Illegal

by Paul Levine

  "You?" he asked, his befuddlement turning to anger. "The bastard son of a worthless whore! My nephew gives you a free ride to the U.S.A. and you come back to Mexico? You are one stupid chilito."

  "Where's my mother!" Tino shouted.

  "Chinga tu madre!"

  "No. Fuck you!"

  "Your whore mother owes me money."

  "Don't talk to the boy like that." Payne still cradled the sixteen-pound ball.

  El Tigre slid his sunglasses down his nose and peered at Payne. "What's your deal, gabacho?"

  "I'm helping Tino find his mother. The two got separated when you botched the crossing."

  "Lies!?Pinche puto pendejo baboso! "

  From having been cursed at by cops, clients, and bondsmen, Payne thought he'd just been called a fucking stupid faggot asshole. "Just tell us where she is," he demanded.

  "Where I took her is como se dice, un secreto profesional."

  "A trade secret?" Tino sneered.

  "What's your trade, kidnapping women?" Payne taunted the man.

  "?Vete a la chingada!" El Tigre reached down and drew a knife from inside his left boot. Flicked his wrist, and a silver blade shot out. Held it in his left hand. A southpaw.

  Quick movements for a big man, Payne noted, figuring he might need that information in a matter of seconds. Payne wished he still had Quinn's gun. Or a crowbar.

  El Tigre pointed the knife at Payne's chest. "Stay out of my business, pendejo, or you will go back to the States without your liver."

  "Just tell me where you left Marisol. Then I'll get out of your life."

  El Tigre stepped closer, waved the knife under Payne's nose. "I swear I fuck you up."

  "I'm already fucked up."

  "Don't let him scare you, Himmy!"

  "He doesn't," Payne lied.

  "When I am done with the gabacho, " El Tigre said, looking at Tino, "I will take care of you."

  "?Chingalo!" Tino shot back.

  Just as El Tigre started to say something to Tino, Payne flipped the bowling ball underhanded. It plopped heavily on the soft leather toes of El Tigre's left boot. He yelped and hopped sideways but… shit!.. did not drop the knife.

  Payne took a step toward the man. Then ducked, El Tigre on one foot, sweeping the air with a roundhouse swipe of the knife.

  Payne came up from under, dug a short left into the man's gut, catching some ribs, missing the solar plexus.

  El Tigre winced, staggered back a step, but kept the knife chest high.

  Payne stood stone still, waited for the man to lunge with the knife. Didn't have to wait long. El Tigre stabbed the air, Payne batted the arm away by blocking an elbow, then throwing a straight left at the chin.

  The punch was off, grazing El Tigre's cheek and sliding into his oily hair. But the second half of Payne's combination was just perfect. A right hook straight into the man's solar plexus.

  A whoosh of air. El Tigre bent over to catch his breath.

  "Hit him again, Himmy!" Tino urged, fists raised as if shadow-boxing.

  Payne locked both hands and brought them up, straight under the man's chin. Solid contact, knuckles on jaw. A crunch, and a yelp of pain, and El Tigre spit out a gold tooth. Payne grabbed him, two hands on a wrist, twisted the arm behind the man's back, kicked a leg out, and propelled him facedown onto the floor.

  He straddled El Tigre's back, grabbed the heavy gold chain, and tightened it into a garotte. The chain bit into the man's neck, drawing blood. El Tigre bucked like a rodeo horse, but Payne held on as the man turned blue.

  "?Donde!" Payne yelled. "Where's Marisol Perez?"

  The man threw an elbow backward, missing Payne's head.

  Payne tightened the chain. "Did you hurt her? Did you!"

  "?Chingate!" The curse bubbling out of El Tigre's throat.

  "Where is she!"

  "Make him tell!" Tino yelled when they got no answer.

  Grabbing a handful of slick hair, Payne rammed El Tigre's face into the filthy wooden floor. Still gripping the chain with his other hand, Payne lifted the man's head, slammed it again. Blood spurted from El Tigre's nose. One more time, Payne smashed him into a floorboard, leaving behind a gold-capped tooth impaled in the wood.

  "What'd you do to her!" Payne yelled.

  Tears squeezed from the man's eyes. Blood pooled on the floor.

  "Where is she! Where's Marisol Perez?"

  El Tigre tried to talk, and Payne loosened the chain.

