Virtual Virgin

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.



My boot heels beat out a rhythm. Ric-is-just-around-the-bend. Come-on-creeps-and-meet-your-end.



Quicksilver had lived up to his name. Our feet were already pounding into the hard-packed sand of the countryside. Away from the glare of city commerce, my only guide was the moonlight winking off of his collar. A high-intensity flashlight was tucked in my backpack but I wasn’t slowing down in rattlesnake and scorpion country to crouch and dig for technological help.



I heard lightning crackle in the distance and stared up at the starless night. We were still close enough to Ciudad Juarez that the city lights made stars hard to see.



The lightning snapped again and again. I slowed my pace, Quick idling with me.



Was it lightning I heard, or the crack of El Demonio’s thirty-foot bull whip? He must be encamped near the city. And Ric, of course, would be hunkered down right on top of his immortal enemy.



My boot soles scraped sand as I hustled up a sage-covered hill, realizing Quick’s feathered lower legs would be picking up burrs and cactus thorns. No insoles or ankle boots for dogs. I wished for the booties the search-and-rescue dogs had used at Ground Zero in 9/11, but my idea came a little late.



Quicksilver would have scorned such niceties, anyway. Now on the scent, his churning legs were kicking up sand and rarin’ to breast the brow of the hill. I charged up alongside him, only to teeter on the brink of a pit. I surveyed a stretch of shifting, sizzling, hissing sand quivering with nocturnal desert life, moonlight scintillating off scales and shiny shells.



Leaping lizards and tarantulas and scorpions and rattlesnakes! It was a desert vermin convention. What would have the local toxic nightlife scrambling to escape en masse?



Chapter Thirty



QUICKSILVER SAT, HIS head almost comically tilted, to view the mess. Claw and fang weren’t going to do much against this seething mass.



Following the moonlit reflections to either side, I saw the living floor of crawling insects and reptiles wasn’t confined to just a piddly gravel pit.



My gaze scanned a gash in the earth that ran as far as the eye could see in both directions. The creatures struggling to escape the deep depression seemed unable to get traction on each others’ amassed bodies. Some jointed legs and clawed limbs tried to scale my boot-toes, but they slid back.



With all the teeming nightlife of the desert assembled before me, I dropped my backpack behind me on the ridge and crouched to dig out the binoculars I’d brought. These weren’t the government-issue night-vision binos Ric and Tallgrass had used in Wichita, but they and the almost-full moonlight were good enough to show how far the living line of desert vermin extended. And, maybe, to reveal what had caused them to cluster like this.



I put the binoculars to my eyes, scanning the distance, then was jolted into dropping them.



A solid form knocked me off my precarious balance on my boot-toes and confined me in a bear hug. I sensed as much as saw Quicksilver leaping at a second form clambering up the ridge behind us. Over and over I rolled, trying to dig my boots into shifting sand as sagebrush crackled under the weight of two bodies locked in battle embrace.



I was planning on a knee to the stomach and then the ribs, followed by a boot-toe killer kick in the groin, when I heard the man still atop the crest laughing softly.



“Oh, Ty-ohni, I know you are glad to see me, but enough tongue on my night-vision goggles.”



At the sound of that familiar but foreign word, I tried to twist my head around, but my captor had me rolled up like Cleopatra in a camouflage-patterned rug. Then I realized what this roll in the sand was all about. The bastard was trying to protect me!



I flailed free and turned to look up the slope. Only one man called my dog by a Native American word for wolf. Yup. Quick had led us to Leonard Tallgrass and . . .



“Ric.” I whispered, but harshly, to my recent “rug.”



“Why did you sneak up on me?” I demanded.



He was as pissed as I was. “And you didn’t do the same? I can’t believe you’d do this, Delilah. Be all okay with staying behind and then slip down to Juarez anyway. It’s dangerous and juvenile and it jeopardizes the mission.”



“Maybe you should have confided ‘the mission’ to me. It’s dangerous and juvenile for you to come back here right where El Demonio wants you.”



The chuckles behind us continued. “You hotheaded kids.” Tallgrass used the same forced whisper we had. “The mission will be fine if you quit trying to out-protect the other. Come on. Time to crawl for your country. They need us on the ridge to see if there are any cartel movements around here.”



“You all right?” Ric mumbled in my ear. He was not only wearing camos, but the moonlight illumined a face painted in dark patterns like cracked dry earth.



“Don’t growl at me. I’d be a lot better if I hadn’t have been given the bum’s rush down a desert roller coaster.”



Grabbing the leather jacket that had fallen loose, I struggled into it without lifting too high from the ground, now that I knew this was a scouting party. Tallgrass’s black jeans, boots, and Western shirt faded into the sky. He crouched to dig in his backpack and threw something down at me.



“Camos. Too small for me, and I don’t need ’em any more than Quicksilver does. Fasten your duty belt over them.”



I didn’t argue, but struggled into the equivalent of desert warfare pajamas. By then, Quicksilver had already belly-crawled back to the ridge top. He and Tallgrass kept low enough to blend with the terrain.



I made a face no one could see at the thought of overlooking those millions of roiling spiders and snakes and scorpions as I dug in my knees and elbows and worked back up the slope like a recruit in boot camp.



Ric was still mad, because he got there first and didn’t look back. Fine with me. I planted myself on the other side of Tallgrass with Quicksilver.



Leonard Tallgrass had been friends with Rick when he was a whiz-kid FBI profiler with a knack for finding buried bodies. I wasn’t sure of the guy’s tribe, but he was as pure a Native American you saw these days off a reservation, and pure Kansas cowboy too. Quicksilver had cottoned to him immediately, which had miffed me some. Quick and I were an unofficial K-9 team. Still, Tallgrass was hard not to like, and harder not to trust, which did not come to me naturally.



At least he didn’t treat me as too fragile to go into the field. He passed me a pair of really powerful binoculars without comment while he and Ric lowered their bone-sensing night goggles from their foreheads to perch onto their faces.



Now I saw the reason for the vermin traffic jam. The binoculars showed a plain below pockmarked with mesquite trees and sagebrush and behind any smidgeon of cover sat duffel bags of probable weapons. A secret army was assembling and preparing to dig in.



On the horizon, heat lightning stabbed the dark night sky.



“What’s going on here?” I asked. Only the vermin had ears and they weren’t the enemy.



“Smackdown.” Ric’s voice was still low. “Secret combined US-Mexican government operation. That’s why I couldn’t tell you. This is an official consulting job for Tallgrass and me. The joint military forces have run a sting that will lure all the firepower of the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels into facing off ten miles north of here.”



“What’s the bait?” I asked.



“A juicy set of visiting state department hostages-to-be, worth millions in ransom,” Tallgrass said, “and it’s working. The bastards from both cartels are setting up major operations to grab the visiting honchos and families.”



“It’ll take them another day to muster all their men and weapons to go after the same target,” Ric said. “Then the combined government forces wait until they take each other out and scoop up the survivors.”



“Smart.” I heard the crack of thunder in the distance. “I was afraid Torbellino and his bull whip were involved.”



“They may be,” Ric said. “He’s certainly not falling for wasting his forces against the two warring cartels while they slaughter one another, as Washington hopes. That action is way north of here.”



“You told them,” Tallgrass muttered, “that wouldn’t work.”