This guy is nuts.
After maybe an hour in the car we turn off. I don’t recognize this place. It’s somewhere outside of Philadelphia, I think, in an industrial area. We drive through a chemical plant or an oil refinery, something like that. Lots of tanks and pipes, except there’s nothing going on, no activity. I know it’s Sunday but places like that don’t usually shut down. It takes a long time for them to start up.
Toward the back of the complex there’s a big warehouse. Parked outside are busses, tucked together in rows. Other cars, signs of life. I stare anxiously through the windows as we park and more men in suits emerge from the building.
They have guns.
The driver pulls the door open and Santiago motions with his pistol. I step out first and pull the girls close to me. Santiago steps out behind me and tucks his tie into his jacket to stop it blowing in the breeze. Sweat beads on his mask, soaking through the fabric. He takes a moment to dab it off with a handkerchief before shoving me around the car as I pull the girls along.
“Get them inside,” Santiago commands. “I don’t want them touched yet. Take them to the office.”
Three men nod, one of them shaking when Santiago looks at him. They’re afraid of this man, I realize. No, they’re terrified.
Karen and Kelly cling to my side when we walk inside. It’s boiling hot in the warehouse, and it smells. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.
Pens. There are pens. They’re made of chain link on posts driven into the floor, ten-foot fences open to their air and topped with concertina wire. Each has six bunk beds in it, and each pen is crowded with ten or more women and girls, packed so tightly together they can do nothing but lie on the beds in puddles of sweat or huddle close to each other, trying to cool themselves on the bare concrete floor. No showers, no privacy, just buckets.
Oh my God.
“Repulsive, isn’t it?” Santiago says loudly.
The armed men glance at him but quickly look away.
“All men are pigs, do you know this? All women, too. This is what people are: they eat and they shit and they make more little people to eat and shit. Strip away the veneer of civilization and this is what you are left with: the strong holding dominance over the weak. You have been told enough already by Quentin, no doubt, to understand that these women are here to be processed and sold.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Many places. Some are homeless, others are runaways. Others answer classified ads looking for models, or offering acting work. Some are here to settle gambling debts or because they needed something they could not afford, and turned to the wrong people. Men are lucky. They are only tortured and killed. Women have something that is always in demand and thus at the end of the day, their bodies are always collateral.”
“This is disgusting.”
“I agree completely.”
“You could do something about it.”
The three men with guns look back at me.
Santiago laughs softly under his mask. “I could. These three I could dispatch before they knew I even meant to kill them, but why should I do this thing? What would I gain by it? It is not by my hand that these unfortunates will be sold, not for me to determine if their masters are pleasant or cruel. Santiago de la Rosa is already the master of death. He has no cares for life. Let them rot. Everyone is rotting anyway.”
“You talk too much,” one of the thugs grunts.
“Begging your pardon,” Santiago says, his voice deadly calm. “What did you say?”
“You talk too much, and her, too.” He looks at me. “Shut the bitch up.”
Santiago sighs. I can barely hear it, muffled through his mask.
Then he whips his whole body in a spin, moving so fast he almost blurs. Something metal flashes in his hand and the guard’s throat opens in a red spray, fanning the wall with blood. I grab the girls and cover their eyes, but it’s too late. The big man falls to the floor in a boneless heap, lying at the foot of metal stairs leading up to a box office overlooking the warehouse floor.
Santiago doesn’t even have a speck of blood on him.
“You two would do well to remember who you are speaking to. Santiago de la Rosa is not a common tough to be ordered about by such as you. Count yourselves blessed if you are alive tomorrow and remember always that it is because Santiago de la Rosa permitted it. Now, up to the office.”
Karen makes a whimpering sound as she has to step over the dead man. I pick up Kelly and carry her, trying to hide it all from her eyes. She squeezes me tight, shaking as she tries not to sob.
The climb up is hard, carrying her. The stairs are narrow and close together and the whole thing is steep, reaching a good twenty feet up in the air.