Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  Anna stiffened and felt Helena stir in the crook of her left arm. Pregnant wouldn’t be her first assumption when told of a person caught in a strainer. Anna was a bit past the age when Helena would automatically be assumed to be hers, but there was no reason not to assume she belonged to a deceased member of the party.

  “Yeah,” Anna said warily.

  “Did she live?” Martinez’s eyes were too wide. Even in the vague light of the moon, Anna could see them spark black against the whites surrounding them. The liquid lines of his muscles were frozen now and he looked a man made of angles and edges.

  “No,” Anna told him. “She died.”

  “God dammit!” Martinez cried. “Mexican?” he demanded.

  “Mexican.”

  “God dammit!” and he started to his feet, his fists clenched as if he planned on battering Anna until she changed her story.

  “Sit down.” Anna had the Glock in her hand and the muzzle pointed unwaveringly at his chest, the biggest target and nearly impossible to miss at this distance.

  Martinez stopped cold, his hands still bunched into fists at his sides, the knuckles big and gleaming white in the reflected light from the desert floor.

  “Sit down,” Anna said again. “You’re going to wake the baby.”

  For a long miserable second Martinez stared down at her and Anna worried that, if she shot him, he would fall on Helena. Finally he sat, folding down with all the grace of a broken chair collapsing. He dropped his head in his hands with more drama than Anna thought the passing of a stranger, pregnant or not, called for.

  “Did the baby die too?” he mumbled through his fingers.

  It crossed Anna’s mind that the guy was psycho, had stolen Martinez’s gun, radio and horse and wandered Texas killing people. It wasn’t unheard of, not even in Anna’s limited experience with murderous psychopaths.

  “The baby did not die,” she said carefully and without taking the Glock off Martinez. “I delivered her by C-section after the mother died. Helena—this baby—is the child of the dead woman in the strainer.”

  Martinez lifted his face from his hands, his eyes glowing with a fanatic light—or that of a man pardoned at the eleventh hour. “No kidding?” he said, and the bizarreness was as if it had never happened. He spoke with the joyous clarity of a nice park ranger hearing the most fabulous news.

  “This is the baby,” he said in a voice close to awe. “Venus, the child from the sea.”

  “Helena. From the river,” Anna said tersely. It annoyed the stuffing out of her that he was messing with the name, as if he had a claim on the baby. She liked him better as a crazed killer. At least she could shoot him in that persona.

  “I’ve got a new baby,” he said. “My wife gave birth to Edgar Allan Martinez six weeks and two days ago.”

  A new father. That could explain the manic-depressive episode but Anna didn’t quite buy it. She wasn’t sure she bought the bit about his wife having a baby. Edgar Allan? Not an auspicious name, not to mention not exactly a Spanish name.

  “Can I hold her?”

  “Would you stop with that?” Anna snapped. “No baby. No gun. You sit and stop being weird. I’m too tired and hungry for anything but nice, ordinary, sane people. Or dead people,” she added, and was gratified to see that the pity was gone from his face and alarm had taken its place.

  They fell silent. The small fire in the metal fire ring had gone out and a cool breeze was coming down from the Chisos. Anna wrapped the rags of T-shirt and sleeping bag closer around Helena. Without the sun the air had an edge to it and Anna wished she’d thought to drag the horse blanket back with her. Cold was seeping into her, mixing with fatigue and beginning to set up like concrete in her joints. Paul should be getting back now, Chrissie and Steve and Cyril with him. Regardless of the hazards of four people ascending the slide with a single flashlight, Anna knew there was no way Paul would be able to keep Chrissie on that rock overnight short of lowering a feather bed and shower down to it.

  “Sorry about the outburst,” Freddy said finally. “When Homeland Security closed the border they killed a lot of people in one way or another, killed their hope, killed their income, some it just plain killed. Closing the border was a crime of violence. This woman was probably trying to cross so her baby could be born in America, in a hospital with proper medical care. The river came up and she got carried down canyon. Because she wanted the best for her child, we killed her. Jesus.”

