Crossers Page 12

  CASTLE’S ACT of human decency had opened a breach in his sanctuary’s walls, and the world he thought he’d renounced came marching in. All next day reporters phoned the ranch, asking to interview him. Monica took the calls—there was no phone in the cabin—and relayed them to Castle on his cell. He did not answer one, prompting the reporters to call again. Monica got annoyed. “I feel like your press secretary,” she said. “Can I give them your cell number?” No, she could not. “Just tell them I’m out of town.”

  His refusals did not keep his name out of the papers or off the air. Though bodies turned up almost every day on the Arizona desert, Héctor’s and Reynaldo’s deaths, and Miguel’s ordeal, possessed sufficient novelty to make the evening news on TV and the front pages of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, the Nogales International, and Patagonia’s local weekly, the Bulletin. TWO BORDER CROSSERS MURDERED—Hunter’s Rescue of Lost Migrant Leads to Grisly Find, its headline cried from the vending machines in front of the post office and the Stage Stop Hotel. All this sensationalism had made Castle the center of a repulsive attention. One day, as he was buying groceries in the Patagonia Market, he was practically accosted by a man he’d never seen before. “Hey! You’re the guy who found those dead Mexicans!” He fled without correcting the man’s misinformation—he’d found a live Mexican—and holed up in his cabin for the next week.

  Almost every night he lay awake till past midnight, listening for footsteps outside, waiting for Sam to warn him of intruders. In the penumbra between sleep and waking, he experienced visions, half dream, half hallucination, of Héctor’s and Reynaldo’s wounds, of dried blood, of the killer’s boot prints in the dust. He snapped out of one at four in the morning, convinced that the murderer was sneaking up on his cabin to kill him. There was no reason for the man to come after him, but at such an hour the rational mind is overthrown by the lizard brain. He got up, loaded his shotgun, and propped it against the wall next to his bed, which made him feel only a little less vulnerable. The next day he drove to the Walgreens in Nogales to renew his Ambien prescription. The pharmacist told him he could pick it up in an hour. Castle took the opportunity to go to the sporting goods department at Wal-Mart, where he bought a .357 Magnum revolver, two boxes of ammunition, and a set of paper targets. He practiced behind his house. Although he was less adept with a pistol than with a rifle or shotgun, he put more than half his shots in the black at twenty-five yards. That left the question as to whether he was capable of shooting another human being, even in self-defense. The possibility could not be dismissed that if confronted by someone who meant to take his life, he would let him take it.

  5

  WHEN THE PROFESSOR FINISHED SHOWERING and stepped into the bedroom, he found Clarice lying on the bed on her stomach, her bare rear end hoisted. “Woof!” she said, twisting her head to look at him with a maniacal grin. “Woof! Woof!”

  She wasn’t acting on one of her sudden, mindless impulses. Not fifteen minutes ago, fully dressed in her park ranger’s uniform, she’d left his hotel room. She must have deliberately left the door ajar, then sneaked back in and taken off her clothes, which, he noticed, were draped neatly over a chair—more evidence of premeditation. For all he knew, she’d been posturing there on the floor the whole time he was in the shower, doggedly (the adverb seemed apt) waiting for her scrubbed lover to come to her.

  He said calmly, “I thought I told you to leave.”

  “Not before you fuck me, Euclid.” She added a syllable to the name she knew him by—E—yew-clid—and wiggled her ass. She was somewhere in her early forties, a few years older than he, but her bottom, like the rest of her body, had been kept fit by the long treks she made up desert canyons and mountainsides, searching for lost hunters and hikers—a woman skilled in effecting rescues of everyone but herself.

  Her shamelessness disgusted him, but his cock reacted to her presentation as his knee would to the tap of a physician’s mallet. A surprise—he thought last night’s festivities had depleted him for at least a week. Well, the easiest way to get rid of her, the only way as far as his cock was concerned, was to do what she wanted. Peeling off the towel wrapped around his waist, he climbed onto the bed and knelt behind her, caressing the divided globe of her bottom with both hands, its curves evoking a sound like a trumpet—Ta-ra-ta-ta!—its smoothness causing a luminous green blob to shimmer before his eyes, its creamy color summoning up a scent like flowers. Fucking Clarice was a multimodal experience, a son et lumière show, with shape prompting sound, texture color, color smell—the full sensory package of his peculiar condition. He threw himself into the act with élan, not so much for the pleasure of it as to get himself off and her out of the room as quickly as possible. He accomplished the first goal in less than two minutes.

