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

apologize for, sweetheart. You’re alive and safe for now. I’ll give you a moment to get your composure while I talk to this guy.”

“Okay,” she said wiping her eyes.

He saw the red welts and blood spots on her wrists where the zip-ties cut into her skin and he became angry. Putting that out of his head so he didn’t do something stupid, he took his phone out, slid a finger across the screen to open it up, and accessed his Image files. He tapped on the picture of Sydney Fox and her three girls.

He then stood up, stepped out of the tub, and set his M4 on the vanity counter. With his free hand, he withdrew his blade. It was still bloody from the last guy.

Kneeling before the man, he showed him the photo and said, “Where are they?”

“No se,” the man said.

“Oh, I think you know just fine,” he said. “Now I can ask you again with the photo and you can answer me in English, or I can ask with the blade.”

“No se,” he said again. There was pain in his voice but it was masked quite well with raw hatred.

Yergha showed him the knife then said, “That blood is from your buddy’s ball sack. So if I stab you in the mouth it’ll be like giving your homie a blowjob. Is that what you’re about capullo?”

“Man I don’t go like that,” he looked up and hissed.

“You’re about to, dumb-ass.”

“Man, fuck you and your mother,” he hissed. “Do what you gotta do.”

In his peripheral vision, he saw Esty stand up and step out of the shower. He looked up at her—this gorgeous woman he’d dreamed of for months—and her eyes were like bullets, so cold and lethal they only needed a target.

“Let me try,” she said, not an ounce of emotion in her voice.

She knelt down before this culo, her chest bruised badly from where her vest caught a bullet, her face tight and swollen. There was blood from her nose smeared all over her mouth, chin, and chest. Yergha backed up from her. She looked like something hell spat out, something so charged that one look from those eyes and you’d surely turn to stone.

She grabbed the man’s hair, jerked his face up then extended her hand toward Yergha. He handed her the phone. She showed him the pictures and said, “Who has them?”

“No se, puta,” he said, his pain evident. This asshat was stubborn but he didn’t know Estella Baccarin.

She set the phone down, then in one horrifying moment, she shoved her finger into the man’s eye, sliding in beside the eyeball, ripping and tearing her way through to the back of the eye itself. The way he started screaming was like nothing Yergha had heard before. Well, not for a long time. Not since the Fifth Balochistan Conflict involving the BLA, which was where his warrior soul had been born.

When she got her finger behind the eyeball, she curled it in and slid the entire thing out of the socket. When the eye popped free, she grabbed it and ripped it out. The man’s screaming went to another level completely.

When the screaming turned to sobbing, she leaned down toward him, looking directly into his other eye. She picked up the phone, tapped the screen to bring it to life then opened it to the picture of the family.

“Where are they?” she asked again.

“Two places, maybe,” he said, his voice shaking. From under his pelvic region, a pool of red was forming from where he’d been shot. “Could be Amado Quintero or Santiago Cardenas. They handle the trafficking of kids like that. But the border is open now.” Angrily, he spat on her leg then said, “Those three little girls are gone now. And the bitch wife is dead. I bet they’re all dead!”

“Where do I find Quintero?” she asked calmly. “Where is Cardenas?”

“Quintero is in the Las Torres area of Juárez, but you won’t get to him without an army. It’s like stepping into the world’s largest hornet’s nest. That neighborhood is a maze and they got eyes and guns in every window. So, good luck there, chica.”

“And Cardenas?” Yergha asked.

“He’s at the base of the mountains at the end of a long dirt road.”

“They both traffic kids?” Esty asked.

Just then it sounded like someone opened the front door. They all fell quiet and then they heard someone moving into the house. “Juárez Police Department,” the man announced in Spanish.

The guy on the ground rolled his one eye up and looked at Yergha. The Pakistani shushed the man but the one-eyed bitch formed a slow grin on his mouth. He drew a breath to scream but Esty cupped his mouth shut and really leaned into him. What emerged, however, was a muffled cry that still felt too loud for their comfort.

With his Sig ready to go, Yergha moved out of the bathroom and into the hallway. Quiet as a mouse, he crept to the turn in the hallway and waited. The second the man came around the corner, Yergha pistol-whipped him. The policeman’s knees buckled and he went down hard, but he was not out cold. Yergha hit him again and he collapsed.

Back in the bathroom, he said to Esty, “We need to go. That was Juárez PD.”

“Talk, now,” Esty said to the one-eyed man.

“I told you enough,” he said, turning that one eye up at her, unafraid as he seemed to have found a new way to stand up to the pain.

“You haven’t told us nearly enough,” she said.

“When we’re done and you think you got away, I’m going to find you and cut you in half,” he said with a cruel and sadistic grin. “I’m going to