Crossers (45 page)

31

T
HEY WERE SHAMBLING UP
both sides of the highway, pilgrim bands of ten or twenty, a few on horseback, most afoot in tennis shoes and rope sandals, for the October peregrinación to Magdalena de Kino could not be made by car or bus. One proved one’s devotion by walking or riding a great distance. Village leaders held aloft banners bearing images of Father Kino and his patron saint, Francis Xavier, while the peregrinos carried in their rough brown hands tiny milagros to lay at the feet of the saint’s effigy in hopes of a cure for whatever ailed them or a wife or child, that is, in the hopes of a miracle.

The Professor was moved by the medieval-looking processions; his chest swelled with pride for his Mexico. Where else in the world would you see hundreds of people trudge hundreds of kilometers because they believed in miracles? Certainly not in Gringoland, whose citizens talked the talk of faith but certainly did not
literally
walk the walk, did not indeed ever walk much farther than from their car to the front door of Wal-Mart. And they wondered how Mexicans could cross deserts and mountains to make beds in their motels and pluck Tyson’s chickens for five dollars an hour! Here was why—they crossed deserts and mountains convinced that the hands of a seventeenth-century padre and a sixteenth-century saint would reach down from heaven to cure anything from a cleft lip to cancer.

Arriving early, as was his habit, he parked near the Palacio de Gobierno and strolled to the plaza. He’d bought his ranchito outside Magdalena de Kino because its climate was salubrious, because it was the cleanest, prettiest town in all Sonora, its municipal buildings painted white as egret feathers, the tiled sidewalks under the porticos of the shops swept and washed daily, and barely a scrap of paper to be found in the shady parks. Because it was a town of miracles. In this digitized, globalized, capitalized, and in many ways anesthetized twenty-first century, there should be sanctuaries for the mysterious, like wildlife preserves. He passed a house with a sign on its door.
ESTE
HOGAR ES CATóLICO. NO ACEPTAMOS PROPOGANDA PROTESTANTE NI DE OTRAS SECTAS. ¡VIVA CRISTO REY! ¡VIVA LA VIRGEN DE GUADALUPE, MADRE
DE DIOS!
Viva! he thought. Keep them out, the Baptists, the Pentecostalists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In whatever form it was dished up, Protestantism was thin soup. Catholicism was—chicharrones! A street vendor was stirring a pot of them with a wooden paddle, succulent chunks of pork rind boiling in their own fat, and pilgrims starved from their treks lined up to buy the chicharrones and spread them on tortillas with shredded cheese.

Many more pilgrims jammed the plaza, filing past the tomb of Father Eusebio Kino, the good Jesuit who’d stood up for the Indians of the Pimería Alta. Lying in the dust several feet below street level, the skeleton could be viewed through a glass window, hands crossed over the pelvic bone. An old man who looked rather skeletal himself knelt by the rotunda, both knees on the paving stones, his arms outspread, his face, brown and seamed as a walnut, turned toward the sky. The Professor sat on a bench to watch him. Eyes shut, he was utterly still; only his lips moved in silent supplication. He had a truly tragic face, spare and gaunt, like Picasso’s old guitarist. For what did the viejo pray? ¿Quién sabe? Here was another scene you wouldn’t see in Gringoland. Imagine a scrubbed, blow-dried, well-dressed congregant in one of those air-conditioned, suburban auditoriums of religion kneeling on concrete for hours in the hot sun.

Glancing toward the Church of Santa María de Kino, he saw Billy Cruz waiting at the side door. Give that to Billy—he was punctual. Rising from the bench, a wave of dejection surged through The Professor. He was reluctant to leave the viejo and his magical devotions.

“¿Qué tal?” he said to Cruz, and then stepped into the side chapel, where peregrinos were passing by the life-size statue of Saint Francis, prone atop a pedestal, upon which they placed their milagros—small wood carvings of a hand or a foot or a leg or a heart or whatever body part was afflicted—then, murmuring prayers, raised and lowered the effigy’s head.

