Holding The Line. Kierney Scott

They were a guttural sound; unlike anything the boy had produced before and unlike anything Torres had heard before. Except in Iraq…

      “Oh, fuck. What did you do?” Torres dropped to his knees. There was blood everywhere. Girl barked madly.

      “Oh, fuck,” Torres said again. It was Ignacio’s leg. It had been blown clean off, just above the knee. No, clean wasn’t the right word, it was messy as fuck, bits of bone and muscle hung off him with nails and shit imbedded into what was left.

      He screamed louder and the dog matched the intensity with her bark. They were going to get caught. Torres reached into his waist. In seconds he cut the dog’s throat before he turned to Ignacio.

      The boy was as good as dead. The explosion hadn’t killed him; the human feces in the bomb meant the wound would be septic in days if he did not bleed to death first. Ignacio was going to die. How he died was up to Torres.

       Chapter Three

      The room was cold. It was August in Texas but Beth wished she had a coat. She could not stop shivering. Her whole body shook with it, even her fingers. She pushed her hands into the pockets of her suit pants to keep them still.

      Was there a reason morgues were always in the basement? Like coroners’ jobs weren’t depressing enough, they got stuck in the icy bowels of buildings. This wasn’t her first morgue or her first body. She was somewhat of a professional at this point. When she first started at the DEA she could not even look at crime scene photos without flinching. She vomited when she had to identify her first body…and her second one…and all of them until she met Torres. She stopped flinching at photos when he left. She had no idea if the two events were related, but she no longer felt like she was going to be sick when she saw a dead body. She was hardened but not apathetic. She still wondered about their lives and the families they had left behind, she just didn’t feel anything any more.

      “I haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?” Alan smiled at her over his bifocals. He had a clipboard in one hand and a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee in the other. Beth no longer questioned how he could casually have a cup of coffee amongst the corpses. She could do the same, honestly now it just reminded her she really wanted another cup of coffee.

      “I’m good. I have been more focused on money laundering these days. How about you?”

      Beth was at a morgue most months. Running drugs was a dangerous occupation, a lot of the men ended up here or in morgues in other border towns.

      “Good. Good. My youngest just graduated.”

      “Longhorn?”

      “That’s right. Good memory.”

      Not really. This was Texas, there was a good chance he would be a Longhorn. “Excellent. What are his plans?” Small talk, surrounded by dead people… She really had grown. Once upon a time she didn’t do small talk. She was in a hurry then, racing for a final destination. She didn’t have time for small talk then, but she wasn’t in a hurry any more. Days passing just meant Alejandra getting older and her mom’s condition getting worse.

      Alan lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “God knows. He majored in American History, apparently. I never saw any evidence of studying of any description, unless you count studying the bottom of beer bottles.”

      Beth smiled. “Sounds about right for college.”

      “What about your little girl?”

      “Alejandra. She is great. Today was her first day of kindergarten.”

      Alan sighed. “Already? It passes so quickly. You blink and they are getting their driver’s licence. Too fast.”

      Beth’s smile faded. She already knew how right he was. The last four years had been a blur. Luckily her sister had been there to document everything with her camera. At least Beth could look back and pretend to recall everything. A lot of it had been spent in survival mode; first was the shock of Torres leaving and then it had been dealing with her mom. Her Alzheimer’s had progressed quickly over the last few years. Beth pushed thoughts of her mom to the back of her mind. She could only deal with one horrible thing at a time.

      “I’m here to formally identify a body.”

      One bushy eyebrow shot up above his glasses. “Are you here in a professional or personal capacity?” He asked because formal identifications were usually done by family not Law Enforcement.

      Beth glanced at the silver wall of bodies. “Neither…both. He was my agent. I recruited him six years ago. I haven’t seen him in four years but he has no living family.” The answer was longwinded and unnecessary. She could have simply said she was here in a professional capacity. But nothing about her time with Torres was professional. It seemed an insult to his memory to pretend it was. Why she still cared was beyond her, he had been gone for a long time.

      “Name?” Alan asked. He sat down his coffee and thumbed through the papers on his clipboard.

      “Armando Torres.” The name barely made it past her lips. She never called him by his Christian name. He was always Torres to her, whether she was swearing at him or calling his name in bed, he was always just Torres. Her Torres…her scary, scarred, tattooed man. She bit her lip to keep the memory from hitting her. She had pushed it down for years. She wasn’t about to let it come out now. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it did to think about him. It shouldn’t still sting. She shouldn’t still cry.

      Alan’s eyes narrowed. “It is just a torso?”

      Beth’s breath caught. For an instant she lost the distance she’d fought so hard to achieve. For a second this was all real. She would let it be real later. She just needed to get through this. She nodded. “That’s fine. I don’t need his head to make an identification.”

      Beth closed her eyes. She knew his body as well as she knew her own. She was losing ground again, getting closer again to reality. She bit into her lip again until she tasted the metallic tang of blood.

      Alan opened the door and pulled out the body, or what was left of it. Beth closed her eyes again. She sucked in as much air as her lungs would allow, she kept forcing down oxygen until her chest burned. She counted to ten. He is a detail in your life. Just a detail…

      She opened her eyes and looked down at the stump. That was all there was left, a stump, no head, no arms, no legs. Everything from the hips down had been removed. Her gaze ran the expanse of his chest, traced the lines of the Santa Muerta tattoo that covered the left side of his body.

      Her eyes narrowed. The skin was smooth, too smooth. Before she could think she reached out and ran her hand along the margins of his chest, between his ribs. That is where the scars had been the most pronounced. Torres’ skin was knotted and raised.

      This skin was smooth.

      She pulled her hand away. Suddenly she realized she was touching a dead body. From the corner of her eye she could see Alan staring at her. She turned to face him.

      She considered her words carefully. “The tattoo is consistent with Armando Torres,” she lied. Her eyes lowered again to the body.

      It wasn’t Torres.

      Someone wanted the world to believe it was. Someone had gone to the trouble of tattooing a dead body to make it look like Torres – at least she hoped the person was already dead before he was chosen – but they could not replicate the burns.

      “I need to go,” Beth said. She needed to get out the there. She glanced down at her watch. She needed to speak to Jessop and figure out what in the hell was going on. Shit, she needed to pick up Alejandra. She wouldn’t be able to speak to him today.

      Beth threw her purse onto the passenger seat. She needed to speak to Jessop tonight. This wouldn’t wait until tomorrow. She dialed her sister’s number. Maybe Paige could pick up Alejandra. Having her sister in Texas was a godsend, not only for the co-parenting, but also because her baby sister kept her sane like