Storm Killer (3 page)

She heard the two men run up the steps of the front porch and bang on the door. Panicked, she ran passed her grandfather’s body up the stairs toward the sanctuary of her bedroom.

The two men at the door stopped their banging and moved to the front windows behind the porch swing. They used the butt of the pistol of one of the men to break the upper glass pane. He reached in, unlocked the lower window and gingerly entered the home avoiding the broken glass scattered around the window opening.

The last thing she saw was the one man’s left foot come through the window as she reached the stop of the stairs and ran down the hall in the direction of her bedroom.

She moved quickly toward her room when she heard the sounds coming from her mother’s room. She stopped at the door and looked in to see two men holding her mother down on the bed while a third man violated her. She heard her mother grunt each time the man shoved forward. She stood frozen as she watched the scene. The two men holding down her mother’s arms saw her at the same time. One of them released her mother’s arm as he sneered. “You want some of this girlie? Come on in, your next!” The man started moving toward her with that same malevolent sneer.

She turned to run and was grabbed by the man with gun that had entered through the window below. He looked into the room at the scene of the three violent men and one struggling woman and spat at the men as he waved his pistol, “You can have the old lady. Me and my partner are going to take care of little Lolita here.” 

For the first time she really looked at her captors. The one doing all of the talking was a middle-aged, overweight man of Hispanic origin of about forty years of age. His accomplice was a younger, rail-thin, brown curly haired man appearing to be a Caucasian about twenty years old. If the situation had been different, she may have actually thought the younger man was cute. Now, she wished him death.

Fight as she might, the two intruders carried her to her bedroom at the end of the hall and threw her on the bed. The two men quickly trussed her hands behind her back on the bed and placed an old handkerchief in her mouth as a gag.

The older man looked around her room and picked the pillow with the name,
Kim
, embroidered in hot pink thread. “So, is that your name, my little one? Kim?”

The girl simply stared at the man with venom spewing from her eyes.

The man laughed and looked at his young partner. “Larry, let me introduce you to Kim. Kim, this is Larry. Larry is going to get to know you real well over the next few days.” The older man giggled as he saw her eyes move to his young accomplice. “You like him, don’t you? You want to make him happy, don’t you? Just like your mother is making those other three guys happy.” As if to properly punctuate the older man’s last statement, a loud cry of agony came from the other bedroom.    

The younger man held a gun on her and the other began to unbuckle his belt. He chuckled, “Now, my little Kim, lay back and enjoy. Let old Arturo and Larry show you how to be a woman. After we finish with you, if you’re good, we just might let you live. But you see, my little one, I like hurting my conquests if they don’t cooperate. So, I’m afraid you’ll not like some of the pain I plan to put you through if you don’t do what I say.” 

The girl’s eyes showed fire as she shook her head and tried to kick the man speaking to her. The man danced back and away from her arching foot. He smiled evilly, danced in and smacked her face hard with his open hand. He grabbed her hair with his other hand, pulled her head up from the bed, and started smacking her repeatedly. The blows were harder and harder with each smack.  

After that, she remembered very little other than pain. The continuous attacks of the two men were eventually replaced by the attack of the three men who had ravaged her mother. Then her original two captors used her again. The next day and night became a blur of pain, humiliation, and subjugation.

She was tied to her bed and was drifting in and out of awareness. She heard gunshots but paid no attention in her current state. She had left her body to mentally reside somewhere else while these men abused her.

She heard sounds of crashing plates, shouts, and gunfire as she re-entered her body and fell into a deep pain-wracked sleep.

When she awoke she was wrapped in a clean gown under crisp sheets. A woman, dressed in a white uniform, was staring intently at her with a concerned look on her face. “Are you with us, child? No! Don’t try to say anything. Just nod your head. Your jaw is wired shut. It was broken in two places.”

The girl nodded and slowly turned her head to look around the room. The woman picked up the girl’s hand and gently held it while she talked with the girl.

“Before you try to ask, let me tell you what I know. Okay?”

The girl nodded her head silently. She felt pain all over her body and tears began to form in the corners of her eyes.

“You’re in a hospital in Pasadena. The National Guard found you when they took back your neighborhood from the rioters. The brutes hurt you badly. We know you went through hell. Just relax -- it’s all over. The men are dead. Killed by your liberators.”

“I’m a nurse. The name is Betsy. I’ll try to tend your needs until you are well enough to do for yourself. You’ve been here for eight days and have been kept sedated. The doctors decided that you were healed enough to wake up, so we stopped those drugs last night.”

The woman looked uneasy as she continued, “Your mom didn’t make it. She died of her injuries at the house sometime on the day you were captured. I probably shouldn’t have told you that now, but you really needed to know. Her funeral was four days ago. I’m so sorry. I lost my own mother to violence. From a home burglary gone very wrong. ”

The girl turned her head away from the nurse and quietly cried until she could cry no more. Betsy had been in and out of the room many times checking on her, adjusting IV lines, and giving her medications but had never said anything else of a personal nature to her.

The girl began to look forward to Betsy and the other nurses’ visits with the morphine vial. When she received the painkiller, she became calm and serene. These were the only times she felt that way. She almost couldn’t wait for the next dose that would give her that euphoric feeling. 

