Triple Crossing (3 page)

OTM meant lawyers, interpreters, headaches, paperwork. An especially burned-out journeyman had once advised Pescatore to simply
turn and flee if he caught an alien who spoke funny Spanish or none at all. But Esparza ran from nobody.

“You know some
federales
or somebody are making money off those Chinese in TJ,” Pescatore said. “Every Chinese alien pays fifty grand, right? That’s
a lot for the
polleros
to spread around.”

Esparza controlled the horse with easy, powerful tugs of the reins, stroking its ears, letting it step in place. He took off
his cowboy hat and wiped his forehead with a sleeve. He was thirty-five and had seven years on the job. With the revolving-door
turnover of the Imperial Beach station, he was an old-timer. He
leaned forward in the saddle and peered at Pescatore, who knew what was coming.

“Garrison got you guys playing that game again?” Esparza asked quietly.

“Yep.” Pescatore had one elbow propped on the roof of the vehicle and one on top of the open door. A moving cluster of lights
flashed in the fog: a Patrol helicopter on the hunt. He heard the distant thump of rotors.

“Tell him you don’t play that shit.”

“Vince, he’s my supervisor.”

“Then switch to the day shift. You need to learn how to wake up in the morning anyway. That
pendejo
is gonna get indicted and bring you down with him.” Passing headlights illuminated the journeyman’s glare beneath the brim
of the hat.

“For thumping aliens? No way. Garrison told me they been allegating him for years. Never laid a glove on him.”

“Not just thumping. The FBI and OIG got a big-time investigation going. He’s at the top of the list. He thinks he’s some big
operator. Treats you young guys like pets, his little walking group, prowling around the canyons. Buying all the drinks. Pool
parties at his house, chicks from TJ. You ever wonder where all that money comes from?”

Pescatore recalled the start of his training period, the scathing Conduct and Efficiency report Esparza had written up on
him. Pescatore had been convinced that Esparza was on a personal mission to kick him out of The Patrol. Instead, the reports
got better and his trainer had put in a good word for him at the end of his probation.

As if reading his mind, Esparza said: “Valentine, I told you a thousand times: You’re a borderline case. You could be a fine
PA if you work at it. But Garrison is a criminal. He is a disgrace to The Patrol. He is bad news. Especially for a kid that’s
easily led.”

Esparza’s tone was making Pescatore depressed. He managed a sickly laugh.

“I appreciate the concern, Vince. I’m gonna be OK.”

Pescatore ducked into the vehicle to respond to the radio; Garrison wanted him back on the levee. Esparza’s mouth turned down
to match the corners of his mustache, the disappointed parent, the voice of doom on horseback.

“You take care, Valentine. Watch yourself.”

“Alright then.”

Midnight approached. Things were getting out of hand. Aliens sprouted out of the brush, flashed across roads, disappeared
behind ridges. He captured some farmworkers from Oaxaca, short dignified
campesinos
who spoke to each other in an indigenous language and crouched automatically at the roadside, familiar with the drill. He
watched, too captivated by the sight to give chase, as a group of illegal-alien musicians in
charro
attire hurried along a hilltop lugging instrument cases. Two of the
mariachis
carried the bass fiddle together, no doubt late for a gig.

Garrison kept him speeding back and forth, changing directions. The Wrangler shuddered across rough terrain, rattling as if
it were going to break apart. A volley of rocks clattered on the roof. The throwers were nowhere to be seen in the fog; maybe
the rocks threw themselves. Garrison yelled at the top of his lungs on the radio. Pescatore heard a plaintive chorus of voices
in the background.

We’re in the hands of a lunatic, Pescatore told himself. Esparza was right. Something terrible is going to happen. He floored
the accelerator, the Wrangler hurtling alongside the rusted-brown metal border fence.

Two silhouettes materialized in the dirt road in front of him. Dangerously close. Moving in terrified underwater slow motion,
Pescatore tromped the brake. The Wrangler went into a long dirt-spraying skid. When it finally came to a stop, the two migrants
cowered unhurt in the blaze of the headlights. They held their hands over their heads. They were women.

“No problem,” Pescatore whispered, clinging to the wheel. “Almost ran you over, killed you dead. No problem.”

He got out. The women shrank against the fence. Loopy with relief, he found himself affecting the jovial authoritative tone
that good-ol’-boy Tejano journeymen used.

