Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  YVONNE, IN THE LIBRARY, read over the documents that Clemente and Daoud had prepared for her last week. She’d told them that she’d contacted the Erskines and convinced them that they would be better off selling the San Ignacio, all of it. They’d accepted her offer. She instructed her lawyer and her cousin to draw up the contract, then she would close the deal herself. Clemente was disappointed that he would lose a substantial commission, but she’d promised to make it up to him.

  “Have you looked at these?” she asked Julián, who was pulling leather-bound books out of a packing case and stacking them on the shelves. Julián often occupied himself with such domestic tasks when he was agitated. The interior decorator. “Are they in order?”

  “They appear to be,” he said, his back to her. He looked at the book he was holding. “This one is Ortega y Gasset. Should I put it under O or G?”

  “Turn around and look at me.”

  She took in the narrow head, as if it had been squashed emerging from her womb, the bladelike nose, the mushy brown eyes, and experienced a wave of displeasure. “You need some liver pills, mi hijo. Pills to strengthen your liver. You have the brains for this business but not the liver.”

  “Which is why,” he said, sneering, “we complement each other. With you, it is the other way around.”

  She refrained from slapping him. “What I have carried off required quite a lot of brains. The attention to every detail, nothing left to chance.”

  “The execution was sane, I will grant you that. It’s the idea that is mad.”

  “I don’t know if you are half the man I am or twice the woman. It has worked out, and all your forecasts of disaster have come to nothing.”

  He propped his slender body against the bookcase, holding the copy of the Ortega y Gasset over his crotch. “You know the old saying, ‘Two can keep a secret if one is dead’? There are a lot of people who know this secret, including me.”

  Yvonne was more than shocked; she was hurt. “You are suggesting that I would—”

  A woman who had commanded the death of her husband and a hundred other people—why not her son as well? thought Julián. The only thing he would not put past his mother was cannibalism. “Someone is bound to let a word slip.”

  Yvonne was so wounded by his insinuation that she in fact felt like killing him. “No, you’re wrong. Everyone who knows about this has been involved in it, and that will keep their mouths shut. And if someone’s tongue does slip, what of it? Nothing but loose talk. There will be no proof of anything.”

  That screech, lancing through him. “That’s right. You’ve thought of every detail.”

  “Por supuesto.” She stuffed the documents into her straw carryall, along with her purse gun, a Walther PK .32 caliber. “Come with me. You should feast your eyes on these people.”

  “My eyes are not hungry,” Julián said.

  Heraclio drove her to the almacén. Her nerves were strained. All the planning, the anxiety, the painstaking attention to those details had worn her out. Outside the warehouse, several of her boys were playing cards on an empty drum under the floodlight over the entrance.

  “Bring those inside,” she said, indicating their chairs.

  ODORS. Textures. Sounds. Castle was sitting on a smooth wooden floor, felt corrugated metal against his back, heard the muffled thump of a diesel generator outside. With his physical senses reduced by one, he concentrated on the others. They tethered him to reality, and if they slipped, he feared his mind would float off into some ghastly void. Smell. Smell, too. The place he was in reeked of a strong, vegetable odor. Cannabis.

  A door opened. Footsteps on the plywood. Someone switched on a light, its glare filtering through his blindfold. But he was aware, too, through another kind of sense, of a change in the air, as if there had been a sudden drop in the barometric pressure. His ears actually popped as he heard the voice, keen as a nail, that had spoken to him on the phone. Four words in Spanish: “Allí. Delante del escritorio.”

