Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  “Lord amighty,” McIntyre murmured.

  “Tim, you stay here with her,” said Blaine, then flicked his head. “Up there. The pack was up there.”

  He, Gerardo, and Castle found the body behind a mound of brush and sticks and dismounted, masking their mouths and noses with their bandannas. She was lying on her back, her face bloated and yellow green, and what they at first mistook for blood dripping from her nostrils were red ants filing into them, like miners into twin tunnels. Gerardo, who wasn’t given to his wife’s religious demonstrations, crossed himself. The slow, deliberate movement wasn’t reverential; it was more of a wordless incantation. Castle felt it too, a presence to be warded off. Something here that didn’t used to be here. He recalled Blaine’s words from months ago, and the yelping of the coyotes from minutes ago, a demonic serenade, the devil’s chorus. But they were really only coyotes that had come upon an easy meal. Meat. Protein. He could no longer hold the salty, sour lump in his gullet and pulled his bandanna down and went off to be sick.

  “Reckon she couldn’t keep up, the condition she was in,” his cousin said when he was finished. “So she got left behind and most likely died of thirst.”

  “But why would she—”

  “So her kid could get born in the States, that would be my guess. Jesus God, never saw nothin’ like this, not even in ’Nam.”

  He went to his horse, took a spare shirt from his saddlebag, and walked back to where Tessa and McIntyre were waiting. They returned with him, Tessa steeling herself, Blaine carrying the—the baby, Castle said it to himself, the baby—swaddled in his shirt. He laid it next to its mother, and for the next half hour they piled rocks atop the bodies. McIntyre found two stout sticks, which he bound with a rawhide saddle string, and wedged the crucifix into the rocks. Blaine asked Castle if he had his GPS with him. He did.

  “Then get the coordinates. I’ll call the Border Patrol when we get home. They can come take her out of here. Maybe they got some way to find out who she was.” He looked at the grave, then at McIntyre. “You got some words you can say?”

  McIntyre removed his hat, and they all removed theirs and bowed their heads. After a short silence McIntyre looked up apologetically. “I can’t think of nothin’. I can’t think of a thing to say to this.”

  “Amen,” said Blaine. “Done all we can. Now we got work to finish.”

  All color had drained from Tessa’s face. Castle gave her an inquiring look—did she feel like carrying on?

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  They rode together but were no longer a team dedicated to a common task; they were five individuals, trapped within their private thoughts.

  They found the bulls resting on a hillside above a meadow, so still they were like three big black boulders as, with heads lifted, they waited for a sign from the heifers congregated below. As the riders approached, they heaved off their knees and quick-trotted down the hill line abreast. Tessa and McIntyre rode out ahead and cut them off, while Blaine, Castle, and Gerardo hemmed them from the sides. Two were docile and quit their flight, but the third, the boss, bluff-charged Blaine, then pivoted and ran off again at top speed. Gerardo went after it and caught up in seconds. Leaning so far over it looked as though he would spill from the saddle, he snatched the bull’s tail near the root and gave it a quick twist. The huge animal dropped as if it had been brain-shot, then rolled back onto its feet, chest heaving, snot flying from its flared nostrils. All bluster. The Mexican pushed it easily back up the hill.

  “Vaquero!” Blaine said, clapping him on the shoulder. Gerardo acknowledged the compliment with a twitch of his head. Nothing more.

  They herded the bulls back toward Tessa’s ranch by way of a canyon shortcut through the Canelo Hills. Under other circumstances they would have been talking about Gerardo’s feat of charro horsemanship, but the thing they had seen oppressed them and made them mute. The pleasure of finishing a hard job was absent. Castle wondered if his companions felt what he did—a mongrelized emotion bred of revulsion, pity, and shame. He had no reason to be ashamed, yet he was; it was as though he’d seen something forbidden, as though some dreadful secret had been revealed to him.

  This day of troubles saved the worst for the last.

