Borderline

by Nevada Barr

Anna let it go for the moment. “So Freddy thinks Mayor Pierson is the devil incarnate,” she said.

  Lisa was so grateful for the subject change she sprang panther-like upon the new topic. “We have relatives in Houston and Corpus Christi. My sister’s nieces on her husband’s side went to school with Judith. She was known as The Piranha in high school because she ate up everything that came near her: boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers. Anita—that’s my sister—said her niece said Judith rigged the election so she could be voted student body president then made sure she was on all the scholarship stuff so she could suck up to the various civic organizations that gave out that kind of thing. Made out like a bandit, I guess, but didn’t graduate with too many friends.

  “My sister got to know her when she was on the city council and there was no love lost there. Judith was a climber. She’d grab on to any idea that was on the rise, not bother to do the work involved, take the credit if it worked and say she’d never been for it if it failed. She was quick to lay blame around too.

  “Freddy and I met her just one time at a fundraiser. We rode my sister’s coattails in for the free food and champagne, something to do while we were visiting Houston is all. Judith had recently been elected mayor and was in full blow at the party since it was all cronies of hers. She got on a roll about how she was making Texas a shining example of an impermeable border, that she was going to keep the Mexicans and their dirty drug wars from threatening the good citizens of Texas if she had to build the wall with her own hands.

  “She wanted to get going building her persona, be the aggressive woman who wasn’t too fancy to get her hands dirty. It was all hot air. Every waiter at the party was Mexican. The boy parking the fancy cars was Mexican. The caterer was Mexican and most of the hotel staff working the event were Mexican. If she closed even the borders of her own shindig her high-end contributors would have jumped ship. Those guys don’t want to clean their own toilets. Shoot, if she closed down the borders that tight, who would she get to build her wall? A bunch of boys from A&M?”

  “Freddy didn’t take the hot air well?” Anna asked drily.

  “Not so well,” Lisa said. “Since his sister—” She stopped herself and got suddenly very busy with Edgar, who was sound asleep and didn’t want to be tucked and jostled.

  “‘ Since his sister died,’ was that what you were going to say?” Anna asked gently.

  “He still has bad feelings about that,” Lisa mumbled.

  “And after his sister died—in a motorcycle accident, you said?”

  “I think so.” Lisa was so busy with Edgar’s blanket he was beginning to wake up and kick.

  “After she died Freddy became politically active about the closing of the border between Big Bend and Mexico?”

  Lisa gave up. Edgar was whimpering testily. She lifted him to her shoulder. “Why don’t you talk to Freddy about this?” she said helplessly.

  “Freddy’s sister was named Gabriela, wasn’t she?”

  Lisa nodded.

  “She tried to cross the Rio Grande after the World Trade Center was bombed and border patrol turned her back. She lost her footing and she and the baby drowned?”

  “Freddy went a little crazy. He wouldn’t stop looking until they found her body. After that, opening the border again kind of became a crusade with him.”

  “Why didn’t he tell anyone she was his sister?” Anna asked.

  Lisa sighed. For some, telling lies or evading the truth was easy. For Lisa it must have been a task that would have exhausted Sisyphus. In the short time she’d been trying to skirt around this truth she’d grown more drawn and haggard than the entire invasion of the baby snatchers had rendered her.

  “Because she was a Mexican national,” Lisa said. “She was crossing the border illegally to have her child in America.”

  “Freddy was ashamed of that?” Anna hadn’t known Freddy then but it seemed so out of character it was hard to believe he had changed so much.

  “No. It was a long time ago. Freddy was on with the park like he’d always wanted to be. His mom and I talked him into leaving it alone.”

  “Because if they looked too close . . .” Anna nudged.

  “Freddy wasn’t a citizen when he got on with the park. He didn’t get citizenship until we got married. So he was a citizen when his sister died but Mama Martinez and I thought the park might fire him anyway, because he’d fooled them, fooled the authorities all his life.”

  Anna nodded without speaking.