“What the fuck is this?” asked Cruz.

“You’re in a church, Billy,” The Professor remonstrated. “They believe that if the feet of that statue go up when you lift the head, you’ll be cured of all diseases. What this is, is magic. It’s Mexico’s secret weapon.”

“Hey, bro, are we going to talk in a
church?
”

“I like doing business in churches. They’re historical—and private. Just stick to English, and keep it to a whisper.”

But this church was filled with pilgrims, not an empty pew to be found. There was a chance that someone who understood English might overhear. He led Cruz back outside and into the uncrowded rotunda, its dome splashed with murals of Padre Kino preaching to Pima converts, of cattle and goats and baskets and gourds and stacked ears of corn, all in bright colors, each shade filling The Professor’s nostrils with its unique smell—a suite of odors as complicated as those in a French kitchen.

Cruz shook his head, bewildered. “I’ve got another one for—” He looked up, momentarily distracted by the figure of a Pima maiden on the dome. She was wearing a deerhide skirt and nothing else, and the muralist’s thoughts must not have been on spiritual matters, for he’d given her a set of tits that would send the Playmate of the Month running to a surgeon for breast implants. “I’ve got another one for you,” Cruz resumed, lowering his gaze. “Ten keys of white. They’ll be packed into four cylinders of a pickup. It’s going to cross at Campini Mesa at the end of the week.”

Two hundred fifty thousand wholesale, street value two million, thought The Professor. “How sure is this?”

“I’m modifying the vehicle myself. I learned a few things from my uncle. And she wants me to cross a load of pollos down the line, to draw La Migra in case they’re around. Said she’d cut me in.”

“She usually moves white through Douglas. Campini Mesa is the dark side of the moon. Why there?”

“There’s questions I don’t ask, but I heard the Douglas crossing has gotten dicey.”

Maybe, but The Professor suspected that Yvonne was pulling a fast one on her army protectors. They had spies on the border who kept them informed about drug movements to make sure they weren’t getting cheated out of their just due. In his dealings with her, he’d heard her whine about the huge sums she had to pay her boys in uniform. One way to cut down on the mordida was to every now and then sneak a shipment down a remote back road. All the traffickers did it.

“I’ve gone out on a limb on this one,” Cruz whispered. “She’s getting flaky. Into the nose candy morning, noon, and night. Starting to suspect everybody, even her kid. He’s pissed at her for keeping her nose in the bag so much, and she’s pissed at him because he flushed a whole key of hers down the toilet.”

“How do you stand?”

“Cool so far.”

“She said anything about me?”

“You’re cool, too. So far. I don’t know what move you’re planning to make, but if it was me, I’d make it sooner than later. Before she gets flakier.”

The Professor ruminated on this assessment. Cruz’s timely tips—in the past six weeks he’d snitched out two big loads of Yvonne’s mota, duly intercepted by the federal police—were a sideshow, their purpose to provide proof that Comandante Zaragoza was fighting the drug trade. The trick was not to overdo it, provoking her into another take-no-prisoners snitch hunt, one that could lead to Billy. He wasn’t ready to lose him, not yet, for there was the grand prize to consider. The Professor had made five controlled buys since August; he’d won Yvonne’s confidence, even to the point that she’d brought him to her ranch twice and once to her airstrip, where he’d observed the off-loading of five hundred pounds of pristine Colombian cocaine. All in all, things were going as planned, but he was as aware as Cruz of her erratic behavior, the spells of gabby excitement alternating with spasms of paranoid belligerence. That night at the airstrip he’d watched her and her pair of watchdogs, Marco and Heraclio, testing the coke’s quality by snorting lines off the magazine of an AK-47. Yvonne’s way of showing she could outmacho the machos. She was laughing and joking, then abruptly turned on Marco, accusing him of taking one line more than she and threatening that she’d shoot him herself if he did that again. Pierce, the U.S. Customs operative, was content to play her for a while longer—he was used to lengthy investigations—but Joaquín was getting anxious. “When are you and your American chotas going to get this cunt out of the way?” It wasn’t a question, it was a command.

