The border Lords ch-4

by T. Jefferson Parker

  They broke a few times so that Sean could e-mail her sweet, lovesick messages. They didn't want ATF suspecting they were both AWOL. Seliah e-mailed him lovesick words in return, playing along just in case someone at ATF had found a way into her hard drive. They laughed and tried composing such letters while having sex in exotic positions. Their e-mails heated up. They joked about Charlie and Janet reading them and struggling to keep their clothes on. More laughter, then more sex.

  Daisy slept at various stations within the suite, following the narrow slats of sun that got past the curtains.

  In the long twilight Seliah put on her running clothes and loped out into the cooling desert where she ran along flowering gardens and country club ponds and a golf course closed this month for re-seeding the fairways. There were towering palms and plaster walls hung richly in bougainvillea. Even in the waning light the bracts vibrated with color. Every green and living thing was framed by the clean beige desert sand. She glided past man-made waterfalls and fountains and ponds and creeks, water gushing everywhere. Every inch of her was sore but the motion helped her gather the pain into one big neat package and will it all away. Maybe we could move here, she thought: Raise the baby here in the good, clean desert heat. Sell the San Clemente house. The prices here are cheaper.

  When she got back to the suite Sean was gone. All of his things were gone. Daisy, too. It was like they'd never been here, like the whole thing was some fever dream she'd had and she would wake up soon in her San Clemente bed, trying to remember all the good moments of the last twelve hours.

  All that was left of him was the light scent of his shampoo and shave cream, and a handwritten note on the Rancho Las Palmas stationery: Dear Seliah, I've thought it through and there's no way I can complete this mission with you. The risk would be unacceptable and my options would be limited by you. Please, please understand. Now that we have been together again there's nothing I want more than you and you and YOU. Go back home. Get Dave to give you your job back. Tell him you were having a bad day. See a new doctor. Find out about us. And wait for me. Wait for me. We will be together soon and we will be together forever. Walking through that door without you will be the hardest thing I've done in my life.

  Love eternal,

  Sean

  PS-Daisy misses you already. I had a talk with her but I don't know if it did any good.

  Seliah took the note and sat on the bed and looked around at the darkened room. The curtains were tightly drawn and the blanket still covered the dresser mirror. She gathered a handful of bedsheet and wiped the tears from her face. She could smell him in it, his wildness, his unsated needs. She stood and ripped the bedsheet with her teeth, then tore it to shreds with her hands. Seliah sprung up and pulled down the blanket and saw herself in the mirror but again she couldn't stand the sight of herself. She picked a vase off a side table and threw it hard into the middle of the mirror and saw a circle of glass splash into shards and spatter to the tile floor.

  "Fuck you, Sean. Fuck you."

  14

  Bradley did Larry King Live the next evening with a fresh haircut and his left arm in a sling. He sat up straight for the interview and he looked sharp in one of his tailored LASD summer weight shirts. He tried to sound objective as he answered the questions and gave his account, downplaying his role as hero, giving large credit to Deputies Vega, Clovis and Klotz.

  "They saved my life," he said.

  Then King cleared his throat and sat forward. "Three dead, Bradley. A deputy-involved shooting. There's an ongoing investigation and it's possible that you and Deputy Vega will face disciplinary actions or even criminal charges. Talk to me about that, will you?"

  "I can't, Larry. It's department policy. All I can say is that the LASD Internal Affairs teams are professional and thorough and they'll do the right thing."

  "Are you worried?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "You know, there's been no neighborhood backlash thus far. No cries of misuse of force. Do you think there's a sense that these alleged Gulf Cartel kidnappers got what was coming to them, taking a little boy who is an American citizen?"

  "People love Stevie Carrasco."

  "You know we wanted to have him on, but we had to respect the privacy of his family. That's number one, in a case like this. What can you tell us about him? How did he behave that night? Do you know yet if he was the one to actually set off the silent alarm?"

