by Peter Craig
Link put his finger to his lips.
The police broke into their car next, talking to each other, complaining about the mess as casually as car wash employees. They threw out trash, papers, fast-food cups and Dr Pepper cans while the police radio murmured a litany of street names and unit numbers.
Link whispered, “You lit up with that stupid kid, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t light up with anybody.”
“Stop lying. I’m not a moron.”
They paused, listening to the knocking on a door beneath them. The police announced themselves, unlocked the door, and fanned out across a new room. Lydia understood that this meant they were continuing, room to room, and her amused expression was suddenly gone. She said, “We’re so fucked.”
“Why do you have to get stoned with a guy like that?”
“I didn’t. Besides, alcohol is twice as damaging as weed.”
“I don’t want to start a fucking—ballot initiative. You just can’t go get high with every stranger you meet. It’s stupid.”
“I’m so stupid I saved both our fat asses.”
“Does my fat ass look saved?”
For some reason, Lydia thought this was hysterical, and she struggled to contain a bad case of the giggles as the police search migrated to the next room, moving southward along their side of the motel. Lydia fell onto her side and held her breath, then busted out so loud that Link had to put his hand over her mouth.
She pulled back, wheezing, and said, “I’m okay, I’m okay,” as if trying to stifle a giant sneeze.
She sat up straight, removed the two faxed pages from her back pocket, and began smoothing them out on the floor. She said, “I’m going to keep these for my scrapbook.”
The police searched another room, accelerating the procedure. Link wondered why the cops assumed that they were still hiding in the building. Had the clerk broken under pressure? They listened to the rumble of footsteps beneath them, the repeating pattern of knocks, the rattling keys, shouting, heavy shoes dispersing across narrow rooms—again and again, as if they were a team running staggered plays during a long practice.
The anxiety made her slaphappy. She squeaked with suppressed laughter and said, “Oh my God, I’m so sad. I’m going to have some prison matron with a shaved head and, like, Popeye forearms. Like the mother I never had.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself here.”
In a room below there was a burst of hollering, kicked furniture, and broken glass, followed by dozens of Spanish voices in a commotion that spilled into the parking lot. Suddenly the motel was surrounded by people, all of them hollering at each other.
There followed a faint knocking on their door: three beats, a pause, and another two. Link said, “Lydia, try to answer me one serious question. If you get pinched—say you go into protective custody—do you think these guys will get to you?”
She said, “Dad? I won’t last five minutes.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m not going back either. For anything.”
He pried the metal bar off the towel rack and held it like a club. “Stay there,” he told her. “This is going to get ugly.”
The knocking continued on the door, and Link moved slowly along the wall. He was prepared to bludgeon the skull of the first cop that crossed the threshold, and, with luck, he hoped that a fallen body might clog up the passageway long enough for him to grab a weapon; but his plan only advanced far enough for him to hope that some brutal new opportunity might present itself in the chaos. He had lost his share of fights in his life, always outnumbered like this. He turned to his daughter and said, “It’s been good seeing you, kid.”
“Yeah, Dad. Same.”
Just then, on the other side of the door, a voice said, “Lydia. You guys in there? Answer if you’re in this one.”
Through the peephole, Link glimpsed the clerk trying to hide against the rough stucco wall. As he opened the door, the kid whispered into the widening crease, “You got to come now.”
When Link saw how fast his daughter picked up their bags and rushed out onto the catwalk beside him, he experienced what must have been fatherly pride. No, this wasn’t a clarinet recital, a spotless report card, or a victory for the track team; but, as he struggled to keep up with her, down the stairs, through the lobby, and out a service door, he thought that there couldn’t be any talent in the world more valuable than being able to move so quickly in the dark. After a short sprint across an empty section of the parking lot, they rounded the adjacent gas station, where a nervous crowd of men had gathered beside an idling pickup truck. The clerk explained in a rush that the cops had stumbled upon a room housing thirty or more illegal aliens, a coyote’s drop spot, a hub for human trafficking, and that the entire area was now a mess of immigrants fleeing in different directions. He helped them up into the bed of the truck, where they found space among sacks, tools, and the legs of other men.
