Torched: A Thriller Read online

  “Shower.”

  They retreated to the bathroom, perfectly oblivious to the figures converging on the little bungalow from the depths of the Mexican jungle.

  ***

  “Be confident, Terri. You’ve got to mean it if you’re going to do it. If you second guess yourself, you’re done.”

  She studied the kit in her hand. “Okay, okay, okay. I can do this. I can do this.”

  A sudden smile brightened her features. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” he replied.

  “Chaco? What’s that all about?”

  “Short for Chacon. My grandfather’s name. What—you thought I was named after some ice cream treat back in the States?”

  Terri cupped a hand to her mouth to stifle the laughter. Chaco’s grin was bright for a moment, but it vanished when the bungalow’s front door snapped open and his target started toward them.

  “Go, Terri!” he whispered. “Don’t you dare come back outside when you’re finished. Understand? Let me come to you.”

  “Okay. Good luck, Chaco,” she replied.

  He nodded and was off, a blur in the brush, his gun at his side.

  She went the other way, her pulse spiking as she honed in on the veranda shading the tiny back stoop. She stole through the palmetto, dashed briefly into the sunlight—utterly exposed—before sprinting to just beneath the kitchen windowsill.

  She heard movement inside—the muted thud of cabinets and the clinking of dishes. She closed her eyes and conjured those persistent images (Sheldon’s casket, her daughter’s mangled hand), steeled her nerves and silently turned the doorknob before slipping inside.

  ***

  Chaco watched the man preparing for his morning’s work. He was tall and lean, but Chaco thought he matched up fine with him—at least physically. Everything else about the guy Terri called “Miguel” was a mystery.

  He slid his hands into leather gloves. He had a pair of shovels, a pick-axe and a hoe beneath his arm, and he carried the tools a quarter mile to the corner of the plot. He quickly fell into a rhythm with the hoe—chopping at the ground and stooping periodically to shake the soil from the root clusters of the plants he cleared away.

  Chaco admired his work ethic. In just fifteen minutes, the man was covered in sweat. He’d built a sizable pile of brush, and he was making good progress.

  But his admiration wouldn’t help Terri so, huddling low in a crouch, he stepped into the field, advancing quickly on the man.

  One chance.

  He slunk to within a dozen feet.

  “Hey!” he said, and the man started. He dropped the tool as he turned, and Chaco pulled the trigger.

  The dart took him high in the shoulder, just below the collarbone, and the man gasped.

  “What the fuck? What’d you do to me?” Miguel shrieked, his expression twisted in confusion and pain. “What the…what the fuck is…is this?” His voice climbed an octave.

  He pawed at the dart, already growing sluggish. He took two faltering steps before pitching forward in the soil. Chaco winced as the tip of the dart snapped off, the body of the tranquilizer flipping through the air in a strangely graceful arc.

  Proceeding with caution, Chaco flipped Miguel onto his back; he watched as awareness was replaced with confusion in the man’s dark eyes. Then, even that vanished.

  Miguel was out cold.

  Chaco hitched his elbows beneath the man’s pits. He dragged the former mortgage trader across the bumpy terrain. Fifteen minutes later, he’d secured Miguel’s wrists and ankles with plastic zip-ties.

  The target (for that was now how Chaco tried to think of him) slept easily in the back of the Beretta, snoring occasionally.

  Chaco cracked a window. He checked his watch and jogged for the bungalow. If the plan had worked, then Vivian was already floating through dreamland herself…

  ***

  Fortune had smiled on her.

  Vivian had her back turned. She was humming softly to herself when Terri jammed the syringe’s tip into the meat of her upper shoulder.

  Vivian screamed, a hand flying to her back. She turned, and Terri punched her hard in the nose. Vivian’s head snapped back, eyes clouded with pain and surprise, and Terri socked her again. Blood poured from her nose, bubbling down over her lips, and Vivian’s expression of perfect, horrified surprise was everything Terri had imagined since she’d managed to get her children off the mountain.

  She feasted on it.

  “Terri? Is that…are you?” Her words were thick, and the nasal twinge almost made Terri laugh.

