Do They Know I'm Running

Thirty-Three

IT WAS LUPE’S IDEA TO STOP AT THE CHURCH.

They’d driven for an hour, daybreak brightening a cloud-jumbled sky, but once they passed the village of Barra de la Cruz they knew trusting their luck any longer was foolhardy. The Bahías de Huatulco lay ahead with their tony resorts; sooner or later they’d reach a checkpoint and it wouldn’t much matter who manned it, the police or the army, vigilantes or paramilitaries, not with the ambushers’ weapons and Tío Faustino’s body in the truck bed.

The sign for the church pointed up a steep and rutted dirt lane shaded by majestic ceibas with their hand-shaped leaf clusters, the peaks of the Sierra Madre del Sur in the distance. There was a notice posted beneath the sign, a declaration from the local archbishop, warning of a con man working the area, impersonating a priest and performing sacred functions-confessions, deathbed absolutions, baptisms, even weddings-for a fee. Atop the hill, the church sat in a clearing surrounded by cornfields-a short steeple lacking a cross, walls the yellow of egg yolks, wood shutters painted an electric blue. Shaped differently, Roque thought, it might have passed for an Easter egg.

Lupe gestured to Samir to let her out.-Let me talk to the priest.

Samir didn’t move.-What will you tell him?

Her face was weary with grief.-I’ll say we got attacked by bandits along the road. We have someone we need to bury. He was a good man… She trembled, choking something back.-He deserves to buried by the church, he deserves to be blessed and prayed for.

– Look at you. Samir eyed her blouse, her jeans, caked with dried blood.-He’ll think you’re crazy. Worse, he’ll think-

With the fury of a child, she began slapping at his head, his chest, his shoulder.-Let me out, asshole. Now. Out of my way…

Samir obliged, if only to escape the indignity. She slid across the seat into the gathering sunlight and stormed off, even her ponytail clotted with blood. Samir slid his hand around his face, chafing the stubble, eyeing her as she climbed the wood-plank steps to the church’s front doors. They were locked. She rattled them hard, testing to be sure, then ventured around back, to an add-on section that looked as though it might be the rectory. A modest cemetery lay beyond.

As she vanished around the corner, the Arab leaned his weight against the pickup’s open door, as though only that were keeping him upright.

“We can’t drive this truck much farther.” Roque checked the gas gauge, an eighth of a tank remaining, but that wasn’t what he was getting at. “We get to a roadblock, it won’t just be the bullet holes we have to answer for. Even if we bury my uncle’s body here, ditch the guns-”

“You seriously want to continue without weapons?”

“The worst is behind us.”

“Says who?”

“The truck’s registered in somebody else’s name. That alone, boom, we’re done. And for all we know those men we killed were police, military, someone else we’ll have to answer for.”

Samir squinted against the dusty wind. “All this I already know.”

“Fine.” Roque opened his door, dragged himself out from behind the wheel and stretched his legs. His clothing, too, was crusted with dried blood. Turning to the truck bed, he checked the tarp covering the weapons and Tío Faustino’s body, tugging at the corners. He lacked the nerve to peek underneath. “Since you already know everything, solve the problem.”

“We’ll catch a bus at the nearest town up the road, head for Mexico City. We’ll catch another bus there for Agua Prieta.”

“We’re sitting ducks on the bus. If those really were cops back there, soldiers, paramilitaries, whatever, word will spread. They’ll be looking for us everywhere. On a bus we have nowhere to run.”

“You asked my solution, I gave it to you. You don’t like it…” He shrugged.

“We can call Victor, back in Arriaga, he might-”

“Who does he know we do not know ourselves? I bet he was bought off. They probably want his skin because we are not already dead.”

“You think he betrayed his own, betrayed Beto.”

“Let me tell you something, this kind of animal we’re dealing with? We paid all that money for nothing. When the gangsters take charge, everything turns to chaos. Trust me, I have seen it with my own eyes. We would be fools to stay with them.”

Despite his fury, Roque felt encouraged by this turn. If Samir was giving up on the salvatruchos down here, maybe he’d given up on making the connection with El Recio in Agua Prieta as well. That meant Lupe was free. After all, they were dead. Their bodies were back there on the road, burned to cinders in the Corolla. “You saying we’re on our own?”

“I am saying we need to be careful. We need-” He winced, something in his eye. He rubbed at it, face naked with fatigue. “Honestly? I have no clue what we need.”

Lupe reappeared, trailed by a man in street clothes, not a cassock. He looked younger than Roque expected, more trim and fit too, though he wore perhaps the world’s nerdiest pair of glasses. He headed straight for the truck bed and glanced down at the wind-rucked tarp. No one said anything. Up close, the man’s face told a more complex story. He had wary eyes and a sensual mouth but a strong jaw, a fighter’s misshapen nose. His thinning brown hair curled around his ears and he had an educated air, though with a worker’s ropy musculature and rough hands. Finally, he looked up and met Roque’s eyes.-He was your uncle?

Roque glanced toward Lupe, but she looked away rather than meet his gaze. Turning back to the man, he nodded.

– We can bury him here if you like. Preparing him for transport elsewhere, to be buried in the United States, let’s say, will take time. And the involvement of the authorities.

He paused there, everyone conceding what he declined to add.

– I’m Father Ruano, by the way. Or Father Luis. Whichever you prefer.

– I think it’s fine, we bury him here. Roque’s voice was so hushed he had to repeat himself.-I’ll let my aunt know where she can visit the grave. We can visit it together… His voice trailed away, as though heading off to find some truth in what he’d just said.

– All right, then. The priest backed away from the truck, pointing vaguely toward the cemetery.-If you carry him behind the church, I will get the shovels. We will have to dig ourselves. That’s not a problem, I assume.

BY MIDMORNING THEY’D FINISHED THE GRAVE, WORKING IN CONCERT, even the priest pitching in. Though baked hard from the tropical sun, the ground was sandy with little rock or clay to break through. They covered their noses and mouths with bandannas against the fine coarse dust, while Lupe murmured the rosary over and over, the monotony of the prayers only intensifying the monotony of the work. Not that anyone complained. It seemed fitting that things should go slow and hard. It rendered the effort devotional. And it distracted them from the zopilotes riding the thermals overhead.

The vultures weren’t the only visitors from the sky. Swarms of monarch butterflies, migrants themselves, descended from the foothills in the southerly downdrafts. Some of the birds Roque had seen in the plates of his Peterson Field Guide made appearances here; he spotted petrels, frigate birds.

He grew numb as his shovel bit into the dirt, wondering if the pain that gnawed at his arms and the small of his back, the blisters breaking open on his palms, weren’t all conspiring to fashion a wall between what he needed to do and what he hoped to feel. In time, though, memories rose up to deliver a little shock of feeling, one recollection in particular standing out, the afternoon of his twelfth birthday.

Until then he’d been practicing guitar on loaners from friends. Then Lalo went to the trouble of stopping by the house to meet Tía Lucha, touting her nephew’s talent. “He’s a natural, señora, an intelligent ear, excellent dexterity, he learns quickly and, at least when it comes to music”-and here he shot Roque a reproving glance-“exhibits considerable discipline.” His problems at school were roundly known, though he was an avid reader-science fiction, crime stories, comics, even some precocious porn. Tía Lucha feared that deeper involvement in music would only mean more skipped classes, more trouble. Tío Faustino, though, did not hesitate. He went to the store with Lalo, asked which guitar he would recommend. Lalo would later confide to Roque that his uncle was almost obsequiously polite, as workers from his part of the world so often are with the educated, and perhaps out of pride made no mention of cost. The courtship between Faustino and Lucha was still fresh at that point and Roque had no doubt the gift was intended as much to impress his aunt as him. No one had ever spent so much money on his behalf, certainly not for a gift. Tía Lucha looked on with a miserly expression as Roque opened the hard-shell case, lifted the nylon-string guitar from its red plush bed, played a bit of “Canción de Cuna,” just enough to piss off Godo. “Learn another fucking tune,” he moaned and Tía Lucha threatened a backhand for his cursing. Tío Faustino merely sat there with a hopeful smile, black grime beneath his fingernails from replacing the rings on his truck, his curly hair mussed, waiting for Roque to thank him.

A woodworker from a nearby village delivered a pine coffin on a mule-drawn cart and they lifted the body into it, hammered the lid shut, then lowered it into the grave using ropes. It all went too quickly for Roque to make much of his last glance at his uncle’s body. Father Luis retrieved his stole and missal from the rectory and said a few prayers that consoled no one. Lupe wept softly, hand clasped across her mouth. Roque, feeling gutted, just stared into the grave, vaguely reassured by Lupe’s emotion, tapping into it secondhand. I will miss you, he nearly said aloud, but caught himself, for he felt the sorrow welling up and knew, once he gave in, there would be no end to it. Then the priest concluded his prayers, the men grabbed their tools again and began to toss back the dirt they’d just dug, the thud of each shovelful atop the coffin like a footfall on some invisible stair.

When they were finished, Father Luis said quietly:-I’m sure we all could use something to eat. He led them into the rectory’s dining room-a crucifix and the Virgin of Guadalupe on the rough plaster wall, a modest cedar table with a white linen cloth. His tiny Mixtec housekeeper set out bowls of corn porridge called atole, tortillas with bean paste and mole, limes and salt, plus sliced fruit and a basket of chapulines, spicy fried grasshoppers. The woman’s name was Dolor and she reminded Roque of the Chamula woman selling popcorn in Arriaga. Samir wolfed down his food, Lupe fussed with hers mindlessly, Roque felt more possessed by his thirst than his appetite. No one but the priest bothered with the grasshoppers.

Once the housekeeper collected the plates and fled to the kitchen, Father Luis looked around the table, registering each face as he enjoyed his dessert, dipping a hunk of soft white bread in a cup of Oaxacan hot chocolate.-You are not the first migrants who have landed on our doorstep in serious trouble. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I can’t help imagining you have a special problem. He lifted one of his hands; unlike Roque, he’d suffered no blisters.-I do not need to know what it is. I would, however, like to know if I’m vaguely correct.

The weapons had raised an eyebrow or two during the day, as had Samir’s accent. Roque had an accent too, of course, but his was easily explained.

– The only thing special about our problem, Roque said, is that the people we paid to get us to the States have been unable to protect us. Their competitors, their enemies, whoever it was out there on the road last night, they’ve been after us almost from the start. And yet, from what I know about how things are down here, there’s nothing really special about that at all.

The priest dipped another morsel of bread in his chocolate.-The government is secretly in league with the Americans. It uses the federal police and the military to push back against the waves of people surging up from the south, who are doing nothing more than voting with their feet. And if the gangs rob the migrants or murder them? If the vigilantes or the paramilitaries torture them, then turn them over to the authorities? Nothing happens. It’s become a criminal system, there is no other word for it. Everyone is dirty.

He brushed a trail of crumbs from the tablecloth into his palm, scowling as he dusted them into his empty coffee cup.

– I believe I may know someone who can help you. He’s an American who lives up the way, a bit of a character, very storied life, if I’m to accept as true all he’s told me, which is probably foolish. My point is, I think he could find some way to be of assistance. He smiled abstractly, peering over the thick black ledge of his glasses.-If, however, I have read the situation incorrectly and you simply want to continue north on your own, you are of course free to do so. But I must warn you, the guns are a mistake. They will not protect you. One way or another, they will betray you.

