The Border Lords

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Beth looked at Hood, the fear bright in her eyes. Then she made a graceful tangolike turn that left her sweater coat half-on and half-off and Ozburn no gentleman’s choice at all. He took the brown bag from her and held the coat so she could slide out of it.

  Palming the derringer, Hood stepped between them and accepted the coat from Ozburn, which left the concealed weapon pointed roughly at Ozburn’s heart.

  “It was good seeing you, Sean. You’re a true and good friend. We need to talk again. Soon, but not now.”

  “Unbearable.” Ozburn wiped his chin on the back of a fist and looked ashamedly at Beth, then Hood. “I am sorry.”

  “Here are the treasures from Seliah.”

  Ozburn took up the bag. “Thank you. Remember to talk to Soriana about my proposal.”

  Hood stood in the doorway and watched him walk into the wind. Ozburn stopped and turned and Hood knew that at this range he was defenseless against Ozburn’s weapons. Ozburn saluted him, then lowered his sunglasses and continued on, looking back once, then continuing down the driveway to the road. Hood saw the glint of glass and metal in the distance. Beth came up next to him. Hood watched Ozburn make his way down the gravel road. He stopped once and waited, then walked on. A moment later the interior lights of a vehicle came on and Hood could make out a red pickup truck. A dark shape moved back and forth inside the cab. Ozburn opened the door and climbed in. The interior lights went out and the brights shot to life. A moment later Ozburn hooked a U-turn and sped down the road and out of sight, his dust a faint contrail rising in the darkness.

  “I’m not sure what we just avoided,” said Beth. “But I think it could have been very, very bad.” She held his arm in both hands and Hood could feel her trembling.

  “We can’t stay here,” said Hood. “But I’ll take you to the very finest motel in Buenavista.”

  “How about my place?”

  “Better.”

  “You’ve got a story to tell me.”

  “Do I ever.”

  While Beth packed up the dinner provisions from the refrigerator Hood called Soriana, Bly, Morris and Velasquez.

  He drove them to Beth’s home in his vehicle, his Colt unholstered and secure between his thigh and the seat. He didn’t think Ozburn would change his mind and try something, but Hood wanted Beth Petty in his sight. He watched the rearview attentively and took an elaborate route before rolling to a stop inside her garage and waiting for the garage door to close behind them. When it clunked into silence Hood felt a flutter of relief.

  Hood hugged her but did not close his eyes as he wanted to, and he kept his ears tuned to the sounds of the night around him.

  “It’s okay, Charlie. He’s gone.”

  33

  Ozburn woke up in a motel room with disjointed memories of how he got there. He remembered Hood’s house. Wind and a pretty woman. Flying Betty through the cool, clear night. A young Mexican man who would watch over Betty for a modest price. A beaten, once-silver Mercury courtesy of Father Joe. Meeting Paco in a bar and collecting the remaining eighty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars for final payment on the Love 32s and later giving him the first ten guns right here in this motel room. No wonder I’m exhausted , he thought. He propped himself up against the headboard and took stock.

  Daisy was curled up at the foot of his bed, eyes on him, tail thumping against the spread. His duffel was on the floor, brimming with money, right where he had put it. His vision was clear and not colored with green. He showered and put on clean clothes and left a disappointed Daisy to guard the fort.

  He stepped out of the lobby and into the tourist zone of Nogales, Mexico. He recognized it immediately. Just across the border from Arizona, the narrow streets jammed with cars and pedestrians, bars and restaurants, curio vendors presiding over acres of wood carvings and colorful pottery and leather purses and boots and belts and blankets hanging brightly in the sunlight.

  He took some video on his Flip, then had the proprietor shoot him as he picked out a dozen wooden flutes painted in scintillant pinks and yellows and purples, twelve leather purses, twelve pairs of huaraches with soles made of old car tires, like numbers of assorted earrings and necklaces possibly containing turquoise, and a dozen tooled leather wallets. He examined the many small wooden crucifixes arranged neatly in a display case, remembering the surge of strength he used to feel at such a sight and comparing it with the blankness he now felt. But he bought twelve anyway, each with its leather necklace. He overpaid the woman and thanked her effusively for taking the video.

