by Lynn Shurr
“Mama Pilar in heaven, your daughter Xochi needs help. Please whisper in the ear of Mother Mary and send me rescue.” She recited the rosary from memory and calmed.
Next, a hot shower, erasing all her makeup. Why try to appear more attractive for kidnappers? She washed out her underwear and carefully hung her purple Anchi Services uniform in the tiny closet, draping the pink, purple and silver scarf over the hanger attached to the pole. Fortunately, the towels were lavish enough to cover her body, though she wondered if spy cameras infested her room like cockroaches. Xochi slid beneath her covers before stripping the towel and allowed the sound of the ship cutting through the water to lull her to sleep.
In the morning, the pale pink sunrise woke her because she’d forgotten to cover the portholes. With the sun to the rear, they still headed west. Too awake to drowse anymore, Xochi wrapped the towel around her again, rummaged in the fridge, and found a breakfast burrito to heat, added a banana to her meal, and made instant coffee so bad she immediately recalled Junior’s perfect brew. Would she ever see him again or Tom or even Edward from the coffee shop? She wanted her life back. She’d be more open to new ideas, she promised. Maybe five years was not such a difference. Possibly she’d hung on to her secret virginity too long, and now it would be wasted on men who did not care. Such thoughts weren’t helpful.
She dressed in slightly damp underwear and her uniform, didn’t bother with shoes, but padded around the room in bare feet. Exercise might help, maybe some music. In a cabinet beneath the TV, she unearthed a selection of CDs and an archaic player to run them. Her favorite salsa tunes were included in the collection. She put one on and danced hard for over an hour, pretending she had a partner big enough to flip her over his shoulder and catch her around the waist, big enough to carry her away from her captivity. Sweaty, she showered again and washed her hair. A few teeth from the cheap comb broke as she forced it through her thick locks.
More movies, more food, more dancing, another shower and to bed. Xochi wished for the voyage to end no matter what the destination.
****
The next day, Xochi roused from a nap to the absence of engine noise and the slapping of waves against the hull. The very stillness woke her. It did not last long. Noise erupted from a very boisterous welcoming party: the shrieks and giggles of women, the hoarse shouts and lewd comments of men that went on for hours. At one point, someone tried to enter her room.
“Beat it!” the cruder of her captors said. “Es occupado.” The couple searching for a bedroom went on their merry way before she could shout for help, not that they would have heard her above the din of the mariachi band and the singing of drunks.
Xochi felt oddly safe in her locked cabin with a guard outside.
Unfortunately, the door did open as the fiesta wound down, allowing the man with the thin mustache to enter. A swath of red material draped his arm and a pair of the icepick heels like the ones Xochi wished she’d had in the cab dangled from his fingers. His compatriot guarded the exit from the inside now.
“Put these on.”
“And if I refuse?” Xochi raised her chin more defiant in attitude than she felt in reality.
“Then, Animal will dress you. That will make him very happy.” El Animal smiled, showing strong, sharp teeth as if he’d like to eat her raw.
She went into the bathroom and considered locking the door until she realized that the mechanism had been removed. No help for it unless she wanted the assistance of the Animal. Xochi shed her business dress and let the cheap, scarlet fabric slide over her underwear, neither mawmaw nor provocative, but she rather wished her bra was not the kind that gave her full breasts a lift. The deep V of the neckline showed off extensive cleavage, and the hem came only to mid-thigh. She sat on the commode to put on the shoes held onto her feet by ankle straps. Standing, Xochi wobbled. One heel appeared to be slightly shorter than the other throwing off her gait. No time to ponder that because the bathroom door flew open.
“Bueno. You are dressed at last. Animal, the rest of her costume.”
Xochi retreated hard against the shower stall, but could go no farther. “You don’t want me to touch you, eh? I am crude and ugly, but he’s the one you should fear. They call Diaz Hijo de Diablo. You understand?”
“Son of the Devil.”
