Her heart beat faster as she slipped behind the recalcitrant car’s wheel and started the engine. She might have been thrown a few curveballs, but she was still at bat, and as long as she could swing, she was doing what she’d always wanted for a living, even if it was from the armpit office of the local fish wrap. The Juárez murders had been shocking and brutal, and her revisiting of the story had struck a chord. If she could follow it up with something nobody had ever seen before, it could be what she’d been dreaming of ever since her disastrous departure from the Herald.
Leah hurried home, thankful that her aunt was now closeted away with the AC blowing, watching her soap operas and crocheting more doilies that nobody wanted. Inside her apartment Leah ferreted around in her nightstand drawer and found her passport, issued when she’d moved to New York with visions of traveling the world in pursuit of the stories lesser reporters didn’t dare cover. Now its unstamped, blank pages were just another reminder of how far she’d fallen since then. She slid it into her back pocket, changed into a clean top, and was out the door with just enough time to grab a hasty lunch and walk across the bridge at the Paso Del Norte border crossing.
The Puente Internacional was dense with pedestrians trudging over the dry riverbed that delineated the Mexican border. The fifteen-minute walk in the heat of the day felt like an hour’s forced march, and when she passed through the Mexican customs building, she sighed in relief. Leah stepped from the immigration checkpoint into a dusty haze of Juárez exhaust and contrasted the antiseptic U.S. side to the chaotic pandemonium of Mexico, with vendors hawking every manner of snack and junk to anyone who would listen and cars growling past, blaring their horns as tempers frayed in the heat. A sweating one-legged man with copper skin and clown makeup on his face juggled bowling pins by a line of taxis, his dog beside him with a party hat affixed to its head and a tip basket clenched in its jaws. Leah deposited a dollar into the basket, mainly for the dog’s sake, and continued to the head of the queue.
The cab driver knew Mi Ranchito and, after they negotiated a price, swung into traffic with suicidal abandon, Banda music screeching from the car radio.
“Do you have air conditioning?” Leah asked from the backseat.
“Oh, no, señorita, I’m sorry, ees broken. But the breeze is fresh from the windows, no?”
Leah shook her head. “No.”
“Ees no very far. You will see.”
The cantina was a seafood restaurant with garish pink paint and a palapa roof. Leah paid the driver and ducked into the shade of the interior. Only a few tables were occupied, all by locals, and a young waiter led her to a corner beneath a ceiling fan that afforded slim ventilation. She checked the time, ordered a soda, and thanked the universe that she only had twenty minutes to wait before Sánchez was due.
Two hours later she paid her bill and stalked to the entrance, where the waiter had called her a taxi. She’d tried Sánchez’s number three times, with no answer, and had ignored a call from Margaret a half hour earlier, not wanting to deal with it. Leah fumed at having been suckered into a wasted trip as the cab wended its way back to the border. She’d squandered precious time she didn’t have on the empty promise of the story of a lifetime that had turned out to be a hoax.
Chapter 4
El Paso, Texas
Leah checked the trace of mascara beneath each eye in her rearview mirror and slid her glasses back in place before easing from behind the wheel and climbing out of the Malibu. She’d made it back from Mexico and returned to the office only to run into Margaret first thing, who’d predictably wanted to know why she hadn’t responded to her calls. Leah had told her that she’d run out of battery. Margaret had looked only half convinced, but had only asked that Leah not leave work until she’d written her piece on the mall opening, which had taken Leah all of twenty minutes to churn out.
She’d foregone any research after work and gone home to freshen up before a dinner she had been dreading: her old boyfriend Bill had been pestering her for weeks to go to a trendy new restaurant near the El Paso Museum of Art, and she’d finally acquiesced just to shut him up. It had seemed harmless enough at the time she’d agreed, but after a day like she’d had, she wanted to do nothing more than climb into a quart of ice cream in front of the TV, not make small talk with an ex who’d never been a great fit in the first place and who, although he claimed to value being “just friends,” she worried would be trying to pressure her into more.
Leah brushed her bangs out of her eyes and walked to a red canopy over a darkened doorway. Bill was standing inside, and she turned so his greeting kiss landed on her cheek. If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. The maître d’ escorted them to a square koa wood table with contemporary low-back chairs and waited while they sat before presenting them with two aluminum clipboards with a single sheet of menu attached to each.
An emaciated waiter with a severe bi-level dyed black haircut and a moue of ennui for greeting looked them over like a banker considering them for a loan.
“May I get you started with something to drink? Cocktail? Wine?” The young man paused. “Beer?” he asked, pronouncing the word with distaste.
“I’ll take an Amstel Light,” Leah said after scanning the list of beverages at the bottom of the menu.
“Me too,” Bill said, and the server nodded slightly and flounced away.
Leah ran down the column of entrées and selected poached salmon. Bill went for a filet, and when the server reappeared with two sweating bottles of beer and poured them into tall glasses, they ordered. The young man eyed them unblinkingly before sighing as though disappointed by their choices.
They watched him depart with their clipboards, and Bill held his glass aloft for a toast.
