Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “Do you know him?”

  “Can’t place him.”

  “You can’t have so many customers that you can’t remember them for a couple of days, can you?”

  “Well, A: I’m not here every day and every night; I have an employee who might have been here then. And B…well, I can’t remember what B was going to be, but there was something.”

  “Check the next date.”

  The man flipped the page. “Someone named Phil Henrick.”

  “You don’t know him either?”

  The guy shrugged. “Sounds a little familiar, maybe.”

  Buck had him check through the rest of the times on Raul’s list. Each one had a different male name written down. The man couldn’t remember any of the customers. “Get the tapes,” Buck said.

  The guy shrugged again and went into the back room. Buck hoped the tapes were more useful than the logbook, in which people apparently wrote down their own names and times. “Can you also pull credit card receipts and match them up to these names?” he called.

  “Most people pay cash,” the guy replied. “But I can look through my files and see what I got.”

  “Please do.” Buck’s patience waned more with every hour that passed. He wanted to be looking for Lulu. If this idea bore fruit, he would be thrilled, but he began to fear it would turn out to be another dead end.

  Five minutes later, the guy returned with an armload of black VHS tapes. Labels had been handwritten on masking tape and stuck to the sides. “Here they are,” he said. “Each tape is time-stamped, so what you’ve got here are all four cameras for the times and dates you specified.” He put the tapes down on the counter, then tore a page from the back of the spiral notebook. Clicking a pen, he drew a rough map of the shop and labeled the computers A through H. “The IP addresses you gave me correspond to F and G,” he said, “so those are the machines you want to keep an eye on.”

  “Thanks,” Buck said. He folded the map and tucked it into a pocket, then gathered up the tapes. “I’ll get these back to you when I’m done with them, unless they become evidence.”

  “Whatever,” the guy said. “They’re cheap these days.”

  Buck had the station’s TV brought into his office and hooked a VCR up to it. The camera quality at Geronimo! left a lot to be desired, and the images were black-and-white, but as he fast-forwarded looking for the correct times he saw people—mostly male—moving in comical fast motion to the computers, working for a while, then disappearing. A couple of them spent hours at the same machines. Then he reached the first time he needed, 12:33 P.M. on the day before Lulu’s disappearance. He pressed PLAY, slowing the tape.

  A man came into view, sitting down before computer G. He was dark and wiry, wearing a loose, dirty polo shirt and jeans. When he leaned over the keyboard, the shirt rode up at the waist, revealing dark back hair. He combed his hair over a balding spot on the back of his head.

  Buck ejected the tape and found another for the same time, hoping for a better angle on the guy’s face. Again he had to speed through the hours until he reached the right time. There was the guy again. He sucked on his cheeks while he looked at the machine, and his thick bushy brows wriggled about on his face like nervous caterpillars. Buck stopped the tape, ejected it. He didn’t have the technology here, but he could send the tapes up to Bisbee and have printouts made from them.

  When he found the same guy on computer F at the next time Raul had identified, Buck sat back in his desk chair, folded his hands over his stomach and smiled. “I don’t know who you are, mister,” he said. “But I will. And I’ll put your ass in jail for a long, long time.”

  7

  Leaning against the passenger door of the blue Toyota, Gabriel tried to snooze, but Clemente Bueno’s thick bulk kept bumping into him. Finally, he drifted off, only to awake a few miles farther up the road, his eyes glued half-shut, mouth tasting coppery and foul. A pressure against his ribs (in his sleep it had been Natalya’s breasts, wrapped in that loose black mesh) turned out to be Clemente’s pudgy arm.

  Clemente was barely five feet tall, with a farmer’s stocky build and short legs, which meant that whenever he wasn’t taking his turn behind the wheel he sat in the middle, legs straddling the gearshift, the earthy reek that wafted up from his armpits offending the other two men equally. Clemente’s face was dark, his eyes slanted, his lips and nose as thick as his accent. He had grown up in a household where Spanish was not spoken, he had explained, and he hadn’t heard the language until his teens. He still spoke with a thick Indian accent, and when Gabriel sprinkled his sentences with English or borderland Spanglish, Clemente always looked a little confused, as if he didn’t quite understand. He looked to Gabriel like pureblood Indian, and maybe he was. He seemed never to take off his straw cowboy hat, despite the fact that it regularly banged into both of the other men in the small truck cab.

