Chapter 15: Abduction and Murder

We flew home on a helicopter Bill had waiting for us at Lubbock airport. He greeted us as we touched down in the front yard, and indicated a lawn care truck with a dead body inside sitting by our new so-called security gate.

“Miles was at work and Sandy was at the real estate closing,” Bill shouted over the roar of the departing helicopter. “The kidnappers hijacked the lawn care truck and forced the owner to open the gate. After they killed him, two SUV’s followed them in and stormed the house. The girls must have seen them coming, ‘cause Trini was able to take a couple of them out before they got her.”

“How’s Trini doing?” I asked as we walked swiftly towards the house.

“Critical. We Medevaced her to Dallas, she took two rounds in her back, one in the head, and one in the leg. She was incredibly lucky. Sandy got back from the title closing in time to stop her bleeding, she couldn’t have missed the kidnappers by more than fifteen or twenty seconds.”

A crime scene crew was investigating two dead Latinos that were lying just inside the front door. Sandy and Miles were sitting in the living room, holding hands. Sandy’s blouse and skirt were soaked with Trini’s blood.

She’s all over me. My blood ran cold.

Sandy stood up when she saw me and burst into tears. “When I got back from the title company there was a d-dead body in the truck, and the house was wide open,” she babbled hysterically. “Trini was lying by the dinner table. I th-thought she was dead! I thought she was DEAD!”

Sarah embraced the screaming blonde and spoke softly. Miles was calmer, but badly shaken.

“She called 911 and then she called me,” Miles said quietly. “There were three cop cars and an ambulance here when I arrived. They said Sandy kept Trini alive, that she had almost bled to death. They airlifted her to the hospital.”

“Manuel Solei, the lawn care guy, was executed, a single round to the head,” Bill said.

Sarah grabbed my arm as I turned back to Bill. Sandy’s tears had ceased, and both women were looking intently at me.

“You go get our girls back, Kenny. Go get ‘em and kill every last one of those motherfuckers. We’re done fooling with these assholes,” Sandy said.

Sarah nodded in agreement. “Time for payback, baby. After you kill those kidnappers, we’ll go after the Giancosimos. I don’t care if it costs every penny and every thing we have!”

I felt detached from reality, my emotions suppressed by adrenaline and the old, familiar coldness. I didn’t say anything, merely nodded my understanding.

The sound of another helicopter landing drew our attention, it was Pop flying in from Houston. As the family filed out to greet him, Bill stopped me.

“One of the girls had the presence of mind to take her cell phone with her, and stash it in their car,” he said softly. “The vehicle was eventually abandoned in Odessa, but it stopped for fifteen or twenty minutes at a farmhouse outside of Midland.”

“How many?” I asked.

“The gate video recorded two SUV’s. One went straight to the house, while the other stopped to pick up the lawn care guy’s murderer. Four guys stormed the front door from the first vehicle, and four more from the second one ran around and came in through the pool entrance.” Bill’s ice cold demeanor cracked a little, his voice shook as he described his fiance’s ambush.

He indicated a large pool of blood by the dining room table. “Trini fired from here. She took those two bastards out when they rushed in the door,” he growled, indicating the two dead bodies. “She would have got all four of them, but the others came up the pool stairs behind her. Six were alive to take the girls. We found Kryssie and Amy’s flip phones charging in the kitchen, so it must have been Jackie that was able to hide hers in the SUV.”

“Good for her,” I said grimly “What about the girls’ sidearms?”

“All present and accounted for, unfortunately. Nobody thinks to carry firearms at home. Trini had one, of course, because she’s a Federal Agent. We feel naked without one.”

I stepped over to greet my Pop. He was comforting Sarah as best he could, but he was on the edge of hysteria himself.

“H-how could I have been so stupid?” Sarah was beside herself, weeping uncontrollably in a fit of self-recrimination. “It was my idea for them to stay here! If they’d gone with you this wouldn’t have happened!”

“Bullshit,” Pop said, “They would have come after us no matter where we were. This is Giancosimo’s fault, baby, nobody else’s.”

“Walt’s people knew exactly where we were, Sarah,” I said. “No doubt he was getting up-to-the-minute reports from somebody at those fucking car lots. That’s where we fucked up, we didn’t take his people into account. He knew the girls were here alone, and they were the easiest targets. If they had gone with Pop, you and I would have been attacked.”

“But ... you’re a Texas Ranger,” she said. “You were all over the news. They would have steered clear...”

Gesturing at the dead guys, Bill said, “DEA facial recognition software has identified these two as soldiers of the Trujillo drug cartel out of Chihuahua. They’re Mexican nationals, semi-pro, and don’t give a shit about Texas Rangers, FBI, or anybody else.”

