Torched: A Thriller

by Daniel Powell

  “Hey, there’s an idea! Maybe you can ask him for help.”

  “Who? Where am I? I need a clue—something, Terri. Whose property is this? Please!”

  “He’s a relative of Shorty Guzman. Sinaloa family. I’ll leave it at that. The man is bad news, as they say. Those gators? Consider them employees. They help the Guzmans take care of the evidence.”

  Vivian swiped a tear away. She had no idea what Terri was talking about, but she knew it was related to the drug trade. There was danger near the border, and it seemed that she was right square in the middle of it.

  “Give me some credit, Vivian. Fair is fair. You have almost nine hours before things get uncomfortable for Miguel. That’s what you gave us, almost to the minute.”

  “Terri, please…is there any way we can work this out? Any other way?”

  Terri’s shook her head. “Look, even if I wanted to help you out, we can’t cash in any more favors. We can’t step foot on that property again, and neither will the authorities. You can be sure of that. But hey—if you get out of there, you might just make it. The hardest part is always that first step, Vivian.”

  Vivian studied her surroundings. The sun was a blinding torch, the landscape on the far side of the canal a scorched desert. It broke her down. “Fuck you, Terri!” she hissed into the screen. “Fuck you and your family, for all that you’ve done to me!”

  “Good luck, Vivian. God speed.”

  The feed terminated, replaced with a blinking avatar indicating her location.

  Vivian sat down. She put her face in her hands and began to cry.

  SIXTEEN

  She wept until she had exhausted her tears and the feeling of helplessness lifted, replaced with a raw, purple anger. Vivian stood, cupping a hand to her forehead to shade the light.

  The terrain was arid and there were very few trees or shrubs. What did grow there appeared too small to support even her petite figure, so she nixed the prospects of going over the canal almost immediately.

  Besides, what would she use for rope?

  She pawed through the dilapidated shelving and paint cans, searching for useful items. By the time she was done she had two: a metal irrigation key and a stubby, rusted landscaping knife—the same sort she’d used to cut sod when they put the yard in all those years ago in Cape Coral.

  The irrigation key was long, made to turn sprinkler valves sunk deep in the ground, and she liked the weight of it in her hand.

  While she knelt there, executing her search, she heard movement on the other side of the wall. She climbed up onto a chunk of concrete and peered over the ledge.

  It was an iguana. Two, in fact.

  She was so relieved that they weren’t gators that her epiphany was slow in coming. But when it dawned on her, she couldn’t hide her smile.

  It was a shot. A long shot, maybe, but it might give her a chance.

  “You can do this,” she whispered. She crept around the side of the structure, where the iguanas watched her with flat, bemused eyes. She took a careful step toward them and they skittered away, tales swishing pebbles behind them.

  “Shit,” she said.

  Still, it was the best idea she had come up with. She would just have to be patient.

  She hid behind the wall, huddling in the scant shade it provided, and hunted through the broken concrete until she had seven baseball-sized chunks. She waited, the minutes sliding away, listening for more of the creatures on the other side.

  When another one finally approached, she crept to the corner of the wall. Steeling her nerves, she darted out into the light and fired the missile at the iguana.

  Missing high, the concrete exploded against the wall and the iguana vanished in the bush. Forty-five minutes and three tries later, she still had nothing to offer the patient gators.

  “Lord, let this work,” she prayed. She was down to her last few throws, and her shoulder and elbow ached.

  The tell-tale skittering echoed again from the other side. She took a deep breath, released it, stepped into the sunlight and fired a shot. It clipped the iguana—a fatty, maybe seven or eight pounds!—on the haunches and the creature fell over on its side.

  She’d broken its leg, but the animal was far from dead. It pawed at the dirt, struggling mightily to escape.

  Vivian charged it with the irrigation key. It stopped moving after three good whacks. Vivian looked at it, horrified by the quantity of bright red blood it shed, and vomited.

