The Crisp Poleward Sky

by Jeff Siebold

  “Working?” asked one of the girls in front of Isela.

  “Yes, of course,” said Ximena impatiently. “You must pay us back for bringing you here to the United States. Do you have money?”

  No one said anything. They looked down.

  “No? So you will entertain our customers to earn money. Men come here to gamble and to be entertained by young women,” she continued. “They will treat you well, and you will make them happy.”

  * * *

  The tall black man with the white shirt and tuxedo trousers was named ‘William.’ Isela couldn’t remember ever hearing him say a word. He stood near the front door of the brothel, which was named “Susie’s Ranch,” and he watched everything that went on in the big room. He had shaved his head and wore a frown as his permanent expression.

  Once, one of the girls stormed out of the building after being groped by a drunken customer. William had gone after her, and moments later they returned, William’s large hand holding her twisted fingers, leading her by the arm back to the Ranch. She was crying from the pain and humiliation, but after that, she had been compliant.

  One of the customers told Isela that they were in Pahrump, Nevada. There was nothing around for miles except flat desert land and scrub, with formidable mountains in the far distance. The temperature rose above 100 degrees every day, and there was nowhere for the girls to run.

  “It’s time to work,” said Ximena as she entered the girl’s room, looking around. “You cleaned up your room—good. Now, it’s time for your medicine.”

  The girl came closer and the woman poured some white powder from a small vial she was holding. Without much thought, she leaned over and used a small straw to inhale the cocaine. It seemed to make things more bearable.

  Once she had figured out what was expected of her, Isela settled into a routine. She slept until after noon each day, then rose and showered and ate. Around three each afternoon, she dressed in what Ximena called her Barbie Doll outfit, and made her way to the main living room, where she ‘entertained’ the men who came to visit. She’d learned how to use the credit card machines.

  When the man she was with was ready, Isela took him down one of the halls to a private bedroom, where they finished their date. Then, usually, they would join the others again in the big room. She kept at this until all of the visitors were gone, and then she showered and went to bed.

  Isela didn’t know how long she’d been at the ranch. She’d become numb and managed the routine by rote. Their expectations of her were small and predictable and unwavering, and she seemed to exist only in the moment. After a time, her memories of El Salvador became indistinct, and she carried out her duties at the ranch numbly, without much feeling or thought.

  * * *

  “This is Mr. Carl, Isela,” said Ximena, leading a large blond man to the sofa she was sitting on. “Mr. Carl thinks you are beautiful like a wild horse.”

  It was Ximena’s way of breaking the ice for their shy customers, and Isela translated it to mean, “He likes it rough, so charge him more.” It didn’t matter, as all the money went to the Ranch anyway.

  Although she had told no one, today was Isela’s birthday, and she’d spent much of the morning awake and thinking about her family. When her mother had heard of the opportunity to go to the United States from her brother-in-law, Isela’s uncle, she was excited. It was a chance for her to get Isela and her sister out of the city with its gangs and crime and war and strife, and to “go north and work for some rich Americanos,” her mother had said with a smile in her voice. This is what she had dreamed of for the girls!

  But along the way they had been separated. Isela was put on the container and shipped directly to Nevada, while her sister had been separated from her before she’d arrived in Mexico, and God knows where she was now. She had cried silently, missing her sister, Rosita.

  * * *

  It was the first time Isela had seen him. Many of her customers came to see her regularly, but this man hadn’t been to Susie’s Ranch before, at least since Isela had arrived. She would have remembered. He looked almost exactly like her older brother, Ricardo.

  He had come into the big room around dinner time when the customers began to show up in earnest, and he’d looked around, teased with a couple of the girls, and then left the building, which was in itself odd.

  Thirty minutes later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, accompanied by the Nevada State Police, had arrived at the front door. With no hesitation the SWAT team took control of the building, dragging one guest out of a bedroom in his shirt only, and another in even less. No shots were fired.

