Stalking Moon

by Неизвестный

  “Thank you. I can explain. But I don't have time.”

  “So what do you want from me, Laura?”

  “I need to know about somebody who claims she was brought up here.”

  “How long ago?”

  “She's about sixty years old. Says she lived here in Kykotsmovi until she was eleven. So that would make it. . . back in the '40s.”

  “You don't want much, do you. Nobody kept records in those days.”

  “Not written records. No. But there have to be people here of the same age. People who'd remember clans, families, names.”

  “What's this woman's name?” he finally asked.

  “Pinau.”

  “That's a pretty unusual name. She said it was Hopi?”

  “Yes. Insisted on it.”

  “Full name?”

  “I only know what she calls herself now. She says she moved to Mexico City when she was eleven. I have no idea if she married, but her full name is Pinau Beltrán de Medina.”

  “Got to be either a husband's name, or the family that took her from here. But Pinau. You sure that's her Hopi name?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she lived in Kykotsmovi? In the '40s?”

  “That's what she said.”

  “I know two women I can ask,” he said. “They're down the hall in the craft preservation office. But maybe you can tell me why the person you're asking me about is the same person that signed this notification from the US Attorney's Office.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you're identified by any law enforcement agent, do not apprehend, it says here. Notify Pinau Beltrán de Medina. Half a dozen phone and fax numbers, some of them in Phoenix, some in Tucson, some in Mexico.”

  He stood up again, grabbed an elaborately carved oak cane, and went down the hall. I read the papers, saw her name, understood nothing about it. Medina identified herself as part of a joint US and Mexican task force.

  I poured a cup of coffee, wandered out in the hallway. He was gone for nearly half an hour, and returned with a frown.

  “Didn't live here,” he said.

  “You're sure?”

  “Part of the new Tribal Chairman's mandate. Compile a record of everybody living on the mesas. Since we're in Kykotsmovi, the women started here. Nobody ever heard of this Pinau. In fact, everybody I talked to insisted that it's not a Hopi name. That doesn't mean it's not a family name, a clan name. My guess, it could be a private name. But my opinion? She never lived here.”

  “So why would she tell me that she did?”

  “Was she trying to gain your confidence? Get you to trust her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you at the time?”

  “In an illegal immigrant detention center.”

  He laughed out loud.

  “I don't know about you, Laura. You sure got a knack for getting into trouble. Listen. You staying the night? Wife and I got a spare bedroom.”

  “No. I've got to get back to Phoenix.”

  “A long day's driving, if you just came up from there.”

  “I came up from Mexico.”

  “What kind of trouble are you into, Laura?”

  “Me? I'm not in trouble, I'm about to cause trouble.”

  Rey drove me back south through the Apache reservation. In Globe we stopped for some Big Macs, and I called Don. I could tell by the clicks and signal shifts that the phone was rolling over from one number to another.

  “Hostess Catering,” he said.

  “Don?”

  “Ah, finally. I've been waiting to hear from you.”

  “Why is this phone number rolling over?”

  “I thought you wouldn't have time to clone your cell phone to the new number.”

  “Don, I'm sorry. I should have told you I had no access to the cloning software.”

  “Realized that. Doesn't matter. Look. I've got all the information you wanted. What do I do with it?”

  “I don't know if I'm on a secure phone any more.”

  “Assume you're not. But I'll give you the info myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can't tell you that on an unsecure phone.”

  He hung up.

  Rey continued on into Phoenix, into Scottsdale, and to the Mayo Clinic Hospital.

  33

  “There's nobody here by that name.”

  The information desk of the Mayo Clinic Hospital.

  “Mari Emerine? You're certain?”

  “Perhaps she wishes privacy?”

  “You mean, she might be using another name?”

  “Some patients do.”

  I thought about that for a few minutes while I went to the Coke machine, but while the can of Diet Coke was thunking its way down the chute, I suddenly realized who to ask for.

  “Hey, lady,” a teenaged girl shouted after me. “You all done left your Diet Coke in the machine.”

  “Take it if you want.”

  Somewhat breathless from running back to the information desk, I smiled at the clerk and patted my breastbone and shook my head.

  “Silly me,” I said. “Of course she's using her married name. Mrs. Bobby Guinnness. She's divorced, but she still uses that name at times.”

  “Yes. Mrs. Guinness. Oh. Family only, I'm afraid.”

  “That's okay. I'm her sister Elizabeth. I just flew in from Des Moines. Her ex-husband called me and said to hurry.”

  The clerk was crestfallen, but recovered immediately. She took a map of the hospital, circled a specific floor and wing, and wrote down the room number.

  “How is she?”

  “I can't really say.” She avoided my eyes for a moment, then looked directly at me. “I do apologize. I've not been here more than three weeks. When you get to the floor, please check with the nurses' station. I'll tell them you're coming up.”

  “How is she?” I asked again.

  “In good care. The nurse will page the doctor, you'll get a consultation. Oh. And the ex-husband is there also.”

  “What husband?” I said without thinking.

  “Mr. Guinness, of course. In his wheelchair.”

  “You found me,” Mari whispered.