  Anna said nothing. She didn’t have a dog in this fight.

  Martinez took a deep breath and blew it out noisily, then another exhaled on the noise. “Lisa—my wife—is a big yoga person. Can’t hurt.” He did it again and seemed calmer.

  “Lisa just had the baby?” Anna wanted to see if the story would change at all.

  “Edgar.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Never. Edgar. Lisa’s thesis was on Poe. She thinks the man was the greatest writer of the nineteenth century.”

  Anna guessed Martinez was in his mid-forties. Lisa was probably the second wife. Or the third. A twenty-something wanting her own family on the tail end of her husband’s, whose children were already grown and gone. It was common enough: Sir Paul McCartney was frolicking with a child who would graduate from college when Papa was an octogenarian. Anna had never much liked the picture, but she suspected it was more because of the iniquities of aging from gender to gender than because it was evil in and of itself. Money was a factor, so the child might lose a father at an early age but there would be a Ferrari in the offing to take the edge off her grief.

  Where the heck was Paul? She looked at her watch. It had died at twenty past three. “What time is it?” she demanded.

  “No watch. It’s my day off.”

  Anna remembered they were in the twenty-first century and rolled the satellite phone over so she could see its face. Paul had headed back down no more than forty-five minutes ago. It would be an hour before she could begin to expect him. She wished she’d had him leave some of the water. There was an inch left in Helena’s cup and the baby was fast asleep. Absurd as it was, Anna could not bring herself to drink it.

  “If you’ll tell me the rest of the story, I promise I won’t do anything as horrific as preferring live babies to dead ones again,” Martinez said.

  He’d recovered his sense of humor. The least Anna could do was to pretend she’d recovered hers. She proffered a fake laugh. The sound amused her so much she laughed outright. It would be good to have a distraction.

  “Sure,” she said. “But no asking to hold Helena.”

  “Holding babies is the best therapy there is,” Martinez said.

  “You’re sure warm and fuzzy for a Texas ranger,” Anna grumbled. “What ever happened to stiff upper lip and smile when you say that, pardner?”

  Martinez just smiled. She was beginning to like the smile. No light but that from the moon and the desert, his big white teeth in his dark face put her in mind of the Cheshire cat.

  “So after the C-section . . .” Martinez cued her.

  Anna told him the rest. Carmen’s death, Lori’s, Easter’s probable demise; he heard it all with solemn dignity, none of it yanking him up by his roots the way the news of the woman in the strainer had. Freddy Martinez was somehow connected to the dead woman, to the baby she held on her lap, a connection that moved him from rage to exultation and back again.

  Careful not to disturb Helena, Anna moved the Glock closer to her thigh. Until she knew what that connection was she would keep both it and the baby close.

  TWENTY

  Shortly after nine o’clock Darden was riding down from the Chisos with a seasonal ranger. The dinner was still in full swing and he hated to leave but it wasn’t his choice; it was Judith’s. Word that shots had been fired on the border resulting in the injury or death of tourists had become common knowledge almost before Darden had made it back through the gift shop to the dining hall. This common knowledge was not accurate. The few known facts had been passed through
imagination, misinformation and self-interest until the final result was as screwy and varied as the end of a children’s game of Rumor.

  Judith knew this phenomenon better than most. “I don’t care what is true,” she’d whispered to Darden after giving him his orders. “I care what I can use.”

  Shots fired on the Rio Grande should come in handy in the next few days while she hammered out her platform on border control. He could have dashed out and tried to corner Bernard Davies, but he doubted that would do anything but get the ranger’s hackles up. Staying out of the way until they’d gotten things under control was the better part of valor and, too, he didn’t want to miss Judith’s announcement speech.

  She was stellar: strong and smart and convincing without losing her charm. Unfortunately the press—and it was they who this week in the wilds was primarily aimed at—were distracted by the smell of blood from the direction of the border. Several had disappeared but came wandering back, looking disappointed. Gerry, he didn’t see again. She must have gotten in on the excitement one way or another.