Thirty-Four

THEY HID THE PICKUP IN THE RECTORY GARAGE AFTER FATHER LUIS drove off. Come nightfall they’d drive it back down the coastal road a ways and push it over the first convenient cliff.

The issue of the guns was seemingly resolved when Samir claimed only a pistol and one of the Kalashnikovs.-You have not had to survive what we have, he’d told Father Luis.-I mean no disrespect but prayers would not have saved us. And I am a man who prays. The priest had countered that if they were caught with weapons at a checkpoint they wouldn’t be sent back to where they’d started, they’d be packed off to jail-and a Mexican jail was nowhere a foreigner wanted to be. Nor could it be known he had guns at the church. Ever since the teachers strike two years back, there were paramilitaries roaming the countryside looking for subversives. Goons and off-duty police murdered at will: organizers, activists, journalists, including an American. The governor boasted an army of thugs and everywhere he went violence broke out, invariably blamed on his opponents. Priests were always suspect, especially those who, like him, served the pinches nacos-the fucking Indians.

– If someone finds weapons here, they will burn this church to the ground. Too bad for whoever happens to be inside at the time.

And so it was decided another grave needed digging, a shallow one, into which not most but all the guns disappeared.

Once the work was done, Dolor showed them to a washroom with a large tin tub, a cake of lye soap and a bucket of well water, asking for their clothes; she would dissolve the blood with hydrogen peroxide, then wash everything and hang it out in the sun. Lupe had only blouses and underwear to change into and so hid herself away in a spare room after washing the blood from her hair, sponging the rest of her body clean, handing up her filthy clothes. The old woman hefted the tub out into the yard and dumped the dirty water, then refreshened the bucket from the well and gestured for Samir. He was even worse off, only the clothes on his back, rank from weeks of relentless wear; once he had a chance to scrub the grime off his body, he modestly handed everything he’d been wearing through a gap in the washroom door. Roque went last; he stripped, passed his clothes to the housekeeper, then went to the tin washtub and began to lather his hands with the knife-cut square of grainy soap.

From his spot on the floor where he sat naked, arms folded across his knees, Samir said, “I have been thinking about what we discussed before, what to do from here, who to trust. Even if the priest links us up with this American he knows, we still have to get across the border. Without money, that’s impossible, unless we stay with our original plan. That fee is already paid. And no offense, I understand you are grieving, but there is one less among us now. They can hardly complain. Perhaps they won’t even make us hand up the girl. It’s possible, you know.”

Roque glanced over his shoulder as he lathered his hands. The Arab was chewing on his thumb, worrying it like a bone. “You’d do that?”

“Let me tell you something, I have never wanted harm for that girl. Never. I just accepted things as they were. I understood I had little control of my fate. The same is true for her, so which of us is free to weep?”

Like that’s the issue, Roque thought. “You said you’d lost confidence in the salvatruchos.”

“They can’t be expected to foresee everything or protect us from every evil. Who knows who those men on the road were?” He inspected the reddened horn of his thumb. “Maybe they were El Chusquero’s, maybe they were Mara Dieciocho, maybe they were police or soldiers or just common thieves.”

Roque gripped the edge of the washtub, looking down into the water murky with soap scum. “I won’t agree to handing Lupe over. I was against it before but now, no, it’s impossible. Not with my uncle… It’s bad enough I failed him, I can’t fail her too. His ghost will haunt me the rest of my life.”

Samir chuckled. “So you’re one who believes in ghosts now.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You think I don’t understand how you feel? Let me tell you something, I too suffer the loss of your uncle. He was a very kind, very hopeful, very brave man. I see his son in him, him in his son. I know, I know, they are very different too but I see the similarities. I will miss him-yes, as little as I knew him, I will miss him. And I think I know enough about him to guess that he would also not want to know that by refusing to honor our promise, we have condemned my wife and my little girl, Shatha, to the misery of their life in Al Tanf. They will die there. It is only a question of when.”

We all have to die someplace, Roque thought. “I’m sure he would’ve felt for your wife and child. But he expressed to me a particular concern for Lupe.”

“That is the choice, yes? Lupe or my family. Obviously, my choice is clear. And not because I am heartless. Should you become a husband, a father, you will feel what I feel.”

“You know,” Roque said, turning around so his nakedness faced the Arab’s, “when I was waiting in Arriaga, I heard that it’s not just evangelicals making inroads down here but Muslims as well. Not so much here in Oaxaca but farther south, Chiapas, in the mountains. Mosques have been cropping up more and more the past few years, that was the gossip anyway, teaching Arabic to Chamula kids who don’t even know Spanish yet. Maybe you could come back here with your family, settle in the hills, teach. Life could be worse.”

Using his shoe, Samir crushed a furry red spider crawling toward him on the cement floor. “That is always easy for the other man to say.”

“It’s better your family stay in that camp?”

“Given everything that’s happened, you honestly believe I would want my family here? Would you bring yours?” He scraped the spider’s remains off his shoe. “Sure, why not? You’d be closer to your uncle’s grave.”

“Don’t mock.”

“Don’t make such ridiculous suggestions.”

Roque turned back to the tub, glancing down into the scummy water again, his reflection a misshapen blur. Finishing up his wash, he soon heard the soft wheeze of the Arab’s breath whistling through his teeth. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Samir still sitting there, legs tucked up, arms locked around his knees but his head had dropped. He’d fallen fast asleep.

ROQUE PULLED JEANS AND UNDERSHORTS AND A T-SHIRT FROM HIS knapsack, dressing like a backdoor man slipping out before daylight, Samir dozing away. The clothes weren’t clean but they’d serve until Dolor was done with the wash. Standing for a moment in the doorway, he watched across the parched hardpan of the churchyard as the tiny Mixtec woman pinned up the damp wrinkled clothes, shirt sleeves and pant legs bucking in the wind.

He idled through the rectory with its concrete floors, coarse plaster walls, bare plank ceilings. It was the stillness, though, that struck him. Lifting his head he silently prayed not to God or any of the saints or angels but to his uncle and his mother. His prayer was brief: Help me. He felt weak and lost and, in that moment, a little dishonest but there was no harm in trying, he supposed.

Then he caught the muffled keen of Lupe’s sobs beyond a thick wood door.

A smallness inside him wondered what she had to cry about. What secrets had she and Tío shared during their trek from Tecún Umán to Arriaga? He wondered if they’d talked about him. What a needy little shit you are, he thought. Was that your uncle’s job, be your pimp?

He eased toward the door, pressed his ear to the wood. Knocking quietly, “Lupe?”

No answer, just snuffling. The door clicked open. Through the gap he spotted a narrow bed of wood planks, a thin straw tick for a mattress. He didn’t see Lupe till he edged his way in, easing back the door. She closed it quickly behind him, standing there naked.

Her damp hair hung tangled across her shoulders, down her chest and back, her breasts peeking through the uncombed strands. Her face was streaked with old tears, fresh ones welled in her eyes. She stepped into his arms, laying her head upon his chest, hands listless at her sides. He held her, pressed his cheek to her drying hair, thick with the fatty smell of the soap. They stood like that until she laced her fingers in his, guided him to the bed, attended to his zipper, pulled off his T-shirt. Neither of them spoke. This isn’t love, he told himself, this is grief, her eyes told him that. And yet touch had never felt so familiar, so necessary. She made room for him and they lay side by side, straw rustling inside the tick as they settled in. Bits of straw poked through the burlap like a hundred pinpricks but when he reached out her skin was smooth and warm and met his sore hand, raw with blisters, with a welcoming tremble. All those times he’d fantasized about sharing her bed, catching her off guard with his know-how, the deft little tricks Mariko had taught him, that all felt obscene now. Open the fuck up, he told himself. No more moody loner, no more hotshot with the sad guitar. Let her in.

She kissed clumsily and the thrill of that startled him. He could taste on her breath a hint of the lemon slices Dolor had stirred into the pitcher during their afternoon meal, along with the vague tin taste of the pitcher itself. He could smell, beneath the mask of soap, a lingering tang of sweat and her growing wetness. She slid beneath him, lifted her legs and wrapped them around his hips, guided him in. No foreplay, no romance, this wasn’t about that. He opened her slowly, shallow at first, deepening his movements bit by bit, rocking his hips gently until the two of them felt locked together. A sense of having found something, not blindly, foretold. He let the sadness come in waves and he rode them toward her, one by one, and she wept out loud as she came, pulling him tight, locking her legs around him, pushing her body hard against his, a dozen rough little jolts or more, jabbing in time with her sobs, then finally she dropped back on the burlap tick, covered her face with her hands. He wanted to tell her no, please, let me see your face, but before he could, she whispered:-I promise I will keep this baby. If God wills it should grow inside me and live, I will keep it and name it Faustino. Or Faustina. I will remember. I will always remember. I am not a bad person. I am stupid and vain and weak but I am not evil. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry…

Thirty-Five

A DOZEN SQUAD CARS JAMMED THE STREET ON THE HILL ABOVE the sugar refinery, strobes flashing blue and red in the afternoon fog, plus another half-dozen unmarked sedans, a canine van, the coroner’s wagon. The TV crews were being held back for now but they’d get cut loose soon enough. All we’re missing, Lattimore thought, is the caterer.

He was standing on the porch with the detective from Crockett, one of just two on the local force; they rotated in and out of patrol on a quarterly schedule. This guy’s name was Dunn-chunky, a workhorse, black loafers, blue suit. They were waiting as a uniform marched up the drive, carrying the pictures requested from Rio Mirada PD.

Lattimore took the manila envelope from the officer and unwound the thread, opened it, shaking out the contents, frontal and profile in-custody shots of Pablo “Happy” Orantes and Godofredo Montalvo, taken from their arrest on pot charges two years back. He felt a curious mix of dread and mystification at the sight of Happy’s face, a vaguely guilty sadness at Godo’s. He remembered the young man well, not just from his name cropping up in the undercover tapes but from that day at the trailer park, when he stood there with his pitted face and a Remington pump-loader, holding off two gung-ho morons from ICE. A miracle all three of them hadn’t died right there. Two marines from his own battalion had taken a similar turn after Desert Storm-a standoff with guns, one with a hostage-and they’d seen far less to justify it, though how did one measure such things?

Dunn waved toward the photos like a lazy magician. “Anything you can tell me?”

They were debriefing the surviving victims here at the scene because they only had two interview rooms at the station. The pictures were for six-packs they were showing to the cleaning lady, who had broken down the instant she was alone in a room with a cop, begging him and everyone else to understand, she’d been forced into the scheme, they’d threatened her girls. For now everyone, Lattimore included, was willing to accept that. She was cooperating, hoping to forestall deportation. They’d tell her the bad news on that front once they were done with her.

Lattimore puffed his cheeks. “They’re cousins, more or less. Not the easiest family to unravel.” He pronounced Godo’s full name, tried to explain the connection, him and Happy.

Dunn regarded him stonily. “Let’s stick with ‘cousins,’ shall we?”

“This one, Montalvo, he doesn’t look like this now. Came back from Iraq looking like a woodpecker mistook him for a stump, shrapnel wounds all over his face.”

