The Girl with the Golden Gun

Tavio was camera shy and banned all cameras from the compound because he didn’t want recent pictures of himself in the newspapers.

But despite his problems he thought of her happiness. When he realized how lonely she was in her room with nothing except week-old, Mexican newspapers to pore over, he’d sent his brother-in-law’s girlfriend, Delia, to be her maid. Delia was sweet if down-trodden, but dear Delia couldn’t be with her all the time, either, so he’d rescued a kitten his men had been about to use as target practice and had given it to her. She’d named the poor little black cat Negra.

When Delia had confided to her about her troubles with Chito, Mia had observed Chito more closely. He was Tavio’s second-in-command, and the worst of a bad bunch. A man of dark temperament, he was as sullen as Tavio was outgoing. Chito always wore a grisly necklace made of real human bones. When he gazed at Mia, he formed the habit of stroking his neck, as if to call attention to the gruesome ornament.

Tavio spent time with her himself, of course. He liked to drive around in the desert in his truck shooting at whatever poor creature darted in his path. When he could, he took her with him on these outings. They were always trailed by jeeps full of armed bodyguards.

Strangely she did not find him totally unattractive. If he hadn’t had that scar across his right cheek where a bullet had creased him, he would have been as handsome as a movie star. A born leader, he was ruggedly virile and charismatic. Unlike his men, who were mostly short, dark and stockily built, Tavio was tall with light skin, thin fine features, an ink-black mustache and bright jet eyes that flashed with intelligence and intuition.

He liked people. He paid attention to them. He understood them. When he turned those eyes on her, she was terrified he could read her thoughts. Once he’d told her that when he knew a person’s weaknesses and strengths, he knew how to use him.

“People are my tools,” he’d said in Spanish, which was the language they usually spoke for she was more fluent in his tongue than he was in hers. “I have to know who can do what for me, no?”

And me? Why has he toyed with me so long?

His mother was the most feared curandera, or witch, in Ciudad Juarez. His men believed he had special powers and that was why he could manipulate people so easily.

He was as fierce and brave as any warrior or pirate king. He was a good father and son. His mother had had some sort of breakdown, and he called Ciudad Juarez constantly to make sure she was being properly cared for.

He was smart, a criminal genius probably. He ran a huge empire that reached to the highest levels in the government from this remote rancho. Army comandantes came to visit him on a regular basis. They strutted around his mansion and barns and he let them take whatever they wanted. Always, they left laughing with thick wads of pesos stuffed in the bulging pockets of their uniforms. Politicians from Mexico City came, as well. When they drove away in the stolen trucks he’d given them, he cursed them for being so greedy. Then he bragged to her, usually in front of an audience, that he had protection at the highest levels in Mexico.

Tavio was responsible. He took international phone calls on his various phones. He worked hard, sometimes day and night, as he had for the last three days and nights, taking pills and chain-smoking those crack-laced cigarettes she hated because they made him edgier and less predictable. He was a highly sexual man, and she was increasingly unnerved by the way his eyes followed her.

He bought her beautiful clothes, including French lingerie, but she refused to wear them. She never smiled at him, either, for fear of charming him.

He wore a gold-plated semiautomatic in a shoulder holster and had a habit of shooting at targets that took his fancy.

Despite his kindnesses and obsession to have her, Mia never forgot that he was a vicious, notorious drug lord, who claimed to be the most powerful man in all of northern Mexico. He said he was linked with another powerful cartel headed by Juan Garza in Colombia, and she believed him.

Terrible things happened here. Hostages were brought here, some of them girlfriends of Tavio’s men, girls whom the men said had cheated on them. Sometimes she heard screams and then gunshots. She had watched men carrying heavy sacks out into the desert and feared the worst. Tavio had touched her red hair once and told her she would be smart to love him because there were many graves in his desert.

“Women you have loved before?” she had whispered.

He had laughed with such conceit she’d known there had been countless women before her. She’d sensed how his awesome power had corrupted him.

“Are you threatening me?” she’d asked.

“No, my love. But I am not a patient man.” His soft voice had been deadly.

“You are married to Estela.”