  The mayor’s entourage had no shortage of vehicles but in his experience, car trips bred conversation, so Darden cadged a ride from a boy ranger. The kid had to be twenty-one—he had a gun on his hip—but with his downy cheeks and acne, he looked about fifteen. Clearly it galled him that he was patrolling campgrounds when the most exciting thing that had happened all season was happening without him. A good subject to pump for gossip, Darden thought.

  As it turned out, no pumping was necessary. It hadn’t taken but one interested look—and that was overkill—to set the kid off. Boy Ranger was anxious to let Darden—whom he mistakenly thought was still Secret Service, a delusion Darden did not disabuse him of—know that, though not chosen to help with the rescue, he was definitely in the know.

  “I gotta make one more pass through the campground before I head down,” the kid said. “You’d be surprised how much trouble campers can get up to.”

  Darden would be surprised but he didn’t say so. “You figure those people on the river were camping?” The segue was about as awkward as it could get, but it forced the conversation Darden wanted back on track.

  “Oh, yeah, for sure,” the kid said. “They were with this commercial outfit out of Terlingua. There’s been radio traffic about it all night. A couple of people were shot, from what it sounds like, and there was a ranger from Rocky Mountain on the trip with her husband and kids, I guess.”

  The kid drove like little old ladies are supposed to and seldom do. He gripped the steering wheel at an eleven and one position and leaned forward as if he was afraid the car would try to break away on its own if he let down his guard for an instant. If the kid didn’t have neck and back trouble already, he would by the time he was thirty. Which, at the rate they were creeping around the snaky black-top between tent sites, he’d be by the time they started down to headquarters.

  “They didn’t know what they were doing and lost the raft at the slide. That’s a rapid about a mile or so in,” the kid said. “I’ve been through it half a dozen times. It’s a piece of cake if you know how to read the water.”

  Darden knew he was supposed to be impressed so he murmured: “Impressive,” and all was well; the kid powered on.

  “Was the ranger leading the trip?” Darden threw in to keep the kid on subject.

  “No, the ranger was this woman named Anna Pigeon. She got mixed up in some funny business on Isle Royale and killed a guy. I guess she flipped out over it and they put her on administrative leave. From what I heard, it was a righteous shooting. Me, I wouldn’t bat an eye. So you have to shoot a bad guy? Isn’t that what we’re hired on for?”

  The last bit sounded like a quote and Darden wondered who the lucky ranger was that this boy wanted to be like. He didn’t have any desire to meet him.

  “Anyway, they didn’t make the rapids and lost all their gear.”

  Finally they were done with the dangerous campground patrol and turning onto the main—the only—road leading down from the Chisos Mountain Lodge to the park headquarters below. Darden heaved a sigh of relief before he could stop himself. He’d wanted the gossip, but the kid was a pain in the patootie, the sort of person who drains the life out of life by trying too hard. It occurred to Darden to overlook it due to the ranger’s youth, but he didn’t. This kid would be the same at thirty and forty and fifty, mid-level boring at some oversized firm, kissing up and talking down.

  Darden took off his seat belt. Not that the kid was so bad it made him suicidal but, with his present physique, there was no way to get comfortable with the belly band cutting one way and the shoulder strap another.

  The kid slammed on the brakes and Darden nearly bashed his head on the dashboard.

  “You have to wear your seat belt in all government vehicles,” he said. “Safety issues.” Then, realizing he sounded like the little prig he was, he added: “I don’t bother with them when I’m on my own, when your number is up, it’s up, right?”

  “Riiiight,” Darden said sourly, and put the belt back on.

  “What was it I heard about shots being fired?” Darden said when they had again reached their snail’s pace. The ride with the kid had been a bad idea, but he might as well get out of it what he could.

  “I guess somebody was shooting at them or something.”

  The boy ranger went on after that, but Darden had quit listening. The opening sentence didn’t bode well for even a scrap of truth making it into subsequent statements.