  Of the many things bureaucrats could forgive, being made to look the fool was not among them.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Judith was coming apart. The crying jag after Charles made his announcement hadn’t bothered Darden, except that Judith was in a lot of pain. She was given to outbursts of emotion, in private. High-strung, hard-driving people needed a safe place to vent. Darden had been the “safe” place for more than one big cheese. Men raged. Women raged and wept.

  What was gnawing at him was her secrecy. Judith was keeping something from him.

  He knew it the way wives know their husbands are running around on them. Darden was an expert on secrets. He’d kept the secrets of presidents and first ladies, ambassadors and their wives; once he even conspired with a presidential child to keep secret the fact that his presidential puppy had chewed the fringe of an historic White House rug. Some secrets invested one with a sense of hidden powers, some with a private delight, but most were akin to the Spartan boy’s fox; the closer they were held the more damage they did to the one holding them.

  Judith’s was eating her alive. During breakfast with Anna Pigeon he could sense the cracks widening. Though Judith did a masterful job of hiding it, he suspected Anna had noticed her brittleness and he was positive Gerry had. Gerry missed very little. He could almost see her nose twitching as she munched her toast and jelly and she watched Judith the way a cat watches a bird hopping closer and closer on the windowsill.

  Judith had been on her satellite phone most of the night after the rafting party was brought in from Santa Elena Canyon; he could hear her through the wall—not the words but the intensity with which they were spoken.

  Then there was Kevin. Not twenty-four hours after demanding his head on a platter they had apparently patched up whatever had put her in a firing mood.

  And the baby. Judith didn’t have any interest in babies until they were old enough to vote. Was she trying to show Charles that she had a maternal side after all? The baby had become a bigger problem than Darden anticipated.

  He realized he’d stopped in the middle of the parking lot between the lodge and the motel units, a target for any passing vehicle. He didn’t know where he was going, didn’t know what to do with himself: a soldier without an army, a bee without a hive.

  “Talk about falling apart,” he muttered, and forced himself to move. He didn’t get far, but cleared the parking lot and sat on a bench without a view in a patch of desert that had been trampled to death on a strip of dirt between the cars and the downstairs units.

  Twenty minutes later, when Gordon appeared in bright red jogging shorts and no shirt running smartly down the asphalt, he was still sitting there. Darden watched him coming around the bend from the cabins and remembered when daily fitness training had been a part of his life. He should get back to it. He should get up and out of the sun before his brain fried. As these thoughts petered out, he wondered if he’d had one of those tiny strokes doctors talked about, TIAs, transient ischemic attacks, they called them. That might account for the fact that his mind and body had short-circuited in a parking lot on top of the middle of nowhere.

  Gordon saw him and veered, jogging over to the bench where Darden had come to rest.

  “Hey, boss, you okay?”

  Gordon was jogging in place, keeping up the pace. It annoyed Darden. “Sit down,” he ordered.

  Gordon sat. He pulled the threadbare hotel towel from around his neck and mopped his face and chest, then laughed. “In Houston I’d be wringing
this thing out. Up here the sweat dries before I get to it.”

  “Yeah,” Darden said absently.

  Gordon waited patiently, his muscles growing cold, his workout disrupted. Finally Darden spoke. “What’s with Judith and Kevin? I don’t want the nitty-gritty, but if there’s anything I need to know, tell me.”

  Gordon didn’t answer right away and Darden wondered if he was worried about being a tattletale. “I’m not sure what you mean, boss,” he said after a moment.

  “Don’t make me spell it out,” Darden said wearily. “It’s my job to protect Judith, even if that means protecting her from herself occasionally.”

  Gordon continued to look confused.

  Darden sighed heavily. “Is Kevin sleeping with Judith?” he forced himself to ask since Gordon was intentionally or unintentionally not picking up on the hints.

  “Boss, Kevin’s gay. Didn’t you know that? I’m not ratting him out or anything, he doesn’t flaunt it but he doesn’t go out of his way to keep it a secret either.”

