Deadly Journey (2 page)

Chapter 2

The Long Walk

My assailants
didn’t waste any time dragging me outside after the call terminated. Thoughts
of another trunk ride scared the hell out of me. After walking for five
minutes, with the rough terrain tearing my socks and feet to shreds, the belief
that they were escorting me to my grave hit me. Fear of what might lie ahead
gave way to the idea that I would happily pay for another ride in the trunk.
Somehow, I didn’t think I was going to be that lucky. Not with these punks.

There was something about the fear of death
which made me hope I’d covered all the bases, so as not to end up in hell. It
was no wonder, then, that I attempted to recite the
Valley of Death
psalm in my mind, as the thugs were hardly likely to grant one last wish. I’m
sure it would have given me some comfort if only I could’ve made it past the
first line, but the words eluded me. The walk from the trailer on the rough
terrain seemed to go on forever, made more ominous by the fact that no one
spoke. All I could hear was the sound of their footwear crunching stones
underfoot and a faint, metallic-squeaking noise. I’d remained silent long
enough.

‘Just what the hell do you want from me?
Why am I here?’

‘Shut the fuck up, you’ll find out soon
enough,’ he replied, in unison with what could have been a rifle butt stabbing
me in the small of my back.

A strong breeze whipped up and pressed the
sackcloth over my head to the contours of my face as we trudged along. The
sound of intermittent squealing cut through the night air and grew louder with
every step. It was as if a metal shaft was turning and a bearing needed oiling.
Drawing closer to the sound, it became unbearable, until we stood below the
source of the high-pitched whine and whooshing blades. I imagined we were under
a wind turbine.

My nose twitched at the detection of
petroleum-gas fumes seeping through the sack. A vision of them dousing me and
setting me alight to incinerate my corpse drained the energy from my legs and I
stumbled.

‘This is as far as we go.’

We stopped. My heart stuttered mid-beat,
tightness pulling at my chest. Short-sharp breaths made me dizzy. I took a deep
inhale and slowly exhaled, returning some composure. Then I heard what sounded
like a metal sheet sliding and screeching on the ground. This had to be my
fate. I wasn’t about to beg for mercy. Experience at the hands of trainee thugs
as a child at school had taught me it would only make matters worse and prolong
the torture. All I could hope was they wouldn’t ask me to kneel so I knew it was
coming. Clasping my sweaty fingers behind my back, I braced, bowed my head, and
squeezed my eyes closed.
Is this it?

Hands passed something around me, which
tightened around my waist. Grasping a cord as it brushed my hand, I determined
that it was a rope. To think the cruel bastards were going to lower me into my
grave and bury me alive petrified me. Quaking, I kept my stance rigid, just in
case they decided to give me a whack with a baseball bat as a going-away
present. Feet clunked on metal in front of me, loud at first and then
diminished.

‘Pass him down,’ the voice echoed.

A prod in the back told me to move forward.
My feet shuffled, waiting for the drop, when a tug of the rope digging at my
gut brought me to a halt. A voice called out an order.

‘Turn around.’ It was the voice of the guy
who’d gripped me around my neck at the stakeout.

There was no point in arguing. He hitched
the rope higher up my torso, grasped me in a bear hug, and lifted my feet off
the ground. The guy must have had the stature of a gorilla. But then
remembering the size of his biceps and the strength of the hold around my neck,
I already had him down as a three-hundred pounder and fond of working out. At
his mercy, I slipped through his grip until the rope took my weight. Breathing
was difficult as the rope tightened further under my arms and crushed my chest.
A hand grabbed an ankle and guided my toes onto a step. He pulled each foot off
the rung, one-step at a time. Slowly, I descended the ladder until my feet
touched the ground. I counted twenty steps.

Unless they had a bulldozer, there was no
way this was my resting place. It would have taken forever to fill the hole we
had just descended. Recalling their coded-cell-phone call, maybe, I thought and
prayed, this could be where they were going to hide me before announcing my
kidnapping, rather than putting a bullet in my skull.

Partly out of nerves and in part because of
itching, I twirled the wristwatch on my shackled wrist. The pin in the strap
must have popped out and I felt it slide away. The division had presented the
watch to me after a massive drug bust that earned them extra funding.
Ironically, losing the watch felt as though my past life had just slipped away
and my time in this life had run its course.

