by Sam Hawken
The interior door remained closed. Sevilla’s eyes got used to the darkness and he saw the bolt cutters waiting there. Though his feet did not want to move, he crept across the room. He put his head to the jamb and eased the door open so slowly it seemed to take hours before the first light came through the crack.
Wider until his head could push through and he could see if anyone waited outside. Wider until he was able to turn sideways and move crablike into the building proper. The men below cheered, but they were not cheering him.
From here he could see the ring fully. He saw naked young men circling each other. Not naked completely, but wearing loincloths that made them look like some kind of Mayan warrior. Their bodies weren’t painted, but each had a colored tassle just above the bicep of the right arm marking them blue or red. There was more red besides.
They fought bare-knuckled and already the skin of their fists was broken and bleeding. The blue fighter’s lower face was painted crimson from a freely oozing nose. He had more blood on his opponent and their faces were welted.
It was not boxing: they used their feet and as Sevilla watched one kicked the other in the thigh with his shin. He heard the whack of bone on flesh even above the throbbing music. They circled and struck and punched and kicked and grappled and there was no bell because this was bloodsport fought with men instead of animals.
The gentlemen watched from their chairs. A purple cloth was thrown over the rough-hewn banquet table and the top was laden with food and drink. An enormous pile of white powder was at hand.
The whores mingled among the men, touching them out of sight or whispering in ears or sharing bestial kisses that came before open rutting. The other girls, the ones who were not prostitutes, watched the fight with disgust and fear on their faces. Sevilla singled out one who argued with the man next to her. The man held her upper arm and held her in her seat and then just as suddenly smacked her across the face hard enough to leave a deep mark. Another girl cried silently in her chair, staring forward at nothing.
Rafa Madrigal sat in his chair at the center and led the cheering when a particularly brutal blow was landed in the ring. He ate with his hands as if he were some kind of medieval king. Sevilla looked for Sebastían, but Sebastían was nowhere to be seen. This was as Ortíz said: the younger made the arrangements while the elder enjoyed the spoils.
Sevilla saw the other old men from that luncheon at Misión Guadalupe and the fourth from their golf session. They did not seem younger among the others despite the way they carried on beneath the party lights.
The one called Hernández, the one who asked after Sevilla’s charity work with hospitals and the police, rose abruptly from the table and dragged one of the girls with him. He bumped against her in a parody of dance and held her when she tried to shrink away. One of the young men joined him and the two of them ground the girl between their hips while she cried openly. Sevilla gritted his teeth.
One of the fighters went down and the other leaped onto him, straddled his hips, rained punches down on upraised forearms. The fighter beneath had his skull cracked against the sawdusted concrete three times until his scalp split and there was gore everywhere. Madrigal and the others roared their approval. A whore fell between Madrigal’s legs and vanished beneath the table.
Hernández and his companion wrestled the girl away from the table, toward the stairs to the second floor. The girl’s clothes were torn from Hernández’s grasping. Up the stairs they went and Sevilla suddenly realized he would be seen if they came to his level. He went back the way he’d come, hiding behind a door and hoping they had no reason to go all the way to the end.
They didn’t come to his door. Over the thunder of the music he heard thin cries. His heart would not slow down. Out of his hiding place he came again, and slowly he advanced along the walkway. At the first door he stopped and pressed hard against the wall, sweating. He risked a glance through.
Hernández and the other man bore the girl to the sheets like wolves, biting and clawing. Hernández’s bare buttocks were turned toward the ceiling. He humped and there was screaming that no amount of music could drown out. Sevilla felt heartsick.
On the warehouse floor the fight was over. One man lay motionless on the sawdust while the other reeled. Madrigal saluted the fighter from his chair and then the man collapsed from exhaustion and lost blood.
The girl was still crying out. For her mother, for God. Sevilla’s eyes stung and he knew he was crying. He trembled all over.
Sevilla drew his pistol. This was not the way he imagined it. He did not want to be so afraid. But he could not stop the sounds of the girl’s rape or of the bacchanal on the warehouse floor as men indulged in good-time girls and wine and drugs.
