by David Cole
“Well…yeah.”
She exploded with laughter, which quickly turned into a sobbing fit.
What’s this? I thought.
“He never touched me,” she said. “Once, he touched me. The first night we met, when he answered my ad for renting out the extra bedrooms. But it was just a touch. He rubbed his finger along my nose and I thought…I thought he was, you know, coming on to me.”
“That’s cool,” I said, wondering how to get away from her.
“I wanted him to touch me more. But he had somebody else.”
She saw the look on my face. I thought it was me that Rey wanted, you see, and Conchita found this very funny.
“I know all about you,” she said. “But it wasn’t you he wanted. It was his ex-wife.”
“Meg?”
“Yeah. Her. He thought they could get back together.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It was the daughter. Amada. She’s really screwed up, she thought all her problems would go away if her parents got back together. She convinced Rey, and he thought…he wanted to do that. They tried. Over the last month. They tried.”
I couldn’t deal with it. Got into my car, drove away, left her with her arms wrapped tight around her body, tight as rubber bands, tight as a straitjacket. That’s how much she’d invested in renting a room and all she got in return was rent money.
Rey and Meg.
I pounded the steering wheel, blasted my horn. That explained it, you see, that explained why he paid me so little attention at the border crossing, explained why he was so frantic to find Meg. Cruz said nothing, stared straight ahead.
Meg had not said anything to me. I guess…I didn’t know why, I thought she and I were so tight as friends, I thought we shared everything.
In Nogales, Cruz asked me to drive by the Border Patrol headquarters.
“Just take me a few minutes,” he said. “Get things cleared to cross over. Find out where your friend Rey is.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Just a few minutes.”
“There’s a Taco Bell. Right down there on Mariposa. I’ll get something, come right back to pick you up.”
He hesitated, thought it over.
“Right there, right back?” he said.
“Sure.”
“The bad thing about you,” he said as he got out of the car, “is that I can’t tell yet when you’re lying.”
At the Taco Bell, I wanted a Burrito Supreme. I saw a long line at the drive-up window, so I parked and went inside.
Another long line.
I was three people from the woman taking orders when a Nogales policeman came up behind me. He had a photocopy of my driver’s license picture, kept looking at it, looking at me.
“Señora,” he said, firm, apologetic, but I noticed he’d unsnapped the strap over his Glock. “Will you please to step outside?”
“Are you arresting me?” I said.
He smiled. He’d heard that a lot of times.
People like me who’ve been arrested once or twice, if we’re smart people, street smarts, we know right away to challenge a policeman. It’s automatic. Like pulling up to a stop sign. To cross the street when a gang of young men is in front of you and looking you over. When somebody is behind you and his footsteps suddenly break into a run and he’s ready to razor your purse strap for a snatch and run.
“No. You’re not being arrested,” he said.
“Then I’ll just wait in line here, get my Burrito Supreme.”
A young woman ahead of me in line, baby on her left hip, turned slightly to look at the policeman and turned away, shaking her head. The policeman hesitated, not wanting to make a scene, but I knew the woman was shaking her head at me. Nogales was a border town, but a safe town, safe from drug smugglers and people-smuggling coyotes, a demilitarized zone between Mexico and the thousands of people in the U.S. who wanted drugs and undocumented workers at low pay.
Once I’d paid for the burrito, I went outside to my car, but he stood in front of me. We played a dodge game for a few steps sideways.
“I have to detain you,” he said. “I have that legal right. If you resist me, I will place you under arrest. Are we clear about this?”
“Can I make a phone call?”
“Later.”
Ignoring him, I thumbed my cell phone open and punched in the number Cruz had given me. He answered immediately.
“Where did you go?” he said.
“I’m looking at a Nogales policeman who wants to take me to the police station. Do you know where that is?”
“Let me talk to him.”
After a short conversation, the policeman handed me back my phone without a word and drove away. I picked up Cruz, unwrapped the burrito, and began to drive. He started to object, but it smelled so fast-food wonderful that he just let me eat it.
“You arranged that, didn’t you?”
“Say what?”
“The policeman. You thought I wanted to get away from you.”
“But here you are.”
“I don’t like baby-sitters.”
“Fair enough. How about…partners?”
I squished the last of the burrito into my mouth, crumpled the wrapper, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Rey called, told me where he was.
“Okay, partner,” I said to Cruz. “How fast can you get me across the border?”
25
An old building with high ceilings, lots of oak paneling, windows in the Mexican style before central air-conditioning. High, shuttered on two sides of the room, although behind the shutters I could see air-conditioning window glass.
A Mexican police station.
Not the main one, downtown, where Rey and I had gone to see my ex-husband, Jonathan, where we bribed the guards and took Jonathan away.
Several uniformed officers looked up when we came into the room. They stood quickly and walked out. A man in civilian clothes remained, drinking a café con leche as he rifled through a stack of reports. Rey didn’t bother to introduce me.
Rey didn’t bother to say anything personal to me.
I was no more or less distinguished than the officers, the civilian.