  The canyon necked down into a ravine roughly as wide as a city street, cut banks rose ten feet high on both sides. The bulls plodded along single file, Tessa and McIntyre flanking them, Gerardo riding drag, Castle in front with his cousin. Rounding an oxbow bend, Blaine’s Tequila stopped dead, bracing her rear legs like a roping horse. Scarcely ten yards away, near where a two-track plunged down into the ravine, a disabled truck faced them, its headlights shattered, its hood thrown open. His back to them, a thin man stood on the canted roof, calling in Spanish into a handheld radio. Calling out numbers he was reading from a GPS in his other hand. A second man was off to the side, digging a hole with a short-handled shovel, something like an army entrenching tool. He saw the riders first and called out to his companion, “¡Luis! ¡Ojo!” The man on the roof spun around, almost toppling from his perch.

  People who have survived collisions or plane crashes often speak of seeing the event unfold in slow motion. That is how Castle’s senses record the next several seconds, and the object that creates this illusion is a chrome-plated semiautomatic shoved in the man’s belt, its ivory handles protruding over a shiny rodeo buckle. The radio and GPS drop from the man’s hands and seem to float like falling leaves; his arm, as he catches his balance, appears to leisurely sweep across his midriff. Castle turns in the saddle and hollers to Tessa, a couple of yards behind him, “Tess! Watch out! Gun!” In the confined space, the pistol shot is nearly as loud as it would be in a room. Horses rear and shy, and the bulls stampede, one sideswiping the truck. Comanche lunges forward, and Castle half falls, half jumps from the saddle and glimpses the man tumbling from the roof—not, he realizes, because of the bull’s collision with the truck but because he’s been shot. He hits the ground and lies on his back, legs thrashing spastically, the pistol still in his belt, blood spreading across his shirt. Only when he stops kicking and lies still as a manikin do Castle’s perceptions return to normal.

  His first thought was for Tessa. Thrown by her frightened horse, she was sitting on the ground, shaking her head. He placed his hands under her arms and pulled her to her feet and held her, she him.

  “What … what …,” she stammered.

  “I don’t know. I—,” Castle began, then saw Blaine, the Luger at his side, kneel down and press a finger to the man’s neck, just under one ear. He stood up, and they all five stared at the dead man and at one another for what felt like a much longer time than it was. It felt, to Castle, like forever. His heart beat erratically.

  Finally Blaine spoke. “Thought you said he was goin’ for the gun.”

  “No, I—”

  “Looked to me like he was. Other one run off.”

  “Them bulls, too,” McIntyre said. “Some day this has been.”

  “You and Gerardo go gather ’em. Couldn’t of run far.”

  “It has been some day. That’s all I’ve got to say. One helluva day.”

  As the two men rode away, Blaine stuck his head under the open hood of the pickup. “Come look at this.”

  The engine block had been partly disassembled, the valves, pistons, and connecting rods removed from four of the eight cylinders. Opening the pliers of his Leatherman, Blaine plucked a squashed sandwich bag from one of the cylinders. It was stoutly wrapped in tape, the kind used to repair radiator hose. He cut it open, and a fine white powder tinged faintly pink spilled to the ground, near the feet of the man he’d killed.

  Blaine has killed a man. This fact now struck Castle in a delayed reaction. That the victim had been an armed drug smuggler seemed, for the moment irrelevant. Thought you said he was goin’ for the gun. He’d said no such thing. If that’s what Blaine had heard, it was because that’s what he wanted to hear. Still, Castle felt somewhat complicit. His shout of that one word�
�Gun!—was all his cousin had needed to at last, at last strike back at these devils bedeviling him. And why had he, Castle, cried that alarm? Out of fear. To protect Tessa—and himself from suffering another loss.

  Now Blaine was narrating a scenario: the drug runners, trying to elude the Border Patrol last night, had driven into the canyon, probably mistaking it for a road in the darkness. They’d bogged down and couldn’t extricate the truck, not with half its cylinders out of operation. After a night in the wilds, they decided to abandon the vehicle and make their way back to Mexico on foot. The dead man had been radioing his boss with the GPS coordinates of where they’d buried the drugs.

