Crossers (42 page)

Pierce rose, refreshed the cups, then withdrew a club from his caddy and made a putt. “I’m all ears.”

“I pose as an American coke dealer, make contact with Yvonne, and gain her confidence with a few buys. Once I’ve established myself as a reliable customer, I dangle temptation. I’ve got a big client who wants to do multikilo deals.” Then, his glance switching between Nacho and Pierce: “You’ll be the client. A heavy hitter but too suspicious to do deals in Mexico. You’ll only do business in the U.S. That’s how we lure her across the line with a load. The transaction goes down, you pop her, and no complications because she’s a U.S. citizen. If we work it right, we net Julián, too. We decapitate the Menéndez organization.”

Pierce replaced the putter. He was skeptical. The sting required a degree of recklessness in Yvonne that he didn’t think she possessed. What made The Professor so confident he could win her trust to the point that she’d cross a load herself?

“Greed. She’s the greediest bitch in the business. If the reward looks big enough to her, she’ll take the risk.”

Pierce squinted to indicate that he still wasn’t persuaded.

“I’ve done this before,” The Professor said, sounding like a salesman pitching himself.

“So Nacho informs me. A long time ago. You might be out of trim.”

“You don’t forget how. It’s like riding a bike. If you’re wondering what it would cost the U.S. government besides your salary, the answer is nothing. Carrasco will fund the buys.”

The color of Pierce’s eyes—they looked like aluminum disks—gave off a bitter smell. He turned them to Nacho. “You talked to the man himself?”

“This afternoon. It’s The Professor’s idea, but Joaquín is behind it, one hundred percent.”

“All that Joaquín asks is that his role in it is kept under wraps,” said The Professor. “We play it as a joint operation, U.S. Customs and the MexFeds join hands to take down a major drug dealer.”

“Writing the headlines already?” asked Pierce. “There’s the small problem of making Yvonne’s acquaintance. How do you plan to do that?”

“I’m working on it. But I need to know before I go ahead that you’re all in.”

“You’ve got brass ones, I’ll give you that much. If she makes you, the best you could hope for is that she takes less than three days to kill you.”

Pierce swung off his chair and extended a hand that looked only a little smaller than a catcher’s mitt.

The Professor shook it. “Actually,” he said with a trace of British slur—
ekshulee
—“I’m looking forward to it. Should be fun.”

26

S
ELDOM IN THE COURSE
of his clandestine labors had The Professor resorted to Sherlock Holmes disguises; however, present circumstances dictated that he blend in with the scenery. His plan was to turn Billy Cruz, and that had brought him here, in what used to be Carrasco’s territory but was now Yvonne’s. He was behind enemy lines. Wearing a straw cowboy hat, jeans, and a dirty denim shirt, towing an empty two-horse trailer behind a Ford pickup that would have had a round-trip to the moon on its odometer if its odometer still worked—the dial had frozen at 300,000 kilometers at some point in the remote past—he was to all appearances a shabby vaquero in a shabby truck. Wide patches of rock and gravel scabbed the overgrazed hillsides, upon which scrawny cattle foraged or lazed under mesquite trees, branches bent and twisted, like arthritic fingers. No rain had fallen in a week—a break in the chubascos—and he hung well behind the convoy (three vans led by Billy Cruz in a white Dodge Ram) to keep from being choked and blinded by the dust. He had picked up the convoy at the Cananea motel where the mojados had been stashed overnight, then followed it down Mex-2 and onto the road to Santa Cruz, its destination. There, Billy would assemble his human cargo for a night run to the border, seven miles away.

Soldiers at the San Lazaro checkpoint flagged The Professor down, and as one, an Indian, listlessly searched the trailer, another peeked into the truck and asked where he was going. To a rancho to pick up some horses, he answered, and continued on. Approaching a cattle guard, a familiar stench assaulted his nostrils. Lying at the roadside was the bloated, fly-specked carcass of a horse, all four legs chopped off at the knee. The animal, blind or extremely stupid, must have attempted to cross the cattle guard and gotten trapped between the rails, blocking the road until someone shot it, amputated its lower legs, and towed it out of the way. The border. La linea. La frontera. Lovely part of the world.

