His interest piqued, Jonathan hooked his thumbs into his vest and shifted his weight to one foot. “How do the children find out that you are here?”
“We get help from people like my dear friend Sofia,” Sister Katherine said.
“Mexico is a fine country, Mr. Bonner,” Sofia said. “It happens to be run by very bad people, but the citizens are good people. Most of them, anyway. Many of us who run taverns, restaurants, hotels, and even gasoline stations are very aware of what you in America call child trafficking. Frankly, I think that’s too clean a word for what actually happens.”
“Excuse me,” Sister Katherine said, “I am going to see to the children.” She pressed past Jonathan and headed for the Durango.
“So, you are part of a modern-day underground railroad?” Jonathan asked.
Sofia clearly did not understand the reference. “We try to spread the word to places where escaped children are likely to go first. From there, contacts are made with the sisters. They are not the only group that is concerned, but they are the most organized.”
“And all of those children come here?”
“No, of course not. This is just one of what I assume are many safe houses. This is the only one that I know of personally.”
Jonathan turned to watch as Sister Katherine opened the passenger side door and addressed the children. Her demeanor seemed easy and friendly. Motherly. “What happens next with the children?”
“I believe they are reconnected with their families,” Sofia said. “That is most certainly the goal.”
The children started climbing out of the Durango, and they followed Sister Katherine as she led them away from Jonathan, toward the side of the building.
“Wait!” Jonathan said, and he started to follow.
Sofia grabbed his arm. “No,” she said. “They will be fine.”
“Where is she taking them?”
“Somewhere else,” Sofia replied. “I do not know where, but if I did, I would not tell you. It would not be safe for the children. The fewer people who know, the better.”
Jonathan didn’t know what to do. He’d taken all those risks, hurt all those people, done all that damage, and now he was supposed to—
“Trust the sister,” Sofia said. “You have my word. And while you don’t know me, you need to trust me, too. It would be foolish to keep the children here for more than a few minutes. The cartels have spies, and they have money. It would be equally foolish to assume that some of the people entrusted with knowledge of these efforts would not betray us all for money.”
Boxers and Dawkins emerged from the front door. “It’s all clean,” Big Guy said.
At that moment, a minivan with heavily tinted windows emerged from behind the church and rumbled past the Durango on the way to the road.
Boxers raised his rifle. “What the hell—”
Jonathan pushed the muzzle down. “Whoa, there, cowboy.”
“Are those the kids?” Dawkins asked.
Jonathan explained, “Our friend, Sofia Reyes, arranged for them to be transported to safety.”
“You’re gonna explain that later, right?” Boxers asked.
“Absolutely. Now, Sofia, can we talk about our original topic?”
Sofia led the way into the empty church, where they all slid into pews. The interior showed signs of structural cancer, the kind of disrepair that evolves so quickly when a building sits unused for too long a time. Mold—or maybe moss—had begun to climb the corners of the concrete block walls where the floors and walls met. The air smelled like an old sponge.
When they settled, Sofia said, “How much damage did you cause, and how many people did you hurt?” Everything about her had changed. Anger had replaced that easygoing persona from a minute ago.
“Trust me when I tell you it was a worthwhile trade,” Jonathan said. “You saw those kids.”
“Answer my question.”
Dawkins said, “We burned the building down, left the . . . customers tied naked in the front yard.”
“Did you hurt any police officers?”
Jonathan shifted uncomfortably. “We killed a couple of child rapists who tried to kill us,” he said. He regretted not having the opportunity to interview at least one of the cops.
Sofia moaned and lowered her head. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I guess I do, too,” Jonathan said.
“I don’t,” Boxers added. “And while we’re sharing details, I shot one of the customers in the ankle, just to be nasty.”
Sofia brought her hand to her face and pinched her forehead. “What did you do with the bodies?”
“Burned them with the rest of the trash,” Big Guy said. He sounded proud.
“What does that mean?”
He told her.
“Oh, my God, what have you done?”
“We made the world a safer place,” Jonathan said.
“You are dead men. What happens to people who kill and defile the bodies of police officers in the United States?”
“No one will know it was us,” Jonathan said. “We had our faces covered, and, well, you might say that we are untraceable.”
“Look at the size of this man!” Sofia said, pointing at Boxers. “Do you really think that his face is the first thing people notice?”
“It’s my personality,” Boxers said.
“This is not funny!”
“No, it’s not,” Boxers said, and he stood, as if to prove her point. “It has never been funny to do the things the people in that whorehouse were doing to those children. It’s not funny that everybody in the whole goddamn neighborhood—hell, in the whole goddamn country—knows that they’re doing it, and yet you just choose to look the other way.”
“You don’t live here,” Sofia said.
“Oh, hell, no, I don’t live here. I’d rather set my eyes on fire than live in this cesspool, but you do! Every goddamn day, you face a choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing, and every goddamn day, you choose to do nothing. How can you live like that?”
“Easy, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. He took a minute to explain the underground railroad for the child victims.
