by R. B. Schow
She took the towel, started to dry herself off, then stood only when Jose shut the glass door and went back to sitting on the toilet seat.
When she was ready, he handed her some clothes she hadn’t even known had arrived, complete with underwear, a bra, socks, and shoes.
“These are all my size,” she said in disbelief.
“Mr. Cardenas is good with details and he is a proficient planner.”
“He bought these for me?” she asked.
“Last week,” Jose replied.
An icy chill raced down her spine, the cold spreading to the connecting tissue. How long had these men been planning to take her and the girls? Sydney had just learned they were going to El Paso last week, but apparently, Santiago knew this as well. What the hell was going on?
“Why did you take me and my daughters?” she asked.
“Because we could.”
“How did you know we’d be in El Paso?”
He looked away, glanced back down at his phone, and then he said, “We’re just lucky, I guess.”
“You said Santiago is a proficient planner, that he is good with details. You don’t just wing something like this. And you certainly don’t plan for someone’s arrival before they even decide to be someplace. Not unless this is part of a larger plan already in the works.”
“Your daughters are gone, Mrs. Fox. You are never going to see them, your husband, or the United States ever again. That is the only thing you need to know.”
“That is also what makes me so dangerous,” she said in a moment of pure, unbridled anger.
He stood up fast, ripped the towel off of her body, then grabbed her head with a giant hand and drove her face into the mirror. Her cheek, half of her nose, and one eye were shoved so hard into the glass she was surprised it hadn’t cracked. He kept her pressed against the mirror. And then this frothing-at-the-mouth maniac leaned forward so close, she felt the warmth of his breath upon her. Her pulse quickened as Jose peered down into her one available eye.
“Do you really think you are dangerous in this world? To people like us? Because that kind of thinking will get you killed in a hurry,” he said. “You only live because we let you live. You only get privacy because we allow it. You will only be spared from suffering if we decide you’re not worth the effort. But guess what? After biting off part of Mr. Cardenas’s ear, and now trying to play tough titties with me, your suffering might just be worth the effort.”
With that, he pulled her face off the mirror then slammed it into the glass again, making her world go black for a split second. When she came back around, her head was spinning ever so slightly. Was he even aware of his strength? Did he even care what he was doing to her?
“I’d think with what you’re about to go through, you’d be smarter than this,” he said calmly into her ear.
“You don’t even see me as human, do you?” she asked, her face still shoved into the mirror.
He started to laugh, and then he laughed even harder. “You’re not even a dog to us,” he said.
“Nor are you to me,” she retorted, her anger getting the best of her.
He held her there, looking into that one eye just long enough to make his point—that he was in control of her—and then he let go.
“Get dressed before Mr. Cardenas thinks I’m doing something with you that I shouldn’t be doing.”
“Am I off-limits to you?” she asked, grabbing hold of the edge of the sink to keep from falling over.
“Yes, but not for sex,” he answered. “That’s not something I want with you or any other woman if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s the killing that’s off-limits to me. Well, until it’s not.”
She put on her underwear and bra, and then she asked, “Are you going to be the one to kill me?”
“I thought so until you did what you did to Mr. Cardenas,” Jose said with deep sorrow. “Now he may want to kill you himself. Or maybe not. He is the kind of man who appreciates a strong woman. He likes the challenge.”
She pulled on her pants, which fit nicely, and then her blouse, which was the perfect size for her frame. When she was done, she slipped on her socks, laced up her shoes, then looked up at him with nothing more to say.
“Mr. Cardenas will want to see you now,” he said.
The two of them walked out into the hallway, a long wide hallway replete with full-sized statues, decorative vases set in perfectly-sized wall niches, expensive paintings, and all number of ornate and foreign décor.
In his rather large office, Santiago Cardenas sat at a presidential-sized desk facing the open doorway. Looking up, he said, “Behold, the princess.” He said this with a fair amount of sarcasm. “Although a princess would never have such disastrous hair, nor would she attempt to eat someone who was still alive. But I digress.”
“How’s the ear?” she asked, aware that her stylish clothes stood in direct contrast to her butchered hair.
He looked up at her, held her gaze for a long time, and let out a chuckle. Fixed to his ear was a large white bandage from where Sydney had Mike Tysoned him earlier. Making mention of it was her way of saying she could go toe-to-toe with his sarcasm any day.
“She’s all clean, boss,” Jose said.
“Were there any problems with her?”
“No boss.”
“Come here, Sydney,” Santiago said. “Pull that chair over here next to me so that I can show you something.”
“Sir?” Jose asked, the rest of the question being unspoken.
Santiago nodded. Jose then joined the three of them behind Santiago’s desk where there was a large computer monitor with what looked like an online human auction going on.
“Do you know about the dark web?” he asked.
“Of course,” Sydney said. “It’s a place for perverts, pedophiles, drug dealers, and hackers, free from the prying eyes of the NSA and the US government.”
“Oh, it’s so much more than that,” Santiago purred.
