Chapter 9 - The Hidden Room
"He was a witness!" Javier shrieked, backing into the rear wall of the office, his finger tightening on the shotgun trigger. "He saw me lock the bunkhouse door! If I let him go back to you, he would have told you everything! I was keeping him here until the corporate sale went through! I was feeding him! I didn't kill him!"
Canela lunged.
With a ferocious, protective roar, the starved mother dog sprang from the floorboards, her jaws clamping down hard on Javier’s right wrist. Javier screamed in pain, the shotgun discharging into the ceiling, blasting a hole through the rusted tin sheets. Plaster and rain rained down on them.
Miguel closed the distance in a split second, swinging the heavy tire iron and knocking the barrel of the gun clean out of Javier’s grasp. The weapon clattered across the floor. Ernesto stepped in with a feral shout, driving the flat of his palm into his brother's jaw, sending the heavier man crashing over the folding table and into a heap of rusted filing cabinets.
Javier groaned on the floor, clutching his bleeding wrist, completely subdued.
Canela didn't stay to watch him bleed. She whirled around and darted toward a reinforced plywood door at the back of the office, padlocked from the outside with a heavy brass lock. She threw herself against the wood, whining and clawing with desperate fury.
"Out of the way, girl!" Ernesto commanded, raising his crowbar. He jammed the curved claw beneath the padlock hasp and hauled back with all the fury of a betrayed father.
With a shriek of bending metal, the screws tore free from the rotten wood. Ernesto kicked the door wide open.
Miguel shone his heavy work flashlight into the darkness of the windowless storage closet.
Curled on a stained mattress on the floor, clutching an old blanket, was a little boy with unruly dark curls. He was terribly thin, his clothes dirty and oversized, his dark eyes wide with terror as he shielded his face from the blinding light.
"Grandpa...?" a tiny, trembling voice whispered.
Canela didn't wait. She leaped onto the mattress, burying her muzzle into the boy's neck, whimpering with a joy so pure and overwhelming that it seemed to fill the entire concrete room. Mateo wrapped his tiny arms around the dog's neck, burying his face in her wet, cinnamon fur.
"Canela!" the boy sobbed, tears cutting clean tracks through the dirt on his cheeks. "You came back! You brought Grandpa!"
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Ernesto fell to his knees beside the mattress. The crowbar dropped from his hands. He gathered both the little boy and the dog into his massive, weathered arms, sobbing uncontrollably, his tears soaking into Mateo's hair.
"I've got you, my boy," Ernesto wept, rocking him back and forth. "I've got you. Grandpa's here. Nobody is ever going to hurt you again."
