by Jeff Miller
The bartender smiled, then stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. A couple of large men rose from one of the tables and started toward them. “Take this guy to your bosses,” the bartender said, digging the bill out of Diego’s hand.
Both of the men were taller than Diego. They were wider and stronger, too. One of them wrapped his hand around Diego’s arm and pulled him toward the door. This, he realized, was the point of no return.
Once outside the bar, the second man became impatient with his limping and grabbed his other arm to hurry him along. The two trotted him through a maze of back alleys. If their intention was to confuse him about his whereabouts, it was working.
They stopped in front of a long, narrow building made of unpainted cinderblocks. There were no windows on the building and no words or numbers on its walls—just a steel door and a small metal box hanging to the right of it. One of the oafs pushed a button on the box and said the word calico. The door buzzed, and the other oaf pushed it open.
A third oaf patted him down on the other side of the door. The microphone in his belt buckle escaped detection. This was a relief.
They pushed him through a long, narrow hallway that wound left and right. Along the way, they passed a number of rooms, each filled with bunk beds and oafs, all with various armaments strapped to parts of their bodies. They craned their necks as Diego was shoved past them. He was in a heavily armed, dangerous concrete fortress. If he screamed “Cincinnati,” there was nothing Dagny could do. “A lot of people here,” he muttered.
There was a red door at the end of the hall. The first oaf knocked on it and pushed it open. A small man sat behind a metal desk, sifting through paper. He had a black mustache and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. It took more than a minute before he looked up, and when he did, he nodded toward the chair across from him. Oaf Two planted Diego in this chair.
The man set his cigarette in the ashtray and studied Diego. “Es esta una especie de broma.” An oaf closed the door and locked it, and then both oafs stood behind Diego with their arms crossed.
It wasn’t a good start. “I’m sorry?”
“Is this some kind of joke?” he repeated. “And now, you are crippled?”
“I can hobble,” Diego said, confused. “But I can’t hobble across the desert. I heard that you can assist my travel.”
The man scrutinized him. “It’s been, what? A month? We fulfilled our obligation. You were delivered to the States without incident. What happens after that is out of our control.”
“I think there has been a misunderstanding,” Diego said. “I have never been here before. Perhaps you have confused me with someone else.”
The man studied him some more, and then picked up his cigarette. “My apologies. I have made a mistake. Tell me what you want.”
“I have family in Ohio. You’ve seen the news? Things are dangerous for them now, and I need to be there for them.”
“You want to go to Ohio?”
“Yes.”
The man studied him some more. “He went to Ohio, too.”
“Who?”
“Why do you want to go to a place where people like you are killed?”
“Because I have family there. They need me.”
“Then they should move, don’t you think?”
“I can pay you for safe transport. Can you guarantee me safety in Ohio?”
“For you?”
“And for my family.”
The man smiled. “What is your name?”
“Paco.”
“Paco, are you a wealthy man?”
“I have money.”
“How much?”
“I have two thousand dollars.”
“Let me see it.”
Diego dug into his pocket and pulled out his stack of bills. He held it up for the man to see.
“Very good, Paco.” The man gestured toward an oaf, who reached down and ripped the money from his hand.
“Does that mean you will take me?”
The man leaned back in his chair, grabbed his cigarette, and took a drag. “Six thousand dollars. Consider this your deposit.”
“Six?” He tried to strike the right tone: believable outrage, expressed cautiously. “Six thousand?”
“That is the price, Paco. If you got two, you can get another four, can’t you?”
This was an opportunity to leave the building alive, but he hadn’t come to survive a rite of passage—he had come for information. “What do I get for six?”
“You get to Ohio safely.”
“And once there? Will my family be protected?”
“There are no guarantees.”
Diego sat back in his chair and studied the man. “I heard that the people you’ve delivered to the States have been spared from the massacre. I thought maybe you had some kind of connection that protected your clients.”
The man smiled. “And this you believed?”
“I hoped it was true.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think I can help you, Paco. I’m afraid it’s time for my men to show you the door.” He deposited the money in a drawer, and one of the oafs pulled Diego up from his chair.
He knew he needed to stay in the room if he was going to get any more information. “I can get you ten thousand dollars, if you can guarantee protection. If you can keep my family safe.”
The man pointed back to the chair, and the oaf shoved Diego down into it.
“You can’t get ten thousand dollars.”
“It will take a few days, but if you can guarantee safety, I will get it.”
“I’ll tell you what, Paco. If you get us fifty thousand dollars, I will guarantee safety.”
“That’s too much,” Diego said, feigning anguish. “I can’t get that much.”
“Your family wants to be safe. I’m sure their friends do, too. If they can gather fifty thousand dollars, I will guarantee their safety.”
“How?”
“By killing the man behind the massacre.” He said it with the cadence and manner of a man capable of doing it.
“You can do that?”
“Of course I can.”
“Who is he?” Since the morning of his goats-and-sheep sermon, Diego had been looking for someone who could answer that question.
The man shook his head.
