Hard Trauma

by Franklin Horton

  There were at least a dozen vehicles strung out in a loose caravan. They skidded to a stop in a cloud of red dust. Motes of it floated in the sharp beams of powerful headlights. Men sprang from their cars, leveling guns over the top of the doors. They barked orders at Ty, having him back up toward them before dropping to his knees and crossing his ankles. They’d all been instructed that he was likely the good guy in this scenario, but they needed to confirm that for themselves. They weren’t taking any chances.

  In a matter of minutes he was cuffed and stuffed, sitting in the back of a police car while officers and men in lettered windbreakers combed the scene. An ambulance rolled up and EMTs began treating the two gunmen. The fact that none were attending to Barger confirmed Ty’s initial assessment that the man was dead from multiple gunshot wounds. While he patiently watched the actions of the officers, two men approached the vehicle and opened the rear door. They studied him in the beam of a flashlight before speaking.

  “I’m Agent Esposito and this is Agent Cornell from the Tucson field office. I’ve been on the phone with a Lieutenant Whitt from the Virginia State Police. She’s been trying to explain to me what the hell is going on here, but I want to hear it from you.”

  “My name is Tyler Stone. I was working as a security guard at the Petro Panda, a truck stop in Virginia, when a girl named Gretchen Wells was abducted.” Ty explained a summarized version of the chain of events that led him to Arizona. With the agent’s assistance, he unlocked his phone and showed them the pictures that convinced him the state police investigators were headed in the wrong direction.

  “So you’re alleging that the clothing in that garbage bag is the same clothing visible in this image taken by the security camera?” Agent Esposito asked.

  Ty nodded. “The bag is also full of hair. I would bet anything it’s Gretchen’s hair.”

  The two agents exchanged a look.

  “Sometimes kidnappers alter the appearance to make the kid harder to spot,” Agent Cornell offered.

  “The problem was that the child’s parents were in the middle of a divorce,” Ty said. “The dad is missing right now, so the investigators in Virginia assumed he was responsible. They weren’t interested in my theories.”

  “And you assumed it was your duty as a security guard to look into this?” Cornell asked, a sarcastic eyebrow raised.

  Ty stared hard at the man. “No, asshole. I lost my job because management didn’t approve of me locking down the station when we couldn’t find the little girl. I decided to look into it myself because no one was listening to me.”

  “How did you trace the tag?” Agent Esposito asked. “How did you find these people?”

  Ty needed to keep Jessica out of this as he’d promised. “My background was in special operations in the military. I called in a favor from an old Army buddy who has access to that information.”

  “The name of this friend?” Agent Cornell asked.

  Ty shrugged. “I don’t feel comfortable sharing that at this time.”

  Cornell frowned at him.

  “Was this part of your plan?” Agent Esposito asked. “A gunfight? Vigilante justice?”

  “I think you know better than that. I’m trying to find the girl. A friend gave me the number for a guy named Cliff Mathis who works with human trafficking cases. I’ve been in contact with him. I was hoping he might give me some idea of how to proceed after I found the RV. Things went south before I got a chance to follow up on that.”

  The two agents exchanged another glance. “We know Mr. Mathis,” Agent Cornell said.

  “I was going to call him in the morning. I assumed he would advise me to bring law enforcement in at that point.”

  Agent Cornell nodded at the RV. “Yeah, it might have been advisable to bring us in before it reached this point.”

  Ty conceded that. “I didn’t feel like I had enough evidence, especially since the Virginia investigators didn’t believe my theory. I figured no one would listen. The FBI wouldn’t even talk to me. Then when I talked with Cliff Mathis, he said this didn’t sound right. I was beginning to doubt myself.”

  “Well, if what you said about the child’s clothing pans out then I would say you have a strong case. People will listen to you now. Your friend Lieutenant Whitt is flying out here in the morning to bring us up to speed on the Virginia end of the investigation. She’s also collecting a hair sample from the child’s home and delivering that to us for comparison with what’s in the garbage bag.”

