13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  She thought that might quiet the girl, but Caroline kept up a steady, whispering stream of coke jabber, reassuring herself in baby talk that things were going to be all right.

  The pistol Val had given them was a German-made automatic, a Walther 9-mm model that was popular with police officers in Europe. Remington clicked the release button and made sure the magazine was full and there was a round in the chamber. She perched in the rickety chair and tried not to let her night thoughts gallop away with her. In the street, a rapid-fire Spanish conversation arose. A dog growled, then yelped.

  Remington trained the pistol on the doorway. The weapon had no manual safety, so it was ready to go. The voices slowly faded. But the night remained un-silent. Barks, calls, moans, wild laughter. The creak of the wind.

  When Val returned, he brought supplies. Caroline immediately grabbed the bottle of cheap tequila and cracked it open. Val offered Remington a black watch cap.

  “Do you think you can be a man?” he asked her. “They’re looking for two females and a male. It would be better —”

  “Why not me?” Caroline asked. “I can be a man as well as she can.”

  “No, honey, you can’t,” Val said. “But we’re going to have to do something about your hair.”

  He produced a bottle of hair dye, or some sort of toxic coal tar that was sold as hair dye in Tijuana. With Caroline complaining, Val slathered the stuff over her red-gold mane. The effect was like putting a bushel basket over a flame.

  Remington busied herself as best she could with the masculinization process. She took off her shirt and bra and bound her chest with a ripped-off strip of T-shirt. The jeans Val produced for her were pre-filthed. He reached out and dirtied her face with the leftover hair dye on his fingers. Val pulled the cap down around Remington’s ears, jammed an extravagant straw hat on Caroline’s head and pulled them both to their feet.

  “What’s the plan?” Remington asked.

  “You’re right. We can’t cross the border, not here. The police will be watching. We’ll have to head farther east.”

  “We’re going to smuggle ourselves into the U.S.?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am an American citizen,” Caroline proclaimed stoutly.

  “Yeah, don’t broadcast that fact around,” Val said.

  —

  She just wanted to go somewhere where she wasn’t going to be bothered by men all the time. Julieta Bautista Galindo had lost count. She was now nineteen. She had first been forced to have relations when she was eleven. In the eight years since then, it seemed to be nonstop. Her chichis were always chewed raw.

  The trip north, she knew, would expose her many more times to the risk of sexual assault. She’d heard the stories. If it wasn’t the polleros, the smugglers, it would be la migra, the border patrol.

  She didn’t care. No place on earth could be worse than Sinaloa. Los violadores, the cartel gangsters called their corps of rapists. The violators. The gangbangers themselves also took their turns. So did the police.

  If America did not prove to be a place beyond rape, then Julieta resolved to go farther. All the way to Canada, where the Eskimos lived in ice houses. Julieta hated the cold, but she often dreamed of it.

  “If you say prayers, they will leave you alone,” her mother had told her when she was young. “A man will never trouble a praying woman.” Julieta discovered this wasn’t true.

  She waited and plotted and planned to make her move. Scrimped and scraped and stole. On a trip into Hermosillo, she spoke to a certain tío, a fixer for the border crossers. Big Daddy Oscar, he called himself, using the American words whose meaning nobody knew. He, too, Julieta was forced to service. ¡Chingado! But for a blowjob and sixteen thousand pesos of her hard-earned money, at least Big Daddy lined her up with a way out. He put her on a bus north to the Sonoran town of Caborca.

  Julieta rode in a kind of luxury that she had never experienced at home. The big twelve-wheeled cruise-liner coach featured two levels of upholstered seats, plus two johns in the back, both with flush toilets. The peasants making the journey to El Norte with her examined their surroundings with a kind of hick glee. They twisted the knobs for the lights and the air shooter thingies time and time again. Julieta told herself that she was more sophisticated than they were, but she enjoyed using the controls herself.

  At Caborca, the central plaza was like an immigration clearinghouse. Big Daddy Oscar had told her where to go and what to do. Smugglers walked around with little cards spelling out U.S. destinations: Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New York. Underage peddlers offered water in gallon-size jugs of cloud-colored plastic.