  It took a few seconds of sputtering and spittle. " No se. Not my business. I just drop off the pollos. Someone else cooks them."

  "Where'd you drop her?"

  The big man coughed up a spray of misting blood. "At Wanda La Ballena's."

  "Wanda the Whale?" Tino said.

  "Big gabacha. Enormes chichis. "

  "What's her real name?" Payne said.

  "No se."

  "Where's her stash house?"

  "Some cabins outside a desert town north of the border."

  "What town?"

  El Tigre rambled in Spanish, Payne picking up most of it. A few miles west of Plaster City. A little turd of a town. Ocotillo. Sugarloaf Lodge. A dung heap next to the railroad tracks.

  Payne heard a shout in Spanish from behind the bar. The bartender pointing a gun and yelling something Payne couldn't understand, though he was fairly sure it wasn't an invitation to happy hour.

  Payne slid off El Tigre. "C'mon, Tino!"

  The bartender, gun in hand, hustled toward them. They were cut off from the front door.

  "This way." Payne pointed down the lane. They sprinted along the gutter, toward the pins, Payne in his borrowed bowling shoes, Tino in his socks. Jimmy dived at the last moment, sliding straight at the headpin, covering his head with his hands. The clattering was so loud that Payne thought the bartender had fired his gun, but it was just the pins, smashing into one another. He left a seven pin standing, but Tino came behind him and cleared it out.

  "?Semipleno!" the pin-boy declared from his perch, awarding a spare.

  "Where's the back door?" Payne yelled.

  The pin-boy pointed into the darkness behind the lanes.

  Jimmy and Tino ran that way. When they reached the alley, Stingray was sitting at the wheel of an old blue Mustang convertible that could use a paint job. The engine was throbbing, a full-throated roar of rolling thunder, Stingray giving it gas, showing off.

  Payne threw open the door and yanked Stingray out. Tino hopped over the passenger door, and Payne banged his bad knee on the steering wheel sliding in. He threw the gearshift into first, popped the clutch, and floored the accelerator. The Mustang fishtailed and belched a cloud of oily smoke.

  Payne could barely hear his own voice over the racket as he yelled to Tino, "Which way is north, kiddo?"

  THIRTY-NINE

  What a shithole, Eugene Rigney thought.

  One hundred four degrees, shirt sticking like flypaper to the Chrysler's seat back, a blazing wind that seared your throat. Rigney had vowed to follow Jimmy Payne to hell and back. Now the detective thought he'd made it halfway.

  Rigney had grown up near Hermosa Beach, surfed as a kid, and thought of California as an endless expanse of ocean. Foggy mornings and chilly waves. God, how he loved to walk barefoot through the shore-break, foamy as a margarita.

  And Christ, how I hate the desert.

  Endless miles of dirt, baked hard as concrete. Thorny plants that could rip your eyes out. Minutes earlier, the New River had announced its presence with the sulferous aroma of floating turds. Flowing north from Mexico, sizzling in the heat, the brown snake of a river was a steaming current of raw sewage and industrial runoff. Rocky shallows were decorated with shredded Styrofoam coolers, rusted bicycles, and tree limbs bleached the color of skeletons.

  A deflated Zodiac was stuck on the rocks. The mode of transport for some illegals, risking hepatitis, flesh-eating bacteria, even polio, the poor bastards. Rigney shot a look at a nearby tract of land. Concrete-block stucco houses, a few traile
rs. How the hell could people live here?

  He watched a dead animal float by, either a dog or a coyote, its limbs stiffened. Earlier, he'd run over an animal on Route 86. The damn thing crunch ed under his tires. Armadillo, maybe?

  Wishing he could run over Jimmy Payne, hear the music of his bones breaking. But at the moment, Rigney knew he was the one up to his ass in armadillos.

  Internal Affairs was investigating. He had failed to follow procedures and couldn't prove he gave Payne $50,000 instead of the $45,000 they recovered. His commander had never signed off on using Payne as the bag man. Judge Rollins's suicide had compromised the investigation and inspired the Los Angeles Times to crow about the L.A.P.D.'s "illegal entrapment" and "lethal harassment" of public officials. The preliminary I.A. report called Rigney a "reckless cowboy" and his superior suggested he should retain counsel for a disciplinary hearing.

  Shit, I could end up working security at Trader Joe's, collecting shopping carts in the parking lot.

