Crossers (13 page)

“Page two bein’ what?”

“Then the killer goes looking for Miguel.”

“The sign tells you that?”

“I found prints matching his out in the wash. He was moving back and forth like he was looking for something or someone, and my money would be on someone. See what I’m saying?”

“He knew there was three of them.”

“Right. So he doesn’t find Miguel. He can’t keep up the search. He’s just killed a couple of people. So he pulls the brush apart and snatches the merca. Drags the bales to the ATV—the drag marks are plain as day—loads up, and takes off—fast. You look at the tire treads, you see where the wheels spun and the vehicle swerved when he punched the gas. There it is, there’s the story.”

Blaine squinted at him, chicken claws forming at the corners of his eyes. “But there’s a whole lot don’t make sense. You’re sayin’ some guy just happens to be drivin’ by on his four-wheeler, just happens to be carryin’ a gun, just happens to run into those old boys, just happens to know they’ve got a load of dope hidden in them rocks, then holes them both and rips the stuff off? That’s about three too many coincidences for me to swallow.”

Morales stood and ran his fingers around the brim of his hat. “Blaine! The perp didn’t just
happen
to run into them. He had to be the guy who was supposed to take delivery. He probably didn’t know about what went down on the other side, so when his mules didn’t show, he must’ve figured they were ripping him off and went looking for them. Maybe it was just blind luck that he did find them, or maybe he had some tracking skills and picked up their trail. How did he know where they’d stashed the dope? He asked them, and Héctor and Reynaldo, figuring this was their guy, told him.
Sí, señor, tenemos la merca
, and there it is, under that brush.”

“So why kill them if they was bein’ so cooperative?”

“I’m a tracker. I know what the ground tells me happened or probably happened. Why it happened and motive and all that shit, that’s for the sheriff. I don’t investigate crimes.”

“But hell, you got to have a good guess to make it add up.”

“Maybe the plan was to kill them all along.”

Blaine scuffed the ground with a boot. “John, the drug boss what sent those three sad sacks over the line with all that merchandise got to have an IQ not much bigger than my hat size.”

“Been done before, turning migrants into mules to pay their way. Those three, they were just backs to put the stuff on.”

The sergeant and his partner used their VHF radio to summon a team of investigators.

“Could be a while before they get here,” the sergeant added. “But you boys stick around. They might have a few questions for you. You in particular, sir,” he said, looking at Castle. “You found the only eyewitness, and that’s what got this pretty little ball rolling.”

They returned to where the horses were tied and sat in the shade. Castle wanted nothing more than to go back to his cabin, to his dog and his Seneca. It gladdened his heart to know that he had rescued Miguel, but that simple act of mercy had somehow enmeshed him in something he wanted no part of. He pondered the chain of accidents that had led him to this point, beginning with his decision, made for no special reason, to hunt close to home this morning. A chain of accidents, yes, but when he looked at it in its totality, it did not seem accidental; it had the quality of fate, as if the course of his life and Miguel’s were destined to meet. Break one link, and he would not be here with his cowboy cousin and a Navaho tracker and a Mexican vaquero and two dead strangers lying amid the willows and broom across a road in the desert.

Blaine tapped a cigarette out of his pack and offered one to Morales, who shook his head. “Those things will kill you sure as a bullet.”

“Not these.” Blaine held up the blue package with the face of an Indian in full headdress. “This here brand has got none of those additives and preservatives. It’s a healthy cigarette.”

Morales snorted. “I like that. A healthy cigarette. Like healthy strychnine.”

Blaine took a deep drag, tilted his head back, and exhaled a long plume of smoke. “There. I feel better already.” Gerardo rolled one of his own. He understood almost as little English as Castle did Spanish, but he seemed content to sit there smoking in silent detachment.

“I was just thinkin’, John,” said Blaine abruptly, “that our granddad, mine and Gil’s, wouldn’t of put up with none of this shit. He was at one time a deputy sheriff of Santa Cruz County. Back in the twenties and thirties.”

