by Don Winslow
“I know.”
“You got a plan for that?”
“Mr. Carlisle, I been pretty much making this whole thing up as I go along,” Cal says.
“It does have that feeling about it.” He stops the truck.
Cal sees the 10 a couple of hundred yards away.
“This is as far as I should go,” Carlisle says. “The police will be watching for any vehicle that gets any closer.”
Cal and Luz get out of the truck.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Cal says, offering his hand.
Carlisle takes it. “Get that girl to her mama.”
Cal watches him turn around and head back up the road. He looks down at Luz and says, “I don’t know Spanish for ‘piggyback,’ so just hop on.”
She jumps onto his back, and they set off hiking.
Cal lies on the top of a low hill and looks at the ranch house.
The lights are on, Bobbi is up.
Probably worrying herself sick, he thinks.
He sees the Border Patrol vehicle sitting outside with the dome light on. Looks like Peterson sitting inside, but he can’t be sure.
The truck is still in the barn, but he can’t drive it down to Mexico. They’ll have roadblocks everywhere and will be surveilling the crossings. But there’s no way he can walk with the girl all the way to his rendezvous with Jaime. There ain’t time for that, and she wouldn’t make it through that rough country anyway.
He crawls back down the hill to where he left Luz waiting.
Takes her by the hand and walks along the base of the hill for a few hundred feet, until he’s out of sight of the house, then through a cut in the hill and down to the road that leads to the old corral.
Riley walks over to him.
“Hey, boy,” Cal says, “we got work to do.”
He saddles the horse, puts Luz up, then sits behind and takes the reins. “Uhhh . . . ¿Un caballo antes?”
Best he can do for, You ever been on a horse before?
She shakes her head no but turns back to him and smiles. First sign of childish joy he’s seen from her.
“¿Cuál es su nombre?” she asks.
“His name is Riley.”
“Voy a llamarlo ‘Rojo.’”
“I guess he won’t mind,” Cal says. “Okay, Riley Rojo, let’s get at it.”
He takes the horse on a gentle walk out of the corral.
Comes to the barbed-wire fence a few minutes later, untwists the stitching he did a few days ago and rides through.
Twyla gets up off the floor.
Looks at her watch.
Three-fifteen in the morning.
She goes back into the living room and checks her computer for news of Cal and is relieved to see that they haven’t caught him.
Yet.
They almost had him in Lubens, but he “evaded capture.”
She wonders where he is, how he is, how Luz is.
Twyla walks into the kitchen and takes the bottle down from the cupboard. Drinks directly from it, because what the hell anyway. Figures she’s going to need a few stiff hits to do what she knows now she has to do.
She takes the bottle, sits down on the sofa and picks up her service weapon from the coffee table.
Takes it out of her holster and lays it on her lap.
The sun won’t come up for another three hours.
It’s too long.
Cal knows this country.
So does the horse.
It’s easy riding, a dirt road along flat farm terrain, plowed fields almost to the river, where there’s a strip of brush near where the border fence ends.
Then it’s the river.
Then Mexico.
The river ain’t far, only a mile or so.
Except now he sees he ain’t gonna make it.
Three Border Patrol SUVs are clear in the moonlight, moving back and forth only a quarter of a mile away to his right.
Spotlights sweep the fields.
Then hit him.
The vehicles stop, Cal hears men’s voices, and then they come toward him.
At speed.
Cal leans down over Riley’s neck. “Boy, you think you got one more in you?”
The horse lifts its head up, like, The hell you talking about? You think you got one more in you?
Cal says to Luz, “¡Espere!”
Hold on!
She grabs Riley’s mane.
Cal jerks the reins, and they gallop.
He runs for a wash that he knows leads to the river.
The cars are faster than the horse and gain ground, rumbling right behind him. Cal knows that no one is going to shoot and risk hitting the girl, but he keeps his head low. One arm around her, one hand on the reins, he gives Riley a nudge with his boot to get a little more speed out of him.
The horse responds, surging forward.
It ain’t enough.
A BP Jeep draws beside him, then races ahead and turns in front of him.
Riley don’t need the reins to know to cut. The horse plants, then veers right, great goddamn cutting horse doing it from memory. Gets around the Jeep and keeps running like he knows it’s his last gallop, his last free run through open country, plunges down into the wash.
The Jeep comes down after him. Cal turns his head back to see the SUVs coming, too. The sandy soil will slow them a bit but not stop them, and his only chance is to gain sufficient ground to get into the brush ahead and lose them long enough to get to the river. He knows a narrow smugglers’ trail that will take him there.
Then a light comes from above, and Cal hears the helicopter rotors whirring low over him.
“Come on, Riley!” he yells. “I need more!”
Knowing he’s killing the horse.
But also knowing that most horses got more heart than most people and that this one sure as hell does, because Riley kicks it up a notch he doesn’t have, they gain ground, and Cal can see the heavy brush just a hundred yards ahead of them, and he has to get to that to lose the chopper.
They’re almost there when an ATV comes down from the left out of nowhere and turns in front of them.
The driver raises his rifle, aims at Cal’s head.
Cal grabs Luz tighter.