He took a breath and then moved.
When he entered the room, the men didn’t see him at first. Sevilla saw the girl eclipsed by Hernández. His companion masturbated furiously. As his eyes lifted to Sevilla, he never stopped grasping his cock.
Sevilla’s mouth was dry, but he forced himself to speak. “Stop,” he said too quietly. “Stop this.”
Hernández took notice and rolled halfway from the girl beneath him. Now Sevilla could see her face, her tears and the desperate hollow in her eyes that could only be filled with more pleading. “What the hell is this? Who are you?”
“I’m police,” Sevilla said, and he raised his gun. His voice was steadier now. “Get away from her.”
“Fuck you, you’re the police,” Hernández said. “What kind of a joke is this?”
Sevilla pointed his gun at Hernández’s face. “I said get away from her. Now.”
“I said fuck you, pinche cabrón!”
Once again Sevilla glanced down at the girl. Afterward he would not remember telling himself to fire. The bullet entered the center of Hernández’s face and crashed out the back of his skull. The man flopped off the mattress completely. There was blood on the girl.
The man called Julio made to run out of the room. Sevilla shot him, too. This time he was splattered.
The music was still booming, but Sevilla thought he heard shouting. The girl was paralyzed on the mattress, her dress torn and dirtied. Sevilla had to leave her. He rushed from the room.
Every eye was raised from the floor of the warehouse and settled on him. Sevilla froze with the gun in his hand.
“¡Policía!” he heard.
Suddenly the big doors at the head of the building were shoved apart and two of the bodyguards spilled in crying panic. Red and blue lights flashed outside in the street and then there was chaos.
Down on the floor of the warehouse the men and their whores fled toward the exits but were turned back by a flood of spotlights from outside. Loudspeakers blared orders to surrender. Some headed for the rear doors.
He wanted to do something for the poor girl at his back, but the time was now. He was on the steps now headed down.
Gunfire sounded on the street and a stray bullet shattered the pane of a high window. Bodies swirled around the great banquet table and at the center there was Madrigal, standing alone. He did not flee. His face was stone because he was not afraid.
He saw Sevilla. Sevilla saw him. The gun was in Sevilla’s hand.
“I know you,” Madrigal said over the noise.
Sevilla put a bullet through Madrigal’s eye.
The federal police poured in through the open doors of the building. Sevilla was already on his knees, his gun on the floor and his identification held over his head. Men in black armor were everywhere, charging up the steps to the second level, swarming around the girls where they lay violated and the bodies of the dead fighter and Madrigal.
Out on the street it was a stroboscopic explosion of clashing lights and black-and-white vehicles. Someone wrapped Sevilla in a blanket and steered him toward an ambulance. Once he saw the girl, the one Hernández violated, being loaded into another, but the glimpse was short and he had no chance to speak with her.
He looked toward the apartment building.
He saw Rudolfo’s window illuminated with yellow light. The ancient man was silhouetted there, and as if he knew Sevilla was watching, he raised his hand in greeting.
EIGHTEEN
IT WAS DAWN AGAIN AND HE WAS SET free. There were questions, so many questions, and he answered them all with half-truths and outright lies. In the end they had no choice but to turn him loose; the evidence was there, the men in custody, the bodies catalogued. He asked one of the federales to take him back to his car.
Behind the wheel, he steered himself to the Hospital General. He signed in at the front desk and went to Kelly’s room. It was empty.
Sevilla went to the nurse’s station. “Excuse me, I came to visit Kelly Courter. He was in that room just there.”
The nurse furrowed her brow. “Who?”
“Kelly Courter. He was being cared for here. Just there. That room.”
“You mean the American?”
“Yes, the American. Kelly Courter. Where has he gone?”
“One moment, señor.” The nurse used the phone. She spoke with her back to Sevilla and glanced once over her shoulder at him in a way Sevilla did not like. When she returned she was polite. “Please wait for Señora Garza. She is the head nurse.”