  “Sit on the floor, there,” shouted an agent holding a frightening looking rifle. “Let’s go, right there,” he pointed. “Sentarse Alli.”

  The girls sat cross-legged on the floor while the agents tied their wrists with large, black zip ties.

  * * *

  “That actually went extremely well,” said Agent Ramirez. He was in his Phoenix office with Zeke. They were discussing the prior day’s action in Pahrump.

  “So apparently the Mara’s ship the incoming refugees directly to the brothels. Must have been to avoid the warehousing in Phoenix or wherever,” said Ramirez, repeating Zeke’s analysis as if he had figured this out himself.

  Zeke nodded and smiled.

  “We’ve got ten illegals, and several of them under-aged girls,” he continued. “And we closed down the Ranch. That should slow Benito Diaz down some.”

  “Good work,” said Zeke, simply.

  “And I think we’ve effectively closed down his pipeline,” added the ICE agent.

  “I’m sure you have.” In fact, Zeke was pretty certain that Benito Diaz’s pipeline was much more extensive than Ramirez perceived.

  “Were you able to arrest any MS-13 members?” asked Zeke.

  “No, no one was there. The girls said they were dropped off and then the men who took them to Nevada, their ‘handlers,’ left.”

  “Think we may want to find them?” asked Zeke.

  “Well, they came in on a container, a TEU, you know? An intermodal container that was rigged to keep them alive. One of the girls said they started out in Mexico and a couple days later they were let out of the box in Nevada.”

  Zeke nodded.

  “And the pretty girls were put to work in the brothel,” said Ramirez.

  “How about the others?” asked Zeke. “And the men?”

  “They were put to work as laborers, we think, or domestics, or on a farm, something like that. Maybe a pot farm. They stay oppressed because they’re illegals and they have no money or papers. And they don’t want to be shipped back.”

  Zeke nodded.

  “Often they’re abused by the people they work for, since they have no recourse. They’re at the bottom of the food chain,” said Ramirez.

  “Sure,” said Zeke. “So will you go after the MS-13’s who brought them to Nevada?” he asked again.

  “Well, they’re either in northern Mexico, or somewhere in Southern California. L.A. is where the gang started, at least in the states. So we’ve got some jurisdictional issues,” said Ramirez. “We had enough trouble getting permission to pull off the raid in Puhrump, Nevada. It would be almost impossible to do something like that in L.A. Besides, we don’t have the manpower for that.”

  Zeke made a mental note to chat with Clark Hall about it. Then he stood and excused himself.

  “Sorry, I’ve got a few things to do before I head back east,” said Zeke. “Congratulations on the Nevada action.”

  Chapter 4

  It was a clear day with a clear sky and good visibility. “If I were a pilot, I’d call this near perfect weather. This was a great idea,” said Bruce Narber. “I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon before.”

  They were on the south rim, strolling the paved sidewalk that adjoins and parallels the canyon itself. To their right was a parking area, one of many. To their left was the very colorful 6,000-foot deep hole in the earth.
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  “I know,” said Jerry Sebastian. “This is spectacular.”

  Crowds of tourists walked with them and toward them, couples dressed in desert boots and floppy sun hats, large families with parents struggling to keep them all together, groups of teens and independent retirees. Bruce navigated around a girl looking down at her iPhone screen and stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, looking north.

  “Wow,” he said. “You don’t get the perspective from the pictures. Not even the aerials.”

  “I thought it would be worth the trip,” said Jerry. They had driven up from Phoenix that afternoon, a three and a half hour drive, and then followed the line of cars into the park. “You need to see it at night.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Bruce, still gazing at the scenery. “I’ll just bet.”

  Bruce Nabor was 32 and fit, and he worked as an air traffic controller at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. He told Jerry that he’d recently transferred from Albuquerque to this airport hub, which was a step up, and that he was settling in nicely. He’d met Jerry Sebastian at an after-work party at a bar in Tempe. Jerry didn’t work at the airport; he said he was in software.

