Read Online Saint Death - John Milton #3 by Mark Dawson - Free Book Online Page A

were shamed and punished. Now that she had her blog, and the thousands of readers who came to read about the disintegration of Juárez, now she was not just another protester. She had influence and power. People paid attention when she wrote things. This would be the biggest story yet.
    Femicide.
    The City of Lost Girls.
    She would make them listen and things would be done.
    “How did you get away?”
    “He untied my hands while he––you know––and then he did not tie them again when he went to use the bathroom. I suppose he was confident in himself, and he had made it plain that they would kill me if I tried to run. I knew that my prayers had been answered then and that I had been given a chance to escape, but, at first, I did not think that my body would allow me to take advantage of it. It was as if all of the strength in my legs had been taken away. I think it was because I was frightened of what they would do to me if they caught me. I know that is not rational, and I know that they would have killed me if I had stayed––I knew about the missing girls, of course, like everyone does––but despite that it was as much as I could do to take my clothes and get off the bed.”
    “But you did.”
    “Eventually, yes. I tried to get the other girl to get up too, but she told me to leave her alone. It was the first thing she had said to me all that time. She looked at me as if I had done something terribly wrong. She was still tied, too, and I am not sure I would have been able to free her, but it would not have mattered––she did not want to leave. I opened the door––he had not locked it––and I ran. I ran as fast as I could. I ran all the way to the Avenue Azucenas and I found a policeman. I did not know if I could trust him but I had no other choice. I was lucky. He was a good man. One of the few. He took me to the police station, away from there.”
    “Do you know his name?”
    “The policeman? Yes––it was Plato. I think his first name was Jesus.”
    “And the man in the hotel?”
    “I do not know his real name. But he liked to talk, all the time he would talk to me and the other girl, and this one time, just before I escaped, he told me about the things that he did for the cartels. He said his father was an important man in El Frontera and that he was a killer for them, a sicario , but not just any sicario ––he said that he was the best, the most dangerous man in all of Juárez. He said that he had killed a thousand men and that, because he was so dangerous, the men who worked with him had given him a name. ‘Santa Muerte.’”
    Caterina wrote that down in her notebook, underlining it six times.
    Santa Muerte.
    Holy Death.
    Saint Death.

 
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    14.
    “SO, OLD MAN––you going to stay in Juárez?”
    Plato looked at Alameda and then at Sanchez. They had been goofing around all evening––mostly at Plato’s expense, about how it felt to be so old––and this felt like the first proper, serious question. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “The girls are settled here, they got their friends, they’re in a decent school. The little one’s just been born, do I want to put him through the hassle of moving? There’s another one on the way. The wife was born here, her old man’s in a home half a mile from the house.”
    “Come on, man,” Sanchez said. “Seriously?”
    And Plato admitted to himself then that he had already decided. Ciudad Juárez was no place to bring up a family. Forty years ago, when he was coming up, even twenty years ago when he was starting to do well in the police, maybe he could’ve made a case that things would have been alright. But now? No, he couldn’t say that. He’d seen too much. He had investigated eleven killings himself this month: the man in the Ford Galaxy who was gunned down at a stop sign; three beaten and tortured municipal cops found in the park; a man who was executed, shot in the head; six narcos shot to pieces in the