“Yes, I do,” Lorabell states with pride, rapidly gathering herself back to a state of immunity from her natural empathy, “we’ll stay focused on the objectives.”
“Do you know what we’re trying to do here?” Henri asks in a tone that displays his lack of confidence in her statement. “About a year ago, a young man dyed his hair orange and burst into a movie theater with assault weapons. The public was horrified; as they should have been. Now, after Nine Eleven, we implemented the TSA, but we don’t have any program like that for gun control in this country. We have no way of tracking these maniacs who are buying 6,000 rounds of ammunition on the Internet, along with body armor, and other bullshit you don’t need for hunting. What I’m trying to do is build a solid case for The President so that he can give me the security authorization that I need to make this happen across the board… I can already get the funding; all I need is a green light from The Commander-In-Chief. We are trying to make history here by stopping the shooting sprees… long before they happen. Can you help me do that?” Henri stares at her evenly, displaying his expectation of compliance with the objectives at hand.
“Yes, I can help you.” Lorabell states with conviction, gesturing back to Maxwell. “Please continue your briefing.”
“Our last subject is Julia Welheim.” Maxwell starts speaking by pointing at an LCD screen that displays a woman alone in a dark home, listening to the radio, and pacing from room to room. “She is 46 years old, a disabled mother who has been confirmed as paranoid schizophrenic. Twenty years ago, she was doing really well until she had a relapse with her therapy, which triggered a violent episode that was minor. Anyway, the episode involved a kitchen knife and a frightened neighbor who blew things out of proportion. This caused her marriage to fall apart, which led to another episode, and soon after, her husband married Julia’s younger sister who is mentally stable, and they took her five-year-old son to live somewhere in the Midwest. Get ready for some bad news…” Maxwell says slowly, watching to see if Professor Cardigan is still strong enough to hear the rest of the story.
After she gives him a quick, irritated nod he continues. ”Every day for the past twenty years, Ms. Welheim has been setting the table with three placements for dinner, waiting for her husband and son to return. When about an hour passes, she breaks down, and sometimes locks herself in the closet for several hours. Other times, she goes upstairs and retrieves a pump shotgun that her husband left behind when he left the Florida with her sister. She then sits with the shotgun in her lap for hours, rocking back and forth. We consider her a threat for obvious reasons, but her behavior becomes much worse when she doesn’t take her antipsychotics.”
“Thank you, Maxwell, that’s all we need.” Henri interrupts with a stern voice, gesturing for his colleague to take up his work elsewhere. “Also, one more thing, work on your encoded messages. The cipher you’re using now is so simple; an eighth-grader could break it.”
Maxwell sighs, twisting his head like a scorned tiger as he snatches his water bottle from the control panel and moves briskly toward the catwalk stairs.
“Do you understand what I need?” Henri asks with concern, looking at Lorabell as if bringing her on may have been a mistake.
“These people all need serious help!” Lorabell declares with outrage, gesturing in a spirited motion at the LCD displays. “I can’t believe we let people slip through the cracks like this; how could we become so cold?”
“Look, my dear, let’s be honest with one another,” The Congressman says in a sweet, salt of the earth tone, “there are, unfortunately, millions of people going through life just like this. Now we can’t afford to give all of them the help that they need, but hopefully, with the right program, we can save thousands of lives every year when these people finally explode and decide to commit gun violence. You’re the expert in the field. You knew that people like this existed. Now you’re surprised to see the reality? Grow up, Professor! I need to know if you’re on my team or not… Right now!”
Lorabell watches Henri with the trained stare of a psychologist, and can see that there is something disturbing hiding behind his eyes. His false gestures of concern send up red flags that he is extremely manipulative and predatory. She observes the subjects on the LCD displays for a moment, her inner-voyeur enjoying a veritable playground of stimulation. Then Lorabell looks back at Henri, deciding it is better for her to be involved than to leave this whole operation in the hands of someone who gleefully broke his moral compass years ago.
“Yes, I’ll help you.” Lorabell agrees, holding out her hand in a gesture of good faith.
“That’s excellent, my dear.” Henri replies, surprising her with a friendly hug; both of them feeling uncomfortably close for a few seconds. “I know you’ll be able to get the results we need,” Henri predicts with a smile as he steps back from the hug, “and just in time.”
The young professor smiles and turns her head to the side, feeling angry that she allowed him to invade her personal space. She takes a few awkward steps backwards and to the left toward the LCD displays, thinking to herself that the one thing you should never do is turn your back to a predator.
VIII. Cartel All
Antonio Espinoche feels the ghost pain creeping up in his right arm. He looks down at the stump in disbelief, realizing that there are so many tasks his body can no longer perform. It has been only two days since Enrique cut the arm off with a machete just below the elbow, and Antonio cannot stop staring at this missing part of his body. He closes his eyes for a moment, feeling like God has punished him for his service to the cartel; all of those bodies put into the ground. Every ounce of his creativity focused on ensuring that they cannot be located by authorities. Antonio ‘Gravedigger’ Espinoche has devolved into ‘The Gimp’ Espinoche.
