by Неизвестный
“Something like that,” Meg admitted. “Except that's more like Rey and Laura. Not me. I don't want to be out of some movie plot, I don't want to be anonymous, I don't want to be an outsider these days. I can't even visit most of my safe houses since I started a public fundraising campaign. The Tucson heat is all over me. Tucson PD, state, federal, all kinds of different agencies have got me on their radar.”
“Why did you cancel the meeting at your safe house here?”
“I always call before I visit a house. The woman on front door duty told me that two US Marshals had just been there, asking for you.”
“Sorry I've got you into this mess.”
“Yeah. So am I. Okay, what next?”
“Are you all right?” I asked Mari.
“Not really,” Mari said. “But I can talk.”
“Meg. Alex. Can you leave the two of us alone?”
“I don't leave my mom alone,” Alex said defiantly.
“Unless I ask,” Man said with a wan smile. “And I'm asking. I really need to talk with this woman in private. So please go with Meg. Sit on the other side of the atrium or go into the restaurant and watch TV.”
“They're tuned to the TV Land network,” she said disgustedly. “I mean, who wants to watch a twenty-year-old dumb television rerun?”
They left.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Okay. Isn't that just a typical happy-face phrase. You know I'm hurting, but you don't want to ask me straight out, so you slide around it by asking if I'm okay. Well, I'm not okay. Had my last chemo yesterday. Talked with the oncologist. I need a really, really big favor.”
“I don't know that I'm much capable of that.”
“Meg is right. You're getting ready to cut out.”
“Yeah. She's right.”
“Where you going?”
“Mexico.”
“Take Alex with you.”
“What?”
“I'm going back into the hospital.”
“Oh, Mari. I'm so sorry.”
“There's a 'but' in there.”
“Tomorrow I might be in jail. I made a deal, I busted the deal. That's why the US Marshals are looking for me.”
“So? You're still going to Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“You're not worried they'll catch you at the border?”
“Not where I'm going to cross.”
“Please. Take Alex with you.”
“Can't do that.”
“It would only be for a week. I'm going to have a bone marrow transplant. In a week, I'll be strong enough to have Alex back.”
“She'd be furious with me trying to keep her from you.”
“She'd be more furious at me for making her go.”
“I can't make her come with me.”
“No. You can't.”
“Can't get around that one.”
“But I will tell her to go.”
“You'll tell her.”
“Yes.”
“To go with me.”
“Yes.”
“To Mexico. Even if I'm saying to you, I don't want her with me.”
“Please. I have nobody else to ask. Meg is freaked out with all the police surveillance. And frankly, without taking her meds, she's really getting so unstable that I can't trust her to be responsible. There's nobody else. Don't you have a daughter?”
“Not the issue.”
“Please. And to make it easier, I'll even tell you where to take Alex.”
“You don't want her with me all the time?”
“Meg's daughter is at some ranch, out in the middle of nowhere in the Sonoran Desert. Take Alex to stay with Meg's daughter.”
“Ranch!” I snorted. “You're talking about that run-down old place where Rey's father used to live. It's no ranch. Just a falling-down house full of holes.”
“Rey said it would be all right.”
“How do you know that?”
“He called Meg's cell phone. Meg wasn't there, I thought the call was for me, I talked with him. Their daughter, Amada, she's apparently going teenage nuts being all alone on that ranch. Rey thinks that Alex would be good company. He's got a TV satellite dish, he's rebuilt the house, he says Amada would love another girl for company. If it's okay with Rey, if I make it okay with Alex, won't you take her?”
“That won't be possible.”
“Why not? Jesus Christ, Laura, why not?”
“Because I think I'm headed back to jail.”
Jake Nasso was loping across the atrium from the street. I got up to run into the Marriott restaurant, but Taá stood in the doorway. Both of them had holstered weapons, both had their hand on the holster. Two waitresses in the restaurant stood behind Taá, mouths open, too young to be anything but curious about what might happen. Jake gathered Meg and Alex, herding them to our table. I slumped into the chair as Jake pulled his handcuffs from behind his back and dropped them with a clank on the glass-topped table.
“Pull over those two chairs,” he said to Taá. “Helllloooooo, Laura.”
Taá sat next to me, her face flushed red with anger.
“And hello again. Um, Mari, was it?”
“Mari Emerine.”
“And daughter Alice.”
“Alex.”
“And Thai food Meg.”
“You don't need them,” I said. “Let's just go, leave them here.”
“Don't need them. But nobody's going anywhere, not just yet. How about some more iced tea, ladies? I need a cold beer.”
“Jake!” Taá was exasperated. “Let's just take her. Now.”
“Hey. You found her. Now I get to be in charge.”
“How did you find me?”
“You still got that bracelet on.”
I lifted my leg, pulling my jeans above the stun anklet.
“It's a stun thing,” I said. “I cut off the digital tracker.”
“Oh, Taá led you down the rabbit hole, Laura. Nobody's invented a stun anklet yet. It's just another tracker model, but she wanted you to think it was something else. We've got these map things? In the cars? Just like a James Bond movie.
