She couldn't hold it down any longer. She bent over and vomited on Chavez's black shiny boots. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his shoes clean.
Andrea struggled and sobbed. "Let her go," Chavez said, with a nod.
She kneeled beside her brother, and rested his head in her hand. "I'm sorry. You'll have to get our business under a thatched roof on the beach, by yourself now," he told her without stammering. He choked on blood spewing from his mouth. "I love you, D." Then he closed his eyes.
Andrea's tears measured a lifetime of regressed mourning. It was the first time in her life she expressed true grief. When most people were saddened by experiences, she was filled the with anger. Her brother was gone, along with his dreams of a business. That was the only wish her brother had.
But her anguish didn't last long. Once again filled with anger, she leaped up and grabbed the closest gun to her. Before guards could react, she aimed at the heavy-set man and fired. The bullet went through his forehead, killing him instantly. Rifles pointed at her, Chavez shouted, "Enough!"
Andrea envisioned a massacre. She wanted to kill everyone in the warehouse, including Chavez. She no longer cared for her own life, but she wouldn't go out alone. She'd take as many with her as she could. "Dorothea, put the gun down," Chavez said, in a calm voice.
The last person who called her by her real name was, her little brother. She froze, trying not to shake or show fear. "Why?" she asked. "Why did you have to kill him. You know he's all I had. He never caused you any harm."
"You know this would happen sooner or later. He was too much of a risk."
"You promised," she said. "He was just a child." Her voice rattled in unison with her body.
"Exactly," he replied. "And there's no place for children here."
"He was my brother, you bastard!" Andrea charged Chavez, ready to pistol whip him. "I'll kill you!"
Chavez reached out and grabbed her wrists. Her pistol fired a shot toward the ceiling. The back of his heavy hand landed flush against her cheek, knocking her to the floor and dislodging the pistol out of her reach. She groveled to retrieve it, but his boot slammed down, pinning her hand against the floor.
"Stop your groveling," he ordered. "You're showing weakness."
Andrea remained on the concrete, sobbing. "Get her up and put her in my office," he ordered. Then he motioned to Carlos. "And get rid of him."
Carlos was dragged by his feet and lifted through the tarps in the truck, while two guards led Andrea by the arms to Chavez's office. Chavez resumed his inspection of his new arrivals. "Put this one in number three," Chavez ordered, gesturing to Maddie, "and get her cleaned up."
A couple of men grabbed Maddie's arms. "Leave her alone!" Emily screamed. "Mom!"
"Just do as they say, Em. I'll see you soon," Maddie said, as she was being led between doors and stacked crates.
Chavez stepped in front of Emily. "Are you feeling better now?" he asked, then rubbed the back of his hand over her abdomen. "Are you a virgin?"
Emily tensed, with her head downcast.
"Answer me!" he ordered. "Are you a virgin?"
"Leave her alone," Jake yelled.
Emily and Jake flinched at the sound of the cracking whip.
Chavez noticed some red ink below her waist. "What do we have here?" then pulled the top of her shorts down, exposing her strawberry tattoo. "Look's ripe," He remarked. "I'll have a taste of this later," he whispered to her. "Put her in number four, close to me."
Emily sounded off a series of coughs again. "And get her some medicine, first thing," he ordered, as she was ushered away in the same direction as Maddie.
"Don't worry, Em, we'll save you," Jake hollered, as Chavez approached him.
"Brave little man, you are, no?"
"You better not lay a hand on my sister."
Chavez chuckled, then blew a smoke ring. Two steps over, he stood and faced Sam. "You know what they say about a man with a large nose."
"You're original, no?" Sam mimicked.
"Comedian. Maybe we can transplant your pene to someone who needs to please the ladies."
Sam remained silent, not knowing for sure what he meant, but he had a good idea.
"I know how much you'd like to save your family, but unfortunately for you, it won't be their lives you'll be saving." Chavez didn't wait for a response. "Take them away. You know which room."
At gunpoint, Sam and Jake ambled between the rows of doors and stacked crates. Sam counted the distance between each door, estimating the rooms to be the same size.
