Free The Slab by Jeffrey J. Mariotte Page A

who were into some group action. Is that one of your fantasies, little Dove? Being taken over and used by a group of strange men?”
    She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of agreeing or shaking her head. She stared at him, fire in her eyes.
    “Ah, it doesn’t look like it,” he continued, closing the knife and shoving it back into its case on his belt. “Doesn’t really matter to us, I assure you.
    “Oh, and you noticed that I called you a Dove? That’s what this is, little Dove. This is our Dove Hunt. You’re the Dove. And we’re very good hunters.”
    ***
    As the afternoon wore on and night fell, Lupe Alvarez’s concern had turned to genuine worry. Lucia had simply gone out to the store for some beer and chips for her brothers, who had been working hard building a new room on the house. The mercado was less than a mile from home, and the whole trip should have taken twenty minutes, at the most. But she had been gone for hours, now.
    Jorge recognized the anxious look on her face as she stared at the phone, saying a silent prayer that it would ring and Lucia would be on the other end. “Mama,” he said. “We got to call the police.”
    She had resisted that all afternoon, not only because Mexicans, even legal ones, didn’t tend to think of the authorities as their friends, but also because calling them would mean admitting that something terrible had happened. But they’d tried everything else—Jorge and Diego, Lucia’s brothers, and Raul and Oscar, Lupe’s husband and father, respectively, had gone out in the boys’ truck, combing the streets for hours while Lupe had waited at home by the phone, worrying her rosary until her fingers ached. She had lit candles, she had prayed to the Virgin and the Saints. Diego had even called Dagoberto Morales, Lucia’s ex-husband, the one who had been so cruel to her that she’d been forced to leave him and move back home.
    It broke Lupe’s heart that her daughter would be divorced before she was even twenty-two. She hadn’t wanted the girl to marry him in the first place—there had been something shady about him, something that didn’t sit right with Lupe, from the very beginning. But when Lucia set her mind to something, she usually did it. This was a girl who had never owned so much as a tricycle, or training wheels, but the day she decided she wanted to ride Jorge’s big two-wheeler, she had climbed up onto the seat and, by the end of the afternoon, was an accomplished rider. Lupe thought that Lucia had inherited her own stubborn streak, and then had improved upon it.
    So Lucia got married when she wanted to get married, and when it became clear to her that Dagoberto was no good, she made up her mind to get a divorce. And Lupe had to admit, with all the men in the house, it was nice to have another woman at home again, even if only for a little while.
    But nothing was worse than this—not knowing where she was, feeling certain that something so horrible she couldn’t even put a name to it had happened.
    “He’s right,” Oscar said. “It’s time.”
    Lupe looked at her father. He was usually the last to want anything to do with the authorities. He’d been illegal when he’d moved to the Estados Unidos, and had remained here, with that status, for more than a decade. Dodging the law had become second nature to him, and continued to be even though he and the rest of the family had been citizens for several years now.
    “If you think so…” she began.
    “I do,” he said. He sat in his chair, feet up on the ottoman, arms crossed resolutely. The circulation in his legs was bad and he had to keep his feet up when he wasn’t working or they swelled and ached. Anyway, he was in his early seventies, and had earned the right to relax in the evenings. But he didn’t look very relaxed right now—with his silver-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, he looked every inch the strict schoolteacher he had been back in Veracruz. Only the bad legs and the