  That penetrated Darden’s fog. “Kevin’s gay?” he said stupidly. “He doesn’t look gay.”

  Gordon shot him a look.

  “Right. Sorry,” Darden said.

  “Is this going to be a problem, boss?”

  “No. I don’t care who he sleeps with as long as it doesn’t adversely affect the mayor’s agenda.” Firing Kevin was a bad idea but Darden had to get rid of him. Divided loyalties didn’t work in his business.

  Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and stared at the bit of dry dirt between his feet. A single ant was crossing the space in a straight line as if it had places to go and people to meet. He envied the bug. It had a sense of purpose.

  “Have you got any idea what’s going on with those two?” Sharing his ignorance with an underling—yet another sign it was time to retire.

  Gordon mopped his dry body again, something to do while he thought. Darden hoped he wasn’t thinking up lies or excuses. After a life of manufacturing them for various people, he had little patience with those who lied to him.

  “Not really, boss,” Gordon said. “He’s pretty close-lipped. Not much of a conversationalist. He may be gay and all but he’s not what you’d call sensitive. One of the big drawbacks to this job as he sees it is the lack of automatic weapons.”

  Darden laughed shortly. There wasn’t enough air in the air up in the Chisos to laugh for any length of time. This mess was making him bone tired in a way it wouldn’t have even two years ago. Untwisting the twists and wrinkles entangling those in power had once invigorated him. Maybe one had to be young to find the thrill in the seamier side of life. More and more he longed for his sunny kitchen, spices in pots on the deep window bay over the sink, the comforting hum of traffic coming through the tiny yard from the street.

  Old man stuff. Sixty-three was too young to let the rocking chair get him but that’s what he wanted. He’d do what he had to—whatever he had to—to straighten out this last kink in the tangle of dirty businesses, then he would retire to a good, clean, quiet life.

  I’m as bad as a con getting Jesus, he thought wryly.

  Darden sat with that for a while. The ant had made it as far as his right shoe and was looking for a pass in this mighty mountain that had been dropped into its landscape. A shift of his weight and Darden could end its life. He’d killed before: spiders, mosquitoes, roaches, wasps, people. This was the first time it had occurred to him that these pests had lives. Not that he suffered guilt for ending them; he just realized how amazing they were. An ant, a creature so small he would have trouble seeing it without his glasses, and it could do all these amazing things. Military geniuses couldn’t build anything as complicated and functional as a lousy ant and yet half the fools didn’t believe in God and the other half thought they were smarter than Him.

  “Finish your workout,” he said to Gordon as he heaved himself up from the bench.

  “What are you going to do, boss?” The concern in Gordon’s voice both touched and annoyed Darden.

  “I’m going to get a massage and a pedicure,” he replied, and walked away, enjoying the look of consternation he’d left on the younger man’s face.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The sheriff’s deputy had come and gone. A gas station owner in Study Butte reported he’d found the banged-up Malibu abandoned behind his grocery-cum-gas-station. Either the two would-be kidnappers had stolen another vehicle that was as yet unreported—not that unusual in a town where tourists routinely left cars unattended for days while they camped or rafted—or they had a compatriot come and pick them up. The car was impounded in the sheriff’s barn. Anna doubted there was a Terlingua CSI. Trace evidence, even fingerprints, might not be collected.

  Lisa had taken Edgar and gone to Study Butte to pick up a few groceries and, Anna suspected, to be free of the house where monsters had so recently been. Anna and Helena stayed behind with the intention, at least on the former’s part, to straighten up the place before Lisa returned, to make it normal again. After the horrors her presence had brought down on the Martinez family, it was the least she could do.

  She didn’t even manage that.

  She was still sitting in the kitchen, Helena clasped in tired arms, her left leg going to sleep, staring at the dregs of cold coffee in a festive mug with a handle fashioned in the image of a lariat, when she heard a car pull up in front of the house.

  Feet crunched on gravel, then came a loud rapping on the screen door. A caller who knocked rather than kicking in the door. Still Anna stashed Helena in Edgar’s crib. The carving knife that had served her so well with previous visitors had been taken by the deputy. She found a replacement before she answered the door.

