by Gary Sapp
for the cartels. He’s not very good at either one. And his accountant is a moron. He’d gotten pretty deep in the red for them to take the females though. Still, Vargas served as an unofficial mayor of a small village of about 50 families or so just west of where they were now. They call it the Hill. Those villagers depended on Vargas to maintain peace with the cartels. He finished by telling her that whoever the cartels regional leader was he considered the debt paid in full now. Victor had gotten to his feet then, his vice of Bourbon calling him from her bed. The girls are property now, Senorita, he had said as if the manner was a matter of fact and nothing else. This man who Roxanne had given herself to could be a study of contrast, of darkness and light. Vargas only called on you to save face in front of his wife for his screw up. He can’t take his girls back even if he wanted to. Besides…he had turned and became one with the shadows, but his voice rasped the truth out at her…he still has three other daughters left.
So Roxanne poked her head in a few doors for a few days and knocked on a few more…to play the game with Vargas was playing with wife…or so she told Victor.
In actually, she was twisting arms and bashing skulls in the way that her lover had shown her over her tenure down here.
Roxanne should have heeded Victor’s warning.
She found them. And within an hour or so of their discovery she’d snuck them off of the compound without setting off an alarm or firing a shot. She brought the girls back to Vargas at his home, his wife running as fast as her weight allowed her to greet her children in the foyer. Two of Vargas’ men wrestled Mrs. Vargas to the ground before she could touch their faces. Roxanne heard the woman’s shoulder pop when her arm hit the tiled floor.
Vargas stood motionless. He looked surprised. The surprised bled into a pained expression. The pained expression died a fast death and anger replaced it.
This is cartel property. He pointed a fat finger, one for each daughter. Take them back from where you found them.
Mrs. Vargas’ grief took her back to the tile as she screamed for all who were the house to know her displeasure, to share a mother’s misery.
When Roxanne didn’t immediately move, Vargas’ men stepped in the girls directions to follow his instructions themselves.
That is when Roxanne had put her gun to the temple of the oldest girl and pressed the head of the other so tightly against the first, that when she squeezed a round off the younger girl would likely share her sister’s fate.
You know not what you do here. Tears dropped from Vargas’ eyes where they had been absent when he told Roxanne of these same girls’ abductions days earlier. They are the cartel’s property. You do not damage cartel property. And then he added: I have three other daughters
She backed out of Vargas’ residence…and out the country without another word and stuck the girls with a family in a remote corner of the world where they would never be found.
24 hours after she left Vargas the cartel’s incursion into the Hill began. Those 50 families or so were slaughtered and the Hill was burned to the ground.
Roxanne Sanchez never saw Victor Castillo, or heard his silly serenades in her ear or any of the rest ever again.
He did send her a text in the same manner that she’d sent Christopher Prince earlier tonight. It said:
You did not heed my words, Senorita. You dipped your hands in cartel business. Someday, when the time is right, Gonzales and I will stop what we are doing here…and find you.
I will see you suffer for what you have done here down below.
I will see you suffer before your end.
The two men had jogged past her without incident. She noticed sweat on her brow even though the night was cool and crisp. She pulled her cell out of her back pocket and it said 1:00 AM. She got her boots beneath her and walked towards the swings where Chris was seated.
“Sanchez?” Chris said and it warmed her heart that he would remember her face so quickly. It had been 6 years now. “Roxanne Sanchez, my God, is that you?”
“It is, Chris.” He stood up from the swing and found his footing in the loose sand. “How are you?”
He nodded his bald head once, made a quick sweep of the park with his eyes and then settled his focus back on her. “I’m good, or at least I thought I was. Look, our line of work has taught me not to believe in coincidences. I’ve been casing this park for the better part of 45 minutes. It’s 1:00 AM in the morning. Except for those two men I saw jog past you a few minutes ago, there isn’t anyone else here.” She watched his gaze turn serious, his opaque skin beautiful in the full moon’s light. “It was you who have been sending me the text messages. It was you who asked me here. What in the hell is going on here, Roxanne? What is the meaning of all this and what does it has to do with my step daughter?”