The sound of the metal sheet dragging above
gave me the impression that they were covering the hole. A click, and there was
a flood of light. Whoever was still with me pushed me in the small of my back,
until my shins hit an object. He started to bind my legs. Instinct told me to
kick out before he tied the knot, but in my predicament, I would have probably
been kicking empty air. I heard what sounded like a young voice.

‘Kneel down.’

‘Look, whatever you want, I’ll pay,’ I
said.

‘Whatever you have ain’t worth
diddley-squat,’ was his reply, stabbing at my brain.

With a dig in the back, I had to kneel and
he roughly handled me to lie face down. My face pressed against a flat surface.
A smell of old-seasoned wood seeped through the sackcloth. More bonds wrapped
around my body, which left me cocooned like a chrysalis.

He growled, right up close to my ear. ‘Safe
journey, dog breath.’

With a rumble of metal on metal, I moved
forward. My neck snapped and jolted my head as the motion juddered. Damned if I
didn’t think I was on some kind of flatbed cart and travelling through a
tunnel. What would Mary tell the kids, came to mind. Then, what if Mary thought
I’d deserted her and the children? Mary could think I had run off with another
woman, and she’d find another guy without even grieving.

I shuddered. There was no doubt, the
late-night stakeouts could lead her reasoning in that direction. I remembered
my lost shoe and the night vision camera that was set up in the bushes that I’d
left behind. The tripod had fallen over when they grabbed me. I prayed they’d
been too busy to collect them. With luck, Rob my partner, or the relief team
would find them and they’d work out that I’d been kidnapped. Maybe, if I hadn’t
sent Rob out on a scouting expedition to find coffee and something to eat, none
of this would have happened. The whole tunnel trip was turning into a guilt
trip, as the “if only” syndrome started to take hold again. Ifs, buts, and
maybes were driving me insane.
Why did I freeze?

Okay, at the time I was concentrating on
the hooded punk, and tiring at the end of a double shift. I had every reason to
think they were Rob’s footsteps. But they were excuses. I was trained better
than most to fight back. All I could think was that my body had gone into
physical and mental shock. It wasn’t like in training where they’d taught me to
defend an attack from behind. You’re expecting that, and your mind is prepared,
same as when you’re face-to-face with an opponent. I’d been found wanting, with
the damned scene playing back in slow motion and imagining all the moves I
could have made to turn the tables on the lowlifes. There was a possible truth
circling that was harder to swallow. Maybe I’d acted the victim in the same way
I used to set a passive stance with bullies at school, like some dumb nerd. At
least I hadn’t wet my pants this time.

Changing the subject in those circumstances
was difficult, but a ridiculous idea came to the rescue when my ears popped and
I could hear nothing. What if, when my neck snapped, he had shot me and I was
dead. No one ever comes back to tell us if your mind still works through your
spirit after the event. Don’t be so stupid, you could say. I know that’s what I
thought at the time, but trust me, when you can’t feel your body and it’s
blacker than black, it’s an easy deduction to make when you have no point of
reference for where you’re going. It didn’t help when, out of the blackness, I
saw a faint light, which was getting brighter. A flood of light and I began to
laugh.

When the movement stopped, voices jabbered
in Spanish. Grasping hands released me from the flatbed and manhandled me to my
feet. Absurd thoughts that they only spoke Spanish in heaven had me in
uncontrollable fits of giggles and I couldn’t stop snickering. Even a blow to
my head didn’t abate my stupor. The second blow connected squarely on my nose,
and I yelped like a kicked puppy. Staggering, I stumbled and fell.

‘You think this is funny,
gringo
.’

I knew that I was inviting them to do some
serious damage as my groans returned to a snicker. Curling into a ball for
protection, I prayed for the blows to stop. My gut exploded with a searing pain
when what must have been a boot found its way through my defences. Winded, I
gasped and searched for air. I finally took in a desperate lungful of air and I
choked, coughing and spluttering on my own blood.