  Strong hands gripped his upper arms, hauled him to his feet, and pushed him into a chair. The same was being done to Blaine and Monica. They were near him. He could smell them as he had in the van, the stench of their unwashed bodies, of urine and feces. They had been forced to lie in their own waste, a barbarity as incomprehensible as their abduction. Someone ripped the duct tape from his mouth, removed his handcuffs, and finally his blindfold. He blinked against the brightness of the fluorescent tubes crackling from a fixture hanging from a wooden beam. Monica, sitting between him and Blaine, looked at him furtively with bloodshot eyes, her lips forming a word that she did not utter, his name perhaps. Blaine, with a dazed stare into space, plucked at the tape residue sticking to the stubble on his jaws. Castle wasn’t able to take in his surroundings all at once, only in segments. A small room in a larger structure, drywall partitions on three sides, a curving steel wall on the fourth. Two large armed men, bellies forming eaves over their belts, stood near the door. He, Blaine, and Monica sat in a row on folding chairs in front of a steel office desk. Behind it was the woman, the owner of the grating voice, the one called La Roja, Yvonne Menéndez. Tightly curled red hair above a high forehead, tiny pits cratering her cheekbones, thin, straight lips, like claw marks scratched beneath her small nose. Castle noticed incipient wattles under her chin, wrinkles crazing the V of her bosom, partly exposed by her open-neck shirt. The pockmarks lent a certain coarseness to her features; otherwise her appearance was ordinary, even banal, and this was somehow disconcerting. He’d expected the wicked queen in Snow White, with her flaring black brows, her vampiric mouth.

  The woman did not say anything, only looked at them with a kind of curious expression, as if she weren’t sure what they were doing there. He found the silence unbearable and said hoarsely, “I brought the money. What else do you want?”

  Yvonne did not reply immediately. She was savoring her victory. Here they were, helpless before her, not the authors of her family’s tragedies but heirs of the man who was, and that made them just as guilty. The man who’d killed her father when she was still in her mother’s belly. Noticing the fine light hairs sprouting from Erskine’s bare chest, she thought of what it would be like to pluck them out with her fingernails, one by one. She very nearly trembled as the cruelty inherent in her nature vied with the necessity to restrain it.

  “It’s being counted,” she said at last. “But that’s only a down payment for what you owe me.” She let out a short, harsh laugh. “Believe it or not, this is a business meeting.”

  Monica sobbed. “For God’s sake, let us go.”

  “I am going to. First you have to sign these.” She withdrew a ballpoint and the documents from her carryall and placed them on the desk, the signature pages on top. “Sign these, all three of you, and then you’ll be free to go. You first,” she said to Erskine.

  He looked at the papers, then looked at her, dumbfounded, his jaw slack.

  “No? Then you.”

  She held the pen out to Castle.

  He saw, in gothic letters at the top of one page, the words “Warranty Deed,” and on the other, “Purchase Agreement.” He read on in disbelief. “Agreement, made on this———day of———2003, by and between The San Ignacio Cattle Company, Blaine Erskine, Monica Erskine, and Gilespie Castle, sole owners, hereinafter referred to as the SELLERS, and LaMorita Enterprises, S.A., of Mexico City, Mexico, hereinafter referred to as the PURCHASER … The sellers agree to sell and convey and the purchaser agrees to purchase the real property described in Schedule A annexed hereto …”

  An extortion! An elaborate, preposterous extortion. So preposterous, Castle chuckled hysterically. “My first name is misspelled. It has two l’s.”

  “That can be fixed.”

  “You must be insane. These aren’t worth anything, with or without our signatures.”

  “Here is what they are worth,” she said, withdrawing two cashier’s checks, one made out to Castle for two and a half million dollars, the other to the Erskines for
the same amount. “I know that is not a fair price, but your freedom is what I’m giving you in return. What is that worth to you?”

  Castle looked at the checks and knew with awful certainty that they would never get the chance to cash them. INTRODUCE DELAY. Yes, delay until the police got here.

  “Why … why … are you doing this?” Monica cried.

  Yvonne sighed. “I knew someone would ask that. To make my mother happy in heaven.”

  To make her mother happy in heaven. What perfect nonsense. But Castle asked himself, Wasn’t it an imperative to confront the no-senseness that led him to cross over an hour ago? All right, here it is, made flesh. Kidnapping. Murder. Extortion. All to make her mother happy in heaven.

  Delay. Stall. Do anything. Sing a song. “You’re not going to let us go,” he said. “You can’t. This agreement wouldn’t be worth anything with us dead. It will be worth less than nothing with us alive.”

