by D. A. Keeley
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Bitter Crossing: A Peyton Cote Novel © 2014 by D.A. Keeley.
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First e-book edition © 2014
E-book ISBN: 9780738741611
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Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people who offered technical insights and support during the writing of this novel.
Thanks to the Houlton Sector (Maine) of the US Border Patrol for allowing me “border tours,” and to the agents who took time to answer numerous questions. I strove to portray their profession accurately (while writing a wholly fictional tale). Any deviation from actual US Border Patrol procedure within the novel is poetic license and the sole responsibility of the author.
Special thanks to former US Border Patrol Deputy Chief Kevin Stevens for serving as something of a technical consultant and for reading partials along the way, and to his wife Elaine and daughter Shannon Staples who read drafts of the novel.
Thanks to my good friend and Maine State Police Det. Adam Stoutamyer for sharing his insights and for critiquing sections of the book.
To my mother, Dick and Nancy Dumont, and Florence Eaton, my first readers—thanks for helpful feedback and suggestions.
Thanks to Clarissa Edelston, formerly of the Eaton Peabody law firm in Bangor, Maine, for answering emails and for offering information about the adoption process.
To Julia Lord and Ginger Curwen, thanks for making this happen. You are much more than the world’s best literary agents, you are family; and to the Midnight Ink gang, Terri Bischoff, thanks for believing, and my world-class editor Nicole Nugent, thanks for making this a better book. Peyton Cote knows how fortunate she is to be with you both.
And, finally, to Lisa, Delaney, Audrey, and Keeley, thanks for being the sound of my waves and the sun over my ocean.
ONE
HOW HAD SHE MISSED it?
US Border Patrol Agent Peyton Cote tossed the binoculars aside and cursed. She threw open the truck’s door and started toward the white sack two hundred yards away, moving swiftly over the frozen dirt field. Missing the drop was bad enough. No way in hell she’d lose a footrace to the package.
While Maine was known for its spectacular foliage season, the state’s northernmost region, Aroostook County, held its breath each fall, living and dying, financially and thus emotionally, with its annual potato harvest. And this year several farms had been devastated by blight, the crop yielding far less than expected.
Peyton’s breaths formed tiny clouds in the thirty-degree air. Her polished black boots slipped and crunched on the rigid earth, forest-green pant legs tucked neatly inside.
BC Bud, North America’s most potent marijuana, held a street value of $4,000 a pound eight hours south of here in Boston. A tip indicated it was entering the US here, at the tiny border town of Garrett, Maine.
So here she was.
But how had she missed the drop?
Fifty yards from the safety of her Ford Expedition, her rational mind intervened: she’d hiked the field’s perimeter only minutes earlier, seeing nothing. She was better than that. Had someone been watching and made the drop moments after she’d passed by? If so, someone now knew precisely where she was and what she was doing.
She slowed, unholstered her Smith & Wesson .40. Overhead the predawn sky was sliding from ink to gray. The distant sack was football-shaped.
Four grand a pound. Get the damned package.
She scanned the desolate field—nothing to shield her, just vast farmland. The eight-pound Kevlar vest she usually bitched about didn’t seem so heavy now.
Thirty yards away, a realization stopped her dead in her tracks.
The bundle was moving.
With a sigh, she reholstered the .40.
“If you don’t want kittens,” she said aloud, “don’t get cats.”
Another Goddamn pillowcase of puppies or kittens. Worst-case scenario: an orphaned bear cub whose mother had been poached. Her breath rasped in the morning stillness. Her ankle was stiff and tender. Couldn’t remember twisting it. Adrenaline did wonders, even on a cold Sunday night shift.
Walking closer, she could see the animal writhing inside. She unclipped her cell phone and was dialing the game warden when she heard the sound.
Not the relentless whine of a cub or the tinny cry of kittens. This was louder.
And it was familiar.
She closed the phone and tore open the pillowcase.
Ten minutes later, Peyton was back inside the Expedition at the field’s edge, awaiting paramedics. The infant’s skin was cold beneath her hand, the baby girl’s eyes dull and glassy. Peyton was relieved when she cried.
The infant had been left wearing only a cotton T-shirt and a diaper and was wrapped in a tattered blanket. Discarded, like a scene from Oedipus Rex. Peyton killed the dome light, recalling her Introduction to Literature class at U-Maine. A single mother herself, she placed her hand on the baby’s forehead, trying to calm her, judging the girl to be three or four months old.
The drop had been well timed, and this was no package of weed.
