Focused on what he was doing, Watcher answered with a shrug as hands came into view at the other side of the rug and together, he and Opie pulled it all the way off the hinged door, set flush with the level of the floorboards. They lifted the rug carefully, silently setting it to one side. Another soft sob came from the space beneath their feet, no longer muffled by the layer of fabric, and Watcher gained certainty there was at least one female in the hidey-hole.
Chin up, he stared at Opie, then pointed at the ring embedded in the door’s wood. Holding up three fingers, he waited for a nod, then flattened himself to the floor beside the edge of the trapdoor. Gun in hand, he rolled silently to his back, eyes on Opie who had one hand outstretched to grip the iron ring, one hand lifted in front of him, three fingers raised. Mouthing the words, Opie locked eyes with him and, lowering one finger with each count, measured out the seconds. Three. Two. One.
Yanking back on the ring, Opie flung open the door, releasing a chorus of screams. Watcher rolled, elbows locked, gun in hand angling down into the opening to see a packed mass of bodies. With them writhing and shifting, it was hard to make out details, but what he did recognize made him lift the gun to a neutral position, resting his forefinger outside the trigger guard. Long hair, short hair, dark brown and pale pink skin, the few faces raised to see the invaders were as diverse as any army classroom, except for gender.
His gaze locked on one woman, lips pulled taut in fear, bottomless brown eyes staring up at him. Hair drawn back into a loosely woven braid, he saw she had an oozing wound, what looked like a burn in the shape of a crown embossed in the skin of her neck, directly behind her ear. A brand. Opie’s voice rose over the din coming from the hole in the floor, calling their men to the room, but the woman’s eyes never left Watcher’s face. In them he saw what looked like hope, the lines radiating from the corners lessening. Then shots rang from the yard surrounding the house, a sharp cry of pain coming from the hallway, floorboards beneath him shaking with the feet running through the house.
Opie reached to close the door, but Watcher lifted a hand, staying the action. The fear in the woman’s face was palpable, and he would not lock her in darkness again. Then he and Opie were up and moving out, sweeping left and right as they came into the hallway, seeing bodies downed on the floor.
An hour later, Watcher stood staring at the back of a truck as Devil slammed the tailgate shut, slapping the metal in an unspoken command to move out. Watcher stayed there as the vehicle disappeared, driving away from the house behind him with the blood-covered floors. In the bed of that truck were three blanket-wrapped bodies, cocooned respectfully in coarsely woven wool, red already seeping into the fabric.
“Watch…brother,” Opie spoke from behind him, and Watcher’s sharp gesture cut him off, not wanting to talk, not wanting to listen, just needing silence and space. Just for a fuckin’ minute. Lifting a hand, he scrubbed across his forehead, feeling grit scouring his skin. The plume of dust trailed off and around a butte, shifting red and ochre sand whirling in the wind. Heavier grains fell back to the earth, no options of fighting against the implacable force of gravity. Smaller, finer grains held their place longer, the wind pushing them this way and that, taking them far from where they had previously lain at rest, eventually settling them nestled against new neighbors. Different, but the same. Jesus.
Tipping his chin down finally, Watcher felt the tendons in his neck creak and pull, complaining against being held too long in one position. Looking down, he stared at the leather and fabric clenched tight in his hand. His fingers gone white, except where the red from the garment stained them. Two patches on the front of the vest caught his eye, and Watcher sucked in a breath in response to the intense pain that tore through his chest. Small rectangles of fabric, held in place with closely placed stitches. He remembered watching the needle stabbing up and down, passing through the layers of material, laughing when the sharp steel pierced the tip of a finger, chuckling at the first blood seen by the vest. President was stitched on one patch, the other held six letters. One word, Danger. Darrie’s road name.
***
Juanita
She watched as the man vanished into the distance, dust swirling up between the back of the van in which she rode and where he stood. Feet planted wide, hands on his hips, he stared at her until the vehicle turned, breaking their joined gaze. The moment he was out of sight, fear swept over her. Surrounded on all sides by silent women, she closed her eyes and swallowed, trying to force the panic that infested her back into the tiny hole she’d long ago dug for it to live. As they traveled the rough backcountry road, she bounced and moved with the van, bare breasts rubbing against the shirt given her. Fingertips chilled, she looked down at the bottle gripped tightly in her fist. From his hand to hers, offered with an intense stare that remained locked on her until she broke the lid’s seal and lifted, drinking deeply of the water.
