This Side of Night

by J. Todd Scott

  The driver turned to him as the van shuddered to a halt, desert dust roiling through the open window. It coated them, choked them. There was the stink of sangre and heated metal. Somewhere, not far away, the sound of more gunfire and engines revving.

  “You are very brave, Abrahán Sierra,” Juan Abrego said. “You are going to die now.”

  The driver laughed. “I am very, very foolish.” Then: “They promised me so many things, but I was dead anyway. I see that now.”

  Then the boy named Abrahán Sierra jumped out and pulled open the van’s back door, dented and scarred with bullet holes, and took the crying Zita out of Juan Abrego’s arms and carried her out into the light and dust.

  * * *

  —

  JUAN ABREGO WAS NO ONE.

  But the man called Fox Uno still had friends, all throughout Manuel Benavides, even though the sicarios and contrabandistas of Los Hermanos Serrano crawled everywhere, like hormigas.

  So Juan Abrego was left behind, one piece at a time.

  He left his bulletproof vest in the desert about two miles from the van, the last time he saw Abrahán Sierra.

  He left behind two gold rings and a Patek Philippe watch in Escobillas de Abajo, and those things bought him and Zita food and some used clothes. They also bought them time, and that was almost priceless.

  He left behind most of his pesos in Nuevo Lajitas, and that bought them another two nights’ rest and a ride to the crossing.

  He left behind one of the three cell phones, crushed beneath his boot under a mesquite near the river. He wanted to believe Gualterio was still alive, but it was unclear how many of their men had been compromised. Everyone was on the run—dead or dying or captured.

  Maybe not everyone.

  They promised me so many things, but I was dead anyway . . .

  And then before he and Zita crossed over the river near Santa Elena in their borrowed clothes, he left behind the silver-plated Ruger.

  He tossed it in the water and watched it sink.

  * * *

  —

  NOW THERE WAS NOTHING to be done except to watch Zita sleep, and wait for his sobrina to come home and decide what to do with them. She might decide to send the one she called Danny, alone, with his gun. Or more policía. Or Las Tres Letras, the DEA. Did his sobrina believe him, trust him? Could she?

  Could he trust her?

  He still had his two remaining cellular phones, secure for a handful more days, because if they weren’t, he was dead already, as he would be if he tried to return now to Ojinaga. America and the one named Danny had eyed them all morning, expecting one or the other to ring at any moment—to give them answers, to help them decide whether he was telling the truth for her familia—although only he knew those phones would never ring on their own, and whatever answers and secrets were on the other end could never satisfy them. There were no answers . . . no easy way to describe his life and the man he was.

  Yo soy la Muerte, mi amigo . . .

  Those phones were his only way to reach back into Ojinaga to find out who still lived, who did not. Who he could trust, and who would still call him padrino . . . El Patrón. They were his lifeline to Gualterio, even Martino, if he thought he could risk that. His sobrina would soon decide to take them from him, as the one named Danny would have already done, had she not stopped him.

  Por el momento, she still believed Juan Abrego. It was easy not to lie when one didn’t know the truth.

  His money and valuables and the fake documents still in his Gucci bag had been enough to get him this far, but like the phones, they would not serve him much longer. He would never leave here with them, and worse, he was enfermo, dying. What was the point of running if there was nowhere go?

  How long did he truly have to decide who he could trust?

  Or who had betrayed him?

  Gualterio? His own son, Martino?

  Fox Uno had not been ready to die outside Santa Elena, and Juan Abrego was not ready to die here, either, in this place.

  Juan Abrego reached into his boot and pulled out one of the small plastic-wrapped slips of black plastic he had hidden there. It was no bigger than his thumbnail.

  He popped open the back of one of the phones and slipped it in, like Martino had once shown him. He wondered if his son remembered that now.

  In another week, if he could survive that long, he needed to be someone and somewhere else.

