by Jodi Compton
Nidia had her hands to her face. “El padre,” she whispered.
I reached under the seat and wrenched the Airweight free of its tape, but for the moment, I kept it out of the men’s line of sight. I didn’t want to start the shooting. I was far too outgunned.
Sure, five rounds is all most civilians will ever need. If you can’t shoot your way out of something with five rounds, you can’t shoot your way out of it at all. It had sounded good at the time.
“Nidia,” I said calmly, “take off your seat belt and get on the floor, as low as you can.”
She was staring at the gun in my hands. She didn’t move.
I reached over and unclicked her seat belt. “Down!” I said. “Ahora!”
She slid down, whispering what I assumed were prayers.
My mind was working pretty well in that cool, empty space where fear should have been and wasn’t. This had to be a case of mistaken identity. They thought we were carrying drugs, or drug money.
One of the men approached. Even from a distance, he was familiar, and up close he became the Young Nice Guy Businessman from the pool of the El Paso hotel. He gestured for me to roll down my window.
Carefully, still keeping the gun out of sight, I rolled down my window to a gap of about two inches and said, “We’re not carrying anything of value. No drugs, and no money.”
He stepped closer, close enough now to see the gun in my hands, but it didn’t seem to worry him. He said, “We want her.”
Nidia? “Why?” I said.
He said, “Not your problem.”
He was surveying me with what almost looked like friendly curiosity. He said, “Please just put the gun down and unlock the doors. My friend over there will take Miss Hernandez gently out of the car and your role in this will all be over.”
I understood that I was not going to shoot our way out of this, not with five rounds, probably not with three times that, had I been better armed. But the Impala was still in drive. If I hit the gas and smashed straight into the back end of the sedan in front of us, maybe I could just bull our way out.
Three problems: One, they could start shooting. Two, even if they didn’t, Nidia was on the floor without a seat belt and could get banged up pretty badly. Three, two of them were standing right in front of the car.
Of course, it was better for Nidia to get banged up than shot. As for the guys in front of the car, could I live with myself if they died of their injuries? Yes, I could, if it was Nidia’s life and mine against theirs.
I inhaled as though steadying my nerves and said to the guy outside the car, “Okay, just let me explain to her. Her English isn’t very good.”
Turning to Nidia, I spoke in Spanish, telling her, Brace yourself.
Then, crouching low behind the steering wheel, I stepped hard on the gas pedal. The Impala’s engine roared in response. The last thing I heard was gunfire.
Part II
eleven
SEPTEMBER 3
The first thought that came to mind, when I woke some time later, was that I was in the barracks, that I had overslept and was going to be late for morning formation. When I opened my eyes and looked around, I realized that wasn’t it.
“How are you feeling?” an accented voice nearby asked.
The speaker was a tall, heavyset man with a broad, kind, copper-brown face and the sort of brushy, full mustache that only Hispanic men look good wearing. He was also wearing a white lab coat. He was a doctor. I was in a hospital. At my side, I saw an IV needle taped to my wrist.
“Are you having difficulty understanding me?” the doctor asked.
I cleared my throat to speak. “No, I understand you,” I said. “You’re speaking English.”
He smiled indulgently. “So I am.”
I realized that wasn’t what he’d meant.
He shone a small light in my eyes. I blinked, but tolerated it.
He pulled up a rolling stool. “Do you remember your name?”
“Hailey,” I said. “Hailey Cain.” My voice was thin and dry.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a pleasure to finally know your name. We didn’t know. I’ve been calling you Miss America.”
“That’s flattering.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Mexico,” I said.
I knew that automatically, but less clear was why. I hadn’t been on vacation. I hadn’t flown down; I had been driving. And something had gone wrong.
Suddenly I stiffened. “Was I shot?” An impossible idea, yet as soon as I said it, I knew it was true. “Doc?”
“Yes,” he said. “You were shot, twice. You also had some blunt-force trauma to your face.”
From when the Impala hit the tunnel wall. Now I remembered.
“Nidia,” I said. “Where is she? Is she all right?”
The doctor looked thoughtful. “You mentioned that name before,” he said.
“Before?”
“Do you remember being awake earlier?”
“Vaguely,” I said. “What do you mean, I mentioned her? Isn’t she here? Haven’t you guys treated her?”
He drew in a deep breath. “About most of this,” he said, “you’ll need to speak with the police. It’s out of my area of expertise.”
“How long was I asleep?”
“You weren’t asleep; you were in a coma. For eight weeks.”
Jesus. Then something occurred to me. “How did you know I was going to wake up when I did?” I asked. “You were right there.”
“I woke you up,” he said. “The coma you were in wasn’t natural.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was medically induced,” he said. “You needed time to recuperate from internal damage from the gunshots and from loss of blood. The best thing for your body was a short-term coma.”
That was a hard thing to wrap the mind around. How screwed up did your body have to be for it to need a coma to get better?
“Plus,” the doctor added, “during the brief periods when you were awake, you were agitated. You were interfering with the tubes and your IV.”