  “Now that wasn’t so difficult, was it?” she said, squirming into her panties, her tanned face aglow with triumph.

  How he regretted taking up with this lustful lunatic, the randy ranger. The Professor led a precarious life. His work—his calling, as he liked to think of it—required the concentration of a high-wire artist working without a net. Unpredictable Clarice threatened his ability to keep his balance.

  “On your way,” he said. “I’m running late.”

  “Such a busy, busy boy.” She got into her uniform and passed a comb through her hair, tinted a macadam shade of black and cropped raggedly short, as if by a stylist with delirium tremens. “Late for what? Why is it you won’t tell me what you do?”

  “Consider the possibility that it’s none of your business.”

  She pressed the tip of his nose as if it were a doorbell. “You wouldn’t be a narc, would you, darling?”

  He clutched her wrist and fixed upon her the unnerving stare of his deep-set, preternaturally blue eyes, a stare that seemed to look through its object rather than at it, with the emotionless concentration of a predator studying its prey before a pounce.

  “Hey, okay, asshole, I get your point,” she said, and he relaxed his grip.

  “Now it really is time for you to go,” he said almost tenderly.

  With relief, he watched the door close behind her. For good measure, he locked it. Patience, he counseled himself. Wait for her to end it. She was bound to sooner rather than later. Clarice openly boasted of her many conquests of younger men, and although she was faithful to whomever she was screwing at the time (she’d once described herself as a “serial slut”), she got bored fairly quickly and moved on.

  The Professor had inherited some of his Mexican mother’s theatrical, quasi-pagan Catholicism. Even though his rendezvous with Nacho was going to be routine, he considered it prudent to go forth in a state of grace. Returning to the bathroom, he soaked a washcloth in water as hot as he could stand and cleansed Clarice from his privates while silently reciting an Act of Contrition, followed by a prayer to Jesús Malverde, patron saint of border traffickers. The Professor did not directly traffic in drugs or people—his main commodity was information—but he figured Malverde’s protection covered that as well.

  After dressing (pressed blue jeans, ostrich-skin cowboy boots, a brown leather jacket), he rode the antique elevator—it had a folding cage door, a brass dial and floor arrow, even an elevator operator—down to the lobby. He always stayed at the Gadsden on his sorties into Douglas because, being a history buff and something of a romantic, he liked its exceedingly retro atmosphere, its Italian marble columns and swooping staircase, up which Pancho Villa was said to have ridden his horse in a fit of revolutionary enthusiasm, evoking images of Douglas’s glory days as a rich copper-mining town. He handed his key—a metal key, not some flimsy plastic card—to the desk clerk and paid his bill. Although the Gadsden wasn’t so retro that it didn’t take credit cards, he paid in cash. It was his habit to leave a light paper trail. “See you next trip, Mr. Carrington,” the clerk said. This was the identity he assumed on the U.S. side of the line, Euclid J. Carrington. Managing the activities of his various incarnations, all united in the person of The Pro
fessor, was his high-wire act. A careless step, a distraction at the wrong moment, an incautious word uttered to the wrong person could have terrible consequences, of which a bullet in the brain would be the least terrible.

  Outside, on this nippy Sunday morning, G Avenue was empty, the quiet hinting at the deserted town Douglas might have become if, after Phelps Dodge shut down the copper smelters in the 1980s, a brisk trade in narcotics, passing through the port of entry from Agua Prieta, had not provided new employment opportunities for some of its citizens and restored its prosperity. The Professor walked around to the parking lot in back of the Gadsden and got into his rented Ford Explorer. His own car—or rather, the car belonging to his other avatar, Gregorio Bonham, a captain in the Mexican Federal Judicial Police—was stashed at MFJP headquarters in Agua Prieta, where he had spent Friday and Saturday snooping into the recent activities of Yvonne Menéndez, the city’s narco-queen. As he always did when a meeting with Nacho had been arranged, he’d crossed the line on foot, informing the U.S. Customs cop that he was an American tourist returning from a day trip, a masquerade to which his appearance lent authenticity. He looked more gringo than most gringos, his English father’s genes having won supremacy over his mother’s, except for the tinge of olive in his complexion, which was barely noticeable.