He turned to me. “Cartel involvement means that Walt’s used his brother Freddy’s connections to hire them.” He gave me a significant glance, “It also means any others we may capture aren’t going to be inclined to talk. They’re fanatically loyal to the cartel, it’s like family to them.”

He took me aside when Sarah fell, sobbing, into Pop’s arms. “They’ve called your dad for ransom, as we expected,” he said darkly. “Since the cartel is involved, DEA will lend us the cash, but they want a piece of the bust. No matter how urgent this is, I figure it’ll be at least two hours before we can get a team assembled and on site. Get me?”

I did get him. “You say none of them will talk?”

“Probably not. Use extreme caution, Ken. These people have already tried to kill Trini. Don’t let them hurt anybody else in our family.” Icy calm washed over me, and I welcomed the darkness.

“Understood.”

I asked Sandy for the keys to her Traverse and ran upstairs to change.

They didn’t realize we spoke their language, so I knew they were from Mexico. It’s impossible to grow up in Texas without learning at least a little Spanish, and American Latinos would have known that. We were rich, spoiled, and ignorant gringo putas to these guys, with no intelligence or ability. They never tried to speak to us, just shoved us towards wherever they wanted us to go. A couple of them did leer at us, though, and let their hands wander. Words weren’t necessary to know what they had in mind.

Not that they spoke a lot, even to each other. After they shot Trini, they went through the house swiftly and captured us, then hustled us out the front door without ransacking the place. We were all they were after. They had done this sort of thing before, I surmised, and must be some of the cartel thugs that Trini had warned us about, the ones that kidnapped and murdered people for a living.

They bound our wrists with plastic zip-ties, and the guy that seemed to be in charge checked to make sure they weren’t too tight. One of the others called him Carlos, and asked how the bodies of the two thugs Trini had killed were to be disposed of. Carlos said to leave them and get us in the car.

Jackie caught my eye as we were pushed towards the SUV and nodded at the ground. I understood what she wanted me to do immediately. We grew up as latch-key kids, and all that time alone together has made my sister and I almost telepathic. All we have to do is look at each other to know what the other is thinking, sometimes.

Anyway, when Jackie faked tripping into the floor of the SUV, I fell right down on top of her, trying to make it look accidental. I saw her shove the little flip-phone under the front seat before one of the Mexicans jerked me up and shoved me into the seat, then did the same to her. I nudged her with my foot and winked, telling her silently that she did good.

They shoved Amy in next, battling the Mexicans for all she was worth! She kicked and screamed, and when one guy grabbed her hair she bit the shit out of him, drawing blood! He viciously backhanded her, and gagged her with duct tape while she was dazed. I saw the fake barrette Trini had given her in her hair, and felt a surge of hope. Carlos climbed in front and warned his compadre not to mark us up.

I cried when we drove past Manny’s body in the truck by the front gate. He was a good man, always polite and a hard worker. I had known he liked me, but he was very shy, and never spoke of it. Before Kenny came, I had toyed with the idea of seducing him, (of course, before Ken came along I thought about fucking pretty much every man I met) but didn’t, because I thought Manny might have turned me down. He loved his family. These people are gonna pay! I vowed silently.

Two things struck me as we drove away; we weren’t blindfolded and none of our captors wore masks. Carlos didn’t act worried when his compatriot called him by name in front of us, either. They didn’t care if we could identify them, I realized. They intended to kill us!

We drove towards Odessa through cattle country, on a bumpy old state road almost devoid of traffic. The radio was tuned to a Latino Pop station playing ‘La Mordidita’ by Ricky Martin, and Carlos turned it off with a snarl.

“I hate fucking Ricky Martin,” he said in Spanish. “His music is for the maricón!”

The driver spoke to him in the same language, still oblivious that we understood every word. “These putas are very beautiful, Carlos. The Russian would pay us big money for them. Do we still do what the gringo wants?”

“Si. These girls are wealthy, and people will look for them. They are too risky to sell, even to the Arabs. The Russian has plenty of girls from his own country that no one will look for. Besides, the pigs are hungry.” Carlos replied with a nasty laugh, and reached over to turn the radio up again.

After an hour or so we pulled into the driveway of an old, weathered two-story farmhouse. There was a huge feed lot of hogs and a ramshackle barn near the house, and the stench was unbelievable. The hogs raised a deafening racket when the SUV’s pulled into the drive, and I wondered how long it had been since they’d been fed. Animal husbandry didn’t seem likely to be among our kidnappers’ skill set.

We were pulled out of the SUV and marched into the house, through a room filled with boxes and packages wrapped in plastic, and up a creaky staircase into a bedroom on the second floor. The only furnishings in the room were an ancient, dusty mattress and an old piece of carpet on the wood floor, with an empty plastic bucket and a gallon jug of water in the corner. A grimy light bulb in the ceiling was the sole light source, because the window was boarded up.