Sevilla looked into Kelly’s room again as if he might be there again and it would all be a mistake, but the bed was empty and the sheets fitted tightly. The quiet machines that ensured his breathing and monitored his pulse and kept track of the functions of his body were all gone. The room seemed emptier still than just of life.
“¿Señor? Pardon me.”
He turned away from the room. The head nurse was there in her whites.
“I’m looking for Kelly Courter. He was in this room.”
“He’s been moved.”
Sevilla could not describe the sensation that rushed through him. It was more than relief or happiness but something akin to both that made his face flush and his skin tingle. He gripped Señora Garza on the arm and felt himself nearly cry. “Is he all right?”
“Yes. He’s been moved to a bed in chronic care. Follow me.”
They went away from the intensive care unit to the third floor. Kelly was held in a long room with many other beds, some occupied and some empty, the only real division between them being curtains hung from sliding tracks in the ceiling. Kelly seemed smaller here, lighter and paler, but he was real and he was alive.
“Thank you, señora,” Sevilla told the head nurse. She left them there.
He could not sit far away from Kelly here, but was so close that his leg touched the bed. This close he could hear Kelly breathing on his own, see the stubble of beard that the hospital staff kept down with trimmers and smell the odor of a man bathed every other day with a sponge as he lay motionless.
How to begin?
“Kelly,” Sevilla said. “I came to… I wanted you to know.”
There was no reason for him to hesitate. Things were no different between them, though Sevilla felt changed. It was the place, open enough that anyone could hear Sevilla talking and draw judgments that only Kelly was qualified to make. Sevilla did not want to speak here, to tell the things he knew and what he’d seen.
Sevilla put his hand on Kelly’s. It was surprisingly warm and soft the way boxers’ hands were always soft, steamed inside tape and gloves for long sessions before the bag. His own hand trembled and then his whole body shook, his breaths shuddery and his eyes suddenly filled with stinging tears. He held onto Kelly and cried until the urge was passed and then he rubbed his eyes with the edge of his sleeve.
“It’s all right now, Kelly,” Sevilla said. “It’s all right now.”
AFTERWORD
THE DEAD WOMEN OF JUÁREZ IS A work of fiction and the Ciudad Juárez of the novel has been semi-fictionalized to fit my purposes as a storyteller. That said, the problem of the feminicidios, the “female homicides” of the real Ciudad Juárez, is not some feat of morbid imagination.
Since 1993 more than four hundred women have gone missing in the city or been found raped and murdered. A handful of the cases have been tried in court, but to a one the suspects have complained of fabricated evidence, torture, forced confessions. For a recent (and excellent) examination of the facts, I refer you to The Daughters of Juárez, written by Teresa Rodriguez with assistance from Diana Montané and Lisa Pulitzer.
In recent years the feminicidios have been overshadowed by an outrageously violent war between drug cartels that has plagued the state of Chihuahua and the city of Juárez in particular. This doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. If anything the situation is worse because the attention groups like Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights managed to direct to these women has now been taken away. The drug war trumps all.
It is my hope that this novel can in some small way shine a light on the femicides. Many dozens of families hope daily for justicia. Some would be happy just for the opportunity to bury their dead. Until the police and the government of Mexico do something substantial, that will never happen.
The group Mujeres Sin Voces in the novel is inspired by the real-life organizations Voces Sin Eco (Voices without Echo) and Las Mujeres De Negro (the Women in Black). I urge you to get involved with the issue through Amnesty International. In the end, this problem will be solved not with a bullet, but by bringing all those responsible for the abuse and murder of Juárez’s daughters to judgment before the law.
—Sam Hawken
Acknowledgements
REGARDLESS OF WHAT IT SAYS ON the cover, every book is a team effort. With that in mind, I must thank Dave Zeltserman and my agent, Svetlana Pironko, for championing my work when even I had my doubts. Thanks also go to Pete Ayrton and John Williams of Serpent’s Tail for taking a chance on me.
Most of all I thank my wife, Mariann, for allowing me the opportunity to pursue a career as a writer, for being my first reader and prime defense against bad writing, and for being the cornerstone of our family. Without her, there would be no novel for you to read.
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Sam Hawken
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