by Karina Halle
He raised his brow in amusement and nodded. I’d seen his picture before, on the news. There was only one, and that was his mugshot, but even in that photo his eyes made an impression on you. They saw right into your depths and made you question yourself. He was one of the men that Salvador feared, even though Salvador had more power. He was the one I had been told to watch out for, the supposed reason why I’d always been locked in the compound or escorted by the local police to go shopping.
And yet here I was, tied to a chair in a cold, leaking basement with nothing in it except five cartel members, a video camera, and a knife that lay on top of a stool in front of me.
All of that for nothing. I could escape Salvador but I could never escape the cartels.
I had asked for this fate.
“You know why you’re here,” Javier said with deliberation, straightening up in his sharp black suit. He walked over to the stool, picked up the knife, and glanced at me over his shoulder. “Don’t you?”
I could only breathe. I wanted to look at the others, at Este, at Franco, at the two other mystery men, but I was frozen in his gaze like a deer in headlights.
“What is the knife for?” I asked, my throat painfully dry.
“You’ll find out after,” he said. “It is for your husband. For your Salvador.” He stepped to the side and waved his arm at the camera. “And this is also for him.”
He eyed someone over my shoulder and gave a sharp nod. I heard a rip from behind and a piece of duct tape was placed over my mouth. I squirmed helplessly and the lights in the basement dimmed. The men stepped to the side while Javier went behind the video camera. A white light came off the front of it and bathed me in an eerie glow.
Javier cleared his throat, his face covered in shadow, and said loudly, projecting to the camera, “This is Luisa Reyes, former beauty queen of the Baja State and property of Salvador Reyes. Salvador, we have your wife and we have a long list of demands, demands which I know you can meet. I expect full cooperation in this matter or she dies in the next seven days. If she’s lucky. I’ll give you some time to think about what you’re willing to give up for her. Then we’ll be contacting you. Goodbye.”
The light on the camera switched off, but the rest of the room remained dim.
“I hope your husband checks his emails often. It would be a shame to have to put this on YouTube.”
There was a smirk on his face at that as he slowly walked toward me, the knife glinting in his hand. His eyes burned through the shadows then grew somber.
He held up the knife. “I think it’s only going to hurt the first time.”
My eyes focused on the silver of the blade, but the terror inside me grew too strong, and my urge to breathe through the duct tape became too difficult. My lungs seized in panic, pulsing dots appearing in my vision. I felt a hand on my collarbone, gripping the edge of my blouse, and then everything went black.
CHAPTER ONE
Three months earlier
“Excuse me, miss?”
I sighed and took a moment to compose myself before I slowly turned around, reminding myself to respond in English.
“Yes?”
The man and his buddies were staring at me with that stupid ogling look they had the whole time they were here. I was happy when they finally asked for the bill, just wanting them out of the bar and back to their drunken tourist festivities or whatever the white men got up to in this damned city of Cabo San Lucas. But it seemed I wasn’t free yet.
The guy who called me, the most obnoxious of the group, wagged his brows at me and nodded at a spot behind me.
“You dropped something.”
I opened my mouth to say something but shut it. I looked down at my feet, then behind me. My pencil was on the ground. Not that I ever needed it to remember orders anymore.
“Thanks,” I said, and bent down to pick it up. Immediately the guys snorted and I quickly snapped back up. Of course they’d wanted me to pick it up—my uniform at Cabo Cocktails consisted of the shortest skirt ever.
I ignored them, not even bothering to turn around again, and made my way back to the bar. I slammed my bill holder on the counter and eyed the receipt. The little jerks hadn’t even tipped me. Not that it was customary in Mexico, but with Americans in a tourist town, you always expected it.
“Stiffed again?” said Camila.
I looked over at her as she snapped the cap off of two bottles of beer. As usual, my colleague had an impish smirk on her pixie-like face. She always got the tips, maybe because she was always smiling.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping the sweat off my brow. The fan beat overhead but it was always a bit too hot in the bar, didn’t matter what time of the year it was. I turned around and eyed the boys who were still at the table, laughing and occasionally looking my way. “Those assholes over there.”