We followed you everywhere. Taá wanted to grab you down in Tucson, but I said Hey, let's see what they got in Scottsdale. Always wanted to come sniff the money up here.“
“I trusted you,” I said to Taá, but she and Meg were staring at each other. Nasso followed their eyelocking and smiled. I realized he knew they'd been lovers.
“Uh uh. Honey?” He waved at one of the young waitresses. “Iced teas all around for the ladies. Draft beer for me.”
I watched the waitress go to the bar and talk excitedly with a man who took her green apron and tied it on. A chef walked by and the man took the chef's hat and sunglasses, nestling the hat onto his curly black hair and tucking the sunglass temples above his ears onto the hat. The waitress hurriedly filled some glasses, put them on a tray, filled a glass with something out of a pressure spigot, and set that glass on the tray also. The man hoisted the tray up on his right hand and came out to us, setting the tray onto our table.
“Ah,” Nasso said, reaching for the glass of beer. “I'm really thirsty.”
“You can drink it when we leave,” the man said, pulling a Glock out from underneath the apron and laying it alongside Nasso's left ear.
“Laura. Take their weapons.”
“Rey?”
“Now!”
I was so dumbstruck I couldn't move. Alex jumped up, carefully approached both Nasso and Taá from behind, and removed their guns. Rey tucked both of them into his belt and waved into the restaurant. His old friend Manny lumbered out and sat down at the next table.
Manny. The Vietnam vet with the picture book of dead people. The man who'd babysat me a year before, content to eat and watch TV while keeping me safe.
“Y'all sit here a while,” Rey said to Taá and Nasso. “Enjoy that beer. My friend over there, he's going to sit with you a while. He's got a chili dog coming.”
“Three,”
Manny said.
“So he'll make sure you stay put while he eats all three chili dogs. And whatever else he wants. Laura, Alex, come on.”
“Go with him,” Mari said to Alex.
“Mom!”
“Sweetie, they can't do anything to me. I'm going in the hospital. For my last chemo treatment.”
“But Mom, you can't ask me to leave you.”
“Sure I can. Just for a few days. Go with Laura, go with this man.”
“No way!”
“Way.”
“Staying here.”
“Not.”
“Just for a day. Three days. Maybe four.”
“Which hospital?”
“Right here in Phoenix. The cancer center.”
“I can call you?”
“Every day.”
“Promise?”
“Do I look strong enough to lie and risk bringing the wrath of teenage doom down on my head?”
“Come on,” Rey said. “People saw the guns, they're making calls inside. I've got to believe 911 is a popular number.”
Alex clutched my hand, clutched her mother's hand. I backed up, stretching her between myself and Mari. Their hands extended as I moved until only the fingertips touched, and then Alex and I turned and began running.
“Where's your pickup?” Rey shouted at me.
I couldn't believe he was that stupid, calling attention to my truck. It was parked across from the Marriott. Alex squeezed between us on the bench seat and Rey drove to Scottsdale Avenue, catching the light, and turning left. At Indian School he turned right, and then left again at Goldwater Boulevard. He pulled into a parking lot behind a building with fake Greek pillars and squeezed the pickup between two large SUVs. We walked past the back entrance of a mystery bookstore and then went through a boutique restaurant out onto Goldwater. A dirty brown Humvee was parked at the curb, three teenagers on skateboards looking in the front windows.
“I thought you didn't play with real guns any more,” I said as he shooed away the skateboarders and got the aircon cranked high.
“Didn't say that. Said I didn't shoot guns any more.”
“What if you'd had to shoot back there?”
He held up his Glock and pulled the trigger. It clicked. He thumbed the magazine release and showed it to me.
“No bullets.”
“You braced two US Marshals with an unloaded gun?”
“They didn't know that. Seatbelts?”
We strapped in. The aircon started blowing cold air. He powered up all the windows and locked the three guns behind a secret panel.
“And Manny?”
“What about him?”
“What kind of gun does Manny have?”
“Nothing but a chili dog.”
Four hours later we were at the Sasabe border crossing.
25
Sasabe. Tigger. House of death. The border.
Cross over into another world, another state, another life.
State of mind, state of grace, hail Mary and Joseph, I have sinned.
A year ago, when my life was steady and sane and safe, I worked with a bounty hunter named Tigist. She was Ethiopian, scarcely five feet tall, with luminous kohl-blackened eyelids, and intense ocean-green pupils, the eyes set deep over a long, slightly hooked nose in the exact middle of a thin face. Since few people remembered how to pronounce her name, she'd started calling herself Tigger after reading a Pooh book to her son. She always told me that she could handle herself in any situation, but I'd brought her into a case that took her to Sasabe, where she'd been murdered.
I'd live with that guilt for the rest of my life.
Driving through the small town, I looked for the spot.
An adobe house, six-foot fence, razor wire, Tigger.
But the house had vanished, scraped clean off the ground. At intervals, other vacant lots, houses destroyed, even the debris transported elsewhere.
“Guy who owns the town, he put it up for sale.”