One entire wall was covered with maps, all of them marked with different colored pens, stretching as high on the walls as a person could reach. Two chalkboards were propped against the other windowless wall, old-style school blackboards, with writing in actual chalk.
A variety of police scanners and radios lay everywhere, some on top of computer monitors where there was no clear desk space. Voices chattered from all the radios at different intervals, sometimes overlapping, most in Spanish, some in English. The civilian listened to each message. I could see his main task was to write down what he heard and sort the papers into different stacks, probably by priority.
“Meg,” I said. “Tell me if you know anything about Meg.”
“She’s been seen.”
He moved to the wall of maps.
“Here.” He stabbed at one area on a lower map. “Here also.” A map two feet away. “And here.” A map with circles marked heavily and repeatedly in red. “This whole section has been isolated. There are over a hundred men, blocking all the streets and searching every house.”
“What do you mean? Seen?”
“See. Eyes. That simple.”
“Seen by who?”
“Informants. Police. A bodega owner.”
“They recognized her? How do they know what she looks like?”
The civilian held up a sheet of paper. Rey pointed, I took the paper from the man’s hand. It was a photo of Meg.
“We’ve distributed over a thousand copies of this photo. She’s been on the Nogales TV stations, on the radio.”
“So…so, what are you telling me?”
“It’s a hostage situation,” the civilian said.
“She’s not kidnapped?” I asked Rey, ignoring the civilian.
“Kidnapped, hostage, there’s no rea
l difference at this point. No. That’s not right. Kidnapped…I guess that would mean we had no idea where she is.”
“A hostage. Who has her?”
“The Peraza drug cartel. Here.”
He handed me an inch-thick stack of photos.
“That’s how many men are known to be in the cartel. People are willing to say they’ve seen Meg. They are not willing to identify anybody she’s been seen with. But a teenager gave us a license plate…”
“Which car?” I asked.
“Every vehicle you saw at the border shootout has been found. Explosives set off inside, gasoline. Just burned-out wrecks. We think they’ve switched cars at least three times when they moved from one colonia to another. Now…this place, the latest place…they’ve moved to a very wealthy neighborhood. Somewhere.”
“A hostage,” I said.
“There’s nothing you can do, Laura.”
“Why am I here?”
“I—”
“If I can’t help—”
“—wanted you here.”
“—why? I mean, I trust you, Rey, but I’m not going on a police raid.”
I gestured at the maps, the photos, the radios.
“I just thought you needed to know. What I’m doing.”
“Can we talk?” I said.
The civilian, although trying hard not to listen, immediately stood up. Rey nodded, and the man left the room.
“I’m desperate to find her, Laura.”
“Jesus Christ, Rey…desperate, I’m…crazy…thinking about her.”
He reached out to touch my nose. An old thing with us, from the loving days. I let him run his finger up and down, but he took it away.
“I went to your house. Her house.”
“That’s just temporary, Laura.”
“Funny. That’s how she looked to me. Not your style.”
“It’s a place to live. A place for Amada. Conchita has two small kids, Amada baby-sits for them.”
“And when she’s working, you can invite Meg in?”
Astonished that I knew, he started to work his mouth, to say something, but a radio crackled, a loud voice talking in machine-gun Spanish.
“Miguel!” Rey shouted and moved toward the maps.
The man came in and joined him as Rey stabbed at a location.
“Yes, yes, I know that neighborhood. You want to go there?”
The radio erupted again, and this time we could hear gunshots in the background. Rey grabbed a leather holster rig, pulled out his Glock, shoved it back in, reached underneath one of the tables, and pulled up an M-16.
“I’ll call you,” he shouted, running from the room.
I could hear a lot of men shouting, running, car doors opening and slamming outside, cars peeling away from the police station. I went out the oaken front doors. The street was deserted except for one car. Cruz got out of his seat, standing with one arm on his door.
“You want to be part of this?” he asked.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been told not to participate. It’s too hard to explain.”
Everybody seemed to have some piece of legal jurisdiction.
Except me.
The hell with jurisdiction.
“Have you got authority to be there?” I asked.
He didn’t even bother talking, just waved me into the car and we joined the line of police vehicles snaking through colonias and into a middle-class neighborhood of Nogales.
26
Too late, too late.
An entire compound had been raided, the courtyard blossoming with flames. Fire trucks pumped furiously, police vehicles cordoned off a four-block-square area. A white delivery van lay on its side at the entrance to the courtyard, where it had tried to smash its way between two police Chevy Suburbans. As we drove up, a small fire bloomed from the engine compartment and a dozen firemen sprayed foam before the flames could grow.
Three bodies lay around the gate, another sprawled half out of the delivery van. Inside the courtyard, I could see several more bodies, two of them in brown Mexican uniforms. In the street, a mother and baby lay crumpled beside an overturned supermarket shopping cart, streaks of blackish blood still running away from the woman’s head.
Rey was clearly a guest, a visitor, not a combatant, and he was furious at not being told everything that had happened. I hung near his side, unable to understand most of the Spanish, hoping to hear Meg’s name, hoping desperately to find her there.