It didn’t help. “What the hell, Scorpion? You think that changes anything? Those poor kids—those victims—does anyone know or care how many of them just friggin’ die?” He thrust a finger at Sofia. “You think that hell is gonna be any cooler for you because you accept them after they’ve figured out all by themselves a way to escape on their own? You really think that means anything to them?”
Sofia’s eyes were growing red and hot.
Big Guy still wasn’t done. “Don’t you dare take up a position on Morality Mountain and lecture us for killing people who should have been killed a long friggin’ time ago. Who the hell do you think you are?”
Jonathan hadn’t seen Boxers’ genie this far out of the bottle in a very long time. He wasn’t sure he knew how to put it back in.
And Boxers was still on a roll. “What you should be doing is learning from our example. We showed you how to take care of business. If there’s another one of these godforsaken brothels left in the country at the end of tomorrow, it’s because you let them stay.”
“Big Guy!” Jonathan shouted it. “Step away, dude!”
“Why?”
“Because you have to! This is what Thor was trying to tell us. We’re throwing rocks in the pond and leaving just as big a hole.”
“God damn!” Boxers boomed, making the walls move. “Not you, too! I won’t accept that from you. Not you! Not after all the shit we’ve done together. You can’t surrender, too.”
“Screw you!” Jonathan shouted back. “Surrender? Surrender? If you want to have that out right now, I’d be happy to go for it. But it is not surrender to keep at least one eye on our mission. Now, let this go. At least for now, let this go.”
Jonathan understood exactly where Big Guy was coming from on this. History was littered with societies who willingly and willfully looked away from t
he very thing that ultimately destroyed them. People whose hearts were still beating could tell stories of European atrocities that everyone knew needed to be ignored unless they wanted to join the misery of the camps. Each of those people chose to put their own comfort and prosperity—whatever that meant to them—ahead of other people’s basic right to live. If you pretended not to smell the stench of the pyres, you could tell yourself that it was something completely different than what you knew it to be.
That’s the way it was with the cartels, too, and it wasn’t just the Mexicans and the Central and South Americans. Politicians in the United States were hip deep in the subornation of human trafficking. In all of the political bickering over the porousness of the U.S. southern border, where accusations of racism and xenophobia and socialist economics were thrown like beer bottles in a street rumble, no one shined the spotlight on the plight of the real victims—the children.
“I’m sorry, Sofia,” Jonathan said. “Tempers are running hot. The things we saw—”
“Should never be seen,” she said. “Should never happen. Yes, I know.” She settled herself with a heavy breath. “Can I assume that these people you are looking for—these children—are close to you?”
“Yes,” Jonathan said. “Okay, to be honest, one of them is. The other is a stranger. We’re worried about both of their safety.”
“As you should be. How can I help?”
Jonathan fished his phone from his pocket and flipped through to the picture of the man who’d stopped the driver, Alvarez, after he’d dropped the kids off at the water park. “Do you recognize this man?”
“I do,” Sofia said. “He is a regular in my bar. I believe he commutes back and forth across the border. His name is Ernesto Guzman. He frequents the building you burned. Was he there?”
“No, he was not. What does he do for a living?” Jonathan asked.
“I do not know. I mean, I hear him talk of a pupusería in El Paso, but given the cars he drives, I do not believe that to be his prime source of income.”
Jonathan recognized a pupusería to be a restaurant or roadside stand that sold pupusas, corn tortillas stuffed with pretty much anything you could stuff into a corn tortilla. Jonathan didn’t care for them. “What do you think his primary source of income is?”
She gave him a look. Duh.
“The cartels.”
“Yes,” she said. “At least, I believe that to be the case. He’s one of many messengers and smugglers who deal with contacts across the border. Because he runs a business in the U.S., no one questions his presence.”
“Is he the kind of man who would kidnap children?”
“He is the kind of man to be very cruel,” Sofia said. “There are stories that he enjoys torturing people. If I may ask, what was his involvement in the kidnappings you speak of?”
“We’re not entirely sure,” Jonathan admitted. “We know that he intimidated a driver in El Paso into giving up the location of the children. He’d taken them to a water park.”
“Was it the Shady Sun?”
Jonathan cocked his head. “It was.”
Sofia’s shoulders sagged. “Oh, my,” she said. “The children may be in very bad trouble, then.” She stood and walked to the altar, where she turned back and sat on the step in front of the rail. “Does the name Cristos Silva mean anything to you?”
Jonathan sat taller. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sofia said. “I believe that Silva uses a warehouse very near that park.”
“Uses it for what?” Boxers asked.
She gave him an angry glare. Apparently, her wounds were still raw.
“Don’t do that,” Jonathan said. “The stakes are too high, and the clock is running too fast.”
“I do not know what he uses the warehouse for. Not specifically. But the fact that it is so close to the spot where your children were taken should not be ignored.”
“Does he own a place here in Sinaloa?” Jonathan asked.
“Oh, my God, Mr. Bonner,” Sofia said with a gasp. “You do not want to encounter him. Not after what you just did with his gentleman’s club.”
Boxers growled at the sound of that phrase, and Jonathan moved quickly to avert another explosion.
“Please call that shithole anything other than that,” Jonathan said.
