Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (4 page)

Pico told him, last night.

They sent Gillis home to sleep for a few hours before the insane holiday shift, but he hung around the US short-term lots to meet Pico. At four AM, the lot was still saturated in rusty iodine light and packed with cars. Drunken high school kids fucked or slept in the back seats, squirming pink worms behind fogged-up glass. No one saw them together.

Pico was Javier’s man on the other side. He received the cars Gillis let through, and distributed to the retailers. Gillis had known him for two years, a lifetime in such work. He had never seen Pico so wired as he was now.

Gillis zipped up the Padres windbreaker covering his uniform and tugged down his hat. “What happened to Javier? If anything changes, I want to hear it from him.”

“It is all new,
Señor Migra
.” Pico chuckled and gagged as he dragged on his cigarette. Pico liked his smokes shermed—dipped in liquid cocaine when times were good, in dry cleaning chemicals when they weren’t. A disgusting habit, it was also a status symbol: he started out with
los cementeros
—a glue-sniffing gang— so to him, it was swanky.

It was all the worse to watch because Pico had no lower jaw. Someone smashed it with a brick when he was nine. The meatball doctors at the clinic in Libertad just picked the shards out and sewed him up, so the lower half of his face was a slack pouch of scars.

Gillis fanned away Pico’s smoke cloud and looked in vain for the pupils in his eyes and wondered how bad things had to get for him to smoke formaldehyde.

“Señor Javier is no seeing you anymore, but you can see him.” Pico flashed a Polaroid. A badly overexposed shot of plaster walls festooned with red party decorations. In the center stood a battered steel cauldron brimming with a flyblown stew, but Gillis knew what it was in the same instant he realized the red stuff was Javier.

“Fuck!” he barked, looking around with his hand on his sidearm. “Who did it?” he demanded, daring Pico to say the name aloud.

Pico hit his smoke so hard it squeaked and touched the medallions on his chest. “He rules now, and the ground is red.”

Gillis felt hammers passing through his heart valves, but more than half of it was relief. They would cut up their own and feed them to the
nganga
, but they’d never dare hit a white man on his own side. He could just walk away. “He’s shutting us down?”

Pico coughed so hard meat from his throat hit Gillis’ gold-tinted sunglasses. “Nothing change for you. He ees taking over.”

“What the fuck? He’s a vigilante! He’s massacring the cartels…” It was insane, but it was Mexico. “So he’s just another pusher, so what? He doesn’t cross
la linea
.”

“Oh no, my main man. He bring something very new, very big. He leading his people to freedom. The Great Night coming, and the sun that rise after, will be a New Sun.”

“What the fuck does he expect me to do?”

“What you always do, amigo. Take what we giving you.” Pico slipped a bulging bindle to Gillis, brushed the back of the border guard’s neck with his other hand.

Something like sand tickled the hairs of his back as it sprinkled down his spine. Gillis snapped the bindle out of the fixer’s hand and almost decked him. He scratched the tickling itch on his neck away and made damned sure Pico didn’t try to put a Flower Of Darkness on him.

Gillis looked around. The glass and steel corridor of the bridge that crossed over the inspection pit was empty of all but a few drunk white kids going to get cavity-searched. Girls smuggled stray puppies and cats, filthy piñatas stuffed with parasites and bacteria; boys tried to sneak ounces of grass or coke, most of which weren’t even real. When he caught them, he had a good eye for people. He could see who was a smuggler and who just made a mistake. He gave them a second chance. Most wept with gratitude when he lifted the contraband off them and waved them through.

Nobody on his side saw, but
they
saw. And that was the beginning of the deal.

That was what this was about—a new deal. But he didn’t want to live on the same planet as the Santero, let alone work for him, if half the stories were true. Not a year ago, stories like that used to make him laugh at the stupid shit Mexicans believed.

He fingered a dab of coke into each nostril as Pico laughed and coughed some more. Gillis flipped him off and started to walk away when his laughter turned to gargling screams.

Pico’s sock-puppet mouth vomited out an endless scarf of glossy black smoke like powdered obsidian that wafted around above him like a cloud of ebony moths, like a huge carrion bird.

A big pimply ass pressed against the rear window of the Ford Escort that Pico collapsed on, choking and retching out boiling blood. It reeked of the bacon-wrapped dog-sausages they sold on
Avenida Revolución
.

The smoke congealed into a wall between Gillis and the border, shining with an inner light that showed Gillis his reflection. The smoking mirror rippled and revealed another face he’d never seen before, and could never describe. Those eyes, staring out of a mask of blood, followed him as he backed up, they saw him… marked him—

Pico shriveled, wrung out like a rag, and Gillis turned and walked away. Nobody saw anything.