Water was flowing in the Santa Cruz River, not much, maybe a foot. Beyond it was its namesake town, a compact, tidy settlement of flat-roofed houses and shops, ornate iron bars on the windows. Half a block ahead the convoy parked in front of a grocery. The Professor watched the drivers go into the store and come out ten minutes later, lugging supplies in plastic bags. Probably the standard pollo fare—cans of frijoles, sterno to heat them, bottled water, Electrolit. A boost to the local economy.

He reached under the seat for his Motorola handheld and radioed the federal police station. “I am in town and so is he. I will tell you to pick him up.”

“Sí, mi capitán,” a voice replied.

The small contingent of federales were his only allies here. They’d remained loyal to Joaquín after Yvonne’s swift takeover, partly because she, calculating that her army patrons provided sufficient protection, had failed to cut them in.

He trailed the vehicles past the plaza to the Pemex station, where they gassed up. From there they proceeded up an unpaved side street, stopping at a mud-brick building with bedsheets curtaining its windows. A wetback hostel. A stash house. The migrants piled out of the vans, around forty of them clutching flight bags, backpacks, and small suitcases, and were hustled inside. Cruz went in with them, carrying an attaché case. The vans left, heading back to Cananea to pick up another load. Cruz emerged from the stash house after collecting his fees and drove back to the plaza, where a small clubfooted girl watched her playmates climbing on the water-tower girders and several young men idled on the benches, smoking, talking. Parked near the police station, on the opposite side of the plaza, The Professor observed Cruz summon the young men to his Dodge for a conference. These were the guides who would lead the migrants through the perils of serpents and scorpions and heat into El Norte, where dreams came true, though not always. Cruz looked quite relaxed, guzzling a beer as he gave instructions. Yvonne must have obtained the Sonoran license plates on his truck; there would be a forged Mexican registration in the glove compartment and a Mexican driver’s license in his wallet, everything he needed to prove he was a citizen.

The streetlamps came on, the kids went home, the clubfooted girl hobbling behind, and the coyotes hurried off in the direction of the stash house. As Cruz pulled away, The Professor keyed his Motorola.

“He is leaving now, going south,” he said, and gave the tag numbers and a description of the truck. “Remember, outside of town. Be sure no one sees the arrest.”

“Sí, mi capitán.”

He slouched behind the wheel, tipping the cowboy hat over his eyes, and waited. Twenty minutes later the radio crackled. They had picked him up, and no, there had been no trouble. Another twenty minutes passed. A federal police SUV pulled up in front of the whitewashed station, across from the courthouse. In handcuffs Cruz was led inside by two federales. The Professor bided his time, then walked up the street, past the church, and entered the station, so sparsely furnished it almost looked uninhabited. A cop sat at a desk, filling out the arrest report on a manual typewriter—the twenty-first century had not yet caught up to Santa Cruz and probably never would. The cop opened Cruz’s attaché case, filled with bundles of hundred-dollar bills, maybe fifty thousand all together, a sight to tempt Saint Francis, and handed The Professor a plastic evidence bag containing Cruz’s wallet and car keys. Inside the wallet were a thousand pesos and two hundred dollars in cash, a Mexican license issued to one Jaime Ortega, and tucked into a compartment, an Arizona license and credit cards in the name of William Cruz. Sloppy, he thought. Exceptionally sloppy. Cruz had flunked Fugitive 101.

He was in what passed for the lockup—a bare-walled room just big enough to accommodate a cot and a toilet. The room stank of urine, of every unwashed body that had spent any time there. Still cuffed, a disconsolate Cruz sat on the concrete floor, wedged into a corner. He couldn’t sit on the cot, infested with fleas. The Professor motioned to the federale to take the handcuffs off.

“Buenas noches, Jaime. Quisiera tener unas palabritas con usted. ¿Está bien?”

Rubbing his wrists, his fingertips blackened by fingerprint ink, Cruz looked up warily from under his pale, scarred eyebrows. “¿Quién eres?”

“At the moment, the only friend you’ve got in the world.”

Cruz blinked, hearing what appeared to be a vaquero address him in perfect English. “American?”

“That’s not important, Jaime. I should say Billy. The only important thing is that I’m your friend.”

“What—what are you … what do you want?”

“I want you to get up off the floor and sit on the toilet.”

“Hey, bro—the floor’s fine.”

