Chapter Text
Charger nodded when the mixture in the test tube darkened. Pure enough. As expected. I shook hands with the Colombian, a moustachioed man with an athletic build. It was all part of the routine. A seal to the deal. Another successful shipment. So far, anyway.
Climbing into the van, bricks of white in tow, I drove back to the warehouse, fingers drumming to a beat I barely registered, eyes switching from rearview to dashboard in an intermittent pattern.
‘You have it?’ Camila droned, the speaker phone lending a static glitch to her voice.
‘Yeah. Driving back now. I’m almost there.’
‘Good.’
The line abruptly died. It vaguely reminded me of a flatline, the silence an electric beeeep.
A cluster of men stood ready to unload as I pulled up. Leaving them to it, I marched through Camila’s concrete den with its impromptu cages cordoning off mules from pros. Even in captivity, there was a hierarchy. The drugged women lying only half-conscious on moth-eaten mattresses, with cool LED lights that did nothing to ease the darkness flickering over them, were a mere blur in my peripheries. Camila’s drawl echoed off the grim walls of her designated office.
‘An accident? . . . Are you hurt?’ she asked with a voice drier than tumbleweed. From her tone, stale and monotonous, I knew she was talking to Epifanio. That, and the tinny squeak that I came to learn belonged to him on the other end, hardly befitting a man of his status.
‘You’re looking for a girl? She doesn’t, by any chance, happen to be connected to this accident you say you’ve been in, does she?’
Seating myself before the desk, I lit a Marlboro, trying not to look overly interested. I wasn’t. So it wasn’t all that hard.
‘I’ll make some enquiries. And in the meantime’—and here her lips, coated in a thick vermillion lipstick that didn’t dare bleed over the sharp boundaries defining them, curled into a snarl that only half passed as a smirk, exposing her bared white teeth—‘get better soon, my love.’ The word love came out strangely. As if it had been chomped and chewed, ground and mushed into a coagulated clot, before being spat out like poison.
She cut the phone on her husband much the same way as she cut the phone on me before beginning to explain, responding to my raised eyebrows which had a habit of questioning her. ‘Epifanio’s been in a car accident, and by the grace of God,’ she said, sarcasm honing the sharp edge in her voice, ‘he only sustained minor injuries.’
‘What about this girl?’
‘I dunno who she is. But Epifanio seems keen to find her. Probably one of his young putas.’ But that wasn’t it, and we both knew it. I didn’t care to push the subject and made only a dim connection to it when Camila received another call later that night about some girl who’d stumbled astray, right onto her mule route. Like a praying mantis with a bee in its line of sight, Camila held onto her new prisoner, demanding she be bought to her. A stroke of bad luck. But that’s the way of the world. Gazelles are slain, and the lioness eats; the strong prey on the weak.
‘Get to cutting the load,’ I told Charger before heading out, calling it a day. ‘And do it fast.’
‘On it.’
Turning the key in the ignition and running a hand over my face to rub some of the sleep from my eyes, I caught a glimpse of her in my rearview mirror before pulling out of the lot outside the warehouse. She dangled off Tonto’s shoulder, a limp arm and a thick mane swinging like a pendulum. He carried her inside as I drove home.
Kim wasn’t there. She had texted me a few hours earlier saying she’d be out with her friend Cara. It was a lie; I knew that. And I knew who he was. Some wealthy businessman from Saudi Arabia whom she’d taken a liking to. One of them glib, slippery sorts. Or so he seemed. After guilting me into spending more time with her, she’d introduced me to her posse at a nightclub. It was an interesting study into how the other half lived. Kim and her girlfriends weren’t averse to having a line or two, just to loosen up. Only on a night out. It wasn’t for me to object. Or to partake.