Antonio thinks about the priestess, turning his head slowly from side-to-side in discomfort as he stands tall on the brightly lit marble flooring of Miguel Horatio’s mansion in Costa Rica. He raises his eyes to the ceiling like a small child beholding something marvelous. The ceiling has been hand-painted to resemble that of The Sistine Chapel, with vibrant colors telling Catholic stories from The Old Testament. His eyes descend from the artwork of the ceiling to the lavish staircase that ascends high to the second floor bedrooms of Miguel’s wife and teenage daughter. The heavy wooden staircase railing was hand carved by skilled carpenters from all over Central America, and the floor is carpeted in a fine gold and red pattern. These dark wooden railings also have a deep history rooted in the area, with carvings of many legendary figures that are meant to bless the home and keep out evil spirits.
Antonio feels a lump in his throat as he thinks about evil spirits, looking down at his arm again in shame. He is certain that he saw the priestess, feeling his forehead begin to perspire as he remembers her unnerving stare and ominous message for Miguel. After the horrors of their first meeting, the last thing that Antonio wants is to tempt the wrath of someone who has crossed over from death.
“Miguel has finished his phone call,” a humble Mexican butler announces quietly as he appears from the corridor to Antonio’s right. “He’s ready to meet with you, Señor.”
Antonio dips his head somewhat in a display of respect, and then steps over to where the butler is standing, waiting for him to lead the way. The butler is dressed in a dark, forest-green uniform. His body is strong and his hair and nails are well-kept. Antonio appears a bit mismatched in his attire, wearing a nice black dress shirt and red tie, complimented by khaki slacks, and expensive leather dress shoes. The look loses something with his large, short-sleeved, green flack jacket. It seems bulky and tediously out of place over the top of the more formal clothing, like a Mexican gentile deceptively encased in the duds of a soldier.
After a short trip down the hallway and around a corner, the two men emerge into the large game room of the Horatio estate. Antonio immediately sees Miguel playing pool at a deluxe, red billiards table with his nineteen-year-old daughter.
The f
orty-year-old cartel boss is bent down on the table like a jackknife, eyeing the cue ball as if it is not to be trusted. He is clad in a bright orange suit and a white dress shirt, which is complimented by a pair of shiny, black leather boots. The aging cartel chief has blue eyes, a muscular frame, and a head full of graying hair.
“Come and have a seat, Antonio.” Miguel shouts through the game room with the throaty confidence of a roaring jungle cat. “We’re almost finished.”
There is a full bar to the far right of Antonio with a fancy white and blue marble top. Just a few feet to the left of the bar, in front of the billiards table, is an inviting round end table with a brass reading light positioned on its surface. There are two, hand-carved, blue leather chairs on either side of this table, and Antonio decides to sit in the chair on the right, facing the pool table. As he takes a seat, Antonio watches Miguel miss his shot on the six ball, his eyes glazing over menacingly after this failed attempt. His daughter Patra then moves closer to the table, swooping in on her father’s missed opportunity like a dragon hovering above the small wooden huts of a Costa Rican village.
Patra is wearing a sexy, white dress, showing off a tall and curvaceous body. Her right hand bears a diamond ring with a titanium band, and an emerald ring with a gold band. She also has exquisite diamond earrings dangling shamelessly from both ears. These fine pieces of jewelry contrast with her frizzy party hairdo, with strands of dyed red hair coming down from her bangs, standing out oddly from her natural black hair color.
The young woman looks as fierce as her father, bending down to examine the table with her bare feet firmly planted on the floor. She sizes up the shot carefully, aiming her pool cue directly inline with the eight ball, which is resting against the fourteen ball. After sliding the cue through her fingers a few times, she hits the cue ball with finesse, tapping the fourteen ball into the side pocket, and simultaneously sending the eight ball into the corner pocket.
Miguel remits a cold half-smile to his daughter, and she returns this gesture with an added spike of malcontent.
“So what happened in Becan, Antonio?” Miguel asks in a dry voice as he sets the pool cue down on the table. “I heard that you killed Enrique. The men told me you encountered a devil woman in the jungle?”
“Devil woman?” Patra says with iron rhetoric, rolling her eyes at Antonio. “This is new! I’ve never heard of a devil woman in the jungle… Unless it was me...”
Miguel glares at Antonio, signaling that he must answer his daughter as if she were also a boss.
Antonio begins to feel a nervous sweat forming on his brow and behind his ears. The stories of Patra’s ruthlessness are far beyond those of her father. He always wanted a son, and she had to fill that role for many years, suffering a callous childhood laden with horrors. Some of these included: broken legs, handling deadly spiders, and unfair fist fights with stronger female leaders in the cartel. Her lack of empathy is displayed in a pair of cold brown eyes, showing the face of a young woman who has grown up, and grown cold, far too soon.
