The morning desert was purple and orange. The air was almost cool. Arnie had a Styrofoam cooler loaded with Dr. Peppers and Cokes. He drove a bitchin’ S-Class Benz. It smelled like leather and aftershave. He kept the satellite tuned to BBC Radio 1. “You like the crazy maricón music, right?” he asked.
“… Ah … right.”
It was more like flying than driving, and when he sped past Arivaca, I wasn’t all that concerned. I figured we were going to Nogales, Arizona. But we slid through that little dry town like a shark and crossed into Mex without slowing down. He just raised a finger off the steering wheel and motored along, saying, “You going to like this.”
And then we were through Nogales, Mexico, too. Black and tan desert. Saguaros and freaky burned-looking cactuses. I don’t know what that stuff was. It was spiky.
We took a long dirt side road. I was craning around, looking at the bad black mountains around us.
“Suspension makes this road feel like butter,” Arnie noted.
We came out in a big valley. There was an airfield of some sort there. Mexican army stuff—trucks, Humvees. Three or four hangars or warehouses. Some shiny Cadillacs and SUVs scattered around.
“You going to like this,” Arnie said. “It’s a surprise.”
There was Big Poppa Popo, the old man himself. He was standing with his hands on his hips. With a tall American. Those dark gray lenses turned toward us. We parked. We got out.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Shut up,” said Arnie.
“Where’s the rancho?” I asked.
The American burst out laughing.
“Jesus, kid!” he shouted. He turned to the old man. “He really is a dumbshit.”
He walked away and got in a white SUV. He slammed the door and drove into the desert, back the way we had come. We stood there watching him go. I’m not going to lie—I was getting scared.
“You marry Amapola?” the old man said.
“One day. Look, I don’t know what you guys are doing here, but—”
“Look at that,” he interrupted, turning from me and gesturing toward a helicopter sitting on the field. “Huey. Old stuff, from your Vietnam. Now the Mexican air force use it to fight las drogas.” He turned to me. “You use las drogas?”
“No! Never.”
They laughed.
“Sure, sure,” the old man said.
“Ask Amapola!” I cried. “She’ll tell you!”
“She already tell me everything,” he said.
Arnie put his arm around my shoulders. “Come,” he said, and started walking toward the helicopter. I resisted for a moment, but the various Mexican soldiers standing around were suddenly really focused and not slouching and were walking along all around us.
“What is this?” I said.
“You know what I do?” the old man asked.
“Business?” I said. My mind was blanking out, I was so scared.
“Business.” He nodded. “Good answer.”
We came under the blades of the big helicopter. I’d never been near one in my life. It scared the crap out of me. The Mexican pilots looked out their side windows at me. The old man patted the machine.
“President Bush!” he said. “DEA!”
I looked at Arnie. He smiled, nodded at me. “Fight the drogas,” he said.
The engines whined and chuffed and the rotor started to turn.
“Is very secret what we do,” said the old man. “But you take a ride and see. Is my special treat. You go with Arnulfo.”
“Come with me,” Arnie said.
“You go up and see, then we talk about love.”
The old man hurried away, and it was just me and Arnie and the soldiers with their black M16s.
“After you,” Arnie said.
He pulled on a helmet. Then we took off. It was rough as hell. I felt like I was being pummeled in the ass and lower back when the engines really kicked in. And when we rose, my guts dropped out through my feet. I closed my eyes and gripped the webbing Arnie had fastened around my waist. “Holy God!” I shouted. It was worse when we banked—the side doors were wide open, and I screamed like a girl, sure I was falling out. The Mexicans laughed and shook their heads, but I didn’t care.
Arnie was standing in the door. He unhooked a big gun from the stanchion where it had been strapped with its barrel pointed up. He dangled it in the door on cords. He leaned toward me and shouted, “Sixty caliber! Hung on double bun-gees!” He slammed a magazine into the thing and pulled levers and snapped snappers. He leaned down to me again and shouted, “Feel the vibration? You lay on the floor, it makes you come!”
I thought I heard him wrong.