“This is different—you and me. For you—I send my wife away. This make Chito, her brother, very mad, and that is a dangerous thing to do. I am not like other men. I bore easily. I live for danger. Still, I cannot divorce my wife, the mother of my sons. Not even for you. I am Mexican. Catholic.”

Mia had been amazed that he, a notorious drug lord and addict, saw himself as a religious person. Estela had had such jealous fits of rage when he’d brought Mia home, throwing pots and pans at Tavio, that Tavio, to preserve the peace, had personally driven her and their two sons in an armed convoy of jeeps to another walled and heavily guarded mansion he owned in Piedras Negras.

If only Shanghai could ever have been half so fascinated by her as Tavio, none of this would ever have happened. When she’d gotten pregnant and had tried to tell him, he would have listened and believed her. She wouldn’t have thought she had to marry Cole. She wouldn’t have been in that plane crash.

Suddenly her eyes stung. What was wrong with her that the men she’d wanted, first her father and then Shanghai, hadn’t loved her, and a criminal like Tavio did?

The wind was picking up. Rocks hit the fuselage like bullets now. Gusts made the plane shudder. Where was Marco?

Wrapping her arms around herself and bending over, Mia swallowed.

She had to get out of here!

Suddenly she heard shouts outside. The cockpit door was slammed open. Then Chito yelled, “Angelita, come out! We know you’re in there.”

Tavio didn’t know her real name because she’d been afraid to tell him. When she’d pretended she suffered from amnesia, he’d nicknamed her Angelita.

“Tavio, he send me. The peasant, Ramiro, he tell him hours ago where you are. Tavio pay Ramiro. Then he break many things with his gun. He say to surround the plane until you get so hot you come out. But you don’t come out, and he’s scared you’re dead. And we have to fly.”

When she didn’t answer, Chito yelled at his men to unload the plane and drag her out. It took them less than ten minutes to unload enough of the heavy bales to reach her. They shouted to Chito when they found her, and he then climbed inside. As always he had a gun in his belt and a knife, which she’d seen him throw with deadly accuracy, in his cowboy boot.

With a low growl, he crawled toward her, grabbed her wrist and yanked her from the plane. She fell to the ground so hard, she lay there stunned for a minute.

“Get the hell out of here,” he told his men, who at his gruff tone, sprinted toward the high adobe walls of Tavio’s desert fortress.

When she would have run from Chito, he grabbed her hand and tugged her unwillingly behind him until they reached the compound. She thought he would take her to Tavio’s mansion in the middle of the compound. Instead he headed for the forbidden buildings that lined the north wall. Opening a door of one of the low dwellings, he threw her across the threshold. The tiny room was dark and dank and reeked of urine and feces and vomit.

He screwed a low wattage bulb into a socket. In its dim light she saw chairs, ropes, a cot, slop buckets, whips, handcuffs and electric cattle prods.

When she gasped, he grinned.

Did he intend to torture her, rape her? Had Tavio given her to Chito? With a cry, she turned to run.

Laughing, Chito slammed the door and barred her way.

“You run from Tavio,” Chito said, his thin smile chilling her, as he fingered the irregularly shaped bone fragments strung on a gold chain that Delia said came from Pablito’s skeleton, a fellow drug dealer Chito had shot for double-dealing and dragged behind his jeep in the desert for hours while he drank tequila. “Maybe you want me instead?” He leered at her.

“Go to hell!”

He laughed, but his black eyes were as cold as ice chips as he leaned down and placed a wedge of wood beneath the door. “Who are you, bitch? Who hid you in that airplane?”

When he lunged for her, she kicked him in the shin and then kneed him in the crotch.

He doubled over, grunting in pain. He tugged the knife loose from his boot. “Now Tavio will realize how dangerous you are.”

Adrenaline pumped through her as she raced for the door. He picked up a pair of handcuffs, shook them so they clinked and laughed at her when she pulled at the door and it didn’t budge.

“He has killed many for less, gringa. But you very sexy. I see why Tavio like you. If you are nice to me, maybe I put in a good word for you, so he don’t kill you. Now—who helped you?”

She hesitated and watched him warily, her gaze flicking to the white chunks of bone at his throat. He was small, only an inch taller than she was, but he was strong and muscular. He could kill her in an instant if he wanted to.

