The Territory: A Novel

by Tricia Fields

  “Don’t be sarcastic,” she said.

  “You are not trained for this kind of work. I know, I have heard, you are a great cop. Outstanding, even. But what you are dealing with is beyond cop work. It’s warfare, and it’s beyond your skill set!”

  “My skill set?” She squinted at him in disbelief. “Could you be a little more insulting? You don’t know what kind of training I received. You don’t know what experiences I’ve dealt with to prepare for my job.”

  “And exactly how do they train you for men standing at the end of your bed with guns?”

  She said nothing.

  “What happens tonight when the Medrano clan finds out that you didn’t release their prisoners like you promised? You think they won’t come back and blow this house to kingdom come? You’ve dodged the bullet.” He stopped speaking. He looked as if he wanted to say more but thought better of it.

  “I’m going to see this through,” Josie said. “I will not give in to these men. Look what’s happened in Mexico. The government, the police force, the good people in the country have lain down and let the cartels take over. The psychopaths are running the show. I refuse to do that here. I’d like to have your support. It means more to me than you know.”

  He stared at her for a long moment before speaking. “I can’t do this. I can’t go to bed each night wondering if you’ll make it home alive the next day. I want a family someday. Kids.”

  Josie said nothing.

  Dillon stood and went outside on the front porch to wait for the police.

  After Dillon was interviewed and told he could leave, Josie spent the next six hours of her Saturday with DPS and Border Patrol. The house was photographed by crime scene technicians who pored over the inside and outside, taking prints and casts. She went to the office and worked with a sketch artist for almost an hour and was pleased with the renditions. Later, Jimmy from BP showed up at the department with a boxed chicken dinner for her from the gas station. They sat together to look at pictures from the Mexican foreign nationals file. Not surprising to anyone, they got a preliminary ID on the suspect with the bandanna and earring as an infantryman for Medrano. Jimmy pulled up the man’s Alien File in the DACS system and found he had been deported twice, was suspected in an armed robbery in Houston, and was wanted for a series of murders in Juárez, Mexico. Josie declined Jimmy’s offer to stay at his home until things stabilized. He’d asked her out to dinner on several occasions, and she always made up an excuse. She didn’t need more complications in her life at the moment, but she did agree to stay at a motel until the prisoners were transferred out of Artemis.

  At seven o’clock, Josie called Moss to ask if the request to transfer prisoners had been granted by the federal penitentiary. He said he had been in contact with the warden, and they were working on a Monday-morning transfer.

  “Monday? The feds don’t work on the weekend? Medrano made it pretty clear today in my home that they aren’t messing around. If those prisoners aren’t moved by tomorrow evening, are you prepared for what’s coming?”

  “Do you know what makes a great man? Perseverance and determination. The willingness to tackle the problems no one else is willing to consider,” Moss said, his tone pious. “Do you think this isn’t weighing on my chest every minute of the day?”

  “That’s it, then?”

  “I’m working to move the transport time up. If and when that happens, I’ll let you know.” He paused a moment, and his voice softened. “I’m sorry about your house. What happened to you is terrible, and I’ll do what I can to make things right.”

  Josie heard the words but realized she was too numb to make sense of them. Usually suspect of everything he said, she was too tired to dig deeper for meaning. She thanked him, hung up, and left word with the dispatcher that she would be staying at Manny’s for the night before returning home in the morning. She walked down the block and around the courthouse to the motel. Through the plate glass window, she saw Manny sitting in his recliner under the yellow glow of his reading lamp. Cigarette smoke filtered up through the light, and his attention was riveted on the book in his lap. He looked over his glasses at her when she stepped inside the door, and he stood and approached the counter. The wringing of his hands and his worry lines reminded her of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. She half expected him to break out into song.

  “How are you getting along? I’ve listened to the radio all day long for updates. Have you caught the bastards?”

  Josie glanced at the radio sitting on the counter and heard the soft classical music from the local public radio station.

