by Louise Ure
“How come you’re telling me all this, vato? Did Chaco tell you to come find me?”
“No man, I swear. I hear they’ve fucked Carlos up good. And I…he was good to me. Helped me along at the beginning. I owe him.”
“But you don’t owe him enough to stand up for him, huh?” Guillermo’s fists were clenched.
“I’m telling you, man. I only just heard about it. I was in Nogales when you and the chica came in. I heard you asking about Carlos. That’s why I called.” The kid was flop-sweat-nervous, but I didn’t know if he was afraid of Guillermo’s temper or the Braceros’ retribution.
I heard two motorcycles approaching and walked quickly to the front window, my hand already on the gun in my purse. They were big bikes, all right, but not Braceros. Just two old white guys looking for the freeway entrance. I looked back at Guillermo and shook my head. The kid breathed a sigh of relief.
Guillermo threw some bills on the table. “Get yourself another beer.”
I joined him at the front door. He turned back to the kid and tapped his fist twice on his heart. “Thank you, man.” A gladiator’s salute.
Chapter Twenty-One
“The Red Tile place?” I asked once we were back in the parking lot.
“I’m not sure. Chaco’s uncle used to have a place on the east side of Tucson where we’d hang out when we came up from Nogales. God, I don’t know, it’s been ten years. I think it had a red-tile roof.”
“Can you find it again?”
“Maybe. But if Carlos is there, we’d have a better shot of taking him at night.”
The Braceros probably knew both our cars. That wouldn’t be so important in the dark, but if we were going to be cruising up and down their street in broad daylight, it might be a good idea to get another one.
We drove back to Bonita’s and picked up my sister’s VW. I drove, so that Guillermo could let his eyes wander across undeveloped, sagebrush-strewn lots and down dead-end streets. We circled the same blocks a dozen times before he found a neighborhood that looked familiar.
“Around here somewhere,” he said. “That dry Tanque Verde riverbed was north of the house. And it was on a short, narrow street. No sidewalks.”
Things had probably changed dramatically since he was last here. New houses were springing up like locoweed. Streets were wider and straighter now, in anticipation of a flock of new snowbirds moving south. But the view was still disheartening. Spray-painted gravel, brown grass, and thorns. A sea of one-story houses in dun colors, all bowed down by the sun and heat to the point where they seemed too weary to even get to their knees, let alone attempt a second floor.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a small house at the back of a narrow lot. I’d almost missed it between the chain-link fences on either side. The tile looked more faded terra-cotta than red, but it was the U-shaped tile they’d used on houses built in the first half of the last century. I let the engine idle.
“That’s it. Let’s circle the block and see if getting to the garage is easier that way.”
I made a left and then a left again, stopping where I thought we’d be aligned with the property on the next block. There was an empty lot, then a chain-link fence. Beyond that, a tarpaper roof littered with needles from the neighbor’s tamarisk tree.
“That could be the garage.”
Guillermo agreed. “And we won’t have to go past the house if we come this way.”
I marked our spot on a city map I found in the VW’s glove box, and we returned to Bonita’s house. We had at least six hours to kill before it would be dark enough to attempt our rescue.
“We ought to call the cops,” I said. “Tell them what you heard. Let them go check out the house.”
Guillermo shook his head. “Not until I know what Carlos is in the middle of. If it’s something the cops can pick him up for…” His voice drifted off. He still didn’t know if his little brother was the victim or the villain here.
Guillermo paced another lap from the front door to the back. “They may have had him for as much as a week and a half. I don’t know what we’re going to find—what kind of shape he’s going to be in.”
“You’ve got to be prepared for anything,” I said, mentally piling up the first-aid kit from my truck, a flashlight, the gun, maybe a sheet if we needed to create a makeshift gurney to carry Carlos back across the lot to the car. “Do you have a gun?”
He shook his head. “I gave that up with my other life.”
I pawed through the boxes in Bonita’s bedroom until I came up with a baseball bat. “Will this do? Or do you prefer a tire iron?”
