Pretty Like an Ugly Girl (Baer Creighton Book 3) Read online

  But this group had a couple rebels. First was the boy who’d figured out how to pry open his handcuffs.

  The second was the girl who defecated on the floor.

  The dirtiness wouldn’t be an issue. They washed the truck in bleach after every run. It was a meat truck.

  But the attitude ...

  Some deals you didn’t take, because beyond the immediate profit, lurked unintended consequences. A boy who’d bolt from the truck at first opportunity? That was a future risk in a dozen ways.

  Just like a girl who’d try to make a statement by leaving a pile of shit on the floor.

  Were she to live and enter their employment arrangement at Salt Lake City, she might pay for herself and then some. But she would be difficult to control. She would sow seeds of disorder and resentment one by one, or inspire wider revolt. She could harm their business’s reputation with their clientele. And the greatest risk: she could escape and bring back law enforcement.

  The limited loss of the cost of acquiring her—a few grand—compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars harm she could potentially cause, made culling the risk the only smart move.

  “One of the girls crapped on the floor,” Cephus told his father.

  Luke came to the door and looked inside. He led Cephus away from the back of the truck. “Whichever girl did that, she’ll be a problem later. Find her. Take her out to the other and make sure they’re never found.”

  “Yep.”

  Cephus entered the back of the Isuzu. All the girls pretended to sleep. The defecate was as close to dead center as possible, as if someone had drawn lines corner to corner and placed the pile on the X. It could have been any of them.

  All the girls had a single hand cuffed to a wood slat located on the wall one foot from the floor. None—even the girls closest the center—could have gotten her rear end to the center of the truck.

  The pile, which had flattened upon impact, had not rolled. It landed where it now rested. There were no smudges, nor were there other traces elsewhere on the truck bed or walls.

  Cephus concluded one of the girls had messed into her hand and tossed it to the center.

  Water was unavailable in the back of the truck, and no amount of spit could wash a hand clean. He grabbed the first girl’s wrist, inspected her open hand, then brought it to his nose. Cephus went to the second girl. The third ...

  The sixth girl resisted when he grasped her arm. She held her hand closed, and when he pried it open, shoved it flat into his face. Cephus responded by instinct, clubbing her with his hand so quickly it was like a slap, except the impact was mostly at the palm of his hand. The blow stunned her.

  This was the girl. He smelled her hand to be sure.

  She was pretty in the face, but skinny and undeveloped elsewhere. A kid.

  He knew what he had to do.

  However ...

  Cephus had never killed a girl.

  Something deep in his biology revolted at the thought. He’d look at himself differently if he crossed that line.

  That wasn’t a bad thing. Just a thing.

  His older brother Wayman would kill her and not be put off by the work. He wouldn’t enjoy it, necessarily, but he would find sufficient satisfaction in knowing he fulfilled his duty with intelligence and dedication. Just like Cephus imagined a utility worker might come home after a ten-hour day and feel good about restoring the power, plugging the leak, whatever they did. There’s pride in doing a dirty job well.

  Wayman had crossed the line so long ago, he seemed comfortable with the depth of his criminality. He was pro, nothing squeamish about him. Cephus looked forward to seeing him the next day. Wayman ran a tight operation and always took pains to explain his processes and strategies, so his little brother could someday run his own shop and not make the same mistakes.

  Cephus unlocked the emergency box at the front of the truck. He removed a twenty-foot quarter inch steel cable with a loop at each end. He brought one to the farthest girl, unlocked her handcuff from the wall rail, and fastened it to the loop. He locked another girl to the opposite loop. One by one, he secured the rest to the cable.

  Except the one who shat.

  He led the string of girls from the Isuzu, down a ramp, to a wire storage cage set up to partially hide the basement entrance. After unlocking the cage, he led the girls inside, down the steps, and to the basement. He uncuffed each, dragged the cable outside with him, then locked them in.