  “Hey, let’s grab something for dinner and come back after dark,” said Bruce. There were waves of people moving past them in some sort of chaotic sequence. “I could use a beer.”

  A short time later the two men were seated at a table in the Arizona Room restaurant in the Bright Angel Lodge, one of the better restaurants in the park. They ordered draft beer and thick steaks, and the sun was just setting as they finished their meal.

  “Delicious,” said Jerry. “Plus, what a great view!”

  “I’m afraid it would be like fine art,” said Bruce. “After you see it for a while, you kind of get used to it. It becomes invisible. To you, anyway.”

  “Let’s walk back to the rim and check out the nighttime views,” said Jerry.

  “Sure. But we can see it from here,” said Bruce.

  * * *

  Jerry Sebastian pulled the SUV into a parking space close to the edge of the rim. At this time of night, the park was comfortably empty, populated only by overnight campers and the random walker. It was dark, and the few people on the sidewalk were carrying flashlights.

  “What time is it?” asked Bruce.

  “Look at those stars, man!” said Jerry, pointing enthusiastically. He looked at his watch. “It’s eleven thirty.”

  “It was smart to book that room. I don’t much feel like driving back to Phoenix right now.”

  “Me either,” said Jerry. He walked to the edge of the canyon and leaned forward, looking while holding onto a small sapling for stability. “Whoa, that’s a long way down,” he said.

  Bruce stepped up next to him and grabbed the sapling and looked down. “Sure is,” he said. He leaned a bit and looked into the dark.

  What they saw was a small area that paralleled the sidewalk, sloping downward, mostly covered with medium sized rocks and brush, and an occasional small tree. Just beyond that, the ground fell away quickly in a steep grade, and then it became the wall of the canyon.

  “Vertigo,” said Bruce, looking down.

  Jerry said, “Yeah,” and pressed his taser against Bruce’s hand, the one holding onto the tree. The shock first contracted his muscles, tightening his grip, and then he lost control before collapsing onto the rim and rolling forward off the edge and into the darkness. He made no sound as he fell.

  * * *

  “There’s a wake of buzzards circling the canyon floor,” said Alice Donnelly, the Chief Ranger in charge of the South Rim National Park. “My people just reported it to me. Can we get a UAS down there to check it out?”

  It was Sunday late morning, and the hot Arizona sun had been beating down on the canyon’s south rim since it rose, seven hours ago. The buzzards wasted no time following the strong odor of death to the canyon floor.

  “Can do, Chief Ranger,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  UAS was an acronym for Unmanned Aerial System, a fleet of drones owned by the park and used for search and rescue missions.

  “What coordinates are we looking at?” asked the head of the UAS Team.

  Donnelly told him, and he agreed to check the area and let her know what they found. She hung up the phone.

  “They’re sending the drones in,” Donnelly said to the Rangers standing next to her. “Might want to get a rescue team ready. They’re bound to find something down there.”

  Typically, the team would find mid-sized animals—coyotes, mountain lions, even Big Horn sheep—that had died. These were the most prevalent reason for the buzzards. Mostly the deaths were the result of contact with predators. But occasionally, they found a human being. Then the rangers had to plan for the rescue considering location, time of day and safety concerns for the rescue team.

  “God, I hope it’s a coyote,” said the Chief Ranger to herself.

  * * *

  They were watching the live streaming video from the drone on computer screens in the operation room. Two of the park’s four UAS devices were circling the area at the base of the south rim, working their way toward the buzzards, which were clustered in a pack, standing on the ground and apparently busy with an unidentified carcass. The birds were large and awkward looking and they screamed and shouldered each other aside for access to the body.

  “There’s something,” said the Chief Ranger.

  The drone slowed and the ground grew closer on the monitor. Some of the buzzards looked up at it as it approached, threatening it with screams, but not giving up their positions.

  “That’s a body,” said the drone operator, watching the screen.

