Deadly Traffic Read online

  Contents

  Front Title

  Other Books

  Untitled

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Thanks

  Dedication

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  A Favor Please

  Deadly Traffic

  Other titles

  by David Crosby

  Million Dollar Staircase

  Book One, Will Harper Series

  Guilty Money

  Book Two, Will Harper Series

  Florida Burning

  Book Three, Will Harper Series

  The Florida Shuffle

  Book Four, Will Harper Series

  Keeping Us Afloat

  A Trip Down the Intracoastal Waterway

  & A Journey Through a Marriage

  (Non-Fiction)

  Copyright © 2020 David Crosby

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-9981943-3-2

  Final Edit by Donna Rich

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The author holds all rights to this work. It is illegal to reproduce this novel or any part of it without express written consent from the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Deadly Traffic

  A Will Harper Novel

  David Crosby

  Published by

  Thanks to the Plantation Writers Guild for their input and especially for their encouragement in the writing of this book, and to all my beta readers for their help with catching errors. Any that remain are my own.

  This book is dedicated to my wonderful wife, Marilyn.

  You are always my inspiration.

  Prologue

  Fifty miles from the Mexican border, miles from the nearest town, the driver of the tractor-trailer struggled to control the wheel as a blowout destroyed his right front tire. He managed to get it stopped, then he panicked. He left the truck running and ran into the grassy fields on the side of the road. He had a bottle of water. It was more than he left his passengers.

  The sun was setting when a Texas State trooper drove by and spotted the abandoned truck. He called it in and requested assistance from the Border Patrol. He waited nearly an hour for the two BP agents to arrive in their SUV.

  They got out, introduced themselves, and said, “So, what’s the story, Officer Robinson?”

  “I was driving home at the end of my shift and saw this truck idling by the side of the road. There’s no sign of the driver. I was going to check in the trailer for contraband, but I have no way to open it.”

  “We carry bolt cutters with us. Shall we?”

  Robinson carried his Maglite to the rear of the trailer, shining his light on the lock as the agents cut it off. When the door was opened, three bodies fell out onto the pavement.

  Robinson jumped back. “Damn! What the hell happened here?”

  Agent Sanchez leaned over one of the bodies. He touched the man on the neck to check for a pulse and yanked his hand back. “This guy is frozen.” He checked the other two bodies. “Their fingers are bloody, and their nails are ripped apart. It looks like they were trying to claw their way out.”

  Robinson shone his torch into the trailer. “Holee shit, there’s dozens of bodies in here.”

  Sanchez removed his radio from his belt. “I’ll call it in. ” When the dispatcher answered, he said. “We’re going to need backup. Got a truck full of bodies out here on highway 9. Looks like a bunch of illegals. Damn smugglers brought ‘em in a freezer truck.”

  §

  Carmelina was sad and exhausted. She took in the luxurious surroundings that were a part of her daily life, but they were not for her to enjoy. They were for her to clean, fourteen hours a day. The house servants, butlers and kitchen help only worked ten hours a day, but Carmelina was of a lower status. She was a slave.

  When she’d departed her home in San Antonio des Nubes, Guatemala, with her brother Pablo and younger sister Leilani, her parents had cried. Not because they wanted them to stay, but because they wanted them to live.

  The rugged patch of land they farmed would not support a family of five, and there were no jobs to be found for a hundred miles. Going to America was their only choice. Mama and Papa had scrimped and saved for more than a year to raise the $5,000 that Pablo would pay to a coyote to sneak them across the Mexican border into the U.S., then across the country to Florida.

  With a large colony of Guatemalans in the state, the three siblings hoped to find work and housing. That had been the dream, anyway. It had been a long trek, fifteen hundred miles from their mountain home to the United States border on foot. Pablo had been excited when he handed the five grand to the smiling man with a mustache who would spirit them over the river to freedom.

  They’d been surprised when he led them to a parking lot where rows of big trucks were lined up. Leilani was terrified as the man and two helpers placed her in a cardboard box inside one of the trucks. She was given a blanket and a bottle of water, then sealed inside. Carmelina trembled as she saw the box lifted by a forklift, then slid to the front of the empty trailer.

  She went in the next box, sweat pouring off of her in the stifling heat. Alone in the dark, she felt the movement of the forklift sliding her box next to her sister’s. She heard Pablo speaking with the coyote, then heard a sharp warning to stay quiet before he too was sealed in a box and slid into the truck.

  We will die before this truck even gets to the border, Carmelina thought. Then she heard the rumble of an air conditioner. The forklift worked for two more hours loading boxes of beef parts. She had no way of knowing, but cows that provided that beef had already crossed the border more than once.