“I saw a woman in the jungle,” Antonio begins, dismissing Patra’s cynicism. “She was wearing a full length, red robe; the type you hear about in rituals. Enrique fired his weapon at her, but his bullets… flew to the ground. She stepped up to us, held out her hands, and we both fell unconscious on the walkway. When I awoke, Enrique was running toward me, screaming and calling me San Perez.” Antonio grimaces and chokes up a bit before continuing, glancing down at his arm. “I told him that I was not San Perez, but he rushed at me with his machete. I pulled away from him, and moved toward my gun. After he cut off my arm… I was able to shoot him and stop his attack.”
“Is that all?” Miguel asks, showing a smile of wicked contempt as he folds his arms and leans back against the pool table.
Patra looks at her father and they both shake their heads in disapproval, turning back to Antonio, and waiting for him to continue.
“No…” Antonio replies with some hesitation. “The woman told me to give you a message. She said that you need to stop hurting her people.” His hands begin to shake as he delivers the message; feeling like the devilish spirit dammed him from the beginning with this request.
“We should take his other arm right now, Father,” Patra declares immediately, looking sideways at Antonio in disgust. “I have a machete in the pantry. We just used it to chop up a hen… I won’t even need to clean the blade for this asshole!”
“She’s joking, of course,” Miguel says standing up straight from the pool table. “It’s actually a meat cleaver, but it will do the job. Tell me, Antonio, why should I stop my daughter from chopping off your other arm?” The cartel chief asks with a hard stare, folding his arms as he waits for an answer.
“I have served you for years, not as many as Enrique did, but I respect the Horatio family,” Antonio announces with a great deal of pride. “But this,” he adds, holding up the bandaged stump on his right arm, “is not my imagination. The woman was there, and she also said… that she will claim your firstborn son… If you don’t stop hurting her people.”
“She will claim my son!?” Miguel asks with a pair of fiery blue eyes, glancing at his daughter with outrage. “Do you know how long I have waited to have a son? Are you trying to threaten me, Antonio… but you just don’t have the balls? Is that what this is!?”
“It seems to me that both men have been stealing your drugs,” Patra declares, glaring at Antonio as if he were a three-legged, stray dog standing in the middle of her game room. “Why else would they be hallucinating in the middle of the jungle unless they were taking your drugs?”
“That makes sense,” Miguel states, placing his hands on his hips. “Did you enjoy some of my drugs? Maybe you and Enrique wanted to have a little party after taking the resort from that family? Or was it hard for you to forget about burying them, so you had to take some of my cocaine!?” The cartel boss lowers his thick, gray brows, staring evenly at Antonio, and feeling confident in his daughter’s assessment.
“I have not had any cocaine!” Antonio says, raising his left hand to plead with Miguel.
“Shut the fuck up!” Patra screams as she swings the pool cue hard into the side of Antonio’s head.
As the compressed wood smashes against his skull, Antonio is engulfed by intense pain. The crushing blow snaps his jawbone, and he drops onto the fine carpet, feeling helpless and consumed by the young woman’s brutality. He steadies himself on his knees with his left palm flat against the carpet, trying to recover his wits after having his jaw broken. Despite his obvious agony, the young woman isn’t finished. She uses the heavy end of the pool cue to batter his left hand while his fingers are outstretched against the carpet, breaking them with tenacious accuracy as blood spurts from his fingernails.
Antonio immediately rolls onto his side, curled up in the fetal position as his nerves are overloaded with extreme pain. His broken jaw feels raw and exposed, as if a cross section of the bone has been gnawed on by a wild animal. Meanwhile, his fingers are starting to swell about three times their normal size, and his middle finger is spurting blood every other second in perfect timing with his heartbeat. The young cartel enforcer steadies himself on the carpet, his extremities shaking, and eyes closed tight as he tries to deal with the overwhelming agony.
Miguel and his daughter begin to circle Antonio like hungry wolves, trying to decide what to do with him. As the young woman raises the pool cue a third time to strike Antonio in the head, Miguel signals with his right hand for her to stop. The cartel chief kneels down next to his young enforcer, looking at him with sympathy for the first time. His eyes are hard-focused on the stub of Antonio’s arm that was cut off by Enrique. After all of his years of torture and murder, Miguel knows that a man in this much pain would have told the truth by now if there were more to tell. As he considers this and looks at where the right arm was cut off, he decides that Antonio is telling the truth in some form.
“Let’s put him in the storage room for two days,�
�� Miguel instructs his daughter. “Then we’ll know if he’s had any cocaine. If he hasn’t had any drugs, and we can’t find anything in his system, then maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe Enrique did attack him, and the pain caused him to go mad...”
“Okay, I’ll get the storage room ready.” Patra states in a professional tone, following her father’s orders without question as she leans the bloody pool cue against the empty leather chair and walks away.
“Oh, and get him some painkillers… for now.” Miguel states with hateful eyes, staring down at Antonio’s arm as if it were some ancient work of art. “If someone is threatening to kill my son… I will take the time to create new hells that have never been experienced on this earth. As for not harming her people… I will do what I like!”
IX. The Cases – Man of Many Manipulations
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She Is Risen (She Is Risen: The Gun Control Case Studies) Page 7