“Are you leading up to something or just passing time?”

Blaine said, “He’d found out some son of a bitch killed two men on his land, he wouldn’t of called the law—”

“Of course not,” Morales interrupted. “He
was
the law.”

“Even when he wasn’t, is what I’m sayin’. He would of made it his business to find the son of a bitch, and when he did … I’ll tell you a story. This was back before he was a lawman, nineteen eighteen or around then. He was out checkin’ the range and caught this guy with a runnin’ iron and a San Ignacio calf with a piggin’ rope round its back legs. Ben got the old drop on him and got off his horse and cold-cocked him with a butt stroke of his saddle gun. He didn’t want to waste good rope tyin’ him up, so he got his cutters and snipped off some barbed wire from a fence nearby and wrapped it around the rustler’s wrists and ankles. Ben flung him over the horse and rode with him all the way to Patagonia, to the town marshal’s office, and dumped the guy right there. Marshal comes out, Ben says, ‘Caught this fella a-tryin’ to steal one of our calves. You don’t take care of him, I will.’” Blaine snubbed the cigarette in the dirt, then field-stripped it—an old habit from Vietnam. “Did your mama ever tell you that story, Gil?”

“She hardly ever talked about him,” Castle said, a split-screen image in his mind: the Darien matron tending her garden on Scott’s Cove; her father cracking a rustler’s jaw with a rifle butt and tying him up with barbed wire. That such a woman had sprung from such a man seemed almost unnatural, as if parent and offspring belonged to two distinct species.

“That’s the kind of man he was,” said Blaine, with reverence. “‘You don’t take care of him, I will.’”

“Different times,” said Morales. “Nowadays the rustler would probably sue.”

“They wasn’t much for lawsuits back then. But if Ben was alive today, count on it, the son of a bitch what shot those two sad sacks wouldn’t enjoy his newfound wealth for long.”

“The dude with the IQ your hat size. Maybe he’s not so dumb after all.”

“I don’t care if he’s Albert goddamn Einstein. I don’t want him and those other greaseballs usin’ my ranch as a highway for the poison they’re peddlin’, grass, coke, or heroin.” Blaine scooped up a handful of dirt and sifted it through his fingers. “Sung to the land,” he said in a quieter voice. “An Aussie commando I knew in Vietnam told me that’s what the aboriginal folks say about a place that’s a part of you so much, you’d die of bein’ away from it. Sung to the land. That’s how I feel about this ranch. I’ve always taken good care of it, and I intend to continue doin’ just that.”

Morales clapped him on the shoulder. “Know the feeling. But we both know that this valley has been a drug corridor for twenty years.”

“Yeah. But this here shootin’ puts things on a different level.” Blaine paused and watched a harrier soar over the wash. “I’ve got a near-eighty-year-old mother to think about. Feisty as all hell and probably in better shape than me, but she is lookin’ at eighty.”

The sound of approaching cars intruded. In a moment a small convoy came jouncing down the road—two SUVs from the sheriff’s department and an ambulance with its roof lights flashing but its siren off. One of the cars swung off sideways to block the road. A patrolman climbed out and immediately began to rope off the area with yellow tape stamped with black lettering,
KEEP OUT—CRIME SCENE,
though it was unlikely anyone would come tramping through this remote area. Two plainclothesmen emerged from the second car, and while one—a homicide detective who gave his name as Lieutenant Soto—questioned Castle, Blaine, and Gerardo. Morales led the other, carrying a camera and a black briefcase, to the bodies. He photographed them from different angles, then took pictures of the four-wheeler’s tire marks and the footprints. When he was finished, he signaled the EMTs, who pulled out a stretcher and body bags from the ambulance and went up the wash to collect Héctor and Reynaldo. All this investigative activity had a degree of unreality—it looked like a scene from a cop show—but those were real corpses being placed into the body bags. How would their families be located? Castle asked himself. Who would notify them, new citizens in the nation of grief? He could almost hear the lamentations that would rise from obscure villages in Mexico, and those but a few voices in the vast chorus of mourning singing even now in homes in America, in Afghanistan, in a thousand other places. If you could broadcast the groans and shrieks and howls of a single day, the sound would deafen the world.

