Stalking Moon

by Неизвестный

  “You've arrested the wrong person,” I said again, although less convincingly as Taá began laying out sheets of paper. The man walked around the table and pulled out a chair for me.

  “Look. I don't have time to be nice. It'll just be easier for all of us if you sit down. Because of the light. Some of these are old-fashioned photostats, hard to read. And I want you to be able to read them all. But I don't have much time, and if I have to, I'll be the sorriest hardass you've ever had to deal with.”

  I sat. Taá pushed a photograph in front of me. It was a jail photo of me taken in 1983 in the Yakima county jail. I was stunned, but tried not to show it.

  “Who is this?”

  Taá carefully placed an arrest record beside the photograph. Emily Gorowicz. I couldn't even remember using that name, and wondered what kind of drugs I was on to pick a name like Emily.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “What am I doing here?”

  “Ah! Who am I? A twenty-five-year-old Native American activist who turned left down a bad road and got arrested for shoplifting. Look at some more documents.”

  I swept the photo and arrest record off the table. Taá bent gracefully to pick them up and positioned them in exactly the same spot in front of me. I swept them off again. Taá started to kneel, but the man held out his right hand.

  “Fair enough, if it will stop you from Uttering. My name is Michael Dance. I'm Assistant United States Attorney, head of the Tucson US Attorney's office. Let's cut to the chase.”

  “The bottom line,” Nasso said with a smile. “The top of the flagpole.”

  Dance ignored him.

  “Look at the last of my goodies.”

  Taá carefully placed a color copy of an Arizona driver's license in front of me.

  “Laura Winslow,” Dance said.

  Taá positioned another driver's license copy, positioning it exactly so that the tops of the two pieces of paper lined up horizontally.

  “Laura Winslow, meet Laura Marana.”

  My heart sank. My stomach shriveled so quickly I thought I was going to throw up. He must have understood my grimace, because he moved back two steps.

  “And the last of the three,” he said as Taá slid the two papers aside and meticulously put a third paper between them. “Laura Cabeza.”

  He moved quickly to my side, bending over, studying the three license photographs.

  “Winslow. Longish light brown hair. Marana. Hair much darker, much longer. And Cabeza, well, were you wearing a blond wig for this photograph?”

  “Three different women,” I said.

  Taá began laying out more papers in three piles above the licenses. Dance waited impatiently until she was done.

  “We know who you are, Laura. Who you are and what you are.”

  He put his hands on the arms of my chair and in one swift motion wrenched it sideways to face him. He bent down and looked at my face. I kept my eyes on the table.

  “Look at me. Look at me!”

  I didn't move. He held out both hands: what can I do? Taá lined up seven pieces of paper below the licenses.

  “These are federal arrest warrants. This first one, over here on the left, goes back to when you were fifteen. At Pine Ridge, where two FBI men were murdered. The next, well, you do see what I've got here, Laura?”

  “What have you got?” I said faintly.

  “Your life.”

  He leaned forward, as though he'd been waiting for this moment.

  “Give it up, Laura,” Jake said. “You don't remember me at all. But Rey once showed me your picture, told me your name was Laura Marana.”

  Nasso saw my startled look.

  “What you don't know about Jake,” Dance said, “is that before he joined the US Marshal service, he spent twenty years in the Border Patrol.”

  “Yeah. I also knew your friend Rey,” he said to me. “Until eleven months ago.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “Somewhere in Mexico,” Nasso said. “We worked together for about two months, just after he nearly killed two other officers and quit the Patrol. Before he met you and Miguel Zepeda.”

  “What is he doing in Mexico?”

  “He comes north, three, four times a year. Runs SWAT team exercises for quick solutions to problems like, say, another Columbine High School.”

  “How long since you've seen him? How is he?”

  Nasso thought for a moment, but decided not to say anything more.

  “What do you want?” I asked Dance.

  “Ah. What do I want? Do you think I have any interest in prosecuting you for those old, sad crimes?”

  Actually, that's exactly what I thought. The only good piece of news so far was that none of these people knew where Rey lived.

  “Yes. Of course. I will prosecute you. Taá is a US Marshal. She will take you into custody immediately, if I say so. Or not.”

  I took a deep breath and settled against the hard, curved back of the wooden chair. Dance saw this and clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

  “So what do you want?” I asked him again.

  I looked at all the papers and slumped and nodded.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Ah!” He was delighted and moved quickly to the other end of the table. “Good. That part is settled. You're an expert at creating different identities. Not just an expert, a genius. You're as good as it gets with fake IDs. But Jesus Christ, Laura, why didn't you realize that almost all of them over the past ten years have the same first name?”

  I smiled to myself, shaking my head.

  “I thought of that once. To be honest, I just got tired of trying to learn different first names. How did you find me?”

  “I work with computers,” Taá said. “Just like you, I find people. When we recognized that you always used the same first name, Laura, I started running possibilities of what your new last name might be. One of the programs I ran suggested that you might be using names of Arizona cities. I set up a database of all the cities, the towns, the ghost towns, the crossroads, the last little bits of civilization in the state. I ran that database against social security numbers, driver's licenses, mortgages, credit cards, everything for a woman with the first name Laura. I had a master list ready for all law enforcement personnel.”

