Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  He dealt the photographs to Yvonne and Julián like playing cards. They showed holes cut into fences, a broken gate, garbage drifted across an arroyo. Billy’s handiwork. Really her handiwork. But was it having the effect she intended? Guerrilla warfare. Attacking Erskine’s state of mind. And what of her own state of mind? Her head was full of agitated thoughts, flitting and flashing like spots before her eyes. She rattled her fingernails on the table, then jumped up, went to the bathroom again, and sucked in two more bumps, so deeply that the powder seemed to blast right through her skull into her brain. Using product. Shit. Disgusted with herself, Yvonne ducked into the stall and went to dump the vial into the toilet, but just then the flickering mental spots vanished and euphoria surged through her. She put the bottle back in her purse and walked out, crossing the room with regal bearing, in full command of herself again, of the men at her table, the queen of dark waters.

  “All right, what happens if they don’t pay those taxes?” she asked her cousin.

  It was Daoud who answered. “The government forecloses on the property. It goes up for auction, at a fire-sale price. They have nine months to start paying from the date of the deceased’s death.”

  “They would be left with nothing.”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  She looked out the window at the plaza, awash in brilliant afternoon light, the bandstand and the trees beginning to cast shadows, the trees whose whitewashed trunks reminded her of the sycamores in the canyon, the ghost trees. Everything was very clear. The old lady Erskine had been struck down for her benefit, and for Rosario’s benefit. Those people did very well for themselves while we suffered. Her mother’s words coming back to her, she realized that as much as she wanted the ranch, she wanted more to see the Erskines ruined.

  “Then I think I will wait them out. All of it, not half.”

  Clemente cleared his throat. “There is a risk. This is not my exclusive listing. There are other brokers involved. If the land sells between now and then, you will be out of luck.”

  “And how likely is that?”

  “It takes a long time to sell a property like this.”

  “I’m used to taking risks.”

  “The Americans say, half a loaf is better than none,” Julián said in a smirking singsong.

  “Shut up!” she cried, and swatted her hand, accidentally knocking a glass to the floor, its shattering like a nail in her ears. Her outburst surprised her as much as it did her dining companions. “I am sick of all you telling me what cannot be done. Am I the only one at this table with balls?”

  25

  IT WAS A LONG RIDE from Carrasco’s ranch to Bisbee, and The Professor thought he would amuse Nacho Gomez with a lecture on synesthesia. Nacho, however, was more bemused than amused.

  “You lost me with that limbic brain, cortex shit,” he said.

  “The limbic brain is right here,” explained The Professor, tapping the base of his skull. “The old brain, the brain we knew with before we knew we knew. It’s preconsciousness.” The headlights flashed on a covey of Gambel’s quail, scuttling across the road ahead. “You like to hunt those things, right? Your bird dog wouldn’t point a roadrunner, would it? Or a hawk, a crow. It picks up a scent and knows it’s quail. How? The dog sees the smell. It sees quail but not with its eyes.”

  “I’ll have to ask my dog about that.”

  “You need to be more open-minded about this. You need to stop thinking I’m a little loco. Synesthetes have amazing memories for one thing, and that can be useful to people who do what we do.”

  Nacho took offense. “I don’t think of what you do and what I do as the same thing.”

  “You’re an undercover cop, and I’m an undercover criminal,” said The Professor.

  “You’re more of a crooked cop.”

  “Amounts to the same thing. You and I, we’re like spies for rival governments. We use the same techniques, the same deceptions, and every so often we find it expedient to join forces.”

  “Like now.”

  “Like now.”

  “So do you have an amazing memory?”

  “I never forget a face or a name. Take when I was with DEA working the Juárez Cartel, for an example. I meet an El Paso city cop, half-Italian, half-Mexican guy who works narcotics undercover. It’s just in passing, I don’t talk to him more than five minutes. Weeks later I’m surveilling a stash house on the other side of the line. Who walks out, giving abrazos grandes to a couple of big-time traffickers? My cop. How do I recognize him? The sensory experience. When I met him, his face made a specific sound, something like wind chimes. I hear the chimes and say, ‘I know that face,’ and then the name comes back to me. Okay, is he working an investigation, or is he rogue? I need to know because I’m supposed to infiltrate the Juárez ring, and if he’s in tight with them, I might have problems.”