  He wanted to kill J. Atticus Payne, Esquire. But only after inflicting a world of pain on the shyster. Now, just outside the shitkicker town of Calexico, Rigney was on his trail. An Imperial County sheriff's deputy had arrested Payne, then let him escape. What's with this Payne-as-Houdini shit? First he gets away from his ex-wife, and now an armed cop? Not that Rigney believed Sharon Payne's story. The woman still had a soft spot for that loser scumbag.

  Maybe I can blame her for this whole goat fuck. Tell Internal Affairs she vouched for her ex as the bag man.

  Not that it was true. But desperate times call for shitty measures.

  He drove past a yellow sign with the silhouettes of a man, a woman, and a little girl running. "CAUTION" printed across the top. Warning motorists to avoid turning wetbacks into roadkill on the melting asphalt. Bullet holes peppered the sign, a welcome-to-California from the local yokels.

  Ten minutes later, Rigney was sitting in front of Deputy Howard Dixon's desk in a trailer adjacent to a bone-dry drainage ditch. The trailer was a sorry excuse for a sheriff's substation, situated within sight of the Mexican border as part of the futile attempt to keep mules-the human variety-from carrying drugs north. Rigney could barely hear the deputy over the whine of a window air conditioner that dripped rusty water but did nothing to cool the place. He was dying for a beer.

  Next to a poster was the taxidermied head of a wild boar. Damn thing stank. Wide-eyed, as if surprised to be decorating a cop shop, the boar stared into the face of Governor Schwarzenegger, whose photo hung on the trailer's opposite wall, a measly six feet away.

  "I thought Payne might give me trouble," the deputy was saying, "but not the little beaner. I guess I lost track of him."

  On a video monitor, they watched the tape from the cruiser's camera. There was Payne, handcuffed and blabbering a mile a minute to the deputy, the Mexican boy ducking out of the picture.

  "The kid said he had to pee," the deputy explained.

  Violating Traffic Stops 101, Rigney thought. Letting one of the subjects out of your sight.

  "The kid has this innocent look," the deputy continued. "Speaks good English. Neatly groomed. If he'd been the typical beaner, I'd have been more careful. You think that's prejudiced, Detective?"

  No, but it's fucking stupid, you sunburned hick.

  "Don't sweat it," Rigney said. "Could happen to anyone."

  On the monitor, the image jumped and so did Payne. Rigney squinted at the screen. The first shotgun blast had blown out a front tire. The second blast knocked out the picture for a moment. When the grainy image returned, Dixon was giving up his gun.

  "Why didn't you shoot Payne when you had the chance?" Rigney asked.

  "He wasn't armed."

  "Neither was that five hundred pounds of bacon on your wall, but you blasted him." Gesturing toward the boar.

  "I wasn't in fear of great bodily harm from Mr. Payne," the deputy said, as if practicing for the sergeant's exam.

  "You have any idea what Payne was doing in this godforsaken place?"

  "Said he was looking for the kid's mother. She disappeared or something."

  "Bullshit. Royal Payne doesn't do diddly-squat for anyone else unless there's an angle."

  The deputy's phone rang. He picked it up, said "Yup" a couple times, hung up. "Five hours ago, cameras picked up Payne's Lexus crossing the border into Mexico at the Mexicali station. That'd be about thirty minutes before our bulletins went out."

  "Great. Just great." Sweating a river, seething with anger.

  "Not to worry, Detective. He'll come back, sooner or later. When he does, we'll grab him."

  "You're pretty confident for a guy who lost his gun to a half-pint wetback."

  "I want Payne as much as you do. The way I see it, Payne's the cricket, and I'm the spider."

  "Actually, Payne is more like a cockroach," Rigney said. "Just when you have the bastard cornered, you learn he can fly."

  FORTY

  Sitting cross-legged in the shade of a corrugated metal sheet propped on wooden posts, Marisol traced letters in the dust.

  "T-I-N-O"

  Again and again. Leaving a trail of Tino s as she yearned for her missing son.

  My boy, my boy. I am so sorry I left you behind.

  The driver who brought her here-the old Mexican from the Sugarloaf-called the place "Hellhole Canyon." A farmhouse, a chicken pen, a fenced yard smelling of animal droppings and creosote. An American man with a rifle paced in the sun, guarding the migrants, though the surrounding mountains and canyons seemed sentinels enough. Chickens pecked the ground near the man's feet. He kicked a skinny hen that looked diseased. Sent it squawking, frayed wings flapping.