“Si.” He forced a strip of black silk into her mouth by pinching her jaws until she opened for him. With a hard spin of her shoulders, he turned her around to knot it tight before she could spit it out. Diaz produced a silver mask that descended over her face and was bound to her head by another silky band. As he checked the effect, Xochi viewed herself in the mirror, two terrified brown eyes peering from the slightly slanted, almond-shaped holes, her mouth completed covered by the gleaming, full lips of the mask. The gag appeared to be part of the fasteners.
Both men wore festive embroidered shirts. Diaz donned the mask of a skull and El Animal the vicious likeness of a snarling jaguar. They shoved her from the bathroom. The ship’s whistle sounded.
“We go.”
“The shoes, I can’t walk in them.”
“You will not go far.” Diaz placed his arm around her neck and the Animal pulled her waist tight against his.
Xochi hobbled along, apparently as drunk as the rest of the crowd, many devils and beasts among them along with tawdry women wearing masks similar to her own, heading for the gangplank where buses waited on the street to take them away. The partiers loaded the vehicles and hung out the windows, many still singing off-color ditties. Xochi stumbled aboard with one man in front and the other behind. They took no special seat, only blended in with the rest of the revelers, Mardi Gras Mexicano style, Xo thought, without a happy ending or even a hangover.
As promised, they did not go far, only to a luxury hotel where apparently the party continued in a ballroom. Only she and her captors and a few other women boarded the elevator to the penthouse floor. Only she, Diaz, and El Animal exited. The rest rode back to the ballroom.
Prodded through a doorway into the suite and across a large room, Xochi came to a halt before a massively ornate silver inlaid desk worthy of the Emperor Maximillian himself. The man behind it on a throne-like chair seemed diminished by its size, but she doubted he realized that. Everything about him had shrunken. Gone the prosperous belly and oily skin of the overly fed. The head of black hair now grew white and wispy above sunken cheeks that made him resemble the skeleton mask. Large yellow teeth gripped the gold holder and grinned at her from behind the glowing red end of a cigarette. The eyes were the same, however—the flat black of a venomous snake.
“Senorita Xochi. Bienvenido. Remove her mask and let her speak.”
Xochi gazed on the man she had once been tutored to call Don Esteban. She’d hung shyly on her father’s leg as he coaxed her to come forward with sweets taken from a pocket. Sometimes, he’d let her ride one of his horses, and she fled to the far end of pasture until her Papi ordered her to return and gave her a cuff for avoiding El Jefe. This man had ordered her parents killed.
She licked her dry lips, but looked at him squarely. “Don Esteban, I see you are dying. Perhaps if I am so welcome, you will let me go as a good deed to save your soul.”
Chapter Eighteen
El Jefe laughed with a sound like rattling bones. “You have wit as well as your mother’s beauty. Her only talent was pleasing a man. But at thirteen, girls have little to say that is worth listening to. Of course, I had her first as soon as her parents sold her to the whorehouse in Laredo. The madam always called me when she had someone young and fresh. Oh, what I taught your mama to do with a man. And when I was done with her, I gave her to your father.”
Shifting her weight onto the better heel, Xochi steadied herself with one hand on the back of a chair. No one sat in Don Esteban’s presence unless told to do so. She recalled that as well, along with her mother being merry and loving, a young woman who took her child to church and pestered her Papi to send her little flower to parochial school. Tho
ugh the ugly comments the dying man made caused her cheeks to burn, she’d figured out her mother’s past fairly easily long ago. How else would a Mexican girl of fourteen have fallen into the hands of Bijou Billodeaux if not through the sex trade?
Xochi did not respond to his baiting. She continued to look into those flat, dead eyes. “I have numerous talents.”
“Si, si, you know many languages and translate for a living. I have kept track of you for many years. Here.” He struggled to open the heavy desk drawer. Diaz leaped to do it for him. “Thank you, hijo. A fancy phone, a tablet, no? All your history is here.”