He had black hair and dark skin and a sullen mouth. He had a hair-trigger temper and suffered from paranoia. He didn’t get along easily with anybody. Not even Tavio. Delia frequently sported black eyes and bruises. Once Mia had asked her why she stayed with him.

Delia’s big brown eyes, which were always so sad and hungry had widened with a strange yearning. Then all the light had gone out of her thin, young face.

“You rich in America. Everybody rich. I see TV. Even the women. You don’t understand how it is down here. For women like me. Chito, he protect me. He don’t share me with nobody.”

“And that’s enough? Do you like him? Love him?”

“My father, he was worse. My older sister…she run away…to Ciudad Juarez.” She strangled on a sob as if there were some horrible end to that tale. “Chito, he help me. He give my family food and money. You lucky. Tavio, he protect you. You should be nice to Tavio.”

Suddenly Chito lunged for Mia, the lust in his eyes, his strength and the stench of his garlic breath bringing her cruelly back to the present. Catching her again even as she pummeled his thick chest, he dragged her screaming to the cot, where he threw her down. When she fell, her head struck a wooden bar on the cot, and she could only stare up at him in dazed confusion.

“Be still, or I will hurt you worse.” He smiled at her as he took his time unbuttoning his trousers.

She was struggling to sit up when the thick wooden door behind them crashed against the adobe wall. Suddenly Tavio was a black giant in the doorway, his legs widely spread apart. He twirled his golden gun idly.

Instantly the air grew even more charged with electric, hostile danger.

Sweat popping across his brow, Chito jumped back from the cot, his knife falling with a soft thud to the dirt floor.

Feeling like a trapped animal, Mia got up and hurled herself into Tavio’s arms and clung to him, shaking, even though he smelled of those awful crack-laced cigarettes.

“Why is your heart beating like a rabbit’s?” Tavio whispered against her ear, pressing her closer for a second. He turned toward Chito. “I told you to bring her to me. What are you two doing here?”

“Teaching her a lesson since you won’t.”

She scarcely dared draw a breath as the two men exchanged dark, dangerous looks.

“I will deal with you later for the trouble you cost me, Angelita. Go to your room,” Tavio said, releasing her in an instant. When she hesitated, his whisper grew vicious. “Go! Ahora!”

“Don’t kill him.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, woman!” Although his voice was soft, every word bit her, especially the last one.

And then to Chito he said, still in that soft, deadly tone as he knelt and retrieved the knife. “What were you doing with my woman alone—here? Why was she on that cot?” He began to curse and make crude sexual accusations that terrified her.

As she walked toward the door, she heard Chito’s shrill, raised yelps. Then Chito’s knife whizzed past her and hit the exact center of the door.

She gasped. Just like that—she could have had a blade in the back of her neck and been dead.

A slop bucket hit the wall, splashing its foul contents. Chito screamed that he wanted her punished.

“It is not for you to punish my woman.” Another bucket was knocked over, increasing the sewerlike stench. “I will punish her myself.”

Mia flinched.

“She knows too much. It’s dangerous. She tried to escape in Marco’s plane. We can’t trust her.”

“I never trust her before,” Tavio said. “So—she try to escape? So what? She is a gringa. A nobody.”

“Don’t be so sure. A traitor helped her. She will betray us. I can feel it. In my gut.”

“Let me do the thinking. With my brain.”

“You are married to my sister. This woman…”

“She has nothing to do with my marriage. Your sister is still my wife.”

“The men snicker behind your back. They say it is sick the way you follow her around like a lovesick dog. Like you have no balls, mano.”

“I will prove to you and to her that I have balls—tonight. I will take her. You can stand outside in the hall and listen to her screams. But first, I will teach you a lesson.”

She heard fists, blows, a life-and-death scuffle. Chairs were overturned. A body hit the ground. When gunshots exploded, and metal pinged, Mia pulled the knife out of the door and then ran all the way to her second-story bedroom. She went to her bathroom.

Setting the knife down, she stared at the wild woman in the mirror. Her face was still flushed from having gotten so overheated in the airplane and from her struggles with Chito. Her own sweat had plastered her hair to her skull. Not that she cared.

She was too afraid. If Chito came instead of Tavio, she would either stab him or herself. She couldn’t bear for him to touch her ever again.

