Stalking Moon

by David Cole

  "School's over," Garza said.

  We got back into the Suburban and left the dump. Halfway through a slum area, I could hear a motorcycle revving its engine, but couldn't see if it was Rey. In ten minutes we were back near the jail. The officer got out and opened my door.

  "You're not finding the money," Garza said. "You're down here in Nogales, you're visiting some American, but you're not at your computer. Finding the money. Who is that American, by the way? That Señor Johnny, is he DEA? Some kind of secret agent, down here to expose corruption?"

  They all laughed.

  "Or does he just run that silly little workers' group so he gets all the women he needs. Mestizos, Indians, foreigners. You'd think a man would have better women on his mind, but as they say, once your cock is inside where it's wet and you're going to come, you don't really care who you're fucking."

  "Why did you kill that woman?"

  "A learning experience."

  "Who was she?"

  "She assembled printed circuit boards. For high definition television sets."

  "You killed her for that?"

  "Get out." He handed me a piece of paper. "Call this number at midnight tonight. Tell whoever answers that you've found some of the money. Or tomorrow, we'll find you, and we'll go back to school. Comprende, señorita?"

  I sat on the broken concrete curb, sobbing. A man came down the street, leading a donkey and carrying an old Speed Graphic camera.

  "Souvenir pictures," he cried. "Memories of Nogales."

  Passing me, he stopped and leaned over to me.

  "Twenty minutes, walk two blocks down, look for the place where they sell bread. Go inside, go out the back door. Your friend is waiting there."

  "What friend?"

  "The one on the old police bike."

  29

  "Bobby. Donald, Don, what the hell do I call you?"

  "Why are you calling, Laura?"

  "Don. That's what Mari calls you, isn't it?"

  "Don is fine."

  "I need serious help."

  "Wait, just wait a minute."

  "Money and information."

  "Laura, slow down, listen to me for a minute."

  "I've got no time to listen."

  "Mari is dying."

  "For Christ's sake, I know she's dying, I just saw her yesterday and she was going in to the hospital to get a bone marrow transplant so she could stop dying."

  "No," Don said very carefully. "Listen to me. She never got the transplant. She's in a coma. She'll probably not last another day."

  Rey caught me as I swayed at the pay phone. He lowered me to the concrete sidewalk. I could hear Don's voice shouting in the phone, but the shock was too great, and my guilt even greater. I didn't care so much that Mari was really dying. I cared more that she couldn't help me. Rey didn't know what to do, but he recognized my panic attack and laid me on the ground. He picked up the phone, told Don I'd just fainted because of whatever he had told me, what the Christ did he say, anyhow, how could he goddam well say something that threw me into shock.

  "Don't hang up," I screamed.

  Rey froze, his hand on the phone, inches from the cutoff plate. He listened, shook his head.

  "He's there."

  "Help me up. No. Just hand me the phone."

  "Where are you?" Don said with alarm. "Ah, I see the trace. Nogales? Mexico?"

  "About Mari," I said. "Is there any way I can talk with her?"

  "Yeah. I know what you're feeling. But no. She's in the operating room. They don't expect to be able to do anything for her. Did an MRI yesterday and found tumors all over her body."

  "Can't they operate?"

  "No. Today, they're trying exploratory surgery, but the lead doctor told me that they'd probably just close her up without doing anything. I need to find Alex."

  "I'll call her. Tell her to contact you."

  "No. Have her call the hospital," he said urgently and gave me a number.

  "What do I do now? Please help me, Don."

  "We take down the score."

  "Don, believe me. I don't even know who the clients are any more."

  "So keep it simple. One thing at a time. What do you need from me?"

  "How much money can I get?"

  "How much do you have, wherever you have it? I mean, I can transfer funds from your bank account to Nogales."

  "Doesn't Mari have some? I mean, can't you do what you always do, get money to me from Mari's accounts?"

  "She closed them all two days ago."

  "What?"

