Chapter 2

We found a little village nestled up against some low mountains, or tall hills—we didn’t know which term applied better. It wasn’t much, barely more than a wide spot in the road with a one-pump gas station, a mechanic’s garage, and a tiny grocery. The girls and I found a small house on the west side of town which sat a little higher on the slope than the little community.

I found a job working on the nearly antique cars and pickups that abounded in the neighborhood. My father had been a damn good shade tree mechanic and I’d learned from him. I’d only quit working on my own vehicle only when I became a police officer and no longer had time for it. I made a deal with the guy who ran a some-time plumbing shop. I’d get his pickup’s motor running like a top and he’d make the ancient plumbing in the house working more than occasionally.

To my surprise, neither Megan nor Evelyn showed the slightest sign of homesickness. They never said a word about going home to their mother and were, in fact, happy with their surroundings. They weren’t going to school, they weren’t seeing their friends, and there wasn’t a cell phone tower for sixty or seventy miles, so their smartphones weren’t usable, but we found things to do with each other that more than compensated.

I was learning Spanish quickly—I had to in order to conduct business—and the girls were soaking up the language at a rate that astounded me. Evelyn amazed me with an interest, and a talent for working on old engines. She became my assistant and my official interpreter when I wasn’t sure a customer and I weren’t communicating effectively.

Megan kept house for all of us, and filled in the hours hiking in the local area using the camera in her smart phone to take pictures of the local men, women, and children along with their animals. Her shots of saguaro cacti with the mountains in the background, and of the local countryside in general, were stunningly well composed and beautiful. It seemed to me she might have found her calling.

After the first rush of folks needing cheap repairs on their old automobiles, things settled down in the garage to a slow trickle. The girls and I were supplementing what I earned at the shop with small amounts of the cash I’d taken out of my accounts the day I’d found my wife about to fuck that guy in her office, but we didn’t need much. The money was going to last a long, long time at the current rate we were using it up.

To fill in the time, I began teaching the girls how to shoot. I’d sneaked a weapon into the country, along with a few others. The .45 caliber Glock was too much weapon for my daughters’ wrists to control, but a .32 caliber pistol was just right for Evelyn. Megan could handle the 9mm semi-automatic, so those weapons became their possessions. After a while, the girls became proficient with the firearms. Megan routinely carried the 9mm on her belt as she hiked the surrounding terrain taking pictures.

We had no problem getting ammunition. I’d figured out Mexico had probably the most corrupt society and government imaginable. Literally anything was possible if you had the cash to buy what you wanted—including, according to reports, whole police departments.

Other than target shooting, which no one else in town ever did, we did our best blend in—as well as three tall, blue-eyed Anglos could, anyway. The local population was mostly from a tribe that had been there when many tribes and a few dozen Spaniards under their commander Hernan Cortez outfoxed, then destroyed the Aztecs.

The old ones who came around to sit and swap stories at the gas station looked so ancient, they might have seen the conquest of Mexico firsthand. They sure had stories to tell. My goodness, they had stories. I spent many an evening in the combination cantina and part-time restaurant listening, spellbound. Puzzling my way through their stories was helping me learn the language very quickly, too.

For six months and a bit longer, Megan, Evelyn and I stayed there, soaking up local history, working, and enjoying the heck out of the experience. There wasn’t a police officer in the small village. The closest police presence was what everyone called Federales stationed in a town almost sixty miles away. This little community where we lived never saw a policeman. They never came to this tiny place.

My girls and I weren’t exciting any official attention whatsoever and we weren’t leaving any virtual footprints by accessing the web either. We were well and truly off the grid.

On the other hand, there wasn’t much happening on the social side of our life. There weren’t any older boys/young men in the community. They’d all gone off to the big city looking for jobs or some high intensity fun. There were a few attractive women there, but they were all married and I wasn’t about to go there. The remainder of women in the surrounding area just were not datable material.

To my horror, after our first six months there, the “not datable” women began looking better to me. I was appalled at myself. Then I was ashamed for being so shallow that I thought physical attractiveness was of primary importance. I was more appalled than I was ashamed, though, so I never hit on any of them and I studiously avoided circumstances where I might have to avoid being hit upon.

