After every meal, she felt woozy and slept for an unknown amount of time. She was also aware that they drugged the food, so each time she ate, she worried that her chance of escape would have alluded her, but skipping the meal was a luxury she couldn't afford.
She always awoke after the meals with a knot in her stomach, just as she did a few minutes ago. She pushed the tray back under the door, which were Pencil's instructions. When you finish, the tray must be returned under the door. The door cannot be opened if the tray does not come back out. You will not receive water if the tray is not out of the door. Pencil's words were served with a side of onion soup, which is what the man's permanent body odor reeked of.
Angela, of course had to test the rule. She kept the tray, hoping to bash it over their heads if she could ever figure out how to undo the ropes from her wrist. The same ropes that forced her to eat off the tray like an animal. In the battle of No Tray No Water, the kidnappers won.
As of yet, nobody had bothered to clean the filth from her skin or offer her a change of clothes. She found a corner in every cell as her makeshift bathroom. If she ever survived, she would never tell anybody about the things she had to do, the smells she had to endure. Angela focused her mind on the scent of citrus, on the smell of freshly peeled oranges wafting underneath the door. She scooted closer, trying to blanket herself in the freshness of it.
Angela nicknamed the two Mexicans guarding her Pencil and Bigfoot. Pencil was a man of epically thin proportions. He was tall but made to look even more so by his lanky build. Every time he smiled, he revealed the discolored gold tooth in the front of his mouth. Upon first seeing it, Angela wondered if the gold was even real. She hated the way his buggy eyes poked out from the bony features of his face. She hated more the way he looked at her with those eyes.
Pencil's stare unsettled Angela. She felt as though she could read the thoughts running through the wiry man's mind, and she didn't like what she found.
His shorter and stouter partner she had named Bigfoot. Not so much for his size and bulk, but more for the thick wooly hair that poked out from his collar and extended down the length of his arm. The effect made him look more beast than man. While his thinner counterpart had a gold tooth, Bigfoot was missing most of his teeth and had a smile that would make a pro hockey player jealous. The scars decorating Bigfoot's face and hands spoke to the violence he'd both delivered and endured.
He was a nasty man. The words he spoke about the things he wanted to do to Angela made her sick with worry. It had been Bigfoot who'd delivered her the water after she tested Pencil's rule. He removed the bottle cap and spit in it before recapping it and giving it to her. He then made her drink it in front of him while he looked on and laughed himself red. Before all of this was over, she hoped to see him dead.
Her heart leapt at the sound of approaching feet. She'd come to recognize their tandem gait. Other people traversed the hallway, but nobody except for the two guards ever stopped or even slowed their pace while passing the door. The other people that moved by seemed to do so with purpose. Pencil and Bigfoot sauntered slowly as if time didn't matter.
What made Rothman's heart skip a beat wasn't the fact that they were coming, it was the hurry in their approach that had her concerned. They were stepping with a purpose. And with men like this, their purposes were never well intended.
Their shadows danced underneath the gap in the door. Rothman turned her ear and quieted her breathing. Her shoulders ached and her wrists were nearly worn to the bone. The cord securing them was a lot less painful than the cuffs they had used on her before, but the tenderness was unbearable. Long confinement in awkward positions didn't agree with her joints and muscles.
Angela heard the tension in the man's voice. Pencil's matched his look. He spoke in a choked squeak. Bigfoot, on the other hand, sounded like the low rumble of a diesel truck, but it was Pencil who spoke first. His panic-babbled Spanish was difficult at first for Angela to pick up, but she honed in on keywords and phrases and was able to make out most of what he said.
"I don't know how she did it," Pencil's voice was frantic. He was unhinged. He always had a nervous edge to him, but something was different, Angela could tell.
"One woman burned down the club and took five of our girls?" Bigfoot's voice rumbled. "I know one thing, if I was there, she'd be in a room with the red head there."
Pencil squeaked a laugh. "Maybe so. Doesn't matter. Not our job."
"I know, I know," Bigfoot said. "The orders just came in. Somebody paid a good price, and we've got to get our package in there cleaned up and ready to go."
Keys rattled against the lock. The shadows of her two captors crept inside as the door opened. Angela Rothman looked up into the light silhouetting their faces, and for the first time since crossing over into Mexico, she had her first glimmer of hope.
Twenty-One
Miguel Ayala pulled up in an older model Nissan Sentra missing three of its four hubcaps. When Hatch placed the call to Ayala, the newspaper man answered immediately and had then given her directions of where to go.
Ayala had told Hatch to go to the San Antonio Nogales Road until it dead ended in a T intersection with Highway 2. He then instructed her to take a right and travel southwest on the two-lane highway for several miles until she came across the Mission of Guadalupe, a Christian mission devoted to caring for the people of the Rancho San Rafael region.