Chapter 25
Ronnie Garcia awoke certain she was being suffocated. Struggling to maintain her composure in the darkness of the cloth hood, she battled the urge to scream, lying still and willing herself to relax. Listening and feeling the situation, she strained to bring her cloudy brain into focus and to remember what had happened to get her here with a bag over her head. She moved her jaw slightly against the coarse material and pressed back the panic of the unknown. Muffled voices spoke now and again, but in her drug- and shock-induced haze, she couldn’t make out the words.
Her hands were cuffed behind her back and she lay on her side. The top of her head rubbed against what felt like the handle of a car door. A gentle swaying sensation told her she was in a moving vehicle. It was impossible to tell where they were since she had no reference to how much time had passed since leaving Gettysburg. Her mouth felt stuffed with dry cotton and her body ached deeply into the bone.
A hand ran slowly along her hip, lingering at the small of her back where her shirt had come up. Whoever sat beside her had decided to have a good feel while he thought she was unconscious.
“Knock it off,” an unfamiliar voice said.
The hand moved away and Joey Benavides spoke. “Mr. Walter wouldn’t care. He’ll do more than touch her ass and you know it.”
Ronnie fought the urge to recoil, knowing it was better that these men thought her still unconscious.
“Whatever,” the other voice said. “But that’s for him to decide.”
Clenching her eyes shut against the darkness of the hood, Ronnie slowed her breathing and listened. She remembered Miyagi’s training—“Do not wait for someone to swoop in and save you. Such thoughts are nonsense, the stuff of fairy tales. Be your own rescue.…”
Ronnie ignored her throbbing hands and shoulders to focus on what she could hear.
The sound of other vehicles whirring past came from her left so they appeared to be traveling on an undivided road. She held her breath, straining to pick up something else, the sound of a church bell or a train — anything that might help provide her with a fix on her location. All she got was more traffic noise and the sickening odor of Joey Benavides’s hair gel.
The swaying car was hypnotic. She was about to give in to a dazed sleep when she felt the SUV begin to climb. It didn’t mean anything at first, but then they slowed, as if caught in a traffic jam. Ronnie could hear other cars nearby, each slowing in turn. Her body rocked in the seat as they SUV came to a rolling stop before accelerating again.
Ronnie waited for the sound she felt sure would come next. She smiled inside the bag when, seconds later, she heard the rhythmic thump of a pavement joint, formed where the sections of a bridge or overpass came together. They had slowed for a tollbooth. Even in the darkness of her hood, she could picture it. The problem was there were countless bridges and tollbooths in the DC area. The rhythmic thump of tires passing over the joints was still going strong two minutes later, allowing Garcia to rule out all but the widest rivers. So, she thought, We’re going east over oceans and bays. She began to run through all the bridges she could think of near DC, still counting the seconds as she listened to the thumps. Roughly four minutes after the noise began, the road smoothed.
A four-mile-long bridge. They had to be crossing the Chesapeake. Garcia pictured the terrifyingly long two-lane Bay Bridge. She’d crossed it with Jericho on a trip to Ocean City — which he’d found too crowded, promising to someday take her to a chillier but much less populated beach in Alaska.
She felt the car rumble again as they crossed a second, shorter bridge. She pictured Kent Island and the Narrows that separated the Bay Bridge from the Delmarva Peninsula — the dangling bulb of land consisting of pieces of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The almost imperceptible smell of sweet corn, maturing, but still in the field, confirmed her guess. She felt the SUV turn to the right, taking them farther south. The pit in her stomach grew as she realized there was little down there but fields, forest, and backwater — with plenty of remote acreage to keep someone stashed away for a very long time.
An hour later, the SUV began to sway and bump as they turned down some uneven road. Branches scraped the doors as they drove down an even narrower lane, before finally coming to a stop.
“Shake your moneymaker, little dove,” Benavides said, giving Garcia a hard slap on the rump before dragging her from the car. “Time to rise and shine.”
Unable to adjust to moving her stiff muscles, she collapsed in a heap. Still bagged, she sprawled into the cool mud, clambering blindly to regain her footing. Benavides took her actions as an attempt to escape and slapped her on the back of the head, sending her face-first into the mud. The wet muck against her face had the effect of a water board and she rolled on her side, wheezing in an attempt to draw enough air through the plastered cloth. The men chuckled while they let her suffer for what seemed like forever. Instead of removing the hood, rough hands simply spun it, giving her neck a rug burn, but putting a relatively clean portion of cloth over her mouth and nose.
Someone grabbed her by either arm and began drag her forward. The sudden shock of cool around her ankles terrified her as every horrible scenario flooded her brain: Alone, handcuffed and hooded with brutal men in the middle of nowhere — and now being led into the water. The thick odor of decaying vegetation seeped through the hood. Cicadas buzzed in the trees. Her Cuban mother would have called the little bugs chicharra.… Ronnie choked back a sob. Of course, she would think of her mother at a time like this. People always thought of their mothers when they were about to die.
She screamed, planting her feet in the mud and refusing to take another step.
“Shut her up,” Benavides said, sloshing up from somewhere behind her. “Bitch,” he spat just inches from her ear. “Get in the skiff before I change my mind and start your R2I before Mr. Walter gets here.”
R2I was short for Resistance to Interrogation — but implied the measures used to see that such resistance did not occur. Her legs began to wobble at the thought. Sleep deprivation, withholding food, constant light and noise, forced nudity, and all manner of debasing treatment — the list of what one human being could do to another was limited only by the imagination — and she was certain Agent Walter had a vivid one when it came to making people suffer.
Ronnie half stepped, half fell over the side of a metal skiff that crunched against the gravel a few feet off the bank. Once over the side, someone, likely Joey Benavides, kicked her hard in the tailbone, sending her crashing into the floor of the skiff.
“Take her out to the boat and put her in the cage until he gets here,” Benavides said.
“You’re not coming?” another man asked, sounding surprised but not upset. Ronnie could imagine that there were few people in the world who really wanted a creep like Joey B hanging around.
“Don’t worry,” Benavides said. “I’ll be back before the boss gets here. I don’t want to miss any of the fun, but I got a date with a little Italian dish.”
“A date?” the other man scoffed.
“Yeah,” Benavides’s syrupy voice made Ronnie cringe. “Her husband’s out of town. We got us a short window of opportunity to really get to, you know, spend some quality time together.”
Chapter 26