Stepping out from the door, a man in a white blood-stained smock limped from the room toting a medium sized ice chest with blood smeared on the outside. It looked like a poor attempt of cleaning, and Sam hoped Jake didn't see it. "Give me thirty minutes," he told the guards, escorting his next operation.
Chapter Eighteen
The room was the size of an airport public bathroom. The invisible wall of stench cowered Sam and Jake. Together with the cigar smoke coming from three guards seated at a table playing cards, the room was like a morning fog ascending from a lake with a ripe odor of a slaughtered animal left in the sun to rot. Instead of flies and maggots one would expect to see, bloodied surgical tools and a bone saw lay on an operating table beside a gurney. Resting on the floor beside it, was a scuba tank sized bottle with tubes leading to a clear mask, the kind anesthesiologists use before surgery.
"What is this place?" Jake asked, maintaining a grasp on his fathers arm.
Sam scanned the room. "They're gonna keep us here until we're ready to leave."
Jake's suspicions told him different.
Rifles leaned against a wall where the three guards played cards at the other end of the room. "Puto pendejo," one of them shouted, thrusting his chair back and grabbing a rifle.
After a brief exchange of laughter and what sounded like verbal bashings, the man shouldered past Sam and slammed the door behind him.
The two remaining men laughed as one raked money from the center of the table. "Your deal," the other said, carving a slice of mango with the serrated hunters knife, perhaps the same knife used to gut Carlos with earlier.
At the foot of the gurney, a muscled Hispanic man with his eyes closed, lay on a soiled blood stained mattress, the thin kind found in jail cells. He looked like he had put up a good fight, but his tattered wife-beater and swollen face revealed evidence of a losing battle. Inked on his shoulder were the words, Semper fi.
"Sit," a man behind Sam and Jake ordered with a nudge of his rifle barrel. "They're all yours," he told the card playing men. Then left the room.
Jake clung to his father. "Look what they did to that guy," Jake whispered, as they neared the bludgeoned tattooed man on the mattress, then took a seat beside him.
Sam and Joseph were about the same height, but Joseph outweighed him by at least fifty pounds of muscle. "Hello. Are you okay?" Sam asked, with a slight tap.
The man groaned then opened the eye that wasn't swollen shut. "I'm Sam. This is my boy, Jake. Can you hear me? How long have you been here?"
"I-I'm Joseph," he said. "I think since yesterday, I don't know," he answered. "Where's Maritza?"
His voice was tired. It was a soft passive tone that sounded of defeat and surrender. Sam felt his pain.
Three days after being discharged from the Marines as an MP, Joseph and Maritza married. Together since high school, it was a given they'd spend their lives together. Joseph's plans on serving his country then entering the police academy after returning from their honeymoon, pleased Maritza's father. "It's just a stepping stone, though," he had told her father. "Someday I'll make detective, then God willing, Chief."
While in the military, Joseph turned his eyes at most minor offenders, while others were destined to spend time in the brig. He was a man who turned his cheek to confrontation, and believed everyone deserved a second chance.
"Whose, Martiza?" Sam asked.
Joseph seemed delirious. "Where's my, M
aritza? I must find her," he asked again, in a tone you wouldn't expect to hear from a man of his stature. Enduring the pain, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a crinkled photo and kissed it. With an unsteady hand, he handed it to Sam. It was a picture of him and Maritza holding each other perched on boulders with a waterfall as the backdrop. "This is Maritza. It's our first photo together since coming here."
She was an attractive Hispanic woman with a shoulder length mane. "Our honeymoon, a sightseeing tour. They brought us here instead," then paused between his fragmented speech. Just a few words seem to exhaust him. "I must find her. Take her away from here."
"Where's here? Where are we?" Sam was anxious, the man in the white smock would be back at any time.
Joseph shook his head, "I don't know."
"My wife and daughter are here, too," Sam said. "We gotta find a way out of here, we don't have much time. Are you well enough to help?"
"There's many of them, and they have weapons."
