A Girl Apart

by Russell Blake

  Leah looked at him. “What did you just say?”

  “That it was a logical place to hide something.”

  Leah blinked as an idea danced on the periphery of her awareness. “I didn’t realize your father was so religious.”

  “I think it was more out of a desire to atone for his sins than out of any righteousness. It’s easier to sit in church every Sunday and pretend to be pious than to actually walk the walk.”

  “What I’m saying is that he seemed to place a lot of value on his faith, at least from the pictures. I mean, the whole refurbishing of the statues…”

  He frowned. “The church is only a block from his house, so it’s not like it required a lot of effort, Leah.”

  She slowed for a moment and then gave the car gas.

  Uriel looked over at her. “What’s wrong?”

  “The church. It’s close to the house. If you were going to hide something where nobody was likely to find it if they searched your place, but wanted to be able to get to it quickly, wouldn’t that be a good spot?”

  Uriel regarded her speechlessly for several beats. “Don’t worry – Archangel Michael will watch over me,” he whispered. “You really think…?”

  “If he was still involved in the church, he was over there regularly helping maintain things. I mean, it’s not a lock, but it makes a certain kind of sense.”

  “Damn. If I’d known him a little better, I would have figured that out by now.”

  “Maybe. But it’s really the pictures that tipped me to it, not the mention of him being in church every Sunday. The proximity to his house, and the fact that he had access…”

  Uriel nodded. “It seems obvious now.”

  “Assuming we’re not wrong again. Like about Moore.”

  “Or the dead girls who are very much alive.”

  She twisted to look at him. “Thanks for the reminder. I’ve kind of failed on everything so far, haven’t I?”

  “You mean you haven’t solved the biggest mystery in Juárez history over a long weekend? What kind of journalist are you, anyway?”

  She laughed. “Put that way…”

  “Seriously. This feels like it may be it.” Uriel checked the time on his phone. “How long until we get to the border?”

  “It’ll be rush hour in El Paso by the time we hit town, so we’ll be stop-and-go crossing to Juárez with all the day traffic. My guess is before dark, but how much before, I don’t know.”

  “The sooner the better.”

  Leah’s eyes darted to the speedometer and she nodded as she goosed the gas, the vision of a gilded ceramic effigy with the wings of an angel at the forefront of her thoughts.

  Chapter 41

  Carla carefully replaced the photo albums on the shelf of her living room bookcase and looked around the area with a wistful smile. It had been so long since she’d seen Uriel she’d almost forgotten how charming he was in person. He had been ever since he was a baby, though, so it was no surprise. And now he was all grown up, teaching, with his own life, too busy to visit his mother, who’d devoted herself to raising him…

  She moved into the kitchen and turned on the tap; the cups and plates in the sink weren’t going to clean themselves. It had given her enormous pleasure to watch him eat – a mother’s joy, proof he was healthy, his appetite good.

  And his new friend. Charming in an American way, she thought. Although she would have preferred if he’d chosen a Mexican, but the heart wants what the heart wants. It was a shame he never settled down with that nice Gabriela. They would have made beautiful babies. And Carla would have loved nothing more than grandchildren.

  She trickled some soap into the mugs and reached for a scouring pad. None of that automatic dishwashing nonsense for her. She wasn’t too proud to wash a plate now and again.

  Carla knew she was somewhat impaired since her incident, but she was doing the best she could with what the good Lord had given her. She had her sewing and her little home – life could have been worse. Her only regret had been that she couldn’t have more kids after Uriel, but that too had probably been part of His plan.

  It was a shame that Uriel harbored such ill will toward his father. She’d tried to disabuse him of his anger, but Uriel had always been headstrong and had never forgiven him. Carla had a different perspective: León had been a man, and as such had wandered, as many did. But in the end he’d behaved honorably, helping financially with his son and ultimately even buying the house Carla now lived in. He hadn’t had to do that.

  She set one of the cups into the drying rack by the side of the sink and sighed. Life was so short, and now León was gone. Some day she would be too, and then Uriel, just like all of humanity before them.

  She really hoped he had kids. He was still young. And strong like a bull, she could see. He had time, although it slipped away when you weren’t looking; she knew that all too well.

  A creak from the back door startled her, and she dropped the plate she was cleaning. It struck the drain at just the wrong angle and splintered. Carla reached for one of the shards and then drew her hand back like she’d been stung by a bee, her finger bleeding from the razor-sharp porcelain.

  “Oh, sugar,” she whispered, and sucked at the cut.

  The creak of a floorboard reminded her of why she’d dropped the plate, and she pirouetted toward the back of the house.

  A man stood by the kitchen island. A scar disfigured his sallow face, and his coal black eyes bored into her with frightening intensity. She gasped and felt with her free hand for the knives behind her in the drying rack. Her fingers curled around a wooden handle and she whipped the blade free, panicked as the man took slow steps toward her.

  “You don’t want to do that,” he said, his accent thick.

  “Get out of here. I don’t have any money,” she replied in Spanish.

  When he smiled, it chilled her to her core, his skin like a mummy’s, too tight for his face. “I don’t want money.”