  “Goodnight, Vivian. Go to sleep now, ‘kay honey?”

  “What…how?” Vivian stumbled against the counter, struggling to keep herself upright.

  Too late.

  Her clumsy fingers scrambled for purchase, failed, and she fell hard to the floor. Blood flowed over her perfect teeth, staining them scarlet, and her mouth opened and closed while she struggled to speak.

  “Ttttttt,” she hissed. “Wwwwww…”

  Terri knelt, her forehead nearly touching Vivian’s. “You look good, Vivian. Life in Mexico seems to agree with you. I have to say, I’m impressed.”

  Vivian made a little gasping sound, like a fish struggling for air on the riverbank.

  “I’m giving you a chance, Vivian. A real chance—none of that bullshit you pulled on my family.

  “And you want to know something? Hey!” She slapped her cheek. “Stay with me, Vivian! Just a minute longer, then you can have your nap. Guess what?

  “I think you can do it. I’m actually pulling for you, girl! When it gets hot out there, just know that. Okay? Know that I’m pulling for you.”

  Vivian’s eyelids fluttered. Still, even in her state of confusion, she tried to speak—tried to make sense of what was happening to her.

  Her glassy eyes posed the question, and Terri relished the opportunity to provide an answer.

  “We have Miguel,” she calmly stated. She might have been chatting about the previous night’s reality television show around the water cooler at work. “That’s right, we have Miguel, and if you ever want to see him again, you’ve got a long road ahead of you.”

  “No,” Vivian whispered. “No…no…no.”

  Her eyelids lazed shut and she fell into a deep, dark void.

  Terri stood. She went to the sink, worked the handle and took a long drink straight from the spigot. When she was finished, she washed Vivian’s blood from her knuckles and took a series of deep breaths—trying to clear the adrenaline from her bloodstream.

  When her sense of control returned, she went to the window. Chaco was jogging toward her, maybe a quarter mile in the distance.

  She watched his approach, not surprised to find that she was smiling.

  “Damn,” she said, turning back to Vivian’s prone form, “I can’t believe I questioned whether I would go through with this or not.”

  She heard Chaco’s footsteps out back and the smile became a grin.

  Things were about to get hot.

  FIFTEEN

  Vivian woke with a start. A creeping sense of dread, of her space being invaded by low-slung creatures—by things that meant her harm—dominated her senses and she pushed herself into a sitting position, the palms of her hands damp in the sweat pooling on the concrete beneath her.

  Her head spun as she struggled in the blinding sunshine to digest her surroundings.

  She had come to on a cracked cement slab. A pair of crumbling brick walls formed an L-shaped joint behind her, the remnants of an old wooden shelf piled at the base of one. There were a few rusted paint cans and some piled plaster or drywall in the corner.

  An old house? More likely a shed.

  Whatever it had once been, it was now surrounded by water.

  She stood on shaky legs and put a hand to her eyes to block the sunlight. An expanse of slow-moving water contained the crumbling ruins on every side.

  She picked up movement from the corner of her eye. Something
swirled in the water, a graceful, languid movement, and she watched in horror as a little trail of bubbles cut a seam down the canal’s surface. Two minutes later, the reptile’s head surfaced.

  It blinked a golden eye—cold and indifferent—and watched her from afar.

  “Jesus,” she hissed. She knew the creature well. She’d actually enjoyed watching gators in the canal behind their house in Cape Coral. The little ones used to snap at dragonflies when they were feeling frisky.

  There was another swirl, now off to her right. This one had three inches between its nostrils.

  Christ, they were big!

  The island was tiny and sparsely vegetated. She couldn’t imagine the place had ever been a home, but somebody had used it. She supposed it had been an outbuilding of some sort. She was in the process of finding something with which to arm herself—a stick, a shovel, something—when a piercing howl cut through the humid stillness.

  She recognized the voice immediately.

  “Mike? Mike, where are you?”

  He screamed again, the sound chilling her to the bone, and that’s when Vivian noticed the iPad.

