An amused chuckle from the other end. A man’s voice. “Guess again.”
“Calisto,” barely a whisper.
“That’s right. I didn’t think you’d forget me so soon.”
Silence as she waited for him to speak again.
“You don’t feel like talking? That’s okay, I prefer if you just listen anyway. You’ve been unconscious for days, do you know that? Leandro thought you were going to die. I wouldn’t let that happen, though. Not before you and your friend were reunited.”
“Neesha? You’re taking me to see Neesha?”
“That’s right. I made a promise to you, and I keep my promises.”
“Where is she? Let me talk to her.”
“In due time. I have some things I want to say to you first.”
He paused and Els waited for him to speak again.
“Meeting you, from what I’ve learned from our interactions, you have put me in a very unique position. I have no illusions about my work, sometimes I have to use people to get results. You might consider it cruel or sadistic, but it’s a business, people like you become a means to an end. People like me use you for those ends. Is it exploitative? Certainly. But it’s capitalism: I use you for a tool to make profits while you get the bare minimum I can afford to keep you working. Which in your case is very little. You come from a country full of people like me. And the workers labor under the delusion that their hard work will make them rich. Their hard work is only keeping the wealthy comfortable. Sweat is rewarded with pride, which is cheap. If you convince a person that a job well done is its own reward, then you can pay them in self-satisfaction instead of dollars. If you convince an entire nation of that, then you have the United States.
“We don’t have the luxury of delusion in my business, so employment becomes somewhat more pragmatic: Do this or you die. Do this or somebody you love will die. Although the methods are different, the results are the same. Profit.
“You don’t need to hear all that, though. As I’ve said, you’ve put me in a unique position. I admire you, do you know that? It’s true. You are fearless, to a fault, perhaps, but it’s unrelenting. You have a great loyalty. If my men were like you we could conquer the drug trade in Mexico. But, alas, they are frail things while you seem to be made of tempered steel.
“Tell me, what would you do if we found ourselves alone in a room together? No consequences. Just you and me.”
“I’d grab the sharpest thing I could find and shove it through your throat,” Els said without hesitation.
Calisto laughed. “I’m certain you would. And that’s why the situation is so troublesome. That’s why things are going to have to work out this way.”
“What way? I’m done listening to you. I want you to tell your thug to take me to Neesha.”
“Fair enough. We have a few more things to discuss, and then you can see your friend.”
Leandro stopped at a four-way intersection. It seemed they were heading out of the suburban area and into the sparse country.
“I understand that between you and my friend Leandro there is a package, do you see it?”
Els looked down at the seat and there was a brown UPS box beside her.
“I see it,” said Els.
“Very good. It is for you.”
“Do you want me to open it?”
“Yes, but not just this minute. Just listen. I said earlier that I admire you. You have a very deadly quality about you. Something very cold and perhaps even savage. I am able to recognize it because it is something I myself posses. We are both very different people, but we are not afraid to hurt someone to get what we want. I think part of what separates us so much is that I know exactly what I want and you do not, or else there would be a slew of bodies in the path between you and what you desire. Yes, I see that and I admire it. But I also hate it. And that’s why I’m going to have you killed.”
Silence from both ends of the phone. Calisto waited for her reaction and got nothing. He might as well have told her he was going outside to get the paper.
“Your friend. I was going to sell her. She’d probably make someone a few bucks in the sex game. I don’t know how much she’d have liked it, though. Not that she’d have a whole lot of say in the matter. Did you know that more than a few girls in that situation commit suicide if given the chance? Isn’t that interesting. I thought that would be a nice little ending for all this. But then I figured, what’s the point? You’ll be dead and you wouldn’t even know it. So I thought of something better.”
Els looked down at the package. She could hear something moving in it whenever they went over a bump. Something solid.
“Calisto. What’s in the box?”
“Why don’t you open it and find out.”
She didn’t have to open it to find out. She knew. And in that moment, the cage, the iron bars in her mind dissolved completely. She was free now. There was nothing in the world that could ever confine her.
“I’m going to kill you. You will die begging at my feet, I promise,” she said into the receiver.
“You already made that promise to me not so long ago. Sadly, I don’t think you'll have the chance to fulfill it. I can see your future. It’s laying wide open in front of you. Would you like to hear it? I’ll tell you anyway.
“My trusted employee Leandro is going to take you someplace private, someplace you can scream. He’s going to rape you, and he’s going to kill you. Slowly. Then he’s going to take lots of pictures for me. I really wish I could be there. I’d like to do it myself.”
“Why?” asked Els. “Why are you doing all this.”
“That’s a very good question. You deserve an answer, so here it is: I probably wouldn’t have let you live anyway, but your friend might have been a good whore for a few years. But I made a very sudden decision when I met you. You may not remember, but you SPIT IN MY FUCKING FACE!” Calisto screamed into the phone and when he spoke again his voice was even and soft. “And no one does that to me and lives. It’s as simple as that. You disrespected me and now I’ll have your life. Well, it’s been fun talking, but I really have to go, these international calls are so expensive. I’m sorry things had to end this way. Maybe not as sorry as you will be in a few minutes, of course. Goodbye.”