  “Definitely a human body. Looks like we have a man down.”

  Chief Ranger Donnelly watched the screen to confirm the assessment, and then she turned away. “Let’s get a rescue team down there. We’ll need to hurry, but we can get the body out before dark.”

  * * *

  “It's taken care of,” said Luis Cruz.

  He was speaking into a prepaid cell phone that fifteen minutes before had been on display on a rack in the Walmart just off Interstate 40 in Flagstaff, Arizona. Right now, Luis was driving seventy-five miles an hour south toward Phoenix.

  “Si,” said Raul Diaz on the other end of the line. “What name did you use this time?”

  Luis paused for a moment. Then he said, “Jerry Sebastian. I was Jerry Sebastian.”

  “Was there any problem?”

  “No,” said Luis. “No problem.”

  “OK. I’ll tell him you called. Check back tomorrow afternoon,” the man said in guttural Spanish.

  Luis Cruz held down the button in the SUV’s center console until his window was all the way down, then he tossed the cell phone toward the scrub on the side of the road. It shattered when it hit the pavement and the pieces flew in every direction.

  He raised the window and turned on the radio.

  * * *

  Ever since he was a boy growing up in south central LA, Luis Cruz had been different. He had never felt much empathy for the other kids, or adults either for that matter. Much of his life had been spent on the shadowy edges of honesty, dealing in half-truths and clever lies.

  When he was fourteen, he found himself on the wrong side of a robbery. A petty theft, actually, when he and a friend tried to exit a local grocery store with several pounds of bacon stuffed down the front of their pants. The grocer had witnessed the theft on a security camera and sent his twin twenty-year-old boys to retrieve the meat. In their enthusiasm, they had kicked the boy unconscious. Luis woke to find himself in the hospital, with both arms broken and contusions all over his body. Any remaining empathy he'd felt toward his fellow man dissipated during his five-month recovery.

  Luis Cruz looked like a CPA, or an engineer, or maybe a software programmer. Software development was a big thing in Phoenix, with ASU located in Tempe on the fringes of the city. Luis comfortably fit himself into that role. He was thirty-five, although he
could have passed for younger, and was meticulous about his appearance and clothing. He wore geekish short-sleeved shirts and black-rimmed glasses, and worked hard to look harmless. His black hair was the only clue to his Latino heritage. His mother had been an Angelo woman with fair skin.

  Luis made the call the following evening, using a new Walmart cellphone. He’d selected a flip phone, because it was cheap and he was going to use it only once. He dialed the number from memory.

  “Hello? Who is this?” asked the voice in Castilian Spanish, very proper with correct enunciation.

  “It is I, Luis,” he replied.

  “Yes,” said the voice. “You’ve completed your assignment, I see.”

  On television, thought Luis. “Yes.”

  “We have another project for you.”

  “Very well,” Luis said with no discernible accent.

  “Come and see me,” said the voice.

  Luis knew that this man liked face to face contact. He prided himself on being able to read a man’s soul by looking into his eyes. Luis knew this belief had served the man well in his professional life.

  “Very well,” said Luis. “Tomorrow.” He closed the flip phone and removed the sim card. Later he would drop the phone into a hotel toilet, wrapped in a small hand towel. He knew that it would easily fit through the four-inch pipe and be washed with the rest of the sewage to the nearest water treatment plant.

  Luis lived on the fringes of society, alone and alert. He was constantly reading and studying anything that might give him an edge. Unlike in the movies, to be effective an assassin had to be patient and willing to devote as much time as necessary to the project at hand. Sometimes it required months to get close to his target, to develop a relationship and build trust. But Luis was good at it. He reflected the empathy he saw in other people, and although soulless, he practiced the appropriate reactions to various situations constantly, developing intricate scenarios in his mind and then putting himself in the place of each of the participants. He studied movies and television for clues to human responses. He would meet people and befriend them as practice. When they bored him too much he moved on.