“But this Orantes mutt, the ringleader, he was your boy?”

Lattimore glanced up. The man was thickly jowled, his stubble and brush cut the same dull gray. His eyes lay burrowed in creased flesh. “My CI.”

“Right,” Dunn said. “No offense meant.”

Lattimore had already endured his first quick interview with OPR; they were trawling through the case files now, seeing what laws or guidelines had gotten short shrift in his handling of things. He felt confident he’d survive the scrutiny-Pete Orpilla, his supe, had his back and for now things felt tense but not hysterical. This mess had come out of the blue, no hint that Happy had been side-balling him but that didn’t mean somebody wouldn’t want his head. All it would take is one call, a congressman, a mayor, somebody with juice paying back a favor. In the time it took to pick up a phone, his career could be history. Maybe that was just. It was possible, without even knowing it, he’d lost interest in the thing, gotten sloppy. Maybe he was just too old-at forty-four, an eye-opener.

Dunn gargled a knot of phlegm loose from his sinuses and spat. “Like I said, anything you could tell me?”

Lattimore shrugged. “Hard to know what to say. Happy was inward, suspicious, a plodder, not a showboat. He was in this for his family, that’s what he said anyway. Wanted everybody back together, home safe for good.” How could I, he thought, misread that so badly? “Never asked for much, listened when you told him things, followed orders.”

Dunn, glancing over his shoulder at the house, “Until today, I expect.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe he was saving all his chits up for this.”

Lattimore shivered the pictures back inside the envelope. “That’s crossed my mind.”

The cleaning lady had already identified Ramon “Puchi” Parada and Manuel “Chato” López in photo six-packs, no such luck with Vasco Ramírez. So far it looked like he’d kept his hands clean of the actual rough stuff, not that it had kept him from fleeing. They’d found his car abandoned at the Greyhound lot in Rio Mirada, about two hundred yards from the garbage bin where he’d dumped his cell phone. God only knew where he was headed, San Diego most likely, after that a brisk walk across the border.

Earlier that afternoon, Lattimore had come down hard on both the truck yard and Vasco’s home, only to find the icy wife, who’d already lawyered up, and the strange and sickly daughter. The wife had screamed obscenities at any agent who so much as cracked a door. “Where’s your fucking warrant?”-over and over, top of her lungs, like somebody’d pulled a string, and Lattimore must have told her fifty times they had a warrant, an arrest warrant for her husband, in response to which he got called every variety of fucker and faggot in the Latin bitch lexicon: puto, pendejo, chingado, jodido, culero, maricón, mariquita, mariposón, with hijueputa and hijo de la verga and hijo de la chingada thrown in just for the sake of thoroughness. Through all of that the little girl sat stock-still on the couch, clutching a stuffed bear reeking of cigarettes, eyes as mournful as a basset hound’s. Compared to that, he supposed, you could nominate Lourdes the cleaning lady for mother of the year. Too bad that didn’t decide who got sent packing.

Using the envelope, he gestured to the door. “Shall we?”

The techs had already scraped and sampled everything they wanted, there was no need to put on the booties. Lourdes was sitting in the kitchen, a chunky woman cop standing guard. Dunn collected the sergeant who’d done the original photo displays and Lattimore gave him the pictures of Happy and Godo, told him to work them into six-packs for a follow-up.

They ambled into the kitchen and pulled up chairs across from Lourdes. Having cried herself out, her eyes were raw; her face, though, was a closed door. She sat there, hands clasped, waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Dunn smiled and did his magic-hand thing again as the sergeant arrived and placed the six-packs on the table.

He said, “We’d like you to go through some more pictures, Lourdes,” pronouncing it Lurdz. “We’re not saying the men you haven’t been able to identify yet are in here or not. We’d just like you to look them through-no pressure, no problem one way or the other, we appreciate all you’ve done so far-look them through and see if any of the faces ring a bell, okay?”

She swept an invisible strand of hair off her face. “My daughters-”

“We’ve sent someone from CPS to watch over your daughters. They’re fine.”

“I would like to talk to them.”

Dunn’s smile slid a little downhill. “Let’s go through the pictures first, Lourdes. These men are at large. You want us to catch them, right?”

She turned her attention to her task. On the third set she stopped, looked, blinked. “This one.” She pointed, bottom center. Happy. “He the one who talk to me. The leader, I think. We talk a lot. All night.”

Dunn took a pen from his inside pocket, thumbed the plunger. “Take a good look, Lourdes. No rush. Be certain.”

She shook her head. “It is him. I know. His eyes. The chin.” She docked her head a little. “Hair, yes, this is different. And he look older now, more thin…”

That’s it, Lattimore thought, let her talk herself out of her own ID. “Lourdes-”

She waved her hands, fending off doubt. “It is him. I sure.”

Dunn pulled that set aside, jotted down the group and position numbers. She went on, picking through the photo sets. Reaching the one with Godo, she looked it over, paused, looked it over again, then moved on. So much for that theory, Lattimore thought. She was already scouring the next group when her face bunched up, she went back, looked at the last set again.

“Him,” she said, pointing out Godo. “I not recognize him first time. He different now.” She circled her hand about her own face. “Picoteado. I see him out there, the farmhouse, with the others. He was the big one I tell you about. Quiet. He was quiet.”

From behind, a uniform cleared his throat. “Agent Lattimore?” A finger drumbeat on the doorframe. “AUSA Pitcavage just signed in at the barricade. Said you should meet him outside?”

LATTIMORE WAITED ON THE PORCH, WATCHING PITCAVAGE ADVANCE through the swirls of blue-and-red light. He had another attorney in tow, a corn-silk blonde in a smart gray suit, no overcoat, bucking the wind with a power stride, holding her hair out of her face with one hand, the other clutching her briefcase. Pitcavage came empty-handed, like a pasha. They climbed the driveway, the woman impressively sure-footed in her pumps. She had a Midwestern prettiness, everything in its place, dull as a prairie. Nice pair though, Lattimore thought, something even the suit couldn’t hide.

Pitcavage gestured him off the porch for a private conclave, shooting the blonde a knowing glance that told her to stay put. Like a collie, she obeyed. Ambling toward the garage, hands in his pockets, he waited for Lattimore. Overhead, a turkey vulture sailed toward the strait.

Pitcavage crossed his arms and made sure none of the local cops was within earshot. “Anything new on where Mr. Orantes might be?”

Lattimore shook his head and tried to straighten up, assume full height, if only to reassert that crucial inch over the lawyer. “You mean from what I’ve found out here?”

“I mean from what you’ve found out, period.”

“His cell phone tracks to somewhere out in the wetlands, little north of here.”

Pitcavage cocked an eyebrow. “We couldn’t be so lucky he’s lying right there beside it, could we.” It wasn’t a question.

“I suppose we could get the locals to dredge around, look for a weighted body.” He found himself ambivalent on the merits of finding Happy dead.

“Ask,” Pitcavage said, pulling a stick of gum from his pocket, peeling away the foil.

“Sure.”

“If he’s alive-and halfway smart-he’s in Mexico already, maybe El Salvador.” He balled up the foil wrapper, dropped it discreetly, chewing noisily. “He’s got connections down there, or am I wrong?”

“Of a sort, yeah.”

“You see him running somewhere else?”

“No. El Salvador, because it’s familiar. Mexico, because it’s Mexico.”

“He gets caught, tries to use his CI status to buy his way out? The lid comes off this thing and there won’t be any putting it back on.” Pitcavage crossed his arms, the unhappy prince. “We become the idiots who green-lighted a comical case with a bent snitch. That’s something I can live without. Which reminds me: You’ve shut the thing down. Or Orpilla has?”

“Of course.”

“But you’ve still got two of the relatives, the CI’s father, his cousin or something, wandering around Central America somewhere.”

“Along with the interpreter, the Iraqi, Palestinian, whatever. Samir Khalid Sadiq.”

Pitcavage winced. “Fuck me.”

“They were in Guatemala last time we knew for certain. The cell phone we had a bead on went dead about a week ago.”

“A week?”

“Jon-”

“And your CI had what to say about that?”

“Said his cousin turned the phone off, save the battery. It’s not like they’re staying in Sheratons down there, 220 wall sockets everywhere they stop.”

“And you believed him?”

Lattimore felt a sagging weight, pulling him down, losing the crucial inch. “At that point, I had no reason not to.”

“A week. Jesus.”

“Not a whole week. Four days. Maybe five.”

Pitcavage pinched the bridge of his nose. Posturing. “Give me your sense of the locals.”

Toeing a clump of dead grass rooted in a crack in the driveway, Lattimore said, “I haven’t caught wind of any axes to grind, if that’s what you mean.”

“They’re not going to ass-fuck us in the press?”

There’s a picture, Lattimore thought. “Not yet.”

“Until they can’t close the thing. Then they’ll start pointing fingers, say one of the two still at large was a federal informant. Oh how lovely that will be.”

“Like I said, I’m not sensing any agendas.”

“Make sure it stays that way. Let them know, as far as cooperation’s concerned, anything and everything’s on the table. It’s not going to be the usual one-way street. They want you to sharpen pencils, you do it. They want you to blow every drunk in the holding tank-”

Another picture. “There any chance we can get a wiretap on the aunt’s phone? She may be the only point of contact between our CI and the three guys heading north for the border. That’s likely our best bet for getting a bead on everybody.”

“Under Title III? Not a chance.” Pitcavage went to spit out his gum, caught himself; it was a crime scene, after all. He glanced down at the foil wrapper but didn’t pick it up. “Prove to me her phone’s being used to advance criminal activity, show me there’s no other way to advance the investigation, maybe. But not if we’re fishing. Locals might have better luck under state law, which returns us to the subject of making nice. Keep them happy. For your own sake if no one else’s.”

He clapped Lattimore on the back with staged camaraderie, then turned and strode back toward the street, signaling the ample blonde in the prim gray suit to come along. Lattimore wondered how long they’d been lovers.

He went back in, saw Dunn wrapping up with Lourdes, gestured him into the living room. He worked up a good-buddy smile. “I know somebody you’re going to want to talk to.”

TWO NIGHTS NOW, GODO STILL HADN’T COME HOME, NO CALL, NO MESSAGE on the machine. Lucha decided to remake his bed as though that might conjure him back. The sheet felt papery crisp beneath her hands as she spread it flat, tucked it tight, that bracing smell. For a moment at least she felt something like hope, even happiness, opening a window to let in some air. What a stench that boy could have, so much worse since he came back from the war. Not just the wounds. He didn’t take care of himself. She grabbed the trash basket and went around the room, collecting balled-up tissues, shredded bits of newspaper-he did this as he watched TV, like a hamster lining its cage-candy wrappers, beer cans. Next she gathered his dirty clothes into a pile, shrinking from the smell. Finding one particularly rank tennis shoe, she hunted for its mate, got down on her knees, checked beneath the bed. The shotgun and pistol were gone. She checked the nightstand, rifling open the drawer. That gun wasn’t there, either, nor the pills.

