The Girl Who Had No Fear. Marnie Riches

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ bowed respectfully low.

      ‘Do they work for me?’ he asked.

      Miguel nodded. ‘Si. They’re all trafficked Nicaraguans and Hondurans. Farming in the week. Brothels at the weekend. Every man and woman you see on the farm is yours, jefe.’ He started to laugh. ‘The farmer wasn’t too pleased, but he stopped moaning once we cut his head off.’

      El cocodrilo turned away from his sniggering minion. It didn’t pay to be too familiar with men on the payroll. Even the ones only a rung beneath him. Rubbing his lime so that the zest left a stinging, oily slick on his fingers, he peered up at the mountains that rose in undulating green peaks on the other side of the road. Smothered in lush coffee crops. Fertile soil. Productive land. His was a diverse and lucrative business.

      The white stucco hacienda appeared just ahead like a tired angel perched on a Christmas tree that had been left over from the days of colonialism – a double-storey affair with ornate arches fringing a balconied quad, topped off with a ridged terracotta roof. Small wonder the farmer had been reluctant to relinquish it. Two tattooed young men stood on the tiled veranda by the front door, holding AK-47s. Not so elegant.

      The car ground to a halt in a cloud of dust.

      ‘Where are the girls?’ he asked. ‘Are they inside?’

      ‘No, jefe. They’re lined up on the airstrip,’ Miguel said. ‘Awaiting your judgement.’

      Ignoring the bowing sycophants and scurrying workers, he followed Miguel through the claustrophobic stalks of the maize crop for some two hundred metres. Feeling the heat strike the parched ground beneath his feet, bouncing back up into the soles of his shoes and onto his skin. Three in the afternoon. The place was an oven. And already he could hear the cicadas starting their lilting evensong. Chapulines, three times the size of the crickets in Europe, click-clicked their chirruping long legs together. He stood on one and committed to memory the sound of it crunching beneath his shoe. Shithole.

      When the stalky growth ended in a perfect line, giving way to the giant clearing, he could breathe again. Peered out beneath the brim of his straw trilby, squinting in the sunshine to see heat rising in mesmerising waves above a perfect white airstrip cut into the scrub. At the far end of the secret runway, a light aircraft had been casually parked. His light aircraft. Purchased to carry his coke, guns and supplies. His landing strip. Silly bitches. There they were, kneeling in the flattened dirt with coffee sacking on their heads. Naked. Hands tied behind them.

      Pondering how best to deal with this insurgence, he turned to Miguel. ‘Bring all of the farm workers and the men here. Now.’

      Walking towards the gaggle of hooded girls, he eyed the transportistas who guarded them warily. As arms-smuggling mercenaries, revered for their professionalism and impartiality by all the cartels, these transportistas were not women under his jurisdiction, despite being on his payroll. Dressed in dark utility clothing and carrying semi-automatic rifles. He recognised AK-47s, American issue AR-15s and German HK G36s. His storerooms would be replete with firepower if they had driven all the way north from Honduras with their ballistic payload.

      ‘Ladies,’ he said, tipping his hat. Making eye contact with a big bruiser of a transportista, wearing the skeletal figure of Santa Muerte emblazoned in white on her black T-shirt. ‘Nice guns.’ He winked.

      The woman scowled at him. ‘Hola, el cocodrilo,’ she said, readjusting her rifle across her hips. ‘Too bad you couldn’t make it to the rendezvous in Palenque in person. That little shit behind the bar needed teaching some respect. I taught him good. Okay?’

      He nodded.

      ‘Well, you’ve got ten cases of our finest arms in the hacienda and in Palenque. Mainly AK-47s.’ She reached out to shake his hand. Her grip was like a vice, far stronger than most of the men who worked for him. He noted the tattoos, more commonly seen on the men of the mara gangs, scrolling up her inner arm, under her T-shirt sleeve, emerging at the base of her thick neck, where the ink travelled northwards over her scarred face in a demonic tapestry of blue-black. Faux-religious images of weeping women and children. Flowers and skulls of the Maya, with numbers and letters scrawled intricately across her throat in some kind of magical code that clearly meant something to the right people. ‘Pleasure doing business with you. As always.’

      ‘And you’ll also take care of this problem for me?’ he asked.

      The farm workers and his own men had gathered along the edge of the airstrip now. Milling around awkwardly, suspecting what was about to happen, perhaps. Visibly squirming, lest the mayhem spill over from the group of absconded prostitutes, somehow tainting them.

      The transportista nodded. ‘Claro,’ she said, gabbling something to her compatriots in rapid-fire Salvadoran Spanish.

      The women slung their rifles across their backs and simultaneously drew machetes in some gruesome choreographed dance. Pulled the sacks from the heads of the bewildered trafficked girls who peered around to see where they were. Wide-eyed and mouthing, ‘No! No!’ when they caught sight of el cocodrilo. Begging for forgiveness, their pleas falling on his unsympathetic ears. Weak, corruptible bitches. Why would he ever spare them? Particularly when they were so easily replaced with the next truckload coming out of Guatemala.

      There was something about the high drama of the Central Americans that appealed to him. It was amusing, all this pandemonium and Latin angst: screaming, now drowning out the high-pitched sound of the cicadas, as the girls understood the fate about to be visited upon them. Weeping from the farm workers, who grasped that this too might be their method of undoing, should they cross the mighty el cocodrilo and dare to take back their freedoms.

      ‘Now,’ he said.

      The transportistas pushed the kneeling girls to the ground until they kissed the dirt with their tear-streaked faces. All bar one raised machetes in unison and, with one forceful blow, beheaded each runaway in almost perfect synchronicity. Amid the wailing of the onlookers, the girls’ heads rolled away from broken bodies that pumped out their life’s blood. Staring but unseeing. For them, at least, it was the end.

      But as el cocodrilo turned to walk away from the scene of execution, he felt he was being watched.

       CHAPTER 5

       Amsterdam, police headquarters, then, Bouwdewijn de Groot Lyceum, Apollolaan, then, Floris Engels’ apartment in Amstelveen, 28 April

      ‘What do we know about our man in the canal?’ Maarten Minks asked. Neatly folded into his chair, he sat with his pen in hand and his pad open, as though he were poised to take notes. Van den Bergen could deduce from the shine on his overenthusiastic, wrinkle-free face that he was on the cusp of getting a stiffy over the discovery of this fourth body. Waiting for his old Chief Inspector’s words of wisdom, no doubt. Bloody fanboy.

      ‘Well,’ Van den Bergen began. Paused. Rearranged his long frame in his seat, grimacing as his hip clicked in protest when he tried to cross his legs. ‘It’s interesting, actually. His wallet and ID were still on him. No money stolen, so he couldn’t have been pushed into the water after a mugging.’ He took the smudged glasses from the end of the chain around his neck and perched them on his nose. Wishing now that he’d had the scratched lens replaced СКАЧАТЬ