River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  He had always sent his papers home to Mission Viejo from whatever site he’d been working at, for Marguerite, Ginny’s mother, to transcribe and file. Her mother had done so willingly, if without a lot of enthusiasm. When Ginny was fourteen, years after her father’s disappearance, someone had broken into the house and stolen some of his original notebooks, but missed the transcriptions. Now she went back and forth between originals and transcriptions, trying to interpret his scratchy handwriting and Marguerite’s frequently misspelled renditions of the same.

  Making things more challenging, she thought that her father might have been going mad toward the end of his life. It had started after a trip to South America, where he had experimented with some of the local hallucinogens. The things he wrote about stopped making sense, as if instead of reporting his own observations, he had started writing down his nightmares. Some of the craziest stuff she had practically committed to memory, having studied it again and again, trying to comprehend it.

  “Raven kept me up all night again, dancing and clattering beads on the cliff. Three nights in a row, now. The only thing that quiets him is if I chant with him, and then only for a while.”

  “Masks that aren’t masks, eyes that see, lips that tell stories of ancient days, nights of fire, the desecrated temples of warring gods.”

  “Kethili ra, kethri chil chilitonate, kethoon ke kelindiri.”

  “Today I flew. Into the air, a foot, two, a dozen. Then more, higher, until the canyons spread out before me like a map, the river only a line. I stayed up for a couple of hours, then lowered gently to the ground, a drifting leaf, and went to sleep for three days and nights.”

  Entries like that, frequent in the last year or so before he vanished, were hard for Ginny to read. For most of his life, Hollis Tupper had been a respected anthropologist. He hadn’t written a lot of books, but he had published monographs and often spoke at universities and professional gatherings. He had married late in life, wanting to solidly establish his career first. When Ginny came along, the whole parenthood thing seemed to take him by surprise, according to the stories her mother told. He had stayed close to home during her pregnancy, but after trying his hand at fatherhood for a few months, he began going back into the field much more often. When he finally disappeared, Marguerite assumed that he had simply decided he couldn’t handle it anymore, and chose not to come home.

  Even as a child, Ginny couldn’t buy that explanation. She remembered her father being awkward with her, but loving. He hadn’t been the world’s greatest dad—no one would have bought him the mug or the plastic trophy—but he wouldn’t have abandoned his only daughter.

  Which meant his disappearance was a mystery.

  Anthropology was all about mystery, about using clues to reconstruct what must have been. Even cultural anthropology involved people going into societies that weren’t their own and trying to understand them. The kind Hollis Tupper had excelled at was the other kind, physical anthropology. Virginia Tupper had followed her father into the same field, earning a doctorate because no one would offer meaningful grants to anyone with a lesser degree, and she had her own agenda, studying the pictographs of Smuggler’s Canyon to find clues to her father’s disappearance. Physical anthropologists tried to make sense of societies that had long since disappeared, to reconstruct their beliefs and the way they lived by studying the minute bits of evidence left behind: skeletons and structures, shards of pottery, scratchings on walls of rock.

  Hollis Tupper had only vanished two decades ago, and he had left a voluminous paper trail. If she couldn’t figure out what happened to him, she needed to find a new line of work.

  Then again, when the organization that had provided her a grant found out that she was at Smuggler’s Canyon for personal—not scientific—research, she might have to do so anyway.

  She was deep into a paper that she had read before, but felt she needed a refresher on, when a loud thump from the window startled her. She dropped the papers onto the bed and jerked her head around. Through a gap in the curtains she saw the familiar orange cat pressed up against the window, mouth wide, looking as surprised as she felt. Had someone thrown him against the glass?

  Well, maybe she needed a break. And that cat obviously needed comforting. She didn’t know how he had hit the window, maybe jumping at a bird or a cricket or something. However it happened, he remained on the brick ledge outside, yowling and looking completely freaked out.

