Stalking Moon

by David Cole

  "Hey," Rey said quietly. "That saguaro off to the left. The one with four arms. You see that hole, almost near the top? You see what's peeking out at us?"

  "Oh yeah! Yeah," Alex said. "It's an owl?"

  "Pygmy owl. Hold on."

  He walked slowly back to the house, returning with the spotting scope I'd given him at the Desert Museum.

  "Check out the white streaks on his forehead."

  "He's cute."

  "He's fierce. Hunts birds, just like redtail hawks and eagles. He's smaller than raptors, but he's a tiger. Not many of pygmy owls left. An endangered species."

  "Cool!"

  "Why don't you girls see what other birds you can find?"

  "Girls!" Amada snorted. "Like, we're only nine years old or something? Like, why don't you say what you really want, I mean, like, take a hike, leave you two alone."

  "Yeah," Rey said. "That's about it."

  "Oh Dad, you're so sick."

  But they ran off happily.

  "I'm glad they're getting along," I said.

  "Come on. Back to what's necessary. I want you to run down everything for me. Why were we at the Desert Museum? Why do the US Marshals want your body? Why do you want to skip out on your life again?"

  "I don't want to leave my life. But I have to."

  "Have some more coffee. Tell me everything."

  Where do I start? I thought. Where do I start?

  "That woman at the Desert Museum. She's Albanian. I don't even know her real name. But she's part of a smuggling ring."

  "Oh Christ. How do you get mixed up in shit like that?"

  "It's not what you think."

  "Smuggling people is now safer than smuggling drugs. Like the old days. Used to call them wetbacks, now they call them illegals."

  "No, no. This is something totally different. It starts out the same."

  "It all starts out with smuggling. People. Drugs."

  "This Albanian woman was smuggled into Mexico with the promise of completely authentic US identity papers."

  "An old racket. Get all the money they've got, take them across the border, say bye bye, dump them in the middle of the desert with no food or water."

  "No. There's a difference with this ring. They smuggle only women. From Albania, Eastern Europe, some from Asia. They're promised US identities in a safe location. Once they get to the destination city—LA, Vegas, New York, wherever—they suddenly find out they're going to work off their fees in a strip joint, as whores, some of them as indentured servants."

  "Ten years ago," Rey said. "Those deaf Mexicans in New York. They rode the subways selling junk, but they lived together."

  "So. That's the first level. Smuggled into Mexico with false promises. But the woman you saw in the Desert Museum, she actually made contact with a second smuggling ring. The old sanctuary routes, used by people from Salvador and Nicaragua. It's run by Basta Ya."

  "Ah. Your ex. Señor Johnny."

  "So that's what's necessary to me. Finding him."

  "Not enough by half. Why the marshals?"

  I told him about Bobby Guinness, about my work, about the horse ride and the arrest and night in the detention center. I told him about Dance, Wheatley, and Nasso. When I told him about Pinau Medina, his eyebrows shot up, but he said nothing. Then I told him about Zamora and showed him the fading newspaper picture.

  "Zamora." He tapped the picture with a fingernail. "God's gift to Nogales, with his huge maquiladora. Treats his workers very well, I hear. Not like some of the hellholes. Medina. She's been in politics for decades. One of the PRI leaders, but now on the outs because Fox was elected. Interesting that she came to see you about recovering embezzled money. Makes you wonder, does she want to return it to the government? Does she want it for herself?"

  "I don't care."

  "Hey. You better care. You're in her country now."

  He thrust the newspaper picture in front of me, pointing at Hector Garza.

  "Death squads. Torture squads. The fact that Garza is Medina's bodyguard, that says enough just in itself."

  "I only want to find my husband. Look. It's almost ten o'clock. Can you make some calls, pull in some markers? Find out what jail he's in?"

  "Maybe ... I'm not sure, but at church a few months ago, I heard something."

  "You go to church?"

  "Part of the twelve-step program. Acknowledge the higher power."

  "I can't believe you actually go to church."

  "Not any more. I kinda got to believing that I was my own higher power. I had to take control of my drinking, set my limits, not cross over. Anyway, I used to go to Mass at the old Kino mission in Caborca. An hour and a half drive from here. One day, I saw this guy, this Señor Johnny."

