To The Lions - 02 (33 page)

Her
son.

She
studied each one, kissing the last one before hiding the pictures away and
replacing the directory.

Suppressing
her nausea, she lifted the phone, summoning a prisoner.

* * *

The
sex was fast and animalistic.
 
He was on
top of her, holding her face down and to the side, mashing it, leaning his
weight on her as he thrust, his powerful triceps showing all three distinct
heads of the long upper arm muscle.
 
When
he was unable to climax, he pulled her hair, earning grunts of pain as he
twisted her head, making her turn over.
 
Again, as was his habit, he held her down by her head as he worked from
behind, cursing her as she began to moan.

He
had no idea she was faking.
 

Her
sounds aroused him, bringing him to his climax.
 
El Toro collapsed into the chair behind him and cleaned himself with her
underwear.

Capitana
de la Mancha didn’t move.

“You
didn’t seem to like that,” he eventually grumped, crossing the room and pouring
four fingers of straight whiskey.

“I
did,” she replied, trying to keep her smile from being tepid as she pulled her
skirt down.
 
“It was amazing as always,
the highlight of my week.”
 
She stepped
into the bathroom to use the toilet.

He
dropped onto the chair again, taking a slug of his whiskey, tightening his lips
over his teeth.
 
After the flush he
yelled, “So, when do I get my money?”

Capitana
de la Mancha froze, staring at herself in the mirror.
 
She watched as her lips moved but only tiny
sounds escaped.

“Damn
it!
 
Are you deaf?” thundered El Toro’s
voice off the tile walls.

Lie, damn you, lie!

“He
called several times,” she managed, satisfied with her casual tone.
 
“His contact wasn’t there and he’s going to
try again tonight.
 
He almost cried when
I offered him the deal…that’s how happy he was.”
 
Mopping beads of makeup-tinged sweat from her
forehead, she turned and walked back into her office, making sure her feigned
afterglow was evident.

“He’s
got one hour,” El Toro barked.
 
“One hour
before he dies.”
 
His sweaty face split
into a wicked grin.
 
“Then, once I get my
money, he dies anyway.”

“Do
you really have to kill him, Sancho?
 
I
know the situation with Cesar goes back many years, but this is just some
American who was hired to—”

A
raised hand silenced her.
 
He extended
his thumb, jabbing it in a pointing motion behind his head.
 
“Just shut up and rub my neck, bitch.”

Capitana
de la Mancha moved behind the gangster, massaging his rough skin with her
fingers, allowing her long nails to occasionally scratch over the tattooed
ectodermal tissue.
 
She closed her eyes
as she rubbed, repulsed by the sweat-tinged, sour smell that arose from her
tormentor.

“Hell
yes, I have to kill him,” he said.
 
“Even
if he hadn’t beaten Gio, even if he brings me a dozen roses along with the
money and sucks me off three times, yes, I still have to kill him. Rub harder,
bitch,” he grunted before loudly slurping his whiskey.

De
la Mancha cursed the situation under her breath.
 

“Who
is he anyway?”

“What?”

“This
is twice I’ve had to repeat myself,” he warned.
 
“Who the hell is the American?
 
You said you were pulling information from his prints.”

“Oh,
that,” Capitana de la Mancha said, again trying to sound blasé.
 
“His real name is Hartline—just a small-time,
bodyguard type.”

“That’s
it?”

“That’s
it.”
 

“And
you
met with him in here?”

“Yes.”

“In
your office?”

“Yes.”

“Just
you two…no one else?”

“No
one else,” she said in an audible exhalation.

“He’s
a pretty big hombre.”

She
kept rubbing.

“Did
you ever once even think about fucking him?”

“Sancho,
don’t—”

“No
more calling me Sancho. And answer the question!”

“No,
I didn’t.”

He
tilted his head.
 
“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m
not lying to you.”

“Don’t
do it!” he bellowed, lifting his clenched fist as if in warning.

“Okay,
Sancho, if you insist…if you’re going to force me to go down that road, then I
did fantasize about him.
 
He’s
attractive, okay?
 
He’s attractive and I
wondered, for one quick second, what it would be like to be with him.
 