Don’t get worked up over nothing, she told herself, sitting on the bed. He’d talked the past few weeks about going out with a group of friends, target practice, the shooting range, showing them a proper respect for their weapons. He said it helped him get over his nerves, so noises didn’t make him jump quite so much. And he had, she thought, seemed more relaxed, more focused, stronger. Then, like that-poof, gone, no word. It was like him in some sense, so thoughtless, so unpredictable. And yet she couldn’t shake a bad feeling. Her dreams had been strange and violent but that had been true since they’d sent Faustino away and it had only grown worse after Roque went down to bring him back. She spent all day trying not to think of what might happen to them, only to have it float up without warning in her sleep.

Then there was Happy. He came and went, sometimes the crack of dawn, sometimes the dead of night, careful to the point of paranoia. Still, his visits were a comfort. He’d changed, grown more respectful. More like his father. He too had vanished, not a glimpse of him for days.

Her loneliness seemed heavier, harder to bear. She felt afraid.

A moment later-was it longer?-the phone rang and she tripped over her own feet, banging into the doorway, running to answer it. Gripping the receiver with both hands, she shouted into the mouthpiece, “Sí. ¿Aló?”

“Tía Lucha?”

It was Roque. He sounded odd. Different.

– Where are you?

– Tía…

– Tell me-where are you?

– Somewhere in Mexico. Tía-

– Are you all right?

– Is Happy there?

Why would he want to speak to Pablito?-I haven’t seen him for days. The same for your brother. Roque-

– Godo’s not there?

– No one is here. I am here. What’s wrong? Talk to me. For the sake of God and his angels, she thought, get a grip on yourself. The line went still for a moment, just the hiss of static.-Roque?

– Tío Faustino…

His voice trailed away. Lucha felt her stomach turn to stone. The taste of copper rose from her throat, her ulcer. As though she were suddenly standing somewhere else in the room, she heard herself say:-No.

– Tío Faustino is dead, Tía. I’m sorry.

She braced herself against the table. No…

– There were bandits on the road, hired killers, somebody. I don’t know who it was. I don’t know why they attacked us. We buried Tío in a cemetery here, behind a church, the priest has been very kind. I’m so sorry, Tía. I wanted to bring him home for you. I wanted…

The hand holding the receiver drifted downward as Lucha stared at the Día de los Muertos figurines on her display shelf, the skeletal mariachis, the unicyclist, the doctor and nurse with their patient in his bed. The truck driver. The bride and groom. Come November, she would have to choose which grave to decorate for the holiday, her sister’s close to home here or Faustino’s far away in Mexico.

Setting the phone down gently, she glided back to her room, unaware of her own footfalls, and pulled open the closet doors. Faustino’s clothes hung there tidily, waiting for his return. One shirt in particular caught her eye, her favorite. It was long-sleeved and white with pearl buttons, gold piping across the shoulders and at the cuffs, a cowboy shirt, but the collar had a subtle touch of embroidery along the edge, very delicate and yet manly. Faustino, with all his simplicity, his rustic manners, his ample belly, had always looked so elegant in it, so handsome. He wore it sometimes when they went out to dinner and the waitresses always smiled at him. And I would get jealous, she reminded herself, and then we would argue. She lifted the sleeve to her cheek, closed her eyes, waited. What kind of monster are you, she thought, unable to muster a single tear for your marido?

A knock came hard at the trailer door and it felt like a hand plunging into her chest. The shirtsleeve dropped, she was stumbling toward the sound, saw the phone hanging by its cord where she’d dropped it. A voice called out, “Police! Open up!”

Thirty-Six

“NO OFFENSE, MIND YOU, BUT I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU HONESTLY thought you could pay some clown at one end of the pipeline and think he’d get you all the way home. Those days are over, folks. Have been for a while.”

His name was Rick Bergen, the resourceful American eccentric the priest had collected. Floating somewhere in his middle years, he was suntanned, well fed but not pudgy with a full head of ash-blond hair. Laugh lines creased his eyes, a handclap of a smile.

They were gathered around the dining-room table, Bergen and Lupe and Roque and Samir. Father Luis had gone off to bless a local fisherman’s lancha; Dolor was mending altar linens in the sacristy. The basket of chapulines sat at the center of the table, back for an encore. Everyone but Bergen ignored them, though his enthusiasm was almost infectious.

“I relied on my cousin to arrange that side of things,” Roque managed to say. He still felt only half there, the other half still on the phone, waiting for Tía Lucha to come back on the line.

“Your cousin misunderstood the playing field,” Bergen said.

The man dressed, Roque thought, as though hoping to be invisible: simple sport shirt, tan linen slacks, no jewelry beyond a weatherproof watch. He could have vanished in any crowd of expats. When asked what it was he did, he’d replied simply that he “tried to help out here and there.” At one point he let slip that he was a pilot, or had been.

Roque stared at the tiny basket of fried grasshoppers as though the things might come alive. “My cousin paid the same people to come across just a few months ago.” He heard his voice as though he were sitting in a different room. “It worked out okay then.”

Bergen snagged a fistful of chapulines from the basket, tumbled them like dice in his palm, popped a few in his mouth. “Your cousin got lucky.”

Across the table, Lupe had drifted off into her own world, unable to follow the English. When she glanced up, Roque ventured an absent smile. Pregnant, he thought as she timidly smiled back. I won’t punk out like my old man, end up nothing but a question.

Samir slouched in his seat, one arm hooked across his chair back, eyeing Bergen like he was poisonous. “Okay. We are unlucky. Are you here to help or call us names?”

Bergen chafed his hands to rid them of lingering bits of insect. “I’d say that depends. I need to know a little more about who I’m dealing with. You in particular.” His eyes shuttered with vaguely hostile mirth. “And don’t lie to me. I’ve spent some time in your part of the world, not just this one. I don’t fool easy.”

Samir, thin-skinned as always, rose to the bait. “Let me tell you something, I have not lied to you. What have I had time to lie about? You have been blah-blah-de-blah ever since you walked in the door.”

That seemed only to amuse Bergen further. “From what I hear, you proved yourself better than average with a weapon out there the other night. You held off an ambush almost single-handed.”

“Not true.” Samir nodded toward Roque. “I had help.”

Bergen’s smile lamped down a notch. “You’ve got a military background. You’re an Iraqi Arab. You told that much to Father Luis. You either come clean with me or you can find your own fucking way to America.”

Even Lupe, lost behind the language barrier, detected the change in temperature. She glanced back and forth between the two men, who were locking eyes, then turned to Roque for reassurance. He offered a shrug, still feeling strangely disembodied, as though floating over the table, watching himself.

“I was in the war with Persia,” Samir said finally with a flutter of his hand, as though nothing could be more matter-of-fact.

“Excuse me but I find that puzzling,” Bergen said. “Palestinians normally didn’t serve in the Iraqi military, even in the war with Iran.”

“How do you know these things?”

“Like I said, I’m no stranger to that part of the world. Besides which, I’m a pilot. You spend a lot of time hanging around airfields, waiting for people and things-or money-to show up. Plenty of time to catch up on your reading.”

Samir leaned in toward the table. “A pilot for who-the airlines? The CIA? The cartels?”

Bergen chortled, it was all grand fun. “We’ll talk about me when the time comes. How did you wind up in the army?”

“When will come the time to talk about you? Why not now?”

“I’m not the one looking for a favor.”

Outside, Father Luis’s ancient Volkswagen puttered up the gravel drive from the coastal road. Somewhere, a dog started barking.

“So that’s how it is,” Samir said. “We’re in need, at your mercy. You know all the promises we have had. And what we paid to get them. Until you show me you have something real to offer, not just more promises, I have nothing to say.”

A faint scent of gasoline wafted in through the open window as the door to Father Luis’s Volkswagen slammed shut and his footsteps crunched the gravel. Nodding that direction, Bergen said, “The padre vouches for me. Who vouches for you?”

“And what do I know of this priest?”

As though on cue, Father Luis appeared in the doorway, nodding toward his company, oblivious to what they were saying. Dusting off his glasses with a handkerchief, he looked in need of a nap and a shave. Roque wondered if Samir might not be on to something: What did they know of this man? Returning his glasses to his face, the priest blinked and smiled, then shuffled off to join Dolor in the sacristy.

“Oh what the hell, let’s move the ball down the field.” Bergen made one last attack on the basket of chapulines, tipping it toward him, looking for the last few tidbits. “No, I did not fly for the airlines. I was trained in the air force, served my first tour at Ramstein which, as you may or may not know, has airlift and supply responsibilities for the Middle East. I got transferred to Davis-Monthan in Tucson just in time for the invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause-or as we called it, Operation Just Because. I bagged out of the service after my second tour and found work in Phoenix, flying businessmen around, them and whoever they wanted to impress or bribe or screw. Flew all over the Southwest, plus Cancún, Belize, Baja, down here. You meet a lot of colorful people in the air, especially in a Gulfstream. I met a few who had some seriously out-of-the-way projects, so far out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere the roads were a rumor. I got work hauling in gasoline, food, clothes-and no, I didn’t fly back with a hold full of dope. Never. It was a pretty decent living for a while, until the men I transacted with left for a meeting one afternoon in Colima and never came back. That happens down here, as I’m sure you can guess. I didn’t care much for the men who took their place. Since then, I’ve been improvising.”

A boy attending a small herd of goats along a path through the cornfield started tooting a recorder. Beyond him, the sky seemed triumphantly blue, streaked with bright cloud.

Samir said, “Why settle here?”

“I’d been to the area off and on, carting clients down here to the beaches or up to Oaxaca de Juárez for the art. I bought myself some property through a presta nombre, a name lender. Foreigners can’t own property within fifty clicks of the coast and I didn’t want to go through a fideicomiso, a bank trust. Had plans to build myself the beach house of my dreams. It’s a charming place. People think goats are the devil, black dogs are good luck, mescal cures diarrhea and skunk meat clears up acne.

“Anyhoo, prices started going through the roof the past few years and greed never sleeps. My presta nombre got himself in serious need of a kidney that never materialized-don’t think I didn’t try to find him one-and under Mexican law his heirs inherit the property, not me. His widow and kids knew a bargain when it fell out of the sky. But I like it here, didn’t feel like letting them run me off. They want to cheat me, they can look me in the eye. Not that that’s a problem, mind you. The Mexican conscience knows how to adapt. Thousands of years of getting screwed will do that.”

Outside, the boy with the recorder had mercifully wandered out of earshot with his goats, which may or may not have been devils.

“Now that’s my story, or the part that’s relevant. Let’s get back to how you wound up in the Iraqi military.”

Samir made a token snort of protest, fluttered his hands. Then he settled deeper into his chair. “I didn’t want to, believe me. Saddam was just throwing bodies at the front, same as the Persians.”

“All wars are lousy,” Bergen offered, “but that one-”

“It was butchery. Obscene. But I came to realize there was no choice, it was enlist or else. I was studying English and Spanish at university, was beginning some classes in Portuguese, Italian. I wanted to work in radio, maybe TV. But the Mukhabarat, they had other ideas. They came to where I was living-my first apartment, overlooking the Tigris, I had just turned twenty-and they drove me to their ministry near the Al-Wasati hospital.

I was put in an interview room on the top floor, at the end of a long hallway of cells, and they made me wait for hours, the door locked.

“Finally a captain came in and sat down. A guard stood behind him at the door. The captain had a folder and he very politely apologized for any inconvenience. He was plump and bald and wore reading glasses and I thought to myself how much he looked like one of my professors. And just as I was thinking this he asked how I enjoyed my classes, like he could read my mind. I told him I liked them very much, I hoped to perhaps work for the foreign ministry. You know, make it look like we were on the same team.