Winter never seemed to enter on tiptoe in Aroostook County. It was only October, just one month removed from peak foliage season, but the maples stood bare, as if bracing patiently for the onslaught of subzero temperatures and two hundred inches of snow. The truck’s heater was on high. Despite growing up here, seven years in El Paso had thinned her blood. She’d freeze in February. Rocking the baby in the crux of one arm, she studied the field below through binoculars. In the distance, near the river, stood a tall blue spruce tree.
She’d parked along Smythe Road at a spot agents deemed “the overlook.” Smythe Road ran east to west, ending at the port of entry. Below, to the east, farmland stretched for a mile. Beyond that, the Crystal View River cut an internatio
nal boundary between Garrett, Maine, and Youngsville, New Brunswick, Canada. Aroostook County consisted of a landmass larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, with fewer than seventy-five thousand residents. The result was a sense of community unlike any other she’d found. It only made sense, she decided long ago, because when you can’t see your closest neighbor but know you must rely on them (and they on you), the result is a connection sprung from desperation that cannot be overstated.
Yet that which boosted regional pride challenged agents. Only 10 percent of the region was farmland, leaving a lot of dense forest along the 137-mile border—ideal for smugglers. In the El Paso desert, she’d been able to spot someone miles away. Northern Maine was different. You were either in a potato field or among thick patches of pines, hearty maples, and walls of thick underbrush. This assignment offered less action than El Paso, but the challenges facing agents could be enormous. Border jumpers quickly became proverbial needles in haystacks.
She set the binoculars aside and pulled back a strip of black electrical tape covering the green dashboard lights. It was 4:47 a.m., daybreak still a half-hour away.
The radio crackled. “Nineteen,” a man’s voice said, “did you request the ambulance?”
It was her boss, Mike Hewitt, the patrol agent in charge at Garrett Station. The PAIC didn’t typically work nights, proving once again Hewitt was a workaholic. His radio transmission also told her the bust she’d anticipated was important—he’d climbed out of bed to follow up.
She grabbed the receiver, wishing to hell she hadn’t listened to Kenny Radke.
“It didn’t go down,” she said cryptically; radio transmissions could be the verbal equivalent of public baths.
“You injured?” Hewitt said.
“No. Better call me.”
Her cell phone rang seconds later.
“What’s going on, Peyton?”
She told him.
“A baby?” he said.
“That’s right.”
“No BC Bud?”
“No—not yet.”
“I told you Kenny Radke was a piece of shit.”
“I really thought—”
“Don’t bother,” he said. “See me when you get to the office.”
When Hewitt hung up, she sat alone in the dark SUV, humiliated.
Brown eyes stared up at her. Whispering soothing words to the baby failed to ease her frustration. She was no rookie. She was thirty-three, an eleven-year veteran. She’d worked Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, had been promoted there, and had not returned to her hometown only to receive false tips and be embarrassed in front of her boss. After her successes in El Paso, she would damn well thrive in tiny Garrett, Maine, which had a population totaling all of 1,100.
For God’s sake then, how, despite night-vision goggles and binoculars, had she failed to see someone place a white sack in a dirt-covered field?
The sun was now an orange splash on the distant horizon. If the tip was legit, the drop had been rescheduled. She’d talk to Kenny Radke about that.
A second Expedition pulled in. Agents Scott Smith and Miguel Jimenez climbed out. Jimenez got into her passenger’s seat.
She pressed her index finger to her lips and pointed to the baby.
“What’s that?”
“What’s it look like?”
“That’s why you called for the ambulance?” Jimenez was the youngest agent at Garrett Station, the son of Mexican immigrants, a devout Catholic, and native Spanish speaker.
She nodded. “I found her.”
Smith stood in front of the truck, binoculars out, scanning the land below.
“What kind of asshole leaves a baby in a potato field?” Jimenez said.
“No idea.”
“Well, I’m almost jealous. This is more action than I’ve had on a night shift in months. Place is dead compared to Brownsville. Is it hurt?”
“It? If I thought she was hurt, I’d have rushed her to the hospital. She wasn’t outside for long.”
Despite hailing from different parts of the country, Peyton knew Miguel’s path had been similar to hers. The Border Patrol was a way out for each. She’d served obligatory time in El Paso and returned home to the northern border; Jimenez, an El Paso native, put in for a transfer to Garrett Station to gain experience on the northern border. Like her, he was a career agent, the US Department of Homeland Security’s eagle tattooed on his right forearm.
Leaning forward, he studied the baby and looked up, surprised.
“She’s Hispanic.”
“Possibly. Dark complexion. Could be French. Could be lots of ethnicities. But migrants do work the potato harvest. Most leave afterward.”
“Not all,” he said. “Not this year.”
“She’s not necessarily with them, Miguel.”
The SUV’s defrost hissed against the windshield.