Faced with the prospect of going home to pack his things and run, Gillis just felt tired, and a craven repulsion at his own thought of deserting the border. If he turned and ran, the border would follow, and the moment he turned around, there, one step behind him would be Mexico, staring him down with those eyes—

Gillis’ father hated Mexico like cancer, a hate so pure it almost hid his fear. All Gillis ever learned about it was that his father went fishing down in at San Felipe once and ended up pulling a month in a Tijuana jail. He grew up cheek by jowl with Mexico, and had seen all the invisible shades of the border: the
pollos
, wetbacks, running like roaches to work and breed in
los Yunaites Estaites
; the coyotes and drug runners, predatory scumbags like Javier and Pico; macho monsters in uniform with licenses to steal, like the
judiciales
and the
federales
who fed the leviathan of ritualized graft below the border.
La
mordida
—the bite—ruled all, and Gillis hated their cops most of all, when he first started. He’d really thought he was going to be better than that.

He did ten years in the Border Patrol, and never a spot on his record. But when he moved over to Customs, excitement was so hard to come by, and it was so easy to be a judge, separating the innocent from the unclean at the border, that he forgot he was doing anything wrong until they came to him. Javier bought him with drugs, and the money came so late in the game that he never made the connection between his corruption and theirs, except in his dreams.

Each year, he flagged two to five tons of cocaine into the Port of Entry for Javier. In small discrete shipments, the cars ran from Tijuana with twenty to one hundred pounds each. Packs of urchins and teenage mothers sold
chiclé
and souvenirs to the gridlocked motorists in the northbound lanes, and steered their couriers to
Señor Burt
. And they almost always had something extra for him.

In less than a year, the Santero changed all that.

The savior of
Colonia Libertad
simply appeared one day and began handing out pesos and tortillas in the slums and the squatter villages in the city dumps. When a mob formed around him, the people trampling each other, he disappeared in their midst. The legend grew. Soup kitchens opened in vacant storefronts, tortillas and beans and coffee and chickens handed out from the backs of trucks with a whispered name,
El
Santero
.

Then drug runners and border bandits began to be found dead in the streets. Then corrupt
judiciales
with bloodless slashed throats, parked in cars stripped of evidence and vandalized by righteous looters.

Everyone knew who was behind it, and when the Chief of Police and the Mayor of Tijuana swore to prosecute the vigilantes, they never even bothered with a press conference. El Santero was cleaning up the streets, said the peasants; the ones who believed in Santeria started calling him that. A sorcerer, a master of white magic, blessed by the Orishas. Javier’s contempt froze into fear and a facial tic as El Santero worked his way up the food chain, but Gillis never thought it would touch the business. In Mexico, the incorruptible were merely expensive.

Now he knew the Santero was just another don. He’d behaved like one, once you cut the magic and the charity out of it. Business was business. Except Gillis found he couldn’t. He hated beaners most because, somewhere, off dirty money or cut coke, he’d ingested the virus of their crazy bullshit.
Lie down with dogs,
as his Dad used to say—

He chopped out a line at his inspection station, busy hands, look what you’ve done?
I can’t do it here
, he thought, but the next car was haggling with the urchins over an Elvis piggy bank, and the other inspectors were all poking around in cars, grilling drivers, flashing lights in eyes to gauge drunkenness and lies.

Why not?
He huddled over his desk, a sawed-off straw ready in his hand. The coke was filmy, fine gray powder with gritty, brittle yellowish specks in it that resisted chopping up into the fluffy Colombian powder Javier usually gave him. Sometimes, the mass shipments got nabbed to make a show of enforcement, but tons more came through pressed into pills and labeled as aspirin. Still, he’d never seen a worse batch.

As he ducked down to snort it, a wicked thought hit his brain just ahead of the white-out. What if this was the same shit as in Pico’s cigarette?

“Hey, Burt!” a shout from too close behind him, and he jumped,
destroy the evidence,
and it was going up his nose, even as his brain was screaming,
Stop!

Gillis palmed the straw and turned to look at his watch commander, though all he could see was white ball lightning.

“Burt, the inbound line’s backed up three hours! You think you could pick up the tempo a bit?”

Gillis shivered as the first galvanic overture of the coke overwhelmed him. His muscles tingled and snapped like overcharged batteries; his brain seethed and percolated with the random energy of a lotto ball-cage, and the considerable weight of his gut simply vaporized as blood was routed elsewhere. He looked the watch commander in the eye and smiled, wiping away the fine particles from his nostrils. “I’ll wave them through a little faster, yes sir—”

Since 9/11, they were supposed to suspend their well-honed inspectors’ eyes and subject everyone to the same withering examination, whether or not they fit the profile of a smuggler or terrorist. Solid citizens got the same harsh scrutiny as hippie surfers and shifty, turbaned foreigners. On holidays, however, when the traffic backed up halfway to Ensenada, vigilance went out the window. But today, he had to watch like never before—