Chapter 4 - THE WHISPER BEHIND THE GARAGE WALLThe phone rang three times before an elderly, sharp voice answered on the other end.
“Navarro? Is it done?”
The doctor looked up at Diego, terrified. Diego nodded sharply, pressing record on his own phone.
“Yes, Teresa,” Navarro said, his voice shaking. “The baby is secured at the old warehouse by the highway. But… we have a problem. The police are sniffing around the garage property. What about Lucía? If she talks—”
“Let her rot in the dry well,” Teresa’s voice hissed through the speaker. “She’s been down there eight months; a few more days won't kill her. Óscar will handle the cleanup once he makes bail. Just make sure Diego signs that deed tonight, or inject the brat with enough saline to put him out for good. I won’t lose everything because of a sentimental fool.”
Click.
The line went dead.
Diego stared at the phone. A dry well.
He remembered the empty storage room behind the country house garage. The concrete floor had sounded hollow when the investigators swept it, but they had assumed it was just a crawlspace.
“Drive,” Diego told Navarro, tossing the doctor’s keys into a dumpster. “If you ever practice medicine again, I’ll bury you.”
Diego raced back to the Guadalajara family home, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had Mateo safely buckled in the back seat, sleeping under a clean blanket.
When he reached the house, the police tape was still fluttering in the evening breeze. The neighborhood was quiet, residents peeking through their curtains at the scene of the afternoon’s chaos.
Diego slipped past the front gate, armed with a heavy sledgehammer he kept in his truck bed.
He marched straight to the garage, bypassed the locked storage room, and began swinging the hammer at the back drywall with a rhythmic, furious vengeance.
Crack. Crash. Dust.
The plaster gave way, revealing a heavy iron hatch embedded deep in the concrete foundation. A rusted padlock held it shut.
Diego swung the sledgehammer again, smashing the lock into pieces. He pulled the heavy iron door open.
A wave of damp, moldy, suffocating air billowed upward.
“Lucía?” Diego called down into the black abyss.
May you like
A weak, raspy cough echoed from the dark.
“...Diego?” a fragile voice whispered, sounding like a ghost from the grave.
