Queen of Humbolt

by Tagan Shepard

  “I know you didn’t,” Jordan said in a rush, her hand moving to Marisol’s shoulder. “I know how you feel about people who treat women like that.”

  “People like you.”

  “I don’t want to do it.” When Marisol rolled her eyes Jordan gripped her shoulder and rushed on. “I don’t want to. I never wanted to. I was just so hurt when you rejected me. I wanted to be the one thing you hated above everything else. I…took my anger too far. I know that now, but it’s too late, baby.”

  Marisol remembered with a stab of guilt how young Jordan had been when they’d been involved. The damage a person suffers at twenty-one can last a lifetime. “It isn’t too late, Jordan. It’s never too late.”

  “You don’t know the things I’ve done.”

  Jordan wouldn’t meet her eye. She looked to the ground between them and stroked Marisol’s leather jacket.

  “I’ve done worse, you know that. I’ve done terrible things.”

  “Not like this.”

  “No. Not like this.” Marisol waited for Jordan to look at her again, to show her eyes, but they remained fixed on the floor. “But you can stop.”

  Jordan shook her head, jerking it awkwardly before dropping her forehead. “It’s too late for me, but it’s not too late for you.”

  There was the hook. Marisol had known it would come, but it was still disappointing how obvious Jordan was.

  “It’s not too late for her either,” Jordan continued, jerking her chin at Sloane sleeping in the shadows.

  “You’ll let her go?”

  Jordan looked up finally and Marisol saw the lie in her eyes. She’d been smart to avoid eye contact before. There was nothing subtle about her, but Marisol would play this game to the end regardless.

  “What would it take?”

  “Who’s your handler?” Jordan licked her lips and they glistened in the dark. “Who’s your contact in Chicago?”

  “You thought it was Sloane. Why would you let her go if you think she’s my handler?”

  “It’s obvious she isn’t and honestly I don’t care why you keep saving her. I just need information, Marisol, and I need it fast.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “He’s coming,” Jordan hissed, her eyes sparkling, the reflection of the bare bulb shining in her pupils. “He’s coming and he’ll hurt you worse than me if you haven’t talked.”

  More likely he’d hurt Jordan, Marisol thought. She was always the loyal hound. Always looking for her owner to pat her head. When Marisol held her leash she craved praise, but there had never been the danger of a beating. The Bishop wouldn’t hesitate to punish her if she couldn’t get what he wanted.

  Marisol pushed her face close to Jordan’s, close enough to hear her breath hitch. “You’ve already hurt me, Jordan. What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is I won’t skin you alive,” she barked before moderating her volume. “I can’t keep you safe once he gets here. You have to tell me before that.”

  “No,” Marisol said. She was done with this game.

  “Please, Marisol. You don’t have to suffer.” She shot a quick glance over her shoulder, scanning the room. “You tell me what I want to know and I’ll let Sloane go. I’ll even save your precious women.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You have my word. I won’t tell him where The Hotel is. I’ll go there myself and burn it to the ground.”

  “Letting them go first?”

  Her hesitation spoke louder than her words. “Of course.”

  “Jordan?” Marisol said, furrowing her brows as she whispered the name.

  “Yes?”

  “Go fuck yourself. You’re scum. You’re worse than scum. You’re a lying, betraying, worthless bitch. I wouldn’t make a deal with you for a pack of gum.”

  Silence roared through the room as Jordan stared hard at her. Her jaw repetitively clenched and unclenched, her teeth grinding together audibly in the close quarters. Marisol waited for her to explode, for her fury to erupt as it had on the plane, but it never did. After a moment of fuming she rolled away from Marisol and pushed to her feet. Marisol watched her walk slowly away. She didn’t even slam the door.

  “That was pretty stupid.” Sloane’s voice floated through the darkness a moment later.

  “Yeah, well, I’m good at stupid,” Marisol said before rolling back over on her stomach and closing her eyes. She needed to rest, but she couldn’t help think about what would happen when the door opened again.

  “It was also very brave,” Sloane said.

