Saint Death - John Milton #3 (7 page)

“I moved to Juárez from Guadalajara for a job,” she said. “It was in one of the
maquiladoras
, on the banks of the river. Making electrical components for an American corporation. Fans for computers. Heat sinks and capacitors. I started work there when I was fourteen years old. A year ago. They paid me fifty-five dollars a week, and I sent all of it back to my mother and father. Occasionally, I would keep a dollar or two so that I could go out with my friends––soda, something to eat. It was hard work. Very hard. Long hours, no air conditioning and so it got hot even by nine or ten in the morning, complicated pieces to put together, sometimes the parts would be sharp and when you got tired––and you
always
got tired––then they would cut your fingers. I worked from seven in the morning until eight at night. Everything was monitored: how fast you were working, the time you spent on your lunch, the time you spent in the bathroom. They would dock your pay if they thought you were taking too long. None of us liked the job but it was money, better money than I could get anywhere else, and so I knew I had to work hard to make sure they didn’t replace me.

“It wasn’t just the work itself, though. There were problems with the bosses––there are more women than men in the factories, and they think it is alright for them to hit on us, and that we should be flattered by it, give them what they want. The bosses have cars and the women never do. Some girls go with the bosses so that they can get rides to work. It’s safer than the busses. I never did that.”

“They hit on you?”

“Of course.”

“But you were fourteen.”

“You think they care about that?” Delores smiled a bitter smile. “I was old enough.” She sipped at the glass of diet Coke that Caterina had bought for her. “They have those busses, the old American ones, the yellow and black ones they use to take their children to school. They were hot and smelly and they broke down all the time, but it was better than walking and safer, too, once the girls started to disappear. I had a place in Lomas de Poleo––you know it?”

“I do.” It was shanty of dwellings spread in high desert, a few miles west of Juárez. Caterina had been there plenty with the
Voces sin Echo.

“It was just a bed, sharing with six other girls who worked in the same
maquiladora
as I did. The bus picked us up at six in the morning and took us up to the river, then, when we were finished at eight or nine, then they would take us back again.”

Caterina’s pen flashed across her pad. She looked at the recorder, checking that it was working properly. “What happened to you?”

“This was a Friday. The other girls were going out but I was tired and I had no money and so I told them I would go home. The bus usually dropped us off in Anapra. The place I was staying was a mile from there, down an unlit dirt track, and it was dark that night, lots of clouds and no moon, darker than it usually was. I was always nervous, and there were usually six of us, but I was on my own and it was worse. I got off the bus and watched it drive up the hill and then walked quickly. There was a car on the same side of the street as me. I remember the lights were on and the engine was still running. I crossed to the other side of the street to avoid it, but before I could get there a man came up from behind me, put his hand over my mouth and dragged me into the car. He was much stronger than I am. There was nothing I could do.”

“Where did they take you?”

“There is a bar in Altavista with a very cheap hotel behind it where the men take the women that they have paid for. They took me there. They put me in a room, tied my hands and my feet and left me on the bed. There was another girl there, too, on the other bed. She had been taken the night before, I think. She was tied down, like me. There was blood. Her eyes were open but they did not focus on anything. She just stared at the ceiling. I tried to speak to her but she did not respond. I tried again but it was no use––she would not speak, let alone tell me her name or where she was from or what had happened to her. So I screamed and screamed until my throat was dry but no-one came. I could hear the music from the bar, and then, when that was quiet, I could hear noises from the other rooms that made me want to be quiet. There were other girls, I think. I never saw any of them, but I heard them. I must have been there for two or three hours before he came in.”

“Just one?”

“Yes. I don’t know if it was the same one who took me. I can remember him and yet
not
remember him, if you know what I mean. He was nothing special, by which I mean there was nothing about him that you would find particularly memorable. Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. Normal looking. Normal clothes. He reminded me of the father of a girl I went to school with when I was younger. He was a nice man, the father of my friend. I hoped that maybe this man would be nice, too, or at least not as bad as I had expected. But he was not like him at all. He was not nice.”

“You don’t have to tell me what happened.”