Roxanne pulled her hoodie up over her ears and stepped closer to him. She needed to gage his reactions to the news she was about to tell him about. Never again will I allow lives to be lost because I failed to judge people correctly. “Chris, your step daughter is missing?”
“Erica? And when did this happen?” He rubbed at his nose and mouth and she heard him whistle. “And if this is true at all, how did you become involved?”
She didn’t blink. “Your ex-wife hired me about two weeks ago.”
“Denise hired you a couple of weeks ago, that means that Erica has supposedly been missing even longer than that.” Even in the faint light, Roxanne could see his naked brow curl in hurt and anger. “And I’m just hearing about this tonight. Yea,” He nodded. “This would be very typical of how my ex-wife conducts her business.”
Roxanne let Chris stew in his anger for a minute or two. The night’s air had grown thick with smoke. Most of it, she figured, blew in from the brushfires that had plagued Atlanta’s metro area during the year long drought. A drought she knew, that had until the last 36 hours, had dominated the local news scene. Yet, at least a portion of haze was the gift of the explosion that had occurred originally at The Andrew Young Center three days ago. The fires had spread to the shotgun houses that sat adjacent to the center, but the dry conditions and the loose brush milling about, had caused an entire block or two to go up in smoke. Local firefighters told reporters that they had never seen anything like the conditions plaguing the city.
“Denise hesitated to involve you at all, Chris.” Roxanne said, remembering that fact alone caused knots in her belly. “She wouldn’t elaborate on what circumstances would cause her to think like that. Denise only told me that there had been some…difficulties in the relationship between the three of you. I finally convinced her that you needed to know what was going on. After all, you had helped raise Erica. You are her father, even if biology says that you aren’t. Despite any difficulties that you three might have struggled through, you had the right to know that she’s come up missing.”
Chris rubbed at his smooth chin, working something out in his mind. “You say that Denise hired you two weeks ago. How long did she think Erica was missing before that?”
“The official APD reports state that she went missing on or about the 10th of March.”
“Did anyone say where she was last seen?”
The born investigator in Chris had taken hold. Good, you are still sharp indeed. “The few people that I got to talk to me said she’d been hanging out with some of her friends in and around some neighborhoods in College Park.” Chris flashed an unsettling look. “And if you don’t mind me asking this, you give me the impression that you don’t truly believe that this young woman is missing?”
He exhaled a deep breath he’d been holding. “Erica is 20 years old and she’s been doing this kind of thing almost half her life. She first started ditching school at 12. And that was just a start of a laundry list of issues she’s put us through.”
“Word on the street is that trouble often found her?”
“Especially when you meet if half way,” Chris nodded, sat down in the swing and took another deep breath. She noticed that it was something about the swi
ng that brought a pleasant memory up to the surface of Chris’ mind. “Did Denise talk to you about Erica, I mean on a more personal level?”
Roxanne sat in the swing next to him. “No, not really,” She said. “She gave me some names, you know a list of family members and friends that she liked to hang out with. She did state, like I heard in the street, that trouble could find Erica, but she didn’t elaborate on it further.”
Chris looked over at her and the skin around his brow curled as if he’d made his mind up about sharing something important with her. “Like I said earlier, Erica first ditched school at 12 years old. The school gave Denise a call. We went looking for her. We found her a few blocks from the house…giving oral sex to this older kid, a 15 year old in the back of a parked car.”
“Whoa.”
“I wish I could say these types of incidents were isolated and that this type of behavior ended there. By the time Erica herself had reached 15years old, she’d served two separate stints at the local juvenile detention center. She served once for a string of petty theft charges and she did a stretch for violence against another female minor with a knife.”
“What about running away?”
“She’d do the teenaged thing; get pissed about something or the other, and hall ass for a day two and show back up at our house when she got hungry or one of her so called
