A mockingbird flitted from one of the perimeter trees, and Indalecio watched its flight, wondering what had startled it from its perch. Then he saw – six men carrying assault rifles were clubbing Ruiz with their weapon butts as he tried to regain his footing. Blood streamed down his face onto his soiled white shirt, and now Indalecio could hear the blows, like truncheons, the wet smacks of wood on flesh, skin splitting with each smack.
Indalecio stood, horrified, frozen in his tracks. He was unarmed, and the only ones with assault rifles in Sinaloa were the cartels and the police – and these weren’t police. What the cartel wanted with a simple farmer escaped him, but the rifles were real enough.
One of the men screamed at Ruiz so loudly that Indalecio could hear him even at that distance.
“Where is he? Come on, old man. You don’t want to die to protect him.”
Indalecio couldn’t hear Ruiz’s response, but he didn’t want to learn the limits of the man’s loyalty – if Indalecio had been in his place, he would have told the assailants whatever they wanted to know already, and it was only human nature that Ruiz would do so sooner than later.
He turned and began running, his legs pumping beneath him, the muscles ropey and taut as he put distance between himself and the house. He flinched when a burst of automatic weapon fire sounded from where he’d abandoned Ruiz, but he kept moving, not needing to look back for confirmation of his worst fears.
Sweat streamed down his face as he reached the edge of the clearing and plunged into the trees, following a trail that led to a stream, the water source for his precious tomatoes. A quarter mile away, if he could make it, was a shed where he had some supplies and a couple of tired burros that hung around to eat their fill of the sweet grass and plants that surrounded the water. Where they’d come from, he never questioned, just as he didn’t question most things in his life. If providence had chosen to favor him with hoofed visitors, then who was he to be inhospitable to his land’s bounty?
Depending upon how skilled the gunmen were, he had anywhere from fifteen minutes to half an hour lead on them. With any luck he could disappear into the foothills and wait them out while figuring out how to deal with the latest wrinkle fate had thrown at him. He didn’t question why they’d killed Ruiz, nor why they were after him. It could have been anything.
Or could it?
Was it possible that this was the retribution he’d long feared because of his lawsuit?
No. That was a title dispute over ejido land, communal property that belonged to agricultural collectives – farmers, like him. Farmers didn’t drive fancy trucks and kill innocents in broad daylight. No, that smacked of the cartel.
The cartel operated according to its own logic, and it could be anything from an imagined slight to one of the new breed wanting Indalecio’s property to grow marijuana or opium poppies – something he’d been approached to do numerous times over his lifetime, but he’d always politely declined. The older leaders of the cartel tended to have respect for the old ways and had honored his wishes, but these new ones…who knew what they were capable of?
It was best to slip away and contrive a strategy from a safe distance rather than die a meaningless death today. He was not without means, having saved the lion’s share of his earnings every year and having sold several worthless patches of land along the edges of his property to speculators a decade earlier.
He’d get away and then seek out the police – the trick being finding some that weren’t in the cartel’s pocket. Finding an honest cop in Sinaloa was as easy as finding a virgin in a whorehouse, so the saying went, and he, like most Mexicans, avoided anyone in uniform or in a position of authority like the plague, not wanting to invite the attention of parasites who wanted nothing more than to suck honest folk dry.
But still. A cold-blooded murder on his property would not go unpunished, and he’d find someone to investigate. He had an attorney in Mazatlán he could call. Perhaps he’d know how to proceed.
Indalecio reached the shack and swung the door open, relieved to see that nothing had been disturbed. He gathered the bare essentials he could comfortably carry and filled two canteens from the stream and then went in search of the burros, hoping he could coax one into returning his generosity by transporting him into the hills, far away from the danger that was working its way up the rise to find him.
Chapter 15
Tijuana, Mexico
A thermal layer had settled over the city, the cool temperatures from the ocean meeting the heat rising off the land to create a thick, low overcast that blanketed the area and blocked any light from the full moon or the stars. The streets that wound through the industrial district of Otay Mesa, near the border crossing of the same name, were deserted at three a.m., the only life an occasional stray dog or a brave seagull on a nocturnal foraging expedition far from the shore. A semi-rig groaned along the road that led south, on its way to Baja loaded with freight, its engine roar dulled by the cloud cover.
El Rey stood with several dozen other men and women near a paint supply warehouse, hidden from view behind the gates, waiting for the escort who would get them across the border to the U.S., where, depending on how much they’d paid, they would either be ferried into San Diego and dropped off downtown, driven north to Los Angeles, or in El Rey’s case, handed the keys to a car.
CISEN had offered to handle getting El Rey into the United States, but he had decided to trust it to the professionals – the cartels that trafficked drugs and human cargo in one direction and weapons and cash in the other, through a network of tunnels that propagated weekly beneath the supposedly impenetrable border. He’d contacted one of the top coyote organizations that worked with the Tijuana cartel and negotiated a platinum-level package: guaranteed crossing via a tunnel, a Ford economy sedan on the U.S. side with current registration and decent tires, and no questions asked. The entire bundle came to twenty-five thousand dollars, but it was CISEN’s money, not his, so he wasn’t price sensitive.