Morales returned. “We’re done. The rest is up to them,” he said, jerking his head at the detectives as they poked through the brush.

“What do you think?” asked Blaine. “I mean the chances they’ll catch the guy?”

Morales glanced at the EMTs, shoving one of the bodies into the ambulance. “Two more dead drug mules? Don’t think this will be on the sheriff’s A-list.”

C
ASTLE’S ACT
of human decency had opened a breach in his sanctuary’s walls, and the world he thought he’d renounced came marching in. All next day reporters phoned the ranch, asking to interview him. Monica took the calls—there was no phone in the cabin—and relayed them to Castle on his cell. He did not answer one, prompting the reporters to call again. Monica got annoyed. “I feel like your press secretary,” she said. “Can I give them your cell number?” No, she could not. “Just tell them I’m out of town.”

His refusals did not keep his name out of the papers or off the air. Though bodies turned up almost every day on the Arizona desert, Héctor’s and Reynaldo’s deaths, and Miguel’s ordeal, possessed sufficient novelty to make the evening news on TV and the front pages of the
Arizona Daily Star in
Tucson, the
Nogales International
, and Patagonia’s local weekly, the
Bulletin
.
TWO BORDER CROSSERS MURDERED—Hunter’s Rescue of Lost Migrant Leads to Grisly Find
, its headline cried from the vending machines in front of the post office and the Stage Stop Hotel. All this sensationalism had made Castle the center of a repulsive attention. One day, as he was buying groceries in the Patagonia Market, he was practically accosted by a man he’d never seen before. “Hey! You’re the guy who found those dead Mexicans!” He fled without correcting the man’s misinformation—he’d found a
live
Mexican—and holed up in his cabin for the next week.

Almost every night he lay awake till past midnight, listening for footsteps outside, waiting for Sam to warn him of intruders. In the penumbra between sleep and waking, he experienced visions, half dream, half hallucination, of Héctor’s and Reynaldo’s wounds, of dried blood, of the killer’s boot prints in the dust. He snapped out of one at four in the morning, convinced that the murderer was sneaking up on his cabin to kill him. There was no reason for the man to come after him, but at such an hour the rational mind is overthrown by the lizard brain. He got up, loaded his shotgun, and propped it against the wall next to his bed, which made him feel only a little less vulnerable. The next day he drove to the Walgreens in Nogales to renew his Ambien prescription. The pharmacist told him he could pick it up in an hour. Castle took the opportunity to go to the sporting goods department at Wal-Mart, where he bought a .357 Magnum revolver, two boxes of ammunition, and a set of paper targets. He practiced behind his house. Although he was less adept with a pistol than with a rifle or shotgun, he put more than half his shots in the black at twenty-five yards. That left the question as to whether he was capable of shooting another human being, even in self-defense. The possibility could not be dismissed that if confronted by someone who meant to take his life, he would let him take it.

5

W
HEN
T
HE
P
ROFESSOR FINISHED SHOWERING
and stepped into the bedroom, he found Clarice lying on the bed on her stomach, her bare rear end hoisted. “Woof!” she said, twisting her head to look at him with a maniacal grin. “Woof! Woof!”

She wasn’t acting on one of her sudden, mindless impulses. Not fifteen minutes ago, fully dressed in her park ranger’s uniform, she’d left his hotel room. She must have deliberately left the door ajar, then sneaked back in and taken off her clothes, which, he noticed, were draped neatly over a chair—more evidence of premeditation. For all he knew, she’d been posturing there on the floor the whole time he was in the shower, doggedly (the adverb seemed apt) waiting for her scrubbed lover to come to her.

He said calmly, “I thought I told you to leave.”