Riley jumps.
Clears the vehicle and its rider by an inch, but clears it.
Then they’re in the brush.
Riley barely slows as they dodge back and forth along the trail between the bushes, headed toward the water.
The terrain opens up again, flat, treeless for a few feet, and they’re at the fence.
Fifteen feet of metal, concrete at the base.
They ride alongside it.
Cal turns and sees the vehicles coming from behind.
“Come on, you damn horse!” He can almost hear Riley’s heart pounding, sees flecks of foam streaming from his mouth. “Come on!”
The fence ends.
Cal whips the reins, turns Riley to the right, and they’re past it.
Into an arroyo and to the river.
Silver in the moonlight.
Riley descends the bank into the water.
It ain’t so deep in summer, the currents aren’t so bad, and the water only comes up to Cal’s ankles as the horse swims across.
And then they’re in a different country.
Semi-drunk, Twyla contemplates whether to stick the barrel in her mouth or under her chin.
Or against my temple? she wonders.
Twyla doesn’t want to mess it up, end up a vegetable full of needles and tubes, and she doesn’t want it to hurt either.
She just wants it to be over.
The ICE suit is foaming-at-the-mouth furious.
“He’s in Mexico?!” she says. “Are you goddamn sure?!”
“My people saw him cross the river,” the BP boss says.
“On a goddamn horse?!”
“Yes.”
“And the girl is with him,” she says. “Do you have any idea what the media is going to do wi
th this?! ‘A lone, heroic cowboy on horseback defies the resources of the federal government and returns a child to her mother’? Do you know how this makes us look?!”
“Like shit.”
“We’d have to look a whole lot better to look like shit!” she says.
She picks up the phone to call Washington.
Decisions get made.
Change the narrative.
Contact the Mexican authorities and have them bend every effort to find the mother, take Strickland into custody, and reunite that family. As was always our intent, as we were making progress doing when Strickland stepped in and endangered the child.
The suit is in front of the cameras half an hour later.
“We have made every effort to reunite families,” she says. “As I’m sure you understand, this is a complicated process. But it has always been our policy to reunite children with their parents, as we are in the process of doing with the Gonsalvezes.”
“Do the Mexican authorities have either Luz or Gabriela Gonsalvez in their custody?” Schurmann asks.
“We’re not taking questions at this point.”
“Is Cal Strickland in Mexican custody?” he asks.
“We’re not taking questions at this point.”
“If he is arrested, will he be extradited to the United States?” Schurmann asks. “And if so, what charges will he face?”
“We’re not taking questions at this point.”
“Will you indict Cal Strickland for carrying out the policy you now say has always been in place?”
“We’re not taking questions at this point.”
She’s not taking questions, but she knows the answer—she’ll charge Strickland with everything she can think of and a few things she hasn’t thought of yet. Once the media moves on to its next story, she’ll put that son of a bitch bastard in prison for life.
Longer, if she can figure out a way to do it.
Cal rides through the thin strip of fields on the Mexican side of the border.
It’s morning now, the sun just rising pale yellow.
A few campesinos stare at the cowboy with the little girl in front of him, but none stop him or ask questions.
They know not to ask questions in this country.
Cal feels Riley’s legs weak underneath him. He’d like to get off and just walk him—the horse is exhausted, played out—but he has to get out of this exposed terrain and down the slope into the arroyo before the Mexican police spot him.
“¿Estás bien?” he asks Luz.
“Sí.”
“Veremos a tu madre pronto.”
We’ll see your mother soon.
Luz just nods.
Yeah, I’m not sure I believe it either, Cal thinks.
They make it through the fields and come to the edge of the slope. Below them, for as far as they can see, is just desert.
Rock and sand.
He finds the mouth of the arroyo, and Riley gently picks his way down the tricky slope with its ankle-breaking stones.
Two miles to go is all, to the rendezvous spot.
They’re about a mile in when Cal feels Riley shudder.
Sweeping Luz in his arm, he jumps off.
Riley’s forelegs buckle.
He goes down to his knees, then rolls over onto his side. His eyes are wide, his breathing labored, belly heaving.
“¡Rojo!” Luz screams.
Cal walks her a few feet away and turns her so her back is to the horse. “No mires.”
Don’t look.
He steps back and squats next to Riley’s head. Strokes his neck and muzzle. “You were always one good goddamn horse. You never let me down.”
Cal gets back up, takes his pistol from its holster and shoots twice.
The horse’s legs kick out.
Then are still.
Cal lets his holster belt drop to the ground and tucks the pistol in the back of his pants behind his shirt. Then he turns and takes the crying child’s hand.
They walk down the arroyo.
Four Ford Explorers sit in a shallow pan at the base of the canyon.
Cal sees Jaime and seven of his boys standing around smoking cigarettes, drinking from plastic bottles of water. They’re armed with AKs and machine pistols.
It’s hot now, the sun fully awake and on the job.
Cal unslings his daddy’s rifle and holds it in front of him as he walks toward Jaime.
All the guns are pointed at him, but Jaime gestures not to shoot.
“You made it, hoss!” Jaime says. “I was about to give up on you!”
