NINE

Talia’s first ride on a motorcycle. Its owner smelled of cigarettes with a touch of cheap cologne. He had smooth arms and a long scar above his beltline that disappeared beneath his shirt. Her thighs spread around his. Her arms circled his waist, and she knew he must have felt her breasts against his back. A peculiar closeness despite the noise of the motor, the heat of exhaust under her feet, wind burning her eyes so she had no choice but to shield her face with his shoulder.

She’d found him by the side of a narrow street back in Barichara after she left the French guy’s apartment. The streets were quiet. She didn’t want to take a chance waiting for a bus, especially when he might come looking for her after waking and realizing he’d been robbed. This guy was straddled over his bike, putting on his helmet, when Talia ran up to him and offered the Frenchman’s phone and everything in his wallet if he could get her out of town.

He inspected the phone and counted all the cards in the wallet slits as if he received such propositions daily. She’d already removed the cash and stuffed it into the crotch of her underwear. He pointed to a government ID. “Can I have this too?”

“Everything.”

“You shouldn’t pick tourists’ pockets. It will give the town a bad name. We depend on their money around here.”

“It’s not what you think. Take me out of here right now and I’ll tell you more later.”

He looked to be a few years older than Talia and not particularly dangerous. Unless he had a gun, but from her position as his passenger, she could feel every crease of his clothing, see down the seat of his jeans, and was pretty sure he wasn’t armed.

The girls in the facility said if you are ever attacked or need to kill a guy but have no weapon, shove your fingers into his eye sockets and twist them like corkscrews. Don’t be shaken if you take out an eyeball. Those things are not as well attached as one might think. Doing this will disable the guy so you can get in a kick to his scrotum. Once he’s doubled over, grab his penis and pull, and when you have him on the ground like a dying roach you can reach for a rock or some other weighty object to drop on his head. This is assuming you don’t have a knife. But if you do, it’s best to try to gash the throat instead of aiming for the body because between ribs and fat and muscle, wounding to kill with a blade is a gamble you’d better not take. It’s much more effective to bash his skull.

None of the girls were full-fledged murderers yet. Those kids were sent somewhere else, housed in a building with no prayer of escape. And should one get close to fleeing, they might be strangled or drowned in a bucket of water and have it labeled an accident or suicide. But some of the girls at the prison school were definite contenders for serious miscreant behavior. Not premeditated like a sicario, but potentially taking a life if sufficiently set off. A couple of girls had tried to kill their fathers, stepfathers, or uncles for molesting them, and who could blame them? One girl stabbed a teacher. She told Talia she couldn’t stand sitting in that class, listening to that arrogant perra lecture for another minute. But as the girls said, it’s not easy to kill by knife, so the teacher survived just fine, and the girl was sentenced to a year on the mountain.