by C. J. Box
“Where in the compound are they?”
“In the green building. It’s a converted shipping container. You’ll see it. But if you try anything you’ll only get yourself killed.”
“How many men are in the compound?”
The Texan did a mental count. “Sixteen.” Then he looked at the man on the ground with blood seeping from his skull. “Fifteen.”
“Counting you?”
The Texan shook his head.
Fifteen men, probably heavily armed, and some of them were certain to have had military training. Not great odds, but better than the lottery, and he still bought a Melate ticket every once in a while.
Noah rubbed the revolver’s hammer spur, feeling it rough against the pad of his thumb, and thought about what he was going to do. The Texan looked back at him with wide frightened eyes. Noah thought about his mother back home in Dallas or Houston, wondering what had happened to him. He thought of his sister crying at the funeral after the body had been discovered in a shallow grave.
“Stand up.”
The Texan stood up.
“Turn around.”
The Texan turned around.
Noah hit him at the base of the skull with the revolver, and he collapsed to the ground unconscious. Noah then stepped into the grave and pulled the man’s shirt off. He tore off a sleeve and shoved it into the mouth. Then tied the rest of the shirt around the head to keep the sleeve in place. Finally he hogtied the man with twine and left him where he lay—let God pass judgment.
Noah didn’t need him dead, just silent.
He stepped out of the grave and walked to whatever was wrapped in the bloody sheet. After pausing a moment, not sure he wanted to see, he pulled the sheet away and found himself looking at the blank face of a teenage girl, maybe sixteen years old. Her left eye had been bruised shut, her nose had been broken, her lower lip was split. Her neck was bent at an unnatural angle. Her right eye stared at him, blank as a broken television screen.
Something inside him shifted and he went cold all over.
He stepped into the grave and stabbed the Texan in the back of his neck, twisted the blade, yanked the knife back out, and watched blood ooze out of the wound.
Maybe God was busy. Maybe sometimes judgment couldn’t wait.
* * *
Noah stood beside Chloe, smoked a cigarette, and waited for dark. He told himself this would be the last cigarette he ever smoked if things went bad. Well, everybody died sometime. He might as well do it while trying to accomplish something good, especially after all the bad he’d done. Two ex-wives he hadn’t treated as well as he should have; a daughter who refused to speak to him; money and girlfriends stolen; friends betrayed. He hadn’t been lying when he told Beverly he wasn’t a nice man. But he hadn’t been telling the whole truth either. He wasn’t a nice man—but he tried not to be a bad one. He tried to find some kind of balance, to do enough right that it offset the wrong.
The sky went dark.
“Are you ready?”
Chloe looked back at him, but her expression was—as always—unreadable.
“I’m going,” Noah said.
He walked toward the compound, telling himself not to look back. But he couldn’t help himself. He glanced over his shoulder, expecting the jaguar to be close behind, but she wasn’t. She had walked to the dead girl’s body and lain down beside it, resting her chin on the girl’s breast. She watched him with her yellow eyes, expressionless, but that was it.
It seemed as though their brief friendship was over.
Noah told himself not to be stupid. The jaguar was a wild animal. There was no telling why she’d decided to walk with him for as long as she had, maybe just curiosity, but they hadn’t been friends and he never should have named her.
Yet he’d taken some kind of comfort in the knowledge that they’d be going into the compound together, and now he was going in alone.
* * *
Noah stood in the shadows and looked at the compound. It was made up entirely of shipping containers that had been converted to buildings. They sat on concrete blocks, had windows and electricity and plumbing, had slant roofs for the frequent rains to run off of. He could see the green building at the other end of the compound. A girl, maybe thirteen, was looking out the barred window.
Noah was certain there were others inside.
Several armed guards—Noah counted six of them, and there were probably others he couldn’t see—were standing around the perimeter. They were dressed in army BDUs and holding M16A2 rifles. At the opposite end of the compound was a dirt runway with a small single-prop airplane parked at the end of it. Beyond that, at the shoreline, the dock feeding into the water and the boat he’d seen on satellite images. And surrounding the entire place, the dock excepted, were high-pressure sodium-vapor lamps, set up about every twenty feet, so that there was almost no space for shadow between them. Noah had no idea how he was going to breach the perimeter without being killed almost immediately. So he stood there for a long time, looking in on the place.
He glanced from one building to the next, looking into the windows to see if he could learn anything else. Behind the third window, he saw Sofia Trujillo standing across from a man Noah recognized as a legislator and prominent member of one of Mexico’s national political parties. This was the man Sofia thought was running the entire human trafficking ring, and now she was standing across from him having an apparently relaxed conversation. The legislator said something and patted her arm. She laughed.
It was possible Sofia had managed to put herself in the legislator’s favor in order to get herself out of a bad situation. But she didn’t appear to be the victim of a kidnapping. She didn’t appear to be the victim of anything.