Calisto hung up.
Els sat holding the silent phone in her hand. She glanced over at the box next to her and her knuckles turned white as her fist clenched the plastic casing.
Outside, the landscape had shifted to a wide open and uneven terrain of rural sprawl that stretched out before them, dust and rocks and mounds of shallow hillocks.
She calmly slid the phone into her pocket.
“Hey, what are you doing? You can’t have that. Give it to me.” Leandro demanded, taking his eyes off the road for a moment.
He reached over to grab the phone back, turning his head back to check the road ahead of them.
With the speed of a venomous snake striking, Els seized his groping hand and wrenched it back toward him until she could hear the bones in his wrist snap.
Leandro howled in pain as sudden agony exploded up the length of his arm.
For a split second there was a white haze creeping in along the edge of his vision and he instinctively took his hand from the wheel to cradle his injured wrist.
In that same instant Els slammed her fist directly into his temple leaving him reeling on the threshold of consciousness.
He bounced along, helpless as a rag doll as Els reached across and took the wheel, turning the truck off road.
One hand steering, the other fumbling with the buckle of Leandro’s seatbelt, she pointed the car toward one of the small hills.
They hit it speeding, and Els turned the passenger side front wheel into the mound, sharply.
For a brief and silent second they were flying through the air. The truck twisted as it sailed above the Earth.
They came down hard with a jarring bang and landed, skidding, in the dust, down on the driver’s side.
> The truck came to a stop and Els hung suspended from her seat belt. Breathing hard, feeling her heart slam inside her aching chest, the echos of impact reverberating in her bones. She looked down at Leandro.
He wasn’t dead, but he would be soon.
His window had been halfway up, near eye-level, and when the truck came down his head had smashed against it at the same time it broke, driving shards into his face. His left eye was a bloody hole packed with sharp fragments of glass. In addition to that and his shattered wrist, he had crushed his sternum against the steering column so severely that his chest was concave, like a child’s plush toy with too little stuffing.
He lay at what was now the bottom of the truck, breathing slow. He tried to get up, to crawl out of the wreck, but his legs refused to move. The realization dawned on him that he could no longer feel them.
He tried to scream, but he couldn’t suck enough air into his lungs and all that came out was a weak moan, wet and feeble. Blood leaked from somewhere inside of him and trickled out of his mouth.
Els unbuckled her seatbelt and carefully lowered herself down. She had to stand on Leandro, crumpled over the dented truck door. He moaned again as Els pushed at her door, opening it like a hatch and pulled herself up .
She felt a hand clasp weakly around her ankle and she looked down.
“Please,” Leandro begged, looking up at her with his one remaining eye, “don’t let me die. Help me get out of here. I don’t want to-” he was overcome with a painful coughing fit and he hacked up more blood.
Els climbed over the wrongside-up floor of the cab without looking back. She came down on the ground hard and lay there in the dirt, looking up at the hot sun.
She was hurt. Pain from her chest screamed. New stitches had torn free and she felt warm blood soaking into her shirt. She hadn’t immediately realized it in the adrenaline after the crash, but some of her ribs were broken from the seatbelt. Pain bloomed in her every time she inhaled. She tried to stand but she discovered her ankle was sprained or broken as well.
She sat back down in the shadow of the truck, the smell of leaking gasoline filling the air.
She reached into her pocket, please don’t be broken, please don’t be broken, she repeated in her head. She took the cell phone out and looked at it. It was a cheap flip phone, the kind you get for twenty bucks at a gas station with a pre-paid card, Els had heard people call them burners.
The display on the front was cracked and blank. She flipped it open and the screen was also damaged, but she heard a tone when she pressed the on button.
She breathed a sigh of relief that made her feel like her shattered ribs were digging into her lungs.
Els dialed the only number she knew. A number she had memorized a few days earlier. Only a week, but it felt like a lifetime.
She held the phone against her ear as it rang.
FORTY SIX
In Port Lavaca, in a small apartment sparsely furnished with Ikea furniture, Wal-Mart shelves and action movie posters from the ‘80s, Elton refreshed the Texas Chronicle’s breaking news page. Nothing had changed in the last few minutes. He looked up from the laptop at the TV and flipped through CNN, MSNBC, and Fox news. He took a few seconds to read the crawl at the bottom of the screen before landing back on the local network affiliate.
For the past several days his life hadn’t been dedicated to much more than obsessively completing this cycle.
In the brief instances between pages refreshing and channels changing, he could feel his heart skip, could almost see the headline in a phantom image that hadn’t yet been called into existence: DISCOVERY OF NUDE CORPSE LEADS AUTHORITIES TO EAST TEXAS NATIVE. Perhaps a picture of him with the words Murder suspect wanted for questioning. Do not approach! Contact local police if you have seen this man, and then there would be a knock on the door.