She felt the metal end of Jose’s gun press against the back of her head. Now she knew what Jose had been asking his boss a moment ago. He wanted to know if he should protect Santiago from her. The fact that he was there told her that Santiago was worried about her.
Looking at all of those precious faces on the monitor felt like a boot stomping on her heart, her lungs, her stomach. There were little boys’ and girls’ faces, all lined up like playing cards, all of them with the same look—a forced smile.
This was indeed a human auction.
Her mind went into a frenzied state, a terrified frenzy where she knew that if she saw any of her daughters there, her mind would tear itself into pieces. How many times must it fracture before enough was enough? How many blows could she take to her emotions before she could no longer function? If they were trying to break her, it was working.
“I don’t see your daughters here,” Santiago said like he was disappointed, “but when I do we will see what this little expedition has netted us.”
Her mouth moved, not to speak, but to quiver in horror, almost like she was beyond words, beyond regular functioning. Her instincts flared with animal rage, but they were quickly tempered by that same, crushing sense of helplessness. She was sitting next to what she feared might be the head of a human trafficking cartel with a gun pressed to her head, a gun held there by a man who hated women enough to want to kill them for his own sick pleasure. She never once felt like a victim in her life, but now…was she a victim now? Hell yes. Was she powerless? She was, in every sense of the word. Was there anything she could do? Slowly, dutifully, her body told her no, which was why she didn’t go after Santiago Cardenas this time.
Her eyes stung with salty liquid, little pinpricks of sorrow that would soon become a flood of tears. They got really glossy, swam for a moment, and then they spilled over as she looked at each of the children for sale. These kids had mothers and fathers, and many of them surely had brothers and sisters who missed them, who would wonder what happened to them after t
hey disappeared. These were people she was looking at, human beings, alive. They weren’t cattle, pigs, or horses meant for an auction block.
The tears cascaded warm and heavy down her cheeks as she studied the expressions on their faces. When the tears reached the end of her chin, they fell into her lap, soaking through the fabric into her skin. She heard herself start to speak, but she was not in control of her words. It was like they came on their own and she could do nothing to stop them. “You don’t buy and sell kids unless you’re a disgusting freak.”
Santiago slowly turned and locked eyes with her. “I am a disgusting freak, Sydney Fox. I would have thought Jose made that clear by now.”
“You’re making it perfectly clear right now,” she said with a heart full of hatred.
On the screen, there was an intermission in the list of human products for sale. “This is the end of this particular block,” Santiago said. “The next auction will start in fifteen minutes. In that block, I am quite sure that we will see Zoey and Maisie.”
A small, pained noise escaped her as her world began to collapse.
“Before that, I feel like it’s time to speak to your husband.” He picked up his cell phone and handed it to her. “Dial his number then give me the phone.”
She begrudgingly did as he asked. When she heard Camden answer, Santiago said, “Mr. Fox, I have your wife and daughters.”
She leaned toward the phone, hoping to hear what her husband was saying. Camden asked what he needed to do to get them back.
“You will need to transfer ten million dollars into my account. It is a dummy account, a corporate cutout, so there is no need to try to find out who I am. I only want you to know that I have what is most precious to you, and I am willing to let each of these precious creatures die a horrible death if you don’t give me what I want.”
“But I don’t have that kind of money,” Camden said.
“You have two days, Mr. Fox. Sydney, say goodbye to your husband,” Santiago replied, turning the phone toward her.
“Camden—” she started to say, and then Santiago hung up.
The second he cut the line, Sydney suffered a violent, explosive reaction. She drew her left arm in, tightened her hand into a fist then glanced sideways just enough to line up an elbow-shot right to his chin. She did all of it in less than two seconds. But then something hard slammed into the back of her head and everything went black once more.
When she opened her eyes, all she saw was the blur of carpet. It took her a moment to realize where she was and why she was face-down on the floor. The pain came roaring back immediately. Moving to try to get up, her head still swimming, she groaned and fell back again. A minute or two later, she pushed herself into a seated position and looked around in a daze.
“She has a head like concrete,” Jose told Santiago.
With the end of his gun, he tapped her on the skull. The pain sent shockwaves through her, causing her to wobble and reach out for something to hold on to. It happened to be Santiago’s leg that she had grabbed. He didn’t shake her hand off of him or complain.
“Why did you hit me?” she asked, sounding drunk.
“Because you are arrogant and you do not learn,” Jose said in response. “You think you can just assert your will without significant consequence? Well, I want to show you something.”
She turned and looked up at him. He was holding a rather large hunting blade.
“I personally believe that it’s okay to hit you on the head a few times, but only if you’re going to learn. But you are not learning, so it’s not okay to keep hitting you. What will come next will be me cutting off pieces of you. Maybe your fingers, your toes, maybe even your tits. We will see how good or how bad you behave when the stakes are this high.”
“I think you need to understand why you are here and what you need to do to get to safety,” Santiago said calmly.
She felt that swirling darkness inside of her letting up a little bit. Was he giving her a way out of this? Was there also a way to get the girls back? Or was this all a ruse to force her to behave?
