Deadly Journey Read online

  I was aware that I answered his question in a monotone and all the others that followed, without emotion, or thoughts as to the consequences. It was as if someone had sucked the very essence of my soul from my body, leaving only a shell.

  The memory of them removing me from the gurney was lost to me. The next recall I had was me slumped against the wall of the barracks cabin next to the desk. A guard passed his sidearm to his colleague and, bending down, he hauled me over his shoulder. My arms hung limp, but with my blistered right hand clenched.

  It’s a strange feeling to be devoid of thought. Some would say impossible, but with my spirit broken, I didn’t even try to lift my head as he took me like a sack of garbage for a walk, before hoisting me onto the tail end of their pickup truck.

  Twilight turned into nighttime on the short journey. I could see my surroundings when the truck stopped at the villa, but strangely, it was as if someone had turned the volume off and I could hear nothing. One of them carried me up to my bedroom like a baby in his arms and threw me onto the bed. Managing to curl into the foetal position, with the lights out, all I was aware of was they had removed my shackles and replaced the tracker on my ankle, the L.E.D. flashing green. Flash, flash, freakin’ flash. There was no pain. In fact, I was numb to anything. No emotion... nothing.

  The door made no noise when it opened and closed. No light flooded the room. All I heard was the haunting voice of Leandra calling out my name. The bedside light suddenly lit the room. Leandra climbed onto the bed and sat with her back to the headboard. She gently hitched my head onto her lap and stroked my hair.

  ‘Oh, Kurt, what have they done?’

  I didn’t have an answer. I was all answered out. She took hold of my clenched fist.

  ‘You’re bleeding! There’s blood trickling from inside your fist. Kurt, are you holding something?’

  She tried to unfurl my fingers, but I resolved to clench them even tighter. Her last words trailed off as I finally closed my eyes, ready to surrender to sleep.

  Chapter 21

  A Broken Mind

  The lace curtains at the balcony door fluttered in the breeze. Someone had fastened back the louver doors, allowing warm sunshine to flood the bedroom. My head rested on a pillow, which strangely had a woman’s legs protruding at right angles to where I lay. Startled at first, it dawned on me that Leandra must have stayed with me all night.

  I tried to lift my head, but couldn’t. Then I realized that the rest of my body couldn’t move, as if paralysis had struck my nervous system. My affliction was nothing of the kind, which was soon brought home by searing pains intensifying in every muscle and joint as the opiate of a deep slumber changed to full consciousness. The best I could muster was a drawn-out groan.

  ‘You’re awake. How do you feel?’ Leandra asked. Her voice was haunting, as if it came from another time and place.

  ‘Dead,’ I wanted to say. At least that’s how I felt inside, as if I was waiting for my body to expire and for it to catch up with my spirit. I don’t think I could have adequately answered her even if had had the strength of mind and body.

  How did I feel? I felt nothing. Only the pain reminded me that I was still alive.

  Leandra hitched her body from underneath the pillow and ran her fingers through my hair.

  ‘You need some dressings – the skin on your wrists is scuffed and raw. Looking at those golf balls on your head, I think you’ll need some pain killers.’

  I stared blankly at the floating curtains. Her words had simply drifted on by as if taken by the breeze. She might just as well not have been there. Aware that my legs were drawn toward my chest, I could feel the tension in a still tightly clenched fist, covered by the palm of my other hand and nestled between my knees.

  The bedroom door opened and closed.

  The dancing curtain filled a void. It was strange how an inanimate object could hold such fascination, acting like an antidepressant to take me to another time and space not of this world.

  Goodness knows how much time had passed, when the high-pitched squeal of the breakfast cart wheel broke the spell. The door opened and to my annoyance, Leandra obscured my view of the balcony with herself and the cart. All I wanted was to be left alone to heal, but I didn’t have the strength or the inclination to protest. She was arranging pillows behind my head when a guard joined us.

  ‘Help me lift him, Carlos, please,’ she said.