  Marisol tried to focus on her surroundings. Knew she must survive yet another day. She counted eighteen other migrants sitting or crouching or lying in the shade.

  Waiting. They had been waiting for hours.

  "Don't be thinking I'm gonna feed you." A rifle slung over a bony shoulder, the Americano guarding them had the emaciated look of a drug user. "I ain't no KFC, even if I got chickens coming out my ass."

  He was shirtless and wore filthy jeans, with a red bandanna around his neck. A bandolier filled with bullets crisscrossed his bare chest like suspenders. His scratchy little goat's beard was spotted with specks of dribbled food. He had several tattoos, but the one on his forehead drew the most attention. A crudely drawn, blue-green swastika. Marisol avoided looking into the man's eyes, which seemed to float in their sockets.

  "Ain't my fault you're starving," the man continued. "Vans are late."

  He stomped through the chicken droppings, chewing on a green apple, surveying the migrants. "You people eat roadkill, doncha? Hushed puppies. Asphalt armadillo. Pavement possum."

  He cackled at his own stupid joke, drool trickling down one corner of his mouth.

  It had been several hours since the old driver had rescued her from the slaughterhouse. As he drove, she tearfully told him about the attack in the locker room and how she had fought off the foreman, perhaps even killing him. Alarmed, the driver called Wanda, repeated the story, then listened a moment before hanging up.

  " La jefa says it is too dangerous for you to come back," he told Marisol.

  He had driven along a lake, through a desert, across dry washes, and into the mountains. He turned onto a dirt road and stopped at the old chicken farm, virtually surrounded by steep mountain walls. Vans were supposed to be there to take a group of migrants to farms upstate.

  "Watch out for the encargado, " the driver had warned her, before driving off. "A drogadicto who thinks he is a Nazi. Probably insane. Just wait for the van and stay away from him."

  With that, Marisol was left in the shade among defecating chickens and snoring migrants, the corrugated roof hot as a griddle.

  She heard a scream. A woman yelling, "No! No! No!"

  Marisol squinted into the sunlight. The woman's husband, a Mexican of perhaps forty, stood with his back against a tree, his hands up by his ears, holding onto a
squirming, squawking chicken. Thirty feet away, the Nazi aimed his rifle at the man.

  No, that's not it!

  The Nazi was trying to shoot the chicken off the man's head. A surreal sight, a scene from a nightmare, a hallucination.

  "Hold still, Pancho!" the Nazi yelled. "Christ! Hold that bird still before it shits on your head!"

  Trembles shook the man's body. The chicken flapped its wings and screeched.

  The man's wife wailed in Spanish, invoking the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

  "Stand up straight, goddammit!" the Nazi ordered.

  The man's knees buckled.

  "I can shoot the freckle off a rabbit's nose at fifty feet. But you gotta hold still, Pancho."

  The man squeezed his eyes shut.

  The sound of the gunshot echoed off the canyon walls. The man fell to the ground, screaming, his face covered with blood.

  "You ain't hit, Pancho! If you was hit, you wouldn't be yelling."

  The decapitated chicken flopped on the ground, spurting gore.

  "Who's next? Who wants to be in the circus?"

  The driver was right, Marisol thought. This man is insane.

  "C'mon now! Deadeye Dickie Chitwood is just warming up."

  The migrants studied the tops of their boots, sneakers, and huaraches.

  "You! Come on down!" Pointing at a man next to Marisol. Mid-twenties. Honduran, she thought, coppery complexion with Indian features. The man didn't resist, didn't say a word. Just walked to the blood-spattered tree and stood there. Like he'd taken orders all his life.

  "My man!" the Nazi shouted. "See!" He gestured to the silent migrants under the corrugated sheet metal. "No fear. This greaser's gonna make a lot of money climbing peach trees for Mr. Rutledge."

  The Nazi took an apple from the back pocket of his jeans, placed it on the Honduran's head. The apple fell to the ground.

  "Pick that up, goddammit! You let it drop again, I'll dig you a third eye."

  The man put the apple back on his head. This time, it stayed in place, even as the man's legs swayed.

  The Nazi moved back to a mark he had made in the dirt, then sighted the rifle. "Gotta adjust for wind and curvature of the earth." Another cackle of laughter. He was still laughing when he pulled the trigger.