Crossers Page 10

  Elena nestled beside Miguel on the sofa, placed a hand on his knee, and murmured to him in a motherly tone. Whatever she said, it drew a faint, tentative smile from him. Gerardo took a tobacco pouch and papers out of his pocket and rolled a cigarette for him, which he inhaled as greedily as he’d drunk Castle’s water and devoured Monica’s soup. Then, prodded by a few questions from the couple, he began his story again. Castle couldn’t tell if this version was more coherent than the previous one. At one point Miguel took out his wallet and showed photographs—of his family, Castle assumed—and then produced a small plastic bag containing a few papers, presumably documents to corroborate some point he was making. A few minutes later his voice rose to a high pitch, cracked, and broke into sobs. Elena whispered, “Pobre hombre,” poor man, and put an arm around his shoulders.

  Composing himself, Miguel resumed his account. It took quite a while. Castle’s attention wandered until he became aware of a silence in the room. Miguel was finished. His listeners looked at one another. Sally, shaking her head, said, “Lordy, lordy,” then Blaine declared, “We’re gone to have to call the sheriff and Border Patrol.” He glanced at Gerardo to second the motion, which Gerardo did with a bob of his head.

  Apparently Miguel understood some English; he folded his small hands in supplication and pleaded, “¡No La Migra! No Border Patrol! ¡Por favor!”

  Blaine went to the phone in the kitchen. Castle asked Monica, “What’s going on?”

  “You heard, he’s calling the cops.” Her tone implied that she wished there were an alternative.

  “Can’t somebody tell him that the Border Patrol will drop him off on the other side and he can give it another try?” Castle suggested. “That’s what you told me they do, right?”

  “Not this time around,” Sally said. “Looks like we’ve got us two men murdered on our land and the witness in our house.”

  That seized Castle’s full attention. “What? What happened?”

  “It would be easier to tell you what didn’t,” Monica replied.

  His full name was Miguel Espinoza, she began, he was thirty years old and had owned a small produce-exporting business that went belly-up because of 9/11: an entire year’s crop rotted on the tarmac waiting for U.S. airspace to reopen. (Another casualty, thought Castle. How far the shock waves reached!) Miguel scraped by, peddling in vegetable markets, doing odd jobs, and earning barely enough to feed his wife and four children. A month ago he was approached by a recruiter assembling a group of workers for a meatpacker in Kansas; Miguel could join them if he could come up with the fee—fifteen hundred dollars, to be paid to the coyote when he got to the border. The sum was stunning to a man of Miguel’s means, and he hardly knew where Kansas was except that it was in the United States, but the job, the recruiter promised, paid nine dollars an hour, more than he earned in a day in the markets of Oaxaca. He sold his old car, borrowed from friends, and was soon on his way.

  With several others he traveled northward in a bus to Hermosillo, befriending two other Oaxaca men who had been hired to work in the same meatpacking factory, Héctor and Reynaldo. Between Hermosillo and Cananea, where they were to meet their coyote, the Moses who would lead them into the promised land, the bus was waylaid by bajadores—bandits—who took turns raping the women and relieved the men of their cash and watches and whatever else they had of value. So Miguel, Héctor, and Reynaldo arrived in Cananea with only the clothes on their backs and a few changes of socks and underwear in their mochilas, their backpacks.

  They were stashed in a hostel on a side street. When their coyote, a fat man wearing a ring on every finger, came for them, they had to tell him that they had been robbed of all their money. What an unfortunate thing! Maybe they knew someone who could wire them more? They did not. Very unfortunate! Of course, he could not take them al otro lado—to the other side—for nothing. But he was a man of compassion, he would try to help them. They were to wait for him, and under no circumstances were they to leave the hostel.

  Late in the afternoon the coyote returned with a young man as skinny as he himself was fat. They were led outside. God was smiling on them, said the coyote. They were young and strong, so they could be of assistance to his friend, who was experiencing a sudden emergency If they did as his friend asked, which was to carry some marijuana over the border, their debt would be paid. Héctor and Reynaldo agreed immediately; Miguel was frightened and balked at first, but after coming so far through so many troubles, he decided to take the risk.

