Champagne for Buzzards (18 page)

It wasn't a big sound, more a dry rustle, like someone moving in the wood shavings in the stall off to my left.

I froze. My hand stopped in the act of lifting a stirrup down, every hair on my body at attention, taking in sensory information and not liking the results.

Humming softly to myself, moving around Joey, ducking under his jaw and away from the sound, I looked over the saddle in the direction of the noise. Nothing.

How did Boomer get back into the barn without me hearing or seeing him? The thought made my legs go weak.

A scream bubbled in my throat.

I gathered the reins. Would Joey let me mount him from the wrong side? Always twitchy at the best of times, he would probably dance away from me while I had one foot in a stirrup. Even if I was able to mount him, could I kick Joey into action and bolt outside before the unknown man leapt out of the shadows and grabbed his bridle? If that happened the stupid creature would probably go crazy, dumping me on the concrete floor in his own horse chestnuts, and then stomping me to death. Besides, Clay had drummed into me that I was never supposed to mount before I was out of the barn.

Maybe the noise I heard wasn't human. Maybe what I heard was a rat. Somehow this thought didn't give me comfort, rats being only one of the many things that scare the shit out of me.

Keeping Joey between me and whatever was hiding in the empty stall, I started to lead Joey to the door. We almost made it too. A man stepped out of the stall. He stood between me and the light at the opening.

He was a small dark man, with piercing black eyes. His clothes were in threads and I could smell his feral scent over the odor of horses and hay. Long hair grew wildly around his head and a scraggily beard covered the bottom half of his face but I knew it was the face I'd seen in the woods.

Joey tried to rear back, lifting me off my feet. “What do you want?” I said.

“
Por favor
,” he said and then went off in a long string of words I didn't understand.

Words from high school Spanish came back. “
No entiendo
,” I don't understand.

He tried again, even faster this time, which did nothing for my comprehension. I didn't have to tell him my Spanish was bad but I did anyway. “
Mi Espanol es malo
.”

He nodded and gave me another string of words but I didn't get one of them.

And then I remembered another phrase that always came in handy: Can you speak slowly? I tried it in Spanish. “
Puedes hablar mas despacio
” or something close to that.

“
Si
,” he said and nodded. “
Tengo hambre, tengo sed
.” He pointed at his mouth. Hungry — he was saying he wanted something to eat or drink. This I could handle.

“
Si
,” I said. All I had to do was convince him to wait here for me and then I could run to the house and call for help while locking myself in one of the bedrooms. My mind was already calculating which door was strongest, which one would actually lock, which one I could shove something in front of while I waited for help.

I said, “
Regreso en un momentito
.” I just hoped I'd told him I'd be right back and not that I had bags of cash in the living room. We didn't get to find out.

Tully and Ziggy made the turn into the yard. My Spanish friend dove for cover in the empty stall.

“Get out of here,” Tully told me when I'd explained the situation.

“And leave you here to do what?”

“Don't know, but I really can't see why this guy is our problem. You don't know what he's done.”

“The sheriff and Boomer are out there looking for him with guns. That tells me the guy in the barn is in a lot of trouble.”

“Still not our problem,” Tully said.

“Why hasn't the sheriff told us why he wants him?”

“It doesn't matter to us why the sheriff wants him.”

“True, but damn, do you want to leave him to the mercy of the Breslaus? If we turn him over to them, I don't think he'll ever make it to jail.”

“Can't hurt to talk to him, Tully,” Uncle Ziggy put in.

Tully rubbed the back of his neck.

“Please,” I begged, “let's just give the guy a chance. I'm all for turning him over to the authorities, just not ones that have Boomer on their team.”

Tully wasn't happy but said, “All right, I'll go out to the barn and figure out what we've got.”

“I'm coming with you,” Uncle Ziggy put in, and then said, “Wait a minute.” He went to his truck and came back with a length of heavy pipe.