  Marisol tried to think of a pithy reply, but the shock of praise from Sabrina Sloane kept her silent long enough to drift off to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Marisol was awake and struggling to sit before the metal door smashed into the wall. She didn’t have time to get upright before Jordan and her goons were on her. Jordan got to her first, grabbing a fistful of Marisol’s choppy hair and yanking hard, ruining her precarious balance. The roots of her hair held and the strain went to her neck. Marisol bit down hard to keep from screaming in pain.

  “Get to your feet!”

  The look of abject terror in Sloane’s wide eyes made Marisol swallow the insult she longed to hurl at Jordan. Instead, she focused on getting oxygen into her lungs. Jordan’s goons appeared on either side of Marisol, hauling her up by her shoulders. Jordan kept firm hold of her hair, pulling her torso down at an awkward angle to keep her from fighting back while the men cut the rope around her wrists. She needn’t have bothered. The moment her arms swung to a more natural position, pain tore through Marisol’s muscles. Blood pounded back into areas long neglected and she couldn’t hold back her scream. If the restricted blood flow was painful, its rapid return was agony.

  A sturdy nylon rope around her wrists replaced the zip ties, this time in front of her body. Whichever man did the job was either a sailor or a seasoned kidnapper, his movements swift and practiced. Marisol watched with detached resignation as one of them tossed a length of rope over an exposed rafter. With a coiled thwack of a snake falling from a tree it fell back to the floor. The other man stabbed the point of a meat hook through the twists of rope separating her wrists. She knew what was coming and had an instant to prepare before they reeled in the free end of the rope. With savage speed they hauled her off her feet. Her toes were barely scraping the floor, just holding up a portion of her body weight, when they tied off around a cleat on the nearest pillar. As they released the rope it slipped a little, providing a few more inches of slack. She allowed her body weight to pull the rope taut. They used another length of rope to bind her ankles together.

  Their job done, the two men disappeared. The room rang with sudden silence, the three women now its only inhabitants.

  Jordan prowled forward, a holster slung low on her slim hips containing a very familiar Colt. Marisol growled at the sight. No one threatened her. Certainly not with her own gun. Jordan stopped a few feet from Marisol, dropping an unzipped duffel bag at her feet. It clattered ominously, spilling its contents onto the floor.

  Marisol spotted a Bowie knife the size of her forearm, its double-edged tip gleaming. It was the least intimidating item in the bag. She also saw meat hooks in a variety of sizes, from a large hook like the one holding her off the ground to one no larger than a crocodile’s claw. A worn baseball bat was stained a sickening red-black. And then there was the dental equipment. She took a deep, calming breath and prepared her body for what was to come.

  Jordan’s eyes moved with glee across the implements. She finally settled on a long black cylinder with a pair of protruding metal points. She tested the weight in her hand before taking a single, loping stride forward and jamming the points into Marisol’s unprotected side.

  She wasn’t able to give voice to her agony. The electricity of the cattle prod locked her jaw. Sloane screamed for her. Marisol did not let it register. Instead, she forced her face to remain blank and tried not to let her eyes roll. Her vision was blank whit
e but she could still feel Jordan’s delight at her pain. It ran through the room a frequency below the crackle of electricity.

  Jordan yanked the prod away, leaving a pair of scorched holes in Marisol’s shirt. With all the strength she could muster, Marisol held her knees firm, refusing them permission to buckle. A thin cord of saliva slipped from her slack bottom lip, but her legs held.

  “Tell me about The Hotel.”

  Marisol’s lungs burned with the effort to inflate and deflate. She tested a deep breath and found it held. She blew it out slowly.

  “You may as well kill me, Jordan.”

  “No!”

  “Shut up, Governor!” Eyes wide, Jordan’s head whipped around at Sloane’s outburst. “If it were up to me, you would be dead twice over. Don’t make me warn you again.”

  Marisol spoke her next words to Sloane. “I won’t say a word, so you might as well let me die.”

  Jordan grabbed her jaw, pinching painfully at her lips. “Don’t worry, Marisol. You’ll die. You’ll die and I’ll be the one to do it. But that won’t be for a long time yet. We have hours, maybe days to play. You’ll talk. Trust me, you will.”