  That night they found themselves riding in the back of a pickup truck with three marijuana bales wrapped in burlap. The skinny man—Héctor had nicknamed him el Lápiz, The Pencil—was driving. A group of migrants—pollos, The Pencil called them—were in a van some distance ahead. At the border a pollero—a chicken herder—would walk them into the United States. After they were on their way, The Pencil would lead Miguel, Héctor, and Reynaldo down the trail, keeping a safe distance behind the migrants. If La Migra agents were patrolling the area or waiting up the trail, they would be decoyed by the pollos and their pollero, and the three men and The Pencil would slip through unnoticed. The Pencil would guide them to a road and then summon another man with his cell phone. This man would take delivery of the drugs and drive Miguel and his friends to a safe house in the city of Tucson. From there they would be given transport to the meatpacking factory in Kansas.

  El Lápiz concluded his instructions with a warning. They were not to lose the load, or to get any crazy ideas about making off with it. The fat man knew where their families lived … No more need be said. All of this thoroughly terrified Miguel, but there was no going back.

  He had yet to see the worst, Monica said.

  The truck came to a sudden stop. Up ahead they saw that the migrants’ van had also stopped. Someone yelled, “¡Judicial!” They knew what that meant—the Mexican federal police. They heard more shouts, then many gunshots. The Pencil stomped on the gas and sped away in reverse. In the darkness he misjudged the road and backed into a ditch, nearly rolling the truck over. He jumped out, crying, “Get the hell out! It’s not federales! It’s bandits! They’ll kill us!” Miguel and his companions piled out of the truck as their guide ran off in a panic. Abandoned, the three men didn’t know where they were or what to do. “Grab the bales!” Héctor said. “We must run!” But run where? “North, you idiots, and that star points north!” He stabbed a finger at the sky, but Miguel could not see what star he meant.

  They shouldered the bales and fled. It was freezing cold, but the walking warmed them. By daybreak they were among low, tree-covered hills beneath high mountains capped in snow. When the day grew warm enough for sleep, they hid in the woods and rested. In the afternoon they resumed their trek, Héctor keeping direction by the sun. Each bale felt like a hundred kilos instead of twenty. They wanted to throw them away but remembered The Pencil’s warnings. They drank dirty water pooled in rocky niches of the arroyos and walked until they were stumbling like drunks.

  Finally they came to a road—not much of a road, just two tracks beside a broad wash overgrown with high brush. This must be it, Héctor declared, pointing at tire marks. The man in the car must be driving up and down, looking for them. All they had to do now was wait for him to come by. Miguel and Reynaldo weren’t so sure—to them, it seemed as if Héctor believed it was so because he hoped it was so.

  They piled brush atop the bales in case La Migra showed up, then concealed themselves in the tall weeds in the wash. The bad water he’d drunk had given Miguel diarrhea. Shy about relieving himself in front of his companions, he went to the far side of the wash and squatted. Just as he did, he heard a vehicle approaching. My God, Héctor had been right. When Miguel rose halfway up, he saw a peculiar conveyance—it resembled a small tractor except that it had four wheels instead of three—moving slowly down the road. The driver was looking at the ground rather than ahead. Héctor jumped out of the weeds and flagged it down. The driver climbed off and began to speak to him. Miguel wa
s about to pull his pants up to rejoin his friends when the diarrhea pains shot through his belly again and drove him back into a squat. He believed that God caused those pains to come at that moment because God, for His own reasons—who can truly know the mind of God?—had willed that he should live and his compañeros die. As he emptied his bowels, he heard Héctor call out and saw the stranger pull a gun from under his jacket. There came a sharp crack, and Reynaldo fell. Two more gunshots quickly followed, and Héctor dropped.