“Let’s both of us stay alert,” The Professor said to Cruz. “That adjourns the meeting.”

He started to rise from the pew. Cruz tugged his sleeve. “Not yet. I want out of this, Carrington. I want to get out from under her.”

“Do you mean that literally?”

Cruz snickered. “Yeah, she won’t let me do it to her no other way. That witness? I got word where he is. I figure you must know people. I figure you could help me out. I figure since I’ve done for you, you can do for me.”

“That’s a lot of figuring, Billy. What is it you figure I can do?”

“Set it up with the Border Patrol or Immigration to pop the pollo as an illegal alien. Get him deported. After he’s on this side, I can take care of things on my own.”

Here was an aspect to Cruz he hadn’t seen yet—a capacity for subtle thought. “Leaving you free to go back home. I’ll see what I can do, but no promises,” he lied. For the time being he wanted Cruz right where he was. “And now the meeting is adjourned. You leave first.”

Outside, he found an empty bench near the Kino rotunda, removed one of his mobiles from his pocket, and punched the country code for the United States, then Nacho’s number. He’d decided to give this one to him rather than to Zaragoza, in the interest of maintaining good international relations.

“Haven’t heard from you in a while,” Nacho said.

“Busy. I’ll get to the point. Our girl is shipping ten keys of white through Campini Mesa on Friday night in a pickup truck. Look in the engine block for the surprise. A load of wets will be crossed as a diversion. Any more details, you’ll be the first to know. Now you owe me.”

He broke the connection. He calculated that Yvonne’s suspicions wouldn’t fall on Cruz after the bust went down. After all, she’d cut him in—why would he snitch on the deal? On the bench kitty-corner from his, a young couple sat holding a plastic bag from a religious-icon store on their laps. Pilgrims streamed past him. He was to all appearances another gringo tourist, visiting Magdalena de Kino for the fiesta. He pulled out his second mobile and called Yvonne on hers, got no answer, and tried her landline at the ranch. Julián picked up. The Professor asked to speak to his mother.

“¡Hola, Carrington!” she said a minute later, sounding to be on one of her upswings. “¿Qué tal?”

“In inglés, por favor.”

“All right. How’s it going?”

“Good. I need to see you. The guy I told you about? From Phoenix?”

“What about him?”

“Got him lined up. He wants to do fifty as soon as you can get it.”

A pause. “That is good news.”

“Here’s the thing. He’ll only deal directly with you. Face-to-face. He’s very mistrustful. And he won’t do business in Mexico. He wants to meet on the U.S. side. That’s what I need to see you about.”

Another, longer pause. “Yes, you do. When can you get here?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“No good. I’m leaving for Zihuatanejo in the morning.”

“This afternoon, then.”

He signed off and walked across the plaza, feeling the old stirring, the hunter’s quickness. The old man was still on his knees in front of Padre Kino’s tomb. It had to be a big miracle he was praying for.

32

C
ASTLE WAS
on his first cup of coffee when Blaine banged at his door. Work to do, cuzzy, he said after Castle let him in. Tessa had phoned him half an hour ago to report that the locked gate to her bull pasture had been knocked down and that three of her herd bulls had escaped onto San Ignacio land. She and McIntyre needed a hand to recapture the fugitives. This was a matter of some urgency for Blaine as well; the bulls had fled into a pasture where he grazed heifers that were too young to breed, their pelvic bones undeveloped. If the bulls got to them and impregnated them, they could die in calving.

Castle got his chaps and spurs and climbed into the truck beside Gerardo. The horses were already loaded in the trailer. Blaine’s eyes were bloodshot, and he seemed on edge, more than usual. He’d been awake since three in the morning, when a Border Patrol helicopter had swooped over his house, the throbbing of rotor blades evoking old and unpleasant memories. Castle hadn’t heard the helicopter, which his cousin thought remarkable. It had passed over twice, pretty low, and when he went outside to see what was going on, it was circling in the distance, sweeping spotlights across the Canelo Hills.

