“You keep it.”
Magdalena gave her friend’s hand a squeeze and nodded at the red-brick house. A dozen black lampposts fringed the circular driveway. The glow of pool lights illuminated the trees on the far side of the big garage. It was fancy, but that didn’t make what happened inside any less horrible.
“They’ll take away all my clothes,” she said. Her throat was so tight she could hardly speak. “You have to help me.” She curled Blanca’s fingers around the thumb drive and patted the girl’s fist. “This is important. I’m sure of it. Maybe it will even save us.”
Blanca’s mouth hung open as she stared at the huge house. The front door opened and a Hispanic woman in her early thirties walked out to stand under a brick archway in the porchlight. A white tank top barely concealed sagging breasts and a muffin top overflowed the waist of her skinny jeans. She held a twisted leather quirt made from a dried bull penis. The cruel thing even had a name, Ratón, or Mouse. It was as long as her leg, and it had the power to flay skin.
The woman’s name was Lupe and she was the bottom bitch here—what Parrot called the senior girl of any operation, the one who’d been around the longest, survived all the chopping, and somehow kept enough of her teeth to hold on to the boss’s affections. Some men wanted innocence, but those girls never got to be in charge. They were just kids, used until they broke and then thrown away. There were always more kids. It was the girls like Lupe who became the bosses, girls who exuded equal parts danger and sex—just enough to be interesting. Though she was small, Magdalena was constantly on guard against giving off too much danger. Not physically, but because she was smart—and that scared men more than anything.
Lupe leered at the car as they pulled up. She’d been through it all herself. She had to know how hard it was, but instead of understanding, she was vindictive and deceitful, enforcing the boss’s orders and using her position to keep the other girls in line. Fiercely jealous, she was known to apply her rawhide mouse with great effect to the back and legs of girls who didn’t obey her quickly enough—or simply for fun.
Chest heaving, choking on her sobs, Magdalena cringed as Lupe tapped the cruel whip against her leg. The terrible woman would go hard on her, since the boss had apparently asked for her specifically. Bottom bitches were always the cruelest to girls they thought might pose a threat to their status. Magdalena had often thought that if her mother had joined the life, she would have been the bottom bitch.
Blanca finally relented and took the thumb drive, stuffing it into her own pocket before Lupe could see. Sobbing in earnest now, she wrapped her arms around her friend, speaking without caring if Reggie heard her or not.
“What if you do not come back?”
Reggie flung open the door, ready to drag her out if she didn’t leave on her own.
Magdalena closed her eyes and whispered, “Then save yourself.”
8
Texas Department of Public Safety trooper Roy Calderon had already ended his shift and made it home once today. He’d just snuggled down against his wife’s pregnant belly at their small three-bedroom house in Mansfield when dispatch called his cell about an overturned cattle trailer at the 287/67 junction. The accident investigation and subsequent report had taken the better part of three hours.
Now on the way home a second time, Calderon thought about calling his wife to tell her he was fifty minutes out—the baby was probably keeping her up, anyway—but decided he’d better not, just in case she’d been able to drift off. Thinking about her made him smile. He hoped the kid was a redhead like her.
The trooper rarely had time to listen to the good-time radio during a normal shift. He preferred to keep his mind on the job between traffic stops, but there were no cars on the road this late—or this early, considering the fact that the sun would be up in a couple hours. The night was wonderfully cool, so he rolled down the windows on his Ford Mustang interceptor and turned up the volume on the AM to let Coast to Coast blast conspiracy theories into the darkness.
He caught the glimpse of taillights fifteen miles south of the Mansfield city limits. Trained to be inquisitive when it came to vehicles on “his” highway, Calderon stomped on the gas. The Mustang’s V-8 roared to life, throwing him back into his seat like a good interceptor should. The other car was going slow—too slow, really—and the Mustang closed the distance in a matter of seconds. The trooper silenced the good-time radio out of habit and fell in behind the vehicle.
The car, a maroon Chrysler 300, kept a constant speed of sixty-three miles an hour, two miles an hour less than the posted limit. It bumped the center line a couple times but didn’t cross it, and that could have been a function of trooperitis. Nobody could drive a quarter-mile without committing some kind of violation, least of all someone with a black-and-white staring at them in the rearview mirror. Still, there was a gnawing in Trooper Calderon’s gut that came from one part experience and two parts instinct—something about this particular vehicle—that made him want to do a little more investigation.
He asked Ellis County to run the license plate, gave the dispatcher his location, then decided to follow it for another minute or so. This guy hadn’t really done anything wrong. Calderon was exhausted, and he wanted to get home to his wife’s pregnant belly.
Then the face of a young girl popped up in the rear window. She hadn’t given him a long look. If fact, the face vanished as quickly as it had appeared, as if someone had ordered her away.
Calderon had seven years on with the Texas Department of Public Safety. Way back during his field-training days, a senior trooper in the Highway Patrol had once told him that only three kinds of people were out during the wee hours of the night—cops, paperboys, and assholes. Thousands of violator contacts over those seven years—many of them after dark—had proven the notion.
Ellis County came back over the radio and said the LP was registered to a guy named Carlos Villanueva, aka Parrot. The dispatcher was on the ball and had already run a triple-I, checking Villanueva’s criminal history as well as any outstanding warrants. He wasn’t wanted, but his record showed two convictions for driving while intoxicated.
Calderon followed the car for another mile, thinking about the girl—and whoever it was that ordered her out of the window.
“That’s too nice a car for a paperboy, asshole,” he muttered, and flipped on his red-and-blues.