  Standing at the door, Cephus listened. Heard nothing. The drug was marvelous at shutting down the girls’ brains.

  Except when they didn’t take it.

  Cephus washed his hands and face in a sink at the side of the garage near the entry to the house. He would do as his father required. This was exactly the kind of obedience and level headed thinking his father needed to witness before entrusting him with the next level of responsibility.

  The easiest kill would be to choke her. No blood. Tiny struggle. She was small and had one arm bound. It would be an easy task.

  But then he’d have to carry her body everywhere, including a couple hundred yards from the road to the body of the boy he’d shot earlier. People’s sphincters released when they died, and the thought of carrying the girl’s unwashed and newly soiled ass a few inches from his head ...

  Be a whole lot easier if he let her walk. She’d enjoy it more too.

  Cephus forced the girl to lie on her belly with her arm held up by handcuff to the rail. He removed it and snapped it to her other wrist, behind her back.

  He lifted her to a standing position. She kept her eyes downward, but when he stepped in front, her glare flashed hatred and she spat in his face. It came out as a dry-mouthed spatter, almost nothing. Cephus backed away, shook his head.

  Beating her would do no good, and her resistance would end soon enough anyway. He wiped his face with the bottom of his untucked flannel shirt and steered the girl to the doorway and down the ramp.

  The next problem was transportation. He could take her in the bed of his pickup truck, but she could easily make herself visible, even handcuffed to a tie down. He could put her up front, but not if she was going to shit all over his leather seats. The only thing he could think of was to give her a good beating. That almost turned his stomach. He could do his duty if he kept it clinical, but hearing her whimper or cry out would go straight to his weakness. Sometimes it was hard to remember these girls weren’t really girls, the way he was taught to think of them.

  He decided to use duct tape.

  His father worked at replacing the near-blown inner tire. Luke gave an approving nod as Cephus manhandled the girl to the cement garage floor, rolled the tape around her ankles several passes, and then right up to her knees, so she had no ability to separate her legs.

  “Get her mouth too,” Luke said. “She gives you any trouble at all, just squeeze her nose. She’ll get compliant.”

  Cephus covered her mouth with tape.

  She writhed and kicked when he threw her head first onto the back seat of his extended cab F-150. On the drive, though she had no voice, she repeatedly kicked with both her taped legs against the door.

  Cephus pulled over on the highway, opened the back door, and slammed the bottom of his fist to her forehead. She stopped kicking.

  Arriving, Cephus drove up and down the road parallel the highway until deciding there was no one around. He turned and parked where he’d changed the front tire on the Isuzu.

  He opened the back door, pulled out the girl, and tied a rope to her handcuffed hands in case she bolted. Then he cut the duct tape between her legs and ripped it from her skin.

  The temperature had plummeted after nightfall, heading from the seventies straight down to something more like snow weather. The girl wore shorts and a thin shirt, the same she’d worn in Sierra Vista, and probably in Mexico. The rest of the girls would be given additional clothing in the morning, and a wardrobe suitable to their profession at Salt Lake City. They wouldn’t need anything e
lse because they’d never leave, except on to the next city.

  The girl shivered.

  “It’ll be over soon,” Cephus said, though none of them ever spoke English.

  Instead of bringing his .308 rifle, for this job Cephus carried a Sig Sauer P226 chambered in a .40 S&W. It was an expensive gun preferred by law enforcement for its superior ergonomics and reliability. Cephus owned it because it came with a shit ton of cool factor.

  He withdrew the pistol from his hip holster and showed it to her. “You work with me, I’ll make this fast and easy. Cause any trouble, it’s going to take a long time and you’ll go through a lot of pain. Comprende?”

  He grasped her upper arm and guided her to the fence. She bent over to pass between the rails, but with her hands locked behind her back, she couldn’t grab a rail to balance herself, and couldn’t lift her leg between the horizontal fence slats. Cephus supported her shoulders, and thought what an irony, how she trusted him to not let her fall on her face now, knowing in five minutes he’d blow a hole through it.