They learned the reason for the commotion when, nearing Tessa’s Crown A Ranch, they were flagged down at a Border Patrol roadblock consisting of two trucks, one parked athwart the road with its roof strobes flashing, the other at the side, and four agents, all armed with assault rifles. The Border Patrol routinely set up roadblocks on main highways to discourage smugglers from using them. To come upon one in the back country was a rare thing, and a sign of real trouble. Blaine spotted Morales and asked what the hell was going on. Last night had been a busy one, answered the Navaho. First a convoy of crossers had been intercepted, and then there’d been a drug bust, an attempted drug bust, that is. Two men in a pickup truck, reported to be carrying cocaine, had opened fire on Border Patrol agents, led them on a high-speed chase, and got away.

“We think they made it back across the line, but we’re still looking for them on this side,” Morales said. “They were driving a silver GMC. If you see it, let us know right away. And stay clear of them,” he warned. “These are serious people.”

After they passed this information on to Tessa and McIntyre, Castle, concerned for her safety, urged her to stay home—the four men could find the bulls.

“They’re my animals,” she said. “And anyway, we’re going to be off the roads.”

I
T HAD TO HAVE
been the smugglers who’d crashed through her gate. It lay across a jeep trail, its crossbars bent, its padlocked chain wrapped around the gatepost that had been ripped from the ground by the impact. Fragments of glass and metal sparkled in the dust.

“Y aún más mala suerte,” grumbled Gerardo as he and Castle dragged the gate off the jeep trail. The range fire. La Señora Sally. The terrible thing by the branding corrals—he ticked off the list like a court clerk reading an indictment on multiple charges. He didn’t name the accused; he didn’t need to.

“Must of hit that thing at sixty,” McIntyre said. “Don’t think the bulls got out too long ago.”

Tessa buckled on her chaps and looked at the fresh hoofprints impressed over the tire tracks. “Let’s hope they’re not in a traveling mood.”

“And not in no romantic mood neither,” drawled Blaine, strapping on the Luger.

They unloaded the horses and followed the bulls’ tracks into a sandy wash trenched by the monsoons, littered with brush piles deposited by flash floods. The land and the grass were dry once again and would stay dry until the winter snows and rains fell, if they fell. The third of October, the leaves in New England would be turning, Castle thought with a stab of nostalgia; but here green still clung to the sycamores, and the sun burned hot in an empty sky. Hooves plodding in sand, the strike of a horseshoe against a rock, wind and hawk glide, and from somewhere ahead a coyote’s howl was followed by the cries of the pack, a demented yodeling that went suddenly silent, like a choir on a bandmaster’s cue. It was unusual to hear them at this time of day. Found them something to eat, Blaine muttered. A dead calf, most likely. They rode on for another quarter mile, then caught a smell on the wind, a rank odor like roadkill after a day in the heat.

Blaine pulled rein. “Yup. Scavengin’. Got me a dead calf.”

It was then that a coyote trotted toward them from out of the brush farther up the wash, with something hanging from its jaws, something dark and bloody and about a foot long. The riders were straight downwind, and the coyote was oblivious to their presence until Tessa said, “It’s got a jackrabbit.” It stopped at the sound of her voice and from thirty or forty yards away stared at the horses and humans, its bristling fur almost platinum in the bright light. Blaine cried out, “Jesus Christ!” and in the same instant he and Gerardo drew their pistols and fired, both shots missing, though one struck between the coyote’s forelegs, spattering dirt into its face. It dropped its prey and fled, bushy tail low. The gunfire flushed the rest of the pack, a little distance beyond, five animals lined out and running fast as racehorses.

Blaine kicked his horse forward, calling over his shoulder, “Tess, you stay back here.”

