Greetings From Buena Rosa - Prologue

Prologue
The cell was dark, and in that darkness, Esther heard things moving. She gauged they were cockroaches by the sound; the dry, scraping of tiny legs on the cinderblock walls. She had grown up in a middle class neighborhood of Mexico City, but even there the relentless insects could find a home somehow, making them familiar. No, the roaches didn’t bother her too much. She knew they hated the smell of people, and would most likely leave her alone. But here, near the U.S. border, there were worse things in the dark. The idea of a scorpion living in the poorly maintained jail, nesting under the floor, or in the wall, no, that was not entirely unlikely.
And as much as that thought knotted her stomach every time she contemplated rolling over on the hard cot, wondering what she might “disturb” by her movement, she knew that there was even worse than scorpions roaming this building. That something worse wore a badge.
They had come for her in the dead of night. Arresting someone half asleep was always much easier than risking a confrontation. She woke with a start, woolen-headed with sleep and a belly-full of Dio Diablo beer, and heard shouts and wood splintering. The lights were bright in her face, and it took a full twenty seconds to realize that someone had cuffed her arms tightly behind her back. Two minutes later, and Esther was in the back of the dust covered Pegasus Motors SUV which the local law used for their paddy wagon.
They didn’t tell her what she had been arrested for until they had beaten a confession from her with hoses. She had gotten off lucky, she thought. There was still blood on some of the surgical and less-than-surgical tools displayed in the “interview” room. And a room she had been led past on the way there had the reek of ozone and singed flesh.
Before then, she had never really seen any proof that the local law used torture. She suspected, of course. They all did. And the residents of Buena Rosa generally knew that their police had the toys to carry out torture if it was their desire to do so. The police in Buena Rosa had a chilling record for closed cases, something of which they took significant pride.
It wasn’t until after Esther had signed the confession that she realized that she was being held for the murder of Muriel Cruz, a local woman she knew only superficially through her attempts to unionize the workers of Pegasus Motor Corporation in Buena Rosa. There was no way it would hold up, she told herself. A confession under torture…no court in the world would accept it. But still she tossed and turned on the hard cot, careful not to disturb any unknown cellmates. And her bruises began to heal. And she began to lose track of days in the dark.
And gradually, she began to lose hope.
Skritch, skritch, skritch-
That wasn’t a cockroach. She knew that. No scorpion either. She pulled her long, matted dark hair free from around her ear and listened intently.
Skritch, skritch, skritch-
No…too large…too...regular. A thought occurred to her and she desperately tried to put it out of her mind. But in the darkness, all it took was the slightest suggestion to let the imagination run wild. The jail shared an alley with a greasy taco stand, and she had seen the rats running in herds there on occasion. A rat, given the inclination, could chew through concrete. And if they were hungry enough, there was little that a rat wouldn’t eat.
Skritch, skritch, skritch – tap, tap-
Esther froze. The sound, wasn’t coming from near the ground, she realized, but higher up, near chest level. And had she really heard that? Had she really heard the tap, or was she finally going out of her mind in isolation and darkness?
Tap, tap-
Reaching towards the untreated cinderblock wall, she ran her fingers
across the rough surface, trying to ignore how much they shook. She curled her hand into a fist and it felt good. It felt strong. She pounded against the wall twice, feeling the rough concrete abrade her hand. Esther didn’t care. She had been hurt far worse recently.
Her pound was met with two more taps. No, she thought. Definitely not a rat. That was metal she heard. “Hello?” she heard her own voice, dry and cracked. She summoned up reserves of strength, willing herself to raise her voice past the painful whisper. “Hello?” Louder this time, she thought. Good.
A dusting of mortar fell across her knuckles, startling her. And a pinprick of light filtered through a crack between cinderblocks. “Who is this? Who did I find?” The voice was terse, and Esther couldn’t tell if it were male or female.
But she didn’t care anymore. She had been forgotten there, left to die in the dark, without being given the chance to let anyone know where she was, to let them know she was innocent. “Esther Vega. My name is Esther Vega. Please you have to help me.”
“Why should I help you, Esther? You killed Muriel, left her body in a wash outside of town for the coyotes.”
“I didn’t do it,” Esther pleaded, surprised that she still had tears left as they cut rivulets through the grime on her face. “Please. They made me sign a confession. I didn’t even know what I was signing until it was too late. I didn’t hurt anyone…didn’t kill anyone. You have to believe me.”
There was silence on the other side of the wall. It seemed to Esther that it stretched on forever. She wept, trying to do so silently to not drown out any possible answer.
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry. I believe you, but I can’t help you,” the voice on the other side of the wall finally answered. “I wanted to know. I didn’t think it could have been you who killed her. Muriel’s friends thought you were a trouble maker, but not trouble, comprende? So I believe you, but what I believe won’t help you. I don’t think there is anyone in Buena Rosa who can help you. I’m sorry.”
Esther felt her heart sink. Of course this stranger couldn’t help her. And who was she to be contemplating a jail break, anyway? She was just a labor organizer, in her thirties with a lifetime of drifting and high ideals. She wouldn’t last a day on the run from the law. “Can you at least let my family know I’m here? Can you tell someone where to find me?”
The silence which greeted Esther’s request was absolute. She stilled her breath until she could hear nothing but her own heart beat pounding in her ears. No response from the other side came for a long moment, and she began to think the voice was gone never to return. The stomach-churning possibility that she had imagined everything clawed at the edge of her thoughts, and she fought that idea down.
“The police almost saw me,” the voice whispered harshly through the space between cinderblocks. “I can let someone know you are here, but you had better hurry. I don’t want to risk getting singled out by the police. Not in this town.”
“Manuel de la Vega,” Esther said immediately, her voice stronger now. “He’s with the police in Cobalt City, in America. A detective, I think. I don’t know his address or phone number…”
“I can find that part out. It was Manuel de la Vega in Cobalt City, right?”
Esther leaned against the wall and sobbed. Her cousin Manny would be able to fix this. If anyone could help her now, it was him. “Yes. Cobalt City.”
“Keep your chin up, Esther. Help is on the way.”
In the dark of the Buena Rosa jail, Esther repeated her visitor’s words again and again, holding them as a feeble flame against the blackness. “Help is on the way. Help is on the way.”
And in the alley between the jail and the back of a busy taqueria, a mysterious figure slipped from shadow to shadow with another mantra repeated over and over again in a terse whisper. “Manuel de la Vega, Cobalt City Police.”
Shortly the night swallowed both the words and the person who spoke them as if they had never been there at all.