Edge of the Heat 5 (20 page)

When I got home that night, all I could think about was Lupe. I did the math inside my own head and knew that if I had done the mission the first time they had asked me to, Lupe would have been in there for only a few months. After my father went to sleep I searched through his papers until I found the address to the brothel. I took two of his guns and two of his knives and the car, and I drove to it. I thought the place would be crawling with cops but it wasn’t. I couldn’t decide if they didn’t know the fat man was dead, or if they buried him in the garden, but I didn’t care. I climbed over the wall, found an unlocked window, and searched out the locked bedroom. It was 3 or 4 in the morning, but there was a guard. He was dozing on his feet, but there. I argued with myself for a long time. I wasn’t tall enough to efficiently cut his throat, but I couldn’t shoot him either, or the whole house would come running. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. Finally, he walked down the hall - to the bathroom or something. I took my chance and tiptoed in. Lupe was sleeping between the bed and the wall, where I left her. I whispered in her ear until she woke up and then she and I went out the window. I boosted her over the wall and drove her to my house.

My father didn’t discover I had her on a makeshift bed in my closet for 2 weeks. She was quiet as a mouse and barely ate anything. I brought her books, and she read all day. I finally had to tell him because he wanted me to go on a mission out of town. She was terrified of him. I tried to explain that he wouldn’t hurt her, but she wouldn’t even look at him. She curled into a ball and moaned if he was in the room.

He was livid when I told him what I did. And terrified. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to take Lupe to an orphanage. I wanted to find her parents. She hadn’t told me her last name but I was confident I would get it out of her eventually.”

Jerry had been so entranced in the story he didn’t notice that Sara’s voice had taken on an almost frantic tone. When she had talked about her mother dying, her voice had been flat, neutral. But now her final sentence pulled him out of his reverie and he looked at her closely. She was crying and her face was contorting as if in pain. Jerry wondered if she had ever told this story to anyone before. He doubted it. Who would she tell? He reached his arm out to hug her, one-armed as they walked, but before he could she spewed out her next sentence with a moan.

“The next day the choice was taken from us. Lupe hung herself in my closet with one of my belts.”

Sara collapsed to the desert hard pan.

J
erry threw off his pack and covered Sara’s body with his own, at first afraid she’d been shot somehow. When he heard her sobbing he realized she’d been ambushed by only her emotions. He ran his fingers through her hair and pressed his cheek to hers. “Shhhhhh, baby, shhhhhh, it’s OK,” he murmured into her ear. His heart went out to her, and to Lupe, and to the whole goddamned mess. If the fat man had been here in front of him now, he might have killed the fat fucker himself. He didn’t normally believe in violence as a way to solve problems, but one man who could inflict so much pain on children didn’t deserve anything better, did he?

Sara sobbed and shook and Jerry let her. He held her close but knew she’d be better off if she got this out. He wondered if she’d ever cried over Lupe before. Knowing Sara, this might be the first time.

Eventually, her cries started to break off into sniffles. She pushed herself to a sitting position and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Sorry,” she said.

“Oh baby, you don’t have to be sorry. Everyone cries sometimes. It sounded like that was a long time coming.” Sara bit her lip and nodded, looking at the ground.

“Sara, you know it wasn’t your fault right? What happened to Lupe?”

Sara’s mouth twisted. “Some of it was my fault. I could have saved her earlier.”

“No baby, you couldn’t have. You were just a little girl yourself. You didn’t even know she existed.”

Sara shook her head. Jerry could see on her face that she didn’t believe it for a second. Sara held herself fully responsible for the atrocities visited on that little girl. Jerry wanted to press. He wanted to insist. But he stayed quiet. She wasn’t ready to give it up yet, and he knew he had to respect that.

Jerry looked around. The sun was rising now. He could see the terrain well. “Is there somewhere close by we can set up camp? Maybe we should break for the day. Let you rest.”

Sara shook her head. “No, we have to get up there.” She pointed where she wanted to go. “The sun will bake us right here.”