  Very little about him was noticeable, as befitted a man who preferred the shadows to the light. He was of unimpressive stature, exactly five feet nine and a half inches tall and 160 pounds. His maple-brown hair was cut short (he eschewed the shaggy look affected by most clandestine operatives), and his features were so well proportioned and symmetrical as to be unmemorable. Indeed, a large mole on his left cheek having been surgically removed some time ago, his face looked like one of those generic faces that used to appear in back-page magazine ads for mail-order artists’ schools. DRAW ME AND WIN TWO FREE LESSONS! The one striking aspect of his appearance were those pale eyes that looked as if a pair of thumbs had pressed them halfway back into his skull and that seemed to be lit from within, the fixity of their gaze unsettling to everyone who met them. This stare wasn’t something he affected to frighten people, though he occasionally found its intimidation useful. He was simply focused, noticing details, on the lookout for threats, for the tics of expression or gesture that betrayed a liar. He was a hunter whose quarry was reliable information—“actionable intelligence,” in military jargon—and like all hunters, he was acutely aware of his environment at all times.

  Before starting off, he called Nacho on his—that is, Carrington’s—cell phone.

  “U.S. Border Patrol. Agent Gomez speaking,” Nacho answered.

  “Ignacio. I’m running late.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Less than an hour later he parked beside Nacho’s unmarked Jeep Cherokee at the junction of two ranch roads in the San Bernardino Valley. Under a blank winter sky the vehicles were lost in the vastness of the desert uplands rising westward to the Chiricahuas, eastward to the embrowned crags of the Peloncillos, where Geronimo had surrendered. The Professor loved it out here—the emptiness, the silence, the Sonoran Desert’s wholeness that mocked the lines little men had drawn on their maps.

  He climbed into the Cherokee and with a cursory handshake said, “Awfully good to see you again, Ignacio.” Despite his American schooling and U.S. Army service, his English still bore traces of his father’s Briticisms.

  “Nacho is okay. We’ve known each other long enough.”

  “You’re not a tortilla chip,” The Professor joked. Concerned that the Border Patrol agent would think he was a screwball, he couldn’t tell him that he preferred calling him Ignacio because he didn’t like the way calling him Nacho felt. It was hard to describe—something like grabbing a handful of tacks; whereas Ignacio evoked a smooth, pleasant sensation, like closing his fist over a glob of shaving cream.

  “So what held you up?”

  “A meaningless relationship.”

  “That nympho park ranger?”

  The Professor nodded. There was very little Nacho didn’t know about him, including his sexual liaisons. Conversely, there was very little about Nacho that he didn’t know. Although some might consider him a snitch, he did not view himself as such. If he was, then Nacho was his snitch, which made their relationship more collegial or at least symbiotic.

  “You’ve seen these?” Nacho asked, brusquely coming to the point. He handed The Professor a file folder of newspaper clippings. Mexican Authorities Baffled by Mass Slaying of Immigrants, read a headline in the Arizona Daily Star. “I’m baffled, too. No robbery, no rape, no attempt to kidnap them for the ransom. More like an act of terrorism than anything else.”

  “Why does this concern you?”

  “We’re wondering if something’s going on we ought to know about,” said Nacho.

  “Terrorism about covers it. We’re pretty sure Yvonne was behind it.”

  “I guess that doesn’t surprise me. La Roja is quite the little lady,” Nacho remarked, in reference to the reputation for viciousness Yvonne had established for herself since she’d taken over the Menéndez organization from her husband, Fermín, murdered last year. She had put out the contract on him. Later, when the Border Patrol and U.S. Customs clamped down on her operations, seizing half her loads on tips from informants, she conducted a snitch hunt with a ferocity that impressed her male counterparts in the trade—and they were not easily impressed when it came to acts of violence. In about six weeks fourteen people were tortured and murdered. That only two were informants was of no concern to her. “Better that a dozen innocents die than two guilty ones get away with it,” she’d said. The discovery of the mutilated bodies, lined up beside a desert cattle tank, made headlines all over Mexico. Fingers, hands, and feet had been chopped off and scattered around the well to feed the coyotes and vultures. CHARCA DE MUERTE!!!—The Pond of Death—screamed the tabloids over gruesome photographs.

