A False Dawn

PROLOGUE

It was Hector Ortega’s turn with the girls, and he was nervous. He backed the nine-passenger van up to a run-down mobile home, turned off the engine, and said, “Make it quick. Don’t like doin’ this shit on Passover.”

Ortega watched as Silas Davis, a black man with the build of a linebacker, got out of a parked pickup truck and entered the trailer. Ortega punched the radio station selector buttons. The pulse of Jamaican Reggae rocked the van.

He opened the glove compartment, took out a small plastic bag of cocaine, shook a loose line on the back of his hand, and inhaled through both of his bull-like nostrils. Ortega closed his eyes, feeling the drugs enter his system and mix with the music.

When he opened his eyes a shadow moved. Beneath a live oak. Somebody watching. A single streetlight illuminated half a dozen ramshackle trailers. Ortega felt his night vision enhanced from the cocaine in his system.

The shadow was a man. Standing. Staring.

Ortega reached for the pistol under his seat. He turned on the van’s lights, flashing the high beams. A farm worker wobbled from under the tree, holding a low-hanging limb for support. Ortega could tell the man was drunk.

The man ambled to a utility pole supporting a street lamp. He leaned his back against the pole for support, unzipped his pants and urinated in the dirt and mud.

Ortega lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew smoke out of his nostrils. He set the pistol on the seat beside him and opened a bag of Fritos. He shoved a dirty handful of Fritos into his small mouth.

The farm worker finished urinating. As he started to walk, he held one hand up to block the glare from the van’s headlights. The man fumbled with his zipper, tripped and fell down in the mud-soaked puddle of urine.

“Stupid shit,” Ortega mumbled.

Silas Davis escorted five women toward the van. They were all young. Eyes wide with fear. “Let’s go ladies,” Davis said, opening the side-panel doors. The first four women timidly did as ordered, each taking her seat in the dark interior.

Angela Ramirez stood next to the van, light from a nearby trailer falling across her striking face.

“Let’s go,” Davis ordered.

There was no fear in her eyes. She looked at him like a warrior might stand up to her sworn enemy. Resolute and bold. “I did not come to this country to be a whore!”

Davis laughed. “Get your ass in the van. We ain’t got all night.” As he reached for her, a dog barked a wolf-like howl. Davis turned his head in the direction of the howling.

Angela bolted into the night. She ran behind the van, straight into the dark of the vast tomato fields.

“Bitch!” Davis said.

“Get her!” Ortega shouted. He turned around in his seat, holding the pistol so the other women could see it. “Don’t make me bury any of you in these fields.”

Angela ran as fast as she could, losing a shoe in the soft dirt. Davis easily caught her, lifting the screaming woman over his shoulder and carrying her back to the van like he was holding a kicking child.

“Shut up bitch!” he said through clinched teeth. He tossed her into the van and slammed the door.

Ortega pointed the pistol directly at Angela’s face. “Who do you think you are, huh? It’s payback time! Now don’t fuck with me, understand?” He tossed his cigarette out the window. “Cause of you, I gotta use the child locks.”

Davis leaned in the open window of the front passenger side of the van. He used the back of his hand to wipe a stream of blood from his cheek. “Look at this! Crazy bitch opened my face with her fingernails. She claws like a wildcat.”

“She’ll learn,” Ortega said, slipping an unlit cigarette behind his right ear. “Silo, one of your boys done pissed on himself. He’s lying over there in the mud and shit. Must have drunk some bad wine.”

“They got to feed the fever.”

“I’d leave him there.” Ortega laughed as he drove away.

Davis strolled over to the man who was passed out in vomit and mud-soaked urine. Davis kicked him hard in the buttocks, lifting the man off the ground, rolling him onto his back. He slowly opened his eyes, squinting in the glare from the streetlight. His eyes were red, heavily bloodshot with disease and alcohol, smoldering like two pieces of ashen charcoal that had caught a breeze for a fleeting second.

Davis leaned over him. “Wake up, asshole, I want your ass on the bus at 5:30 in the mornin’.

The man tried to focus on Davis’ face. He held a hand up for a second, like a baby trying to focus and touch something above its crib. The man coughed up bile and said through a raspy voice, “Why you kickin’ me? Ain’t right to kick a brother when he’s down.”

“Not your fuckin’ brother.”

The man rested his spinning head in the mud, the red slits staring at the cloudless night sky. “You can’t be doin’ this to folks. I’m a man.”

The sounds of throaty snarls and hisses from feral cats fighting each other came from the shadows. They fought under one of the trailers with an exposed light bulb over the door. From inside the trailer came a woman's terrified scream.

Gnats and moths circled the light bulb in a silent cloud.

When the van pulled onto State Road 46, Hector Ortega glanced in the mirror to check his cargo of women. All looked as well as could be expected. He didn’t see the calm in the eyes of Angela Ramirez.

And he didn’t see a black car pull out from a side road and start to follow.