Deadly Journey (12 page)
Authors: Declan Conner
A Broken Mind
The lace curtains
at the balcony door fluttered in the breeze. Someone had fastened back the
louver doors, allowing warm sunshine to flood the bedroom. My head rested on a
pillow, which strangely had a woman’s legs protruding at right angles to where
I lay. Startled at first, it dawned on me that Leandra must have stayed with me
all night.
I tried to lift my head, but couldn’t. Then
I realized that the rest of my body couldn’t move, as if paralysis had struck
my nervous system. My affliction was nothing of the kind, which was soon
brought home by searing pains intensifying in every muscle and joint as the opiate
of a deep slumber changed to full consciousness. The best I could muster was a
drawn-out groan.
‘You’re awake. How do you feel?’ Leandra
asked. Her voice was haunting, as if it came from another time and place.
‘Dead,’ I wanted to say. At least that’s how
I felt inside, as if I was waiting for my body to expire and for it to catch up
with my spirit. I don’t think I could have adequately answered her even if had
had the strength of mind and body.
How did I feel? I felt nothing. Only the
pain reminded me that I was still alive.
Leandra hitched her body from underneath
the pillow and ran her fingers through my hair.
‘You need some dressings
–
the skin on your wrists is scuffed and raw. Looking at those golf
balls on your head, I think you’ll need some pain killers.’
I stared blankly at the floating curtains.
Her words had simply drifted on by as if taken by the breeze. She might just as
well not have been there. Aware that my legs were drawn toward my chest, I
could feel the tension in a still tightly clenched fist, covered by the palm of
my other hand and nestled between my knees.
The bedroom door opened and closed.
The dancing curtain filled a void. It was
strange how an inanimate object could hold such fascination, acting like an
antidepressant to take me to another time and space not of this world.
Goodness knows how much time had passed,
when the high-pitched squeal of the breakfast cart wheel broke the spell. The
door opened and to my annoyance, Leandra obscured my view of the balcony with
herself and the cart. All I wanted was to be left alone to heal, but I didn’t
have the strength or the inclination to protest. She was arranging pillows
behind my head when a guard joined us.
‘Help me lift him, Carlos, please,’ she
said.
Powerless to resist, I gritted my teeth to
avoid screaming out as they bundled me against a bank of pillows at the
headboard. Sitting in an upright position, facing the blank screen of the
television, a sense of panic enveloped me as Leandra forced a pill into my
mouth. She held a glass of water to my lips, but I wasn’t able to drink and
managed to avert my head at a flashback to Stony Face holding his jug of water.
‘Come on, take a sip to swallow the tablet.
The doctor left them for you. They’re really strong for the pain. He’s also left
some sleeping pills if you need them later.’
My eyes met Carlos’s gaze. He sucked air
through his teeth and shook his head as if he pitied me. He took hold of
Leandra’s hand and whispered something in Spanish. Whatever he said, she nodded
and they both left the room. Half the tablet had dissolved, leaving a bitter
taste in my mouth by the time she returned. She held up a shot-size glass
filled with milk and held a straw in her other hand.
‘Sorry about the water. I didn’t realize
until the guard explained.’ She climbed on the bed. ‘Try sipping this, or we
can use the straw if you like.’
Somehow, I managed to signal, lifting the
index finger of my left hand to point to the straw. Leandra leaned over and I
sucked on the straw as best I could, but the remainder of the tablet simply
wouldn’t go down my reluctant, blocked throat, and I ended up gagging. She
knelt back. With a final gulp, the tablet passed on its way.
Leandra stroked my cheek. A cobweb of red
lines streaked the whites of her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept. They were moist
to the point of a tear welling at the bottom of each tear duct. First one
droplet tumbled and then the other.
‘Oh, Kurt, we can mend your body, but you
have to fight what’s going on in your head. You have to be strong and get through
this. You don’t have the time I had to recover. We have to get you out of here.’
I heard the words and they registered, but
they had no meaning. I was done trying to work out where her loyalties lay. She
reached over to the cart and then, turning, busied herself, cleansing and
bandaging my wrists. She took some ice packs and used a towel fashioned as a
turban to hold them in place around my head. At first, I flinched when she
applied them, the cure being worse than the pain, but then the ice worked its
soothing magic.
‘Let’s take look at your hand.’
