Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 128488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
The man just grunted. “So here you are. Too young and stupid to realize that whatever this is, you’re probably better off than if you’d tried to cross that desert by yourself.”
Cedro bristled. “What the hell do you know, you old used-up drunk?” His brother had crossed that desert and lived to tell about it, even though he was only a teenager like him. He’d written their mother when he’d arrived in Arizona and told them he was living in a migrant shelter and to follow his lead.
“Grim,” the man said right before he went into a coughing fit.
“What’s grim?” he asked once the man had gotten hold of himself.
“My name. Grimaldo. Friends call me Grim.”
“You think we’re friends?”
“Not even close.” He coughed once more. It was rattly and loose. “I’ve seen you before, little pickpocketing thief,” Grim said. “You stole something from me.”
Cedro pulled in a silent breath, turning his head again and squinting over at the man’s profile. Oh. It came to him then. He’d seen the man, too, in the small lawless border town he was from. Once. Only once. “You shot that dog,” he said.
Grim turned his head, looking at him for a moment and then turning away again. “She was suffering,” he rasped.
Yes, Cedro knew that. He’d seen the piece-of-shit car that hit her, watched from a doorway as it’d driven away, leaving the animal moaning and broken in the dirt road. Cedro hadn’t known what to do, but he’d hated it, that moaning. He felt it inside himself like it was leaking through his pores. The man, Grim, had been in a building nearby. Cedro had tracked him as he exited the doorway and made his way toward the dog. He’d knelt down beside it, and then he’d taken a gun from the waistband of his jeans and he’d shot it in the head. That shot had rung in Cedro’s ears long after the man had disappeared down the road.
He didn’t remember stealing anything from him, though. “I didn’t steal from you. I don’t steal,” he lied. “I sell vegetables from my mother’s garden.”
The man snorted. “A thief and a liar. A better liar than a thief, however. I’d like my property back.”
Outrage rose in Cedro, even though what the man said was true. Maybe that was the part that made him so angry. This man thought he knew him. And he didn’t. He didn’t at all. “What is it you think I stole from you, pig?”
“A locket.”
A locket. Oh. He remembered that locket. He’d gotten a pretty penny for it from the man who ran the migrant aid group near the border. He’d eaten regularly for the next month. It’d been a good month. Cedro didn’t have many of those. “I don’t know anything about any locket. You probably got drunk and lost it, pig.”
Grim let out a chuff of laughter.
“Who are you, anyway?” Cedro asked. “And why are we here together? Who took us?”
“I have no fucking clue,” Grim mumbled. “One of the gangs, I assume.”
“What do they want with us?”
Grim glanced over, and his face looked like his name. “No clue,” he mumbled again, but Cedro was a liar, after all, and he could spot another one.
“What do you do, other than roll around in your own vomit?” Cedro asked.
Another rattly cough. “A little bit of everything.”
A little bit of everything. Which probably meant he took money from anyone who was desperate enough to pay an old drunk for his services. “Do you take people into the desert?” He refused to say help. Help was hardly ever what came to those who let someone else guide them out into that brutal place where even fewer laws existed than in the town where he lived.
“Sometimes,” he said. “I help those who can pay for it.”
“Help? Or use?”
“Look who’s talking, pickpocket.”
Cedro startled when the door directly in front of their cages slid open and a man walked through. He had a receding hairline and greasy black hair that fell past his shoulders. Cedro crawled quickly on his knees to the front of his cage. “Hey, mister. Let us out of here. Please. I don’t have anything you want. I’m an orphan. No parents, not a dime to my name. I sell vegetables on the street, just enough to feed myself. Please.”
The man gave him a slight smile, but it was cold, and it chilled Cedro so much that he let go of the bars and slunk back. “I am not authorized to make deals with you,” the man said. His speech was clipped, and he had a slight accent that Cedro had never heard before. “You’ve been rented,” he said.
Cedro’s mouth went even drier than it already was. “Rented?” he croaked. He didn’t look over at Grim, but he could tell by the still silence that he was watching this interaction closely, unmoving. “I . . . what do you mean?” But he thought he knew. Oh, not this. He’d done anything and everything not to have to do this. He’d stolen vegetables from others almost as poor as him and sat in the hot sun hour after hour to sell them on the street for nothing but change. He’d slept in alleyways, covered in trash so no one spotted him. He’d rooted through garbage for food. He’d picked pockets and sold what he’d stolen. He’d taken chances and barely survived. But he’d told himself he was doing okay because he hadn’t resorted to making the trip to that squalid street where kids no older than him, and some younger, stared hollow eyed out of upstairs windows while old men entered through the doors below. “No,” he said, more so for himself than because he thought he had any voice in this matter.