Somewhere in the daze, my brain seemed to
make a few logical deductions. I worked out that I was stoned, probably from an
infusion of the cannabis fumes and whatever other drugs the bag over my head
had held. But still I kept snickering and whimpering. Numb to any more pain,
the blows kept arriving until my body shut down and my vision faded to black.

Chapter 3

No Way Out

The feel and
taste of grit on my lips, together with the dank smell of urine mingled in the
air and my stomach churned. Somewhere along the journey, I had lost the
blindfold sack, my jacket, shoes, wristwatch, and gun holster. Raising my head,
I rolled around to survey the surroundings. The swollen and gashed bridge of my
nose was visible and beyond that my upper lip. It felt and looked as if I’d had
some kind of foreign object transplanted onto my face, acting like a
projecting-gun turret on a tank as I looked around. The vision stayed with me
at every turn and was annoying as hell. My head exploded with the pain.

Whitewashed walls in the room, no more than
eight feet square, made me squint. Light shone through a barred window high up
on an outside wall. A barred, rusting-metal door faced me. In one corner was a
mattress on the moist and crumbling concrete floor. It didn’t look as though it
could afford much comfort, barely one and a half inches thick and just about
wide enough for the shoulders. It looked like the type that campers use to roll
up and carry on their backpacks. The cuffs were gone, leaving red scuffmarks on
my wrists. Using my hands, I pushed with all the strength I could summon to
raise my aching body to the support of my knees. Looking at where I had lain
revealed a six-inch opening to a drain in the centre of the floor. A cockroach
scurried down the drain. The thought that my face had been partly lying on the
drain, which, from the stench and look of the opening, those imprisoned before
me had used as a toilet, brought an acid taste into my mouth.

There was no light bulb hanging from the
ceiling. Brown spots, low on one of the walls, caught my attention. The pattern
was familiar and unlikely to be a former prisoner’s attempt at surreal art. Pins
jabbing at me surged through my body. Upon closer inspection I found a human
hair congealed in the thickest area of blood splatter.

The urge to call out to my captors my need
to urinate was hard to suppress. The last thing I wanted to do was to hasten my
demise, so I did what others must have done before me and relieved myself over
the drain. The sound of a cockerel crowing drew my attention to the window and
I tried to reach for the sill, but it was too high. What did strike me was how
thin the wall must have been, say five or six inches at the most. Where the
cement had crumbled around the window frame, it exposed a red brick with a
cavity. I’d seen this type of wall construction and bricks before... in Mexico.

The tunnel ride made sense; they must have
shipped me over, or rather under, the border in a drug smuggling tunnel. Why
they would go to such lengths hung heavily on my mind. If I were in the hands
of a drug cartel, chipping a way out through the wall wouldn’t be my only
worry, especially if I didn’t succeed. It wasn’t as though they would need the
money from a ransom. That wasn’t my only concern. Since I was a kidnap victim,
the FBI would take charge of any investigation and I wasn’t sure if that was a
good thing. Not after a recent altercation I had had with one of their senior
agents, dumbass Agent Walters
–
what a dick. That was a
heavy ride and turned nasty on a personal level. It had left me with a sour
taste as far as the FBI was concerned. Their gung-ho attitude had fouled up
many a rescue and the Mexicans wouldn’t give a crap if I died in any rescue
attempt as long as they potted my captors. With over fifty thousand drug-gang
related deaths south of the border, I doubted they would lose any sleep over
adding one more to the statistics.

Negative thoughts were not doing my psyche
any good, and I reckoned I needed to make my own plans if I was ever going to
see Mary and the kids again.

‘Hey...
gringo
.’

The laboured voice seemed imaginary at
first when the heavy Mexican accent called out and echoed in the corridor
outside the cell door. A groan and the voice called again.

‘Hey,
gringo
... You alive?’

It would have been a stupid question to ask
if I was dead, but then how would they know if I didn’t answer?

‘Yeah, just about. Who are you?’

‘Miguel. I heard them drag you in here
during the night. I’m in the next cell. I heard them say you were American.’

‘Where are we?’

There was a pause and I strained to listen
for his reply. His breathing was irregular, interspersed with muffled groans.

‘Mexico. Somewhere near to the border as
far as I can tell. You work for one of the other cartels?’

