The Beasts of Juarez by R.B. Schow (story books to read .txt) 📗

was worried that he wouldn’t see her again. Maybe he was developing a fondness for her. That would be unexplainable but fine by him.

“Whatever she was today,” Isabelle warned, “she won’t be that way the next time you see her.”

“You should let her talk freely next time I get her,” he said. “This crap about her not being able to speak…I’m all done with it. She has a voice and she should be able to use it.”

In the driver’s seat, he thought he saw Savannah smile.

“She has had those permissions for months now,” Isabelle said. She reached up and kissed Leopold’s cheek. “You look like a little boy when you’re stymied. It’s almost cute. Almost.”

“Is it too late to ask you to be a mother figure to me?” he asked, knowing she got a rise out of him because that’s what she wanted.

“No,” she said, looking back. “Ask me again next time.”

And with that, she got in the Range Rover and the three women drove away. Once he was back on the plane, Leopold said to the pilot, “Wake me when we get there, please.”

They landed at San Francisco International later that day. Leopold picked up a car in short-term parking, something a lot less flashy and much slower than the Audi S6, and then he drove it to the address set into his phone.

Before he arrived, he put on dark sunglasses, a black balaclava, and a skater’s hat—the kind of hat that had a flat bill that concealed everything from the top of his sunglasses upward.

Darkness fell upon the neighborhood and that’s when he got out of the car, went around the back of the house, and quietly broke a window. When no alarms were set off, no dogs began barking, and no neighbors started snooping around, he made his way inside.

He sat at the kitchen table and waited. Forty minutes later, he heard the garage door open, a car pull in, and then the garage door closed. Moments later, a door opened into the house and Leopold heard the man he was waiting for walk inside. This same man flipped on the kitchen lights and looked directly at Leopold. By then, Leopold had taken off the hat and the glasses, and he’d let the balaclava puddle down around his neck.

“You,” Warden Dicampli hissed.

“I warned you, Fabian,” Leopold said, a gun with a sound suppressor in his hand. “I warned you and I spelled out the consequences, did I not?”

“You think that just because you have money, power, and a gun you can pull everyone else’s strings to suit your needs?”

“I looked into your kid, your wife, even your dog, and do you know what I found? They’re all better off without you. You messed with Cira and Atlas. People’s lives were at stake and you cost us half a day. In that time, a sixteen-year-old girl was taken to another country, killed for a snuff film using a chainsaw, and then stuffed into garbage bags and dumped at the front entrance to the US Embassy in Prague.”

“Jesus,” he said, shocked.

“We might have been able to stop that if you would have just done what I told you to do, but you got cute. You suddenly thought that what you were about was far more important than what I told you we were about.”

“You can’t put that crap on me,” Dicampli hissed.

“I just did, you fucking dick.”

Leopold then pulled the trigger twice, both bullets crashing into Dicampli’s chest. The warden staggered back, put a hand out to grab something that wasn’t there, then fell down and landed on his ass.

Leopold stood up and said, “My team wanted me to get my hands dirty.” He put the gun to Dicampli’s head and pulled the trigger a third time. “Well, now they’re dirty.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

ATLAS HARGROVE

One month later… As Atlas sat in his cell contemplating his life, his future, and all of the successes and failures he’d had since he first entered prison, a package arrived for him. This particular package didn’t come through the regular channels. Charles brought it to him when he was passing out books.

“The new warden would never allow this, but sometimes things slip through the cracks,” the Ohio native said. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

Atlas looked at the package then said, “Yeah, for sure.”

“What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither of them,” Charles grinned. “Chickens and eggs don’t have dicks.”

After belting out a worthy laugh, Atlas asked, “So do you have any word on my new celly?”

“Nothing so far,” he said.

With an appreciative nod, Atlas said, “Thanks for always having my back.”

“Anytime,” he said with a wink. “Be you, brother.”

When he was gone, Atlas opened the package, saw the cell phone, and smiled. He turned it on and saw only one icon: an Images file. He opened the file and found only one folder: Alabama.

Seeing this had his heart racing. He took a breath, his finger hovering over the screen. And then he pressed the icon.

Inside this folder were dozens of pictures of his daughter, all pictures that had him falling into his bed, weeping, unable to speak. He looked through each and every photo, his eyes sopping wet. Seeing her as she progressed in age had him falling in love with her all over again. She was so sweet, so innocent, so broken. Never before had he loved anyone more than he did this young girl, his only child.

At the end of the photo album, however, there were a couple of photos he didn’t expect to see—pictures that shouldn’t have been there. Their very existence meant that he’d been caught on someone’s surveillance camera.

One of the pictures was of him kissing Jade. The other was her face just before