Watcher.
She’d heard the men call him that name, read it on the front of his vest. Held that vest for him as she stood next to the van, shivering in the heat. He was the leader, but his men seemed to respect him, not held vassals by fear. He’d then shed his shirt, and tugged his undershirt off, handing that to her as well. Confused but accustomed to obedience, she’d stood quietly, holding heavy leather in one hand, and a sweaty cotton in the other. Eyes downcast, she’d been humiliatingly aware of her exposed skin, covered only in dirt and bruises. Once he got his shirt back on and buttoned, he reached and retrieved the vest, slinging it around his shoulders, arms shoved through the large holes, settling it into place with an impatient shrug. She looked up when he took the undershirt from her, watched him gather it oddly in his hands, felt his gaze searching her face.
It wasn’t until he lifted it towards her head that she understood his intent. Ducking, she had felt the stretched neck glance along her nose, passing over her hair and like a child, she’d raised first one arm, then the other, allowing him to work them into the sleeves. The backs of his fingers skimmed her sides as he settled the shirt over her torso, covering her nakedness. The greatest act of kindness she had ever received, and just the memory was enough to flood her eyes, nose stinging with unshed tears.
Large enough that it covered her to midthigh, she smoothed the fabric against her skin. It was his shirt, stripped from his body to cover hers. Soft and warm. Chin dipping to her shoulder, she breathed deeply, a jumble of odors reaching her nose. Sweat, but she smelled so much worse, having been inside the hole for three weeks as punishment. It didn’t pay to refuse the men, not smart to fight the things they forced upon the women, but the weight of giving in was sometimes too much, and when one of the girls came back—her mind shied away from the bloody memory. Sometimes all you could do was fight.
She breathed deeply again. Oil and grease, gasoline, and underlying everything was a fresh woodsy scent. Like the woods on top of a mountain. Like the Sierra Madres, seen on a family vacation, her upturned nose childishly pressed to the window of her papa’s car, watching as scrub gave way to true trees. Her muscles relaxing at the memory, she breathed deeply again. A forest of springy evergreens. Clean, musky. Free.
Watcher.
Outside looking in
Watcher
“Señor.” Watcher heard the soft voice of a woman and turned to look that direction, seeing one of the nearly thirty rescued from the hole under the house three days ago. This was the doe-eyed beauty who had first caught his attention. The woman who, mired in the filth covering the floor of the dirt-walled room in which she had been imprisoned, had stared up at him, hope in her eyes. Her mouth moved, lips clamped together, then she breathed out, “Señor, por favor.”
Turning away, staring at the mess of papers on the desk in front of him, he responded with a question. “Yes?” He knew his tone was brusque, but he didn’t have time for niceties. Darrie’s funeral would be back in Kentucky, and he needed to already be in the wind, not dealing with some fucking Mexican bitch who cost his brother’s life to rescu
e from whatever it was the Machos originally planned for that abandoned payload of flesh. He had too much bullshit to deal with already, without layering on anything else.
Getting the bodies home had taken a day. Getting the women out of Mexico and installed in the basement of the church had taken another. Then even more time to parcel the women out to various members’ homes. Today, Darrie was flying home. Watcher had come back from the airport only a few minutes ago, seeing his brother’s casket loaded into the cargo hold of a commercial jet. In four days Watcher would be standing in the graveyard watching the last of his blood be laid to rest in the family plot. The space beside Darrie forever empty, designated for a wife his brother never found.
“Señor.” The woman began again, and Watcher propped his elbows on the desktop, dropping his head into his hands. Gonna lose my shit if she don’t pull it together, he thought, grinding his teeth. If she didn’t get to the point, he knew he would blow up at her, and decided to hurry things along.