  "She must have known. About the cancer. How little time she had."

  "Where did all her money go?" I said.

  "Actually, she's been draining off her accounts steadily in the past six months. Some of it is in an irrevocable account. Trust fund for Alex. The rest, I can't trace it. Have no idea what she did. A guess, I'd say, she's transferred almost four hundred thousand dollars that I have no information about."

  "Where? For who?"

  "Can't say. Back to the basics, Laura. First things first. I looked in your main Tucson bank account. You've got sixty-five thousand dollars. If you need it immediately, you'll have to cross back over the border. No Mexican bank can quickly process that much money."

  "Okay, okay. I'll come to Tucson."

  "What information do you need?" he asked.

  "Everything on these names. Pinau Beltrán de Medina. Office of the Mexican Attorney General. Hector Garza. Colonel of Federal Mexican Policia and also works for Medina as her chief investigator. Michael Dance. Assistant US Attorney for Arizona. Jake Nasso. US Marshal. And while you're at that, look up Taá Wheatley. Another US Marshal."

  "I'll get on it right away. But I can't promise how quick I can get background."

  "There's a guy, a score Mari set up two years ago. Belgian. Opium smuggling."

  "I remember. He flipped, gave us major resources."

  "Look back through his file, Don. He gave us a name, somebody in Guatemala or Nicaragua, somewhere in Central America. Had files on all top Mexican officials."

  "I'm on that. What else?"

  "Francisco Angel Zamora. Runs a large maquiladora down here in Nogales. Find out his US connections, what product lines he does, the size of his NAFTA contracts, if there's any complaints logged against him."

  "Got it."

  "Xochitl Gálvez. This is purely a hunch. I don't think that's her real name, and I'm not even sure she's using Xochitl any more. On her way to Kansas, so you might strike out with her. Oh, and run two addresses in California. 12 La Pintoresca, Pasadena. 4488 Lexington Avenue, West Hollywood."

  "Am I looking for an Albania connection?"

  "No," I said without explaining. "The addresses are personal."

  "What else?"

  "One last thing. Try to find out where Mari's money went."

  "I promised her I'd never do anything like that."

  "Do it. For her."

  "Will it help you take down her score?"

  "How the hell do I know, Don!"

  I was shouting into the phone, and Rey put a hand on my shoulder, trying to steady me, trying to get me to move back from my anxiety attack.

  "I'm assuming I can't call you?"

  "No. If you can believe it, I gave my cell phone to Mari's daughter."

  "Why didn't you tell me that when I just asked you how to find her?"

  "I'm really confused, Don. It's a bad, bad time down here."

  "So. Where is Alex?"

  "Safe." I gave him the cell number. "Out of the action."

  "Not if I know Alex. When are you coming back across the border?"

  "There's something I have to do here."

  "Laura, when you call me remember our phone code number?"

  From my refrigerator magnet.

  "Use this code. Minus six. Plus five. I'm dumping all my cell numbers. This line may not even be safe. My scanners are showing intense traffic trying to read my encrypted stuff. I may have to move somewhere."

 
"Don't leave me hanging, Don."

  "If I move, you'll be able to get me with absolutely no delay."

  "Why are you talking about moving?"

  "Tell you later. Let me get cranking on these names."

  He hung up. Rey wrapped an arm around me and led me to the Harley.

  "Let's go back to my place," he said. "Let's just get you away from all of this."

  "No!"

  "Well, at least let's get out of the center of town."

  We sat outside a Pizza Hut on the southern edge of Nogales. I'd gone through three Diet Cokes but had barely touched the pizza. My shoulders ached, my back was on fire, so I'd made Rey take me to a pharmacia where I bought a hundred tablets of Vicodin and another hundred Percosets. I'd now swallowed two of each, but my body vibrated like piano wires, wrapped too tight, and I couldn't feel any buzz from the pills.

  "You're sure the woman died."

  "He shot her. She fell. The bulldozer started to bury her."

