“Okay, Nic, what can we do for you?” he asked again.
“It’s a long story but I need to tell it all for you to understand why I’m here.” Ham and Gator both nodded, Jak, Christopher, and Cowboy in the room as well.
“We’re all ears.”
“When I was seventeen, I was getting into a lot of trouble at home. I lived with my aunt and she was working two jobs just trying to feed us. I was a little shit. She was trying so hard to help me and I just wouldn’t listen. Finally, she had no alternative. She sent me to live with her brother in Mexico.”
“Okay, what was that like for you?” asked Ham.
“Worse. She had no idea what or who her brother really was. Or at least she pretended like she didn’t know. His name is Felix Santori.”
“Fuck me,” mumbled Gator.
“Exactly. I knew you would know his name. I’ve heard him talk about all of you. He doesn’t know where you’re located, only that Louisiana needed to be avoided at all costs, along with several neighboring states. I came to New Orleans hoping to find you and when that nice man from the restaurant helped me, I explained it to him.”
“Okay, so Henri got you to us. What are you here for? Are you running from your uncle?” asked Ham.
“You have no idea,” he said shaking his head. “As you know, my uncle has his fingers in everything. Drugs, trafficking, all of it. He’s one of the biggest coyotes in Mexico, running illegals across the borders back and forth.”
“I don’t think we were aware of that,” said Gator frowning.
“That’s where my trouble begins. I was a kid working with two other kids, but I knew it wasn’t okay. He’d take all the money these poor people had and promise them safe passage across the border into the U.S. He got them across the border, then he’d leave them in the backs of those big trailers to die.
“He’d wait about a week, sometimes two and if no one found them, I was sent to bury the trailers. We’d use big excavation equipment.”
“The whole trailer? Why not just bury the bodies?” asked Ham.
“I didn’t ask questions back then,” said Nic. “No one did. Questions got you killed even if you were related to him. Anyway, one day he comes to me and the other two that were with me, and says they all have to be dug up, the bodies burned, and I was to take whatever was left and bury it in these fields in Iowa and Nebraska.
“I’ve done a lot of horrible shit in my life but burning those bodies was the worst. I can still smell it. At night, it’s all I smell, all I see is burning flesh. I know they were dead but it didn’t matter to me. Until about five months ago.”
“What happened that made it matter to you five months ago?” asked Gator.
“He killed my aunt. The only person who ever gave a fuck about me. She knew that I had left his employment and knew why. I told her not to tell him we’d spoken and that she should just tell him we hadn’t seen one another in years.”
“That obviously didn’t work,” said Ham.
“Not even a little,” said the man shaking his head. “He had a tracker on my phone that I didn’t know about and he sent the two other kids I had worked with to find me.
“He knew I’d been at her house. He-he beat her to death, crushed her skull. His own sister.” Tears were streaming down his face.
“I’m sorry,” said Gator.
“She was the only person who cared about me. The only one and I got her killed. I was going to find where I buried those ashes and take them to the authorities. I’d put them all in these big cardboard ice-cream barrels. I was just going to dig them up and take them to the police.”
“Nic, cardboard degrades quickly over time. Some of it is even biodegradable. It just melts into the earth. I think, we know exactly where you buried some of these people,” said Gator. “Do you know two people named Theo Grant and June Morgan?”
“Oh, God,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “They’re two of his prized negotiators and they were the ones that did this, willingly, with me. They’re the ones that go in and try to gently make people sell the land but in the end, they just do whatever is necessary to get them off. Even kill the entire family.”
“Is this just in Nebraska?” asked Ham.
“No. No, they’re planning to go to all of the locations where I had to bury these people. Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, hell, I even had several that were buried in the Dakotas. He won’t stop until he knows that the evidence is gone and I can’t live with the idea that those poor people are lost to their families forever.”
“We can protect you, Nic but you do understand that sooner or later you’re going to have to testify in front of a federal jury. That’s going to be very dangerous for you. We’ll try to ensure your safety but you need to understand…” Nic held up his hands.
“I understand perfectly. Just let me give my testimony via deposition or whatever it’s called and I’ll tell you exactly where to find all these people. It’s hundreds. Do you understand what I’m saying? Hundreds of innocent people that gave their life’s savings hoping to have better lives and we killed them. We killed them,” he sobbed.
Nothing could console the man. Exhausted from running and carrying the emotional burden of what he’d done, he looked like a man ready to give in. They couldn’t allow him to do that. Not yet.
