Read She Is Risen (She Is Risen: The Gun Control Case Studies) Online
Authors: Travis Adams Irish
“Doctor Wellsly went on a fishing trip a few years
ago and has not been found.” Maxwell declares with a smirk. “They’re still
trying to wrap up the investigation. That’s why we started watching her in the
first place.”
“We need contact info for the husband and son…”
Lorabell says with a short pause as Maxwell begins to shake his head. “Yes,” she
states with bold reassurance, “we are going to go there!”
Large drops of tropical rain slam down
repeatedly on the clay Spanish tiles of Miguel Horatio’s estate in Costa Rica. The rain has been coming down for only ten minutes this evening, and large
puddles are already starting to form on the grounds below. The day is almost
finished, and the sun is moving lower as if to be extinguished by the waters of
The Pacific Ocean. At the southwest corner of the grounds, a solitary
watchtower rises up from the earth over seventy-five feet. There are three
guards on the top floor of the tower, each monitoring different aspects of the
business. An internal, steel staircase leads down to the ground floor below
where two other guards are sleeping in cots on the concrete foundation, waiting
for the next shift to begin. They are resting peacefully, barely moving
despite the constant rain and thunder.
At the top of the control tower, one guard
watches a radar screen, monitors the weather, and listens to radio alerts
coming from the Costa Rican Government. There is a desk to his immediate right
where another man is watching video feeds from over twenty-four cameras throughout
the home and grounds. On the far left, the eldest guard is monitoring
distribution traffic on the cartel’s secure radio band. As he looks out at the
deluge pouring down on the estate, the eldest guard solemnly shakes his head,
not remembering a fiercer storm during his lifetime.
Inside the estate, Miguel Horatio is too busy
handling an issue with a business associate to care about the rain. He
projects a frozen stare toward Jose Lecroix, his deep blue eyes indulging a
swath of hatred not seen since The Holocaust. His graying hair is slicked back
except for a few tufts out of place on the right side of his head. The two men
are meeting in the game room; Jose is seated in one of the hand-carved, blue
leather chairs, and Miguel is standing just a few feet away. The room is
ominous with the sounds of the rain outside, and the only lighting shines from
blue and yellow neon signs at the bar, along with a bright beam shone from the
reading lamp that is next to Jose on the small, round end table.
“So you haven’t told anyone about our drop off
location?” Miguel asks with stern conviction as he struts fiercely to the bar,
leaning over with his muscular frame to grab a beer. As he reaches across to
the fridge on the opposite side, his black shirt pulls tight against the bar,
exposing a silver, Desert Eagle tucked down the back of his dark gray pants.
“Would you like a cerveza?” Miguel asks quickly, still leaning over the bar.
“No, gracias, Señor Horatio.” Jose replies
immediately, putting up his hands with the palms facing out as he sees the
Desert Eagle. “And I haven’t told anyone about the drop off location.”
“Oh, you don’t need to answer that question;”
Miguel declares boldly, turning away from the bar with a bottle of Corona Extra
in his right hand, “that was a rhetorical question. I already know that you
told someone about the drop off tonight, and they paid you twelve million
Colóns for that information…”
A spike of fear drives through Jose from his
toes to his chest as though the lightning outside just pierced his flesh. He sits
back in the leather, designer chair, sweating a bit in his faded blue jeans and
white button-down dress shirt. Jose looks down at his small belly, trying to
decide if he should run or attempt to ‘lie’ his way out of this. As an older
cartel member, he has seen some atrocious punishments for those who committed
far less. He runs his tongue over the back of his teeth as beads of sweat roll
out from beneath his short cotton-like hair down to his weathered, dark walnut
colored skin.
“You’ve been helping me for a long time, Jose,
but do you know what I’ve learned over the years?” Miguel inquires with a
half-smile. “I’ve learned that the young guys get it; they ARE afraid to fuck
with me. But you older guys… You’re the ones that grow a pair of big, apricot balls,
and treat my business like it’s the running of the bulls. El Toreador, Señor?”