  "Could have been staged."

  I hadn't thought of that possibility, considered it, nodded.

  "Death squads. Americans have been hearing about them for decades. Sure. It could've been, except ... no. Dead. The chains. Remember the video? On CNN? Death by dragging across the desert? I'm telling you, Rey, when that bulldozer dragged the woman's body into that hole, it left this—this—Jesus, it was a bloody streak."

  "So are you saying that the videotapes were made by Garza?"

  "Maybe. But why?"

  "He works for the Medina woman. What do they gain by murder?"

  "Not just murder, Rey. The publicity. Videotapes of the murder."

  "Warnings, okay, sure. But warning who? And why?"

  "I don't know."

  "So. Please. Let's go back to my place."

  I took out my money pouch and spread the bills on the stained plastic table.

  "Laura. People can see what you're doing."

  A quick count. I had almost fifteen thousand dollars left.

  "I've got to go back to the jail. I've got to get Jonathan out of there. Do you think this is enough money to buy his way out?"

  "Those guards, they're probably terrified of Garza."

  "With this kind of money, Rey, they could walk away from their lives here. They could just go somewhere else in Mexico."

  "Garza would find them."

  "I don't care if Garza finds them. I don't care if he kills them tomorrow morning. By then we'll have Jonathan out of the jail."

  "No room for three on the Harley," Rey said.

  "Dump it. Trade it for an old pickup truck, the older the better."

  "Could do that."

  "We'll take Jonathan back to your place. Give him the pickup, tell him to disappear into Mexico. Then we'll take the Humvee back to Tucson.

  "Gotta do one more thing before we get Jonathan."

  "There's no time."

  "Trust me, Rey. There's one thing we can do that may unravel all of this."

  "Okay," he sighed. "What are we going to do?"

  "We've got to find the water man."

  30

  Away from the downtown streets, away from the tourist sprawl, passing through middle-class neighborhoods, we soon found the shadowlands of life on the margins in Nogales. Huge shantytowns sprawled unchecked in the ravines and atop the rocky desert mesas south and east of Nogales.

  An hour later we found the entrance to the water tunnels, guarded by five men in brown uniforms with M16s.

  "Police?" I asked Rey.

  "They're taking money just to get into the tunnels. Could be policia, could just be guys dressed in a uniform and out to earn a living."

  A long line of people straggled behind them, disappearing up over a hillside. Almost all of them carried lightweight white supermarket plastic bags. Singly or in groups they approached the armed men. Negotiations were swift and entirely dependent on who had money and who hadn't. Some bargained with stacks of pesos, some tried to barter with items wrapped in cloth, bags, or even woven baskets.

  Far off in the distance a siren cranked up. The armed men disappeared quickly and the people scattered. Those close enough to the tunnel entrance ran inside. The rest disappeared over the hill as two police jeeps drove up, one pulling a U-Haul trailer. Men from both jeeps removed a portable generator and several light stands from the trailer. In ten minutes a dozen floodlights lit the tunnel entrances.

  "It's still daylight," I said. "Why are they putting up the spotlights?"

  "A warning. Who knows?"

  "This can't be what I'm looking for," I said.

  "You got any other ideas?" Rey asked.

  We drove around aimlessly for half an hour until Rey pulled off the dirt road.

  "You notice anything about these neighborhoods?" he said.

  "Shantytowns."

  "You see any electricity?"

  "They're too poor."

  "Right. You see the open sewers?"

  "I see them and I smell them."

  "So there's no running water either. What do you suppose they do up here for bathing? Washing clothes? Drinking?"

  "No idea. Drive up there."

  He carefully worked the pickup along a rutted dirt track between rows of shanty houses constructed up the side of a waterless ravine. Some of the shanties were connected, others stood precariously alone. Some were constructed of concrete blocks, showing a certain degree of either wealth or luck in scavenging or stealing from a building site. Most of the shanties were built from cardboard packing crates, chunks of tin siding materials, mesquite ribs, old tires, anything usable and free.