  It reminded him how he had not been able to hold back a laugh when he and Zita finally waded through the sluggish current of the river, moments after throwing the Ruger into it: stinking water no deeper than his ankles. Warm on his bare skin, like a woman’s touch. But there had been no one there to question their false papers . . . su nombre . . . anyway.

  Just la luna above, shining like plata, like the gun he had tossed away.

  Zita had asked: Why are you laughing, Papa? And he had hugged her and whispered: Because the world is such a funny place, little one.

  And that is why he had laughed: at the foolishness of it all.

  All these men, all these years, hunting for Fox Uno . . . para él . . . across México, but there had been no one at all to watch when the most wanted and feared cartel leader in history crossed the border for the first time into Los Estados Unidos.

  No one to watch, or remember, what appeared to be a young nieta holding her viejo abuelo’s weakened hand against the slight current of the mighty Río Bravo.

  EIGHTEEN

  My uncle is at my apartment now, along with a girl he claims is his daughter. They crossed over the border earlier. How long ago, I don’t know,” Amé said.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” Chris asked. “In person?”

  “¿Tal vez nunca? When I was too young to remember?”

  “So he really could be anyone at all?”

  “Well, except for the gun,” Danny added. “Except for that.”

  Amé nodded, reluctantly. “Rodolfo had a silver gun, a gift from Nemesio, from my uncle. I also received such a gun. It arrived in a package at my front door. This was a year ago, right after Ben died. There was no note, nada. I never showed it to anyone or talked about it, but I knew who sent it. The man in my apartment described it.”

  “You never told me that, Amé,” Chris said.

  “I know. I never told Danny, either, or anyone.” She stopped, didn’t add anything else. If Chris thought she was going to apologize for it, she didn’t.

  Danny stood again. He’d been up and down as they’d been talking about what happened last night, rising and falling in rhythm with the story. “I searched him. He had some money and a Mexican passport and license, both probably fake. Neither are in the name Juan Abrego, which is what he called himself to us. He’s got a B-2 visa visitor stamp in the passport, although he says he’s never been to the U.S. He also has two phones, one a regular Telcel, the other something called a Blackphone. I looked it up, it’s some super-high-tech phone, hard to hack or trace, but you can fucking buy it on Amazon. For what it’s worth, neither of his numbers were in Eddy’s phone, which was another thing I checked this morning, and another reason why we went to see him.”

  “These phones are how he’s talking to his people in Mexico?”

  “Whatever people he has left,” Danny answered. “He claims he needs time to get him and the girl out of Texas, probably out of the U.S. altogether. He says he can get someone to meet him here and bring him new passports, money, whatever. Just a few days, and then he’s gone.”

  “But what about Amé’s family . . . ?” Chris added. Chris didn’t know much about Amé’s mother—Margarita—who used to work at the Supreme Clean in Murfee. He remembered picking up Sheriff Ross’s uniform shirts from her. But she and Amé’s father had moved back to Mexico a few years ago, after they’d identified their son’s body in the desert, and although his deputy talke
d to her mother once or twice a month, he didn’t think she’d seen her in a long time. Margarita was always trying to get Amé to come south to stay with them, but she wouldn’t cross the river, at least as far he knew.

  Danny nodded. “Yeah, there is that.”

  Amé completed the thought for them: “He has to make calls each day to his men across the river. If I don’t help him, if he can’t get out of Texas, or if he doesn’t make those calls on time, my mama will be killed.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY ALL SAT SILENT for a long time after that, watching the sun move outside Chris’s office windows. The lemon trees the city council had planted long ago all along Main Street were trying hard to cast thin, barely-there shadows. The trees had never quite taken hold, no matter how much care they’d been given. He’d stood under them once, afraid to lean against them for support, after he’d talked with Sheriff Ross about the skeleton he’d recovered from Indian Bluffs. The skeleton they all later learned was Amé’s brother.

