The Dark Side

The guy found what he was looking for; a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. A moment later he was lighting a cigarette with his left hand cupped around it protecting it from the slight breeze.

I holstered my .45 and stepped forward, moving quietly but as swiftly as I could manage while he was blinded by the flare of his lighter. He never made a move, so I guess he didn't hear me behind him. Gathering myself, I took the 2x4 at one end, holding it like a baseball bat and stepped into a hard swing. The hard wood came whistling around and the more narrow face of the 2x4 slammed into the base of his skull in back.

I heard bone crunching and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. He didn't move a muscle.

Dropping to a knee, I looked all around, trying to see in all directions at once. No one raised an alarm.

I went to the van's door and slid it open. There were five young girls inside, crying. I shushed them and motioned them out, pressing my forefinger up to my lips to urge them into silence. They stifled their tears after a moment.

"Las chicas se van a casa. Ten cuidado. Cállate como un ratón," I told them.

I was fairly sure I was telling them to go home, to be careful while doing it, and to be quiet. Or I may have been advising them to find something to eat in the train station near their house. I wasn't entirely sure. Maybe I got it right, because they all took off toward the edge of town, running fast.

Just as I was about to turn back to my daughters in the Land Rover, there was a commotion from an opening too narrow to call a street a couple of yards in front of the van. Someone was coming from the west end of the village. There was some cursing in Spanish and the sounds of crying coming from at least two, maybe three more girls.

I ghosted back into the shadow of the building, found a doorway to wait in, and waited. I had the .45 ready for whatever I had to do next. These newly captured girls, and my daughters' lives depended on it.

There were two more bad guys shepherding a trio of young girls toward the van. When they saw the back doors were wide open and there was no one inside, they started cursing in Spanish, using words I didn't understand. They didn't sound happy, though. They milled around for a long moment, then found the dead man near the back end. Foolishly, for them—happily for me—they clustered together there with their backs to me with pistols in their hands. They took time to discuss the situation instead of facing outward, trying to find a threat. That's what I would have done, but I wasn't about to complain they weren't doing what they should have.

I walked quietly out of the shadow behind them. There was no way to do this quietly. There were two of them and I was out of makeshift baseball bats. I was, I guess, some eight or nine feet from the one to my right front when I lifted the .45 Glock and assumed the two-handed shooting stance I'd been taught at the Police Academy.

I triggered two rounds into the back of the first guy's head. Swiveling minutely to my left, I fired two more rounds into the side of this guy's head. He'd been startled into trying to find the cause of the shooting behind him and I caught him just after he started turning. They were dead before they knew they were dying.

I yelled at the three girls who'd been about to be forced into the van. I'd been amazed to see none of the other five had been restrained, and these three didn't have their hands or arms tied either. I told them all to go home and do it quickly in my uncertain Spanish. Shooting into both of the van's front tires, I whirled and raced back toward my Land Rover. Apparently my Spanish had been good enough; all the village girls were disappearing down the street and moving rapidly out of sight in the dimness.

There wasn't much point to being quiet now. "MEGAN—START THE ENGINE!" I bellowed. She was taller than Evelyn and could actually reach the gas pedal without straining. I was sure I'd have to explain that to Evelyn. Sibling rivalry was alive and well, even during firefights.

Making noise was actually in my favor now. If I'd come sneaking back to our truck, I might have been shot by one of my girls who thought I was one of the bandidos.

I was proud of my daughters. They were certainly crazy scared, but they weren't giving in to panic. By the time I was halfway to the Land Rover, Megan had the motor turning over and the headlights on. Megan jumped over to the passenger side as I came up. I threw myself inside, found first gear, and stomped on the gas.

Our tires spat gravel behind us as I accelerated. I wrestled the wheel hard left when we hit the poorly maintained road, slammed the transmission into second gear and moved up through the gears as quickly as I could. Inside a hundred yards, the needle in the speedometer was passing through the 50 mph mark and sweeping higher. Once we cleared the village, I really opened it up and made the engine howl.

