—
JOHNNIE ASKED THE QUESTIONS, and the others—except for Ortiz—took turns hitting him. Mostly in the stomach, and ribs, although the big one—Roman—cocked him good in the face. It rocked his head back and he spit a mouthful of blood, maybe a tooth. It was like he’d been in a bad car accident, and now he really was wishing he had taken that meth—all of it—because he’d still be flying high above his body, and it would almost be like someone else, someone he didn’t even know, was getting the shit beat out of him.
That motherfucker probably deserved it, not Eddy.
Johnnie asked him about this old man he didn’t know and the wetback girl deputy. He asked him what he told the cops after he got arrested, and what Charity might have told them, and what happened to their Motorola radios and his cell phone, and Johnnie had Eddy unlock it so the fucker could search through it. Johnnie also looked through the cell he’d given him, the one Eddy had hidden with the meth, to make sure there weren’t any other calls to or from it. Eddy wasn’t sure he was giving the right or wrong answers, because there didn’t seem to be much connection between what he said and the punches he got, so whenever the opportunity presented itself, he basically lied through his teeth . . . through all the blood in his mouth.
It was freeing in a way—goddamn liberating—to know that no matter what choices he’d made, he was always going to end up truly fucked.
Particularly when it came to any questions about the deputies, about the Mex girl, America, or even Danny, who Johnnie seemed to know personally and not much like.
Eddy didn’t tell them jack shit about Deputy Danny Ford.
* * *
—
HE DIDN’T KNOW how long they had him tied to that chair, but when they were done, and Johnnie brought him another Bud to drink or put against his darkening bruises, it had gotten good and cold sitting in his mini-fridge . . .
“I didn’t want to do that,” Johnnie said, as Eddy clutched the beer. He held on to it like it was a goddamn rope, and he was drowning. “See, I didn’t enjoy it, not at all, not like some of those other fuckers in there.” Johnnie hooked a thumb behind him into the trailer. Johnnie and Eddy were standing behind it outside in the grass, or rather Johnnie was standing, drinking his own beer. Eddy instead was hunched over, every muscle, even his fucking eyes, hurting. Like he’d taken a bath in sand and salt. He’d tried to stand up straight, but when dark blood had leaked out of his goddamn pecker, he decided it was best he just kinda stay down low.
The others were still inside; through the pain, Eddy could hear them laughing and cutting up again, probably about him.
“There’s a good lesson here, though. Don’t ever fuck with those boys of mine. Ever. They’re nervous now, amped up about being here. They get up a head of steam like that again? Who knows what might happen. For me, this is all business, all professional. They take this shit way more personal. They get off on it.”
As fucked up as Eddy was, he still picked out some uncertainty in Johnnie’s voice . . . something weak and unsteady and unsure. That old Spidey sense of his was tuning right through the static and pain to a clear station—it always worked a helluva lot better when his brain wasn’t burning like a forest fire—where he could hear the frustrated sound of a small dog that had grabbed hold of the bumper of a big car, like that Dodge Charger hidden down in the salt cedar, and now had no idea what the fuck to do with it.
Even as Johnnie stared down at him in the grass, Eddy knew Johnnie was seeing a future where he was the one all bloody and busted up, if those laughing fuckers inside slipped their own leashes and decided they weren’t taking orders from him anymore. Maybe, if things here didn’t go quite as planned, Johnnie himself might end up tied to some fucking chair, getting his clock cleaned.
Eddy was trapped out here with them, but so was Johnnie. Roman and Ringo and the rest may have been cops once (or still liked to think they were), but none of this shit was official or professional. This wasn’t goddamn police business, no matter what Johnnie said. They were sneaking around the Big Bend, and they didn’t want to be found out if they could help it.
Yep, his beer-drinking buddy Johnnie, good old Apache, was way off the reservation now.
“I’m going to do my best to keep those psychopaths off you, Eddy. You just gotta do what I say. Don’t fuck around, don’t ever fuck around. I’ll keep an eye out for you, but you gotta keep an eye out for me, too. We’ll get through this shit together, amigo.”