  “Am I under arrest?” Ty asked. His tone was neither scared nor accusatory, only curious.

  Agent Esposito shook his head. “You’re not under arrest. You’re not a suspect but we’d prefer you not leave yet. Do you have a hotel room?”

  “I haven’t found one yet,” Ty replied. “I got sidetracked.”

  “Obviously. Well, when we’re done here, we’ll get you settled into a hotel room,” Agent Esposito replied. “You’ll need to stick around for a couple of days in case we have questions.”

  “Trust me, I don’t plan on going anywhere until Gretchen Wells is found.”

  “You do realize you’re out of this now, right?” Agent Cornell said. “You proved your point. You have law enforcement’s attention and we’re looking in the right direction. This is where you back up and let us do our job.”

  “I’m fine with that. That’s all I ever wanted.”

  Agent Esposito leaned forward and removed Ty’s handcuffs. “You stay over here. Stay out of the way until we’re done.”

  “No problem,” Ty said. “I do need to point out that the Glock 19 over there is mine. I have a concealed carry permit from Virginia and had it on me when Barger bashed me in the head.”

  “It’s evidence now,” Agent Cornell said. “You’ll get it back when the investigation is completed. Maybe.”

  “We’ll get somebody to look at your head,” Agent Esposito said. “You might need some stitches.”

  32

  When the sicarios didn’t answer Tia’s calls, she became concerned. These were loyal men, associates of her son, and they’d worked for her before. They didn’t quit until the mission was complete unless something went very wrong. When she finally gave up trying to reach them, she went to the carport, removing the battery from the phone as she walked. She placed the burner phone on the concrete and pounded it with a rusty claw hammer until nothing remained but shards of plastic. She swept the pieces into a dustpan then dumped them into the garbage.

  Everything in life meant something. Everything was a sign. She wondered if this most recent turn of events was a sign. Perhaps she was entering a downward cycle in her life. First, the girl they were supposed to pick up in Richmond, Virginia, had not shown up. Then, after her prayers, Holy Death provided them with a new girl and everything was looking up again. Now things were weird. Some guy from Virginia showed up out of the blue and the men she sent to deal with him were not answering her calls. That was not a good sign.

  Tia was no stranger to the ups and downs of life. She’d come into this world at the bottom. Her childhood had been miserable. They were poor and entered the country illegally. Her father was a hard worker who always found jobs, but couldn’t keep them because he drank too much. He was a mean drunk, abusing everyone in the family when he was in the bottle. Her mother died when she was ten and Tia distinctly remembered thinking how lucky her mother was that she’d found a way to escape the misery.

  Tia escaped her father’s house by selling that thing all men wanted. On the street, she was a renegade, working without a pimp. They called it working “out of pocket” and the local pimps didn’t like it. They tried to make her choose up. When they forced the issue, trapping her in a pimp circle, she fought back. She drew a gun and opened fire on them.

  The looks on their faces. She smiled at the memory of it. They had not expected that. She made no threats, just whipped out a gun and started blasting. She didn’t kill any of them but she’d hit a couple. No one went to the cops. That was not
how they did things in the neighborhood. Some of them tried to get revenge over the years but she always came out on top.

  She developed a reputation for her willingness to kill any man who laid a hand on her. In fact, she became so powerful it led to other girls wanting to come work for her. Soon she was a madam, and the proceeds from that enterprise were how she started her crew.

  From the mid-1980s up through the late 1990s, Tia became a boss in Barrio Libre through ruthlessness and sheer force of will. She grew her stable of prostitutes into other lines of revenue. She ran drugs and robbed houses. She had crews chopping cars and selling the parts in California and Mexico. She ran all of it from a decrepit home in Barrio Libre with an enormous satellite dish in a bare dirt yard. Even as technology evolved and satellite dishes got smaller, she kept hers. In Mexico, those large dishes had been status symbols. No matter the condition of your home, that dish meant you were a person of resources. You were somebody, and Tia was definitely somebody.