  Ginny went to the door, opened it, and stuck a hand out toward the beast. The parking lot was empty. Out on the interstate, a truck growled through its gears; its array of lights streaking against the night sky.

  “Are you okay, kitty?” she asked. “What happened?”

  The cat meowed, backing away from her hand instead of coming toward it.

  “It’s okay, kitty. Whatever happened, I’m not going to hurt you.” She took another step closer, reaching to scoop him up.

  Ordinarily the cat would have jumped into her hands.

  Instead, he hissed and lashed out with his right front paw, claws bared. Ginny barely snatched her hand away in time. An inch closer and her flesh would have been lacerated. “Jesus!” she said. “What was that?”

  The cat didn’t answer. He jumped down off the window ledge and stalked away, his back to Ginny, tail switching defiantly in the air.

  Like he’s just vanquished an enemy, Ginny thought.

  An enemy who thought she was a friend.

  NINETEEN

  At twenty-three, Gilbert Ramirez was the oldest of them, and he had crossed over many times before so he knew the tricks. Where it was easiest to cross, how to dodge la migra, where to look for work—all of these things he had learned, and he was willing to share that knowledge with his friends from Taxco, Guillermo Romo (who had gone by the name Billy since he was nine) and Carlos Quintano.

  This trip wasn’t even for real. Gilbert had a job in Ciudad Juárez, washing cars at a used-car dealership. It wasn’t the best job he’d ever had, but it paid okay, and he had met a local girl who liked him, and life was good. He had no particular interest, just now, in working on the other side of the line, dealing with all the crap that was going on these days, the anti-migrant forces, the vigilantes and the politicians who called it a crisis when a man wanted to pick vegetables or paint houses to earn a few American dollars.

  But he and Billy and Carlos had been drinking cervezas they bought at Bip Bip, downing bottles and talking about the land they could see from the dirt embankment they sat on. Across the street, over the river that they called Rio Bravo and Americans called Rio Grande, across the canal and the fences and the barriers of the law, that was los Estados Unidos, Gringolandia, the promised land—at least that’s how some described it. Gilbert knew this wasn’t quite the case. Sure, there was work there, and money to be made, and places to spend it. He had been inside a mall in Houston that made him literally gasp with wonder at the sheer variety of merchandise one could buy, and the money it would require to truly take advantage of it.

  But Mexico wasn’t so bad when a man had a job and a girl. Teresa was slender and pretty and she earned good tips from gringos who thought they’d be able to get with her, so that helped, too. A person could keep away from the gangsters and the government and the cops, could mind his own business and have a decent life.

  So they were drinking, he and Billy and Carlos, and talking, and drinking some more, and Gilbert got to telling them stories about how many times he had crossed over, how he knew El Paso like it was sleepy little Taxco, and he could show them where the strippers from the clubs along the interstate drank when they weren’t working.

  Billy was the one who challenged him first. “If it’s so easy, then show us,” he’d said. “Take us over there. Teach us how the master crosses the line.” Billy had always taunted Gilbert about being the “lucky one” of the three friends, and the fact that Gilbert had spent time in the north just added to his case. One glimpse of Teresa had fueled the fire even more. �
��You’re the lucky one, Gilbert,” he said now. “Show us how you get your luck.”

  Carlos took up the appeal then, and after a couple more drinks, Gilbert agreed. The two younger men had come up from Taxco intending to cross the border, to look for work in the north, and if he could help them, he had to do it. Recognizing that crossing drunk wasn’t the best idea—on the concrete banks of the river, he kept slipping, falling on his ass, scraping his palms, and laughing out loud—he ignored his condition and went ahead with the plan they had discussed sitting outside Bip Bip, sometimes shouting to be heard over the loud corridos coming from a truck parked nearby.

  There was hardly any water in the river, just a muddy stream, then a kind of island choked with tall, stiff grass, mud-caked around the bottom, and some other bushes, and then a second muddy stream. Both streams were narrow enough to jump over if you were sober—which they weren’t—and Billy, trying to clear the second, hit the bank on the far side and fell backward, landing on his hands and ass in the muddy water with a shout.