"We don't have a choice, we have to try. But we gotta do it now." After a moment of hesitation, Sam decided to appeal to Joseph's love for his wife. He held the crinkled photo to Joseph's face, "Do you want to see, Maritza again?"
The impact of Sam's words sobered Joseph from his daze. They glanced at the men still playing cards when the man in the white smock entered the room and limped by them. "Get this one ready," the man said, gesturing to Sam.
###
Emily fought to resist the two men holding her on the vile mattress. "Get your filthy hands off me," she screamed.
"Shoot her, Ramona," one of the men said.
Ramona hesitated, staring at the defenseless rage in Emily's eyes.
"What are you waiting for? Shoot her!" the man ordered, again. Ramona wiped the tears from Emily's cheek and brushed hair from her forehead, "I'm sorry, child," then pierced Emily's arm with the needle.
Everything turned into a blur, attempting to keep her eyes open. Her captors felt her strength cease and released their grips. "Now she's all ours," a guard said.
"Why can't you leave her alone?" Ramona asked.
A guard pushed Ramona back. Her footing slipped, stumbling her to the floor. "Go mind your own business," he shouted.
"Someday you'll pay for your sins," she mumbled, standing and walking to the other side of the room.
###
Andrea had been pacing Chavez's private quarters, plotting a plan to kill him. She loathed him and wanted to give him the same death he gave her brother. Deep in her thoughts, she was oblivious to him entering and plopping in his chair behind his desk. When he fired up his cigar, she turned to him, startled at his presence. "Why did you have to kill him? You promised you wouldn't do anything to him."
Chavez remained silent with his cigar in his mouth. He knew she wasn't through venting.
"Since the first we met, you promised you would never do anything to him. I even risked my life, getting out of that hell hole in the time you gave me. Were they all lies?"
Carlos twirled his cigar in his mouth, still saying nothing.
"For years, I've done everything you've asked. Why? Why did you have to kill him?" Her tone rose as her anger increased.
She slammed her hands on his desk. "Say something, answer me."
"Quiet!" he snapped. "Your brother was a risk, you've always known that. How do you think you got busted in the first place? He even said himself, he didn't know what he was doing when he struck that family. If he had a half a brain, he would have handled things better."
"But you promised..."
"Promises are kept by those who fear consequences," he interrupted.
"What gives you the right...?"
"What gives me the right? This is my operation and nobody, even you, will risk what I have built," he barked. "You owe me. When I found you, you were nothing, nothing more than a circus sideshow. You should be thanking me. I've given you everything!"
"Everything? All I am is one of your dispensable thugs you order around."
Chavez rose from his chair and approached her. "You respect me, woman."
"Respect? The only respect you have comes from people who fear you. You're nothing more than an incompetent bastard, who needs others to do your dirty work."
"Callate!"
"You're a spineless jellyfish, that..."
The back of his hand slapped flush against her cheek. Veins protruded through his forehead. She had never seen him this angry, but it didn't scare her. Her life meant nothing with her brother there. She glanced around the table, searching for something to hit him with, then spit in his face. "I'll swear, I'll kill..."
Another slap stifled her. With a forceful twist he bent her over the table, smashing the side of her face against the surface. "Go ahead, kill me?" she said. "I don't care."
"I'm gonna do better than that," he replied, tearing her pants to her ankles. "I gotta remind you the way things are around here."
Her stone-cold face rubbed against the hardwood surface of the table, as she reluctantly tolerated his pelvic poundings.
###
Two men tilted their chairs against a wall blurting remarks in Spanish about the unclothed woman standing before them in front of the full length mirror. Maddie's aggressiveness was remedied by the injection of Haloperidol, the alternative to the OxyContin or heroin they often used in extreme cases.
Two Latina women mended Maddie and prepared her for her grand entrance, a loose presentation of a model strutting down a runway with ogling judges. It was their chore to make sure all blemishes and evidence of beatings were hidden. Another reason why Chavez preferred a dim lit environment in the main warehouse.