A couple of minutes later, all we could see of the village where we'd spent the past few months was a few lights in the upper stories of widely separated houses. I couldn't make out very much through the rearview mirrors.

"You see anything, Evelyn?" I called to my youngest daughter. She was in the back seat and had her body swiveled around watching the road behind us.

"No, Daddy," she replied tightly. She wouldn't be fifteen for another month but she was holding it together amazing well, and so was Megan. My sixteen year-old had had the presence of mind to react quickly to my yell to start the engine and then quickly vacate the driver's seat so I could climb in. Both my daughters were fine young women. I was incredibly proud of them.

We topped a rise that I knew to be a good ten miles from the village and I slowed to a crawl, then stopped in the middle of the road. There was no traffic in the hot Mexican night. I got out of the truck and looked back the way we'd come. My daughters climbed out too and arranged themselves on either side of me, throwing their arms around my waist while I had my arms around their shoulders.

There were no car lights at all, and nothing coming in our direction. I'd immobilized the van and it appeared the human traffickers had either all come in the now-disabled vehicle, or they had no stomach to chase us in something else.

"Okay, let's go," I told my wonderful daughters. We couldn't go back. Mexican police would be crawling all over the village by sunrise tomorrow and I couldn't afford the attention. Rape was an extraditable crime, so we had to keep going.

We got back in the Land Rover and started on down the road at a far more leisurely pace than before. Our throats were parched and we each guzzled two half-liter bottles of water in the next mile and a half. We didn't stop driving until we got to Mexico City.

* * *

My intention was to take the girls to the Mexico City International Airport, buy them tickets back home and put them on a plane out of danger. I thought that was the best thing I could do, under the circumstances.

We'd talked on the drive about me killing three men; about how I'd done it because I was certain I had to do it to protect them, and to free the innocent girls the bandidos had already captured. I told them I wasn't sorry I'd done it, but Mexican police were probably going to be looking for me. I thought we had several days before a manhunt would be organized because I wasn't terribly impressed with Mexican officialdom or their ability to react swiftly.

To my amazement, Megan and Evelyn weren't especially upset by what I'd done back in the village. Instead, they had a thoroughly pragmatic view of the evening's events. Their reasoning went, (A) bad guys came to town to hurt Daddy's daughters, (B) Daddy's job was to make sure that didn't happen, and (C) Daddy took care of business. Therefore, (D) all was right with the world. Q.E.D.

I'm sure one of the contributing factors was that they already knew I'd killed a guy in a robbery-gone-bad, some years earlier. Consequently, they'd had time to deal with the dichotomy of me being a loving father to them, but that I was also a violent man who could kill when it was necessary.

They were adamantly against being put on a plane back home and I got a lecture about loyalty, their love for me, and their dislike for their mother. They delivered several opinions on what would be good, common-sense solutions for our problems, teenage maturity, and a whole slew of other issues that had no bearing whatsoever to our situation. I think at one point, I was being held responsible for the change to daylight savings time every summer.

We still went to Mexico City, but our purpose was only to find a nice hotel where we could spend a few days out of sight, recuperating and planning our next step. I got rid of the Land Rover by parking it a few blocks away with the ignition key in the driver's side door. The truck probably departed the area about the time I turned the corner walking back to the hotel.

We rested until Sunday, spending most of the daylight hours in the pool. Three nights later, we made our way closer to the border between Mexico and Texas under the guidance of a coyote we'd hired to sneak us back into the United States.

We'd decided to return to the U.S. because we felt an urgent need to depart Mexico. I didn't want to be arrested by the Mexican authorities, and my daughters didn't want me to go through the horrors of Mexican prison. At the same time, if we used our passports and American citizenship to re-enter the United States in the usual fashion, it would be noted in a computer system somewhere, and there was almost certainly a pick up order already in effect for me. We wanted to avoid that.

