Torched: A Thriller (10 page)

Here it freaking
was
, her moment of personal clarity, and it all actually made sense. If
this was it for her—if her destiny had included being taken hostage in a
Mexican tomato field all along—then it was time to rail hard against that
future.

What was there
to lose?

She heard the
farmhands behind her, scuffling through the dust, talking quickly in their
native tongue. They were relaxed. What threat was a hobbled, 110-pound woman to
them?

She limped
toward the truck, selling the wounded animal routine even as she waited for her
opportunity. The rifle barrel brushed her back from time to time, hovering
loosely above her right kidney.

The pickup was
close. Twenty-five yards.

Somebody made a
joke and her captors erupted in laughter. Vivian spun to the right, swiveling
her hips even as she jabbed the barrel of the rifle away from her with her left
hand. The driver yipped his surprise and the rifle belched an errant shot.

Smoke obscured
his features for an instant, and Vivian stepped forward and punched him hard in
the throat. She felt his larynx buckle—like crunching a Styrofoam cup—and he
dropped the rifle, his hands clamped to his throat. He keeled over on his side,
tongue lolling as he struggled for air.

Vivian snatched
up the rifle and leveled it at the stunned quartet. The old man, who had tried
to hit her with the car door, studied her with flat, dark eyes. His lips
twisted in a snarl and he pointed to the driver choking to death on the ground.

“Mi
hijo
,”
he pleaded. “Por favor, mi hijo!”

Vivian took a
step back, steadied herself and pulled the trigger. The shot cleared the old
man’s head by a foot, and he and the others hit the ground, screaming in fear.

“The next one
won’t go high!” she shrieked. “Keys! Give me the damned keys to the truck!”

The young one
scrambled over to the driver, who had stopped struggling. He was making a
strange whistling sound, his eyes unfocused. The kid rooted around in his
pockets until he found the keys. Shouting in Spanish, palms raised, he tossed
them at her feet.

Vivian stooped
to pick them up, the rifle steady on the men, before scuttling backward toward
the truck.

The last thing
she saw before climbing up into the passenger side of the truck was the old man
cradling his son there in the dirt. She put the rifle on the seat, slid over
and fired the truck up. Instead of backing up she floored it, screaming down
the road until she found a spot to turn around.

“Gas, Vivian.
Jesus, girl—
think
!”

She sighed with
relief when she saw there was more than half a tank. Her eyes darted to the
rearview, where she saw the scab of a nasty cut forming near her hairline.
Dried blood tracked down the left side of her face, branching over her cheek
like the tributaries of the Rio Grande. When she passed her would-be captors,
they were now standing in the field, watching her exit.

All but one,
that is. The old man, arms at his side, did not look up. His eyes were instead
fixed on his son (
Mi hijo!
), who lay unmoving in the soil.

“Fucking
assholes,” Vivian said, pressing harder on the gas pedal. She blinked back the
tears, then slammed the palm of her hand against the steering wheel.

Perhaps she’d
killed the driver. In fact, she thought she probably had. Her blow had caught
him flush in the Adam’s apple, a lucky shot to be sure.

She turned her
eyes to the rifle, then onto the seat, where the iPad lay silent—broken and
impotent.

She said a quick
prayer and then took a deep breath, trying to clear her conscious. If she’d
killed him, she would come to terms with it another day. For now, though, she
had more pressing matters.

She also had
more advantages than she’d ever thought possible, just an hour before. She had
a truck and a gun, though she had no idea how many bullets were left in the
rifle. She had a plausible excuse for keeping the iPad switched off, which gave
her the element of surprise—at least for as long as she could remember her
route.

And she had time
to get to Miguel.

The truck was no
great prize, but it moved along at sixty miles an hour without any problems.

She pushed
forward, ignoring the knee injury and the sting of the road rash as she surged
into a destiny of her own creation.

EIGHTEEN

Miguel had never
felt so utterly devoid of hope. Even when he’d left the firm, amidst all of
those emotions of anger and doubt, he’d always maintained a sense of confidence
that the future would be better.

Now, looking
down at his mangled legs, he felt nothing of the sort. The one called Chaco had
rubbed a numbing agent over his thighs and calves, but it hadn’t been enough.
There were enough toxins in his flesh and bloodstream that his entire body had
become a cinder. Sweat tracked down his temples. He could feel it trickling
down his ribcage.

