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  No one spoke for half a minute. Blaine broke the hush. “Well, I’ll be damned. Darlin’, what do you think?” Looking at Monica.

  “I’m not sure what to think at the moment,” she said.

  “What about you, counselor?”

  “I don’t see any problems,” Lovelace answered. “You could reorganize into an S corporation, you and Monica as majority shareholders. But”—he turned to Castle—“forgive me for asking this, but could you … I assume you wouldn’t have made the offer if … We are talking seven figures here.”

  Castle smiled into the earnest young face. “I’m good for the money. I used to be a Wall Street big shot.”

  24

  TO BREAK THE BED with billy. Yvonne liked the sound of it in English—the hard, alliterative consonants were more direct, punchier than the Spanish, desvencijar la cama con Billy. The bed, the king-size canopy bed, she loved the expanse of it, the coolness of the satin sheets she’d ordered from Mexico City, the privacy of it when the translucent curtains were drawn, as they were now. She felt that she and Billy were in a cocoon, a small world of their own, where in the act of love she could escape her cares for a while.

  Privacy had become very rare in her life, what with a dozen bodyguards prowling the grounds outside, what with the foreman and his vaqueros coming and going. There always seemed to be some crisis to deal with, some client to meet with, a deal to be cut, an army officer coming to her with his hand out, local yokels begging her, their madrina, for plastic irrigation pipe or a generator or a tractor or any one of a thousand things the miserable government of this country should provide for them but could not or would not. And then there was the war and all the plotting and planning it required of her. Strike and counterstrike. Attack and reprisal. Carrasco’s most recent stroke had been audacious, brilliant, she was forced to admit. The Golden Roosters would crow no more. Now she would have to go him one better. Such were the dynamics. Do unto me, and I shall do much worse unto you.

  Sometimes she was plagued by doubts. Did she have the capacity to realize her aims? The demands on her time and energy were too much, and she had begun to violate her rule, Never use product. She wasn’t using a lot, a few lines now and then to keep her going. The Gulf Cartel’s coke was of the purest kind, as smooth in its way as a fine, well-aged tequila. No burn in her nostrils, and oh, the elevation it brought, the sense of well-being, the zip, the zing, the keen buzz.

  She could use a long holiday, a month or two at her villa in Zihuatanejo. Or Cancún. Or Puerto Vallarta. How wonderful it would be to see the ocean again, to swim, to lie on hot white sands with … someone. With the Man of Her Dreams. Yvonne Menéndez did have a Man of Her Dreams. She didn’t know what he looked like. She had never seen him. He was in fact invisible. He had first come to her when she was a girl on the ejido, one night after Dámaso had violated her. He lifted her off the bed in incredibly strong arms and carried her across the desert, away from that wretched hovel, away from her perverted stepfather. The fantasy was so powerful that she had felt herself levitating, then flying out of the dark room stinking of Dámaso’s liquor-breath, his boozy sweat, and the marvelous thing was that she also felt secure in the powerful arms. She had nothing to fear, she would be safe for as long as they held her. He made many visits, rescuing her from her degradation, until she’d rescued herself. Sometimes she thought he might have been the father she’d never seen, not even in a photograph.

  Billy Cruz was not he. Billy was strong, with his prizefighter’s physique, and he was virile, as she’d known he would be from the start—three times last night and once more this morning!—but his powers were all in his body, while the Man of Her Dreams had a strength that transcended the physical. Billy was not capable of rescuing her, nor of making her safe and secure. As a matter of fact, it was she who had rescued him, offering him the sanctuary of her ranch until such time as his difficulties on the other side were resolved. Or until she had no further use for him. Or plain got sick of him.

  Now she turned over on her side and passed her hand over his forehead, damp from their last lovemaking. Well no, it wasn’t lovemaking, it was fucking. “I was just thinking,” she said, “that it’s lucky for you we met. By now you would be in a different bed than this one.”

  A grin formed under the wreckage of his nose. “I did my best to say thanks.”

