Crossers Read online

  “Where are you now?”

  “Nogales airport,” Nacho radioed back. “What’s the situation?”

  Erskine’s wife, supported by two cops, was still shrieking, loudly enough that The Professor had to plug an ear with a finger. “Erskine’s dead, and so is Yvonne,” he said. “We’ve got two live hostages, but one of them has been hit, Castle. Get a medical helicopter to the airport. We can fly him there in ten minutes.”

  “Something of a mess, Professor.”

  “Save that for later. Get a helicopter.”

  “Will do. How bad is Castle?”

  “It’s bad enough.”

  CASTLE DID NOT KNOW he’d been hurt until someone freed his hands and rolled him over and he grasped his side, feeling a warm, sticky dampness in his shirt. He’d pulled his hand away and saw it smeared with blood. My God, I’ve been shot! The words themselves struck him like a bullet. He had not heard a gun go off, nor had he felt any pain, only the impact. When Monica let out a nightmarish wail, he struggled to his hands and knees and caught sight of her, throwing herself at Blaine, prone on the ground, prone and motionless. Blaine, too? Blaine shot, too? No, no, no, he’d thought, and attempted to stand and go to Monica but fell backward, clutching his side again.

  There was pain now, stabbing his ribs with each breath. He tried to gulp air but could manage only sips and wheezed when he exhaled. He closed his eyes. Someone shook him and said sternly, like a teacher reprimanding a pupil who’d nodded off in class, “Stay awake!” It was the Mexican cop, the fair-skinned one. Monica continued to wail, almost like a siren. “Blaine …,” Castle moaned. His lips stuck together. “Never mind that,” the cop said in English. “He’s going to be all right. Stay awake. Stay with us.” Castle wanted to laugh, but it hurt too much. Where did the cop think he was going to go? He was beginning to feel drowsy and told himself, Stay awake! Then three men picked him up, one by his shoulders, two by the legs, and carried him into a helicopter. The light-skinned Mexican climbed in with him. The engine started, increased in pitch until he could hear nothing else. A sudden lurch, and the helicopter was airborne. Then he blacked out.

  He woke up on a gurney, which was being rolled down a street or sidewalk. He heard the rattle of its wheels on pavement and saw faces above him, faces he did not recognize, and an IV drip bottle swaying from a stand above his head. Where was he? Facts. He was aware of a necessity to cling to every small, concrete fact he could. Stay awake! Some kind of device was wrapped around his chest. It squeezed and relaxed, gently squeezed and relaxed. A fact. A voice said, “Okay, lift.” As he was raised off the gurney, he saw that he was on an airport runway. He was on a stretcher, and the stretcher was being placed inside another helicopter, smaller than the first. He noted that it was orange and white. More facts. EMTs slipped him into a snug Plexiglas pod, just big enough to accommodate him, and buckled safety belts, one over his waist, another over his ankles. Tubes and wires attached to his body snaked into the belly of the helicopter, where two EMTs, a woman and a man, sat behind the pilot’s seat, their faces half lit by a soft infrared glow. The woman asked if he was in any pain, and he whispered, “Yes.” There were mutterings about a dosage, something about his blood pressure and pulse rate, and then the female EMT rolled up his sleeve and gave him an injection.

  The helicopter rose. Turning his head slightly, Castle observed city lights below and the headlights of a few cars, speeding down a highway. The aircraft made a tight turn, and they were soon racing over a vast darkness, with only scattered lights twinkling in it, like the lights of fishing boats on a midnight sea. He made out the silhouette of a mountain range, the Santa Ritas, he thought, but he wasn’t sure. The morphine had taken effect, dulling the acute pain in his side. He actually felt euphoric. Turning his head again to look straight up through the Plexiglas bubble, he beheld the most marvelous sight—the autumn stars, a million crystal rivets hammered into the sky. A big, square constellation sparkled directly overhead. Pegasus? Was it Pegasus? The woman said something to him. He couldn’t make out what.

  As the helicopter descended, he could see the glaze of lights that were Tucson in the distance, and he felt himself slipping back into unconsciousness. Stay with us. Stay awake. He pictured Tessa’s long, strong body, the fall of her brown hair, the shy way she would raise her hand to her crooked teeth when she smiled. Once more she had summoned him back to life, with all its uncertainties, its dangers, its unforeseen calamities, its frustrated hopes and futile dreams, for all that it was life.

  38

  ROGER CLYNE and the Peacemakers played on The Professor’s CD player: “Switchblade,” a kind of American narco-corrido.

  Pablo and Dan had a plan said

  “We’re gonna get rich,

  Put the double-cross

  on a double-crossin’ narco-snitch …

  A nasty beat, not like the epic but too-lyrical “Pancho and Lefty,” but hard and low-down.

  They said, “Amigo don’tcha worry

  now we gonna disappear

  Just for a couple of months,” they said

  Now it’s been almost a year

  Yeah if you want that kind of money,

  Man you gotta stay brave

  federales are pullin’ bodies out of shallow graves.

  Federales pullin’ bodies out of shallow graves. He loved that line. Puttin’ a few bodies in, too. He slapped and tapped the rhythm on the dashboard, the pitch of Clyne’s gravelly voice all bright red spikes bouncing as The Professor’s car bounced down the border road into Lochiel. La Noria had been its name before the Gadsden Purchase yanked it into the United States and some Scots cattleman had rechristened it after his ancestral town. It was a semi-ghost town now, the old border station, abandoned thirty years ago, decaying behind a chain-link fence, a few deserted houses, a whitewashed chapel atop a hill to serve the spiritual needs of its remaining inhabitants—a handful of vaqueros, desert hermits, border rats.