His heart
strained in his chest as his system struggled with the ant bites. The insects
had
covered
his lower body, and he couldn’t bear the sight of his legs.
They didn’t even seem like they belonged to him. Instead, it looked like
somebody had stuffed a pair of tanned sausage casings with dozens of golf
balls. Enormous welts pocked the landscape of his body, weeping blood and puss
in equal amounts.

Chaco had used a
whisk broom to brush the ants off when the screaming had become unbearable, but
it was too late. Miguel couldn’t picture a future in which he would ever walk
again.

“We had to stop
it, Terri. Look—he might still die anyway. You’re taking this…” Chaco said, and
Miguel turned to study his captors. They stood in the shade, Chaco using his
hands to underscore his points while Terri stared at the ground, her arms
crossed over her chest in defiance.

“Terri?” he
called. His voice cracked. “Water? Please.”

“Water?” she
parroted. “You want some water, Mike? Okay! Okay, we can do that…”

She left Chaco
standing there, an expression of pure frustration on his face, and marched over
to a rusted spigot attached near the crumbling warehouse. She pumped the handle
until a gusher of water spurted out, then stooped to pick up a discarded paint
can. She slapped it a few times to clear the surface dirt and spiders nesting
inside, then filled it with water.

“Here you go,
Mikey. Drink up. And don’t you dare tell Vivian I never did anything for you.”

Miguel swallowed
thickly.

“What? Not good
enough for you?”

The water was
tinged orange with rust. Dirt, paint flakes and the shriveled exoskeleton of a
scorpion floated on top.

“Fine. I’ll just
toss it out…”

“No! Please!
Please, Terri. Please—I…I’d like some water.”

Terri grinned.
She held the can to his mouth and he drank deeply. It tasted like rust and it
was warm, but he took down as much as he could, gagging a little at the end.

“I like it when
you beg, Mike. Hey, did Mr. Whethers ever come begging to you when the final
foreclosure documents were served on his family home? When he was asked to send
his keys in to the bank? This would have been
before
his daughter found
him hanging from the rafters in the barn.”

Miguel turned
away.

People
had
called. That was the thing—people had called.

He never
understood how they had found his number at Pegasus Funds, but they somehow
managed to. Hell, anything was out there on the internet nowadays. By the time
that their banks had closed every door on them, many had simply gone to the
source—to the firms that bundled the loans and moved them around like shells in
a game of chance, never understanding that there were people’s lives and homes
at stake.

And my, how they
had pleaded with him! A few times, he’d simply hung the phone up on them in
mid-sentence. It was all he could do.

He didn’t
recognize William Whethers’s name, but that didn’t mean the man hadn’t
contacted him.

“He might have,”
Miguel finally replied, his voice little more than a whisper.

Terri’s eyes
narrowed, the smirk vanishing. “What was that like?”

“It was hell.
The very worst part of the job. We never…we weren’t supposed to take those
calls.”

Chaco had drawn
near. He was watching Terri intently.

“Did you know
that Pegasus was about to tank?”

He nodded.

“And so you ran.
Just like my husband did. Just like Vivian. Christ, Mike, don’t people accept
responsibility for their actions anymore?”

“Before I left,
I hear a rumor that my supervisors were going up on federal charges. It had to
do with robo-signing documents, with bait-and-switch deals on interest rates.
I’m not sure what happened to them, Terri, but I knew I couldn’t stand prison.
I know it’s a…it’s a cowardly move on my part, but I had to leave. I had to go
someplace else.”

“Those were
people
,
Mike. Ordinary people with regular loans that were bundled and sold to your
greed factory. They lost everything while you moved to Mexico to play
mysterious American in some tropical village.”

Miguel’s cheeks
colored. “And what am I, Terry? I’m a person, too. And look at you. You’re a
monster, Terri! Him?” he nodded at Chaco. “You should see the way he was
looking at you when you let those ants swarm on me. You’re a monster!

“What about me,
Terry? Aren’t I a person in your eyes?”

Terri bent
forward until their foreheads were almost touching. She could feel the heat
radiating from his skin—a combination of the baking sun and the venom surging
through his veins. “I don’t know yet,” she replied, “but you better pray I come
around to that conclusion, Mikey. You better…”

They were
interrupted by the iPad’s chime.

