The Sinister Pig - 15 (13 page)

A man in stained coveralls was squatting beside the bus doing something to the front wheel. Nearby, sitting, standing, or prone, she could count five others taking cover from the sun in the sparse shade of the mesquite brush growing beside the outcrop.

Bernie reached into the cab of her pickup, got the mike, pushed the proper buttons. “Manuelito again,” she [119] said. “I count five people now. Man trying to fix the bus. Another man, a woman, toddler-sized boy, and a girl, maybe six or seven.”

“That global positioning you gave me put you at Big Hatchet Mountain,” the dispatcher said. “That look right?”

“It does to me. But not much of a mountain to be called big.”

“Smaller down here, but rougher. The nearest backup I could find for you is a unit south of Road Forks and he’s tied up for a while. If you think they’re running dope I could send down a chopper from Tucson. What do you think?”

“I think we’re looking at a family of starved-out farmers. I think they got off on the wrong track and ruined their front suspension.”

“OK, then. Keep an eye on ’em. Let me know if they’re moving out, or if anyone shows up to haul them away.” He paused. “And remember, Miss Manuelito, they’re illegals. That’s criminals. C-R-I-M-I-N-A-L-S. Don’t do anything dumb.”

Whereupon, after a few more minutes of watching the driver struggling with the front wheel, after remembering the painful plight of the half-starved and dehydrated illegals she had helped round up a week earlier, Bernie decided she’d rather do something dumb than be ashamed of herself. It was standard practice for Customs officers patrolling in desert country to carry oversized canteens. Since a painful arrest of last week in which the illegals had been almost dead of dehydration, Bernie had also been taking along two big plastic jugs of water just in case.

She drove down the ridge, circled carefully through the brush and cactus, and found the still-fresh tracks the [120]bus must have left. She followed them around the corner of the Big Hatchet toward the Bar Ridge outcrop. The bus was there, but no humans were in sight. Bernie wasn’t surprised. They would have heard her coming, seen the Customs vehicle, and would be hiding somewhere.

She parked behind the bus, got her pistol out of the glove box, and put on her holster, took the battery megaphone from its rack, and stepped out of her pickup.

“Amigos,”she shouted.
“Tengo agua para ustedes.”
She listened, heard no response, and repeated the call, with one small revision in her classroom-and-border Spanish, changing
amigos
to
amiga,
to appeal to the woman she’d seen. “I’m Border Patrol,” she shouted, “but you have nothing to fear from me. I will give you water. I will help you.” Then she put the megaphone on the truck roof, studied the brushy ridge, listened, and heard nothing.

Bernie dropped the truck’s tailgate, extracted her water jugs, and put them on the hood.
“Agua para usted. For la niña y el niño.”

Again, no answer. What now?

A man was hurrying through the brush toward her, waving. She had the sudden thought that perhaps she had been stupid and felt for the snap on her holster flap. Then she saw the man seemed to be crying. Or was he laughing? Whatever, he didn’t seem threatening. And he was babbling something in Spanish. It was, “Thank God you found us.”

Bernie raised her hand. “Hold it,” she said. “Do you speak English? Who are you?”

“I was coming to get these people,” he said in fluent English. He pointed to the bus. “But it broke. Going over a rock.”

[121] “You can’t fix it?” Bernie asked. “And who are you?”

The young man in the greasy coveralls straightened, drew a deep breath. “My name is Delos Vasquez. I am a mechanic.” Then he gestured toward the jugs. “Water, you said. I must call Mr. Gomez and his family.”

“Sure,” Bernie said, thinking the man looked totally harmless. Not much taller than her and skinny. About thirty, with large, brown, sad-looking eyes. Now she noticed Mr. Gomez and his family emerging from the hillside brush and moving cautiously toward them. Gomez wore a straw hat, a neatly trimmed white beard, and was carrying the little girl.

Vasquez motioned, shouted in Spanish. Something about water but Bernie didn’t catch much of it. She was in the truck cab, screwing the cap off her Thermos, handing that and the cup under it to Vasquez, motioning to him to help himself to the water.