  Bradley nodded and furrowed his brow. He had invented the alarm story for Theresa Brewer, to explain their appearance at the kidnappers' house. And she had passed it along to FOX News, which later solidified the tale for scores of thousands of viewers. Bradley figured when LASD dispatch checked the tapes and found no such alarm call, they'd blame FOX for the error. And he also figured that this seemed like a good moment to wash his hands of it.

  "Larry, I don't know who set off what. So far as Stevie goes, he's brave, cool and tough as nails. He didn't shed a tear. But his old man did when he got Stevie back, is what I heard."

  "I'm sure you know that his father is a convicted felon. A former member of the violent prison gang La Eme?"

  "I've never met him. I'd guess that even gangsters can love their children."

  "How's your chest wound, Deputy Jones?" "Oh, yes, gangsters love their children!" said Rocky Carrasco. "You're quite a philosopher for being a dumbass cop!"

  He smiled as Bradley walked into his El Monte lair an hour later. They bumped fists semi-elaborately. Bradley went to the fridge and got a cold Pacifico and plopped down on the leather sofa in front of the big-screen TVs. There were three of them, each tuned to picture-in-picture mode, which, when coupled with Rocky's digital recorder, gave him all the Mexican football matches and Pimp My Ride and Wild Planet and Simpsons he could handle. Rocky pulled a remote from the waistband of his baggy Lakers shorts and muted all three monitors.

  Bradley had shed his uniform and sling and now wore plaid shorts and a white Lacoste tennis shirt and flip-flops and a narrow-brimmed hat. He raised his left arm gingerly to the sofa pillows. The little bayonet of a potato peeler had gone in two full inches, the doctors had told him, and it had sliced through a goodly portion of pectoral muscle but stopped short of the major blood vessels that lay deeper. They'd cleaned it out but left it unstitched so the wound could drain and heal. They'd given him twenty thick, sterile adhesive pads and pumped him full of antibiotics and told him to take a week off from any demanding physical work.

  Which was fine with Bradley because he had plenty of non-physical work to do tonight.

  Rocky sat at the other end of the sofa. He was a small knot of a man, muscular, covered in tatts and the scars left by various enemies. Shirtless, and wearing the oversize basketball shorts, Rocky appeared gnomelike. His skin was pale from years at Pelican Bay and years of indoor living. As the linchpin of Carlos Herredia's L.A. franchise Rocky liked privacy and anonymity. He rarely left this compound. He was the opposite of the showy gangsta and he claimed that his quiet life would allow him to live a hundred years, as his father had. The old patriarch had been gone a year now.

  "I hear El Tigre might have a deal for you," said Rocky. "A proposal."

  "Carlos always has something cooking."

  "You're gonna like it. Mateo told me not to tell you so I'm not telling you."

  "No."

  "He says it's a good thing. I say it's kinda like this Larry King deal, but bigger."

  "What could be bigger than Larry King?"

  Rocky laughed. "You will be seeing what I mean."

  Bradley checked his watch. "How'd we do this week?"

  "Three hundred fifty plus some."

  "Down again."

  "I don't get it," said Rocky. "In a bad economy people need to get wasted even more. You know they're getting their kicks somewhere, man."

  "Maybe from the Mara Salvatrucha-Armenta's hired cutthroats. I hear his product is terrific. Well, let's get this thing done, Rock. I have a long drive."

  "Yeah, man. You rest. I got cu
t four times in a fight and they took me to a horse doctor 'cause nobody knew a real doctor that wouldn't call the cops. It was one shit feeling when I woke up the next day. I killed the boy, too. Stupid. We knew each other. Fuckin' Mexicans. I'll get the stuff ready."

  "Thanks, Rocky."

  "Hey, amigo. Just in case I didn't make it clear to you, I'm thankful for what you did for me. For Stevie. I'm thankful to you and God Himself."

  "I'm proud to have you as a friend, Rocky."

  "You're gonna have me for a friend for another fifty years, man."

  Rocky walked over to his game room. He grabbed the cue ball on his way past the pool table and backhanded it sharply into a corner pocket. In the corner was a large wall safe. A moment later Rocky swung open the door and stepped inside.

