The Beasts of Juarez by R.B. Schow (best books to read for beginners txt) 📕

return to his cell where he’d deal with that Baxter Kirtman the way someone should have dealt with him a long time ago.

Chapter Six

SYDNEY FOX

Sydney Fox and her three daughters—Callie, Zoey, and Maisie—rode in the empty, featureless panel van to an unknown location on what felt like the outskirts of El Paso. At first, she tried memorizing the route. But when she started losing track of the turns, she gave up in that pursuit.

They slowed down almost to a stop, drove up over a small curb then cruised ever so slowly over uneven concrete. When they finally came to a stop, she heard the driver roll down the window and start speaking to the man outside in Spanish. A moment later, she listened as someone lifted a clunky metal gate. Were they at…a warehouse? This certainly wasn’t the kind of garage door noise you’d hear at a house. When they idled inside, she heard the echoing sounds of the engine confirming they were in a warehouse or some sort of large industrial garage.

The van’s doors opened up and someone said, “Muévete.”

Hands grabbed her, shoved her, and dragged her out of the back of the van. Through all of this, she told herself she wasn’t going to freak out because she couldn’t spook her daughters. They had to be terrified as it was. Moreover, she didn’t want any retaliation from whomever she and the girls were being brought to, or handed off to, whichever was the case.

Narrowing her focus, she listened for any noises that her daughters might have made or might still be making. She knew them well. Their near-silence bothered her the most. She heard them, though. She managed to identify all three of them. Now that she was sure they were all there, her biggest fear became being separated from them.

The men who brought them there were talking with the men they had come to see, but they were conversing so quickly in Spanish she couldn’t keep up, not with a rudimentary understanding of the language at best.

As a group, they were shuffled across a hard concrete floor, then led toward the familiar sounds of someone opening another set of van doors. Where the panel van’s doors sounded thin and hollow, these doors opened and closed with authority. Suddenly the hard concrete surface beneath her feet softened. Was this some sort of carpet, or a pad?

“¡Alto!” the voice barked.

She stopped.

The girls stopped.

“Lay down,” the voice commanded in English.

She lowered herself into a squat, then leaned back and landed on her butt. She was able to steady herself on what felt like a shag carpet. Slowly, she lay down on her side. A pair of hands rolled her body over onto her stomach then flattened her out. The pressure on her cheek, her breasts, her pelvic bone, and her knees was more than she wanted while feeling so scared. Hands pulled her ankles together, and then whoever was handling her stepped off the carpet.

Huffing and snorting, the duct tape constricting her lungs, everything was dark and threatening. Was she about to die? Was this an assassination instead of a kidnapping?

Inadvertently, she inhaled carpet fibers, jumped at the tickle of them then blew hard to clear her nose. Laying her head down sideways, she smelled fabric dye and warm stale air. Why the carpet?

To her dismay, her daughters were made to endure the same treatment. Should she be more or less concerned about this development? She just didn’t know.

Her panic began to diminish a bit but only because she was scrambling to figure out what the hell was going—

A pair of hands grabbed her by her armpits and hauled her forward until her cheek touched the cold concrete floor. Before she could make sense of any of this, the man flipped the carpet on top of her and began rolling her up. Her head remained free, but the rest of her was squeezed in the rug so tightly she could hardly breathe.

She was then hoisted head-first into the back of what felt like a longer van. Her head was suddenly smashed against the metal divider between the driver’s cabin and the van itself, but then the rug was pulled back a bit, giving her the relief she needed. With only her nose and ears to tell her what was going on, she sniffed the air and smelled fresh carpet, lots of fresh carpet. Her ears picked up everything, including the slight grunts of the girls as they too were shoved into what had to be a commercial carpet van.

She heard her girls’ little noses working to inhale and exhale against their fear and whatever pain they were in, and again, she was grateful that as bad as the situation had become, they were still together.

When all four of them were inside the van, the heavy doors were shut and sealed, and there was nothing but the sounds of the four of them breathing and the muffled noises of the men outside the van.

Even though she could not understand their conversation, she listened intently, catching a few of the familiar words and phrases she learned during her three years of high school Spanish. The words she made out, however, were not very encouraging. One thing she understood clearly was “Avénida dé las Américas”—a.k.a. the border. Other than that, she thought she picked up something about them taking a specific lane.

If what she heard was right, they were leaving El Paso and heading into Ciudad Juárez, one of the scariest places on earth, and home to some of the most horrific drug dealing, child trafficking, and gangland activity in the world.

The men then got in the van, started it up, and pulled out of the warehouse. The instant she heard the sounds