Читать книгу BORDER JUSTICE - Aubrey Smith - Страница 3

On February twenty-eighth, Ben Hoover’s married daughter Cindy Feller went to the grocery store to pick up a few items before the family left on their return trip to Chicago. This was the first year Cindy had accompanied her parents to South Texas for the winter. She was eight months pregnant and excited to be going home to her husband and her doctor. Cindy never returned to the Hoover’s motor home.

The next day Cindy was driven, blindfolded to a ranch in Mexico. A few miles away, Sierra Lara and her small baby girl hunkered behind a wooden outhouse. As the foul smell of rotting bile and urine emanated from the privy, Sierra shivering, cold and wet thought she might throw up. The heavy morning shower had now stopped, but threatening black clouds still hung on the tops of the mountains to the north. Carefully she peeked around the corner of the filthy outbuilding and prayed that X would not see her. The smell was horrible. She had to fight back a wave of nausea. Flies buzzed around her nose and eyes. She wanted to slap them away. Once she started to swat at the vile insects, but quickly stopped. Sierra knew she could not move until she was certain where X was.

”Where is he,” she wondered?

Then she saw him, stumbling, as he came around the corner of the edificio. She watched him run into the middle of the street. She could see him squint. She felt the anger in his steel eyes searching the dirty street and the rundown storefronts, looking for her.

I’m dead if he finds me… or worse, she thought.

X spat, cleared his throat and spat again. He was only twenty feet from where she crouched. She could hear him breathing, his boots sloshing in the sticky mud. She heard him swear and ask, “Where could she have gone?” Suddenly she jumped. She couldn’t help herself when she saw a flea-infested rat crawling across her cold and wet left leg.

“Oh my God, please help me,” she whispered. Somehow she managed to lie quietly in the mud. She held her breath, waiting, scared and thanking God, X had not heard her.

Suddenly X bolted down the muddy street. He ran right past where she lay, his head turning side to side as he ran, looking in every store and building. As soon as he was out of her sight, she kicked as hard as she could and sent the rat flying. Once it landed, it turned to give her a what’s the matter with you look, then ran into a crack under the privy. A huge black fly landed on her face and rapidly crawled across her lips. Feeling the fly’s spiny Velcro feet on her lips made her gag. Now she had to stand. Wiping at her mouth, Sierra turned and began to run when she saw X again. He was about half a block to her east,. The sun behind him pushed his shadow toward her.

“Sierra, mi preciosa, you can’t escape,” he hollered. “Come here cabrona, you ungrateful little witch.”

She put her head down, hugged her tiny baby closer to her and ran as fast as she could around the privy and through the edificio. She didn’t look back, but she knew X was right behind her and closing ground between them quickly. She knew that if he caught her, he’d drag her back to the farm. She knew he’d sell her baby to the German couple and, after he and the Idiot-boy were through with her, he’d sell her to Mondo or the Chinese. Either way, she was doomed to be someone’s whore.

She was not going to let X separate her from her baby so she ran until every muscle in her body screamed for relief. She quickly turned right, down an alley and then right again through the small market square. People stopped and looked at her and Angie Marie pressed to her bosom. She ran through a candle shop and out the back door into another muddy alley. Her heart was pounding, about to explode. Then she saw a cart of straw. With one hand she pulled herself up into the cart and quickly looked to see if X was in the alley yet. He was nowhere in sight and she fell into the pile of straw, covering herself and her tiny baby as best she could.

She lay still, hoping that Angie Marie wouldn’t cry. Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, please help me. Dear God please help me, and my baby. She heard X’s feet pounding the mud as he raced past. Sierra thanked Jesus. She wondered how in God’s name had she ever gotten herself in this mess.

Angie Marie began to wiggle and started to cry.

“Hush Little Baby, don’t cry. Mama’s going to somehow get us out of here.”

Gasping for breath, Sierra unbuttoned her blouse and let Angie Marie nurse.

“Maybe this will help you be quiet my little darling,” she uttered softly as she felt her milk begin to flow and little Angie Marie became calm.

Lying under the straw, she listened to the quiet sounds of motherhood and remembered all too well how she had gotten here. Randy Howard and the prom, May the twenty-third, that’s when it started. Memories flashed across her mind, memories of Randy Howard, the Senior Prom and that hot Saturday night last May. Sad memories of how all this mess had started.