  Yvonne was getting fed up with these people. “Listen, you’re going to sign it over, and I’m going to keep you here, all of you, till you do. A day, a month, I don’t care.” She looked at Erskine’s wife and felt that she, Yvonne, deserved a reward for all her work, some amusement. Rising, she went round behind the wife’s chair and pulled the straps of her nightgown down over her shoulders, her breasts spilling. The woman stank—she’d shit her pants when she was captured. She gasped, tugged at the straps, and began to cry harder. “I don’t like boring guests,” Yvonne said. “I like to be entertained. Your wife isn’t young but not bad-looking, Erskine, and I’ve got a lot of men around here. You’re going to watch. We’re all going to watch.”

  Erskine jumped up. Marco and Heraclio rushed from the door, grabbed him, and wrestled him back in his chair.

  “Goddamn you! Goddamn your soul!”

  Yvonne was a little disappointed when, as she handed him the pen a second time, he signed the deed and agreement. She would have liked to see him forced to witness the defilement of his wife, yes, to watch her bent over a bale in the other room and the boys rutting her like goats. His balls would probably fall right off. But this was business, and business needed to be concluded.

  After she’d obtained the other signatures, she stuffed the checks in Castle’s pocket, then told Marco not to bother with the blindfolds and gags; the handcuffs would do for now. She flipped Erskine’s car keys to Heraclio. Every detail. And the truck was one of those details. It would be found overturned and burned in a ditch on the Nogales highway, the bodies charred beyond recognition. A little mordida would be necessary to ensure a less-than-thorough accident investigation into the true cause of death. She knew that the victims would be identified eventually, that rumors of foul play would fly over the U.S. side; but there would be no evidence linking her to their deaths. In the end, all that would be said was that these three Americans had gone on a drive into Mexico and were killed in a fiery crash. Oddly, though, she didn’t feel satisfied as they trooped outside. Erskine needed to know, and she needed him to know, that he and his kind had inherited a debt, not of the kind reckoned in numbers but in the accounting of the vengeful heart. Only then would her triumph be complete.

  Outside, in the gathering dusk, a floodlight shone on Blaine’s truck. Its presence here did not surprise Castle. He was past being surprised in this world of anything at any moment for any reason. Or for no reason. The three of them were shoved into the backseat. A peculiar serenity had come over him. He wondered how and where it was going to happen. A bullet to the backs of their heads? Here? Down the road? There was something strangely fated about all this. His only regret, and it was considerable, was that he would not keep his promise to Tessa.

  The Menéndez woman stood by the rear door, facing Blaine through the open window. She said, “There is something I want to tell you, Erskine. Before I was married, my name was Quinn. Rafael was my father.”

  The name did not register in Castle’s mind for four or five seconds, but when it did—His name was Rafael Quinn but Rafe is what they called him, Sally had told him—the no-senseness began to make sense, a terrible sense.

  Then he heard the percussion of helicopter rotor blades.

  POISED IN THE DOOR of the Bell, The Professor was shouting to the pilot through the helicopter’s internal radio. “Get your lights on them! Drop us!”

  The helicopter spun, as if caught in a vortex, then hovered. Its landing lights created a false noon in which he saw a white pickup truck and Yvonne, staring upward, stunned, as if a UFO were descending on her. The comandante’s bird circled the almacén, muzzle flashes winking as his agents fired at her gunmen, who were scattering in panic. The doors of the truck burst open, and two men leaped out, one raising an assault rifle at The Professor’s helicopter as it flared for a landing. He recognized Heraclio in the glare of the aircraft’s light. Four or five federales opened up on him, bullets geysering dust. He crumpled. Another gunman, Marco, tore open the pickup’s rear door and pulled out one of the hostages, the woman. He was about to drag her away, using her as a shield, when he fell hard. A split-second later Félix jumped out of the arroyo, from which he’d dropped the gunman with a single shot, ran toward the woman, and then was stopped before he could reach her by the maelstrom raised by the rotors.

  “Don’t shoot at the truck!” The Professor yelled as he stepped onto the skid and jumped to the ground.

  The engines shut down, the air began to clear. He and his squad fanned out across the open space in front of the warehouse. The floodlight over its trolley door had been knocked out; a partial moon was all there was to see by. He sprinted over to the two male hostages, who were handcuffed and sprawled on their backs. A couple of agents helped them stand. One was clad only in his underwear—Erskine, he guessed. Not ten yards away Yvonne stood behind Erskine’s wife, clutching her long hair, pressing a pistol to her temple. The Professor signaled his men to lower their weapons, then announced, with grand formality, that he was Capitán Bonham of the federal police, that her situation was hopeless, that she should let the woman go and surrender.