The clerk said, “It’s cool. I know these guys in the front. Just keep your heads down.” As the truck began to roll away, he walked alongside them, and Lydia leaned down and kissed him dramatically on the mouth. He waved his hat; she blew him kisses; and Link said, “Jesus Christ, it’s fucking Casablanca.”
Passing the motel parking lot, they saw immigrants being cuffed, facedown on the concrete, and soon they were rolling past the men who had escaped, walking and running in packs along the highway. They rode in a wind thickening with harvest dust.
The sky was just changing texture. As they continued onward, they could begin to distinguish the stoic faces of migrant workers along the other side of the pickup bed: three men, two older and one young, all seeming unfazed by their own near miss, expressions stern under their flicking strands of hair.
The light clarified the hills on the horizon, then became strong enough to show features in the landscape and distinct faces, as if sculpting everything from shadows. They were heading up into the date palm groves, circling to the other side of the Salton Sea. There were seagulls awake now and wheeling in the gray sky. The men watched Link and his daughter, distantly, as if they were nothing more than figures on the horizon. The air gusted past, broken by the cab in front of them, where two white men gestured in an adamant conversation, rolling down their windows every now and then to spit or toss flaring cigarettes onto the road.
Link sighed and said, “Going on two years out of the joint and I’m back in a truck full of Mexicans. Where’s the halfway house?”
As the light strengthened and uncovered everyone in sharp detail, face-to-face in the truck amid the tools and sacks, Lydia introduced herself in clumsy Spanish. She gave them her wide, pretty smile, and she said, “él es mi padre, pero no le gusta hablar.”
One of the men nodded faintly.
Link was grumbling, and, in response to his discomfort, Lydia said, “No le gusta nadie. Sólo motos. Y tambien, a él no le gustan Mejicanos.”
Link could understand what she’d told them: He didn’t like Mexicans, only motorcycles. One of the men smiled at this, and he made a strange show of tipping an invisible hat to Lydia.
Link said, “If you think I don’t speak any Spanish, you’re nuts.”
“I don’t know how to say Aryan in Spanish, though. No se preoccupen. él es un oso grande, pero no es peligroso.” Something about him being a big bear.
The men were laughing, smiling at her and nodding their heads in amusement at her heavily accented Spanish—for some reason she sounded even more like an American mall rat in a foreign language. Her voice was an octave higher, as if it carried with it a permanent apology.
“Before you start organizing some kind of fucking union here, why don’t you just be glad we’re out of there?”
“I don’t want these guys to think I’m rude because you’re a white supremacist.”
“Oh Jesus. I’m sure they all love you, Lydia.”
“What do you have against them anyway?”
“Nothing. I just don’t like people coming up here, taking my job.�
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“Did you used to pick oranges for a living?”
“I’m sure some American did.”
“No, no. Not true. No American ever did. In fact, no white person has ever picked a piece of fruit off a tree, unless you count Eve.”
“So I’m a fucking racist then? You’re the one saying Eve was white. Where the fuck was the Garden of Eden—Norway?”
She started laughing hysterically, throwing her head back. “That’s awesome, Dad. You’re right. Eve was an Australopithecus.”
“I think you’re getting your beliefs a little screwed up.”
She leaned forward and said to the men, heads bobbing, all smiling faintly now at the scene in front of them, “No se parece, pero mi padre no es tan mal. Es un buén niño Católico. Cree que a Jesus nos ama a los todos.” He wasn’t so bad, a good Catholic boy; Jesus loves us all.
The men grew solemn, nodded at Link, and crossed themselves in the wind.
thirteen
Just past dawn, after hitching a ride, Link and Lydia were riding southbound out of the citrus groves in the cab of a sixteen-wheeler with a trucker who looked as if he hadn’t slept in months. He had a snug bed behind the front seats, with a neatly tucked yellow blanket and a good luck teddy bear, old and ratty and held together with duct tape. After Lydia dozed off momentarily against her window, the trucker offered her use of the bed. She crawled back and curled up on top of the blanket, scattering hair over her face to block out the light.