  He bought breakfast burritos and sopadillas from a street cart and ate them standing up outside an art gallery, looking through the window at the paintings inside—Madonnas and calla lilies and peasants done in the style of Rivera. His feet began to tingle then lose feeling so he ate faster. When he was done he hoisted up his plastic bags and walked back across to the cart and got Daisy carnitas wrapped to go in tinfoil.

  An hour later they set off in the old Mercury heading south on Highway 15. Near Cibuta he pulled off the road where a group of schoolchildren waited for their bus. He covered the machine guns on his front seat with the bags of curios, then got out and gave the children the flutes. They accepted the gifts happily and Ozburn tried to say a prayer for them but he couldn’t think of anything to say and they seemed puzzled by his words. When he pulled away he heard musical notes and laughter rising up behind the car in spirited chaos and he believed he had touched the children in some good way.

  He drove through the rough country, his mind fixed on Seliah, trying to find her in the depths of her unconsciousness. Was she thinking? Did she feel? He imagined her in the hospital bed, nurses and doctors hovering above her, her pale beauty arrested in sleep, Seliah an object to them, a hope, a possibility given certain odds. What could he do?

  In Imuris he stopped and approached the group of old men who were sitting in the meager shade offered by the eaves of the mini-super that stood adjacent to the dirt town square. They squinted wordlessly at him but when Ozburn struck up a conversation in decent Spanish they were happy to tell him that no, they knew of no airstrip; no, they had not seen any narco activity at all lately; no, there was almost no rain last season but the government said maybe more this year. He said he might go check the airstrip himself, the one they didn’t know of. They laughed. He gave them the huaraches and wallets and they smiled, some toothlessly, others with the great white teeth that seemed to follow so many Mexican men into old age.

  At the bakery he found some women and girls but they were suspicious of him and hardly answered his Spanish. He bought some pastries and bottled water and gave them some of the purses and jewelry and some of the crucifixes.

  Outside of Imuris he turned east on a dirt road. He had driven it six months before on an undercover meth buy that had strengthened his standing with some low-level players in Carlos Herredia’s North Baja Cartel. Ozburn had been treated disrespectfully by a gigantic one-eared cartel enforcer and it was last night’s dream of this man that brought him here now. The road was rough and narrow but firm enough to buoy the heavy, low-slung car. Rounding a curve he could see the airstrip and the cinder-block building with the tin roof and the window frames with the glass long smashed out and the smugglers’ trailers baking in the sun. There were no vehicles in sight and Ozburn scanned the rocky peaks of the hills for lookouts but he saw no movement except for three vultures circling in the thermals high above.

  He kicked in the door of the cinder-block building and lowered both Love 32s but the place was empty. There were old sofas and folding chairs and a television with rabbit ears tipped in tinfoil. The fireplace was black and there were food cans tossed on the floor among the mattresses and old blankets and mouse turds. Daisy investigated. Ozburn stood approximately where he had been searched by the enforcer’s men and he remembered the roughness of it and their insults and the terrible serrated edge of flesh where the man’s ear had been detached. He looked over at the slouching plywood countertop where he
had laid out five thousand dollars in ATF buy money to cover the methamphetamine. He stood in the doorway and watched the road and the rocky hills for approaching narcos but saw none. He hoped that his dangerous questions to the old men would result in a quick phone call as soon as he left them, so he sat with his machine guns crossed on his lap on a rickety wooden chair outside in the shade and waited.

  By midafternoon no one had arrived so Ozburn drove south, then west to Atil where he found a two-track that he had also once traveled on a quad vehicle with a college buddy, ostensibly on a quest for a hot spring they had been told attracted beautiful Mexican girls who bathed naked and were sexually loose. They never found the hot spring or any girls at all, but Ozburn did remember an oasis where clear, cool water flowed up from the rocks and formed a pool beneath a cluster of greasewood trees and fan palms.

  Here he spread a blanket in the shade and sat with Daisy beside him. He faced away from the pool because the sight of water would cause his muscles to cramp as if hit with an electrical charge. He began to get hungry and with the hunger came the aches in his body and the cursed green tint to his vision and the frightening numbness to his feet. He ate some of the pastries, oddly flavorless, then removed his bandana and dipped it in the cold water without looking at the pool and lay back on the blanket and covered his eyes, sunglasses and all.

