by Billy Kring
Mickey hopped off her bike and hurried to me, all fluttering, touching hands and worried looks. “Are you all right? Are you having any chest pains, pains down the right arm -- or is it left? Are you having any pain down either arm?” Hondo put a hand on her shoulder and she stopped.
“You find something?” He said.
I nodded between gasps. Mickey hopped right in front of me, “I know what to do!” She made the peace sign with two fingers and tapped the V on her forearm. “Does it have two syllables?” She raised three fingers and tapped them on her forearm, “Three?”
Hondo said, “I don’t think charades is what he had in mind. Let’s give him a minute to catch his breath.”
Mickey wrung her hands and bit at her lower lip and paced in tiny zigzags that always came back to me. I finally got enough air in my system to croak, “Found some tracks...on a game trail...same tread as ours.”
Mickey hopped on her bike and showered dirt like a dragster as she took off. Hondo said, “Time to go, you athletic looking son of a gun.”
Mickey passed up the game trail and we yelled at her. She skidded to a stop and pedaled back like an insane person. Her mohawk had mutated in all the wind and sweat so that it curled over to the side like Free Willy’s dorsal fin. Pink and green glitter stuck to her face like fish scales and there were snail tracks where sweat trickled through the dust on her face. Fetching. “Where is it? Where’s Bob? He’s not hurt is he?”
“I don’t know that it’s even him. Calm down and we’ll find out.” We parked our bikes behind a large bush and started down the trail. Mickey was behind me moving constantly from side to side, peeking around my shoulder on the left side for five seconds, then my right, then left, over and over. I stopped. “Mickey, calm down or I’m going to tie you to a tree.” Big tears formed in her eyes. Christ. I said, “Look, I’m sorry, but you need to be less noisy, move less on the trail. That will help us check this out faster. Can you do that?” The small head nodded, eyes big and red. A couple of pink flakes dropped off her cheek and fluttered to the ground. Mickey didn’t say a word, but moved behind Hondo to take up the end of the line. Hondo mouthed, “You big bully,” at me. I shook my head and turned to the tracks.
A hundred yards into the brush was a small side draw. A dense growth of oaks filled the bottom and several sycamores farther down indicated possible water. I caught the tiniest glimpse of yellow, like a fresh-discarded banana skin deep under the oaks. I pointed it out to Hondo and Mickey. “You see it?”
Hondo nodded and Mickey held my arm and jumped up and down, “Yesyesyes! You are so magnificent!” I got another look from Hondo.
We moved into the canyon and as we reached the bottom, the thick brush and young sapling oaks shortened our line of sight. Even so, we found a good trail that snaked around the thickest portions and moved under the big trees. The last bit of trail rounded a pile of large slabs of rock infused with marine fossils. I smelled smoke as we turned the corner and stepped into a small, neat clearing shaded by the largest oaks.
Two small brown women sat beside a fire and stared at us. From their facial expressions, you’d have thought we were a pack of man-eating lions. Mickey clung to my arm, then made a sound of alarm and pointed to a yellow bicycle leaning against a fallen log. “It’s Bob’s!”
She sprinted across the clearing and the women scrambled out of her path like frightened deer: afraid to run, afraid to stay. Mickey reached the bike and put her hands on it, alternately crying and cooing. You’d have thought it was a sacred relic.
Hondo told the aliens, “Amigos, amigos.” He pointed to us as he talked. The women relaxed a little. They were around twenty, and had reddish-blond hair, green eyes and skin the color of caramel.
As we walked closer, we could see they were unkempt, with un-brushed hair and clothes they’d worn too long without laundering. These women had been living in the woods for a while. One of them had a bandage on her head, but seemed in no pain. They wore shorts and pullover tops, with one in tennis shoes and the other wearing Mexican sandals. Hondo said to Mickey, “You have a cell phone?”
“What? Yes, yes I do.” She touched the bike one more time, then opened her purple fanny pack and took out a pink cell phone and walked to Hondo, putting it in his hand.