The CB murmured between Link and the trucker, a more energetic and urgent conversation than Link was used to hearing so early in the morning. Link had nothing to say to the man behind the wheel, who was chewing a wad of tobacco and spitting in a coffee can at his feet. At one point, the man smirked, leaned toward Link, and asked, “Where’d you find her?”
The question startled Link. He looked angrily back at the trucker and replied, “In the fucking delivery room.”
The man swallowed a pinch of chew and looked away, turning a greenish pale, and finally added, “Didn’t see the family resemblance right away.”
Link faced toward the morning skies and the wheeling seagulls. Silent for many miles, he grew steadily more curious about the gossip brewing on the CB. He had listened to his own radio for so long in lieu of television, preferring its sleepy rhythms, that he could immediately recognize this altered and urgent tone.
It had begun with a warning about a rare backup on highway 111, which was a desolate road along the eastern edge of the Salton Sea. Another trucker had explained that CHP was setting up roadblocks on both sides of Niland, searching every car. It sounded to Link from the description as if he and Lydia had already passed outside these parameters, but he nevertheless was concerned, and assumed that another roadblock might be waiting farther south before Interstate 8.
Little by little, he began to understand that something else had happened last night while he and his daughter were holed up in the motel room. Truckers were referring to a murder in the desert near Slab City, arguing about the details. One man was livid, claiming that illegal immigrants had killed a white kid, suggesting that the mangled body had been found along a well-known route for smugglers and coyotes. Link asked the trucker if he could change over to channel 3, the frequency used by the campers and squatters Link knew around the settlement.
Link intended only to call Dagget for information, but he emerged into a conversation about the same murder, this time with a dozen disembodied voices speaking with far more sadness and alarm. Link keyed in, asking for Dagget. A woman answered him, saying that Dagget had gone off to San Diego yesterday, trying to clear up a problem with the Veterans Bureau. “And it’s lucky he did,” said the woman. “I think whoever it was came here looking for him.”
Link hadn’t heard the news, and several intersecting voices began retelling the story. At a little past midnight, a white car had driven into Slab City, wandering plot to plot for some time with the headlights off. They had stopped at Dagget’s trailer, possibly because of the bikes, and when they were unable to find him, they smashed his work, vandalized his trailer, and moved farther toward the hills.
“There’s been trouble with those kids out on the southeastern edge,” said a woman. Apparently they had been dealing small amounts of weed for the past few months underneath the radar, avoiding the scrutiny of Slab City’s own volunteer security forces. One of the kids, a twenty-year-old named Trent Rucker, with a shaved head and neo-Nazi tattoos, had willingly stepped into the white car in order to make a deal. Whatever happened next was anyone’s guess, but, just past sunrise, two younger boys on dirt bikes had come across his mangled body in the desert, a frenzy of crows and seagulls around it.
What shook the residents of Slab City so deeply was not merely that a young drug dealer had been murdered, though they took it upon themselves to keep this element out of their frontier town, but that the job had been so savage. The killers had apparently stolen tires from the makeshift walls along the dirt roads; they doused them in gasoline, set them on fire, and threw them over the boy’s head and neck. He had burned to death trying to free himself. At dawn, there had still been a sickening cloud of rubber smoke hovering over the campsites.
Link thanked the woman for telling him and told her to stay tough.
The trucker said, “Some sick fucks out there.”
Lydia woke up and climbed back into the front seat, rubbing the corners of her mouth. She faced the wind and shook the hair off her face, then studied the passing desert with squinting, stoic eyes. Link thought for the first time that she was tied up in something far more complicated than he had expected. The murder sounded professional to Link, meant to leave evidence as a warning, to start rumors, create a reputation, spread fear and respect; and it seemed more expert and calculated than the sloppy, trigger-happy bravado he’d witnessed up at his trailer. Who were these people, and how were they so close behind?