Dripped in designer, a pair of men joined our party. ‘Friends,’ Kim said as she made introductions. I would’ve believed her if they hadn’t been so obvious. Between her twisting and twirling and whirling and swirling a lock of her red hair around her finger in a never-ending spiral and him staring through her dress in a way that told me he’d seen her naked, they left no doubt. Kim, latching onto me as if letting go meant sudden death, jutted out her hips and chest in a primal way only women were capable of, accentuating her figure into something of an hourglass. Her game plan was unclear. In the end, I believed she wanted me to know. So I’d be scared. Scared of how easy it’d be for her to leave me.
I was already asleep when she came back, the chiming lilt of her keys breaking into my subconscious. In a similar state of somnolence, I felt her getting into bed and whispering, ‘Goodnight, Jimmy’. I grunted something in reply.
Spilled on the filthy floor behind the chain-link fence were dark curls. I never looked directly at them, intent on monitoring the mules who prepared their deliveries. The usual blurred image in my peripheral field of view was different, altered by the new girl. It was a minute change. Almost unnoticeable. Except it was the very minuteness of the change that forced me to zero in, a blip on my radar. Like sonar, I decreased the range, zooming in on her hair.
She moved, sitting up at first to take in her view, her future. Maybe that realisation was what made her go to Tonto, probably begging for freedom. For mercy. For—
The grating clang sent an icy shock bolting through me. All heads in the vicinity turned to watch the new girl crumpled on the floor after being struck hard by the butt of Tonto’s rifle. ‘Damn you bitch! Don’t mess up my shit!’ said Mina, her drugs collateral damage to the girl’s fall.
People here were harsh. Harsher than necessary. But women on her side of the fence weren’t given concessions. They got knocked down, used and discarded. She was new; she didn’t know yet. But she’d soon learn the lay of the land, the unwritten rules.
Shaking my head, I called for Aveline, leading her to an inner room where the balloons were set.
She had tried to run, the new girl. There was something pitiable about that. Outnumbered, outsized, overpowered; she had to know she wasn’t getting far. Still, I couldn’t blame her for trying. People could be surprisingly brave. Particularly in the face of mortality. There was no respect in this life, not even for the dead. Especially not for the dead. Watching men shovel around in a dead girl’s bowels couldn’t have been pretty. Anyway, the tenacity doesn’t last long. Some may fight it longer than others, but they all end up in the same place. Resigned.
Right now, she wasn’t backing down. Two of Camila’s men fought to bend her over a table as Charger prepared the syringe that held the sedative.
Even as I faced her head-on, she was blurred. Her screams were far off. Far away. Whatever was happening couldn’t involve me, even though I stood there looking. If I didn’t see, I wasn’t there. If I didn’t see, I wasn’t responsible. All her kicking and pulling, tugging and struggling, only tightened the mens’ grip on her, like quicksand. Camila would have her way. In here, there was only one way.
‘Wait!’
I heard that, resoundingly clear.
‘I can be more for you. I’ll deliver the drugs.’
Stupid. It was stupid. But she was desperate. And maybe she wanted to die, a kamikaze mission straight to her boyfriend. Anything better than the life Camila threatened her with.
More desperate than her was Camila. How many more girls were we to lose for this one delivery?
‘Don’t worry about her. Better her than the girl you spent months training.’
Aveline had been good, and whether Camila realised it or not, her death was a loss. She was reliable; clients’ trusted her; she had kept the girls’ morales up. (She had a kid.)
Despite having had a good working relationship, we had never been particularly fond of each other. When the future was inevitably bleak, Aveline’s steadfast and constant positivity, naive and senseless, irked me. As I washed her blood off my hands, it only annoyed me more. Angered me, even. I couldn’t have said exactly why.
‘I don’t care about her. I care about getting those drugs to Han.’
We’d already lost two bags.
Was this how Japanese soldiers felt, I thought, as they locked their comrades inside the cockpit of a torpedo plane? Aveline and Carmen and Salina had all swallowed these same baggies. And I had supervised each time. Just as I supervised her. Teresa Mendoza.
The plan was flawed, set up to fail. I snapped a picture of her. ‘You’re gonna need a passport,’ I said. And what did it matter that she was wearing the same clothes or that she was sporting the same cut on her lip? We were never going to make it as far as the TSA agent.