Too upset to shower, she ran a shaky hand through her hair. The wet tangles just fell back in her eyes. Squeezing her eyes shut, she fought against her rising fear.

For a long time she stood there, paralyzed. Finally Negra came up and rubbed her leg. Then the cat began to purr. Picking the animal up she returned to her bedroom and sat down on the bed where she began to stroke the cat’s soft fur. Doing so restored her a little. If only she knew where Julio lived, she would try to find him and warn him and tell him that he must flee.

For a while Negra endured her affection. Then as if sensing her nervousness, the independent creature sprang to the floor and curled up to sleep on a little rug under a chair. A door slammed downstairs and she heard Tavio shout to his men.

Feeling only slightly relieved, she placed the knife under her pillow and waited. As the awful seconds ticked by, Mia began to feel dull and hopeless. She could do nothing but sit here and wait.

Hours later, when Tavio still hadn’t come upstairs, she finally drove herself to get up from the bed and shower. As she toweled off, she was surprised that such a little thing had made her feel better. After she dressed, she paced back and forth at the end of her bed, her heart racing every time she heard Tavio or one of his men shout angrily below.

She should go to bed and yet she was afraid of the bed and what it might mean tonight. As she stared at the melon-colored adobe walls that imprisoned her, they seemed to close in on her more than ever. She wanted to run, but she knew that behind those high, thick, adobe walls, Tavio Morales’s immense, adobe mansion was a veritable fortress. An army of gunmen patrolled the rancho and airstrips in trucks and SUVs.

A natural spring with cold, icy water bubbled up from the ground not far from the stables, so there was a sure source of water. Tall cottonwood trees grew around the sparkling pool.

Beyond Tavio’s private army, every Mexican peasant, poor men like Ramiro, in the desert belonged to Tavio, as well. If one of their children was sick, Tavio paid for the doctor, buying their undying loyalty.

“They are my ears and eyes,” he’d told her. “I love them. And they love me. I protect them, and they protect me. I very important man here. I am much loved.” He’d smiled as if that thought pleased him. “If you try to escape, my little friends will tell me. If anyone try to help you, they will tell me, and I kill him.”

Remembering Ramiro watching her again, she bit her lips. Worrying about Julio, she went to the barred window. She had to get away or go mad. She had to.

Since the ranch house was located on a slight rise above the desert floor, Mia’s plush room with its heavy furniture and red-velvet spread and draperies had a view of the Chihuahua Desert and Tavio’s airstrip. She’d spent long hours watching the dusty two-lane road that led across the parched earth to the airstrips. Sometimes she’d watched huge dirt devils race across the barren, beige moonscape, and always she had wished she were free to whirl away.

She’d watched the birds, the vultures, hawks and the eagles with special envy because they could fly. In her other life, she had taken freedom for granted.

If I’m ever free again, I will treasure every single moment.

She had to get out of here.

“Oh, Shanghai…” She called to him, willing him to think of her, willing him to care, willing him to come.

Had she gone mad? Maybe she had if she believed Shanghai could hear her thoughts or that he would be moved by them.

She picked up her brush and sat down on her bed to work with her hair. Despite the thick adobe walls and floors, she heard telephones ring and more doors slam downstairs. She heard men come and go. When heavy boots stomped up the stairs, she cringed.

Tavio’s door opened and slammed.

The noise downstairs continued. Much was going on tonight. Trucks roared up to the compound. Planes took off and landed.

After a long time, most of the activity stopped, but still she listened to the silence, almost fearing it more, because soon Tavio would finish whatever he was doing in his own bedroom and come.

Finally she grew so weary, she lay down. At some point she must’ve fallen asleep because footsteps in the hall awakened her. When her door opened, her hand went to her throat. She sprang up, her heart pounding.

“Are you all right?” Delia whispered across the darkness.

“Delia! It’s only you. Come in! I’m so glad to see you! Turn on the light!”

“I know you are in that plane all day. I worry about you.”

Delia lit the lamp, and Mia forgot her own fears when she saw that Delia was limping. The poor girl had a cut lip and two black eyes that were swollen nearly shut. Her hands shook.

“Did Chito beat you again?”

