“Oh, easy. A young boy feels it more. The old ones are harder. Tougher. They don’t give you the satisfaction of seein’ ’em squirm and hearin’ ’em squeal. Besides, if you start ’em in on it nice and young, sometimes you’ll find one that takes to it. Gets a taste for the hurt, you know? Likes it. Does things on purpose because he wants to be facedown on that bed feeling that strap come down.” As he said it, something in his voice got huskier, thicker, nastier, and it made me feel sick with disgust.
Before I could answer, I heard him draw a deep breath, and then I saw the strap slither backward, out of my line of sight. The movement was followed by a slight hiss, and then a slapping sound—the slap of leather hitting the rough wooden ceiling at the top of its arc overhead—and a grunt of effort. Suddenly I felt an explosion of heat and pain on the backs of my thighs. Involuntarily I cried out in pain. “One,” said Cochran. “I believe my aim’s a little off. Gettin’ kinda rusty. If you were a boy, I’d tell you that if you make a sound, or if you move, I’d start counting all over again, from one. But with you, it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll just keep counting, ’cause I don’t have to stop at twenty, or forty, or even a hundred. I can just keep going as long as you’re breathing. Maybe longer, if I feel like it.” The strap snaked off me and out of sight, and I thought he was winding up for another blow, but he paused. “You can bite that pillow if you want to. Or holler if you want to. You can try it both ways. You can try it as many ways as you got the stamina for. Toward the end, I figure you might be whimpering a little bit, and then you’ll get pretty quiet for the last of it.”
He took another breath, and this time I heard the soles of his shoes scraping the floor slightly as he pivoted into the windup. The strap seethed through the air again, slapped the ceiling, and exploded onto my buttocks. This time I’d stiffened up, bracing myself for the blow, but still it made me gasp. “Two,” he said. “How’s that feeling? You think you might could develop a taste for this, Mister Fancy Forensic Scientist?” The strap slid off me and slithered away; his shoes pivoted, and the leather seethed and slapped and exploded again, this time onto the same spot as the previous blow. It felt as if my flesh were splitting open all the way to the bone. I groaned. “Three,” he counted. “You know, after I went to Texas, I didn’t get a chance to do this. I thought about trying to get work in a boys’ school down there, but they didn’t have anyplace as good as what I’d left. And I figured I’d best lie low anyhow.” Swishpivotseetheslapexplode. “Four. But you know what?” The only answer I could manage was a moan. “There’s a lot of illegals smuggled across the border from Mexico. Sometimes they bring their kids with ’em. Five. Sometimes the parents don’t survive the trip, for one reason or another.” He paused to breathe and wind up again. “Six.” I felt myself on the brink of losing consciousness again. “So then the smuggler—the ‘coyote,’ the smuggler’s called—the coyote’s got this kid on his hands. So every now and then, I’d get me a boy. The girls, they’d end up somewhere else—in a cage in somebody’s basement in El Paso, or in a brothel back across the border in Juarez—but there wasn’t as much market for the boys. Seven. You’d be surprised how cheap you can buy a little ten-year-old wetback boy.”
Either he miscounted, or I passed out briefly, because “ten” was the next number I heard him say. It was the last number I heard before unconsciousness—blessed unconsciousness—took me under again.
When I came to once more, I was lying on the floor, my legs and buttocks and back afire, my hands and feet tied. I heard a sound like a dying animal might make—half groan, half whimper—and realized it was coming from me. Then, through the fog and through the pain, I heard the seethe and slap of the leather strap again. “Stop,” I gasped, flinching and shrinking from the pain as best I could. The strap struck flesh with a loud whack, but this time I did not feel the impact. I heard another groan, but this time the groan came from someone else’s mouth.
A pair of feet and legs and the leather strap came into my field of view, and a man I did not recognize squatted down and looked at me. He appeared to be about my own age, maybe a few years older. His face was weathered and bore multiple scars—a thin vertical line down his left cheek, another over his right eye, and one across his chin—and the top of his left ear was missing a ragged crescent of flesh. His neck was as thick as a tree trunk, and his shoulders were beefy. The fingers of both hands—unlike Cochran, he had them both, I noticed, as he squatted with his hands on his knees—were tattooed with letters that spelled out F-U-C-K Y-O-U. His eyes flitted rapidly, never quite settling, as he looked at me. “Hurts like hell, don’t it?”
“Just go ahead and kill me,” I said.
“No,” he said. The corner of his right eye—the one with the scar—twitched slightly. “That’s not what I’m here to do.”
“I don’t understand,” I groaned. “Who are you?”