  Castle listened to this analysis, fascinated not by Blaine’s reconstruction of events but by his matter-of-factness. He had just shot a man to death, and he was carrying on like some amateur crime solver, Miss Marple with a western drawl. “Who gives a shit about all that?” Castle said. “What do we do now?”

  Blaine grabbed the shovel. “Follow the Three-S Rule. Shoot ’em, shovel ’em, shut up.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  He started digging. Castle picked up the bag of cocaine. “What do we do about this? Leave it here? Take it home and start selling it?”

  “We bury him deep,” said Blaine, grunting. “Then we call the Border Patrol, tell ’em we come across an abandoned truck and found the stuff in it.” Grunt. “Tell ’em where it is, and if they do find this bastard”—grunt—“they’ll think he was shot by another smuggler.”

  My God, Castle thought, he’d turn us all into conspirators. “That’s not going to happen, Blaine.”

  Tessa stepped up, rubbing her back. “Gil’s right.”

  Blaine kept digging.

  She tugged at his arm. “There is no way we’re going to pretend that what happened here didn’t happen.”

  Castle went to snatch the shovel. “We’re not going to lie for you, not about something like this.”

  Blaine planted the shovel and glanced at them. “Well, Jesus H. Christ. The Girl Scout and the Boy Scout. Just what would you do?”

  “How does the truth sound?” said Castle. “I yelled ‘Gun!,’ you thought you heard me say he was reaching for it, you fired in what you thought was self-defense.” He was aware that this was not entirely the truth, that he was weaving a kind of alibi, but it would have to do. “We’ll back you up. I can’t imagine there’d be any kind of investigation. It’s not like this guy was an upstanding citizen.”

  BECAUSE A SHOOTING and a corpse were involved, the matter fell under the sheriff’s jurisdiction. Rodriguez was cooperative, and in the official report there was no question that the shooting of the Mexican, identified as one Luis Acevado, had been justifiable homicide. Castle pleaded with the sheriff to keep the episode quiet, which of course proved impossible. What with the border heating up in the fever swamps of the national consciousness, the story was too dramatic to ignore, too rich in clashing iconographies—the Old West versus the New West, Cowboys and Smugglers. BORDER WARS. RANCHER SLAYS DRUG TRAFFICKER. $2M IN COCAINE CONFISCATED. In some of the media accounts the truth underwent certain mutations. The smuggler drew his weapon before Blaine shot him, the smuggler actually fired, a falsehood to which the powder grains found in the Colt automatic’s barrel lent credence. (These doubtlessly had come from the night before, when he’d shot at the pursuing Border Patrolmen.) Castle gave an interview to a Tucson TV station to correct the record, without much success. The reality was too ambiguous for a thirty-second segment or a fifteen-second radio spot or a four-hundred-word newspaper story.

  The publicity made him uneasy, and not only because of its mutilation of the facts. Blaine, who had been prepared to conceal everything, now revealed everything. Everything and then some. He relished the spotlight, playing up the portrayal of himself as the straight-shooting cowboy, grandson of Arizona’s last frontier lawman. Weird messages came from opposite ends of the political spectrum. An immigrant-rights group threatened to investigate if the killing had been justified and, if not, to bring suit against Blaine for violating Acevado’s civil rights. Letters and e-mails of support arrived, some howls from the dank mole holes of the American soul—“Instead of shooting him, you should have done what those boys did to that nigger in Texas, chained him to your bumper and dragged him down the road till his head came off.” Border bloggers, inhabiting the space occupied a generation ago by John Birchers and the Posse Comitatus, posted congratulations and offers of assistance. “Be happy to join you the next time out. I’ve got a smooth Ruger Mini-14 that kills nothing but Mexicans.” Blaine encouraged this kind of response by failing to discourage it. In one interview he looked straight into the camera and said, “Anybody else wants to smuggle poison through my ranch is welcome to try.”