“I might be able to get fifty thousand from the community in Ohio,” Diego said. “A lot of people will give some, and a few people will give a lot, to make this monster go away. But if I’m going to convince people to send me their money, I’m going to need to persuade them that it will work.” He hoped it was convincing.
The man sat silent for a moment. “The man killing people in Ohio used to place our clients in employment. He no longer works for us but has enough sense to know that he should not cross us. That is why our customers have been safe.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“Of course.”
Diego decided to push him a little further. “Can you tell me where he lives?”
“Paco, you are looking for safety, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps you should stop asking questions.”
“Can you give me a description of him? So that I can pass it along to my family, so they can keep clear? Is he Mexican?”
“Do not try my patience.”
Diego had to keep trying; they needed more information. “Isn’t my two thousand dollars worth at least that?”
The man reached into his bottom desk drawer. Diego hoped it was to retrieve his money, but instead the man pulled out a gun. He cocked it and pointed it at Diego. If there were any way for Dagny to rescue him, this was the moment he would have screamed “Cincinnati.”
“I use this gun to clean up problems, Paco. Don’t become a problem. Come back in a week with fifty thousand dollars. Don’t disappoint me.” He gestured to the oafs, who pulled Diego up from his chair. One of them flicked the locks on the door.
Diego looked back at the man. He took another
drag on his cigarette and blew a puff of smoke. “Tell them to watch out for a thin man.” He laughed as the oafs dragged Diego from the office.
CHAPTER 56
Her high school Spanish was good enough for her to follow highly enunciated, slowly articulated sentences, but most of what Dagny heard came so fast it sounded like gibberish. There was, she knew, lots of talk about dollars. And then, at the end, there was the word pistola—spoken plain and clear—and she knew that meant gun. Her heart, already racing, was pounding after that, and it continued to pound until a couple of minutes later, when she heard Diego’s voice in her earpiece. “I’m out of there, Dagny. Everything is okay.”
Studying the GPS monitor, Dagny logged the coordinates of Diablo Rico’s headquarters, and then watched Diego’s dot traverse the map. It took twenty-two minutes for that dot to return to the lot where she was parked, but it felt like hours. She climbed to the back of the van and threw open the doors as Diego was opening the gate.
He hopped into the back of the truck and smiled at her. “I’m glad that’s over,” he said, hugging her.
Behind him, a white pickup truck stopped in front of the open gate, blocking any exit. Four large men stood in the back of the truck. “You were followed,” Dagny said.
The men in the back of the truck drew guns. She pushed Diego down and pulled the van door closed as they started to fire. “I didn’t know!” he yelled over the sound of the bullets pounding the back of the van.
Dagny climbed into the driver’s seat. “Hold on!” she yelled back, turning on the van and shifting to reverse. “We’re going to crash.”
With her eyes fixed on the rear-camera display on the dashboard screen, she floored the accelerator, hurtling the van toward the pickup. “Oh, please, dear Lord,” Diego muttered, crouched to the floor.
The van smashed into the pickup, spinning it ninety degrees and knocking the men down. She turned the steering wheel, threw the car into drive, and accelerated away.
Glancing at the side-view mirror, Dagny watched them back into a driveway and turn around to give chase. She pushed the button to roll down her window, grabbed her gun from its holster, and slammed on the brakes. Leaning out the window, she fired at the pickup’s tires. A shot hit the front-left wheel, and the pickup careened into an iron fence by the side of the road.
Dagny hit the accelerator, turned onto a six-lane roadway, and forced her way through the traffic by charging among cars and forcing them to cede the road. Diego climbed into the front passenger seat. “You’re scaring me,” he said.
“I’d rather dodge traffic than bullets.”
She saw a Matamoros police car ahead of her and pulled off onto a residential street, squeezing between the cars parked on each side. When she got to the end of the block, she saw the white pickup pull onto the street in her rearview mirror.
“Nothing is easy.” She turned left at an intersection, then right at the next one, barreling down a narrow street that ran between the gray-concrete walls of two abandoned factories.
“I’m sorry, Dagny. I really thought I was convincing.”
They passed an alley on the left side of the road. She slammed on her brakes, put the car into reverse, and backed into the alley.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“Going on offense again.” She heard the screeching of the tires. With buildings on both sides of the alley, she couldn’t see who was coming, but she guessed it was Diablo Rico in the white pickup. She put the car in drive, slammed her foot against the accelerator, and propelled the van toward the street. Her timing was right—the pickup was crossing in front of them, and the van shoved it against the concrete wall on the other side of the street. Dagny backed up, straightened the van, and took off. As she turned the corner, she watched the stationary pickup disappear from their view.
She looked at Diego, who was shaking. It seemed like a reasonable response to what had happened.
They took the most meandering path they could back to the lot where they had deposited their rental car, and she permitted Diego to open the gate only after she was certain they had lost their tail. After driving in the lot and closing the gate, he changed back to his regular attire. They cleaned up the inside of the van. There was nothing they could do to clean up the outside. Smashed headlights, folded hood. Broken rear bumper, dented doors. About fifty indentations, some with compacted bullets still inside them. Dagny wrote a note and left it on the driver’s seat:
Sorry about the damage; it was worse for the other guys. Will try to make you whole.
