Triple Crossing

by Sebastian Rotella

  They grinned at each other. He looked forward to every debriefing as if it were a date. The relationship felt like an affair: laughing furtively, whispering, watching over their shoulders. She appeared to enjoy herself, but no doubt that was the way a female handler was supposed to treat a male informant.

  “I’m still getting used to the idea that you pulled a thorn out of Omar Mendoza’s paw,” she said. “His cousin’s paw, anyway.”

  “Garrison didn’t say much ’cause he likes to be the big boss, but you could tell he was happy about that.”

  “It works out well for us,” she said. “You’re really doing good.”

  “I feel good. You were right, it’s easier dealing with Garrison now that I’m spying on him.”

  “You have a knack for undercover work.”

  “Yeah? I guess I always felt like I was impersonating a Border Patrol agent in the first place.”

  Isabel laughed. Pescatore felt a charge of exhilaration.

  “When Buffalo and Rufino were whispering and everything, I thought I was history,” he said. “I thought that humongous throwdown jailbird was gonna march over and crush my skull. But he totally changed when we got to talking. At the ranch he let me shoot this laser-sight pistol. The Buffalo seems pretty cool to me.”

  “Uh-huh. Remind me to show you his sheet. He started killing people in middle school. He was in a gang in the worst housing project in the San Fernando Valley. The Gardens. Hasn’t stopped since. Be really, really careful, Valentine.”

  Pescatore spent the rest of the lunch telling Puente about the evening’s activities in detail. He watched her fill her notebook with careful ornate scribbles, her mouth half-open in concentration. Her legs were tucked up under her, smooth muscles bunched in a short crimson skirt.

  “If this was Taylor Street in the summer, now we could walk over to Mario’s Italian Ice, sit on a stoop and have a couple of lemonades,” Pescatore sighed, digging caffeinated granules of sugar out of his espresso cup. “But around here they never heard of Italian ice. And you’d probably have to drive fifty miles for it.”

  “You’ve got a serious case of homesickness,” Puente said, pointing the pen at him like a teacher.

  “I guess home always seems better when you’re far away,” Pescatore said, running a hand through his curls.

  “I get the idea your neighborhood wasn’t that great.”

  “Yeah. The Italians and the Mexicans and the blacks were always brawling. A three-way hatefest. For me, not hanging with any one group was good sometimes. But other times it sucked. I had to stay in the house or run like hell. I got good at running.”

  “And boxing?”

  “You know about the boxing?”

  Puente responded with a look that said “Silly Question.”

  “I boxed a little. I wasn’t exactly great. What about you, Isabel? You never get homesick? You don’t go someplace reminds you of Miami?”

  Puente smiled. “This is classified, Valentine. I go to a Cuban restaurant on Morena Boulevard. A family place. They treat me like a queen. I don’t order, they just give me whatever they think I’ll like.”

  “Sounds great. When we going there?”

  “I never take anybody there.”

  “So I guess when you take me, that’d be a big step, huh?” He said it fast and breezy, caught up in the moment.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I hope we go there, that’s all.” He had decided it was ridiculous not to give it a shot. What was she going to do, fire him? He said: “We could even not talk about work, for once. We could spend the whole night not talking about work.”

  “Valentine.” They stared at each other, both leaning on their elbows. “You’re not getting distracted from your assignment, are you?”

  “No way. But I’m not gonna hide my feelings, Isabel.”

  She tilted her head warily.

  “Really,” she said.

  “Can’t help it.” He grinned apologetically. “That’s the way it is.”

  “I’m not going to hide the way I feel either,” she said, her smile disappearing. “Mainly I feel worried. You’re my best informant and you’re infiltrating this organization better than I thought you would. The last thing we want is distractions. Understand? The better you do, the more dangerous it gets.”

  At roll call at the Imperial Beach station the following Sunday afternoon, the field operations supervisor and the assistant station chief went through a typical litany: a new overtime policy, more sniper threats, a tip about backpackers who were paying their coyotes by carrying marijuana. The bosses outlined procedures for using on-call interpreters of exotic languages—Mandarin, Arabic—who had been hired to handle all the OTMs. Intel reports said the smugglers had warehouses in Tijuana full of hundreds of aliens from far-off places waiting to cross. And keep the agents in report-writing hell.

