Hailey's War (11 page)

“I wasn't traveling alone,” I told him. “I was traveling with a girl, Nidia Hernandez. Even if she wasn't at the scene, her things were in the car.”

He said, “There was no car. No luggage, and no girl. Just you.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“Why don't you tell me your story from the beginning.”

I did, leaving out only the fact that the friend who had gotten me involved in Nidia's situation was a semi-notorious girl gangster in L.A. Serena became, loosely, “a friend of Nidia's.” The rest was the unvarnished truth, from Oakland to the border to the tunnel.

“They were white,” I said, “and armed. These guys were pros. I don't know why they wanted Nidia, but they did.”

When I was done, Juarez didn't ask the questions I would have expected. He didn't ask for details about the ambush, or for a more thorough description of Nidia, which would have helped the police find her. Instead, he asked about my life in America: in particular, what I did for work.

“A bike messenger,” he said, “that's a young person's job, I understand. Not very lucrative, no?”

“I don't need much money.”

“Really,” he said. “I've heard that life in America is quite expensive, particularly California. People have high standards for what their lifestyle should be. Everyone reaching for the golden apple.”

I had a sinking feeling about what was motivating this line of questioning. I said, “Can I ask why you're so interested in my lifestyle and income?”

He looked thoughtfully at nothing in particular. Then he turned his attention back to me.

“Miss Cain,” he said, “let me be blunt. When an American meets with violence in Mexico, far from tourist areas, and without frantic American family members demanding information—”

“I'm not a drug mule,” I said.

He looked out the window, hesitated, and began to speak more slowly and deliberately. “In my experience,” he said, “when women become involved in the drug trade, it is rarely because of their own vice. Usually they become involved at the insistence of corrupt men who hold too much influence in their lives and do not have their best interests at heart. The law is commonly gentle with such women.”

“That's nice to know, but I'm not in the drug trade,” I said.

I'd wanted to say it since he was about five words in, but it had been obvious that nothing was going to proceed until he'd finished his little speech inviting me to fall into the sympathetic arms of the Mexican law.

I said, “You're skeptical about my story, okay, I can understand that. But Nidia is out there somewhere and needs help. I don't want your suspicions about me to keep people from looking for her.”

“To be honest,” he said, “it occurs to me that if you needed an explanation for why a group of armed men would ambush you on the road, and you couldn't tell us they were in search of money or drugs, a young woman would make a sympathetic substitute.”

“You don't even believe that Nidia
exists?”

“We have only your word on that,” he said. “Look at this from my perspective: You've described your traveling companion as a Mexican-born teenager without money or connections. Why would she be of interest to men like that?”

“I don't know what kind of men they were,” I said, “so it's hard to speculate.”

“Speculate,” he repeated, leaning back a little. “You have a certain level of education.”

“I did nearly four years at West Point. I didn't finish.”

“That's the American military academy?”

“One of them,” I said.

“Why didn't you finish there?”

“I was discharged. Not for using drugs, if that's what you're thinking,” I told him. “Listen, whatever you think of me, Nidia needs your help. She's only nineteen. You owe it to her to have people looking for her.”

Juarez hesitated, then said, “I must admit, you are convincing in your zeal.” He raised pen to notepad. “Tell me as much as you can about her and I'll get her description out.”

“To the U.S. authorities, too?” I said. “In case these men took her back over the border?”

He nodded.

When we were done, I had one last question for him. I said, “The doctor told me that no one here knew my name.”

Juarez waited for the rest.

“Didn't you identify me from missing-persons reports?”

“I'm sorry, Miss Cain,” he said, “but no one matching your description was reported missing.”

Sometimes one offhand comment can bring a truth about your life home to
you. Until Juarez's statement, I hadn't realized how isolated I'd let myself get from other people. CJ, Serena, my mother in Truckee—there was no one who wasn't accustomed to not hearing from me for weeks on end. My disappearance had not registered with anyone in my life.

Except for this: I'd promised to see Serena on my way back north. I'd never shown up, yet she hadn't reported me missing. Serena, who was the only person in my life who'd known where I was going. Wasn't that an odd thing?

It was she who had asked me to do this in the first place. She'd called me out of the blue, after we hadn't spoken in nearly a year, wanting me to take a girl I'd never met to central Mexico. Conveniently, none of Nidia's family, nor Serena nor her sucias, could do the job. Only a white stranger in the Bay Area seemed to be able to do it.

A stranger to Nidia, that was. I was no stranger to Serena; we were friends, and now I couldn't help pulling at the threads of that friendship, wondering how much they'd weakened in the time we'd been apart. Enough to allow her to set me up to be killed?

Some time later, a nurse came in and gave me a pill. I didn't ask what it was. Maybe it was a sleeper, because sleep came on fast.

The next day, Juarez returned. I couldn't tell from his long, sober face what he'd concluded about my story, but he blandly told me that when I was well enough to leave the hospital, I would be taken to the U.S. Consulate and would become their problem.

Seventy-two hours later, I was riding high in the cab of a Peterbilt truck
, rolling across the dry, severe Arizona terrain, heading back toward California.

I was exceedingly grateful for my military service, because having my fingerprints in the system had streamlined the process of proving who I was—and therefore my citizenship—to consular authorities. Of course, they'd wanted to hear the whole story, and I'd told it to them. I stressed the part about Nidia's disappearance as I had with Juarez, but it didn't make much of an impression. Nidia was not an American citizen, therefore not their problem.