  It was early evening, but still incredibly hot and almost intolerably foul with the stench of industrial and human waste. Shallow channels of watery sludge ran between houses, alongside the dirt track, all of it headed downhill.

  "Good Christ," I said angrily. "Mexico's border cities, land of NAFTA opportunities. How can people live like this?"

  "Ten dollars a day in wages at a maquiladora. If they're lucky."

  We passed a family of nine clearing a spot of land, using an old pair of kitchen scissors and a paring knife to cut off creosote bushes and everything else that grew above ground. Rey stopped and got out of the pickup. The family drew together protectively, the woman and children huddled behind the man. Rey talked to them in gentle, apologetic tones, and when I heard him say agua, the woman nodded fiercely and pointed uphill.

  "That's what she needs most. Water. Forget plumbing. They just need enough to drink and cook. Every day, it's a struggle up here to get water."

  "So where are we going?"

  He pointed to the top of the hill. I could see a tank truck.

  "Pedro. The water man."

  "Good. We found him."

  "Not really. That woman told me that every shantytown has a water man. There may be fifty, a hundred men with old tank trucks, delivering water to places like this."

  "I don't see a hundred trucks. One will have to do."

  Pedro cut his eyes toward us as he filled a woman's plastic liter jugs. Fifteen people stood in line, waiting with pans, buckets, jugs, anything of plastic or metal that would hold water. Pedro patiently filled them all.

  We could tell that he wasn't charging exorbitant fees, because everybody seemed to be able to afford the water. Finally his truck ran dry with three people left in line. We heard him apologizing, showing them that no water ran from his taps. They trudged away, disconsolate. He closed up the taps and hoses, stood at the door of his truck.

  "A moment of your time?" Rey asked politely.

  "I have no more water."

  He looked us over carefully, a sense of fear in his eyes. He kept one hand on the door handle, getting inside his cab being his only escape route.

  "Policia? Traficantes?"

  "He thinks we're with a drug cartel. He's afraid."

  "Habla ingles?"

  "Yes, señora."

  "We're from Tucson. We're not police of any kind. We're not involved with any kind of drugs."<
br />
  "Begging your pardon, but why should I believe you?"

  I took his boldness as a sign that in fact he did believe me to some degree, but didn't much trust us, and mainly wanted us to go away.

  "There are women up here that work in the maquiladoras?"

  "If they're lucky, si."

  "About these women, have you heard about those who want to go north?"

  "Ahhh. So you are coyotes," he said with disgust.

  "No! We have nothing to do with smuggling women across the border. But there are stories in Tucson. In the sanctuary groups, among women who are in safe houses, women who have survived the coyotes and now have a good life."

  "There are stories everywhere."

  "They talk about the water man."

  "I am a water man," he said, puzzled. "There are many like me. But we just do what we do. Bring water."

  "Where do you get it?"

  "Anywhere I can afford it."

  "No. I mean, in Nogales."

  "Nogales, sometimes. But water is expensive there. And it is not safe to drink. All the maquiladoras, they have chemicals, they dump whatever filth they want into the rivers, the water supply. Me, I live south of here. In Caborca. Every morning, I get fresh water from a spring. Nobody else knows about it. But the spring moves slowly. It takes me three hours to fill my truck. Then I drive up here."

  "You do that every day?"

  "People need good water."

  "And you've never heard about a water man who also smuggles women across the border?"

  "Never. I stay out of that kind of talk. Most people here, they know about the coyotes, they dream of crossing, of going north. It's not safe to talk about such things unless you have a lot of money. And sometimes, only if you have protection."

  "Wait a minute," Rey said. "Do all of you water men get your water in Mexico?"

  "If I went north, it would be so expensive, these women could not afford to buy any from me."

  "Do you know anybody who does get water from the north?"

  "No. Why would they do that?"