“Where’s the woman?” Cal asks, aiming the rifle at Jaime’s chest.
Jaime jerks his thumb at one of the SUVs. “She’s here. The question is, why should I give her to you? I mean, Cal, the deal I was going to make was that I give you the bitch and you go back and work for me. But you’ve totally fucked that up by taking the niña here. You can’t go back, and even if you could, you’d be no use to me. I can get a good price for a mother-daughter team in Juárez.”
“Don’t.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because I’ll kill you.”
“You pull that trigger,” Jaime says, “my boys will blast you into pozole.”
“But you won’t see it.”
“And then they’ll kill the woman and the girl,” Jaime says. “After they’ve had some fun with them.”
Cal lowers the rifle.
Jaime is right—killing him would do no damn good at all.
“Do the right thing for once in your life,” Cal says. “How much money can you spend? How many more burritos can you eat? How many cars can you drive? And think of the story, Jaime: ‘Mexican coyote does what the American government won’t.’ It’ll go viral. They’ll sing songs about you.”
“I have to admit, it has some appeal,” Jaime says. “But so does killing you.”
“Do both, then,” Cal says.
In this life, he knows, you take the deal you can get. It ain’t always what you want—hell, it almost never is—but as his daddy used to say, “If good enough wasn’t good enough, it wouldn’t be good enough.”
This is good enough, Cal thinks.
Jaime nods his head toward one of the cars. His guy opens the back door and takes Gabriela out.
She runs to Luz, lifts the child in her arms.
“Touching,” Jaime says. “I’m deeply moved. Okay, hoss, you got it. I’ll dump them off at a shelter, get a blessing from the nuns. The other part of our deal, though, that’s on, ¿comprende?”
“Comprendo.”
Jaime snaps some orders. One of his guys takes the rifle from Cal. He don’t think to look for a pistol.
Gabriela Gonsalvez walks over to him. Her daughter is the spitting image of her. “Thank you.”
“It should never have happened in the first place,” Cal says. “I’m sorry.”
Luz wraps her arms around his waist, puts her face into his stomach and holds him tight.
“Está bien,” Cal says. He reaches down and holds her. “It’s all right.”
They stand like that for a few seconds, and then one of Jaime’s guys takes them and leads them back to the car.
“Get them out of here,” Jaime says. “No need for the kid to see this.”
Cal watches the car go.
He did what he came to do.
Jaime goes to the back of the Explorer and pulls two bottles of Modelo out of a cooler. “You want one, hoss? For old times’ sake?”
“Sure.”
Cal takes the cold beer, and it feels great going down.
“High school feels like a long time ago,” Jaime says.
“It was a long time ago.”
“Where did it go, huh?” Jaime asks.
“I dunno.” Cal takes another long draw, almost finishing the bottle.
“What happened to us?” Jaime asks.
“I don’t know that either,” Cal says.
“You scared, hoss?”
�
�Yeah.” He is, he feels like he could piss himself.
“Good,” Jaime says. He pulls a pistol from his belt. “That makes it better. Finish that off and start walking.”
Cal drains the bottle and drops it to the ground.
He walks away.
Can’t stop his legs from shaking.
They feel like old wood fence posts rattling in a north wind. First the posts blow down, and then the wire.
Jesus, Jaime, why don’t you shoot?
Then he hears, “I can’t do it, hoss! Just don’t have it in me! You just keep walking! Enjoy prison, okay!?”
Cal hears doors open and shut.
Then motors start.
He keeps walking.
The pistol under her chin, Twyla sees the news on her computer screen. Tape of a suit saying that Cal made it across the border with the girl.
Good for you, Cal, she thinks.
Good for goddamn you.
You got out.
She lowers the gun.
Picks up her phone to start looking for some kind of help.
Can’t live inside this anymore.
Cal walks back up the arroyo.
Staggers is more like it. The sun beats on his head like a hammer, and the climb makes his legs ache. He’s thirsty, the beer was good, but now he needs water he don’t have.
He comes to where Riley lies and sits down beside the horse. Waves the bottle flies away from Riley’s eyes.
Exhausted, Cal looks out at the empty terrain. Below him he sees the caravan of cars taking Luz and her mother away. Behind him, up the slope, are green fields fed by irrigation, then the river, then the fence, then his country. The only thing waiting for me on the other side, he thinks, is more wire.
They’ll put me in a cage and I won’t ever ride this country again.
His daddy used to say that most people will do what’s right when it don’t cost much and no one will do what’s right when it costs everything.
But sometimes it does cost everything.
Cal takes his pistol, sticks it under his chin, and pulls the trigger.
His head falls back on his horse’s neck.
The first time he saw the child, she was in a cage.
The last time he saw her, she was free.
Acknowledgments
I harbor no illusion that I’m a self-made man, or that this volume, like any of my work, comes from the sole efforts of one person. My parents saw that I always had books, public school teachers taught me how to read them. Friends and family give encouragement and support, fellow writers, past and present, inspire me. Publishers work so hard to get the books out there to libraries, booksellers, and readers. My agent sees that I have the financial means to sit down and write. My spouse cheerfully shares the uncertainties of a writer’s life.
