City of the Sun (32 page)

“Hey,
pendejo
, you just visiting here, but we have to live,” Ernesto said, and then spat. He got in the truck.

Victor hesitated, seeming unwilling to part from them.

“I sorry,” he said, looking down at his feet uncomfortably, “about the gun. I didn’t know for what you were here. I didn’t know about your son. I just think—”

Ernesto rolled down his window. “
Cierra la boca
.“ He spoke with disgust. “
Hijo de puta
.”

Victor fell silent.

“It’s okay,” Paul said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Victor began moving toward the passenger side with resignation and then stopped. “If you try to go there, don’t go without the word.”

“What word?” Behr asked.

Victor thought for a moment. “Password. If you go without the password, they shoot you at the gate.”

“What is it?” Behr asked.

“
Cállate, burro
,“ Ernesto called, causing Victor to flinch.

“
No sé
.“ Victor sighed deeply and slumped into Ernesto’s truck.

The Toyota pulled out, kicking up considerable dust, and drove back from where they had come. When the dust and the night silence had settled once again, Behr edged their car up just beyond where Ernesto had ventured. They went the rest of the way on foot. They climbed the rise, perhaps seventy vertical feet at a steep pitch, their feet sliding in the soft sand as it gave way in miniature avalanches at their every step.

“You think there’s anything over this hill?” Paul asked, grabbing at roots and rocks to help pull himself up.

“Either way we’ve seen the last of those guys and that two grand,” Behr responded.

“It didn’t seem like the time to haggle.”

“You’re probably right about that.”

They scrambled up the last of the hill, taking care not to profile themselves against the ridgeline. They flattened on their bellies amid the sagebrush and saw the place for the first time in what remained of the darkness. Down in the bowl beneath them a quarter mile in the distance was a series of low buildings, some constructed entirely of cinder block, others of fiberglass but propped up on cinder-block foundations that rose a few feet out of the desert floor. Floodlights mounted on ten-foot-high poles cast stark light on the compound.

The structures appeared sturdy enough, but the place seemed temporary, like an army encampment. The only nod to permanence was a dark, moatlike band of vegetation that had been deliberately planted and wrapped around the far edges of the buildings. A hurricane fence topped with coiled razor wire wrapped around that. A single dirt road led in from the darkness, and a tired-looking man leaned against a sturdy gate. A quarter mile beyond the cluster of buildings was a large propane tank and a small shed from which they could hear the low clatter of a generator. Occasionally, quiet bursts of Spanish escaped one or another of the buildings and reached them on the hill.

Behr produced a pair of field glasses from his jacket and scoped the place in detail. “Off the grid,” he said. He turned the binoculars on the man leaning against the gate. “That big boy’s on guard duty. He’s got a sidearm strapped to his hip.” Behr pointed out that the band of undergrowth around the buildings was horse crippler cactus, planted close together, deterring anyone from crossing it to get to the buildings or vice versa.

There was a row of four cars parked to one side. A dust-covered Bronco, a shiny Nissan Armada SUV, an aging Ford sedan, and a Japanese car, perhaps a Honda Civic. Another few cars protruded from around a building, but they could make out neither model nor license plate. Paul watched as Behr pulled out a notebook, removed a pen cap with his teeth, and wrote down the license plate numbers of the other vehicles.

Paul hoped Behr’s professional eye was picking the place apart for weaknesses, because he didn’t spot any gaps in the place’s defenses.

At the main building, a door opened and a rotund man emerged walking two large-barreled dogs that strained against their chain leashes.

“Rottweilers?” Paul asked, squinting into the distance.

“Worse,” Behr said, recognizing the breed. “Presa Canarios. Portuguese fighting dogs.” After a time the dogs squatted by the cactus patch until they’d done their business, then the man took them inside. They did not reemerge.