We drove past and took the loop down to the right, hay now eleven dollars a bale, curve up to the left and the inverted vee roofing of the border station.
“Three million, he first asked.”
We waited behind an old Dodge Ram pickup, the bed so overloaded with hay that the weight bottomed out the worn springs and suspension, the rear wheels splayed outward like a coyote van overloaded with twenty hopeful illegals.
“When he got no takers, he picked half a dozen houses where some crime had been committed. Dope storage, rape, murder, maybe it was eight houses. Bulldozers came in, they wiped out the houses. Brought forty day workers over the border to carry away the debris. Picked the house sites clean. But still no takers.”
The pickup was waved through by the US Customs agent, who slouched, bored, waiting for us to drive up to him.
“Don't know if the price dropped, or if the guy who owns Sasabe just took the town off the market. Couldn't say.”
“Where are you headed?” the agent asked.
Rey flashed a fake Border Patrol badge. The agent nodded as soon as he saw the familiar shape and colors, waved us past without even reading the badge. At the Mexican side, Rey folded his left hand around his policia card and a twenty-dollar bill. The Mexican agent took the card and the money, palmed the money, and without looking at it, handed Rey back his card.
“We're in,” he said, as the Humvee bounced off the US pavement onto a rough Mexican road. “You might as well try to sleep or something.”
I took the identity card before he could stuff it into his pocket.
“Ramon Vargas,” I read out loud.
“I told you. When I cross the border, I'm a different person.”
The border. A statement of geography, a state of mind, a line. Like death. In one instant, you cross over the edge of your known world.
Approaching it on foot, you raise a leg and place it into another country before your body follows. Up in the four corners area, you can get down on hands and knees and have a different part of your body in four different states. Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado.
A state of mind, state of grace, state of citizenship, state of escape.
You wake up feeling great, wonderful, life's a bonanza and cream. Go for a routine checkup, have tests, have a diagnosis and a follow-up chat and a second opinion, and then you're in for bone marrow transplants, knowing it's downhill, you're in another country, you've crossed the border.
Cruising at sixty kilometers per hour, the Humvee hit a stretch of dirt washboard. Before Rey could hit the brakes and slow down, the Humvee rattled violently, and because I'd taken off my seatbelt to try and sleep, the vibrations bounced me off the ceiling panel and against the door.
“Sorry,” Rey said. “I didn't see that coming.”
He slowed at a fork, chose the right track, accelerated when the dirt smoothed out for a long stretch.
“You know what you taught me?” he said.
“What?”
“There are conditions, options, rules. You taught me to question those rules. You weren't afraid to do that when I knew you a year ago. Question the rules, make changes, become somebody else.”
“I just want to sleep, Rey.”
“You want to know why I have these false identity cards? These Border Patrol badges? You taught me that. Be who you want to be.”
“Please.”
I looked over my shoulder at Alex, dead asleep across the rear seat.
“Just let us sleep.”
The sun glowed full on the western horizon and dropped out of sight.
“Green,” Rey shouted.
“What, what?” Alex said from the backseat.
I'd been asleep, but had awakened ten minutes before.
“Don't you remember telling me about the green wave?”
“Stare at the setting sun. Keep your mind on nothing else but the sun. Red, orange, big and fat, then bop it's gone and you see a green sun. You mind is totally betrayed. Your eyes have been taking in the color spe
ctrum red through orange. And when those colors disappear, your mind tries so hard to compensate that it overcompensates on the color scale and you see the exact opposite. Green.”
“What are you guys talking about?”
“Go back to sleep, Alex.”
“When do we get there?”
“A while,” Rey said, “a while yet.”
But she'd already fallen back asleep.
“Kids. Live for the moment. If they don't like that moment, they drop out of it.”
“Rey, it's not that simple.”
“Kids.”
At Zacateca, nothing more than a junction in the road with three old houses, Rey pulled the Humvee to a stop.
“Need a beer. Want something?”
“Mmmmm.”
When he came back with four cans of beer, I popped the tab on one and drank thirstily.
Draining one beer, he popped open another.
“Talk to me about this job,” he said.
“Smuggling people across the border.
“Two different. . . I'd guess I'd have to call them cartels. There's so much money behind one of the smuggling rings, it has to be related to drugs. They bring in foreign women, they sell them in the US. Whorehouses, strip joints, sweatshops, even as indentured servants. So I'm told. I don't really know this, I'm just told.”
“People can say anything.”
“You ever hear of Basta Ya?”
“Some kind of workers' union? For Indians? Mestizos?”
“I think so.”
“Yeah. I've heard of it. Small change, I hear. When something is tolerated by the policia, when they let it continue, it's got to be small change. No money in it. No bribes, so let it happen until it shows a profit.”
“It's run by my ex-husband.”
Stunned, he let the Humvee drift off the road. We crashed down and over a small ditch and started ramming creosote bushes alongside the road until he regained control and took his foot off the accelerator. We drifted to a stop in the middle of a patch of jumping cholla.
“Jonathan Begay,” I said.“
“Señor Johnny. I've heard people talk about him. He's in jail.”