Terri jogged
over and collected it from her chair. “Vivian? That you?”

“Miguel, it’s
me! I’m coming!” Vivian shouted, ignoring Terri. Despite his condition, Miguel
smiled. Somehow, she’d managed to get away.

“I’m impressed,”
Terri said. “You’re…well, you’re just about here, aren’t you, Vivian? You
covered all that space with plenty of time to spare.”

“Still got eight
miles to go,” Vivian said. “They broke the iPad, Terri. Getting kind of hard to
read this map, but I think I can manage. What…what’s the end game here?”

“I stand by the
things I say, Vivian. I only wanted a word with you. If you make it in time,
then you’ll have your precious Miguel back. And you and I can have a little
chat about loss.”

“What do you
mean ‘if,’ Terri? I’ll be there in less than ten minutes. I only turned this
piece of shit tablet back on to get the GPS back on track.”

“Ten minutes can
be an
eternity
, Vivian. I mean jeez, things can get really hot in just
ten minutes! Ever pre-heat a convection oven? Goodbye for now, dear. We eagerly
await your arrival.”

Vivian began to
protest, but Terri switched off the iPad and let it fall to the ground. That
portion of the game was finished. “Help me, Chaco. We need to get this sun
torch set up.”

He just shook
his head. “No, Terri. I won’t. I told you from the start—I won’t kill a man.
You’ve made your point here, and now it’s time for us to go. Vivian can untie
him, and we can all just go our separate ways.”

Terri’s features
wrinkled in confusion. “No, Chaco! No! Are you saying you…are you done helping
me?”

“Look, Terri,
I’ve already done too much. I’ve already done more than I might be able to live
with, but I did it
for you
. You want to hear something? I could feel
your sorrow in that little johnboat. Sitting across from you on the Rio Grande,
I could feel your sorrow. It was coming off of you in waves. And I wanted to
help you.”

Terri blinked
back the tears. “And you’ve done so much, Chacon. Please…just help me do this
last thing, and then we’ll go. I promise.”

“No,” he said.
He turned and started to walk away. He passed the Beretta, pausing briefly to
drop the keys on the front seat. Before disappearing around the corner of the
warehouse, he turned back to Terri. “You can still live with yourself. If you
leave right now, Terri, you can still have a decent life. Don’t go through with
it.”

“Goodbye,
Chacon. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

His shoulders
slumped and he vanished behind the warehouse. Terri set to work and Chaco
walked away.

He’d covered
about three hundred yards when he heard the first screams.

NINETEEN

Vivian hobbled
over to the metal post and undid the chain. She nosed the pickup across the
barrier before climbing out to reattach it.

Better to fly
under the radar if things got messy.

She took the
dirt road for most of one final mile before cresting a bluff and descending
down into a little valley that was home to about a dozen buildings in various
states of disrepair. From her vantage point at the top of the hill, she could
see the glint of the torch. It blazed in the tropical sun, its light focused on
a writhing figure strapped into a chair.

She saw Terri,
pacing back and forth behind it.

She punched the
accelerator and the truck shot down the road. Terri looked up, then went
running. Vivian was close now—maybe fifty yards—and she saw Terri digging
around in the front seat of a maroon clunker.

When she came
out, she had a pistol in her hand.

The first shot
splintered the windshield on the passenger side. The second plinked the grill;
a geyser of steam and radiator fluid sprinkled down on the windshield.

“Shit!” Vivian
screamed, fighting to keep control of the truck. She skidded around the final
curve and across a cattle guard, and then she was surging across gravel.

There it was.

She creamed the
torch at fifteen miles an hour. The tripod crumpled beneath the tires, the
glass lens arcing high over the truck before shattering in a thousand kernels
of light.

Vivian stood up
on the brakes, but they were spongy. The truck skidded over concrete before
hitting the side of the warehouse with a mighty thud. Vivian grabbed the rifle
and scrambled out of the passenger side before taking a defensive position
behind the front wheel well.

“Miguel!” she
screamed. “Miguel, are you there?”

“I’m here,” he
croaked.

She risked a
glance across the courtyard and her stomach buckled at the sight of him. His
face was impossibly discolored, his legs like columns of mashed potatoes.
Christ, what had they done to him?