“You always have one of them handy?” I asked.

Zig nodded. “Pays to 'cause some guys just don't listen real good, so's you have talk to them in a language they understand.”

“Not a bad idea, Zig.” Tully headed for the bunkhouse, leaving us to watch the barn door, expecting the guy to come charging out to attack us. Joey hip-hopped about. I stroked his neck, trying to settle him down as Tully returned with a handgun hanging down by his side.

“Do either of you speak Spanish?” I asked. They shook their heads.

“Then I'm going with you.”

We were still arguing about that when Marley pulled in. “I speak Spanish,” she said when she heard the story.

“It's true, Marley was real smart in school,” I assured Tully.

“Yeah,” she said, with a nod in my direction, “While Sherri was studying anatomy in the back of a car, I was studying all the other subjects.”

“What?” Tully asked, hung up on the anatomy lesson.

“Let's go see what he has to say,” I said.

The guy was more frightened than we were, cowering deep in wood shavings in the farthest corner of the stall, waiting for the blows to start falling.

“Why didn't he run?” I wondered aloud.

“Too done in by the looks of him,” Tully said.

It was true. The man, skeletally thin, was beaten; there was no running left in him. He was curled up in a fetal position with his bare feet, swollen and cut, poking towards us. On his left foot a sore had festered and was draining white pus. Insect bites and scratches covered his bare arms, which protected his head.

“And there's nowhere left to run,” I added. “Boomer and Red Hozen are out back waiting for him. They probably chased him in here.”

Marley bent down and started to talk to him. Her voice was soft and kind, almost as if she were talking to a hurt child. He uncurled and looked up at her with hope in his face.

We waited. This talking went on for rather a long time until finally Marley said, “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Tully asked.

She looked up at Tully and said, “He's been held as a slave.” Tully made a sound of disgust. “He's lying. Why would he think we'd believe that?”

“Because it's true,” Marley said. “I've heard about it happening.”

“I haven't,” Tully said.

“Yes you have,” Marley said. “Think of women from foreign countries held as prostitutes. We've all heard of it happening.”

“But in Florida…here?”

Ziggy patted my arm. “Go get him some water and something to eat, Sherri.”

I stuck Joey in a stall and went for food. When I came back with the plastic grocery bag of sandwiches, bottled water and fruit, Marley was sitting in the shavings with the ragged man.

When I handed over the food, he tore into it with both hands. Marley told him to go slowly but, although he nodded in agreement, it didn't stop him from shoveling in the food. “What's the story, Marley?” I asked as we watched him eat.

“The Breslaus are into human trafficking,” she replied. We all jumped in with questions, our words tripping over each other and making no sense, sure she was making a mistake, wanting her to be wrong.

“It's true,” Marley said. Her quiet words were sad and spoke of defeat.

She had accepted the truth but Tully shook his head in denial. “It doesn't happen here. The guy is just trying to get your sympathy.”

“I know it's true,” Marley said. “Florida is the third largest state for trade in humans, right behind California and New York.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “David told me this is happening all over the state. There's a bill before the Florida legislature right now to stop human trafficking. David went up to Tallahassee to represent a coalition of churches. The churches have been working hard to change the law.” Her eyes were full of tears. “Victims, those who get away, are usually too afraid to go to the police because they get deported. David's church sponsored one man who escaped, I've met him, and I know it's true.” Tears washed over the brim of her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

Uncle Ziggy went to Marley. “It's okay, honey,” he said, patting her shoulder. “It's okay.”

Nothing was okay. He was just trying to wipe away the hurt and grief from her face.

“Tell us what happened,” Tully said. “How did he get away?”

“As near as I can tell he was brought to the Breslau place late on Thursday night along with five others. They were chained to the walls in a transport truck. Three men were left in the truck to be moved on somewhere else while Ramiro and the other two were taken off the truck. They were taken upstairs in the house and each of them was chained to a wall in a different room. The next night they were taken out and put back into a truck.” She wiped a knuckle under her nose. “They were being moved to a new farm. He doesn't know where. He got away Friday night.”

