Cedro glanced over as the older man heaved into the metal toilet for the hundredth time. He groaned, wiping his mouth with his arm, and fell in a heap on the floor of his cage.
“You should be almost done,” Cedro remarked casually. He’d watched his father detox before. Messy. Gross. The man in the cage next to him had been puking his guts up for the past three days. Or what Cedro thought were three days, if he could count on the schedule of the lights turning on and off to tell him when it was day and when it was night. Until that morning, the man had been crazed, ranting and sweating and plain out of his mind. Lucky break for him in some ways. In others, not so much. Because now, with a sane mind, he’d have to come to terms with where he was.
“If you’ve been wondering if the cage was part of your sickness, it wasn’t,” Cedro said. “The cage is real. And your stench is definitely real. I can smell you from over here.”
“Shut the fuck up,” the man slurred, rolling over and gripping his head.
“Make me.”
The man pulled himself into a sitting position, gripping his bars and squinting over at Cedro. Cedro wasn’t good at guessing ages. The guy looked old to him, but part of that was probably because he’d spent a week at death’s doorstep. His eyes were sunken in, and though his hands were brown, his face was pale and was sorta green, and he had deep wrinkles that looked carved into his skin and a generous amount of gray in his short beard. Yes, he was at least oldish, and there was something just a little familiar about him.
“Who are you?” the man demanded, his voice scratchy.
“Cedro Leon.”
“I didn’t ask your name. Who are you?”
Cedro thought about that. Maybe the guy was asking because he was trying to figure out why he’d been snatched and locked in a cage with him in particular? Maybe it wasn’t random like he’d thought? And maybe the guy hadn’t barfed up every single one of his brain cells. “I’m nobody,” he said. He didn’t say it because he was sad or sorry about that. It was just true, and Cedro was a realist. He’d survived, so far anyway, in his life because he was honest, at least with himself. “I was crossing to the US. My brother’s seventeen, and he’s in Arizona. I was nabbed about an hour past the border.” He’d been stung by a bee, or so he’d thought for a brief second. He’d quickly brought his hand to his neck to swat the insect, and that was the last thing he remembered. He’d woken in the dark, and at first he’d wondered if he’d been caught by border-patrol agents, but when the lights never came on and he realized that even when his eyes had had time to adjust to the dark, all remained pitch black, he knew something was very wrong. He’d felt around and realized he was caged. That’s when he knew traffickers must have taken him. He’d panicked—yelled and kicked and gone a little crazy—but not for too long. He was where he was. Throwing a fit wasn’t going to change it. At the first opportunity, he’d have to use his wits and his skills to get free.
What he hadn’t at all expected was that they’d toss someone else in the cage next to him while he was sleeping and then turn on the lights.
“How old are you?” the stranger demanded.
“Fourteen,” he said.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the man muttered, collapsing back down so that he was half-propped against the bars. “You didn’t hire someone to bring you across?”
“You mean a coyote?” he asked, turning his head and making a spitting sound. He would have brought up some actual saliva, but he didn’t think it smart to waste the moisture in his mouth. “Never,” he said. “Animals.” He knew what the coyotes did to those stupid enough to trust them.
The man just grunted. “So here you are. Too young and stupid to realize that whatever this is, you’re probably better off than if you’d tried to cross that desert by yourself.”
Cedro bristled. “What the hell do you know, you old used-up drunk?” His brother had crossed that desert and lived to tell about it, even though he was only a teenager like him. He’d written their mother when he’d arrived in Arizona and told them he was living in a migrant shelter and to follow his lead.
“Grim,” the man said right before he went into a coughing fit.
“What’s grim?” he asked once the man had gotten hold of himself.
“My name. Grimaldo. Friends call me Grim.”
“You think we’re friends?”
“Not even close.” He coughed once more. It was rattly and loose. “I’ve seen you before, little pickpocketing thief,” Grim said. “You stole something from me.”
Cedro pulled in a silent breath, turning his head again and squinting over at the man’s profile. Oh. It came to him then. He’d seen the man, too, in the small lawless border town he was from. Once. Only once. “You shot that dog,” he said.
Grim turned his head, looking at him for a moment and then turning away again. “She was suffering,” he rasped.
Yes, Cedro knew that. He’d seen the piece-of-shit car that hit her, watched from a doorway as it’d driven away, leaving the animal moaning and broken in the dirt road. Cedro hadn’t known what to do, but he’d hated it, that moaning. He felt it inside himself like it was leaking through his pores. The man, Grim, had been in a building nearby. Cedro had tracked him as he exited the doorway and made his way toward the dog. He’d knelt down beside it, and then he’d taken a gun from the waistband of his jeans and he’d shot it in the head. That shot had rung in Cedro’s ears long after the man had disappeared down the road.
He didn’t remember stealing anything from him, though. “I didn’t steal from you. I don’t steal,” he lied. “I sell vegetables from my mother’s garden.”
The man snorted. “A thief and a liar. A better liar than a thief, however. I’d like my property back.”
Outrage rose in Cedro, even though what the man said was true. Maybe that was the part that made him so angry. This man thought he knew him. And he didn’t. He didn’t at all. “What is it you think I stole from you, pig?”
“A locket.”
A locket. Oh. He remembered that locket. He’d gotten a pretty penny for it from the man who ran the migrant aid group near the border. He’d eaten regularly for the next month. It’d been a good month. Cedro didn’t have many of those. “I don’t know anything about any locket. You probably got drunk and lost it, pig.”
Grim let out a chuff of laughter.
“Who are you, anyway?” Cedro asked. “And why are we here together? Who took us?”
“I have no fucking clue,” Grim mumbled. “One of the gangs, I assume.”
“What do they want with us?”
Grim glanced over, and his face looked like his name. “No clue,” he mumbled again, but Cedro was a liar, after all, and he could spot another one.
“What do you do, other than roll around in your own vomit?” Cedro asked.
Another rattly cough. “A little bit of everything.”
A little bit of everything. Which probably meant he took money from anyone who was desperate enough to pay an old drunk for his services. “Do you take people into the desert?” He refused to say help. Help was hardly ever what came to those who let someone else guide them out into that brutal place where even fewer laws existed than in the town where he lived.
“Sometimes,” he said. “I help those who can pay for it.”
“Help? Or use?”
“Look who’s talking, pickpocket.”
Cedro startled when the door directly in front of their cages slid open and a man walked through. He had a receding hairline and greasy black hair that fell past his shoulders. Cedro crawled quickly on his knees to the front of his cage. “Hey, mister. Let us out of here. Please. I don’t have anything you want. I’m an orphan. No parents, not a dime to my name. I sell vegetables on the street, just enough to feed myself. Please.”