He smiled at her. “No. The rule is that the women and children must go first.”

While the woman and the children were dealing with their thirst, Vasquez brought over the bearded man. “May I present the father of my sister-in-law, Señor Miguel Gomez,” he said. Señor Gomez bowed. So did Bernie, trying to remember the formal language of introduction. Failing that, she said: “Welcome to the United States.”

“And this is Señora Catherina Vasquez, the
esposa
of my brother, and their children.”

Catherina Vasquez, dusty, disheveled, looking utterly exhausted, managed a shy smile. So did the children.

My criminals, Bernie thought.

Before the Border Patrol shuttle arrived Bernie had improved her Spanish a little and collected from Vasquez [122] and Mr. Gomez an account of how he and the Gomez group happened to be here. Gomez, so the story went, had gone to San Pedro Corralitos to get work at the copper smelter there because there was no work at Nuevo Casas Grandes, where his family lived. But the smelter was still shut down, and the only work there was a crew repairing the pipeline that had brought the fuel in to fire its furnaces. So Mr. Gomez had paid a tour guide in Sabinas Hidalgo to bring his daughter, Catherina, and her children to visit Vasquez’s mother in Lordsburg, so she could see her grandchildren. The coyote had taken them to the port of entry at Antelope Wells and given them visa credentials. Mr. Gomez showed these to Bernie, who recognized them instantly as examples of the fraudulent documents she’d been shown in training classes. With some translating help from Vasquez, Gomez told her the coyote had then taken them to the border fence, showed them where to cross it, and showed them where to wait until a truck would arrive to take them to Lordsburg. The truck arrived, took them up the road toward Interstate 10. But near this mountain he stopped, told Mr. Gomez a border patrol helicopter had flown over and seen them and they must get out and hide. He would come back and get them.

Here Vasquez took over. “I got a call in Lordsburg yesterday. The son of a bitch told me where he had left them. He said he had to drop them off or everyone would have been arrested. So I came where he told me, and finally I found them.” He shook his head, eyes sad. “If I hadn’t they would have died.”

That was the story Bernie was passing along to the dispatcher.

[123] “Haven’t got time for all this. But you can’t believe it anyway.”

“What he told me sounds logical enough. But I’m new in this business.”

“No sign of coke. So forth?”

“Nothing easily visible. But I didn’t pry into the luggage, or the tires or anything like that. They had hours to hide it. Does that Delos Vasquez name mean anything to you?”

“Vasquez around here is like Kelly in Boston or Jones in Texas or Begay at Window Rock,” he said. “But Delos, that’s unusual. Rings a bell. I think he showed up on a list of underlings of some big dealer at Agua Prieta. Down in Sonora.”

“Do we have a warrant for him?”

“Just some gossip. Collect lots of that. Agua P’s just over the border from Douglas. Good place for eavesdropping.”

The Border Patrol van arrived, manned by two CPOs she’d never met. They introduced themselves as Billy and Lorenzo, and handcuffed Vasquez. Gomez, Catherina, and the children were shoed into the van and the door locked.

“We’re going to search your bus,” one of the backup crew said, “and we want you to stay right here with Officer Manuelito while we’re doing that. If we have any questions we’ll be calling you down.”

Vasquez nodded.

They stood by the van, watching the bus being searched.

“They will be deported back to Mexico now,” Vasquez [124] said. “All their money gone to the damned coyote. Poorer than ever.”

“How about you?”

“I’m a U.S. citizen,” Vasquez said. “Probably I will have to spend some time in jail. But I don’t know what they will charge me with.”

“Maybe conspiring to violate the immigration law?”

“Yes. I guess I did that.” He looked at her, expression sad. “But with family needing help, then you do what you have to do. And it wasn’t anything about drugs. I wouldn’t do that. Those men are evil.”

