John Gilstrap - Damage Control

He turned to another of his noncoms. “I want thirty villagers in here in the next ten minutes. I don’t care how you get them. I want ten of them to be children.”

Eight minutes later, the church was filled with sleep-starved villagers. Palma’s men stood behind them with their weapons at a loose port arms. Their stances were threatening, but the directions of their muzzles were not.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Palma said. The crowd before him was mostly dressed, but entirely barefoot. Two or three of the men were bare-chested, and five of the women wore nightclothes that would otherwise never have seen public scrutiny. A few of the children appeared to still be asleep, but Palma forgave that. It was the wailing baby that he could not forgive. With a single glance, he granted special dispensation for the baby and her parents to leave.

“We are here for a difficult task,” Palma went on. “Your village had visitors tonight. They are known murderers, and wanted by the police. I asked Father Peron for details, and he refused to give them. Now he has to pay the price.”

A man stepped forward from the crowd. Palma recognized him as Roberto Gonzalez. “I know who took the truck,” he said.

“Many of you know who took the truck,” Palma replied, “Father Peron among them. Even I know the truth of who took the truck. But I need to know it from this man.”

The parishioners had difficulty looking at their pastor in this condition. They diverted their eyes.

“Bring the cross forward,” Palma ordered.

Sanchez and Corporal Martinez walked up onto the altar to the life-size crucifix and pulled the statue of Jesus from its mountings. They brought the cross downstage and poised it next to Father Peron.

“Please don’t do this,” the priest whispered. He didn’t want to beg in front of his congregation, but neither did he want to suffer the agony that lay ahead for him.

Palma watched the crowd. They were appalled, but they were with him. Palma had found it to be a quirk of human nature that the torture of others served two masters. On the one hand, witnessed agony transferred as a negative-a fear-inducing event-to those who watched, even as it provided a sense of relief that the torture was being endured by someone else, and therefore brought a measure of peace.

Watching others suffer bred fear, and fear brought cooperation. People needed to understand that actions had consequences, and if the consequences were brutal beyond proportion, the cooperation was even more guaranteed.

Because today’s victim was a priest-and no matter how jaded to violence a soldier became, there was always a special place in the heart for a man of the cloth-Palma decided to drive the nails himself. With the hardwood cross on the floor, they forced Father Peron to lie with his shoulders at the spot where the horizontal members met the vertical members. Sergeant Sanchez literally sat on the priest’s chest to hold him in place while Palma stretched one arm as far out to the side as it would go. Planting a knee on Peron’s wrist, he pried open the priest’s fingers and pounded the four-inch twenty-penny nail through the flesh of his palm, directly below the space between the second and third knuckles.

That was when the priest screamed for the first time-the moment when the nail pierced his flesh and the oak with the same hammer blow. In Palma’s mind the scream was one of fear more than it was one of agony. How much could it hurt, after all? Palma had taken care to avoid bone and tendon, and he’d done this enough to be very skilled.

The wood was harder than Palma had anticipated, though. It took seven hard blows with the carpenter hammer to sink it deeply enough to serve its function. At that, he left half an inch of the nail head exposed so that the villagers could later remove it.

As he moved to the other hand-the priest’s left-Father Peron started to spew information. “Two men took the truck,” he said. “Three Americans.”

“You’re giving me information that I already know,” Peron said around the nail he had poised between his lips like a cigarette about to be smoked. He pulled on the left arm and kneeled on the wrist.

“I know that they’re going to Juarez,” Peron said.

Palma pried open the fingers, noting that the priest had rough hands, the hands of a man who was used to physical labor. “How are they getting across the border?”

As he placed the point of the nail against flesh, Father Peron started speaking faster. “Please don’t,” he said.

Palma raised the hammer high over his head.

“I don’t know,” the priest blurted. “I swear to all things holy that I don’t know.”

Palma smiled. The hammer remained poised in the air. “I believe you, Father,” he said.

“Thank you.”

And then he drove the nail through his hand.

Venice lay on the white leather sofa in her office, neither awake nor asleep, waiting for something to happen. As the clock closed in on 9 AM, she recognized that it was time for her to be functional again. Her twelve-year-old son, Roman, had already called to ask if he could go to the pool at Resurrection House-the answer was yes-and she’d already taken her tongue-lashing from Mama Alexander for putting work above family. Mama knew that that was not the case, but sometimes she had a hard time controlling herself. It was as if a lecture was born out of the ether, and it was Mama’s mission to make sure it got delivered. And who better to deliver it to than her only daughter?

Beyond the doors to The Cave, Venice heard the sounds of arriving employees. Part of her wanted to greet them-nearly half of them worked for her-but she didn’t have the energy. She was closing in on thirty hours without meaningful sleep, and no one needed to witness that.

Dom strode into her office without knocking, looking every bit as exhausted and harried as she. He carried a manila folder in his hand. “I’ve got it,” he said. Despite the overall exhaustion, he seemed completely energized. “The secret isn’t in who the hostages are. The secret is in who they aren’t.”

Exhaustion was playing tricks on Venice. Dom’s statement no doubt made sense, but she had no idea what it meant. She waited for it.

The priest dialed it back, settled himself with a breath. He walked across the office and helped himself to one of the guest chairs near her desk. She rose from the sofa and walked over.

“I’m sorry,” Dom said. “I’m so tired I don’t even know if I’m speaking in complete sentences.”

“That makes two of us.” Venice sat at her desk and leaned in, signaling her desire to hear what Dom had to say.

Dom met her halfway. “I pretended I was you last night,” he said. “I started searching through the historical record, just trying to find some clue as to who was betraying whom and why. Did you know that there were originally supposed to be seven pilgrims on this trip? Two more than the five who showed up?”

Venice shrugged. She hadn’t thought much about it, one way or the other.

Dom opened his folder and extracted a sheet of paper that looked like a printed news story. “This is from three months ago,” he said. “A news story from the Phoenix Sun. It announces the pilgrimage to Mexico, and in so doing lists seven names. We know who five of them are, but there are two more, as well: Bill Georgen and Bobby Cantrell. Those two apparently dropped out.”

Venice scowled. “And?”

“I just thought it was strange,” Dom explained. He pulled another news story out of the folder. “Look at this. Two weeks before the trip, another news story, this one from a local weekly, lists the same kids.”

“So, they got sick,” Venice said. “Or they lost their nerve. How is this an answer?”