  In cities such as Tijuana, Nogales and Ciudad Juárez, the urban border was no longer passable. A big push by la migra the previous year, a coordinated action called Operation Gatekeeper, had closed those crossings up tight. Gone were the days when an individual could slog across the wetlands of the Tijuana River delta and be picking grapes in the Central Valley the next day.

  The only way now was east, the desert. They were called the walkers, the ones who gathered in sun-murdered hamlets between Tijuana and Mexicali, or between Mexicali and Nogales. Alambristas, the Wire Crossers. Other names were not so kind. Pollos, cooked chickens.

  From Caborca to the frontera, Julieta traveled in a van crowded mostly with smelly men and only two other women. Some of the country boys were nice. They looked at Julieta shyly out of the corner of their eyes. One of the older men had a little portable device, a phone that he wanted to sell to her. When she said she didn’t have any money, he suggested that there were other ways to pay.

  The ride was hot, endless. She missed the air-conditioned comfort of the cruise-liner bus. The passengers named the van el horno, the kiln, or called it the o-van, playing off the English word “oven.” Julieta kept taking sips from her jug of water, even though she had told herself to conserve it.

  The van dropped them off in a village called La Rumarosa. There they were hustled into the most dilapidated lodgings Julieta had ever seen, a baking-hot farm shed with straw mats spread haphazardly on the dirt floor. Everyone was exhausted. She took a far corner and settled in to wait for night. She was soon surrounded by recumbent men. Look ugly, she told herself. She did her best. She coughed as though she were sick.

  Just before midnight, a group of five polleros came into the shed. They shined flashlights in the faces of the walkers. Julieta looked down when they came to her, but they pulled her to her feet anyway. Outside, the air seemed not to have cooled. Usually the desert nights were not so warm, but sweat still pricked Julieta’s cheeks. She went off into a side yard to pee. One of the polleros bent down and watched as she squatted.

  In the dark corral outside the shed, other groups of alambristas gathered. They milled around, seemed to flow into units, break apart, come back together in different formations. The polleros waded in among them like cattle wranglers, sorting the walkers out, employing some indecipherable formula to group people dozen by dozen. Everyone there wanted to stay with people they had come with, but that didn’t seem to be possible.

  Each group wound up headed by two guías, guides. Julieta’s pair both looked younger than she was. They tried for a cocky attitude. One wore his hair in the style of el punk, a mohawk. But the shaved part was growing back in already. She went along as they trudged away from town, the mohawk at the fore of the little group, the other guide at the rear.

  Julieta examined her fellow walkers. Most of them were young boys, teenagers or in their early twenties. They must be headed out to try their luck in American cities, she thought, since the growing season was over and the fields wouldn’t need many workers until spring. Four female and nine male walkers.

  She looked more closely and decided that one of the males was really a female who was only pretending to have a little something between her legs. The cross-dresser was with another female and a tall, good-looking vato. Both women were, in border-speak, OTM—other than Mexican. Julieta had a hard time reading the
m. Russian? Serbian? Who knew? They had dirtied up their faces, but Julieta had no trouble seeing past the camouflage. Caucasian shines through.

  So. Five females, then. Eight males.

  Any way you sliced it, it added up to thirteen.

  She didn’t like the number. It had been unlucky ever since thirteen people sat down to the Last Supper. Julieta wondered if there was a Judas among them, a traitor who would turn them in to the U.S. Border Patrol for the reward. She sidled up to the little mohawk guide.

  “Somos trece,” she said. We are thirteen.

  He looked back over his shoulder. “Doce,” he said. Twelve.

  “No, trece.”

  The guía with the mohawk went by the name of Twip. He stopped the column and conferred in whispers with his fellow guide.

  “Se puede regresar,” he told Julieta. You can go back. Twip directed her to return to the shed at La Rumarosa and join another group of walkers. He admitted that he didn’t like the number thirteen, either.