But she did. She drew a breath and explained, looking down at the table all the time. She was a little vague, relying on euphemism, but Caterina was able to complete the details that she left out. Delores’ bravery filled her with fury. She gripped her pen tighter and tighter until her knuckles were pale against the tanned skin on the back of her right hand. A fourteen year old girl. Fourteen. She vowed, for the hundredth time, the thousandth, that she would expose the men who were responsible for this. She did not care about her own safety. The only thing that mattered was that they were shamed and punished. Now that she had her blog, and the thousands of readers who came to read about the disintegration of Juárez, now she was not just another protester. She had influence and power. People paid attention when she wrote things. This would be the biggest story yet.

Femicide.

The City of Lost Girls.

She would make them listen and things would be done.

“How did you get away?”

“He untied my hands while he––you know––and then he did not tie them again when he went to use the bathroom. I suppose he was confident in himself, and he had made it plain that they would kill me if I tried to run. I knew that my prayers had been answered then and that I had been given a chance to escape, but, at first, I did not think that my body would allow me to take advantage of it. It was as if all of the strength in my legs had been taken away. I think it was because I was frightened of what they would do to me if they caught me. I know that is not rational, and I know that they would have killed me if I had stayed––I knew about the missing girls, of course, like everyone does––but despite that it was as much as I could do to take my clothes and get off the bed.”

“But you did.”

“Eventually, yes. I tried to get the other girl to get up too, but she told me to leave her alone. It was the first thing she had said to me all that time. She looked at me as if I had done something terribly wrong. She was still tied, too, and I am not sure I would have been able to free her, but it would not have mattered––she did not want to leave. I opened the door––he had not locked it––and I ran. I ran as fast as I could. I ran all the way to the Avenue Azucenas and I found a policeman. I did not know if I could trust him but I had no other choice. I was lucky. He was a good man. One of the few. He took me to the police station, away from there.”

“Do you know his name?”

“The policeman? Yes––it was Plato. I think his first name was Jesus.”

“And the man in the hotel?”

“I do not know his real name. But he liked to talk, all the time he would talk to me and the other girl, and this one time, just before I escaped, he told me about the things that he did for the cartels. He said his father was an important man in El Frontera and that he was a killer for them, a
sicario
, but not just any
sicario
––he said that he was the best, the most dangerous man in all of Juárez. He said that he had killed a thousand men and that, because he was so dangerous, the men who worked with him had given him a name. ‘Santa Muerte.’”

Caterina wrote that down in her notebook, underlining it six times.

Santa Muerte.

Holy Death.

Saint Death.

14.

“SO, OLD MAN––you going to stay in Juárez?”

Plato looked at Alameda and then at Sanchez. They had been goofing around all evening––mostly at Plato’s expense, about how it felt to be so old––and this felt like the first proper, serious question. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “The girls are settled here, they got their friends, they’re in a decent school. The little one’s just been born, do I want to put him through the hassle of moving? There’s another one on the way. The wife was born here, her old man’s in a home half a mile from the house.”

“Come on, man,” Sanchez said. “Seriously?”

And Plato admitted to himself then that he had already decided. Ciudad Juárez was no place to bring up a family. Forty years ago, when he was coming up, even twenty years ago when he was starting to do well in the police, maybe he could’ve made a case that things would have been alright. But now? No, he couldn’t say that. He’d seen too much. He had investigated eleven killings himself this month: the man in the Ford Galaxy who was gunned down at a stop sign; three beaten and tortured municipal cops found in the park; a man who was executed, shot in the head; six narcos shot to pieces in the
barrio
by the army. In the early days, at the start, he had kept a list in a book, hidden it in the shed at the bottom of the garden. They called it Murder City for a reason. It took him two months to learn and give up.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe?” Alameda tweaked the end of his long moustache. “You ask me, Jesus, you’d be out of your mind if you stay here. Think what it’ll be like when your girls are all grown. Or Jesus Jr, you want him hanging out on the corners when he gets a little hair on his chin? I’m telling you, man, as soon as I got my pension I’m getting the family together and we are out of here, as far away as we can.”

“Me too,” Sanchez said. “I’ve got family in New Mexico.”