The Professor made a sound of dismay. “You’re in trouble. You’re an American citizen illegally in Mexico, with a phony driver’s license under an assumed name. You’ve got a suitcase full of cash you can’t account for. You’re also wanted for questioning in Arizona about a double homicide. I’m sure the gentlemen who arrested you have gone over all that with you.”

“What of it?”

“If you would like these troubles to go away, you’ll do as I ask.”

Cruz pulled himself to his feet and sat on the commode. Its acrid smell had a color and shape—a greenish blob—and Cruz’s handsome but battered face made a distinctive sound, the sound of footsteps crunching on gravel.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Carrington. A few years ago you did time in the Arizona state penitentiary on drug charges. That’s where you and I became friends.”

“Never saw you in my life,” said Cruz, after a silence.

“I know that. You know that. Yvonne Menéndez doesn’t know that. You’re going to introduce me to Yvonne, you’re going to vouch for me. You’re going to tell her that I’m your old cellmate from Florence, and that I want to do business with her. No mota, coke only, in quantity. That’s what I want. I want to meet Yvonne Menéndez.”

“Bro, I don’t—”

The Professor signaled him to be quiet. “Let’s make this conversation short and pleasant instead of long and unpleasant. Please don’t tell me you don’t know any Yvonne Menéndez. You’re living on her ranch, you’re running wets into the U.S. with her blessings, and you’re fucking her.”

Cruz stared at him for half a second before his glance skidded away. He muttered something.

“I’m not sure you appreciate your situation. If I leave here a disappointed man, the MexFeds are going to take you to the Nogales port of entry and hand you over to Sheriff Danny Rodriguez. He’s got an eyewitness and evidence identifying you as the guy who killed a couple of Mexicans in January. They were carrying drugs, which you stole. Twenty-five years at least, maybe life, maybe, if the prosecutor does a bang-up job, a lethal injection. Now, I can understand why you might be willing to take that risk. A conviction is a possibility, the alternative is a certainty.”

He was gaining Cruz’s attention. “What alternative?”

“What Yvonne will do to you if she finds out that you and your deceased uncle were ripping her off.”

“You’re talking shit!” Cruz exclaimed.

“I’m a student of history, Billy, and I’ve done some research this past week or so into recent history. Vicente was a kleptomaniac, couldn’t resist stealing from whoever he was working for, and he was stealing from Yvonne. Part of a load here, part of a load there. Sometimes he had problems crossing the stolen merca. That’s when he’d call on his pollero nephew to rope a few mojados to mule it over. Then he’d split the proceeds with you. So one day last winter, you got three wets down on their luck to pack in about sixty, seventy kilos of mota. The plan was for them to move behind a vanload of illegals who were supposed to decoy the Border Patrol in case they were in the neighborhood. You were on the other side, waiting to pick up the load. But things went wrong. You didn’t know what or why—I imagine you do now—all you knew was that your three mules didn’t show. ‘They’re ripping me off!’ is what you thought. You tracked them down and capped two. You couldn’t find the third but figured you’d better snatch the load and get the hell out. That’s exactly what you did.”

Hands folded between his knees, Cruz did not respond.

“It’s interesting when you think about it. It’s, oh, ironic. You didn’t know at the time that the woman you and your uncle had ripped off had ordered the illegals in the van to be massacred to teach a lesson. And she didn’t know that right behind that van was another, with her merca in it. It scares
me
to think what she would do if she ever found out. And you being her fuck of the month would only make it worse. Hell hath no fury, et cetera. So here you are, between the rock—a murder trial—and the hard place—Yvonne Menéndez. No, you don’t want me to leave here disappointed.”

Cruz rubbed his face with both hands. “My best friend in the world.”

“Best and only. All you have to do is make an introduction, and oh yeah, whenever you think of it, keep me informed about what your lover and patroness is up to.”

“You didn’t say nothing before about snitching.”

“It must have slipped my mind.”

“So what are you? DEA? ICE? FBI?”

“You’ve got a real command of the alphabet,” The Professor said. “What I am doesn’t matter. All that matters is for us to be friends.”

27

“W
ANT YOU TO MEET
my cousin and new partner,” Blaine said to the bartender in the Wagon Wheel Saloon
(PATAGONIA’S ORIGINAL COWBOY BAR—ESTABLISHED 1937
read the sign out front). “Signed the papers today.”