“You weel stay in here until your father pay us,” Carlos told us in thickly accented English. “Nobody is gonna hurt you.” He peeled the tape off Amy’s mouth and said, “You must be quiet, or wear the tape.”

“What if we need to use the bathroom?” Jackie whined.

Carlos simply pointed to the bucket, then exited the room, closing and locking the door behind him.

“I don’t care what he says, we’re gonna get raped,” Amy whispered fiercely. “It’s obvious. You can see it every time they look at us.”

“Accept the situation as it comes, that’s what Trini said to do,” Jackie said softly. “If it’s inevitable, don’t worry about it. Figure out how to use it, then get some payback when you can.”

“We need to figure out something quick, then, ‘cause they’re gonna kill us and feed our bodies to the pigs,” I said. “I figure they’ll do it as soon as Carlos gets word that daddy’s paid our ransom. We know his name and we’ve seen all their faces. They can’t afford to let us go.” Jackie paled.

“Check out the room!” Amy suggested. With our hands zip-tied, it was difficult. Jackie kicked at the mattress, while Amy and I examined the walls.

“This would be a lot easier if we could cut these zip ties,” Jackie groused. “Turn around and let me get your barrette, Amy.”

“No!” I hissed. “At least not mine. They’re gonna be up here to rape us soon, and will search us if we’re not tied. Then they’ll find the barrette. Just cut yours, Jackie, and Amy and I will try to make sure they do us first.”

“Yeah, that one guy is pissed at me already, ‘cause I bit him,” said Amy. “Oh, Jesus, Kryssie, what are we gonna do?” a hint of panic in her voice.

“Calm down, sweetie, we’ll think of something,” I said. “We gotta work together. The first thing to do is keep our heads. Remember what Trini told us – ‘You’re gonna get hurt, you can’t avoid it. Accept that fact and you can still function. It’s okay to be scared, but you can’t let it paralyze you.”

“Right.” Amy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said after a moment, “what’s our next move?”

“Hey, there’s something hard in here!” Jackie whispered excitedly as she poked the lumpy mattress.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, it’s inside the mattress. Quick, cut this tie!”

Amy dropped to her knees and I backed up to unclasp her fake hair clip. I removed the plastic guard, turned around to Jackie, and carefully cut the tie around her wrists while we were back to back.

“Maybe it’s a knife or a gun or something!” Amy said hopefully as Jackie slit a hole and dug inside the mattress, but what she pulled out was a rusty old Phillips-head screwdriver.

“Why in the world would somebody hide a screwdriver in their bed?” Jackie wondered.

“I don’t know, but I’m glad they did! A desperate idea occurred to me when I saw the screwdriver. I watch too many movies. “Okay, girls, here’s what we’re gonna do.” I whispered.

I left the Traverse by an old irrigation pump about a mile from the farmhouse and began a cautious approach. The flat, treeless and arid West Texas prairie is about as close to desert as it’s possible to get without actually being one, and the blistering late summer temperatures had turned the long prairie grass sere, brown, and yellow, exactly the colors of my desert fatigues and the mustard-colored greasepaint that streaked my face.

The rough, cracked concrete roadway was typical of rural Texas. There was a three-foot embankment and drainage ditch on either side of it, bone dry and overgrown with weeds, perfect cover for me as I moved towards the house.

I used a spotter scope to examine the farm when I got close enough. The house was located a couple of hundred feet south of the road at the end of a rutted dirt driveway. Fortunately for me, the Mexicans had neglected to mow the grass, which was a couple of feet high and would provide excellent concealment. Behind the house to the north was an old barn and a tumble-down silo. Behind the barn was a feed lot full of big hogs. The good thing was that the hogs were making a lot of noise because they were hungry. The bad thing was that the smell was indescribable. I was glad I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.

From my current vantage, I could see one lookout in the loft door of the barn, looking east up the road towards me. He was sitting in the door of the loft at the moment, but would alert the whole place if he detected anything unusual. I had to assume there would be another lookout, watching the road from the west. I would have to approach the place from the north, through the feed lot. Oh joy.

I eased back to the Traverse and circled to the back of the feed lot. The hogs were bad-tempered, even aggressive, and I had to get rough with a couple of them to keep them off me. The mud and the gagging smell of pigshit didn’t help my own temper any, either. I swore to my inner monster that I was going to kill all these Mexican motherfuckers. But then again, that was what I had intended from the start, pigs or no pigs.