“He asked if any foreigners had approached me, any reason at all. I said no, none. He seemed disappointed. I was afraid he didn’t believe me. Then he asked that I contact him should I receive any job or research offers by noncitizens, even visiting professors. Even Arabs. I of course agreed, even though I knew what this meant. If I didn’t report some contact, I would be the one under suspicion. But there was no one to report. I’d have to hand up someone innocent.”

Lupe yawned-so much talk, none she could understand-then formed a cradle with her arms and laid down her head.

“I went home, tried to think of what to do. You have to understand what it was like, living under Saddam. Once you were a target there was no place to hide. At some point it came to me: Why not join the army? The war had been dragging on for eight years, Iraq fighting for a stalemate, the Persians fighting to win. Without the Americans we would have been done for. But the Kurds were mounting skirmishes in the north, the Shia in the south-this, I realized, was why the Mukhabarat had come for me. They were becoming suspicious of all outsiders in the country. If I enlisted, it’s not like they’d turn me away. They were executing ordinary Iraqis who refused to serve, then making the families pay for the bullet. I realized my friend the captain might think I only joined to be a spy but I could not afford to do nothing. I had to prove my loyalty. This was the only way I could see to do that without harming someone else.”

“Except in battle,” Bergen noted.

“The Persians are dogs. I was at the front, I saw with my own eyes what they did. Don’t lecture me.”

Bergen’s smile froze. “So you enlisted-”

“I was put into the infantry just before the offensive in Shalamcheh. I was lucky, my sergeant was a good soldier. The irony? He had been a cop in America. I’m serious. Dearborn, Michigan. He knew how to shoot, something none of the other recruits ever learned. It was criminal how badly trained the army was. Lucky for us, the Iranians were no better. We fought them hand to hand, sometimes just hacking and beating each other with our weapons because we’d run out of ammunition. There is no word in any language for what that is like. I became an animal, the men around me became animals.

“The offensive was our first victory in years. Then the Iranians struck back with incredible ferocity, we lost tens of thousands of men. I was fortunate, my position was not gassed. But I knew men who were. The Iranians of course said we were the ones who used gas-and who knows, maybe they were right. I would not put it past Saddam to gas his own troops. But we managed to hold out, regroup, and within the week we went on the attack again, recaptured the Majnoon oil fields, then Halabja. Soon the war was over, Iran agreed to peace. I came home a hero. People were so proud we’d actually, at long last, pushed back, regained some of the country’s pride.”

“But that didn’t satisfy the Mukhabarat,” Bergen guessed.

“I was back in school maybe two months when they came around again. There were incredible purges going on in the country, people disappearing right and left, not just Shia and Kurds. I was taken to the ministry again, a different room, this one on the second floor, but the same captain came in, sat down.

My file was much larger at this point. They must have been watching me in the army. Just like before, he asked me how my classes were going. Honey would have melted on his tongue. I was more scared in that room than I had been at the front.

“Finally I asked, ‘What do I have to do to convince you I am no enemy of the regime?’ He seemed offended but that lasted only an instant. He said I had to know someone in the Palestinian community who had spoken out against the war, against Saddam. And there it was. My way out. All I had to do was give them a name. I had joined the army for nothing. They wanted to terrorize the whole Palestinian community, remind us that our safety under Saddam was a gift, not a right.

“So I went home, thought about who I would betray. Given what I saw in the war, I was no longer quite so squeamish about doing what I had to do to survive-do you understand? There was a man named Salah Hassan, he had a little business repairing radios and televisions and vacuum sweepers. I knew, when the war was going badly, he had demanded that some of his customers pay him in Saudi riyals-better yet, pounds or dollars if they had them. This was considered a crime in Saddam’s Iraq, a kind of money laundering. Worse, subversion. So I told my friend the captain about it. A few nights later, while I lay awake in my bed, I heard the cars pull up outside the repairman’s house, I heard them pound on his door. I heard him speak very respectfully, very cordially to the men who took him away. And after that night, my problems with the Mukhabarat ended.”

Lupe, head still lolling on her arms, uttered a drowsy, uncomprehending sigh. Samir fussed absently with his hands. Bergen said, “I don’t mean to be contrary, but from what I know of intelligence agencies, they don’t tend to let go. They keep coming back-”

“You misunderstand.” Samir seemed strangely uncoiled, even relaxed. “The Palestinian community in Baghdad had caused no problems during the war. The Mukhabarat just wanted to make a point. We were not beyond their reach.”

“You’d told them you had ambitions to work in the foreign ministry.”

“I can only assume the captain saw through that. Regardless, I wanted nothing to do with working for the regime. I got my degree and found work with Al-Zawra, the country’s main newspaper, translating wire-service pieces for publication.”

“Al-Zawra was owned by Uday, Saddam’s son.”

“Yes, but I had nothing to do with any of that. Let me tell you something, in Iraq you could not work for the media in any form and not have contact with someone who knew someone-you understand? But I was a very small fish. I kept to myself, bothering no one. And no one bothered me. That is the truth. Choose to believe it or not. But if you are worried I am some kind of jihadi, let me tell you something. I worked for the coalition as an interpreter, it’s how I got to know this one’s cousin.” A bob of his chin toward Roque. “I did what I could to help America. All I want is to get across the border, make my case for asylum and try as best I can to rebuild my life and help my family. If you do not want to help me, I will find some other way. But I will not be denied. On my honor as a husband and father, I will see this through.”

Bergen sat there a moment then pushed up from the table. “Excuse me a sec.” He collected the empty chapulín basket and ambled off toward the kitchen. Samir dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and rubbed. Lupe stirred and stretched, rising from her nap.

Roque said:-You okay?

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled.-What’s everybody been blabbering about?

– True confessions. He shrugged apologetically for Samir’s sake.-I’ll tell you later.

– Okay. The smile lingered.

Samir looked back and forth between them.-What’s this?

– What business is it of yours? She nailed him with a stare.

– You know what business of mine it is.

– He’s lost his uncle. Have some pity.

– I’m neither blind nor stupid. Pity?

– Listen, I’ll do what I please, feel what I please. What are you going to do-kill me?

Bergen returned, bearing Dolor’s tin pitcher and four glasses. “Figured all this time, flapping our jaws, somebody might be thirsty.” He filled each of the four glasses with water and passed them around. “Don’t worry,” he added. “It’s bottled.”

Resuming his seat, he regarded Lupe now.-What’s this about our Arab friend here killing you? His Spanish was clumsily accented, the same Rocky Mountain twang as his English.

Roque explained the situation to him, the expected connection with El Recio in Agua Prieta, Samir’s crossing in exchange for Lupe. Bergen’s gaze traveled the table.

– And that’s acceptable to all concerned?

– Acceptable? Roque acted insulted.-My uncle hated the idea. I’ll do anything to see it doesn’t happen.

Samir drained his glass. “You should hear yourself. Fine. I’m tired of arguing with you. If you think you know some way back home with no money, no connections, just that noble heart of yours, be my guest. Leave me here. I’ll fend for myself. But I wonder what it will be like for you, when you come face-to-face with your cousin Happy again and he learns not only that his father is dead but that you froze like a little boy when it came time to defend him. You needed me to snap you out of it, get you to act like a man, but by then it was too late. And then you left me behind. Will you be noble enough to tell him the truth?”

He reached out for the pitcher, poured himself more water. Lupe turned to Roque.-What is happening?

Before Roque could answer, Bergen stepped in.-Seems to me you folks have a thing or two to work out. There’s no way I’m taking you anywhere with this going on. I don’t need the hassle. You find common cause or I leave now and that’s that. And Father Luis can’t put you up forever. People are going to come looking for you. Then what?

Samir, finally surrendering, switched to Spanish, letting Lupe in.-I said it before, all we have from you so far is promises, same as we’ve had from every thief and deadbeat along the way. Why should we trust you? What’s the special trick you know that will make our problems vanish?

Bergen considered the question, taking a leisurely sip of water, then lowered his glass and offered that jolting smile.-You’re right, I know a trick. Pretty simple trick, actually. When I drive up to a checkpoint, I flash this happy white face. I show them my Utah license, the Beehive State. Plain old vanilla, that’s me. Maybe this trip I’m a teacher on sabbatical indulging my wanderlust. Maybe I’m a Mormon, hoping to save your souls. Regardless, far more likely as not-I know this from long experience, my friend-they’re going to wave me right on through.

Thirty-Seven

RIDING ALONE IN THE BACKSEAT, LUCHA HAD TO FIGHT BACK the nausea bubbling up in her stomach, fearing she might get sick. She told herself to breathe but the car had a sour smell, like food that had spoiled.

They’d ransacked the trailer, telling her nothing, just handing her a piece of paper that made no sense. She knew not to stand in their way. Armed men, you object, you suffer. Then these two stepped forward through the bedlam, told her they wanted her to come with them.

She knew the handsome one from that day la migra raided the trailer park. He was the one who calmed everyone down, talked sense into Godo. Lattimore, his name was. The other one, the driver-Dunn, his card read-was unfamiliar. He was homely and yet full of himself, the kind of man Graciela used to mock with… what was the phrase? Sapo guapo. Handsome toad. Every few minutes he hawked up mucus, cranked down his window, spat onto the road. Qué grencho. What a hick.

Lattimore talked into his cell, confirmed something, slapped the small black phone shut. He turned in his seat to face her, wearing a thoughtful smile that his eyes betrayed.

“Sorry for that interruption. Your nephew, Godo, and your son-in-law, Pablo-”

“He is not my son-in-law.”

“All right. Excuse me. Pablo, let’s just call him that. The last time you saw him was?”

She looked out the window. They’d crossed the bridge spanning the Carquinez Strait and were veering down the first off-ramp, the one for Crockett. It was almost dark now, the bridge’s new span lit up like a monument and shrouded with wind-driven mist, the distant house lights glowing against the fogbound hill. Directly below the bridge, the sugar refinery’s massive neon sign anchored the small downtown with its abandoned railhead and lonely dock and ghostly warehouses. “I told you. I am afraid. I have temporary protected status and my green-card application is pending but nothing is certain these days. I do not want to do anything to harm my chances. I wish to have a lawyer with me when I talk to you.”

She kept to herself the fact that her heart was breaking.

“You’re not a suspect, Lucha.”

“Lucha is what my family calls me. My name is Élida.”

The man’s smile weakened. His eyes remained unchanged. “You’re not a suspect, Élida.”

Dunn cranked down his window again, a burst of cold air, smelling of brackish water and eucalyptus, a hint of the oil refinery over the hill in Rodeo. “You’re not a citizen, either.” A punctuating spit. The window shuddered back up. “Your right to a lawyer’s not absolute.”

“I wish,” she repeated, “to have a lawyer when I talk to you.”

“I understand,” Lattimore said, stepping back in. “But this isn’t El Salvador, especially the El Salvador you left behind. I mean, sure, we’re cops, not dancers. But we’re not here to hurt you. We just want the truth.”

He thinks I’m stupid, Lucha thought. Like all he has to do is keep chattering away and I will forget about a lawyer. Will they ever stop insulting us?