“It’ll be long distance,” he said.
“That’s all right. Go ahead.”
Hondo dialed a number and as it rang, he turned to me, “Figured I’d call Hunter and get her to translate for us. You want to talk to her?”
I shook my head, “Uh-uh. She’s still mad at me.”
Hondo’s attention returned to the phone and he said, “Hey Hunter, It’s Hondo. How you doing?” He listened for a few seconds and said, “Yeah, doing fine. Hey, Ronny’s right here and he says Hi-” Hondo pulled the phone away from his ear, then put it back, “You bet. I’ll be sure and tell him. Exactly, yes.” He listened, then said, “I need to ask a favor. We are up in the mountains and ran into a couple of undocumented aliens, and they’re young women, yes women, and we need to ask them some questions. They don’t speak English and I thought you could translate for us.” More listening, then, “Yes, I know you’re working, but this is sort of like your business, after all you’re the Border Patrol, right? The Border Patrol’s for the whole United States, right, and California is part of that, right?” Hondo smiled and I knew Hunter Kincaid was laughing on the other end of the line. Hondo said, “Okay, I’ll hand it to one of them, hold on.” He walked to the woman who appeared the least nervous and showed her how to hold the phone. Hondo told Hunter, “I’m passing you over. Go ahead.”
The small woman listened and nodded four or five times, never saying a word, then she suddenly jerked the phone away from her ear and looked at it wide-eyed. She put it back and said, “Si senorita official, voy a hablar!” The woman listened for a bit, then rattled off Spanish like a machine gun, using her free hand to emphasize the conversation as if Hunter could see as well as hear her.
She gave the phone to Hondo who listened, then said to Hunter, “We want to know about the bicycle they have. How they got it, when they got it, did they see anyone with it or nearby, did they hear anything that sounded like someone in trouble.” Hondo handed the phone back to the woman, who listened, then talked for a long time, pointing at the sky and the ground and the other women who wore a dirty bandage on her ear and then back at the mountains.
She gave the phone back to Hondo, who listened for a while and said, “Okay, thanks a lot. We’re going to call the Sheriff’s office, let them know the women are here. The main thing is, they have a fire up here and everything’s as dry as tinder. If the Santa Anas start blowing it’ll burn all of these people to cinders and turn half the houses in Malibu to charcoal sticks. It’s way too dangerous to let them stay. I have to tell you, though, I’d almost rather not do it.” Hondo listened some more, then said, “Yeah, the case is a little funny, got some Hollywood people in it, so you could tag along and meet some movie stars.”
I felt the hair raise up on my neck. What was he doing?
Hondo said, “Okay, we’ll see you then. Adios.” He handed the cell to Mickey and said to us, “Hunter said the women are from Durango, the city. They’ve been here for about two weeks. They were smuggled into the country by a coyote, an alien smuggler, a mean man who hid them near the highway. There were three others, but the – and I’m telling you what Hunter said they said – the beautiful man found them and brought them here. Three days ago, he came back while the two of them were out setting snares and he took the other three with him. They said he left a note in Spanish saying he would be back soon, but he hasn’t returned. Hunter said she asked them what they had planned to do in the United States, and the woman said the coyote lied to them to get them across the border and then told them they would be forced to work as strippers and prostitutes.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
Hondo said, “I know. Neither did Hunter. She’s worried about them, said it
sounds like a ring she worked in Florida that forced the women into prostitution and working at strip clubs. It’s something we’ll need to tell the Sheriff’s office when we call.”
Mickey said, “I don’t see any food. What were they eating?”
“They were down to living on rabbits and a few tortillas until the miracle happened three days ago, the same day the other three women left with, we assume, Landman.”
“Miracle?” Mickey said.
“That’s what they called it. The woman said they were sitting around that evening talking about what to do when the bike fell from the sky and landed on Modesta’s head. They considered it a miracle because now one of them can ride down to the edges of the communities and get food from dumpsters and bring it back.”
I said, “It dropped from the sky?”