  “Back away, or I’ll kill this fucking bitch!”

  Castle had never seen so feral a human being. He glanced sidelong at the policeman standing next to him, a light-haired, pale-complected Mexican who now spoke into his portable radio. A moment later another helicopter that had been circling overhead swooped in low, its landing lights stabbing the darkness, its blades churning up a miniature tornado. As the madwoman holding Monica threw up an arm to shield her face against the blast of dirt and gravel, Blaine let out a howl and, with his head down, rushed her.

  “No!” Castle yelled and went to stop him, but felt a terrific blow to his ribs—had the cop struck him? He dropped to his knees, and then tumbled sideways and lay choking for breath.

  Yvonne ran. She’d seen Erskine through the buffeting dust-cloud, charging her like a ram, his bound hands behind his back. At that moment, the woman broke free. Yvonne, half blinded by the dust and helicopter lights, emptied her Walther’s clip at Erskine, but he slammed into her shoulder first, bowling her over and knocking the pistol from her hand. Without looking to see if she’d hit him, she got up and fled up the road toward the ranch house. Her one thought was to get to Julián’s car and escape to Agua Prieta. She would be safe there. She was the queen of the city. Five kilometers. Could she run that far? She must. She was running so fast that when she tripped, she was flung forward. An instant later she heard the gunshot from behind her and knew she hadn’t tripped. She clawed at the ground, but as she struggled to regain her footing, her right arm folded beneath her. There was a strange taste in her mouth, and blood pumped from her shoulder, streamed down her right arm, and dripped from her fingers. Her whole arm was numb; if she didn’t see it, bleeding in the moonlight, she would not have known it was there. She was outraged. This was so undignified. Someone grabbed her under the opposite arm and yanked her upright and spun her around. She felt nauseous and, losing strength, sank to her knees.

  “¡Chota!”
she hissed when she saw Carrington standing over her with a drawn gun. “I knew you were a fucking chota!”

  “Some of the time.” The Professor took a step forward and, clutching her hair to hold her head steady, pressed his .40 caliber to her mouth. “Este beso es de tus enemigos,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

  He stood over Yvonne’s corpse for a few moments. One bullet, one body. Those were his standards. He’d had to fire two, but then, he’d squeezed off the first one on the run, so failing to make a killing shot was excusable.

  Right then he heard a shriek and ran back toward the almacén. When he got to the warehouse, he saw both helicopters parked side by side and the federales circled around several of Yvonne’s pistoleros, who were facedown on the ground and handcuffed. Near the truck Erskine lay on his back, his arms locked beneath him, his wife kneeling over him, bowing up and down like a Muslim at prayer and screaming, screaming. The Professor went to her and gently stood her up and called to a policeman to take care of her. Erskine’s eyes were open but did not see anything. Blood rimmed a hole in his chest. The Professor had seen him plow into Yvonne as her pistol went off, the reports muffled by the noise of the rotors, but he didn’t know, till now, that she’d hit him. And a lucky shot it had been—in the heart.

  As he picked up the handgun, Zarogosa shouted “¡Capitán! Over here.”

  The comandante was squatting over the other man, Castle. Yvonne had certainly gotten her licks in. He too had been shot, hit in the side, but he was still alive.

  “We’ve got to get him out of here,” Zaragoza said. “Yvonne?”

  “Ella está muerta.”

  “Tanto mejor. She would only have run things from prison anyway.”

  The Professor bent down to have a look at the wounded man. Zaragoza had cut the plastic cuffs from his wrists and turned him onto his back. He was conscious, breathing in labored fashion. Lung shot. A good thing it was a .32 and not a nine; otherwise, he’d be dead, too. The bullet had entered below his right breast and exited through his ribs. The Professor jogged over to one of the 212s. Its radio was more powerful than the portable. He told the pilot which frequency to switch to, then keyed the transmitter and raised Nacho.