The coyote got us across the Rio Grande without incident. That is, without incident once the girls and I showed him how well armed we were. After that, things proceeded smoothly. What precipitated our new understanding with him was a decision he made to lead us down a path leading in an easterly direction. We'd been bearing north and west most of the night, so I questioned him about the sudden change in direction—with my .45 caliber Glock in hand.

He was very apologetic. As he explained it, he'd been preoccupied thinking about his lovely girlfriend and had almost taken the wrong path. When he saw both my daughters also had pistols in their fists aimed at his chest, he was even sorrier. He instantly corrected his mistake and led us onward. Our hike from that point to the river and getting across was admirably uneventful.

It was routine for coyotes to take illegals close to the border and then demand more money to actually get them across. This guy didn't even try to get anything more from us.

Once back in the United States, my daughters and I had a few hour's hike before we found a small motel on the outskirts of Laredo, Texas, and checked in. We explained we'd broken down just over that hill over there. A wrecker had towed it away already, but our car wouldn't be repaired for several days.

I told anyone who would listen how badly I needed to get my daughters home. It was my number one priority. I'd come back for the car later. The three of us discussed those things at length in the restaurant where we had lunch and dinner—loudly.

The next day, we caught a bus for San Antonio, Texas, and found another friendly motel. It had the prerequisite pool—a thing that was surprisingly important to us. Maybe it had something to do with the fact we'd been living in a tiny village in a huge desert.

San Antonio is the country's seventh largest city, and virtually anything one needed could be found within the city limits. What I did, was make a phone call to a low-life piece of scum who owed me a big favor for helping keep his daughter from getting a felony conviction one time. It'd been a discretionary thing. I could have arrested her for the illegal alcohol, or made her dump it out or I could let her go with a lecture and a warning. Her attitude had been good and she'd seemed repentant, so I chose the latter. He figured he owed me, and now I was going to collect.

It turned out the low-life had a cousin, who had a friend, whose brother-in-law was a confident of a woman, whose boyfriend.... Well, anyway, I got hooked up with a master forger who, for the paltry sum of $20,000, generated passports, and various other forms of identification for all three of us. In fact, we got six separate different personae for myself and my daughters.

This was the first major expense debited from the almost three-hundred thousand in cash I had left from the day I'd discovered my wife about to have sex with a couple members of her staff. We'd spent almost nothing in the Mexican village where we'd stayed for several months, and the coyote had been admirably inexpensive, so we were still doing very well from a financial standpoint.

We bought a five year old Volvo and stuffed it to the ceiling with things the girls had acquired by way of another shopping spree. We'd needed clothing to replace what we'd left behind in our hurried departure, accessories for the same, plus electronic devices for everyone and other assorted "stuff."

With my daughters' addiction for shopping temporarily assuaged, we motored north and west to the state of Oregon and found a pretty little town in the eastern part of the state amid enormous rolling hills. The lush greenery was about as far as one could get away from the desert around the Mexican village, and that felt good to us. We stayed there from early Fall to late Spring of the following year, keeping ourselves well beneath the radar.

After discussing the issue for some time, we decided to relocate again, and leave the U.S. once more. At first, we didn't have any particular destination in mind, except that it would NOT be Mexico. We'd had enough of that country.

After much debate, we picked Australia. My daughters said I wanted to go there because I'd seen pictures of bikini-clad beauties on Australian beaches. I said I wanted to go there because it was an English-speaking country, sort of, and was also about as far from the continental United States as one could get and not fall off the edge of the earth. The girls said I was being too dramatic. They accepted the English-speaking part though.

With our objective decided, we chose to travel there by tramp steamer. I convinced my girls, it would be fun to travel on a working freighter, which carried only a few passengers. It would be unique, I told them, a thing most teenagers would never experience. For myself, I figured the security for that mode of transportation would be somewhat less than what we'd encounter in an international airport, for instance.