  The tall vato who was with the cross-dressing girl spoke up and asked what the holdup was. Julieta didn’t want to make trouble, and she didn’t want to walk back to La Rumarosa by herself in the dark. They moved forward.

  Ten minutes later, there it was. The border. In these parts, El Alambre was quite literally nothing but a steel cable, plus a couple of broken-down strands of barbed wire stretched between weathered fence posts. No one could quite believe it. They could actually, physically step under the wire. All they had to do was duck. That was it? This was what all the fuss was about?

  The group became almost giddy. A few of the boys danced as they crossed the border. Nothing to it. “Pinche migra,” they chortled. Screw the border patrol.

  Twip let the excitement pass, then wrangled them onward.

  How far? Everyone wanted to know.

  Forty kilometers, Twip said—twenty-five miles. Las calles serán pavimentadas con oro. Then the streets will be paved with gold.

  —

  Yes, nature abhors a vacuum, law enforcement abhors a vacuum, cocker spaniels abhor a vacuum, but most of all the gentle persons of the media abhor a vacuum. If the Kappa Kappa Chi massacre had fallen off the front pages and no longer led the TV news reports, the idea that a mass murderer of sorority sisters could somehow remain anonymous kept the journalistic wolf pack in full howl. In this day of DNA, the internet, CSI-level forensic science, how could such a state of affairs be possible? Wouldn’t Gil Grissom be able to pick this puzzle apart?

  The crime-scene analysts at the state lab in Milwaukee tried. They were down to trace evidence now, looking at carpet fibers, spores, soil samples, other environmental signs. The lab worked in two directions at once—on the assailant’s corpse, of course, but also on the victims.

  A microscopist named Barbara Venright did blood work in the state lab. The results kept coming back showing contaminated samples. She couldn’t figure out what was happening. The substance she was testing was blood, for sure. The presence of hemoglobin confirmed that. But it didn’t seem to be human blood. She was working with tiny, microgram samples. Venright employed the polymerase chain reaction as well as both EGIS and IONSCAN mass spectrometry. None of the results made sense.

  She finally decided that trace amounts of admixed animal blood could have been recovered from the scene. The microscopist jotted down two words on a notepad beside her work station. “Chicken???” “Goat???” Venright didn’t take it any further than that, and never officially reported her findings, since the evidence she was examining effectively degenerated under analysis.

  Thus the tiny quantity of telltale sacrificial animal blood from the sacred nganga, transferred to the twin blades of Raúl dos Santos and then transferred again to the corpora of the victims, escaped official government notice.

  Would it have made a difference? Events were developing too rapidly to save the life of anyone who was caught up in them. The evidence put forth by a certain police-academy cadet, gleaned from the lyrics of a narcocorrido CD, slowly wended its way through law-enforcement channels.

  The missing brain of Cindy Loushane—its loss still not revealed to the public—bedeviled the multi-jurisdictional investigative team made up of state and local detectives. They proposed dragging Geneva Lake in an attempt to turn up the body part, notwithstanding a reminder from the county M.E. that brain matter suspended in any aqueous solution simply melted away in the course of a few hours.

  The exasperated medical examiner cited chapter and verse from a recent article in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease of the American Neurological Association: “Water itself had a strong action on brain matter after death,” read the citation, “for it was capable of dissolving certain principles from the brain.”

  Certain principles. What might those be? Morality? Courage? Fear? Had Cindy Loushane’s Catholicism been somehow dissolved in midwestern waters?

  They dragged the lake anyway. Nobody on the boat team of the Lake Geneva Police Department thought anything serious would come of it, since they were all fishermen. They had all seen a largemouth bass take down a cheese curd. Nothing organic was safe in the freshwater bodies of Wisconsin.

  But they dragged the lake all the same, because it was something to do.

  E. J. O’Brien had volunteered for the duty. Officer O’Brien’s friends on the force thought he’d been looking a little haggard since the incident in the forest-preserve parking lot. That was understandable. Everyone involved had been shaken by that one. But O’Brien blamed himself for the state’s inability to ID the assailant. If he hadn’t gone all trigger-happy on the perp’s skull, perhaps the lab boys wouldn’t be having so much trouble.

