trek on the bank alongside it. His uniform would protect him from cops, but not Código X. That was a risk he had to take.
After two hours of the same black trees and starlight for guidance, he reached the blacktop. It was cracked and lined with stones and dried mud. The opening in the trees above allowed the meager light from the thin crescent moon to come through. He stooped and let his eyes adjust to the purple outlines. He looked left and right. Miahuatlán lay north, so he turned right and picked up the pace.
The boots were a luxury and he stomped rather than jogged and thanked his saint for the comfort they provided. He was sweaty now. Even at night, the temperature did not drop below twenty-five degrees Celsius and the humidity remained brutal.
In an hour of trekking, he didn’t see a single car, and when the sound of an engine did come from the distance, he felt ashamed at the fact it had made him jump. He cursed his nerves as he hauled himself up onto the high bank and hid in the bushes.
The engine drew closer. It was a truck. Eight cylinders.
Tearing up tarmac.
Its light spilled onto the section of road where Jairo was, blinding him at first.
He heard voices, shouting and laughing. Drunk guys hanging out the back.
The truck zoomed past—it was an old State Police Toyota. The guys inside were not cops, but every one of them held a semiautomatic. AR-15.
They whooped and screamed. With them were two young ladies, both in red mini-dresses. They were smiling, but even at that speed and at that distance, Jairo could see they were terrified.
Código X.
The truck passed and Jairo jumped down and continued.
After another thirty minutes, the road came to a curve and at the lip was a cliff. Across from the cliff, a sharp tectonic-plate-shift of a canyon, and on the opposite side, a sea of lights.
Miahuatlán.
Thousands of lights, more than there should have been for a small town in the middle o
f the mountains. Jairo looked closer. There weren’t only lights.
There were fires. Miahuatlán was ablaze.
The town was set into one half of a shallow valley nestled on the side of the mountain road. There was one main street running through it, illuminated, unlike the others, by streetlights. Jairo could track it up the slope to a large arch that presumably announced the town’s name to the passing drivers. From this viewpoint, the whole town was laid out. In the center was an old double-spired church painted red and yellow. In front of that, he expected, was a square, but the roofs blocked the view. Around the spires were perhaps four hundred buildings, mostly one-story residential places, spreading out in a messy circle until they hit the jungle.
Most of the fires were on house roofs. There were people milling about near the flames.
Jairo looked closer.
Not people, cops.
Jairo crouched and focused on the foreground. He was on a slope and it would take a certain degree of concentration to get down and closer. He began the slow descent, protected from being spotted by the trees all around him. He skirted the slope, moving around the town as he did, getting a better view with each step.
Miahuatlán was buzzing. He could see cops everywhere, but also men and women dressed casually. There were also kids and dogs running around. As he got closer, he heard shouting, and the fires nearest to him blazing too. It was wild.
After ten minutes and circling around fifty percent of the town, Jairo stopped.
The information he had been given only provided the name of the town where they were keeping the secuestrados. The kidnapped. In truth, he had no idea in which building his father would be, and there were hundreds of options.
He kept moving, and as he did the church’s frontage came into view and, in front of it, the town plaza.
And there, he found what he was looking for.
In the middle of the square, which was otherwise clear of people, sat his father, strapped to a chair, head slumped down.
The trap, as it turned out, was anything but subtle.
Chapter Ten
The remnants of the drug doses swilled and swished through the nerve endings in my head, although they no longer dulled the pain in my cranium, which thumped and battered my brain. My head was full of a venomous sludge, malevolent and cruel. The chair I was on was a cheap plastic one, and the ties around my wrists were rope. Not that it mattered; my muscles had no strength.
I was in the open air. I opened my eyes and lifted my head. The scene swirled in front of me. There was a church, an old colonial design, domed, with two spires shooting up. The plaza was empty except for me at its center. It had buildings of a similar Hispanic style surrounding it, and on top of each roof a fire burned. In fact, the collective embers lit the plaza, changing the normally dull rock into baked terracotta-red. On the roofs, next to each bonfire, figures were moving and talking and laughing, a steady hum of noise.
I closed my eyes again and my head pounded. I felt like I was about to vomit. But nothing came up.
It was impossible to deduce how long they had kept me knocked out. But I suspected it was weeks, not days. Their plan was clear now. A crude trap, and of course it made sense. It was the way here in Mexico. I remembered reading how assassinations in Colombia went down in the ’90s. One guy, one gun, one motorbike. One shot to the head.
Here in Mexico, the cartels favored arms that emptied a hundred rounds a minute.
Pepper the target, eliminate any chance of failure.
More of a show.
I had no idea how my son would locate me. But I supposed my captors had a way. Why would they do this otherwise?
Jairo was coming. That was certain.
I scanned the rooftops again. But the figures were black, obscured by the fires. They swayed and moved and that was all I could make out. I wondered whether this town had once been a normal place, with families wandering around, old women selling caramelized fruit pieces in plastic cups, and the odd taco stand at night. There was none of that now. The insane had taken over the asylum; feudal law had won out.