“Yeah, I guess we will move,” Plato admitted. “I fancy the coast. Down south, maybe.”

“Get to use that boat you’re wasting all your time on.”

“That did cross my mind.”

Sanchez got up. “I’m gonna drain the lizard.”

Alameda got up, too, indicating the three empty glasses. “Another?”

He watched Alameda and Sanchez as they made their way across the restaurant, Alameda heading to the bar and Sanchez for the rest room. They had chosen La Case del Mole tonight. It was a decent enough joint; the food was a little better than average, the beer was reasonably priced and plenty strong enough and the owner––a fat little gringo from El Paso––owed the police a favour and so there would always be a hefty markdown on the bill at the end of the night.

He relaxed in his chair, stretching out his legs so that the ache in his muscles might ease a little. He was getting old, no point hiding it. It had been a long day, too, and, if those two had their way, it would be a long night. He thought of his wife and the chaos of bedtime, trying to get the two girls to behave while she struggled to get the baby to settle, and then feeding them, and then tidying the house, and, for a moment, he felt guilty. He should get home; there were chores to be done, there were always chores, and it wasn’t fair to live it up here with the boys and leave her to do everything herself. But then he caught himself; there wouldn’t be many more chances to do this, to knock off after a shift and have a beer to wind down, maybe stop at a taco stand and shoot the breeze. He would keep in touch with his old colleagues, that was for sure, but it would be different when he was a civilian. He should enjoy himself. Emelia didn’t mind. And she’d given him a pass.

It was almost nine and, as he waited for the busboy to clear the plates away so they could get down to the serious drinking, he idly played with his empty glass and looked out into the parking lot outside. Darkness was falling, the sodium oranges and reds slowly darkening, and the big overhead lights were on. A nice new SUV rolled in, an Audi Q5, the same model that he had had his eye on for a while, the one he knew he probably couldn’t afford. He took in the details: silver-coloured, El Paso plates, premium trim, nearly a hundred grand if you bought it new. The truck stopped, not in a bay but right out in front of the restaurant, and Plato sat up a little in his chair. The engine was still running––he could see the smoke trailing out of the exhaust––and the doors on both sides slid open, four men getting out, too dark and too far away for him to see their faces well enough to remember them. There was something about the way they moved that he had seen before: not running but not walking either, quick, purposeful. He didn’t even notice that he had stopped trailing his finger around the rim of the beer glass, that his hand had cautiously gone to his hip, that his thumb and forefinger were fretting with the clip on the holstered Glock.

Plato heard a woman’s voice protesting, saying “no, no,” and then the crisp thud of a punch and something falling to the floor. The men were into the restaurant now, all four of them, fanning out around the room, each of them with something metallic in their hands. Plato had seen enough firearms in his time to pick them all out: two of them had machine pistols, Uzis or Mac-10s, another had a semi-automatic Desert Eagle, and the last one, keeping watch at the door, had an AK-47. Plato had unfastened the clip now, his hand settling around the butt of the Glock, the handgun cold and final in the palm of his hot hand. He looked around, knowing that there were fractions of seconds before the shooting started, looking for Alameda or Sanchez or anyone else who might be able to back him up but Sanchez was still in the john and Alameda had his back to him, facing the bar. The other diners, those that had seen the newcomers and recognised what was about to go down, they were looking away, terrified, frozen to their chairs and praying that it wasn’t them.

Twenty feet away to Plato’s left, a fifth man rose from his seat. He recognised him: his name was Machichi. He was a mouthy braggart, early twenties, with oily brown shoulder-length hair and a high-cheekboned Apache face. Two yellow, snaggled buck teeth protruded from beneath a scraggly moustache and an equally scrubby goatee. Machichi had a small Saturday night special in his hand, and he pointed to the table a couple away to his left. Plato knew what was playing out: Machichi was the tail-man, his job was to ID the targets so the others could do the shooting. They were
sicarios
: cartel killers, murderers for El Patrón. But their targets didn’t look like narcos. It was just a table of three: two young women and a man. One of the women––pretty, with long dark hair––saw Machichi and his revolver, shouted “no”, and dragged the other woman away from the table, away from the
sicarios
.