Scorpion moved with speed that gave credit to his radio handle. With the hostage no longer in play, this would go down easy. As the kid flew out into the hallway, the curtain parted far enough to for Jonathan to get a flash of the fat cop standing against the far wall before the fabric fell back into place.
Jonathan fired three rounds through the curtain at the image that was still retained by his retinas. To his right, Boxers pounded the same spot with five rounds from his 417.
“Go!” Big Guy yelled.
Pistol up, Jonathan squirted in past the curtain to finish the job. The cop lay very dead on the floor, his jiggly body punctured with holes and his bottom jaw sheared from his face.
“We’re clear!” Jonathan called. Then he shot the phone that the cop still clutched in his fist.
That done, he returned to the hallway, where he checked his watch. So far, not counting the business with the kids at the guard shack, they were three minutes into this operation.
“We’ve got two minutes,” Jonathan announced to his team. “Thor, get these assholes zipped and dragged outside.”
“Let ’em get dressed?”
“Absolutely not. Let them explain that to their families. Big Guy, find a way to burn this place to the ground.”
“Pleasure.”
In Spanish, Jonathan said, “Boys and girls, please get dressed and go outside. We are taking you back to safety. Taking you back home.”
The boy from the sixth room still lay facedown on the disgusting carpet. When Jonathan stooped and touched his shoulder, the boy yelled and tried to run. Jonathan caught him with an arm around his chest.
“No, no, no,” Jonathan said. “We’re here to rescue you.”
“No hablo Español,” the boy said. His accent sounded Texan.
“Are you American?” Jonathan asked in English.
That seemed to settle the kid. A little.
“We’re here to rescue you, son. We’re here to take you home.”
He seemed confused. Terrified. He cast a nervous look back toward the room he’d just escaped from.
“You don’t have to worry about him,” Jonathan said. “Not ever again. Go get dressed.”
The boy continued to stare. He said nothing as he twitched his head no.
“How old are you?” Jonathan asked. Truth be told, he didn’t think he wanted to know.
The boy looked at the floor. “Almost twelve.”
“Your name?”
“Number Seven.”
Jonathan’s stomach turned. What the hell had they done to these kids? He didn’t really want to know that, either. “What’s your real name?”
“Cameron. Cameron Porter.”
“I need you to get dressed, Cameron. We need to get you out of here.”
He cast a nervous glance back at the curtained room. Clearly, he was afraid to go back inside. Jonathan understood that. “Are your clothes in there?”
A nod.
Up toward the front of the annex, several of the victims had stepped out into the hallway. They all wore an identical garment, a cross between a dress and a nightshirt. None of them had shoes.
Jesus.
Jonathan stepped back into what he now thought of as Room Six and scanned the walls for a dresser or a closet. Then he saw what he was looking for. This nightshirt might have been older than Cameron. Threadbare and stained, it was hung on a nail in the wall. As he plucked it off, the temperature of his blood dropped ten degrees as he noticed the leg shackles that were attached to the steel footboard of the bed. The chain separating the cuffs was perhaps six feet long and it passed through a loop that had been welded to the face of the footboard.
As he took the nightshirt out to Cameron, he noted the red irritations around his ankles.
Upon closer inspection, each of the children’s legs bore similar markings. “Here you go, Cameron,” he said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Jonathan thought back to the wire and posts in the backyard as he dropped the partially spent magazine from his pistol into his palm and replaced it with another from his belt.
Then he did the same with the M27, switching the partially empty magazine out with a new one from a pouch in his vest.
Two minutes turned out to be an unreasonable time frame, but he still felt the press of time. What he’d done—and what he was about to do—was going to piss off a lot of people, and the more time they spent here on-site, the worse things were going to be.
“Hey, Scorpion,” Dawkins asked as he stood from zip-tying his third john and headed for the one in the back who hadn’t moved from the puddle of cop-gore. “What are we going to do with these guys?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” His first choice was to kill every one of them. As an alternative, maybe he could shoot their balls off. He’d dealt with difficult stuff before, but nothing that rose to this level of awfulness. They were all kids.
“You know this happens every day, right?” Dawkins said. “They even have a name for it. They call it sex tourism.”
Jonathan had heard of it. He knew it existed. But this was the first time he’d been this close to it. He wondered how many of these assholes were Americans. Yeah, this stuff was illegal even in Mexico, but no one had the stones to stand up to any industry run by the cartels.
“For the time being, just haul their asses outside. We’ll figure it out from there. Wait till we get the kids out of here, though.”
Jonathan had heard stories over the years of what it was like when the allies liberated concentration camps at the end of the Second World War, where despite being free of the immediate hazards of murder and torture, there was an utter lack of joy. The misery of what the prisoners had endured surpassed the wonder of being free.
He thought of those stories here at the brothel. These kids had endured tortures that Jonathan couldn’t begin to understand—didn’t want to understand. A pall hung over the place as the boys and girls padded out through the front room and then into the yard. Perhaps they understood that they would never truly recover from this. They would never be the same again. They would always and forever be wounded.