The bartender, a tall and substantial man with a sweatband of brownish hair, thrust out his hand to Castle. “Word’s all over town that you pulled Blaine’s fat out of the fire. Don’t know if I should congratulate you or feel sorry for you. What’ll it be?”

It was Castle’s first time in the Wagon Wheel. A vintage Hank Williams tune played on the jukebox, and two men circled the pool table chalking cues; a stuffed bobcat crouched on a fired-brick wall displaying antique firearms and frontier implements. Castle wanted a martini, but the saloon did not seem like a martini sort of place, so he ordered a Pacífico with a tequila chaser.

“And none of that well tequila that you can burn in a Coleman lantern,” Blaine said. “My cuzzy has refined tastes.”

“Will this do, sir?” asked the barkeep, holding up a bottle of Patrón Silver.

Blaine slapped two twenties on the bar and motioned with his finger that he was buying the house. A couple of women customers smiled at him discreetly, men in cowboy hats and baseball caps and work shirts, looking through shoals of cigarette smoke stirred by a hot August breeze blowing through the screen door, nodded or flipped two-finger salutes. Castle, garbed in the khakis, polo shirt, and loafers he’d worn to Lovelace’s Tucson office, felt out of place, despite his new status as a working cattleman. He, Blaine, and Monica had signed the incorporation papers in the morning, and he had turned over a check made out to the Internal Revenue Service for the first payment on the estate taxes. Looking at the figure had brought on a wave of buyer’s remorse—not the amount itself but the commitment it represented.

The bartender came back from attending another customer and poured himself a shot of the well tequila. “Need to light my inner Coleman lantern. Salud, you two.”

“Salud,” said Blaine, raising his beer.

“So the ranch is off the market? I can tell Ted Turner to forget it the next time he’s in here?”

“As of too-day. And as of too-morrow, Gil gets to find out what he paid for. We’re gone to—”

The sharp rap of an empty beer bottle on the bar interrupted Blaine. “Can a man get a drink around here?”

“Look who’s here,” drawled Blaine, glowering at the wasted figure standing between two seated patrons, holding a cue stick. “My offer don’t apply to him,” he said to the barkeep, who took the empty, pulled a fresh one from the cooler, and said, “Three-fifty.”

“You oughta be careful who you let into this place,” Blaine said in a loud voice.

Idaho Jim paid for his drink and threw a hard look at him. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

He went to the pool table and, setting the beer on the floor, racked the balls. His partner, a Mexican with the dimensions of a retired nose tackle, broke the rack, the cue ball cracking like a starter’s pistol, the balls exploding in all directions.

“You seem to have a problem with that guy,” the bartender remarked to Blaine.

“More him with me. Who’s the big Mexican?”

“Name is Linares. That’s all I know.”

Blaine fell into one of his brooding silences, then finished his beer. “Drink up, Gil. All of a sudden I don’t feel like celebrating.”

As they left, Idaho Jim crouched over the table to line up a shot. At the moment when he drew the cue stick, Blaine managed to bump into him on the way out the door. The tip made a splintering sound, and the cue ball dribbled off wide of its mark.

They had just got into Castle’s Suburban when the Mexican giant appeared outside. Although his arms and hands spelled “blunt-force trauma,” he wore an almost genial smile. “Hey, man, got to tell you something,” he said, looking at Blaine. “You gotta lot of luck. You don’t know how much. You shouldn’t push it, you know?”

Blaine started to say something, but Castle backed out onto the street before he could say it.

D
URING HIS EIGHT MONTHS
at the San Ignacio, Castle had sampled the drudgery of the ranchman’s life; the next morning, he got a chance to experience the romance of it: a gathering, which was the correct term for what tenderfeet called a roundup. Yesterday, after the near altercation at the Wagon Wheel, Blaine had given him a crash course in the terminologies of his newfound trade—the different parts of the stock saddle, the various kinds of bits and bridles—along with lectures on cattle breeds, species of grasses, the current cattle market, the San Ignacio’s business plan (to sell yearling steers at 780 pounds). In delivering these tutorials, Blaine was determined to show that although the cattle business wasn’t, in Castle’s words, nuclear physics, it wasn’t first grade, either.