He talked to me a little bit about my injuries, the two gunshot wounds to the chest and the damage they’d done. Then paused, frowning slightly. “Do you remember saying, ‘They were white’?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Do you know the significance of that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You said it twice. It seemed to be very important to you.”
I shook my head again, and the doctor got up from his stool. “Try to rest.”
“Wait,” I said. “You already know something about Nidia, don’t you? Is she dead? You can tell me. I’m strong, I won’t go into shock.”
He said, “You were traveling alone, Miss Cain.”
The rest of it I learned from an officer of the state judicial police. His name was Juarez. He was taller and thinner than the doctor, though with that same mustache. He took down some basic introductory details first, my full name, where I lived.
Juarez went on to tell me that I was found just outside the tunnel, alone on the edge of the road, bleeding profusely, without ID, money, or a car. The farmworkers who found me had believed that I was in a bizarre hit-and-run in which I had been walking on a remote highway. No one had realized I’d been shot until I was examined at the hospital.
“I wasn’t traveling alone,” I told him. “I was traveling with a girl, Nidia Hernandez. Even if she wasn’t at the scene, her things were in the car.”
He said, “There was no car. No luggage, and no girl. Just you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why don’t you tell me your story from the beginning.”
I did, leaving out only the fact that the friend who had gotten me involved in Nidia’s situation was a semi-notorious girl gangster in L.A. Serena became, loosely, “a friend of Nidia’s.” The rest was the unvarnished truth, from Oakland to the border to the tunnel.
“They were w
hite,” I said, “and armed. These guys were pros. I don’t know why they wanted Nidia, but they did.”
When I was done, Juarez didn’t ask the questions I would have expected. He didn’t ask for details about the ambush, or for a more thorough description of Nidia, which would have helped the police find her. Instead, he asked about my life in America: in particular, what I did for work.
“A bike messenger,” he said, “that’s a young person’s job, I understand. Not very lucrative, no?”
“I don’t need much money.”
“Really,” he said. “I’ve heard that life in America is quite expensive, particularly California. People have high standards for what their lifestyle should be. Everyone reaching for the golden apple.”
I had a sinking feeling about what was motivating this line of questioning. I said, “Can I ask why you’re so interested in my lifestyle and income?”
He looked thoughtfully at nothing in particular. Then he turned his attention back to me.
“Miss Cain,” he said, “let me be blunt. When an American meets with violence in Mexico, far from tourist areas, and without frantic American family members demanding information-”
“I’m not a drug mule,” I said.
He looked out the window, hesitated, and began to speak more slowly and deliberately. “In my experience,” he said, “when women become involved in the drug trade, it is rarely because of their own vice. Usually they become involved at the insistence of corrupt men who hold too much influence in their lives and do not have their best interests at heart. The law is commonly gentle with such women.”
“That’s nice to know, but I’m not in the drug trade,” I said.
I’d wanted to say it since he was about five words in, but it had been obvious that nothing was going to proceed until he’d finished his little speech inviting me to fall into the sympathetic arms of the Mexican law.
I said, “You’re skeptical about my story, okay, I can understand that. But Nidia is out there somewhere and needs help. I don’t want your suspicions about me to keep people from looking for her.”
“To be honest,” he said, “it occurs to me that if you needed an explanation for why a group of armed men would ambush you on the road, and you couldn’t tell us they were in search of money or drugs, a young woman would make a sympathetic substitute.”
“You don’t even believe that Nidia exists?”
“We have only your word on that,” he said. “Look at this from my perspective: You’ve described your traveling companion as a Mexican-born teenager without money or connections. Why would she be of interest to men like that?”
“I don’t know what kind of men they were,” I said, “so it’s hard to speculate.”
“Speculate,” he repeated, leaning back a little. “You have a certain level of education.”
“I did nearly four years at West Point. I didn’t finish.”
“That’s the American military academy?”
“One of them,” I said.
“Why didn’t you finish there?”
“I was discharged. Not for using drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I told him. “Listen, whatever you think of me, Nidia needs your help. She’s only nineteen. You owe it to her to have people looking for her.”
Juarez hesitated, then said, “I must admit, you are convincing in your zeal.” He raised pen to notepad. “Tell me as much as you can about her and I’ll get her description out.”
“To the U.S. authorities, too?” I said. “In case these men took her back over the border?”
He nodded.
When we were done, I had one last question for him. I said, “The doctor told me that no one here knew my name.”
Juarez waited for the rest.
“Didn’t you identify me from missing-persons reports?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Cain,” he said, “but no one matching your description was reported missing.”
twelve
Sometimes one offhand comment can bring a truth about your life home to you. Until Juarez’s statement, I hadn’t realized how isolated I’d let myself get from other people. CJ, Serena, my mother in Truckee-there was no one who wasn’t accustomed to not hearing from me for weeks on end. My disappearance had not registered with anyone in my life.