  “I’ll…don’t come any closer,” she warned, but her voice was scared. She switched the knife to her cut hand and nearly dropped it, the handle slick from the water on her fingers and now with blood.

  “Did you have a nice time with your visitors?” he asked, his voice a soft purr as he inched nearer.

  “I’m warning you.”

  The man moved so quickly it shocked Carla. One moment he was several meters away, and the next he was on her, twisting her knife hand so the blade skittered harmlessly against the linoleum floor. She recoiled at the pungent odor of perspiration and stale nicotine from his clothes. She fought and cried out, but a sharp backhand snapped her head to the side and stunned her.

  He reached for a dishtowel and stuffed it into her mouth. She tried to bite him, but it was no use. She struggled to break free and attempted to knee him in the groin, but he twisted away and she only grazed his thigh.

  Another blow sent her reeling, this one a punch, and her vision dimmed as she teetered on the brink of consciousness. Her legs failed her and she dropped like a sack of bricks, and then the pain in her jaw was replaced by the welcome relief of blackness as reality receded and silence enveloped her.

  When Carla came to, she was bound to one of her dining room chairs with duct tape. She blinked as awareness flooded her senses, the throbbing pain in her head confirming she was still alive.

  The man was standing in front of her, smoking a cigarette, watching her without expression. Her eyes narrowed and she glanced down at where his ashes were landing on her carpet, and she made a tiny sound in her throat, the tape over her mouth preventing her from speaking.

  “Now, we’re wasting time I don’t have,” the man said. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer them, or I’m going to hurt you like you’ve never imagined. I will burn, cut, whatever I need to do. But I don’t want this. You can save yourself the agony and tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave as I came in, and this will all be like a bad dream. Do you understand?”

>   Tears streamed down Carla’s cheeks as she tried to grasp why this was happening. She had nothing worth stealing – her television was ten years old, her stereo fifteen and cheap to begin with, her car near the quarter-million-mile mark, and there were only a few dollars in her rainy-day jar.

  The man dropped the cigarette onto the carpet and ground it out with his boot. She inhaled sharply through her nose and strained against the tape, and the man took a step toward her, malevolence radiating from him like heat.

  “When I pull the tape off your mouth, you scream and I’ll knock your teeth out. I’ll do it without thinking, and you’ll be eating through a straw for the rest of your life. Are we clear on that?”

  She nodded. This wasn’t a man. This was a demon sent straight from hell, just like out of the scariest parts of the Old Testament.

  “It’s going to sting a little. Ready?” he asked, reaching out with yellowed fingers. Carla registered the dirt beneath his nails, the half-moons of grime in his cuticles, and recoiled as she closed her eyes.

  The tape came off with a shredding sound and she cried out softly. The man tossed the tape aside and stepped away, out of her field of vision. She heard him rummaging around in one of her drawers, and then he returned with a bread knife, the serrated blade glinting in the dining room light.

  He leaned in and hissed in her ear, his proximity worse than the sight of the knife. “Now, my questions are simple, and if you’re honest with me, I’ll be gone in no time. But lie or try to stall, and you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

  “What do you want? I told you I don’t have anything,” she said, rivulets coursing down her face as she gasped for breath.

  Carla never saw the punch to her cheek coming, and when it landed, splitting the skin and flooding her vision with pinpoints of red light, it knocked the wind from her. She fought for air, the pain as intense as any she’d ever felt, and then her stomach lurched and she vomited down the front of her dress, the acrid stench overpowering.

  The man stepped back, his gaze flat as a shark’s, and let her recover. When she was able to breathe, he twirled the knife so its stainless steel flashed and smirked at her.

  “You don’t ask the questions. I do,” he said, his voice dangerously low.

  Carla didn’t say anything, fear coiling tight in her guts.

  “Why did those two come see you?” he snapped.

  She blinked away tears. “Uriel?” she stammered. “He’s my son.”

  The man nodded. “Very good. A truthful answer. This may go easier than I’d hoped. Next question. What did he want?”

  “He…he wanted to visit his mother,” she said, her voice plaintive.

  “Just out of the blue, after going to the bank? Come on. What did you discuss?”

  “I…we didn’t discuss anything. We just talked about old times, about his father. I showed them some pictures. We ate.” She moaned softly. “I don’t understand any of this. Why are you hurting me? Who are you?”

  He swung hard, and the force of the punch knocked the chair over. Carla hit her head against the carpeted floor and screamed in pain, but he could see she was still conscious, although by the angle of her arm, he could tell she’d fractured her ulna. He leaned over, righted the chair, and studied the splinted end of the bone protruding from her arm, dripping blood. He shook his head in disapproval.

  Agony radiated up Carla’s arm and she blacked out again. When she came to after several minutes, her face swollen and her vision gone in one eye, the man was smoking again, and he held up the glowing tip, a serpentine coil of smoke spiraling toward the ceiling.

  “I thought I was clear. You don’t ask anything. And now you’ve made me angry. You aren’t going to like me angry.” He took a step toward her, his lips two worms over yellowed teeth. “You looked at pictures and talked. What pictures, and what did you talk about? I want you to tell me every word, every nuance, or I’m going to start carving, and when I do, you’ll pray for death.” He stopped, confirming that his warning had registered. When he saw that it had, he moved the smoldering cigarette ember to her neck. “Start with the pictures. Where are they?”

