Crossers (52 page)

“Back away, or I’ll kill this fucking bitch!”

Castle had never seen so feral a human being. He glanced sidelong at the policeman standing next to him, a light-haired, pale-complected Mexican who now spoke into his portable radio. A moment later another helicopter that had been circling overhead swooped in low, its landing lights stabbing the darkness, its blades churning up a miniature tornado. As the madwoman holding Monica threw up an arm to shield her face against the blast of dirt and gravel, Blaine let out a howl and, with his head down, rushed her.

“No!” Castle yelled and went to stop him, but felt a terrific blow to his ribs—had the cop struck him? He dropped to his knees, and then tumbled sideways and lay choking for breath.

Yvonne ran. She’d seen Erskine through the buffeting dust-cloud, charging her like a ram, his bound hands behind his back. At that moment, the woman broke free. Yvonne, half blinded by the dust and helicopter lights, emptied her Walther’s clip at Erskine, but he slammed into her shoulder first, bowling her over and knocking the pistol from her hand. Without looking to see if she’d hit him, she got up and fled up the road toward the ranch house. Her one thought was to get to Julián’s car and escape to Agua Prieta. She would be safe there. She was the queen of the city. Five kilometers. Could she run that far? She must. She was running so fast that when she tripped, she was flung forward. An instant later she heard the gunshot from behind her and knew she hadn’t tripped. She clawed at the ground, but as she struggled to regain her footing, her right arm folded beneath her. There was a strange taste in her mouth, and blood pumped from her shoulder, streamed down her right arm, and dripped from her fingers. Her whole arm was numb; if she didn’t see it, bleeding in the moonlight, she would not have known it was there. She was outraged. This was so undignified. Someone grabbed her under the opposite arm and yanked her upright and spun her around. She felt nauseous and, losing strength, sank to her knees.

“¡Chota!” she hissed when she saw Carrington standing over her with a drawn gun. “I knew you were a fucking chota!”

“Some of the time.” The Professor took a step forward and, clutching her hair to hold her head steady, pressed his .40 caliber to her mouth. “Este beso es de tus enemigos,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

He stood over Yvonne’s corpse for a few moments. One bullet, one body. Those were his standards. He’d had to fire two, but then, he’d squeezed off the first one on the run, so failing to make a killing shot was excusable.

Right then he heard a shriek and ran back toward the almacén. When he got to the warehouse, he saw both helicopters parked side by side and the federales circled around several of Yvonne’s pistoleros, who were facedown on the ground and handcuffed. Near the truck Erskine lay on his back, his arms locked beneath him, his wife kneeling over him, bowing up and down like a Muslim at prayer and screaming, screaming. The Professor went to her and gently stood her up and called to a policeman to take care of her. Erskine’s eyes were open but did not see anything. Blood rimmed a hole in his chest. The Professor had seen him plow into Yvonne as her pistol went off, the reports muffled by the noise of the rotors, but he didn’t know, till now, that she’d hit him. And a lucky shot it had been—in the heart.

As he picked up the handgun, Zarogosa shouted “¡Capitán! Over here.”

The comandante was squatting over the other man, Castle. Yvonne had certainly gotten her licks in. He too had been shot, hit in the side, but he was still alive.

“We’ve got to get him out of here,” Zaragoza said. “Yvonne?”

“Ella está muerta.”

“Tanto mejor. She would only have run things from prison anyway.”

The Professor bent down to have a look at the wounded man. Zaragoza had cut the plastic cuffs from his wrists and turned him onto his back. He was conscious, breathing in labored fashion. Lung shot. A good thing it was a .32 and not a nine; otherwise, he’d be dead, too. The bullet had entered below his right breast and exited through his ribs. The Professor jogged over to one of the 212s. Its radio was more powerful than the portable. He told the pilot which frequency to switch to, then keyed the transmitter and raised Nacho.

“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.”

C
ASTLE 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

R
OGER 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.”