Chapter 3

In the basement of the largest house in the Diablo del Norte area, a small Mexican town a little over an hour’s drive from Cactus Point, a young woman’s tear-soaked eyes darted between her husband and two small children, a four-year-old son and six-year-old daughter. Her husband was bound to a chair with ropes around his wrists and ankles. His chin rested on his chest. He had two swollen black eyes. The gag parting his lips and digging into his cheeks was soaked in the blood oozing from both his nose and mouth. It overflowed down his chin to stain his dirty, yellowing undershirt. The children stood not far from the woman—fear in the girl’s eyes, confusion in the boy’s.

A man towering over the children pressed them against the front of his legs with a single hand large and strong enough to hold both in place. The girl’s hair, black as her mother’s, was parted down the middle and tied into two long pigtails with red ribbons that matched her short summer dress. One of the dress’s spaghetti straps hung loosely off her bony, bare shoulder. Her big brown eyes stared at her mother from under her unevenly cut bangs. The boy wore navy shorts and a light blue polo shirt, his straight hair combed down in the 1960s style of the Beatles. In his case, it wasn’t a fashion statement. A barber was a luxury. His father simply placed a bowl over his head and cut around the edges.