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

Tyler,” Camden said, standing up. He extended his hand, which both Esty and Yergha quickly shook. “It’s nice to meet both of you. Thank you for coming on such short notice.”

“These things can move quickly, so we need to try to move faster if we want to get our arms around it,” Esty said. “I need to know why you think they went over the border.”

“They were headed in that direction when they took the family and they were brazen,” Tyler said. “They grabbed the family in the middle of the day during a busy street fair and opened fire on me. They weren’t trying to hide. It can get like that in Mexico if you know the cops are in your back pocket. Not in El Paso, mind you, but in Mexico…definitely.”

“That’s not enough to go on,” Yergha said.

“I agree,” Tyler replied. “I made a call to a friend working with Border Patrol who called one of the supervisors at the BOA crossing. He noted the time of the incident and a description of the family, and then he calculated the approximate time of crossing. He understood the importance of the kidnapping, so he checked the surveillance feeds from the various booths looking for anything suspicious.”

“And?” Esty asked, rapt.

“We think maybe we got him but we can’t be certain. There is a man in a larger van but he’s too blurry for comparison video, let alone some kind of positive ID through any of the federal or international databases. What he did find was one of his border attendants selling what looked like Mexican plates and tourist visas to a guy in a carpet van.”

“Good,” Yergha said. “We have a man who can patch into the traffic system and find out where the van went after the incident in El Paso, but it’s going to take some time.”

“That’s not legal,” Camden said, matter-of-factly.

“Permission to speak freely?” Esty asked.

“This isn’t the military,” Camden replied. “You can say what you want.”

“You are the client,” Yergha said softly. “We are hired-hands, but we are not without manners or an understanding of our place in this operation.”

“Go ahead, Estella,” Camden said with the wave of a hand. “Say what’s on your mind.”

“None of what we’re going to do is legal,” she said. “But we weren’t hired to take legal action; we were hired to get your family back. We have some unsavory tactics, which is to say, we operate by any means necessary. I don’t want to give you the particulars for the purposes of plausible deniability but you need to know that when we find these men, we are going to gut them and scatter their insides from Juárez all the way into America if that’s what it takes.”

“I didn’t need to know that,” Camden said.

“Am I still free to speak my mind?” Estella asked.

“Be my guest,” he said, unable to look at her now. “We’ve already gone this far.”

“With all due respect, you’d better drop this little sweetheart act you have going on. Some very powerful people grabbed your entire family in broad daylight and likely smuggled them out of the country. I don’t know what you did, but you pissed these people off badly and not because you’re a good guy. Neither my partner nor me give a damn about your sensitivities or really what your weak ass stomach can handle. We don’t really even care about you. We are only here to find out what you know so we can recover your wife and kids. So, the longer you play this stupid game with us, the more you slow us down.”

Before he could say anything, Yergha got a few words in edgewise. “You people are so selfish. The fact that you’d put anything before your family, you fucking son of a—”

“Yergha!” Esty said, turning to him.

Camden looked between the two of them, shocked back into reality. The double-edged outburst seemed to change his thinking, though, because he said, “Yergha’s right. Do whatever you need to do to get them back.”

“We were going to do that anyway,” Esty said with some bite to her tone. “We don’t need your permission. We have Leopold’s permission and we know the consequences if we’re caught or if we fail.”

“Fair enough,” Camden said after looking at Tyler and getting his nod of approval.

“As I said, we have an associate who can get into the security camera footage either from traffic light cams, nearby businesses, or homes. We’ll find out where the van went that took your family. And if they switched vans mid-route, if they transferred into the larger van that Tyler’s contact saw at the border, we’ll find them.”

“But that will take time,” Camden said.

“That’s why we’re going into Juárez tonight,” Esty said.

“You don’t want to be there during the day,” Tyler warned, “let alone at night on such short notice.”

“Everything we do is on short notice,” Yergha told Tyler.

“Is there anything else you think you need from them, Yergha?” Esty asked her partner. He shook his head. She returned her attention to Camden. “We’ll need contact information for both of you, just in case.”

Both men nodded.

“Make sure your phones are fully charged with your ringers on,” she continued. “If we call, we need you to pick up your phone on the first ring because these things get dicey sometimes. What that means is that the difference between life and death may very well be the difference between you picking up on the first ring and you picking up on the second ring.”

“That seems a little dramatic, don’t you think?” Camden asked.

Yergha lunged forward just enough to make him back up. Esty put her arm across her partner’s chest, pulled him back. It didn’t matter; he’d already crossed that Rubicon.

“Dramatic is