Border Line, page 9
I took the stairs to the second floor and was nearly at my Jeep when I saw something out of the corner of my eye between two cars. Before I could react, an arm looped around my neck, and I was yanked backward. My attacker wore overpowering mint-smelling aftershave. A guy.
I slammed my foot down hard on the top of my attacker’s foot. I either felt or heard some small bones break, but instead of releasing me, a fist came out of nowhere and slammed into my kidneys. I howled in pain. Without pausing, I bent my other leg and kicked backward with all my might, this time making contact with a thigh instead of the knee I’d hoped to shatter. I was throwing my elbows behind me, connecting uselessly with a solid bulk of something.
At this point, I was twisting and biting and clawing and scratching at everything I could. But the pressure of the forearm squeezing my neck increased, and soon I was gasping for air. I heard a grunt. It was definitely a man attacking me.
I struggled to stay on my feet at the same time I instinctively reached both hands up to the arm that was cutting off my breathing. My nails dug into a slippery sleeve and lost traction. I clawed at the arm again, this time higher, my brain screaming for air.
Meanwhile, I was being dragged across the pavement.
I knew I only had seconds before he’d choke me out. I reached over my head and clawed for his eyes. I managed to scratch something that made him grunt loudly in pain before he swept my feet out from under me and lifted me off the ground.
I was fighting the large black circle closing in on my vision when the grip on my neck loosened slightly. By the way we were leaning and from the sounds of his straining, I could tell he was trying to keep ahold of me while reaching for the handle of the car in front of us. When his beefy gloved hand appeared in front of me and moved toward the door handle, I jutted one knee up, knocking his arm away. It was enough for him to loosen his hold on my neck as he regrouped. Now that I had some wiggle room, I went limp and slipped out of his grip. As I fell to the ground, I reached for my ankle, but my dagger was in my duffel bag. I’d dropped it when I’d been attacked. Shit.
Before I could scramble to my knees or feet, the man was crouched beside me pressing two hands hard onto my throat. That’s when I realized he wasn’t trying to choke me out or render me unconscious—he was trying to kill me.
I looked up but only saw a black mask and black pools where the eyeholes were. I was starting to lose consciousness when I heard the ding of an elevator and the click clack of heels and people talking. In an instant, the man was off me, and the car I was lying beside started up. I rolled out of the way and tucked myself partially under the car on the other side just as the vehicle zoomed past.
I heard shouting and swearing as it sped off.
Not wanting attention or to answer questions, I crawled to the front of the car, between the hood and the wall and waited for the group to pass, panting and trying to get my senses back.
Once the voices faded and the sounds of cars leaving disappeared, I hobbled over to my Jeep. I found my duffel bag near the front tire. Only when I crawled in the driver’s seat and locked my door did I allow myself to relax. I felt tears prick at the corner of my eyes, but I brushed them away. I was getting soft.
I shouldn’t be sad that I was just attacked. I should be angry.
But as I drove away, I knew there was another emotion lying under the surface that I didn’t want to acknowledge: fear.
I never used to be afraid.
But in those days, I was alone. I didn’t value my own life as much as I now valued the people I loved.
As soon as the Jeep pulled out of the parking garage and into daylight, I called James.
“Hi!” He sounded out of breath.
“How’s the zoo.”
“Great.”
“James… I just got attacked in the parking garage by the dojo. Someone was choking me and trying to drag me into a car. I only got away when some people came. I didn’t get a chance to see my attacker, but I’m worried about you and Rosalie.”
He was quiet as I spoke. Then I heard him say, “Rosalie? Can you sit right here a second with me?”
Then he whispered. “Are you being followed?”
I’d been keeping an eye on my rearview mirror and hadn’t seen any cars sticking to me.
“I don’t think so, but I’ll take the long way home just to make sure.”
“Good,” he said. “I think we’ll cut our visit short here. I’ll meet you back at the loft.”
I hung up. My knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel, and I was leaning forward in my seat, my eyes shooting to my rearview mirror every few seconds. I loosened my hold and leaned back. I made some nonsensical turns and even went through some North Beach alleys before I was one hundred percent confident that nobody was following me. When I got to the loft, I circled the block twice, looking for heads or bodies in any of the cars parked on my street. When I didn’t see anyone, I hit the garage door opener. I was relieved to see James’s van already there.
Upstairs, I found Rosalie at the dining room table putting a puzzle together. James was on the other side on his laptop.
I smiled when I walked in, but James gave me a look. I’d fixed my lipstick in my car in the garage, but from the way James jerked his head toward the bathroom, I realized something else was wrong.
“Be right back,” I said in a cheery voice and slipped into the bathroom. The mirror revealed bruises already forming on my neck.
I yanked the collar of my shirt up and came back out.
“Did you have fun at the zoo?”
“Yes,” Rosalie answered but didn’t look up from her puzzle.
James was watching me carefully. I tried to give him a look to show I was okay.