  “So who is she trying to terrorize?” Nacho inquired.

  “There are rumors. We do know she can’t stand wetbacks or wetback smugglers. They burn the routes. They attract too many of your boys. So one theory is that she was sending a message to the polleros to run their chickens somewhere else.”

  “Carrasco doesn’t like pollos and polleros for the same reason.”

  “C’mon, Ignacio,” The Professor said in a scoffing tone. Joaquín Carrasco, mero mero of the Hermosillo Cartel, was the most businesslike of Mexico’s narcotraficantes. Murdering webacks wasn’t his style.

  Nacho peered at him over his John Lennon glasses, but like everyone else’s, his gaze couldn’t hold The Professor’s and caromed like a billiard ball off the cushion. For a moment or two, he looked away toward a treeless summit of the Chiricahuas, where the snow lay like a slab of whitewashed concrete. Then he said, “But I’m thinking, there’s a problem with your theory. The San Pedro Valley and Douglas are Yvonne’s territory. The massacre took place in the San Rafael, and that’s Carrasco’s.”

  “You’ve got the geography right.”

  “There’s no reason why Yvonne should give a good goddamn if wets are burning the San Rafael routes. They’re not hers.”

  “Right again.”

  “This is starting to feel like a tooth extraction,” said Nacho. “Don’t make my life difficult. You’re on our side of the line at the moment.”

  “I am still a citizen of El Norte,” The Professor said in mock indignation.

  “Yeah, with a federal warrant outstanding for your arrest and some people in the CIA who would love to settle accounts.”

  “They’ve got better things to do now. Busy hunting terrorists, real and imagined. Besides, I’m too valuable to the Department of Homeland Security right where I am.”

  “Don’t get smug,” Nacho scolded. “So these rumors …”

  “Let’s say we’re not sure what Yvonne is up to. Let’s say we’re keeping an eye on her. She’s a woman in a man’s world. Also ambitious.”

  “I know that. I’m asking a
bout these rumors.”

  “Ever see that old movie Key Largo?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “There’s a moment in it when the Humphrey Bogart character asks the Edward G. Robinson character, Johnny Rocco, what he wants. And Rocco says, ‘More. That’s right! I want more.’ There’s Yvonne for you. She couldn’t spell enough in English or Spanish.”

  “Look, the Agua Prieta Cartel is too small to go head-to-head with Carrasco,” Nacho said. “She wouldn’t think of muscling in on him if she didn’t have somebody behind her.”

  “A valid supposition.”

  Nacho sighed, exasperated with the evasive answers.

  An evasiveness The Professor considered appropriate. He was a captain of federales, yes, but he was also Joaquín Carrasco’s eyes and ears on both sides of the line, keeping tabs on gringo law enforcement agencies while at the same time monitoring the loyalties and honesty of the multitudes Carrasco employed, from the managers of his marijuana plantations to the dealers who marketed his products in the United States. The Professor much admired Carrasco, in whom an astute mind—he would have been a CEO in any other culture—was camouflaged by coarse peasant features. Yvonne’s flamboyant violence drew the sort of publicity he abhorred for the negative effect it had on business. The “Pond of Death” incident had been bad enough; the slaughter of the migrants was worse, and not only because of the attention it attracted; it was a kind of declaration on her part.

  The Professor’s role in Carrasco’s organization required discretion. How much information should he give about Carrasco’s conflict with the mercurial La Roja, so named for her brittle red hair? Information was the currency of undercover work—you had to give some to get some—but it was never wise to blow the whole wad. Speaking in a low, monotonous voice, he dribbled out another rumor he’d gathered in Agua Prieta: Yvonne had entered into alliance with the Gulf Cartel, the largest and most powerful of the Mexican drug rings.