“You know, if you just joke with them and smile sometimes, they’d probably tip you more,” she said innocently, putting her beers on a tray.
I put my hand on my hip. “The minute I smile or play nice with them is the minute they take advantage of me. I don’t want to give them the wrong idea.”
“Luisa, I’m really starting to think you’re afraid of men.”
That bothered me a bit. “So? Aren’t you?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m a lesbian because I like pussy, not because men scare me.” And with that she took the beers over to her waiting table.
I pressed my hand on the back of my neck, trying to alleviate the constant strain I felt there. It was nearly eleven o’ clock at night, and I had been on my feet for twelve hours. I had three more hours of this before I could go home, which meant a forty-minute drive to San Jose del Cabo where I lived with my parents.
Which reminded me. My mother’s birthday was tomorrow and I knew she deserved something special. We didn’t have much money—I was the breadwinner at the house since my father suffered from early onset Alzheimer’s and my mother was blind. She was healthy otherwise, but neither she nor my father could work, which meant everything fell on me. It was a lot for a twenty-three year old but I’d been working since I was a child; even when my father was able to hold a job it was never a high paying one. I was used to poverty and I was used to hard work.
I just could never get used to being treated like a piece of meat. I could never get used to the constant fear. And working at Cabo Cocktails, working for my boss, Bruno Corchado, meant I’d been dealing with those two things since I was twenty. And now, because the only way I could get my mother a gift tomorrow would be to ask for an advance on my paycheck, I was walking right into the lion’s den.
I took a deep breath, looked around to see if any new patrons had come in, and when I saw they hadn’t, I straightened my shirt, pulling it up around my cleavage, and walked around the corner to Bruno’s office.
I gave three quick raps on it and stood back. I hadn’t seen him much today so I wasn’t sure what kind of mood he was in. I was hoping for generous and disinterested but knew that was pressing my luck a little bit. At this time of night he was usually drunk and a jackass. Or a lecherous pervert.
I swallowed hard as I heard him bark, “Come in!”
I opened the door and poked my head in. “Bruno?” I asked.
He was sitting at his desk, a row of empty beer bottles beside him, going over the ledger. He looked at me with red eyes, his head swaying from side to side, and I immediately knew I’d made a mistake. “Luisa. My beauty queen. Come on in.” He nodded at the door. “And shut that behind you.”
My heart rate started to pick up. I’d been in this exact situation too many times and knew this was going to end very badly. Still, I needed this favor. I did as he asked, the door shutting like a cell door, and walked two steps toward him, hoping I could keep my distance.
Bruno wasn’t a bad looking guy. He was in his late thirties, an apparent family man, though he never wore his ring at work and told every waitress that his marriage was open. We’d never seen his wife, or his children
for that matter—we weren’t even sure if they lived in the city, and none of us cared enough to ask. Many men operated businesses elsewhere and only visited their families on the weekends.
But just because he wasn’t bad looking, didn’t mean he wasn’t bad.
“What is it, Miss Los Cabos?” he asked, stroking his chin and looking me up and down with drunken eyes. “You know, I was Googling you the other night and I found a picture of you winning that beauty queen contest. What were you, eighteen? Your tits were higher back then.”
I bit down on my tongue to stop me from saying something that would probably get me fired. Work in the waitressing industry in Cabo was hard these days and not easy to come by. Damned economy in America meant the tourists weren’t coming here as much.
I ignored his remark and ignored that his eyes were still fixed on my breasts. I licked my lips quickly and said, “I was wondering if I could ask a favor.”
He raised his brows and gave me a sloppy grin, teeth gleaming with opportunity. “Well, well, well. What is it this time? Time off to take your dad to the hospital again? Something wrong with your mother?”
