HELLO BEAUTIFUL

Rating: NC17  for violence, murder, gunplay, adult themes. For safety’s sake, this will apply to ALL chapters. There will be no smut in this fic. There will be references, but references only, to rape, murder, mutilation in places

Copyright © December 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx

Ch 12

I drove the two kids back to the diner and carefully jotted down Marcus’ number. A cell phone, which didn’t come as a surprise. Kids like Marcus didn’t really exist, not the way regular kids did.  They didn’t have homes where they ate string beans and read to their little sisters. I didn’t like to think too much about what I would need to call him for, when I called him.

The black tape sat evilly, untouched on the seat beside me, as I drove across the city. I didn’t want to watch it, but I knew that I had to. I had to know. I couldn’t go back to Danno’s place, he didn’t have a TV, and there was no way I would bring the tape to my own place to watch it. Not where my wife and kids lived.

I closed my eyes at the next light, the drops of rain distinct on the windshield as I thought. There was only one place for me. I had to find Holloway. Except I didn’t think anyone really found Holloway, the man simply appeared.

I pulled around at the next street and made my way to the morgue; it had a sort of gravity that I knew would pull in Holloway. If he wasn’t there, I would drive by the precinct house, and then go back to Danno’s, but I didn’t think I would have to. Water splashed in the puddles as I pulled around to the back entrance of the morgue.

I slowed down, as I pulled up to the rear doors out into the alleyway. Holloway peeled away, a shadow amongst deeper shadows, and I stopped the car so that I wouldn’t splatter water all over him. He took a last deep inhale of his cigarette and flicked it across into a puddle before he got into the car, without a word.

He picked up the black tape on the seat before he sat down and looked at me. I couldn’t look back; I couldn’t look at the tape, and I could offer no explanation for how it had arrived. The crime of breaking and entering was one we had already shared at this point but it was still a crime, and the less said about it the better.

Holloway snapped the zippo, a sharp sound in the silence. “Take this left.” I followed his hand signals as we took side streets back across the busy streets of El Paso, out into the fringes. Other than the occasional curt direction, we said nothing to each other until we reached a tiny house, miles away from anything else, in the hills close to the border. “Park around back, Alvarez.”

I followed Holloway down a neat path that ran between the back of the house and the expanse of the canyon beyond. Holloway unlocked the door and I quickly followed him inside. The house was neat and tidy, almost Spartan, furnished with only the bare necessities. I had thought it was a standard safe house until I saw the comfortable chair close to the window out front. A decent stereo, table, reading lamp. An ashtray. It was Holloways’ home. I said nothing.

Holloway threw his coat over the back of a chair and moved to crouch next to an entertainment stand, where he slipped the tape into the VCR. I didn’t want to look. What I wanted was to run from the house and wash my hands of everything, but my feet moved forward with a will of their own until I sat at the edge of another chair beside Holloway’s.
A burst of static, the snow of an old tape. Jerky frames as the filming started in an amateur fashion, giving the gritty realism of an art school production. What came next wasn’t art, but horror and depravity. I didn’t breathe, I couldn’t. My heart was a stone in my throat and my fingers clawed into the fabric of the chair. My eyes burned with tears and I didn’t care if I cried; that Holloway sat to my left didn’t mean a thing; he wouldn’t have said a word. A strangled inhuman sob was all I could manage as I lurched drunkenly from the chair and raced for a door, anywhere, just to get outside and breathe something clean again.

Holloways’ hand shook slightly when he came out and offered me the tumbler of whiskey. The burn did nothing for me. I swiped angrily at the tears but Holloway made a point not to notice; he just took a seat on the wooden edge of his back porch and waited for me to compose myself.

I muttered and swore softly in Spanish, something I hadn’t done in a long time, the English ingrained in me. My hands knotted themselves into fists as the horror I had felt became something else, and I sat down next to Holloway.