Lydia noticed some changed expression on his face, and she asked, “What?”
“It’s okay—we’re getting off up ahead. I’ll tell you later.”
“Was I farting in my sleep or something?”
“No, kid, I don’t believe so,” said Link. “You’re off the hook on that one at least.”
The truck let them off on the outskirts of El Centro—a hub at the southern edge of the Imperial Valley, a few miles north of Mexico, stranded halfway between entry points into Tijuana and Mexicali. A city of immigrants and old cars, it had always seemed to Link like disputed territory. Most of the storefront signs were hand-painted in Spanish; cramped cement row houses hung flags of colorful laundry; radios blasted festive accordions. It lacked only the tourist traps and diesel smell of towns on the other side.
Almost ten years ago, Preacher had disappeared somewhere into those distant foothills, hidden beyond the haze, fifty miles, maybe a hundred miles out into the obscure air. After surviving two trials on federal conspiracy and racketeering charges under the RICO statute, Preacher had sold the house in Palm Springs and bought up a sweep of barren acreage, desert canyons and abandoned military hangars along the edges of the bombardment range, with the idea that he could start over, build a libertarian utopia of die-hard bikers and useless land. When Link was out on bond, taking his last deep breath before going to trial, he’d sold his chopper to Preacher to help with legal expenses, making the deal in a bar somewhere on the eastern edge of this town. Because he had never betrayed Preacher, never said a word to prosecutors or accepted a plea bargain, Link believed that he deserved more than help.
In a phone booth, he hunted for the address of an old biker bar he knew, while Lydia shuffled down the aisles of a supermarket, buying pretzels, licorice, and soda for breakfast.
Just past ten o’clock, they found the dive, the only surviving segment of a boarded-up stucco strip mall. Four bikes sat outside against the curb. Link asked Lydia to wait outside, but she refused, arguing that he needed to be chaperoned as much as she did. So they stepped together into the dark,
damp, windowless room, past a screaming jukebox. Three drowsy men looked up from the bar, first ogling Lydia, then sizing up Link.
The bartender was a huge, doughy man with a Fu Manchu mustache and a hoop through his pierced septum. While dipping glasses into a basin of suds, he asked Lydia for ID, and she began digging through her satchel.
Link said, “Hey man, I’m looking for a guy named Tom Harris—people used to call him Preacher. I wonder if he still comes around here.”
When Lydia handed the bartender her ID, he clicked his tongue, then showed it to the men along the bar, one of whom laughed with weak sputters and coughs, as if his beer had gone down the wrong pipe.
“Ever hear of him?”
“Maybe. What do you want from him?”
“I got old business with him.”
The bartender shook his head and dipped another glass into sudsy water. At the far end of the bar, a very old man had Lydia’s ID, and he was attempting to make a joke about confiscating it, but his mouth was so caved in and his words so mashed that Link couldn’t understand a word he said. The others laughed, maybe to support the old fool’s sudden gust of clowning energy as he stood and feinted at leaving with the card. Whatever joke he intended, he kept doing it over and over again until no one paid attention. Then he flung the ID back across the bar and gave a dismissive wave of his arm.
“Just give her a glass of water anyway,” said Link. “He lived in the foothills last time I heard.”
“Nobody’s doing any business around here, buddy. Not right now.”
Lydia downed her ice water in ten accelerating gulps, and the men watched her throat move like it was a burlesque show. Link told her to stay where he could see her, and he rushed to a pay phone across the room, where he needed to close his eyes and calm himself enough to remember his sponsor’s number. Kirby answered and immediately offered to come and get him. Kirby was pushy and desperate, as if he could see the bar and the rows of whisky under a single slanted light; and he pleaded with Link to give him an address where he could come and help. But, in a lull between jukebox songs, Link became distracted by the way Lydia was talking to the old drunks across the bar. There was no such thing as unwelcome attention to this girl. She laughed, raised her chin, rocked back on the stool; she wiggled her hips and rose up straighter like a charmed snake; and she said something in response with a giddy quaver in her voice.