The phrase ‘extreme caution’ means ‘scorched earth’ in Covert Ops parlance, nothing left alive to come bite you in the ass. When Bill used that phrase to me, he was speaking as one pro to another. These bastards had critically, maybe mortally wounded his fiancee, and he referred to the rest of the girls as family. This was beyond law enforcement now, this was deeply personal to both of us.

Bill’s experience as a federal agent told him that he couldn’t expect to gain any useful evidence or intelligence from the kidnappers, that they were callous, cold-blooded killers. As Judge Roy Bean would have said, they “needed killin’.” Since he couldn’t do the job himself, he did the next best thing and sent me. He made sure I knew where they were, how long I had, and trusted me to handle the rest. I didn’t intend to disappoint him.

As I had surmised, there was no one watching the pig lot. These cartel assholes might be good at kidnapping and murder, but they suck balls when it comes to establishing a defensive perimeter. They just assumed any adversaries would use the road to approach the place. It was a fatal mistake. I checked my watch, and saw I had maybe thirty minutes to get this over with before the cavalry got here. All the time in the world.

The barn was an older one, the galvanized and corrugated sheet-metal siding brown with rust. I ghosted to the side of it and found a hole in the wall to spy out the interior. There were five or six Mexican men inside, using a noisy contraption to shrink-wrap what looked like bales of weed and stack them against the back wall. There had to be a couple of tons of mary jane in there, and I grinned to myself. The DEA guys were gonna be happy with this one!

I eased around to the rear of the barn and scoped out the west side of the house. There were two windows on the second floor, and sure enough, there was a lookout in one of them, watching the road to the west. He was sitting in the window and smoking a cigarette. The other window was boarded up on the outside, the plywood gleaming new.

That’s where the girls are, I thought. The first floor of the house had a wrap-around porch, the roof of which was immediately below the two windows. I gave a mental snort of contempt. This was gonna be too easy.

Too easy. The thought triggered a blast from the past.

Gunnery Sargent Hardison laughed as he tapped my helmet with the butt of his M-27. “Not as smart as you thought, eh, Davis? Yer dead, yer fucking dead!”

I shook my head ruefully. “I thought that perimeter was too easy,” I grumbled, to the most hard-ass jungle training instructor in the Corps. “There was more than a trip-wire and a guard, wasn’t there?”

“There was a Claymore in the bush. Not that it mattered. You were never supposed to penetrate the perimeter, remember? You wanted to show off, didn’t you? Thought you’d wipe out the target all by yourself, didn’t you?” He shook his head. “Mission first, Davis. If you’d stuck to the mission, you’d be alive. As it is, you’re dead, the enemy is alert to your team’s presence, and the mission is dead in the water. You tried to be a fucking hero, and instead you fucked up your mission and killed yourself and your teammates, every last fucking one of you. There’s always something you can’t see, Davis, always. Never forget it. If you think it’s too easy, you’re right. Always. The Corps doesn’t need fucking heroes, they need Marines. Now do it again! Stay on mission this time, and consider yourself lucky I don’t send your ass up for a court-martial!”

The memory was a cold slap in the face. My attitude was all wrong. Mission first, Davis. My mission was to get our girls to safety. Period. Vengeance was a luxury. If Bill wanted to kill all these assholes, it would have to wait until the girls were out.

I took a second look at the house. My idea was to sneak around the corner of the roof and stick the lookout in the throat before snatching him out of the window, but I would need to clear that porch and get a look inside the downstairs before I climbed up on the porch roof.

To get to the house without being spotted meant that I had to take out the barn lookout first. An examination of the rusty barn’s back wall revealed a spot where the wood that the sheet metal was nailed to was dry-rotted, and I used my Ka-bar to prize out a few loose nails, and bend the siding back to create an entrance.

Once inside, the wrapped and stacked bales of weed were between me and the Mexicans. I was able to clamber my way up to peek over the pile, and discovered a trap door to the loft directly over my head. The Mexicans were busy with their work, not looking up where I was, so I crawled atop the bales and gingerly raised the trapdoor to scope out upstairs. In the dim light from the open door at the opposite end of the building, I saw that big loft was empty save for a few dusty old tools and debris. I could see the lookout’s silhouette as he stood and stretched in an effort to keep from falling asleep.

Crossing the fifty or so feet between us would require skill and stealth. If he heard me at all he would yell down the ladder to his buddies, who would probably shoot me through the ceiling. The machinery downstairs was making a lot of racket, though, so he never heard a thing.

Although I had my Sig-Sauer 9mm and my Ka-bar with me, for this guy I used a piano-wire garrote. It was totally silent, and wouldn’t leave a pool of blood to drip on somebody downstairs. He kicked once or twice, but the thumps were totally drowned out by the racket.

I propped the body up in the loft door to make things look normal, at least to a casual glance, and called Bill to give him a sitrep.