  "My husband."

  "Your ex-husband, you said."

  "Yes. Ex."

  "He gave the sermon. Speaks absolutely fluent Spanish. There were a lot of women in the mission that day. I was surprised, at the time. Usually only twenty or thirty people for Sunday Mass. But that day there were easily a hundred, almost all of them women. He talked about Basta Ya, what the organization did for Indian and mestizo women. Especially those who worked in maquiladoras. Said to listen for his broadcasts on the radio. I don't know what he meant by that."

  "A pirate radio station."

  "Figures. Anyway, after the Mass, I had cafe con leche with the priest. A habit he got me into. Coffee instead of booze, he said. That's one way to do it. Plus, he got lonely down there, and he liked me because I once ran a coke peddler out of Caborca. Anyway, this priest said that Señor Johnny was in some danger from the government, so instead of having a fixed house, he lived in this van. Not the small kind, the ones the coyotes use. But more like a laundry van. Or a UPS truck. And he traveled pretty much on the circuit of the Kino missions. Pretty much down here in Sonora. From Caborca in the west all the way over to Cocospera in the east. Did you know that San Xavier was a Kino mission?"

  The dogs, the dogs, I thought, the boy who burned in jet fuel, last year when Rey and I were searching Miguel Zepeda's office at the San Xavier mission. Rey saw the horror and sadness on my face and started talking hurriedly to dispel my memories.

  "Anyway, I've got some calls out already. Wherever Señor Johnny spent the night before he was arrested, it's likely to be one of the missions. My friend the priest at Caborca is calling around."

  "Thanks."

  "This is important? Seeing your husband?"

  "My ex."

  "Your ex-husband?"

  "Yes."

  "You're not ... the two of you, are you like, hoping, I mean, why do you want to see him again?"

  "My god, Rey, you think I'm still in love with him?"

  He blushed, turned to pour more coffee so I couldn't see his face.

  "So. This daughter. How old is she?"

  "Twenty-something. Twenty-five, maybe. I don't really know. We were on the run from the FBI at the time Jonathan took her from me when she was only two. I delivered. Had a Lakota midwife. We didn't even get a birth certificate."

  "You don't even know your daughter's birthday? The year she was born?"

  "It was a wild time for me."

  "Yeah, but I know exactly when Amada was born. Three-fifteen in the morning."

  "Rey. Enough of this. I don't remember, okay?"

  "So you think your ex knows how to find her?"

  "I'm hoping."

  "So you're giving up everything, just to find your daughter?"

  "Everything."

  "What are you talking about, this ... this everything?"

  I told him about how Bobby Guinness arranged scores, how each score I successfully pulled down was five to six figures.

  "But you're going to shuck that whole life?"

  "No. Just ... just move on. Somewhere."

  "Another state?"

  "I was thinking, maybe Virginia."

  "Ah, fuck," he said to himself. "Figures."

  "You'll know where I am. I promise. I'll keep in to
uch."

  "I don't trust you for that, Laura."

  "So don't. Meanwhile. Once we get this phone call."

  I'd been playing with Xochitl's Palm Pilot. I figured that she'd not check into any chat rooms while driving to Kansas. Plus when I'd bought my Palm Pilot, the one I'd switched for hers, I'd asked the Radio Shack clerk if he had any dead AA batteries.

  He'd just thrown two away, and I'd put them into the Palm Pilot. If Xochitl did try to use it, the batteries wouldn't work, and she might just not bother to stop and replace them. It was a gamble, though, and I figured I had a window of a day, two at the outside, to use her Palm Pilot to get into the chat room as though I was her, as though I was LUNA5.

  The downside of chat rooms is that when you use the same computer as somebody else, people out the other end have no real suspicion that you aren't who you say you are.

  Working with the satellite dish system, I tried some hacks I'd learned about from people in Canada, where some dish systems were illegal. Because they were declared "valueless" by the government, any attempts to hack into the systems to get free TV were not seen as a criminal action.