  “I’m doing okay. We have three new guests at the Arroyo County Jail. The feds have taken over now. They’ll hopefully be moved quickly.”

  He reached across the counter and clasped her hand. “You need a room tonight?”

  She nodded.

  “You stay in room six. Right next to my apartment. You need anything tonight, you knock on the wall and I’m at your door in two seconds.” He opened the key box on the counter and passed her a gold key on a smiley face key chain. “Anything else I can do?” he asked.

  She paused, embarrassed, and looked down at her uniform. “I don’t want to go home tonight. I can’t face that house right now.”

  “You need clothes? You go to your room and I’ll run to the store.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment to fight back her humiliation. She finally sighed and looked at Manny. “I can’t go to the liquor store in uniform. Do you have any bourbon stocked away somewhere?”

  He smiled at her warmly. “Sleep. That’s what you need.” He left her for a moment and returned from the back room with a fifth of bourbon, still sealed. “I get this question occasionally. On the house. The room, too, of course.”

  * * *

  Josie turned on the lamp on the bedside table and set the air-conditioning on high. The unit hummed to life and blew musty, damp air into the hot room. The paneled walls were painted a buttery yellow, and an ancient wedding ring–pattern quilt was on the bed. Hand-embroidered pillows were piled up against a wicker headboard, and a rocking chair with a lace-covered cushion sat in the corner facing a TV. It was a cozy room that reminded her of country farmhouses back in Indiana. Josie used Manny’s complimentary toothbrush and ate the cheese crackers she had brought with her from her stash at the department. She laid her uniform out across the rocker and propped herself against the pillows in bed in her underwear. She put the remote control beside her and cracked the seal on the bourbon, filling the drinking glass on the bedside table half-full. She stared into the amber liquid in the glass as if some measure of clarity might bubble up into her thoughts after the burn dissipated.

  Josie wondered what her mother had done, propped up in a bed just like hers—if she had drunk her own glass of bourbon or taken pills to fall asleep. Josie had tried desperately to keep her mother’s real intentions behind the mental wall she constructed, and she thought she had succeeded. She wondered now if she had been too harsh, if she should have given her mother a chance to explain things. But what good was an explanation in the end? She had been a lousy mother. The question Josie was wrestling with now was, did that give her a free pass to be a lousy daughter? And what about a girlfriend? Did her job give her a free pass to shut out a man who obviously loved her?

  Josie drank, eventually straight from the bottle, until the room tilted. She closed her eyes and imagined a chalkboard with a list of solutions. She felt sure there were answers inside her and wondered: Did she want to be a good cop, a good person, a good daughter, a good wife? It was obvious she couldn’t be all those to everyone, so she had to choose. She slipped down the pillows, set the bottle on the table, and fell asleep with the lights on. She dreamt about monsoons filling up the desert, the water closing in around her neck.

  TWELVE

  Josie sat in her squad car with the air-conditioning blowing on her face and stared at her front door for a long time. It wasn’t fear so much as dread. The smell of smoke and gunp
owder and the image of the guns pointed at Dillon’s chest, at her face, would stay with her for many years to come. The spray of debris, the shattered glass, splintered pieces of wood trim and pockmarked walls awaited her. The sick knowledge that these men had come into her life with their guns and ruined her chance at a normal, loving relationship made her breathless and light-headed. Blood rushed to her head, and she gripped her steering wheel and let herself cry, the silent tears eventually giving way to sobs for the pathetic excuse of a life she was leading.

  Eventually, cried out, she entered her house and found Chester asleep on the kitchen floor beside his dog dish. She had called Dell the night before and arranged for the dog to stay at Dell’s house. Dell called her cell phone that morning and said Chester had whined all night until Dell brought him home that morning. She knelt beside Chester and buried her face in his neck and talked to him, grateful for his big, brown, nonjudgmental eyes. He’d been through hell, too, and she felt lousy for leaving him the night before. One more living being to let down, she thought.