  Things changed though. The cartels began to exert more influence north of the border. People moved in on her territory, bringing more firepower to the fight than she could ever muster. She was faced with a simple choice. She could fight and die, or she could retire. So that was what she did. She surrendered her territory.

  It was a hard pill to swallow. She had money stashed away but it was hard to give up the life. La vida. It was all she’d ever known. These days, she had no dreams of becoming a gang leader again. Her time had come and gone. She was a fat old woman. She needed to feel alive, though, and she needed to earn. You didn’t spend your entire life in the game then start knitting old lady shit when you turned fifty. That wasn’t how it worked, and that wasn’t who she was.

  When she surrendered her territory to the cartel, she had a crisis of faith that eventually led her to discover Santa Muerte. Like tens of millions of other Mexicans, she began to pray to the saint affectionately called Holy Death or The Bony Lady. She built an elaborate shrine to Santa Muerte in her home. From the neighborhood botanica, she purchased an effigy of the saint, a skeleton in a beautiful hooded robe, with jewels for eyes. She carried a scythe in one hand, like the grim reaper, and held a globe in the other. Tia surrounded it with votive candles to light in prayer, with different colored candles having different meanings.

  She learned more about the religion from the folks who were fresh over the border. There were no books, bibles, or churches to Santa Muerte. It was a people’s religion, spreading from person to person like wildfire. People told her about shrines that sprang up in villages and drew steady streams of pilgrims. They brought offerings of cigarettes, marijuana, money, and tequila. Some crawled for miles on bloody knees to show their devotion.

  Some in her neighborhood told her about the dark offerings that could bring favor with Santa Muerte. Black candles, animal skulls, and blood were offered for those requests that the other saints wouldn’t hear. It was said there were cannibals in Mexico who ate flesh in an attempt to earn her favor. After all, only she would offer protection for your illegal cargos. Only she would help you retain your criminal power. Only she would help you kill your enemies.

  This was part of why the Catholic church didn’t recognize Santa Muerte as a saint. As far as they were concerned, she was public enemy number one. As people left the church, the ranks of Santa Muerte worshippers grew steadily.

  One night, when the wound of losing her territory was still fresh, she lamented her loss of power. The loss of status in the community stung. People no longer feared or respected her in the same way. She wondered if Santa Muerte might be able to help her, as she had helped others. Rumors of Holy Death’s taste for those dark offerings made Tia think of the child she’d lost. She had six sons by six different men over the years. One child had died at birth and four others had since died in the life. Only one, Luis, remained alive.

  The dead child had been delivered at home, stillborn because Tia was too old and drank too much to be having children. Her body swollen by alcohol, she hadn’t even known she was pregnant until it was too late. There was no record of the birth and the body was buried beneath a dead bush in the back yard.

  Desperate for her life to change, for the blessing of Holy Death, she’d stumbled drunk into the backyard in search of a powerful offering. She wanted to honor the saint and ask for her help. With a butter knife, she scratched at the baked soil until she found all that remained of her child–a tiny skeleton held together by blackened strips of desiccated flesh. Tia carried it to her bedroom, where she placed it on her shrine with a flurry of frantic prayers.

  Santa Muerte listened.

  In just a few months, she was back in the life again. This time she wasn’t a madam or a drug dealer. She wasn’t running a gang. She was a trafficker, working with the cartel instead of against them. She found the girls, she groomed them, and then she delivered them to El Clavo. The arrangement came about because of her son, Luis, who introduced her to the business. While Tia had been shut down by the cartel, Luis had risen within the ranks of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Although it was a sore spot for Tia she kept her mouth shut about it.

  The girls became a lucrative sideline. For nearly twenty years now, Tia had been working her special kind of magic with the young girls. She drew on skills she learned as a madam, befriending those who appeared to have no one else in the world. If they needed a mother, she mothered them. If they needed a hug, she hugged them.