He hefted the bat. “This’ll do fine. Plus a length of chain, if you have it. And some bolt cutters.”
I nodded. I’d always stocked my vehicles with the kind of stuff that would get my brothers out of whatever minor scrape they’d gotten into growing up. Need a tow? Call Jessie. Run out of gas? Call Jessie. Lost the key to the toolshed? Call Jessie. It was an old habit that was hard to break. I got the chain and the cutters from the truck.
Guillermo was on the phone when I came back in, giving someone Bonita’s address. “Can you be here by nine? And bring Little Joe with you.”
“Little Joe?”
“If that house is where they’re keeping Carlos, it’s going to take more than just the two of us to get him out. I’m calling in reinforcements.”
The reinforcements arrived with the darkness, in the shape of Guillermo’s cousins—Esteban, Miguel, and Joe. Miguel was the youngest—about eighteen—and the quietest. He squatted in a corner of the living room cleaning his fingernails with a sawtoothed switchblade. Esteban and Joe brought guns.
Little Joe was anything but little. He was ripped, with better muscle definition across the lats and delts than I had seen since the last Mr. Universe competition. Roid rash littered his cheeks and shoulders. His T-shirt proclaimed, PAIN IS JUST WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY.
“What’s the plan?” Esteban asked. “We go in loud or we go in quiet?” He had big sad eyes that made him look softer than his voice and his hands let on. A face begging for a scar.
“Quiet,” Guillermo replied. “They may just have a couple of guys at the house. If we can get in and out without them knowing it, all the better.”
We agreed to wait until after the bars had closed and the Braceros would likely be asleep. In the meantime, I went out for a sackful of burgers and fries. Guillermo and two of his cousins were playing cards on the floor when I returned. Miguel was still in the corner, now with his legs stretched out in front of him, drawing abstract patterns on Bonita’s carpet with the tip of the knife. I made a pot of coffee to keep us awake.
“Not hungry?” Guillermo asked his youngest cousin, seeing him rewrap and set aside two hamburgers.
“Saving ’em,” Miguel replied.
I rifled through my suitcase until I came up with a black sweatshirt and a pair of steel-toed Doc Martens I hadn’t worn for years. Ready for a night prowl.
At two-thirty, we loaded up. Little Joe took the eight-foot length of chain I’d found and sprawled out in the backseat of Guillermo’s Camaro. The other two got back in their black pickup and followed us out of the driveway.
The street we were on was quiet. We circled the house. No lights shown from either the front or the back. Guillermo pulled to the curb alongside the empty lot behind the property and we closed the car doors without a sound. The moon had set a couple of hours before; there were few shadows.
A dog started barking behind the fence on our right. A big dog. Loud. Miguel approached the fence and lobbed over one of his wrapped hamburgers. The dog shut up.
We went single file. Guillermo first, with Little Joe right behind. I was near the back of the line, with Miguel bringing up the rear. I pushed past a bushy creosote, releasing the smell of desert rain as I walked on.
Guillermo and Little Joe cut a four-foot slit through the chain-link fence at the back of the Braceros’ property and peeled the mesh up from the bottom. I ducked thr
ough and followed Esteban’s shadowy form toward the rectangular structure in front of us.
It was the size of a garage, all right, but more shedlike in its upkeep and age. Thin sheets of warped wood over a malnourished frame; tarpaper shingles, grayed with tamarisk needles and debris. Weeds grew knee high in the path from the house. If the driveway had been used recently, it wasn’t by a car.
A flashlight came on ahead of me, Guillermo shining the light on the garage door. Whatever he saw there required only a snip from the bolt cutters.
He had started to inch the door open when it smashed back against him. Three shadowy figures rushed out, one cracking Guillermo across the temple with a two-by-four, another swinging wildly at Esteban with a metal pipe. Little Joe went down in a pile with two guys wearing light-colored bandanas like masks across their faces. One of them stayed down when Little Joe rolled away.