Somehow, telling him I worked in law
enforcement didn’t compute, so I answered him with a question.

‘Who are these people and what are you
doing here?’

‘Facebook. I’ve been naming names.’ It
sounded as though he was using the cell bars to get to his feet. ‘They must
have paid some tech guy to track me down. I don’t know which gang is holding
us.’

‘Have you figured a way out yet?’

‘Way out? There isn’t a way out. Say your
prayers,
mi amigo
, and wish for a swift end.’

He let out a groan and it sounded as though
he fell.

‘Miguel, you okay?’

‘Quiet in there, you two crap heads, or
it’ll be sooner than you think.’

A tinkling sound on metal followed the
statement. A small in stature, squat-looking guy appeared at my cell door and
rapped a machete on the bars. He had the appearance of a Buddha figure with his
shaven head. It was hard to figure where his chin ended and his chest began,
save for a moustache connected to a goatee beard. Over his shoulder, a strap
held an AK-47. He wore a sweat-stained string vest and jeans, his waist hidden
by a well-fed and -watered potbelly. His face contorted into a growl.

‘Stand back from the door and face the
wall.’

This time, there weren’t any shackles or
blindfolds. If he was to enter and approach, I decided that I would take him
on. Hearing the sound of a bolt sliding and a creak and then the sound of
something skimming on the floor, I prepared mentally for action.

‘Make the best of it, scumbag. There’s no
more today.’

I turned around in time to see a
small-hinged opening at the bottom of the bars close and a tin-foil plate of
food sitting in front of the door. A moment of pleasure from the pleasant aroma
of the food soon turned to disgust when Squat pulled out his dick and urinated
on the food. A hot flush in my cheeks and tension in my clenched fists sent a
tremble though my body that made it difficult to hold back from wanting to
charge over and rip his appendage from his body. He pulled up his zipper,
belched and walked away laughing. His footsteps stopped. I counted ten
footsteps. A door opened and closed, followed by the sound of bolts engaging.

‘Did he give you food?’ Miguel asked.

‘Yeah, but then he pissed on it. Were you
blindfolded when they brought you here?’

‘No, but then I doubt I’ll live to tell the
tale. What about you?’

‘Blindfolded most of the way and possibly
all the way. I was out cold when I arrived here.’

‘Maybe they’re going to let you live. They
haven’t fed me or given me water in twenty-four hours. My fate is sealed. I’m
as good as dead. I know we’re at a hacienda, but I don’t know how many of the
gang is here.’

‘So it’s a farm?’

‘
Si
. There’s a single farmhouse, and
this cell block.’

‘What made you come out and name names?’

‘They murdered my two older brothers and my
sister, and put their heads on spikes in the village centre. She was only ten
years old. My brothers couldn’t pay for the shipment of drugs the police took
from them. Damned
chotas
.’

‘Jesus, shit, why your sister? And why
didn’t the cops arrest your brothers? It could have saved their lives. Anyways,
what’s a
chota
?’

A picture flashed through my mind of my own
daughter and my heart went out to Miguel.

‘Arrest them? You never heard the Mexican
term
chota
for crooked cops? That’s life and the corruption here in the
border towns. Lessons are learned by fear and the strong take. You Americans
should stop and think about that before snorting coke. The dollar bills handed
over fuel their part in the genocide that’s going on down here, when all it
does for them is to give them a moment of pleasure.’

His lengthy sermon deserved applause.

‘Amen to that, brother. I’m on your side.
I’m with you all the way on that score.’

‘My side?’ He laughed. ‘You’re not my
freakin’ brother. You know nothing about my side. I’ve killed more men, women
and children than I can remember for the gangs and the
chota.
How do you
think I could name names?’

My mind turned into maggots. I staggered
against the cell wall before sliding into a haunch on the floor. There I was
feeling sorry for him, and all the time he was no different from the murdering
scum buckets who had taken the lives of his family. His statement defied logic
for a contract killer. I could only think that with his family dead and him
facing death, it was his way of avoiding responsibility for his career choice,
by blaming others. Still, he had a point about the users. I stared at the wall
opposite me. A question burned in my mind, as if someone had branded my brain
with the thought. Just who were these people who were holding me captive, and
why had they kidnapped me?