  Pescatore half listened as they ended the briefing with an alert for three inmates who had escaped hours earlier from the penitentiary in Tijuana during a shoot-out that left five dead. One of the fugitives was the former chief of the state police in Tijuana, the supervisor said: Regino Astorga. Aka the Colonel.

  By the time Pescatore registered the name, the agents were getting up from the tables and heading out into the warm and rainy evening. Pescatore knew that Isabel Puente was interested in the Colonel. She was helping her secretive Mexican cop friends on an investigation related to him. But that was all she had told him.

  Garrison met Pescatore, Dillard and Macías for a dinner break at Adalberto’s, a hole-in-the-wall taco place in San Ysidro. Usually, Garrison high-fived, bullshitted and cheerfully terrorized every Mexican in the place, employee or customer, Americanized or border brother. But tonight he slumped, silent and ornery, next to Dillard in the scarred wooden booth.

  “We got an urgent thing tonight,” Garrison said. “I need all three of you. Full operational mode.”

  Garrison ordered them to meet at the parking lot overlooking the beach in Border Field State Park. As the appointed time approached, Pescatore heard Garrison on the radio deploying agents to the east and north. Pescatore assumed he was clearing the way for whatever he had cooking at the beach.

  A light steady rain fell as Pescatore drove into Border Field State Park. He waved at a park ranger in a yellow slicker who sat in a guardhouse by the entrance. The road slanted southwest through a grassy field. Sheer hills topped by mansions with satellite dishes and cupolas, the exclusive Playas de Tijuana neighborhood with its beach-and-border view, marked the international line. The rain and mist blurred the bowl-shaped hulk of Tijuana’s seaside bullring in the distance. Three Patrol Wranglers were parked in the lot overlooking the southwestern corner of the border.

  When Pescatore had arrived in the San Diego sector, a retired agent had told him about what the beach was like in the years before the border fence. On sunny weekends, the retired agent had explained, an unspoken agreement between The Patrol and the beachgoers caused the border to temporarily disappear. Extended families arrived in contingents, some from San Diego and some from Tijuana. They camped out on blankets and towels. Kids chased soccer balls in the surf. Vendors carried Styrofoam coolers and pushed ice cream carts. Musical trios known as conjuntos lugged instruments across the sand to perform serenades. All of them breaching the unmarked international line as Border Patrol agents lounged in the parking lot above the beach.

  The agents sunned themselves, propped on their vehicle hoods in wraparound dark glasses. They permitted the foot traffic between First and Third worlds as long as no one strayed off the sand or too far north. It was a peaceful scene. Only on rare occasions did some lowlife cholo ruin the mood by removing his shirt, hoisting a boogie board over his shoulder as camouflage, and trying to sneak toward downtown San Diego, which rose out of the Pacific like an apparition in the distance.

  But then the U.S. Army had constructed a specially engineered metal fence at the state park. The fence extended down the dune, across the sand
and several hundred yards into the ocean. And it put an end to transborder weekends at the beach forever more.

  Pescatore climbed into Garrison’s Wrangler with Dillard and Macías. Garrison was on the phone and smoking furiously. Garrison said the name Mauro and wrapped up the conversation.

  “Listen up, gentlemen,” Garrison said, peering south through the rivulets on the windshield. “You know this Colonel Astorga that busted out of the penitentiary in TJ? Well, he’s coming across in a couple minutes. We’re giving him a escort north.”

  “Here?” asked Macías, who was in his early twenties and had a crew cut. “Be less fuss to have him come through one of our lanes at the port of entry, wouldn’t it?”

  “This guy’s all over the news,” Garrison said. “It’s too hot for him to show up at San Ysidro or Otay. Macías, I want you out by the park entrance. Anybody shows up, you shoo ’em off. Me and Valentine and Dillard are gonna meet our guy. Door-to-door service.”

  Garrison said he planned to stash the Colonel at the safe house in Imperial Beach until the end of the shift. Then they would give him a ride north past the Border Patrol freeway checkpoint at San Clemente. Somebody else would take over from there.