He called up photos and ran his yellowed finger over one picture after another of Xochi—playing soccer, dressed in white lace for her first communion on the church steps, graduating from high school, studying abroad and mingling with Spanish friends, receiving her college diploma, summa cum laude in languages, and most recently having her latte and beignets after church services, and walking with Connor in the sculpture garden. Unnerving, all of it, to have been spied upon for so many years. None at the ranch or inside a church, and she took comfort from that. Mama Pilar and Mother Mary be with me now.
Xochi looked away from her life flickering by like an old-time movie and regarded El Jefe again. “You have very little time to live, maybe a few days. I can see the dirty brown-green of the cancer inside you engulfing your lungs, your kidneys, your brain, spreading its darkness, becoming one with the blackness of your soul. You are beyond salvation.”
Don Esteban raised almost nonexistent brows that wrinkled his lax flesh. “What, a girl so devout she never misses church on Sunday does not believe I can be saved by my last-minute confession to a priest?”
“God is so not easily fooled.” Her words sliced like a sacrificial knife. She noticed more about his aura, that the edges appeared to be thinning to smoke, his blackness slowly unraveling. Not long to go at all.
El Jefe slapped his frail hand on the desk. “You, you will give me life again, here on the island sacred to Ix Chel, goddess of birth. The offering of a virgin to her at the time of the full moon will restore me.”
“You truly believe that? Or that I am a virgin…an American woman of my age? The cancer has rotted your brain.” Xochi matched his laugh now, hers one of scorn.
She bluffed. Her fears had kept her from the ultimate intimacy with men. When her body blossomed so early, casting her into womanhood before her mind could understand its meaning and power, she hunched her shoulders and ran from men who called out to her making suggestive comments and boys her age who just wanted to touch her body. What if she were like her mother—a puta in the making, hot-blooded, a natural whore?
The manifestation of her auras rode hard on the tails of that fear. Mama Nell had told her she was her own person, to put her shoulders back, ignore the catcalls, and slap away the gropers, but she could offer no cure for the auras. Help came from Rosemarie Leleux who explained them as gifts from God, one that could protect her from harm and aid others. After seeing them as an asset, relying on them to gauge people, she worried the auras would disappear if she lost her virginity. A silly notion, perhaps, but one she hadn’t confided to Miss Rosemarie, unwed and probably still a virgin at her advanced age.
Don Esteban’s raspy voice battered through her rambling thoughts. “I know you, Xochi, everything about you. In the clubs, you dance like a wanton woman, but go home alone. When you lived in Spain, you took no lovers among the other students. In college, you only go out in groups of friends. Before that, Joe Billodeaux and your brothers keep the men away.”
Xochi straightened her spine and pulled back her shoulders as Mama Nell had taught her. Her posture in the sleazy dress only made her breasts more prominent. El Animal licked his lips, and Diaz’s dark eyes glittered at the sight. “I’ve been in sinful New Orleans for a few years and lived with a man for several weeks recently.”
Still bluffing. Even self-involved Stacy did not know her long-time roommate was a virgin. She’d simply assumed that while she carried on with a professor at college, Xochi had done the same with college boys and later experimented some more while abroad. Mooning over Dean and finally connecting with him had taken all Stacy’s attention away from anything Xo might be doing.
Again, her bluff did not work. Esteban Miro laughed, his teeth clacking together unpleasantly when he stopped. “That overgrown boy who follows you like a puppy as he has your entire life? I think not. You did not share a room and sent him away not long ago.”
How did the drug lord know these things? Being famous, the Billodeauxs were cautious about directional listening devices and long-range cameras. Perhaps, his men had gained access to the electronics store below her and bugged the apartment. Whatever, it did not matter now.
Xochi grasped at a last drifting straw. “What if I told you I was a lesbian? Would that make me ineligible to be a human sacrifice to Ix Chel?”
Don Esteban brought up one more photo—of her kissing Connor by the LOVE sculpture in the park. “All over the internet. But, this doctor has been too occupied to go any farther. Still, you should be more careful of your reputation.”
“Why? To save myself for you?” Haughty defiance did not help either, only provoked him.
“Enough! Indio!”
