South

by Lance Charnes

  FRIDAY, 7 MAY

  Luis returned home from San Diego via I-15 through Miramar and Lake Elsinore to avoid the mess around the I-5 CBP checkpoint at Camp Pendleton. By the time he’d left the loaner car at the dropoff and walked the couple blocks to his house, he found all the lights off and everyone in bed. A dark lump took up the sofa; he could see enough face to tag her as Ros, one of Bel’s hospital buddies. He’d ask tomorrow.

  He retreated to the patio with a beer, pulled up a bleached-gray plastic lawn chair and watched the fire in the hills. The wind had kicked up at sunset, and flames fringed the hillcrests. Twin torches marked what used to be a pair of houses at the nearest slope’s bottom. They must not have paid their fire insurance.

  He hoped Sunday would end this job. He’d driven more in the past week than he had in the previous two months. He hadn’t slept more than a couple hours at a time since Tavo extorted him into this a week ago. He missed Bel, not just in bed but everywhere, and he’d come to dread that hurt-sad-angry look in her eyes whenever they passed in the house.

  The sliding screen door scratched open and closed behind him. He looked back to see his father Alvaro shuffle toward him, the three-quarter moon glowing on his white sleeveless undershirt. He rolled as he walked, and his slippers made a scritch-scrrraaaatch sound on the cement. While Alvaro approached, Luis ankled a nearby lawn chair and settled it next to his.

  His father’s hand clawed his shoulder. “Oye, hijo.”

  “Oye, Papi. Why’re you up so late? You okay?”

  Alvaro took a minute to carefully lower himself into his chair and hook his cane on the arm. Every move came with a grunt or sigh. Bel had told Luis that soon his father wouldn’t be able to walk on his own. He hoped she was wrong but knew she wasn’t. “Can’t sleep,” he wheezed in Spanish. “Your mother snores.”

  “She says you’re the one who snores.”

  Alvaro waved that thought away. “You on a run now?” Luis nodded. “More Moros?”

  “Yes, Papi.”

  “So why aren’t you with that pretty wife of yours?”

  “She’s pissed at me. Did Mom get on your case about doing this?”

  Alvaro stared at the fire, nodding and wheezing. “Of course she did. Gracie would get mad, make me sleep in the truck. I go out, she’d cry and cook all night until I called. Your sister told me this. Then I come home, kitchen’s full of food and Gracie yells at me some more. Then we make up.” He smiled, maybe remembering the making-up.

  “I remember now. I’d watch her cook and wonder if it was the onions making her cry.” Luis sighed. “I bribed a guy today to let me cross with the travelers.”

  “Did it work?”

  “We’ll find out soon. You know, I’ve been paying bribes to cops for years when they ask for them. But every time I bribe one without them hitting me up, it just feels so slimy.”

  Alvaro shrugged. “It’s part of the job, hijo. Back then, I bribed men, leaned on them, you know. They had their hands out then, too.”

  “I don’t remember seeing you do that.”

  “I didn’t do it in front of you. So you wouldn’t think I was malvado, you know. So when I get old, you think I’m a hero and take care of me.”

  Exactly the reason Luis had never told Nacho or Christa. Especially Christa. She hadn’t needed to know where the money came from for her braces and her quinceañera. Now only Nacho remained, and if he stayed in the Marines, who could tell if he’d ever be able to take care of his parents when they couldn’t work anymore?

  He watched his father slump in the chair, hands trembling, dragging each breath over sandpaper. He’d been so strong, not big but barrel-chested from the warehouse work, hands like Vise-Grips. He’d worked so hard all his life and had nothing much to show for it. He wasn’t even seventy yet but looked ninety. Me in twenty years.

  Luis laid his hand over Alvaro’s and squeezed. “I’m sorry, Papi.”

  “What for?”

  “That things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to. That you’re sick and we can’t get you to a doctor. That you had to sell the house. That all your retirement money went down the toilet. That…that all I can give you is a little room in a little house.”

  Alvaro rocked gently in his chair for a few moments, then snorted. “More than I gave my padre. I left him back home, never got back to see him, sent money like that meant something. You’re here for me and your mother. Your mujer preciosa cares for me like a daughter. So you stay with us until we’re gone. That’s all we can ask.”

