The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online Page A

silence next to her, how awestruck he had been at being closed in with the dead.
    “Why won’t they let us out?” Lupe asked. He huddled against her, trembling, even though it was hot like an oven in the trailer. They hadn’t moved in a long while, and several of the men had kicked and scraped and pushed against the walls, one by one dropping from heatstroke and dehydration. Looking across the silhouetted forms crowded into the trailer, she could tell that most of them were dead already.
    “They’ve probably left us here,” she said. “Disconnected the truck and left us here by the side of the road.”
    “But why? We paid them, didn’t we? We paid them what they wanted.”
    She thought about the frightened look on the truck driver’s face when he opened the back and learned that four of the migrants riding in his trailer had died. She thought about the men surging against the doors when they closed, their screams of rage and horror as the padlock clamped shut.
    “Yes, we paid them.”
    “Then why?” He was starting to whine.
    She squeezed his hand until his whining turned to whimpers.
    “Stop it,” she said. “Be quiet. Somebody will come soon.”
    “My head hurts,” he said.
    “You’ll be okay.”
    “I want to throw up.”
    “You’ll be okay. Just stay calm. Don’t move if you don’t have to. Somebody will come.”
    To drive her memories of that time away she took the old woman’s hand again.
    “You’re so very sweet,” the woman said.
    Pilar smiled, wishing that were really true.
     
     
    It was nearly midnight when she disembarked at San Antonio International Airport. The airport was almost deserted, the shops along the concourse all closed up, nobody but a few bored custodians wandering around. Pilar never checked baggage on these flights back and forth between Washington, D.C., and San Antonio. Everything she needed, and that wasn’t much, she kept in her carry-on.
    She made her way with the other passengers down to the exits where she rented a car on her Monica Rivas credit card. Less than ten minutes later, she had the airport in her rearview mirror and was looking for a place to pull over.
    She found it in an abandoned gas station parking lot.
    She turned out the lights, rolled down the windows, and waited. Washington had been hot and sticky with humidity when she left. Here, in San Antonio, it was even hotter, but the night air was dry and still and scented by a nearby magnolia tree in bloom. It pleased her. Even if coming back here stirred up a lot of memories she’d rather forget, there was still something satisfying, even welcoming, like a narcotic sleep, about the South Texas nights.
    And with the windows open and the night air moving across her skin, she could almost hear Lupe laughing at the sparks rising on the hot air above the open fire they’d lit the night before they were to board the eighteen-wheeler and make the trip across the border. They were out on the black hills above Ciudad Juarez, behind a cluster of tarpaper shacks sitting on car tires. They didn’t have anything to eat but some gum she’d stolen from a shop down in the city, but that was okay. Lupe was happy just listening to her talk about the wheel of fortune and what was in store for them.
    “If you start at the bottom of the wheel and rise to the top, that’s a comedy,” she said.
    “And if you start at the top and you go to the bottom . . .”
    “That’s a tragedy,” she answered. “But that’s not us.”
    “We’re like those sparks, right?” They both watched pinpoints of light rise into the air, winking out above their heads.
    “That’s right. Our life’s a comedy.”
    Oh, how he’d laughed about that.
    And oh, how it hurt now to think about him laughing.
    At 12:30 A.M. , she took out her iPhone and called up a Gmail account that she shared with Ramon Medina, head of the Porra Cartel. The inbox contained a few junk e-mails, but those were unimportant. It was the draft folder with which