“Puta!” Grunts. Cursing. But no lights and no gunfire.
I stepped to the left and kept the LadySmith in my hand. I didn’t want to be the first one to shoot, but I was ready to.
Guillermo had pushed his assailant back toward me and I sidestepped him. When the guy raised his slab of wood again, I planted my foot right behind his heel, pulled him backward, and sent him sprawling. He grabbed my ankle with his left hand, then slashed at my calf with his right. I felt the pain only after he let go. Cold and searing.
Rage traveled through me like a shot of tequila—rage against knives and strong hands. Against pain-givers everywhere. I kicked him in the head until he lay still.
Lights were on in the main house now, and more Braceros raced—shouting—out the door and toward the garage. Little Joe and Esteban fired toward the silhouetted figures. Three went down.
Guillermo and I rushed into the garage. He flashed the light in a circle—kaleidoscopic images of a rusted mower, four bald tires in a tottering pile, and three lawn chairs where the Braceros had waited. And at the back of the room, a slumped figure roped up against one of the support columns.
“Carlos!” Guillermo dropped the flashlight and ran to his brother.
The smell alone was enough to tell you he was dead. No wonder the Braceros had been wearing bandanas in here while they lay in wait for us.
I picked up the flashlight and followed, training it on the young man’s downturned face. His body was bloated and the skin was dark gray. His mouth was neutered by a ball gag. Guillermo scrabbled at the gag, pushing it at last under his brother’s chin. I set the flashlight on the floor to shine up and started in on the knot of ropes that held his hands trapped behind the post. The hemp was buried in the swollen, rotting flesh on his wrists.
“Use this,” Miguel said, offering me his switchblade. I sliced through the bonds and Carlos’s body slumped to the ground.
Guillermo took his brother’s face in his hands, his fingers sinking into the loose flesh like it was a Halloween pumpkin in December.
If he was searching for signs of a peaceful death, he would find none. Carlos’s face and chest were branded with blisters and cigarette burns. His tongue had been cut out before the gag was put in place. A bib of dried blood covered his chin and chest and the oily stench of decay rose from his body.
Miguel quietly picked up the switchblade from where I had dropped it and returned to the yard. Guillermo bowed his head and wept.
“Let’s get out of here,” Esteban said from the doorway. Guillermo wriggled his hands under Carlos’s body and tried to stand.
“Leave him,” I said. “We can’t help him now.”
“I can’t leave him. He’s my brother.” I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such hollow-eyed emptiness in a man’s face.
“The cops are probably on the way. They’ll take care of him.”
I teetered against the post, the pain of the slash across my calf finally reaching through the adrenaline. There was a six-inch slit in my Levi’s where the Bracero’s knife had found its target. I couldn’t see the cut, but my shoe was filling with blood.
Guillermo let me lead him out of the garage by the hand. Little Joe and Esteban were already at the fence, gesturing us to hurry. The lights were on at the houses on both sides, although with the gunfire no one dared to look out the windows.
Miguel took his time behind us. All but one of the Braceros had limped away into the night. Miguel approached the last fallen man and lifted his chin for a final slice. He wiped his knife off on his jeans.
I led Guillermo back to the car.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I drove Guillermo’s car and followed the cousins back toward town. They pulled to the curb at a small stucco house near the university. “This is Miguel’s place,” Esteban said. “Let’s get Guillermo inside.”
“No.” Guillermo fought to keep the car door closed. “I can’t.” His eyes were still glassy with loss. Esteban touched his forehead to Guillermo’s for a moment, then turned away. I drove us back to Bonita’s house.
“Turn on the lights,” Guillermo said. “All the lights.” I did as he asked, the little house blazing from back porch to front. It showed every empty corner, every old, faded, forgotten wish. It felt cold, the loss of a brother and innocence, of hope and a future already sadly realized.
