El Gavilan (3 page)

Patricia shot him a look, café au lait cheeks running to red. “Jesus, she’s not a
whore
, Shawn. She must be more desperate for money than I knew. Luz’s mother, Severina, and her daughter, Elizabeth, are back in Matamoros, living in poverty I doubt you can fathom. Her mother is very sick and there is nobody else to care for Liz, who is three. Time is short. If Luz truly was sleeping with those men, I’m sure it was to make more money to bring her family here where they can have a life, Shawn. I mean, well,
Jesus
…”

Shawn kissed her forehead; it tasted salty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That is terrible.”

Patricia sat up. “I need to let my folks know what’s happened to Luz.”

Shawn ran his fingernails down her long back, tracing down to her tailbone. “Use the phone there,” he said. It was sitting on the nightstand by the bed. He was watching her ass.

“No,” she said, slipping on black panties. “I’ll call from the kitchen. Be right back.”

Shawn propped up his pillow and sat up, watching her walk nearly naked through the rooms of his apartment to the kitchen, which opened onto his fire escape. Downstairs, from the bar below, he heard someone break a rack of balls. He heard billiard balls drop and roll in the coin-operated pool table.

He slid off the limp condom and knotted it off and tossed it atop a copy of his own discarded newspaper. He reached across the bed and picked up Patricia’s pack of Merits and butane lighter and fired one up, balancing a promotional ashtray for the film
The Man Who Wasn’t There
on his belly. He couldn’t hear Patricia’s words, but he watched her pacing back and forth, gesturing vigorously with her right hand while holding the phone to her ear with her left. Her big, small-nippled breasts—the real things—swayed with each emphatic hand thrust. Her tangled black hair, flat belly and shapely hips … Shawn felt himself getting hard again. He thought he’d keep pressing her to go bald down there.

Patricia hung up his phone and walked back through his shotgun apartment, frowning.

She sat down on the bed next to him, one leg tucked up under her, and he stroked her left breast with his fingernails. Still frowning, she grabbed his cigarette from him, took a long draw and said, “Damn that Able Hawk, anyway. Usually I’m on the page with him, but this time … ?”

Shawn scowled. “Are you joking?
You
support our sheriff? Son of a bitch is like some fascist with all these raids and billboards and that damned blog of his.”

“You’re such an absolutist, Shawn. Always black and white with you. You’re maybe too certain of things.”

Patricia took another deep drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out and moved the ashtray to the side table. “Hawk is a realist. Look around. This can’t continue, Shawn. The town is collapsing around us. Neighborhoods are overrun with too many people. There’s crime like this area hasn’t seen. Our schools can’t begin to keep up. Test scores are falling and state funding with them. Most of the illegals come across from Mexico with the equivalent of an eighth-grade education—the adults, I mean. So you can imagine the level their kids are at in comparison with the ones already here.”

Shawn was shaking his head. Patricia narrowed her eyes. “I know exactly what you’re thinking, Shawn O’Hara, and step careful now, because it’s close to racist thinking on your part. Don’t even say it.”

“What?”

“You’re thinking that I’m some kind of traitor to Hispanics and Latinos because I support much of what Hawk does. My family played by the rules, Shawn. My mother and father are legally here. I was born here. We spent years legally getting my grandmother and grandfather here. This stuff of sneaking across the border and making money and sending money back to Mexico and then expecting some kind of amnesty, it isn’t fair. Sixteen billion dollars earned by underpaid illegals and sucked out of our own economy and funneled to Mexico. It’s criminal.”

Shawn shook his head. “Big so what? And where’d you get that stuff? Hawk’s blog?”

She bit her lip. “Maybe … But it’s a thing we all
know
. And it isn’t just my family who’s worried, Shawn. Other legals feel the same about Able Hawk. He’s a hero to many in the Latino community, hard as that might be for you to grasp. Friends and enemies, they have a name for him,
El Gavilan
. It’s Spanish for the Hawk.”

Shawn smiled crookedly. “God, Able must love that dumbass nickname.”

Patricia shook her head. “Hawk’s a realist, like I said. We love this country too, Shawn. I don’t want to see it wrecked or crippled by presumed compassion or wrong-headed charity.”