  “Yes.”

  I barely recognized her. In a week she'd lost another twenty pounds, her face haggard, tubes and monitors attached everywhere to her body.

  “I'm Don,” said the man in the wheelchair at the other side of the bed.

  “He's Bobby,” Mari whispered with a large smile.

  I pulled a plastic chair next to the bed and stroked Mari's cheeks.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “No. Plenty of drugs for pain, when you're dying. But actually, yes, I'm in pain that I won't see Alex again.”

  “Rey left to get her.”

  “How. . . long?”

  “She tires out after a few sentences,” Don said. “And I was just going over some things with her, so she's already at the point where we have to leave her alone.”

  “Don't. . . go. How long?”

  “From here, almost four hours each way.”

  “I'll wait. Talk. . . talk. . . to. . . Don.”

  “Why don't we go outside?” he said.

  “No. In. . . here,” Mari said.

  “Okay. Laura, why don't you bring your chair over here?”

  “Who are you, Don? Really, who are you?”

  “Captain, US Army. Served with Mari, went through Desert Storm as a tank commander. One of the few lucky hits by an Iraqi tank, jammed me inside mine, broke my back. Mari and I, both casualties of George Bush's war. I'm thirty-two years old, I'm single, I have an MBA from Wharton and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.”

  “All that while you were in the army?”

  “Before. One of those child prodigies. Finished the Ph.D. when I was twenty-two, decided on a whim I'd join the army, thought I'd make a difference. A foolish notion, but we're all fools at one time or another. Here.”

  He handed me a stack of envelopes, ea
ch with a name in tiny, neat black ink written on the envelope flap.

  “I'll look at them later.”

  “Oh? I thought there was a specific thing you wanted about each of these people. Perhaps you've already learned what you wanted to know?”

  “Some of it.”

  “Don. Tell. . . her. . . about. . . the water.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That's what I don't know.”

  “Water. Specifically, the water man.”

  “Xochitl, well, the woman who called herself Xochitl, she told me to watch out for the water man. I realized later that could be taken several different ways.”

  “And made more difficult by her imprecise English. Well. Water. We're actually talking about water trucks. Tank trucks.”

  “I saw some of them. In Nogales. The men who bring water up into the slum areas. Is that what you mean?”

  “Not quite. As you probably know, Mexico has a bad problem with polluted water. Nogales, Juarez, the border towns, the problem is even more severe because of the less worthy maquiladoras. So some maquiladoras, the ones with enough money and good reputations, they bring in water from the US. In Nogales, there are several maquiladoras that regularly send tank trucks into Arizona.”

  “Wait, wait. I'm having trouble following this. Can you go back to why Mari went on all those horseback rides, looking for water in the San Rafael Valley?”

  “Of course. But let me jump sideways here.” He laughed. “I can't really jump, but I still like the memory of jumping. So. Bobby Guinness. I think Mari told you that we were cutting back on the number of jobs we took on. Her reputation was world famous, well, Bobby Guinness was world famous. But two things happened. Two problems. Her cancer, of course. We decided to scale back, work only with you. Did you know that I'm also a hacker, that I pretty much do the same things you do?”

  “I guessed that.”

  “Don't need much sleep, since I doze in my chair between computer tasks. So I've been working pretty much inside this big circle. More like two horseshoe-shaped desks with an aisle on each side large enough for my chair. I've got a dozen workstations, but then, I don't need to tell you how I worked.”

  “I'd like to see your setup.”

  “When I'm set up again, you will.”

  “Again?”

  “I've had to move my operational base. I told you we had two problems. The second thing that happened to us was that after we took on this job of finding the embezzled Mexican money, we started getting all kinds of probes directed at our computers. I had enough cutouts, firewalls, that kind of thing. Nobody got within three jumps of my computers. But they were clumsier, and I could trace most of the attacks to Chechnya. Then we heard about the new, increased trafficking in women into Mexico and on to the US. When we agreed to take on that job, trying to find who ran the smuggling cartel, the probes increased. Not just in number, but in sophistication. One probe got just a jump away from me. I knew it was only a matter of time.”

  A nurse came in to adjust the morphine drip.

  “Can I bring you anything to eat?” she said.

  “I've never been in a hospital where they gave you food,” I said.

  “We're different. Most hospitals figure that only the patients need special care. We know that family and friends suffer in their own way. Food? Something to drink?”

  “How about a beer?” Don asked.

  “I'll see what's in the fridge. And you, miss?”

  “Some Vicodin,” I said with a laugh, but she took me seriously.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Actually, yes. I fell off a horse a while back, really screwed up my shoulder.”

  “I'll have the doctor write you a scrip, I'll make sure it gets to you. The doctor would like to have a consultation with you, Mr. Guinness, when you're free.”

  “Ten minutes,” Don said. “I'll ring the call button.”

  When she left, I flipped through the envelopes and opened the one labeled zamora. Don let me glance over the pages.

  “Nothing there that rang any of my bells. What were you looking for?”

  “Can't say.”

  “How about this one?”

  He nudged the medina folder.

  “Not yet. You need to wrap things up for me. I see three separate threads here, I don't yet see how they connect.”