Eddy knew they were probably going to kill him. That shit had been decided long before they’d showed up at his door, but that didn’t mean he had to make it easy for them.
Sure, Johnnie called the shots today, but who knew what tomorrow would bring?
He smiled up at Johnnie, and spit both beer and blood into the grass. “We’re good, amigo, we’re good. All good.”
And tomorrow was a motherfucker.
FORTY-FOUR
Garrison didn’t know a damn thing about helicopters.
Frankly, he didn’t know how they stayed airborne. It was a physical impossibility to him, an act as amazing as any Catholic miracle, which was what he needed now, because he had eight FAST members cooling their heels at Fort Bliss with their DEA chopper grounded, suffering from mysterious “engine problems.” He’d made calls, trying to beg or borrow one from the base, but since Bliss was home to an armored division and various artillery brigades, they had plenty of tanks sitting around, just not many free birds. And the bird he needed had to be suited to the kinds of exfil exercises the team wanted to conduct, so the other DEA Air Wing assets he could get his hands on wouldn’t work. The team was already two days late getting out to the ranch owned by Terry Macrae that Chris Cherry had helped arrange, and it looked like it could be as many as two more even if the repairs went without a hitch. Garrison hated imposing on the old rancher, but he seemed honored to host the team, no matter when they showed up.
The whole thing made Garrison feel more like some sort of party planner rather than a real agent, and now that he was an ASAC, he never felt much like a real agent anymore anyway. His badge and gun were just props since he spent most of his time in meetings or briefings or signing off on travel vouchers and funding documents or reading other people’s reports.
Reports like the daily write-up the intel unit was still giving him about Fox Uno and Nemesio, the ongoing hunt for the cartel leader. Garrison had submitted the brief Chesney had requested, and Chesney hadn’t asked him any more about it, so the issue was apparently dead as far as the SAC was concerned. But Garrison insisted on getting fresh intel reports anyway, making a point of looking through them. He told himself he was being thorough, but he was really just pretending that he could still do worthwhile agent work.
And this morning, while pretending, one of those reports had jumped out at him.
Or at least one word had . . .
Tejas.
* * *
—
IT WASN’T MUCH.
A single word picked out of the air: a thirty-second radio transmission between two members of the Serrano Brothers cartel. Not Nemesio, but intriguing all the same. Mexican traffickers sometimes used the word to talk about the border generally—the old northern Mexican state of Tejas—but it had more specific roots in the Native American history of the state itself. In this case, it could have been a direct reference to Diego Serrano, the older of the two brothers, who was often called El Indio due to his ruddier skin and features. It was a title he wore proudly, allegedly bragging about his supposed ancestral ties to the original Aztecs or Mayans or whatever the hell it was. But neither Diego nor Axel Serrano, the younger brother, had finished eighth grade, so although they claimed they were indios, Garrison guessed they had no more knowledge about their ancient ancestry or the more recent history of Coahuila y Tejas than he had about fixing a broken helicopter.
It was possible, though, that t
he radio intercept crew had overheard two Serrano plaza bosses talking about Chuy and Johnnie Machado’s Tejas unit, and that would make unfortunate sense. The Serrano Brothers had been moving across Texas for at least five years now, murdering or bribing their way along the border. Diego had started in the Rio Grande Valley, working west, while Axel—in Nogales, Arizona—had expanded eastward, with the siblings planning to meet in the middle. It was a giant hangman’s noose, an awful snake eating its tail. They’d successfully seized the most important smuggling and plaza routes along the way, carving out huge chunks of territory by buying off or killing Nemesio loyalists, and fatally choking out the rival cartel in the process. For the last eighteen months, the Ojinaga corridor, including the Big Bend, had been Nemesio’s last, best stronghold, and that wasn’t saying much.
Ojinaga was the knot in the noose, the middle of the snake.
