“In the Yucatan Peninsula, yes, they’re modern day Mayans. But the struggle continues—they don’t think of it as a war, per se. And the Aztecs are strictly an ancient people. They no longer exist as a separate group. Their genes are floating around, but not so you could claim heritage. Sometime around the twelfth century the Aztecs took to wandering from their mostly central Mexico region….”
I wandered away, only half listening to them. I needed to find a way down this hill.
“But the Mayans continue to exist largely separated from the general Mexican population. They are considered Mexico’s Indigenous people. They are mostly centered in Mixe, Oaxaca.” Gerry.
“Mixe, as in mixed?” Hannah.
“It’s a city. Oaxaca is a city but it’s also the name of one of the Mexican states….”
She was teaching. I was searching.
“The indigenous people of Mexico have been treated with a combination of disdain and romantic fascination for years…but the Mayan population numbers more closely resemble our African-American subculture. They number between eleven and thirteen percent of the total population of Mexico. And the last real Mayan ‘war’ was the Caste War of the Yucatan....”
Gerry made air quote marks as she spoke. I stepped down a narrow path, first one foot then another, hoping they continued their discussion for several more minutes, until my path down was concealed from them.
“Over a hundred years ago.” Hannah.
“And bloody. The Mexican people have always had difficulties with the fact that they are a mixture of races…the Mayans—who are a darker color than most Mexican people….”
Another few steps. Hannah and Gerry’s Socratic discussion faded further away, a fact that gave me confidence that no one in the little house below could hear them.
“Anyway, we really don’t know what happened to the Aztecs. They took to wandering in the twelfth century….”
I heard a door slam faintly below and pushed further down the narrow path, fighting my way through the thick chaparral where necessary. The female voices faded away behind me. New male voices—in Spanish--were luring me forward. Some of them sounded drunken, angry.
I never stopped wondering where the snakes of Snakebite Hill were as I crept down. Only snatches of the women’s conversation reached me now.
A faint light was forming to the east. The sun was preparing its rise. Dawn Dragon was approaching.
The small house where I assumed all three girls were being held was a one-story, low-roofed, L-shaped structure. The short bottom of the L faced west. The long side of the L was facing toward me, on the north. The top of this side was facing east and I was assuming this was the front of the house as a gravel driveway led up to it from the cop circus out on the primary road. That circus was surprisingly hidden by a copse of trees between the house and that hard surface road.
Along the short bottom leg of the house were a scattering of vehicles—two or three, it was hard to tell in the dark, the cars were all black. The driveway must run around the south side and end up at the back, probably off the kitchen.
I continued filling in the interior in my mind, as I made my way through the chaparral. The activity at the back of the house was why I decided to enter the house from the front.
The lower I went on the hill the clearer the copse of trees became, actually a row of riparian trees—Arroyo Willows, Black cottonwoods, and California Sycamores. I realized the brush was thinning. I stopped and assessed. I also loaded my gun, a simple six-shooter, and held it in front of me, remembering the last time when the gun had gotten stuck in my coat pocket.
I figured the four windows directly in front of me now were for the living room at the front, and a couple of bedrooms off a hallway leading back toward the kitchen. An odd arrangement; maybe the house had been expanded over the years.
“What about the Incas?”
I was startled by the sudden sounds from Hannah and Gerry. Were they following me, or had the wind shifted.
“…Incas are Peruvian…”
Then an external light flashed on at the back of the house. I waited. No one exited. My heart was pounding.
Switching off my own LED light I searched the house and its surrounds for any sign of movement. A couple of shadows moved occasionally through the dimly lit interior.
Finally my fear subsided to a dull anxiety again and I moved forward.
I could now make out the several vehicles parked at the rear of the structure. One was a large black SUV with the rear door opened, the other two were smaller black sedans. They were definitely positioned for escape.
From behind I heard, “Rachel?”
“Where are you?”
Damn! They were calling out!
I raised my hand hoping to still them when I heard Gerry say they needed to be quiet.
Ya think?
I stumbled on a bit farther—a sense of urgency filling my breast--until suddenly the growth around me disappeared entirely and I found myself fully exposed looking down a grassy hill.
I crouched.
Waves of fresh wet grass and a darker undercurrent flooded my nostrils with earthen delight. Primal messages of the night. My bunny nose had been alerted. And my bunny ears were standing tall for the sounds of coyotes. Delicious grass, dead ahead. Danger a few feet away. Dawn about to rise.
I was profoundly aware I was a mere bunny.
I thought I was hearing snatches of conversations from the house, still half a football field away.
I had to act soon, or…
My heart began tripping in my chest as my mind roamed the field of possibilities before me. What a time to wonder what I was going to do.
I thought back to the orange hazard cones we’d run into on our way down Otay Mesa Road. We’d turned back at that point, as all the east bound cars were doing. But unlike the others, we whipped off to the north across the field as soon as a long break in the traffic allowed us to. That dirt road had taken us up Snakebite Hill.