  “As it turns out,” Dance said, “we didn't even need Taá's list. Jake knew he'd seen you before, when you were at the ranch. He just couldn't remember where.”

  “Had a senior moment,” Nasso said. “You must have been living the big easy, down there on that ranch. Hated to give it up. From your records here, I'd say you've lost your touch at knowing when the wolf's at the door.”

  “So,” I said. “What do you all want with me?”

  Nasso pushed his chair back from the table as though he could no longer stand being confined against it.

  “What do you know about smuggling?” he said.

  He slouched in the chair and propped his legs on the table, ignoring Dance's frown. His scuffed and worn lizard boots had two-inch-high rodeo heels.

  “You mean drugs? Across the border?”

  “Not drugs. People.”

  “Illegals? Those people, the ones looking for work?”

  “Illegal immigrants, yes,” Nasso said. “But not somebody who'll clean your toilets, mow your lawn, wash and iron your clothes. We don't care about those people. God bless them if they want to come to the United States.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “You're a computer expert,” Dance said. “A hacker, a cracker, a whatever they call it these days. Taá is also an expert, but she's got a problem she can't solve. She doesn't want to do all the illegal stuff that you do. She's got morals, our Taá. So. To get right down to it, here's the deal. I need somebody with no morals when it comes to computers and the Internet. All those arrest warrants against you, I can make them go away. If you agree to work with our team.”

  “Go away?”

  “They're in a federal dat
abase,” Taá said. “We can expunge them. Totally.”

  “Irrevocably,” Dance added. “Your record will be clean. Can be clean. If you agree to work with us.”

  “Doing what?”

  “First you agree. Then we tell you what.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”

  “I got a problem,” Nasso said. “You change your identity more often than I buy new pickups. Personally, if I was sitting down there in your chair, I'd lie like hell, say anything, looking for an edge. And in a few days, a week or two, when I'm out buying milk and eggs at the supermarket, I just vamoose out the back door.”

  “Fake ID is a cinch for us computer people,” Taá said. “If you've set up five, you've set up fifty.”

  Nasso pulled a crumpled wad of money from his left shirt pocket and tossed it onto the table without separating the bills.

  “I'd bet whatever's in that poke that you've already got a bunch of fake IDs stashed away somewhere. And Jesus wept, have I looked everywhere! While you were stuck in that detention center, I spent five hours tearing your house apart. Nothing.”

  He flicked the wad of money halfway down the table at me.

  “That, plus my bank account, says you've got 'em. I just couldn't find 'em.”

  “I don't get it,” I said, ignoring him, but relieved that he hadn't found my hidey hole in Heather's stables. “You've got a woman here who knows exactly how to run identity searches with such sophistication that you found me. I don't buy your talk about morals. If she's good, what could I possibly do that she can't?”

  “Deal?” Dance said.

  I was about to say yes, but I saw the knuckles of his left hand whiten against the table rim. I pulled the arrest warrants close to me and took several minutes to read through them.

  “Pass.”

  “Jake, hook her up again.”

  Jake hesitated, but reached behind his back and took out handcuffs. He shoved his chair back and stretched his legs out so that his boot heels lay just exactly on the edge of the table, all the while swinging the cuffs around his left index finger.

  “These are old warrants,” I said. “I was fifteen, seventeen, twenty-two. That was twenty years ago and more. I'm really not accused of anything in these warrants. I've got to tell you, I've been terrified for years that I could really get sent away. But after I've finally seen what's in them, I don't think you can do much to me. Pass.”

  “I told ya she'd pass,” Nasso said to nobody in particular.

  “We know that the smuggling ring is based in the state of Sonora,” Dance said. “We've intercepted cell phone calls, radio messages, tons of email. That's where you come in. Most of this stuff is encrypted, plus it goes through some kind of anonymous Internet service. We've got people working for Taá, trying to intercept and decode the Internet traffic. We've got the best computer people in the Southwest.

  But we need somebody who thinks different than we do, somebody who's used to going outside the law, finding things in a way that we might not think of doing.“

  “That's bullshit,” I said. “Any hacker can do what I do. It's not the law that makes the rules, it's the technology. I'm not that good. You give me too much credit.”

  “Play your aces,” Nasso said. “This woman is good.”

  “Aces,” Dance said. “I've got three.”

  Taá fiddled with the papers.

  “First there's this old friend of yours.”

  Taá placed a picture of Meg Arizana in front of me.

  “She runs safe houses for abused women,” I said. “What's that got to do with smuggling women?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Dance said. “I don't care. She's leverage. If you don't agree, I'll swear out warrants that state unequivocally that she is involved. I'll close her down. I'll send her to prison.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “I can be that. But hold off on your judgment for a bit. There's another old friend of yours that could be involved. Villaneuva.”

  Dance moved around to Nasso, put an arm under his legs, and lifted them off the table. He let them drop, but Nasso was ready for that and lowered his legs to the floor.

