[Georgia 03] Fallen

side.”
    “Los Texicanos,” Sara provided.
    “Amanda told me their preferred method is slitting throats.”
    Sara put her hand to her neck, trying not to shudder. “You think that Evelyn was still doing business with these drug dealers?”
    He closed Ortiz’s file. “I can’t see how. She doesn’t have any juice without her badge. And I can’t picture her as a kingpin unless she’s some kind of sociopath. Granny-Nanny by day, drug lord by night.”
    “You said Ortiz is in prison for attempted manslaughter. Who’d he try to kill?”
    “His brother. He found him in bed with his wife.”
    “Maybe this is the brother.” Sara opened the next file. “Hector Ortiz,” she told him. “He’s not a bad guy on paper, but he made the defense witness list. I pulled him because he has the same last name as Ignatio.”
    Will unclipped the mugshot from the file to get a closer look. “Is your gut still telling you that Evelyn is innocent?”
    Sara looked at her watch. She had to be at work in five hours. “My gut has turned in for the night. What is it?”
    He held up Hector Ortiz’s photograph. The man was bald with a salt-and-pepper goatee. His shirt was rumpled. He held up his arm to show a tattoo to the camera: a green and red Texas star with a rattlesnake wrapped around it.
    Will said, “Meet Evelyn’s gentleman friend.”

 

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    T HE OPEN-HANDED SLAPS HAD TURNED INTO PUNCHES HOURS ago. Days ago? Evelyn wasn’t sure. She was blindfolded, sitting in total darkness. Something dripped—faucet, gutter, blood—she didn’t know. Her body was so riddled with pain that even when she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to block out every screaming muscle, every broken bone, nothing felt undamaged.
    She panted out a laugh. Blood sprayed from her mouth. Her missing finger. There was one bone that wasn’t broken, one piece of flesh that wasn’t bruised.
    They had started on her feet, beating the soles with a galvanized metal pipe. It was a form of torture they had apparently seen in a movie, which Evelyn knew because one of them had helpfully coached, “The dude was swinging it back higher, like this.” The sensation Evelyn had felt could not be called pain. It was a searing of the skin that her blood carried like fire through her entire body.
    Like most women, it was rape that had always terrified her, but she knew now that there were far worse dangers. There was at least an animalistic logic to the crime of rape. These men were not deriving pleasure from hurting her. Their reward came from the cheers of their friends. They were trying to impress each other, pulling a game of one-upmanship to see who could make her scream the loudest. And Evelyn did scream. She screamed so loud that she was sure that her vocal cords would rupture. She screamed from pain. She screamed from terror. She screamed from anger, fury, loss. She screamed most of all because these competing emotions felt like burning hot lava rushing up her throat.
    At one point, they’d had a protracted discussion about where her vagus nerve was located. Three of them took turns, punching her in the general area of her kidneys until, like children hitting a piñata, one hit pay dirt. They’d laughed uncontrollably as Evelyn seized as if electrocuted. The feeling was one of primal terror. She had never in her life felt so close to death. She had urinated herself. She had screamed into the darkness until there was no sound coming out of her mouth.
    And then they had broken her leg. Not a clean break, but the result of the heavy metal pipe pounding again and again against her leg until there was the resounding crunch of a single bone splintering into two.
    One of them pressed his hand over the break, his putrid breath in her ear. “This is what that stupid bitch did to Ricardo.”
    That stupid bitch was her baby. They had no way of knowing how the words had given Evelyn hope. She had been knocked out, dragged from the scene, shortly after Faith’s car had pulled into the driveway. Evelyn had come to in the back of a van. The engine noise had been rumbling in her ears, but she’d heard two distinct gunshots, the second following the first by a good forty seconds.
    But now Evelyn knew the answer to the only question that kept her from just giving up. Faith was alive. She had gotten away. After that, every horror they visited on her was inconsequential. She thought of Emma in her daughter’s arms, Jeremy together with his mother. Zeke