“Hunter said she quizzed her pretty close on that, and the woman said it absolutely came down on them from the air, that God in heaven must have seen their need and provided for them.”
I thought about it for a minute as I checked the area. I looked at the location of the fire ring, then at the draw where we had entered, and tried to imagine where the biking trail was in relation to us. Hondo must have been reading my mind because he said, “I think the trail’s pretty close to that ridge up there.” He pointed to a higher outcrop that jutted at the top of a bluff on the hillside.
I said, “A strong guy could toss a bike off of there.”
“I don’t know. It’s a long way out from there to the fire.”
“Yeah, but I bet you could do it.”
Hondo looked at it. “I could tell better from up there, but yeah, maybe.”
In clothes, Hondo doesn’t look muscular. In fact, he looks almost thin, even though he weighs about two-oh-five. But he’s strong the way Bruce Lee was strong. I once watched Hondo pull a practical joke on a friend of ours where he took the friend’s Volkswagen bug and put it in the bed of a nearby pickup truck.
He nudged me with his elbow. “Want to know what else Hunter said?”
“No, I do not.”
He grinned, “She said she’s got a vacation scheduled with no place to go, so I thought she might want to come visit, and she said she’d plan on coming out.”
I closed my eyes, “Tell me you didn’t.”
“It’ll be like old times.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Look at it this way: It’ll give you a chance to work things out. You can’t leave something like that unresolved.”
“Thank you, Doctor Phil.”
Mickey said, “Who’s this Hunter Kincaid?”
Hondo said, “She’s a friend of ours. Grew up in a town about twenty miles from Ronny and me. She and Ronny became quite the item last year while we were working a case, then they developed some problems that have to be worked out so we can all be friends again.”
“She’s a Border Patrol Agent?”
“Yeah, lives in West Texas. Good officer, too.”
I said, “A hell of a shot. Deadly, not someone you want mad at you.” I looked at Hondo as I spoke.
Mickey said, “I’d like to meet her. You know, Bob had optioned a script a couple of weeks ago that’s about the Border Patrol. It’s called Ninety Notches, and of course he would play the lead.”
“Ninety Notches?”
Mickey pretended she was holding a pistol and she pointed at the grip. “You know, notches for the men killed in gunfights?”
If somebody lived through ninety gunfights and put notches in a pistol grip, there wouldn’t be enough wood left to make a decent toothpick. The last person I’d read about who was vain enough to put notches on their gun was General Patton, and that had been when he was a young lieutenant with Pershing on their futile campaign into Mexico to find Pancho Villa.
Hondo said, “Sounds like an academy-award winner to me. That Bob is a genius at picking quality scripts. Big sense of realism with that one.”
Mickey nodded her head, “That is exactly what he said: ‘A movie about the realities of the border.’” As Mickey looked around you could see her mind returning to the realities of the present. She said, “What about Bob? He’s not going to throw his favorite bike off a cliff. So what do we do now?”
“Why don’t we go up there and take a look. There may not be anything to see, but we won’t know if we don’t look.”
“What about Bob’s bike?”
“We’ll tell the sheriff’s office about it when we call and have them bring it out. We can’t take four bikes back without a lot of trouble.”
We waved good-bye to the women and Mickey made push-down motions with her hands, saying in a loud, slow voice, “Stay-o...here-o.” The women looked at her with eyes so big they reminded me of owls.
Hondo touched Mickey on the shoulder and as she looked at him, he shook his head and said, “No.”
Hondo led us out of the draw and back up the trail. We reached a spot that came within fifty or sixty feet of the bluff. Hondo led us through the brush on a hand-wide trail made of flattened grass and broken twigs all the way to the edge of the bluff, where we looked down at the tops of the trees below. Just past the trees, the canyon deepened by five or six hundred feet. No sign of the women or their camp was visible.
I looked around, but the grass was so thick that nothing distinctive showed. I had my head down, focusing on the ground near the edge when Mickey squealed so loud I jumped and almost went over. “It’s Bob’s!”
