by Billy Kring
Adan breathed hard at the sight, but he moved the shirt to see where the iron exited Dario’s back. The tip showed about three inches higher up, beside Dario’s shoulder blade, between it and his spine. He called to Hunter, holding his fingers up to show how much flesh was over the iron point. “About three inches, looks like.”
Hunter said “Is it skin, or something else?”
“Like bone?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“No, only skin. It shows the iron underneath, like it is folded around it.”
“Can you cut him loose?”
“I can try, but I don’t know. Maybe I can pull him off.”
Hunter thought, “Tie Dario off with the other rope, under his arms if you can.”
Adan folded the knife, put it in his pocket, then tied the second rope around Dario, snugging it tight.
Hunter said to Dario, “This might hurt, but we need to free you.”
“Do it.”
Adan positioned himself and pulled up on Dario. The boy hissed, and a trickle of blood ran from the wound, down his back, staining the belt line of his pants. Adan tried again, stronger this time, but he was pinned with the iron like a nail was holding him. Adan strained until red dots and purple lines showed in his vision, but it was no use.
Dario bled steadily now, and his head hung limp. “Dario?” Adan said. There was no answer. Anxiety made his voice break. “Hunter, he’s passed out, and he’s not breathing very well.”
“Can you cut along the skin over the iron? You need to do it to free him. Cut a single line down it from where it goes in to where it exits.”
“Okay.”
“And hold him if you can, because he will fall when you do.”
“The rope is on him.”
“I know, and I’ll hold tight, so with both of us it should be fine.”
Adan took a deep breath, pulled the knife from his pocket and opened it, then put the blade tip at the top where the iron exited. He sliced down with one strong movement.
Dario dropped three feet before the rope stopped his fall, swinging him across the shaft opening and into the wall below Hunter. Adan swung in space because Dario’s sudden drop knocked him off his perch. Hunter said, “Hold on, I’m pulling Dario up first.”
Hunter had her heels braced against a short ridge of stone near the mine opening, and her rear was low so she could use maximum leg power. Dario was lighter than she expected, but was still a hundred pounds to lift, and with no pulley, just strength, needed to go straight up the mine wall. Her hands burned, but the gloves helped, and her back and legs began quivering when he came up fifteen of the twenty feet. The last five feet had her huffing and straining, but she got his body over the lip and positioned him face up on the stone floor.
Her legs felt like jelly as she stood and moved to help Adan up from his rope. Adan could assist so it didn’t take as much effort, but at the end, Hunter felt drained. She knew she would recover soon, but the need to get Dario somewhere for medical attention pressed her mind with urgency.
She said to Adan, “Get behind him and prop him up against you. I need to get some water in him.”
Adan moved above Dario’s head and sat with his legs wide, leaving the injured boy’s head between his thighs. He reached under the boy’s armpits, lifting and scooting him up while he leaned back, until Dario’s limp head was only a few inches lower than his own, with the back of his head lolling against his friend’s chest.
He looks bad, Hunter thought. She brought the water to him and put several drops on his lips. Dario responded, and she added more. His eyes opened and she held up the canteen. He nodded yes. She fed him small sips for the next ten minutes, until he recovered enough to speak, “My back really hurts.”
She said, “We’ll turn you over, and I’ll put some medicine on it.”
He nodded, and Adan and Hunter turned him on his side, so that he was three-quarters over, but not face down. She glanced at Adan’s shirt and saw it red and sticky with blood. A good amount of blood. She motioned for the medicine kit. She stripped off her gloves and opened the canvas bag, taking out a rolled pair of pale blue nitrile gloves and slipping them on. She pulled out several items and turned to Dario’s back. She took the canteen and poured water into and around the wound. It made Dario hiss through his teeth, and squeeze Adan’s hand, but he didn’t say a word. She looked at the wound, using the flashlight beam to check for any grit or dirt or iron residue still there, but the wound looked clean. It was bruised but free of debris.