“Welcome to the United States, ladies. You are under arrest.”

They were apparently sisters, late teens or early twenties. Piles of curls around striking, Caribbean-looking faces. He shined
his flashlight at the top of the fence, mindful of rock throwers, then back at the women. Taller than average, long-legged
in tight jeans. Maybe Honduran, Venezuelan? They reminded him of a teenage girl he had once arrested in a load van, a pouty
Venezuelan sporting sunglasses and platform heels that were completely inappropriate for border-crossing. OTMs for sure. A
lot of forms to fill out, but he could get the hell off The Line for the rest of the shift. One of the women wore two sweaters
under a cheap leather jacket. Her hands were still raised over her head. As gently as he could, he asked her where she was
from.

“Veracruz,” she said, heavy-lidded eyes on the ground.

That part of Mexico could account for their looks, but a smuggler could have also coached them. Pescatore ushered them into
the vehicle.

“Valentine.” Garrison’s voice on the radio startled him. “Where you at, buddy?”

“Got two OTMs. Gonna take ’em back to the station and start processing.”

“Negative. Need you here at my location. Hurry it up.”

“Yessir.”

The dirt road wound up and around a hill. Crickets buzzed in the darkness. The tires crunched over rocks. In a clearing at
the top of the hill, Pescatore found Garrison, Dillard and an agent named Macías. They stood around a parked Wrangler in the
middle of the clearing. They examined it with folded arms,
like researchers in a laboratory. The Wrangler was illuminated by the headlights of other vehicles.

Pescatore glanced in his rearview mirror: The two women were transfixed by the scene, fear flaring in enormous eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

The Wrangler in the middle of the clearing was crammed impossibly full of prisoners. Men were in the front seat, the caged
backseat and the space behind it. They were stacked on one another’s laps. The mass of bodies wriggled behind the breath-steamed
glass as if in an aquarium, a face visible here, a foot there. The captives pounded intermittently on the windows and roof,
blows rocking the vehicle. There were complaints and curses.

The prisoners had become pieces in the Game. Garrison organized the Game now and then when he felt like gambling. The Game
consisted of seeing how many prisoners could be stuffed into a vehicle during the course of a night.

Garrison welcomed Pescatore with another vigorous black-gloved handshake.

“I told you,” he declared. “I got twelve. Your two gives me fourteen. And then I collect, buddy.”

“My two?” Pescatore said, keeping his tone mild. “They’re OTMs, I gotta process them.”

“Hell with that. Where do they say they’re from?”

“Veracruz. But—”

“Hey, take ’em at their word. Transfer your prisoners to my vehicle, Valentine.”

Pescatore beckoned his supervisor aside. Garrison grinned at his discomfort.

“Listen,” Pescatore hissed, “all due respect, you can’t put females in there.”

“It’s only till the end of the shift.”

“Still. It ain’t right.”

Valentine peered at Garrison in the shadows, trying to figure out if the supervisor really intended on going through with
it or was just messing with him. Both scenarios pissed him off. Garrison looked down at him as if he were about to swat a
bug.

“Valentine. These people break the law every day. They spit at you. They rock you. And it’s all a big joke to them. This is
the worst punishment they’ll ever get. So don’t you wussy out on me now. Get with the program.”

Coming up next to Garrison, Dillard made an exasperated noise. “Come on, Valentine, nobody’s gonna hurt your girlfriends.”

“Who asked you?” Pescatore retorted. “Take a giant step back outta my face.”

“Fuck you.” Dillard’s thin lips tightened. “I don’t understand a word you say in the first place, you crazy Chicago asshole.”

Partly because he was getting angry and partly to stall Garrison, Pescatore decided to respond as ignorantly as possible.
He stepped close to Dillard and cocked his head. He felt a buzzing sensation in his face and hands.

“You gotta problem with the way I talk, you hayseed redneck punk bitch?”

Dillard’s face contorted. Pescatore blocked his shove, backpedaling. Dillard started after him and Pescatore crouched and
slammed him with a gut punch. Garrison got between them. Dillard was flushed and wild, a hand on his belly.

“Now, Larry, you sure you can take Valentine?” Garrison chortled. “He’s not big, but he’s pretty mean.”