“Shut it out, Alvarez, and tell me what you saw.” We had both seen the same thing; Holloway wasn’t talking about the video itself. He wanted me to get cold and see beyond it, to look for things other people wouldn’t see. It was what I was good at, that ability to get distance. I had to take a few deep breaths to try to clear what I had just witnessed, and I put my head down for a minute before looking up, and out across the canyon.

Cold. I could do cold. “They would need privacy to do what they did.” I hardly recognized my own voice, vicious and hard as I thought about what they had done. “More than just privacy, they would need to ensure the silence of those that took part. Drivers, the people that filmed it. The …people…that had done it. The money could pay for a good deal of that, but it couldn’t pay for everything. These people were a group before this took place; they would have to trust each other, to do that. They were a group, maybe a gang, hell, maybe even a family.”

Holloway sat and nodded, before he swung his knees over the edge of the porch and rested back against the railing. He spoke in that same grew voice. “The trailer park could offer them that sort of privacy. No one would dare talk.” He was quiet for another moment as he took another deep pull on his cigarette.  “Other than the first couple of shaky frames, the rest of the production was relatively professional. That not only takes money, it takes skill. Professional photographer.”

“There’s the tapes themselves, there were a lot of them, Holloway.” Holloway didn’t ask how I knew, he just got up and returned with another tumbler of whiskey, and a glass for himself. “That’s a lot of money.” It disgusted me to think of it, that someone would pay for that, but people would do just that. “Not only in selling the tapes, but buying the tapes, the equipment itself.” I looked over at Holloway before I continued. “I don’t have the connections to look into any of that, I’m on my own.”

“I can take apart that lawyer, and then there’s Rodriguez.” He finished his glass of whiskey and lit another cigarette, blowing the smoke out in rings. “That’s peripheral, it’s mopping up. These women are being kept at the trailer court. They’re being picked out there. By someone.”

Holloway looked over at me. I had been in that bar; I had been there at last call, when there were far too many waitresses for such a small place. It was a cattle call of sorts, and someone was making a choice. Then those women would be separated from the others and kept in the ‘cage’ at the back of the bar, until they were taken somewhere else.

I pulled out the notes that Hernandez had made when he had stolen the tape and handed them to Holloway. There were three women being kept in the ‘cage’ right now, and another seven being kept elsewhere throughout the trailer park.

Holloway moved through the dates listed next to the three women that had already been separated. Two of the dates were for a time when the feds would likely already be involved. The third date was tomorrow night, when the girl would be moved from that room, and taken who knows where. We would have to move soon.

Holloway took another sip of his whiskey and we stared out across the canyon. “We need to be coordinated, Alvarez.”

I had thought of that myself. If we took out Rodriguez, and waited, the women would disappear from their cage in the bar. Take out the lawyer, and everyone involved could vanish like smoke. I needed specifics about how and when those women were taken out of the bar; to me that was more important than all the rest. I wanted vengeance for Danno, but I couldn’t sacrifice those women’s lives for that blood. In the end, Danno would understand. He loved women, all of them, and he would understand this.

“I have to go back to the bar. Talk to Carl, the bartender.” Holloway raised an eyebrow but otherwise said nothing. “That one woman, ‘Kimberley’, is going to be taken out tomorrow night, and I need to know what the procedure is for that.”

Holloways’ glass clicked against the wood, an empty sound. “I’ll start to set things up at the trailer park, and at the lawyers.” He didn’t specify but I knew that anything he did wouldn’t be seen by anyone, he was preparing for something big. It made me wonder again what Holloway was before he was a detective. “Take that kid with you when you go. He’s not exactly a kid, Alvarez, no matter what he looks like. We can keep in touch through him”

I made to write down the number Marcus had given me but Holloway waved me off. “I’ve had contact with Marcus before.”

I was still stone cold sober after what I had witnessed. Holloway walked back into the house and sealed up the tape in an envelope he pulled from a side desk and slipped it into his coat pocket. We drove back into the city in silence, and I made plans to return to the South Pacific.