Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (5 page)

The traffic crawled and time stood still. Gillis robotically demanded, “Nationality?” and “Purpose of visit?” and heard only muted, flatulent blats in response. He interrogated shadows as to what they were bringing back, and rubbed his eyes to see past the masks they wore. He got wise-ass, mush-mouth answers from vacationing Missouri ministers and earnest Tijuana students commuting to UCSD to research doctoral theses. He banished them all to secondary: slash their seats, sift their urine, yes, sir or ma’am, this is how we do things in America.

He knew what the Mexicans believed. You couldn’t work so close to them without soaking it up. Their faith came in layers, some buried so deep they couldn’t know to whom they were really praying. Under every cathedral in Mexico, it was said, there was an Aztec altar, and under that—

The Yoruba people of Africa, whose sad lot it was to be the preferred stock for the American slave trade, brought their gods to the Caribbean, rechristened and reborn as Catholic saints. The Mexicans absorbed the potent syncretic faith of Santeria, which blended the upstanding piety of the Church with peasant sorcery that promised them deliverance in this world, as well. Every stripe of Mexican had a pet
orisha
, a pagan saint who heard their pleas. Even hoodlums like Pico and Javier—and himself, he supposed—had their patron saint, but
Santissima Muerte
had proven unable or unwilling to save her wayward supplicants today. The Santero was stronger. To the people, he was a white magician, a vigilante savior, but with his new eyes, Gillis could see how old he really was.

In Mexico, ancient, savage faces hid behind even the mask of Santeria, old gods who drank blood and prayers and received sacrifice in pious disguises. Gillis used to scoff at the stories he heard for so many years, but when you pass so many sleepless nights in the company of those haunted by hungry spirits, it begins to bury roots in your heart. The Santero was not just another drug lord, not just a faith healer. He was all that Mexico had pretended to shed in its haphazard crawl into modern civilization. He was all that fearful white men had built the border to keep out, and he was coming—

“Nationality?” he barked at a Trans Am filled with hung-over Marines. Normally, he waved them through with a salute, but you had to be careful, today. He wore so many masks—

The cherry-red PFC sounded off, “Aztlan.”

Secondary. He would have to find a better disguise.

He was losing it. He dabbed a finger of the coke into his nose as he bent to the next car. It scoured the uncertainty away like cobwebs, but kept on burning through his brain, twisting his nerves into braids of icy fire. The uncrushed yellow nuggets in the bindle were brittle and glossy, like fragments of bone and teeth. He snorted and wiped the doughnut off his lip. The powder smeared into his skin like ashes, creeping numbness spreading to make his face feel like a cheap Halloween mask. He stared into the inscrutable brown eyes of a carload of Mexican Carmelite nuns. The driver presented their visas. So many masks—

“What is the purpose of your visit to the United States?” he asked, boring into her skull with his coke-honed X-ray eyes and seeing only fog.

“Behold, I come, and you will sweep the road clear,” said the nun.

His fist drummed the roof of the rusted-out Chevy Vega. “What the fuck did you just say?”

The nun blinked, biting her hairy lip and shifting in her tent of a habit. “I am so sorry,
señor
… I only said that Our Lord, the Flayed One, comes to don his golden cape, and want will go from me.”

He slapped an inspection sticker on her windshield. “Secondary. And tell your master I’m not for sale.”

The phone rang in his station. Gillis picked it up, expecting the watch commander.

“My god, give me in part plenteous tender maize,” chanted a rumbling, subterranean voice, in English, in Spanish, and in the guttural, reptilian tongue he somehow knew as Nahuatl, the speech of the ancient Aztecs. “Thy worshippers looketh toward thy mountain.”

“You’re not scaring me, fucker! Come on! Come on and face me, I fucking dare you!”

“Gillis, what’s going on down there?”

“Oh, shit, sorry, sir, I’m…”
losing my mind
. “I’m just tired,” he mumbled in a mushy rush, “but I can tough it out, and I shall be content if first I ripen.”

“Burt, you’re burned out,” said the watch commander. “I’ll see if I can’t call somebody else in to close out your shift. You need rest.”

“I don’t need rest, sir. I need to stay here, he’s coming and I’m the only one who can see him…”
Dig yourself in deeper, that’s it.

“Burt, you’ve got me scared. Come back up to my office. The warrior chief is born.”

Gillis fumed, dropped the barricade across his station. Horns honked in skull-splitting chorus at the outrage, but Gillis could only stare dumbly at the endless ranks of cars snaking back into the chaotic netherworld of Tijuana, their headlights like a river of votive candles. The faceless, dirty urchins and souvenir sellers—eyes and ears of the Santero— swaying, dancing among the cars like a net drawing tighter around him, and somewhere among them—

When had it gotten so dark? Gillis dumped the bindle in the gutter and crossed the secondary inspection yard. The service lane was open, and a massive Itasca motor home idled in the gateway. Gillis recognized it immediately.

The Chief of San Diego Police went down to Baja to fish every Memorial and Labor Day weekend with his wife. Nobody searched the Chief’s RV— he’d been the Chief for twenty-two years— but one or two ice chests of tuna or shark were always “confiscated,” and ended up at some inspector’s backyard barbecue that night.

Gillis wandered over to the driver’s side. Bob Echols and Lee Ortiz chatted up the Chief, who, by the way his arms measured out an impossible length, was describing a fish he’d almost caught. The Chief and his wife usually got out and stretched their legs, but he hadn’t shut off the engine. Echols and Ortiz were candy-asses, with no eye for telltale signs, no brains to speak of.