  Chapter 42

  Sunset veined the sky to the west of Ciudad Juárez with an ochre glow as darkness fell over the border town. Traffic had been dense, as Leah had feared, and by the time they arrived at the crossing and parked her car, the pedestrian wait had been lengthy, laborers returning home after a long day clogging the way in a parade of tired humanity. She slipped from behind the wheel, pointed at the queue snaking all the way outside the main immigration building, and shook her head.

  “This is going to take forever.”

  “Sooner we start, the sooner we’ll be across,” Uriel said, rounding the rear fender and placing a hand on the trunk.

  Leah opened it and they looked inside, confused by the absence of the bag and box. Leah poked around under the storage mat, and when she straightened, she was frowning. “They’re not here.”

  “They have to be. I watched you put them in,” he said, stepping beside her and reaching into the dark space. He felt in every nook and cranny, and then faced her to deliver the inevitable conclusion. “We’ve been robbed.”

  Leah shivered in spite of the evening warmth. “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it happened. Must have been while we were at my mother’s.”

  “But how…”

  “It doesn’t matter. The stuff is gone.”

  “Maybe one of the neighborhood kids?”

  He inspected the lock. “Maybe. Or one of the local hoodlums. They see a strange car, nobody’s around, bam, in and out.” He looked around the huge lot. “It was somebody’s day to hit the lottery.”

  “It just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?”

  “Hasn’t been my favorite week,” Uriel agreed. “But maybe we’ll get lucky at the church.”

  “All that gold…”

  He nodded. “Yes, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. I should have taken it in with me.”

  “How could you have known someone would break into the trunk, of all things?”

  “You can bet that’s the last time I’ll ever leave anything valuable in one.” He smiled grimly. “That was an expensive lesson.”

  “Sucks.”

  “Not much about this trip hasn’t.”

  They walked to the line and shuffled along with the others, the high-wattage spotlights on the far side of the building bright in the gloom. German shepherds in harnesses sniffed at their legs as they neared the entrance, and the procession inched forward at a snail’s pace, stopping and starting every few moments as another group proceeded through customs and across the bridge.

  When it was their turn to present their passports, the immigration clerk barely glanced at them before motioning for them to pass.

  Leah was again reminded of how the quarter mile span connected two very different worlds, a wall of steel and glass stopped in the automobile lanes in both directions. Uriel’s phone rang halfway across the bridge, and he answered it as they walked.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Pedro. How are you?”

  “Ah, Pedro. Good.”

  “I’m just checking in. Never heard from you about your sister,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Pedro. I’ve been in the U.S., waiting for a call from the attorney. She never had her bail hearing today.”

  “No? Then when? Tomorrow?”

  “That’s the hope.” Uriel glanced at Leah. “Listen, we’re crossing into Juárez right now, headed to my father’s house. You want to join us?”

  “We?”

  “Leah and I.”

  “Oh, of course. When?”

  “Maybe twenty minutes. We think we have a lead on the file.”

  “You do? That’s great. I’ll see you then.”

  Once across, they located a taxi. The city blurred by, horns blaring at every intersection as drivers ignored traffic signs and cut each other off. Leah was all too aware of Uriel wh
en the driver swerved unexpectedly to avoid a motorcycle and she fell into his arms, the sensation of being cradled by him not altogether unpleasant. The cabby glanced at them in the rearview mirror and apologized, and then floored the gas again as he tore between a delivery van and a double-parked car at suicidal speed. She flushed scarlet as Uriel held her a second longer than necessary, and then she was back on her side of the car, her heart beating faster as she white-knuckled the door.

  The taxi turned off the main drag and onto the tributary that led to the house, and she peered through the dusty windshield at the dark street.

  “None of these neighborhoods are really big on streetlights, are they?” she commented.

  “Thieves would steal the copper wire within a week of them being erected, so at some point the city stops replacing them,” Uriel explained. “Or they put in the poles, but some corrupt official sells the cabling before it ever reaches the street, and they’re never connected to anything.”

  “Don’t the people complain?”

  “Sure. But nothing is ever done about it until just before the elections, and then the candidates come through and promise the world, kiss babies, the usual. Afterward they disappear until the next cycle and are never seen in the interim.”

  “So you’re not surprised that the mayor is a crook?”

  That drew a genuine laugh. “Are you kidding? Here we know our politicians are liars and thieves.” His expression grew serious and he looked away. “Much like my mother’s idea about men – they excuse their dishonesty as just the way nature made them. Perhaps there’s some truth to that, but it’s still the people who get screwed in the end.”

  “But they keep voting them in. The mayor has been elected how many terms?”

  “This is his third or fourth, I believe. Remember I’m not from around here anymore.”

  “Amazing.”

  He shook his head. “Not really.”

  The taxi reached the house, and Uriel paid the driver and stepped from the car. Leah followed just as Pedro’s Pathfinder coasted to a stop in the driveway. He joined them on the sidewalk and shook their hands, and then glanced around the street with hooded eyes.