All in all, the girls and I agreed we’d achieved our purpose with our stay here. We’d intended to disappear from Allison and from the police searching for me, and we’d achieved that. What I’d done to Allison was almost certainly not on the front burner with any law enforcement agency now, and I suspected Allison had probably given up looking for us to serve me with divorce papers. That didn’t matter. She could file, claiming desertion without me ever being aware of it.

We stayed alert—we had go bags always packed and stowed in the back of the Land Rover—but we were happy and relaxed.

The knock at the back door was unexpected, particularly since it was well past the time most folks in the village were in bed and fast asleep. When I opened it with gun in hand, I found one of the oldsters from the cantina standing there, fairly hopping from foot to foot.

“Señor Russ, vienen hombres malos. Vienen por las chicas. Debes esconderte. Deprisa, señor. ¡Por favor, apúrate!“ he said. “Mister Russ, there are bad men coming. They are coming for the girls. You must hide. Hurry, sir. Please hurry!”

I understood most of what he was saying. Evelyn supplied the rest.

“Quieren hacer putas de tus jovencitas!” he added. I understood the word “puta” and knew it meant whore. I guessed the rest of what he’d said.

“Tell him we understand, Evelyn,” I said. “Tell our friend to run away and hide, himself. I don’t want them to see him!”

“Entendemos. Gracias ... Muchas gracias. Ahora, debes esconderte. No dejes que te vean, amigo mío,” Evelyn rattled off, pointing at me. I guessed she was translating verbatim and she was indicating I had spoken those words. The old man grinned tightly, whirled around and vanished into the night. I guessed he didn’t need any advice from me at all.

“Jackets, boots, guns—whatever else you want and can get to in three minutes—Land Rover!” I snapped in Megan and Evelyn’s direction. They turned and raced into their bedrooms while I did the same thing I’d admonished them to do.

My bag of extra clothing was behind the living room couch. I grabbed it and threw it at the kitchen door. Jumping up two rungs on the attic access ladder, I pulled down the big duffle bag holding our stash of twenty-dollar bills and tossed it into the kitchen too. I belted on my holstered .45, dropped an extra magazine and a couple boxes of cartridges in my jacket pockets and laced up my hiking boots. We already had more ammo and bottle water stored permanently in the Land Rover.

We’d practiced this. We’d timed grabbing our “go bags” and whatever else we wanted/needed from what we used on a daily basis and running for the truck. Three minutes was all we allowed ourselves for preparation, and sometimes we didn’t even give ourselves that.

I dumped every bit of food in the kitchen into a burlap sack and put it near the back door. We were all done at virtually the same moment. We’d practiced often enough and the drills were paying big dividends now.

After dousing the lights in our tiny living room and kitchen, I slipped out the back door and stood to one side of the doorway with gun in hand, listening to the night. I could hear yelling and screaming in the distance, but nothing nearby—not yet, anyway. I hissed to get my daughters’ attention and they filed out of what had been a pretty good home for us.

I’d long since disabled the overhead light in the Land Rover’s passenger cabin, so when we carefully opened the doors, there was no splash of light to draw unwanted interest. We closed the doors softly. Our house was fairly high on a slope over the town, beyond which was an indifferently paved road. I left the engine off for now and let the Land Rover coast slowly downhill through uninhabited streets. We almost got all the way down to the road.

Ahead of us was a large step van facing the same direction we needed to go. It was not quite blocking the whole of the narrow street. I could get by, but there was a tall, big-bellied man standing at the rear end of the van with a pistol of some sort thrust behind his belt buckle. My daughters and I could hear the sound of wailing and crying coming from the interior of the vehicle.

We couldn’t possibly get past the guy unnoticed. There was also the fact that we’d been a part of this community for a while; acquaintances and friends we’d made here were under attack. And ... I’d been a cop working to protect members of society for too many years. I couldn’t NOT do something about this. We rolled to a stop at what would have been a short city block away in a real town.

“Megan, get your 9mm ready,” I whispered. “Evelyn, you need your gun too. I have to take this guy out before we can go anywhere.” I paused. “If any of these guys comes up to the truck, you’re going to have to be strong, girls. Aim the muzzle at their chest if they come close, pull the trigger and keep pulling it ‘til the bad guy goes down, okay?”