Castle, puzzled, rode after him and Gerardo to the creature that had fallen from the coyote’s mouth. At first, Castle couldn’t make it out. There was a lag of a few seconds between his first sight of the glistening blue thing wrapped in skeins of blood and his recognition of what it was; then another lag before his mind, denying the evidence of his senses, accepted the recognition. How Blaine and Gerardo had identified it at a distance astonished him. Now he too wanted to protect Tessa, out of some antiquated sense of male gallantry. Too late. She’d ignored Blaine’s warning and ridden up, and when her eyes fell on it, she made a sound, a kind of wheeze, and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. Castle nudged his horse next to hers and grasped her arm. He wasn’t sure if he was afraid she would faint or he would.

“Lord amighty,” McIntyre murmured.

“Tim, you stay here with her,” said Blaine, then flicked his head. “Up there. The pack was up there.”

He, Gerardo, and Castle found the body behind a mound of brush and sticks and dismounted, masking their mouths and noses with their bandannas. She was lying on her back, her face bloated and yellow green, and what they at first mistook for blood dripping from her nostrils were red ants filing into them, like miners into twin tunnels. Gerardo, who wasn’t given to his wife’s religious demonstrations, crossed himself. The slow, deliberate movement wasn’t reverential; it was more of a wordless incantation. Castle felt it too, a presence to be warded off.
Something here that didn’t used to be here
. He recalled Blaine’s words from months ago, and the yelping of the coyotes from minutes ago, a demonic serenade, the devil’s chorus. But they were really only coyotes that had come upon an easy meal. Meat. Protein. He could no longer hold the salty, sour lump in his gullet and pulled his bandanna down and went off to be sick.

“Reckon she couldn’t keep up, the condition she was in,” his cousin said when he was finished. “So she got left behind and most likely died of thirst.”

“But why would she—”

“So her kid could get born in the States, that would be my guess. Jesus God, never saw nothin’ like this, not even in ’Nam.”

He went to his horse, took a spare shirt from his saddlebag, and walked back to where Tessa and McIntyre were waiting. They returned with him, Tessa steeling herself, Blaine carrying the—the baby, Castle said it to himself, the baby—swaddled in his shirt. He laid it next to its mother, and for the next half hour they piled rocks atop the bodies. McIntyre found two stout sticks, which he bound with a rawhide saddle string, and wedged the crucifix into the rocks. Blaine asked Castle if he had his GPS with him. He did.

“Then get the coordinates. I’ll call the Border Patrol when we get home. They can come take her out of here. Maybe they got some way to find out who she was.” He looked at the grave, then at McIntyre. “You got some words you can say?”

McIntyre removed his hat, and they all removed theirs and bowed their heads. After a short silence McIntyre looked up apologetically. “I can’t think of nothin’. I can’t think of a thing to say to this.”

“Amen,” said Blaine. “Done all we can. Now we got work to finish.”

All color had drained from Tessa’s face. Castle gave her an inquiring look—did she feel like carrying on?

“Let’s go,” she said.

They rode together but were no longer a team dedicated to a common task; they were five individuals, trapped within their private thoughts.

They found the bulls resting on a hillside above a meadow, so still they were like three big black boulders as, with heads lifted, they waited for a sign from the heifers congregated below. As the riders approached, they heaved off their knees and quick-trotted down the hill line abreast. Tessa and McIntyre rode out ahead and cut them off, while Blaine, Castle, and Gerardo hemmed them from the sides. Two were docile and quit their flight, but the third, the boss, bluff-charged Blaine, then pivoted and ran off again at top speed. Gerardo went after it and caught up in seconds. Leaning so far over it looked as though he would spill from the saddle, he snatched the bull’s tail near the root and gave it a quick twist. The huge animal dropped as if it had been brain-shot, then rolled back onto its feet, chest heaving, snot flying from its flared nostrils. All bluster. The Mexican pushed it easily back up the hill.

“Vaquero!” Blaine said, clapping him on the shoulder. Gerardo acknowledged the compliment with a twitch of his head. Nothing more.

