Rosarito Beach (18 page)

J
essica came to in a small, windowless room with bare concrete walls. The only furniture in the room was a bed; there was a mattress on the bed, but no sheets or blankets. Her watch, her cell phone, and her shoes had been taken from her. She had a headache and her mouth was very dry.

She was still wearing her school clothes—the pink polo shirt and knee-length khaki shorts she'd worn to school. She didn't think they'd done anything to her. Yet.

She didn't understand why they'd kidnapped her. The guys who snatched her had been young, in their late teens or early twenties, with shaved heads and lots of tats; they looked like gangbangers, and Jessica initially thought that they were going to rape her. But as soon as they got her into the van, a woman who was older than the men, maybe thirty, gave her an injection while the gangsters held her still. Then she woke up in the windowless room, which she suspected was in the basement of some building.

She didn't think they'd kidnapped her for ransom. Kay wasn't rich; she worked for the government. Jessica wondered if they'd mistaken her for the daughter of some rich kid who went to her school. Another possibility occurred to her, one that made more sense than kidnapping her for money: Kay was a cop, and maybe this was somebody's way of getting back at her for someone she'd arrested.

No, this wasn't about money, and she didn't think it was about revenge. She thought it more likely that this was about sex. She'd read about young women in foreign countries being kidnapped and sold as sex slaves and turned into prostitutes. It happened all the time in places like Asia and South America and Mexico. She'd seen a movie a couple years earlier called
Taken
,
in which Liam Neeson's daughter in the movie, a girl about her age, is kidnapped and sold for an enormous price to some pervert because she's a virgin. Jessica was still a virgin. But how would they know that? Had they done some kind of exam on her while she was unconscious? The thought made her want to throw up.

The fact that no one had worn masks really bothered her, too, neither the guys who grabbed her nor the woman who gave her the injection. They obviously didn't care that she'd seen their faces—and that meant that either they were going to kill her or send her someplace where they were sure no one would ever find her.

She started to cry.

Half an hour later, the door opened and she moved into a corner, her back up against the wall. There was nothing in the room to use for a weapon, but she was going to fight them with every ounce of strength she had.

The guy who opened the door was her worst nightmare. He was about forty, Hispanic, a huge gross guy with a beer belly, greasy hair hanging down to his shoulders, and a week's worth of black beard. Behind him was a younger guy, in his twenties. He was short and wiry, a weaselly little guy, also Hispanic. He had dark hair tied into a ponytail, a sharp nose, and a stupid little strip of hair under his lower lip.

She might be able to fight off the little guy—the Weasel—but the big one was like a bear and weighed well over two hundred pounds. This was not the way she'd ever expected to lose her virginity.

Jessica knew several girls her age who had already had sex, but she didn't feel ready for sex just yet. And now, knowing how Kay had gotten pregnant at fifteen, she felt even less ready. But she'd always figured that when she did have sex for the first time, it would be with a nice guy, someone a little older than her and someone she really liked, even if she wasn't in love with him, and it would occur in some romantic setting and not in the backseat of a car. What she had never imagined was losing her virginity by being raped by two men like this.

The men didn't approach her, however. They stood in the doorway, and the big one rattled off a bunch of words in Spanish. Kay spoke Spanish like she'd been raised in Mexico City, and Jessica was taking Spanish in school at Kay's insistence. Kay said if you lived in California, speaking Spanish made sense, particularly when it came to finding a job. But she couldn't follow the big guy; he was talking too fast.

Seeing she didn't understand, the big one turned to the Weasel and said, “Carlos,” and the little one said, “My cousin asked if you are thirsty. Do you want some water?”

Hell, yes, she wanted some water. Her mouth was bone dry, probably from the drug they shot into her. But just like the men who kidnapped her not wearing masks, it bothered her that these two weren't wearing masks and that the big one had used the other one's name.

“Well?” Carlos said. “Do you want water or not?”

“Why am I here?” Jessica said. “Why did you kidnap me?”

“That will be explained to you later,” he said.

“Yes,” Jessica said, “I want some water.” Then she added, “Please.”

Carlos turned and left the room. The big one continued to look at her, his eyes showing nothing. He wasn't leering at her, nothing creepy like that; he was just staring at her in a dull sort of way, and Jessica got the impression he wasn't too bright. A moment later, Carlos returned and handed her a bottle of water.

“You can scream if you want,” he said. “No one will hear you. If you need something, pound on the door. We'll feel the vibrations. But don't be a pest, or I'll hurt you.”

And Jessica knew—even if she couldn't explain how she knew—that Carlos would enjoy hurting her. He might enjoy hurting her even more than having sex with her.

He closed the door, and she heard the lock being turned—and she was alone again to wonder what was going to happen to her.

—

J
essica drank the entire bottle of water and, half an hour later, wished she hadn't; now she needed to pee. She waited another ten minutes, then gave up and rapped on the door, softly at first, then harder, and Carlos finally opened the door.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.

“Come,” he said, and stepped aside so she could get by him. He stunk from some kind of cheap cologne. “Down the hall,” he said, and pointed.

She stepped out of the room and saw she was in a narrow corridor with concrete walls and overhead fluorescent lights and several closed doors along the corridor. She took a few more steps and came to an open door, the bathroom. There was a toilet and a small sink, and she was surprised to see they were clean. She started to close the door after she entered the bathroom, but Carlos said, “No. You must leave the door open.”

“I'm not going to pee with you watching me,” she said.

He shrugged. “Then go back to your room.”

This couldn't be happening to her. She wasn't going to let this guy watch her pee. She'd pee on the floor of her room rather than allow that. She walked back to her room—her cell—and she heard Carlos laughing as he locked the door.