Now, as the sky lightened to oyster gray, nine people rode out of ranch headquarters at an easy trot—Blaine, Monica, Gerardo, Castle, Tessa, McIntyre, and the manager of a neighboring ranch with his two young hands, an Anglo and a Mexican. There was no wind and no sound except for the hoofbeats. The Huachucas retarded the dawn, and Venus shone in the east, its brilliance fading as the sun rose behind the mountains, coloring a reef of clouds pale pink, then peach, and finally a fiery gold. The Mexican hand loped out ahead of the others. Blaine’s neighbor rode after him, and after catching up, he smacked the young cowboy on the back with his hat and spoke to him sharply in Spanish. The cowboy pulled rein, then waited for the riders to pass before taking his place in the rear.

Castle asked what that was all about.

“A lesson in ett-ee-cut,” answered his cousin. “You don’t never ride out ahead of the cow boss. An old-time vaquero would of known that before he was out of diapers. These new ones don’t know better.”

They rode on for another mile, halting in a basin where Blaine gave out assignments: his neighbor and the two cowboys to take the right wing, gathering the pastures along the Mexican border; he, Monica, and Gerardo would take the middle; Tessa, McIntyre, and Castle the left. They were all to rendezvous in the basin, then drive the herd to the pastures near the shipping corrals for branding the next day.

“Tessa, you’ll be in charge. Should be sixty head up in there. Show my cuzzy how it’s done.”

Tack creaked and jiggled, and the horses’ legs swished in the tall grass, speckled by the mustard-colored flowers of camphor weed. In single file, Tessa leading and Castle behind on Comanche, they followed a ridgeline above a canyon a quarter mile wide at its mouth. Yellowhead crows perched on the fence wire flew off in clouds at the riders’ approach. They eased their horses down to the canyon floor, split by an arroyo, through which a ribbon of water flowed, trickling over rock dams to form shining pools. A splendid buck antelope, hide like rubbed leather, burst from its bed, jumped the arroyo, and sprinted up the ridge without breaking stride. A dozen Angus cows with calves rested ahead, the cows with bright green tags dangling from their ears. Tessa advised Castle not to get too close or the calves would think he was part of the herd and follow him instead of their mothers. She was all business and looked it in a denim shirt, a sweat-stained hat, and scratched chaps. A flash of lust distracted Castle nonetheless, for she sat her horse like a show rider, her erect posture exaggerating the swell of her breasts, which needed no exaggerating, her hips, thighs, and bent knees forming a snaky curve.

She approached the herd at a slow walk, Castle on one side, McIntyre on the other. The cows heaved off their knees and immediately began to bawl for their calves, and each one seemed to know the sound of its mother’s voice, though they all sounded alike to the human ear.

A short distance farther on, in an almost treeless meadow, another twenty head grazed. Leaving Castle to trail the first twelve, Tessa and McIntyre rode off, slapping their coiled lariats, and collected the animals. One cow bolted, her bull calf running after her. Tessa checked her, but the calf panicked and continued its flight. She shook out a loop and made a toss, the loop dropping over the little bull’s neck as neatly as a ring over a stake. Tessa dallied; the calf flipped onto its side, then scrambled to its feet, shaken but unhurt. The chase, the throw, the capture had been all one fluid movement, and thrilling to see. Castle’s heart swelled; it felt like a blossom, opening up.

They chased cows off ridges and out of gullies, through wooded side canyons and across hillside meadows. Delinquents attempted to escape, fleeing into tight defiles from which the Christian cowboy dislodged them with un-Christian epithets. On his own Castle ran down four miscreants, two with calves, two without, turned them, and brought them in, flushed from the exhilarating pursuit, pleased with himself for accomplishing the feat without supervision.

They pushed the herd at an easy pace to avoid overheating the calves—it was now past midmorning and well over ninety degrees—and stopped at the canyon mouth, riding in slow circles until the animals settled down, a milling mass, heads and backs haloed by flies. After making a count, they concluded they were short three head. McIntyre said he’d seen them in a side canyon. Tessa said she would hold herd while he looked for the strays. Castle volunteered to ride along.

“Thought you’d be a tad butt-sore by now,” said McIntyre as they backtracked at a quick walk.

“I am, but this doesn’t feel like work.”

“Cowboying ain’t work—it’s a disease. Best job in the world, except when you’re out here in a thunderstorm or it’s twelve above with a norther slappin’ your face.” McIntyre ducked under a low branch. “There one of ’em is.”