  Luis nodded, swallowed. He hoped that would be a long time, but he heard reality every time Alvaro coughed. Still, it was his duty, and he’d do it as best he could.

  Just one more reason to get Nora to el otro lado—the other side.

  22

  Dr. Ajayan says the last unmatchable human forensic sample he recalls coming to the L.A. Crime Lab occurred in 2025…“Between federal, state, local, and private DNA databases, our samples can hit [match a database entry] three or four times.”…Private databases can be problematic, however. Studies show that like the online “background check” services of the 2010s, for-profit DNA databases often misidentify profiles or store corrupted data.

  — “LAPD: No More ‘Unknown Subjects’,” LATimes.com

  SATURDAY, 8 MAY

  After a passel of reports and meetings and what-all kept him from doing any real work, McGinley finally got back to his desk to find the usual email backup on his slate. The fifth message from the top was from Special Agent Destry Park out of ICE ERO, El Paso field office. That name was familiar somehow. It came to him after a moment: Park was the troop who found that white whore in New Mexico, in the Zeta van.

  The email got right to the point:

  joella marie murchison, 32, 339 tophill rd san antonio. subj id conf by dna match via txdps. rptd missing to sapd 6/21/29. call if u need more.

  McGinley slumped back in his chair, staring at the message. He knew exactly where 339 Tophill Road was. Northwood, just under the north edge of the 410 Loop. Three blocks from his house.

  Joella was one of the five women with Carla Jean when the Zetas got her.

  The infirmary at the ICE Otero Processing Center was every bit as depressing as McGinley remembered these kinds of places being, though nowhere near as bad as that sewer where he’d talked to Ojeda’s wife a few days back. Lots of chipped not-quite-white and almost-tan paint, linoleum, metal doors, staff that checked out a long time ago, orderlies who looked like they belonged in orange jumpsuits.

  McGinley hunkered down in a plastic chair across from Joella’s room, waiting on the locals to let him see her. A nurse had warned him about what he’d find in there: 20% underweight, twice the intox levels of kronk in her system on admit, every STD known to man and a few they weren’t so sure about.

  There’d been seven of them back in Northwood, a gang of pretty girls, and if you found one you didn’t have to look far to find another couple. Joella was the cute redhead, the one Carla Jean called “sorta trashy” on account of the tight tops and short skirts that got her into trouble with the bluenoses now and then. Her husband Kyle sure loved to show her off. McGinley held that picture in his mind: Kyle and Joella in their back yard next to the grill, laughing at what-have-you, her all freckles and pale skin and legs and straight, white teeth.

  Kyle. McGinley didn’t know whether he ought to envy or pity the poor son-of-a-bitch. He was getting his woman back…broken. Never gonna be the way she was again.

  But she was still alive. He’d spent the whole flight from Santa Ana to El Paso trying not to think about what that meant. His brain had almost convinced his heart that Carla Jean was dead, that she went fast, without pain, and he’d been chasing a ghost. Joella could blow that story all to hell, but not in the happy-ending Bollywood way.

  “You McGinley?”

  He looked up into an ICE polo and an olive face with a salt-and-pepper moustache. “Guilty as charged. I reckon you ain’t Park.”


  “Nope. Cal Gennaro, ERO. I’m the investigator assigned to her.” He nodded toward Joella’s room.

  After they shook hands and played do-you-know and generally sized up each other, McGinley said, “Reckon I can get some time with Joella in there?”

  Gennaro scratched the back of his head. “Remind me again how you’re involved in this. Park kind of waved his hands around it.”

  McGinley had been as vague as he could when he explained it to Park. “Joella was one of five women with my wife when they disappeared in Matamoros back in June of ’29. She’s the first proof we got that any of ‘em survived.”

  Gennaro nodded. “So you’re that McGinley. Your case popped when we IDed her. And I know you’re not assigned to that case, but what the fuck, I’d be here too if it was my wife.” He rubbed his hand across his chin. “How much do you know about Zetas and hookers?”

  “A fair bit. I learned fast back then.”

  “I’ll bet. So you know the white ones are in demand. Old Paco’ll pay extra to fuck a gringa. They load them up on kronk to keep them quiet, work them hard, then when the kronk eats too many holes in their brains, they take them out in the desert and put one in the back of their heads.”