  One eye on the behemoths in the canal, she went over to it and picked it up.

  Miguel had been strapped into a metal folding chair. He was stripped to the waist, his torso covered in what looked, through the slightly blurred camera lens, like legions of angry welts. They covered his torso and shoulders, and there were a few on his neck and cheeks.

  There was a sudden flicker on the screen and he loosed another terrible cry.

  “Just waking him up,” Terri said, her tone cheerful. Her face filled the screen, and Vivian’s stomach lurched. Her knees weakened, she was so frightened by the expression on the woman’s face.

  Terri James looked insane.

  Her face disappeared as she moved the camera. There was a dizzying moment of vertigo, and then Vivian saw it. It took her a moment to make sense of what she was seeing.

  It was coated with blood, and a tiny strip of torn skin dangled from the tip.

  It was the chunky portion of an extension cord—the receiving end of the adapter. Vivian couldn’t hold it together any longer. She sobbed, and then the camera was moving again.

  Terri returned it to its previous position, the lens trained again on Miguel, and she stepped into the frame, twirling the cord like a calf roper going through warm-ups.

  Miguel’s chin dangled over his chest, his sweaty hair shrouding his features. In an eruption of rage, Terri swung the cord across his chest and he strained against the bonds.

  Vivian saw the tendons in his neck bulging as he panted the pain away.

  “Hey! Hey, Mike! You still with us?” Terri said.

  He peered up at Terri, his eyes filled with hatred; it improved Vivian’s spirits, seeing him like that. She couldn’t explain it, other than the fact that his expression showed some spirit—some toughness.

  “Gooood! That’s a good boy. Here, Mike. Say hello to your little honeypot.”

  Vivian brought the lens close to his face, and Miguel squinted into the screen.

  “Mike! Mike, I love you honey, I’m so sorry, I don’t know how they found us, I don’t…!”

  He shook his head.

  “He can’t hear you,” Terri said, her face filling the screen. “You remember that little trick, Vivian? It’s a good one! You pulled it on me, remember? Said I could type something out to my children. Said I had a few characters. Remember?”

  Vivian nodded, tears streaming down her face.

  “Then go ahead, bitch. You get five characters. I think you know the drill.”

  Vivian worked the keypad: luvuM

  His smile was small (more like a pained grimace), but it gave her strength.

  “What do you want from us, Terri?” Vivian said. The words echoed in Terri’s earpiece.

  “Good question! Hmmm. I guess I want to feel better, Vivian. And I want you to know that you didn’t get away with it. I want you to understand what you did to my family that day on the mountain.

  “And I want you to pay. You pathetic fucking bitch, I want you to pay. You went after my entire family, when you should have gone after my husband. You were angry about the things he did to your daughter, am I right?”

  “Terri, I…”

  “Am I right?”

  “Yes, but…but Jesus, Terri, he took my daughter! He just…he just hit her and he left her there in the street and he ran! He ran like the fucking coward that he was, and my daughter bled to death there in the street! Can’t you see? Don’t you understand what Sheldon did to us?”

  Terri’s response was quiet, her voice measured. “That’s right, Vivian. He ran. And so what did you do? What did you do after you put my children through hell?”

  Vivian’s breath caught in her chest. She stared into the webcam.

  “What did you do, Vivian?”

  “I ran,” she whispered.

  “What’s that? Say it louder, so your little fuckbuddy can hear it too!”

  “I ran!” Vivian said. She choked on a sob. “I ran.”

  “That’s right. You ran. And now you’ll get a chance to run a little more. That is, if you’re a decent swimmer. I guess that’s step one.”

  “Where am I, Terri? What is this place?”

  “Did you know that the American Alligator’s territory has virtually exploded in just the last two decades?” Terri replied, ignoring the question. “We both remember how plentiful they were in Cape Coral, but they’re turning up all over the place now, girl! And I’m not talking about that random critter that was captured up in Montana, or the ones they found in Maryland.

  “Nope, I’m talking about gators putting down roots in Oklahoma. In fact, biologists have discovered a rather large population living in the Rio Grande. That’s right, honey—they’re pushing into Mexico.”

