Border Crossings: A Catherine James Thriller
Read Border Crossings: A Catherine James Thriller Online
Authors: Michael L. Weems
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers
Border Crossings:
A Catherine James Thriller
Michael Weems
Kindle
Edition 11.22.12
Copyright Michael Weems 2010-2012
All rights reserved. No part of this material may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Thank you to
Heather Wren for helping edit.
“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.”
–Bess Myerson
Table of Contents
T
he afternoon lay quiet except for the crunch of dirt beneath tires on an old worn out trail. A white and green Ford Explorer bounced along the dirt road, kicking up the desert floor and scattering it to the wind. In the passenger seat a young man’s hazel eyes peered out from under the shadow of his green ball cap towards the searing sun. “It's awful hot,” he said. It was more a premonition than a comment on the weather.
In the driver seat sat a squat man, brown-skinned with a wispy mustache that flickered with the air blowing in through the vents.
He raced along the road with eerie calm for someone so consistently close to a cataclysmic crash at any second, skipping and sliding the SUV around each bend like a seasoned drift racer. He glanced down at the temperature gauge on the dashboard which read 94 degrees. It could be well over 150 degrees in a confined metal space, an oversized oven. “Yeah,” he agreed, “they might already be dead.” He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a well-worn toothpick and placed it between his teeth as he continued slipping along. The other said nothing, only watched the desert pass them by.
In front of them, Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at an elevation of 8,749 ft, rose up in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
Before them lay the dirt road designated for 4x4 vehicles only, and somewhere out in the canyon region sat an abandoned metal trailer which had six young women locked inside and left for dead.
As they passed a campground sign the ranger in the passenger seat pulled the crudely drawn map from his shirt pocket, a fax they’d received not
10 minutes ago. He matched up the line drawn on the map with a trail he saw ahead. “There,” he pointed, "that’s it.” The SUV made a sharp turn that sent him sloshing against the door while the driver barely shifted his weight. They turned on an offshoot where a sign that read “No Vehicles Beyond This Point” sat crooked on an old post. Nearby, a Gila monster sat flicking its tongue on a rock, curiously watching the great green and white beast roar past him.
They followed a trail along McKittrick Canyon just south of the New Mexico border. There lay the only natural source of water in the park in the form of a small creek on the Eastern side of the massif.
After about a mile and a half they came to a ridge they followed until it ducked down into another miniature canyon.
There, they saw the small pull-behind trailer, old and discolored, not much bigger than the discount economy size available at any local moving truck rental facility. The sun was glinting off the less worn parts of its metallic exterior and rust was eating at its joints. The SUV rolled to a halt, its catalytic converter crackling as though desperate for breath after the race it’d just run. The two rangers exited quickly, yet apprehensively. They’d found a dead hiker several months back and both had learned it took some roots under your feet when greeting death out in the desert. The combination of sight and smell the heat could render human remains in just a short time could easily bowl over the unprepared.
And death’s handiwork there was.
Before they even approached the trailer they saw their first victim. A man’s body lay stretched out on the ground, blood soaking his chest and iridescent green-bellied flies buzzing the newly dead flesh. The passenger approached but didn’t have to go far. “Oh, yeah, this one’s gone,” he announced, seeing the man’s open eyes staring unnaturally at the blazing sun, a few flies licking the wetness of his pupils.
The driver took his toothpick out of his mouth and tucked it away.
“Damn,” he muttered to himself. It wasn’t a good sign for the rest of them.
He headed to the back of the trailer, but there was a massive padlock securing the door.
“Hey!” he called in Spanish, “anyone in there?” He rapped on the side of the trailer but heard nothing. Then he put his hand on the trailer door and was nearly burned by the heat.
Chinga madre!
h
e cursed. “It's too late,” he told the other, “it’s like a hot grill.”
H
is thoughts went to dark places, imagining bodies inside the trailer littering the floor like remnants of the holocaust ovens, charred grotesquely like a cannibal’s Memorial Day weekend barbecue celebration. He turned and headed back to the SUV to call it in. As he did the other ranger strolled to the trailer and palmed the padlock, feeling its weight and heat.
“God, can you imagine?” he asked. “What a horrible way to go.