Jonathan led them out through the sunshine, well past the parked vehicles, and stopped about halfway to the guardhouse. “Sit down in the grass,” he said. He couldn’t help but notice that Juan and Carlos had left their post.
The liberated children complied, each sitting in identical postures, their feet folded under their thighs. None of them had said a word.
“You can talk among yourselves,” he said, but they didn’t appear to be interested. “We’ll get you to safety very soon.” He repeated the words in English for Cameron and for any of the others who might not understand Spanish. Hell, for all he knew, some of these kids might have been vacationing from Europe when they were taken.
When Jonathan turned back to the house, he saw Dawkins, who looked disgusted as he escorted four trussed and naked men outside. With them was the receptionist, who was also trussed but clothed. Jonathan pointed to a spot far away. “Plant them over there.”
Boxers then appeared from behind the house with what looked to be a can of gasoline. Jonathan joined him at the front door. “Here’s the plan,” he said.
“We’re going to kill those shitheads, right?”
“No,” Jonathan said.
“You saw what they were doing.”
“Yes.”
“They have to die.”
“We promised Thor.”
“I didn’t promise shit,” Boxers objected.
“We need to stay focused, Big Guy.”
“I am focused. Those assholes need to suffer.”
“We’re going to set fire to the building,” Jonathan said. “We’re going to burn this place to the ground. And while it’s burning, we’re going to set fire to their clothes, and we’re going to drive away and leave every one of them trussed and stranded.”
Boxers looked at his boss with a slight smile.
“Maybe coyotes will come and feed on them,
” Jonathan said.
Big Guy’s smile grew larger. “It’s not as good as killing them,” he said. “Not even close.”
“But it will do?”
Big Guy took his time answering. “Yeah, it’ll do.”
While Dawkins kept an eye on the kids and held guard over the rapists, Jonathan and Boxers made quick work of stacking mattresses, bedding, clothing, and furniture into two enormous piles, one in the torture chamber and another in the front room. Every bed frame had been affixed with the same shackles as the ones Jonathan had found on Cameron’s bed.
“Want to pull out IDs or anything?” Boxers asked as he slung men’s clothing onto the pile. “We can figure out who they are?”
“I don’t care who they are,” Jonathan said.
“You know what we should do?” Big Guy asked. “We should chain each one of those sunsabitches to a bed and then torch the place. Burn ’em alive.”
For reasons that Jonathan didn’t understand—and about which he’d never inquired—Boxers had a particularly homicidal intolerance for anyone who harmed children. Jonathan had seen him kill kid touchers with his bare hands. The last one they’d encountered, Big Guy had slashed the guy’s eyes with a knife before breaking his body one bone at a time.
Boxers didn’t reach that frenzied stage very often, but when he did, it was a frightening thing to witness.
“Tell you what,” Jonathan said. “We’ll stack the bodies onto the pile and burn them with the rest of the trash.”
Boxers smirked and winked. He liked the idea. “You know, Boss, I’ve never found you to be this sexy before.”
Less than three minutes later, they were ready to go. Boxers sloshed about a third of the gasoline in the can onto the stacked clothes and bodies in the torture room and lit it with his Zippo lighter.
With the fire burning in the back room, they needed to move more quickly to ignite the pile in the front room with another pour of the gas.
The fire in the back room grew from small to raging with startling speed. The pile in the front started as smoky, but then after thirty seconds or so, it found its momentum. Soon, the entire structure was ablaze.
Their final stop was out at the parked vehicles. Jonathan used an ASP collapsible wand to break out windows, and Boxers added splashes of gasoline. While they let the vapors expand, Jonathan shot holes into the gas tanks. When they got rolling, he didn’t want just to gut the interiors. He wanted it all to go up.
Because Big Guy considered himself an artist whose medium was destruction, he’d daisy-chained the vehicles together with a trail of gasoline so he could light the whole thing with a single flip of the Zippo.
They were rewarded with a satisfying whump as they all lit at once.
“Is that a pretty sight or what?” Boxers asked with a grin.
“Our work here is done,” Jonathan said. “Thor! Load ’em up, and let’s get on the road.”
“What about us?” the fifty-something fat guy yelled from his spot on the ground. “You can’t just leave us here like this.”
Boxers stopped, pivoted, and headed toward the trussed rapists.
“Big Guy,” Jonathan said, following behind. “Easy.”
“They couldn’ta just kept their mouths shut.”
“We’re done here, Big Guy. Leave it alone.”
But Boxers was focused. He walked in long strides, and his eyes showed murder.
“Goddammit, Big Guy, listen to me!” Jonathan yelled.
“Leave you here like this?” Boxers growled in Spanish. “You don’t want to be left here like this?” He drew his HK45 pistol from his holster on his hip and, in one quick motion, shot the guy in the ankle. “You like this way better?”
The man howled, and the others tried to get their legs under them to run.
“Stop!” Big Guy yelled. “Or I swear to God that I will cripple all of you.” As he spoke, he swept the pistol’s muzzle past each of their faces. Jonathan noted that his finger was on the trigger. That was Big Guy’s tell that he was a half-pull away from blasting these guys apart.
Jonathan stepped in closer, hoping to defuse the situation some.
