The Border Lords (17 page)

But even Bradley’s overflowing heart was no match for the peril he sensed here, and he did not hesitate in his answer.

“I didn’t do that, Erin. I was helping out a friend. I swear this to you and the many children I hope to have with you.”

“You would swear on them?”

“I do swear on them.”

She stepped back into his arms and squeezed him gently. He could feel the tapping of her heart against his chest. “Stop the Mexico runs. We can live on less.”

“No. I’ll do anything you want but not that.”

“Why?”

“So I can become.”

“Become what?”

“A man able to protect what he loves.”

“You didn’t protect me last night.”

“I can change that. There will never be another night like it.”

She moved away again and looked at him and he saw the uncertainty in her eyes.

He went to his knees. “When you look at me it’s like walking into a beautiful room,” he said. “The most beautiful room on earth. It’s the only place I ever want to be.”

A tear rolled down her pale face and she wiped it away. She bit her lip and stepped forward and helped him up.

Wednesday morning Hood sat
in the Buenavista ATF station watching Sean Ozburn’s videos again on the now-useless safe house monitor number four. Oz was using a Flip now, so the latest videos sent to Seliah were of better quality than the first few. Playing any of them on the good monitor made them even clearer, and more haunting.

Hood watched the miracle healing of Daisy. It was like seeing it for the first time. Ozburn began this segment with an establishing shot and Hood now recognized El Centro. Then came a jumbled, poorly focused episode: a black, bleeding dog lying on the side of the road, a little crowd forming, Sean scooping up the animal in one big tattooed arm while holding the cell camera high in the other hand for an aerial shot as he crunched along the sun-cooked street toward his car.

Hood noted that the actual miracle healing wasn’t caught on video because Ozburn was presumably steering with one hand and healing with the other. But Oz narrated his actions as the unmanned camera filmed the headliner of the Range Rover.

Phone back in hand, Ozburn focused on the dog, bouncing along with the rhythm of the vehicle, panting gently, looking up at Sean with affection and loyalty.

Next came a sermon delivered by Sean at an outdoor service of some kind. Hood couldn’t place the landscape: rolling hills, grassland, some oak and madrone and manzanita. Someone else was working the camera. Ozburn stood before twenty or thirty people sitting on fallen logs and a crumbling adobe brick wall. The cameraman panned the people. They were a mix of ages, half of them brown and the other half white. There was a big fire ring made of river rock but there was no fire. An orange cooler sat on a slouching picnic table, and beside it was a glass jar with a few coins in it.

An aged evangelist introduced Sean Gravas as a “man come newly to our Lord,” but Hood saw annoyance in his craggy face. The evangelist held a Bible in one hand and wore a white shirt buttoned to the top with no tie, and a beaten black coat, and his crucifix was large and made of silver and turquoise.

When Sean stood and faced the assembly and the camera, Hood could see that he wasn’t right. Sweat poured down his face and he looked to be in pain. He was dressed in his sleeveless biker vest and the black jeans and harness boots and he wore a black bandana pirate style. Over his left shoulder was slung a Love 32 with the curving fifty-shot magazine and the noise suppressor screwed into place. He held a white-covered book in both hands but he didn’t open it. He kept looking skyward, as if he was waiting for something to appear, something perhaps not good. Daisy stood at his feet and looked up at him with a similar expression.

Sean sweated and talked on. Blood and life eternal. The lamb and the sword.

Hood’s heart broke some as he watched and listened. Sean was a good man. And something had gotten into him. Something had changed him. Sean had all but lost his once-kind and strong and generous self. Who was this inhabiting his body? Who in hell? Where was Sean?

Then came the baptism of Daisy by Father Arriaga.

Then came a long lecture on the evils of whoredom. Hood watched Sean throttle a young man, then drive him through a window of what appeared to be a bordello bedroom. A prostitute flailed at him with a red stiletto shoe and cursed in Spanish. Ozburn growled at her and she ran out. He went bar to bar and club to club in what Hood recognized as Tijuana, lecturing whoever was too afraid to scuttle away.

Then came video that Hood had never seen before: a beautiful Mexican girl lying on a bed, wide-eyed and sobbing, a woman holding a bag of something against her neck.

Hood checked the time and date: It had been sent to Seliah just an hour ago. Ozburn narrated:

In the village of Agua Blanca a girl was dressing for school. She put on her hat but a huge scorpion fell from the hat to her neck and drove its deadly stinger into her flesh. Then it fell to the floor. Her mother trapped the scorpion under a glass bowl, then ran into the streets to find the
curandera
. The village had no ice so the
curandera
filled a plastic bag with peeled cucumbers, dandelions and cool well water. She viewed the scorpion and said it was the deadly variety, the only scorpion that can kill a healthy girl. The girl’s neck swelled up at the sting. I’m here in Agua Blanca on a personal matter but it can wait. Now I see that I was brought here by someone or something, for another purpose. My purpose here is to save this girl. Her name is Silvia.

Ozburn turned his camera to the floor and got a close-up of the upended glass mixing bowl. The scorpion nearly spanned its diameter, head and pinchers facing the camera, stinger cocked up and ready for action. Daisy nosed the bowl and the scorpion swiveled on her; then she sprang away.

Hood knew from his boyhood that the
curandera
was right: There was only one deadly species of scorpion in the West. But she was wrong, too: The one that had stung the girl was a much larger and darker, and less potent, creature than the slender, pale, lethal other.