  She gave Chester a hot dog out of the refrigerator and fresh water, and then let him out to run. She gathered broom and dustpan and the large plastic garbage can from outside. As she walked down the hallway, she heard a car pull into the driveway and felt her pulse race. She dropped the broom and pulled the gun out of her ankle holster, then looked through the crack in the living room curtain to find Otto and his wife, Delores, getting out of their car and walking up the front path.

  Otto and Delores were both dressed in jeans and T-shirts. Even when Otto was out of his uniform, Josie rarely saw the sixty-year-old in anything but dress pants and button-down shirt or Delores in anything but print dresses. Otto carried a large duffel bag and a home-baked pie. When Josie opened the door, Delores came at her, smiling, with both arms extended. She pulled Josie against her soft body and spoke quietly into her ear about how good it was to see her safe and how she had a bed ready with fresh sheets for her.

  “We’ll get your place cleaned up like new, and you can pack a bag and move in tonight. No excuses or fussing. This is the way it’s going to be,” Delores said.

  “Dell called this morning and said he would come down this afternoon and patch the plaster in the walls from the bullet holes. It looks pretty bad right now,” Josie said.

  Josie took the pie into the kitchen as Delores wandered back into the bedroom with her bag of cleaning supplies. Otto motioned to the couch and Josie sat down. She noticed him staring at her and she realized how bad she must look. She hadn’t showered since the day before, and her eyes and nose were still red and swollen.

  “You holding up okay?” Otto asked.

  She shrugged and smiled. The answer was obvious.

  “Dillon called me. He said you were staying by yourself at Manny’s. I told him not to worry, that I had plans to cart you home with me.”

  “Let me ask you something. If I were a man, would we be having this same conversation?”

  “Absolutely. Except I would probably tell you to quit acting like a hero, to pack your bags, and get your ass over to the house. I can turn up the language if it makes you feel any better.”

  She smiled and tipped her head to acknowledge his point.

  “So you’ll come with us?”

  “I’m worried about tonight,” she said. “It’s not about having a place to stay; it’s about what’s going to happen with the Medranos. I don’t think the mayor understands the magnitude of what’s happening. I’ve called him twice today about the prisoner transfer. He told me he was working on it the first time. When I called back, he claimed Monday is the earliest he could arrange it.”

  “Which probably means two days from now, once the paperwork gets jammed up some bureaucrat’s hind end. Who’s taking the prisoners?”

  “Houston. The federal detention center takes pretrial inmates. Moss has supposedly arranged everything, but I don’t know if I trust him enough to follow through on the details. At this point, I don’t know if I trust him on anything.”

  Otto’s expression was fierce. “Don’t you know the warden at the detention center?”

  Josie nodded. “Remi Escobedo. I worked with him a few years ago on a federal indictment. He’s a good man.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “Chain of command? Moss would stroke out if I went around him to check details with the warden.”

  “So, let him,” Otto said. “You’ve got good instincts. You need to start there. Clean up the politics later.”

  After a few calls, Josie tracked down Escobedo at his home in Presidio. As soon as he discovered it was Josie on the phone, he said he was sorry for her troubles and asked about her safety.

  “I’d like to ask you a question in confidence,” Josie said.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s about the prisoner transfer. You’ve talked to Mayor Moss about the four prisoners moving to the federal prison?” she asked.

  “Yes, I spoke with him by phone this morning. You’ve got the shooter from the Trauma Center, and the three guys you stopped at the river with the explosives. Right?”

  “That’s right. Did he also explain that two more gunmen came to my house yesterday, shot up my house, and threatened me? Said that if the prisoners weren’t released by tonight that I would be killed?”

  Escobedo paused. “He did not.”

  “Is there a reason why the prisoners can’t be moved today?”

