On The Grind

Chapter 53

The tunnel became damp, collecting ground moisture the farther down we went. At its deepest spot we were forced to slog through almost an inch of blackish brown water before making the slow climb back up on the Mexican side.

Somewhere well past the halfway point Rocky stumbled and fell into me, knocking me into the vato guard in front. The man spun and in the next few seconds it got very busy. He started raining blows onto me. I ducked and dodged, with my hands cuffed helplessly behind my back. He ended the short, vicious routine with a right hook, which caught me high in the forehead, the part of the skull where the bone is the thickest. I heard one of his knuckles break as the punch landed. He screamed in pain. Rocky was being wrestled to the ground a few feet to my right. For the next couple of seconds we were back to back, sprawled across the narrow-gauge tracks on the tunnel floor.

Then I felt something sharp poking me in the kidney. I moved my cuffed hands up to the middle of my hack to try to stop it and got jabbed again, this time in my left palm. Why the hell was Rocky stabbing me?

I finally figured it out. He had somehow gotten his hands on a sharp piece of metal. He jabbed it out again and this time I caught it in my right hand and wrapped my fingers around it. It was a four-inch nail, which he'd probably pulled out of that gun crate he'd been leaning against in the Calexico warehouse.

Just then I was snatched back up to my feet. The punk with the busted knuckle was standing in front of me, cradling his hand and glowering angrily. He finally pulled out his gun with his good hand, then slammed me in the head with the flat side of the automatic.

"Carechimba hijueputa," he shouted, then hit me with it again. I went down on one knee, and struggled to retain consciousness. As I teetered there, half out of it, I fought to get my head to stop spinning.

"Flaquito," he screamed and spit on me.

Rocky and I were then pulled up to our feet and pushed roughly through the dimly lit tunnel. I managed to slowly collect myself during the next few minutes.

The air was damp and fetid, despite the ventilation tubes punched into the tunnels ceiling every fifteen feet or so. Whoever designed this thing knew what they were doing.

I'd been through a few captured drug tunnels in the past and they usually looked like fun house exhibits where the floors and walls serpentined all over the place. Somewhere around the middle of the passage there would be a hard left or right to accommodate the fact that the diggers tunneling in one direction had to make a sharp course correction to meet up with the ones coming the other way. This tunnel was straight and true. It had been carefully engineered, attesting to the organization behind this smuggling operation.

We finally reached the far end, where another staircase waited. Rocky and I were stopped. The celador in front of me snatched up a phone mounted to the wall at the base of the staircase.

"Es Ramon. Tengo los prisoneros."

Ramon listened for a moment, hung up, then climbed the stairs and opened a reinforced wooden door.

We were led up into a carpeted basement hallway. Halfway down the corridor Ramon opened another door and flipped a light switch. Then we were pushed inside what looked like a very large laundry area containing several commercial-sized washers and dryers. There were two long folding tables in the center of the room attached to the floor with metal brackets. Along one wall were several porcelain sinks.

While his partner pointed an automatic pistol at me, Ramon removed my handcuffs and recuffed my wrists in front of me through a wrought-iron wall brace that supported a huge metal drying rack that contained half a dozen small, three-foot-square Mexican blankets. Rocky was cuffed to a similar rack on the opposite side of the room.

The four guards started patting us down, stealing everything we had in our pockets. One of them saw my belt, which had a silver buckle. He undid it and pulled it off, taking the satellite transmitter with him. Then they left, closing and locking the door behind them. I was pretty sure they were just outside waiting, so I kept my voice low.

"I thought you were trying to kill me in that tunnel," I whispered.

"You said you wanted a nail. Now get going and pick these cuffs, homes."

I shifted the nail carefully between my index finger and thumb, making sure I didn't drop it. Then I went to work on the new Hook-fast stainless steel handcuffs that were securing my wrists to the thick metal bracket.