“It’s good to finally have a chance to see you one-on-one, Leah,” he said.
“Cheers right back atcha, Bill,” she replied with a half-smile.
He took a long pull of beer and set the glass down. “Didn’t see you all day.”
“I was covering a mall opening for Margaret.” She hesitated before continuing. “And I had to go down to Juárez to chase down a lead.”
Bill’s mouth dropped open. “Juárez? Why there? Was it something about your story?”
Leah nodded and told him about the call. When she finished, he was frowning.
“You shouldn’t have gone. It’s dangerous as hell, even now that the worst of the cartel wars are over.”
“It’s not like I was trying to buy a couple of kilos, Bill. It was just a cab ride and a fruitless wait in a stifling hellhole.”
Bill shook his head. “I’m surprised Margaret asked you to do that.”
Leah looked away. “She didn’t exactly tell me to.”
His eyes narrowed and he studied her. “So this was you going off on your own?”
“I’m researching my story, Bill. You know, the first installment of which got the paper more visibility than it’s had in years? That story?”
“About the Juárez murders. Which involves killers, last time I checked. And which your piece hinted are still out there. So tell me again how going to Juárez, where they’d be, to meet some anonymous voice on the phone was a good idea?”
“You have to follow up leads, Bill. It’s what reporters do.”
“Not at this paper. You’ve been watching too many movies. What reporters, real reporters, do if they want to keep their jobs is what their bosses tell them to do.” He paused. “Didn’t New York teach you anything?”
Leah’s face hardened. “That’s not relevant, Bill, and you know it.”
He held up his hands in a sign of surrender. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that…well, you went off on your own that time, too. It didn’t work out the way you planned, did it? And that wasn’t even murder or anything.”
She controlled her breathing and willed away the anger she felt rising in her gorge. Her face flushed and she placed her napkin on the table and stood. “I’m going to use the ladies’ room.”
“Leave it there, Bill. I’ll be back in a few.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but appeared to reconsider it. Leah made for the restrooms at the rear of the restaurant, past chic urbanites doing their best Manhattan impressions with varying degrees of success.
The thought slowed her. Bill had a point – but the wound was still raw, and it wasn’t his place to rub her nose in it. She knew she’d crossed a line when she hadn’t obeyed her boss’s instructions to drop the investigation. When her digging brought the world down around her, it had been too late for regrets, and she’d found herself out on the street with no job, no money, and no prospects.
And now she was back where she’d started, only worse. She’d been in the big leagues but had screwed it up and was now starting over with a suitcase full of ugly baggage and a reputation to live down. It didn’t help that her old colleagues at the Examiner seemed to be reveling in her fall, even if they didn’t show it. Schadenfreude was human nature, and she understood it, even when she was the target of it.
She shouldered through the bathroom door and saw with relief that it was empty. Speakers crooned a reggae acoustic guitar version of a nineties grunge song, and she imagined its author spinning in his grave. Leah smoothed her blouse and studied herself in the mirror, taking stock and not loving what stared back.
Why had she even agreed to dinner? She and Bill had been on again, off again for the year before she’d turned in her notice and moved to New York, but since her return he’d been obvious about wanting to give it another try. He wasn’t bad-looking and made decent money as the top ad rep at the paper, but she knew him well enough to want someone more compatible. She hadn’t hit such a bottom that she was willing to go back to something she’d walked away from for good reason.
She hoped she didn’t hurt him when she made clear it wasn’t going to happen, and then decided she didn’t really care if he got bent or not. She wasn’t the one doing the pursuing, and they were both adults.
Leah adjusted her slacks and tried a smile at her reflection. Satisfied with her composure, she took a deep breath and nodded. They would have a nice dinner, chat about crap neither of them cared much about, and then she would go home alone, Bill hopefully having received her message loud and clear.
She checked her phone for messages and, seeing none, pushed back into the dining room, where beautiful people bantered about meaningless trivia while some monster was snatching helpless teenage girls only cigarette-flicking distance away.
Chapter 5
The Examiner offices smelled like coffee and doughnuts when Leah arrived for work two days later. The prior day she’d spent most of her time researching the Juárez story while Margaret was busy in her office with the computer tech trying to coax more life from her system, and Leah had given her a wide berth and left with the rest of the staff at precisely five. This morning she had a headache from insufficient sleep and too much convenience store caffeine, and she wanted nothing more than to keep her head down and go unnoticed.
When Leah reached her desk, her shoulders slumped at the sight of a bouquet of grocery store flowers in a plastic vase on her blotter. She looked around the half-empty newsroom, but everybody was going about their business, so she sat heavily and reached for the small card taped to the vase.
Sorry to be a bummer the other night. Let’s start over, okay? Bill
She closed her eyes for a moment. Dinner had been tense, Bill being the type who was unable to let go of a topic, and she’d finally had to cut their meal short with a terse explanation that she wasn’t feeling sociable and she wanted to go home. Bill had realized too late that he’d pushed too hard, but the damage had been done, and she couldn’t get out of the restaurant fast enough, her evening ruined by his prodding. She’d considered herself lucky when he hadn’t come into the office yesterday, but her celebration of her good fortune had obviously been premature.