Death was inevitable. This was how she was going to end. Flooring the car, I swerved through daytime congestion. Any minute now, a bag would burst—quite possibly multiple bags. Into her bloodstream, never reaching Han. A significant loss for Camila. This was the last chance, but it would fail because the bags would burst, Teresa would die. My tires screeched as they laboured around the bend.
‘You’re religious? That’s a laugh.’
Really didn’t seem like an appropriate attitude for someone about to meet Death. ‘I’m not religious.’ So don’t expect me to make a prayer to God for your soul when it departs, journeying back to Him.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Teresa.’
‘Teresa what?’
‘Garcia.’
‘Address.’
What the fuck does it matter?
‘2414 um—’
‘7714 Elms Avenue. Seventy-seven.’
Sloppy and irresponsible. ‘Study the passport.’ A slip like that would fuck us up, make the TSA agent take a harder look at that fucking picture, make him clock that we were up to no fucking good. It would waste time, and before they could even arrest us, the balloons would burst. She’d be long gone, and so would Han. So when we got to the airport—if we got to the airport—
‘What’s your name?’
‘Teresa. Garcia.’
‘Address?’
‘Address!’
‘7714 Elms Avenue.’
—she needed to have the details down. I wasn’t going to have made it all that way just to be fucked on a technicality, on her bad fucking memory, on her reckless, unprepared, inexperienced—
‘You know driving like a pendejo’s not gonna help, right?’
—ungratefulness. My driving was what was going to get her to Han before the balloons burst. My driving was what was going to keep her alive. She didn’t need to like it. This wasn’t about her. ‘I get there. This is how we do it.’
Fifteen minutes. If I kept at this pace, we would make the airport in eight. Seven minutes was pushing it, but it could be enough to get the boarding passes, get past security, get to the storage closet; optimistically, we could—
‘We’re never gonna make it.’ I never was one for optimism. It was over. That was it. She was going to die.
The road was blocked. The diversion would take another five minutes. Five minutes we didn’t have.
‘We are gonna make it.’
‘You’ve got ten minutes.’ Not enough time. Nowhere near enough. They were going to burst. She was going to die. There was nothing I could do.
‘Listen to me,’ I said, trying to be reasonable, needing her to understand that this wasn’t up to her, it wasn’t about her, it was about those balloons, about getting them out before they burst. ‘You’re not gonna have time.’ What was it that she didn’t understand? What was it that she was trying to prove?
‘I am not gonna throw it up!’
She had to, ‘I’ll make you,’ or else she’d die, and I’d have to dig six feet deep, pile her on top of Salina and Carmen and Aveline. There was no comfort in my not having had a choice because I had hired the dodgy fucking chemist. I’m not—I can’t—‘I am not having that again.’
But she was stubborn. Worse than that, she was determined. It wasn’t about suicide, going out prematurely for romance’s sake. It wasn’t about weakness. Back at the warehouse awaited a fate that she’d rather die than accept. Her pertinacity forced me to put my car in gear and drive.
‘She did it.’ I seated myself across from Camila, lighting a Marlboro. Maybe it was a stroke of luck. But that wouldn’t be fair (not that fairness meant much on this side of life). In the back of the taxicab after the delivery, as I stole a glance, trying to make her out, I had realised something different about her. It was the same difference that had singled her out to me in the warehouse as she’d slept among a clutter of other women. It was a difference that I couldn’t define or describe. But whatever it was had me on alert, so that I could almost hear the beep beep beep.
And as obscure as she was, it was also plain to see that she was war-bitten, had been right in the mouth of it. The dust and dirt had settled into the fibres of the flannel that hung off her when she’d first arrived. There was something destructive about her, following her, a storm in her wake. She was someone who would fight for her will and her way. Rebellion emanated from her like a perfume.
‘You know this Mendoza girl? Keep an eye on her. I think she might be more useful than I thought.’
Survival wasn’t all it was cut out to be, it seemed. With Camila’s special attention on her, she would need to step in line.