She had no idea how to make McGilligan whole.
They hopped into their rental and backed out of the lot. As they drove toward Brownsville, she scanned the streets, searching for any sign of Diablo Rico.
“You’re still nervous,” Diego said.
“It’s easier to shake a tattoo than these guys,” she said. They’d been in Mexico for less than eight hours, but it felt like a month.
The backup at the border looked like it might take another month. She eased the Impala into the line, craning her neck to find the front. There were at least fifty cars ahead of them. She turned on the radio and scanned her way through the stations until she found an NPR newscast.
Bilford was still the top story, except now it wasn’t about eightysome Mexican boys—it was about the disappearance of Allison Jenkins, the beautiful up-and-coming newscaster from Dayton, Ohio. “They finally have a white girl to carry on about,” Diego said.
Twenty minutes of talk about Jenkins revealed only two facts. First, she was missing. Second, her cell phone had been found, smashed in the middle of a road. The rest was backstory, speculation, and a meta-examination about why her disappearance was overshadowing the deaths of the undocumented young men found in the silo.
Slowly, they inched forward in line. Dagny kept looking in the rear mirror for a banged-up white pickup, holding her breath until the man at the Mexican checkpoint waved them along.
Diego sighed relief. “It feels good to be home.”
They weren’t home yet. Although they had passed through the Mexican checkpoint, the US checkpoint was still six cars ahead. A young border agent approached their car. She wore a black vest emblazoned with the letters CBP and a gold badge pinned to the front. A gun and other tools of the trade hung on her belt. She bent down next to Dagny’s window and motioned for her to unroll it. Dagny obliged.
“Headed to the United States?”
Where else would she be heading? “Yes,” Dagny said, reaching for her wallet.
The border agent held up her hand. “No need yet. You’ll do that when you get to the station.” She looked at Diego. “Visiting our country?”
“My country,” he said.
She smiled. “Of course. Anyway, just wanted to let you guys know that you’ve been selected for a random canine examination. I’ll be bringing Cassandra over to your car to sniff around it.” She left and came back with a leashed German shepherd that she led around the car. Dagny watched the dog as it sniffed the car’s exterior, poking her nose in the wheel wells, the undercarriage, and along all the car’s openings. When the dog was done, the agent handed the leash to a colleague and motioned for Dagny to roll down the window again.
“Okay, just to let you know, the dog signaled that there are drugs present in your car, so we have probable cause to search the vehicle. I’m going to have you two come with me to a holding area while we execute the search.”
“The dog didn’t alert for any drugs,” Dagny said. “I watched her.” She was well acquainted with the training of canines by law enforcement.
“She passively alerted to the presence of narcotics in your vehicle, ma’am. At this time, I’m going to need the two of you to step outside this car.”
A male border agent walked over to Diego’s side of the car. His hand was resting on the grip of his holstered gun.
Passive alerts were only used for bomb detection; canines were trained to bark aggressively if they detected drugs.
“You’re lying,” Dagny said. “Presumably because my friend is Hispanic, and you’re profiling him.”
“Ma’am, if you’re not willing to cooperate, we will pull you from this vehicle. Any further obstruction will lead to criminal charges.”
Dagny pulled her FBI creds from her pocket and flashed them for the agent. “We’ve had a long day. Please let us through.”
The woman shook her head. “Again, ma’am, for the last time, I’m going to ask you to get out of the car.”
Dagny looked at Diego, and then opened her door and stepped out of the car. He followed suit.
“Please follow Agent Jasper to the border station, where you can wait during the search of your vehicle.”
“I’m going to stand right here and witness the search of my vehicle.”
“Again, I’m going to have to ask you—”
“I’m going to stay right here,” Dagny said firmly, “unless you want to be charged with impeding my investigation of a crime.”
“What crime is that?” the woman said.
“Illegal searches and seizures on the border. Profiling of citizens based upon skin color. Planting of evidence.”
“There’s no planting of evidence,” the woman protested.
“That’s what I need to witness. If you obstruct me in this investigation, I’ll arrest you right now,” Dagny said.
“Fine,” the woman grunted. She reached into the car and pushed the buttons to pop the trunk and hood of the car. Along with her male colleague, she rifled through the car, lifting up upholstery and permitting Cassandra to sniff throughout. While they searched, the other cars drove into the country without canine examination.
After two passes through the car, the border agent gave up. “There appear to be no drugs at this time,” she said. “It must have been some marijuana shake from past usage that Cassandra noticed. Not uncommon for rental cars.”
“You should be ashamed. This is all a charade,” Dagny said, gesturing to the entirety of the checkpoint.
“This ‘charade’ is what keeps our country safe,” the woman sneered.
“You have no idea what keeps our country safe. You can’t even imagine.” Dagny climbed back into the car and motioned for Diego to do the same. They drove up to the checkpoint stand and were waved through the border crossing.