And so it proved. Whatever they were supposed to do, the ship's personnel only gave our documents a cursory examination. Our passports were in the name of "Jackson" instead of "Chambers," but we might not have had any trouble using our own names, considering the lack of security. It didn't hurt to be careful, though. We were the Jacksons, Paul, his older daughter Courtney and younger daughter Belinda.

We took a slow, meandering voyage across the Pacific Ocean, enjoying the salt breeze and getting lots of sun along the way. We wound up visiting ports in Korea and then Japan, and then we turned southwest toward Indonesia across the South China Sea, en route to our destination in Australia. Everything was new and very interesting.

It was a nice interlude for the girls and me. There weren't very many passengers on board the freighter, transporting passengers was not the main focus, but there were enough to provide company when one did want to socialize. There weren't any teenagers for Megan and Evelyn to enjoy meeting, but they got along well together and were each other's best friend. I was in that "in-between" group. I wasn't a young sprout any longer, carefree and giddy with just being alive, but I wasn't old either.

There was one couple aboard who appeared to have one foot in the grave already who never socialized at all; they practically never moved either. Their only activity seemed to be sitting in deck chairs staring out to sea. I think some of the deck crew checked them every couple of hours to make sure they were still alive.

I didn't have anything in common with those representatives of the older generation; they made me uncomfortable. At the other end of the spectrum, the few twenty-something people on board were preoccupied with being finding themselves, and they bored me. Neither my daughters nor I had anything in common with them.

Our salvation was a thirty-six year old, green-eyed brunette staying just two staterooms away. She was taking a roundabout route from her native France back to an island her family had owned outright since the late nineteenth century.

Danielle Bastien and I, with or without my daughters, began to accompany each other to dinner and the few organized events on board. There was nothing serious between Danielle and me; we didn't do anything outside my daughters' presence we couldn't have done in front of them, but it was pleasant spending time with an attractive, younger woman for a change. There was a sadness in Danielle's eyes when my daughters and I first met Danielle, but that was fading as my girls and I grew closer to her.

The four of us formed an interesting dynamic. Danielle was older than Megan and Evelyn and younger than I was by about the same number of years. We discovered she and I could talk easily together, but she could easily relate to my teenage daughters too. Danielle began teaching us French, and we were sounding boards for her to practice her English. We were all having a great time.

Eighteen months and a little more than a week after the incident with my wife, I was beginning to relax and just enjoy living again. I was looking forward to arriving in Australia in another nine days. Danielle was going to take a break in her journey and show us around. She'd been to Sydney several times and was eager to share some of her favorite places with us.

CHAPTER THREE

The promenade deck, set aside for passengers to enjoy the sun and get a little exercise, was just forward of the superstructure. The bare steel of the deck was covered with what looked to me like nothing more than cheap green outdoor carpeting, but I guess it was better than plain grey paint slapped on cold metal.

From where I was lying on the surprisingly comfortable lounger, I could look aft and see the ship's bridge and watch the officers and crew as they went about the task of navigating big freighter around the Pacific Ocean. The ship was of Danish registry and many of the officers, including the Captain, were Danish. The crew was largely Filipino, with a smattering of other ethnic groups. The most senior of the crew—they called him "The Bosun." He was an enormous Samoan who had muscles on his muscles and I never heard him addressed by his surname—I don't even know if he had one. When he relayed an order to the crew from one of the ship's officers, no one even considered talking back to him.

The morning was well advanced; it was almost time to begin thinking of moving toward the single restaurant-like facility on board for the passenger's use. The crew had a crew mess collocated with the galley, the officers and passengers dined in the restaurant/café. It wasn't terribly democratic, but everyone seemed to accept it.

My eye was caught by a sudden flurry of activity up on what I'd learned to call the "port" side of the bridge—I'd have called it the "left" side if left to my own devices. For several days now, crewmen with heavy binoculars had watched the far horizon from both wings of the bridge, both fore and aft. I didn't know why; there were two rotating radar disks which I'd been presuming would meet the requirement to search the open sea for other solid objects coming too close. But for the past two days, binocular-equipped men had supplemented the electronic surveillance.