There, I admitted it.
 
Satisfied?”

His
body vibrated as he chuckled in a smug manner, muttering chauvinistic
insults.
 
“So, speaking of you and your
nasty little habits, exactly how many men have you been with, capitana?”

Gritting
her teeth, de la Mancha rubbed her face with her free hand.
 
She hated when he took a turn to the
perverse.
 
It meant only one thing:
degrading her as he again grew aroused, only to be followed by another symbolic
rape episode, the next one almost certainly more violent.

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen,
my ass!” he snarled, laughing in a malevolent manner.
 
“You’re so full of shit.
 
What are you now, forty-four?
 
Your box has got more miles on it than an old
city bus.
 
I bet you screwed sixteen guys
when you
were
sixteen.
 
Now tell me the damned truth.”

“That
is the damned truth,” she snapped.
 
“Three between the time I was nineteen and twenty-one.
 
Only one, my husband, until I was
thirty-three, and the rest since then, the last one being you.”

“Right
there,” he groaned, hitching his thumb again.
 
“Yeah.
 
Dig into that knot.
 
That’s it, right there.”
 
When she’d rubbed the knot out, he lifted the
heavy tumbler to his shoulder.
 
“Go
refill my glass, bitch.
 
Fill it
up.”
 

As
she poured, he asked, “Who did he call?”

“What?”

“That’s
three times!”

“Sorry.”

“
Who
,” he emphasized, “did Hartline call
on the phone?”

“I
was listening, but they didn’t answer.
 
He claims he was calling a woman.”

El
Toro nodded.
 
“Yeah, that’d be the one
who visited him.
 
Your guard Consuelos
said she sounded Russian, or something.
 
Said she was gorgeous, a premium
pedazo
de culo
.”

“Great,”
de la Mancha said without enthusiasm.

“What’s
her name?”

Why is he asking all these
questions?
 
“She signed
in as Olga Nemcova,” de la Mancha answered mildly.

“How
did she get here?”

Capitana
de la Mancha stood to his side, handing him the brimming tumbler.
 
“We don’t know.
 
The lot was full and she came from the
overflow across the road.
 
There are no
cameras there.”

“Did
you get the number he called?”

“No.
 
I don’t have that capability on my phone.”

He
glared up at her, curling his lip.
 
“You’re a completely useless twat, you know that?”

Unable
to hold back, and without any venom, she politely said, “Please don’t call me
that.
 
I hate words like that.”

Whiskey
sloshed as he stood.
 
She saw it coming,
letting it happen.
 
If she didn’t, the
resulting beating would be worse.

El
Toro slapped her so hard across the face that she fell and slid all the way to
the sitting area on her side.
 
He moved
above her, shouting Catalan curses before spitting on her.
 
Then, just as she’d known he would, he pushed
his pants down, displaying his excitement.
 
El Toro mounted her on the floor, biting her neck as he began their
forced union.
 
Bearing the humiliation in
silence, Capitana de la Mancha wondered if she’d broken her wrist in the fall.

Fortunately,
as she knew from at least three previous episodes, violence inflamed Sancho “El
Toro” Molina.
 
This would be the last
episode of the day and, if it played out as it had since he’d taken the top
spot at Berga, probably the last time for a few weeks.
 

Her
palms flat on the floor, accepting the violation that was occurring to her
body, and despite the pain in her face and her wrist, Capitana de la Mancha
closed her eyes and thought of where she might go and who she might become.

Who am I?
 
Why am I here?
 
What have I done with the pretty and demure
girl who graduated
con honores grandes
, full of promise and with a resolution to affect change through dogged
determination and a career in criminal justice?

From there to here, face down on a
cold floor, taking it like an alley cat in heat.

Capitana
Angelines de la Mancha, for the first time in years, despite what she was
currently enduring, felt the energy of renewal.

When
he was done, El Toro stood and strutted across the office.
 
He filled another tumbler, shooting at least
four shots of whiskey in one gulp.
 

“You
gonna cry now?” he asked with a sneer.

She
lay still, not looking at him.

“Where’s
Hartline?”

She
twitched.
 
Then, lying there and still
not facing him, she said, “In
el aposento
.”

“I
want to see him.”

She
turned her head.
 
“No.”

“What
did you say?”

“You
heard me.
 
After what I put up with, you
can at least give me a day to get his money.
 
And Vasco told me it’s my responsibility anyway.
 
If you go in there alone, none of us will get
a single euro because you’ll end up killing him, and Vasco will relay that to
Xavier.”
 
Doing something she rarely did,
she eyed El Toro.
 
“Vasco said that
no one
better foul this up.”

By
his hesitation, she knew she’d trumped him.
 
El Toro feared no one in Berga, but he knew what Xavier was capable of.

El
Toro eventually smiled, his gold teeth glittering as he said, “You just want
time to screw him, don’t you, bitch?”

“Give
me until tomorrow.”

El
Toro studied de la Mancha with narrowed eyes.
 
“Send for me tomorrow morning at nine, and not a second later.
 
When you do, you’d better be telling me that
money is on its way here.”
 
He pointed a
finger in the direction of
el aposento
.
 
“Or Señor Hartline will get what Cesar got.”

El
Toro left.

Alone,
Angelines de la Mancha lay on the cool hardwoods.

She
didn’t move for a half-hour.

Chapter Twenty-One

The
“aposento,” as Capitana de la Mancha had termed it, was nothing special but
certainly a far cry from Gage’s prison cell.
 
Painted exclusively in buff, a bland color common to government
buildings the world over, it seemed to have once been a single room.
 
Gage estimated the dimensions of the entire
unit as twenty-five feet by ten.
 
A wall
with a drape-covered pass-thru had been installed in the center, cutting the
large room into two.
 
The first room had
a small stove, a miniature refrigerator, and a tweed couch with disgusting
flaky whitish stains all over its cushions, like sugar crust from a glazed
donut.
 
Relics from all the conjugal
visits.
 
There was a throw rug and,
behind a bolted-on piece of safety glass, an old television.

The
pull drape revealed a bedroom with a twin bed, a nightstand and a toilet in a
corner.
 
Fortunately the bed had clean
sheets and there was an extra sheet on the nightstand, presumably to cover the
ejaculate-infused couch.

Gage
studied the toilet for a moment.
 
It
wasn’t the type in the cells, gravity-fed, built into the floor, similar to
what one would find in a sports stadium.
 
This was a standard European toilet, like one might find in a home, with
a reservoir that was bolted down and held by a clamp.
 
He passed back into the sitting area, using
the spare sheet to triple-cover a spot on the sofa.
 
Reasoning to himself that he’d sat, and
slept, in far filthier environments, Gage perched on the edge of the sofa and
studied the kitchenette.
 
He eyed the
stove, briefly remembering the natural gas explosion he’d once created outside
of Metz, France.

That’s got to be nearly a thousand
kilometers from here,
he mused.
 
I did
that back when I was a prisoner to grief, but free.
 
Now I’m no longer grieving, but I’m
imprisoned.

He
pictured Monika, recalling the blackness of her death, shaking the image away
with a wobble of his head.
 
Then his mind
created a vision of Justina, in bed next to him, viewing him as if he were the
only male on earth, moving her hands through his hair, drinking him in,
touching him, loving him.

Though
he’d told the captain he wouldn’t reveal Justina even if tortured, Gage knew
enough about torture to know that every man has a limit.

So, don’t let it come to that.

Gage
refocused his efforts.
 
Unfortunately the
stove was electric, small and chintzy.
 
He turned his eyes to the refrigerator.
 
It was about three-and-a-half-feet tall, not unlike the type found in an
office or a college dorm room, quietly humming as it impotently cooled a few
presumably empty cubic feet of air inside itself.
 
He bounced several times on the couch,
listening for the squeak of springs.
 
After a glance through the drape to the bed and nightstand, his eyes
drifted up to the overhead light, which was nothing more than a single bulb,
the glass fixture having been removed.
 
His gaze rotated through the unit and…

There!
 
Right there in the corner above the door,
black and with a plano-convex lens for fisheye viewing, only about the size of
a Sharpie pen’s tip, was the security camera’s aperture.
 
There would certainly be another one in the
bedroom.

But did you spring for night
viewing, Capitana de la Mancha?
 
Did you
pay the big bucks, or did you spend that on one of those paintings in the
office you claim you didn’t decorate?

Sliding
backward on the disgusting sofa, he furtively pulled the phone from behind him,
using his right hand to push it, cord and all, down into the cushions.

That
done, his eyes drifted left, to the outer wall.
 
He’d knocked on it on his way in.
 
It wasn’t brick or mortar—probably laid in sheets of some sort of
hardboard.
 
The camera was on that wall,
as was electricity, marked by the wall outlet.
 
Next to the electrical outlet was a rectangle, the same size, covered in
a steel plate.
 
Gage focused on the
plate, seeing dual holes—like eyes—on the screws.
 
The screws were spanner-drilled, meaning whoever
installed the plate didn’t want tampering.

Fighting
to keep from smiling, Gage felt almost certain the plate covered an old phone
jack.
 
And, if so, was the jack live?

“We’re
going to find out,” Gage whispered inaudibly, hoping.

Eyes
moving back to the kitchenette, and back to the overhead light, he licked his
lips, suppressing his excitement over the tiny chance that had bloomed on this
dreary prison day.

* * *

Capitana
Angelines de la Mancha emerged from the blistering hot shower, turning on the
exhaust fan and using her hair dryer to blow the condensation from the
full-length mirror.
 
As the chill air of
the office swept into the bathroom, she studied herself in the mirror, fighting
to view her familiar features objectively.
 
This time she wanted a cold appraisal.
 

Her
face, minus the arguable benefit of her trademark caked-on makeup, still held
its shape for the most part.
 
Sunspots dotted
her temples and forehead.
 
Tiny random
bumps, pigment-free moles according to the dermatologist, had grown in a few
areas of her face.
 
The spots and bumps
were easily taken care of with makeup, but the crow’s feet and the slight
wattle of loose skin under her chin couldn’t be readily concealed.
 
She bared her teeth, one of her best features
along with her full lips, satisfied with their bleach-aided whiteness and
straight, square appearance.

De
la Mancha took a few steps back, feeling gooseflesh as the powerful exhaust fan
ushered in more cold air.
 
Squinting her
eyes at her reflection, pretending she was a man viewing her form on a beach
from a distance, she knew she could pass for thirty at a quick glance.
 
She’d birthed her son, Jordi—her secret
son—thirteen years before and had worked hard to regain her form afterward,
especially on the loose skin that gathered below her navel.
 
Being hyper-conscious about her body, she’d
chosen not to nurse Jordi and, ever since she’d given him up to her mother,
she’d spent at least ten hours per week in exercise to combat and slow the inescapable
aging process.

With
a trim stomach and a decent set of medium-sized breasts, she admitted to
herself that she’d done a nice job with her fitness.
 
But, despite all the hard work, a slight
gathering of extra flesh had grown just below her waistline, on her hips, a
shadow of the wideness her mother had carried nearly her entire adult
life.
 
Despite that small flaw, she
possessed a killer set of legs and even her feet and painted toes seemed cute
and dainty.

The
grin that had grown quickly dissolved as she had one final place to view.
 
Desiring to get it over with quickly,
Angelines de la Mancha turned, looking over her right shoulder at the ass she’d
grown to despise.

If
polled, there would be hardly a man on earth who found her rear end as
grotesque as she.
 
In fact, though she’d
never admit it to herself, most men would find it quite desirable.
 
It looked perfectly at home on a fit woman of
her age.
 
Nevertheless, she loathed her
backside, wearing uncomfortable body shapers and tights under her outfits to
help improve her shape.
 
Her butt was
trim and without cellulite or deformity but, to Angelines, it now had one very
fatal flaw.
 
Since she’d turned forty,
her ass had begun a faster-than-wanted trip southward.
 
In other words, it sagged.
 
Not a great deal but, despite all her running
and time spent sweating on the elliptical, her ass had not gotten the “stay in
shape” memo.

