by Ethan Cross
With a shake of his head, Canyon replied, “Why does everyone keep asking me that? I don’t know where your missing agent run off to. How can you be so certain that she was even here?”
“According to your police captain,” Marcus said, “You killed her and disposed of the body somewhere up in the hills.”
Canyon tried to keep the emotion out of his face, but his gaze flicked to Yazzie with suspicion and hatred swirling in his eyes.
The police captain seemed about as concerned as Ackerman would have been. He merely shrugged and said, “He’s lying to save his own ass, trying to pit us against one another. A pretty obvious attempt to manipulate us.”
Marcus looked at Canyon and asked, “May I pull my phone out of my pants pocket?”
With a nod of approval, he retrieved his phone from a pouch on the front left of his tactical pants. After a series of swipes and taps, a voice came over the device’s small speaker. Turning the volume all the way up, her directed the speaker toward Canyon.
The recording was of Yazzie’s previous confession at the ranch: “When I confronted him about it, Canyon told me that he had taken her up into the hills and disposed of her. I do my best to keep the peace around here, but it’s hard when you work for a monster like John Canyon. What was I supposed to do? He has the feds on his payroll. I was scared for my life.”
John Canyon quivered with rage, and his eyes burned with fire at the police captain. He yelled some curses or obscenities at Yazzie in a language that Marcus didn’t understand.
For the first time, Yazzie—from whatever words Canyon had spoken—seemed visibly affected, a small crack in the man’s gargoyle mask. But then without saying another word, Yazzie turned to one of the cartel members and gave a nod. The four Mexican gentleman who were pointing their submachine guns at Marcus instead turned their weapons toward Canyon and his men. But that wasn’t all, Marcus also noted some of Canyon’s own number who redirected their weapons, apparently turned by Yazzie and betraying their brethren.
Gritting his teeth, rage eclipsing fear, Canyon asked, “What in the hell is going on here, Yaz?”
“I’ve been in conversation with Mr. Alvarez, and while we feel that this is a good business model, we’re in agreement that the operation is in need of new management.”
Canyon spit on the ground and said, “You’ve been slithering through the grass a long time waiting for this moment, haven’t you, old friend?”
“No,” Yazzie said, “I’m a lamprey, not a shark. I was perfectly happy playing the roles we were in, but someone has to go down for all of this. The feds have the truck. They have evidence that could take down your entire operation. And they’ve already sent one of their own out to bypass your communication blockade.”
Seizing the moment, Marcus stepped forward and added, “In fact, I received a phone call on the way here. Your Officer Pitka was kind enough to disable the cellular block you had on the valley. I spoke with some of my associates at the Department of Justice. Within a few hours, this whole place is going to be swarming with federal agents. This isn’t a negotiation or a battle. I don’t give a shit about your family baggage or your little power struggle. This is me, giving you one last chance to surrender and maybe make it through this night alive. If you kill us, you had better run as fast as you can, because the long arm of the United States government will find you wherever you go.”
Canyon locked gazes with Marcus for a few seconds as silence hung over the whole encampment. Then the drug kingpin of northern New Mexico nodded and said, “Fine, let’s make a deal, Agent Williams. I’ll tell you everything I know.”
78
They were all one itchy trigger finger away from a bloodbath. At the moment, Marcus didn’t care. Canyon had information about whether or not Maggie was still alive. And Marcus would do whatever it took, including dying, to find out what happened to her. And, of course, there was always a chance. There was always hope that she was still alive.
Canyon, turning to his men, proclaimed, “Do any of you know the kinds of things our great police captain has done? Yazzie used to steal children and then every year on the anniversary of the adoption, he would send out a piece of their clothing or hair, just to torture the families. He did all that up until a couple years ago when I found out about it and put a stop to it. He’s sick in the head.”