  Later in the fall, I got a call, “Boy won’t cha come down, Maybe put a name with a few unlucky faces we found.” Now no matter what I do, can’t get my heart to mend Somebody buried a switchblade in each of my friends.

  Miguel Espinoza was one such unlucky face, found two days after the raid in an arroyo not far on the Mexican side. Billy had guided the police to his body, in the hopes his cooperativeness would win favor. It did not.

  A dust devil conjured by a brisk winter wind pirouetted across the road, which turned northward through quivering cottonwoods. In a moment The Professor spotted Nacho’s Jeep Cherokee and Nacho, huddled in a sheepskin jacket, sitting on a bench in front of the monument to Fray Marcos de Niza.

  “Feliz Año Nuevo,” he said, getting out of his car and blowing on his hands.

  “New Year’s was three weeks ago,” Nacho replied. They hadn’t seen each other since last November.

  “Close enough,” The Professor said. “What are you doing out here in the cold?”

  “I was looking at that.” He gestured at the commemorative plaque bolted into a slab marked by a tall concrete crucifix. The legend on the plaque briefly summarized the journey of Fray Marcos de Niza, who passed through this point in 1539—the first European to enter what would become, some 373 years later, the state of Arizona. “See, you’ve turned me into a student of history.”

  “Is that so? You could say that Fray Marcos was the first crosser.”

  “Except there wasn’t a border in fifteen thirty-nine.”

  “And there won’t be again one day.”

  “Please, no lectures about the reconquista and all that shit.”

  “I’ll spare you. Ante todo, let’s talk.”

  Pablo and Dan had a plan said, “We’re gonna get rich, Put the double-cross on a double-crossin’ narco-snitch …” The Professor could not get the lyrics out of his head. He sat down and snitched on an expendable load, four hundred pounds to cross Montezuma Pass day after tomorrow. Nacho snitched in his fashion, providing generalities about forthcoming Border
Patrol operations but nothing too specific, nothing that would compromise his integrity. Scrap of information for scrap of information, their stock in trade, for it was in their mutual interest to maintain some sort of order, now that Yvonne and her disruptions were over. Organized crime was better than disorganized crime. They went from there to another matter of mutual interest—the gangs of bajadores who were preying on drug runners. Scavengers, hyenas.

  In twenty minutes they were done, and The Professor brought his associate up to date on other matters. There was a possibility that he would testify at Cruz’s forthcoming trial on federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges.

  Nacho laughed. “That should get him off. I can’t think of a more impeachable witness than you.”

  “Right. His lawyer will say he was tortured into making his confession, and to a foreign law-enforcement agency. But I’m not so sure there’ll be a trial. Cruz might plead out. You see, there’s Miguel’s body. We can charge Cruz as an accessory to murder in Mexico. Where would you rather do time—a federal prison here or in one of ours?”

  “Miguel. That poor son of a bitch. I was talking to Castle the other day. He’s a bleeding heart. He’s been sending Miguel’s salary to his wife every week. Said it’s the least he can do.”

  The Professor looked again at the narrative of Fray Marcos’s adventures. “Miguel got caught in the crossfire of a family feud,” he said.

  “Yeah. Castle mentioned something like that to me. That his grandfather had shot La Roja’s father way back when, and that’s what she was paying them back for.”

  “There was more to it,” said The Professor. “Castle and his lady friend took me and Zaragoza to dinner at La Roca after he got out of the hospital. They wanted to thank us.”

  “Don’t imagine Erskine’s wife was there,” Nacho said sourly. “She hasn’t got much to thank you for.”

  “She’d be dead, too, if we hadn’t moved. And Erskine himself would be alive if he hadn’t played hero of the hour.”

  “It was still a mess.”

  “Less of a mess than it would have been,” said The Professor, piqued by Nacho’s criticism.

  “You were saying that there was more to it.”

  “There was some point in the evening when I was thinking out loud, wondering why Yvonne would go so far just to get her hands on a ranch. With her money, she could have bought ten ranches. That’s when Castle told me about the grandfather. He said he was going to do some research into the old man’s life. You know how I like that kind of thing, so I gave him a hand whenever I had some free time. Dug up quite a bit at the Arizona Historical Society, and it explained a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Yvonne’s father wasn’t the only one the old man killed. He spilled a lot of blood, and some of it didn’t need to be spilled, and maybe Castle and Erskine had to pay for it.”

  Nacho turned up his collar and shoved his hands into the sheepskin’s pockets. “That sounds a little, you know, far-out.”

  “The past is never dead, Nacho. It’s always with us. The sins of the father. Grandfather in this case. Not that I think what he did was sinning. But then, my standards are pretty low.”

  “Well, Erskine sure paid for them,” Nacho said. “And his wife, too.”

  “Did you know Castle lost his wife in nine-eleven?”

  Nacho nodded.

  “It’s the whole reason he came out here, he told me,” The Professor went on. “You could say he was trying to escape history. Kind of fascinating when you think about it. His family history and the big history of what’s happening here coming together.”

  “He couldn’t escape it, that’s what you’re saying?”

  “Exactamente.”

  A Note About the Author

  Philip Caputo worked for nine years for the Chicago Tribune and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his reporting on election fraud in Chicago. He is the author of seven other works of fiction, four works of nonfiction, and two memoirs, including A Rumor of War, about his service in Vietnam. He divides his time between Connecticut and Arizona.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2009 by Philip Caputo

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random

  House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Roger Clyne for permission

  to reprint an excerpt from “Switchblade” by Roger Clyne.

  Reprinted by permission of Roger Clyne.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Caputo, Philip.

  Crossers : a novel / by Philip Caputo. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-27298-0

  1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Drug traffic—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction.

  4. Mexican-American Border Region—Fiction. 5. Arizona—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.A625C76 2009

  813′.54—dc22 2009019096

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are

  used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.0

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright