by L T Ryan
Instead of severing Hatch's head, Hector Fuentes' son had shifted direction at the last minute and pivoted to the two men looking on. In a flash of movement, Rafael crossed the distance and swung at his father with the machete in his hand and buried it into the side of his father's midsection, just below the rib cage.
The attack had been more of a slash than a thrust. Juan Carlos moved forward, knocking the blade free, and plunging one of his own under the chin of Rafael Fuentes. It was a long blade, maybe eight inches long, the point of which came through the top of Rafael Fuentes' skull at the same time Hatch freed her right hand.
The machete had helicoptered to a stop underneath the right side of her chair and was within arm's reach.
Juan Carlos Moreno was busy tending to his master as Hatch quickly cut herself free of the remaining bindings. There was no way she'd be able to cross the distance between her and Moreno before the cartel enforcer would get the drop on her.
With Moreno momentarily distracted, Hatch was already in motion and running for the door. She'd just passed into a short hallway which led to a kitchen. One of the bodyguards was leaning against the ordering counter and flirting with a waitress when he noticed Hatch.
She slammed the machete down, severing the man's gun hand at the wrist. The blade impacted with such force it stuck into the wood of the counter. The handless cartel man staggered back in shock. With his only hand he held the severed wrist up. Blood sprayed into the face of the waitress he'd been flirting with. She screamed, drawing attention from the crowded restaurant. Hatch grabbed a frying pan, still hot with the sizzling spiced chicken, and used it to finish off the guard with a blow learned from Ayala and Ernesto.
The bleeding, and now unconscious, guard fell aside as Hatch ran out into the street when the second shot hit the wall next to her. Shouts of angry men accompanied the smell of onions chasing Hatch out of the café and into the morning’s light.
A moment ago, she was with Dalton Savage on top of a Ridge line in Hawks Landing, Colorado, preparing to say goodbye in her mind to the man she loved most. Now she was given a new breath of life. And she used it.
Hatch sprinted into the street, trying to put as much distance between her and the café as possible. Tires screeched nearby. Yellow filled her blurred vision.
As her eyes cleared, Hatch saw the beat-up yellow Nissan Sentra.
"I like your choice in weapons." Miguel Ayala gnawed on the end of his cigar while wearing the same Hawaiian shirt with the same yellow pineapples. And Hatch couldn't be happier to see all of it.
Angela sat in the passenger seat. Hatch pulled the door handle, and it came off in her hand. She heard Ayala muttering something about meaning to get it fixed as Hatch raced around to the other side.
Hatch's body hadn't even hit the seat when bullets began to strike the back of Ayala's sedan. She pulled the door closed as she landed on the frayed leather bench-seat covered in the shattered bits of glass from Ayala's back windshield.
The little yellow Nissan, old and tired and now bullet-ridden, pushed forward by will of its driver while Hatch remained low in her seat as she took stock of her injuries.
"Where to now?" Hatch asked.
“The river.”
Thirty-Five
Ernesto took solace in the fact that he had gotten Letty to his doctor friend, who'd agreed to meet them at the same mission where the black van had been dumped. He'd thought it would've been safe since the cartel henchmen had already been through the lot.
It hadn't taken the good doctor long to find the small microchip, no bigger than a cellphone sim card, embedded in the girl's calf, just above the ankle. After patching her up and cleaning her properly, another member of their team, a man who was known locally throughout Nogales as Azul, met them at the mission.
She departed in his blue ambulance ten minutes before they returned, and thirty seconds too long for the doctor, who was in mid-embrace when the bullet passing through his skull showered Ernesto in the good doctor's brain matter before slipping from his grasp to the gravel lot.
At least he died quickly. It was a thought playing on a constant loop in his mind since he and his wife, Josefina, had been captured by Moreno and his goons.
He refused to give the sadist any information about Letty, and he needed to hold out if he could give her and Azul as much of a head start as his waning life would allow. It was a long ride to Vera Cruz, where one of Ernesto's connections had run down Letty's mother. Through the grapevine, she had expressed her gratitude and excitement at the prospect of seeing her daughter again, who'd she'd given up for dead since three long years had passed since she disappeared.
Mexico was a big place, but it can become very small when somebody like Hector Fuentes decided they needed to find you. There are few rocks one can hide under. Unable to use his right shoulder, Ernesto leaned to the left, dipping his cheek to it, and clearing away some of the blood leaking from someplace he couldn't see or differentiate from the other wounds he'd sustained since making Moreno's acquaintance. His right shoulder had been dislocated and they'd spent countless time twisting it into unspeakable positions, using a tire iron as a fulcrum.
He'd heard his wife's screaming die out ten minutes ago. They were torn from each other the moment they entered the building, a dingy place smelling of day-old fish, that Moreno and his men were using as an impromptu torture chamber.
Ernesto's last image of his wife was that of her tear-soaked face as she spoke the last words he feared he'd ever hear pass over those lips, por siempre nunca es suficiente, forever is never enough.
Her words left her lips, those same lips he'd shared sixty years of conversations with, spoken over sixty years in the home they shared for the entirety of those sixty years of love that blossomed some sixty years ago with a simple kiss…on those lips.
He called out his response, repeating the words spoken before the end of every day. This being their last, Ernesto held onto the memory of the first time he’d laid eyes on his beautiful Josefina, and not the bloodied image hauled away by their captors.
He remembered the first time they'd held hands, replacing the snap of his finger when he refused to answer any question regarding the whereabouts of Hatch, Ayala, Angela, or Letty.
Ernesto thought of the time when he tried to impress his Josefina with his horse-riding skills having never ridden one in his life. As Ernesto tried to leap onto the saddle, he overestimated the amount of effort and had launched himself onto the saddle and over the other side landing awkwardly on his ankle and spraining it. He called that memory forward to erase the moment of Moreno plunging a hot poker into the bottom of his left foot.
He held the last memory the longest. His body numbed to the abuse. Ernesto felt himself above it all. The last memory had been holding back the emotionally crippling pain of the building probability that his beautiful wife's beautiful heart stopped beating ten minutes ago.
Refusing to accept it and wanting to stay with her for as long as forever took, he called to mind what happened to the young seventeen-year-old-Ernesto after he fell off that horse. Because it had been in that moment, sitting in the hot midday sun while rubbing his sore ankle near a pile of hay that smelled strongly of horse manure, that Josefina had come to his side.
He remembered, to this very breath, the electric sensation passing from her lips to his as she leaned in for their first kiss.
He remembered breathing her breath as their mouths worked awkwardly, as teenagers experiencing their first romance.
He remembered everything and held onto it all for as long as humanly possible while he waited for the answer to the question he refused to ask. Is my Josefina gone?
"Ernesto, my friend, we are going to continue our little conversation, you and me. You're going to tell me where you shipped Mr. Fuentes' property, so that he can properly recover it."
Ernesto heard the words but could no longer make out the mangled face of the man speaking them. It was to start again. The knife was in Moreno's hand
again. The last time he'd used it, Ernesto nearly bit off his tongue while he endured it. He could not endure it again. And so, Ernesto Cruz asked the question that came out as a final declaration.
"I can't hear my Josephina anymore, and I fear that you have taken her from me. If this is true, then there is nothing further for us to discuss, for it is you that has taken something. You have stolen my purpose for living. You ripped out my heart, the moment you touched my wife. When the fires of hell lick at your feet, know that my wife and I are sailing high above, where we can no longer smell the stink of the world that you have poisoned."
Moreno coughed up a smile that was more a sneer and played with the knife in his hand. Ernesto could no longer make out the blade's sharp point.
"I free you to go be with your wife."
The blurred image of the knife dancing in front of Ernesto's face disappeared. A second later, the stinging in his hands and the pain in his body disappeared completely, as Juan Carlos Moreno used the same blade that killed Raphael Fuentes and buried it in similar fashion.
Moreno wiped the blood from his blade on Ernesto's shirt, before picking up his cell phone and making a call. "It was just the two old ones."
"Make the call." Hector Fuentes coughed into the phone and then hung up.
Thirty-Six
Jose Machado walked through the front door of his small ranch-style home set on a ten-acre plot of land in the countryside, forty miles south of Juarez. It had once belonged to a tobacco farmer and his wife before Jose’s employer acquired both the farm and farmhouse after being slighted by the couple in a business deal. Machado, one of his employer's most trusted employees, was given the keys to the house so that he could oversee the land and its harvesting. Or better yet, that's what he told anybody who asked.
It's what he told his daughter, although it was a lie she had begun to silently question recently, noticed by Machado in the looks she gave when he added his money to the stack behind the false wall in the pantry.
To most, Machado was known as Fumar, Smoke. He was given the moniker on account of both his profession and his light-skinned complexion. To others, he was known by another name, one whispered on the breaths of dead men. To those who had met him at their life's end, Jose Machado was known as El Vibora, The Viper.
He dusted the top of his hat and hung it on the coatrack near the door. The smell of eggs and peppers greeted him, and it pleased Machado to know Maria was awake. At seventeen, she tended to him more as a wife than a daughter, but only in the platonic sense of domestic responsibility. It was initially why he'd taken the girl. But over time, he'd come to see her as more than a servant girl.
The girl he'd saved from the hellhole of a life that she was destined for five years ago had become in time as much a daughter as any flesh and blood ever could be. Machado, unable to father a family of his own, found himself a bachelor, but Maria completed him, gave his life a purpose beyond its purpose, and a new perspective.
He rounded the corner of the short hallway and entered the kitchen where the smell intensified. He was pleasantly surprised by the plate of Chorizo cooling on the stove. Maria cracked an egg into the pan just as Machado walked in. She breezed across the kitchen floor as if walking on air. Then, with the grace of a prima ballerina, simultaneously dropped the eggshells in the trash and laid a kiss upon his cheek before pirouetting her way back to the stove.
"My flower," he said. "It smells delicious."
"Have a seat, papa. I'll have a plate to you shortly. It's your favorite."