“Not before you fuck me, Euclid.” She added a syllable to the name she knew him by—E—yew-clid—and wiggled her ass. She was somewhere in her early forties, a few years older than he, but her bottom, like the rest of her body, had been kept fit by the long treks she made up desert canyons and mountainsides, searching for lost hunters and hikers—a woman skilled in effecting rescues of everyone but herself.

Her shamelessness disgusted him, but his cock reacted to her presentation as his knee would to the tap of a physician’s mallet. A surprise—he thought last night’s festivities had depleted him for at least a week. Well, the easiest way to get rid of her, the
only
way as far as his cock was concerned, was to do what she wanted. Peeling off the towel wrapped around his waist, he climbed onto the bed and knelt behind her, caressing the divided globe of her bottom with both hands, its curves evoking a sound like a trumpet—Ta-ra-ta-ta!—its smoothness causing a luminous green blob to shimmer before his eyes, its creamy color summoning up a scent like flowers. Fucking Clarice was a multimodal experience, a son et lumière show, with shape prompting sound, texture color, color smell—the full sensory package of his peculiar condition. He threw himself into the act with élan, not so much for the pleasure of it as to get himself off and her out of the room as quickly as possible. He accomplished the first goal in less than two minutes.

“Now that wasn’t so difficult, was it?” she said, squirming into her panties, her tanned face aglow with triumph.

How he regretted taking up with this lustful lunatic, the randy ranger. The Professor led a precarious life. His work—his calling, as he liked to think of it—required the concentration of a high-wire artist working without a net. Unpredictable Clarice threatened his ability to keep his balance.

“On your way,” he said. “I’m running late.”

“Such a busy, busy boy.” She got into her uniform and passed a comb through her hair, tinted a macadam shade of black and cropped raggedly short, as if by a stylist with delirium tremens. “Late for what? Why is it you won’t tell me what you do?”

“Consider the possibility that it’s none of your business.”

She pressed the tip of his nose as if it were a doorbell. “You wouldn’t be a narc, would you, darling?”

He clutched her wrist and fixed upon her the unnerving stare of his deep-set, preternaturally blue eyes, a stare that seemed to look through its object rather than at it, with the emotionless concentration of a predator studying its prey before a pounce.

“Hey, okay, asshole, I get your point,” she said, and he relaxed his grip.

“Now it really is time for you to go,” he said almost tenderly.

With relief, he watched the door close behind her. For good measure, he locked it. Patience, he counseled himself. Wait for her to end it. She was bound to sooner rather than later. Clarice openly boasted of her many conquests of younger men, and although she was faithful to whomever she was screwing at the time (she’d once described herself as a “serial slut”), she got bored fairly quickly and moved on.

The Professor had inherited some of his Mexican mother’s theatrical, quasi-pagan Catholicism. Even though his rendezvous with Nacho was going to be routine, he considered it prudent to go forth in a state of grace. Returning to the bathroom, he soaked a washcloth in water as hot as he could stand and cleansed Clarice from his privates while silently reciting an Act of Contrition, followed by a prayer to Jesús Malverde, patron saint of border traffickers. The Professor did not directly traffic in drugs or people—his main commodity was information—but he figured Malverde’s protection covered that as well.

After dressing (pressed blue jeans, ostrich-skin cowboy boots, a brown leather jacket), he rode the antique elevator—it had a folding cage door, a brass dial and floor arrow, even an elevator operator—down to the lobby. He always stayed at the Gadsden on his sorties into Douglas because, being a history buff and something of a romantic, he liked its exceedingly retro atmosphere, its Italian marble columns and swooping staircase, up which Pancho Villa was said to have ridden his horse in a fit of revolutionary enthusiasm, evoking images of Douglas’s glory days as a rich copper-mining town. He handed his key—a metal key, not some flimsy plastic card—to the desk clerk and paid his bill. Although the Gadsden wasn’t so retro that it didn’t take credit cards, he paid in cash. It was his habit to leave a light paper trail. “See you next trip, Mr. Carrington,” the clerk said. This was the identity he assumed on the U.S. side of the line, Euclid J. Carrington. Managing the activities of his various incarnations, all united in the person of The Professor, was his high-wire act. A careless step, a distraction at the wrong moment, an incautious word uttered to the wrong person could have terrible consequences, of which a bullet in the brain would be the least terrible.