Had the Tejas unit been helping the Serrano Brothers tighten that noose, stealing or harrying Nemesio drug loads? That could account for all their seizures . . . all those alleged successes. Over the past year, they easily could have been using their badges to “legally” steal Nemesio drug loads, turning around and then selling them on behalf of the Serrano Brothers. Local rip crews in El Paso did the same thing all the time. Why buy the dope and incur the risk and expense of smuggling it over the border, when you could just steal it from someone who already had?
It was an effective business model, but a goddamn vicious one. Missing drug loads bred distrust and reprisals. You ended up with a lot of people disappearing, whole families wiped out.
Bodies dug out of makeshift graves.
Garrison had all but given up convincing Chesney that the Terrell task force was worth a hard look, but maybe it was at least worth another discussion. And if that one word alone—“Tejas”—hadn’t caught his eye, another term in that intercept would have: el viejo, the old man. Again, that could be a reference to Diego Serrano—another honorific, the way some had called Fox Uno “El Patrón”—but Diego was barely in his thirties, and his brother, Axel, only a year or two younger, so that didn’t fit. When Garrison had pressed his intel folks, they’d admitted they had no idea who el viejo was, and wouldn’t hazard a guess based on the limited context. All they did have was a handful of garbled words across thirty seconds of static, a coded conversation buried in white noise. Trying to make sense out of that was like putting together a thousand-piece puzzle without any idea of what the final picture was supposed to be.
Every piece might as well have been a shade of black or gray, nearly indistinguishable.
Garrison had two pieces: Tejas . . . and the old man.
But it had only taken a couple of similar puzzle pieces to spur Darin to take a hard look at the heart of Murfee, searching for Rodolfo Reynosa and evidence against the corrupt Sheriff Ross. Darin just hadn’t survived long enough to see the finished picture.
A few nights ago, Garrison had dismissed the idea of Fox Uno crossing the border, but maybe the Serrano Brothers hadn’t. Maybe they were looking for him here, and they had more than enough motivation to find him and finish the job they’d started in Ojinaga. Even if the Serranos, or Tiburón, Fox Uno’s son, had successfully orchestrated his ouster from Nemesio, he’d always be a threat if he was alive. If he ever fell into the hands of the U.S. government and agreed to cooperate—highly unlikely, but a risk impossible for them to ignore—he was a walking, talking Rosetta Stone. There was no end to what he could reveal about how all the current cartels recruited and negotiated among themselves, how they were organized and communicated to their trafficking cells in the tight United States.
Who they bribed, and who protected them in Mexico.
You truly would have a goddamn snake eating its tail, choking on itself.
If Fox Uno talked, he could do more with a few words to single-handedly disrupt Mexican narco-trafficking than a hundred federal arrests or a thousand seized dope loads.
A few words, a few puzzle pieces was all Garrison had.
But that had been enough for Darin.
* * *
—
LATER, AFTER CHECKING ONCE MORE with intel to see if anything else had come in, Garrison returned to his nearly empty office and shut the door.
He’d pulled teletype intelligence traffic from all the DEA offices across Arizona and California. If Fox Uno had slipped over the border, he was going to need help on this side. A lot of help. Unfortunately, Garrison had a suspicion where he’d go looking for that help, but he wanted to check everywhere to be sure.
He wanted to be thorough.
He undid his tie and took the typed transcript of the radio intercept and laid it in front of him, along with all the other intel briefs and teletypes he had, including the half-assed report he had written for Chesney. He made a couple of notes to himself, so he’d say everything just the way he wanted to, then he picked up his secure phone.
He needed to make two calls.
The first was back to Washington, D.C. Technically, he was going over Chesney’s head, way over, but he’d deal with the fallout of that later. Garrison still had friends back there in those other “alphabet” agencies, and he wanted to see about calling in a favor or two. Hoping to get another pair of eyes or ears focused down on his problem.
To find a few more puzzle pieces.
Then, after that, he’d make the second call—on his personal cell phone.
And that one was going to be to Sheriff Cherry.
FORTY-FIVE
The plan was for Javy Cruz to pick Mel up before America and the rest of them invaded her house.