  Powerless to resist, I gritted my teeth to avoid screaming out as they bundled me against a bank of pillows at the headboard. Sitting in an upright position, facing the blank screen of the television, a sense of panic enveloped me as Leandra forced a pill into my mouth. She held a glass of water to my lips, but I wasn’t able to drink and managed to avert my head at a flashback to Stony Face holding his jug of water.

  ‘Come on, take a sip to swallow the tablet. The doctor left them for you. They’re really strong for the pain. He’s also left some sleeping pills if you need them later.’

  My eyes met Carlos’s gaze. He sucked air through his teeth and shook his head as if he pitied me. He took hold of Leandra’s hand and whispered something in Spanish. Whatever he said, she nodded and they both left the room. Half the tablet had dissolved, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth by the time she returned. She held up a shot-size glass filled with milk and held a straw in her other hand.

  ‘Sorry about the water. I didn’t realize until the guard explained.’ She climbed on the bed. ‘Try sipping this, or we can use the straw if you like.’

  Somehow, I managed to signal, lifting the index finger of my left hand to point to the straw. Leandra leaned over and I sucked on the straw as best I could, but the remainder of the tablet simply wouldn’t go down my reluctant, blocked throat, and I ended up gagging. She knelt back. With a final gulp, the tablet passed on its way.

  Leandra stroked my cheek. A cobweb of red lines streaked the whites of her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept. They were moist to the point of a tear welling at the bottom of each tear duct. First one droplet tumbled and then the other.

  ‘Oh, Kurt, we can mend your body, but you have to fight what’s going on in your head. You have to be strong and get through this. You don’t have the time I had to recover. We have to get you out of here.’

  I heard the words and they registered, but they had no meaning. I was done trying to work out where her loyalties lay. She reached over to the cart and then, turning, busied herself, cleansing and bandaging my wrists. She took some ice packs and used a towel fashioned as a turban to hold them in place around my head. At first, I flinched when she applied them, the cure being worse than the pain, but then the ice worked its soothing magic.

  ‘Let’s take look at your hand.’

  She attempted to release my clenched fingers, to no avail. A puzzled expression spread on her face from an initial twitch of her nose, to her lips pouting. Leaning back, she crossed her arms. ‘I can’t help you if you don’t let me. Have they cut your hand?’

  I looked through her, unresponsive to her question. She turned her head over her shoulder and skewed her body sideways to follow my line of vision.

  ‘You want to watch television?’

  I didn’t want anything, other than for her to leave me alone.

  Maybe I blinked. Regardless, she took whatever response my eyes gave her as a “yes”, shuffled off the bed, and switched on the TV. Then she walked to the cart.

  ‘Okay, we’ll leave your hand until last. Let me try this cream on your muscles.’

  I could smell the cream before I felt the initial cold shock to the skin as she applied it and vigorously rubbed it into my calf muscle. It had the kind of odour as the cream Mom used to smear under my nose if I had a cold, to relive my sinuses. As she started to rub it into my other calf, the first application started working to heat up the muscle. By the time she had finished with my arms, my entire body felt as though I was on fire.

  She disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the water running and I assumed she was wa
shing the residue from her hands. On her return, she stood at the side of the bed and I glanced sideways at her rubbing her hands with a towel.

  ‘We have to deal with your hand, and then we’re done.’ She dropped the towel onto the cart and then stood akimbo. ‘Well, I say done, what I mean is... with the outside. I may have to call the doctor back to put you on an intravenous drip if we can’t get you to take any fluid. You know you’ve been out of it for eighteen hours?’

  She reached over to take hold of my clenched hand, but not before I managed to put it out of her reach.

  ‘W... why?’ I croaked and then gulped at the strain of attempting to talk.

  ‘Why what?’

  She took hold of my left hand. I took another gulp and tried to free the burr that was blocking my throat.

  ‘Why...c...an’t… you escape?’

  ‘Oh, Kurt, do you want me to re-live what it is you’re going through now?’

  ‘Answer... then... the... hand.’