Outside, on this nippy Sunday morning, G Avenue was empty, the quiet hinting at the deserted town Douglas might have become if, after Phelps Dodge shut down the copper smelters in the 1980s, a brisk trade in narcotics, passing through the port of entry from Agua Prieta, had not provided new employment opportunities for some of its citizens and restored its prosperity. The Professor walked around to the parking lot in back of the Gadsden and got into his rented Ford Explorer. His own car—or rather, the car belonging to his other avatar, Gregorio Bonham, a captain in the Mexican Federal Judicial Police—was stashed at MFJP headquarters in Agua Prieta, where he had spent Friday and Saturday snooping into the recent activities of Yvonne Menéndez, the city’s narco-queen. As he always did when a meeting with Nacho had been arranged, he’d crossed the line on foot, informing the U.S. Customs cop that he was an American tourist returning from a day trip, a masquerade to which his appearance lent authenticity. He looked more gringo than most gringos, his English father’s genes having won supremacy over his mother’s, except for the tinge of olive in his complexion, which was barely noticeable.

Very little about him was noticeable, as befitted a man who preferred the shadows to the light. He was of unimpressive stature, exactly five feet nine and a half inches tall and 160 pounds. His maple-brown hair was cut short (he eschewed the shaggy look affected by most clandestine operatives), and his features were so well proportioned and symmetrical as to be unmemorable. Indeed, a large mole on his left cheek having been surgically removed some time ago, his face looked like one of those generic faces that used to appear in back-page magazine ads for mail-order artists’ schools.
DRAW ME AND WIN TWO FREE LESSONS!
The one striking aspect of his appearance were those pale eyes that looked as if a pair of thumbs had pressed them halfway back into his skull and that seemed to be lit from within, the fixity of their gaze unsettling to everyone who met them. This stare wasn’t something he affected to frighten people, though he occasionally found its intimidation useful. He was simply focused, noticing details, on the lookout for threats, for the tics of expression or gesture that betrayed a liar. He was a hunter whose quarry was reliable information—“actionable intelligence,” in military jargon—and like all hunters, he was acutely aware of his environment at all times.

Before starting off, he called Nacho on his—that is, Carrington’s—cell phone.

“U.S. Border Patrol. Agent Gomez speaking,” Nacho answered.

“Ignacio. I’m running late.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Less than an hour later he parked beside Nacho’s unmarked Jeep Cherokee at the junction of two ranch roads in the San Bernardino Valley. Under a blank winter sky the vehicles were lost in the vastness of the desert uplands rising westward to the Chiricahuas, eastward to the embrowned crags of the Peloncillos, where Geronimo had surrendered. The Professor loved it out here—the emptiness, the silence, the Sonoran Desert’s wholeness that mocked the lines little men had drawn on their maps.

He climbed into the Cherokee and with a cursory handshake said, “Awfully good to see you again, Ignacio.” Despite his American schooling and U.S. Army service, his English still bore traces of his father’s Briticisms.

“Nacho
is okay. We’ve known each other long enough.”

“You’re not a tortilla chip,” The Professor joked. Concerned that the Border Patrol agent would think he was a screwball, he couldn’t tell him that he preferred calling him Ignacio because he didn’t like the way calling him Nacho
felt
. It was hard to describe—something like grabbing a handful of tacks; whereas
Ignacio
evoked a smooth, pleasant sensation, like closing his fist over a glob of shaving cream.

“So what held you up?”

“A meaningless relationship.”

“That nympho park ranger?”

The Professor nodded. There was very little Nacho didn’t know about him, including his sexual liaisons. Conversely, there was very little about Nacho that he didn’t know. Although some might consider him a snitch, he did not view himself as such. If he was, then Nacho was
his
snitch, which made their relationship more collegial or at least symbiotic.