“Miguel, I don’t know who told you that-“ Jose
begins to formulate a lie, but is cut off by the cartel chief.
“No… No, let’s not do that.” Miguel says
gently, holding up his beer. “How about a toast..?” The cartel chief looks
around for a moment, as if scripted in a bad soap opera. “Where is my bottle
opener?”
Jose jumps up from his seat and begins to run
towards the door, but Miguel easily catches up to him with his muscular legs.
The cartel chief grabs the older man by the throat and lowers him down to the
floor on his back. Then he stands tall and places his right boot on the man’s
throat, pressing down firmly until he begins to choke.
“I’ve never actually put my boot in a man’s
throat.” Miguel states with his wicked, dark eyes locked on Jose’s face. “It
feels very good… refreshing. Like a cold beer.”
“No! No! No!” Jose screams as Miguel kneels down
at his side and grips his forehead.
Once he has a firm grip on Jose’s head, Miguel
puts his right knee on his chest to prevent him from moving. His eyes fill
with a murky satisfaction as he raises the beer bottle over his right shoulder,
holding it by the neck. The cartel chief waits for Jose to start pleading with
him, and then swings the beer with tremendous force down at his mouth, hitting
his teeth with the broadside of the bottle.
Jose writhes with incredulous suffering on the
dark hardwood flooring of the game room, screaming as many have done at the
hands of the brutal cartel chief. After about ninety seconds of hellish
punishment, Miguel opens the older man’s mouth to see how many teeth he has
left. Jose’s lips and cheeks are now a swollen mass, and the inside of his
mouth is filled with saliva and blood from the beating. The cartel chief is
excited to see a pile of broken teeth still sitting at the left side of his
mouth, doused in blood.
“It looks like you have three left on the bottom
and four left on the top, Señor.” Miguel reports with satisfaction as if he is
doing Jose a favor.
Jose turns on his side and spits out the broken
teeth, a dark dribble of blood flowing from his lips to the floor.
“By the way,” Miguel admits with dry
satisfaction, “I knew they paid you for the drop off location… because it was
my money they used to pay you. I don’t like thieves, Jose, but my days of
killing experienced men are coming to an end. It is too hard to train someone
with your type of loyalty. If you wanted that money, you could have asked me
and we may have worked something out.”
Miguel stops for a minute deep in thought. He
steps over to the small, round table and uses the ledge to pry the cap off of
his beer bottle, slamming the top with the palm of his left hand. Miguel’s
beer immediately shoots foam all over his shirt as the cap is released causing
him to giggle a bit. The cartel chief smiles down at Jose, embracing a more
positive attitude. He holds up the somewhat bloody beer bottle in a toast to
his employee, and then drinks it down with voracious thirst.
“You know what I’m going to do for you?” Miguel
asks, slamming the beer bottle down on the small wooden table as he steps over
to where Jose is lying on the floor in anguish. “I’m going to let you live…
Surprised? Let me explain. Someone recently came to me with a story about a
woman who threatened to hurt my family if I don’t stop hurting her people…
Now, we can’t do business… cannot be number one without violence; it is just
our way of life… But I don’t need to be the face of that violence. So let me
explain your new position with the cartel. You will become el jefe, and we
will let everyone know that you are responsible for our group. When a man’s
wife is raped, he will know that Jose was responsible. When a child’s mother
is run over during a smuggling run, they will know that Jose was responsible.
When a man is beaten to death and left to be eaten alive by the rats, then will
know that… Jose was in charge!”
Miguel looks on with pride, realizing that a
death sentence would be like stroking Jose’s neck with a feather compared to
making him responsible for over 10,000 murders a year.
“Smile, Jose, you are the new face of the
cartel.” Miguel evokes with a grin of disturbed pleasure. “I said SMILE!”
Despite his agony, nausea, and the feeling as
though he will pass out from the pain, Jose manages to weakly smile from the
floor toward his boss. Miguel breaks out into a storm of belly laughter,
clapping his hands together slowly three times.