Shawn didn’t know where to begin to rebut that one. He leaned forward and kissed her mouth, his hand squeezing Patricia’s breast. “I can see that. That makes sense.”

He sounded insincere to his own ears.

Patricia shifted her arm, felt Shawn’s erection. She said with a frown, “So much for conversation.”

THEN

Not long after crossing the border, Thalia’s mother and father came to see that immigration worked best when one already had family in the North. Better still if that family was established and best of all if some of those family members had become U.S. citizens. Then a kind of Jacob’s Ladder could establish itself, hastening ascension and assimilation of ensuing waves of clan members who made it across.

But that wisdom came too late for the Gómez clan.

They had no such foothold.

They were the first of their family to cross, spoke no English and so had to find their own way.

Young as she was, Thalia tried hard to see what advantage they had gained coming to America.

What had been the lure?

The trip across the desert to Arizona had been a nightmare that cost them
everything
. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, daughters and sons had been lost.

For what?

In Veracruz, in the manner of all young children with reasonably good parents, Thalia had thought her father some kind of lesser God. Crossing the desert, she’d seen Francisco crazed and crying and helpless to save the lives of his own children.

She had seen her father become a wild-eyed madman who gutted her uncle as she and her mother looked on.

On their third day in Arizona, her father had bought a dilapidated ’68 Falcon that could barely hold his surviving family. He’d bought the car from a fat bald man with gold front teeth who ran a used car lot on a gravel strip by an all-night truck stop.

The man spoke badly accented Spanish and was willing to sell a car to an obvious illegal immigrant with no insurance and no operator’s license.

A handwritten sign behind the cash register cautioned in English:

Cash ONLY!

All Sales Are FINAL!

Absolutely NO Refunds

&

NO Returns!

That last line might have been the car salesman’s notion of a grim joke. He never explained to the Gómez family—not in Spanish—what the sales policy was.

Francisco Gómez paid two hundred seventy-five of the one thousand American dollars they’d brought across the border for the Falcon that had thrown a rod and couldn’t go much faster than a bone-shaking fifty mph. It had a leak that required the Gómez family to carry several jugs of water in the already crowded car—to make frequent stops to refill the damaged radiator.

The sloshing water jugs and the need to keep them at hand and filled were a bitter reminder of the jugs they had banked their lives on making their ill-fated border crossing.

By the time Francisco realized what a lemon he had bought, they were deep into northeastern Arizona with no way to turn back.

FOUR

Thalia Ruiz freshened the three sheriffs’ coffees. The tallest of the lawmen—a very slender man—didn’t hand Thalia his cup, so she had to reach over the shorter, huskier sheriff to reach the mug. Her breast accidentally brushed the shorter sheriff’s arm. The man, Sheriff Walt Pierce, gave her a smile that Thalia didn’t return. She felt his gaze on her hips as she moved to the next table.

“The ass on that one, huh?” Sheriff Pierce smiled meanly at Able Hawk.

Sheriff Hawk said, “Enough of that shit, Pierce. Thalia’s one of
my
legals. And she’s a good kid. So just let it be, cocksucker.”

Hawk examined Pierce over the rim of his coffee cup. Pierce was what you’d call a sometimes “useful idiot” to Hawk’s mind. Pierce was a flavor of tool about half the time at any rate.

The other half?

Sometimes Pierce was strangely effective in getting results, if one construed arrest rates and resulting convictions as “getting results.” Hawk was dubious that many of Pierce’s arrests were righteous collars. Even across county lines, Hawk had heard rumblings of Pierce massaging evidence and suborning witnesses to firm cases.

But Hawk didn’t have the luxury of choosing his peers; the voters in the adjacent county decided Pierce’s fate every four years, just as Hawk was beholden to his Horton County constituents for his own continued employment.

The one thing Walt consistently struck Able as being was a potentially dangerous enemy.

The tall sheriff—Jim Denton of neighboring Phipps County—said, “Speaking of ass, as in taking it up same, you’re fuckin’ killing me, Able. I mean all the pressure you’re putting on your illegals. They’re goddamn
running
to my county now.”

“Mine too,” Walt said sourly. Walt was something of a dandy. He wore gold chains. He also had rings on most every finger. Fraternity rings; lodge and service organization rings. Able thought Walt looked like a short white pimp with a buzz cut.