  After two hours, I'd figured out that the chat rooms access by the Palm Pilot were on the MSN network. So much for the twenty thousand I'd spent for the AOL hack. I got as far as logging into the room and watching posts for twenty minutes. No LUNA13, no LUNAs with other numbers at the end. I had no idea how many people were involved, but I'd seen chat room talks by three different people. They'd all used different online grammar and syntax, the only sure giveaway to online identities.

  I had no capability to set up a hack into the MSN computers and gather logfiles, so I decided not to post any message as LUNA5 until I had something specific to ask.

  The priest called in midafternoon. Señor Johnny had been taken prisoner at the old mission in Cocospera. Since it was not a working mission, there was no priest there who might know what jail Jonathan had been taken to. We'd have to drive to Cocospera and talk with some of the workers who were rebuilding the facade of the old mission.

  "Tell me more about that surveillance center," Rey asked.

  I went over everything I could remember about the one time I'd been in the Arizona Intel Center.

  "These government satellites. They take pictures how close to the ground?"

  "Ten square feet."

  "So they could recognize a car."

  "The car, yes. If they're straight overhead, they usually can't get a license plate."

  "And this woman, Wheatley. You say she had a file on me?"

  "Yes."

  "So she knows where we are now?"

  "Not in the file. But ... oh shit, she did know that you drove a Humvee."

  "Glad I parked that in the barn. Okay, we can work around that."

  "You'll get a car in Caborca?"

  "Well. Maybe something else. You ever ride a motorcycle?"

  27

  "How much money we got to work with?"

  "Don't worry about it."

  "This mestizo, he only deals in Harleys. We're talking six- to eight-thousand dollars. You got that?"

  "Yup."

  "I'm in the wrong business."

  "Are we going to Caborca?"

  "That's a hundred miles out of the way, if we take the good roads. I figure we can take the Humvee to a place I know in Los Molinos. Then hire somebody to drive us to Tubutama. Tell me again about this surveillance."

  "Satellites?"

  "Whatever looks for digital transmitters."

  "I don't have any of them since you cut off the second ankle bracelet."

  "How do you know? Jewelry?"

  "None."

  "Pen? Any kind of writing instrument?"

  "None."

  "Belt? Shoes? What size are you?"

  "Five seven."

  "No, no, no. What size clothes? Like, dress size?"

  "Four. Six when I feel fat."

  "Amada is five seven. You go, what, a hundred thirty?"

  "Thanks a lot."

  "Just a little humor here. Okay, say, one ten?"

  "One fifteen."

  "Lo?"

  Amada came outside from watching TV.

  "Laura needs some of your clothes."

  "Daaad. I hardly brought anything."

  "I'll pay you," I said.

  "No you won't," Rey shot back. "Tanktop and jeans. And sandals."

  "I've got a wifebeater," she said.

  "A what?"

  "Tanktop. Like, you know, men's underwear shirt, like you wear."

  "I'll take it," I said.

  She ran to her bedroom.

  "Jesus Christ," Rey said. "Can you imagine? A piece of underwear, like these skells were wearing when I used to arrest them for beating the shit out of their wives, and now my daughter thinks it's cool to wear something like that?"

  "Laura," Amada shouted. "Come here."

  "Hey, Stelllllllllaaaaaa!" Rey said.

  "Marlon Brando?"

  "From Streetcar."

  "Yeah. I think Amada wants to give you some underwear."

  I went into her bedroom and changed into the tanktop, or underwear, I wasn't quite sure what to call it. We tried on two pairs of jeans, one fitting very tight in my hips, but the legs long enough.

  I modeled it all to Rey's disgust.

  "You're not gonna call that underwear by that name."

  "Oh, Dad. Get real. Besides. It looks really sick on her?"

  "Sick is right."

  "No," I said. "She means cool."

  "Cool. What was once called great. So we've gone from great to awesome to neat to cool to ... what?"

  "Bad," Alex said. "Phat. Now people say, like, sick."

  "So what do you say if something's really bad?"

  "It's gay."

  "What!"

  "Everybody says that. To be uncool is to be gay."

  "Do you have any idea," Rey asked, "what you're saying?"