She moved the flowers and considered tossing them into her garbage, but elected to keep them so Bill wouldn’t feel any worse than he probably already did. If he came in today, they’d be on display, and his gesture wouldn’t have been in vain. Leah rose and walked across the room to the coffee area and poured herself a large steaming mug, and then retraced her steps to begin her day by scouring the wire for anything that might be relevant to her story.
Her Spanish was rusty at best, two years of high school language class coupled with living in a border town leaving her with little more than a rudimentary vocabulary, and it was hard to decipher many of the online Spanish news pages and blogs that centered around Juárez. The papers were a quick read that she could plug into an online translator for a rough interpretation, but the blogs and Facebook pages devoted to crime in the city were more difficult, as much of the commentary was written in slang and riddled with spelling or typing errors and nonstandard grammar, confounding the translation software and often leaving her shaking her head.
Juárez, like many cities near the border, had a thriving social media network that advised residents of unsafe routes where robberies had recently occurred, where gunfights had broken out, or where a military sweep was in progress. She’d discovered that the amateur sites covered topics that the mainstream publications refused to, in part because the cartels routinely threatened reporters and editors and in some cases went as far as murdering any that published articles critical of their interests.
Leah was finishing her first cup of coffee and arguing with herself about whether her nerves really needed another when her desk phone rang.
“Leah Mason,” she said, typing in another web address as she answered.
“Miss Mason, thank goodness I reached you.”
The male voice was almost a whisper, the Spanish accent light. Leah glanced at Margaret’s door and sat forward.
“Who am I speaking with?”
“I’m sorry. My name is Uriel. Uriel Sánchez.”
She gulped the final swallow of coffee and exhaled. “Sánchez?”
“Yes. I see you recognize the name.”
Leah didn’t respond. Instead, she leaned back in her chair and looked at her monitor.
“Miss Mason?” Sánchez asked.
“I’m here. What can I do for you?”
“I received a rather cryptic message from my father, Miss Mason. It says that if anything happens to him, I should get in touch with you.”
“I have no idea why, Mr. Sánchez. Your father made an appointment to see me the day before yesterday in Juárez and then stood me up. We have nothing to talk about.”
A long pause hung over the line. Sánchez’s voice softened further. “What time was your meeting?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Please. It’s important.”
Leah removed her glasses and set them on the desk. The monitor and her surroundings blurred, and she blinked several times. “Two o’clock.”
Sánchez said something unintelligible that sounded like a curse. Leah frowned and waited for the man to get to the point, and then something he’d said registered. “You said he told you to get in touch with me if something happened to him?”
Sánchez’s sigh on the other end of the line was audible. “That’s right, Miss Mason. He was killed two days ago at one fifteen. That’s why he never made it to your meeting.”
Chapter 6
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
The sun beat down on a group of mourners gathered around an open grave in a long dirt cemetery, where an ancient priest was finishing up his prayer for the dead while the assembly waited with bowed heads. Uriel Sánchez stood rigid with his arm around his half sister, Ana Maria, whose shoulders were shuddering with sobs, and dared a look around the gathering at a sea of faces he didn’t recognize.
His father had obviously been well liked, judging from the turnout, and he wondered whether his passing would be as mourned as Sánchez senior’s. Single, an academic who lived in
Guadalajara, Uriel had few friends other than members of the faculty, who were more professional acquaintances than anything. The morbid thought danced at the edges of his awareness, and he willed it away. This wasn’t about him or his failings. He was burying his father – something he never thought he’d have to do, or at least not for many decades to come.
The manner of his death had shocked Uriel. The elder Sánchez had managed to survive four decades as a cop in an area of the world where it was often a death sentence, only to be gunned down by unknown assailants within spitting distance of his own house. And for what? He’d still had his wallet in his back pocket when the police had arrived, so it hadn’t been robbery. His neighborhood was one of the better ones in an admittedly questionable town, but there had been no real cartel trouble for almost five years as a tentative truce had descended over the city, each of the warring clans occupying their section and staying out of the others.
Juárez was a perennial hotspot due to its location, one of the main drug-trafficking hubs for Mexican heroin and meth as well as cocaine from South America, transported by Mexicans to the border for distribution in the world’s largest market. As such it was hotly contested, and the death toll from the drug wars numbered in the tens of thousands. Whole neighborhoods had been abandoned and were now ghost towns, deserted save for the desperate homeless waiting to try their luck at a border run. Even in a time of relative peace, the sound of gunfire at night wasn’t uncommon.
Drugs were astoundingly lucrative, with the profit margin in the thousand percent range, and it was small wonder that in a country where the average wage was a couple hundred dollars a month, cartel fighters would kill each other for the trade. Efforts to slow the traffic had failed for decades, and revenue from the business represented over ten percent of Mexico’s GDP. When the reinvested laundered profits were factored in, over half the economy was related in some way to the industry, and the corruption and violence associated with it was a permanent part of life – and death – for the population unlucky enough to live in the contested gateway cities.
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