Robert Crais: Taken

She opened her hand.

“He gave this to me when I was seven years old.”

A faded plastic figure of Jiminy Cricket was in her palm, the blue paint of his top hat chipped and worn. Pinocchio’s conscience.

“When I saw his clock in the picture, I thought we were not so different.”

She put the figure in my hand.

“I can’t take this.”

“Give it back when you find my baby.”

I put the cricket in my pocket, and got out of her car.

Joe Pike: eleven days after they were taken

Dennis Orlato

Their job was to get rid of the bodies.

Twenty-two miles west of the Salton Sea, one hundred sixty-two miles east of Los Angeles, yellow dust rooster-tailed behind them as the Escalade raced across the twilight desert. The sound system boomed so they could hear bad music over the eighty-mile-per-hour wind, what with the windows down to blow out the stink.

Dennis Orlato, who was driving, punched off the music as he checked the GPS.

Pedro Ruiz, the man in the passenger seat, shifted the 12-gauge shotgun, fingering the barrel like a second dick.

“What you doin’? Give it back.”

Ruiz, who was a Colombian with a badly fixed cleft lip, liked narcocorridos — songs that romanticized the lives of drug dealers and Latin-American guerrillas. Orlato was a sixth-generation Mexican-American from Bakersfield, and thought the songs were stupid.

Orlato said, “I’m looking for the turn. We miss it, we’ll be here all night.”

In the back seat, Khalil Haddad leaned forward. Haddad was a thin, dark Yemeni drug runner who had been hauling khat into Mexico before the cartels shut him down. Now, he worked for the Syrian like Orlato and Ruiz. Orlato was certain Haddad talked shit about him to the Syrian, Arab to Arab, so Orlato hated the little bastard.

Haddad said, “A kilometer, less than two. You can’t miss it.”

When they reached the turn, Orlato zeroed the odometer, and drove another two-point-six miles to the head of a narrow sandy road, then stopped again to search the land ahead. Three crumbling rock walls sprouted from the brush less than a mile in the distance, and were all that remained of an abandoned supply shed built for bauxite miners before the turn of the century. Orlato and Ruiz opened their doors, and climbed onto their seats to scan the coppery gloom with binoculars.

The surrounding desert was flat for miles, broken only by rocks and scrub too low to conceal a vehicle. The sandy road before them showed only their tire tracks, made three days earlier, and no footprints. Seeing this, Orlato dropped back behind the wheel. No other cars, trucks, motorcycles, people, or ATVs had passed on this road.

“It’s good. We go.”

Two minutes later, they pulled up beside the walls, and went to work. It was a nasty and dangerous job, there at the edge of the evening hour, best done quickly before the light was lost. They stripped off their shirts and guns, then pulled on gloves as Haddad threw open the back door. The two women and man were the last of a group from India, pollos who had been on their way to the Pacific Northwest, brought up through Mexico from Brazil and Central America, only to be kidnapped and held for ransom as they crossed the border into the U.S. Each had been shot in the back of the head when their families stopped paying ransom. The three bodies were now wrapped in plastic, and smelled of sour gas. Orlato pulled them from beneath the carpet remnants that covered them, and let the bodies drop. Ruiz and Haddad each dragged a body to a jagged cut in the wash behind the ruins, and Orlato dragged the last. Counting these three, they had deposited eleven bodies here during the past nine days. Their work here west of the Salton Sea was done.

As Orlato dragged the last body, Ruiz pointed down into the cut.

“Look at this shit. What you want to do?”

An animal had gotten down among the bodies and torn open the plastic. A man’s hand now reached through the split.

Orlato said, “Get the chlorine.”

“Shit, we put a hundred pounds of chlorine in there already, and it didn’t help. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Powdered chlorine as fine and white as confectioners’ sugar was supposed to keep the coyotes away. Everyone knew the bodies would be found, but the longer it took the better. Their operation was strictly short term. They set up fast, moved often, and kept moving until they had milked or killed the last of the pollos.

But coyotes would spread the bones, and if a dog brought a human bone home, the police and federal authorities would swarm over the desert.

Orlato glared at Ruiz.

“Get the chlorine, you lazy fuck. Maybe you didn’t put enough last time.”

When Ruiz skulked away for the chlorine, Orlato scanned the horizon for approaching vehicles. He was searching the sky for helicopters when Haddad unzipped his pants.

“What’re you doing?”

“Taking a piss.”

“Don’t piss on them bodies. The police could get your DNA.”

“What do they have now, a piss detector?”

Haddad unleashed a rope that hit the plastic as loudly as tearing cloth. Orlato wanted to shove the slack-jaw bastard into the cut with the piss-soaked bodies, but instead turned to see if Ruiz was coming. As he turned, something hit him between the eyes, and three more strikes rained after the first so quickly he threw up his arms to cover his face even as his legs were swept from beneath him. He slammed onto his back, and his solar plexus exploded as he was struck again, then struck on his left temple, snapping his head to the side.

Shock and awe. A sudden, violent attack of such furious intensity Orlato had not seen the man or men who attacked him, or even understood what was happening. Orlato’s head buzzed as if swarming with wasps, and his ears screamed with a high-pitched hum. Now, drifting in a sleep-world, he felt hands on his body. Someone groped his legs, waist, and groin; rolled him over, then rolled him again. Orlato’s head cleared, but he offered no resistance.

A low male voice.

“Look at me.”

Orlato opened his eyes, and saw a tall, muscular Anglo, dark from the sun, wearing a sleeveless gray sweatshirt and jeans. He had short hair, dark glasses, and blurry tattoos on the outer rounds of his shoulders. Orlato squinted to clear his vision. Scarlet arrows. A black revolver floated at the man’s side.

Orlato showed open palms.

“ Policia? ”

A man spoke behind him.

“You’re gonna wish we were policia.”

Orlato saw that a man with spiky blond hair had Haddad pinned to the ground. The blond man held an American M4 battle rifle. He tipped the rifle toward the bodies.

“You kill these people?”

Orlato had personally murdered four of the eleven, Ruiz two, and Haddad the rest, but now Orlato shook his head.

“We only bring the bodies. We don’t kill no one.”

The blond man showed teeth like a shark, then lifted Haddad’s bloody head by his hair, and said something in Arabic. This surprised Orlato, who had met few people who spoke it besides Arabs. In that moment, Orlato knew these two men were not the police. He assumed they were bajadores — predators who preyed on other criminals.

“You want the car? The keys are in my pocket. You want money? I can get you money.”

The tall man said, “Up.”

Orlato struggled to his feet, careful in how he moved. He remembered being searched, but had left his pistol in the Escalade, and now could not remember if the man found the five-inch knife hidden at the small of his back.

When Orlato was standing, the tall man touched the center of his own forehead.

“Anglo. This tall. He was taken.”

Orlato felt a stitch in his belly. He knew who the tall man described, but shook his head, lying as he had lied about killing the pollos.