" As he spoke he thought he heard a faint clunk from within the trailer. Then, from a small hole in the rust near the bottom, a finger poked out. It was painted in crimson from its tip down to where it disappeared within the crevice, and as it poked out the rusty edges of metal cut against it like tiny teeth. The ranger noticed that some of what he thought had been rust around the hole was instead dried blood, someone’s efforts to expand the tiny little opening with their fingers. Then a voice, if it could be called such, called out weakly.
“Hey!” he yelled excitedly
, “hey, they’re still alive! I've got a finger over here.” He called to the people inside, “Hold on, we’re going to get you out!” He bent down quickly and touched the finger. It immediately curved and tried to grip him and he heard the faint sounds of someone trying to talk, though he could not make out the words. The voice was a whisper, raspy and desperate. “I think maybe there’s some bolt cutters in the truck,” he told his partner.
“No, bolt cutters won't work. Lock’s too thick.” The driver was now doing his best to run to the truck in an odd sort of gait from a hip that’d been a bit off most all his life, although he’d never bothered to get a medical opinion on the matter.
The other stayed holding to the finger and tried his best to say something helpful, “We’re going to get you out, just hold on.”
The driver returned from the Explorer with a shotgun. Besides buckshot, they had a box of deer slugs in the glove box, which he loaded. He walked back towards the lock with a determined grimace, pushing the shuttle of the gun to place with its distinctive clicking.
“You think that’s a good idea?” asked the other.
He shrugged. “Better move out of the way.” In a loud voice he called out to those inside the trailer in Spanish, “Get back away from the door! I’m going to shoot the lock.” There was no response, but the finger retreated and he heard the faint sound of movement. He angled his shotgun down in such a way that it would only catch the lock and the very right edge of the door. Then he pulled the trigger and the shotgun let off a blast, which resounded off the rocks around them. In the distance the Gila monster retreated to a shadowy crevice. The lock thudded in its place but the ring of the loop unclasped, freeing the latch. He put down the shotgun and grabbed the handle of the doors, which was also burning hot, and swung them open.
A wave of heat poured out as though cracking open a broiler, followed by the sickening stench of urine, vomit, and skin that had begun to burn slowly against the metal.
The ranger with the shotgun held his arm up to his nose in an effort to block the odor. His younger peer came around his side and his heart froze with what he saw. “Christ.”
Inside the trailer were six young women, all lying next to each other.
Their clothes had been stripped off in an apparent effort to cool themselves and spread out on the floor of the trailer in an attempt to provide some protection from the surface heat. The rangers could see some of them not only had heat blisters on their arms and faces, but burn marks on their arms from prolonged exposure to the metal. The walls of the trailer were covered in dings and dents and along the bottom edges were tiny pinpricks of light where rust had eaten through the metal leaving small holes, many of which were now spotted with bits of blood. They had struggled against their prison before succumbing to the heat. The inside of the trailer looked like a trap in which the prey had flung itself against the walls over and over, beating itself with every effort of escape.
Two were undoubtedly dead, their faces sunken in and eyes staring forward in similar fashion as the corpse on the ground outside . . . the death stare looking beyond the mortal world.
Three others lay completely motionless and the rangers didn’t know if they were alive or dead. The sixth and final, the only one conscious, peered at the rangers, her nude body withered and tinted with a greenish discoloration, drained of an unnatural amount of fluid.
Her skin had the appearance of an old woman, her body the gaunt and lethargic bend of a withered
, dry reed before it breaks. Her arms were wrapped around one of the other girls. Her tortured hands, swollen and splayed awkwardly revealing dozens of cuts, rested on the other’s motionless chest. Her cracked and bleeding lips quivered as she tried to say something.
“
Water,” she pleaded in her native tongue. The cooler outside air brushed against her face and she held her head up to its breeze as her eyes rolled back and she lost consciousness.
He sat in the parked car staring at the photograph in his hand, his right thumb circling the face. He’d been this way for several minutes now. Finally, he tucked it inside his shirt pocket and picked the gun up off the passenger seat. He opened the door and began walking down the darkened street, the gun held in his hand, tucked away in his sport coat pocket. He turned the corner and proceeded a few more blocks toward the neon sign. There in front of its red glow he waited in shadow.