  Driving the truck was Rafael Camacho, the third member of their little band. Rafael was a native Spanish speaker and a poor man, possibly poorer than Clemente. The belt that held up his ill-fitting black pants was made from a section of a car’s seat belt, tied instead of buckled in front. His striped T-shirt, orange and red and black, had a woman’s capped sleeves. His face was emaciated, his hair looked as if he’d cut it with a rusty knife and no mirror. Scars trailed up his arms like thick pink worms. Gabriel was afraid he was sick, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near the man, but the decision was out of his hands. Rafael and Clemente had both been Called, the same as him.

  Gabriel never had learned, and had come to accept that he never would, how she got in the truck in the first place. He had driven it to a remote jungle clearing in Oaxaca, following directions he didn’t understand how he knew, and in that clearing he had met Clemente and Rafael. They were just as ignorant as he about why they had all come. They had slept in the clearing that night, and in the morning a statue had been in the truck’s bed that hadn’t been there before. They had snugged a dark green plastic tarpaulin over it with thick hemp rope and bungee cords and started north. In various towns along the way he had heard rumors that the statue left the truck to perform miracles, but whenever they looked, there she remained, underneath her tarp.

  At the edge of a town (no sign identified it, and Gabriel hadn’t looked at a map in days) Rafael pulled the truck into a CITGO station and stopped at the pump. “We need gas,” he said. “And I need to shit.” He said this last with a wide smile that showed rotten teeth and gaping pink holes, as he always did when he was able to stop at a place with indoor plumbing. He had never lived in a house with a toilet, he explained, and as a result he took great joy from using other people’s whenever he could.

  How did I end up with these losers? Gabriel wondered. A glance into the truck’s bed reminded him. Since he sat against the door, he had to fill the tank. That was the rule, and the fact that Clemente always rode in the middle didn’t enter into it, since neither Gabriel nor Rafael wanted to sit there.

  He worked the door latch and climbed out, stretching, feeling his bones pop, glad at least to be in the relatively fresh air and away from the smells of Clemente, who stank of the farm, and Rafael, whose odor was more understated but unhealthy. Gabriel had been using extra cologne, stashed with a couple changes of clothes in a bag lashed in the back under the tarp, so he could combat their aromas with one of his own.

  He glanced nervously across the street at the lavandería and into the gas station’s single service bay, so crowded with used tires and equipment a car couldn’t be driven into it. Piñatas dangled from beams above the opening: a purple Barney, an orange Pikachu, Buzz Lightyear, Spider-Man, a stiffnecked yellow giraffe with green polka dots. Gabriel had hoped their course would take them through Chihuahua, maybe—anyplace except right back through Sonora. He had not called Enrique since taking his truck, or Carolina, for that matter, but he had a feeling if anyone from the Sonora Cartel saw and recognized him, Arturo’s big cats would be spitting out chunks of him before the day was out.
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  No one paid them any attention now, though. An old man crossed the street at an angle, holding a plastic grocery bag by its handles. A woman in an upstairs apartment glanced their way as she piled bedding on the windowsill to air out. The guy working the gas station’s cash register eyed them to make sure they didn’t bolt without paying, but he didn’t seem to take any special note, and Gabriel didn’t recognize him.

  Gabriel topped off the tank, closed it up and then got back into the truck, in the driver’s seat. Let Clemente’s elbow dig into Rafael for a while. He was awake now, he might as well drive.

  “You ever been there?” Clemente asked as he slid onto the bench seat.

  “Where?”

  “Across the line? El Norte?”

  “Sure,” Gabriel said. “Plenty of times. I have relatives in El Paso.”

  “To work, though?”

  “No,” Gabriel said. It was a lie—he had crossed over once, in his late teens, and picked lettuce for a season. He hated it and never went back illegally. “You?”