  Bradley went to a window and looked out at the compound. Rocky owned two adjacent homes on Gallo Avenue, which Bradley found amusing because gallo meant rooster in Spanish and it was slang for marijuana, of which Rocky moved tons throughout his So Cal network every year. Not to mention the heroin, cocaine and meth. The homes were old and two-story, and the lots were large. Rocky owned two more homes one street over and directly behind the Gallo Avenue houses, and these faced the opposite direction, so that after Rocky removed the fences, all four spacious backyards formed one big space. Rocky had walled off the front yards as close to the street as municipal setback codes would allow, giving the four-plex a fortresslike attitude. He and his wife and six children lived in the house in which Bradley now stood, while his brothers and sister and their families occupied the other three homes, along with countless children, stepchildren, relatives and friends. Rocky's father, the hundred-year-old George Carrasco, had lived out his last quiet years shuffling from home to home, sipping tequila mixed with vitamin water, bearing gossip and news and describing the visions for which he was known.

  Bradley looked down on the central backyard. In the bright security floodlights he could see the little Mexican village/playground that Rocky and his family had established: the palapas and concrete tables and benches, the big freezers with the Pacifico and Corona and Modelo ads on them, the grills made from split fifty-five-gallon drums. There were dozens of tall palms and bird of paradise and plantain, and big pots of mandevilla and plumeria plants now dying back for the season, and succulents overflowing their pots and barrels. There were brightly painted plywood shanties for the kids to play in, a hoop and half-court for basketball, and a foreshortened football field with its one goal and a wall of upended pallets forming one out-of-bounds line. There was a chicken coop and a screened-off garden and an aboveground kiddie pool and bikes and scooters and skateboards and pit bulls lounging everywhere Bradley looked.

  He joined Rocky in the game room, where four large suitcases filled with cash now waited on the pool table. The cash had been separated by denomination and rubber-banded into blocks that a man could just get a hand around. Rocky had set the digital scales up on the bar counter. Bradley could smell the vacuum sealer warming up down by the jukebox. Two hours later they had weighed the cash and pressed it into tight bundles and sent them through the sealer. There were too many bills to count by hand, so they went by weight instead: exactly one pound of twenties contained four hundred eighty bills worth $9,600; a pound of fives was worth $2,400; a pound of hundreds, worth $48,000. The sealing machine was made for game meat but the thick plastic discouraged the ICE dogs from smelling the one-pound bundles. Bradley pictured a German shepherd with a forty-eight-thousand-dollar brick in its mouth, and this did not amuse him.

  He picked up one of the bundles and read the denomination through the plastic. All of this money was only about half the California profits for Carlos Herredia's North Baja Cartel, he knew-four hundred grand plus for the week. Another hundred grand had gone into the pockets of Rocky's hundreds of young pushers who worked the So Cal streets, and into the pockets of dozens of middlemen, and more to the lieutenants and captains he knew. And of course another fifty went to Rocky himself, some of which was shared with his Eme equals, most of whom could only dream of it from their prison cells. And this did not include the fabulously lucrative markets of the Bay Area and San Diego, also serviced by the North Baja Cartel, and by others. Bradley looked at the bundles and shook his head.

  "What a fucked-up country we are, Rocky."

  "Yes, but we make a good living fucking it up."

  "If we were smart, we'd just make it legal. You know, legal to have some for yourself. Legal to grow some or make some for yourself. Let the junkies kill themselves off. Let the crack and meth heads do the same. So people get stoned more. So what? It's no worse than booze. Then there's no market for us. We have to find other things to do."

  "Americans won't give themselves freedom like that. It would make them feel bad about themselves. It would hurt their self-esteem. And jobs would go away."

  "No. It won't happen."

  "No. I'll live to be a hundred and it won't happen."

  They put the money into one rolling suitcase and filled two others with new clothing, the store tags still on. Then two of Rocky's men carried all three suitcases downstairs. They re-packed the cash into a cutout under the rear cargo space, then set the carpet back in place and slid in the two decoy suitcases. Around and on top of them they packed in store bags of loose clothing-jeans and shoes and shirts and underwear, all new, all in children's sizes. Store receipts, too.

