The Dead Women of Juarez

that.

Sevilla showered with the bathroom light off and the door open for illumination, resting his eyes against the onslaught of the day. When he was done he dressed and put the impact baton in his pocket where he’d begun to get used to its weight. He reloaded the .45 from a box of shells kept in the bedstand. The weapon had the fresh, peppery smell of cordite still clinging to it.

It was almost noon before he left the house, careful to double-lock the door behind him, and stepped out onto the street. Saturday was a good day in this neighborhood, when children played outside and families met in their little courtyards to share food and stories and good company. He saw a pack of kids on bicycles down by the corner in intense discussion about where to ride. The cross street was busy with Saturday traffic. Shops were prime destinations on Saturdays, parkings lots turned into open-air markets. Farmers came into the city with a portion of their crop to sell at near wholesale prices. There were clothes and toys and all manner of other things crowded along sidewalks all over Juarez.

“Hola, Senor Sevilla,” one of Sevilla’s neighbors called.

Sevilla smiled and waved to the old woman. Her daughters and seven grandchildren visited every Saturday. Once Ana and Ofelia had gone over to spend time with them, but only once. “Hola, Senora Perez.”

“Be careful!” Senora Perez urged.

“I will. Gracias.”

He drove off the block past the children and their bicycles and joined the ebb and flow of cars and trucks, headed easterly away from his home toward an address given him once by a man about to die on a restroom floor.

He found the building in a place where apartments and businesses freely mixed in a dingy clustering of old buildings stained by age and little upkeep. Auto-repair shops spilled battered vehicles into lots ringed with storm fencing and double curls of barbed wire. There were machine works cradled between decaying apartment blocks. It was not a neighborhood of restaurants and grocerias and the occasional little house left over from some generation gone by. The predominant colors were dead gray and rust of corrugated aluminum and stained concrete.

The first time Sevilla passed it, the place was so plain and much like the others around it. The building hunkered down on heavy foundations, a block of cement and cinder blocks with six-paned industrial windows that could hinge out in a block to vent hot air from inside. Once there had been a long metal sign above the truck-sized rolling doors at the head of the structure, but only a corner remained bolted to the building’s face. The doors themselves were chained shut. An entrance for men stood off to one side, the windows beside it boarded over.

Even having found it, Sevilla circled once more. He looked at the other buildings nearby, particularly a three- story corner apartment building fifty yards away on the other side of the street. There were windows there that offered an angled view of the place. This was something Sevilla put away for later.

He parked along the curb near those apartments and walked to his destination. Somewhere he heard the insistent scree of metal on metal, the sound of machineworks, but he could have his pick of a half-dozen places where the sound could be coming from. Work in Ciudad Juarez never stopped, even for the delights of Saturday, and paused only a little while on Sunday before heading back to the job.

Unlike his neighborhood, this one had deserted streets. A vacant lot sprouted thickets of grass, obscuring the squares of what might have been concrete flooring for some long-destroyed building. A few other cars dotted the curbs, but the atmosphere of abandonment was nearly total. They were not far from an industrial park for two large maquiladoras and Sevilla estimated he could reach Kelly’s apartment in twenty minutes if he knew the right turns.

For a long time he stood before the building. He didn’t want to go inside as much as he knew he must. He wished for an open window on the ground floor, but there were none. Sevilla walked the edges of the structure and passed down a narrow alley between this building and the next. The ground was packed so densely here that even grass struggled to grow. He found another boarded-up window.

The back of the building fronted a long, open expanse of grassy field. Recognition hit Sevilla so sharply that he put a hand on the wall to steady himself. A distant line of brown and white marked the apartment complex where Kelly used to live. As for the field itself… Sevilla had seen Paloma’s body there. He tasted something acid and he felt anger.

Twin tire ruts came away from another set of rolling doors at the back of the building, curving away into the field. It hadn’t rained in a while, but the tracks here were gouged into the earth deeply as if they had been muddy then. Sevilla tried to remember the weather in the days leading up to Paloma’s discovery, but the recollection would not come. He cursed under his breath. He went on.

The fourth face of the building adjoined the vacant lot. An exterior staircase snaked up to the second floor. The metal grating underfoot flaked rust as Sevilla mounted the steps. The door at the top was the same deep red- orange. Double links of chain strung through the handle kept it secured, though there was no lock. Sevilla pulled on it once, vainly hoping the chains would just magically disintegrate, but they didn’t give way.

He completed the circuit and went back to his car. He drove away and was back within the hour with a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters with the price sticker still on them. Sevilla felt exposed on the street with the long-handled tool, but he spotted no one watching from any high window and no car disturbed the near-perfect silence.

Cutting the chain was easier than he expected. Hardened steel cut through one set of links and then the next. The chains snaked out of the handle and fell at Sevilla’s feet, making a noise that sounded like a hundred tons of metal collapsing. Sevilla squeezed his eyes shut, listened for commotion from inside. There was nothing.

The door opened onto a small room half-filled with corroded barrels leaking something that stank of benzene. Sevilla’s shoes splashed in the stuff. Overhead the simple aluminum roof had exposed beams and holes that let in sunlight. Birds had made their nests up there, though the fumes must have eventually driven them away.

Sevilla tried an inner door and found it unlocked. He left the bolt cutters there and ventured through.

It was impossible to know what had once been housed in the building. The second floor was a warren of rooms in different sizes, some still storing what looked like machine equipment and others empty. He found one with a naked mattress on the floor and short tables thick with candle wax that dripped into heavy stalactites and pooled white on the concrete below. Steel eyehooks were fixed to the wall with rope loops dangling from them.

Sevilla’s mouth was dry. He swallowed three times to get the flow of spit going again, but the flavor of his mouth did not improve.

He went downstairs.

The high windows angled light into the large space on the ground floor like some plain cathedral without stained glass. DayGlo spray-paint graffiti marked the cinder block walls. The corners were littered with broken or discarded beer bottles. Someone had tried to gussy up the industrial space by hanging tarps in an approximation of tapestries, but the tarps were dingy-colored and sometimes spattered with something that might have been dark paint.

The fighting arena was the dominant feature. Lengths of thick rope marked off the space, strung from metal pillar to metal pillar and lashed in place with wire and bungee cords. It approximated the size of a boxing ring, but there was no matting here. Plain cement was scattered with a thick layer of sawdust, some of it clotted together with unmistakable blood.

Facing the ring was a long table, a feudal lord’s banquet space with a large chair in the center such as the lord himself would occupy. A dozen men could sit and watch the battle, and though the table was bare and rough and even splintered it would be transformed by a feast.

In another, smaller space in the back corner there was a dog-fighting pit. Brown-stained carpeting marked out the space, knee-high pressboard all around it and scarred by claws. Finally he found another large mattress, this one still clad in cheap sheets. Others were scattered around. Sevilla breathed deeply through his nose and out through his mouth but the growing nausea wouldn’t go away.

He fled up the stairs and back to the room with the barrels. He threw up in a corner there and gagged still further until there was nothing his stomach could give up. The stink of it was nothing compared to the petroleum reek of the barrels themselves.