“You’ve seen these?” Nacho asked, brusquely coming to the point. He handed The Professor a file folder of newspaper clippings.
Mexican
Authorities Baffled by Mass Slaying of Immigrants
, read a headline in the
Arizona Daily Star
. “I’m baffled, too. No robbery, no rape, no attempt to kidnap them for the ransom. More like an act of terrorism than anything else.”

“Why does this concern you?”

“We’re wondering if something’s going on we ought to know about,” said Nacho.

“Terrorism about covers it. We’re pretty sure Yvonne was behind it.”

“I guess that doesn’t surprise me. La Roja is quite the little lady,” Nacho remarked, in reference to the reputation for viciousness Yvonne had established for herself since she’d taken over the Menéndez organization from her husband, Fermín, murdered last year. She had put out the contract on him. Later, when the Border Patrol and U.S. Customs clamped down on her operations, seizing half her loads on tips from informants, she conducted a snitch hunt with a ferocity that impressed her male counterparts in the trade—and they were not easily impressed when it came to acts of violence. In about six weeks fourteen people were tortured and murdered. That only two were informants was of no concern to her. “Better that a dozen innocents die than two guilty ones get away with it,” she’d said. The discovery of the mutilated bodies, lined up beside a desert cattle tank, made headlines all over Mexico. Fingers, hands, and feet had been chopped off and scattered around the well to feed the coyotes and vultures.
CHARCA DE MUERTE!!!—The Pond of Death—
screamed the tabloids over gruesome photographs.

“So who is she trying to terrorize?” Nacho inquired.

“There are rumors. We do know she can’t stand wetbacks or wetback smugglers. They burn the routes. They attract too many of your boys. So one theory is that she was sending a message to the polleros to run their chickens somewhere else.”

“Carrasco doesn’t like pollos and polleros for the same reason.”

“C’mon, Ignacio,” The Professor said in a scoffing tone. Joaquín Carrasco, mero mero of the Hermosillo Cartel, was the most businesslike of Mexico’s narcotraficantes. Murdering webacks wasn’t his style.

Nacho peered at him over his John Lennon glasses, but like everyone else’s, his gaze couldn’t hold The Professor’s and caromed like a billiard ball off the cushion. For a moment or two, he looked away toward a treeless summit of the Chiricahuas, where the snow lay like a slab of whitewashed concrete. Then he said, “But I’m thinking, there’s a problem with your theory. The San Pedro Valley and Douglas are Yvonne’s territory. The massacre took place in the San Rafael, and that’s Carrasco’s.”

“You’ve got the geography right.”

“There’s no reason why Yvonne should give a good goddamn if wets are burning the San Rafael routes. They’re not hers.”

“Right again.”

“This is starting to feel like a tooth extraction,” said Nacho. “Don’t make my life difficult. You’re on our side of the line at the moment.”

“I am still a citizen of El Norte,” The Professor said in mock indignation.

“Yeah, with a federal warrant outstanding for your arrest and some people in the CIA who would love to settle accounts.”

“They’ve got better things to do now. Busy hunting terrorists, real and imagined. Besides, I’m too valuable to the Department of Homeland Security right where I am.”

“Don’t get smug,” Nacho scolded. “So these rumors …”

“Let’s say we’re not sure what Yvonne is up to. Let’s say we’re keeping an eye on her. She’s a woman in a man’s world. Also ambitious.”

“I know that. I’m asking about these rumors.”

“Ever see that old movie
Key Largo?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“There’s a moment in it when the Humphrey Bogart character asks the Edward G. Robinson character, Johnny Rocco, what he wants. And Rocco says, ‘More. That’s right! I want more.’ There’s Yvonne for you. She couldn’t spell
enough
in English or Spanish.”

“Look, the Agua Prieta Cartel is too small to go head-to-head with Carrasco,” Nacho said. “She wouldn’t think of muscling in on him if she didn’t have somebody behind her.”