  Thinks he’s something, Yvonne thought. And that it’s me, the vieja, who should be grateful. “I’m going to see my lawyer today, my American lawyer. He knows a lot of people. I’m going to ask him if he can fix your problem.”

  “Sure would be good if he can.”

  Yvonne wanted it fixed as well. She was disappointed in Billy for getting himself into such a bad pinch, and all over a couple of worthless toilet scrubbers. Running his operations from the Mexican side of the line was proving cumbersome. Not impossible, but more complicated, and she had enough complications on her plate.

  “Murder is a big problem to take care of,” she said. “Alex will need to know all the facts, so let me make sure I’ve got them straight. You shot those mojados because they didn’t pay you. They were supposed to pay you when you picked them up, but they said they didn’t have the money and then tried to run away. Is that right?”

  Billy rolled off his back and lay looking at her, cradling his cheek in a hand. “That’s right.”

  “Two of them. You don’t know what happened to the third?”

  “I figured he got separated, yeah.”

  “So for six months nothing happened, and then you are told the chotas want to question you about these killings. Did your friend tell you why it took them so long? Did they find some evidence? Why, all of a sudden, did they come looking for you?”

  “Don’t know. My friend is a Nogales cop. All he knew was that the third guy, some little verga, had ID’d me and the sheriff had issued a warrant for my arrest.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “That’s it.”

  “There was a story in the newspapers that the mojados were carrying merca.”

  “That’s bullshit. They didn’t have a gram on them.”

  Yvonne believed she had a built-in lie detector in her sensory equipment, and though it wasn’t registering a lie at the moment, it was telling her that there was something wrong in this sketchy story. “It’s not much to go on, so I’ll ask my lawyer to find out what he can. Then I think he’ll want to speak to you. I need you en el otro lado, you know?”

  “Sure. But I can run things okay from here for a while. All I need is a phone.”

  She nudged his shoulder, a gentle push, and when he lay again on his back, she swung her legs over to straddle him. “This is the only way you’re ever going to fuck me, Billy.”

  He laughed and gave her ass a squeeze. “You’re the type who likes to be on top.”

  “Yes, but you know what I mean.”

  “Sure.”

  “I want to trust you, chico, and I’ve learned that I trust people who know exactly what will happen if they”—she poked his crooked nose—“cheat me. If they”—another poke—“steal from me”—and another—“or snitch or”—and yet another—“lie to me.”

  DRESSED AS IF she were going to dinner in the capital, in a black skirt, a patterned cotton blouse, pantyhose, and sexy high heels with ankle straps, Yvonne met Alex Daoud for lunch at Las Palmeras in Agua Prieta’s central plaza. Just before leaving the car, she removed a small glass vial from her purse and inhaled a couple of bumps of la puta blanca with a tiny gold spoon. The white witch sharpened her mind and curbed her appetite. With a younger lover, she didn’t want to get fat. Alex and Julián were already seated when she entered, flanked by Heraclio and Marco and attended by a fawning maître d’. She’d bought the restaurant a year ago, or rather one of her companies had, and she’d spent a small fortune hiring a decorator to refurbish the place. The result was an unhappy marriage of styles, Roman villa wed to Spanish colonial, with Mexican fishing village thrown in—Las Palmeras served
seafood, flown in fresh three times a week, snapper and grouper from the Gulf of Mexico, shrimp and tuna from the Sea of Cortez.

  While her bodyguards went off to another table, from which they could keep an eye on the door, she sat down with her son and her lawyer and ordered camarones with a sauce made of prickly pear. Julián and Alex complimented her appearance—she looked ten years younger, Alex said—and indeed Yvonne felt younger, freshly fucked, a glow in her cheeks, Billy’s ardent embraces had taken years off her.

  She convened the meeting, speaking in English—despite years of practicing law on the border, Alex’s Spanish was third-grade level, and anyway it was more prudent to conduct their affairs in English. The main item on the agenda was a problem at the Douglas border crossing, a few blocks from where they now sat. The U.S. Customs inspectors who were paid to give Menéndez family vehicles a less-than-thorough going-over had been removed from their posts.