For all his interaction with CISEN, he didn’t trust the intelligence service, and the less he depended on them for anything besides info and cash, the better. When he’d asked, they’d proposed getting him in using a diplomatic passport, but that would leave a trail he didn’t want. Instead he’d made his own arrangements through a set of contacts he’d developed over the years, which was how he found himself shifting from foot to foot in the chill, his bag over his shoulder, amidst a group of tired-looking fellow travelers from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
The Tijuana tunnels were the surest but most expensive route north for those wishing to try for a new life in the land of promise. There were approaches for every budget, varying from stowing away in hidden compartments of northbound freight trucks to night crossings in the high desert east of Tecate to the longer and more treacherous route that began in the Sonora desert and ended in Arizona. All had their risks, but El Rey liked his odds with the tunnels. Barring a cave-in or a raid, which the cartels usually knew about well in advance, they were a safe bet, with none of the danger of the other approaches: that their guides might execute them and take their belongings, or leave them to cook in a van in the middle of nowhere, or that they’d be apprehended by an increasingly trigger-happy border patrol.
A forest green nineties-era Lincoln Town Car pulled up, and two men got out. The car backed away and disappeared into the night as the pair approached the iron gate, opened it, and moved to the waiting group. El Rey dressed to blend into American life, wearing a No Fear T-shirt, a black hoodie, ratty beige cargo shorts, and a pair of new hundred-dollar Nike running shoes. To anyone studying him, he looked like a typical twenty-something slacker – that is, except for his eyes, which were as flat and dead as a shark’s.
The taller of the two men cleared his throat and spoke in a low rasp.
“Everyone knows what to expect, right? It should have been explained. We’ll be in the tunnel for half an hour, and there’s no reason to be concerned about ventilation or cave-ins, s
o I don’t want any freaking out. I’ll warn you all that it can be claustrophobic, but once we’re in, there’s no going back, so take a pill or have a last drink or whatever you need to do, because this is a one-way ride. You don’t need to bring a bunch of survival crap like food or water, so leave anything you have here – toss it in the dumpster. We’ve got water on the other side, and the neighborhoods where we’ll be taking you are a hundred percent Latino, right down to the street signs in Spanish – you can get tamales just like mama used to make within a block of the drop-off points, and they probably take pesos. So lighten your loads and get ready. We’ll go down in five minutes.” The speaker looked around. “Which one of you is Pablo?”
El Rey stepped forward. “That’s me.”
“Okay. Stay close to the front. Once we’re on the other side, you have your deal. Everyone else goes into a pair of vans.”
“Works for me.”
Three of the younger men in the group lit up a joint and nervously passed it among them. El Rey watched them for a moment, and then his eyes moved to a pregnant woman who looked ready to pop. It was common to make a run for the border in the final weeks of pregnancy so that the baby would be born with American citizenship and the mother would be able to avail herself of free health care and a social support infrastructure, whereas in Mexico there was nothing but the social security hospital. He guessed that her parents had scraped together the ten grand to get her across, hoping for a better life for their daughter than they’d had.
“All right. Follow me,” called their guide, and the group trailed him to one of the outbuildings. He unlocked a padlock and swung open the iron door. Inside it was pitch black, but he knew the way and in a few seconds had switched on a single low-wattage bulb.
“From this point on, no talking. Not even a whisper, do you understand? The border patrol has been using listening technology lately, and I don’t want to risk it. Any questions?”
Everyone shook their heads, and he nodded. His companion moved to a pallet, pushed it aside, and opened a steel hatch in the concrete floor. “This way,” he said, motioning for the pregnant woman to go immediately after him, and then he dropped into the darkness. El Rey could hear him scrambling down the rungs of a ladder. Light flickered to life below, and the woman eased herself down next, her face determined even as she struggled to avoid straining herself.
El Rey went next and found himself in a long shaft with support struts in place the entire two-story length. Once at the bottom he gazed around – more shoring, wood beams holding the earth above in place, and a chamber that was larger than he’d expected, at least twenty by twenty. A string of LED lights illuminated the area, and he eyed the steel door on the far end, triple-bolted on the cement wall.
Once everyone was in the room, the lead guide moved to the steel door, slipped the bolts free, and opened it. He flicked a switch, and more lights glowed into nothingness down a ten-foot-wide shaft. El Rey noted rails running along the floor, no doubt to make the efficient, silent transport of drugs or cargo possible. A ventilation fan hummed above his head, and he could feel a stirring from air being blown into the shaft, which receded as far as his eye could see.
The trip was anticlimactic given his expectations, nothing more than a third of a mile walk below ground. He was used to spending days in caves, so for him it was unremarkable, but he could smell the fear from the others as they forged deeper into the earth.
When they ascended a ladder that was the twin of the one on the Mexican side, El Rey helped the pregnant woman up the first rungs, for which he received a frightened but grateful glance. He amended his prior guess about her age – she was nothing more than a girl, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. This was probably the furthest she had ever been from home, headed into an uncertain future in a country she only knew from rumors. He allowed her to make her way at her own pace and then followed her up, anxious to be on the road.