I could've wept a river of tears at the sheer awfulness of it. “Who did this?” I asked.

“He doesn't know the names of his captors but I think from the description one of them was Boomer.” She ran her hand up her arm. “Does he have tattoos up and down his arms?”

“Yeah, that's him,” I agreed.

“Ramiro,” she looked at the man. “That's his name.”

“
Si
,
si
,” the man agreed. He pounded his chest with the flat of his hand. “Ramiro Aguila.”

“Yes,” Marley agreed. “He wants us to remember his name. He's afraid he'll be taken and never heard of again. He wants us to remember him. He's Ramiro Aguila from Jalapa, Guatemala.”

“
Si
,
si
,” the man said again. “Ramiro Aguila, Jalapa.” The rest of what followed was beyond me.

Marley translated. “He says please tell everyone who he is and that he was here.”

We all nodded and agreed that was who he was and that we would remember his name.

He went off on a long excited speech which was too fast for me to follow but from Marley's horrified look it was pretty dramatic. “His family doesn't know where he is or what's become of him.” She consulted him for a minute and then she said, “It's been over a year.”

I reached out my hand for Tully's arm, needing to hold onto him, needing to feel safe. Dying in a strange place, where no one knew your name or who would remember you, and with no one ever to tell the people you left behind what had happened to you — well, the thought made us edge closer together.

Tully squatted down in the straw with knees that cracked and held out his hand to Ramiro. “I'm Tully Jenkins, son.” The man shook Tully's hand.

“I'm not going to let anything bad happen to you if I can help it and we'll remember your name.” Tully looked to Marley. “You tell him what I said and tell him I'm not a man that goes back on a promise.”

Marley did as Tully asked. “
Gracias
,” Ramiro said, nodding his head and smiling. “
Gracias
.”

Marley asked a question and Ramiro nodded his head and began to explain something. Twice Marley asked him to slow down; that I could understand but none of the rest. He just seemed to want to get it all out there while he could, before he was swept away again. Maybe he really didn't feel he'd been rescued; perhaps he saw us as only a reprieve not a safe harbor. And maybe he was right. Could we save him, no matter what Tully vowed?

At last Ramiro ran out of words and Marley turned to us. “After dark, Ramiro was the next to the last one taken out of the house to be loaded into the truck by two of the men. The old man and another man were upstairs bringing down the last captive — Ramiro uses the word
slave
.” She lifted a shoulder and wiped her face across it. “That's what they were you know, slaves, part of a crew that was moved from place to place to work. They were beaten and worked nearly to death. At night they were locked in the back of an old transport truck with nothing for a toilet but a bucket.”

It was hard to hear. None of us could look at Ramiro anymore.

“They'd been held on a farm.” With a bark of a laugh she wiped her palms across her face. “The American dream turned into the American nightmare for cheap tomatoes. The crop was finished there so they were being moved again to a new farm.”

Marley pushed back her hair and took a deep breath. “He has no idea what today's date is. When I told him, we worked it out. He's been held for fifteen months.” She looked up at us and wailed, “How could anyone do that?” Sitting in the shavings beside her, Ziggy hugged her to him. “The two men were quarreling. When they put Ramiro in the truck, before they chained him to the wall, they started yelling and shoving each other, this young man and the older man. They'd been arguing all night. The older man started pushing the younger man away from him towards the back door of the truck. He was screaming at him. They started fighting. Overhead the hatch was open for ventilation. Ramiro went out the hatch and down the side of the truck while they were still fighting. He was in the woods before they knew he was gone but they came after him pretty quick. He's been out in the woods since then. While they searched for him, he's been living out in the palmettos, trying to stay alive. He ate grubs and ants and drank from pools of water. One morning he saw a panther. He was afraid to go into the jungle, that's what he thought it was, thought he'd get lost and never be able to find his way out. He wanted to stay close, near other people. By Sunday, after he'd spent a day hiding in the palmettos and drinking groundwater, he was really ill, he thought he was dying. He couldn't travel then.