  33

  LESS THAN TWENTY MILES AWAY, in the sala of her ranch house, Yvonne watched the interview on her satellite TV with Julián and Billy. It was her first glimpse of her enemy, and she did not find him physically appealing, though he wasn’t as ugly as she wanted him to be. This man who was causing her so much trouble should look like the cucaracha that he was. Instead, with that narrow head and coxcomb of hair, he resembled an underfed gallo. He certainly was crowing.

  Julián had phoned her in Zihuatanejo with the bad news, right after the story broke in the press. She’d immediately cut her holiday short and chartered a private plane to fly her and her security detail directly back to Los Tres Encinos. The loss of the load and her best runner was not catastrophic—Acevado was replaceable, and ten kilos of coke was a fraction of what she sold every week, representing no more to her than the spoilage of a few tomatoes would to a farmer who grew them by the hectare. It was the principle of the thing. To suffer such a loss not at the hands of La Migra or the DEA or the federales but at the hands of a stupid cowboy was a disgrace. The damage to her reputation, that was her concern. The Gulf Cartel and, more important, people within her own organization would think she was slipping. And then there was Billy’s friend, Carrington. The day before she’d left for the seashore, he’d made her an extremely attractive proposition. Fifty kilos a week every week, his client wanted. She’d told him she would consider it while she was on vacation—she didn’t like the demand to deal with her only on the U.S. side of the line. That didn’t feel right. But if Carrington’s customer was making a legitimate offer, he would go elsewhere if he thought she was incapable of guaranteeing safe delivery.

  She hadn’t had much time in Zihuatanejo, but even that little bit had been good for her. Not a line, not a bump. She’d eaten well, swum in the ocean, signed up for exercise classes at a resort. Her mind began to work as it used to. No nervous flitting from thought to thought—coke’s illusion of mental quickness. A clear, straight, unwavering line, a laser beam. Flying back in the chartered Cessna, she’d seen that her methods of psychological warfare had been unsound. Really, she’d been too clever by half, thinking that she could harass and wear Erskine down. If anything, Erskine was wearing her down. He, whose family had ruined hers, had now made her look like an incompetent fool. But at least his killing of Acevado had clarified the situation. Direct, decisive action was required. The way was now open for her to realize her aims in a single stroke. By the time the plane landed at her airstrip, the rough outline of a plan had presented itself.

  Before she could proceed, she had to demonstrate that she was in full control. She interrogated the runner who’d accompanied Acevado and who’d fled back to Mexico—had the load been snitched out, or had the two merely run into bad luck? Whatever the case, she was disappointed in Acevado’s companion. A man of honor, a man with huevos, a man, would not have run away; he would have fought to the death. Everybody in her organization needed to be reminded that she would abide neither cowardice nor screwups. Marco and Heraclio took the cobarde to the airstrip, shot him in both legs, then drenched him in aviation fuel and burned him alive.

  And then there was Billy, her Billy, who had given her so much pleasure, the field com
mander of her armies of toilet scrubbers and strawberry pickers. Billy’s chickens were supposed to have decoyed La Migra but had failed. Why was that? she’d asked him on the night of her return as they lay naked on her bed. He couldn’t explain it. “Shit happens” was all he’d said, a brilliant comment.

  “It does, darling, but it usually happens for a reason.”

  He folded his hands on his belly and asked her meaning.

  “That friend of yours, Carrington,” she said. “He’s got some client who wants to deal big, but I wonder if the client might be a chota. He says he won’t do the deal except in the United States. I even wonder sometimes if Carrington is a chota.” She turned onto her side and pulled Billy’s ear to her breast. “Do you hear my little Chihuahua? He goes ‘yip, yip’ when something doesn’t feel right. How did La Migra know where that load was going to cross?”

  Billy lifted his head. “Hey, Yvonne, hey, c’mon—”

  The unfortunate nose, the battered eyebrows, the thick blond hair. She’d grown fond of him, more than she’d thought she would, and it truly pained her to suspect that he might have betrayed her. Pained her more to think what she would have to do if he did.

  She laughed. “I’m not thinking what you think I’m thinking,” she lied. “My customer was going to pay me a quarter of a million wholesale for that load, and I promised you ten percent. Why would you snitch it out?”