Except for this: I’d promised to see Serena on my way back north. I’d never shown up, yet she hadn’t reported me missing. Serena, who was the only person in my life who’d known where I was going. Wasn’t that an odd thing?
It was she who had asked me to do this in the first place. She’d called me out of the blue, after we hadn’t spoken in nearly a year, wanting me to take a girl I’d never met to central Mexico. Conveniently, none of Nidia’s family, nor Serena nor her sucias, could do the job. Only a white stranger in the Bay Area seemed to be able to do it.
A stranger to Nidia, that was. I was no stranger to Serena; we were friends, and now I couldn’t help pulling at the threads of that friendship, wondering how much they’d weakened in the time we’d been apart. Enough to allow her to set me up to be killed?
Some time later, a nurse came in and gave me a pill. I didn’t ask what it was. Maybe it was a sleeper, because sleep came on fast.
The next day, Juarez returned. I couldn’t tell from his long, sober face what he’d concluded about my story, but he blandly told me that when I was well enough to leave the hospital, I would be taken to the U.S. Consulate and would become their problem.
thirteen
Seventy-two hours later, I was riding high in the cab of a Peterbilt truck, rolling across the dry, severe Arizona terrain, heading back toward California.
I was exceedingly grateful for my military service, because having my fingerprints in the system had streamlined the process of proving who I was-and therefore my citizenship-to consular authorities. Of course, they’d wanted to hear the whole story, and I’d told it to them. I stressed the part about Nidia’s disappearance as I had with Juarez, but it didn’t make much of an impression. Nidia was not an American citizen, therefore not their problem.
I, on the other hand, penniless and stranded, was their problem. They arranged for me to get on a bus to the U.S. border, where I’d stuck out my thumb and eventually found what I was looking for: a truck driver headed to Los Angeles. That was Ed. Ed had rusty, curly hair and seemed decent; he kept his hands to himself and, as evening fell, had given me his jacket. At the hospital, they’d found me some civilian clothes to replace the ones that had been ruined in the attack. They gave me jeans and running shoes, and a T-shirt with the word NAVY on it in block letters, which I’d taken with a small inward smile. A little joke on the part of the universe.
“You’re young to have been on your own in Mexico,” Ed said. “You’re what, nineteen, I’d guess?”
People always lowballed my age, because of the open, guileless features I’d inherited from my father.
“Twenty-three,” I said. Then: “No, wait, twenty-four. I just had a birthday.”
July five, the day after I’d been shot. I’d turned twenty-four in my sleep.
“You got someone you can call when we get to L.A.?” Ed asked.
“Several people,” I told him. “There’s one friend in particular I’m dying to get caught up with.”
I was thinking, of course, of Serena. I still didn’t want to believe that my old friend had set me up, but it was the theory that best fit the facts.
Serena used to call me prima, meaning cousin. Yet I’d heard her call other girls hermana, or sister. I had never been sure if this was because they were sucias or because they were Mexican like her. It would have been uncool to ask. But the very fact that she made that distinction troubled me now. I was white, and since I’d moved north, I was no longer an everyday friend. Had those things made me expendable?
It was painful to consider that possibility. But if it was true, what had been her motivation for setting Nidia up? Money? Serena knew a lot of people, and she saw and heard a lot. Maybe she’d
known that someone wanted Nidia, and had exacted a price for helping them to get her. Maybe that was why, when I’d called her from El Paso having second thoughts, she’d said, I don’t think you should interfere. Of course not, not if her big payday depended on me getting Nidia to the abduction point.
But if Serena’s incentive had been money, what was the motive of whoever had hired the seven men in the tunnel? Juarez’s skepticism on that point was entirely understandable. Seven armed men had braced us in a tunnel in a sophisticated maneuver, and shot me, and they had done all this, apparently, to abduct or kill a nineteen-year-old daughter of Mexican illegal immigrants. How to explain that? To have a plausible theory, didn’t you need to start with a plausible event?
I bit my thumbnail and shifted in my seat.
“You okay?” Ed asked.
“I’m cool,” I said.
It wasn’t necessary to think so far ahead. The theory I had now-that Serena set me up-was enough. It was credible and I could act on it.
That was why Los Angeles was my destination, instead of San Francisco. I was going to ambush Serena, and then she’d have to tell me what was going on.
Either that or I would screw up my ambush and she, being Warchild, would kill me.
fourteen
So, for the second time in my life, I washed up in Los Angeles, broke and without a plan. I’d had to ask Ed for ten dollars to buy a meal. This made him skeptical all over again that I really had friends in L.A. I could call. I assured him several times I’d be fine before he left me in the vast parking lot of a shopping center and drove away.
I wasn’t lying, strictly speaking, about having someone I could call. CJ could have provided most of what I needed: a safe place, a meal, a bed, and money. But I wasn’t going to call him, because I was into some heavy shit right now, worse than the Marsellus thing, and I was not going to get my cousin involved. This was my private, post-West Point honor code: You might have to lie, cheat, or steal, but you do not endanger Cletus Jeffrey Mooney.