Now looking out across that bumpy plain from this new vantage I could see another dirt road leading across it, directly from the back of the house toward Mexico. It would cross Otay Mesa fifty yards or so from the roadblock.
The cops would never spot them in the chaos of the u-turning vehicles, as they made their run in the half dark.
And then all they had to do was continue to weave and bump—as we had done—across the next couple of fields until they found the road that led to the border crossing.
A matter of meters and yards, not kilometers and miles.
I knew Abigail was in increasing danger as the light grew. Dawn was a perfect time to escape. Dawn was when they’d act, when human eyesight was at its weakest. When colors and shapes and patterns flowed in and out of each other like a two-toned charcoal landscape, gray on slightly grayer.
I had to act.
If we could sneak our way across those fields as we just had, then those killers could. And the Mexican border guards wouldn’t dare to stop the son of El Antipapa.
Music started playing.
Chapter 87
My heart jumped into my throat like a monkey fleeing a leaping lion. It was my cell phone.
Nearing hysteria, I fell back into the deeper brush, fumbled with the gee-dee device trying to open it and smash down the green on-button to receive the call and stop the stupid jingle.
My eyes skittered back and forth across the windows only a couple of feet away…or so it felt. No one looked out them at me. No one stepped out onto the still well-lit back stoop. No one had noticed the idiot tune at the bottom of Snakebite Hill.
It was Matt. The last guy on earth I wanted to speak to right now. I pressed farther back into the snake-filled brush—turned my back to the house. Held the phone to my ear.
“Speak Rache!”
“What!” I finally whisper-snapped.
“Why are you breathing so hard?”
“I’m having sex with a couple of really gorgeous twenty-year-olds, why?”
“They better be females. And that better not be you up on that ridge, because half the cops in Southern California are on their way to you.”
He was lying.
“I’m busy Matt…sewing.”
I was lying--too late. He knew I wasn’t sewing. Life is all in the timing.
“Tell me where you are Rachel or I’ll…”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll wring your neck, is what.”
No he wouldn’t. The next time he would see me he’d wildly embrace me in his mannish arms and practically bear hug me to death while whispering in my ear that he loved me and needed me. But I didn’t really know that now.
I said, “Have you got your damned warrant yet?”
“What…?”
Too late again.
“I saw you Matt. Hunkered down a half mile from Abigail, doing nothing. How long do you expect you and all the Homeland Boys are going to wait for permission to go in and save her?”
“Rache…”
“Six miles, Matt. Only six miles between them and the Mexican hell they have planned for those innocents…”
“Rache…”
He was stymied. He couldn’t speak above a whisper anymore than I could. We were both stymied, but I was stuck in my little pocket of fear, looking back down on Abigail’s prison. Waiting.
For what?
“I’m busy Matt, and unless you want to get me killed, don’t call back.”
I shut down the call. Then I turned off my cell so he couldn’t call back and jammed the gee-dee device back in my jeans pocket.
A female scream ripped the air like tiger claws ripping through living flesh. The scream went on from ripped flesh to torn flesh to shredded, bloody dying flesh….
Chapter 88
I could feel the solitary scream that rose from the house more than hear it, as if the pressure of the cry pushed through the growing fog, sending vibrations up to my viewpoint, until it arrived as drops of terror splashing cold against my face.
Fog! The impending sunrise was forming another protective cover for the bad guys’ escape.
The ice water facial woke me as if from a stupor and my feet started moving.
I ignored the cries of reason in my head. I was one enraged elephant momma chasing danger from her baby. I was suffering from an extreme sugar rush, on a sugar high, wildly sugared up to the point of sugar insanity.
To my right as I careened down the green carpet, which wasn’t nearly as smooth as it pretended to be, I spotted movement coming toward the house. Just a float of clouds at first, caught by the corner of my cornea.
Until it pulled out of the dimness of the near-night and formed itself into a whitish grayish truck with a funny flat nosed front. A funny, bull-nosed…like a bulbar! A homemade bulbar!
A giant bulbar, like the one that had transformed my beloved red Taurus station wagon into a speeding bullet less than a month ago—while I was driving down a California freeway going sixty-plus miles an hour.
The white…it was white...pickup truck with the flat sheet of scarred metal driven by…driven by…Eddie!
Eddie was here! Eddie was racing toward the back of the house faster than I was stumble-running down the grassy knoll, and unless he stopped soon he would plow right the blazes into it!
Finally, I spotted one of the men in the nearest window, staring out at me as if he was seeing an angel of hell descending on him.
He was a gangbanger if ever I’d seen one, a Mexican gangbanger, with an eye patch propped above his left eye in the signature headgear of the Hidalgo’s.
They thought they were pirates, for cripes sake. They thought they were freakin’ Johnny Depp look-alikes!
I raised my pitiful revolver—which wasn’t an easy feat while trying to stay on my feet, arms pumping rhythmically in apposition to speeding feet--and the man in the window slid back into the darkness behind him.
I ran straight at the side wall, but turned at the last moment and landed, slam, with my back plastered to the stucco.