“The warrant’s a little sketchy on what this is all about, so let me explain a few things. Witnesses place Pablo Orantes and your nephew Godo at the scene of a home invasion this morning. The thing went pretty badly off the rails. The homeowner’s dead. His nine-year-old daughter’s in pretty bad shape too, not physically, but her dad was gunned down right in front of her. We’re still putting things together but it seems pretty clear that Pablo was the ringleader. Godo wasn’t just along for the ride, though. He was in deep, especially on the violence end.”

She felt like she’d misunderstood. He couldn’t have said what she just heard. “Excuse me, I do not-”

“We need to find both these young men. I could lie to you, try to trick you, say we just want to talk to them. But I don’t want to do that. They’re in very serious trouble. That trouble won’t go away. They need to come in, give themselves up, tell us what happened. It could get a great deal worse for both of them if they don’t do the right thing now. I can understand how frightened they might be. I would be, in their shoes. I can imagine why they did it, hoping to score enough money to get Pablo’s father back from El Salvador. Or maybe somebody else put them up to it, Vasco Ramírez, let’s say.” He paused, as though to see how she reacted to the name. It meant nothing to her, she just sat there. “They’re going to be caught, Élida. They won’t walk away free. They need to talk to me or Detective Dunn here, tell us everything. I promise, they’ll be treated fairly.”

She could no longer look at his face. Such a cruel and devious thing to do, take advantage of her grief, play on her conscience, so soon after hearing that Faustino was dead-did they know that? Were they piling one misery on top of the other, just to get her to say something, get her to tell them where Godo was, where Pablito was? As if she knew. As if, supposing everything he’d just said had actually taken place, those two would tell her anything about it.

By the time she realized what was happening she couldn’t stop it, the vomit churned up into her throat and out of her mouth, sour and hot, showering across the seat and onto the floor mats. Her skin was flushed, she felt repulsive, childish, naked.

“Don’t worry, ma’am.” It was Dunn, his voice surprisingly gentle. “You’re probably the third person this month who’s lost his lunch back there. But I bet you figured that out already.”

THEY HELPED HER WALK FROM THE CAR, ONE ON EACH ARM, LEADING her up the steep driveway and into the house. Everyone stared as she came through the door; their gazes weren’t kind. There were strange markings everywhere, circles drawn on the floor and walls, smudges of soot-like powder. Police officers milled about as though they had nowhere else to go. She wavered, feeling sick again but there was nothing left to bring up. Lattimore, sensing her unsteadiness, tightened his hold on her arm. A midair feeling, about to fall-from where?

Lattimore addressed one of the uniformed officers. “The girl still here?”

The officer glanced offhandedly at Lucha, then shook his head. “She was acting a little loose on deck. Mom pitched a fit, be glad you weren’t here. Meds all around, that’s what they wanted. Sergeant said screw it, take her to Kaiser in Martinez, patrol car drove them over about an hour ago. Son went with them. He came home from school while you were gone.”

Lattimore frowned like he was adding up a sum. “Housekeeper’s still here, right?”

“Lourdes? For now. DHS called, they put dibs on her.”

Lucha felt Lattimore’s grip slacken. “DHS? Christ, what the… They’re going to deport her. Best wit we’ve got, only one-” He cut himself short, glancing to Lucha and Dunn then back at the officer, looking sheepish, tense. “Never mind. Not your problem.”

“She’s still in there,” he pointed, “you want to talk to her.”

“Yeah. Good. Thanks.”

Lattimore guided Lucha into a spacious, dimly lit kitchen. A greasy black stain coated the wall above the stove, the lingering smell of a grease fire. A mejicana sat napping at the table. Lucha felt a shudder of contempt. The woman was short like a stump, flabby arms, pudgy hands, dyed hair. She looks like one of those troll dolls, Lucha thought, even as she recognized the scorn for what it was. Fear. What has this puta cochina said, what does she know?

The woman lifted her head, rubbing her eyes, blinking, then staring at Lucha with the same instant distrust. They were opposites, they were mirrors.

Lattimore said, “Élida, this is Lourdes. She was kidnapped yesterday morning by Pablo Orantes and two other young men, Puchi Parada and Chato López, shortly after she finished cleaning this house. They threatened to kill her daughters if she didn’t help them rob the family who lives here. She was here when the robbery took place, when Mr. Snell, the owner, was murdered. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, she’s now in trouble with immigration. She’s not lucky like you, temporary protected status, green card in the pipeline. She may get sent away with no chance of ever coming back. I’ll do what I can but I don’t have much pull. What will happen to her daughters is anybody’s guess. In any event, I thought you might like to meet her, or she might like to meet you, seeing as your nephew and stepson-”

“I told you-”

“-were the leaders in the robbery. She picked out-”

“My marido is dead.” The words escaped before she even had the thought formed. Everyone stared. “Faustino. He was murdered by bandits in Mexico. Yesterday. We were together six years.” She looked at Lourdes with an indifference that felt limitless. “I have nothing to say to this woman.”

ON THE DRIVE BACK TO THE TRAILER, LATTIMORE TOLD HER THAT HE knew about Roque, how he had been driving north through Mexico with Faustino, intending to bring him back home. He did not say how he’d learned this and she felt too numb to ask, staring out the car window, seeing nothing but blurred lights and hulking shapes. He told her he was sorry about Faustino’s death-whatever his sources, she thought, the chivatos had not filled him in on that-but Roque’s involvement made him an accomplice in a conspiracy. She needed to consider that carefully. Everyone would suffer if she did not step forward, tell the truth.

“I will get in touch with a lawyer tomorrow,” she murmured. “I will see what advice he has to give. He or I will contact you.” Or not, she thought.

After they dropped her off at the trailer, she stood for a moment listening to her wind chimes, enjoying them, resenting them. How many little treasures, she wondered, how many fleeting joys slip past as we fail to pay attention?

Inside the trailer, she couldn’t get her bearings. She moved from spot to spot as though looking for something but had no idea what it was. The next thing she knew she was standing in the doorway to his bedroom, looking at the freshly made bed, thinking: My lonely funny Godo, always the wily one, the character, the demon. Do you remember, m’ijo, that time you got so angry when your mother did herself up like a tart and went out, another night at the bar, leaving us alone together like always? How quiet you became, so intense, but I didn’t see that for what it was. Then, behind my back, you found the scissors. By the time I realized you were up to something you’d torn her pillow to shreds, stabbing at it, ripping it, like some crazed little fiend. I grabbed the scissors away and slapped you so hard. You did not cry, though. You bit your lip, daring me to hit you again. I shouted, What do you think you’re doing? But you said nothing, glaring at me. I slapped you once more, harder still. Tears ran down your face but you refused to wipe them away. I dragged you to the couch, told you to sit. If you move, I said, I will beat you like a mule. Later, when your mother stumbled in with the man she dragged home that night, I was lying in bed and I heard the door to my room open, felt you slip into the bed behind me in the dark. For once, I did not shoo you back to your room. I felt guilty and, yes, alone. We lay there, me on my side, my back to you, you on the edge of the bed, so still, and we listened as your mother and her man went at it. Do you remember what I told you? Your mother is going to get pregnant, I said. You are going to have a little brother, maybe a little sister-how are you going to handle that, m’ijo? Only then did you cry. And I did not turn over to comfort you. I let you cry yourself to sleep, thinking: Now, my little monster, now you will learn what it really means to want what is impossible.

The loneliness became unbearable. Shrugging back into the coat she’d just removed, she went out to the car, drove over to Food 4 Less.

A sense of nakedness swept through her as she marched in, everyone glancing up. Did they know what had happened? How? Maybe they were just surprised, it was her day off after all. Only then did it occur to her that she hadn’t put on her makeup. She’d worn her normal face, her dark indígena face. She was the only woman she knew who went to such trouble anymore but only a fool trusts the open-mindedness of strangers. After a moment of stunned silence, Regina the checker broke into an uneasy smile. Alion the bag boy raised a power fist. The others quickly turned back to what they were doing.

The manager’s office lay back off the storage room. She climbed the three wood steps to the door and knocked. A muffled voice called from within, “It’s open.”

The manager on duty was named Rafael, a muscular Tongan with a high tight fade, a meticulously groomed Fu Manchu. His necktie was loose at his unbuttoned collar, one of his shirttails had worked itself free. A half-eaten lumpia laced with brown Chinese mustard and the discarded banana leaf from a patupat, both courtesy of the Filipino bakery next door, sat in a Styrofoam container on his desk. “Lucha, hey-whazzup?” He too stared for a moment at her face, then gestured her into a chair.

Lucha hugged her purse to her belly, taking a second to compose herself. A fly careened about the remains of Rafael’s dinner. “I am going to need extra shifts,” she said, “if you can.” It seemed wise to stop there. No need to explain what the money was for-mention a lawyer, there would be no end to the rumors.

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Rafael wiped his lips with a napkin. “Let’s take a looky-look at the schedule.” He plucked a clipboard from the top of the file cabinet behind him, pushed back the top page. “Gina’s been screaming for time off, her kid’s got some kinda skin problem. You want her Wednesday ten to six, Friday noon to close?”

Lucha realized at that moment that in just a short while she would be returning to the empty trailer, spending the night there, nothing and no one to distract her from what she was feeling. And what would happen when these people found out what Godo and Happy had done-would she still have a job?

“Lucha?”

She snapped to. “I’m sorry. Could you say that again?”

“You okay?”

“Yes. Yes. Tired, maybe.”

He repeated the shifts he had to offer. She said, “Starting when?”

“Day after tomorrow. That soon enough?”

“That would be fine.” She considered asking for an advance on her paycheck but felt she stood a better chance by asking Monroe, the day-shift manager. He liked her-she reminded him of a babysitter he’d had growing up in Chula Vista, he said-and the extra shifts would serve as a kind of collateral.

“Hey, almost forgot.” Rafael picked up his pad of message slips, ripped one free, tossed it across his desk. It fluttered to the floor, he said, “Sorry,” and Lucha said, “It’s all right,” and they both bent to pick it up. Lucha got there first. It contained one word, “Pablo,” and a phone number. Rafael said, “That came in through the message center maybe, I dunno, two o’clock?”

She stared at the handwriting as though it came from another world. Leaving his office, she walked though the store waving a curt goodbye to everyone, whether they looked up or not, then went outside to the pay phone in front of the store, opened her pocketbook, took out her change purse and inserted three quarters into the slot. A disposable phone, she thought, that was his style. He picked up on the second ring.

– You lied to me, you son of a bitch. You told me Godo wasn’t involved in anything and that was a goddamn lie. You got him into this and now he can’t get out and shut up! Shut up and listen to me! They took me to the house in Crockett, told me about the robbery, the man you killed. I had to face the woman you kidnapped you selfish little shit, she may never see her daughters again. And now let me guess, you need my help. Well let me tell you something-your father is dead too, how’s that? Roque called me today, he told me, your father is dead, killed by bandits. Bandits like you. Look what you’ve done. This whole thing was your idea. You always thought you were smart. You’ve never been smart. You’ve always been the stupid one. The worthless one. Don’t come back, understand? If I so much as see you I will call the police, if I don’t kill you myself.

