The Death Box(41)

The mayaté and an ally came at Orzibel in a storeroom. Orzibel’s blade removed a thumb from the ally before going after the main attacker. Orzibel had made sure the mayaté spent his last minutes in incredible pain – removal of the testes does that – ensuring that others kept their distance.

Then, after three years, release from prison. He’d worked in the clean world for several months, hating every aspect, but smiling for the social workers and parole assholes. Then, like a test, a real job: the man he’d come to know as El Jefé – the Chief – had a product slated for a special, one-time kind of work, but the product had been compromised by a lowly coyote. Orzibel was charged with punishing the coyote. He had devised a spectacular demonstration, even publicizing it within a certain culture.

The coyote’s remains had gone into the then secret hole in the field and Orzibel had been elevated to his current position: running the ground operations of the enterprise. That, and enforcement, such as handling the punishment of the gordo accountant.

But just like that, Amili Zelaya had told him – Orlando Orzibel – to pat little Leala on the head and shake a finger at her: Be good, Leala. It pleases your mother. The woman knew how to wrap El Jefé around her perfect little fingers, but she knew nothing of taming girls who tried to resist.

Fuck Amili Zelaya and this lapse into softness, Orzibel thought. He would have Miguel pay a different kind of visit to the mother.





21





Yolanda was gone.

Her face still stinging from Orzibel’s slaps, Leala stared at an empty bed, its sheets unchanged and stained with her friend’s blood and urine. After the upstairs confrontation with Cho, Leala had been carried to the basement by the bald monster. He’d unlocked the mesh door and thrust her back into the warren of filthy halls and rooms. Leala had come to Yolanda’s room to check on her friend. But she had disappeared.

Leala heard Yolanda’s terrified voice echo in her head. They said I would soon go elsewhere to do … the work.

Thinking she heard the door open at the top of the steps, Leala froze, fearing Orzibel was coming down to continue beating her for resisting the filthy, sinful work at Cho’s enterprise. But it was just another of the rats who skulked between basement drains, its feet skittering over a Tostitos bag tossed to the garbage dump of the floor.

Leala crept back to her room and lay atop the mattress, praying she would not hear the hard click of Orzibel’s boots as he came down the steps to slap her face. Or worse.

Footsteps? She would hear them, right? It occurred to Leala that whenever Orzibel or the bald monster or the dangerous-looking men were in the basement, their appearance was almost always telegraphed by the thumping of feet down the steps and the clanging of the grated door.

But several times Leala had noticed something interesting: A person would appear or disappear without a stair-step or gate-opening sound. She had even discussed it with Yolanda. They had been talking and suddenly the gangster men were in the basement and throwing bottles of water into the room. How had the pair missed hearing the footfalls on the wood? The rattle of the gate?

Unless …

There was another way into the basement.

Amili entered the day’s accounting into the laptop and locked it in the safe, the day over. She checked her watch, a vintage Piaget and a constant reminder of him. A few months back they’d risen from his downtown apartment bed to go to dinner, do some shopping in the Design District, then return for a second session in the bed. While outside a jewelry store he’d noted her eyes lingering on the watch and bought it without even asking the price. When she’d protested the expense, he laughed and said be quiet or he’d buy her two of them.

Amili never told him she was studying the watch because she found it so stupidly gaudy. Though it was crusted with shining stones and special metals, inside was a machine that performed no better than a four-hundred-peso Timex. She wore it because he expected to see it on her wrist.

And she’d almost had two of the ridiculous things!

When Amili first arrived in the States, she had spent three days in the basement of the club. Orzibel had been in Honduras at the time, a meeting with Tolandoro. Amili had been rented by a now-dead sadist named Dimitri Bachinkl, who owned four massage parlors near Biscayne Boulevard. Once in Bachinkl’s hands, Amili lived in a filthy bedroom with three other parlor attendants whose ten-hour shifts consisted mainly of servicing a bleary procession of penises.

Amili had resisted at first, feeling betrayed by the universe, her face implacably sullen. Ordered by Bachinkl to smile and laugh and “Do like God made woman to do,” she remained obdurate until receiving a savage beating. “Use your beauty, little fool,” Bachinkl had screamed, the cattle prod stinging like a fifty-thousand-volt hornet. “Use what God has given you and it will make the world easier.”