'Inside,' Manny Avila said, and pulled Rocky up from the box he'd been leaning against.
I was pushed forward, with Rocky directly behind me. We were led down a short wooden staircase, which descended about twenty feet. Once we reached the bottom, we were standing on the floor of a long, well-lit tunnel. Sitting before us was a small trolley, which ran on half-gauge tracks. Question answered.
'Walk,' Manny ordered.
With two gangsters in front of us and two in back, we started down the tunnel, leaving Manny Avila near the staircase, watching us.
The tunnel narrowed and descended on a ten-to fifteen-degree slant. After descending for about a quarter mile, I estimated we were another twenty feet down, leaving Calexico behind, heading toward Mexicali, where we were undoubtedly going to be murdered.
Chapter 53
The tunnel became damp, collecting ground moisture the farther down we went. At its deepest spot we were forced to slog through almost an inch of blackish brown water before making the slow climb back up on the Mexican side.
Somewhere well past the halfway point Rocky stumbled and fell into me, knocking me into the vato guard in front. The man spun and in the next few seconds it got very busy. He started raining blows onto me. I ducked and dodged, with my hands cuffed helplessly behind my back. He ended the short, vicious routine with a right hook, which caught me high in the forehead, the part of the skull where the bone is the thickest. I heard one of his knuckles break as the punch landed. He screamed in pain. Rocky was being wrestled to the ground a few feet to my right. For the next couple of seconds we were back to back, sprawled across the narrow-gauge tracks on the tunnel floor.
Then I felt something sharp poking me in the kidney. I moved my cuffed hands up to the middle of my hack to try to stop it and got jabbed again, this time in my left palm. Why the hell was Rocky stabbing me?
I finally figured it out. He had somehow gotten his hands on a sharp piece of metal. He jabbed it out again and this time I caught it in my right hand and wrapped my fingers around it. It was a four-inch nail, which he'd probably pulled out of that gun crate he'd been leaning against in the Calexico warehouse.
Just then I was snatched back up to my feet. The punk with the busted knuckle was standing in front of me, cradling his hand and glowering angrily. He finally pulled out his gun with his good hand, then slammed me in the head with the flat side of the automatic.
'Carechimba hijueputa,' he shouted, then hit me with it again. I went down on one knee, and struggled to retain consciousness. As I teetered there, half out of it, I fought to get my head to stop spinning.
'Flaquito,' he screamed and spit on me.
Rocky and I were then pulled up to our feet and pushed roughly through the dimly lit tunnel. I managed to slowly collect myself during the next few minutes.
The air was damp and fetid, despite the ventilation tubes punched into the tunnels ceiling every fifteen feet or so. Whoever designed this thing knew what they were doing.
I'd been through a few captured drug tunnels in the past and they usually looked like fun house exhibits where the floors and walls serpentined all over the place. Somewhere around the middle of the passage there would be a hard left or right to accommodate the fact that the diggers tunneling in one direction had to make a sharp course correction to meet up with the ones coming the other way. This tunnel was straight and true. It had been carefully engineered, attesting to the organization behind this smuggling operation.
We finally reached the far end, where another staircase waited. Rocky and I were stopped. The celador in front of me snatched up a phone mounted to the wall at the base of the staircase.
'Es Ramon. Tengo los prisoneros.'
Ramon listened for a moment, hung up, then climbed the stairs and opened a reinforced wooden door.
We were led up into a carpeted basement hallway. Halfway down the corridor Ramon opened another door and flipped a light switch. Then we were pushed inside what looked like a very large laundry area containing several commercial-sized washers and dryers. There were two long folding tables in the center of the room attached to the floor with metal brackets. Along one wall were several porcelain sinks.
While his partner pointed an automatic pistol at me, Ramon removed my handcuffs and recuffed my wrists in front of me through a wrought-iron wall brace that supported a huge metal drying rack that contained half a dozen small, three-foot-square Mexican blankets. Rocky was cuffed to a similar rack on the opposite side of the room.
The four guards started patting us down, stealing everything we had in our pockets. One of them saw my belt, which had a silver buckle. He undid it and pulled it off, taking the satellite transmitter with him. Then they left, closing and locking the door behind them. I was pretty sure they were just outside waiting, so I kept my voice low.
'I thought you were trying to kill me in that tunnel,' I whispered.
'You said you wanted a nail. Now get going and pick these cuffs, homes.'
I shifted the nail carefully between my index finger and thumb, making sure I didn't drop it. Then I went to work on the new Hook-fast stainless steel handcuffs that were securing my wrists to the thick metal bracket.
Chapter 54
It only took me two minutes to pop my handcuffs open. Once I was loose I moved across the laundry room and freed Rocky. We both started looking around for anything we could use as a weapon. Almost everything in the room was bolted down.
I finally pulled one of the large commercial dryers away from the wall and found a heavy extension cable coated in an eighth of an inch of black rubber. It had a heavy rubber-encased plug on one end. I disconnected it and started to knot the end of the cord around the plug until I had a three-foot cord with a tennis-ball-sized monkey knot at the end.
While I was doing this, Rocky hunted around in back of the washing machines and finally came out with a two-foot-long brass pipe. Not much of an arsenal but it was better than being chained to a wall and getting beat to death.
'You got a way you want to do this?' he asked.
'Lets make some noise. We'll pretend we're still chained to these racks. Once they're inside, whammo-take them from behind.'
'I like it, homes.'
I positioned myself where I was before. I had the knotted extension cord stuffed under my belt where I could yank it out quickly. I nodded at Rocky and he started banging on the front of one of the washers that was pulled away from the wall. As Rock returned to his place by the drying rack across the room, we heard the door being unlocked.
A second later two of the G's rushed in, guns out. After a quick glance at us, they turned their backs and studied the room.
As they were trying to figure out how the hell one of the washing machines got moved, Rocky and I stepped quietly away from the metal racks.
'Hey, Ramon,' I said softly to the vato with the broken hand who'd pistol-whipped me. He spun quickly and I let him have it with my makeshift mace. The monkey knot hit Ramon flush in the throat. His Adam's apple cracked loudly, sounding like a Ping-Pong ball being crushed. The gun fell from his fingers, clattering to the cement floor.
I didn't see Rocky's guy get it because Ramon immediately dropped to his knees with both hands clutching his throat. He started gasping for breath, then gagging. I had one eye on the door waiting for the other two thugs to come busting in.