  “Four threads, actually. Smuggling. Water. Money. Basta Ya.”

  “How are they connected?”

  “I don't know, Laura. Do you?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Okay. Two last things you should know. Water. Zamora's maquiladora is one of the Nogales corporations that sends tank trucks into Arizona for water. He has five trucks. I did some sophisticated math. Gallons of water, number of workers. One truck a day would take care of all needs inside his maquiladora. Including worker's showers.”

  “So? Five trucks, a different truck goes up every day.”

  “By hacking into the US Customs database, I found out that as many as three trucks a day come across at the Nogales border station. The database also shows the time they go back into Mexico, so I can make a rough calculation of how long they're in the US. Average time, sixteen to twenty hours. My guess? The trucks are smuggling women. If I had the time, I'd access whatever computers stored digital satellite information, mapping the most popular smuggling routes of the coyotes. My guess? We'd see a lot of those trucks up into the ranching areas of the San Rafael Valley. Wait, wait, hold that question, I may have the answer. I'm having somebody do a search right now of ownership of all ranches. I want to find out how many have been purchased over the past two years by some front organization that I can trace to Zamora.”

  “God, you're a busy boy, Don.”

  “Don't you love it?”

  “What's the other thing you want to tell me?”

  “Basta Ya and Luna. What did you find out?”

  “I know my ex-husband was heavily financed to get women authentic identity kits and then help them relocate in the US.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He was only the conduit. He never knew who provided the money.”

  “Mari is Luna. Luna is Mari.”

  We both looked at her. She was still unconscious.

  “But there are so many people involved.”

  “At least twenty in different cities, helping the women get settled. But it was all Mari's idea. Her money, her connections.”

  “So I was talking to her. In the chat room.”

  “She was doing that when I first got here. Amazing that she had the strength to focus on operating that Palm Pilot. There's one thing more.”

  He took a thick list from his briefcase. Page after page of names, some with addresses or other information, most of them blank.

  “Do you recognize these?”

  I ran my finger down several pages, finally stopped and shook my head.

  “It's all the names in those underground bunkers. The names from the videotape that Alex shot. That's why Man was up in that area on that day you rode with her. She'd gotten something from Xochitl. I don't know what, but she'd told Mari to look at that specific ranch.”

  “Jesus Christ. I can't deal with all of this.”

  “I'm sorry. We didn't think for a moment that you'd get so. . . so involved. Your arrest was a major surprise. Mari was heartsick.”

  A doctor appeared in the doorway. She looked at Mari, looked at the computer monitors, and flipped quickly through her charts.

  “Mr. Guinness. I'm Dr. Nancy Miller. Could we have a talk?”

  “Sure. Dr. Miller, this is Man's sister, Laura.”

  “Laura. Please, you're welcome to join us. Can we talk in my office? Do you need help with your wheelchair?”

  “Can you please give us another ten minutes?” I said.

  “We need to talk now.”

  My cell phone rang.

  “Mom?” Alex said.

  “No. It's Laura. But I'm in her room. Let me see if she can talk.”

  M
ari's eyes flickered open. She looked vaguely around the room until she fixed on the cell phone in my hand. She tried to reach for it.

  “Hold on, Alex.”

  I put the phone to Mari's ear, intending to hold it there. But she slowly maneuvered her hand to the phone.

  “Leave me with Alex,” she said.

  Don wheeled his chair to the doorway, and the three of us left. As the door swooshed shut behind us, I looked through the window and saw Mari smiling.

  “It's her daughter,” I said. “She's on her way here.”

  “How long will it take?” Dr. Miller asked, her lips a tight line—not a good sign, not at all what I wanted to see.

  “She's in Mexico. She's just leaving. She'll be here in four hours.”

  “I'm really sorry, Laura. Your sister probably won't live another ten minutes.”

  “We've got to be inside,” Don said, about to ram the door open with his chair.

  “No.”

  I held back his chair.

  “Let go, Goddamnit! Let me in there. I want to be with her.”

  I put my hands on his shoulders, knelt, leaned against him, put my head against his neck, and hugged him.

  “She's saying goodbye to Alex.”

  The three of us watched through the glass, Don pressing against the chair's armrests to raise his body high enough. Mari's lips moved slowly, deliberately, her chest rising and falling every so slightly as she tried to keep enough oxygen in her lungs to propel yet another word, yet one more.

  Finally, I couldn't bear to watch her face and turned to the heart rate and blood pressure monitor. Her vital signs ebbed and flowed, falling off.

  “I love you,” Don said, his lips pressed against the glass as we saw Mari make an extraordinary effort to say the same words into the cell phone. Her head settled into the pillow, the hand with the cell phone relaxed away from her ear, and she died.

  Dr. Miller pushed the door open, and I picked up the cell phone.

  “Alex,” I said, but she wouldn't stop screaming. “Alex. She's gone.”

  34

  I drove Don to Tucson, arranged a room for him at Lodge on the Desert, and set about unpacking his aluminum work cases. In an hour we had all three of his laptops connected through Qualcomm SatPhones into the Globalstar Stratos network.