The Dead Women of Juarez (33 page)

“Then you should go away from here.”

Sevilla went to the window. He saw two cars with their headlights on against the gathering darkness. They stopped at the building and disgorged their passengers. He saw one woman among them in a bright dress. She looked like a whore. The men were all in jackets and shirts as if they were headed for a night on the town at restaurants and casinos. They went in through the little door by the boarded window.

“I have to stay,” Sevilla replied at last. “These men… they must be stopped.”

“If you wanted to stop them, you would not be alone. I’m old,
señor
, but I am not blind. You are here to die.”

Rudolfo’s words made Sevilla look away from the street. The ancient man was on his couch again with the deck of cards on the coffee table untouched. As he regarded Rudolfo, the man switched on a lamp and yellow light spilled around the room.

“I’m not here to die,” Sevilla said.

“Aren’t you?”

“No. I’ve come too far with this to die before it’s done.”

More cars came and more still until there was a crowd of them along the curb in front of the building and across the street. Sevilla
saw more women, more prostitutes and some that even from a distance and in the dark he could see were not whores. The acid feeling in his stomach increased again and made the food there like stone.

“These men you seek, they aren’t
narcos
, are they?”

Sevilla took up his notepad. He began to scribble instructions on them, then slowed himself deliberately so his handwriting would be clear; Rudolfo would have to follow them and so they must be legible.

“Who are they?” Rudolfo asked again.

“You don’t want to know what kind of men they are,” Sevilla replied.

Now Sevilla did hear something from the street. He paused and turned his ear to the night and heard it again: the thudding pulsebeat of loud electronic music. Lights shone through the spots and cracks in the corrugated aluminum doors and out of the windows high above. Someone had opened them to let the party noise spill out.

He finished writing and came to Rudolfo on the couch. “Listen to me,” he said. “When I’m gone I want you to wait fifteen minutes and call the number. This number here.”

“My telephone doesn’t work,” said Rudolfo. “They are supposed to repair the lines on Monday.”

Sevilla flinched, and then he went into his pockets. He pressed his phone into the ancient man’s hands. “Here. This is my phone. You know how to use a phone like this?”

“Yes.”

“Good. It also has a clock. Wait fifteen minutes by the clock and call the number. When you are put through, give them my name and then tell them exactly what I’ve written here. Every word.”

“Who am I calling?”

“The Policía Federal,” Sevilla told Rudolfo. “When they come, close your windows and go to your bedroom. There may be gunshots. I don’t want you to be hurt. Stray bullets go far.”

“You are going in there?”

“Yes, I am.”

“What good do you think you can do that the
policía
cannot?”

Sevilla put his notepad in Rudolfo’s lap. He clasped his hands around the ancient man’s, the cell phone clutched between those strong old fingers. “I can do one good thing. Only promise me you will do what I ask. I thank you for everything, but do what I ask now.”

“I will do it.”

“
Gracias, señor. Muchas gracias
.”

He left the apartment and waited long enough to hear Rudolfo put back the chain and lock the door behind him. The stairwell was dimly lit, but it was illuminated enough for Sevilla to check his pistol one last time. He was breathing too quickly and the edges of his vision glowed white. He made himself relax and then he took the stairs.

Out on the street he could better hear the music. It thudded louder and louder as he closed the distance to the building until his heart beat in the same rhythm and his nerves steadied. He did not wish for whisky.

There were bodyguards out on the street. Sevilla thought one of them might have been Ortíz’s man, but he did not want to make sure. He cut across the vacant lot, crouching low with the line of the tall grass, making no sound that the music didn’t cover. He heard a burst of cheering from inside as he passed around the back.

Light poured out the gap in the building’s rear doors. Sevilla pressed his eye close. He saw the Lexus parked close at hand, the trunk up. The heavy bass of the music seemed to push air against his face. There were flashing strobes and somewhere a mirrored light cast a thousand little spots across the gloomy interior of the structure.

