The Dead Women of Juarez

The Dead Women of Juarez (2011)

A novel by Sam Hawken

Synopsis:

In the last twenty years, over 3000 women have disappeared from Ciudad Juarez, on the border between Mexico and the USA. Sam Hawken takes this story of mass murder and abduction and weaves around it the story of Kelly Courter, a washed up boxer from Texas, who is past playing the stooge in the ring, as long as he gets paid.

A visceral crime novel based on the true story of mass murder in a Mexican border town

Sam Hawken is a native of Texas now living on the east coast of the United States. A graduate of the University of Maryland, he pursued a career as an historian before turning to writing. The Dead Women of Juarez is his first novel.

Sam Hawken

For las mujeres muertas de Juarez

PART ONE

Bolillo

ONE

ROGER KAHN WROTE, “BOXING IS smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed,” but in Mexico everything bled in the ring. And there was also pain.

When Kelly Courter fought in the States he was a welterweight, but he didn’t fight Stateside anymore and he was heavier. No amount of sweating and starving would take him out of the middleweight class now. This mattered little to the man who paid the purse. If pressed he would call these catchweight fights, but they were really just demolition without a weigh-in or any formality beyond money changing hands.

The Mexican kid was leaner and harder than Kelly, and that was the point; Kelly was here to be the kid’s punching bag. Mexicans liked to see La Raza get one over on a white guy. It was twice as good if the white guy came from Texas like Kelly did.

They circled. Kelly’s blood was on the canvas because he was gashed over the right eye and his nose was dripping. Vidal, the cut man working Kelly’s corner, wasn’t much for adrenaline and pressure alone couldn’t stop the leaking. The crowd wanted to see the bolillo bleed anyway.

Kelly worked the jab to keep the kid at a distance. He connected, but he wasn’t putting enough hurt behind the punches to make a difference to the outcome. His shoulders burned and his calves threatened to cramp. He started the match dancing, but now he was shuffling.

They traded punches. Kelly soaked up the kid’s straight right with his cheekbone and when his head rocked he heard and felt his neck bones crackle. He hooked a punch into the kid’s ribs, but his follow-up left windmilled. And then they were apart again, circling. If Kelly could keep the action in the center of the ring, he might manage to stay on his feet through six rounds.

The bell rang. The crowd was happy. Under the ring lights a layer of tobacco smoke was as thick and gray as a veil.

Vidal wiped the blood off Kelly’s face and pressed an icy-cold enswell where it would do the most good. In the other corner, the Mexican kid’s trainer talked the boy up while he got all the best stuff, from ice packs to adrenaline hydrochloride. Kelly didn’t have a trainer with him because he wasn’t that high-class; he was just the designated sacrifice. Vidal came with a ten-year-old boy who worked the bucket and iced down Kelly’s mouthpiece. Kelly paid them both ten bucks a round.

“Can you do something about my nose?” Kelly asked Vidal after his gum shield came out. “I can’t breathe right.”

“Don’t get punched in the face no more,” Vidal replied, but he stuffed a soaking Q-tip up Kelly’s left nostril and swabbed it around. “Here, suck it up.”

Kelly snorted and his sinuses flushed with the stink of alcohol and blood. Kelly felt nauseated. The boy held up his plastic bucket. Kelly spat into it instead of throwing up.

“You going to make it?” Vidal asked.

“What round are we in?”

“You can fall down any time now. Fall down or get knocked down.”

“He can knock me down.”

“Then you’re stupid.”

The bell rang. Vidal yanked the Q-tip out of Kelly’s nose too roughly, but the bleeding didn’t start again.

As far as smokers went this one wasn’t too big: about forty men surrounded the ring and the walls were close. Everybody had something to drink and there were lots of cigars. Old Mexican faces heavy with wrinkles and extra chins and dark eyes grew darker in the shadows of a fight so that looking out beyond the ropes a fighter saw only dozens of dead, unblinking holes.

“?Delo a la madre!”

Give him to the Mother. Roughly it meant kick his ass to death.

The Mexican kid came straight at Kelly and so did the first hard jab. Maybe Kelly was distracted, or maybe he was slower than he thought, but the punch came through his hands and cracked him right between the eyes. It shouldn’t have rocked him, but it did.

Kelly took a step back. A left hook took him flush and the combo right to the body made his guts shake. He had his hands up, but they weren’t where they needed to be, so the kid battered him left-right, left-right, and he fell while all the old men cheered the blood.

Back in the States the ref would step in once Kelly’s head bounced off the canvas, but this wasn’t the States.