The carved double doors to a master bedroom opened. Beyond it, a bed draped in royal purple waited. Chubby cupids peeped from the intricate design of a golden headboard and giggled atop the bedposts. Seeming out of place beside it stood a man in a white lab coat. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves from a box sitting on the bow-legged, gilded night table, but it was the man called Indio who came for Xochi.
“Come, Xochitl, warrior queen, you will not be harmed.”
“Only Corazon calls me that.”
“You should embrace your full Nahuatl name and all it means.” He held out an arm thickened by fat to support her.
In the daylight, Xochi took notice of his soft stomach and the lines of age in his broad, sagging face. One swift kick in the gut with the spiked heels, and she could take him. Not as leggy as Alix, but she had her dance moves going for her. Maybe her thoughts showed on her face because the Animal moved behind her and locked her arms with his.
He lifted her half off the ground and bodily moved her into the bedroom. “She kicks,” he explained as he tossed her belly down on the bed.
“I will need her face-up, por favor,” the man in the lab coat said as he held his hands up, keeping them sterile.
“If you think I’m going to cooperate in this you…” Xochi burrowed into the rich coverlet.
“Of course, we do not expect that. Animal, put her into position,” Diaz said, cold, calm and detached.
The Animal put an ungentle hand on her arm, drew it up behind her back, and flipped her before it snapped. She struck out at him with those heels, but he dodged in time.
“Careful. Do not bruise her. Use these as restraints.” The Mayan man removed four sets of padded handcuffs from the night table.
The Animal managed to fasten her wrists without help to the bedposts, but when it came to securing her legs spread eagle, he motioned to Diaz to do the work while he laid on top of her calves, pressing her hard into the mattress. Once she was bound, he discarded the shoes, throwing them across the room as if they personally offended him. He shoved the cheap dress above her waist and pulled down the black cotton bikini panties she’d worn to work—how many days ago—stretching them below her knees, her modest bikini wax job exposed for all four men to see. He sniffed her underwear before straightening.
“Good enough, doctor?” El Animal stepped aside, his eyes on her crotch, not Xochi’s face as if she were only a cunt to him and not a person.
“Si, if you please.” The medical man nodded toward a LED light on a headband. Indio fitted it over his gray hair.
Xochi tensed. She could imagine many, many things these men could do to her without taking her virginity. Wasn’t she already staked out like a character in a bondage movie
? She clung with hope to the Indian’s orders—no bruises.
The doctor leaned over and gently parted her labia as if coaxing a pink rosebud to open, nothing more but some close scrutiny. Keeping his fingers in place, he beckoned Indio to come closer with a jerk of his head and aimed the bright light at her vagina again. “Ella es una virgen.”
“Si, Bueno.”
The doctor rolled off his gloves and tossed them in a wastebasket. Diaz stepped forward to place a wad of hundred-dollar American bills—the preferred currency of Cozumel—into his hands. He left immediately, replaced by El Jefe staring at her privates from the foot of the bed.
“As I thought, the virgin who will restore me to health and allow me to take revenge on Bijou Billodeaux. Once I would have delighted in relieving you of your virginity, would not have hesitated to take you with all these men watching me full of envy. No matter, soon my potency will be restored.”
Xochi arched both brows at him. “Bijou is long gone, or have you forgotten? This man, this Indio, is a charlatan after your money. He, too, knows you will not live long enough to turn on him. Your illness has no cure, and your evil is without redemption.” She would have spit had her mouth not been so dry.
“Indio is a revered curandero, better by far than the old woman you consult. He bears a name in Nahuatl so long and complex that Indio is simply easier. He descends from the royal Mayan priests of old. Indio knows ways to restore a man and bring back his virility—with the sacrifice of a virgin on the night of the full moon to the goddess, Ix Chel.” The flat, black eyes of Esteban Miro now held a spark of madness and desperation.
Xochi turned her head to one side to study the face of the supposed Mayan priest. “While I have no doubt that this man’s ancestors sacrificed virgins, he is a fraud and a liar making this up as he goes along. His motive for deceiving you is more than greed, something else personal.” Yes, she made the man blink his heavy lids.