  McGinley glanced away, nodded. That movie had played a few times in his brain.

  “Sorry to be harsh. I guess I’m saying…even if the woman’s coherent enough to talk, she may not tell you anything you want to hear.”

  “I know that.” McGinley took Gennaro’s measure. The man was lean and almost as dark as a Mex, with a drinker’s nose and squint lines like gullies. On the job a long time, and showing it. “She can’t tell me nothing I ain’t already told myself. So. Can I talk to her?”

  The little room smelled like alcohol wipes and bleach. A skeleton wearing a ratty red mop on its head lay in the middle of a tangle of machines and tubes. McGinley cued up the picture of Joella on his dataspecs and peered at the skull under the frazzled hair. Her eyes and cheeks were sunk deep and her nose had been busted along the way, but McGinley found the mole on her left temple and the little scar under her lower lip. For an instant he saw Carla Jean there, not for long but long enough to curdle his stomach. He took a deep breath, flipped his dataspecs to “record,” then leaned closer. “Joella?” he said as gently as he could. “You awake, darlin’?”

  Her half-mast eyes slewed his way. She frowned. “I…know you.”

  “Yes you do. I’m Jack. Carla Jean’s husband?”

  “Jack.” Her eyes flickered. Recognition? “Jack. Jack.”

  He pulled a photo of Carla Jean from his shirt pocket and held it in front of Joella’s face, careful to not look at it himself. He didn’t dare, not here. “Remember her?”

  A scratchy little sound creaked out of her throat. For the first time, her eyes—the white parts mostly red—really focused. “Carla,” she whispered.

  “That’s right, darlin’. Carla. What happened when they took you, down Matamoros way? What’d they do with all y’all?”

  Her eyes sloshed around a bit more. “Jasmine. Shot her. Don’t…don’t know why.”

  “Jasmine?” Gennaro asked.

  “Holtz,” McGinley said. “Oldest of them, thirty-five maybe back then.” Damn it. McGinley knew why they shot her—nobody wanted an old whore. Carla Jean was next oldest. He bent closer to Joella. “What’d they do with you then?”

  She was breathing through her mouth, and he could feel it on his cheek. Her eyes drifted here and there for a spell. “Took us…to a place.”

  “What place?”

  “Some place. Gave us stuff…made me sleepy. Took our clothes. They…they…” Pain bust through the glaze over her eyes. “It hurt.”

  Gang rape, beatings and drugs until they stopped fighting. The part he’d hoped Carla Jean had been spared. Those evil fuckers. “You’re doing fine, darlin’. Now, think hard. When was the last time you saw Carla Jean? Where were you?”

  “Who are you?”

  Lord. “Jack. Jack McGinley.”

  “I know you.”

  “I know you do, darlin’. Think, now. When was the last time you saw Carla Jean?”

  The machines beeped and hummed. She squeezed shut her eyes, then eked them open again. Her left eye fuzzed out with a tear. “A few…few months…maybe.”

  He’d prepared for anything she might say—anything but that. McGinley stood bolt upright. Carla Jean could still be…

  No. That wasn’t possible. She survived…all that? There’d been too many false alarms, too many mystery-blonde sightings, too many bodies with bleached hair. Looking at Joella—a bundle of sticks held together with Kleenex—he couldn’t reckon whether he could call this “surviving.”

  “You okay, McGinley?” Gennaro asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, reckon so.” He bent over Joella again, wrapped a hand around her scrawny arm, more to convince himself she was real than to give her any comfort. “Where was she? Where’d you see her?”

  More fading in and out, more head-rocking. She squinted through him. The tear trickled down her neck, followed by another. “Beach place,” she whispered. “Lotsa soldiers. We…we were in trailers…by a…a big hotel or something.” Her eyes landed on him again. “Who are you?”

  “The GPS on the driver’s phone said he came from Puerto Peñasco,” Gennaro told McGinley in a shabby break room down the hall from Joella. “You know that place?”

  McGinley shook his head. He hadn’t memorized the whole damn country.

  “R&R spot for Zetas and their army buddies on the Gulf of California. Closest beach to Arizona. Back before the war, folks from Phoenix and Tucson would go down there for the weekend.”

  “Zetas got it now?”