“That’s why we need to be in lockstep,” Able said. “United front’s what’s called for. We implement the same protocols and follow the same strategies. We make them illegals someone else’s problem farther out to other compass points.”

“That’ll endear us to our neighbors for sure,” Jim said.

Able smiled at her as Thalia brought him a slice of banana cream pie. He received a smile back. After she was gone, talking around a mouthful, Able said, “That’s why, in turn, you two’ll have a talk with your neighbors, just as I’m having with you now. Then they, in turn, can do the same with some others.”

Another forkful of pie was poised at his mouth. Able smiled and said, “As that repeats, we’ll push them illegals over the northern border into the welcoming arms of our compassionate Canadian brothers. Serves those Canuck bastards right, after that millennium bomber ass-fucking they nearly dealt us with their own lax border security.”

“S’pose that’s one way of lookin’ at it,” Jim said. He brought a fist up to suppress a belch. “Goddamn coffee,” he said. “My stomach don’t process this shit no more.” He belched again, said, “How in hell are you keeping on top of all this, Able? I can’t even get a rough estimate of my own illegals, let alone collar ’em with the ferocity you are.”

Able shrugged. “Just good intelligence. He shrugged again. “You know, boys—our bread and butter. Snitches and whatnot.”

Walt said, “How’s that billing the feds for your jail costs goin’ for you, Able?”

“I have four lawyers tell me my foundation is firm,” Able said. “But if you two would do the same, and if we were to form a regional coalition, so to speak, we’d be more the force for those federal cocksuckers to reckon with. Maybe get ourselves national profile as hardliners.”

Walt watched Thalia serving truckers and tourists on the other side of the diner. He stared at her ass again. “Nice notion, Able,” Walt said, distracted. “But we’ve got to make the arrests first in order to bill the feds for our costs. We don’t have the ‘good intelligence’ you seem to.”

There it was: Able’s opening.

Sheriff Hawk cleared his throat. He pulled his briefcase from under the table. He plopped it on the empty seat next to himself and flicked the latches. He pulled out two manila file folders thick with photocopies. He checked the contents of the top file then chucked one to Jim. He passed the other folder to Walt.

“These are photocopies of forged driver’s licenses and Social Security cards,” Able said. “All of these were issued to illegals living in your respective counties. Sorry bastards used their real addresses for obvious reasons. So now you know where to go to arrest ’em, don’t you?”

Jim whistled. “Where do you come by this stuff, Able?”

“That’s not talking to the goddamn point,” Able said. He forked in another bite of pie. “Thing is to use what I’ve given you. Make your arrests, then, using the invoice samples I’ve given you there with the rest, you two do just like me. You bill the fucking federal government your costs for jailing your illegals.”

Jim said, “Again I ask, Able: How’d you come to get these?”

“Sources,” Able said. “Snitches and the like. Now, anything for me?”

Walt, sorting sheets of photocopied licenses said, “My personal goddamn priest—his church is on your side of the county line, Able—is gonna start offering Spanish-language Mass Saturday afternoons. Guess my priest did a missionary stint in El Salvador back-when and he speaks good Mex’.” Walt waved a hand, muttered, “I mean fuckin’ Spanish.”

Able grunted, shaking his head. He looked at his half-eaten slice of pie. “I’ll talk to your misguided padre about that, as he’s in my county. I’ll steer him straight again.” He said, “Jim, you got anything for me?”

“I’ve got nothin’,” Jim said.

The other sheriffs left and Able watched them walking out together, the one tall and thin, the other short and fat, like Laurel and Hardy with badges.

“More coffee, Sheriff?”

Able smiled at Thalia. “Always. You’re about owed a break, aren’t you, darlin’? Why don’t you sit down and take a load off?”

Thalia freshened Able’s coffee and said, “Just let me pass the pot off to Betty and tell ’em I’m going on that break.”

While he waited, Able stirred cream and sugar into his coffee. He looked up and smiled as Thalia slid into the booth across from him.

Since he’d lost his own daughter, Able had taken to talking to Thalia each morning after breakfast rush—in the half-hour lull before the lunch crowd packed the place. It was all small talk directed toward no unsavory end. Able’s interest in Thalia wasn’t like that, although he was certainly aware of her quiet, understated beauty.