17
Garcia walked around the Mexico City fortress and imagined one day owning something that magnificent. The views alone were worth a few million dollars. The security was phenomenal. There were at least two dozen armed men either at the gate or patrolling the grounds. The pool was out of a movie. It had a fifteen-foot waterfall and a damn jungle surrounding it. He tried not to stare at the half-naked woman lounging by it. He didn’t recognize the woman as the big boss’s wife, but that didn’t mean anything. Hair colors changed. Boob sizes changed. And besides, the last thing he wanted to be caught doing was ogling the boss’s woman.
He’d heard the man’s one weakness was jealousy.
Instead, Garcia admired the El Greco painting on the wall of the sitting room where he waited for the big boss to come down.
He heard the man’s throat clear directly behind him.
He hadn’t even heard him enter the room.
Turning, he quickly stifled his unease and tried to put on an air of confidence that was one level below feeling as if he were an equal. He knew better than to go that far.
The big boss smiled at him, dark eyes glittering, and Garcia realized he might not ever go home. A smile like that was usually the last thing any man ever saw on this planet.
He couldn’t even breathe as he waited for el jefe to speak.
The big boss blinked, keeping his eyes closed an extra second to show that his patience had been tested. Then he cleared his throat and opened his eyes. “I like you,” he said, searching Garcia’s eyes.
He was not comforted by the words.
“Which is why you are still alive.”
The big boss gestured his head toward the massive oak dining table. Garcia followed his gaze. A manila folder rested on the table. It had not been there earlier.
“You may return home. I expect the girl delivered by tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
Then the big boss turned and left.
A driver—the same one who had picked him up from the airport less than an hour ago—stood in the doorway jiggling his car keys. The visit was over.
The big boss had him fly all the way to Mexico City for a meeting that lasted less than a minute. He was nearly out of the room when the driver raised an eyebrow and pointedly looked at the manila folder on the table.
Garcia turned. With trembling fingers, he flipped open the folder. An eight-by-ten black-and-white photo was inside. The picture was of his daughter, Adele. She was at a restaurant with his wife. They were seated under a large clock. The picture had been taken twenty minutes before.
18
The coyote had made the wrong choice. He had followed the Santella woman to Chinatown. After he saw where she parked, he made a call and returned to the Tenderloin neighborhood to stake out her place. He hadn’t planned on the ex-cop leaving the building—he didn’t even know a man in a wheelchair could drive. But when he pulled up to park, he saw a van fly past with James Hunt behind the wheel.
By the time he got back in his car, the van had disappeared.
He went up to his rented room and, in a fit of fury, destroyed everything. He smashed the chair against the desk until it had disintegrated into shards of slivered wood. He ripped open the pillows. He took his blade to the painting over the bed and then to the mattress.
Finally, when he got sick of the person pounding on the door, he opened it and stuck the knife out. The manager’s face had grown white, and he’d backed away toward the stairs.
And then came the call; Santella had also gotten away.
He looked out his window in time to see her car disappear into her garage. Before the door closed, he got a glimpse of Hunt’s van inside. It had returned during his temper tantrum. Things could not get worse.
The coyote knew he had only hours to get the girl, or the two men from San Diego would kill him.
19
I was still waking up when I noticed Rosalie open a small container and put something in her mouth. I froze. Whatever it was had been small—the size of a pill.
Not wanting to startle her, I walked over to where she sat on her bed, the contents of her backpack spread out beside her.
She still clutched a small silver pill box with a mosaic flower lid.
“Hi there.” I sat beside her.
She gave me a small smile.
“Do you take vitamins every day?” I said, looking at the small pill box.
Her forehead furrowed. “Vitamins?”
“Oh,” I said. “I take a vitamin every day. It has stuff in it to keep me healthy. Do you do that too?”
She shrugged.
This was harder than I thought.
“What do you take that’s in that beautiful little box?”
“The doctor gave it to me.”
“Aha,” I said, as if this explained everything. “Can I see the box? I’ve never seen anything so delicate and lovely.”
“My abuela gave it to me. It was her abuelas.”
“Oh, it’s just gorgeous.” I held out my hand. “Can I see it up close?”
She nodded and put it in my palm.
I admired it for a few seconds and then said, “Can I see what the doctor gave you to take?”
“Okay.”
I opened the lid with one fingernail. The tiny pink pills were not marked.
“What are these for, Rosalie? Do you know? Were you sick?”
She smiled. “No, silly. They are so I don’t have a baby.”
My heart stopped in my chest for a second. I was sure of it. The blood drained from my face, and my cheeks felt icy cold. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t have swallowed if I needed to.
I opened my mouth to speak but couldn’t form any words. Finally, the words came.
“Why do you think you would have a baby?”
She shrugged.
“Did anyone ever do anything to you—” I trailed off. I had no idea how to ask this question. And I had no idea if I even had the right to do so.
I decided to try again.
“Has any man ever touched you where you go to the bathroom?”
She drew back and made a face. “No!”