“If I were you, or if I was your lawyer, I would give you some advice, Mr. Vasquez. When the federal authorities ask you about your part in this, I would start at the point where you get a call from the man who told you he had dropped off the family and they wanted you to pick them up and if you didn’t you were afraid they would die of thirst. I would leave off all that first part. Let Mr. Gomez tell them about that.”

Vasquez considered that. Nodded.

“Do you know those drug dealers in Mexico?”

“Two or three,” he said. “At Agua Prieta, I was a driver for them for a while. But I didn’t want to do that work. I didn’t want to be around them.”

Bernie nodded.

“I think you think I am a drug man,” Vasquez said, shaking his head. “Or Mr. Gomez is one. But no.”

During all this conversation, Vasquez had been studying her, and the little silver and turquoise replica of Big Thunder she was wearing on her collar.

“That is very pretty,” he said, pointing to it. “That little silver stick man.”

[125] “He represents one of the Navajo spirits. My mother’s brother made him for me. For luck. We call him Big Thunder.” But Bernie didn’t want this conversation to be so personal. She said: “Why didn’t you want to be around them?”

“Well,” he began, and stopped. “They kill people.”

“I’ve heard that,” she said.

He was frowning at her, looking hesitant and thoughtful.

“You have been very kind to us,” he said. “Did you know they have your picture in Agua Prieta? Those men, I mean. I think the coyotes down there might be afraid of you.”

“My picture?” Bernie said, startled. “I don’t think so. How could they?”

“It was you,” Vasquez said. “I noticed it the first time I saw you. Just like the picture they were showing around.”

Bernie produced a shaky smile. “A lot of women look like me.”

“This one was wearing that little silver stick man on her shirt. I noticed it in the photograph.”

“But why would they have my picture? I don’t understand that.”

The men searching the bus shouted, motioning for Vasquez.

“Because they seemed to be afraid of you. So when any of them see you they will recognize you as a spy. And these people, when they are afraid of somebody, they want to kill them.”

Winsor’s houseman, George, brought the package into his living suite. It was one of those tough document-sized Airborne Express envelopes, originally delivered to his office and then relayed to his town house by messenger. It was marked“personal,” and it came from El Paso, Winsor noticed, with the return address of the office of the lawyer he used there. He zipped it open and removed the contents.

Seven 8-by-12-inch black-and-white photographs and a note folded with them:

The answer to your Who question: Carl Mankin.

No personal data available to us here.

The answer to your Why question:

Remember your order required extreme action.

Enclosed: the requested photos and photo of the CPO Officer who took them. Officer
[128]
Bernadette Manuelito. Former Navajo Tribal Police Officer, transferred down from the Shiprock NTP district earlier this year with strong endorsement from NTP headquarters.

Her photo taken by West.

Winsor looked at the photo of Bernie long enough to decide the woman, rewarding him with an embarrassed smile, was one of those who would never be called “cute.” Pretty, yes. Probably a very handsome woman. More important for his interests, she looked intelligent. Noticeably intelligent. Smart. Clever. That led him to the photographs she had taken.

He set two aside with a glance, then focused on the Mexican standing beside a tool trailer glowering at the camera. He fished his magnifying glass from a desk drawer for a closer look. The tools he could identify were what one would expect in a mechanic’s truck—assorted wrenches, measuring devices, pressure gauges, two fuel tanks. Probably propane or methane. Some were strange to him. But would they be strange to pipeline workers? Probably not.

Then he focused on a photo, obviously taken from a location above the work scene with a telescopic lens. It showed three big ugly animals walking along a hillside. Oryx, and one with a great curving, trophy-sized horn. Some of old man Tuttle’s exotic game. The other photo looked directly down on the trucks, the men working around the excavation—and into the excavation. He picked up the magnifying glass again. Looked through it at the print, held his breath for a long moment, and then exhaled and produced an angry expletive.

He picked up his telephone, punched his houseman’s [129] number. While he waited he studied the photo of Bernie again. Why had she taken that photograph? Because she’d been sent there specifically to take it? Because something she’d seen had made her suspicious?