Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

Awesome work, dude.

Since Quick was my guardian spirit too, I wondered how or when we’d reconnect.

I finished crossing the bridge, newly wary. This was not Texas anymore. Soon I was swallowed into the crowded commercial streets of the city. Restaurants along the main drag were lighting up for the evening, with hookers appearing in shady doorways. I wondered that they dared, but need drove them to risk being inevitable targets. Or their pimps did.

Low-rider cars, rusted and burned-out American classics like Dolly, and taxis loaded with American tourists, cruised by the women, seeking sex, or even a murderous desert rendezvous, for the night.

I walked briskly, hunting the motel I’d found on the Internet.

Sounds of merciless male laughter and gunshots punctuated the growing dusk.

Cars idled alongside me, male passengers shouting out words I’d seen only in my street Spanish dictionary, mostly puta for prostitute. How did the young women who had to work in the border’s American factories put up with such nightly harassment? Puppies and women didn’t fare well here, and the cartels’ Reign of Terror only upped the atrocities.

No wonder Ric hadn’t wanted me here, but he didn’t realize how far I’d gone to save his life. I wasn’t going to let him lose it now. I’d probably already crossed any normal line between life and death to keep him here and with me.

A scabrous nineteen-seventies Chevy had blocked my path.

“Get in,” a voice ordered in English.

Uh, no.

“Puta!” another male voice labeled me.

I looked around. People filled the street. Nobody glanced toward the calls or the car. Or me.

Okay.

I kicked the opening passenger-side door shut on the emerging man. He yowled at his smashed hand, cursing with impressive bilingual zest. Meanwhile, I dashed into the slow-moving traffic, doing the paso doble through a sluggish parade of big old heavy cruising Detroit metal, ending up on the opposite side of the thoroughfare and down a side street.

Cars thronged the main streets. Here people crowded these narrow side streets, too many to permit rapid changes of direction. I returned my attention to locating the Motel de los Flamencos Rosas. That echo of the Strip’s venerable Flamingo Hotel had somehow seemed comforting.

Someone bumped my backpack. I whirled, ready to fight for my vital belongings.

Quicksilver, dry and bright-eyed, grinned back at me.

No one would dare call me puta now.

Ducking into the doorway of a closed dentist’s office, I pulled his collar from the backpack.

“Here’s your brand of silver mojo,” I said, buckling it around his neck.

Under my fingers, the silver circles swiftly shrank to three-quarters full to mimic the moon’s current phase. The collar’s “coins” tracked the moon’s phases, a phenomenon I didn’t understand but accepted, like many eerie happenings these days.

“Come on,” I told Quick, standing. “I’ve got a motel reservation. You’ll have to wait outside while I claim it, but then you’ve got an inside bunk.”

ACTUALLY, I’D LIED. I just wanted to claim a roof in Juarez with a key to a door. Sleep wouldn’t come until much later.

“Quick, I need you to track down Ric and Leonard Tallgrass,” I said after I sat, gingerly, on the one lumpy armchair in the motel room. “I couldn’t bring any weapons across the border into Murder City, so it’s just you and me.”

I pulled my leather workout gloves from my pack while the silver familiar arranged itself into a major spiked forearm band on my left arm. The left one. I knew why: so I could grab cartel killers with my right hand and put their brutal faces through the cheese-parer of metal on my opposite arm. Mean place, mean weapons.

Seeing Ric’s childhood enslaver, El Demonio Torbellino, in Wichita recently, I knew I’d viewed the ugly face of ultimate evil. If I ever encountered it again, I would not leave it unmarked.

Quick was turning circles on the battered linoleum floor and eyeing the door, slavering.

He either needed a potty break bad, or to sink his teeth into some handy murdering gangsters, and this was the place to do it. Killers teemed only blocks outside our door, where the native Juarez cartel and the Sinaloa group dueled each other to commit the worst atrocity of the day.

Torbellino was probably planning to make them all look like hothouse flowers of evil. Flora di mal. The Spanish I’d learned when Ricardo Montoya came into my life and love life seemed natural.

We had to save ourselves for the main event.

“Just find Ric,” I told Quicksilver. “We make it up from there on.”

I undid the three door locks, fastening my secondhand cop duty belt and black leather motorcycle jacket around my hips for the certain cool of the night coming to hot Juarez.

Quicksilver trotted ahead of me through the thronged streets, tourists even now hunting food, bargains, and prostitutes. I figured we were headed for the outskirts. Juarez, aka El Paso del Norte , housed one-and-a-half-million people, most in poverty, fear, and corrugated steel barrio shacks. Juarez remains the most violent site in the world outside of declared war zones. UN intervention had been called for years ago.

The beige-uniformed police had been the only middle class in a town where rich Norteamericanos had set up factories and fancy homes since the forties and fifties. Now the cops were not only corrupt, but any honest ones were an endangered species.

Quicksilver and I dodged patrolling army troops as we passed through mingled commerce and squalor, barely sensed shadows ourselves. We were silent, fast, and broadcast a Don’t Tread on Me message to both human and canine as we passed the slums.

Thousands of young women who worked in the hundreds of border factories traveled by bus at night. They had died here for two decades, some said as many as five thousand. Most were rape victims who’d showed signs of “torment and torture,” news stories reported, making me shudder to wonder what the possible difference between two such dreadful words could be.

Most were presumed to be prey of human and unhuman traffickers like Torbellino, the ones who refused to go quietly into that degraded slavery. Ric hadn’t been in Torbellino’s brutal hands then, having been rescued as a “wild child” by the right upper-middle-class Washington professionals before the “femicides” began.

The other most likely suspects were the drug gangs with initiation rites of raping and killing a girl or woman, no matter how young or old. The Mexican police either joined the gangs in their brutality or were targeted by them for death if they didn’t.

Miserable, starving dogs slunk around the thinning buildings and hovels, too cowed to attack living prey. No children haunted the darkening streets, all corralled in whatever homes they had. The homeless ones were in the brighter, all-night border streets, selling themselves. This place made my traumas at the hands of mid-America’s children’s services seem minor.

Quicksilver was leading me into the so-called city suburbs where the femicides had taken place near dirt roads. In the desert beyond, most of their bodies had been buried and later discovered. This place was so crammed with human evil and darkness it must have kept even the predatory supernaturals out.

Quick whimpered beside me.

“Yeah, it’s a dark time in a dark place. You picking up any scents besides rotting things?”

His gait, always a fluid trot, kicked up into a hard-driving cantor. I began jogging, glad for the Dr. Scholl’s insoles in my motorcycle boots.

Don’t call me wimpy; call me prepared. I’d gone solo on some dicey crime scenes when reporting on paranormal activities back in Wichita. Some would call me crazy for going alone into this meat grinder of a landscape, but when your partner goes off to the crime capital of the continent, you’re supposed to do something about it, according to noir detective Sam Spade. Unlike him, I wasn’t waiting until my partner was dead. Or dead again.