The Sinister Pig - 15 (3 page)

“Well, you’ve got yourself a whole lot of work before you’re finished with this fellow here. No identification. No wallet. Expensive duds. Pockets empty except car keys.”

[16] Chee raised his eyebrows. “Car keys but no car?”

“Lots of legwork ahead,” Dashee said, “and without pretty little Bernie Manuelito for you to send out here to do it for you. Maybe you could borrow her back from the Border Patrol.”

The week Bernadette Manuelito quit being a Navajo Tribal Police Officer and became a Customs Patrol Officer, her new supervisor had suggested that Rodeo, a village just on the New Mexico side of the Arizona border, would be a fine place for her to live. It would be handy to the section of U.S.-Mexico border she would be patrolling and Customs Officer Eleanda Garza already lived there. Mrs. Garza’s two-bedroom house had one bedroom empty and was available due to the resignation of Customs Officer Dezzie Something-or-Other—Dezzie having quit to marry some fellow in Tucson.

Mrs. Garza was a member of Tohono O’odham Nation, which had been called the Papagos (“The Bean Eaters”), a name given the tribe by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. They had voted in 1980 to resume their traditional name (in English, “The Desert People”) and the sentiment for that was overwhelming. Mrs. Garzawas [18] older than Bernadette, larger by about twenty pounds, and married to a telephone company maintenance manner second husband—who lived and worked at Las Cruces. Her son was a new recruit in navy boot camp in San Diego, and her daughter was far away in Chicago, where her son-in-law worked for the
Chicago Tribune
circulation department. This had left Eleanda Garza suffering the “empty nest syndrome.”

Thus, even though the Desert People are reputed to be sort of hostile to Navajos and Apaches (and vice versa) by the end of the first week as housemates, Mrs. Garzahad developed a liking for Bernie.

The feeling was mutual. Bernie was homesick. Her own traditional name was “Girl Who Laughs,” but lately she rarely did. She missed her mother, people she worked with at the Shiprock office of the Navajo Tribal Police, and her girlfriends. Although she hated to admit it, she also missed Sergeant Jim Chee.

Mrs. Garza had spotted that the very first day they talked, when Bernie explained why she had changed jobs. Bernie had described the last case she had been involved in—her very first homicide—how she had bungled the crime scene, and how she had been shot at herself, or thought she had been, anyway. She also described the dreadful shock of finding—locked in one of those miles of mostly empty army ammunition bunkers at old Fort Wingate—the mummified body of a young wife who had written love notes to her husband while she starved to death in the silent darkness.

“I just couldn’t stand any more of that,” Bernie had said. Mrs. Garza had sensed, instantly, that there was more to it than the tragedy involved in the case. But she [19] was too kind (or wise) to press. Not then, anyway. It wasn’t until Eleanda was driving Bernie along the track that runs along the U.S. side of Mexican border fence that the truth emerged.

They had been bumping along the absolute southernmost bottom of New Mexico’s so-called boot heel. For hours Bernie had been mostly silent. She’d seen no evidence of human existence except the steel fence posts and three (sometimes two) strands of the barbed wire stretched between them. Dry, ragged mountains to the south in Sonora, northward in New Mexico, the same ahead, same behind. Bernie had a weakness for botany, her major study at the University of New Mexico, and this landscape was interesting as well as hostile. Various varieties of cacti, with little herds of javlina browsing on the pods of some of them, clumps of gray and tan desert grasses waving their autumn seed stems, the orderly scattering of creosote bush, and species of mesquite new to her and swarming with bees attracted by the honey in the flowers, and brush with more thorns than leaves. Bernie was accustomed to empty country, but Dinetah, her “Land Between the Sacred Mountains,” was greener, friendlier, had at least a few people in it. Philosophers teach that lonely country wears on friendly people.

Eleanda was sympathetic. She had been stopping now and then to show trails illegals used, pointing to examples of the deeper heel prints, the shorter paces and the wider stances that suggested “mules” carrying heavy loads of cocaine or heroin had mixed with the immigrants to use them as cover. She knelt where the limbs of a thorny bush intruded into the trail—showed Bernie a thorn that held a tiny clump of fiber.

[20] “That’s an acacia,” Bernie said. “The catclaw acacia. I forget the scientific name. But the one people try to grow is the desert acacia. Has beautiful yellow flowers. Very fragrant.”

Eleanda laughed. “And right there, that vine to your left with those beautiful white blossoms, that’s sacred datura. You know. The psychedelic. The little button seeds, if you chew them, or brew them, they send you off into visions.”

“As in the rites of the Native American Church,” Bernie said. “I tried that when I was in college.” She shuddered. “How can a flower that beautiful produce something that tastes so terrible?”

“Datura used to be on the illegal substances list,” Eleanda said. “Until the court ruled it was a religious sacrament. But forget the datura. I was showing you the cloth,” she said.

“Cloth?”

“These fibers caught on the claw are from a gunny sack. The drug smugglers use potato sacks to carry the dope in.”

Bernie nodded.

“The illegals, they’re good people. They just can’t get work in Mexico and their families are hungry. They don’t have guns. Wouldn’t hurt anybody if they did. But when you see this”—she pulled the fiber from a thorn—“then you’re not just tracking illegal immigrants going north to look for a job. Then you should be very careful.”

“I’m careful,” Bernie said, and produced a wry smile. “That’s exactly what Sergeant Chee told me when I left. ‘Be very careful.’ That’s all he said.”

[21] “That’s the sergeant you told me about? Did you talk to him about coming down here?”

“I didn’t talk to him about it.”

“You didn’t? What you told me made him sound very nice. But I guess you don’t like him? He was bad to you, wasn’t he?”

