She says something in Spanish, but her words are muffled behind her mask and I don’t quite catch what she says. Something about shoes? Something about a bandana? Natalia scowls at the girl. She flips her knife over and puts it away again, then gathers her hair back in her hands and ties it into a ponytail.
“You tell him we’re coming down,” she hisses, and then she kicks at the girl with the toe of her scuffed red Converse shoe. The girl makes a disgruntled growling sound, shooting a hateful look in my direction, but she disappears, lowering herself back down into the oppressive darkness below her.
“Come on. Don’t worry. You don’t need to get undressed,” Natalia tells me. “Normally my father is very strict about his guests removing their clothes. He’s in a good mood today, though.” She squats down and climbs down into the tunnel beyond the hatch, and then she’s vanishing into the inky shadows, too. I can hear the soles of her shoes hitting the rungs of a ladder as she descends, and then her voice calling up from the depths.
“Are you afraid of the dark, Sam?”
“Only when it’s smart to be,” I mutter under my breath. If I follow her down into this hole in the ground, I am going in blind. Literally. It’s dark as fuck down there, and I have no idea how many armed guards are waiting for us. One look at Ocho tells me I’m not going to be able to back out of this without a fight, though. I’m bigger, stronger, faster, and younger than he is, so I have no doubt I could take him, but where would that get me? No closer to Laura, that’s for sure.
Slowly, I lower myself through the hatch, keeping an eye on Ocho as I climb down, hand over hand. He hops into the hole after me with the practiced ease of someone who’s done this many times before. He closes the hatch after himself, sealing it shut with the clanking of a bolt being drawn across, and the light goes out. The ladder is much longer than I anticipated, and it takes a while to reach the bottom. Ocho climbs down four or five rungs above me, silently, a ghost moving through the pitch black. Eventually I reach the bottom of the ladder and step down onto solid concrete.
Natalia’s voice echoes when she speaks. “Put your hand on my shoulder, Sam. Here. Yes.” I learn a lot from the way her voice bounces around inside the dark space—we’re in a tunnel, long and narrow by the sounds of things, and the walls are pressing in. My hand touches the bare skin of her arm and then her shoulder. She’s much shorter than me; she’s probably only five seven or five eight, yet her confidence makes her seem taller somehow. I feel like I’m looming over her as she sets off in an easterly direction, skimming her fingertips along one side of a wall. God knows where the naked girl has gone. It would be really easy for me to take Natalia down right now. Ocho, too. It’s as if he can read my mind, though. I feel a sharp, angry prod in my lower back, and I know all too well what I’m being poked with—the muzzle of his rifle. He’s ready and willing to shot me in the spine at the first sign of any trouble out of me. Fair enough, I guess.
Moments later, blazing, stark white light is suddenly burning into my retinas as Natalia opens up a door in front of us. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the light again. Once my vision is restored, I’m surprised by the space that lies ahead: a huge underground warehouse, clean, everything painted white. Strip lights overhead hum with electricity, lighting up the vast, hollow space, and well over twenty young girls, all naked, stop what they’re doing and turn to look at us. The low tables they’re standing in front of are covered in cocaine. Bags of cocaine, already sealed and bricked up, presumably ready to ship out. Cocaine drying in trays under heat lamps. More coke in small lines, arranged on sheets of tinfoil, being mixed with a variety of other white, non-descript powders. About a billion dollars of cocaine, just floating around in the fucking air.
At regular intervals, huge guys with machetes and assault rifles in their hands lean against the walls, watching everything with sharp eyes. They are unsmiling, serious-looking motherfuckers, and I suddenly get to thinking this might not be such a great idea after all.