  “Had it a couple years. They’ve got the Nortes pushed back almost to the Sonora border. Anyway, big logistics base for them, bivouac, some parts of the Mexican Navy they own, so it makes sense they’d keep hookers there for the ‘recreation’ part of R&R.”

  Another picture of Carla Jean that McGinley didn’t want, and reckoned he’d never be rid of. “If they moved her, where’d they move her to?”

  Gennaro shrugged. “Anywhere. Sometimes they put ‘em in RVs and work the forward units. But maybe there’s another story. That GPS? The dumb fuck had it set for his destination, too. A big open-cut coal mine up on the Mogollon Rim in Arizona east of Payson, the Christopher Creek Mine. It’s run by this big Ozzie company, but we think they contract with the Zetas for security and probably drugs and hookers.”

  “So why ain’t you busted them?”

  “We didn’t have anything on them worth a warrant until now. My office’s working a warrant for the whorehouse they probably have on their property, based on the van full of hookers headed there.”

  “Ain’t whoring legal in Arizona?”

  “It’s Federal land. Sitgreaves National Forest.” Gennaro set a hand on McGinley’s shoulder and leaned in. “If she’s there, we’ll find her, Jack. I promise.”

  McGinley’s wheels started turning. He slammed a door on the horror movie starring Carla Jean playing in his head and concentrated as hard as he could on what Gennaro was telling him. “I want to be on that raid.”

  Gennaro pulled back, threw up his hands. “Yeah, I get it. But you’re HSI, this isn’t your party, you’re not even on the investigation. You’re outside your lane here. I—”

  “I do that a lot.” McGinley loomed over the other agent. “Get me on that raid. I know the women, they know me, they’ll talk to me. Hell, look what I got from Joella, and that girl’s brain is half melted.” He bent to stare at Gennaro straight on. “I’ve had straphangers on raids with way less reason to be there. If my wife is there, I need to be the one who finds her. Got it?”

  “I got it.” Gennaro sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  A notion came to McGinley: probably nobody knew more about what the Zetas were up to around Baja than the Nortes. And he just happened to have a line on one of them. He’d arrange another talk with Ojeda…this time, a
serious one.

  23

  Despite the war and the hassles in crossing the border, it’s not all blood and guts. The border towns totally controlled by one of the cartels—like Tecate, where we were crossing, or Nogales—are pretty chill now. It’s the ones where the cartels crash together that get scary. At least, that’s what our guide Fidel told us.

  — “Moto in the War Zone,” OutsideOnline.com

  SUNDAY, 9 MAY

  Luis parked the Geely in a dirt lot scattered with sorry-looking trucks a couple hundred yards from the Tecate crossing. He steadied his elbows on the top of the open driver’s door so he could watch the action through his Chinese Zen-Ray compact binoculars.

  The brown hills of Mexico wavered in the heat haze beyond the checkpoint. Eight cars waited to get through the border station, three in each southbound crossing lane, two waiting in line on the road behind. Justin was in the left lane; a sunburned kid with a sun shade draped over his neck was in the right lane. A third guy in utilities hovered in the middle, dumpy but not fat, pacing between the two. He’d duck his head to peer through a car window, look over a guard’s shoulder, circle a vehicle as if on an inspection.

  Hijo de perra. Justin hadn’t mentioned a shadow. Was the guy in on it? Not too damn likely; if he was, he’d be hiding out in the nice air-conditioned booth in the middle of the road under the overhead. Luis palmed the sweat from his eyes.

  “Why are we stopped?” Nora asked. She leaned far over the driver’s seat, frowning out. Her huge, round sunglasses made her look like a bug but would help screw up facial recognition.

  “There’s too many cars waiting. We’ll let a few get through before we go down there.” Which was true as far as it went. She didn’t need to know about the extra trooper yet. “You and Paul should switch places. I want them to have to work at it to see you.”

  Whispering and door slams went on while he scoped the crossing. Like a lot of the smaller border posts, there wasn’t much to it: a chalky tan overhead structure on big, square pillars, the Mexican eagle-and-snake crest over the southbound lanes. You could pass through the California version of Tecate without noticing it, but the Mexican town beyond was far bigger and busier. A not-bad place for Nora and family to land—easy access to Tijuana, a couple semi-decent hotels, safely removed from the battle lines between the Nortes and the Zetas.