  He listened to the thumping of his heart and felt the downward pull of sleep and when he awakened and peeled off the almost-dry bandana, three men stood across from him on the other side of the small pool. A green sun hovered behind them. They wore jeans and hoodies and he couldn’t see their faces. Daisy growled and Ozburn growled, too. He found the Love 32 with one hand and swung it up and at them. The tallest one, in the middle, raised a hand, as if calming Ozburn.

  “Can I help you?” Ozburn asked. His voice sounded to him like a croak.

  The middle man nodded to the west. Then he turned and walked away in that direction, one fellow on either side.

  Ozburn clambered around the pool after them, his feet dead and clumsy. He dropped the machine pistol and it landed hard on the rocks but he picked it up and slung the strap over his shoulder. Daisy easily caught them, touching her sensitive black nose to their legs, tail down and not wagging. They stopped and let Ozburn approach. He came to within a few yards and studied them. The sun was still at their backs and their faces were lost in the folds of the hoods and he couldn’t tell who they were—Mexicans, Americans—they might have been Inuits or Swedes for all he could see.

  “If you repent, Seliah will live,” said the tallest one.

  Ozburn felt his anger spike. He was long past trying to suppress it. He felt the trigger against his finger. “Repent for what?”

  “The faith you have abandoned. The lives you have taken.”

  “How can you find faith where there is none?”

  “In your heart.”

  “It’s empty. And what can my repentance do for the lives I have taken?”

  “It can save your wife.”

  “You know nothing of Seliah.”

  “She is in the hospital in California. Don’t doubt us. Don’t make yourself smaller to us. You spit on the face of God. His mercies are small and easily withdrawn. Ours are even smaller.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Representatives.”

  “What guarantee do I have that Seliah will survive?”

  “There is no power higher than the word.”

  “Pull down the hoods. All three of you.”

  “If you repent, Seliah will live.”

  “Let me see your faces!” None of the three moved so Ozburn pulled the trigger and swept the Love 32 across them but only one shot fired. He heard the round spit and felt the recoil and saw the quick dimple form on the sweatshirt of the man on the left. A stomach shot. The man didn’t so much as flinch. Rather he tilted his head down as if for a look at it, then turned his face back up at Ozburn. Ozburn felt for the extended fifty-shot magazine but it was gone. He looked back to where he had dropped the gun and saw the magazine, faintly green and luminescent, shining upon the rocks.

  When he turned back the men were gone and Daisy was crisscrossing the ground where they had stood, nose lowered for scent, tail wagging hopefully. Ozburn labored up the nearest rise and from here he looked out on the vast, barren desert, unpeopled and motionless. He folded to his knees and sat slumped amidst the rocks and asked God to return his faith but he felt no return of it, just the ocean of dark urges moving inside him. And he repented to God his several murders but even as he did this there was a voice inside him, speaking more quietly than the voice with which he called to God, and it said, The brutes deserved it, the brutes deserved it, they deserved to be exterminated.

  Backtracking to the Imuris airstrip, Ozburn parked short of a hillock and left Daisy in the car and climbed to the top. In the wavering green distance he could see the airstrip and the building and the black SUV parked nearby and the huge one-eared enforcer sitting in the shade just has he had done. Teodoro, Ozburn remembered. Teodoro “El Gigante” Caborca. Another sicario stood beside him, eyeing the landscape, a weapon slung over one shoulder. The door that Ozburn had kicked in swung in and out with the breeze. Ozburn slid down the hillside to his car and made sure the two Love 32s had full magazines; then he locked the car and hiked around to the south side of the cinder-block building, which was tucked against the rocky hills.

  It took almost an hour. The feeling in his legs came and went. The numbness was climbing him now, almost to his hips. He was sweating hard. Daisy panted and stayed a few yards behind, never venturing ahead. She seemed to know the difference between playing and working, and Ozburn was impressed by her intuitions.

  When Ozburn finally settled behind a boulder for a concealed look he could see that the enforcer’s SUV was still parked where it had been. He could hear music spilling out from the building, then laughter. When he had caught his breath Ozburn picked his way down the hill on a game trail and soon he was pressed up against the back of the building, Daisy at his feet, a machine pistol ready in each hand.