Ouch. Stucco is rough…especially when you hit it at ninety miles an hour.
My heart was pounding so loudly I was temporarily deaf. So at first I didn’t hear the cavalry coming from the east. And then I did.
Matt must have alerted the Homeland Boys to the fact that his flipping-out wife was racing down the north hill toward the Hidalgo’s, raised gun in hand, and that gave them the imminent danger they needed to finally start their engines and make their assault.
I had forced everybody’s hand, as the saying goes.
Chapter 89
My heart was pounding.
The dark was fading like filaments of mist in candle light, microscopically. You more sensed the loss of dark than saw it.
Hysterical voices were darting around within the house; Eddie’s truck door slammed; and the mechanized Boys to the Rescue were making their interminable way around the bend through the row of riparian trees. Slowly. Lights off. As if to take us all by surprise.
Idiots. Where were the Marines when we needed them?
Holding my Braztech Rossie revolver .38 special up by the side of my head I calmed my breathing by remembering I’d just practiced at the Escondido range Friday.
I listened. The girls had gone silent. My heart was trying to escape my chest, using a battering-ram to get through my tender flesh. My back was screaming ouch, that hurt! to the stucco wall which now felt partially embedded in it. Thank God I’d put on a sweatshirt; it was the only thing between me and the rough cement. And I imagined my hero husband was leading the charge of the good-guys, only a hundred yards away but audible.
I peeled myself off the outside of the house and, bending low to get safely under the side windows, I raced around toward the front of the house, up onto the front stoop. It looked remarkably like the back stoop, except for a sickly potted plant.
I could have sworn I heard Matt shouting behind me, but it was probably just a subconscious voice…or was he sending me Ruth-messages?
Or maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me to run the other way.
The front door was open. I could see straight through to the back door.
Believe it or not, Eddie stood in the back doorway in full cowboy regalia. Once again I flashed back on the bizarre encounter when I first laid eyes on him last month, pale and androgynous, wearing cowboy gear in his empty, haunted house, finally discovered by the outside world.
Déjà vu cowboys all over again.
He tipped his ten gallon hat to me, and stepped into the kitchen and moved for the rooms I hadn’t identified at the back of the house, way ahead and to my left.
I did the same, stepped inside. My breathing doubled. I wondered if he was as terrified as I was.
I peeked around the corners of the entryway to see who was possibly hiding inside the living room. It was empty.
Where were the bad guys?!
Still super-charged on sugar and adrenaline I moved into the living room and stoop-walked—arm and gun extended—toward the narrow hall leading through the house. I clicked the living room lights off when I came to the wall switch. We needed to escape in this direction and I wanted our departure protected by the dark. Then I clicked off the hall lights, after first identifying where the hall doors were.
One on the left and two more on the right.
I moved to the first bedroom, on the right, rounded the corner in the same way I’d entered the house, arms outstretched, prepared to shoot if necessary. The room was dark. With the hall lights off, I mostly sensed there was someone in the room, prone, on the bed in front of me, so I slid the door closed and switched the room light on.
My breath stopped in my throat as the image inside the room blossomed like some evil flower before me.
Tied flat on her back, naked, beaten and bruised, her legs spread eagled to expose her bloodied genitals, lay Betty Wolftooth. She stared sightlessly at the ceiling above her, mouth open, breathing shallowly. She was missing a front tooth. He
r lips were split. There were bite marks on her breasts. That was all I could bear to take in.
My courage departed between my legs toward the floor and I almost fell to my knees. No I didn’t wet my pants. The sensation was caused by internal flows, not external. My body was moving toward shock.
But the shouted Spanish behind me and the sound of a bullet passing through flesh and thudding to a stop in some distant wall somewhere behind me woke me from my terror-bound state, and I moved quickly to her bedside, dropped the gun on the bed like some cast-off chore and began tearing at the ropes tying her hands.
Betty Wolftooth was beaten in more ways than one. Her first freed arm fell back on the greasy pillow under her head and lay there nearly lifeless. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t focusing. Her color was gray, maybe because it was still pre-sunrise, but her face was a mask of death-acceptance—the final stage of dying Elizabeth Kübler-Ross had defined decades ago.
Fighting off a rising sense of hopelessness, I finished untying her ankles and her other hand, and picked up my gun. I would have to leave Betty to continue my search.
Where the hell was my cavalry?! Eddie might well be dead by now.
My legs were shaking as I moved down the dark hall into the second closed door, this one on the left. Dark and silent, and again I was forced to turn on the overhead light, and what lay on the bed before me brought home again the urgency of my actions. A couple, not much older than Matt and I, lay side by side, hands tied in front, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. They had clearly been executed.
I took them to be the original occupants of the house. Their ages encouraged me to believe they might have been living in the house alone. Additional younger people would seriously complicate things.
To the sound of more shouts and another gunshot, I approached the third bedroom, on my right.
It was empty, but a puddle of blood at the center of the bed suggested this had been a torture room for another of the girls.
Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel Page 32