After Filomena injected Maddie with Haloperidol, she went to work on her back, mending the nine-inch long gashes torn into through her skin from the sting of the whip, and preparing it for the tattoo that would soon cover it. All aggressiveness had vanished from Maddie. She stood motionless, trance-like, in front of a full length mirror while they poked and rubbed her skin, ignoring comments made by the guards. Pilar applied mineral foundation to her face, then caked mounds of makeup to conceal the cuts and bruises. This was a distant cry from the dreams Pilar and Filomena once had, but dreams were for people who had choices, and they had lost their's years before. "This is gonna sting a bit, dear," Filomena said, as she dabbed her wound with peroxide.
When the final touches to Maddie were complete, she resembled a prostitute perched against a flickering light pole outside a corner dime store. The bargain basement evening gown chosen from the many hanging from the rack nearby, revealed hints of body parts only exposed during private moments.
The two guards chuckled remarks, gliding their tongues across their lips as Maddie was escorted to the mattress to wait her entrance. Maddie glanced around the room with a glazed expression, stopping her gaze just long enough at the two guards to give them the notion of an invitation. They wasted no time, they rose to their feet and sauntered toward her while unbuckling their belts.
Chapter Nineteen
Surgical tools were toweled, polished, and lined side-by-side on a tray, much like you'd expect to see a waitress carrying at a busy truck-stop diner. The failed medical student, now with gray showing around his temples, took a deep breath and summoned, "Hurry up, let's get this done. Another shipment will be here soon."
The sound of a hunter's knife brushing against a pant leg rifled Sam's attention. Standing over him, he stared down the pointed barrel. "Rise!" demanded the man.
Joseph kissed the photo again, but before he could return it to his pocket, the knifed man reached down and snatched it. "Ah yes," he said, inspecting the photo. "She was a fighter, this one."
Joseph's energy returned with surging rage. He clutched the man's wrist and twisted until the sound of breaking bones were heard and knife pointed toward the man's chest. With one sudden push, the knife plunged into the man. Before the rifled man could react, Sam buried his foot into his knee, hurling him to the floor. Like a leopard pouncing, Joseph
sprung from the mattress, grasped the man's head, and with a quick jerk, twisted and snapped the man's neck. Joseph retrieved his photo, giving one last kiss before placing it back in his pocket.
Scalpel in hand, the man in the white smock stared with fear at Sam and Joseph. "Hope you're not planning on using that," Joseph advised.
Before Sam and Joseph could make it to their feet, the man made a break toward the door. Still seated on the mattress, Jake stretched his leg out, tripping the man to the floor. Just as the man inhaled to scream for help, Sam dove and cupped his mouth. Emulating Joseph, Sam grasped the man's head and twisted it. The man reached out, struggling toward the door. "Quick and firm," Joseph said. "Hurry."
Sam took a deep breath, clinched his teeth, then performed as instructed. The vibration of cracking bones, and the sight of the man's lifeless eyes, made him queazy. "Dad, you're a bone crusher," Jake said.
"Good job, take a rifle," Joseph told Sam, then tucked the knife under his belt. "Let's go get our families."
Sam probed the rifle, inspecting its parts. "They're 22 caliber semi-automatics," Joseph said. "Just point, aim, and pull the trigger."
"We won't use them unless it's absolutely necessary, right?" Sam asked.
"Yeah, right." Joseph's sarcastic answer came as no surprise. "We won't use them for long, if we don't find more ammo."
Sam knew many more would die before the night was over.
One hand on the door handle, the other on the rifle, it was a scene right out of Die Hard, and Sam was John McClane. Or so he felt. "Stay close to us, buddy."
"Come on, let's do this," Joseph blurted with an impatient tone.
Sam took a deep breath ready to lead his small brigade into battle, but before he could twist the door handle, the door flung open. Sam was forced back into Joseph and nearly knocking Jake to the floor. Sam regained balance and noticed the figure poised in the doorway. It was the man who had brought Maddie to her knees with the sting of his whip. "What's going on here?" he asked, unraveling his whip to the floor.