When they emerged into the still night, two vans were waiting by the rear of the warehouse. The guide motioned to El Rey, and the assassin followed him through a gate to the street, where the promised vehicle sat under a streetlight. El Rey inspected the license plate, confirming that the tags were current, and after starting the engine and listening to it for several seconds, handed over the remaining ten thousand dollars.
“There’s a map in the glove compartment,” the man said and then left the assassin to make his own way. El Rey belted himself in and pulled away, glancing at the gas gauge showing full, and within minutes pulled onto the 905 freeway headed north. As he accelerated to cruising speed, he checked his watch and did a quick calculation – he could be in Sedona by late afternoon, at which point he would find a motel and get some rest before embarking on the next stage of his mission.
The archbishop had been found, as expected, that morning, and the evening news had been filled with vague accounts of the tragic death of a beloved community leader. As El Rey had expected, the Church had ensured that any embarrassing details were kept confidential, and the only things he saw were glowing testimonials and expressions of sadness at having lost such a fine holy man. He wondered what the average reader would have thought if they’d had access to the information in the CISEN dossier, but decided it didn’t matter. That was one out of three down, without a hitch.
Hopefully the next one would go as smoothly.
Chapter 16
Sedona, Arizona
The old Indian sat down heavily at the bar of the honky-tonk roadhouse and ordered a beer and a sidecar of cheap bourbon. A country western quartet was plodding through a Hank Williams standard with all the enthusiasm of cattle on the way to slaughter. The saloon was barely a quarter full at 10:00 p.m. He looked around the darkened room at his fellow celebrants – sixties throwback hippies with long thinning gray hair and rainbow-colored Grateful Dead T-shirts, scrawny biker chicks with leathery faces wearing knee-high moccasins and faded jeans, truckers in flannel shirts and grimy baseball hats, ex-cons and future inmates standing around a battered pool table at the back of the main room – the sort of detritus one expected to see hanging around a third-rate carnival or a soup kitchen.
The seat to his left swiveled, and a young man with refined features and longish black hair sat and ordered a draft beer, his English accented with the cadence of a native Spanish speaker. The bartender brought his drink, and the young man slid two dollars to him before taking a long pull and sighing contentedly.
“Boy, does that taste good,” El Rey said, a lopsided grin on his face.
The Indian clinked his glass against El Rey’s and nodded. “Been a dry one.”
“That it has.” El Rey eyed the Indian’s glass. “You look about done. Next one’s on me.”
The Indian shook his head. “You don’t have to do that.”
“No problem. Gotta spend it on something.”
El Rey waited until the bartender brought the man another round and then extended his hand. “Name’s Domingo.”
“Sam.” They shook and returned to drinking, both having pushed their customary level of interaction to the limits.
Three hours later Sam and El Rey staggered out of the bar into the gravel parking lot. “You sure you can drive?” El Rey asked the bleary-eyed Sam.
“Yup. Done it a million times. Hey, and I’m serious about the job. You want to come watch the ceremony a couple of times, if you think it’s something you can do, I’ll put in a good word for you. I’ve been looking for a replacement for a while.”
“No takers, huh?”
“It’s not exactly a growth business,” Sam slurred, and burped loudly.
Both men laughed. “Well, like I said, I’m not doing much right now. I was planning to see about getting a landscaping job, but your thing sounds interesting.”
“All you gotta do is look Indian and mysterious. Rich gringos don’t know the difference between a red and a brown man. You’ll see.”
“I’ll come by tomorrow. What time again?” El Rey asked.
�
�Six. We usually start it at around seven and go till eight or so. Sometimes later. I’m telling you, it’s the easiest money you’ll ever make.” Sam squinted at him. “You got your work papers?”
“Sure.”
“Then leave the rest to me.” Sam burped again. “Shit. I shouldn’ta drunk so much.”
“I can give you a ride if you want.”
Sam considered the offer, stared at his old pickup, and then grimaced. “Maybe that’s a good idea. I don’t feel so hot.”
“All right. Come on. Just tell me where to go. I’m right over here,” El Rey said, leading him to the Ford, which was parked in the shadows.
“Cool. Thanks again, Dom.”
El Rey popped the lock and swung the passenger door open for his new friend. “No problem. Hell, if you’re going to get me a cush gig like that, it’s the least I can do.”
Sam struggled to focus as El Rey followed his mumbled directions to his house, a run-down single-story ranch that looked like it had been through a flood. When they arrived, it took Sam three tries at the door handle to get it open, and El Rey watched him weave and stumble to the entryway, bleary from the six shots and matching beers he’d put down while regaling the assassin with his dismal life story: growing up on the reservation, then working a variety of menial jobs in between bouts on government assistance, which had culminated in his current role as a faux shaman for a boutique hotel that specialized in new age soul-searching.
Old Sam had a taste for the sauce, that was clear, and El Rey smiled to himself as he waved and rolled away. This was going to be easier than he’d hoped.
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