We were beating out of the desert and into low hills. I could see our shadow below us, fluttering like a giant bug on the ground and over the bushes. The seat kicked up and we were rising.
Arnulfo took a pistol from his belt and showed me.
“Amapola,” he said.
I looked around for her, stupidly. But then I saw what was below us, in a watered valley. Orange flowers. Amapola. Poppies.
“This is what we do,” Arnulfo said.
He raised his pistol and shot three rounds out the door and laughed. I put my hands over my ears.
“You’re DEA?” I cried.
He popped off another round.
“Is competition,” he said. “We do business.”
Oh my God.
He fell against me and was shouting in my ear and there was nowhere I could go. “You want Amapola? You want to marry my sobrina? Just like that? Really? Pendejo.” He grabbed my shirt. “Can you fly, gringo? Can you fly?” I was shaking. I was trying to shrink away from him, but I could not. I was trapped in my seat. His breath stank, and his lips were at my ear like hers might have been, and he was screaming, “Can you fly, chingado? Because you got a choice! You fly, or you do what we do.”
I kept shouting, “What? What?” It was like one of those dreams where nothing makes sense. “What?”
“You do what we do, I let you live, cabrón.”
“What?”
“I let you live. Or you fly. Decide.”
“I don’t want to die!” I yelled. I was close to wetting my pants. The Huey was nose-down and sweeping in a circle. I could see people below us, running. A few small huts. Horses or mules. A pickup started to speed out of the big poppy field. Arnulfo talked into his mike and the helicopter heaved after it. Oh no, oh no. He took up the .60 caliber and braced himself. I put my fingers in my ears. And he ripped a long stream of bullets out the door. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. Louder than the loudest thing you can imagine. So loud your insides jump, but it all becomes an endless rip of noise, like thunder cracking inside your bladder and your teeth hurt from gritting against it.
The truck just tattered, if metal can tatter. The roof of the cab blew apart and the smoking ruin of the vehicle spun away below us and vanished in dust and smoke and steam.
I was crying.
“Be a man!” Arnulfo yelled.
We were hovering. The crew members were all turned toward me, staring.
Arnie unsnapped my seat webbing.
“Choose,” he said.
“I want to live.”
“Choose.”
You know how it goes in
Die Hard
movies. How the hero kicks the bad guy out the door and sprays the Mexican crew with the .60 and survives a crash landing. But that’s not what happened. That didn’t even cross my mind. Not even close. No, I got up on terribly shaky legs, so shaky I might have pitched out the open door all by myself to discover that I could not, in fact, fly. I said, “What do I do?” And the door gunner grabbed me and shoved me up to the hot gun. The ground was wobbling far below us, and I could see the Indian workers down there. Six men and a woman. And they were running. I was praying and begging God to get me out of this somehow and I was thinking of my beautiful lover and I told myself I didn’t know how I got there and the door gunner came up behind me now, he slammed himself against my ass, and he said, “Hold it, lean into it. It’s gonna kick, okay? Finger on the trigger. I got you.” And I braced the .60 and I tried to close my eyes and prayed I’d miss them and I was saying,
Ama-pola, Amapola,
over and over in my mind, and the gunner was hard against me, he was erect and pressing it into my buttocks and he shouted, “For love!” and I squeezed the trigger.
H
e said he wouldn’t talk to me. I asked him why. He said because he was a cop and I was a journalist. I said he sounded like a guy with something to hide. He said no, he had nothing to hide.
“So talk to me,” I said, and I knew he would.
He scuffed around for a minute more, hands on the top of the bar, drumming his fingers, moving a little on his stool. I knew him fairly well. He was edging out of the summer of his career and entering the autumn. His best years were behind him. He was in the valley, facing a long ten years before his pension. He liked winning, but losing didn’t worry him too much. He was a realistic man. But he liked to be sure. What he hated was not really knowing whether he had won or lost.
“From the top,” I said.
He shrugged and took a sip of his beer and sighed and blew fumes toward the mirror facing us. Then he started with the 911 call. The house, out beyond Chandler, south and east of the city. A long low ranch, prosperous, walled in, the unlit pool, the darkness. The parents, arriving home from a party. The silence. The busted window, the empty bed. The trail of blood through the hallway. The daughter’s body, all ripped up. Fourteen years old, damaged in a way he still wasn’t prepared to discuss.