  “I specifically offered to set transfer up myself this morning, as soon as I heard from the mayor.” His voice was measured and steely. “He told me he was working in tandem with the sheriff. The mayor did not tell me anything about the threat to your life. He explained the shooting and said we needed the prisoners moved to a more secure location. But he set up the transfer for Monday at four P.M. He chose the time. He said local law enforcement had the jail secured tonight, and a National Guard contingent was scheduled this weekend. I offered to have a transport van there by two o’clock today.”

  Josie rubbed the back of her neck and sat down on the couch. She stared at Otto as she spoke, trying to make some sense of what she had just heard. “It’s not just my own safety; it’s every officer at that jail. Medrano has a personal score to settle with his cousin, and he intends to take care of it on his own terms. This won’t end until Gutiérrez is dead.”

  Josie heard Escobedo breathing heavily on the other end of the phone. “I don’t like this. What do you know about Moss?”

  “He’s arrogant. He doesn’t like women in authority. He’s either loved or hated by everyone in Artemis, no in between. He’s a control freak with designs on a senator’s seat. This, though?”

  “Think he’s in with Medrano?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a deputy I have my doubts about. He’s scammed money from the department. Probably ten to twenty thousand from the county, and there is a fair chance it’s connected to La Bestia. Gun sales.”

  Otto threw his hands up in the air and gave her a look that said, Why the hell didn’t I know any of this?

  “You don’t suppose the mayor is playing La Bestia against Medrano, do you? There’s serious cash to be had there,” Escobedo said.

  “La Bestia’s been silent through this. I think their concern is in Piedra. It’s the drug route they’re after. They couldn’t care less about losing Gutiérrez to a jail cell. He’s a throwaway pawn. They’ve already got any information from him they were going to get. Now he’s just leverage against Medrano and not much else.”

  “Do you have any other law enforcement in the county that knows what’s going on? Prosecutor? Sheriff?” he asked.

  “The sheriff knows some. I think he’s square, but with one of his deputies possibly involved, I haven’t confided much. I haven’t talked to the prosecutor yet, because I don’t have my facts in order. Right now, you know as much as anybody outside my own department.”

  “Your top priority right now has to be getting those prisoners out of town safely and immedia
tely.”

  Josie sighed, frustrated, and rolled her eyes at Otto, who was staring at her intently from the couch. “I’ve been telling the mayor that, but I can’t get him to take me seriously. Can you make that call?”

  Escobedo breathed out heavily. “I don’t think we want to do that just yet.”

  * * *

  At one o’clock that afternoon, Josie and Otto met Escobedo at the Arroyo County Jail. At the suggestion of Escobedo, Josie had called Sheriff Martínez and asked if she and Otto could use the interrogation room to talk with Gutiérrez. It was Saturday, and Martínez had the day off. He agreed and told Josie to ask the intake officer to show them up to a room per his order. Josie did not mention that Warden Escobedo from the federal penitentiary would also be meeting with the prisoner in the sheriff’s jail. She felt guilty about the omission, but Escobedo made it clear that Martínez was to be kept out of the loop. Escobedo viewed Martínez as an unknown at this point and didn’t want to risk the chance that Martínez might blow the operation. Because Gutiérrez had already been remanded into the federal prison system, Escobedo was in the jail in his official capacity as warden.

  The jailer, Maria Santiago, set the three up in an interrogation room and asked one of the guards to escort the prisoner from his cell. Ten minutes later, the jailer brought in Miguel Gutiérrez, shackled and handcuffed, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit. His arm was still in a sling from the gunshot wound at the Trauma Center, and he winced as the guard chained the handcuffs to a bar that ran the length of the metal interrogation table. Escobedo and Otto both pulled their chairs back away from the table several feet to signify that Josie was in charge.

  Gutiérrez had been in custody for six days, and he appeared as if he had not eaten. His face was gaunt and ashen, his thick black hair brittle and dry. Slumped forward in his seat, he looked like an old man on the verge of dying.