“Get an ID on the guy who left her?”
She hesitated, but it was futile. The story would get out, sooner or later—her BC Bud tip had been bullshit, and Peyton Cote had been left holding a baby. She was the new agent, having returned to her hometown only four months earlier. But newbie status wouldn’t save her. She knew diapers and teething rings would find their way to her locker.
“I got nothing. No ID, no bust.”
The ambulance pulled in behind them. They both got out, and she approached the EMTs. She could smell the acidic odor from the nearby potato processing plant.
Smith smirked. “Starting an orphanage, Peyton?”
“Keep smiling,” she said, “and you’ll see how my steel toe feels against your right testicle.”
“Jesus, relax.”
“She’s a black belt,” Jimenez warned, “with a temper.”
Peyton carefully handed the baby girl to the EMT and answered several questions as Jimenez and Smith departed. When the ambulance left, she returned to her SUV.
Beyond the field, the Crystal View River looked dark and cold. She knew this region—its topography, people, and culture—well. Mornings like this reminded her of that—and of her childhood. The loss of her family’s farm years ago had meant the end of life as she knew it—carefree days that began with her mother’s homemade ployes, and afternoons spent among the century-old maples. And with the farm went her father’s dignity, “homemaker” status for her mother, and a debt-free college education for herself. The Border Patrol had been a lifeline she’d grabbed onto with both hands. She’d built more than just a career since joining; she’d built a life. Now she had a son to take care of. Failures like this one were not an option.
She thought she’d seen everything in El Paso, but how long had the tiny girl lain inside a pillowcase on the frozen ground? To die? Or had it been intended for Peyton to find her?
The wind was picking up, and wet snowflakes began to fall. In the distance, beyond the blue spruce, a series of large waves crashed unexpectedly against the river’s shoreline.
Peyton refocused the binoculars on the river but saw nothing. If there had been a boat there, she’d missed that, too.
TWO
BORDER PATROL AGENTS WORK odd hours. Eight-hour shifts are often scheduled around station needs (Garrett Station had fewer than thirty agents) and even the angle of the sun (it’s easier to sign cut and spot footprints when the sun is low). In Garrett, Maine, which was actually farther north than Montreal, the sun rose at 4:30 a.m. in the summer and set around 4 p.m. during the shortest winter days. So shifts were far from regular. Peyton, though, liked the irregularity of Garrett Station. She found it to be informal. All agents—even Mike Hewitt, the boss—were on a first-name basis.
Peyton returned to Garrett Station at 5:30 a.m., climbed out of the Expedition, and slung her duffle over her shoulder. It contained night-vision goggles, binoculars, PowerBars, and area maps. A gunmetal sky now spit heavy wet flakes.
Stan Jackman, an agent nearing the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven, strolled toward her.
“Just heard the good news.”
He extended his hand.
Flurries hit his thinning hair and melted against his pate.
Peyton shook his hand. She couldn’t look at him without thinking of his wife of thirty-four years, Karen, whom she’d met only once. Karen had recently lost her brief battle to pancreatic cancer. Nor could Peyton help noticing his sudden weight gain and the red capillary lines associated with drinking that now mapped Stan’s nose.
“My shift was a disaster,” she said.
“Congratulations on BORSTAR,” he said. “Quite an honor.”
The wind and falling slush were harbingers of a nasty winter, and in this place, where solitude and desolation spawned an us-against-the-world mentality and wind chills pushed minus fifty, harbingers were taken seriously.
“This place makes Minnesota seem warm.” He shook his head. “I’m heading home. Anyhow, it’s great to have someone from Garrett Station get the nod.”
The US Border Patrol’s Search, Trauma, and Rescue (BORSTAR) team was a specialized unit comprised of volunteer agents selected from a nationwide pool to undergo rigorous fitness, medical, and rescue training. They were an all-star squad of sorts, traveling wherever necessary to find and save agents and civilians. Peyton had been surprised at her selection, even more so when she’d discovered it was her boss of only four months, Mike Hewitt, who’d made the nomination.
She knew Hewitt was waiting for her. And she knew he wanted to speak to her about Kenny Radke. She looked down at the slush-covered pavement and started toward the stationhouse door.
“Are we the DEA or the Border Patrol?”
She had just taken her seat across the desk from Hewitt, who wasted no time.
“Or, shit,” he continued, “maybe we’re a daycare, because I have the Department of Health and Human Services on line one.”
He hadn’t bothered to close his office door. Peyton knew the receptionist and the agents scattered around the bullpen would be enjoying this.
“Am I getting warm?”
She’d learned long ago that little good comes from answering rhetorical questions, so she let these pass and sat perfectly still.
