The car screeches to a halt. The doors open, and two men step out. They aren’t frantic like you’d expect men who just hit a girl with their car would be. Instead, they appear calm, looking up and down the street at the dark warehouses, quietly closing their doors, slowly circling to the front of the car to check on the girl.
Both of the men look to be in their late-thirties, early-forties. They wear jeans and cowboy boots. One of them has on a white short-sleeved button-down shirt tucked into his jeans, the other a blue polo. The one with the button-down shirt also wears a cowboy hat. He’s the driver. He adjusts the hat as he gazes down at the girl’s body.
“Well shit, there she is.”
The other man says, “Yep.”
“She’s still alive.”
“Barely.”
“She doesn’t have the bag, though.”
“Nope.”
The man with the cowboy hat crouches down beside the girl.
“Hey.”
When the girl doesn’t answer—she lays sprawled on the macadam, a broken mess, even more bloodied than before—the man with the cowboy hat snaps his fingers in front of her face.
“Bitch, you hear me?”
The girl still doesn’t answer. Even if she wanted to, it doesn’t look like she can. A hoarse wheezing comes from her mouth. Several of her ribs probably shattered on impact. Some of them probably pierced her lungs.
I’m standing around the corner of the alleyway, still holding the duffel bag, leaning out just far enough to watch these two men and the girl. My first instinct was to rush out immediately, but once those men had unhurriedly stepped out of the car, a red warning light started flashing in my head.
That red warning light starts pulsing faster when the driver walks back to the car—a piece of silver glinting on his belt—and opens his door and pulls out a black nine-millimeter.
Guns aren’t rare here in Texas. Alden is a small town compared to most, maybe only a thousand residents, and almost everybody carries a gun with them wherever they go.
But very few carry suppressors.
Which this man also brings out, casually screwing it onto the barrel of his gun as he returns to the front of the car.
This entire time—maybe a minute—I’ve been quiet, watching the two men. This section of Alden is deserted at this time of night. People refer to it as the industrial part of town, though many of the jobs have long since packed up and left. So many of these buildings sit empty. I usually walk home after a shift because it’s not far from the bar to my apartment, and besides, I like the fresh air after I work all night, try to get the cigarette smoke out of my hair and clothes as much as I can. The main thing is, there’s nobody around right now. These two men—men I’ve never seen before—seem to know it and don’t care that the girl is writhing in pain on the ground.
Part of me wants to go out there. Step out from around the corner and approach these men. I don’t have a gun, don’t have a knife, don’t have a weapon of any kind, but somebody needs to help the girl. Somebody needs to step in before the man places a bullet in her head.
Before I can, though, the duffel bag moves.
But it’s not the duffel bag—it’s something inside the duffel bag.
The light isn’t good here in the alleyway, but there’s enough light that when I open the duffel bag I can easily tell what’s inside.
A baby.
It looks newly born—no more than a month old—and it has a pacifier in its mouth, the only thing keeping it quiet. Its dark eyes look up at me, searching, and like that, the pacifier falls out of its mouth.
The baby’s face scrunches up. It looks ready to start wailing—it even sucks in a breath—but I slip my finger into its mouth before it can. Still, it made some noise, just a tiny bit, and I hold my breath, hoping the men didn’t hear.
For an instant, silence.
Then one of the men—what sounds like the passenger in the blue polo—says, “Did you hear that?”
In response, the quiet thut thut of two bullets from the silenced gun.
Without even looking around the corner again, I can tell the girl’s now dead. Probably shot in the face to put her out of her misery. Not that she couldn’t have been saved. The men could have called for an ambulance. Assuming they still wanted her alive.
The driver says, “Hear what?”
“It sounded like something came from the alley.”
“I didn’t hear anything. It bothers you, go check it out.”
By the time the man in the blue polo steps into the alleyway, I’m no longer there. Neither is the duffel bag or the baby inside it.
A dumpster sits halfway down the alley, an abandoned dumpster that’s rusting after years of disuse. I’m crouched behind it, cradling the duffel bag, my finger still in the baby’s mouth.
If the man advances down the alley, he’ll surely see me. In that case, I’ll have to gently set the duffel bag aside, do what I can to protect the baby. The man probably has a gun, just like his partner, but that’s okay. I haven’t worked in a year, but I’m confident that my training will kick back in once it’s needed. Two men with pistols? Easy. Then again, right now that’s not my main concern. My main concern is the baby.
But the man doesn’t advance much farther. He takes a couple steps forward—the dull clap of his boots echoing against the brick walls—and shines a flashlight down the alley, but that’s it.
The driver calls, “Anything?”
“No.”
“Then get your ass back here and help me put her body in the trunk.”
“What about the bag?”
“She could’ve dropped it anywhere in the past couple blocks.”
“We need that bag.”
“What we need to do is clean up this mess. Now hurry over here and give me a hand.”
The flashlight beam winks out. The man’s footsteps fade away as he leaves the alley and returns to the car.
The baby’s suckling on my finger so much it’s starting to hurt. With my other hand, I dig around in the bag—feel a blanket, a bottle, a small container of formula, and then the pacifier.
I risk pulling out my finger just for an instant so I can replace it with the pacifier.
I wait another beat, listening to the men as they quietly work to clean up the body, and then I peek around the corner to make sure the alley is dark and empty.
Cradling the duffel bag again, I start back toward the mouth of the alleyway, hurrying as quietly as possible, intent on getting this baby as far away from the men with guns as I can.