  “It’s bullshit,” Danny finally said. “He’s bluffing, both about who he is, and what he’s doing here.” He turned to Amé. “And this threat about your family? These mysterious phone calls? It’s crazy, I don’t buy any of it.”

  “Maybe,” Chris conceded, “but it tracks somewhat with what Garrison told me. Think about it—if Fox Uno is on the run, what better place to hide than here? The one place no one is looking for him, or would ever expect him to be.” Chris penciled an empty circle on a piece of paper in front of him. It was a copy of an election filing form, something he’d forgotten to fill out until Mel had done it for him. He looked up at Amé. “Do you really think he’d let your mother, his own sister, die over there?”

  But it was a question Chris hardly needed to ask. He’d read Garrison’s file—all the things Fox Uno had allegedly done. The tortures and beheadings and bombings. In 2010, some sort of suitcase bomb he’d meant for a rival had killed three small children. A couple of years later, he ordered the killing of three Catholic priests, who were strangled with their vestments. Those were only a few of the murders that had attracted attention, but how many more had not?

  Amé agreed with a shrug, a small, desperate gesture. “I know I cannot reach my mama. I cannot reach anyone. If he is the man I know he is, then yes.”

  “If he’s really in charge of anything at all anymore,” Danny countered. “If he’s running for his life, who’s left to call? Who can he trust? Everyone he knows, everyone related to him, is probably already dead anyway.” Danny stopped, realizing he was talking about the rest of Amé’s family, but then pushed angrily ahead anyway; Chris could feel the heat of it. “He’s buying time with money he doesn’t have. Whoever he is, he came over the river in some shitty clothes he stole off someone’s laundry line, dragging that poor girl with him. Maybe she’s his daughter, or granddaughter, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. He used that girl as a shield, just like he’s now trying to use Amé.”

  Chris said, “I could call Garrison right now. He’s always talking about his people listening to stuff down here, like they have satellites spinning above us all the time. Hell, they probably do. Maybe he’s finally heard something about Fox Uno slipping over the border?”

  Amé nodded, although Chris wasn’t sure she was agreeing with him. “He’ll ask questions. He’ll want answers.”

  “And you’ll tell him the truth. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. We explain what we have, who we think we have. He’ll be down here before nightfall. Then we turn this man over to him and see how it plays out.”

  “¿Y la chica? What happens to her?” Amé asked.

  Chris and Danny both stayed silent.

  “I don’t know, Amé,” Chris finally admitted. “We’re all just guessing here.”

  “We’re guessing about mi familia. What if we were guessing about Ms. Bristow, or your son?”

  Chris drew a second empty circle, close but not touching the other, then tossed the pencil down. “Are you seriously asking me to let him stay here in Murfee? To go along with this?”

  Amé crossed and uncrossed her arms. “No lo sé. But if it’s only a few days . . . and there’s a chance it can save my mama . . .”

  “When’s the last time you spoke to her?”

  “Two weeks ago. My mama is in Camargo, my papa is . . . is not. He works outside the city and returns home now and then. Fox Uno says he can do nothing for him anyway. He may already be lost to me.”

  Chris picked up the hesitation, but it didn’t matter to him what Amé’s father did over the river. Like so many, he did whatever he had to in order to survive. He hoped the man was doing that now.

  “You tried to reach out to her last night, this morning?”

  “Sí, nada. And I have no way to talk to my papa.” She looked at her hands, like she was holding her anger, all her desperation, there. “I have no way to know what’s going on over there. But . . . if it’s just a few days . . .”

  “Then what?” Chris asked. “This man is gone for good? If you do this, do you really think he’s out of your life forever? Is that what you really believe?”

  “Eso es lo que dice,” Amé said.