Behr passed the binoculars and Paul took a long look. At the sound of another door opening, Paul whip-panned to the largest of the structures in time to see a pair of men exiting. The men, Caucasian, apparently Americans, in their late forties and dressed in casual clothes, wove slightly, as if pleasantly drunk. They did not speak before they got into the Armada and drove out. The guard swung the gate open and raised a hand in farewell as the SUV exited. The guard resecured the gate as the Armada drove off into the night, and all was quiet again, until another pair of men, smaller in stature than the gate guard and the dog walker, appeared from inside the main structure as well. Between them was a tallish but slight boy dressed in a tracksuit, perhaps sixteen years old, with dark hair and features. They led the boy, who showed no signs of resistance, toward a long, trailer-style building. They paused. One of the men lit a cigarette and he and the boy waited while the other one pissed into the cactus. When he was done, they crossed the interior of the compound and then disappeared one by one into the long trailer. A snatch of Latin music leaked out the door when they entered. Over the next three-quarters of an hour, several lone men left. Then all became still and quiet. After a long time looking, Paul lowered the glasses.

“Something wrong’s going on down there.” “Yep,” Behr breathed. Cold descended on them and they stiffened on the hard, dusty ground, where they lay.

DON RAMON PONCETERRA LAY NEXT TO
his wife in the large hand-carved wooden bed that had been in his family for generations. Though the air was cool, the bed was soft, and he felt the comfort of all of his ancestors who had rested in it before him, sleep was far off. He thought of his father, the stern presence who had shaped his life, in large part in this very bed. There were nights when his mother had left the
finca
and gone into the city, and Señor Ponceterra had called young Ramon into the darkened room.
There are many things you must understand
, mijo,
in order to become a man
, he would say, his rough hands grabbing at the boy’s nightshirt. But Ponceterra had become a man and built his world around him as all men must do.

He had received a few more reports and checked with his sources in town earlier that evening. They had made inquiries at the various brothels and learned that, indeed, two
gueros
a bit unlike the rest had been seen. They had spent money and previewed but hadn’t partaken, not that he’d learned so far, anyway. This was not unheard-of, but it was not usual, and now it concerned him. He’d learned that they’d spread cash around, had also paid cash at the motel, and though they seemed to have left, he didn’t take for granted that they actually had. Other than that, there was no real information to be gained. Only that they had been seen in the company of a young local named Victor Colon. He’d asked Esteban to try to find Victor, to see if he had anything to volunteer on the subject. Esteban had not yet turned up this Victor. But he would. He always did. He had never let Ponceterra down. This thought eased his mind. He listened to his wife’s steady, ignorant breathing and finally the hold of the day relaxed, and he began his own drift toward the territory of sleep.

THE NIGHT WAS HALF SPENT
when Behr spoke.

“We have a couple of choices here, and I’ve got to set them out for you.”

“Okay.”

“We can drive back and notify the U.S. government, see what they say. Plain and simple, this is the high-percentage play and I’m honor-bound to advance it.”

“Uh-huh,” Paul said, but he was concerned about the time it might take to involve U.S. authorities. He felt that leaving their spot, even breaking his gaze, would cause the compound to disappear like a mirage, and he was afraid to risk that.

“We could go back to town and call the Mexican police,” Behr went on, “but we don’t know for sure what the fuck is going on down there. We’ve seen some remains in a different location. And we don’t even know whose. It’s clear people are paid off left, right, and center out here. If they get word about us, they’ll arrest us or kill us, or move or kill everybody in that place and burn it to the ground.” This hung in the dark air for a moment as the light around them turned from purple to gray with the morning’s approach. “It might be time to pull back and hire some help,” Behr finally continued.

“Other detectives?”

“PIs, private security. I’ve got contacts, but again it’d take time.”

“And I’m out of money.”

They kept looking.

“Or?” Paul said.

Behr couldn’t bring himself to answer for a long time. In his mind was the notion of the great mistake. One in a lifetime was enough to ruin a man and he seemed to be trading in them. His first had destroyed his son, the second his career. There had been others, and this last one upon which he was on the precipice would likely kill his client and himself. But as he looked down on the compound he realized that unspeakable things happened inside it, that he’d been living in an unspeakable world since he’d started on the case and he was unable to go one more day without changing that.