I went to her and looked over the edge, then got to my hands and knees to grip the rock. Heights and me do not get along. Hondo came up behind and tapped the sole of my shoe with his toe, making a ha-ha gesture of kicking me off.
“That’s not funny,” I said. I think my voice quivered, but I’m not sure because I couldn’t hear over the thudthudthud of my heart.
“You need to relax, let that tension flow out of you.”
A laugh a minute, that’s Hondo. He hopped over me to the edge and walked along it like walking across a gym floor. He spotted it at the same time I did. A purple fanny pack, exactly like the one Mickey wore, hung up on a small bush growing out of the bluff twenty feet below the rim.
I started to say something to Hondo, but he had disappeared. As I got to my feet, Mickey screamed near my ear, “Don’t fall!” My heart whanged against my ribcage.
“Don’t do that.” I said. She was biting her fingers and pointing down the edge of the cliff. Hondo was free-climbing down the rocks like a spider, with nothing but a pair of cotton shorts between him and a hundred foot fall to rocks.
We watched him, with Mickey clinging to me the way a baby spider monkey clings to its mother. I was beginning to worry about the circulation in my arm when Hondo reached the fanny pack, picked it up, put it over his arm and neck like a bandoleer, and started up. He came up faster than he went down. When he topped out, he handed the fanny pack to Mickey. His fingers left pale dusty prints on the purple cloth. Mickey opened it and moaned. “It’s his. It’s really his. What do we do now?” She looked like she was going to cry.
“Let me take a look,” I said. She handed it to me and I squatted down, dumping out the contents on the pale yellow grass. There was a stick of strawberry Chapstick, a granola bar, a half-full box of Tic-Tacs, a money clip with the initials B.L. holding a half-inch thick stack of folded hundreds, a cheap pen from a Motel Camino Real with an address in East LA, some scraps of paper, a Leatherman pocket tool, and two flint arrowheads.
“Chumash,” Hondo said.
“What?”
“The arrowheads. They’re Chumash. Lived in these mountains for thousands of years.”
“Thank you, Professor Leakey.” I turned to Mickey, who was about to cry again, “Mickey, did Bob collect arrowheads?”
“No, not that I ever saw.”
I puzzled over it, then started looking at the scraps of paper, turning them with a broken stem of grass. There were several numbers written on individual pieces, and the last one had a jumble of words.
“Bingo,” I said. Hondo and Mickey looked over my shoulder and read: Valdar Deco Urgent Paint Martinez Chumash. There had been something written after Chumash, but the paper was torn and all that was left was a bow-shaped line that could have been the start of anything. I thought maybe an O or a C.
Hondo reached over and pointed at the word Chumash, then stood up and grinned. “Knowledge is power,” he said.
This was enough for me. I borrowed Mickey’s cell phone and called my friend, Vick Best with the Sheriff’s department. I thought our location was county jurisdiction and things were not looking rosy for Bob Landman. I told Vick where we were.
He said, “We’ll be right out, don’t go anywhere.”
I told the others and we sat down to wait. It was an hour before the deputies showed up on four-wheelers. We talked it through and the deputies went into the draw to talk to the women and to put out any coals in the fire ring. Sergeant Vick Best said to Hondo and me, “You two going to Texas any time soon?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You do talk to people back there, right?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, it’ll square us up if you get them to send a care package this way.”
“Like what?”
“Last time I went through Texas near San Antonio I ate some local chips and salsa that were almost addictive. About three big bags of Julio’s chips and three jars of his salsa would be just fine.”
Hondo said, “I can eat a bag of those in about five seconds.”
“Tell me about it.” Vick looked around and said, “It’ll be official now, we’ll list Landman as a Missing Person. We’re going to be a while up here, but you three can leave. We’ll take the women in, get them cleaned, and fed, then call immigration. If it’s like last time, they’ll tell us to turn them loose because they don’t have anybody that can come. We’ll probably hold these women for a couple days just to get a few meals into them.” He shook his head. You three go on, now. I know where to reach you.”