  “Just in case he had an amazing memory, too,” Nacho said.

  “Exactly. Did some checking, found out he was kinked up, passed the word to El Paso Internal Investigations, they nailed him, and that cleared the way for me. See how useful this condition can be?”

  “Always an education with El Profesor.”

  “I might start charging you tuition.”

  Nacho swung off the federal highway onto the local road to Naco, one hand on the wheel, the other massaging the back of his neck. He’d crossed into Mexico twelve hours ago on what was known as an Eewee—an EWI, Entry Without Inspection, that is, illegally through a gap in the boundary fence—then drove to Carrasco’s ranch near Caborca for a strategy session with Carrasco, Zaragoza, and The Professor; and his day was far from over.

  “I’d like to test your amazing powers,” he said. “There’s a photograph in my briefcase. Take a look at it.”

  The Professor withdrew the five-by-seven mug shot and held it under the map light. He laughed. “Are you having fun? His name’s right on it.”

  “Yeah, but who is Billy Cruz?”

  “The late Vicente’s nephew. A pollero. He was drinking beers with his uncle the night Vicente got killed. He was sitting on Vicente’s right.”

  “Pretty good. I’m not supposed to know you know that, but that’s neither here nor there. All right, the test. Eight months ago, I showed you a newspaper clipping about an incident that took place on January twenty-first in the Huachucas. What did the story say?”

  The Professor saw the story scroll through his mind, like a teleprompter, and summarized the salient facts, including the names of the victims and the surviving witness.

  “Damn good. It seems Mr. Miguel Espinoza has identified Cruz as the shooter. The Santa Cruz County sheriff went to take him in, but somebody got word to Cruz, and he skipped. He’s believed to be here in Mexico. A BOL was sent to the MexFeds. You’re a MexFed, some of the time anyway. Have you seen it?”

  “Not in my department.”

  “There are rumors he’s hiding out on Yvonne’s ranch. He’s working for her.”

  “For her? The only people who hate pollos and polleros more than her are the Minutemen.”

  “La Roja may have diversified into the chicken business, and Cruz is her vice president in charge. Cruz is crossing illegals with her okay and cutting her in. So I’ve heard. Makes sense. A good alien smuggler can bring in fifty thousand a month.”

  “A gringo fugitive on the dodge in old Me-hee-co,” The Professor quipped after absorbing this intelligence, which was new to him. “In an ever-changing world, it’s comforting to know that some things never change.”

  “There’s a point to all this,” said Nacho, annoyed with the flippancy. “The sheriff is up for reelection in ’oh-four. He wants this guy. He wants to show the voters that he’s doing something about violence on the border.”

  The Professor took it from there. “To continue the script, the sheriff’s good friend, Agent Gomez, requests my assistance in locating and apprehending Mr. Cruz. A win-win. The Border Patrol busts the mero mero of an alien smuggling ring, the sheriff catches a kil
ler.”

  “Not asking you to make a special effort, but you do owe me one.”

  “I’m paying you back. What’s this? Interest?”

  They drove on. La Roja—mixed up in alien smuggling? The Professor thought. He wouldn’t have believed it. In fact, he didn’t believe it.

  Some distance away the lights of Naco glittered on the black face of the desert, a sparse clustering, sparse and faint compared with the klieg lights glaring across the border wall running east and west of the little town for five miles, the barrier constructed of steel landing mats, the kind used to build temporary military airfields, and where it ended, surveillance towers took over, picketing arroyos and shallow canyons. The Professor could not see the towers, but he knew they were there, tall steel poles with steel arms, at the ends of which cameras swiveled, transmitting greenish images to monitors in the Naco Border Patrol station. When one spied mules or mojados coming over, an agent grasped a joystick, took manual control of the camera, and tracking the scurrying figures on his screen, radioed mounted patrolmen wearing night-vision goggles under their cowboy hats—“Twelve walkers brushed up two hundred yards south of you”—to ride in and capture the crossers. Star Wars joining hands with the Old West, two myths linked by the gringo faith in technology to overcome, the Winchester repeating rifle that cleared the plains of buffalo and Indians ancestor to the electronic sensors and infrared cameras that kept the Mexicans out.

