The Beasts of Juarez, R.B. Schow [books to read for self improvement .txt] 📗

saw that she was kneading her fingers. For a second he felt bad for her. Whatever news she had was important enough to warrant an interruption. How should she handle that? He didn’t know, but if she was breaking into a live feed…

He was about to say something comforting when he heard the reporter behind him say to her cameraman, “Keep it rolling.”

The higher Camden’s cheeks lifted as he apologized to the reporters for having to break away, the more he let loose with a string of internal cursing.

Discreetly, he leaned toward Mary and whispered, “If this is anything less than life-altering I’m going to make sure you never work another day in your adult life.”

Startled, she said nothing, but the look on her face remained unchanged. She handed him a phone and said, “I stand by my decision.”

He took the phone from her. “This is Camden.”

“Sir, the family was taken,” his bodyguard said, breathless.

“Where are you?” Camden asked, bloodless, a dozen pairs of eyes on him. If this was bad news, these people wanted it on film. Vultures... maybe useful vultures, though.

“I…I don’t know, sir. Someone got the jump on me. A lot of someones, I think. I’ve been talking to people in the vicinity to see if they had actionable intel. One guy gave me the plate number to one of the vans, but other than that…”

“Other than that, what?”

“They’re gone.”

Camden took a deep breath, felt the world around him tunneling down, pulling him into a tiny pinprick of existence where he could neither move nor breathe. For a second he tried to imagine what his wife and daughters were going through, what they must be feeling, and then unexpectedly, he felt himself starting to fall apart inside.

The phone slid from his hand, bumped off his foot, and skidded across the floor face-down. He took an unsteady step backward, aware that the camera was still rolling.

Someone took his arm, led him to a chair. “Sit down, you’re looking…Jesus man, you’re looking…green.”

“Cut the feed, stop rolling,” he heard the reporter tell the cameraman.

He didn’t know who was telling him he looked green but he didn’t appreciate it. The squeeze of tears was brief but powerful. When they came, his tears leaked out warm and plentiful, and then he wiped them away.

He turned to Mary and said, “My family was just taken.”

“Taken how?” she asked.

“Kidnapped.”

She drew a sharp breath. “What are you going to do?”

“I…I don’t know,” he stammered.

“You have to call the police,” a man said, someone he didn’t know. He went and picked up Mary’s phone and handed it back to Camden. Thankfully the screen wasn’t cracked. He handed it back to Mary.

“I think I should make a call,” he said as he fished his own phone out of his pocket.

His fingers were weak, his countenance in total disarray. It was like he was being swallowed into a void, one so dark and all-consuming he knew that soon there would be nothing left of him but sadness, fear, and regret.

He dialed his closest friend in the world, a former federal prosecutor living in San Antonio. Damien Stone.

“Damien,” he said when his friend picked up, “this is Cam.”

“Hey Cam, what’s going on?”

“Sydney and the girls were just grabbed in El Paso.”

His friend paused for a long moment then he let out a breath. “That’s right on the border,” he said. “Are they still in the US?”

This is actually happening, he told himself in disbelief. For a moment, he felt this unbearable disconnect between this tragedy and the stark reality of the situation.

Looking up, he saw the sad eyes of several people around him. One of them was an unattractive female reporter for CNN.

“What was the bad news, Congressman?” the reporter asked.

“It’s a family matter,” he replied, covering the phone so that Damien didn’t have to hear all of this. He absolutely hated reporters. “That’s off the record, of course.”

“Of course,” she replied.

He wiped his eyes then said to Damien, “The border, yeah…I…I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You know as well as anyone that they’re grabbing girls from El Paso and taking them into Juárez for…well, this could be a bigger matter than either of us thinks,” Damien said. “Did you contact local law enforcement yet?”

“And say what?”

“Tell them what happened!”

“No,” he said in a desperate voice as he ran a hand through his hair. “I thought maybe, if you wanted to reach out, if you could…I don’t know. Do you know anyone here, or even close by that might have influence or free rein between here and Mexico?”

“If this is an international incident, Camden, things could get convoluted really quickly. It’ll be even worse if the cartel is involved. If that turns out to be the case, we’re going to find ourselves in the middle of a shit storm of catastrophic proportions.”

“What do you suggest?” Camden asked.

“Be quiet, let me think,” Damien replied. Then: “I have a guy. He’s not cheap, but he and his team are more than capable.”

“Capable of what?”

“Capable of getting your family back and vanquishing the threat, permanently.”

“How much does he charge?” Camden asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never personally used him or his team. How liquid are you?”

He leaned in close to his phone. “A million, maybe two?”

“Overseas or local?”

“I don’t have—”

“I know the drill with you guys. This isn’t the time to dick around, Camden. How much do you have and is it local?”

“Seven million,” Camden whispered, “most of it offshore.”

“I’m going to give you a phone number but once you call this number you need to treat the situation like everything is in play.”

“Meaning?”

“When you hire these people, you are ringing a bell you can’t un-ring,” Damien said, cryptically. “The kinds of people you’re about to employ, you don’t want to cross