CHAPTER 3
FOR A MOMENT, Natalie thought she’d imagined the voice.
Hold it together, girl. She sat on her heels and grasped the iron bars of the door for support, unable to stop her body from trembling, her gaze fixed on the floor, trying despite the darkness to spot any sign of eight-legged movement. Hold it together.
Then she heard it again—a man’s voice, deep and rough, speaking to her out of the darkness. “Natalie? That is your name, isn’t it?”
For a moment, she said nothing, astonished to realize she wasn’t alone in this terrible place. “Who . . . who are you?”
“My name’s Zach. I’m your new neighbor. Sorry if I startled you.”
“H-how do you know my name?”
“I overheard you telling them.”
For a second, she forgot about scorpions. “You’re American, too.”
“Yeah. Born in Chicago. You’re from the South. New Orleans?”
“Yes.” So maybe she did have an accent. “Where are we?”
“I have no idea. I was unconscious when they brought me in.”
Something moved near her right foot. She shrieked, stood, felt something crunch beneath her shoe. She kicked it aside, her skin crawling. “Wh-who are those awful men?”
“They’re mercenaries for Los Zetas. They work for Arturo Cesár Cárdenas.”
Natalie had never heard of them. “What would they want with me?”
“Why don’t you tell me how you got here, and we’ll try to figure that out.”
So Natalie told him about the SPJ convention and how armed men had stormed the tour bus in downtown Juárez, killing the Mexican journalists—and Joaquin.
“He was a good friend, always watching out for the rest of us, especially the women. And he was the best photojournalist I’ve known.
He kept shooting . . . While they were killing people, he kept shooting .
. .” And for the first time since this whole nightmare began, Natalie found herself fighting tears, the all-too-familiar ache of grief in her chest. Why did the people she cared about always die?
“I tried to stop them. I blocked the aisle. I told them he was American over and over again, but . . .”
Oh, Joaquin!
“I’m sorry, Natalie.” He sounded like he truly meant it. “You did more than most people would have. Give yourself credit for that much.”
“That’s kind of you to say, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s gone.”
“I know.”
And for a time neither of them spoke.
“So you were researching the cartels for an article and joined this tour?”
She wiped tears off her cheeks with her hands. “N-no. I just wanted to get away from the office for a while. I’ve never written about drug smuggling or cartels.”
“Never?” He sounded surprised.
“Never.” Something tickled her cheek. She gasped, brushed at it, her fingertips knocking what might have been a small spider off her face. She shrank against the bars, looking up to see what else might be about to drop down on her, but it was too dark.
“How about any big drug busts? Cartels growing dope on national forest land in Colorado? Mexican politics? Anything related to Juárez or the state of Chihuahua?”
“No. Not at all. I cover mostly local issues. Before I left, I started looking into the sheriff’s handling of some sexual assaults that happened at a local boarding school. I don’t imagine these Zetas care one whit about that.”
“No, I don’t imagine they do.”
“Maybe I just caught their attention by trying to stop them from killing Joaquin.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Why are you here? Are you a journalist, too?”
Silence filled the darkness.
Then at last he answered. “The less you know about me, the better. Let’s just say I made a bad decision and leave it at that.”
So he’d done something to cross the Zetas. That meant he was probably a criminal, maybe even involved in the drug trade. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”
“The Zetas have been . . . interrogating me for six days now. If they thought I’d spilled my guts to you, they’d start interrogating you, too, and believe me, that’s not something either of us wants to see happen.”
And Natalie understood. They weren’t just asking Zach questions. They were torturing him. Then she noticed something she hadn’t before. The way he spoke his words slowly, the strain in his voice, its rough timbre—he was in pain. “You’re hurt.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I . . . I’m sorry. I wish I could help—”
“You can’t.” The tone of his voice was starkly final.
Something brushed her arm, making her gasp and jump—and she realized it was a lock of her own hair. Good grief, Benoit! “You . . . You’ve been here for six days? I don’t know how you’ve been able to stand it.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t like the accommodations.” He chuckled, then groaned, as if it hurt to laugh. “I know it’s not five-star, and room service leaves a lot to be desired, but what this place lacks in comfort it more than makes up for in scorpions.”
Natalie didn’t find that funny. “I hate those things!”
“Yeah, I figured. I can hear you gasping and jumping around over there. I’m guessing you’re afraid of the dark, too.”
“No. I’m . . . I’m claustrophobic.”