She attempted to release my clenched
fingers, to no avail. A puzzled expression spread on her face from an initial
twitch of her nose, to her lips pouting. Leaning back, she crossed her arms. ‘I
can’t help you if you don’t let me. Have they cut your hand?’
I looked through her, unresponsive to her
question. She turned her head over her shoulder and skewed her body sideways to
follow my line of vision.
‘You want to watch television?’
I didn’t want anything, other than for her
to leave me alone.
Maybe I blinked. Regardless, she took
whatever response my eyes gave her as a “yes”, shuffled off the bed, and
switched on the TV. Then she walked to the cart.
‘Okay, we’ll leave your hand until last.
Let me try this cream on your muscles.’
I could smell the cream before I felt the
initial cold shock to the skin as she applied it and vigorously rubbed it into
my calf muscle. It had the kind of odour as the cream Mom used to smear under
my nose if I had a cold, to relive my sinuses. As she started to rub it into my
other calf, the first application started working to heat up the muscle. By the
time she had finished with my arms, my entire body felt as though I was on
fire.
She disappeared into the bathroom. I heard
the water running and I assumed she was washing the residue from her hands. On
her return, she stood at the side of the bed and I glanced sideways at her
rubbing her hands with a towel.
‘We have to deal with your hand, and then
we’re done.’ She dropped the towel onto the cart and then stood akimbo. ‘Well,
I say done, what I mean is... with the outside. I may have to call the doctor
back to put you on an intravenous drip if we can’t get you to take any fluid.
You know you’ve been out of it for eighteen hours?’
She reached over to take hold of my
clenched hand, but not before I managed to put it out of her reach.
‘W... why?’ I croaked and then gulped at
the strain of attempting to talk.
‘Why what?’
She took hold of my left hand. I took
another gulp and tried to free the burr that was blocking my throat.
‘Why...c...an’t… you escape?’
‘Oh, Kurt, do you want me to re-live what
it is you’re going through now?’
‘Answer... then... the... hand.’
She drew an arm across her stomach and set
her other arm in the manner of The Thinker, but with her fingers spread out
covering her face and her head bowed. She shook her head slowly from side to
side and then drew her head upward to look up at the ceiling, her fingers
sliding down her face to hold her chin at rest.
‘This is going to be hard, Kurt.’
Leandra’s Secret
Leandra climbed
on the bed and sat next to me, with her feet on the bed drawn backward.
‘Listen.’ She shaped her finger and a thumb
into a steeple and then held them before my eyes. ‘See the gap? They’re not
quite touching. That’s how close you are to completely shutting down. On top of
that, you’re seriously dehydrated. Your body can’t stand much more than the
twenty-four hours you’ve already missed in taking fluids.’ She dropped her hand
to her knee.
What she was saying seemed ironic,
considering the amount of water they’d poured down my throat during the
waterboarding sessions. I could see frustration on her face as it reddened and
her tone changed.
‘Damn you, acknowledge me. Do you
understand?’
I understood, but strangely, I didn’t care.
‘Answer me, for God’s sake.’
I blinked my eyes twice. This time her tone
lowered and she was less agitated, but she still talked forcefully.
‘Good, so you do hear me. We have to get
you back to strength, so you can escape. So, before I tell you my story, I need
you to drink some water.’
She reached out to the cart and picked up a
glass of water, dropped in a straw and held it to my lips. I turned my head
from side to side, keeping my lips closed as she tried to follow my movement
with the glass.
Leandra gave up and banged the glass down
on the cart. Reaching over to the nightstand, she grabbed the photo of my
family and thrust it in front of my face.
‘See this, your family. Do you want them to
suffer forever?’
The picture of my family morphed in my mind
to the clips of Mary at the school with Rob guarding and her taking the kids to
her mom’s with bodyguards in tow. I started to breathe rapidly. She raised her
voice.
‘What have you lost? Man up. All you’ve
lost is your pride, for Christ’s sake. Now drink the damn water.’
She put down the photo, picked up the
glass, and held it close to my mouth. My breathing grew ever more rapid and my
chest tightened. My dad’s voice screamed “stand tall” in my mind.
‘Drink.’ Her voice boomed.
A vision of Stony Face flashed before me,
pouring the water into my mouth. That final feeling of drowning seemed all too
real. My hand swiped the glass, sending it crashing against the bedroom wall.