Garrison had a loglike arm extended at each of them, without urgency, like a referee about to resume the action. He’s not
gonna stop us, Pescatore realized. He loves it: the brawling, those poor bastards in the vehicle, the crazy bullshit all night.

They were interrupted by a commotion. Suddenly the Wrangler disgorged its cargo, prisoners bolting in every direction. The
agents spun around, yelling.

Pescatore focused on a man who crouched by a door, pulling
aliens to freedom. A bowlegged man holding a pair of wire cutters, his head wrapped in a red bandanna. A man who had sneaked
out of the bushes behind four PAs and sprung a vehicleful of prisoners.

Pulpo.

Pescatore lunged forward, pushing someone aside. Pulpo reappeared, closer, grimacing with effort. The wire cutters came whipping
around at Pescatore. He snapped aside his head, reducing the force of the blow, but it staggered him. The smuggler ran into
the brush.

“I got him,” Pescatore said, unsheathing his baton.

Pescatore pounded through the brush and down a ravine. He ran at an incredible, exhilarating, foolish speed. His head and
ankle throbbed. It’s all your fault, Valentine, he muttered, they got away and it’s all your fault. He ran faster, ripping
through curtains of fog. He gripped the baton like a sprinter. He noticed liquid trickling down his forehead onto his face.
He tasted it: blood.

“I got him,” he said into the radio clipped to his lapel.

At the bottom of the hill, the border fence loomed up out of the mist. Pulpo made for a spot where floodwaters had washed
out dirt between two boulders and created a gap beneath the fence. Pulpo scuttled through the opening and disappeared. Pescatore
dropped, rolled and came back up on the other side of the fence.

He saw Pulpo glance back over his shoulder in disbelief, then plunge into the traffic on Calle Internacional, the highway
that paralleled the international boundary on the Tijuana side. An orange-and-brown station wagon–taxi, elaborate script decorating
its side, swerved and fishtailed and almost flattened Pulpo. A bedraggled pink bus braked and honked, the croak of a prehistoric
animal. Pulpo reached the center median, which was waist high and as wide as a sidewalk. He stumbled, but kept going as Pescatore
closed the gap. A truck left Pescatore a lungful of pestilential exhaust.

A group of migrants trudging single file along the median stopped and stared at the agent and the smuggler pelting by.

“I got him,” Pescatore told them.

He found the looks on their faces pretty comical. What’s the matter? You never seen a U.S. Border Patrol agent chasing a Mexican
through Tijuana before? See it and believe it, motherfuckers.

Pescatore realized full well that he had crossed The Line. He had broken the ultimate commandment. He was making a suicide
charge into enemy territory. He wondered what Garrison would say. He wondered what Esparza would say. But he felt dizzy liberation,
as if the combined effect of the knock on the head and the incursion into Mexico had transformed him. He was a speed machine.
A force of justice. A green avenger. He didn’t care if he had to run all the way to Ensenada. He was going to catch him a
tonk.

Pulpo fled down the middle of a residential street that went south from the Calle Internacional. It was a quiet, unevenly
paved, anemically lit street in the Zona Norte area, dense with cooking smells. Rickety fences fronted low houses painted
in orange, green and blue. There was a field in the distance, perhaps a schoolyard.

Halfway down the block, Pulpo threw Pescatore another frantic glance. He zigzagged and cut left onto the sidewalk, knocking
aside a gate. Pescatore pursued him into a narrow dirt lot between stucco houses, through an obstacle course of junk: bicycle
tires, car parts, a lean-to fashioned from the camper shell of a pickup truck propped up with bricks. There was a wooden one-story
hut at the back of the lot.

Pescatore caught up to the smuggler just as he reached the open door. He jabbed with the baton, javelin-style, connecting
with Pulpo’s back below the label of the overalls. It made a satisfying thud.

The blow carried them both through a curtain of beads hang
ing in the front entrance and into the hut. Pescatore jabbed again and Pulpo went down, yowling, into a mangy armchair. Pescatore
raised the baton with both hands to strike. A lightbulb on a chain swung above their heads, spattering images as if through
a strobe: a dank cramped living room of sorts, a shrine with a Virgin of Guadalupe statuette, candles, an incongruously new
and large television. A radio chattered. The bead curtain clattered in the doorway. Pescatore and Pulpo gulped oxygen in loud
gasps.