She slammed the phone so hard against its chrome-plated stirrup it banged out of her hand. She fumbled for it, got it under control, redoubled her grip, then slammed it home again, over and over, harder, faster, time and time again until the plastic earpiece shattered, exposing the copper coils and tin diaphragm beneath. She threw it down, staring in disgust.

From behind Alion the bag boy said, “Fuck, Lucha. Be trippin’.”

She pivoted toward the parking lot, finger-raking her hair to hide her face, chin down, sucking in jolts of air as she stormed to her car.

Thirty-Eight

A SINGLE BARE BULB SCREWED INTO A WALL SOCKET LIT THE bathroom mirror. El Recio, naked except for tattered slippers and a silvery brown boa constrictor coiled around his shoulders, leaned over the basin, brushing his teeth. Happy stood in the doorway, waiting. A small desert gecko hid in the corner, outside the snake’s reach, lurking behind a coffee can stuffed with foul tissues, the toilet barely usable because of the trickling water pressure.

Beyond the bracing whiff of shit, the house smelled of fresh cement, rotten fruit rinds and raw sewage from outside. They were in one of the new developments, if that was the word, on the outskirts of Agua Prieta. Happy had driven two straight days to get here, checking into a transient hotel downtown with Godo, then discreetly asking around, finding his way to El Recio. He was light-headed from lack of food, his body humming with adrenalin and foul with sweat.

El Recio drooled a thin white spume into the sink. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, güey. Ain’t heard nothing from nobody down south about moving your people across.” He’d spent most of his life banging around Tucson, his accent flat and hard. “You say you paid them? News to me. I ain’t seen nothing. Ain’t heard nothing.” He affected a shrug, not wanting to disturb the snake. “Way it is.”

Happy only half heard, Tía Lucha’s voice still echoing inside his brain: The stupid one. The worthless one. Let the scrawny bitch talk, he thought, she’s not your mother. Your mother was a hero, she died on Guazapa volcano.

El Recio rinsed, spat, then stuck the toothbrush behind his ear. He had a manly, misshapen, bone-smooth head and stood tall for a mejicano, over six feet, but so skinny his veins popped. He gave the snake an attentive, leisurely stroke. “You want to get somebody over the wall, you know the freight. Fifteen hundred a head.”

“I already paid,” Happy heard himself say. “Twelve large per.”

“Not me you didn’t.”

“It’s a lot of money. It was supposed to get them all the way.”

“Look, you got a beef with Lonely, go down and talk to him about it.” He gestured for Happy to make way, he and the snake were coming out.

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Call, then.” He edged past and shuffled bow-legged toward the front room, the tattoos down his back blending with the boa’s mottled scales.

Happy, following: “Every number I got, plug’s been pulled. Best I get is a ring nobody answers. If you got a number-”

“Last time I say this, right? Ain’t my fucking problem.” Entering the front room, he regaled the rest of the company with a hearty scratch of his balls. Over his shoulder: “You paid twelve thousand per head-for real? Man, those faggots musta seen you comin’.”

Them or you, Happy thought. He couldn’t figure out who exactly was screwing him. The fact Lonely couldn’t be reached smacked of rip-off and yet maybe there’d been a raid down there, everybody popped or driven underground, something El Recio, sly motherfucker, would no doubt recognize as the genius of luck. He could say anything, demand whatever, who’d contradict him-how could he not know how much got paid and why? Either way, Happy thought, I’m stuck. And the kicker? My old man’s dead. All that money and trouble to keep him safe. A restless sorrow fluttered inside his chest. He saw the wisdom of keeping that to himself. It would only make him look weak.

The front room was bare except for a large-screen TV, a leather sofa, an armchair that didn’t match. El Recio’s two underlings had commandeered the couch, nursing beers and watching some rerun of The Shield, Spanish subtitles. One was named Kiki, freckled and wiry, his long black hair knotted in a bun atop his head like a samurai. The other, Osvaldo, was thirtyish, dumpy suit, roach-killer boots, one of those close-cropped beards so trendy a few years back. A girl sat by herself in the armchair, throwing back Jägerbombers-Ripple with a shot of Jägermeister over ice. She had thin Asian eyes carved into a stony Latina face and wore a party dress, no shoes. It wasn’t clear who she belonged to.

Happy said quietly, “Look, about the fifteen hundred.” He was thinking of Samir. Roque could cross on his own with his passport. “No way I can get my hands-”

El Recio, back still turned, cut him off. “You can work, right?”

Happy’d told him about the home invasion. In the half-assed logic of machismo, it was less important the thing went bad than he and Godo walked out alive. It created expectations. He still suffered flashbacks-the contractor lying on his side, face ripped open, the girl screaming through the duct tape-and yet he could barely recall a single moment of the drive south. “Yeah. I can work.”

“Good.” El Recio gestured to the girl. She obliged with a huffing frown, hoisted her glass, uncrossed her legs and wrestled herself onto her feet, taking no notice of his nakedness. The chair clear, he uncoiled the boa from his shoulders, gentled it down into the deserted warm spot, then continued with Happy. “’Cuz I think I got something maybe could suit you.”

Happy’s cell phone rang. In unison, the two on the couch glanced up, the stubbled one growling, “Afuera, pendejo.” Take it outside, asshole. Heading for the door, Happy checked the incoming-call display. Tía Lucha was the only person he’d contacted so far on this phone, but this wasn’t a callback. He didn’t know who it was.

Letting his eyes adjust to the darkness, he stepped first across the open ditch ripe with filth that ran downhill to the sewer linkage, then past the concrete pila topped with potable water, filmed with mosquito larvae. Across the muddy roadbed, unfinished houses loomed in shadow, wands of rebar fingering skyward in the moonlight. Down the road, a few lived-in houses sported satellite dishes, courtesy of El Recio, so his own wouldn’t tip off the police.

He flipped the phone open, put it to his ear, waited.

“Happy-that you?” It was Roque.

A nervous rage crackled up Happy’s spine. “Tell me what happened.”

“Happy-”

“You know what I mean.”

Roque stammered out an explanation-a cow in the road, two trucks of gunmen, it all sounding too fucked up to disbelieve. “Tío got hurt in the accident, he was dazed, it made him an easy target. We all would’ve died if not for Samir. He was like a killing machine.”

Wait, Happy thought, that can’t be right. He recalled the ambush on the road to Karbala, when Samir saved his life. The Arab never grabbed a gun, not off the wounded, not off the dead, he never even tried. He ran and hid, then talked his way out. He lied to me, Happy thought. He’s lied to me all along and so has Lonely and every other glad-handing cocksucker who said he was doing me a favor. There are no favors.

Roque broke back in: “Tía Lucha said Godo’s with you.”

“Not this minute.” He glanced around, looking to see if anyone was listening in. The night was disconcertingly quiet. Come daylight, the neighborhood would burst with the hiss and rumble of propane wagons and water trucks, the shriek of postman whistles, the jingle of bells on the helado wagons, the hawker calls from men and women selling newspapers, corncobs, goat-cheek tacos, broiled tripe. “But yeah, Godo’s here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Agua Prieta.”

“What are you doing-”

“We’re waiting for you.” Across the way, a crow perched atop one of the exposed rods of rebar fluttered its long black wings in the moonlight. “Listen, no more calls to Tía Lucha, understand? The phone might be bugged. Things’ve taken an odd turn the past couple days. I’ll explain when I see you.”

WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE HOTEL HE FOUND GODO SITTING CROSS-LEGGED on the floor of their tiny room, facing a girl maybe six or seven years old. She was wrapping his hand in fresh gauze with only a candle to see by.

Godo glanced up at the doorway. “Hey, primo.” Nodding to the girl, “This is Paca.”

The child spun her head around, pigtails flying. She was rail thin with an incongruously round face, like a human lollipop, except she had fever-dream eyes. Her smile was short a tooth.

Happy nodded hello. Then, to Godo, “She got a mother?”

“You mean around?” Godo took the end of the gauze from the girl, tucked it in, finishing the wrap. “Mom’s out working.” He glanced up meaningfully. There were only a few things a woman could do in this town for quick money. “They’re making their fourth go at the border.”

Happy sat down on his cot, gnawed by weariness but too wired to sleep. Four tries, he thought, Christ.

“Last three times, funny enough, they’ve walked right into the arms of la migra. Their guía says it’s just bad luck. Fucker.

They’re decoys, he’s running a load of dope some other route once he’s got the border boys chasing his pollos around.”

“Stuff happens.” Happy lay flat. In the candlelight the ceiling looked like a rippling pond.

Godo placed his bandaged hand atop the girl’s head and scrubbed affectionately. She pointed toward the cot, beaming. “Hap pee?”

“Yes. Happy.” Godo smiled proudly. “I’ve been teaching her some English.”

“Slaphappy,” the girl chirped.

“Hey! Recuerdas. Good.”

“Naphappy! Craphappy!” She bounced with delight, accenting the second syllable, not the first, thinking in Spanish.

Happy lifted himself onto one elbow. “Those aren’t words.”

“They oughta be. You’ve never been naphappy?”

“Laphappy! Sappycrap!”

“Can I talk to you alone?”

Godo broke the news to Paca. Like a little soldier, no pout, no pretending she hadn’t heard, she jumped to her feet, brushed off her skirt and padded out, shooting back an over-the-shoulder smile with its little notch of blackness-her happygap, Happy thought.

“Get the door, okay?”

Godo rose, did as asked, then sat on the opposite cot. “What’s up?”

“El Recio says he never got paid. I’ve gotta scratch up another fifteen hundred to get Samir across.”

Godo looked puzzled. “You sound like you resent it.”

“The money? Fuck yeah. This shit never ends.”

“Not the money. Samir. You sound like you loathe the fucker. Change your mind about getting him across?”

It’s that obvious, Happy thought. Not good. “Roque got in touch, by the way.”

Godo made an odd sound, grunt and snort and chuckle all rolled into one. “How goes the golden child?”

“He told me what happened. With Pops. It doesn’t sound like it was his fault.”

“Since when are you so forgiving?”

Happy let that go. “The way he described it, I don’t see it going down much different if it was you or me who’d been there. You, maybe.”

“Stop beating yourself up. Like I made some big difference back at Fucked Chuck’s house.” He rested his bandaged hand on his thigh, palm up, staring into it. “Unlucky Chuck.”

“What is it with you and this rhyming shit?”

“I’m bored stupid here. Thought I was gonna die from fucking tedium before Paca showed up.”

There are worse ways to go, Happy thought. “Well, knock it off. We got stuff to discuss.” He told him about El Recio’s offer, the job he’d proposed. “He wanted to know if you were interested. I told him your hand was still messed up.”

Godo’s pocked face looked like a mask in the candlelight. “My hand’s fine.”

“Wrapped up like that?”

“I can carry my weight.”

“I wanted you kept out of it.”

Godo chewed on that for a bit. “You ashamed of me?”

“I’m trying to be thoughtful, pendejo. Everything you been through?”

“You my mother now?”

Drop it, Happy told himself. “That’s not my point.” He glanced up at the watery shadows again, feeling as though, if he stared long enough, they might speak. “You still get nightmares?”

Godo reached beneath his cot. “You know I do. And not just at night.” He checked the duffel holding his guns. “Thing back in Crockett eating you?”

Happy wanted to close his eyes but felt afraid. He could hear the dying man’s blood, smell the girl’s screams. “Stuff just comes out of nowhere.”