  Miguel flung himself down and cowered in the underbrush, his pants around his ankles and his heart pounding. After some minutes passed, he dared to raise his head and observed the stranger walking through the wash, the pistol in his hand. Miguel got a good look at him. He was tall and well built and bare-headed, a güero—a blond—but Miguel couldn’t tell if he was a gringo or a fair-haired Mexican. Miguel ducked back down, curling up to make himself as small as possible. More minutes passed. He heard the vehicle drive off. Still he lay, afraid to move. He lay there until dusk, and then he found the courage to get up and see what had happened. Héctor’s and Reynaldo’s bodies lay near each other, Reynaldo with a bullet hole in his head, Héctor with blood all over his chest. The brush pile had been torn apart and the marijuana bales were gone.

  He ran, ran blindly into the hills until he could run no more, but he kept moving, stumbling and falling in the darkness, weeping for his wife and children, cursing the smuggler who’d promised him a job in Kansas, cursing himself for leaving Oaxaca, then weeping again because the load had been lost and now bad men would come to his house to kill his family … It was for this that God allowed him to live?

  “And you were right, Gil,” Monica said. Her retelling of the saga almost word for word had taken close to half an hour. Miguel had left some time ago with Gerardo and Elena; they had brought him to their house to bathe and give him a change of clothes. “He saw the light in your place. He was going to ask for help, but the dog scared him off. He ran over the hill, and that was the last thing he remembered till you found him.”

  Castle, trying to absorb everything he’d heard, said nothing.

  “It’s like everything that can happen to an illegal happened to him,” she added.

  Blaine, smoking a cigarette, nodded. “But some of it don’t add up.”

  Monica looked at him, a question in her brilliant blue eyes.

  “These dopers use guys they know and trust to mule their stuff over. They don’t give sixty kilos of dope to strangers.”

  “You’re not suggesting that he—”

  “No, that little guy didn’t shoot his buddies and make off with the merca,” Blaine said, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “But it don’t add up all the same, and then there’s that massacre on the other side. Christ almighty. Who would do a thing like that?”

  “Bandits, like he said. Bandits posing as federales.”

  “There ain’t much difference between bandits and federales,” said Sally.

  “Well, finding out what the hell went on is gone to be their job.” Blaine motioned out the front window at a green and white Border Patrol truck towing a horse trailer. It was followed by two Santa Cruz county sheriff’s squad cars.

  4

  BLAINE AND A BORDER PATROL TRACKER studied a topographic map draped over the coffee table while two sheriff’s deputies and another cop—an undercover agent in civilian clothes who’d identified himself only as Nacho—questioned Miguel in the Murrietas’ house, near the corrals. Nacho said he’d heard about the massacre of the migrants from a Mexican informant and wanted to find out if Miguel could “connect a dot or two.” The homicides that had occurred on this side of the line fell under the Sheriff Department’s jurisdiction. Of course, it could not be said for sure that Héctor and Reynaldo had been murdered until their bodies were found, and that was the tracker’s job.

  Earlier the tracker had put his own questions to Miguel. Could he describe the scene of the shootings a little more clearly? He could not. How far was it from here? He didn’t know. How about in which direction? He had no idea.

  “It could of been any one of half a dozen places on this ranch,” Blaine said now, poking a pencil at the map. “My best guess is right here.”

  The tracker, a Navaho named John Morales, leaned over and squinted. “Why there?”

  “This road runs alongside a big wash, Juniper Canyon it’s called. And it’s inside of five miles of where my cousin found him. The way I figure, that old boy didn’t walk far in the dark, him bein’ as beat as he was and not knowin’ the country.”

  “Better get a start. I haven’t got all week to look for a couple of ten-sevens.”

  “Ten-seven?” asked Castle, sitting on the other side of the room.

  “A corpse,” Morales answered. He slapped a tan Stetson on his crew cut and stood. In a dark green uniform with a semiautomatic pistol and lawman’s accoutrements—handcuffs, magazine case, flashlight, and VHF radio—belted to his waist, he was an impressive-looking figure of six feet, with a steer wrestler’s shoulders and the profile of a Roman general. “You show me where you found him and I’ll backtrack from there,” he said to Castle.

  “We’ll be goin’ with you,” Blaine said.

  The tracker frowned and shook his head. “I can’t be responsible for any civilians.”