“No. No. No,” Bernie said. “It wasn’t that. Really, he’s very kind. Very ...” She paused. How could she express this?

“Kind? To you?”

“I didn’t mean that. He was my boss.”

“So kind to who?”

Bernie shrugged. “Well, pretty much everybody.”

“Like how, for example.”

“Well, I didn’t see this myself,” Bernie said. “But it’s a story people tell about him. He had a hit-and-run homicide case. Real strange one. There’s a radio station at Farmington that has an open mike program. People who want to invite people to a curing ceremony, or buy a horse, or sell baled hay, they just go in and the station lets them use the mike. So this fugitive driver does that. He goes in and broadcasts that he is the man who ran over the fellow beside the road and drove off and left the body. He said he was too drunk to know what he was doing, and he is sorry, and that every month he will send part of his paycheck to the man’s family.”

“Really!” Eleanda said. “I wish we had that kind of drunks. But did he actually send money?”

“Two hundred dollars every month,” Bernie said. “But Sergeant Chee still had this homicide case to solve. Nobody at the open mike station had recognized him, but [22] they remembered he smelled like onions. Jim went to Navajo Agricultural Project onion warehouse and described the bumper stickers on the truck, and the people there told him who owned it. Jim went to his place. He wasn’t home but his grandson was there. An emotionally disturbed boy named Don the grandfather was raising. So Jim had another set of bumper stickers printed. Stuff like ‘Don Is My Hero.’ You know? And he gave ’em to the boy and told him to have his granddad change the stickers because the police would arrest him if he kept using the old ones.”

Story finished, Bernie looked at Eleanda, gauging her reaction. And Eleanda looked at Bernie. She saw large and beautiful brown eyes, a little sad now, the perfect oval face popular for cosmetics commercials, and a shape that looked fine even in the Border Patrol uniform. A sweet girl. This Sergeant Chee must be blind or retarded. She shook her head.

“Pretty risky for a cop to do that,” Eleanda said. “You think it actually happened like that?”

“Yes,” Bernie said. “It’s just like him.”

“Doing something like that could cost you your job. Worse than that, you’re destroying evidence in a felony case. You’re risking—”

“I know,” Bernie said. “I didn’t say he was smart. I just said he was kind.” And then, being tired, confused, homesick, lonely, and unhappy, she started to cry, and Eleanda hugged her.

“Men are so damned stupid,” Eleanda said.

A minute or two later, after finding a handkerchief and wiping her eyes, Bernie looked up and nodded.

“Most of them, I guess. But not all. My mother’s father, [23] Hostiin Yellow. I guess you’d call him my godfather. The one in Navajo culture who gives us our real name, the name we use in ceremonies. We get that name when we’re old enough to smile, and it’s a secret. After that awful business at the bunker, Hostiin Yellow had a curing ceremony for me. A Ghost Way, we call it, and it cured me. So I could sleep without dreams and feel normal again. I think I should go and talk to him.”

Mrs. Garza hugged her again, and smiled at her. “Ask Hostiin Yellow if he can cure you of being lonesome for your man.”

Rawley Winsor had put the e-mail printout on his desk and was staring across it through his office window, focused on the distant dome of the Capitol. The e-mail concerned one of the issues on his list of today’s chores. It had added to an unpleasant feeling that things were slipping out of control. Winsor hated not being in control.

Even the schedule for today was already offbeat. On his notepad he listed an agenda of problems to be dealt with:

1. War on Drugs. Haret?

2. Chrissy. Budge.

3. Reassure Bank, call V.P. for M.C.

4. Four Corners. Mex lawyer.

Come to think of it, the e-mail concerned all the same problem. Everything but Chrissy. And now Chrissy [26]had been handled properly and neatly, with no residual loose ends left to complicate matters. He drew a line through “Chrissy. Budge.” and renumbered items 3 and 4, making them 2 and 3. He could draw a line throughchrissy because in that one he had kept control himself. He had assigned it to a man who was solidly, and stolidly, under control. A valuable keeper, Budge. But the other three problems had all grown out of assigning jobs to people he had no handle on.

He had assigned a really important project to people he was never sure he could trust—either for honesty or competence—because he didn’t have a hammer held over their heads. As a result 3,644 pounds 11 ounces of his cocaine, neatly packaged in one-liter Baggies, had been loaded on a rusty trawler at Puerto Cortez in Belize, and the trawler had blown its old diesel engine. He had the trawler towed into a wharf at Vera Cruz, sent one of his A.G.H. Industries lawyers flying down there to arrange a secure way to get the coke into the A.G.H. warehouse outside Mexico City. All that represented more than $400,000 in needless costs, and at least a hundred hours of his own time. The cost of developing a secure way to get that coke out of Mexico, where it was worth maybe $5,000 a liter, into the U.S. market, where it was selling for $28,000 a liter as of yesterday in Washington, was even more expensive. That ran into the millions, and it wasn’t over yet.

Winsor made a deprecatory clicking sound. The retail price in the District of Columbia had dropped $2,000 a liter in just two months, the slide starting as soon as that move to legalize medical marijuana began looking serious. If the bill passed, the fear of genuine federal control of all narcotics would spread, sending the [27] wholesaler’s price to the bottom. There was too much big money against it to keep even that mild little marijuana bill from passing now, he was pretty sure of that, but even the fear of it was already costing him. He did the math in his head: 3,644 pounds, at 2.206 pounds per kilo, made 1,656 kilograms. The $20,000 per kilo he could now count on in bulk price to wholesalers would bring in $33 million if the value held. He had less than $9 million invested so far. Even if he wrote off the trawler as a total loss—which it probably would be—the deal would be a big winner. And most of the remaining expenses were in a capital property, repeatedly useful if he stayed in the importing business. If he didn’t, he could rent it to other importers.