The guard burst into the room.
‘It’s okay. It’s the water thing. Contact
the doctor and have him bring some intravenous fluid.’
‘
Sí, entiendo
,’ he replied.
This guard clearly understood English.
I laboured to reach out, grasped her arm,
and shook my head. ‘Try... again,’ I said, barely getting the words out in a
whisper.
She turned to the guard. ‘Put a hold on
calling the doctor.’
He answered with a nod and closed the door.
Leandra’s demeanour changed, with a huge
ear-to-ear smile. She slipped off the bed and walked to the door. ‘I’ll get a
broom and a dustpan and a fresh glass.’
Somehow, her words made sense. Yes, my body
had taken a battering, and I could handle that. However, I’d been found wanting
in the mental department. The neural transmitters and receptors that had worked
against me when I was kidnapped had conspired against me once again. On this
occasion, they had short-circuited, closing my mind to what I couldn’t accept,
instead of meeting my fears head on. Leandra was right. All I had lost was my
dignity and sense of honour. As Dad had said, it was time to stand tall. It was
time to remind myself who I really was. I wasn’t a “nobody”, as they’d had me
believe. I was DEA Agent Kurt Rawlings of the United States of America, loving
husband, and father to two wonderful children. Not only that, I had a victory
over my captors within my grasp. All I needed to be sure of was that I could
trust Leandra.
She returned with a fresh glass, cleared up
the broken glass, and disposed of it in the wastebasket. Settling on the bed,
she poured water from the jug to the glass, dropped in a straw and turned to
me.
‘Only sip whatever you need. If it’s hard
sucking through the straw, blink your eyes and you can try sipping a little
from the glass. No pressure. The water is iced, so it should soothe your
throat.’
My tongue had swollen, and my mouth was dry
and foul-tasting. The first small sip through the straw merely cleansed my
mouth and absorbed into the skin. The second trickled down my throat and sure
enough, it had a soothing effect. It was still hard going and at half a glass,
I put my hand to my mouth.
‘No problem, we can try again later. Half a
glass is fine to start with,’ Leandra said, looking pleased.
The tablet had kicked in and though I was
still sore, I felt comfortable. Leandra turned and placed the glass on the
cart. It seemed an overly long time that she had faced away from me. It was
hard going, but I raised my arm.
When I placed my hand on her shoulder, she
half-turned. ‘Give me a minute.’
My hand slid off her shoulder and my arm
dropped limply to my side. She picked up the hand towel and appeared to be
drying her eyes.
Sure enough, there was no hiding the
moisture in her eyes when she turned to face me. Leandra seemed to dig deep
within. Taking in a deep breath, she let out a long, soulful sigh.
‘You want to know why can’t I escape, or go
back to my family? I suppose I should start from back home, just before I was
taken.’ She drew her hand across her eyes. ‘Father was strict. The business
he’s in, meant I had bodyguards at all times outside our farm. Anyway, I fell
in love with a worker on our farm, Andreas.’ She buried her head in her hands. ‘We
were going to have a child. I was only two months pregnant. The situation was
hopeless. He wasn’t a Catholic, just a simple farmhand with no prospects and my
father would never have approved. You would have had to meet him to understand.
Regardless, we decided to elope and get married.’
Leandra eased off the bedside and faced the
balcony. Her hair floated in the breeze along with the curtains. The pause was
long and deliberate, as if she were re-living the memory.
She started to sob, quietly at first, and
then the sobs turned to wails of grief.
She stepped backward and dropped her
backside on the bed. Only burying her head in the towel stifled her sobbing. I
began to wonder what sort of Pandora’s Box I had opened, but cruel as it
seemed, I had to know the rest of her story. With my outstretched arm, my
fingers trembling, I placed a hand on her shoulder and gently squeezed
encouragement.
Finally, she dug deep and continued.
‘We made a plan. I slipped away from my
bodyguards on a shopping trip to the city and we met. It all happened so
quickly. A van pulled up beside us. Someone grabbed me from the sidewalk.
Andreas fought with one of them, trying to protect me... They... they shot him.
Perez’s hired hands shot him in front of my eyes.’