  “Number one, this is my ranch. Number two, there’s not a square yard of it me and Gerardo don’t know. And Gerardo—now, don’t take offense, John—can cut sign better’n any man alive. Track a lost cow over bare rock. Seen him do it.”

  “Okay,” Morales said after pondering a moment. “But I’m the cow boss. Nobody rides out ahead of me and fucks up the trail.”

  Blaine got up with a slow, deliberate movement. “Let’s go, cousin.”

  Castle hesitated. He considered himself a spectator in the theater of life, removed from the march of events great and small, and that included this particular event. “You go over the ridge behind my place,” he said. “Two-thirds of the way down, a little to the left, you’ll see a big manzanita thicket. Can’t miss it. You start from there.”

  “For chrissake, Gil, it was you who found him,” Blaine said impatiently. “Least you can do is show us where. Then you can go back to readin your books or shootin’ quail or whatever the hell it is you do with yourself all day.”

  The remark stung and struck Castle as unfair, but he didn’t want to argue. Besides, maybe Blaine was right. He’d stepped into this drama, if unintentionally, and he could not now step out of it in good conscience. “All right.”

  “You can ride along with us after. Another pair of eyes. I’ll put you on Rojo. He’s so calm, you’ll think we’re feedin’ him tranquilizers.”

  Morales unloaded his horse from the trailer and led it to the corral that held the ranch’s herd of cow ponies, where Blaine and Gerardo caught and saddled their mounts and Castle’s. Castle clutched Rojo’s mane and swung on board, feeling very much like the tenderfoot he was. As, following the others, he nudged the roan gelding out onto the road, Nacho and the deputies, with Miguel in tow, emerged from the Murrietas’ house, directly across from the corral. Miguel was shaved and washed and in clean clothes, but he looked pathetic none theless. Sally, changed out of her robe and nightgown, stood nearby with Monica and Elena.

  “Get anything out of him?” Morales asked

  Nacho twitched a shoulder. Of medium height, potbellied and bespectacled, he looked more like a supermarket clerk than an undercover agent. On the other hand, a good undercover agent would not look like one. “Not much more than I got from my snitch,” he said. “Miguel didn’t see the massacre, just heard the gunshots. There’s something weird going on over there.”

  Morales rested his hands on his saddle horn. “What’s weird about bandits?”

  “Whoever killed them didn’t take a thing, that’s what my snitch told me. Wallets, money, watches, rings—everything was still on them. And the women’s clothes weren’t messed up, like they would have been if the
y’d been raped. It’s like some psychos wasted those people just for the helluva it. Or like something terrorists would do.”

  “Terrorists?” Castle blurted out.

  “I’m talking narco-terrorists, not Osama bin Laden,” said Nacho.

  To Castle, this was hardly reassuring. One of the deputies meanwhile led Miguel to the patrol car, in which a third cop waited behind the wheel. As he climbed in, Miguel threw a fleeting, bewildered glance at Castle and his saviors.

  “So what happens to him now?” Monica asked Nacho.

  “Mr. Espinoza is what we call an I-two-forty-seven detainee, ma’am. Meaning a special case.”

  “He’s a suspect?”

  “It’ll be up to the sheriff to decide that, but I kind of doubt it. If Héctor’s and Reynaldo’s bodies are found and it looks like what happened is what he says happened, they’ll hold him as a material witness. Protective custody in the county jail till the investigation’s over.”

  “We’re not going to find anything by yakking here,” Morales said, and they rode at a slow trot in single file, the Navaho in the lead. The deputies, one a rookie, the other a sergeant, followed them in the second patrol car as far as Castle’s cabin. They parked there and, slinging assault rifles over their shoulders, proceeded on foot alongside the mounted party to provide security.

  Earlier, preoccupied with horsemanship, Castle had failed to notice that Gerardo and his cousin were also armed, Blaine wearing a refurbished Luger in a military-style flap holster, Gerardo a revolver. Turning in the saddle, he asked Blaine, “Why the guns?” They had three cops to guard them.