They murmured their understanding in the darkness. There was no crying or panic. I was so proud of them.

“I’ll be back in a minute, girls,” I said softly.

“Be careful, Daddy,” Megan cautioned me quietly. Evelyn added her admonition half a heartbeat later.

I opened the door and got out quietly, closing the door behind me with a soft click. I motioned for Megan to lock it, then did my best imitation of a phantom gliding down the street. I didn’t have the woodsman skills to move silently, but I did my best. It helped that the van’s engine was running and a breeze was blowing, moving shrubbery and making branches of the stunted trees bump around. When I got close, I could see the obese man standing at the rear of the van, facing it, and away from me.

A part of me was aghast at what I was about to do. I was, or had been, a sworn officer of the law, a cop, for a hell of a long time. Good cops didn’t even think of doing what I intended to do to this guy. Another part of me was perfectly fine with it. Whoever he was, was part of a gang who would rape and enslave my daughters. I wasn’t going to allow that.

There was a length of 2x4 leaning up against a house I passed. I picked it up in my left hand, keeping my .45 ready in my right. Twenty feet behind the man I was stalking, I saw him patting his pockets and looking down at himself. I was putting my feet down softly, making sure there wasn’t anything that would roll under my shoes or make any kind of noise if I stepped on it. A few more quiet steps and I was very near him. He was illuminated in the glow of moonshine, but I was in a deep shadow thrown by the nearby building. I waited for ... something ... I didn’t know what.

The guy found what he was looking for; a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. A moment later he was lighting a cigarette with his left hand cupped around it protecting it from the slight breeze.

I holstered my .45 and stepped forward, moving quietly but as swiftly as I could manage while he was blinded by the flare of his lighter. He never made a move, so I guess he didn’t hear me behind him. Gathering myself, I took the 2x4 at one end, holding it like a baseball bat and stepped into a hard swing. The hard wood came whistling around and the more narrow face of the 2x4 slammed into the base of his skull in back.

I heard bone crunching and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. He didn’t move a muscle.

Dropping to a knee, I looked all around, trying to see in all directions at once. No one raised an alarm.

I went to the van’s door and slid it open. There were five young girls inside, crying. I shushed them and motioned them out, pressing my forefinger up to my lips to urge them into silence. They stifled their tears after a moment.

“Las chicas se van a casa. Ten cuidado. Cállate como un ratón,” I told them.

I was fairly sure I was telling them to go home, to be careful while doing it, and to be quiet. Or I may have been advising them to find something to eat in the train station near their house. I wasn’t entirely sure. Maybe I got it right, because they all took off toward the edge of town, running fast.

Just as I was about to turn back to my daughters in the Land Rover, there was a commotion from an opening too narrow to call a street a couple of yards in front of the van. Someone was coming from the west end of the village. There was some cursing in Spanish and the sounds of crying coming from at least two, maybe three more girls.

I ghosted back into the shadow of the building, found a doorway to wait in, and waited. I had the .45 ready for whatever I had to do next. These newly captured girls, and my daughters’ lives depended on it.

There were two more bad guys shepherding a trio of young girls toward the van. When they saw the back doors were wide open and there was no one inside, they started cursing in Spanish, using words I didn’t understand. They didn’t sound happy, though. They milled around for a long moment, then found the dead man near the back end. Foolishly, for them—happily for me—they clustered together there with their backs to me with pistols in their hands. They took time to discuss the situation instead of facing outward, trying to find a threat. That’s what I would have done, but I wasn’t about to complain they weren’t doing what they should have.

I walked quietly out of the shadow behind them. There was no way to do this quietly. There were two of them and I was out of makeshift baseball bats. I was, I guess, some eight or nine feet from the one to my right front when I lifted the .45 Glock and assumed the two-handed shooting stance I’d been taught at the Police Academy.

I triggered two rounds into the back of the first guy’s head. Swiveling minutely to my left, I fired two more rounds into the side of this guy’s head. He’d been startled into trying to find the cause of the shooting behind him and I caught him just after he started turning. They were dead before they knew they were dying.