  The Mexican cattle are sent to the United States to be fattened on corn and alfalfa, then sent back across the border for slaughter. The prime cuts are sent back across the river to feed American consumers, and some of the parts that are considered “beef byproducts” by the U.S. stay in Mexico, where they are popular delicacies.

  Beef tongue, oxtail, stomachs and even the head, nothing is wasted. The head of the cow, you put it to boil, and you get the cheeks for barbacoa. You save the eyeballs for special gourmet tacos.

  None of this mattered to Carmelina, Leilani or Pablo. They sat in the dark, feeling the motion as the truck rolled onto the highway. They’d finally gotten relief from the sweltering heat when first the temperature dropped from over one hundred degrees to a comfortable seventy. The problem was, it kept dropping, all the way to thirty-five degrees. br />
  Soon they were shivering, barely helped by the thin blankets they’d been given. They tried to stay quiet when the truck stopped at the border, but Carmelina was afraid the chattering of her teeth would give them away.

  It didn’t, and the truck drove for another forty-five minutes before finally stopping. She heard the sound of a metal door opening, then the truck moved again briefly before stopping.Without the noise of the truck, Carmelina tried whispering to her brother in Spanish.

  “Pablo.”

  “Shhh.”

  “Where are we?”

  The metal door squealed on rusty tracks again

  She heard a low voice through the heavy cardboard. “We’re across the border, but I don’t know where.”

  The sound of the truck door opening stopped the conversation. Carmelina could hear the forklift starting up, then a lift gate rising to the back of the truck. After more than an hour of hearing boxes moving out of the trailer, she was startled to feel her box being lifted. After a few moments the motion stopped, and she felt it settle to the floor.

  She cowered on the bottom of the box as a blade cut through the packing tape at the top, then squinted at the sudden light as the box was opened.

  “Come on, get up.”

  She struggled to her feet, stiff after the cold and the hours of confinement. She was in a high-ceiling room lined with metal shelves, huge boxes covering most of them. Two men stood by a box.

  One of them, a burly man with a large, black beard, reached over and grabbed her arms, lifting her from the cardboard.

  The smaller man said, “Stand over there and be quiet.”

  She watched as first Pablo and then Leilani’s hiding places were taken from the truck, opened, and her siblings came blinking into the overhead lights. The three of them hugged, then Leilani whispered to Pablo.

  He turned to the men. “Please, sir, we need to use the bathroom.”

  The bearded man cursed, but the other one said, “Come this way.” He led them to a door into a dirty restroom with four stalls, then waited outside as they relieved themselves and washed.

  Leilani whispered to Pablo, “Do you think they will feed us?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask.”

  There was a pounding on the door. “Hurry up in there!”

  The three siblings hugged again, then walked out the door back into the warehouse. They followed the man into a room with tables, benches and vending machines. Leilani looked hungrily at the snack machine, but they had no dollar bills or coins.

  Pablo asked, “Could we have something to eat and some water?”

  “Wait here.”

  They sat, and a few minutes later the man returned with three bottles of water and several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. “This is all we’ve got. They’ll feed you a proper meal in the morning.”

  The three of them ate, drank the water, and then lay on the benches, exhausted. An hour later, the thin man returned.

  “Let’s go. Your ride is here.”

  Groggy, they followed him out into the warehouse where a rust-streaked van with “Smith Brothers Electrical” painted on the side waited.

  The bearded man opened the rear door. Empty shelves for equipment lined the walls, but that wasn’t what they looked at. Four men, dirty and weary looking, were sprawled on the floor on sleeping bags. There was very little open room on the floor.

  He said, “Find a place and get comfortable.” He tossed in three more sleeping bags. “It’s a long drive to Florida.”

  §

  The next twenty-four hours were a blur. They sat on the sleeping bags, crowded between the shelves and the men. The three siblings took turns sleeping, Leilani with her head in Pablo’s lap. The four men talked among themselves, and more than once Carmelina saw them looking hungrily at her younger sister.

  Only once when they stopped for gas did they receive anything to eat, bags of fast food and sodas which they devoured. Pablo asked the thin man if they could get out to use the bathroom and stretch at the next stop, but he shook his head.

  “Too risky, someone might see you.” He pointed to a plastic utility pail near the back door. “Use the bucket.”

  Growing up on a farm, the bucket wasn’t too shocking to them, but the lack of privacy was an issue. Pablo held up a sleeping bag in front of each of his sisters as they took turns at the bucket.

  Finally, after a long and mostly sleepless night and much of the next day in the back of the work van, they arrived in Florida. The two men in front changed drivers at the welcome station, and they gave the passengers each another bottle of water.