The edge of the fighting ring was visible, but Sevilla couldn’t see more, or the great banquet table with its oversized chair fit for a baron. He moved on, circling around to the building’s far side
and then up the rusty steps to the chained side door. No one had disturbed it. Sevilla gathered the links in both hands and set them down gently.

As earlier, the hinges on the door squealed, but it was so loud inside that it swallowed up the noise. Sevilla could not hear his own thoughts, and in a way that was good because he did not want to hear the fresh fear scratching at the back of his mind or the echoing response that would make him shake and piss himself.

He pulled the door shut behind him. He stayed in the dark among the reeking barrels for a long time, half-waiting for someone to throw the interior door open. Light would wash over him and he would be exposed, crouched in a puddle of leaking benzene, blinded and trapped. Bullets would follow and he would be cut down. No one would come.

The interior door remained closed. Sevilla’s eyes got used to the darkness and he saw the bolt cutters waiting there. Though his feet did not want to move, he crept across the room. He put his head to the jamb and eased the door open so slowly it seemed to take hours before the first light came through the crack.

Wider until his head could push through and he could see if anyone waited outside. Wider until he was able to turn sideways and move crablike into the building proper. The men below cheered, but they were not cheering him.

From here he could see the ring fully. He saw naked young men circling each other. Not naked completely, but wearing loincloths that made them look like some kind of Mayan warrior. Their bodies weren’t painted, but each had a colored tassle just above the bicep of the right arm marking them blue or red. There was more red besides.

They fought bare-knuckled and already the skin of their fists was broken and bleeding. The blue fighter’s lower face was painted crimson from a freely oozing nose. He had more blood on his opponent and their faces were welted.

It was not boxing: they used their feet and as Sevilla watched
one kicked the other in the thigh with his shin. He heard the whack of bone on flesh even above the throbbing music. They circled and struck and punched and kicked and grappled and there was no bell because this was bloodsport fought with men instead of animals.

The gentlemen watched from their chairs. A purple cloth was thrown over the rough-hewn banquet table and the top was laden with food and drink. An enormous pile of white powder was at hand.

The whores mingled among the men, touching them out of sight or whispering in ears or sharing bestial kisses that came before open rutting. The other girls, the ones who were not prostitutes, watched the fight with disgust and fear on their faces. Sevilla singled out one who argued with the man next to her. The man held her upper arm and held her in her seat and then just as suddenly smacked her across the face hard enough to leave a deep mark. Another girl cried silently in her chair, staring forward at nothing.

Rafa Madrigal sat in his chair at the center and led the cheering when a particularly brutal blow was landed in the ring. He ate with his hands as if he were some kind of medieval king. Sevilla looked for Sebastían, but Sebastían was nowhere to be seen. This was as Ortíz said: the younger made the arrangements while the elder enjoyed the spoils.

Sevilla saw the other old men from that luncheon at Misión Guadalupe and the fourth from their golf session. They did not seem younger among the others despite the way they carried on beneath the party lights.

The one called Hernández, the one who asked after Sevilla’s charity work with hospitals and the police, rose abruptly from the table and dragged one of the girls with him. He bumped against her in a parody of dance and held her when she tried to shrink away. One of the young men joined him and the two of them ground the girl between their hips while she cried openly. Sevilla gritted his teeth.

One of the fighters went down and the other leaped onto him, straddled his hips, rained punches down on upraised forearms. The
fighter beneath had his skull cracked against the sawdusted concrete three times until his scalp split and there was gore everywhere. Madrigal and the others roared their approval. A whore fell between Madrigal’s legs and vanished beneath the table.

Hernández and his companion wrestled the girl away from the table, toward the stairs to the second floor. The girl’s clothes were torn from Hernández’s grasping. Up the stairs they went and Sevilla suddenly realized he would be seen if they came to his level. He went back the way he’d come, hiding behind a door and hoping they had no reason to go all the way to the end.

They didn’t come to his door. Over the thunder of the music he heard thin cries. His heart would not slow down. Out of his hiding place he came again, and slowly he advanced along the walkway. At the first door he stopped and pressed hard against the wall, sweating. He risked a glance through.