A lightning bolt hits the grounds of the estate
as if it were a javelin cast down by monstrous, Olympic Athlete. Miguel
shudders and cowers a bit as the thunder creaks its way through the earth,
shattering the air with mighty electric force. He holds his breath, waiting
for the earth to stop shaking and give him peace again, but the earth does not
stop shaking. The symphony of tectonic grinding beneath the home goes far
beyond lightning strikes, causing glasses to fall off the bar, and a power
outage at the estate. Miguel’s heart is now pumping vigorously as the result
of a childhood phobia; lightning and thunder have always plagued him with anxiety.
Underneath the estate, the earth shifts in a very deliberate manner, a slow,
churning movement, pushing upward from the furious interior beneath the
foundation.
The priestess steps out of the jungle wearing a
black, ceremonial robe that descends all the way to her feet. Large drops of
rain have soaked into the fabric, showing off her powerful body and ample
breasts. She fixes her green eyes on the outer wall of The Horatio Estate,
walking with conviction toward the fifteen-foot concrete structure. Her face
is painted white with waterproof clay, and her eyes are coated with deep black
circles of grease. This ghastly display is softened a bit by her lips that are
painted red with ten black vertical stitches drawn on them. There are two dark
spots on her nose, resembling the holes leftover on a skull where the skin is
missing after the body has died.
The priestess smiles with universal confidence
under her mask of death when she approaches the outer wall. She holds out her right
hand with the palm hovering just inches from the face of the thick concrete.
Her strength is felt and acknowledged by the earth, commanding the concrete to
erode; it blows away with the ferocious winds of the storm and leaves a three-foot
gap in the wall. She enters the grounds like a deathly monarch, enjoying the
rain on her face, but maintaining a deified stare. After walking ten feet, the
priestess puts her hand out toward the second wall, and again, the concrete
erodes away in a three-foot section as if having been struck by the blast wave
of a nuclear weapon.
When she steps through the opening in the
concrete, her green eyes focus on the rounded balcony just twenty feet above
her head. The priestess looks to her left and sees a trio of Rottweilers watching
her with dignified affection from their small shelter near the home. All three
dogs recognize her as their mother, and while they yearn for her embrace, they
know that she is just as vicious in nature as any other wild animal.
From the watchtower, the eldest guard rubs his
eyes as he looks out at the grounds. A woman in a black robe is standing at
the base of a hill that has recently appeared from out of the earth. The new
formation of sand and rock leads from the grounds up to the nursery; twenty
feet from the yard… Or what was twenty feet off the ground last time he
looked. The man shakes his head from side-to-side in disbelief, trying to
logically explain how a mountain of earth grew out of the ground from the inner
wall to the nursery. He squeezes his eyes tight in confusion as he sees the
woman climbing the mound of freshly formed earth toward the estate. The old
cartel guard recalls the tremors from a few moments ago, and gazes in awe at
the large pathway of broken rocks and dirt. It has the fresh appearance of
something regurgitated by a mountain.
During her ascent up the mound of earth and
rock, the water feels good running under her bare feet. The priestess senses
movement to her left, and looks up at the watchtower where men are pointing at
her and screaming. She closes her eyes, tightening her hands into fists as she
points them toward the earth.
Beneath the watchtower, the foundation shifts
violently upward, and the flimsy structure shudders under the pressure, swaying
slightly in the wind. All three men at the top are thrown to the floor or
against their control panels as the power goes out in the seventy-five-foot
structure. The earth bucks once again, and the tower is stripped from its
foundation, tearing in half as the top portion falls over the wall, with the
security office crashing hard into the jungle outside of the grounds. The two
guards who were sleeping in their cots climb out from the bottom half of the
tower with minor injuries. They stop in the middle of the yard, looking up at
the new mound of earth in wonder, and staring at the priestess with confused
expressions.
The cold jungle rain pounds deftly in sloppy
drips of various sizes, landing heavily on the two guards that just awoke.
They shiver and gaze at the ferocious eyes of the otherworldly being. She
glares at them from behind her death mask, displaying a formidable contempt for
the two men; a lamentation of their service to the cartel.