They herded the bulls back toward Tessa’s ranch by way of a canyon shortcut through the Canelo Hills. Under other circumstances they would have been talking about Gerardo’s feat of charro horsemanship, but the thing they had seen oppressed them and made them mute. The pleasure of finishing a hard job was absent. Castle wondered if his companions felt what he did—a mongrelized emotion bred of revulsion, pity, and shame. He had no reason to be ashamed, yet he was; it was as though he’d seen something forbidden, as though some dreadful secret had been revealed to him.

This day of troubles saved the worst for the last.

The canyon necked down into a ravine roughly as wide as a city street, cut banks rose ten feet high on both sides. The bulls plodded along single file, Tessa and McIntyre flanking them, Gerardo riding drag, Castle in front with his cousin. Rounding an oxbow bend, Blaine’s Tequila stopped dead, bracing her rear legs like a roping horse. Scarcely ten yards away, near where a two-track plunged down into the ravine, a disabled truck faced them, its headlights shattered, its hood thrown open. His back to them, a thin man stood on the canted roof, calling in Spanish into a handheld radio. Calling out numbers he was reading from a GPS in his other hand. A second man was off to the side, digging a hole with a short-handled shovel, something like an army entrenching tool. He saw the riders first and called out to his companion, “¡Luis! ¡Ojo!” The man on the roof spun around, almost toppling from his perch.

People who have survived collisions or plane crashes often speak of seeing the event unfold in slow motion. That is how Castle’s senses record the next several seconds, and the object that creates this illusion is a chrome-plated semiautomatic shoved in the man’s belt, its ivory handles protruding over a shiny rodeo buckle. The radio and GPS drop from the man’s hands and seem to float like falling leaves; his arm, as he catches his balance, appears to leisurely sweep across his midriff. Castle turns in the saddle and hollers to Tessa, a couple of yards behind him, “Tess! Watch out! Gun!” In the confined space, the pistol shot is nearly as loud as it would be in a room. Horses rear and shy, and the bulls stampede, one sideswiping the truck. Comanche lunges forward, and Castle half falls, half jumps from the saddle and glimpses the man tumbling from the roof—not, he realizes, because of the bull’s collision with the truck but because he’s been shot. He hits the ground and lies on his back, legs thrashing spastically, the pistol still in his belt, blood spreading across his shirt. Only when he stops kicking and lies still as a manikin do Castle’s perceptions return to normal.

His first thought was for Tessa. Thrown by her frightened horse, she was sitting on the ground, shaking her head. He placed his hands under her arms and pulled her to her feet and held her, she him.

“What … what …,” she stammered.

“I don’t know. I—,” Castle began, then saw Blaine, the Luger at his side, kneel down and press a finger to the man’s neck, just under one ear. He stood up, and they all five stared at the dead man and at one another for what felt like a much longer time than it was. It felt, to Castle, like forever. His heart beat erratically.

Finally Blaine spoke. “Thought you said he was goin’ for the gun.”

“No, I—”

“Looked to me like he was. Other one run off.”

“Them bulls, too,” McIntyre said. “Some day this has been.”

“You and Gerardo go gather ’em. Couldn’t of run far.”

“It has been some day. That’s all I’ve got to say. One
helluva
day.”

As the two men rode away, Blaine stuck his head under the open hood of the pickup. “Come look at this.”

The engine block had been partly disassembled, the valves, pistons, and connecting rods removed from four of the eight cylinders. Opening the pliers of his Leatherman, Blaine plucked a squashed sandwich bag from one of the cylinders. It was stoutly wrapped in tape, the kind used to repair radiator hose. He cut it open, and a fine white powder tinged faintly pink spilled to the ground, near the feet of the man he’d killed.

Blaine has killed a man
. This fact now struck Castle in a delayed reaction. That the victim had been an armed drug smuggler seemed, for the moment irrelevant.
Thought you said he was goin’ for the gun
. He’d said no such thing. If that’s what Blaine had heard, it was because that’s what he wanted to hear. Still, Castle felt somewhat complicit. His shout of that one word—
Gun!
—was all his cousin had needed to at last, at last strike back at these devils bedeviling him. And why had he, Castle, cried that alarm? Out of fear. To protect Tessa—and himself from suffering another loss.