The Dead Women of Juarez

“She’s not here,” Kelly said at last.

Sevilla turned around in the driver’s seat. Kelly saw Sevilla was flushed, perspiring hard, the veins in his temples showing. “What?” Sevilla asked.

“If they want Paloma,” Kelly said. “She’s not here. I talked to—”

Sevilla cut him off: “Shut up, Kelly. Listen to me now and say nothing, you understand? If you want to live through the day, you don’t speak unless you are spoken to. If you can’t answer a question yes or no, keep your mouth shut.”

“I know—” Kelly started.

“?Tu no sabe cualquier cosa! You don’t know anything at all, Kelly. No, don’t sit up; just stay down like that. I’ll tell you again: you have nothing to say to these men that you won’t tell me first. This is the only favor I will do for you, Kelly. Don’t waste it.”

Armed police passed Sevilla’s car. They didn’t stop to look through the windows. Kelly felt the cool air wicking away nervous perspiration. His wrists were hurting in the handcuffs. Old vinyl seat covers stuck to his exposed skin. “I don’t understand.”

“Paloma,” Sevilla said.

“She’s gone,” Kelly said. “They took her. I talked to one of the girls at the place… Ella. She said there were men that took her.”

Sevilla glanced over his shoulder. When he looked back, he shook his head. “You should have come to me, Kelly. You should have done what I asked you to do. Why did you have to be so goddamned stubborn? How many times did I offer you a way out?”

Salt-sweat got into Kelly’s eyes and stung them. He squinted and blinked and rubbed his face against the seat. “I don’t understand,” he said again. “I told you everything I knew. I was going to call you. We could find her.”

“Don’t you understand, Kelly?” Sevilla asked. “She’s already been found.”

A cop rapped on the driver’s side window. Sevilla turned away from Kelly. Everything he said to the cop fell into empty space. She was found. Not alive, not dead, only found. She could be anything.

Kelly trembled. He couldn’t breathe deeply and he felt more sweat in his eyes, but it wasn’t sweat; this time it was fresh tears. When he turned on his back, his arms were pinned beneath him and the cuffs dug into his flesh. “I want to see her,” Kelly said.

“Shut up,” Sevilla said. He spoke again to the policeman and the cop said something back. They were talking in gibberish.

“I said I want to see her!”

“Kelly, I told you to shut up!”

The back door of Sevilla’s car swung wide. Cool air rushed out and hot air swarmed over Kelly. The cop wasn’t at the front window anymore, but here. He wore a lighter version of the body armor, what the police called a stab vest. His arms were bare, long and ropy with muscle. He blocked out the sun.

The cop dragged Kelly from the back of the car by his ankles. Sevilla shouted, but Kelly only heard the thud of his skull against the lower doorframe and then the asphalt outside. He caught a boot to the ribs that he couldn’t block or twist away from. He sensed a descending fist before it crashed into his face.

Sevilla threw himself on the cop and they struggled over Kelly like titans mantled by the sun. The cop pushed Sevilla off and there followed more kicks, more punches. Kelly’s skull rebounded on the pavement. He saw flashes of new light that didn’t come from the sky. Unconsciousness came like exhausted sleep. One blow after another raised the blanket and there was only darkness underneath, warm and safe and free of pain, where even the sensation of knuckles on flesh became distant.

Kelly was dimly aware of Sevilla shouting and the other cop’s voice cutting through, driven behind every punch: “You want to see? You want to see something? I’ll show you something, pinche puto! I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”

Ring the damned bell, Kelly thought. Ring the bell. This one’s over… right?

NINE

THE CEILING WAS MADE OF STEEL springs and cotton. Kelly opened one eye first and then the other, but slowly; his head felt swollen on the inside and even the flesh behind his eye sockets was sore. He felt cool concrete beneath him and sore muscles from sleep without comfort.

Kelly was on the floor. His head lay half beneath the lower of two bunks. The air smelled heavily of chlorine, as if Kelly were in the dressing room at a YMCA, underlaid with perspiration and urine. These were the fear smells, the ones that could not be blanked out by any other. Kelly reeked of them.

He moved. Sevilla’s handcuffs were gone and his hands were free. Kelly rolled onto his back, touched the sore places on his sides and chest and face. His nose was prone to breakage, but this time it was only swollen.

Sitting up was hard. Kelly used the wall to help himself into a corner beside a toilet without a seat or lid. The cell was six-by-six, the cinder blocks whitewashed and chipped and riddled with graffiti. Tu madre es puta y pendeja, one scrawl proclaimed in letters three inches high.

Both bunks were empty. The bottom rack had a thin mattress patterned with red and white, the stripes stained and faded by years. The top rack’s mattress was rolled up. Kelly could look up from his place on the floor through the wire mesh to the low ceiling. The lower bunk had no pillow, no sheets.

Men called to each other in Spanish in other cells nearby. The light in Kelly’s cell came from a compact fluorescent bulb screwed into a protected socket overhead. Without a window, he couldn’t know the hour. Kelly didn’t remember arriving.

He managed to get onto his feet. He was still in his sweats and barefoot. It took effort to urinate and when he did Kelly spotted flecks of blood in the stream. He used the cell’s little sink to rinse his mouth and scrubbed his gums and teeth with his finger. This brought more blood. Some of his teeth were loose.

Kelly walked to the bars and tried to look left and right, but the cells ran along one wall, making it impossible to see from one into the next. The air was crowded with voices and odors. The fluorescent lights made everything sallow.

Kelly had thirst he satisfied with warm water out of the tap. It seemed clean enough and it washed away the last bad taste of unconsciousness. He was too sore to pace, so he sat on the edge of the lower bunk, clasped his hands between his knees and prayed without praying that way he had in the field of pink crosses, but without knowing what to ask for.

Somewhere a heavy door opened and closed. The chatter from unseen men in other cells surged and then subsided. Kelly came to the bars of his cell and looked again. Hands with little mirrors sprouted from neighboring cells, angling toward an invisible stretch of corridor where footfalls rang. Kelly’s stomach knotted.

Seeing Sevilla was not a relief. He came with another man Kelly didn’t recognize, though the uniform was familiar enough. Once Kelly had to pick up Esteban from the city jail; all the men there wore the same tan shirts and slacks, shiny patent-leather shoes and a belt adorned with a billy club and a can of mace. Sevilla’s face was leaden. He didn’t greet Kelly and Kelly kept quiet.

The jailor came close to the bars. He took out his can of mace and motioned to the rear wall of the cell. “Move it,” he said in English. Sevilla was unreadable.

Kelly backed away and the jailor opened his cell. He turned around when he was told to turn around and put his hands behind his back as he was instructed. The jailor cuffed him and led Kelly out to where Sevilla waited. Kelly looked into Sevilla’s eyes and saw nothing.

“Two,” Sevilla told the jailor. He walked behind so that Kelly couldn’t see him.

Out in the passageway Kelly finally saw the far end and the gleam of sunlight from a window out of sight. The jailor marched him forward and prisoners watched him pass by. Every cell was crowded with three and sometimes four men. Where there was no bunk space, prisoners had bedrolls on the meager open floor.

“Hey! Hey, gringo, go fuck yourself,” someone called out, and men laughed.

A heavy steel door ahead was painted green, but rust showed in deep gouges across its surface. The jailor made Kelly rest his forehead against the door while they waited for a guard on the far side to open the locks.