  HEADQUARTERS WAS humming. The rescue team had returned with the victims, the ambulance was back, half a dozen cars were parked hurriedly in the front lot and all the lights were on. The boy ranger insisted on escorting Darden in, probably in hopes of being included in whatever was going on inside. He wasn’t. The chief ranger wasn’t particularly thrilled to have Darden show up unannounced, either, but Darden was good at ingratiating himself when the need arose. He poured on humility salted with a need to understand the park’s issues and was allowed to join the group in the conference room. He took a chair in a corner, out of the limelight and the line of fire, and proceeded to vanish as best he could by looking older and fatter and sleepier than he actually was, a person of no import, nobody to be reckoned with. Wallpaper, Darden liked to think of it. In moments he was forgotten.

  The room was spacious and, during the day, probably had a spectacular view of the mountains. At this hour the big square windows on the southwest side of the conference table showed as black mirrors. On the internal wall were three good photographs of scenic stuff and one in black and white of the park in the early days, but other than that it looked like any of a hundred conference rooms Darden had wallpapered.

  Bernard Davies sat at the head of the table in an office chair made to match the oak of the table. He had it tilted back as far as it would go to accommodate his long legs and sat with his right ankle crossed over his left knee, exposing eight inches of white sock. His left hand rested on the ankle, looking too big and too rawboned for a man with an office job. Beside him was a compact man wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He looked to be in his forties, but had already lost most of his hair. What remained was still dark brown and curled over the tops of his ears and collar like fringe on a threadbare carpet. Darden remembered he was the head of the law enforcement wing for the park but couldn’t recall his name. Bad PR. He was slipping. Once he got Judith into the governor’s mansion he would step down, he promised himself. Judith needed a sharper man than he’d become. A younger man.

  The head of law enforcement had his elbows on the table and an open, sympathetic look on his face that Darden bet got him a lot more information in a week than the old hard-line cops got in a lifetime. Across from him was the river district ranger, Freddy Martinez. He was dressed like a cowboy, down to his high-heeled boots, a Mexican cowboy—vaquero, that was what they called themselves. Darden knew a lot about Martinez; he was so outspoken about the evils of closing the border between the park and its companion villa
ges on the other side of the Rio Grande that Judith had figured she might have some trouble with him, or be able to use him as a foil if he wasn’t all that bright. Darden was surprised how good-looking he was. Sitting comfortably in one of the swivel chairs, a foam coffee cup in his hand, he didn’t give off the aura of a fanatic, but one never knew.

  The others—there were six of them if the baby was counted—were at the other end of the table. Had he no clue what was going on, Darden would have known where the power was by the obvious separation between Us and Them. Rangers and tourists or, in this case, victim tourists. A double Them.

  The three teenagers, two obviously brother and sister if not fraternal twins, and the third, looking like she was going to burst into tears at any moment, he spent little time on. They were as lost as sheep and he was pretty sure the boy ranger had been mistaken. He didn’t peg any one of them as belonging to the older couple. The woman sitting, holding the baby, had to be the Anna Pigeon Boy Ranger had waxed so derisive about. The fallen ranger from Rocky Mountains, wherever the heck that was. Montana probably. One of the square states in the middle of the country, anyway.

  She was small, her hair was a bird’s nest, dried blood or catsup or mud speckled her face and arms. The shirt she was sort of wearing was ripped till it would have put a bag lady to shame and she was no spring chicken, forties at a guess. But she didn’t look crazy and she didn’t look like the sort of person who gave up without a fight. Or gave up with a fight, for that matter. She struck Darden as the kind whose corpse would kick you three days after you shot her.

  Davies and the law enforcement ranger—whose name Darden still couldn’t recall—didn’t see her that way. They were too professional to want to let their condescension show but not good enough actors to do it up thoroughly. In the tone of their voices and the tiredness of their smiles Darden could see that they didn’t want to deal with her as a fellow ranger, as another law enforcement professional, as a peer of any kind. It was more comfortable for them to put her in the role of poor little crazy middle-aged victim. A waste, Darden thought, one of their own was front and central to the incident they wanted to investigate and they were ignoring her.