Hernández and the other man bore the girl to the sheets like wolves, biting and clawing. Hernández’s bare buttocks were turned toward the ceiling. He humped and there was screaming that no amount of music could drown out. Sevilla felt heartsick.

On the warehouse floor the fight was over. One man lay motionless on the sawdust while the other reeled. Madrigal saluted the fighter from his chair and then the man collapsed from exhaustion and lost blood.

The girl was still crying out. For her mother, for God. Sevilla’s eyes stung and he knew he was crying. He trembled all over.

Sevilla drew his pistol. This was not the way he imagined it. He did not want to be so afraid. But he could not stop the sounds of the girl’s rape or of the bacchanal on the warehouse floor as men indulged in good-time girls and wine and drugs.

He took a breath and then moved.

When he entered the room, the men didn’t see him at first. Sevilla saw the girl eclipsed by Hernández. His companion masturbated furiously. As his eyes lifted to Sevilla, he never stopped grasping his cock.

Sevilla’s mouth was dry, but he forced himself to speak. “Stop,” he said too quietly. “Stop this.”

Hernández took notice and rolled halfway from the girl beneath him. Now Sevilla could see her face, her tears and the desperate hollow in her eyes that could only be filled with more pleading. “What the hell is this? Who are you?”

“I’m police,” Sevilla said, and he raised his gun. His voice was steadier now. “Get away from her.”

“Fuck you, you’re the police,” Hernández said. “What kind of a joke is this?”

Sevilla pointed his gun at Hernández’s face. “I said get away from her. Now.”

“I said fuck you,
pinche cabrón!
”

Once again Sevilla glanced down at the girl. Afterward he would not remember telling himself to fire. The bullet entered the center of Hernández’s face and crashed out the back of his skull. The man flopped off the mattress completely. There was blood on the girl.

The man called Julio made to run out of the room. Sevilla shot him, too. This time he was splattered.

The music was still booming, but Sevilla thought he heard shouting. The girl was paralyzed on the mattress, her dress torn and dirtied. Sevilla had to leave her. He rushed from the room.

Every eye was raised from the floor of the warehouse and settled on him. Sevilla froze with the gun in his hand.

“
¡Policía!
” he heard.

Suddenly the big doors at the head of the building were shoved apart and two of the bodyguards spilled in crying panic. Red and blue lights flashed outside in the street and then there was chaos.

Down on the floor of the warehouse the men and their whores fled toward the exits but were turned back by a flood of spotlights from outside. Loudspeakers blared orders to surrender. Some headed for the rear doors.

He wanted to do something for the poor girl at his back, but the time was now. He was on the steps now headed down.

Gunfire sounded on the street and a stray bullet shattered the pane of a high window. Bodies swirled around the great banquet table and at the center there was Madrigal, standing alone. He did not flee. His face was stone because he was not afraid.

He saw Sevilla. Sevilla saw him. The gun was in Sevilla’s hand.

“I know you,” Madrigal said over the noise.

Sevilla put a bullet through Madrigal’s eye.

The federal police poured in through the open doors of the building. Sevilla was already on his knees, his gun on the floor and his identification held over his head. Men in black armor were everywhere, charging up the steps to the second level, swarming around the girls where they lay violated and the bodies of the dead fighter and Madrigal.

Out on the street it was a stroboscopic explosion of clashing lights and black-and-white vehicles. Someone wrapped Sevilla in a blanket and steered him toward an ambulance. Once he saw the girl, the one Hernández violated, being loaded into another, but the glimpse was short and he had no chance to speak with her.

He looked toward the apartment building. He saw Rudolfo’s window illuminated with yellow light. The ancient man was silhouetted there, and as if he knew Sevilla was watching, he raised his hand in greeting.

I
T WAS DAWN AGAIN AND HE WAS SET
free. There were questions, so many questions, and he answered them all with half-truths and outright lies. In the end they had no choice but to turn him loose; the evidence was there, the men in custody, the bodies catalogued. He asked one of the
federales
to take him back to his car.