Chris had arranged for her to stay out at Javy’s place, about eight miles east of the Far Six; close enough for Chris to get to her if he needed to, but just as remote. But Javy was running late, and then Chris got stuck on a sudden call from Joe Garrison—a call that now had him pacing back and forth across their bedroom.
That was how Mel ended up opening her door to Fox Uno.
* * *
—
THEY WERE ALL OUT THERE ON HER PORCH: America, Danny, the young girl Zita all done up in a dress, and last, Fox Uno. They’d come in Danny’s Bronco, dragging with them an odd assortment of bags, even a sleeping bag. The girl was shy, half hidden behind Danny and Amé, but Fox Uno stared at Mel without concern or embarrassment. He had the same weathered look as Javy Cruz—thinning white hair pushed back high on his head in a near pompadour, deep crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, a thick turkey wattle. But those eyes of his were clear, calculating. It was like the eyes weren’t as old as the rest of him, or somehow—and this was worse—far, far older. They sort of reminded her of her daddy’s eyes midway through a solid night of drinking, only without the bloodshot.
Given all the things Mel now knew about Fox Uno, she couldn’t help wondering how many people had looked in those eyes as their final act on earth.
“You all come in now, make yourself at home,” she said, keeping her voice steady, composed. She pointed down at the sleeping bag. “I think we have enough beds and pull-outs for everyone. I don’t think you’ll need that.”
No one moved, and Danny wouldn’t even look at her. Amé did, but it was impossible to guess what she was thinking.
Mel tried again, this time forcing a smile she didn’t feel. She couldn’t take her eyes off the girl, Zita. Why on earth had they brought her here? Had they all lost their minds? “C’mon, let’s get you inside. I’m grabbing a few more things for Jack, and then we’ll be clearing out of here. The house is yours.”
Finally, Danny tried something: “Thank you, ma’am, we’re—”
She stopped him. “It’s okay, Deputy Ford. Just fine. Just give me back my house the way you found it, unless you want to do some cleaning or fix that leaky faucet in the kitchen. That would be great.”
She held the door wide for them, and went to get Chris.
FORTY-SIX
About once a month, Chris would drive out to the place Sheriff Ross had called El Dorado.
The land was still owned by Caleb Ross, as far as Chris knew, although the boy had sold off the house in town he’d shared with his father. Chris figured Caleb held on to El Dorado for the same reason he drove out to walk its paths—it was now a memorial to Evelyn Ross.
They both believed the woman was out there, somewhere.
If she was, El Dorado had stubbornly refused to give up its secrets. Her secrets. More than five years had passed since her disappearance, and no one truly knew what had happened to her. In the end, for all the crimes Sheriff Ross had seemed ready to justify or accept responsibility for, he’d never admitted to killing Evelyn. It was a thing Chris had never understood, that had never made any sense. The not knowing, the never knowing. And how often did Caleb—far away and safe in Virginia—think of that place anymore? How often did he still dream of his mother buried beneath the scrub, lost forever beneath the oak brush and red oak, in the shadows of the mountain peaks? In its own way, it was a beautiful thought—it was truly a beautiful place—but still cold comfort. If her spirit was all that remained to haunt the land, then she wandered alone through its empty vales and creek bottoms and uncaring rocks and swaying timeless trees tipped by sunlight.
Except for Chris’s occasional visits, Evelyn Ross had all of El Dorado to herself.
Although his bad leg wasn’t much good for hiking, he always tried to give it a couple of hours, marking each new path with chalk, small signs he could read on the spruce, fir, and aspen: a map of where he was going and where he’d been. It was futile, but also important; a sense of duty that he forever owed victims, like Evelyn Ross. Like all those who’d been hurt or lost or forgotten since he’d taken up the badge, including America Reynosa, who despite all her strength and success was still a victim. A victim of Fox Uno and men like him—Dupree, Ross—who’d always cast long, inescapable shadows in her life.
This Side of Night Page 27