His testy, “Do you speak English?” was brusque, but they would have a better chance of communicating if she did because his Spanish was poor. Piss poor, he thought, another item on the list of shit I need to get better at.
“Si…yes.” She stumbled over her response, but at least it was forward movement, albeit slow paced.
“What do you need, honey?” Sighing, he deliberately gentled his tone, dipping down to soften the edge of his soldier’s tongue demanding information. “I’m finishing up a few things, then I have to leave.” Twisting in the chair, he turned and studied her for a minute. Her hair was clean and shiny, the dark strands looked soft as silk, drifting unbound over her shoulder. He saw she had pulled up the collar of her shirt, and held her head tipped slightly to one side, reminding him of the wound he had seen on all the women rescued from the hole. A brand. Symbol of the cartel’s ownership, it marked them as property.
“I am…” She paused, eyelashes drifting down to rest on her cheeks. Eyes closed, she continued, “Sorry tu hermano, your brother, he died.”
Watcher grunted in response, gaze fixed on the part in her hair. With her head tipped down, it was all he could see. Musing, he noted the thin strip of skin looked pink compared to her dark hands, twisting against each other where they wound themselves into knots in the hem of her shirt. When she didn’t speak for several seconds, he urged her again, hoping to draw this awkward encounter to an end. “Thank you.” After pausing for a moment, reminding himself to go gentle, he asked, “Honey, was there anything else?”
She didn’t move. Jesus.
Some of the former captives were staying here in Darrie’s house, the woman in front of him one of nearly a dozen. If they all approached him to express gratitude this way, it would be a week before he was able to leave. Fuck. “Honey, there’s no need, but I appreciate your sympathy. Darren would have been glad to know his sacrifice bought your freedom.” Shit, I didn’t mean it to sound like she owed me anything for us getting them free. “What I mean to say is, he would be happy to know you don’t have to worry about the cartel now.”
“I would…I want.” Her neck twisted, tipping her chin towards one shoulder and she hissed, whether in frustration or pain, he wasn’t sure. “My respects…gah.” She made an angry sound, then rattled off a sentence in Spanish, the only word of which he caught was English. “Ingles es tan dificil.”
“Honey,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing tone. “It’s okay. Take your time.” Impatiently rushing her had added to the layers of her anxiety, and Watcher hated thinking he’d caused even more distress.
Lifting her chin, she opened her eyes, whiskey-brown pools staring at him. After a moment she said, “I would go with you. To pay respects. With your brother. For him.” Breaking her words down into halting individual phrases seemed to undam her tongue, allowing her to finally communicate what she needed. “Por favor, señor. Quiero honrarlo.”
“No need for that.” Head shaking back and forth, he pushed the chair away from the desk, intending to create space to stand before he recognized the flood of tension in her muscles at his movements. Scared as fuck, and still standing here with an ask she won’t back down from. He admired her fortitude, having come through what she had, and still had the guts to push past her fear. She’d shown the same courage at the site in Mexico, when she’d allowed him to dress her in his shirt. Scared as fuck, yeah. But she’s strong as fuck, too.
Halting his movements, he mapped her reactions, watching a slow easing of her muscles when he remained seated. “What I mean to say is it’s nice you want to go to the funeral and all, but I’m not driving over. I’m going on my bike.”
None of the women had ridden back on members’ bikes. Not only weren’t they steady enough on their feet to balance on the back of a motorcycle, but it was the Soldiers’ way to not put unpatched pussy on their bikes. Instead, they had confiscated three of the cartel’s cargo vans abandoned at the location, loading the women into the vehicles and bringing them home.
The firefight at the house in Mexico had been unique in his experience. The Soldiers had actually stumbled into what looked like a cartel-on-cartel fight, two distinct groups of men converging on the house at the same time. Each gang had telltale signs meant to quickly identify friendlies from the enemy. While the Soldiers lost three men, each of the cartel factions had nearly a dozen dead.
At his words, she lowered her gaze to the floor for a moment, then lifted her chin again, even as her eyes remained averted. “I would go.”