She next took a tube of Neosporin with pain reliever in it and squeezed the entire tube into the wound, then folded the flaps of skin down so it held the medicine. She covered the wound with two, four-by-four telfa pads, which she taped down, and for extra measure wrapped Dario’s chest and the wound with an ace bandage to anchor it all in place. “Okay,” she said, and rose to her feet. Pulling off the blue latex gloves left her hands feeling sweaty, so she wiped them on her pants and said to Adan, “We need to get him to the vehicle, then to a medical facility.”
Dario surprised them both by struggling to stand, and they stood on both sides and helped him to his feet. He was wobbly, but tough, and the three of them walked out of the mine and the shed to the pickup on the slope. Dario got in the back seat and lay on his side. Hunter used a seatbelt to strap across him.
Adan glanced over his shoulder at his friend, and said to Hunter, “He looks better after the water.”
“The hospital in Ojinaga is on the Avenida Cuautemoc, so we can get there fast because it is a wide road.” She turned the pickup around and drove off the hill, with rocks and talus banging into the undercarriage as she maneuvered on the primitive road. She caught a quick wink of light on a nearby hill and studied the area, but didn’t make out anyone. Probably an old bottle, she thought. Hunter turned her focus on the road and the race to get her little friend to some help.
Ellis pulled his binoculars down and watched the Border Patrol Agent drive like a crazy person down the hill, and on to more level roads that would lead her to Camino 160, and from there to Ojinaga. He called from the top of the hill, and although reception was scratchy, got old man Hart on the line.
“You find them?”
“Yeah, been watching them for over an hour. They went to the mine.”
“And?”
“Two went in, and three came out. The kid went to the truck once for some supplies. A canteen and a canvas bag. She parked the pickup in some cedars which half-blocked my line of sight.”
“Nothing else?”
“I’m gonna go check it out. I’ll call you back when I get through.”
“Make it tomorrow, I have two state representatives coming out in a few minutes to socialize and talk over some matters.”
“They coming by copter?”
“Of course. I had my pilot pick them up.”
“Talk to you tomorrow.” Ellis hung up and drove toward the mine, thinking all the while about Hart, and the old journal he’d found twenty years ago, the one from the original patriarch of the hart clan, from 1850, when he first came to the Big Bend area with nefarious scalphunter and sadistic killer John Glanton. In his journal he’d been eloquent, a good speller, and an arrogant, evil sonofabitch. The thought made Ellis smile.
He followed behind Hunter’s pickup at a distance, being careful not to get close and raise her suspicion. Ellis let his imagination wander, and thought what that fine, fine woman looked like out of uniform, and buck naked on a bed. He might just find out, and sometime soon. Some itches had to be scratched.
His first had been when he was thirteen, under some thin trees on a rock-covered rise near Blackwell, Texas. She was willing at first, even started it by wanting to see his “thing”, but then, when they both had their clothes off and he was on top of her, she grew reluctant. She fought him and cried when it was done. That would have been the end of it but she threatened him through her tears, saying “I’m going to tell my momma and daddy what you did.”
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br /> He didn’t remember picking up the sharp-edged rock the size of a softball, but it was in his hand, and bloody, as he looked down at the girl’s body on the ground. She didn’t move, other than to let out one last rattling gasp. He pulled her into the brush and found a shallow trench where he put her, then covered her with dirt and stones and old leaves and twigs.
There’s been more since then. And a lot more when he worked in El Salvador and Nicaragua with the Sandinistas, He’d had all the women he wanted. But sometimes, he needed the extra thrill, and had some that he killed right after he finished. It was like an adrenaline rush, every time. Never any witnesses, no sir. So maybe, he’d do the same thing with this Hunter Kincaid, after finishing some more things for the Harts. Have to be careful with her, though. The woman was a federal agent, and was said to be a good shot.
But then again, he was better than good, and he’d had his way with the ones he wounded, too. A bullet low in the spine stopped them every time. They were alive but couldn’t run, or fight very well. The thoughts made a pleasant drive back to Ojinaga.