  How long had it been since she’d eaten anything? There wasn’t anything there but bile and water, and her abdominal muscles cramped.

  She kicked sand over the vomit, collected the iguana corpse by the tail and disappeared behind the wall.

  It wasn’t enough. She had to have more.

  She hunkered down to wait, but it didn’t take long. Maybe attracted by the blood, maybe by her vomit—a bevy of lizards ventured out of the brush.

  This time, Vivian had options. She plunked another fatty, thankful that it stayed down. The others scattered, but now she had two.

  Would it work?

  It had to.

  She studied the canal’s surface, counting a total of eight gators in the water, and two more sunning themselves on the far shore.

  She located the best place to cross, estimating a forty-yard swim. She’d been decent as a child, but she hadn’t trotted out her competitive stroke in decades.

  “No movement, and it’s been almost an hour,” Terri said. “You coming, girl?”

  Vivian collected the iPad, peering into the screen. “How’s this for movement?” she said. She hefted the device, working her wrist like a hinge before chucking it like a frisbee. It sailed true, gliding across the canal and landing, seemingly none the worse for wear, in a puff of dust on the far banks.

  “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” she muttered to herself as she tore long gashes in the iguanas with the sod knife.

  She threw the irrigation key across the canal, careful to land it far from the iPad. She removed her shoes and socks and tossed them across. The sand was scorching beneath her feet.

  She took the first carcass as near to the shore of the canal as she dared. Alligators were ambush hunters. If there were eight on the surface, there were probably that many on the canal bed as well.

  “Come and get it!” she shouted, heaving the lizard out into the water. The iguana landed with a hearty splash and the water boiled, a flurry of green and gray scales writhing in a contest for the tiny scrap of food. A few of the gators blocking her route moved closer to the feeding frenzy, and she lured them even closer by tossing the second carcass.

  As another battle erupted there, she sprinted for the canal. She leaped, bounding out into the water. One step, a second, and then she tucked into a shallow dive, skimming through the murky water, repulsed by its stagnant warmth and the threat of unseen monsters.

  She surfaced, churning the water with arms and legs, and swam as hard as she could for the far banks.

  Something big knocked against her calf. Something attempted to grip her upper arm, and she wrenched it free and kept flailing forward.

  Her mind went blank, instincts taking over. She felt the water thrashing all around her, sensed the presence of reptiles beneath her and at her side.

  And still she flailed.

  The canal was deep and then, just as quickly, it was shallow. She’d covered the distance in a blur; she felt silt beneath her feet, and then she was stumbling forward, scrambling to free herself of the water.

  She stood on shaking legs and stumbled, half lurching and half running, up the gradual bank. She fell hard on her ass and scuttled backward, hands slipping in the loose sand, screaming as a reptile the size of a log pushed across the canal.

  A gator, an enormous gator, sprang up out of the water. Its jaws sprang open and clamped shut, and she felt the force of air on her face and chest. She smelled the creature’s rancid breath—a sour, reptilian stench that she associated with water in August, low in Florida’s r
etention ponds.

  Instinct still governed her, and it was instinct that shot her arm forward. Screaming, she buried the knife in the creature’s head. It sunk to the hilt, the powerful beast snapping again at her arm. She felt the creature’s leathery muzzle against the exposed flesh of her forearm, and then the cursed monster backed off.

  The knife sticking out of its head, it slipped back into the canal.

  Still screaming, Vivian scrambled backward from the canal.

  She was whole. Her hands darted about her body, double checking that she had, indeed, survived the passage.

  There was an ugly gash on her calf, a wound probably torn open by the armored tail of one of the gators, but she was whole and she had made it.

  Dripping, she looked up at the sky and loosed a feral shout. She snatched up the iPad.

  “I’m coming, Terri! You better be fucking ready, because I’m coming!”

  “Good! See you soon,” Terri said, smiling pleasantly. The map replaced the video feed, and Vivian quickly pulled her shoes and socks on.