Dragging the towel to her eyes once more,
she continued to sob. If she had been two months pregnant, I wondered if maybe
she had lost the baby. My heart went out to her for the loss of her boyfriend
and the baby she had carried. I wondered how she had managed to deal with her
grief during the last four years. None of what she had said explained why she
couldn’t return to her parents, or attempt an escape.
Leandra walked around the bed to the
bathroom. She turned on the tap water, cupped her hands, and bending over, she
splashed her face at the sink, then turned to close the door. There was no
denying this was hard for her. She deserved the respite to regroup.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw mug
shots of four villains appear on the television screen. Two of the thugs I
recognized immediately. I located the remote lying beside me and pressed the
button to increase the volume slightly.
‘...have been identified following the fire
that destroyed their trailer. The youngest of the three on your left, Mike
Dawson, had a previous criminal history involving petty crime, but Carlos Lopez
and Greg Hines, in the centre, have long rap sheets for drug and
violence-related crimes. The fourth, thought to be Antonio Morales, is an
illegal from Mexico, according to identification found on his person. Police
are still investigating.’
The news item changed and I lowered the
volume. There was no mention of the tunnel. Hines and Lopez we suspected to
have carried out a number of hits to settle drug debts and territorial
disputes. Despite Rob and me dragging them in for questioning on more than one
occasion, we had always had to let them go for lack of evidence. Even working
closely with Jeff Clayton at the Homicide Division, nothing stuck. I couldn’t
see how questioning both would leave them with such a score to settle that they
would have decided to kill me. However, they were perfectly capable of
accepting a third-party contract.
With them dead, it was even more unlikely
that I would ever discover who had ordered my death.
The bathroom door opened. Leandra’s
expression was one of desolation.
‘Sorry,’ I mouthed.
Her lip quivered. I’m not sure if it was to
form a smile or to let the floodgates open. She became resolute.
‘No, I need to tell someone. I’ve had to
carry all this for the past four years. I try to put on a good front, but it
haunts my every waking hour.’
She mounted the bed and sat alongside me,
her legs drawn to her chest, her arms embracing them, her forehead resting on
her knees.
‘I can’t tell you anything about my journey
here. It’s all a blank, other than that most of it was by sea, and as I said
before, I arrived in a mini-sub. I’m not even sure to this day if my father
organized my kidnap with Perez and the death of Andreas. It was even a blur
after I arrived here. If it wasn’t for Marina, the woman who looked after me
and reminded me I had a baby inside me to feed, I would have died of
starvation.’
I took hold of her hand. ‘Your child?’ I
said in a whisper. I gave her hand a squeeze.
Leandra leaned forward and then began
slowly rocking back and forth. ‘They have her.’ She lifted her head, her eyes
rolled to the ceiling. There were no tears now, just a blank stare.
Even if I had had my full voice, I couldn’t
have prompted her. The revelation her child had lived left me in shock.
‘A month before term, I started to have labour
pains. A helicopter arrived to take me to a hospital, so I was told.’ She
banged her fists on her knees. ‘We arrived at a farm. I went into labour and
gave birth a month early. All I heard them say was that it was a girl. A woman
wrapped my baby in a cloth, handed it to a smelly little fat guy, and that’s
the last I saw of Rosa. You want to know why I can’t escape. I’ll tell you why.
It’s because they’ve said until they exchange me with my sister, I won’t be
reunited with my child.’
I choked on the doubts I had had about her.
Tears streamed down my cheeks, blurring my vision. She was right on the button;
I had lost nothing by comparison. I expected her to break down with an
emotional response at having had to re-live the trauma. Then she had probably
done all the breaking down she had needed over this past four years.
The room was deadly quiet. I forced a
whisper.
‘I guess my hand isn’t that important,
considering. Sorry.’
‘Your hand? Oh yeah. Let’s see the damage,’
she said and cleared her nose with a sniffle. Reaching over to the cart, she
took some tissues, wiping first her eyes and then mine. She took my clenched
fist in her hand.
‘Wait,’ I said in a croak. ‘Open the closet
door.’ I could just about raise a finger, pointing to the one in the corner.
She gave me a puzzled look, but did as I
told her and returned to my side. With the camera obscured, I tried to unravel
my fingers, but the joints had locked. She pried them open one at a time. The
blister had popped, leaving raw, exposed flesh.
In the centre of my palm, digging into the
wound, there was what I had been guarding.
‘My God,’ she gasped. ‘How did you get
that?’