  Bradley got in. He strapped on the seat belt and glanced at his personal luggage on the seat beside him. On top of it lay a letter from the Los Angeles Catholic Diocese, beautifully forged by a friend, introducing him as a delegate of the Sacred Heart Charity of Santa Monica and tasked with delivering weekly gifts of clothing to the poor of Mexico. Beside this letter was a clipboard thick with invoices and charitable-donation receipts and IRS forms, and page after page of Mexican charities and churches to be receiving the gifts, and maps showing how to find these places. It was a blizzard of forged documents and scavenged forms but it was also his history-some of the dates went back almost three years.

  "Vaya con Dios, Bradley. You listen close to Herredia. I think you're gonna like his idea."

  He drove away from Rocky's compound. There were armed escorts in the truck behind him and in the SUV ahead of him and they accompanied him onto the freeway, then vanished.

  Bradley drove the speed limit and thought of his wife, Erin. He looked at the picture of her that he had taped to the dashboard and his spirit lifted. It was a promotional shot for Erin and the Inmates. They had her turned out pretty well, he thought-the hair and the makeup and the clothes and the whole 'tude of the shot. But there was so much more to Erin than simply her beauty. There was her heart, her soul, her life, her music. What heart, what music. Bradley glanced at the picture again.

  Since meeting her nearly four years ago, not an hour of his life had passed without him thinking of her. He had long wondered if this was not love at all but some kind of obsession. He had read about love, and talked about love with his friends and teachers and his mother and a minister he once liked, yet he had never heard nor read of a love like his. He absolutely craved being near her. Same room. Same space. He didn't have to be touching her, didn't need her attention. But she had to be close. And if she wasn't there, he would imagine her, daydream her, mutter to her. He would picture himself as seen by her.

  He wondered if he was wired differently from other people. But wasn't everyone? Didn't they spend half their time and energy hiding the odd wires, the frayed connections, the suspect splices? Maybe nobody talked or wrote honestly about love. He wished he could write a poem about it. Poetry was big enough to handle love. The poets got closest to making sense of love, in his opinion. Neruda did. He thought of Neruda. A line came to him and he spoke it out loud in Spanish, then in English. Bradley wished he could steal a good poem the way he had stolen other things-an Escalade, say, or fifty thousand rounds of factory.32 ACP ammunition. But some things could not be stolen.

  He took a deep
breath and spoke a voice-dial command into his headset.

  "You," said Erin.

  "It's so good to hear your voice. Talk to me. Say anything you want. Just talk and don't stop."

  "Okay. I can do that…"

  He listened. She talked to him for miles, his heart brimming with love at the sound of her, his mind firing with images, but every mile that led him farther away caused its own specific pain, too. The lights along I-5 stretched south toward the border, as if pointing the way to his fortune. But they were taking him away from Erin, and for this he cursed them. Two hours later he was at the border crossing in San Ysidro. It was Tuesday night and the traffic was light. Bradley rolled down the window and dangled his arm into the cool night. He wondered if he should show his badge. He tried to use it sparingly, but an aggressive ICE agent was always worth badging. He could see the agent questioning the next driver. The agent was an expressionless black man with big arms. He waved the Volvo through with hardly a word and Bradley thought: Piece of cake.

  He had yet to show the forged letter at the border-the Americans rarely asked more than his destination and time of stay. And the Mexicans, under Herredia's firm influence, had yet to pull him over into secondary. The only thing they didn't want coming into their country was guns, anyway.

  But, in Bradley's opinion, it was important to give the border guards different looks: Sometimes he hid the money under pounds of fishing gear instead of charity donations. Sometimes he drove his black Dodge Ram; sometimes the classic Cyclone GT he'd restored. Sometimes he used forged plates. Sometimes he made the run in the early morning; sometimes at rush hour.

  "Destination?"