Hunter sped into Ojinaga and got on the Avenida, then in minutes she was at the hospital and pulling into the emergency parking area. Nurses and a physician came out and took Dario on a stretcher as Hunter explained what had happened. She left off the part where Ellis pushed Dario into the mine, otherwise the police would be involved and she would never get away from here. Adan backed up her story, saying that he and Dario were looking around when his friend stumbled and fell into the abandoned mine, and he had panicked, not knowing what to do at first, and then remembering he’d seen his friend, Hunter Kincaid nearby, and ran to her for help. Together they rescued Dario and drove him to Ojinaga’s great hospital. The doctors weren’t positive they were hearing the total truth, but they were busy, so let Hunter and Adan go.
As Hunter drove away, Adan said, “I will tell Dario’s mother about this.”
“That would be good. How are you going to get there?”
“The bus. It leaves in an hour.” He was silent for a moment, “While I was hanging in the shaft, looking down,” he turned his face toward her, his eyes haunted, “I saw bones and skulls at the bottom.”
Hunter said, “I saw one skull, but that was all.”
“You glanced down at the bottom, I looked at it for twenty, thirty seconds at least. Most of them are coated with the red mud, and barely under the surface of the water. There are many.”
Hunter said, “When I get you safe, I’ll go back, check it out.”
“Don’t go alone. Please.”
She patted his shoulder, “Okay.”
Chapter 5
Ellis took his time driving to the abandoned mine, thinking about recent events and how his financial situation currently was holding. Not so good, as a matter of fact. The smuggling loads of illegals had been stymied at several stages. The first was swept away in the flood. Then no others wanted to be transported by Ellis and his partners. After that, the guns being smuggled south had been intercepted twice in the last two months, one by the Highway Patrol and the other by the Border Patrol, with each load being fifty AR-15s and seventy pistols.
The drugs fared no better. They were being caught at the Port of Entry, and the Border Patrol along the river border. Especially his three loads of fentanyl knocked off out near Van Horn last month. That hurt his wallet like a sonofabitch.
On top of that, Winston Hart was not going to adopt him any time soon, so no income there, either. He smiled because his plan to get a piece of the Hart fortune was still in the works, with or without the Harts.
Driving up the slope to the mine was rough, and his vehicle bounced over rocks and potholes, dropping dust from the headliner like thin fog. Once, his teeth clicked together when he didn’t see a deep one, but the trail became smoother as he reached the level area among the junipers and sage.
He parked fifty feet from the mine entrance, picked up the large flashlight from the passenger’s seat and checked his pistol in the concealed holster situated in front for a cross-draw if he needed it. Ellis didn’t expect trouble, maybe a rattler or rabid raccoon in the mine, for sure nothing human, but then again it never hurt to be prepared.
He entered the small blockhouse beside the shed, using his key to open the lock and flip back the hasp. Inside was a case of dynamite, still three-quarters full of the red sticks. Beside it were several coils of timer fuses, the ones that burned at a measured rate. These, he knew burned slowly, at ten minutes for every six inches. There were also fuse strikers in a smaller box, the ones with a ring on the end of the pull plunger that they attached to the fuse end. All he had to do was pull back the spring-loaded ring and let it snap back and that would light the fuse. A small box of blasting caps nestled beside it, and inside the box shined the silver caps, resting on a pad of cotton. A cheap pair of aluminum dynamite pliers to be used to crimp the cap onto the fuse lay nearby.
There were also four hand grenades, two of them fragmentations, and two of them white phosphorus, called Wilson Pickett, by some former Marines he knew.
He spotted something half-hidden in the corner shadow by the dynamite box. Ellis stepped closer and picked up the dusty watch. He ran his thumb across the face. The leather band had been torn in half. It was a Piaget, very expensive, and Ellis remembered twelve years ago when it fell there during his tussle with Vincent Hart. Things had been hectic for a while until he got control of the situation and tied up Hart to take him to the ranch. He put the watch in his pocket, patting it once for good luck.
Ellis took the timer fuse and cut off six inches, then placed a blasting cap on the end, crimping it with the aluminum pliers and made his way into the actual mine shaft. He used his knife to make a hole in the end of a single dynamite stick, then slid in the cap. It fit snug enough to hold the fuse and cap firmly in place.