  Macías departed. Garrison, Pescatore and Dillard sat in the Wrangler listening to the rain on the roof. Pescatore’s hand gripped the belt sheath holding his cell phone. He cursed himself for not having called Isabel Puente when he had had the chance. He had resisted his initial instinct that Garrison’s “urgent thing” involved the Colonel. It had seemed too brazen, too risky.

  Garrison checked his watch.

  “Ready?” he said.

  His phone rang again. Pescatore slumped, restless, exhaling forcefully. He watched Garrison. The supervisor closed his eyes momentarily as he listened. He muttered one word into the phone: “OK.”

  Garrison closed the phone and clipped it to his belt. He did not look at Pescatore or Dillard.

  “You guys get going down there in Valentine’s vehicle,” Garrison said. “The Colonel is about five seven, one seventy-five, late fifties. Wearing a fatigue-type jacket and a Pittsburgh Pirates cap. He’s with a subject in a Padres cap named Rico. You just put ’em in the vehicle. I’ll cover you from my little command post up here, buddy.”

  His door open, water hitting his sleeve, Pescatore started to ask Garrison where the third escapee was and, more important, why Garrison wasn’t coming down to the beach. But as he studied the bulging gray eyes, the controlled savagery with which the supervisor stubbed out his cigarette, Pescatore understood. He’s scared, Pescatore thought. That’s why he’s not taking the lead, shaking the Colonel’s hand, the big-shot bullshit. It doesn’t make sense—unless somebody just told him it’s not such a hot idea to get close to the Colonel right this minute. And if he’s scared, I’m scared.

  Pescatore steered his Wrangler down a sandy ridge to the beach. Dillard popped bubbles next to him. Pescatore drove slowly south across the sand. He stopped about a hundred feet from The Line. There were fuzzy lights along the fence on the Tijuana side, the shadow of the bullring beyond. The fence was dark and devoid of movement. Rain usually thinned the gathering of migrants and vendors on the beach.

  The Colonel was supposed to come through a new hole in the fence. The gap was about the size of a doorway. Floods and erosion had weakened the support of one of the metal panels during the winter rains, and smugglers had knocked it down.

  Pescatore glanced back up to his left. He saw Garrison’s vehicle over the low stone wall of the parking lot atop the bluff. Pescatore intended to sit in the Wrangler until the Colonel came to him.

  “They’re waitin’ on ya,” Garrison said over the radio. “You gotta meet ’em on foot. That’s the arrangement.”

  Dillard got out. Reluctantly, Pescatore followed suit. Rain pattered on the brim of his uniform cap. The moon-striped surf sloshed and crackled on his right.

  Stepping clear of the Wrangler, Pescatore drew his gun. He held it next to his leg. It made him feel better.

  They walked slowly, Dillard about fifteen feet to his right.

  “What’re you doin’ with your gun out?” Dillard snapped. “You’re gonna spook them old boys.”

  “Fuck them old boys,” Pescatore hissed, his eyes never leaving the gap in the fence. “I’m takin’ appropriate precautions.”

  The certainty that something terrible was about to happen settled over him. He felt utterly focused. He stopped, knees slightly bent.

  Shadows filled the gap in the fence. Two men, both wearing baseball caps, entered U.S. territory. They made their way down the sand slope to the beach. A third shadow remained in the gap.

  The tall one in the Padres cap, Rico, raised a hand in greeting. A coat flapped around him. Pescatore heard Dillard advise Garrison over his radio. Pescatore could see the black P on the yellow background of a Pittsburgh Pirates cap taking shape in the gloom, the hard squarish face of the shorter man beneath it. The Colonel. Both of the men in caps had their hands open and extended to their sides as they walked.

  A raindrop slid along Pescatore’s cheek. Shifting his gaze back and forth from the approaching duo to the fence, he saw the third man make a move.

  Pescatore went into a crouch, causing the Colonel and his sidekick to falter. Pescatore started to shout a warning. Gunshots exploded in the gap at the fence.

  Multiple impacts buckled the Colonel. He said, “Ay.” He pitched forward onto his belly.

  Pescatore shouted: “Ten-ten! Shots fired, shots fired!”