  “Sure,” Clemente said. “Every fall for six years. I had a grower who would always hire me, but after the last couple times I got deported, I stopped going back. Next to last time, we had this coyote who was supposed to get us to Phoenix, but he got lost and we almost died in the desert. Time after that I got there, but la migra swept the fields on my third day and sent me back. I was out five hundred dollars, U.S., that time, and for what? That’s when I gave up. It’s just not worth it.”

  Gabriel agreed. There were plenty of better ways to make money, he had learned. Norteamericanos wanted the cheap labor Mexicans provided, but didn’t want to pay the price of having Mexicans living among them. They would, however, pay any price for drugs. The Sonora cartel didn’t even have to have its own supplies—they made bank from Colombians and Guatemalans just for the privilege of transporting their loads through Sonora and across the border. When they did run their own dope, the money was even better. They could pay a farmer a few hundred dollars for some coca leaf, process it, ship a few kilos across the line, and in Chicago or New York or L.A. sell the kilo, ounce by ounce, for almost two hundred thousand.

  Gabriel didn’t see that kind of money, of course. There were many links on the chain, and he was still near the bottom. But Enrique had explained the profit potential of their business, and it only took one look around Arturo’s estate to know that there was virtually no limit to what they could all earn.

  And he had given that up for what? To drive around in a stolen pickup with her, a cargo that he didn’t even understand, making his way north. If they did cross the border—he was more and more sure they would—they would have to do it in the truck or else carry the statue, which none of them wanted to do.

  He did all of it because he had seen a vision and heard a name. Aztlán. Arturo would never understand that, and neither would Carolina. When this came to an end—if it did—he would have to move on, maybe into the north or maybe to Baja, where nobody knew him. Not Sonora or Juarez—he wouldn’t live a week in either place.

  Rafael finally came back from the toilet, that stupid, gap-toothed grin on his skinny face. Gabriel cranked the engine as Rafael sauntered across the tarmac, and he had the truck in motion before the man had closed his door.

  He had started this, and he would see it through. But more and more he wondered what it really meant, and whether he had made the right choice by getting involved with it.

  8

  When Buck got to Nellie Oberricht’s ranch, she was not in the Bridges Not Borders office out back. He knocked on the door of her ranch house, and when no one answered that, he stood in her dirt driveway for a few minutes, scanning in every direction, hand over his brow to shade his eyes. South and west, clouds piled on themselves, white and lumpy on top like dirt rolled under the fingertips, gray and threatening beneath. Shadows streaked down from them, broken by fainter streaks of sunlight. A couple of hours, he guessed, until the rains hit.

  Finally, he spotted her off to the east of the former stable or garage, on her knees, tugging on a strand of broken barbed wire. She wore leather gloves and a long-sleeved pink shirt, open over a T-shirt, it looked like, and blue jeans. A straw hat—a lady’s gardening hat, not the cowboy hats practically ubiquitous in ranch country—shaded her head. A few miles beyond her, a dust devil whirled, pale tan against the blue silhouette (brown and green only where the sun chose to spotlight it) of a mountain range down in Mexico.

  He didn’t call out, but watched as Nellie twisted a length of wire around the barbed wire, then twisted its other end around the stretch of barbed wire to which the first section had been connected until it had been cut, or broke. When she had the repair done and tilted her hat back with one gloved hand, he called and waved.

  Still on her knees, Nellie returned the wave. She gathered her tools into a bucket, put one hand on the nearby fencepost to steady herself and lurched to her feet. Carrying the bucket, she cut across a field toward Buck, leaving a wake like an ocean liner’s in the grass.

  “Do you have any news about Lulu?” she asked when she was near enough to be heard.

  “I wish I did.”

  “It’s so rare that I get two visits from you in the space of a week, Buck. What’s the occasion this time?”

  “I wanted to pick your brain a little, if that’s all right.”

  “Let me put this stuff down,” she said, shaking the pail with a loud rattle. “Then we can walk around and talk, if you like. I’ll be inside all afternoon, so I’d like to get some sun while it’s here.”