I retrieved the first-aid kit from my truck and brought it back in. Shucking my jeans, I could see how lucky I was. The gash across my calf was long but not deep, and it had missed the tendon entirely. Guillermo cleaned the wound for me, then painted the flayed skin together with New-Skin and wrapped my leg in gauze. The injury didn’t merit more than a sharp intake of breath with every step, but then again, there’s more than one kind of pain.
I wished I had something stronger than beer in the house. Tequila, maybe. Absinthe. Heroin. Something to make time move backward.
“I’m so sorry.” I placed my hands on both sides of Guillermo’s face and forced him to look at me. The lump above his ear was hidden in his hair. I caressed it gently. The emptiness in his eyes had been replaced by ice.
He knocked my hands away, then streaked out one muscled forearm and grabbed my wrist. He forced me to the floor and jammed his hand into my crotch, then shuddered as if he’d awakened from a nightmare and rolled off me.
“I’m so sorry,” he echoed.
I didn’t need to reply. I understood that animal desire to prove you’re still alive, to drive death away when it had come so close. He’d stopped himself before the final act. He was still in control.
“The police will be looking for you when they identify Carlos’s body,” I said.
His chin ducked in acknowledgment.
“They have my blood at the scene.” I thought of my Doc Martens awash in blood, dripping onto the floor of the garage. “And our fingerprints for sure.”
He nodded again, but didn’t reply.
“What about your cousins?”
Guillermo rolled over, retrieved the cell phone from his pants pocket, and made a call. He rolled back into position when the call was done, his shoulder under my head.
“Joe may have a broken arm, but the other two are fine.”
“Tell them to get rid of their guns.” My crime cover-up skills were coming back to me.
“They know better than to keep them. But Miguel would be hard-pressed to lose that knife.”
The calm confidence with which Miguel had slit that last Bracero’s throat suggested a longtime tryst with the blade.
I marveled at the fact that, for one brief, metallic moment there in that shed, I had thought of calling the police. Let them see that the Braceros—at least one of them now dead—had killed Carlos Ochoa and were probably responsible for the deaths of Darren Markson and Felicia Villalobos as well. Before the thought could become action, however, I had done what any other criminal would have done. I ran.
When had I crossed that weathered threshold that divided the world between citizens and survivors? Between what we could be and what we are in our darkest hours?
I think it was the night that the woman from C
hildren’s Services reported back that they couldn’t find any evidence to support my claims of Racine’s danger to his great-niece. I’d felt like a diver whose air had been cut off. Silent. So scared for Katie.
I’d picked up a fist-sized stone and heaved it through the woman’s car window. The glass shattered inward, like my faith in the safe world of citizens. A world where police and counselors and arrest warrants could stop bad things from happening to little girls. A world I could no longer count on.
“I have to tell my mom about Carlos,” Guillermo said as the sun finally parted the slatted blinds.
I put my finger across his lips. “Not until the police come by. You have to hear it from them first.”
“I can’t—”
“It won’t be long.”
I got up to put on a pot of coffee. It wouldn’t take much time for the cops to match the corpse’s fingerprints to those of the missing man whose car had been found at the dog track. Would they start the ID right away or wait until they had processed the whole crime scene? How long would it be before they found my fingerprints on the wooden post next to the ropes that had held Carlos or matched my blood to that pooled next to his body?
I handed Guillermo a mug. “Where will you be?”
“At Carlos’s house.” He still seemed a half step behind the danger.
“We’ll need to get our stories straight. The phone records will show the call to your cousin. My neighbors may remember their truck, or hearing their voices here last night.”
He nodded but I wasn’t sure that he was listening.
“So that’s the story. You and your cousins came over here to play cards. We’re not sure what time it wrapped up—maybe eleven or twelve. We don’t know anything else.”
“I’ll tell the others.” He fingered his car keys like they were a puzzle to him.
I watched him walk to his car, spine stiff and head steady, but with a hesitation in his step, as if his world had gone off plumb and he couldn’t quite get his balance.