  He quietly picked his way along the perimeter. The music was a narcocorrido and the voices were of three men. He heard a beer can spit open. When he came to a window he motioned Daisy to stay, then ducked beneath it and sidled past. Rising to a crouch he hustled around the corner, then snuck beneath another window and stopped just short of the open front doorway. Laughter and an accordion. Laughter and profanities. Another can popping open. Daisy had broken her stay and now came crawling around the corner on her stomach, ears down in penance and an apologetic look on her face. Repentance, thought Ozburn. You want repentance—watch this.

  Ozburn motioned her again to stay; then, guns up, he burst through the door for the second time that day.

  All three men stared at him in disbelief. Two had beers in their hands instead of weapons. El Gigante sat hugely on one of the battered old couches and Ozburn knew that he could shoot both of the beer-drinking bad guys before their leader could get off the couch, and he saw that Teodoro knew it, too.

  He ordered the two men to their knees and they took their positions with doomed expressions on their faces. One bowed his head and prayed. Ozburn ordered Teodoro to join them and he tracked the big man’s slow movements with one of the Love 32s. Teodoro finally righted himself and lumbered toward Ozburn. When the big man came abreast of his comrades he did not kneel but instead lunged forward at Ozburn. Ozburn stepped aside deftly and let the gun in his right hand swing free on the shoulder sling. He hit Teodoro’s jaw with an uppercut so hard the big man stopped and straightened, then dropped to the floor. When Teodoro managed to get to his knees Ozburn leveled a machine pistol at his forehead.

  Daisy sat in the doorway wagging her tail.

  —Do you repent, Ozburn asked in Spanish.

  —I repent.

  —I repent.

  —I’ll find you in hell and kill you, said Teodoro.

  Ozburn looked down at the big man
’s quivering face, the dark, searching eyes, the jagged edge where the ear had been.

  —Who has the vehicle keys?

  Teodoro nodded toward the TV and Ozburn saw the fob and keys sitting beside the rabbit-ear antenna. He retrieved the keys and stuffed them into a vest pocket without taking his eyes off the men.

  —Touch your faces to the floor, all of you.

  ATF training was to never get on the ground on orders from an armed opponent: You will almost certainly be executed. Stay on your feet. Stay on your feet. Ozburn knew that trained or not, the cartel men understood this. The two smaller men lowered their heads to the concrete. One began to sob. He offered five thousand U.S. dollars for his life. Then ten thousand. Then ten million. Teodoro stared down at the floor muttering words that Ozburn couldn’t understand. He caught the word Malverde, patron saint of the narcos, and that was all.

  —I’ve bet the life of my wife on this moment. Her name is Seliah.

  With that, Ozburn let go of the left gun and brought the last three crucifixes from his vest pocket. He moved from man to man, left to right, working the leather necklaces over their heads with his left hand and the barrel of the machine pistol he held in his right. Teodoro’s head was too big so Ozburn dropped the crucifix to the floor in front of him where it landed with a clear tap.

  —The god I no longer know has asked me to spare your lives. He says he can save Seliah. We’ll see about that, won’t we? Stay where you are until I’m safely away or I’ll certainly kill you all.

  Ozburn drove back to his car and shot flat the tires of the SUV, then took the Mercury to the spring near Atil and stayed in the wilderness three days. He ate the bread and pastries and forced himself to drink the water he’d bought at the panadería. There was a blanket and a heavy jacket in his duffel on top of the bricks of tightly wrapped cash. He had enough kibble in the bag for Daisy, who seemed perfectly content to sleep under the stars, her back to him for warmth. Ozburn’s body was alternatingly numb or pain-riddled. Hours were minutes and seconds stretched to days. He hallucinated and wailed and sobbed when the pain was upon him, and he slept through the numbness. He slept for what seemed like a lifetime. He awakened to music, terrifying music so loud his eardrums pounded in pain. His visions were of violence and beasts that he knew did not exist, then of Seliah, whose beauty burst away the ugliness but when he could no longer hold her image the terrors returned and were worse.