  Or were supposed to keep them out. It was as strong and blind as any religious conviction, this faith, and it had turned America into a nation of lazy, superficial, Web-surfing fools playing video games, alienated from the beating heart of life. He, the synesthete, understood this better than most people. As he could see with his eyes and with more than his eyes, so could he know with his reason and with more than his reason, and what he knew was that the wetbacks got through in spite of the gadgets and gizmos because they lived at the depths the gringos had abandoned long ago; lived close to the bone and relied on wit and grit to overcome (in Juárez, he remembered, there had been a run on Phillips-head screwdrivers because the Mexicans pounded them into a barrier fence as pitons to climb out of the land of blood and memory into the land of machines and tomorrow); because they were driven by history—their destiny was manifest, too, in the North rather than in the West—and by emotion, the same lust for riches, or what to them were riches, that had pushed Coronado from Mexico City all the way into modern Kansas on his quest for the Seven Cities of Cibola. It was a kind of gold rush, this migration, bigger and more inexorable than the one in California a century and a half ago. The first gold rush could not have been stopped with high-tech towers and virtual barricades, had such marvels existed then; and this one would not be stopped, either. La reconquista would triumph in the end, and the Spanish tongue prevail in the lands where it had been silenced.

  They entered Naco, where the atmosphere of an Old West border town lingered. Parts of it—dirt streets, quaint, mud-brick houses—looked like a set for a Clint Eastwood western. Some buildings would have to be blocked from the shot, like the cavernous disco hulking incongruously above the low-lying adobes, stores, and cantinas on the main drag. THE GALAXY, its neon sign said, one of Yvonne Menéndez’s laundries. The Professor caught the scents of mesquite-burning stoves, of frying tacos and tortillas, and he saw the colors of the smells, violet, rose, pale yellow. A gang of burreros lurked on a street corner, all with the disheveled, worn-out look of grunts returned from a desert patrol.

  “Dropped their loads, and now they’re home for R and R,” Nacho remarked. “You know, I kind of admire those guys. Tough dudes. Hump fifty pounds on your back for twenty-five miles, walk twenty-five back, and for five hundred bucks a trip.”

  “Two, three trips a month, you’re talking real money to a Mexican kid,” The Professor said. “New truck, new clothes, money to toss around in the clubs. Look at it this way. Every drug mule represents one wetback you don’t have to deal with, and one more pissed-off, unemployed trabajador Mexico doesn’t have to worry about starting a revolution. The social benefits are enormous.”

  “Yeah, right. Tough dudes all the same. Few years ago, when I was in the field, I busted a nineteen-year-old who got separated from the others way the fuck out in East Jesus. ‘¿Dónde está la mota?’ I ask him, but he doesn’t know squat about any dope, so I cuff him to a mesquite tree and ask him again. He still doesn’t know. This goes on for fifteen minutes. Then I ask him for his mother’s name and address. What do I want to know that for? ‘Because,’ I tell him, ‘I’m a nice guy who wants your mamacita to know what happened to her son because he wouldn’t tell me where the dope was.’ He starts to shake, and I’m thinking, This is where I break him. Wrong. ‘What dope?’ he says. ‘I don’t carry no dope. I carry only the food and water.’ They all say that. Finally I take out my piece, cock it, and stick it in the back of his head. ‘One last time, you little pendejo, where is the fucking dope, or I’ll blow your brains all over this tree.’ Know what he says? ‘Then I guess this is my time to die.’ Holstered the pistol, let him go. He’d broken me.”

  “Another lesson learned,” The Professor sighed. “Never make a threat you’re not prepared to carry out.”

  “It was his first trip. He didn’t know that.”

  “He does now.”