“Yes, we can leave you here like this,” Jonathan said. “And yes, you’re lucky that you’re still alive.”
The guy who’d been manning the desk—the only one whose dick wasn’t hanging out—said, “Just who—”
Jonathan cut him off. “Do you really think this is a good time to be running your mouth? You see that hole in your friend’s ankle, right? Just shut up. It doesn’t matter who we are, and I don’t care what happens to any of you. Given the size of those fires, I’d say somebody’s got to notice and come by to do something. I just wish I could be here to listen to your stories.”
He looked up to Boxers. “Big Guy, we’ve got to go.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Jonathan and Dawkins rode in the cargo area on the way back to La Lagartija, leaving the seats for the children. They still had not spoken, and they still looked terrified. Not surprising, Jonathan supposed, given what they’d been through—compounded by the violence surrounding their rescue—but he hoped that freedom would bring some happiness into their faces.
When they were still ten minutes out, Dawkins called Sofia Reyes to tell her they were on their way to her. He listened carefully and then held up a finger. “Wait,” he said as he looked to Jonathan. “You have something to write with?”
Jonathan pulled a pen from a pocket on his vest and then a tiny notebook. He offered them to Dawkins, who shook his head.
“Write this down for me,” he said. Then, into the phone he said, “Go ahead.” He repeated an address to Jonathan, who wrote it down. “Okay, Sofia, we’ll see you in a few minutes.” As he clicked off, he said to Jonathan, “That’s our new destination.”
“What is it?”
“Not a bar with a bunch of cops and bad guys hanging around.”
“I didn’t ask what it’s not,” Jonathan said.
“She said it’s a safe place.”
“She said.” Jonathan’s skepticism was front and center.
“Best I can do,” Dawkins said. “Look, I’ve dealt with Sofia for years.”
“And you trust her?”
“Didn’t we have this discussion already? Sofia is a survivor and a quiet spy. Those two identities are almost impossible to juggle down here. She pretends to be the local Switzerland, totally neutral. She knows who the dirty cops are, and she knows who pays them off. I’ve heard rumors that both sides actually trust her to hold the money.”
“What’s the nature of your interactions with her?” Jonathan asked.
“Intel, mostly. We’re building cases against a number of the players—working our way up to the big guys. She walks a line where she keeps us on the right track—never misleads us—but also never cuts her own throat by handing us exactly what we need.”
“Your own Deep Throat,” Boxers said. “Pardon the pun.”
Dawkins feigned a shiver at the thought. “But here’s where she really stepped up. Two, two-and-a-half years ago, one of our informants got burned, and Sofia sheltered him for long enough for us to get him out. That takes real guts.”
Jonathan still didn’t like the change. He hated surprises. Every surprise on an op provided one more way for things to go wrong.
“Well, shit,” he said. “I guess a friend of yours is a friend of ours.” Shouting past the kids, he yelled, “Hey, Big Guy, we’ve got a change in location. I’ll send it to your GPS.”
Twenty-five minutes later, they arrived at a tall adobe structure with an orange tile roof. A peak in the center of the front wall gave the impression of a church. Old-school functioning shutters framed tall casement windows, all of which stood open. As they approached, Sofia Reyes stepped out of the front door in the company of a nun who wore the kind of habit that is rarely seen in the United States anymore, complete with black tunic and white wimple.
“Children, stay in the truck,” Jonathan said as Boxers
released the tailgate to let Dawkins and him out. “Thor, Big Guy, come with me.”
They hadn’t yet disarmed, and Jonathan was well aware that they projected menace to the ladies, but that was part of the point. Sofia Reyes may be a friend of Dawkins’s, but she was nobody to him, and in his line of work, trust needed to be earned.
As they approached, Jonathan said, “You guys check out the interior. Make sure it’s safe.”
“I already told you,” Dawkins protested.
“Then it shouldn’t take very long, should it?”
Jonathan slid his M27 around to the side and extended his hand to address the nun. “Neil Bonner.”
“I am Sister Katherine,” she said in Spanish as she shook his hand. With so much of her body covered, it was difficult to make out her age, but Jonathan pegged her at around thirty. Thirty-five at most, and she had the kind of smile you wanted to see from a lady of the Church. “Thank you so much for rescuing the children. I will take care of them now.”
“Did you find who you were looking for?” Sofia asked.
“Not yet,” Jonathan said. Then, to Sister Katherine: “Regarding the children in the truck. I don’t mean to insult, but an hour ago, they were living in hell. And I mean that as literally as it can be meant. My friends are checking out the inside to make sure that, well, you know.”
“I understand.”
“What is this place?” Jonathan asked.
Sister Katherine said, “This church used to be home to the parish of St. Ignatius.”
“Used to be?”
Her eyes hardened. “The cartels. They do not like people to gather in churches. Especially in churches like this one, in so rural a location.”
It was a classic power play. Governments learned centuries ago that congregations of worshipers were likely to discuss topics that were not a part of the approved talking points. The closings were always sold to the people as actions designed for their own good, but the very fact that the people involved had no say laid bare the truth.
Sofia explained, “Sister Katherine and the other sisters have turned this place into a safe house for children who manage to escape.”
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