  “The word on the street is that they’re under investigation,” Alex said.

  Because it was more concealable than mota, coke was crossed in cars through ports of entry. On the scale between an absolute necessity and a mere luxury, owning a badge or two in the customs service fell somewhere in the middle. If you knew when your man was on duty and in which lane, it made hauling merca so much easier and safer.

  “You know their boss,” Yvonne said. “What does he say?”

  Alex spread his freakishly large hands. “If they are under investigation, he is, too. Or will be. And maybe I could be, too.”

  “You’ve been there before,” she said, referring to the times in the past when he had been investigated by the FBI for money laundering. He’d survived without a dent. Not even disbarred.

  “I’m not worried, but I’d advise you to use another crossing for the time being. And if you do use Douglas, you know—”

  “Do a better job of modifying the vehicles,” said Julián.

  Alex tilted his head slyly. He was of Arab descent, Lebanese or Syrian, she didn’t know which, and she disliked him, for his looks if for no other reason, goggle-eyes under a high, sloping forehead, thick lips, a fishhook of a nose. In a Mr. Ugly Universe contest, he would be a finalist. But he and Yvonne made a royal couple. She was the Queen of Agua Prieta, he was the King of Douglas, having been at one time or another its mayor, its chief of police, and justice of the peace, besides serving two terms in the Arizona state legislature. He knew all sorts of people, the right kind of people. Few things happened in Douglas without his okay, and nothing happened without his knowing about it.

  “It’s too bad we don’t have Vicente,” she said as their meals arrived. “There was a genius with cars.”

  The two bumps had had the desired effect. She felt full after eating only three of the camarones. While Julián and Alex dived into their dishes, she sipped her wine, a Spanish red, and pondered this matter of the customs inspectors. It seemed to give new urgency to acquiring the San Ignacio. Her own port of entry twenty kilometers end to end, and no worries about investigations, mordida, and all the rest. Thinking of that transited her thoughts back to Billy’s predicament. She gave Alex an abridged account, asking if there was anything he could do. Julián pouted. He disapproved of her mixing business with pleasure, of sleeping with “the help,” as he put it. She did not regard Billy as “help;” more as her partner in an enterprise. Nor could she see what was so wrong with mixing business and pleasure. There was no point in having money and power if she couldn’t have anything, or anyone, she wanted. What did her son know of a woman’s needs anyway? Come to think of it, maybe the mariposa knew too much about a woman’s needs.

  “First thing I’ll do is advise you to get Cruz off your ranch,” Alex said of her request.

  “I don’t believe my mother would want to do that,” Julián chimed in with a stupid leer.

  The lawyer fluttered his bulging eyes at Julián, then at her. “For chrissake, Yvonne. You’ve got yourself a boy-toy?”

  She blushed and was irritated with herself for blushing.

  “Harboring an American fugitive can’t do you any good,” Alex went on.

  Julián clinked his glass with his fork. “Exactly what I told her.”

  His voice chafed her nerves. “I am talking to Alex, all right? Escúchame, Alex, what can you do about this?”

  “Do you want me to a recommend a good criminal lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “You’re asking if I can get a murder warrant quashed?” he said in an undertone.

  “What is this ‘quashed’?”

  “Make it go away.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m asking. Make it go away.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy. It would take time and money.”

  “But would it be impossible? Why should the gringos give a shit about a couple of fucking dead toilet scrubbers? All they talk about over there is how to stop the toilet scrubbers and strawberry pickers from coming in. So there’s two less they don’t have to worry about.”

  Alex made a pleading gesture. “I’ll see what can be done. I can’t promise more.”

  She needed to pee and have another snort. Pushing away from the table, she said, “And just so you know, I don’t need him for that. For other reasons you don’t have to know, I need him working for me on the other side.”