  She drew an arm across her stomach and set her other arm in the manner of The Thinker, but with her fingers spread out covering her face and her head bowed. She shook her head slowly from side to side and then drew her head upward to look up at the ceiling, her fingers sliding down her face to hold her chin at rest.

  ‘This is going to be hard, Kurt.’

  Chapter 22

  Leandra’s Secret

  Leandra climbed on the bed and sat next to me, with her feet on the bed drawn backward.

  ‘Listen.’ She shaped her finger and a thumb into a steeple and then held them before my eyes. ‘See the gap? They’re not quite touching. That’s how close you are to completely shutting down. On top of that, you’re seriously dehydrated. Your body can’t stand much more than the twenty-four hours you’ve already missed in taking fluids.’ She dropped her hand to her knee.

  What she was saying seemed ironic, considering the amount of water they’d poured down my throat during the waterboarding sessions. I could see frustration on her face as it reddened and her tone changed.

  ‘Damn you, acknowledge me. Do you understand?’

  I understood, but strangely, I didn’t care.

  ‘Answer me, for God’s sake.’

  I blinked my eyes twice. This time her tone lowered and she was less agitated, but she still talked forcefully.

  ‘Good, so you do hear me. We have to get you back to strength, so you can escape. So, before I tell you my story, I need you to drink some water.’

  She reached out to the cart and picked up a glass of water, dropped in a straw and held it to my lips. I turned my head from side to side, keeping my lips closed as she tried to follow my movement with the glass.

  Leandra gave up and banged the glass down on the cart. Reaching over to the nightstand, she grabbed the photo of my family and thrust it in front of my face.

  ‘See this, your family. Do you want them to suffer forever?’

  The picture of my family morphed in my mind to the clips of Mary at the school with Rob guarding and her taking the kids to her mom’s with bodyguards in tow. I started to breathe rapidly. She raised her voice.

  ‘What have you lost? Man up. All you’ve lost is your pride, for Christ’s sake. Now drink the damn water.’

  She put down the photo, picked up the glass, and held it close to my mouth. My breathing grew ever more rapid and my chest tightened. My dad’s voice screamed “stand tall” in my mind.

  ‘Drink.’ Her voice boomed.

  A vision of Stony Face flashed before me, pouring the water into my mouth. That final feeling of drowning seemed all too real. My hand swiped the glass, sending it crashing against the bedroom wall.

  The guard burst into the room.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s the water thing. Contact the doctor and have him bring some intravenous fluid.’

  ‘Sí, entiendo,’ he replied. This guard clearly understood English.

  I laboured to reach out, grasped her arm, and shook my head. ‘Try... again,’ I said, barely getting the words out in a whisper.

  She turned to the guard. ‘Put a hold on calling the doctor.’

  He answered with a nod and closed the door.

  Leandra’s demeanour changed, with a huge ear-to-ear smile. She slipped off the bed and walked to the door. ‘I’ll get a broom and a dustpan and a fresh glass.’

  Somehow, her words made sense. Yes, my body had taken a battering, and I could handle that. However, I’d been found wanting in the mental department. The neural transmitters and receptors that had worked against me when I was kidnapped had conspired against me once again. On this occasion, they had short-circuited, closing my mind to what I couldn’t accept, instead of meeting my fears head on. Leandra was right. All I had lost was my dignity and sense of honour. As Dad had said, it was time to stand tall. It was time to remind myself who I really was. I wasn’t a “nobody”, as they’d had me believe. I was DEA Agent Kurt Rawlings of the United States of America, loving husband, and father to two wonderful children. Not only that, I had a victory over my captors within my grasp. All I needed to be sure of was that I could trust Leandra.

  She returned with a fresh glass, cleared up the broken glass, and disposed of it in the wastebasket. Settling on the bed, she poured water from the jug to the glass, dropped in a straw and turned to me.

  ‘Only sip whatever you need. If it’s hard sucking through the straw, blink your eyes and you can try sipping a little from the glass. No pressure. The water is iced, so it should soothe your throat.’