“OK, let’s just have some water and then we’ll move on.”

Sara nodded, looking relaxed and sad.

When they got moving again, Sara started talking again.

“We didn’t know what to do with the body, so my dad called Thorpe. He was scared to death to do it, but he did. Thorpe flew down himself to take care of it. Afterwards he came to our house and said he wanted to talk to me alone. My dad thought he’d be hard on me and didn’t want me to, but I saw Thorpe's eyes. He wasn’t upset. He was excited. I told my dad I’d be OK and went for a walk with him. I was right. Thorpe said he knew why I did it. Then he said that the country was full of brothels just like that, and many of them had little girls like Lupe in them. He said I could save them though. He said I could do it just like I had done this one, but I’d get more support from now on. He said he could imagine a place where human trafficking just didn’t exist anymore. Where people were too scared to steal babies and little kids because they knew it would be a death sentence.  He said he would start a foundation for me that found the mothers and fathers of kids like Lupe, and if they couldn’t find the parents they would find them homes, and if they couldn't find homes they could live at the foundation. He said he would provide therapy and care so that none of them felt like they just had to end it all. He sold me a vision and I bought it. I bought the whole package.”

Sara took a deep breath and plunged forward in her story while they walked, their path steadily on the incline.

“I started to get missions that didn’t involve my dad. He accepted this, but never seemed happy about it. Now, I was a real agent though. My support staff treated me like I was in charge, and I fell into the role willingly enough. But over time they became more of a liability than anything. I only did a few missions the way Thorpe set them up for me, and then I started doing them on my own. I would enter a place as a street prostitute looking for a pimp or a permanent bed. I would stay a few days and figure out what was going on inside. Sometimes I just left them alone, if there was nothing worse than adult women willingly selling themselves. Sometimes I would go in and come back out with 5 or 6 children. Frequently there were teenage girls who acted like they were OK with being there, but really they were terrified and terrorized. I became an expert at convincing them that I could help them - that they didn’t have to live like that. And Thorpe was true to his word. He set up an amazing foundation that is still funded today throughout Mexico and South America.

Thorpe let me have free reign as long as I would do missions for him when he needed one. He would give me a name and instructions and I would be expected to drop what I was doing and carry the warning, or sometimes even to kill someone. By the time I was 21, I had freed over 54 children under the age of 12 and 138 under the age of 18. I had also killed 9 men. My father was a basket-case because of it. He hated the killing especially. He retired and refused to talk to me about the agency at all. I obliged him, and pretended that I was a kindergarten teacher when I went home to visit him. It was strange. I finally figured out that he was starting an early decline into old-age and illness. The stress of the changes at the agency had put strain on him. Eventually I had to take him to the U.S. where he moved in with his sister. She took care of him.

Back in Mexico, if I ran into trouble of any type Thorpe had a clean up team on it in hours. But I began to get frustrated. It seemed that no matter what I did, things never slowed down. Every time I cleaned out an illegal brothel that dealt in trafficking and got rid of the person in charge, someone else just took his place. I watched the stories in the U.S. and the funnels from Mexico to the U.S. and the U.S. to Mexico never slowed either, like he swore they would. That was the reason we were doing this in the first place. Supposedly our over-arching mission was to reduce trafficking for the U.S.

I began experimenting. My first experiment was a run down place near the border. I went in and found the worst conditions I’d seen so far. And there were 4 young children being held captive here. 3 young girls and a boy. Plus there were 8 girls between the ages of 12 and 16. I got them all out to the foundation, then I went back and slaughtered almost every man in the building. The only ones who were safe were the regular johns with adult women. Everyone else I killed. I did that twice more. And my reputation started growing. I began to get nicknames. You’ve heard a couple of them. I became this mythical creature. Some swore I was a monster or an apparition, like the chupacabra. And finally things did start to slow down. Finally I would go into brothels and there would be no children. And every place I went there would be stories about the butcher of Mexico, a lovely girl, who would kill you if you stole children.”