He flipped on the flashlight as he entered the mine and walked to the edge of the ten-foot-wide hole in the mine floor. Shining the light into the bottom twenty feet down revealed a water level that had dropped several inches because of no recent rains, and the bottom showed a number of bones exposed. The old two-by-twelve board reaching across the hole was still in place to serve as a bridge, but it looked creaky to him.
Shining the light on the shaft walls showed several new cracks where the old mine walls were deteriorating, and he noticed them on all sides of the shaft. Thinking about it for a minute, Ellis decided what to do. Holding the dynamite, he pulled the ring and heard a pop, then smelled and saw the smoke. When it was going good, he dropped it to the bottom of the mine.
Ellis trotted from the mine and back to the vehicle where he leaned on the fender and waited. The six-inch fuse was timed to ten minutes, so he checked the surrounding countryside for a bit, seeing no other soul in sight. Nine minutes later, Ellis felt a soft rumble and heard a muffled boom, followed by the tin shed rattling and a geyser of dust and gravel shooting out the door. One panel of corrugated aluminum came off the shed and twirled through the air like a flipped coin to land in a juniper bush some forty feet distant. Other sounds came from the mine, with most of them the sounds of falling stones. Dust lessened from the shed door, until five minutes later, it had dissipated.
Ellis grabbed the flashlight and entered the mine. Fine bits of dust filtered in the air like motes. He glanced into the bottom of the shaft to see a fresh layer of rubble covering everything a foot deep, but not more than that. The fresh rock hid everything down there.
“Good enough,” He said. He returned to his vehicle and drove off the mountain and toward Presidio. He thought about what to do next. Starting a new pile of bodies in the mine would be handy, and he could cover them up again when needed. Now, to work on upping the game on his plans, including becoming the sole heir of the Hart fortune. It was complex, deceptive, and would be bloody, and the thought made him smile. He hadn’t been good and bloody in a long time.
As he entered Ojinaga, he called RL, who answered, “Sup?”
“You
ready to do some work?”
“Sure.”
Ellis told him where to wait, and he picked him up as they drove toward the International Bridge. Ellis said, “We need to make some money.”
“I’m ready.”
“I need you to travel to Odessa, talk to the contacts there and see what they need. Tell them whatever it is, we’ll provide it.”
RL said, “Got it.”
“After that, contact the Juarez Cartel and ask your friends there what they want. We’ll make money runs both ways, and use each group to help us supply the others without them knowing.”
“I’ll go today, probably be back tomorrow or the next day. Depends on how hard they want to party. You know what I mean.”
“I do.” Ellis drove across the bridge and the men showed their passports to the uniformed officers on the U.S. side. They waved the two men on, and Ellis and RL travelled to a warehouse on the outskirts of town on Bridge Street, two hundred feet north of the Rio Grande. RL used his own set of keys to open the padlock and slide the doors open. Inside were two, four-by-four Dodge Ram pickups, a Buick Enclave Avenir, and a twenty-year-old, two-ton dump truck.
They had parked the dump truck on top of the false floor where guns and drugs were stored. It also marked where the tunnel would soon be finished. The tunnel that would run from a large metal shed in Mexico, on Calle Fronteriza, under the shallow border river, to the warehouse.
It had begun twenty months ago, with Ellis soliciting the Juarez Cartel, and getting a sit-down with Juan Pablo Ledezma, the Cartel’s powerful and ruthless leader. That had been sweaty work, Ellis remembered, with Ledezma sitting close in front of him, talking at length while not blinking, which reminded Ellis of a rattlesnake he once came face to face with while climbing a cliff. The scaled head rose off the rock and hovered motionless two inches from his face. He’d dropped off the short cliff and turned an ankle when he hit, but got away from the rattler.
Ledezma, when he finished talking, listened to the American. Ellis kept it short, direct, and emphasized how much money could be made. The Cartel’s armed units, the Zetas and La Linea, stood behind him, with automatic weapons pointed at Ellis. He remembered that a dozen rifles pointed at him from six feet away definitely left his underarms as humid as a swamp, even with deodorant on them.