  “Shut up!” Gilbert said in a loud whisper. “Silencio, dude! You want BP to hear you?” He had lived on the border so long that he spoke half English, half Spanish, switching back and forth between them without even thinking about it.

  Billy sat in the thick stream for a few seconds, wide-eyed in the darkness, then stood up and tried to wipe his jeans off. “Forget about that,” Gilbert urged, knowing what came next. Carlos rolled on the cement bank, arms wrapped around his sides, trying to laugh silently. Gilbert envisioned border patrol agents at the fence, ready to beam those bright lights right down at them, blinding them as they climbed the bank.

  But maybe there was no migra out tonight, because no shouts came, no piercing beams of light. Billy and Carlos calmed down, and Gilbert led them up the bank, into the Franklin Canal (this one had water they had to wade through, up to their chests, cold and swiftly flowing; this water, unlike the Rio Grande, would be confined to the U.S. side), through a gap clipped in the chain-link fence by some other crossers, earlier that night or the night before, and they were there. American soil.

  They passed through a thick growth of three-meter-high brittle weeds that reminded Gilbert of corn, and found themselves in a small, grassy park. It was some sort of historical site from the early days of American control—this part was explained on a plaque standing with some other monuments and a gravesite near the parking area. The funny part, to him, was that the historic American site was now a Mexican restaurant. One of Teresa’s older brothers worked there.

  They crossed the grassy field silently—Gilbert was silent because that dip in the cold canal had sobered him up and he wanted to be careful, Billy and Carlos were silent presumably because they were in awe that they had finally reached El Norte, so far from Taxco in every way. Gilbert led them between the various monuments, pausing to check the name on the gravestone. Major Simeon Hart it said, and the place had once been called Hart’s Mill, but no longer was. Before Major Simeon Hart, El Camino Real had cut across this land, connecting Mexico City with San Francisco, all Mexican territory in those days. El Paso’s name had come from the Mexicans, as another plaque pointed out: Don Juan de Oñate had called this place El Paso Del Rio Del Norte way back in 1598.

  These days the Americans wanted to keep the Mexicans off land that had formerly been theirs, and not that long ago. A Mexican had to steal across the line in the night, like a criminal. It was insanity.

  Past the gravel parking lot were a highway and a railroad track. El Paso waited for them on the other side. But Billy and Carlos hadn’t intended to make the crossing tonight; all their stuff was back in Gilbert’s apartment.

  “We should go back over,” he whispered. “Before someone sees us.” He didn’t want them to get caught when they were just here on a lark.

  “No way, ese,” Billy said. “What about those strippers you told us about? What about the stores full of everything a person could ever want? Didn’t you say there were swimming pools filled with champagne in El Paso?”

  Gilbert didn’t think he had ever mentioned any such thing, although in the grip of cerveza or tequila he sometimes made claims that weren’t strictly true, things he forgot by morning.

  But before he could say anything at all, Carlos clutched his arm in a painful grip. “Gilbert!”

  Gilbert saw what Carlos did: a man coming out of the trees toward them. He was in the shadows, walking with purpose, and Gilbert had a bad feeling. A border patrol officer would have announced himself by now, might even have a gun in his hand. This man appeared empty-handed at first, but then he passed through the beam cast by a pole-mounted floodlight and Gilbert saw that he had something in his right hand after all, and it gleamed, metallic, in the light.

  “Vamonos!” he shouted, remembering to use Spanish so his friends would understand. He tried to break into a run, but when he swiveled to head back to the fence, his wet shoes slid on the damp grass and he flew facedown in the little circle where the monuments and plaques were.

  He tried to rise, but the strength seemed to have fled from his arms and legs. He raised his head enough to see the man reach Billy. The man’s arm slashed out and then Billy crumpled to the ground, blood shooting from his neck and pattering on the grass like rain.