  And there was The Phrase. He uppercased it like that, The Phrase. The words kept echoing in O’Brien’s mind.

  “I can’t stand to see you not dead.”

  Did he really actually hear The Phrase pronounced? Or did he only imagine hearing it? The question tormented him. No one else on the response team had reported anything so outlandish as speech from a severed head. He told nobody about his experience. He might just as well have reported an invasion of aliens.

  O’Brien drove away from the fruitless Geneva Lake search feeling despondent. He paid a visit to his estranged wife, MaryAnn, in their three-bedroom A-frame in Twin Lakes, south of town. They used to walk to the Wisconsin-Illinois border through the woods out their back door. The two of them were going through rough times. That afternoon O’Brien told MaryAnn hello when he came in. She didn’t respond, just stood at the sink in the laundry room staring out the window. He went past her and descended into the basement.

  When compared with the general public, the law-enforcement profession is well known to experience elevated levels of self-authored death. Most cops who kill themselves eat the gun. This is a quite literal description of a common tragedy. Open mouth, insert pistol, squeeze-don’t-pull the trigger.

  E. J. O’Brien failed to live up to the cliché. Instead, he reversed his department-issued .38-caliber revolver, rested the muzzle at a point in the middle of his forehead, and ended his life with a single bullet. He couldn’t stand to see himself not dead.

  The suicide of a Wisconsin cop caused barely a ripple in a Loushane family household already reeling from death. Elsewhere in America it was a normal comatose Sunday, occupied by the twin religions of church and football, but in L.A. repercussions of the early-morning Atzlándia raid slowly took hold. The media woke up. Chicano radicals had targeted one of L.A.’s wealthiest men, and attention had to be paid.

  Victor Loushane’s phone began to ring constantly. A protective detail of LAPD officers arrived at Wildermanse and established a security perimeter around the estate. It seemed impossible that it might be true, but Victor’s strident anti-immigration stance had made his family a target of violence.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” Brockton told him. “They got the guy. The subcomandante is dead.”

  “Do you know how many more of these characters are running around?” h
is father demanded. “I swear, I’d like to strangle every illegal one of them.”

  Victor became frantic to know where his surviving children were. Brock was there at his elbow, of course. But Ellis was…where? At the Malibu beach house?

  “Get everyone home, now!” he commanded his son.

  And Caroline? Hadn’t they sent Remington after her? Where in the hell was Caroline?

  Chapter 13

  Remington peered at the dozens of Chinese people carrying auto parts across the desert. The countless figures wore the kinds of padded cloth jackets that were so common in China. Gray cotton, most of them, or a dull maroon. Unsuitable for the heat, Remington thought. The sun…

  The multitudes came on. What looked like soldiers in dun-colored military uniforms mixed among them. They all held various mechanical items having to do with cars. One elderly man cradled a chrome bumper in his arms. A woman carried a windshield, the glass glinting in the sun. Others staggered along with tire rims, axles, pistons, carburetors, steering wheels. What in the world?

  She decided it must be some kind of strange religious ritual. The Chinese hordes solemnly stepped forward, placing their auto-parts offerings up into overhanging branches of the trees that studded the desert landscape. Remington’s head ached fiercely. It was all a fever dream.

  “Do you see them?” she asked Caroline.

  Her words didn’t come out right. Her speech was gummed up, the dry thumb of her tongue welded to the roof of her mouth. She had entered the initial stages of heat death, and her mind wasn’t functioning well.

  Caroline paid no attention to Remington or to the auto-parts hordes. She was busy digging a hole for herself, somewhere pleasant to get out of the murderous sun. The barrel cactus they had crawled behind in an attempt to gain shade no longer provided any. They would have to move elsewhere. Remington wondered if the Chinese people were dangerous, if they would somehow stop her from seeking shelter.

  The prospect struck her as ludicrous. As if anybody had to stop anyone. Clearly she and Val and Caroline and Julieta and the others were already stopped. They were nothing but stopped. They were concrete hardening in the sun. The sun…