Hood watched Sean try to convince the mother to take the recorder. Ozburn said he wanted to say a healing prayer while touching the girl. Finally the mother took the camera and shot video of the
curandera
, a wizened woman with a troubled face and sharp teeth and a scapular festooned with the heads and tails of very large rattlesnakes. She drank from a can of orange soda.

Ozburn sat on the bed beside the girl, his machine pistol slung over one shoulder. He held the plastic bag to the girl’s neck. In this part of the video Hood couldn’t see Ozburn’s face. All he saw was his broad back and big shoulders, and the blond hair and the fearful face of the girl. Beside the bed were a pitcher and a bowl and a rustic vanity with a mirror. Someone had draped one of the girl’s dresses over the mirror and it looked to Hood like an observer, a ghost.

The mother spoke in rapid Spanish and the camera wobbled dramatically. Hood heard the
curandera
answer in a strangely low and disapproving voice. Though it was much clearer than the audio of his cell phone, Hood still couldn’t understand her words.

He said the sentences again and again.

Offscreen the
curandera
spoke in the background, and although again Hood could not make out her words, her voice was low and trembled with foreboding.

Offscreen the mother answered her in an anxious tone.

No!
said Sean.
No water for her.
No agua!

The
curandera
hissed something and Sean turned and ordered her to shut her foul old mouth. His eyes were crazy black, and Hood saw almost nothing in them of the man he had known. He was sweating badly. Daisy looked away from him.

Hood was surprised by the enormity of the change in Sean, as revealed by the good video monitor. Only a small fraction of it had registered over the tiny screen on his cell phone.

Ozburn turned back to the girl and set the plastic bag on the bed and pressed one of his great rough hands to the girl’s forehead. He kept repeating the two sentences. Gradually the girl’s eyes closed. He prayed on, the same words, the same cadence, his voice growing softer and slower until Hood could barely hear it. And still he prayed.

A minute or two later Ozburn removed his hand from the girl’s head. Her eyes were still closed and her face was peaceful. Her chest rose and fell in the rhythm of sleep. Offscreen the
curandera
muttered something accusatory.

Ozburn reached back and claimed the recorder. He turned it on the girl, zooming in close to the wound on her neck. The swelling had gone down and the skin was reddened. Hood could see the mark the stinger had left, much like a bee sting. Ozburn put the cooling sack of cucumbers back over it.

Ozburn panned the room and settled the camera on the
curandera
. She spoke to him in Spanish now and for the first time Hood could both hear and understand her words.

—Why did you come to Agua Blanca?

—People talk of you. I’m suffering and I want you to make it stop.

—Your suffering will stop when it is finished.

—Tell me what it is.

—It lives in the caves of your blood.

The
curandera
moved to the vanity and pulled the dress from the mirror.

—
Bruja
, said Ozburn, swinging the camera away from his reflection.

Witch
, thought Hood.

The
curandera
reached up and grasped one of the snake heads on her scapular. The camera came in on it. Hood saw the glazed eyes with their vertical pupils, the enlarged nose scales, and the pits through which these vipers could sense the body heat of their prey. He was impressed by its size, though the many others were easily as big. He’d seen his share of rattlesnakes in and around Bakersfield but rarely had they been more than five feet long, as these snakes had once been. Most of the rattles separating the heads were blunt rectangles, at least two inches long. The
curandera
held it up to the camera, a matter-of-fact expression on her dark, wrinkled face.

—You two look a lot alike, lady. You must have a hundred of those heads.

—Come with me, white devil. I will show you how your suffering will end.

—Let’s do it,
bruja
.

Hood’s scalp crawled as the picture faded to black.

A moment later the girl appeared, sitting up in bed with a bowl of soup in her lap and a spoon in her hand. She looked at the camera shyly, then blushed.

Ozburn narrated:

The camera zoomed in close. Even the once-reddish patch at the sting site was gone. All that was left was the small pinprick of the stinger.

Then Ozburn swung the camera down and walked into the next room where the scorpion was still trapped under the glass bowl. He reached down and lifted it and the scorpion raised its pinchers and tail and scuttled backward. Ozburn’s harness boot crushed it into the dirt floor. Daisy sniffed the boot toe.

—
Curandera! Apúrate!

Hood made Agua Blanca by afternoon.
It sat along a potholed asphalt road, ten miles below Tecate. The buildings were rectangles of blue and yellow and pink and green, and the speed bump gave Hood and his SUV a sharp bounce.

He bought two orange soft drinks at the mini-super Ayala and asked about the
curandera
. The clerk told Hood that she lived at the far end of town, on a dirt road that began at a green ice cream stand and a white pharmacy. He said to drive west one hundred meters and look for the driveway marked by a hubcap and some flowers. He said the
curandera
had saved a girl from scorpions.

Hood stopped at the ice cream stand and got two deluxe Popsicles, one coconut and one orange. He turned right and crunched down the wide dirt road. Half a mile later he saw the hubcap with the spray of plastic flowers long blanched of color by the sun. The driveway was not quite wide enough for his Durango so the manzanita branches streaked its flanks. The house was a pale green cinder-block rectangle with a water tank on the roof.

She stood in the doorway as if she had been expecting him. He climbed down from the vehicle with the drink bottles in one hand and the Popsicles in the other and swung the door shut with an elbow. They spoke in Spanish.