“I made it!”
Vivian shouted, ducking down, the rifle clutched to her chest. “Do you hear me,
Terry! I made it past your alligators and your outlaws and these…these crazy
fucking
farmhands! I made it through a hundred miles of fucking
desert
! Honor
your word and let us leave. We’re done, you and me! Do you hear me! We’re done,
Terri!”

The only
response came from Miguel—a moan so low and weak that she didn’t think he had
much time left at all. He was losing it.

“I’m coming out
now!” Vivian said. She stood, the rifle butt in the crux of her armpit. “I’m
walking over to Miguel, Terri.”

Terri just
watched her, the pistol clutched in shaking hands. “Kind of funny, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“This,” Terri
replied with a shoulder shrug. “You and me. We’re stuck out here in a Mexican
standoff.”

Vivian took
small steps toward Miguel. Terri tracked her with the barrel of Chaco’s pistol.

“It doesn’t have
to be that way,” Vivian replied. Her voice was eerily calm, despite the panic
she felt in her heart. “We’re quits, you and me. This thing between us is
done.”

Terri noticed
movement from the corner of her eye. It was Chaco.

“I heard the
gunshots,” he said. “I had to come back for you. That’s the second time I’ve
come back, Terri.”

She turned her
attention to him, the barrel of the gun sagging ten inches. Vivian thought
about snapping off a shot.

Instead, she
bent and placed the rifle on the concrete.

Terri turned
back to her, the suspicion clear in her expression.

“Nothing either
one of us do will bring back what we had—what we
lost
. My husband and my
daughter and that life—they’re gone,” Vivian said. “They’re gone forever.

“I know that
now—I
feel
that now—more than I ever have before. You need to let this
thing between us end, Terri. Let me help Miguel, and let us go.”

Terri’s shoulders
hitched as she sobbed. She wept not for Sheldon, although she would always have
some beautiful memories of their lives together before things had turned to
shit.

No, she wept for
her children, who still cried themselves into a nightly slumber filled with
dreams of dreadful cold and sickening isolation. She cried for her daughter and
her son, and she cried for herself.

She dropped the
pistol. It clattered to the concrete, and she looked at Miguel.

Had she…had she
really
done that
to another human being?

His skin was
black where she had directed the torch. A patch on his left shoulder still
smoked. Blisters and welts covered every bit of exposed skin, and flies buzzed
over the pool of urine that was quickly evaporating near his mutilated feet.

Chaco walked
across the courtyard. He picked up the pistol and put it in his pocket, then
pulled Terri into his arms.

“You got him?”
Chaco said, motioning with his head at Miguel.

Vivian nodded,
limping over to him. She cupped his jaw, saw light in his eyes, and carefully
brushed his blistered lips with her own.

“Vi,” he
whispered. “
Help
…
me
.”

“I promise,
honey, we’ll get you some help.”

She worked at
the restraints.

Terri buried her
face in Chaco’s chest, sobbing. “This is it, right? You two are finished now?”
he called out to Vivian.

“As far as I’m
concerned,” Vivian said. “We’re quits.”

Chaco grasped
Terri’s shoulders. He bent his head to make eye contact. “No more. Right?”

“
No more
,”
she said.

Vivian undid the
final restraint around Miguel’s waist and he slumped out of the chair and fell
face first on the pavement. She knelt and looped his arm over her shoulder. It
was painful, but she helped him stand.

Chaco guided
Terri to the Beretta while Vivian helped Miguel to the pickup truck.

She put the
rifle in the bed of the truck and paused, just for an instant, as Chaco helped
Terri down into the passenger seat.

The sun glinted
on the windshield, obscuring the woman’s features. Still, Vivian raised a hand.
Whether Terri caught the gesture or not, it didn’t matter.

It was merely a
final acknowledgement—a way of saying that they were finished.

Vivian climbed
into the cab. After a few anxious cranks, the engine turned over. She backed
the battered pickup away from the wall and nosed it onto the dirt drive. Miguel
was unconscious in the passenger seat, his blistered face pressed up against
the glass.

The Beretta
filled the rearview, crawling along behind her. She couldn’t see Terri, but she
didn’t need to in order to understand that she never would again.

Quits.

She didn’t so
much as tap the brakes as she pushed the truck through the chain. It snapped
with a twang and she spun the wheel and angled south on the paved road.

The Beretta went
north.