  She spent some time showing Marisol exactly what those hours would be like. The cattle prod was only the start, though she used it long enough to leave Marisol drooping on the hook, her shoulders straining terribly. She moved on to the bat after that, softening up the fleshy places on Marisol’s body without breaking bone. Marisol had no doubt that would come later.

  It wasn’t until Jordan discarded the bat in favor of one of the smaller meat hooks that Sloane spoke up again. Jordan nestled the handle against her palm. The hook, a good eight or ten inches long, rested between her fingers like a sadistic middle finger. She slid the wicked point along Marisol’s neck, leaving a shallow scratch that oozed a single droplet of blood. The moment the point came to rest against Marisol’s windpipe, Sloane shot to her feet.

  “Stop it! Stop it, you’ll kill her!”

  Marisol shouted before Jordan could, “Sit down!”

  Whether it was shock that the admonition came from Marisol or numbness from all that she had seen, Sloane stood frozen as Jordan leapt across the room. Sloane cowered as Jordan brandished the hook at her, but she did not cry and she did not sit down.

  “Didn’t I warn you to shut up? Do you doubt that I’ll kill you to get what I want? I thought by now you would be…”

  “Tell me what you’re talking about.” Sloane’s voice wasn’t quite steady, but it carried an undeniable note of confidence. “If I’m going to die over this hotel, I want to know what it is.”

  Marisol tried to tell her to be quiet, but her strength gave out and all she could manage was a gurgling groan as she slumped forward, supported only by the hook through her bindings. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as she thought it would. Her foot swayed drunkenly, propped on the toe of her boot like a wobbly ballet dancer en pointe.

  “You want to know, do you?” Jordan smirked and pressed the curve of the hook into Sloane’s cheek. “Shall I tell her, Marisol?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  Jordan chuckled and slid the cold steel across Sloane’s cheek. “I think that’s a yes, don’t you, Governor?”

  “Just tell me.”

  Sloane kept her eyes fixed on Marisol’s slumped form, ostentatiously ignoring the woman standing so close to her. Marisol didn’t waste energy trying to meet her eye. She couldn’t muster the strength to protest as Jordan revealed the secrets she had sworn her life to protect.

  “After I’m done with Marisol, I’ll teach you some respect,” Jordan said, caressing Sloane’s cheek again with the hook. “But for now, I think it’ll do Marisol good to know just how many of her secrets I know. It might inspire her to share the rest. The Hotel is a safe house. A place to hide people.”

  “What people? Who are they hiding from?”

  “People who think they have free will, even though they belong to someone else.” Jordan paced around behind Sloane, slapping the flat end of the meat hook into her open palm. “You see my employer is a businessman.”

  Marisol couldn’t keep silent anymore, but there was only air enough in her lungs to croak. “He’s a monster.”

  “Yes, he is. I gave you the chance to get out of this without ever meeting him, but you had to be stubborn.”

  Sloane’s forehead furrowed, “This hotel belongs to your employer?”

  “No, only those inside it belong to him. As I said, he’s a businessman. Certain wealthy individuals require a product. He provides it to them for a price.”

  “You’re talking about women.” Marisol finally managed to raise her head, her eyes slicing through Jordan without touching her. “Girls. They aren’t things to be bought and sold.”

  Jordan ignored her, dropping her lips close to Sloane’s ear. “Like any good businessman, he keeps close eye on his inventory. That inventory started to disappear when no one was looking.”

  Marisol’s eyes finally landed on Sloane. She saw something in the woman’s face. She looked impressed or, at the very least, not disgusted. Marisol was unaccountably pleased at the prospect that Sloane might respect her. At the moment she could not allow herself to get lost in the warm feeling of it, so she held it away from her. Tucked it aside until later. She let her head fall again.

  “We heard rumors. Someone who came and stole the merchandise. Took them away to a safe place until they could be sent back home or given a new life. Maybe even testify against my employer. They whispered about a place called The Hotel.”

  Jordan moved away from Sloane, slowly striding across the dirt floor.

  “But you lost one, didn’t you, Marisol? You can’t keep your eyes on them all the time. Probably because The Hotel isn’t in Chicago, is it?”