  This restored Gilbert’s strength, and he pushed off the ground, regaining his footing. He started for the fence again. Carlos reached the tall weeds before he did, and when they both tried to shove through at once, sharp leaves sliced his skin. The two friends got tangled together and Gilbert fell again. This time he caught himself on the plants and didn’t go all the way down. Before he could free himself, however, he felt a powerful hand gripping his collar, wrenching him back to his feet. Not Carlos, who was several inches shorter than he and had never been so strong.

  The man’s blade flashed again. For a moment, Gilbert couldn’t feel anything. Had he missed? Or was it so sharp, the slice it must have made so fine that air had not yet penetrated the cut, blood not yet found passage to the outside?

  It was, he realized, the latter. The pain came all at once, searing, as if he had leaned into a white-hot wire, and when blood began to spray from his throat, the world went dark, as if the border patrol had decided to shut off all the floodlights after all, and every other light, too.

  The light didn’t fade away fast enough, though, to keep him from seeing the man catch up to Carlos at the fence. Down in the wet grass again, feeling his life slip away a little more with every pulse of blood that burbled through his throat, Gilbert heard Carlos’s long, final screams, and he decided that Billy, who hadn’t even seen what was coming, had been the lucky one.

  TWENTY

  Molly had spent the day before sweating the Gretchen Fuchs story. Murder wasn’t her usual beat by a long shot, and the more she worked on it, studying what little she’d been able to get from the cops—which, perhaps unfortunately, included crime-scene photos, sharp and distinct—the more it disturbed her. She understood that tackling new things was the key to growing as a reporter, and that if she wanted to make her bones, she would have to prove herself in a variety of ways. So she did what she was told, and tried to think of it as a résumé builder.

  Gretchen Fuchs had been a single woman, just like her. Was that what made it so awful? Or was it backlash from Byrd’s prolonged death, making her more attuned to the mortality of every human being?

  Gretchen had entertained some friends at her home, something Molly had also done. Her guests left and Gretchen started the after-dinner cleanup, another familiar activity. Then something horrible happened. Was it just the wrong person happening by at the wrong time? Or had Gretchen been stalked, followed, observed by someone waiting for the perfect moment to strike?

  Molly hadn’t been able to figure that out. She wasn’t Brenda Starr or Lois Lane, and she couldn’t solve, through a simple examination of the dry facts of murder, a mystery the police hadn’t.

  Inside Gretchen’s house, Officer Kozlowski had left he
r alone for a few minutes, and Molly had managed to copy numbers out of Gretchen’s address book. Today her plan was to call some of Gretchen’s friends, to try to get more information about who Gretchen had been in life. That, as Frank had suggested, would be the focus of her piece.

  Gretchen had worked in a small travel agency, which was getting smaller as the Internet replaced travel agents. Besides the owner, only Gretchen and two other employees had kept their jobs through the most recent downsizing. Molly would be calling them today, too.

  She had swung by Providence Memorial on her way in this morning. For most of her life, she had never imagined that the nursing staff of a hospital’s oncology unit would know her by name, but as she walked down the halls (marveling, as she always did, at how squeaky the floors were under rubber-soled shoes, and didn’t most people who worked here wear rubber soles?) several of them greeted her cheerfully.

  Wade was already there. She had known because she’d parked next to his rented Ford Focus, which she recognized by the books and magazines he had already strewn on the passenger seat, in the parking lot behind the Hilton Tower, one of the hospital’s three main buildings. Mud caked the car’s lower side, around the bottom of the driver’s door, and she wondered briefly how this had happened on the short trip between the hotel and the hospital. By the time she got upstairs and found the two of them engaged in a loud and obscene recollection of women they’d known over the years, she had forgotten all about the mud. Deciding that discretion was, after all, the better part of valor, Molly simply stopped in for a quick hello before leaving the boys to their memories.