  Carmelina asked, “Is this our destination?”

  The bearded man laughed. “Close. Only about five more hours.” Then he shut the door.

  Pablo leaned over to the older of his two sisters. “Remember the paper I gave you with the family members in Florida?”

  “Yes, our Morales cousins, and phone numbers for two of them. I still have it.”

  “If we get separated for any reason, get to a phone and call them. They will be expecting us.”

  Her eyes widened. “I don’t want to go without you!”

  “I want the three of us to stay together, but I’m trying to plan in case something goes wrong. Be sure and watch out for Leilani. She is young and pretty, and that could be dangerous for her.”

  He saw the hurt look in her eyes and touched her cheek. “Ah, my Carmelina, you are pretty as well, but her youth puts her more at risk. You are the wiser one.”

  She gave him a weak smile. “Please stay with us, Pablo.”

  “I promise.”

  It was a promise he could not keep.

  §

  Finally, the van arrived in West Palm Beach and pulled into another warehouse facility. The passengers heard the engine stop and waited anxiously for freedom. The rear door opened.

  The bearded man who had done most of the talking told Pablo and his sisters to wait by the van . They watched while he unloaded the four men from the back and sent them off with the thin man. Then he turned to Pablo.

  “Okay, I got you over the border and into Florida. Now pay me the rest of the money.”

  Pablo looked shocked. “But I already paid you!”

  “You paid the coyote his fee. He gave you to me. My fee is $10,000. I usually charge $5,000 each, but I’m giving you a discount.” The man gave him a nasty smile. “I’m a generous guy.”

  Carmelina said, “Sir, please, that was all the money we had.”

  He crossed his arms. “Then you’ll have to work off your debt.”

  Pablo started to object loudly, and the bearded man pulled a pistol from his pocket.

  “No arguments.” He gestured towards a corridor. “This way.”

  They walked in front of him to a small room with an empty desk and two chairs. There was a window looking out of the warehouse, but it had metal bars on the exterior. Once they were inside, he said, “Wait here,” and closed the door and bolted it from the outside.

  Carmelina hugged Leilani and looked over her shoulder at Pablo. “What are we going to do?”

  “They have laws in this country,” he said. “He can’t keep us prisoners.”

  Once again, he was wrong.

  After several hours, the bearded man opened the door and gestured at Pablo with the pistol.

  “You. Come here.”

  Pablo followed him into the hallway, and the door was closed and bolted again. After a few minutes Carmelina saw movement outside the window and rushed to see what was happening. It was Pablo, being led in handcuffs towards an old pickup truck with a big red tomato painted on the door. A man in overalls opened the passenger door and shoved him inside, then got in the driver’s side and drove the truck out of the compound.

  Leilani and Carmelina cried together for an hour before running out of tears. Two hours later, they came for Leilani. The buyer was a man with slicked-back blond hair and a slight paunch.

  He said, “Mmm, tasty. She’ll work out ju
st fine on the party boat.”

  Carmelina flew at him, clawing at his face until she was dragged away by the bearded man and thrown to the floor.

  “Bitch! I’m gonna have a hard time getting anything for you with that attitude. Keep it up and I might have Capn’ Willy here take you out and toss you overboard.”

  The blond man dabbed at a scratch on his check with a handkerchief. He glared at her. “I’d be glad to.”

  The bearded man shook his head. “Not today. I know someone who might take her. Cheap bastard, too. He’ll be happy to get a bargain.”

  Their American Dream had become a nightmare.

  Chapter One

  I watched Jimmy’s back as he pedaled in front of me. We were on the last leg of a twenty-mile bike ride, and I’d stayed with him the entire way. As we made the last eighth of a mile, I poured on the speed, powering past Jimmy just as we crossed the imaginary finish line.

  I threw my arms in the air. “Yes!” I said, declaring victory.

  Jimmy grinned. “If I’d known you were that close, I’d have never let you take me.”

  I gaped at him. “No way did you let me win.”

  “I’m just ragging you, Will. You did great. Quite an improvement from where you started.”

  When we’d begun riding together a few months ago I did well to even finish seven miles. Now I was riding twenty miles, kayaking for hours, and had become a star in the ladies self-defense class. That means I no longer got my ass kicked, about which I was very relieved.

  “Thanks, Jimmy. You’ve helped me a lot with my conditioning.”

  “You’ve worked hard, that’s what did it. You’ll be ready the next time someone comes after you.” He laughed. “Of course, kicking Axel Winter in the balls worked pretty well!”

  I grinned. “One thing you taught me is all’s fair in a fight.”