“Hey, Chief,” Gillis called out, “you leave any fish for the natives?” He climbed up the step-ladder and hung on by the side view mirror, and took a good look.

Gillis had pulled a turn or two on service gate duty when the Chief came through, had hosted more than one barbecue at his house on the Chief’s catches. He knew the Chief. He recognized the Chief’s clothes and salt-and-pepper hair, his sallow, acne-scarred skin, but with a weird corkscrewing twist, his vision shifted and showed him that the man inside the skin was not the Chief at all.

He sat in the driver’s seat with the Chief’s T-shirt from the SDPD Academy softball team on over skin laced with long, artfully contoured surgical slits, bound together with fishing line. Beside the imposter sat another suit of skin, the Chief’s wife, out of whose gaping face-mask leered a pair of hungry brown eyes and a lascivious, flicking tongue and long, curling canine teeth.

The Chief’s face drew close. Out of the expertly peeled skin of that stolen face, out of black pits such as moray eels might nest in to ambush unwary prey, out of a dark that knew no sunlight, came those eyes.

“Do you like my costume? This faded skin is become holy god-flesh, the golden cape of Xipe Totec Iouallauan, the lord of sowing. I will bring a new spring, and make the fire serpent a quetzal.”

Breathless, speechless, Gillis could only look.

“I will bring rain and plenty to the people, but I must have the
nagual
of a gringo. This one is all that we would have, all that you have kept from us. In his heart, I found the power to bring a new sun for my people. You have tasted the seed I will sow.”

The Chief touched Gillis’ inflamed nose with his bloody glove, and chuckled. “Can you imagine the harvest we shall reap?”

“That shit you gave me,” Gillis growled. “It’s not coke. Nobody will buy that shit.” He leaned into the cab of the RV, into the abattoir stench of blood, cyclones of flies buzzing around the Santero and his bride. The others could not see what was smeared in the Chief’s blood, could not see the shrink-wrapped blocks of yellow-gray powder filling the RV like blocks of concrete.

“Did you like the medicine? Very powerful… so potent, you are blessed to receive it, a sacrament, for you shall be my cloak. Only the priests could use it, in times gone by and yet to come, to give flesh to the invisible world, and let the ancestors speak. It is not
coca
at all.

“I promised to lead my people into a new world, new lives in new bodies, and the wealth of the white man. They offer their bones, burned and crushed…” The Santero touched his stolen nose and sniffed.

Gillis gagged, but nothing would come up. The scummy film of cremated Mexicans coated his sinuses. Gritty fragments of bone and tooth stuck in his arid throat. Panicked voices unleashed a tumbling Babel tower in his brain, but he couldn’t understand a word of it.

“The spirits are dead to you no longer. When my medicine comes to your streets, there will be no more border between us. We will live in your empty bodies. We will share one world, with the same gods. We shall feed them together…”

The Chief started up the RV. Gillis jumped down and pocketed the bindle the Chief slipped into his hand. The buzz ran amok in his skull, making him hate himself, making him crave more. He looked around. Nobody else could see it. The world of the spirit was dead to them, the truth—

He
could see it. Even now, as the Santero wrestled with the gearshift in the Chief’s clumsy skin-mittens, Gillis alone could see the truth, and the awful promise of the future.

When my medicine comes to your streets—

Gillis drew and fired into the open window of the RV. His first shot smashed the sideview mirror, but the next two slapped the Santero out of his seat, one in the neck, one just above his ear.

The other inspectors shouted and swarmed over Gillis, but all the fire he had left exploded in his muscles. He tore free, leapt onto the running board as the RV rolled out of the inspection pit, and emptied his gun into the driver and his passenger. As they pulled him down, Gillis screamed, “It’s not the Chief, it’s an imposter, can’t you see?”

Suddenly, the crowd ripped apart. Sirens and police from both sides of the border converged on the inspection station. Ragged brown shapes swept through the unguarded inspection pits, an invisible army timing its invasion perfectly with the bloody moment.

Gillis ripped his arms free and dropped his empty pistol. He stopped it. He killed the Santero. When would the magic wear off? When would they see what he saw?

But the illusion was stronger than ever. Even to him, the bodies slumped over in their seats looked like the Chief and his wife. The only blood in the RV was leaking out of them, and the blocks of crematorium powder were coolers sealed with duct-tape marked, BLUEGILL, TUNA and SCALLOPS, with dates and locations. The Chief was a methodical fisherman.

A siren whooped and a van swerved into the midst of the crowd of inspectors. Gillis stood alone before it, dazzled by the flashing red and blue lights, Catherine wheels of sparks overlapping the phosphene fireworks of the gunshots lingering in his eyes. An American Hartson’s ambulance, though it came over from the south, didn’t it? Gillis was all turned around, he needed to know which way to go—

A paramedic snatched Gillis’ sleeve and tugged him in the open doors. All the inspectors around him seemed frozen, the SDPD approaching with guns drawn, murder in their eyes, he’d killed their king. Anywhere was better than this, so he let himself be pulled into the ambulance, and fell onto the gurney as they squealed out of the inspection pits, heading north.

He needed to straighten out, he needed to get a handle on things, he needed something to straighten him out, he needed something—

The walls of the ambulance were lined with shrink-wrapped bricks of powder that he knew were not cocaine.

“O Xipe Totec Iouallauan,” said the paramedic, “why dost thou mask thyself?” He pushed Gillis down and showed him the knife: chipped obsidian, yet sharper than any scalpel. His eyes swam up out of bottomless pits in his unspeakably naked face, wide enough to reflect the first hot rush of blood.

“Put on thy disguise,” he said, “for you shall be my cloak.”