She didn't pee on the floor; she didn't want to have to live with the mess and the smell. She simply tried not to think about peeing, but she didn't know how long that was going to work. She tried to think of other things, pleasant things, good memories from the past. She tried to remember what her mother had looked like before the cancer had eaten her alive; her mother hadn't been pretty—not like Kay—but she had the kindest, sweetest face. She remembered a trip they all took to Yellowstone and how her father, who was the smartest man she knew, couldn't figure out how to pitch the tent and had to ask some guy camping next to them for help. But it didn't work. The only things she could think of were all the awful things that might happen to her.

Five years earlier she'd had a perfect life: good parents who loved her and protected her, a nice house, a nice school. Then it was almost as if God woke up one day and said
Let's see how this kid does when things aren't so nice.
Her father dying, her mother getting laid off, the move to Cleveland, her mother dying. And now she was living with a woman who may have been her biological mother but who didn't really want anything to do with her. Her family—her real family—had never been churchgoers, and Jessica had always felt that it was hypocritical to pray only when you were in trouble. But she'd never been in this kind of trouble before; what could she do now but pray?

—

T
he door opened and both of them were there again, the big, gross one and Carlos. What did they want now? Were they going to rape her now?

“Come,” Carlos said. “Señor Perez wants you.”

Perez? Was he the one in charge? she wondered; Carlos had called him Señor. And what did he mean when he said Perez
wanted
her? Jessica didn't move.

The big one cursed in Spanish and stepped toward her, and she came off the bed swinging. She hit him in the left eye with her right fist. He cursed, grabbed her arm before she could hit him again, then got a one-handed grip on the nape of her neck, the way you'd grab a puppy, and dragged her out of the room, her bare feet skidding on the concrete floor. The big one was fat, but he was incredibly strong.

He took her down the hallway, past the bathroom she refused to use, and into another room, where there was a man sitting in a chair in front of a small table. On the table was a laptop and behind the table was a second chair. The Bear forced her to sit in the vacant chair and then held her in place by pushing down on her shoulders.

The man sitting across the table from her was in his thirties, clean-shaven, short hair, also Hispanic. There was something military about him. Maybe because he had a light green shirt with those little button-down flaps on the shoulders like epaulets. This must be Perez. And where Carlos and the Bear looked like they might be laborers, this guy looked like management.

In English, with only a slight Spanish accent, Perez said, “Sit there and be quiet or I'll slap the shit out of you. In a couple of minutes you're going to have a Skype conversation with your mother.”

For five minutes they sat looking at each other, the man smoking, flicking the ashes onto the floor, his eyes glancing frequently at the computer screen.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Jessica finally said. Her bladder felt like it was going to burst.

“Why didn't you go earlier?” he said.

Pointing at Carlos, she said, “Because he said he had to watch me go.”

“He does. Those are his orders. We have to make sure you don't do something to harm yourself. He's not going to do anything to you, and as soon as we talk to your mother, you can go to the toilet. If you're too modest to pee in front of him, piss your pants. I don't care.”

She'd just learned something really important: They needed her alive and uninjured—at least for the moment.

Then Jessica heard a man's voice, coming from the computer, say, “Are you familiar with Skype?”—and Perez turned the laptop so Jessica could see the screen. The time shown in the upper right-hand corner of the screen said it was six-fifteen p.m. She wondered if that was Pacific Standard Time; if it was, she'd been kidnapped about three hours before.

When Perez turned the laptop toward her, the Bear, keeping his left hand on her shoulder to keep her in the chair, pulled out a big black pistol and placed the muzzle of the gun against the right side of her head. Oh, Jesus, were they going to execute her? She thought they needed her alive.

The laptop screen flickered and she could see Kay. She was sitting in the living room of their house in San Diego. Then she heard: “Say something to your daughter, Agent Hamilton, so you'll know the transmission is live and that you're not looking at a recorded image.”

“Jessica, have they hurt you?” Kay said.

“Oh, God, Kay, help me.”

“Where are you, Jessica?”

“I don't know. Some guys threw me into a van when I got off the bus. I don't know where I am. I don't know what they want. Kay, what do they
want
with me?”

Then the screen went dark and Kay was gone.

“What do you want with me?” Jessica asked Perez, struggling not to cry. She wasn't going to let these people see her cry.

“We want your mother to do something for us, and if she wants you back, she will. If she's successful, you'll be set free tomorrow. If she fails or refuses to cooperate . . . well, there's no need to burden you with what will happen next.” To Carlos he said in English, “Take her back to her room. Bring her some food, no forks or spoons. And let her go to the bathroom, and don't be a creep about it.”

In the bathroom, with Carlos staring at her, she pulled down her shorts as little as possible, giving him the barest glimpse of her thighs. She was embarrassed to hear her urine tinkling into the toilet, and he could tell she was embarrassed and he smiled. She finished urinating, pulled up her shorts, didn't bother to wash her hands, and Carlos grasped her upper arm to lead her back to her room. She noticed again that he wasn't much taller than she was and he didn't seem very strong; his hands were small. He said something to her in Spanish, something that he must have thought was funny, because he laughed. Then he locked the door.

She thought she might be able to take Carlos if she had the chance. After her dad died, and before her mom got breast cancer, her mom insisted they take a self-defense class together. Jessica didn't know if her mom was feeling vulnerable or just wanted to do something the two of them could do together. The main thing they were taught in the class was that if you couldn't just run away screaming your head off, then strike fast and hard and someplace where your attacker would feel a lot of pain: gouge his eyes, smash his nose, kick him in the nuts. Jessica had never had the opportunity to use what she'd been taught, but she figured she could do it if she had to. She was fast, she was pretty strong for her size, and the biggest thing she had going for her was that Carlos wasn't that big. The other guy, however, the Bear—she'd never stand a chance against him. But if it was just her against Carlos . . .