  “Darden,” she said with surprise. The mayor of Houston’s chief of security was the last person she’d expected.

  “Mind if I come in?” he asked.

  Anna stepped away, opening the screen door as she did.

  Before he’d crossed the lintel he stopped. Alarms must have been clanging in his head. His shoulders straightened and readiness momentarily overruled the tired slump he’d arrived with. In that instant Anna realized how different he looked from the man with whom she’d breakfasted. Gone was the jauntiness; the age and slowness he pretended to were no longer pretense. Exhaustion dragged down the flesh beneath his eyes and the eyes themselves housed a fatigue so deep it was as if days of sleeplessness and worry had elapsed in the seven hours that passed for the rest of the world.

  “This must have been quite a party,” he said, taking in the shattered lamps and the overturned furniture.

  “It had its moments,” Anna conceded.

  His vision narrowed to Anna standing quietly by his left shoulder, to the butcher knife in her hand, and she saw shock widen his eyes. He wasn’t scared of her, she guessed; he was scared of himself. Mr. Security Guy hadn’t noticed an edged weapon inches from his femoral artery.

  “Chopping vegetables?” His dry wit was back, but there was a weariness to it.

  “Come on into the kitchen,” Anna said. “I can offer you reheated coffee and a straight-backed chair.”

  “That would be good,” Darden said absently. His eyes were searching the small front room, looking for something.

  “Through there.” Not yet comfortable having anyone behind her, she used the butcher knife to point to the archway on the left.

  Darden smiled at the knife but said nothing as he preceded her into the kitchen. While she poured a mug full of cold coffee and put it in the microwave, he gave the kitchen the same scrutiny as he had the living room, taking in the broken crockery and tumbled phone table.

  “What happened here?” he asked as she set the nuked coffee in front of the chair he had finally settled in.

  Anna told him.

  If he was surprised that two impostors had come to take the river baby by guile or force, he didn’t show it. “Ah” was all he said and: “Where is the baby?”

  Anna didn’t want to tell him. Suddenly
she didn’t trust him any more than she had trusted the two fake social workers. Before she could make up a convincing lie, Helena decided to make her location known and began to cry. Darden’s exhaustion lifted momentarily, his interest pricking like that of a hound catching scent of its quarry.

  “She’s sleeping,” Anna said.

  “Pretty noisy sleeper,” Darden replied, and took a sip of his coffee. A hint of a grimace flickered on his face but he managed to quell it.

  Helena’s crying went from whimpering on awakening to full-fledged shrieking for service. After scarcely thirty seconds, Anna could take no more.

  “Excuse me,” she said. Moving into the short hall of the West Wing, she took the butcher knife from where she’d laid it down by the coffeepot. Again there was a wisp of a smile on Darden’s face.

  He nodded at the knife. “That should teach her to be quiet.”

  Anna couldn’t tell if he was joking. She was supposed to think he was joking. Black humor was her favorite kind but after a number of homicides and a violent interaction with Danny, she’d pretty much lost her sense of humor about knives and babies.

  She backed into the hall then turned and walked quickly away. What might have been a chuckle followed her. She didn’t care. It was better to make a fool of oneself than a corpse of oneself.

  Helena stopped crying the moment Anna leaned over the crib. The honor was as great as that of having a cat choose her lap above all others, and Anna smiled down at the wriggling bit of humanity. “I guess cute is a survival tool for people too small and toothless to fight for their food,” she said. Carrying both knife and baby wasn’t practical and, like countless generations of women before her, Anna put down the weapon to pick up the child. Holding Helena, Anna was overcome with fear. She couldn’t remember if she’d been afraid when she was facing Danny. Remembering how immense he had seemed, how it was as if he’d filled all the space in the room, she knew she must have been. In the bottom of Santa Elena, when the rifleman was shooting at them, she must have felt terror. That seemed so infinitely long ago now that she couldn’t remember the fear, only the action.