There were four seats at the small round table, but they typically favored only two. He sat in his and only had to wait a moment before Maria brought the plate. She nudged the drawing she'd been working on. From the looks of it, it was a lily blooming in springtime with the last droplet of morning's dew dangling at the edge of its light purple petals.
When Machado found Maria those five years ago, the home she was in was littered in the drawings, as was his now. Every time he returned from one of his “business trips,” she greeted him with a new illustration, sometimes several new ones depending on how long he was gone.
Machado waited patiently until Maria was seated. The two let the food cool. And in the quiet that settled over the table and its occupants, the two took hands and prayed. His arms were almost as thin as the girl's across from him, one of the lasting effects leftover from a rattlesnake bite he’d received as a child.
As a young boy, Machado's bird-like physique cost him ridicule and abuse in both verbal and physical forms. That was before they saw past his pale, lanky body and hunched shoulders, making him look more vulture than boy, and saw that he was not actually a vulture at all. But instead, a viper.
Machado felt then, as he still did now, that in the brutal moment when the rattlesnake seared him with its venom, a transfer had occurred. In that transfer of blood and venom when the two were joined, Machado believed a communion between man and serpent took place. His destiny had been laid at his feet on his fourth birthday.
His first memory outside of the infantile amnesia boundary line in his memory was of the time he was bitten by the rattlesnake. He believed that day marked his spiritual rebirth into the world. His re-emergence came with its own personal spirit guide whose menacing rattle and slithering tongue called to him and showed him his path, one he'd been walking since that day.
It is why Machado still wrapped its leathered skin around his. The rattle of the snake that bit him still dangled its warning loosely outside of the white button-up dress shirt, cinched tight at the collar by the turquoise bolo necktie his father had worn, and the sun-faded black blazer and wide-brimmed hat of similar color and wear. Two of the items he wore had cost the life of their wearer. No matter how hard he had scrubbed, Machado couldn't get all of the blood out of the cracks and crevices of the snakeskin and necktie. And in just the right light, he could still see the stain of it. The bloody talismans served as an important milestone in Machado's life. It's when he, at the early age of nine, first killed a man.
A thief had broken in through the window in his family's home and slit his father's throat while stealing a necktie he wasn't even wearing. The thief then killed his mother, but not before the horrible things she had to endure while laying in her dead husband's blood. Things Machado endured while he watched, hiding in the hallway pantry across from the opened door of his parent’s bedroom when the burglar first entered. He’d tried and failed to block the sights and sounds.
On that day, Machado felt that he had died. The serpent whose blood pulsed through his veins swallowed his soul whole.
And on that day, a boy of nine gave himself over to the snake's power. He no longer hunched his shoulders to hide himself as he skulked about. He stood erect. He remained thin and pale. And the hat kept the promise his father had made when giving it to him. The shade continued to shield his trigger eye from the light.
The neighborhood boys stopped teasing after seeing the young Machado wandering the streets draped in his dead father's clothes. As he grew into those clothes, so did the stories of his legend.
The shake of the rattle dangling from his wrist drew an unholy fear. When he was young this had not been so because he wore it for its intended purpose, using it as a belt. As he grew past the belt's last notch, Machado, refusing to separate himself from the talisman, wrapped it around his left wrist. And there it had remained.
He secretly found amusement in the truth that what people feared most about him was built with love and worn in honor of it.
Machado found the snakeskin in a box under his parent's bed. In it was the same snake who'd bitten him. Machado knew this because he asked his father, a man who valued honesty above all else, and he had answered honestly. He could still remember the way his father would lean close when he had something important to say.
Machado's father told him he wanted to remember the day he almost lost his son. Machado had been upset by this. His father went on to explain he kept it to remember the fear he felt that
day, to keep close the terrible image of his son writhing on the ground after being injected by the snake’s venom. He wanted to always know that he could go to the shoebox in those times when he needed perspective.
Machado then asked his father if it could be made into a belt. His father didn’t see why not, but before agreeing, asked why. Machado told of his bond with the snake. And how, even though he may look different, it’s those differences who made him who he was.
He remembered his father’s kind eyes in that moment. They always held a gentleness, but on that day, they seemed overly so. The warm orange glow of the setting sun sent a stray beam past the lip of his father's wide-brimmed hat stinging Machado's right eye and causing it to water. The falling teardrop trickled its way past the two scarred holes, marking the wounds that created this tear, before or after that day on the rocks, when the viper's poisoned teeth nearly blinded him.
While exploring the small farm where his parents worked, Machado came across a large rattlesnake sunning itself on the warm surface of a nearby rock. Being a boy of such a young age and curious about such things, Machado took to poking at it with a stick the length of his arm.
He could never recall the sensation of the bite itself. The snake's long, curved fangs penetrated Machado's face with such speed and force that he was knocked to his back with the snake still locked to his fleshy cheek. He woke in the local hospital two days later.
His father wiped the tear away with his thumb that smelled of the dried tobacco he'd harvested that day. He then removed the hat and placed it on the young Machado's head. Its shadow doused the light. His father pressed the hat down, firmly securing it as best he could to the top of his son's head. He spoke the words, forever etched in his mind.