  "Oh, come on," Amada said. "We don't mean gay. Like my mom. Leave it, Dad."

  "You girls going to be okay here?" Rey asked. "A day, two days?"

  "How much beer have you got?"

  "Amada, don't start. And I don't want to see on my next month's dish TV bill that the two of you are watching adult movies."

  "Oh Dad. We are so not going to have that conversation."

  "Come on, Rey," I said. "Leave them. It's already three o'clock."

  "Does she actually watch adult movies?" I asked Rey as we got into the Humvee. "Do you know that, for sure?"

  "For sure."

  The Tubutama mission rose on the horizon several miles before we dropped off the main road and headed due south. We drove slowly past the white facade and faded brick front entrance walkway, but Rey showed absolutely no interest in the mission.

  "Look at the details," I said. "Look at those beautiful round windows on either side of the archway."

  He whipped around a corner onto a dirt street. We passed a one-room adobe house so wrecked that only the walls were standing, covered with spray-painted gang graffiti. Inside I could see the coiled-spring remains of an old mattress. Through the doorway and across to the only window, a fourteen-inch aluminum car rim lay on its side atop the window ledge. Next to the house, a junkyard spread in all directions, an unusual sight in Mexico where cars rarely rusted and even totally-stripped frames were reusable. Rey parked near a mock teepee constructed of long mesquite ribs, the interlocking top of the teepee at least fourteen feet high.

  An old man sat outside a garage built entirely of sheets of corrugated tin, nailed haphazardly to some internal structure. But it wasn't flimsy, and it wasn't unprotected. The sliding garage door was double-ribbed sheet metal, and the entire garage was surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with a row of razor wire. Two pit bulls ran around excitedly inside the fence as we got out of the Humvee.

  The old man said something in a quiet voice, and both dogs immediately dropped to the ground. As Rey approached the gateway, one dog r
aised up on his front haunches, a streak of white running diagonally from left to right down his face, but he dropped again when the man spoke to him.

  "El Grandee," Rey said.

  "Ehhh! Reymundo. Who's the chiquita? Is she for sale?"

  "He's harmless," Rey said to me.

  "His language isn't harmless."

  "Oh, yeah. You get that old, that withered from decades in the sun, you see what it takes to get your blood rotating. Wiggle your hips for him."

  "Rey!"

  "Just do it."

  I wiggled. El Grandee put his hand over his heart and sighed. He said something else to the dogs, and they ran around the corner of the garage out of sight.

  "Come on in."

  "I hate dogs," I said to Rey.

  "Laura, meet El Grandee. Actually, it used to be just two words: Grand Dee."

  "Dee for Dennis," the man whispered. I could see an oxygen bottle behind his chrome-legged chair. "You'll excuse me, you got me so excited, I've got to get a sniff here." He put a breathing tube around his head and turned on the valve of the oxygen cylinder. "Hey, so long," he announced as loud as he could to the open air.

  "We just got here," I said.

  "Si. Seeing you, and then having to take this oxygen, I figured I'd better say goodbye to my hardon."

  "You're awful, old man."

  "El Grandee. Like those rich people, from the old days. Owned the big ranches, where you could ride for a week and still be on your own land. I walk so slow, pulling this oxygen tank, I get the same feeling just going around my garage."

  "I need a bike," Rey said.

  "Hoy. A bike. Are you in luck?"

  "Depends."

  "Got a girl's Harley for you. Five thousand. American."

  He led us to the garage door and struggled with it before Rey put his shoulder against the edge and slid it back. Inside, there were no lights, but somebody had long ago cut rectangular skylights in the roof and laid plastic sheeting over the top. Seeing me look up, he laughed.

  "Anybody get as far as the roof, they fall right through the plastic. First, they get by my fence, then they get by Rudolpho and Fernando. Anybody who can do that, they can steal anything in here. Of course, then they've got to get out. Here's the beauty.

  "An '88 sportster, some call 'em huggers, I don't say hugger. Model eight eight three. Was gonna turn it into a chopper complete. Add a 1200cc upgrade kit, tons of chrome, some ape-hanger handlebars, an extended front fork. But money talks, Rey. You want it for five, it's yours."