Revenge by Meli Raine

bellows.
    “Yeah. This one has no arms, no legs, and...” his words die out as Murphy looks at me. He closes his mouth like a steel trap.
    “What?” I ask. “And what?”
    “ And another three women have gone missing. Reported at various times in the middle of the night, and this morning. All of them from parking lots or...” His words die out again and he looks at Mark. Then at my car.  
    T hen at me.
    “What Murphy’s trying to say,” Mark says to me in a voice filled with acid, “is that these motherfuckers are stealing women from parking lots and the side of the road .”
    I look over at my car.
    “Right. Am I still overreacting?” Mark snaps at me. “ They’re disappearing from roadside assistance situations. I’m driving along, headed out for a meeting about the killings, and I see your car by the side of the road, and find you with fucking Eric ! The guy I warned you to stay away from!”  
    “Why?” I plead. “What’s so bad about Eric?”
    Mark glares at Murphy, who takes the hint and saunters back to the police car.
    “You want me to be honest?” he asks in a quiet voice.  
    “Yes.”
    “Brutally honest?”
    “Yes!”
    “Carrie, I don’t think Ignatio Landau has anything to do with a drug ring. Not any more. If he is a drug lord, it’s an extra. A thing to do on the side. I think he’s doing something much, much worse.”
    “What’s worse than turning a university into a giant drug operation and then framing my dad for it?” I ask, incredulous.  
    “He’ s a sex slave trafficker.”

Chapter Fourteen
    I’m speechless.
    Mark and Murphy’s brief conversation explodes in my mind like a giant firework in the sky.
    Van load.
    Seventeen of them.
    “He’s kidnapping women and turning them into sex slaves?” I ask. The words seem unreal. Are they really coming out of my mouth?
    Mark shakes his head. “No. Worse. He’s smuggling them across the Mexican border and then selling them off. He uses them as drug mules first . We’ve had three of them die from having plastic bags they swallowed burst inside them, killing them with overdoses.”
    “Wait. What? Explain that.” My words feel like little b ubble s, floating out of my mouth and toward the sun.
    “He kidnaps women in Mexico. H is henchmen do. Then he forces them to swallow small plastic balloons of drugs. They cross the border through some sort of network—we’re not sure. We think there are underground tunnels somehow, but we can’t prove much of it. They surface, he gets the drugs out of them, then he sells the women off into the sex trade. Some of them are as young as eleven. ” Mark looks sick.  
    “That’s real ?” My eyes feel like they’re popping out of my head. “I thought that was just some urban legend people spread. You mean people seriously do that? Here in America?”
    Mark’s looking at me like I just fell off the turnip truck. “There’s no atrocity that goes on anywhere in the world that isn’t also happening right here in the United States, Carrie.”
    If he’d slapped me I couldn’t have been more shocked.
    We live in souther n California. People cross the border all the time illegally, normall y coming from the south to the north. T hey search for jobs, a better life, more opportunities.
    The idea that Dean L andau i s involved in trafficking women across the border to act as drug mules and then as sex slaves makes my nausea come back.
    To o many pieces make sense now.
    “Amy?” My voice sounds like rust come to life. “Is Amy being sold int o —is she going to be a—oh, God.”
    He braces himself. I can see it through the caked-on mud, through his anger, through his struggle to decide how much to say and how much to keep to himself.
    Then his shoulders drop.
    “I don’t know. We’re doing everything we can to track down these fuckers,” he snaps. Rage twists his face into a kind of determination that makes me feel hope. His shoulders rise again and he gives me a steady