The young men inside ordered another round, a pile of shot glasses already stacked in a small pyramid on the bar. A couple in the corner watched them apprehensively until one of the men noticed them looking on, “You got a problem,
puta
?” he asked the man. The onlooker quickly looked away. “That’s what I thought." He smiled at the girl, “Hey,
chica
? Why don’t you drop that pussy and come hang out with some real men?”
The couple quickly got up and left, leaving money on the table for their drinks with plenty of change to spare. The other men
laughed at them.
“Later,
puta,
” one called after them.
“I’ll see you around,
chica
,” said the first man to the departing woman. The man outside watched the couple leave from his shadowy alcove. “Let’s get out of this shithole,” said the first man to the rest. “We can go to Maricel’s place and have her call up some friends.”
Another finished the last shot on the table, licking the salted rim and tossing back the tequila. “Let’s do it,” he said, adding the glass to the top of the pyramid. They all shuffled out without paying. The bartender knew better than to offer them a bill. They came in once or twice a week drinking his establishment dry and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. It was simply another cost of doing business in the shadier parts of Chetumal, Mexico.
They swaggered out into the night with hearty laughs, getting into a metallic gray Chrysler 300, which stuck out like a sore thumb on the impoverished street. Its over-sized chrome wheels reflected the dilapidated storefronts condescendingly.
As the driver put the key in the ignition, one of the others pointed out a man walking towards the car on the sidewalk. He stood some feet away but under the open sky’s light they could see something was distinctly off about the man. He was staring at the trio with a look of profound hatred. He wasn’t a man of intimidating size or build, but his gaze was so cold it was enough to falter the three men’s bravado. As he came along the car, he stopped walking, turned towards them slightly, and proceeded to simply stand and stare at them.
“Who the fuck is this guy?” one of them asked. The vehicle started, but still they remained, staring back at the man as he stared at them. They had been momentarily quieted by his unnerving demeanor but the moment passed quickly. They were not the type to be easily intimidated, particularly when there were three of them and one of anyone else. The driver hit the power window, ready to ask the brazen man if he had a death wish looking to be granted, but what happened next happened quickly and the driver had just enough time to realize his initial fear had been the best idea his rarely conversed with common sense had offered up in a long while. He wasn’t afforded much time to regret not heeding it.
The man’s hand appeared from the sport
coat, a gun in tow with his index finger already in place on the trigger for introductions. The driver opened his mouth to yell
Oh, shit,
but the quicker bullet rendered him constipated as the word
shit
never made it out.
The man on the sidewalk calmly began firing. First was the driver, whose head was halfway out of the window and whose lips were just in the
O
shape preparing for his last exclamation, when
POP!
His forehead caved in like Gallagher was in town, and the bullet made a messy exit to the back seat where it found the rear passenger’s third rib. Before the other two had time to flee or reach for guns of their own they had stashed in interesting places, the man was already firing at them, his finger pulling the trigger, releasing, and pulling again in a steady rhythm. He fired ten rounds, seven of which hit their mark of flesh, and those that were astray were not much so and would have found their mark but for the flailing inside the Chrysler.
Seven seconds later the men lay motionless, the car’s interior redecorated in blood-splattered windows in a piece Pollack aficionados would have admired. The man stood staring in disgust with the gun still raised, his hand shaking, but only slightly. He looked around to see who else was on the street and may have seen the massacre, but there was no one. The few people in the bar had heard the shots
, but didn’t dare come out to see what had happened. The bartender was inside, crouched down behind his counter, quickly dialing for the police with a 20-year old shotgun on his lap. A man in a nearby apartment had heard the shots and ran to close his window blinds, not even peeking to see who was outside.
The man on the sidewalk lowered his weapon and looked down at the gun in his hand, pondering its meaning in this world.
He’d been worried about how he’d feel afterward . . . about whether or not he could live with himself; becoming something so similar to that which he claimed foe. Much to his relief, he was feeling fine with it for the moment. There was no remorse. Perhaps that’d come tomorrow, perhaps not. But as he stood there looking upon the death he’d brought to them, he just felt right. Hell, who was he kidding? As he turned around and disappeared back into the shadows he had to admit killing them had felt pretty damn good.