  On the other side of the fence, they walked into the hundred-acre flatland. A distant mountain rose black against the moon-gray sky. Again, Cephus smelled wood smoke.

  After several minutes of back-and-forth searching, he found the red-jacketed boy.

  “Fucking Finch!”

  The body was completed exposed. Finch had apparently scraped the shovel to the ground a few times and called it quits.

  “That’s the kind of shit right there—”

  “Want somethin’ done right, gotta do it yer own damn self.”

  Cephus spun but the source of the voice was darkness.

  “Got ya in the moon, asshole.”

  The voice came from low.

  “Let the boy go.”

  Cephus saw a flash.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Driving to Flagstaff, Finch Graves threw up in his mouth and choked it back down. He pulled a bottle of water from the center console of his Mustang. Gargled water and tried to swallow the burn out of his throat. It didn’t work.

  The drugs and alcohol charade was wearing thin. He didn’t crave excess by nature, as some did. Truth was, he hated being stoned or drunk. However, years earlier, when the family first made the foray from being the town butcher to the town brothel, from one meat to another as his father said, Finch had stayed out partying one night. The next day he arrived late for work, and found his father made an allowance for him. Luke wasn’t pleased, but accepted the explanation that Finch was incapacitated due to alcohol.

  All night drinking served two functions. On one hand, he missed a lot of work. On the other, he coped with the self-loathing created by the work he didn’t escape.

  The strategy became successful, if unsustainable. The more he drank, smoked pot, and let himself go, the less Luke and Cephus expected from him. He carried less responsibility and figured small in their plans, if at all.

  On the downside, Finch saw his lack of reliability was wearing thin, and his body was telling him he couldn’t abuse it forever.

  He needed out soon. He wanted out now. Tonight.

  He swerved into the parking lot of a realtor located next to an outfitter. Flagstaff was full of tourist shit. They came to see the natural wonders, the red rocks of Sedona, the San Francisco Peaks, the volcano cones and Cinder Lake, and canyon after canyon. Elk. They came for the clean air.

  But no one saw the raw, human reality hidden between, behind, and underneath the landscape. The misery that passed through—very often in a meat truck.

  Finch parked next to a Chevy Impala and waited. He watched the cars that had been behind him to make sure none followed, or pulled over up ahead. Satisfied his brother or father had not had him tailed, Finch powered down the window.

  The Impala window descended. Inside sat a woman with hair pulled tight in a ponytail, maybe a little too high on the head for a woman her age. It made her face brittle.

  Finch noticed things like that. Finch noticed everything.

  “Oh Christ, I gotta talk. I need out. I gotta get out.”

  “Get in the car.”

  He exited the Mustang and climbed into the Impala “Got your text,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “I finally saw it. I finally have what you need.”

  “What’s that?”

  Finch unzipped his jacket. Pulled his shirt from his pants and up to his chest. “Take it.”

  “Is the run over?”

  “No.”

  “Then put your fucking shirt down.”

  The device looked like a circular band-aid, an inch and a half wide with a slightly thicker pad in the center. It recorded only when sound amplitude was high enough for the microphone to catch conversations at the preset desired volume. The battery lasted days, and the memory chip held up to fifteen hours of talk.

  Finch lowered his shirt.

  “It’s the same deal, right? I’m coming clean. I’ve got no part of this. I’m giving you everything.”

  “The deal hasn’t changed.” The woman looked away from him and then back, a move he interpreted as saying, Spit it out.

  “Cephus shot a man tonight.”

  She adjusted her weight in the seat. “One of the kids?”

  Finch nodded. “A boy.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I—I wanted to help him escape. All of them. I thought if I gave him a key—I was going to open the door to the back of the truck at a gas station. We usually fill the tanks at the same station, at the end of the run. They’d all get out and there’d be nothing Cephus could do to get them back.”