“How much do you love your daughters?” Santiago asked.
Sydney started to cry at the thought of never seeing them again, of them being abused by scrupulous men, maybe even killed.
“They are my life,” she said in a tortured tone.
“How much does your husband love those three beautiful girls?” Santiago asked.
Her eyes were streaming, her nose leaking as well. She didn’t need to say anything that her personal anguish wasn’t already saying.
“Most people think the cartels deal in drugs, weapons, and the trafficking of humans over the border. Different cartels handle different trades, and some diversify. Not us. We move humans and that’s it. This new border wall hurt us. Then, when the pandemic caused a full shut down, whatever sex trafficking we could manage came to an immediate stop. There was no way to move them through, not under the former president and his enhanced border patrol.”
“Why do you keep tormenting me with the details of your work?” she asked. “I don’t need to be sold on your persona anymore. You’re a bad guy, one of the worst. I hear you loud and clear.”
“When we couldn’t traffic our stores of people over the border into your lovely, corrupt country, we began to sell them to other countries with less problematic travel restrictions. But now, as of about a week ago, it has become rather easy to get people from America into Mexico and vice-versa. Think of how easy it was to get you and your daughters into Juárez. Other kids were taken, too. Not just yours. And not just from America. We pull children from many other countries. In fact, we have entire warehouses full of them. And now that all the borders are open and everyone is vying for new product, our supply will not only sell fast, but it will also yield a higher price. That is why your situation is so perfect for us.”
“You’re sick,” she said, brushing her tears aside.
“What we are is rich. The safest, most available commodities are always the ones with the smallest profit margins. But trafficking in kids? They are on the radar when we take them, and they’re hard to transport unless you have a network of paid helpers. And the things that can happen to them along the way? The things people do to them? Well, now, that is some truly diabolical shit. Then again, it’s always the diabolical shit that pays the biggest dividends.”
She turned away, unable to even look at him anymore.
“When a person’s depravity sinks that low, when what they do is far more than even monsters like me can stomach, then what you have is a bunch of rich assholes and truly sadistic sons of whores who couldn’t tell right from wrong.”
“Do you even look at their faces?” she asked, no longer biting back her tears.
“Yes, I do, each one of them. And do you know what I see? I see dollar signs. Some kids are worth more than others, but your kids, Sydney…your kids are going to fetch a premium.”
She ached with every fiber of her being to go after him again. She could take getting knocked on the head with a gun, but cut with a knife? That was one of her worst fears, third only to being raped and having her kids taken from her.
“We have become the hub for the sales and distribution of young women,” Santiago said. “Jose is my enforcer and he likes to enforce.”
“I don’t give a damn about your business,” she muttered.
“You think I limit trafficking to just children? They are far more profitable than adults, but a woman like you, even you being an old goat like you are, you have value as well.”
“I’m hardly an old goat,” she said wiping her eyes again, the lids becoming raw to the touch.
“Compared to your eight-year-old daughter, you are,” Santiago said. “There are men who don’t have the taste for children but would pay to play with you for a while before killing you.”
She looked at him, floored by his forthrightness, by his blunt and brutal honesty.
“I bet your husband has not taken care of you in mon
ths. He is, after all, a politician. And everyone knows that politicians only take care of themselves.”
“My husband is none of your business,” she said.
“Actually, he’s exactly my business. But I don’t want you to feel despondent. I would like to give you hope that things will be okay. I wanted to tell you this earlier, but you were rude, to say the least.”
“For a reason,” she said.
Touching the bandage on his ear, he said, “It can take time to move a girl like Callie, and children like Maisie and Zoey, from the auction block to the end-user. Days, perhaps. Maybe even a week, if we stall. So here is my offer, the one you will convey to your husband. If he brings me the money I request in the time that I request it, your children will survive this with their fingers, their toes, and their adorable little eyes. But if your husband involves the authorities, if he tries to be a hero, the clock on your kids’ lives will run out.”
“We aren’t rich people,” she said.
“Nor are we greedy people. But the men who will soon bid on your three daughters…well now, they have both money and desire.”
“We don’t have ten million.”
“If your husband fails to counter with some reasonable offer inside of our time frame, your girls will be sold to the highest bidders and then carted off to the farthest parts of the world where men who are not as nice as me—men who like little girls—will do unspeakable things to them. And then, if your stupid husband still doesn’t cooperate, I will mail him pieces of you for years to come, that last piece being your heart because no man truly deserves the heart of a woman unless he earns it, right?”
She sat there quaking, her soul shrinking so far inside of her that it almost seemed to have forsaken her.
Santiago slapped her across the face so hard she lost her equilibrium, and then he screamed at the top of his lungs, “AM I RIGHT?”
Holding her face where she’d been hit, she slowly nodded in reply. “Yes, Santiago. You’re right.”
With that one slap, with the cumulative amount of contempt Santiago and Jose had shown her and her family, Sydney vowed that no matter what happened, no matter who survived, she was going to kill these two men.