The urge to vomit came once again, but when I retched only bile filled my mouth. I must have stunk, after so long lying down in the same clothes. Not that it mattered. Whether Jairo came or not, what was the point? Either he’d get gunned down the minute he stepped inside the square, or we’d both be sacrificed.
I just wanted to know Eleanor was okay. And that Jairo hadn’t got her hurt. Somehow, some way, I knew he hadn’t. I remembered back to when they had met, back in Pozos. He had saved her. Hurting her made no sense at all. And this. This proved that whoever was in charge now wanted Jairo dead, or perhaps alive. How was I to know?
I breathed and stared at the red ground, waiting.
Two hours or so passed by. My neck and arm muscles ached severely. I supposed the drugs had worn off and the blood was washing into my undernourished muscles, filling them with pain. My body burned, but I’d become accustomed to great discomfort and controlled it to a certain extent. I looked up, and the figures on the rooftops had not budged. In fact, more had joined them, all watching the show.
Another hour went by. The figures were stoking the fires, keeping them roaring their fin-shaped orange jets into the black sky. All I could hear was the crackling and whooshing of the blazes, until out of nowhere a public-address system kicked into action.
A voice said, in Spanish, “We know you are here. Come get your father. Or in one hour, we shoot him. Come get him. We only want to talk.”
The voice was whiny and southern, uneducated and crass. A taunt to Jairo.
My spirits rose. He was here for sure. And even if that was a bad thing, it made me happy that he’d come for me. After everything. He wanted me still. I felt a smile creep across my face.
But nothing happened. Not for another thirty minutes. My body ached as though I’d received a beating from hell. I wanted to lie down. I got desperate and rocked the chair like I was having a fit. Its legs upended and I slammed down on my side. It hurt, but the feeling of weight shifting downwards, horizontally, felt better.
I looked sideways and saw a kid walking slowly out of one of the side streets that led off into darkness beside the church. I went to scream at him to turn back, but my throat was dry like it had been stuffed with cotton. I watched in terror as the small boy, dressed in a dingy Barcelona home shirt, walked toward me. He was out in the open, a sitting duck.
“Stop,” I croaked.
He kept walking. His thick black hair, cut in a bob, bounced above his smiling face as he bounded toward me, like this was fun. Then the PA system burst into life again.
“Parate, hijo,” boomed around the plaza.
Stop, son.
But he didn’t. He kept coming. I wiggled in my lying position, but it was no good. In four or so hours, the ropes hadn’t loosened a bit.
The kid reached me and stood over me and smiled. I smiled back as best I could, but then turned stern. “¡Vete ya!”
Go now!
He kept smiling.
“Por favor.”
He didn’t budge.
Then, behind him, from the same street came another three small boys. Then a girl, then four more boys. All came skittering towards us.
Then more came.
Then I lost count.
The voice coming through the PA system screamed across the square at them to stop and go back. But their insolence was solid. They kept walking toward me until I was surrounded by little bodies standing in a circle.
“Por favor, largarse,” I said.
Please, go away.
“It’s not safe.”
The mass of bodies around me became dense, in the hundreds easily. The small boy in the Barca shirt stooped down and drew a cheap kitchen knife his mom probably used to cut the vegetables in his daily soup and used it to cut my ties.
“Crawl, Señor,” he said.
And I did. I started slow but got faster. I looked forward, through tens of pairs
of little legs, covered and protected by the weak. The vulnerable, helping me. The white guy. The privileged.
The going was snail-paced, and the rough paving underneath scratched and scraped my elbows. I kept going, towards the edge. Then I became aware of someone behind me, guiding me. The first boy. He was steering me through his friends.
I heard a gunshot.
Some of the kids screamed. Some laughed, hysterically.
I went to get up. There was no way a kid was getting a bullet for helping me. But the Barca boy pushed me. I looked back and his eyes met mine. They were serious and black. I nodded. And he nodded back.
I will save you from this, I thought. I will.
I turned back and kept crawling.
Another gunshot sounded.
I hurried, and through the little limbs I saw the walls of plaza buildings. And to the left, a passageway. I looked back at Barca Boy, and he smiled and nodded.
I picked up the pace and made it to the edge. I could hear adult voices hovering above the children; they were hunting me.
Rolling, I caught a glimpse of the passageway and I moved closer. Then more gunshots. And the PA system again, though I failed to make out its message.
I crawled until my elbows stung. And eventually I made it to the passageway entrance. I rolled to the side and out of sight of the plaza, then rose.
Gathering my wits, I glanced down the passageway and was met with blackness. The streetlights had dropped out and the street was a tunnel leading to a deep black hole.
I jogged into it.
Behind me the kids started screaming and laughing and making raucous noises. I sprinted.
I kept my gaze on the end of the passageway, a square of black. And the fading light from the plaza showing the way. And all of a sudden, the end came into view. Maybe twenty meters in front of me.
The exit.
And it was blocked.
By a cop.
Chapter Eleven
