Ciudad Hueca, Mexico
Two years agoWhat a suck ass day.
To think, it started out so lovely and perfect.
Since Tula Gomez didn’t have to go into work, she’d decided to make it a bra-less, drink-wine-at-noon, binge-on-Hellraiser-movies, and masturbate-more-than-once kind of day.
Until her phone rang.
She should’ve sent her sister’s call to voicemail.
She should’ve let Vera ruin someone else’s day.
But she didn’t.
She answered the damn phone and surrendered to Vera’s demands.
Instead of slumming in her pajamas on the couch, she spent the past six hours on the road, driving toward the last city on Earth she wanted to visit.
When she crossed the New Mexico-Texas border two-hundred-miles back, her mood had spiraled past annoyance and straight into pissed-off.
She eased her Jeep Wrangler forward in the stop-start traffic, trying not to ride the old clutch. If the manual transmission decided to go out, today would be the fucking day.
Wavy lines of heat rose from the scorched asphalt. Horns blared, and some idiot a few cars back blasted his bass so loud it rattled the frame of her poor Jeep.
She grabbed her phone and redialed her sister. “Come on, Vera. Pick up.”
As it rang, she inched along with hundreds of other border-crossing commuters lined up at the Mexico port of entry.
The phone continued to ring. And ring. Why wasn’t Vera answering her calls?
“Dammit!” Tula gritted her teeth at the sound of the voicemail greeting. “This is bullshit.”
She disconnected and gripped the steering wheel, vacillating between turning back home and speeding toward hell.
Home was a one-bedroom apartment two states away in Phoenix, Arizona, where everything in her world was safe, normal, orderly, and stress-free.
Hell was her childhood colonia in Ciudad Hueca, Mexico, where Vera still lived. Her younger sister thrived in chaos, drama, and danger—all the things Tula had run away from when she moved to the states.
Her visits to Mexico were infrequent and made only out of obligation to Vera.
She didn’t shun her Mexican roots, but it had taken her a long damn time to go through the naturalization process to become a U.S. citizen. She was a proud American and a law-abiding taxpayer, who worked nine to five as a high school Spanish teacher.
Her peaceful, boring life suited her just fine. If she never stepped foot across the border again, she would be just fine with that, too.
But Vera was family. Her only living relative. And her sister needed her.
God only knew what sort of mess Vera had landed in this time. When she called this morning, the shitty connection had chopped up the short conversation into a few staticky words.
Some trouble.
Need you.
Come now.
Bring money.
When the connection had cut off, Tula called back, again and again, with no luck. None of her questions had been answered, and she had very little to go on.
Except Vera’s track record.
Last time Vera called, she needed help kicking her thieving loser boyfriend to the curb. The time before that, she’d been abandoned a day’s drive from home without money or a ride back. There were dozens of other situations over the years, and Tula always, begrudgingly, came to the rescue.
It wasn’t a secret Vera hung out with the wrong people. Living in Ciudad Hueca, it was easy to become entangled with cartels.
Tula’s nagging pleas to stay away from them fell on deaf ears, and their relationship became resentful and strained. But at the end of the day, all they had was each other.
She attempted several more phone calls while trudging along in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Rows of cars pressed in on all sides, filled with people whose frustration rivaled her own. Road rage simmered like the summer heat, all of it weighing on her with each passing minute.
An hour later, she made it through the port of entry and took the safest route toward her childhood home.
Not that there was a safe route. Ciudad Hueca was going through a volatile time. As a border city, it was perfectly located for drug distribution throughout the United States. This made it extremely valuable to cartels, turning it into one of the most fought-over territories in the country.
Since Vera refused to move to the states, Tula stayed abreast of the local news and crime here. Two violent drug cartels battled for dominance, street by street, to control the lucrative drug-trafficking routes.
Driving through her hometown, alone and unarmed, was dangerous as hell.
She kept pepper spray in her Jeep just for these visits. But no guns. Given her inexperience with weapons, she’d end up shooting herself during an attack.
As a precaution, she’d topped off the gas tank in Texas to avoid an extra stop in Mexico. No lingering. No shortcuts.
The five-hundred dollars in cash she’d stuffed in her purse would have to be enough to fix Vera’s mess. Tula planned to stay three hours tops, confirm Vera’s well-being with her own eyes, and return to the U.S. before nightfall.