  She went to the ladies’ room, her heels clattering on the clay-tile floors. Squatting in the stall, her knees shackled by her pantyhose and underwear, she took the vial from her purse, dipped the gold spoon, brought it to a nostril, cupped one hand under the spoon, and inhaled sharply. Then the other nostril. There. Dos y no más. She heard “El Degüello,” the bugle call that Santa Anna had sounded at the Alamo to signal “No quarter,” its Moorish notes chilling yet sad, as if to say, We are sorry that we must slit your throats. She removed her mobile from the purse and answered. It was Clemente Morales, her cousin, the real estate broker.

  “Yvonne, where are you? I could not reach you at the ranch.”

  “At the moment, I am in the cuartito changing the canary’s water.”

  Clemente laughed, then apologized for catching her in such an embarrassing position. He had good news for her. She said she could use some. What was it?

  “That rancho you have your eye on, the San Ignacio, it’s up for sale.”

  This was incredible. It was as if the desire in her heart had made this happen. “Where are you, Clemente?”

  “In Douglas. At my office.”

  “I am across the street. At Las Palmeras. Get over here as soon as you can.”

  She exited the stall and at the mirror freshened her makeup and wiped her nose of residue.

  Her cousin was a short, portly man, his face a smooth brown moon always beaming. A real estate agent had to project an air of cheerful optimism. He arrived after dessert and gave Yvonne a two-page printout of the listing.

  DESERT DIAMOND LTD

  Douglas, AZ • Agua Prieta, Son.

  Specializing in large agricultural properties in southern Arizona

  and Sonora, Mexico

  Designated Broker • Clemente Morales

  SAN IGNACIO RANCH

  SANTA CRUZ AND COCHISE COUNTY, ARIZONA

  GENERAL DESCRIPTION: The San Ignacio Ranch was started in 1910 and is one of the oldest and largest continuously operated cattle ranches in southern Arizona …

  Size and Land Tenure: The San Ignacio contains approximately 32,415 acres. The deeded land comprises four contiguous parcels totaling 19,850 acres. The ranch’s grazing permit in the Coronado National Forest contains approximately 12,565 acres …

  THIS RANCH IS TO BE SUBDIVIDED: Two of the four parcels of deeded land are being offered for sale. These parcels, 1 & 2, are in a single block totaling approximately 10,115 acres …

  PRICE, TERMS, AND CONDITIONS: Parcels 1 & 2 of the San Ignacio Ranch are for sale for $5,000,000, cash.

  Looking at the map on one page, she noticed that the two parcels for sale were not adjacent to the border. What the hell good w
ould that do her? The photographs on the last page—broad rangelands with mountains in the background, a small house included in the sale—caught her attention, not because they were particularly striking but because they offered her the first glimpse of the land she coveted.

  She looked at Clemente. “You said the ranch was for sale. This says only half of it is for sale.”

  “Yes. They are subdividing it.”

  “I don’t want half of it. I want all of it.”

  “But all of it is not for sale.”

  “I see that, I just said that, you idiot,” she snapped. She felt irritable again, jumpy. “Why are they selling only the half?”

  “I am told they are having tax problems,” answered Clemente, warily. He seemed afraid of saying something that would provoke her. “The old lady died. The old lady Erskine. She and her son owned the place. I am told she was killed in an automobile accident, so now the son has to pay the taxes on her estate, and he must sell the half to pay them. They have, you know, motivación. They are motivated sellers.”

  “They who? Who are you talking about now?”

  “The son and his wife,” said Clemente, thrusting his brown moon face forward. “They have motivation to sell.”

  Yvonne’s curiosity was piqued. “You met them?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know they are motivated?”

  Clemente puffed his cheeks and sighed. “Because they must pay these taxes. Right now you could make them an offer for much less than what they are asking, and I think they would agree.”

  “What if you went to them and said you have a buyer who wants the whole place?” Julián interjected.

  Clemente shrugged. “Everything is for sale, you know.” He opened the folder containing the listing and took out a few snapshots. “They are having more problems than tax problems, I heard. There are a lot of mojados moving through that rancho, and a lot of it is a mess. It is possible they would want someone to take the place and the problems off their hands. I took these pictures when I was out there.”