  “That would have been really dumb. We’d have no case, and your father would bury you in the desert. What were you thinking?”

  “About the kids. Each of them. They’re all lost!”

  “Calm down, tell your story.”

  “Well, it didn’t work. We hit something on the road and had a flat. When I opened the back door of the truck to get the jack and spare, the kid who had the key bolted. And it was just the one. He didn’t help any of the girls. He just took off.”

  “So ...”

  “Cephus shot him with his rifle. It was off the Cool Pines exit, close to Williams. Then he sent me out to bury him.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. But barely. I piled some dirt on top, but he’ll be easy to find.”

  “Okay. And you’re sure he was dead?”

  “One hundred percent dead.”

  “That could be useful, but here’s the problem. We don’t have what we need. Not even close.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? My brother murdered a kid. I’ll say it in court. He shot him in the back. The kid was maybe fifteen. He was running for his life.”

  “And that’ll be helpful. We might be able to bargain with it. Your brother gets a reduced sentence, maybe, for giving us what he knows about the Salt Lake City operation. It’s something to keep in our back pocket. And to make it work we’d need your testimony, and the murder weapon with fingerprints. That and the matching bullet, it’d be air tight.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  She smiled at him—the dumb kid getting the remedial lesson.

  “That’s not the case we want. We don’t have a team deployed here and at Salt Lake City so we can grab one guy for murder. We want your father and both your brothers. And we want them to roll on everyone else. Their contacts on both sides, the supply chain and the distribution chain. Who does your father buy from in Mexico? Who does he sell to after the girls leave Salt Lake City? Who are the clients? We want everything. Not some murder rap on a single guy. That’s not the FBI. Without everything, we don’t even put a dent in it.”

  Finch shook his head. Sniffed. “Yeah, while you’re fucking around, another truckload of kids gets shipped to the city.”

  Finch stared at her. Agent Lou Rivers regarded him with unperturbed composure.

  “You need to get us more. You’re completing the trip tomorrow?”


  “Uh. Yeah.”

  “Okay. You’re going to keep wearing the device. Get your brother and father to discuss their contacts. Business arrangements. We need more than criminality on their parts. We could put them away right now and it would do no good because the system would stay in place. If you want to really save these kids—and all the ones who will come after them—you have to let the bigger case unfold. We’re making a big omelet. You have to bust a few eggs.”

  Finch stared at her. Wondered.

  He exited the car. Closed the door.

  Finch didn’t keep track of the numbers, but given how few they shipped to the next shop in Denver, Colorado, he guessed up to half of the kids they brought in from Mexico died of overdose or were killed for attempting to escape. All within maybe six months of entering the country.

  Finch sat in his Mustang with his eyes closed. FBI Agent Lou Rivers fired her Impala’s engine and pulled away.

  I’m going to hell for this.

  We’re all going to hell for this.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Getting easier to shoot people. Right situation presents, I don’t think on it more ’n a second. Even all my life seeing liars and cheats, never woulda guessed how many pure wretched souls is out there. Cursed, murderous, evil ass souls. This one stands frozen in the flash of Smith & Wesson. Even with my voice coming low he’s looking high when the bullet pops off the back his head.

  He come out to do in another blackhair. Now he on his back, feet pointing at the dead Mexican. His face reflect the moonlight and his glare make it colder.

  I’ll leave him where he lay.

  Blackhair takes off, stumbles and lands on his face; got no hands, and rope strung behind him. I step on it.

  “Hold on, dipshit. You’ll freeze dressed like that. And you got cuffs on.”

  I holster Smith and from my other side fish out my Leatherman tool. Got a couple varieties of awl and if I jam ’em in the handcuffs, or pry on the fold, I’ll bust em loose somehow.

  “You wanna take off into the hills and that’s fine as water. But you’s liable to freeze to death with no clothes and yer hands locked behind yer back. Stop bein’ so cussed stupid and let me free you.”