The Long Con: Full Version

Part 1.

The glass breaks.

As I press his face against it, the sound of the cracking of the window is muffled by the red liquid draining from his scalp. He whimpers, ready to collapse onto the floor. I hold him there in a vice grip as he begins to quiver, trying to reach up to his open wound. I command, “Stop.” He freezes.

Head wounds bleed the worst due to trauma-induced blood vessels. The twenty percent of the blood flowing from his heart up to his brain pulses beneath my fingertips. A peace rushes over me. The oxygen-rich river encompasses my hand. I can finally breathe again.

Some people aren’t always who you think they are.

Over fifty percent of marriages end in either separation or divorce. You can’t just say “divorce” anymore, because people are too lazy—and cheap—to go through the paperwork for that. Fifteen to twenty percent of couples are sexless. I wonder what percent of couples hide something from each other. A hundred?

The man I had married is not the same man breaking on the floor in beneath me. The man I had married was happy. He had a spark in his eye. Life soaked out of him impacting all those around him with joy. But, now, as the blood pools under his fading glare, I only see my enemy.

I click on my radio. “Partner, you’d better come in here.”

“Status?”

“Just, come in here.”

Not once pitying him for the things he had done, I was glad she had waited outside.

“What the fuuuck?” Jackie’s voice carried a bemused confusion as she opened the door to the scene. “I thought you were just gonna talk, Partner?” Her brown eyes seem concerned as her well-trimmed brunette eyebrow raises toward me. Her petite Dominican frame, inherited from her mother, made her seem soft, but I knew she was a lioness. She had a fire inside.

“Don’t worry. I didn’t kill the man.”

She scoffs as she moves in closer to my ex-lover. “You’re gonna make me call this in, aren’t you?”

My husband had gone limp on the floor. But, I had done this enough to know it was just a mixture of blood loss and shock. He would be fine. “I got it.” I say—pissed--I hand her a rag for the blood and step away to phone it in.

Every nine seconds a woman in the United States is affected by domestic violence. Sexual assault can happen through physical force or threats of force. Often the victim is drugged for rape and coercion. They are pinched, pushed, shaken, pulled, punched, kicked, strangled, restrained, or thrown. They are humiliated in front of others and blamed for anything that goes wrong. They are controlled and accused of being unfaithful.

That’s not gonna be me anymore.

Part 2.

“Hey, hey, little chickie!” The words are hardly audible under his thick accent and the clamoring of the men against the metal cell doors along the walls of the long, sterile, corridor. “Come to papi!” The place smells like sweat and piss. “I love what you’ve done with your looong brown hair.” I only come here when I have to. Today, I would have rather been anywhere else. “Ba-gawk ba-gawk, cock-a-doodle-doo.” Maybe my tight jeans weren’t the best idea. “I know what you wanna see lil mama!” But, even these primal men should have some sort of control.

I don’t look as the gawker’s breath becomes heavier. “Yeah, that’s it.” I maintain my pace, destination forefront in my mind. “Shake it.” I know his hand goes down his pants. “Mmm.” I fight my gag reflex. “Right there.” The loud steel safety doors open in front of me. I step through. They close behind me. Silence. I breathe out, not realizing I had held my breath for half of the walk. As I step forward, the heels of my black cowboy books click, breaking the serenity of the empty hallway.

Static. Then, Jackie’s voice, “Perez, you don’t have to--”

I forgot I had my radio on.

”I do. Just stay in the car.” I reply, shutting it off so she couldn’t respond. Usually, I don’t do anything without Jackie. But, today is different. Today is five years.

The average temperature for Texas in the summer is above ninety degrees. Seventy-two percent of our prisons have no air conditioning. This leads to unsafe—possibly lethal—condition as those with prolonged exposure can suffer from dehydration, heat stroke, and affects in the kidney, liver, heart, brain, and lungs leading to renal failure, heart attack, or stroke.

Under my thin white shirt, I begin to sweat around my chest and armpits. Although this place feels like hell, it is still too good for the man who had taken advantage of me… the man who conned me. Was any of it real? I thought I had dealt with that question half a decade ago, yet there it is.

Flashes of the wedding, the brutality, the honeymoon, the agony, the pregnancy, the bruises, the accident all come to my mind like the sight of a child bobbing in and out of the water, up and down, back and forth, drowning and screaming for help. The only way to live had been to get out. I did.

I’m ushered into an interrogation room and motioned to sit. I take the chair as the armed guard leaves. The door locks behind him. Memories haunt me when I’m alone. My, now, ex-husband’s abuse had been just the beginning. I thought I had ended it. But, upon his arrest, they found more… more abuse… more suffering… more pain. I hadn’t been the only one that the sadistic worm had destroyed. I was just the first to get out.