  The iguanas were gone. In the midst of the feeding frenzy, one of the gators had been ripped apart. She watched, an eerie sense of satisfaction steeling her nerves, while a twelve-footer crunched the bones of his vanquished competitor on the banks of the island that had been her cell.

  With a little grin, she gathered the iPad and the irrigation key and jogged south.

  ***

  “She’s not the same person,” Miguel said. He bled from a dozen wounds, though the lashes didn’t bother him as much as the mosquito bites. His skin crawled with irritation, and he yearned to scratch the bites. “Please…you can still call this off. It’s not like we can go to the authorities.”

  Chaco listened to the begging man. He wore a grin. “No? No authorities, eh? Well, that changes everything! What do you say, then, Terri? Should we set him free?”

  Terri sidled up to Chaco. She had a set of pruning shears in her hand. “Can’t do it, Chacon. You see, our friend here is not without blame himself.”

  “Oh?” Chaco said. Terri had filled him in on the research, about the information Benny Hines had gathered for her. “Do tell.”

  Terri put the shears down and picked up the iPad. She made a racket, dragging her metal chair close to Miguel’s. She navigated the machine until she found the folder and pulled up a document.

  “Read it,” she said.

  Miguel squinted.

  “Out loud, Mikey.”

  He cleared his throat. “William Allen Whethers entered into the kingdom of heaven on March 12, 2012. Mr. Whethers was a devoted father to his three children and a loving husband to his wife, Marie. Other survivors include…”

  He finished the obituary and turned to Terri. Grimly, she moved to the next document. Another obituary. Then there were news stories and photographs. The last image showed a man and a woman and four children, standing about a make-shift campsite. A ripped tarp had been tied to their SUV, which was stuffed to bursting with clothes and other items.

  “Why? Why show me all of this?”

  “These people were victims of the Pegasus Funds collapse. They were regular people with good jobs and decent lives. They paid their mortgages on time. They weren’t speculators.”

  Miguel’s face fell. He looked away. “So? What does that have to do with me?”

  “Oh, you know exactly what it has to do with you. Those first two obituaries were suicides, Mike. It was Will Whethers’s young daughter that found him, hanging from the rafters in the shed outside of their ranch home. The same home that had been his own father’s—the one that was scheduled for foreclosure before the end of the March. These people signed documents in good faith, and when Pegasus crashed, they were pulled to the bottom through no fault of their own.”

  Miguel shook his head. “Fuck that, Terri. There were twenty mortgage traders working on those funds. You going after every one of them?”

  Terri smiled. “Probably not. After all, none of them are fucking the woman that terrorized my family and killed my husband, are they?”

  “What are you going to do to me?” Miguel said. His demeanor had shifted. The knowledge that his captors were prepared, that they knew him intimately, deflated his bravado.

  “Here. Take a look at this picture. Tell me if you see anything…different about it.”

  It was a portrait of Terri, Mike and Erin—taken just a few weeks earlier. The kids wore synthetic smiles. Terri had more lines around her eyes than ever before. She barely recognized herself any more when it came to family photographs.

  “It’s you and, I guess, your kids. Good looking photograph, Terri. I don’t know what…”

  “Look closer.”

  He sighed. After a moment, he had it.

  “Your daughter. She’s missing two fingers on her left hand.”

  “Bingo! We’ve got a winner here, Chaco!”

  “Hey!”

  “So,” Miguel said, nodding at the table. “That’s what those shears are for, am I right?”

  Terri shrugged. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  ***

  Vivian covered a little over two miles before the posse caught up to her. Six riders screamed across the desert on dirt bikes, the bandanas covering their mouths flapping in the breeze.

  Vivian slowed to a walk, thankful for the chance to quell the stitch that was forming in her side. They pulled up short, and she noticed that three riders had automatic weapons strung across their shoulders.