“Okay.” Relief filled me.
“Is that why Carmela left me? Is she having a baby?”
“What about Carmela?”
“The coyote. He did that to Carmela. Is she going to have a baby now?” Rosalie frowned. “She was crying. It must hurt to have a baby.”
My blood boiled.
I would kill him if I ever saw him again. I wondered if he had hired someone to attack me in the garage or if it was connected to the police chief.
Rosalie’s voice startled me.
“He did it by the tree,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“What tree?”
She didn’t respond.
“Rosalie? What tree? Where was the tree? Here or in Mexico?”
“Here. It had underwear hanging on it. And little plastic things that looked like pieces of skin.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. But it made my stomach churn.
Rosalie sat up straight. “That’s where she is!”
Before I could ask more, Rosalie looked at me wide-eyed. “I remember,” she said. “Carmela said her money was there in her little pouch, like for pencils. She hid it in the dirt when the coyote took a bath in the creek. She said she had to go back to get it. That’s where she is going.”
I tried to act proud of her for remembering this detail because it seemed as if that is what she expected of me.
“How would you find the tree?”
“The sign!”
“What sign?”
“We could see the highway sign.”
She explained. From what I could gather, the tree was near a major freeway that had a massive billboard advertising Water Works Fun Park.
I was surprised she remembered the name exactly, but she said it with pride.
“Can we go there one day, Gia?”
For a second I froze. Didn’t she know there wouldn’t be “one day” once I had returned her to family? I didn’t answer.
Before she could say anything else, the elevator dinged. The doors opened. James came in, a bag of groceries on his lap.
“James?”
He knew why I said his name in that tone of voice without me having to spell it out because he said, “I didn’t leave without saying goodbye. I was meeting the delivery guy downstairs.”
“Oh good,” I said. We needed to be careful.
He must have heard something in my voice because he looked up with an alarmed glance.
“Can you look at something in the bathroom? I think the toilet is plugged.”
“Sure.” He set the bag down on the table and headed toward our bathroom.
“Just a sec, Rosalie. Why don’t you watch TV?”
I flicked on PBS Kids and she was instantly entranced.
Once the bathroom door closed I filled James in.
He didn’t answer for a second, just stared at me. “I’m just sick.”
“Me too.”
“Okay, if I see that guy again, he’s dead.”
“James!” It was so strange to hear my once-goody-two-shoe-former-cop-boyfriend say this.
“Well, not dead. But he won’t get away with this.”
“Dead is fine by me.”
He grimaced. “I think we need to be grateful that he didn’t touch Rosalie.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” he echoed.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me, either.” But I had an idea.
There really was only one way to get Rosalie home—find Carmela, the woman who had pretended to be her mother.
We spent the rest of the day inside the loft. Every once in a while, I went to the rooftop and scoped out the street below and the windows in the adjacent buildings.
In one building, I thought I saw a flash of something shiny before a curtain fell closed.
There was a good chance someone was watching my building. I needed to remain on alert. We would stay hunkered down until I had a plan. The three of us watched two movies: Finding Nemo and Frozen. Rosalie’s eyes were glued to the screen the entire time.
Later, after dinner, while James played Go Fish with Rosalie at one end of the table, I began searching for information on coyotes and Guatemalan immigrants.
I soon found what I was looking for. It made my dinner churn in my stomach. Rapes of immigrants along their journey from Central and South America to our border was so common that women and girls went on birth control before they left their home towns. That explained the little pills Rosalie took religiously. Even, seemingly, girls too young to conceive.
I wondered how I could tell her she was safe now and didn’t have to take the pills anymore? What I needed to do was take her to a doctor to be examined.
As soon as I thought this, I realized I was thinking long term again—as if she were staying with us. And that was not an option.
I continued to search. I flagged articles and then stopped searching to read them, a dozen at a time. Soon James put Rosalie to bed. I was still at it.
During my search, I came across a journalist for a Texas newspaper who exclusively covered the border crisis. She seemed objective and not in bed with one side of the issue or the other. She’d written articles about the poor conditions of the detention camps, but also about how locals were at their wits ends with the influx of immigrants and the lack of government response to care for them.
Any way you looked at it, something needed to be done.
It was while reading one of this young reporter’s articles, that I read about “the rape trees.” It was what Rosalie had been talking about. Trees marking where coyotes raped the people they smuggled across the border. I jumped up, ready to wake James to show him. But he was softly snoring on his side of the bed, and I knew it could wait until morning.
Instead, I grabbed my laptop and headed to the roof. As soon as he heard the roof door open, Django’s head popped up from where he was nestled in the covers of Rosalie’s bed.
“You can stay, buddy.”
I swear that dog understands English because he sighed loudly and put his head back down out of sight.
The fog had rolled into the city with the night. I drew my jacket around me, turned on a heater, and put a thick blanket on my legs as I continued to read. I smoked three cigarettes and then regretted it. They only made my already queasy stomach worse.