I dug my nails into the palm of my hand. “No. But it does involve my mother. It’s her birthday tomorrow and I would like to get her a gift. I was wondering if I could get an advance on my wages. Two hundred pesos.”
He laughed. “What are you buying for your mother for two hundred pesos? She’s blind, isn’t she?”
It took everything I had to keep it together. “It’s a Kobo. An e-reader. A used one. I can buy audiobooks for her on it. She doesn’t like Braille so much anymore with her arthritis.”
“Well aren’t you just the perfect daughter. You must be the apple of her eye.”
His choice of words wasn’t lost on me. “They’ve given so much to me over the years just to keep food on the table. It’s the least I can do in return.”
He stared at me for a few heavy moments before picking up his beer and having a long swig of it. “And what will you do for me in return?”
This was what I feared. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “You can have my word that I’ll pay you back. Dock it out of my paycheck.”
He grinned, though there was only malice in his eyes. “Oh, you’ll pay me back. I know you will. I will take it from you before you have a chance. But I mean, what are you going to do for me to thank me for being such a wonderful and generous boss?”
I took in a deep breath. I didn’t have much choice but I still had a choice. “I don’t know. What did you have in mind? An extra shift?”
Bruno snorted and got out of his chair. He wasn’t a tall man, but I was only 5’2” and he still towered over me. His eyes became lazy with lust and a bit of spittle dripped out of the corner of his mouth. “Not an extra shift. Tell me, Luisa, why is it that every single woman here, except for the dyke, has been with me and you haven’t?”
It felt like a piece of dry toast was lodged in my throat. “Because you’re not my type.”
He raised his brow then nodded as if this whole thing was an elaborate joke. “I’m starting to think you don’t have a type, Luisa. That you just like to be a tease. I see you every day, walking around in that outfit, flashing those legs and ass, showing those tits. You’re fucking beautiful and you know it. But you don’t fuck.”
“This is the uniform you gave me.”
“And yet you wear it better than any of those other girls. The men all come here to look at you. They want you. And you’re such a stuck-up bitch that you can’t even pretend to be nice. If you did, you wouldn’t be here asking me for money. You’d be paying for everything with your tips. And your tits.”
“This was a mistake,” I said, feeling dizzy. I turned around, ready to leave. He reached out and grabbed my arm, his fingers digging into it.
“It is a mistake to leave,” he said, pulling me close to him. He smelled like beer and chili, and it made my stomach roll. “I promise to give you your money, you just have to give me something.” He read the fear on my face. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to see what others do not. I want to feel you.”
I didn’t know what to do. He dug his nails into mine and then he pushed me back. “Take off your shirt.”
I opened my mouth to say no. I had to say no. In the past he had grabbed my ass, rubbed his erection against me, had kissed me briefly on the mouth, and made an attempt to grope my breasts. But he’d never told me to take my shirt off. This was too much, and yet I thought, I felt, if I could just do it and go to some other place in my head, I would be okay. I wouldn’t be a whore. I would still be a virgin. I would still be pure and intact.
I could be all that and be a good daughter. I could ease the guilt of my mother staying at home, essentially alone, because my father was often a million miles away and didn’t know who she was.
So I pulled my low-cut T-shirt over my head and stood there before my boss, the fluorescent light flickering behind him and making everything look that much worse. I stared at him straight in the eyes while he leered at my thin cotton bra.
“Well,” I said. “Now you’re seeing what no one except for me and my parents and my doctor have seen. Is that all?”
He looked so dumbfounded that it was almost laughable. Granted, I knew I had a good body, but I worked hard at it by going for my 5K jogs every morning. But I wasn’t any different from any other girl. My breasts were still breasts.
Bruno managed to close his mouth. “Your bra. Take off your bra.”
I could tell this was non-negotiable.
You’re not here, you’re not here, you’re not here, I chanted to myself while I reached around my back and undid the clasp. I took it off, my breasts free, and held the bra in my hands.
He whistled. “I feel privileged.”
“Funny how I don’t feel the same.”