“We can go in and try to find out for ourselves,” Behr said. “We’ve confirmed four guards. Dogs. The place can only be reached by crossing an open expanse. We’d have to drive straight in. I could try and do it alone, but it’d be senseless.”

He fell silent.

Paul was unable to answer. A wave of panic broke over him, causing him to sweat and chill at the same time. Fear of what might happen down there, that he wouldn’t make it back, and that Behr himself was afraid, hit hard against his lower abdomen. Paul flipped over onto his back looking for air, sucking in great gulps of the cold stuff, as if his goal were to swallow the night sky. He flashed on the last breakfast at home, and on his last night with Carol, and the hope it gave him for his return, whether with answers or without.

Paul felt Behr looking at him, but the detective didn’t say anything and eventually turned his gaze back down to what was in front of them. Paul didn’t belong out here in the desert. Nothing in his life had prepared him for what he was contemplating. He had once thought of his existence as a neat package. Then he had watched that package explode. He knew now that life was never the tidy thing he had imagined it to be, that he had just seen it that way. He had come to learn that the horrible could happen, and when it did, there were things more horrible still that could occur. But when the power that ran the universe, whatever it was, had decided to lay him low, it had reached out and touched him, it had singled him out and had become intimate with him. He understood then that even if his existence had become warped and misshapen, it was life nonetheless, and it was worth everything. He knew now that anything was possible. Maybe he’d even survive.

“We need to tell the FBI, you’re right about that,” Paul said, his words floating away into the darkness. “But after. If that was my son out there rotting in the desert, then I can’t leave this spot until I know. I’ve got to go in there, Frank. I’ve got to. But I won’t ask you to. I can’t do that.”

“We’ll do it together,” Behr said without pause. “You stay here and watch. I’d better go work on that password.” He pulled himself to his feet.

Sometime just after three the floodlights in the compound went out and the whole bowl below Paul was cast into darkness, thick and absolute. Moments later the generator cut off, and silence joined the dark in a chorus of isolation for Paul on top of the bleak hill. He had no concept of where he was. He would have no idea how to even locate himself on a map. His only tether to civilization, to his life, was Behr, and there was no guarantee of his return. He felt his heart beat into the hard ground beneath him, scarce evidence of his own existence. Fear, as he had once known it, no longer existed. He had passed beyond such an earth-bound condition. He was eye-to-eye with his oblivion now. Only a sense of logic, feeble and habitual, suggested that the morning would even come.

Behr looked out the windshield, thick with dirt, as girls in groups of two and three left the hybrid adobe-trailer building. Nearly a dozen in all, they made their way to a battered pickup that quickly drove off. Another few walked down the road into the night, perhaps to a bus stop, he considered. Lights went off from one end of the building to another, until only one remained on. Where the kitchen would be, Behr thought, based on most of the double-wides he’d been in. The screen door opened, and the woman, older than the others, small and slight, exited smoking a cigarette. That was when Behr got out of his car.

The woman was the one he had heard Victor call Marta. The one he had heard mention the
rancho de los caballitos
. She was frightened as he stepped out of the darkness into the trailer’s weak ring of light, but she hid it quickly and well.

“
Buenas
,” he said.

“We are closed, eh.
Cerrado
. Girls gone home.” If she remembered him from his last visit, she was trying to keep it from him. But he knew she knew. There was a flinty intelligence in her black eyes. It had made an impression on him during his last visit, and it gave him hope for coming back now.

“I’m not here for that, Marta.”

“No hablo—”

“Yes, you do.”

“It’s late. I go to bed.”

“Wait. Finish your cigarette.” She stared up at him with malice. He supposed in that moment that he was every man that had made her a commodity in her day and currently did so to all the girls in her charge.

“What you want?”

“I need the password to enter the
rancho
,“ he said. Now she glared at him outright. He saw genuine fear behind the expression she was trying to mask with the anger.