Delia hung her head. “Tavio, he very scared and angry. The Cessna you hide in—it not return. He is afraid, it no going to. He is afraid for Marco. He ask everybody who hide you. Even me.”

Delia sat down beside her, and Mia clutched her hand, finding strength in her kindness.

“Everybody scared. Many rumors. Tavio, he think one of us betray him. He walk back and forth on the balcony outside his bedroom like a big wild cat. He listen for Marco’s airplane motor. He smoke too much. The crack make him mean tonight. Meaner than Chito even. He accuse everybody of giving information to the gringos. I ask him if he want more tequila, and he jump at me, his eyes burning me. He so crazy he scare me just by looking at me. I don’t go near him. Be careful when he come.”

Mia shuddered. “What about Chito?”

Delia shrugged. “So—they fight each other. Over you, no? It is not the first time they fight over a woman. Then Chito, he hit me. Now he feel better.”

Mia went to her and hugged her. Then she led her to the bathroom and gently washed her face with soap and water.

There were shouts from below. Her eyes large and fearful, Delia pulled away and rushed to the door.

“Stay with me a little while,” Mia pleaded, not wanting Delia to suffer more abuse.

“I have much work. The men, they are hungry…. You hear them….”

“I will teach you to read. Like before.”

Delia’s eyes lit up for the briefest moment, and then her face became dull again. She was very intelligent, but her family hadn’t been able to send her to school for more than a single year. As long as she was with Chito, she would have a life of dreary servitude and abuse.

“All right. For a little while,” Delia said.

When Delia handed Mia the cartoon page from the last newspaper Tavio had given her, Mia forced a tight smile. They sat down on the bed. Pulling the sheets over themselves, Delia began to read.

The gloomy atmosphere from down below seeped into the bedroom. Mia was glad that they had some occupation to distract them.

In between Delia’s nervous, halting words in Spanish and Mia’s gentle corrections, Mia heard the rising wind outside but no plane engine. In the passing of the next half hour, she began to feel Delia’s severely repressed uneasiness. The girl stumbled over words she’d read easily only yesterday. The men had grown silent downstairs, and again Mia’s own fears escalated at the thought of Tavio coming. But still they continued to read the cartoons until Tavio’s bedroom door banged again. When they heard his heavy-booted footsteps in the hall, Delia stopped.

Then Tavio burst into her bedroom, flipped his cell phone shut and stared at them with wild, unseeing eyes.

“Marco’s dead,” he said.

Delia gave a cry. Newspapers slipped to the floor, and she ran from the room.

“Why did Marco have to get out of the plane?” Tavio whispered, more to himself than to her. “He is the pilot. He never gets out. He should have taken off again. When the DEA agents pointed their guns at him, he panicked and backed into the propeller. He…”

“Oh, no….”

At the sound of her voice, his bloodshot black eyes focused on her face as if he realized she was there for the first time. His dark scowl was terrifying.

He’d been smoking, she knew. As a result his tense, vicious, grief-stricken mood was worse.

“I want you,” he whispered.

She sat up in bed shivering. “Please…no…Not like this!”

“Like how then?” he yelled as he strode toward her. “I want. I take. I’m a beast. A big rat!” He pounded his chest. “A criminal! That’s what you think! That is why you hide all day in that plane. I know you are burning up in there, but you won’t come out. I get scared you’d rather die than be my woman, so I send Chito. He nearly rape you. I save you, and still you say no to me.”

She didn’t look at him. Even so, his burning lust and her fear lit the air between them like a fuse. She could almost feel sparks rushing toward dynamite.

Wrapping the sheet around her, she got out of bed. She was shaking so hard she could barely breathe. “Rape me then. Be like Chito. Go ahead. Take me like an animal. What are you waiting for? I’ve heard those other women scream.”

“Would it be rape?” In two more strides, he was beside her, towering over her like an angry giant.

Not that she cowered.

His rough hand slipped under her hair. “Let go of the sheet. I want to see one of those nightgowns I ordered for you.”

“I’m wearing jeans.”

“Pull the sheet down!”

She flinched and released the sheet. Even when she felt his eyes and her body heat with shame, she did not scream or struggle.

He lowered his dark head to kiss her, his mouth coming so close to hers, she felt his hot, tobacco flavored breath fanning her lips.