He motioned at a patch of black showing through the trees, where the side canyon met the main canyon. But the cow didn’t move, and when they drew closer, they saw why: it was a black plastic tarp, partly camouflaged with cut tree branches, thrown over marijuana bales stacked like hay.

McIntyre looked around nervously, stood in the stirrups, and called out, “¡Buscamos ganado y nada más!” He hesitated a beat, then yelled again. “¡Buscamos ganado y nada más!”

“What’s that?” asked Castle quietly.

“Tellin’ ’em we’re lookin for cattle and nothin’ else. Don’t want ’em to think we’re law, or what’d be worse, bajadores lookin’ to rip off their load.”

“They’re here? They’re around?”

“Watchin’ us right now, I’d bet, and make another bet at least one of ’em is carryin an assault rifle. Ain’t gonna let a load this big get stole. Must be twenty bales, a thousand keys. Probably waitin’ for a vehicle to make the pickup.”

“Do we keep looking or get the hell out of here?”

McIntyre crossed his hands over the saddle horn. “The mules won’t make no trouble for us, long as they know we ain’t gonna make none for them.”

They entered the side canyon, turning their heads back and forth, wary of surprising the drug runners. The landscape had changed; that is, Castle’s view of it had, his imagination populating the underbrush and oak stands with smugglers watching his every move. Yet anger simmered under his uneasiness. Who the hell did these traffickers think they were to use his land—yes, it was his now—as a warehouse for their goods? He was not, as he might have been in the past, inclined to forgive those who had trespassed against him. He was beginning to think like Blaine.

They found the three strays and moved them to the herd by a different route, agreeing that the smugglers might not tolerate their passing by a second time. McIntyre asked, “Say, Gil, how many joints do you figure you could roll out of a thousand keys?”

Castle’s skill wasn’t at a level where he could herd cows, talk, and do arithmetic in his head at the same time, but he gave it a try. “Depends on how many grams to a joint. Say two. A thousand grams to a kilo, so that would make five hundred per kilo, times a thousand.” He paused, picturing the zeroes. “Half a million.”

The cowboy whistled through his teeth. “And that’s just one load. I mean,
who
is smokin’ all this shit?”

After rejoining Tessa, they pushed their sixty head to the basin and held there until the others came in. The neighboring rancher, recognizable at a distance by his flame-red bandanna, appeared first, riding point over the basin’s southern rim. The cattle behind him appeared as a solid river of black, surging down the shallow slope; startled meadow-larks burst out of the grass in front of the herd. Blaine and Gerardo rode one flank, Monica and the Anglo hand the other, and the Mexican who didn’t know his manners rode drag, a kerchief pulled over his mouth and nose. Castle thought it a grand sight.

Blaine rode over to Tessa and asked for a count. “They look good, don’t they?” he said of the cattle, hemmed into the basin by the riders. “Gone to make some fine four-to-five-year-old cows.”

Castle hated to spoil his mood with news of his discovery.

Blaine mopped his face. “Where?”

“Maybe a quarter mile up the canyon, on the north side.”

The queer, oblique smile veered across his cousin’s face. “Know what our grandpa would of done? Set fire to that stash, and when the dopers come out of the bushes to put it out, shot every one of the fuckin’ bastards.”

“That was then, and now is now,” said Castle, a little irritated by the John Wayne theatrics. “And anyway, I didn’t have a match.”

“Yeah, and heck, Blaine,” McIntyre said, “if you was to light up that much dope, everybody downwind for twenty miles would be stoned all day.”

Castle laughed with Tessa. Blaine wasn’t in a humorous frame of mind. “We’ve got to move this whole bunch through two gates, cuzzy. That can be easy sometimes, and sometimes it’s like tryin’ to shove a wet noodle up a bobcat’s ass. Watch for a cow wants to bolt. Keep off to the side, so you can see how she turns her head. That way you’ll know what she wants to do before she does.”

The point rider seemed to tow the herd out of the basin single-handed. Mother cows again lowed to their young, and the calves squealed in response; the hands prodded stragglers with whistles and cries of “Yah! Yah!” The procession plodded across a muddy ciénaga, and then the pasture burned in the range fire and funneled into the first of the gates, bumping and jostling.