  He saw Dillard draw his gun, wild and disoriented, and yell at Rico, who had extracted a big revolver from the folds of his coat. Rico was next to the fallen Colonel, whirling back and forth between the agents and the shooter at the fence. When Rico saw Dillard point his gun in his general direction, he sank down on one knee in a practiced and fluid motion. He shot Dillard in the face.

  Rico thought it was a double-cross; Pescatore was next. Pescatore bounded sideways to his right, still crouching. He aimed with both hands as he moved.

  It could have been the fog, sheer concentration, the spotlights above, a supernatural experience. Whatever the reason, the gunman on one knee seemed to emanate a bright white glow, a halo that caught fire as Pescatore capped off rounds, pumping bullets into him, the shots punching Rico back and down into the sand.

  A volley rang out from the fence. Pescatore sprinted, dropped and rolled for the shelter of the Wrangler. He felt bullets kick up sand around him. He wondered if the wetness on his chest and back and arms was rain or blood or both. He rolled interminably, convinced that he was dead. He clung desperately to his gun. He rolled through fragments of memories and images and regrets. He came to a stop against a tire of the Wrangler.

  He slithered around behind the tire, halfway under the vehicle. There was sand in his mouth. His ears roared with the shots and his own gasping breath. He sighted over his Glock. He sighted through gunsmoke and rain on Dillard’s body, Rico’s body, a Pirates cap lying in the sand. He sighted on the bareheaded, fleeing figure of the Colonel.

  The Colonel was on his feet again, tottering south. He was heading, insanely enough, toward the very spot where the gunman had fired on him. There were no more shots, no sign of the gunman.

  The Colonel went down heavily. He struggled back up. He turned in drunken circles. He had a pistol in his hand now, and he pointed it this way and that. He crawled slowly up the embankment. He staggered back through the hole in the fence from which he had come.

  Then came a single, final shot. And the sound of a vehicle departing on the other side of the fence. And the waves and the rain.

  Part Two

  THE OTHER PATROL

  6

  THE COLONEL LAY FACEDOWN a few yards south of the gap in the border fence.

  Peppered by flashlight beams, the corpse’s torso was contorted. An arm was stretched forward, a leg bent double, as if he had expired while trying to swim over the sand. An object protruded from the top of a snakeskin boot:
an extra ammunition clip for the Makarov automatic pistol clutched in his right hand. The back of his jacket was stitched with half a dozen bullet holes.

  Méndez watched Mauro Fernández Rochetti in action on the other side of the corpse. The silver-haired homicide chief stood beneath an umbrella held for him by his driver, a meaty-faced cop in a cowboy hat known as Chancho. Fernández Rochetti had his two-way radio near his ear, alternately listening to it and tapping the antenna pensively against his shoulder. He rocked forward, his sharp-toed black shoes digging into the sand. His lips puckered as detectives came up to him, delivered terse reports, then returned to their inspections of the crime scene. Which they, as was the custom of the state police homicide squad when it suited them, had done their best to tromp all over.

  The deaths of the Colonel, his sidekick Rico, and a U.S. Border Patrol agent had drawn a swarm of international law enforcement. Representing Mexico were the state police, state prosecutors, the Diogenes Group, the federal police, the municipal police and federal immigration officers. The dark van sitting in the cul-de-sac above the beach belonged to Mexico’s domestic espionage agency.

  In years past, the Mexican Army would have also shown up. But the national coalition government that was in power as a result of the political crisis had withdrawn the armed forces from their frontline role in the drug wars. Some leaders of the coalition said that the military campaign against the cartels had degenerated into brutality and corruption. Some worried, privately, that the military had done too good a job pursuing drug lords and the politicians who protected them. Most political leaders agreed that the presence of troops on the streets did not send the right message at a time of instability.

  Nonetheless, the deployment of multiple agencies made it clear that the border shoot-out was a big deal. As did the turnout on the U.S. side. The Border Patrol brass had responded, accompanied by riot-equipped agents of BORTAC, the Patrol’s tactical unit. The San Diego Police were there to investigate the homicides. Inspector General agents were there to investigate the conduct of the Border Patrol. The FBI was there on general principle, accompanied by a deputy chief of the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Diego. The beach north and south of the fence was a maze of yellow tape, four-wheel-drive vehicles and officers holding flashlights.