  Vivian’s eyes flashed to the canal. A ten footer on the opposite bank slid into the water, quick as a shot and silent as a heartbeat.

  “That’s right, Vivian. You’re actually very near the border. I guess that’s going to be your second decision. Do you come after ol’ Mikey the fuckbuddy here, or should you just go on home? Hell, maybe you can turn yourself in. Start paying that debt to society.”

  “What do you want?” Vivian repeated, her voice cooling. She recognized certain things in Terri’s voice, because they had once been there in her own. She recognized the madness, as well as the determination.

  She needed her wits if she would ever see Miguel again.

  “Actually, I think it’s what you want, darling. Step one is getting off that island. That iPad, I’m sure, is very familiar to you. It’s not the same machine you left for Sheldon and me on the mountain, but the differences are merely superficial.

  “You know the drill: that computer is your lifeline. It’s your GPS. It’s your route back here to Miguel. I have remote access, and I’m listening to your every movement, girl. Here’s our location.”

  The video feed vanished, replaced by a Google map. In the bottom of the screen, Vivian noticed the distance: 98.4 miles.

  “It’s not perfect, I’ll admit. But that little island there was too perfect to pass up. The big man used to store chemicals for treating his swimming pools out there, but he found a different use for the place. By the way, you should be honored. You woke up on the property of one very famous outlaw. Those gators belong to him. They’re a…well, a business expense, I guess you could call it. I imagine they’re pretty hungry, too.

  “He keeps ‘em that way intentionally.”

  Vivian frowned and Terri caught it, her grin widening.

  “So your first task is getting off that island. You want to see Mikey here again, then you’ll head south. But, if you’ve had a change of heart and you decide that Mexico just isn’t your thing, nobody will think unkindly of you if you just head home.”

  “If I do, what happens to Miguel?”

  Terri rotated the camera; she zoomed in on a dark-skinned man. He sat in a
chair, reading a book. His bored eyes darted briefly to the camera before returning to the page.

  There was a pistol balanced on his knee.

  “Then he’ll have a chance to parlay with Sheldon in the afterlife. They can trade notes on the crazy women in their life. Fair’s fair, Vivian.”

  The camera tracked back onto Miguel. His eyes flashed with defiance, and he spat on the concrete. “Just go home, Vivian!” he screamed. “Leave! These people are sick! They’re sick, and…”

  The man with the pistol suddenly decked Miguel with the butt of the gun. Vivian heard the blow—THWACK! Miguel was knocked cold, his head canted forward on his chest.

  The man walked across the room, eased himself back into his seat and picked up the thread of his story. Violence, it seemed, came easy to him.

  “How long do I have?” Vivian said.

  Terri smiled. “Ahh, the crucial question. See this?” She held an object up to the camera.

  Vivian nodded, her stomach running through another set of acrobatics. Adrenaline dumped into her veins.

  She knew just where this was heading.

  “At 6:04 p.m. this evening, the sun will hang in the sky at a location directly over latitude 22.4, longitude -100.3. At this time of year, and in this precise location, the potency of the UVB rays will be just about as powerful as they get all year long. In other words, things could get pretty uncomfortable for ol’ Mikey here.”

  Terri had displayed a horrible object; it was a large glass lens, similar to a magnifying glass. The contraption had an aluminum reflection screen behind it, and a housing that held it secure in a tripod.

  “You tried to leave my children outside in the freezing cold, Vivian. My husband died out there, alone and injured. If you,” she fumed, her eyes shining with rage, “want anything more than a charred cinder back of your precious fuckbuddy, then you’ll find a way to get your pretty little ass back down to Cerritos.”

  “How, Terri? How? I left you a vehicle. How do I get there?”

  “A vehicle?” Terri smirked. “A fucking vehicle? You left us in the middle of the Rocky Mountains with an antique snowmobile and a couple pair of sweatpants! You’re in Mexico, Vivian. There are people all around you. And I mean that literally. You’re standing on a very influential drug dealer’s property.