  “Sure,” Buck said. “That’ll be fine.”

  He followed her to the back of the building in which she kept her office. This side clearly showed that it had, in fact, been a stable—the Dutch doors of the stalls remained, although she only opened a regular door and went in just far enough to put her tools and gloves on a shelf. Tall sunflowers stood against the wall, their broad yellow heads blocking the Dutch doors, making it obvious that horses no longer used them.

  “What progress have you made, Buck?” she asked when she emerged again.

  “Not enough, I’m afraid.”

  “Isn’t time usually a factor in cases like this?”

  “I’m not precisely sure what a case like this is,” Buck said. “It’s not exactly a kidnapping, in the usual sense. There hasn’t been a ransom demand or anything like that. But yes, time is a factor in any case, especially when someone’s life may be in danger.”

  Nellie looked sideways at him as she led him down a footpath that ran behind the stable and her house. “I’m not accusing you of anything,” she said. “I’m sure you’re doing what you can.”

  “I’m trying my best,” he assured her. “I just wish I had more to go on.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a small print he’d had made of the man from the Geronimo! surveillance tapes. “You know this guy?”

  Nellie took the picture, examined it closely. “I’ve never seen him,” she said. “He gives me the willies, though. Who is he?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Buck said.

  “Do you think he’s the one?”

  “It’s possible. I just don’t know.”

  “Well, if a picture can carry vibrations, that one does, Buck. And they’re not good ones.”

  Buck put the photo away, not wanting to let on to Nellie how much he agreed with her. “I know you said Lulu is never put into a position where she would have much interaction with illegal aliens.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But how many hours a week did she volunteer with your group?”

  “Probably about twenty,” Nellie said without hesitating.

  “Leaving her plenty of time to do other things.”

  “Mostly classes and homework, to hear her tell it.”

  “Her boyfriend says she was also involved with some of his causes. Said she used to circulate petitions, put up
posters around town, that kind of thing.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Nellie said. Just beyond her house, the land dropped away into a sloping field full of wildflowers. Tall Arizona prickly poppies, white-petaled with egg yolk centers, towered over purple and red and yellow and blue blossoms. She caught him looking at the display. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It surely is.”

  “One thing we can thank the monsoon for. Along with water to live on, of course. I try to come out here whenever I get tired of the afternoons inside, listening to the thunder and feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Can’t blame you, Nellie,” Buck said.

  “So your point is, she could have encountered someone while engaged in these other activities. Someone who might want to hurt her, for whatever reason.”

  “I got the impression she didn’t exactly make a secret of her politics,” Buck said. “Someone could have seen her at the Bridges Not Borders table at the Farmer’s Market, maybe, then run into her again while she was out with a petition or something.”

  “You’re not talking about migrants here.”

  “Doesn’t seem like they’d have much reason to complain about her views.”

  “Not really. But then…”

  “I was thinking more like Minuteman types. Vigilante border watchers.”

  “There’s no shortage of those,” Nellie said. “The American Border Patrol, Arizonans for Border Control, Border Guardians, the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, Minuteman of One of Arizona, even a new one called Mothers Against Illegal Aliens. Oh, and another fairly recent one is American Pride, right here in Douglas. I don’t know much about them yet. Some days you can’t throw a rock around the border area without hitting one of those groups.”

  “Any you can think of who might be especially violent?”

  Nellie stopped, chewed on her lower lip. Her gaze was distant, off into the stratosphere somewhere. “Peter Endicott was convicted of pistol-whipping a migrant,” she said. “But there’s some doubt as to whether he actually did it, and since he’s in jail in Texas, he obviously didn’t take Lulu. Some of the others…it’s hard to say. If they’ve committed violent acts, they haven’t been caught at it, for the most part. But they surround themselves with guns, they live these paramilitary lifestyles, they patrol the border as if they were real law enforcement officers, even though many of them have had no military or law enforcement experience at all. Living that way, violence is never far from the surface, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that one of them, or even a whole group, had gone over the edge.”