  Eventually, when she earned their trust, she offered to let them come live with her. They could do what they wanted. There would be no rules. They wouldn’t have to go to school. They could live like adults. She promised to give them everything their current lives denied them. For a certain kind of girl, those promises were a dream come true.

  It was all a lie. As soon as they were in Arizona, she got them addicted to heroin, meth, crack, or pain pills, then turned them over to El Clavo. Through his network of pimps, he put them to work on the streets. He had a circuit of girls working Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego. He paid Tia a certain amount for each girl, based on what he expected to earn from them. It was a simple deal for Tia and worked like clockwork for twenty years.

  Until the trip to Virginia.

  There was a cold, sinking feeling within her. Things were flying apart. Like she might be returning to that gloomy, helpless place she was when the cartels ran her out of business and took her territory. Had she screwed up by taking the girl at the truck stop? Had that been a mistake? It wasn’t the way they normally did things but the child was like a gift from Holy Death. Like a prayer answered. Had she been wrong?

  In her bedroom, she removed a cheap Nokia cell phone from her nightstand. It wasn’t a smart phone. It didn’t do anything fancy. It was just an LCD display and some clunky plastic buttons. She dialed Luis. When he answered, she addressed him in Spanish.

  “Those sicarios are not answering. I think something might be wrong. I should probably get out of the house.”

  Luis sighed. “I guess I can let you stay here for a few days. My wife will not like it.”

  Tia ignored that comment. She didn’t care for Luis’s wife. “I have a guest here that will need to come with me. Her ride is supposed to pick her up next week.”

  “Jesus, Tia, what kind of trouble are you in?”

  “No trouble. I just missed the pickup.”

  “Will this bring trouble down on me, Mother?”

  “No, Luis. I just need to stay low until my guest is gone.”

  “What about this business you sent the sicarios to deal with? Can it be traced back to you?”

  “I don’t think so. I just needed some help with Barger. He was becoming a whiny bitch.” She had no interest in telling Luis about the man from Virginia. If she did, he might not help her.

  “Can you drive yourself to my house?”

  “No. I don’t drive at night any longer. My eyes are old.”

  Luis sighed. “Your eyes are probably drunk. I can ha
ve a car there in an hour. You be ready. Is your guest cooperative? Will she be a problem?”

  “She’s young and sleepy. There’s no fight in her.”

  “Then make sure your shit is packed and you’re ready to go. An hour, Mother. If you’re not ready, we leave you.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  Tia ended the call and placed the phone on the nightstand. She went to the closet and got out a large suitcase. It’d been a gift from one of her sons but she’d never used it. People like her didn’t go on vacation. They didn’t take cruises and go to Disney World. She spread the suitcase open on the bed and began piling in some cheap clothing, several handguns, an AK-47 with a folding stock, and several rubber-banded stacks of cash.

  She went to the spare room where Gretchen lay handcuffed to the bed. She was conscious but groggy from the dose of Demerol Tia had given her in the RV. Tia gave her another injection for the road. She needed her to be cooperative during the move. When she was done, she stashed the Demerol in the suitcase with a box of syringes. She made a last pass through the house but there was nothing she wanted.

  She returned to the bedroom and struggled to kneel in front of her altar. She kept a thin pillow there for such moments. “Holy Death, I have tried to honor you. I pray to you many times each day. You have saved me more times than I can count. You gave me purpose when I had nothing. What have I done that you have turned your back on me?”

  Tia leaned forward and used a long match to light the two candles. One showed Santa Muerte in a long brown robe, like a monk. The other showed her in a white gown like the Virgin Mary. Both showed the same skull face with its wide eyes and shining teeth. When she attempted to return to kneeling, her elbow struck the skeleton of the child she’d offered all those years ago and it fell to the ground. The sinews and leathery flesh were no longer enough to keep it intact. It collapsed into dozens of pieces, the tiny skull rolling across the floor until it landed on its side, facing her.