  In the single-lane port of entry, Nacho showed his badge to the inspector, and The Professor produced the Arizona driver’s license identifying him by his American cryptonym, E. J. Carrington. Naco, Arizona, was smaller, darker, and less lively than Naco, Sonora. There was the mission-style border station, its handsome lines harking back to an era before the minimum-security prison became the default model for American municipal architecture, a bar where gringos on Social Security rubbed elbows with contrabandistas, and—not much else. Nacho proceeded up the Bisbee highway as a summer storm strafed the Mule Mountains. In a quarter of an hour he pulled into the San Jose Lodge, on Bisbee’s outskirts, and he and The Professor went up to the second floor, where a U.S. Customs agent named Brent Pierce had rented a room.

  “He’s motivated,” Nacho said as they climbed the stairs. “He was working the case that Yvonne fucked up with her snitch massacre.”

  “The Pond of Death. You’re sure he’s cool with this?”

  “Won’t be the first time he made a bargain with one devil to pop another.”

  Unlike the paunchy, clerkish Nacho, Pierce looked so much like an undercover cop, he might as well have been wearing a badge and uniform: shaggy hair, three-day growth of beard, the build of a steroid abuser. The set of clubs in a leather caddy standing beside the dresser did not go with his thuggish appearance; it was as if an outlaw biker had taken up golf.

  Following the introductions, Pierce produced a bottle of Herradura from the minifridge and poured three generous shots into plastic cups.

  “Too bad we don’t have real glasses,” he said apologetically, settling into a table chair turned backward. “Ruins the taste of a good tequila. Salud.”

  The Professor raised his cup and seated himself beside Nacho on the sofa. “Salud.”

  “Let’s start by making sure we’re on the same page,” Pierce said. “Nacho tells me Carrasco wants what we want—Yvonne out of the picture. And that you’ve got some ideas about how we can get there. That’s right?”

  “It is.”

  “What does Carrasco need us for? He’s got resources. Why doesn’t he take care of her himself. Or sic the MexFeds on her?”

  “You want me to count the ways?”

  Pierce looked at him with dry, bright eyes, sniper’s eyes. “Yeah, count the ways.”

  “One, Yvonne’s got legal protection all the way up the food chain. Two, she’s got the army on her side—that leaves the MexFeds out, unless you want Mexican cops shooting it out with Mexican troops. Three, she’s franchised herself to the Gulf cartel, so she’s got its gunman on call. Four, Joaquín wants the war over with. It’s not doing anybody any good.”

  And,
he thought, I’m sick of it, too. He’d been sick of it since the slaughter of the Golden Roosters.

  Pierce wrapped his fence-post arms around the back of his chair. He looked capable of splintering the rungs with one good squeeze. “Violence up, profits down.”

  “In a phrase,” The Professor said. “It will be a lot less messy if the U.S. takes care of Yvonne. Joaquín gets rid of her without any more bloodshed. Good for him, good for U.S. Customs.”

  “And exactly how is he going to cooperate with us, or us with him, however you want to put it?” asked Pierce.

  “I’m on loan to you. Yvonne has never seen me—neither has her son, Julián. As far as I know, and that’s pretty far, nobody in her organization knows what I look like. I’m going to infiltrate her Agua Prieta Cartel. I’m going to be your informant.”

  Pierce rose, refreshed the cups, then withdrew a club from his caddy and made a putt. “I’m all ears.”

  “I pose as an American coke dealer, make contact with Yvonne, and gain her confidence with a few buys. Once I’ve established myself as a reliable customer, I dangle temptation. I’ve got a big client who wants to do multikilo deals.” Then, his glance switching between Nacho and Pierce: “You’ll be the client. A heavy hitter but too suspicious to do deals in Mexico. You’ll only do business in the U.S. That’s how we lure her across the line with a load. The transaction goes down, you pop her, and no complications because she’s a U.S. citizen. If we work it right, we net Julián, too. We decapitate the Menéndez organization.”

  Pierce replaced the putter. He was skeptical. The sting required a degree of recklessness in Yvonne that he didn’t think she possessed. What made The Professor so confident he could win her trust to the point that she’d cross a load herself?

  “Greed. She’s the greediest bitch in the business. If the reward looks big enough to her, she’ll take the risk.”

  Pierce squinted to indicate that he still wasn’t persuaded.