I said, “There were details that you withheld.”
He asked, “How do you know?”
“You guys always do that. To evaluate the confessions.”
He nodded.
I asked, “How many confessions did you get?”
“A hundred and eight.”
“All phony?”
“Of course.”
“What information did you withhold?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Why not? You not sure you got the right guy?”
He didn’t answer.
“Keep going,” I said.
So he did. The scene was clearly fresh. The parents had gotten back maybe moments after the perpetrator had exited. Police response had been fast. The blood on the hallway carpet was still liquid. Dark red, not black, against the kid’s pale skin. The kid’s pale skin was a problem from the start. They all knew it. They were in a position to act fast and heavy, so they were going to, and they knew it would be claimed later that the speed was all about the kid being white, not black or brown. It wasn’t. It was a question of luck and timing. They got a fresh scene, and they got a couple of breaks. I nodded, like I accepted his view. Which I did. I was a journalist, and I liked mischief as much as the next guy, but sometimes things were straightforward.
“Go on,” I said.
There were photographs of the kid all over the house. She was an only child. She was luminous and beautiful. She was stupefying, the way fourteen-year-old white Arizona girls often are.
“Go on,” I said.
The first break had been the weather. There had been torrential rain two days previously, and then the heat had come back with a vengeance. The rain had skimmed the street with sand and mud and the heat had baked it to a film of dust, and the dust showed no tire tracks other than those from the parents’ vehicle and the cop cars and the ambulance. Therefore the perpetrator had arrived on foot. And left on foot. There were clear marks in the dust. Sneakers, maybe size ten, fairly generic soles. The prints were photographed and e-mailed and everyone was confident that in the fullness of time some database somewhere would match a brand and a style. But what was more important was that they had a suspect recently departed from a live scene on foot, in a landscape where no one walked. So APBs and be-on-the-lookouts were broadcast for a two-mile radius. It was midnight and more than a hundred degrees and pedestrians were going to be rare. It was simply too hot for walking. Certainly too hot for running. Any kind of sustained physical activity would be close to a suicide attempt. Greater Phoenix was that kind of place, especially in the summer.
Ten minutes passed and no fugitives were found.
Then they got their second break. The parents were reasonably lucid. In between all the bawling and screaming they noticed their daughter’s cell phone was missing. It had been her pride and joy. An iPhone, with an AT&T contract that gave her unlimited minutes, which she exploited to the max. Back then iPhones were new and cool. The cops figured the perp had stolen it. They figured the kind of guy who had no car in Arizona would have been entranced by a small shiny object like an iPhone. Or else if he was some kind of big-time deviant, maybe he collected souvenirs. Maybe the cache of photographs of the kid’s friends was exciting. Or the text messages stored in the memory.
“Go on,” I said.
The third break was all about middle-class parents and fourteen-year-old daughters. The parents had signed up for a service whereby they could track the GPS chip in the iPhone on their home computer. Not cheap, but they were the kind of people who wanted to know their kid was telling the truth when she said she was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house or riding with a buddy to the library. The cops got the password and logged on right there and then and saw the phone moving slowly north, toward Tempe. Too fast for walking. Too fast for running. Too slow to be in a car.
“Bike?” one of them said.
“Too hot,” another answered. “Plus no tire tracks in the driveway.”
The guy telling the story next to me on his stool had been the one who had understood.
“Bus,” he said. “The perp is on the bus.”
Greater Phoenix had a lot of buses. They were for workers paid too little to own cars. They shuttled folks around, especially early in the morning and late at night. The giant city would have ground to a halt without them. Meals would have gone unserved, pools uncleaned, beds unmade, trash not collected. Immediately all the cops as one imagined a rough profile. A dark-skinned man, probably small, probably crazy, rocking on a seat as a bus headed north. Fiddling with the iPhone, checking the music library, looking at the pictures. Maybe with the knife still in his pocket, although surely that was too much to ask.