Yazzie laughed, “That’s interesting coming from a man like you. And, if memory serves, you are the one who brokered the sale of those same children and profited from it. I sent the families those items because it was a custom of our ancestors when a prisoner was taken, to send a piece of their clothing or hair every year in order to let their family know that they were still alive and well. Of course, that was in a time when we treated even prisoners better than we do today.”
“It doesn’t matter what insanity you use to justify it, Yazzie. What about all the girls? All those belegana women who have went missing. All of the women who’ve then turned up staked out in the desert after having been eaten alive.”
Yazzie merely looked to his cartel friends and shrugged. He said, “Those are all things that my new business partners value in an associate. You see, John, you’re done. You’re dried up and over with. Your little kingdom is crumbling down around you, and you see that. He’s telling the truth about getting the call and Officer Pitka disabling the cellular blocking. The only choice any of us have now is to run.”
“Bullshit,” Canyon snapped. “This can all be cleaned up. We buy off the right white men, and it goes away. That’s how this world works. The only evidence is these two agents, your little turncoat deputy, and the missing truck.”
Marcus, although he didn’t seem to be in any position to demand anything, asked again, “What happened to Maggie Carlisle?”
Canyon looked from Ackerman to Marcus and said, “Like I’ve been telling you all night, I had nothing to do with her disappearance! Yazzie is a pathological liar. I’m not sure he even knows what’s true anymore, everything that he said on that recording was a lie. He never called me about any agent because she wasn’t here looking for me. She was here looking for the Taker. The man who had stolen her brother all those years ago. One of the missing children. I never told him that I did anything with your Agent Carlisle because I don’t know what happened to her.”
Marcus considered all that Canyon had revealed, and a few things started clicking into place. He said, “Captain Yazzie…the girls found staked out in the desert, by the time they were found so many animals had eaten on them that it was impossible to tell, but you used rat torture to kill them?”
For the first time since Marcus had met him, Yazzie seemed to show a genuine emotion as his face split into a wide grin.
Marcus added, “That’s why you did the little experiment with the scorpion and your lighter, it was a smaller version of what you did to those girls. Everything Canyon is saying is true, isn’t it?”
Over the top of the truck bed Canyon asked, “What in the world is ‘rat torture’?”
Looking to his brother, Marcus gave a nod. With an almost gleeful excitement, Ackerman said, “Rat torture, also known as rat excitation. The methodology varies from age to age, but it’s been a common practice throughout history. It basically involves encouraging a rat to eat its way through a person’s body. The most common iteration is accomplished by placing a bucket over the abdomen of a naked victim and then heating the bucket in some way to encourage the rats—fleeing from the fire, following their natural instinct—to gnaw their way down through the person and then continue to do so until they find a way out. Needless to say, this doesn’t end very well for the person being eaten. Rat torture has also been featured in the works of Orwell, Easton Ellis, and R. R. Martin. One of the earliest cases on record being used for purposes of extracting information was during the Dutch revolt by Diederik Sonay, an ally of William the Silent. It also appears in a famous case study by Sigmund Freud about a patient being obsessed that his father and a friend would subjected to t
his torture. Also, on a personal level, I once employed a similar form of torture where I cut someone open, and using a tube, I inserted a rat and sewed the victim back up, in order for—”
“Thanks, Frank. We get the idea.” Then, turning to Yazzie, Marcus said, “Enough games. Did you do that to Maggie? Or is she still alive?”
The captain seemed to consider that a moment and then replied, “No, she was too special to merely be food for the desert rats. I don’t see what difference it makes now, so I will tell you that, when I last saw your friend, she was alive. That very well could have changed between then and now.”
“What the hell did you do with her?”
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you. I think it’s time that we end this.”
Ackerman cleared his throat in a loud and facetious manner and loudly exclaimed, “I agree. Remember me, I’m the guy who has killed more people than cancer and is currently holding a grenade to a person’s face. I think this has been great. See, we all came to the table, and talked this thing out. Now, we know that Yazzie is our man, which some of us may have suspected for a while, but we couldn’t be sure who had actually taken Maggie. Now that we have established that Mr. Yazzie is in possession of the knowledge we need,” Ackerman turned to Canyon and continued, “we would be willing to trade all of the current hostages for your police captain. I would think this would be something that even if we were playing it by the book would be something everyone could agree upon, that the leader of the police force of any community would be willing to trade himself in such a manner.”