The United States is annually among the three countries with the largest amount of human trafficking. These “severe forms of trafficking in persons” include, sex trafficking where sex is sold by force, fraud, or coercion, possibly induced with a minor. In many cases, there is a sort of “trauma bonding” synonymous with “Stockholm Syndrome,” where cycles of abuse are used to foster a powerful emotional connection with the victim affecting them on a neurobiological level. This may negatively affect brain development causing the victim to become numb and disconnected from themselves.

I’m still not sure if I have fully recovered. I had thought it was normal. I had thought it was love. I didn’t look for help. Thank God, Jackie was there. She had refused to let me stay the victim. It wasn’t too late.

The door opens. He walks in. Cuffed. Alone. My ex-husband was almost unrecognizable. His beard had grown into an uneven, rough, dark and gray-splotched muzzle. His head was clean-shaven apart from the scar, creating a seem in the middle, right where I gave it to him. He had fallen a long way from the straight-laced, upper-class, white man who had first stolen me away. But, the biggest change wasn’t the beard or the scalp, it was his eyes. They were cold, hardened, void of any emotion he had once held towards me.

“Sit.” I command.

He frowns as his bushy eyebrows squint toward me. “What the hell—”

“Sit.” I say it again.

He complies, sitting, facing down toward cold metal table immediately in front of him. I don’t move. After a moment, he turns his head, slowly, like a neglected animal waiting to be struck. Steadily his gaze moves as he recons every corner of the room. Every single inch, but me.

It is only then that he looks at me. His dead eyes soften for just a moment as they meet mine, almost as if they were going to break from their hardness, but the moment passes. “Why—”

“Shut up.” He doesn’t deserve to be in the same room as me. He knows it. “Why do you think you have any right to ask anything from me?” My tone comes out harsher than I had planned, but still not harsh enough.

“I’m—I’m.”

“You’re what? Innocent? I’ve heard that one… You would think after five years, you would finally change your tone—Get honest. You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it’s like to be the only cop on the force—already discredited for being a woman—a divorced woman--with the balls to stick with it after what you did to me…

How you mislead me and controlled me and tricked me to consume me… you abused me and I didn’t even know it. I thought it was normal… you abused all those women… those children… that you were selling…”

I lean in to make the point over the table, “You think I could ever believe your innocence?”

He looks down at the table again.

“You sure you feel safe in here with me?” I ask, smirking. He’s shaking. I thought it was fear at first, but as he speaks, I realize that it’s bottled-up rage, “You’re a bitch!!!” he spits at me with a line of liquid trailing back to his mouth over his thick beard. “You can’t see it.”

“And, you aren’t even man enough to know how to spit.” I wipe the discharge from my face with the back of my left hand. “Tell me about these.” I set a file on the table, opening up the pages one-by-one. They’re his victims, the women and children that he had trafficked—whose records we had found at our house, stashed where he thought no one would look—Jackie had found them behind our new drywall.

Many of them had disappeared, they were cleaned up—I assume dead—upon his arrest. How had I not known? His office hours had been getting later and later, but I assumed it was just an affair. I knew it was going to be over. But, this? It was five years ago.

Today, one of the children in his record had been spotted. A cute, blonde, seventeen-year-old girl, who still had the whole world to see... That made her thirteen when he had her. Sick. Twisted. Worm. “Tell me about her.” I flipped to her page and stayed on her.

“Never seen her in my life.” He growled.

“Tell me.” I glare with my finder on her image. It was a picture of her smiling a feigned smile. You could tell there was pain beneath it. “Tell me somethin’ about her.” He looks down at the picture and doesn’t even flinch.

“I don’t know her.” He lies through his teeth. “I said I’ve never seen her.”

“I know you have.” I snarl. “Help us find her.”

He shouts, standing, “I’m done.” He moves over to the door, pounding in anger, “I’m done.”

The door opens. The guard grabs him by the arm. He looks back at me to say, “Some people aren’t always who you think they are.” He sounds regretful as security drags him away.

At the very least, prison is painful, and those who are incarcerated often suffer long-term consequences from the pain, deprivation, and extremely atypical life. Their freedom and autonomy are torn away. Even if they re-enter the world, they fail, having become dependent on the institution.

Part 3.

“STOP!!!” I shout after her as I see the strands of her long blonde hair turn the corner ahead of me. My side is on fire from running, “We just need to talk.” We had spent weeks tracking the girl, in hopes of finding out who my ex-husband had worked for and with. Since his arrest, he only claimed innocence and clammed up about details, facts, and accomplices. But, he could have not done this on his own.

I hear a gunshot and speed forward. Jackie had gone around the other side. The girl is on the ground, bleeding out, looking up at her in terror. “No, no, no, no, no, no…” she was stammering as she lost her breath. He pupils were fully dilated. I bent down for compressions. “It was her.” She breathed. Jackie shot. I could feel the hole in my chest bleeding out.

“Some people aren’t always who you think they are,” she whispers as I drown in my own blood.