She hugged the legislator, kissed him on the mouth—lips parted—and picked a purse up from a table. She made her way outside, carrying the purse, and walked to the green shipping container in which the girls were kept. She pulled a key from her pocket and snapped open a padlock. She slipped it out of the staple, flipped open the hasp, and pulled open the door. She stepped inside.
This might be Noah’s only chance—if it was a chance.
He walked through the shadows along the perimeter of the compound, looking for a way to get into the building without being seen. But even as he moved, he thought about what might happen if he was seen. He wondered to himself whether the steel of a shipping container might stop a bullet. The walls were made from fourteen-gauge high-strength low-alloy steel—he’d once had a friend who wanted to convert one into a bomb shelter, and the motherfucker wouldn’t shut up about it—so he thought they’d at least slow down most bullets to the point of nonlethality. They weren’t dealing with aluminum foil here. But there was only one way to find out for sure, and he hoped he didn’t have to.
He was now positioned directly across from the unlocked door, but there were about a hundred feet of well-lighted ground between him and it—and no protection. There was also an armed guard positioned so that he’d see Noah the second he stepped out of the darkness.
Noah shrugged out of his rucksack and set it down gently beside the trunk of a tree. He exhaled in a sigh and removed his knife. He gripped it tight, but it felt slick with sweat. He reached up, grabbed a tree branch, and yanked it down. It snapped loudly. He hid himself behind the trunk of a tree and watched.
The armed guard looked toward the sound—seemed to be looking right at Noah, though that was impossible—but for a moment he didn’t move. Finally he decided to check it out, so he walked toward the woods. Noah held his breath, hoping the guard suspected a capybara or something rather than a human, and watched as the man took step after step through the light before entering the woods and covering himself with shadows.
The guard was now only ten feet away from him—now he was eight.
If he turned his head to the right, he’d see Noah, but he didn’t turn his head. He was looking toward the ground, looking to see a creatu
re on the forest floor.
Now he was only five feet away and Noah knew he needed to move—if the guard kept walking, he’d only put distance between them.
He jumped out of his hiding spot and wrapped an arm around the guard’s head, covering his mouth with the palm of his hand. The man struggled and elbowed Noah in the ribs. He tried to turn the M16 around so he could fire at him. But Noah ducked left and jammed his knife into the throat just below the jawline. Blood throbbed out of the wound around the blade, each gush timed to the guard’s heartbeat. But soon enough the bleeding stopped with the heart and the guard went limp as a wet towel.
Noah let him drop to the ground, let him sag down, then leaned over, picked up the M16, and strapped it over his shoulder. His right arm was covered in the man’s blood, and more was soaking into his shirt. It smelled strongly of metal. Noah ignored it and walked to the edge of the woods. He looked out at the compound. It was quiet, still. No one had yet noticed the guard was missing.
Noah paused a beat, inhale, exhale, and ran for the building—shot out of the darkness and into the light. His heart thumped in his chest. His eyes darted as he looked for danger, but he saw no one, and he believed no one saw him.
He reached the door and pulled it open.
He stepped inside, shut the door behind him, and stood there with his back to it. Seven faces floated in front of him like moons—six girls, aged five to sixteen or so, and Sofia Trujillo. From the looks of it, Sofia had been putting makeup onto the youngest girl. She already had eye shadow on, and Sofia was holding a dark red lipstick in her hand. But nobody was doing anything now. Every face was turned toward him, staring, silent.
Noah looked at Sofia. “Santino Garcia sent me here to rescue you—if you were still alive—but I’m not sure you need rescuing.”
“You shouldn’t have come here. You’re gonna get yourself killed.”
“That may be, but before I do, I’d like you to tell me what’s happening here.”
“I don’t owe you an explanation.”
“That’s where we disagree. You’re the reason I’m here, so I think you owe me something.”
“I’m here to help these girls.”
“By putting makeup on them while they’re being held captive? I read your research. I know what this place is. How you can participate in it is—”
“You need to talk to Jose Luis.”
“Ramos?” She didn’t answer, but her eyes said yes: Jose Luis Ramos, the legislator. “Why is it you think I need to talk to him?”
“Because you don’t understand what’s happening here. I didn’t either, not at first. But they’re getting these girls out of a life of poverty and into new homes in the United States. Into new homes with families who will love them.”
“By keeping them locked in a storage container?”
“For their own safety—ask them yourself.”
“I don’t need to. They’ll repeat the lies they’ve been told.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Then why is one of the girls lying beside a shallow grave a quarter mile from here with her fucking neck snapped?”
“Ana?” Sofia looked confused.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask her her name. She was about sixteen. Black hair, cut at the jawline, like a short bob. Big brown eyes.”
“That’s Ana. She went to her new home yesterday afternoon.”
“If her new home is a grave, she’s right next to it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What do you think happened to her? How do you think I know what she looked like?”
“I saw her step on a plane with her new father.”