“He saw them, saw you and I out riding, and he saw the airplane searching for him too. They nearly caught him twice. He's really exhausted. Even though he's terrified, he can't hide from them anymore. He wasn't sure when he came here if he wasn't running back to the place he escaped from. He never saw the house in the daylight. But he thought it was different because the place he ran from seemed to have more trees and underbrush closer to it. But he was totally disoriented and lost in the woods. He just hoped he was doing the right thing, hoped we weren't going to put him back in a truck.”

We were stunned into silence. Tully was the first to recover. “What are we going to do with him?”

“We have to be careful who we tell,” I warned. “Red Hozen is a part of this. He was out there with Boomer today. We can't turn him over to the sheriff. Ramiro would never make it to jail.”

“All right,” Tully said. “Are we all agreed whatever we do we don't turn him over to the sheriff?”

We were all agreed. Uncle Ziggy had some rather heated things to say about the sheriff and his relatives, present and past and future, before Tully cut in with, “But what are we going to do with him? They've been watching Riverwood pretty close. They must know he's somewhere on Clay's property.”

There was something bothering me. “We only have Ramiro's word for all this. He could be a common criminal. He may have heard of trafficking in humans and be using it to get our sympathy. We don't know if what he's saying is true.”

“The sheriff was real short on the details of the guy he was searching for,” Tully said. “You pointed that out yourself. And you saw the sheriff out there with a gun, hunting with Boomer. Something bad is going down, for sure. Do we want to get in the middle of this?”

Marley's answer to the question came from out of left field. “Remember Anne Frank?”

“Who?” I said.

“Anne Frank, we read her diary in grade nine.”

“What about her?”

“I always wondered if I saw my neighbor being dragged out in the middle of the night, what would I do? Well, this is sorta like the Gestapo coming for our neighbor. If the bad guys want him, we shouldn't let them have him. I'm not brave, never have been, you know that, but I'll be damned if the one time in my life I'm called on to do something I'll fold without trying…not for him, you understand, but for me, for my own self-respect.”

“Marley's right,” Uncle Ziggy said, jutting out his chin, determined and ready to fight.

Tully said, “We don't know if he's lying to us, although I don't think he is, but even if he's telling us the truth he could still be dangerous. Desperate people can do desperate things. That's still no reason we should turn him over to that gang with guns. I said I'd make sure he got somewhere safe and I will. We need to get him away from here and turn him over to people who can sort it out.”

“Okay,” I said, “Let's put him in Uncle Ziggy's rig, cover him with blankets and run him into Jacaranda. The police there will take care of it. We need to turn him over to someone else quick.”

Tully shook his head at this idea. “We can't take him out. Since last Monday we've been stopped by a deputy every time we went off the property.”

“Don't break cover,” Uncle Ziggy warned. “That's always the first rule, isn't it Tully? That's what we learned in 'Nam.”

“Ziggy's right. We have to bring help here rather than try and run to it.”

“I'm calling Styles,” I said. It was a comfort reflex. I trusted him to tell me how to solve this problem.

Detective Styles and I had developed a mutual respect. If I were honest, it was even more than that. The physical attraction was something I mostly chose to ignore, but the fact that it was there meant that when I called I was sure he'd come…except this time. This time he was still up in Tallahassee at the conference and out of touch until Thursday, one day away. I left a message, giving an outline of the situation and asking him to come out when he was finished in Tallahassee.

Twenty-four hours wasn't much, was it? We had it all under control. If Ramiro was still on Riverwood tomorrow, Styles would take care of him. We could hold out twenty-four hours. Just sit tight and wait until tomorrow and it would all be over.