  A face flashed across her mind’s eye. A young woman who’d heard too many threats from The Bishop and wouldn’t wait at The Hotel for Marisol to get her back to Colombia. “Her name was Anna. Were you the one who hurt her?”

  “I did more than that. Not until after she described who rescued her, though. Do you know what they call you?”

  Marisol had spent weeks searching for Anna after she left the safety of The Hotel. She’d never found a trace and had foolishly hoped she’d managed to get home on her own.

  “They call you The Dark Angel. Ángel Oscuro. She kept crying out for you to save her. If only she could see you now.”

  Jordan grabbed Marisol’s hair and jerked her head back. Her neck screamed in pain but she didn’t have the breath to give voice to it.

  “Human trafficking.” Sloane’s voice cut through the air between them. “That’s what this is all about. Sex trafficking. Where are you getting the girls?”

  “People go missing all the time here in Colombia. The question,” Jordan said in a quiet voice inches from Marisol’s face. “Is where do they end up?”

  Marisol’s eyes began to roll. She prayed for unconsciousness, oblivion.

  “Where is The Hotel, Marisol? Your little runaway couldn’t tell us, but you can. Unless you want me to hang your guts from the rafters.”

  She released Marisol’s head and it fell forward, her chin hitting hard against her chest. There was a moment of quiet anticipation. A heartbeat when the whole world stopped and Marisol thought her prayers might be answered, but they weren’t. Her mind stayed aware and Jordan slammed the blunt end of the hook hard into her ribs on the right side. A sharp stab of pain erupted from the bones, but they held. For now.

  Marisol heard the hook clatter to the floor and wondered whether her body could take this. She supposed it depended on what Jordan took out of the bag, but part of her was ambivalent. Whatever it was, it would hurt her and not kill her. She could hold on. For how long was the question. Perhaps another day. She only knew that she would not break right now.

  She heard the crackle of arcing electricity a second before the prongs touched her abdomen and every muscle in her body seized.

  Chapter Twenty-two />
  “Tell me where it is, Marisol!”

  Jordan was using her fists this time, secure inside fingerless boxing gloves. The padded knuckles kept her from splitting Marisol’s face open. She pounded them in quick succession into Marisol’s abdomen. Jordan wasn’t a good enough boxer to know exactly where her kidneys were, but she was doing a good job of bruising Marisol from head to toe.

  “Where is The Hotel?”

  Marisol shook her head and the fists came again. Four or five shots to her ribs and then a lazy hook to her jaw. Her head jostled around like a worn out bobblehead doll. Her shoulders and neck ached so badly she wanted to scream. She kept her mouth shut and waited for the world to right itself again.

  She squinted at the blur of blue in the corner of the room. The blur held perfectly still and gave Marisol an anchor point. As it came into focus, the red wave of Sloane’s hair separated itself in hue from the now dirty sapphire of her dress. She stared unblinkingly at Marisol.

  She let her mind empty as she stared into Sloane’s eyes. The pain in her shoulders dulled. Her neck was only a pinprick of agony rather than a knife’s blade. She tried to tell her face to smile, but her lips wouldn’t comply. She tried to tell herself to wink, but she was too exhausted even for that. All she could do was stare, and she was surprised to find that Sloane did not look away.

  Marisol knew when Jordan picked up the knife because Sloane’s eyes widened. She turned to look at her tormentor. The overhead light shuddered as a large truck rumbled by on the dirt road outside. The vibration made it swing, the hypnotic movement of light flashing on the sharp blade.

  Sloane screamed for her when the blade entered her bare bicep. It didn’t cut deeply, just a fine slice. Marisol felt the hot trickle of blood on her cool skin. She focused on that rather than the pain.

  “Who’s your handler?”

  Marisol’s focus gave her new clarity. She heard the words of Sloane’s scream rather than just the sound of it. Heard the plea for help that would never be answered. She let her eyes fall to the holster riding low on Jordan’s hip. The hammer of Marisol’s Colt glinted like the knife in swaying light. Jordan hadn’t secured the thumb break. Apparently she wasn’t worried about her weapon’s security. She had no reason to worry about Marisol breaking free and Sloane had probably never even held a gun.