“But what you probably didn’t see is what he tried to do to her on that plane. How she fought back. How he killed her for it. And you didn’t see Ramos’s men unload the body after dark and drag it out into the woods.”
“That can’t be true. Jose Luis is a kind man. He screens the adoptive parents. What he’s doing—it might be illegal, but he’s doing it to help these girls.”
Noah glanced over to the girls. They were clean and well fed and staring at him wide-eyed and fearful. As if he were the bad guy. For just a moment he almost allowed himself to believe Sofia’s story. It would make this much easier. He could walk out of here and not look back. Only he didn’t believe her story. He believed that she believed it, but that was all.
“How much money do you think he’s making off them?”
“A person can’t make money and do a good thing?”
“Let me ask you this, Sofia: why is he only ‘rescuing’ girls?”
“His sister died in an orphanage, and the normal adoption process takes so long and—”
“You’re sleeping with him.”
“I don’t—”
“I’ve read your research. You’re too smart to believe any of this bullshit. You dug your way to the truth and now you’re denying facts that you uncovered. The only explanation is, you’re falling for him. Love makes everybody stupid.”
Sofia looked toward the corner for a long time. When she looked back at him there were tears in her eyes. “You’re right. I let myself fall in love with him. I didn’t mean for it to happen—I met with him to confront him with what I knew—but it did.” She looked down at her hands, at the lipstick and cap she was holding. She twisted down the lipstick, put the cap on it, and tucked it into her purse. “So what do I do now?”
* * *
The question was answered by a gunshot. The bullet thwacked through the glass and dinged against the far wall of the building, denting it. It flew by close enough that Noah felt the air move in its wake. Someone outside had seen him and decided to shoot rather than investigate.
The girls screamed and huddled into a corner of the room. Noah shoved Sofia out of the line of fire and ducked down.
People outside were yelling in Spanish, and he could hear the heavy thudding sound of boots pounding earth.
Noah’s plan—if it could be called a plan—had been to find Sofia, sneak her out of the compound, and get to the boat. But the time for sneaking around had ended with a gunshot. Now he had to react.
In Spanish he told the girls to lie on the floor, facedown. Then he looked at Sofia. “You got a compact in that purse?”
She nodded.
From outside: “Come out of the building with your hands up.”
Noah didn’t respond to the request. He reached over to the purse and grabbed it, dropping it at his feet. He dug through it till he found a Mac foundation compact. He opened it and let the applicator pad fall to the floor.
“We have you surrounded; come out of the fucking building with your hands in the air.”
Noah looked at Sofia. “Real good people here, shooting into a building with six innocent girls inside—and you.”
She looked back at him but said nothing.
With his back to the wall, sitting on his haunches just below the window, he held up the compact to get a view of the situation outside. He saw three of the guards standing about thirty feet away, aiming their rifles at the building. Then one of them saw the mirror’s reflection and fired. Noah saw a brief muzzle flash and the compact exploded in his hand.
“Fuck.”
He glanced at the door.
It remained closed—for now.
He listened for the sound of footsteps outside but heard nothing.
“You have one more chance—come out with your hands in the air.”
He was in the soup now, and didn’t know how to get out of it. After a beat, he decided there wasn’t an elegant solution to this inelegant situation. He’d have to be blunt.
He crawled to the cots on which the girls slept and pulled a mattress down from one of them. It was about six inches thick and filled only with foam; no chance it would stop a bullet, but it would at least block the guards’ view of what was happening inside. He yanked it toward the window and pushed it up, blocking the bullet-punctuated glass. T
hen pushed it enough to the side that he’d have an inch or so of room to see—and to fire.
He flipped the M16 to three-shot bursts, knowing he wouldn’t have time for precision shooting—he wasn’t the world’s best shot anyway—and got to his feet with his back to the wall. He closed his eyes, inhaled, exhaled, and opened his eyes.
He looked through the strip of glass and pulled back.
A bullet thwacked against the wall, denting it, but didn’t penetrate.
The three guards were standing in the same positions. The other guards—and who knew how many there really were; there might be up to ten of them—could have been anywhere, but his guess was that they were planning to burst through the door, so he’d have to keep an eye on it.
He waited a moment—and then another moment. He looked at the girls and, in Spanish, told them to cover their ears. Then he looked at Sofia. “You too.”
He turned around, fired three three-shot bursts through the window, moving from left to right, taking no time to line up his targets, then put his back against the wall again. The sound of the gunfire in the building, in this small metal room, was deafening. His ears rang with tinnitus.
He glanced quickly through the window.
One of the guards was on the ground. Another had been shot in the shoulder but wasn’t incapacitated. The third he’d missed altogether.
And he had twenty-one rounds left in the M16—if the thirty-round clip jammed into it had been full, of which there was no guarantee.
The door flew open with a bang and a guard in a bulletproof vest barged in, aimed at Noah, and—