He gave me a sharp look. “You’re not done yet.”
I gulped while he walked up to me. I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t be afraid. I didn’t want him to think he was winning. I looked straight at him while his greasy hands went to my breasts, cupping them. I sucked in my breath while he ran his thumbs over my nipples, and I felt relief that they were reluctant to harden. The last thing I needed him to think was that this was turning me on. The reality was that I wanted to vomit, and if it happened, I wanted it to be all over him, just so he’d know how disgusting I thought he was.
He leaned in close, and for a second I thought he was going to kiss me. But he whispered in my ear, “I should have asked for more.”
I suppressed a shudder, holding my breath while I waited for his next move. To my utter relief, he took his hands away and stepped back.
“You may make yourself decent again,” he said nonchalantly. “To be honest, I expected your breasts to be a little bit bigger. I guess the shirt makes it look like you have more than you have. Again, that would come in handy if you actually cared about tips.”
I knew my breasts were just big enough for my frame, but I didn’t dare say anything while he sat back down at his desk and started removing pesos from his wallet. I put on my bra and shirt in record speed and tried to remind myself that my loss of dignity was worth whatever happiness I could buy my mother.
He gave me the money, holding on to my hand for a little too long, before he said, “Don’t say I don’t do you any favors. But if you ever ask for one again, expect more involvement from your side. Nothing in life is free. You of all people should know this.”
I nodded, thanking him curtly and yanked the money out of his slimy grasp. As I turned and left his office, back into the heat, satellite TV and drunken cries of the bar, I made a vow that at the first chance to leave this place, the first promise of a better life, I would take it.
I didn’t even have to wait that long.
CHAPTER TWO
The next morning I woke up early and went for my jog around the neighborhood. The house I rented for me and my parents was just outside of the airport. All
day long it was nothing but the unrelenting sun and the sound of airplanes. Dust coated everything¸ and I was convinced if anyone did a scan of my lungs they’d find a sandcastle in there. But it was cheap and cheap was all I could afford. Plus, we did have a lot of privacy which was great for when my father had one of his episodes, and the house was big enough so that there was a bedroom for each of us. That was more than we had when I was growing up.
I usually jogged just after dawn when the air was still relatively cool. After my shower I got breakfast ready and woke my parents. I was lucky that most mornings my father was still my father. He knew my name, he knew where we were, and he smoked his pipe with his left hand. It was during the day that he would falter. If I wasn’t home, like I hadn’t been yesterday, my mother had to deal with it all by herself. Her blindness wasn’t even a disability at that point since she knew quite well how to handle herself. I just knew how hard it was to have to control Papa, to calm him, to make him understand he was loved and with loved ones. One day I could afford a nurse to take care of him, but that day always seemed so far away.
That morning I made breakfast with my special fried potatoes and peppers with goat cheese that I only brought out on special occasions, and brought the breakfast with a gardenia in a vase to my mother. She wouldn’t see it, but the smell always lifted her spirits. When she and my father were both well fed and well caffeinated, I got in my car, a beat-up old Toyota with windows that didn’t roll up, went out into the town of San Jose del Cabo and bought the Kobo device I’d had my eye on at one of the local pawnshops.
The woman who normally worked there wasn’t on duty, but a young man was, and he tried to jack up the price at the last minute. I tried out what Camila had recommended—smiling more, acting flirty—and even though I felt a bit silly doing it, it actually worked. I got it for a lot less, leaving me enough cash left over to pay the library fees I owed and get a bottle of cheap sparkling wine for my mother.
“You shouldn’t have,” my mother said as I handed the e-reader over to her. Her mouth was set in a stern line, but I could tell from the way she was handling the device, like it was precious gold, that she already loved it more than she could say. She was a proud woman in every sense of the word, and if it wasn’t for the empty look in her pupils, you wouldn’t know she was blind. She always stood very tall, neck long, her dark hair pulled off her face with only a few strands of grey coming in at the corners.