I, on the other hand, penniless and stranded, was their problem. They arranged for me to get on a bus to the U.S. border, where I'd stuck out my thumb and eventually found what I was looking for: a truck driver headed to Los Angeles. That was Ed. Ed had rusty, curly hair and seemed decent; he kept his hands to himself and, as evening fell, had given me his jacket. At the hospital, they'd found me some civilian clothes to replace the ones that had been ruined in the attack. They gave me jeans and running shoes, and a T-shirt with the word
NAVY
on it in block letters, which I'd taken with a small inward smile. A little joke on the part of the universe.

“You're young to have been on your own in Mexico,” Ed said. “You're what, nineteen, I'd guess?”

People always lowballed my age, because of the open, guileless features I'd inherited from my father.

“Twenty-three,” I said. Then: “No, wait, twenty-four. I just had a birthday.”

July five, the day after I'd been shot. I'd turned twenty-four in my sleep.

“You got someone you can call when we get to L.A.?” Ed asked.

“Several people,” I told him. “There's one friend in particular I'm dying to get caught up with.”

I was thinking, of course, of Serena. I still didn't want to believe that my old friend had set me up, but it was the theory that best fit the facts.

Serena used to call me
prima
, meaning cousin. Yet I'd heard her call other girls
hermana
, or sister. I had never been sure if this was because they were sucias or because they were Mexican like her. It would have been uncool to ask. But the very fact that she made that distinction troubled me now. I was white, and since I'd moved north, I was no longer an everyday friend. Had those things made me expendable?

It was painful to consider that possibility. But if it was true, what had been her motivation for setting Nidia up? Money? Serena knew a lot of people, and she saw and heard a lot. Maybe she'd known that someone wanted Nidia, and had exacted a price for helping them to get her. Maybe that was why, when I'd called her from El Paso having second thoughts, she'd said,
I don't think you should interfere
. Of course not, not if her big payday depended on me getting Nidia to the abduction point.

But if Serena's incentive had been money, what was the motive of whoever had hired the seven men in the tunnel? Juarez's skepticism on that point was entirely understandable. Seven armed men had braced us in a tunnel in a sophisticated maneuver, and shot me, and they had done all this, apparently, to abduct or kill a nineteen-year-old daughter of Mexican illegal immigrants. How to explain that? To have a plausible theory, didn't you need to start with a plausible event?

I bit my thumbnail and shifted in my seat.

“You okay?” Ed asked.

“I'm cool,” I said.

It wasn't necessary to think so far ahead. The theory I had now—that Serena set me up—was enough. It was credible and I could act on it.

That was why Los Angeles was my destination, instead of San Francisco. I was going to ambush Serena, and then she'd have to tell me what was going on.

Either that or I would screw up my ambush and she, being Warchild, would kill me.

So, for the second time in my life, I washed up in Los Angeles, broke and
without a plan. I'd had to ask Ed for ten dollars to buy a meal. This made him skeptical all over again that I really had friends in L.A. I could call. I assured him several times I'd be fine before he left me in the vast parking lot of a shopping center and drove away.

I wasn't lying, strictly speaking, about having someone I could call. CJ could have provided most of what I needed: a safe place, a meal, a bed, and money. But I wasn't going to call him, because I was into some heavy shit right now, worse than the Marsellus thing, and I was not going to get my cousin involved. This was my private, post–West Point honor code: You might have to lie, cheat, or steal, but you do not endanger Cletus Jeffrey Mooney.

Instead, I started walking.

If San Francisco was bigger than it looked for a person on foot, Los Angeles was huge. East L.A., where I was headed, wasn't even in L.A. proper. I wasn't sure how many miles lay ahead of me. I did know that in the oppressively bright, hot weather, I was going to have a wicked sunburn.

It's just another road march
,
I told myself. At West Point we had done them
all the time, with our rifles and heavy rucks on our backs.

A lot of what I'd learned at West Point was going to be useful here. The officers who'd taught us had foreseen the day when we might be dropped into a hostile landscape without resources and would need to survive by our wits. We'd learned to ignore hunger
and other physical privations. We'd been taught to be resourceful, to find what we needed to survive in the territory around us.

You can do this
, I told myself.
You're made outta this
.

I had a basic plan. I was going to find a fast-food place where I could get a meal for less than ten dollars, and then I was going to keep walking until I saw my destination: the donation center for one of the nation's largest charities.

Sometime before midnight, I was breaking into Serena's car
.

This hadn't been Plan A, which had been to wait outside until she came home from some late-night mission or errand, and then brace her from out of the shadows. It had seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. It was rare for gangbangers to go places unaccompanied—they had an innate understanding of the fire-team concept—but Serena did it more than most, a combination of her bravado and her need for privacy. So I had a better-than-average chance of catching her alone.

Unfortunately, I'd arrived too late. She was inside the house, probably for the night. Staging a raid on the home base of the Trece Sucias was out of the question. Too many guns and trigger-happy girls inside.

So, Plan B: the car. I knew it didn't have an alarm. In Serena's neighborhood, the only kind of car you could park outside was an old and inexpensive one from which the sound system had already been stolen. That described Serena's car, a pale blue Chevy Caprice with no radio.

Fortunately, I'd thought ahead and supplied myself for a break-in.

When I'd gotten to the donation center, I'd wandered casually to the back and slipped unseen into a supply closet. Then I'd made a small barricade of boxes in case someone opened the door and looked inside. I spent three hours sitting with my legs tucked up against me, behind those boxes, until I'd heard the volunteer workers close up and leave.

When I came out, I was alone in an acre-sized warehouse of used goods. One-stop shopping. By the time I left, I was wearing a heavy flannel shirt over my Navy T-shirt, and thicker socks under my work boots. I had a canvas backpack strapped to my back, into which I'd tucked a sharp boning knife from the housewares section, a long, tough screwdriver I'd found on a table laden with assorted tools, and a wire coat hanger. I was also pushing a ten-speed bicycle. That had carried me to Serena's place.