It was only a matter of time. Nobody gets away with murder in this day and age, he had seen enough movies to know that. There were too many variables: too many people involved in it. Himself, six other strangers he thought he could trust to hide a body. To keep it secret. He must have been insane. These were six strangers he wouldn’t have tasked with hiding a spare key under a welcome mat, and now his freedom, his life, were in the hands of the weakest of them. Whichever one decided he felt guilty, whichever one thought it would make a cool story, whichever one would let it slip when he was drunk. Any or all of the above. All it took was the weakest.
And then there was the body. A corpse can tell one hell of a story. And they don’t lie.
He imagined the timeline. Short. Police find the body. They search it and find a single carpet fiber. It leads them to the motel. They focus on a room with a suspiciously broken window. DNA in the bathroom. The whole place would be practically painted with it. Forensics tells them exactly when the cowboy died and now they know where. They check the register, find the girl and her friend, find the frat boys. Police get the story from them and the next thing you know, Elton’s on death row eating Salisbury steak and creamed corn they push through a little slot in the door. No silverware, Elton, my boy. You might cut your wrists open with it, cut your throat. We couldn’t have you checking out one second before the state tells you to. It wouldn’t be right. Wouldn’t be proper justice.
But there was the girl. Els. If there was one thing he felt good about, felt sure about in all of this, it was her. She was cool. She was a fucking icicle. Maybe a little crazy, but he didn’t think of her as a loose end.
In reality he was probably the loose end. He was probably the one keeping everyone else up at night. But that was the thing: they were strangers, they were all the weak links in each other’s mind.
He wanted it to be over. He would almost welcome the sight of uniformed police officers knocking on his door to take him away just so he could know it was over.
But it wasn’t. Maybe it would never be over. The only thing to assuage the guilt and fear would be time. He would bury it all under the second hand if he could. But it takes time. Time takes time.
It was only the smallest sliver of comfort that he would never see the people involved again. And they would never see him.
His phone rang.
It was sitting on the coffee table next to the laptop. He had switched it to vibrate. The ringtone, a sample of Ennio Morricone’s score from John Carpenter’s The Thing, had been too jarring for his raw nerves over the last several days. The grinding buzz of the phone against the tabletop was no less unsettling. It sounded almost ominous.
Elton looked at the screen. He didn’t recognize the number.
Don’t answer it. For the love of God, why would you answer it? Thoughts in his head like an audience member screaming at characters on a movie screen.
He tapped the little green telephone icon to answer and put the phone to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Elton? Are you Elton?” a voice asked on the other end. A familiar voice. A voice he would have thought would have been the last one he would ever want to hear. But now that it was speaking to him, it was strangely welcome.
“Els?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Oh my God! How are you? You sound great. What’s up? I was just thinking about you,” he babbled.
“Elton, listen to me. I’m in trouble. I’m in bad trouble and I need your help. Are you listening? I need you to come and get me. Are you there? Say something if you’re there.”
“I’m there.” It came out like a whimper and he felt a sinking sensation like falling into something very dark and very soft from high up. You should have let it ring, old boy. Shouldn’t have answered.
“Okay, good. I’m about six miles outside of Victoria, in the middle of nowhere, just off Old Flood road. Can you get here?”
“I don’t know,” Elton stammered. “I think so. Are you North or south of the Guadalupe?”
“The river? I’m not sure. North, I think.”
“I’m in Port Lavaca, I can be there in twenty, twenty-five minut
es if I hurry. How did you know I was so close?”
“I didn’t. You have to come right now. Please hurry before anyone else finds me.”
“Alright, I’m on my way. But how will I find you?”
“You’ll see me. I promise.”
Els hung up and Elton stood staring at the phone in his hand. He was instantly filled with the notion that the conversation hadn’t happened. It was some bizarre auditory hallucination brought on by guilt and stress. But the call was in his history. He checked it three different times before leaving.
Less than a minute after his front door slammed shut he was In his Ford Ranger heading toward highway 87 which was a straight shot to Victoria.
He had never been more excited in his life. And he had never been more afraid.
FORTY SEVEN
A fifteen-minute drive across highway 87 had given Elton time to think. He was in Victoria now, searching for Old Flood road. He replayed their conversation in his head for the dozenth time.
I should have asked her for a little more detail. I have no idea what I’m rushing into. He created a scenario where he had asked her what sort of trouble she was in and the only reply he could imagine was ‘I can’t talk about it over the phone.’ That was a cliche he knew from movies. People always said that. It was probably to create suspense or alleviate needless exposition, but it was godamned impractical. People should be more willing to discuss specifics on the phone.
Ten minutes into the drive he had tried to call her back, but she didn’t answer. Maybe she trashed the phone. Maybe someone was tracking her calls. That was a cliche, too.
He found the road and turned off on it.
It occurred to him that a lot of his real-life experiences got filtered through what he had seen in movies. He imagined Els as a character similar to Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight: an unassuming woman leading a normal, boring life, but in reality she’s a super-spy assassin unfuck-withable badass.
If that’s the scenario we’re going for, I guess that makes me Sam Jackson.
He slowed the truck down, looking for her somewhere off the road.
Mules:: A Novel Page 23