Yazzie laughed. “You don’t have any bargaining power left. I’m about three seconds from telling my associates—both those who have come from south of the border and pledged their alliance and those in Canyon’s employment who think that he is coming to an end here—to start killing all of you. I don’t care about Tobias or his friends. As far as I’m concerned, you have no hostages. Kill him, if you like.”
Canyon screamed, “£eechaa’itsa’ii biyaazh! You’re his uncle!”
Ignoring Canyon, Yazzie continued, “The only thing keeping you and your brother alive is that we would still like to recover the truck. But it has also been deemed an acceptable loss, if we are unable to locate it. However, considering that Mr. Alvarez has offered me a cut of the money to recover your truck, I would love for you boys to reveal it’s location without too much drama. If that’s not on your agenda, then I’m happy to kill all of you and sort out the details later.”
Ackerman merely smiled and said, “Oh now, Captain, you’re not the shoot first and ask questions later kind of guy. You’re a player of the long game. But you are right about one thing. What we have here is essentially a war for knowledge. You want the location of a product worth millions of dollars. My brother and I want to know the whereabouts of my little sister. This is information which holds no value to you from a monetary standpoint. In a perfect and rational world, one would think that we would be able to come to some sort of agreement where all parties involved can get what they want.”
Canyon was first to add, “This is far from a perfect world.”
“Yes,” Ackerman continued, “this entire situation has been clouded by doubt. We each doubt that the other party would give up that info no matter what. Even at the threat of torture and death. But then we also doubt that, if we were to exchange this information in some way, the other party would tell the truth and would not, in the end, try to screw us over in one way or another.”
Yazzie asked, “Was there a reason in there as to why I shouldn’t just kill all of you?”
Ackerman rolled his eyes. “Come now, you haven’t gotten to be your age by having a death wish. Again, you doubt that you would make it out of such a battle alive. You don’t want to fight.”
“I don’t see any other solution, but I’m up for a quick suggestion, before we just see who’s left standing.”
“Well, I do have one thought. When in doubt…blow something up.” With the last word, Ackerman pulled the pin on the frag grenade duct taped to Tobias Canyon’s face and shoved the boy toward his father.
79
After pulling the pin on both grenades—the frag grenade duct taped over Tobias’s mouth and the smoke grenade taped to his lower back—Ackerman dived to the side and, knowing that there were still a lot of gun barrels pointed in his direction, rolled and came up beside the back tire of one of the angled pickup trucks. This positioned him to where no one could possibly have a clear shot, except for maybe Canyon, who was busy at the moment.
Grabbing for his backpack full of explosives, Ackerman pulled out multiple smoke grenades and tossed them over his shoulders to land in the midst of the encampment.
The next item he pulled from his bag of tricks was the detonator for the C-4, which he and Marcus had strategically buried earlier in the evening. Although his brother was still in the danger zone, Ackerman had to merely pray that Marcus remembered where the bombs had been buried and wouldn’t be hit with any flying debris. They had buried the C-4 in the spots where they expected Canyon and his men to park, and then Ackerman had stopped the caravan in approximately the correct places using the Barrett sniper rifle. The plan and placement had worked like a charm.
Flipping open the tiny plastic guard on top of the detonator, Ackerman closed his eyes and smiled as he pressed the red button and unleashed hell.
80
25 years earlier…
Xavier’s first recollection of the fall was his stomach flipping like he was on a carnival ride, then pure terror, then the pain of landing on a pile of jagged rocks. At least, he thought they were rocks, at first, until he rolled over and came face to face with a petrified human skull. Xavier didn’t scream or cry out, he merely tried to stand up, only to fall back to the pile of bones. He looked down at his ruined leg. He could see the bone sticking out from one side. Oddly, he couldn’t feel it at all. Shock and adrenaline, he supposed.