And then it dawned on her. She hadn’t had to fight off panic since she’d heard Zach’s voice.
ZACH CONCENTRATED ON Natalie’s words as she told him what had happened to her to make her claustrophobic, the feminine sound of her voice calling him back from the brink, keeping him awake, helping him ignore his pain.
“Then he turned and saw me standing there. He knew I’d seen him inject that poor old man.
I tried to run, but he moved so fast. He put his hand over my mouth and dragged me down the back stairs to the morgue.
I fought as hard as I could, but he was so much stronger.
He forced me into a morgue locker. He said the same thing to me that I’d overheard him say to the old man—‘H-have a good death, a p-peaceful death.’ And then he . . . he shut the door.”
Her words quavered slightly, telling him that she was trembling, proof of how hard it was for her to relive what had happened to her during Hurricane Katrina—and no wonder. “Morgue lockers are airtight, aren’t they?”
“Y-yes. It was cold, so cold. I tried to push the door open . . . but they don’t open from the inside.”
That made sense, as corpses rarely had a pressing reason to get out.
“I beat on the door, but that only used up air faster. Most of the staff had been evacuated, so no one was on the other side to hear.” Her voice quavered again, something twisting in Zach’s chest at the sound.
“I started to fall asleep. I knew I was suffocating. I blacked out. Then a doctor was standing over me, pumping air into my lungs. They’d brought down the body of one of his victims and ended up finding me. ”
And none too soon from the sound of it.
“What happened to the intern?” It was bad enough that the bastard had decided to play God, murdering dying people, robbing them of their last days. But what he’d done to Natalie . . .
Have a good death, a peaceful death.
What kind of fucked up insanity was that? The son of a bitch was a sociopath, and Zach hoped someone had kicked his ass. And all at once it struck Zach as grotesquely unfair that Natalie had survived her ordeal during Katrina only to end up in the hands of the Zetas.
God has a sick sense of humor, McBride. You know that.
He sure as hell did.
“When I was fully conscious again, I told them what had happened. They arrested him. I wrote about it for the paper and testified at his trial. The jury sentenced him to life without parole. But I’ve been claustrophobic ever since. I . . . I just can’t take feeling shut in.”
Zach couldn’t blame her for that. As he knew only too well, some experiences marked a person for life. But that was then. This was now.
“Listen to me, Natalie, and listen hard. Spiders won’t kill you.
These scorpions won’t kill you—they’re not the deadly kind.
The dark sure as hell won’t kill you, and no matter how it feels to you, this closed-in space won’t kill you, either.
But those men out there—there’s not one of them who would think twice about taking your life. ”
For a moment she said nothing.
“What are they going to do to you, Zach?”
Wasn’t that obvious? “You’re talking to a dead man.”
“Are you sure? Maybe, if you—”
“I’m sure.”
“Aren’t you . . . aren’t you afraid?”
Hell, yeah, he was afraid—of breaking, of giving up intel that would get other people killed, of betraying his country, his fellow DUSMs, his mission. But he couldn’t tell her that. “I’m not afraid of dying.”
“You’re braver than I am.” She paused. “Wh-what do you think they’ll do to me?”
Ah, hell.
How was he supposed to answer that question?
“Are you sure you want to go there?”
“I’m going to end up like the other girls who’ve gone missing from Juárez, aren’t I?” She spoke the words calmly, but he knew she was terrified. What woman wouldn’t be?
He wished he could tell her that everything would be okay, but he couldn’t lie to her. “I don’t think these guys are going to touch you. I heard them say they’re saving you for their boss, for Cárdenas.”
“B-but . . . why does he want me?”
Zach wished he could answer that question.
He’d studied Cárdenas for years, knew him better than any other U.S.
operative, and he found it strange that the bastard would kidnap an American journalist unless he had a reason.
Then again, when it came to women, Cárdenas was a predator.
“I’ve heard he has a thing for young women. Is your photo online?”
“Y-yes. It’s on the newspaper’s website and . . . and I think it’s on the networking page for the SPJ conference, too. Do you think that’s how he found out about me?”
“It’s possible.” Cárdenas had probably looked through the networking site to see which Mexican journalists would be on that bus, had seen Natalie’s photograph, and had decided to take her. That meant Natalie had to be extremely attractive. Otherwise, Cárdenas wouldn’t have bothered.
“What do you think Cárdenas will do with me?” She sounded so vulnerable.