Jerry interrupted her. “How is it that no one recognized you when you went in to a brothel as a prostitute?”

She smiled. “You have to remember, this was before the days of cell phones and digital photos. No one took pictures of the prostitutes. They were non-people. And it’s not like I stood out. I looked like everyone else. Besides, I had a knack for disguise. I made myself look a little different every time. Some people would describe me as having short hair, some with long. Some said I had black hair, some said blondish. Some said my skin was fair, some said dark. They were all right.”

She got back to her story.

“I also started to see bands or groups of local women who would swarm local brothels and take in any teenage girls or children they found. This surprised me the most. It was like I started a movement or something. I didn’t create these groups, or encourage them, and sometimes the women in them would get hurt or even killed, but most times the men would stand back and let them come in, let them search the place and free the children. It was an incredibly gratifying thing to witness. They would sew cloth banners that had a picture of a large knife on them, and carry them to the brothels. They would say they were there in my name or with my blessing. And the men in the brothels would be terrified that if they stopped the women I would show up and they would all die. These women could just march in, take the children, and march out. Their pictures would be in the paper the next day. The children would all get new homes or reunited with their families if they could be found. It was even better than Thorpe’s foundation.

Eventually I branched out of Mexico. I went to Guatemala, then Honduras, with Thorpe’s blessing. I noticed the pattern start all over again. I set in to work. I became computerized. I started keeping extensive records above and beyond what the agency wanted.

Then one day something happened that made me question my purpose, the agency, my country, and my entire life. I was doing scouting in Honduras, and living in a hotel. When I came in one night I had a package at the front desk. It was a manila envelope and inside it were 7 pictures. The pictures were all of Thorpe and different men. Each one of the men was someone I had killed on his orders.”

Jerry sucked in a breath. He could see where this was going. Sara looked at him with an odd expression on her face. They were both breathing heavy from the steady incline. Sara had led them to a way up the ridge line and they were going higher and higher in the now full daylight.

“One thing you have to understand now, is that when I went into a place it was never just prostitution and trafficking going on there. There were always drugs, money and weapons too. Always. I didn’t ever care about the drugs, money, or weapons, but when it seemed like there was just
too much
, I would call in one of Thorpe’s clean up teams. And they would do whatever they did with the drugs, money, and weapons. I never thought about it much. That was someone else’s job.

Back to the pictures. Each picture in the envelope was dated. Each picture was obviously surveillance and showed Thorpe in a heated discussion with the man. Always he looked like he was trying to convince them of something. The pictures were in restaurants or homes. That confused me. Why would Thorpe be dining with criminals. And what would he be trying to convince them of? I took the pictures to my room, not even bothering to ask who had left them. It would be a dead end. I abandoned Honduras and flew home. I checked my old reports, and discovered each picture was taken approximately 1 week before I was given the order to kill the man.

With the pictures was a note. It was handwritten and said ‘The wolf is not what he seems.’ Cryptic. Almost silly. Why not say ‘Thorpe is not what he seems.’? Thorpe was not known as The Wolf, as far as I knew.

I thought a lot about who had sent the pictures. It had to be someone very high up in the agency. Someone who knew about me and knew much about Thorpe. Someone with their own agenda. But suddenly Thorpe’s agenda was called into question by the very fact that the pictures existed. I had to know. I told Thorpe I was taking a vacation. I’d never taken one. At this point I was 23 years old, and the agency, plus my obsession had become my whole life.”

Sara broke off and dropped her pack and the cot she was dragging. The movement broke into Jerry’s reverie, where he was seeing the things Sara was describing. “Be right back!” she yelled and then bounded up the side of a huge boulder to stand on top of it. Jerry watched her go in amazement. She didn’t even look tired. He felt exhausted.

Sara turned in a circle and examined the land around them. Jerry looked back the way they had came and saw the desert shine gorgeous in the morning light. It stretched on forever in every direction. Not a house or car or road to be seen. Just oranges and purples and muted chocolate browns spreading across the landscape.