Light shined in from the chamber above, and in the pale glow, Xavier could see Eugene laying among the bones across the chamber. He wasn’t moving. Crawling over to the older boy, Xavier flipped him over to examine his wounds.
With the movement, Eugene came awake and screamed his lungs out. Xavier supposed that Eugene didn’t have as good of a system as he did for handling critical shock. Eugene had what looked like a femur, or at least the broken end of one, embedded in his side.
Xavier cursed under his breath, grabbed one of the skulls, and threw it against the sandstone wall. The pit was perhaps twenty feet deep and shaped like a teardrop. He had read about such chambers in Anasazi culture. Called a kiva, it was usually a place reserved for religious ceremonies.
Looking to the opening of the pit, where they had fallen from, Xavier saw Reyna looking down at them. He screamed, “Go get help! We’re both hurt pretty bad.”
But his sister merely stared at him. He matched her gaze, and in her eyes, he saw her working it all out. They hadn’t told anyone where they would be that day. There was no way that either Xavier or Eugene would be able to pull themselves out from pit. They were totally reliant on her.
In the split second when he saw her realize this, his beloved sister Reyna smiled and then turned and walked away.
81
John Canyon knew that there was nothing he could do for his son. He knew that because he had been standing there asking that very question for the past few moments. He had ran the scenarios in his head. Duct tape was tough stuff, and the grenade had been thoroughly wrapped. His only hope of getting it off Tobias’s face in time would’ve been to perhaps slice it with a knife, and then grab it and throw it. Trying to pull it off would have been working against all of those little fibers of the tape and its glue. He probably could have slipped his fingers underneath and ripped it off the boy’s head, but he doubted that he could do it within the three to five seconds he would have before the grenade detonated. He knew that no matter what he did, those little glue fibers would always beat him in the race. There
was strength in numbers, and the numbers were against him.
Not to mention, that was only the grenade on Toby’s face. He was almost certain that Frank had hold of another behind the boy’s back.
So John Canyon did the only thing that he could think to do when he saw his son coming at him and the release mechanism of the grenade falling away. He didn’t bother trying to help the boy, instead he dove for cover.
John Canyon, war veteran and leader of his own small crime syndicate, fell to the ground and shielded his head with his arms, hoping to survive the blast, if for no other reason than to avenge his son’s unavoidable demise.
Eruptions of gunfire had followed the second that Frank was clear of his hostage, and the shots continued now.
But after six seconds, Canyon still hadn’t heard the detonation of a grenade. He looked up to see Tobias fighting with his restraints and coughing, the grenades still taped in place on his mouth and back. The frag grenade was apparently a dud, and the other spewed smoke.
Then the explosion came.
82
Marcus knew what was coming, but there was no real way to prepare for it. The moment that Frank made his move, chaos overtook the small encampment. No one seemed to know what to do or where to aim their guns for a split second. Several of Canyon’s men who were standing close, opened fire on Frank as he dove away, but Marcus knew that none of them would be quick enough.
And, at the moment, he was only concerned about the cartel thug standing behind him pointing a Mac-10 submachine gun at his back. After Frank sprang into action, Marcus waited a few seconds keeping his hands raised and his shoulders hunched in a nonthreatening way. He wanted to make sure that the cartel thug’s attention had been drawn away before he made his own move.
Seeing the proper reaction in his periphery, Marcus spun on his captor. Grabbing the Mac-10 by the long black suppressor threaded over its barrel and then, using leverage and a forearm to snap the wrist, Marcus pulled the weapon away from the cartel henchman, who seemed to be barely over the age of eighteen. Although, it seemed the older Marcus became, the younger everyone else looked. He swung the submachine gun like a club, smashing the metal into the side of young man’s face. Gunfire was erupting all around them now, and Marcus knew that he only had a few seconds before Frank detonated the C-4.