  Danny looked back and forth between them. “Look, I know I don’t understand much Spanish, but I know enough that I can’t believe you two are actually considering this.” Danny leaned so close to Amé that Chris thought he was going to grab her hand, but he didn’t. “Listen to me, I’ll even accept for the moment that he’s your uncle, and that he’s this big-time cartel figure. So let’s look at what he’s done, who he’s hurt. Your own brother, for starters. If you truly believe him . . . if you believe all the things he’s done and the things he’s saying now . . . then you have to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, he’s been setting you up for this from the beginning. He’s playing you. For fuck’s sake, he’s threatening to let his own sister die if you don’t help him. He’s killing her if he doesn’t make one fucking phone call, and he’s holding you hostage at the same time. There’s no way this ends well for anyone. It can’t.”

  “Before I decide anything, I’ll have to talk to him,” Chris said.

  Danny turned back to him. “Sheriff, please listen to me. Listen to yourself. Go down there and arrest this son of a bitch and be done with it. I nearly shot him last night—please don’t make me regret that I didn’t.”

  “I hear you, Danny. Don’t think for a minute I don’t know how goddamn serious this is, for all of us. This man tried to have me killed, too.” Chris stopped, not sure what else to say, how to explain and summarize the last four years of his life . . . and Amé’s. Maybe if it wasn’t Amé they were talking about, he would feel differently, which didn’t make him feel any better about it at all. Maybe then he would go down there and haul this man in and let the chips fall where they may.

  What if we were guessing about Ms. Bristow, or your son?

  Chris knew there shouldn’t be two sets of rules, one for those he loved and another for those he didn’t—he and Mel had had that exact talk when the Earls were holed up after Ben’s death—but this was different. He couldn’t help remembering Amé as that girl outside Mancha’s, the one with the sunglasses and cigarettes—the one he’d promised to protect, save—and thinking how little he’d actually done.

  He’d waited too long to deal with Sheriff Ross, and people had died. He’d waited too long to deal with John Wesley Earl, and people had died. Both times, he’d done what he’d thought was the right thing, only to have other people pay for that with their lives.

  He’d made those choices and had to live with them.

  And if he chose the right thing here again—and the only choice that made any real sense at all was to put handcuffs on this man calling himself Fox Uno and let Garrison deal with him—then it seemed likely more people would die. For the third time, on his watch.

  If Chris believed the man in Am�
�’s apartment was who he was claiming to be.

  Was it about believing that man . . . or Amé?

  Because if Chris chose wrong and helped his young deputy harbor an international fugitive and murderer, he had to wonder what that said about him.

  Maybe it said he wasn’t fit to be the sheriff after all.

  And in the end, he’d have to live with that choice, too.

  Chris turned all his attention to Amé. “Would you have told me about this if Danny hadn’t been there, too, last night? You never said a word about the gun. For God’s sake, Amé, I thought we were past all that.”

  She didn’t shake his stare. “Sí, I would have told you about Fox Uno. No matter what he had said or promised, I would not decide this without you. It affects too many. Todos nosotros.”

  Was it about believing that man . . . or Amé?

  “That makes me feel better, I guess,” Chris said, although it didn’t, not at all. He stood up anyway, though, slow, and got ready to leave.

  “What are we doing?” Danny asked, serious. He looked ready to block the office door with his body, if Amé wasn’t already standing in front of it.

  Chris said, “Well, I guess I’m going to formally introduce myself to Amé’s uncle.”

  NINETEEN

  CHAYO & NEVA

  Getting across the river wasn’t the problem.

  It was surviving the other side.

  Surviving the sun and the rocks and the crushing emptiness. It was easy to get turned around and lost there, to die from the heat and thirst in that unfamiliar place before you ever found what you were looking for.

  That’s why most who crossed bought maps, hand-drawn things that tried to make sense of that tangle of canyons and arroyos and roads. Endless trails that had been worn smooth and glassy by centuries of callused feet; places where water and shade could be found, dugouts and holes where you could lay up and hide from the camisetas verdes, the americano Border Patrol in their green shirts. Most of these maps were also marked with tiny calaveras, faded ink warnings marking those smuggling paths controlled by los narcos. They would kill you if they found you there, and leave your body to rot as a warning to others.