Shaking his head, he forgot her nervousness and pushed to his feet, freezing as she took two quick steps backwards, her shoulders slamming against the wall with a bone-rattling thud. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head fiercely back and forth, hair whipping around her face. The motion ended with strands draped across her cheeks, caught in the web of her lashes. Lips barely moving, she whispered to herself, “Muy estupida. Odio esto.”
“Honey, you aren’t stupid.” Watcher took a careful step in her direction, hating to see how she cringed into the wall at the sound of his feet moving. “Not stupid at all. You’ve been through a whole hell of a lot, and what you’ve lived through would spook anyone. Make it hard to think in one language, much less try to communicate in two of ‘em. You’re overwhelmed, and out of your element. I see a woman who’s making her way the best she knows how. I respect that, honey. Not stupid. Don’t say that.” So fucking strong.
Her eyes flew wide open. Those dark pools latched onto him and he felt like he was drowning in her. Thumping solidly against the wall, her head fell back and he read sorrow on her features. A devastated helplessness. This mattered to her. “I want. Please. I would.” Drawing in a shuddering breath, she breathed the single word on repeat, “Please.”
“Okay.” Her plea broke his resolve, and Watcher surprised himself with his immediate agreement, following it up with what he expected to be a show stopper. “But I’m leaving now. Right now. So, I don’t have time for you to pack.” He knew the old ladies of the club had brought the women clothes, and expected this one wouldn’t want to leave behind the few belongings she had.
He was surprised when her trembling lips spread in what should have been a smile. She made the effort, but missed the mark by a fair amount. With movements controlled and careful, she leaned through the doorway and pulled a small duffle from the hall. “Gracias, señor.”
***
Deja vu, Watcher thought, staring across the open hole scarring the red clay to where his aunt and uncle sat. Uncle Ezra lounged back in the chair, one ankle propped high on top of a skinny knee while Aunt Loretta perched on the edge of her seat. He felt someone approach right before Juanita slipped one warm hand into his, her other arm wrapping tightly around his waist, holding him up as much as holding on.
They’d been on the road for hours, sitting in a rest area outside Oklahoma City before he asked her name, and then been taken aback when she stared at him for a long minute before declining to disclose it, her only response a
whispered, “Señor.”
By then he knew her too well to allow that kind of shit. Had seen her naked the day they’d rescued the women. Been riding with her legs wrapped around his hips for nearly 700 miles at that point, and there she was, thinking hard about holding back on something as simple as a name. He had reached out and cupped her tiny chin in his hand. Ignoring the blinking flinch telling him there was an instinctive expectation of pain to accompany the touch, Watcher told her, “You’re safe with me, honey. You should get that by now, and if you don’t—” He shook his head. “—then you probably won’t ever.”
He poked a finger at the patch on his vest, then up at his own face, “I’m Watcher, not señor. Got it?” He knew the women were required to call their…benefactors by titles of respect, prefacing any communication with don, el patrón, or señor. He wanted to draw a clear line in her head separating him from the kind of men who had been forced on her in the past. Wanted her to see him.
He’d felt the tiniest of tugs against his fingers when her head moved up and down, and waited a moment before asking again. “You got it? Call me Watcher, not señor.”
“Yes,” she said immediately, muscles in her jaw tensing under his fingers as she spoke. “You are Watcher.”
“And your name is…?”
“Juanita.” She blinked and cut her gaze to one side, quickly spitting out the rest without urging. “Juanita Teresa Consuela los Carmen del Estavez.”
In the musical flood of Spanish, he heard a name that caught his attention. Her last name snagged his focus and didn’t let it go: del Estavez. It was attention-worthy because the president of the Machos was Carlos Estavez.
Standing with her arm wrapped around his waist, her warmth pressed against his side, he reminded himself for the two-dozenth time he needed to ask her about that.
Glancing down, he saw Juanita’s attention was directed towards the rose granite headstone he and Darrie had gotten installed not two years ago. It took decades, but their parents and sister finally had a lasting memorial. He cut his gaze to the turf-covered pile of dirt standing at the head of Darrie’s grave. One more thing for the to-do list: contact the same company, get them to do another one. He sighed, lifting his eyes to look across the grave again.
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