  They spoke in rapid-fire Spanish for a moment before dismounting and surrounding her. The bandanas fell, and she saw that only one of them was young. He had a round baby face, and he took a position at the front of the group. He wore designer blue jeans and an expensive tee-shirt. The others wore faded western shirts and dusty Wranglers.

  “You are her,” the young man said. He spoke without even a hint of an accent. “Congratulations on making it past the beasts.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What is your name?”

  Vivian told him, and he smiled at her. His teeth were white and straight. “These fellows…they want me to take you with us.”

  Vivian shook her head. “I can’t. I have to help someone, and my time is short.”

  “You are driven. I can see that,” the young man said, his eyes exploring her figure. She was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, her cheeks flushed from the run. “I don’t understand the circumstances of the game you are playing, Vivian, but your odds are not good, it seems.”

  She nodded. “I understand. But I have to try. I can’t…I can’t give up. Someone is counting on me.”

  A large man with a dark goatee and a straw cowboy hat stepped forward and muttered a stream of Spanish at the young leader. Vivian understood a few of the terms, but the word “ransom” went right over her head.

  The young man silenced his subordinate by simply raising his right hand. “Maybe we can improve those odds. Can you ride a dirt bike?”

  “Probably. I mean, I can learn.”

  “Good. I promised myself that, if you survived that nasty pack of alligators, I would not harm you. Now that I see you in person, it’s very clear to me that you need some help. Come, let me show you how it works.”

  She followed him to the large man’s bike. He grumbled beneath his breath, but he stepped aside when the young man locked eyes with him. He explained the bike’s controls before mounting the bike and pulling her onto the seat behind him. Her hands beneath his, he illustrated the brake and the throttle, then let her try it on her own.

  “It’s a fast bike. It’ll take you where you need to go, but be careful, Vivian. You survived those alligators, but there are other monsters out there on the road. Some of them carry the badge of the polícia. Cuidado.”

  His smile was kind as he handed her his bandana.

  “I don’t understand,” Vivian said. “The people that brought me here—they said you were dangerous.”

  He shrugged. “They were telling the tr
uth. I am dangerous. But I made a promise, and you did your part. You made it across the canal. I’ll chalk it up as my good deed for the day.”

  “What’s your name?” Vivian said.

  “Call me Solomon. That’s what they call me in the States.”

  “You’re from the U.S.?”

  “Earned a degree in accounting at UNM. Go Lobos.” His grin was disarming, and Vivian returned it.

  “Thanks for the help, Solomon. It means a lot to me. Should I…should I contact you when I’m finished with the bike?”

  He laughed. “Uh, no! In fact, it’s probably best that you never find your way back here at all.

  “Just pay it forward. Lord knows somebody out there could use a decent bike like that. Good luck, Vivian. I hope you make your deadline.”

  He climbed aboard his bike. The brute that had proposed her captivity climbed on behind another of the soldiers. They laughed at him, and his face flushed, and then they were gone, racing north in a cloud of dust.

  She watched their departure before firing the bike up and piloting it in a shaky line for a tenuous half mile.

  Within thirty minutes, she had it up to forty-five miles an hour, and she was flying toward her destination, the sweat already dry on her brow.

  SEVENTEEN

  “It appears that your little vixen received some much-needed help out there on the narcotics ranch, Mikey. We’ll have to pick up the pace if we’re going to get everything accomplished.”

  “What are you talking about?” Miguel said. His voice was weak, and he was sweating profusely. His face was a sallow yellow, his tongue swollen in his parched mouth.

  Chaco had dragged their captive outside, directly beneath the early-afternoon sun. It was just shy of 100 degrees, and he and Terri sipped ice water from lawn chairs in the shade of the dilapidated warehouse Terri had selected for their test of wills.

  Terri put her drink down. She walked over to show Miguel the iPad. “See? That little dot there is your honeybunch. She’s making good time—covered almost half the distance since just this morning. At this rate, she’ll be here in a few hours.”