“That’s what he called it, like it or not. If you left anyone alive up there, Mr. Silva will soon know what happened. He will be very angry. He has an army of enforcers who defend him, fight for him.”
“We’ve faced armies before,” Jonathan said, though he didn’t relish the idea of doing it again.
“I told you we shoulda killed them all,” Boxers said.
“Can you tell me where Cristos Silva lives?” Jonathan asked.
“He has a vast hacienda,” Sofia explained. “Not near, but not far. It is very well guarded.”
“You’ve been there?” Dawkins asked.
“No, but I have heard from those who have.” She approached from the altar and took Jonathan’s hands in her own. “I like you, Mr. Bonner. I do not want to see you die that way.”
Jonathan blushed. “I appreciate the words, Sofia. Now, please tell us how to find Silva.”
“I do not know that he is even there.”
He waited for it.
“All right, then,” she said through a heavy sigh. “And when you leave here, I will say a prayer for you.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Alberto Bris did not look nearly frightened enough as he sat in the parlor of Cristos Silva’s hacienda. Sure, he trembled and there were tears in his eyes, but given what he had allowed to happen, Silva wanted more.
“Y–you don’t understand,” Alberto stammered. “They came from nowhere. I could not have stopped them.”
“You pay guards to stop them, do you not?” Silva said. He wanted to keep his tone quiet, calm. He’d found over the years that people are more intimidated by measured words and tone than they are by shouting.
“They could not stop the likes of these men. I think they are American soldiers. They wore masks over their faces, and each of them had many guns. One of them must have been over two meters tall. The largest man I have ever seen.”
“That makes him a better target,” Silva said. “You were a coward, Alberto. You did nothing as they burned down my club.”
“But they tied—”
“You are paid to run the club. Part of running the club is protecting it from damage.” He leaned in very close. “Do you think that you did your job well today?”
“Mr. Silva, please.”
Silva walked back to his worktable and sat in his rolling chair. He crossed his legs and straightened the crisp seam in his chinos. “Please what?”
“Please do not hurt me.”
“You allowed them to burn my club to the ground, Alberto. You allowed them to steal my property. You let them walk away with eight of my best workers. Do you have any idea how much you have cost me?”
He waved two fingers at Guzman, who stepped forward out of the corner. As Guzman passed the stools that were pressed up against the chest-high bar, he snagged the handle of his sledgehammer in his right hand and smiled.
Silva continued, “After all of that, what do you think I should do with you?”
“No, please, Mr. Silva. Please, sir. I swear that this is not my fault.” He spat saliva as he spoke and moved to rise out of the hardbacked chair he’d been assigned.
“Stay seated,” Silva said.
Alberto stood anyway—how could he not?—and Guzman struck like a snake to grab the man by his tie and jerk him back down into the chair.
Silva said, “Sit.”
“P–please,” Alberto begged. “Please look at the security video. You’ll see. We had no chance against those men.”
Silva couldn’t stand the sight of this sniveling creature. “Show some self-respect—that is, if you can find any after that spectacle out in the yard. Tied to a bunch of naked men. None of yo
u should show your faces again. When you make a laughingstock out of my business, you make a laughingstock out of me. And when people are laughing at me, they are not respecting me. When they are not respecting me, that is when I am in danger. Alberto, you put me in danger.”
Silva nodded to Guzman, who reacted instantly. With a grand underhand rotation of his arm, he swung the sledgehammer full force into the point of Alberto’s kneecap. The bone splintered like a pistol shot. Alberto shrieked in pain as the leg of his suit pants became wet with blood.
“Take him outside,” Silva said. “Finish it in the barn. Do not kill him. I want him to be an example to my rivals for many years to come. Let him be an example for our young guest, as well.”
Alberto howled as Guzman lifted him by his tie. As soon as he was vertical, he collapsed, launching another agonized scream.
“Carry him,” Silva said. “I do not want a blood trail through my home.”
Guzman had to put the hammer down for a few seconds, but after he’d hefted the screaming man onto his shoulder, he picked it up again. Silva watched them exit through the kitchen door, then turned to his laptop.
A message awaited him. He clicked on the icon to open the window and was met with an unintelligible scattering of letters and numbers. He ran them through the decryption protocol to reveal a message from Billy Monroe, one of his lawyers in the United States. Normally, his usefulness was limited to keeping politicians in check on Capitol Hill and making sure that selected headquarters personnel at DEA and ATF were well compensated and always contented with their stations.
Because of this business with Fernando Pérez, though, and its proximity to Washington, Silva had been forced to elevate Monroe to a more trusted position, at least for a short time. Not trusting of lawyers in general, Silva had special trepidations about Monroe that he couldn’t fully explain. Perhaps it was because they’d always been at arm’s length before.
The text of the encrypted message was both short and direct. “Media reports that an FBI agent was killed by a gunman this afternoon. No identities released for either the agent or the shooter, but confidence is high that PK did his job.”
Silva felt his face redden as he saw the inclusion of the initials. In this business, at this level, monograms were as good as names. They provided one more search vector for people who were hell-bent on knowing Silva’s business. Monroe should have known better.
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