  My tongue had swollen, and my mouth was dry and foul-tasting. The first small sip through the straw merely cleansed my mouth and absorbed into the skin. The second trickled down my throat and sure enough, it had a soothing effect. It was still hard going and at half a glass, I put my hand to my mouth.

  ‘No problem, we can try again later. Half a glass is fine to start with,’ Leandra said, looking pleased.

  The tablet had kicked in and though I was still sore, I felt comfortable. Leandra turned and placed the glass on the cart. It seemed an overly long time that she had faced away from me. It was hard going, but I raised my arm.

  When I placed my hand on her shoulder, she half-turned. ‘Give me a minute.’

  My hand slid off her shoulder and my arm dropped limply to my side. She picked up the hand towel and appeared to be drying her eyes.

  Sure enough, there was no hiding the moisture in her eyes when she turned to face me. Leandra seemed to dig deep within. Taking in a deep breath, she let out a long, soulful sigh.

  ‘You want to know why can’t I escape, or go back to my family? I suppose I should start from back home, just before I was taken.’ She drew her hand across her eyes. ‘Father was strict. The business he’s in, meant I had bodyguards at all times outside our farm. Anyway, I fell in love with a worker on our farm, Andreas.’ She buried her head in her hands. ‘We were going to have a child. I was only two months pregnant. The situation was hopeless. He wasn’t a Catholic, just a simple farmhand with no prospects and my father would never have approved. You would have had to meet him to understand. Regardless, we decided to elope and get married.’

  Leandra eased off the bedside and faced the balcony. Her hair floated in the breeze along with the curtains. The pause was long and deliberate, as if she were re-living the memory.

  She started to sob, quietly at first, and then the sobs turned to wails of grief.

  She stepped backward and dropped her backside on the bed. Only burying her head in the towel stifled her sobbing. I began to wonder what sort of Pandora’s Box I had opened, but cruel as it seemed, I had to know the rest of her story. With my outstretched arm, my fingers trembling, I placed a hand on her shoulder and gently squeezed encouragement.

  Finally, she dug deep and continued.

  ‘We made a plan. I slipped away from my bodyguards on a shopping trip to the city and we met. It all happened so quickly. A van pulled up beside us. Someone grabbed me from the sidewalk. Andreas fought with one of them, trying
to protect me... They... they shot him. Perez’s hired hands shot him in front of my eyes.’

  Dragging the towel to her eyes once more, she continued to sob. If she had been two months pregnant, I wondered if maybe she had lost the baby. My heart went out to her for the loss of her boyfriend and the baby she had carried. I wondered how she had managed to deal with her grief during the last four years. None of what she had said explained why she couldn’t return to her parents, or attempt an escape.

  Leandra walked around the bed to the bathroom. She turned on the tap water, cupped her hands, and bending over, she splashed her face at the sink, then turned to close the door. There was no denying this was hard for her. She deserved the respite to regroup.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw mug shots of four villains appear on the television screen. Two of the thugs I recognized immediately. I located the remote lying beside me and pressed the button to increase the volume slightly.

  ‘...have been identified following the fire that destroyed their trailer. The youngest of the three on your left, Mike Dawson, had a previous criminal history involving petty crime, but Carlos Lopez and Greg Hines, in the centre, have long rap sheets for drug and violence-related crimes. The fourth, thought to be Antonio Morales, is an illegal from Mexico, according to identification found on his person. Police are still investigating.’

  The news item changed and I lowered the volume. There was no mention of the tunnel. Hines and Lopez we suspected to have carried out a number of hits to settle drug debts and territorial disputes. Despite Rob and me dragging them in for questioning on more than one occasion, we had always had to let them go for lack of evidence. Even working closely with Jeff Clayton at the Homicide Division, nothing stuck. I couldn’t see how questioning both would leave them with such a score to settle that they would have decided to kill me. However, they were perfectly capable of accepting a third-party contract.

  With them dead, it was even more unlikely that I would ever discover who had ordered my death.