I heard her name, yelled at Rey to come with me. He questioned the soldier, who immediately pointed at an officer. Rey questioned him, both men shouting wildly, the captain trying to get away from Rey, who at one point gripped the captain by the shoulders and would not let him move.
Two men had escaped, Meg with them.
“A four-star clusterfuck mess,” Rey said angrily. “God, these men, if I could just train one of their commanders.”
“What’s happening now?”
Roadblocks were being set up all over the southern edges of Nogales, but Rey insisted that these blocks were too short, the men had left more than half an hour ago, and they’d be well south of the city. But nobody wanted to talk to him, and finally the captain brought two soldiers over and lined them up to keep Rey from interfering.
“Come on,” Rey said to me finally. “These yahoos are all local. I’m going to call the Federales.”
“Rey,” I said, tugging on his sleeve, but he charged ahead of me. “Rey!”
“Can’t talk.”
“You’ve got to hear this.”
At his car, I grabbed his keys, held them behind my back, shouted that he listen to me. Reluctant, angry, but relenting, he listened to my story about the black market in body parts, about the kidnappings, and about Victorio who wanted revenge on Meg and me.
He snatched the keys, slammed the door so fast I almost got my fingers jammed. Starting the engine, he started to shift into Drive. I shouted for him to stop, but he rolled up the window, so I picked up a huge rock and smashed in his window. Furious, his face mottled red and white with anger, slabs of muscle moving around his jaws, neck cords so taut I backed away before he tried to hit me.
I’d seen him that furious before. If driving, he wanted to smash his way through any intersection, any stoplight or one-way street, maniacal, determined to have total control over the roads.
“Victorio,” he said dismissively. “Useless. If he only communicates with you through voice mail and computers, you’ll never find him.”
“Scorpion!” I shouted. “This Victorio, he has a picture of a bark scorpion on his email messages.”
“Scorpion?”
“Yes.”
“A bark scorpion?”
“What do I know about scorpions? But I’ve seen the symbol.”
I tried to explain the digital picture, but I didn’t want to tell him that it was associated with the doctored picture of Meg with her arm hacked off.
“Was it green?”
“Yes.”
Just like that, he was calm. Some switch, thrown inside his head, turning off the anger, turning on his reason.
“That’s the logo for the Peraza drug cartel. You know, every dealer has a special identifier stamp on bricks of heroin.”
“How does that help us?”
“I need a beer,” he said. “You tell me everything that’s been going on.”
We sat outdoors on an old leather sofa, Rey drinking Negra Modelo as he listened to everything I’d done in the past two days.
Like old times, like special times, like the times when we were lovers. That’s how gentle Rey became, but every few minutes I’d see him cut his eyes toward me at something I’d said, I saw his mind working, I knew it really wasn’t like the old times.
“Here’s what you do,” he said. “This woman, this…reporter?”
“Jo?”
“She’s the key. She’s been at the kidnappers’ camp, she might be able to find her way back. How bad does she want to do that?”
; “Somebody raped her. She wants him, I think she wants to kill him. She’s wrapped totally too tight.”
“Does she listen to you?”
“Only if she thinks I’m helping her. She’s a control freak, so I let her play that, I let her think she’s using me. But I also got her to pay for Don Ralph to fly to Tucson and help do some computer tracing.”
“Victorio.”
Three beer bottles emptied. He arranged them in different patterns, the bottoms pointing out, a three-pointed star, the bottoms pointing in. Finishing the fourth beer, he started laying it out with the rest.
“You’re drinking again,” I said quietly.
He stared into my eyes, held my head in his hands, and drew me so close I thought he was going to kiss me, but really, he just wanted to see my eyes.
“You on that stuff again?”
“Ritalin?”
“Yeah.”
It was the first time I’d thought of Ritalin since going across the border with Jo, when she bought a thousand pills, but I realized that she’d kept all the pills, that I’d not taken any since then.
“I’m not sure,” I said in wonder, but he really didn’t care.
“Victorio. Two things. First, I’ve got a complete printout of everybody in the Peraza cartel. They’re always adding people, hell, they’re always killing some of them off. But second thing, I’ve never seen that name on any of the lists. It could be Mexican, but…back in the last century, days of Cochise and Geronimo, Victorio was the baddest of them all.”
“Taá Wheatley was Apache.”
“Did she have a brother?”
“I don’t know, but it’s easy to check.”
“I figure it like this. Peraza had a good thing going. He’d kidnap wealthy people, he’d ransom them, they’d go home. But this black market in body parts, I don’t know anybody in law enforcement down here that’s ever heard of such a thing. It’s almost too sophisticated. Plus, why ruin a good thing? Word gets around that people are paying ransom but the kidnapped person never shows up, pretty soon the honey will stop flowing to the bees.”
He kicked the empty beer bottles, one at a time, aiming them at a battered cholla cactus near the roadway. Finishing his last beer, he drew back his arm like a football quarterback, but instead of throwing the bottle something occurred to him and he dropped it beside him.