As Kim slowly mended she could set up and communicate with the nurse and visitors by written note. Her father had visited her several times. He was divorced from her mother for many years and had married a woman in Long Beach. They had a boy two years younger than she that was her half-brother. Her father had sired this son while still married to her mother.

Kim had never held her father or his new wife responsible for the breakup of her family. Her mother, at best of times, had been a shrew. Her mother had relentlessly denigrated her father. It really didn’t surprise Kim when her father announced he was seeking a divorce. Nor did it really surprise her to know that she had a half-brother. Her father had mellowed the last few years of the marriage in a way that always made Kim feel he had another woman. Another woman who treated him like the wonderful person Kim knew her father truly was.     

One day, as Betsy was changing Kim’s bandages, the girl had gotten up her courage to ask questions about her attackers. She wrote her questions out and Betsy answered what she could. She had been shocked to learn that authorities thought the three men still in house when they arrived were all of her attackers.

She wrote a note to Betsy:

But what about the other two men? The ones that first captured me? 

Betsy had gotten the police to come and interview the girl about these men but things were still so chaotic in Los Angeles, and nothing was ever found of these men. Even knowing the first names and having police artist sketches of the two perpetrators weren’t sufficient clues to give the police any leads. The investigation was now a cold case in a box on a shelf in a file room somewhere.

As the girl recovered and learned that the two men had apparently gotten away with their crimes against her, she became resolute in her life’s goal. She would become a police investigator and run down the evil men of the world. Hopefully, someday, she could open that cold case box and solve the mystery of the two men’s identity and bring them to justice for their brutal crimes. She needed experience and skills in detective work first.

As the girl was about to fall asleep in the spare room of her father’s home on the first night of her release from the hospital, she vowed to her self,
I’ll find you someday. You’ll pay for what you did to my mother and me. Until then, I dedicate my life to finding villains like you.
              

5

The two men in business suits slowly walked up hill toward Emperor Maximilian’s castle at the top of the hill in Chapultepec Park. The castle was once the palatial home to the Emperor Maximilian and his wife, Empress Carlota. Now, it was home the National Museum of History.

The park, a well-known tourist attraction, was located in the outskirts of Mexico City. The well-dressed men seemed out of place among all the gaudily clad tourists.

It was obvious that the men were not there as tourists. They looked neither left nor right as they moved up the walkway. They took no notice of the wonderful smells and noises emanating from the street vendors scattered on the sides of the walkway hawking their carts’ delicacies. Nor did the men seem to notice the lunch hour crowd gathered to purchase their mid-day meals from these vendors.

They appeared to be in a heated debate as they weaved their way through the crowd. Their waving arms and hand gestures showed a serious disagreement was underway.

They were about the same height but the older, dark-skinned, gray-haired man was a good seventy pounds heavier than the younger dark-haired man. It was obvious from his trim build and light step that the younger man belonged to a gym and attended on a regular basis. The older man walked in a fast, but ponderous flat-footed step in his attempt to keep pace with the younger man.

“If we must, we will have our operatives destroy the damned thing. We’ll end its operation almost as soon as it starts,” the older man emphatically spoke to his companion.

“No, sir. We should only disable the beast. It may prove useful sometime in the future, once the technology is proven,” the younger, lighter-skinned man replied in a heated voice.

“Proven technology? Proven how? That thing will never be allowed to threaten our shores! We stopped them in the nineteen fifties and we will stop them now!” the older man spat.

“Please talk with your associates in the other countries before committing to its destruction,” pled the younger man, as he grabbed the older man by the arm, stopping him in the middle of the walkway.

The older man pulled away in apparent disdain and leveled a stare at the younger man.

“What do you think you’re doing, Antonio? How dare you touch my person! You take far too many liberties for an assistant!” the older man roared at the now petrified younger man.

As soon as he had touched his employer’s arm, he knew he had crossed a line. While he was a close advisor to his employer, he was neither a friend nor family member.

“Pardon me, sir. I was overcome with emotion and forgot my place,” Antonio apologized as he slightly bowed to his employer, Mexico’s Federal Senator Carlos Gutierrez of the Caribbean coast Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Quintana Roo, on the Yucatan peninsula, contained the resorts of Cozumel and Cancun.

These resort areas were hard hit by hurricanes on a frequent basis. Any experiments that could cause these storms to change, for good or bad, was a high priority for Quintana Roo’s elected representative.

Quintana Roo’s senatorial representative, in the nineteen fifties, had led the charge to have the United States cease hurricane cloud seeding experiments because of the possibilities that the experiment would make the storm worse and that it would strike the Yucatan.

That Quintana Roo senatorial representative was Carlos Gutierrez’s father.

The current Senator Gutierrez was fighting a new political war with the United States over the proposed use of this technology, orbiting in a stationary position over Quintana Roo’s residents’ collective head.

The Senator’s fight was on the public political stage and was coming to head in a requested meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the United States’ use of this technology. But more sinister, was the unspoken private war the Senator had launched involving paid spies and possibly worse, if the technology did, indeed, become operational.

Antonio De La Cruz, the Senator’s personal assistant, was distraught over how this espionage front might play out if and when the political front failed to find a solution.
The Senator is digging himself in deep with the wrong people,
Antonio thought as the offended Senator began walking again.
I’ve got to do something, but what?

6