She
whirled back around and, using her thumbs, gently tugged backward on her
temples.
 
The crow’s feet disappeared.

Bringing
her thumbs downward, she touched her neck, lightly pulling under her ears,
watching as the gentle wattle became youthfully taut under her chin.

Taking
a steadying breath and turning, Angelines touched her dimples of Venus with her
oh-so-helpful thumbs, briefly closing her eyes and pretending she was again
28.
 
Then, with some pressure and a tug,
she watched as her butt gloriously levitated to the one she once knew and
loved.

After
staring at it for a full minute, she donned her robe, lit an ultra-light
cigarette and walked into her office, dropping a few rough cubes of ice into a
highball glass and pouring mineral water in, hearing the crack of the
protesting ice.

“Nearly
one million euro,” she said aloud, thinking about what Gage Hartline had said
about Zurich.
 
Sitting on the leather
sofa, she flipped the cover over on her iPad and made sure she was on her
cellular connection and not Berga’s WiFi.
 
She typed in a quick search about the world’s best, and most affordable,
plastic surgeons.

Singapore
was mentioned often.

After
reading a few top-search entries on the high quality of available Singaporean
plastic surgery, she reclined on the sofa, a wistful smile on her face as she
searched the nearby countries.
 
There
were a bevy of affordable homes for rent in Indonesia, and the pictures were
captivating.
 

A
year with her mother and son, mending fences and washing the sludge of Berga
Prison from her mind.

She
dropped the iPad on the sofa beside her, pointing her toes and stretching,
groaning from the pain.
 
Angelines’ groin
area ached from earlier—not because El Toro, sicko, was well-endowed.
 
Not in the least.
 
The pain was from the beginning of their copulation,
before her body was able to provide its own natural lubrication, when he’d
jabbed her with his fingers and his pint-sized organ.
 
She blew smoke upward in a lacey stream,
telling herself that, along with plastic surgery, she’d get some psychiatric help
to blow away (or at least hide) her hellish prison memories.

Setting
aside the sexual abuse she’d endured, she recalled the scornful expression Gage
Hartline had worn when she’d justified the killings that had occurred under her
watch.
 
She’d always told herself
(especially after enduring one of her frequent nightmares) that the men she’d
allowed to be killed were dead anyway.
 
They were in Berga Prison, the definition of hell on earth, for life
with hardly any chance at parole.
 
Yes,
often their end was fraught with suffering but, wouldn’t a person be better off
with a few moments of pain followed by death over a lifetime spent in misery,
also followed by death?

Sipping
the bracing mineral water, she closed her eyes again, resetting her thoughts
and making a mental note to line up the psychiatric help first—even before the
butt lift.

So,
getting the money from Hartline was priority one.
 
Added to her savings and the cash she’d
squirreled away, she would have well in excess of a million euro.
 
Then, as quickly as possible, she’d have to
collect her mother and son and go to ground.
 
They would need new identifications, disguises, and rail transport out
of Spain.

“Assume
Los Leones will find out within hours,” she whispered to herself, her voice
quavering.
 
“Just accept it and
understand what you’re up against.”

Because
when El Toro figured out that she’d escaped, he would immediately tell Xavier
Zambrano.
 
And, if Xavier caught her, a
well-compensated trustee, double-crossing Los Leones, her end, and that of her
family, would be beyond her darkest fears.

“Unless
El Toro is dead,” she whispered, a smile relieving the lines of stress on her
face.

A
final drag and a swill of her drink.
 
It
was time to put herself back together, to forget about the “rape,” and to go
home for the evening.
 
Assuming she could
make all the arrangements this evening, she could awaken early, with the dark,
for a long run in the Aviàn forest.
 
It
would be the very first physical step in the cleansing after the disgusting
liaison with El Toro—and to prepare for what it was she had to do on the
morrow.

In
the bathroom, Angelines lifted the hair dryer but paused.
 
She slumped forward, dropping the hair dryer
onto the counter as she supported herself with her arms.
 
The hair dryer switched on in its tumble,
running loudly and twirling back and forth like an untended garden hose on full
blast.