  “The point is,” Dance said, “if you found Villaneuva, you could get him to work angles in Mexico that we might not think of. Again, if you don't deal, I'll see to it that he never works in the US again. The next time he crosses the border, he'll be arrested.”

  “When this guy wants to be an asshole,” Nasso said, “he's got no limits.”

  “But your old friends are minor league compared to this guy”

  He shuffled through the stack of papers in front of him and found a single sheet. He brought it around and placed it in front of me.

  “Remember him?”

  It was an arrest warrant for Jonathan Begay. My ex-husband. Father of my only daughter, Spider. I'd been trying to find both of them for over twenty years.

  “Would you still pass,” Dance said, “if I told you I know where he is?”

  “What has Jonathan done now?”

  “We think—we suspect he might be connected to the smuggling ring. Not for the money. He's changed a lot from the person you once knew. Now he works for a Zapatista kind of organization for workers' rights. Basta Ya. We think he participates in the smuggling ring to get people into the US for a better life.”

  “Why would he want them to give up their own families?”

  “He doesn't. The people who settle here make a lot of money, and they send most of it back to their families in Mexico. We think he gets a small percentage of that money which he turns right back into the smuggling ring.”

  “So what we're asking you,” Dance said, “is to talk to your ex-husband and get him to describe the smuggling ring.”

  Ah!

  There it was again.

  One of those moments that mark before and after.

  You go over the line, you can't go back.

  “And let me be even more forthcoming,” Dance said. “I not only will tell you where he is, I'll tell you that he's the very reason we thought you could help us.”

  I was totally conflicted.

  Jonathan.

  I wanted to find him so bad, for so long. But I also knew that these people would keep me on a very short leash, and I'd been free for so long, you see, free and private and unknown in the world, I didn't know if I could give that up.

  “You're conflicted,” Dance said, as though he'd read my mind. “So am I. Finding you, offering you a deal, that wasn't my idea. Taá first brought it up, and Jake here said we'd never do what we need to do without you. But once I figured out who you are, I knew that you always work alone. If I tied you down to a team, made you work in a place where we kept close watch on you, you'd hate it like hell. But if I gave you some slack, you'd skip off with some other identity we know nothing about, and be damn sure you don't use the name Laura ever again. So you see, we've both got problems with this.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In a dirty, cheap, cockroach-infested Mexican jail,” Nasso said. “The very worst kind of jail, run by totally corrupt cops.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Deal?”

  Dance's tongue darted out and flicked to either side of his mouth. He looked at his watch, looked at Taá. She looked at her own watch.

  “Seven minutes,” she said.

  “I've got to get your answer right away,” Dance said.

  “So I deal,” I said finally. “How?”

  Taá put a legal document in front of me and laid a ballpoint pen crosswise on the page.

  “First,” Dance said, “you sign that agreement.”

  “Agreeing to what?”

  “You try to shuck us,” Nasso said, “I come find you and we violate your ass directly to prison.”

  “If I agree, I want two things guaranteed.”

  “Depends,” Dance said.

  “My friends. Meg and Rey. No harassment, no arrests.”

  “That's possible.”


  “Write it on this paper. Guarantees that they'll never be bothered.”

  Dance didn't hesitate, standing behind me and leaning into my shoulder as he swiftly wrote out what I'd asked and signed it.

  “Okay,” Dance said. “Sign all of these papers.”

  He laid them on the table. They all looked at me in silence, waiting.

  It's only paper, I thought. If signing my name gets me out of here, I'll sign anything he puts in front of me. Once they let me go, I'd create a new identity, I'd get a new name, and I'd be gone.

  Without reading the papers, I signed each one, dropping the ballpoint pen on the table. It rolled off the edge and clattered on the floor.

  “Done,” I said. “What now?”

  “Joel's talk about chat rooms.”

  15

  Taá set a Sony Vaio laptop in front of me.

  “Wireless,” she said. “You and I can talk about that later.”

  The laptop was already logged into a Yahoo chat room. My heart sank. Yahoo, AOL, my god, how many major Internet portals have chat rooms. I'd just spent twenty thousand dollars to get AOL chat user names. But LUNA13 could be anywhere.

  A chat window was open, the cursor blinking.

  The user name was MidnightChyna.

  “I watch wrestling,” Taá said unapologetically. “Chyna's my idol.”

  “You're going to have to wing this,” Dance said to me. “We were contacted by email, told to be online at this time in this place. The email was untraceable. It said we'd be given details of the two women who were murdered this week.”

  “Why are you having me chat with this person?”

  “I'll explain that later.”

  The laptop chimed. LUNA13 was online, specifying a private chat room called Donette. I hesitated, not sure of what to do, and Taá quickly swiveled the laptop and typed something that created an overlapping window. She minimized the first window, and we all waited.

  LUNA13: > who is there? names, please

  Taá quickly swiveled the laptop and typed.

  MidnightChyna: > Taá Wheatley. US Marshal. Michael Dance. US Attorney. Jacob Nasso. US Border Patrol.

  LUNA13: > which are you?

  The laptop in front of me again, I started to use my regular no-capitals minimal style, but realized quickly from Taá's first msg that I had to imitate her.