Godo settled back on his own cot, lacing his fingers beneath his head. “Sorry to tell you this, cabrón, but that’s gonna be part of the mental furniture from now on.” He nudged off his shoes. “Welcome to the house.”

Thirty-Nine

THEY HIT THEIR FIRST CHECKPOINT WITHIN HALF AN HOUR OF setting out, between Puente Copalita and the turnoff to the beaches at Huatulco. Contrary to Bergen’s prediction, he wasn’t waved breezily through. He was directed to the berm. He was told to have everyone step out of the van.

Roque was struck by how young the soldiers looked; even the lieutenant interrogating Bergen appeared to be no older than twenty. He reminded himself of Sisco’s advice regarding moments like this-keep smiling-as he watched a German shepherd sniff the undercarriage of the Eurovan, straining his leash. Meanwhile, maybe twenty feet away, a group of especially entrepreneurial local women dressed in festive pozahuancos were selling fruit, snakes, even an iguana on a rope, in the event the detainees might want to take the opportunity for some impulse shopping. One woman waved frantically at a cluster of bees swarming her bucket of sweet panochas. It was midmorning, still reasonably mild with the breeze off the ocean, but Roque couldn’t help himself, he was sweating like a thief.

The pimpled soldier who took his passport flipped to the border stamps.-You’ve come up from El Salvador, through Guatemala.

His voice was reedy with forced authority. Roque acknowledged the observation while the soldier checked his face and arms for tattoos, told him to open his shirt so he could inspect his torso as well. Roque obliged: clean. The young soldier, expressionless, handed back his passport, then moved on to Samir.

Thanks to Beto’s compas in Tecún Umán, both the Arab and Lupe had voter registration cards from Veracruz, mocked up with the obligatory lousy picture, one of the few ways the salvatruchos had actually come through. Bergen, fearing their accents might nevertheless give away the charade, had enlisted the company of a frog-faced local named Pingo who, as far as Roque could tell, was on board chiefly to blow smoke.

– We’re headed for Nogales, get work permits from the union, you know? He almost crackled as he talked, mesmerist eye contact, homely smile.-Gonna pick cantaloupes in Yuma. Used to be you had to go through recruiters, couple hundred a permit, goddamn shakedown. With the union, the growers pay. For real. Least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Not like the recruiters gonna cave without a fight. Fucking gangsters. Couple union dudes been shot, I heard.

The pimply soldier paid Pingo little mind, choosing instead to glance back and forth-Samir’s face, his ID picture, looking for something, lingering, then all of a sudden handing the voter reg card back. Moving on to Lupe he repeated the process, mimicking his own actions so unimaginatively Roque caught on finally it was all just mindless rote. The guy barely glanced at Pingo’s ID. Roque felt his shoulders unbind.

Then the lieutenant told Bergen to open the back of the van.

The whole reason the American was traveling north was to deliver a vanload of art to a dealer he knew in California. That was his story, anyway.

– You know how it is, Captain, he told the lieutenant, ever since the troublemakers caused all the problems here in Oaxaca, the tourist trade has dried up. No one comes to the galleries anymore. You have some of the most talented artists in the region on the verge of going broke. He removed a cardboard tube from the back, popped open one end, shook out the canvas that was rolled up inside.-Here, let me show you something.

The lieutenant nosed around the boxes of tin ornaments, copal wood carvings, hand-painted masks and figurines, ceramic bowls and pitchers, then called for the dog handler to bring the shepherd around. The animal hiked his forepaws onto the bumper, probed the nearest boxes with his snout.

Bergen, undeterred, unrolled the painting.-Look at that. The colors remind me of Chagall. But the artist is from here, just over the mountain in Zimatlán. Now here’s a question for you, Captain: How much do you think this painting is worth? He paused, as though to give the lieutenant time to think, playing the thing out, milking it.-Up north, it will fetch five thousand dollars. Five thousand. Imagine what that means to this artist and his family.

Roque had to grant the man his bullshit. What he was leaving unsaid was that the artists whose work he was carrying north had exclusive contracts with fiercely competitive local galleries. You could get blacklisted if any of the curators figured out they were getting backdoored. But nothing was moving here and the artists had mouths to feed, supplies to buy. So on the sly Bergen had offered to broker their work to a gallery in Santa Monica, for which he was getting three times the normal commission-calculated on the 500 percent markup on the other end-but what could they do? A smaller slice of something still beat a bigger slice of nothing.

The point, though, was Bergen had an angle. God only knew what else he was up to, Roque thought, half expecting the German shepherd to alert on the boxes piled in back-there’d be pot or scag or crank in there, courtesy of Bergen’s old paymasters, maybe Pingo the joker.

The dog dropped down onto the pavement. No alert. The lieutenant curtly gestured the American and his curious pack of fellow travelers back onto the road, then marched toward the next waiting vehicle, his retinue of baby-faced soldiers traipsing along behind.

Bergen rolled up his painting and suggested with a glance that everyone climb back into the Eurovan with as much oomph as they could muster. As they pulled onto the highway, he studied his rearview mirror and said, “My guess is that’s the worst we’ll have to handle.”

“That’s not what you said before.” Sitting in back on the passenger side, Roque leaned out his window, tenting his shirt to dry his skin. “You said they’d just wave us through.”

“I made no promises.”

“Yeah. I can see why.”

To the west, immaculate beaches melted away into emerald green water frothed with surf. Pelicans strafed the waves for food. The southern end of the Sierra Madres dropped into the sea. Roque wished he could enjoy it all but he could only think of who wasn’t there to enjoy it with him. He’d abandoned his uncle to a lonely grave, far from everyone he loved. It brought to mind his strained conversation with Happy. So much anger, so little grief, but that was hardly surprising. Things have taken an odd turn, he’d said, there might be a bug on Tía Lucha’s phone. What had they gone and done, why head for Agua Prieta? And whose side would they take when it came time to talk El Recio into letting Lupe go?

Tourists:

Oaxaca is Temporarily Closed.

It will Reopen as Soon as There is Justice.

“That reminds me,” Bergen said. “I did a little nosing around about what happened to you folks on the highway the other night. Appears you were mistaken for somebody else. The governor here is facing something that, in its own modest way, feels like full-fledged rebellion. He sure sees it that way, and he’s not been shy responding, which is why tourism’s in the toilet.

“Word apparently reached him or someone in his camp that members of the EZLN-the Zapatistas, the guerrillas from the next state down, Chiapas-were coming to powwow with the local opposition on tactics. There were rumors of a new general strike. The powers that be decided to nip that little fucker in the bud and they had their men waiting out there on the road.”

Roque glanced toward Lupe, who was staring out at the hypnotic surf. “Why chase us? What made us so suspicious?”

“It’s my understanding,” Bergen said, “that the folks who could answer your question best are unavailable.” A turn toward the sun sent a shock of white glare across the windshield. Bergen flipped down his visor. “I can tell you this much, if those phony IDs you guys picked up from your salvatrucho pals were from Chiapas instead of Veracruz? We’d still be back there at that checkpoint, most likely facedown on the pavement.”

Roque caught a whiff of himself, realizing only then just how scared he’d been. “How come we didn’t hear any of this from you before?”

Bergen glanced over his shoulder, his customary smile at half-mast. “You aren’t seriously complaining, are you?”

Roque blanched. “No. I’m not.”

“Good.” Bergen slowed for a tope and a pack of women swarmed the windows on each side, holding up bags of oranges, cold drinks, miscellaneous chácharas. The windows filled with eager hands, the voices almost accusing in their urgency.

Once the van picked up speed again, Bergen said, “I’ll tell you a story. About the way things are here. I have this friend, delightful lady, used to run a restaurant in Oaxaca de Juárez. Best pork with mancha manteles mole you’ll ever know. One morning she was walking to her bank to make the daily deposit when the Policía Federal Preventiva rolled in. This was November 2006, during the teachers’ strike. The PFP came to teach the teachers a lesson. Batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, the whole trick bag. Alix, my friend, she tried to help somebody who’d been tear-gassed, dabbing their eyes with a hankie dipped in Coca-Cola. Trust me, it works. Anyway, she got snatched up by the PFP along with everybody else, dragged to a van, thrown inside with ten other women. One cop said they were going to get taken out in a helicopter and dropped into the ocean. That’s not an idle threat down here. It’s not folklore, either. It gets done. Good news is, it didn’t get done that day.

“Cops took them to the women’s prison in Miahuatlán, not that things were swell there, either. Alix got questioned, to use the usual euphemism, and the man in charge used a blanket when he kicked her so he wouldn’t leave marks. She was charged with assaulting police, sedition, destruction of public property. Mind you, I’m talking a nice middle-aged lady here, maybe weighs 110 after a heavy breakfast, who was trying to help somebody who was hurt. She closed up her restaurant after that. No more pork with mancha manteles mole. Haven’t heard from her in over a year.”

The driver of the truck just ahead signaled that Bergen could pass. He downshifted, wound the Eurovan out in third gear, then ventured his move into the oncoming lane.

“What I’m saying is, that’s the state of things you folks walked into. Just so you know.”

Thanks for the tip, Roque thought, sinking in his seat. It was like they were trapped in some hellish video game where the longer they played the more their enemies multiplied.

They hit two more checkpoints in short order, one just before Puerto Angel, the second at the lighthouse turnoff right before Puerto Escondido. Bergen’s magic seemed to be taking hold, they got waved through each time. After that their biggest problems were road washouts and wandering livestock until they passed Pinotepa Nacional-another checkpoint, but though they got stopped the soldier simply reached in, opened the glove box, checked inside for a pistol or drugs, then directed the van into the slow-moving queue for a giant X-ray machine, its white crane-like boom arching over the road.

By midafternoon they reached Acapulco-or Narcopulco as it often got called these days, Bergen said. The cartels were jockeying for control of the port, with the predictable rise in body count, at least until the army got sent in. Things were returning to normal, more or less, or the illusion of normal. The southern end of town looked shopworn and sad, the northern more stylish and new. Pingo, from his perch up front, pointed to the top of one particularly stunning cliff with shameless reverence.-Check it out, that’s Sly Stallone’s house.

Come twilight they pulled into a modest roadside hotel half a mile beyond a pig-filled swamp just outside Zihuatenejo-only a dozen or so rooms, high walls isolating each of the entrances, an armed guard stationed in the parking lot, another at the office door. Bergen explained it was a casa de citas; patrons paid by the hour, not the night, a favorite spot for a poke with the mistress. “I know the folks who run this place,” he said, killing the ignition, lodging the emergency brake. Beyond the hotel, the hillside rose with lush thickets of nameless greenery, crowned with mango and thorn trees. Across the highway, fishing boats thronged a network of docks. “It’s clean, it’s discreet, the van will be safe. And I’m guessing, given prior experience, you’re not all that eager to travel the roads at night. Me, neither.”

Forty

EL RECIO PUT HAPPY ON THE FRONT DOOR, KIKI WITH HIS TOP-KNOT watched the back. Osvaldo with his dumpy suit and roach killers joined El Recio and another man, Hilario, in the kitchen where they got to play butcher.

How had he put it: I think I got something maybe could suit you.

Happy couldn’t tell if this was their standard MO or whether they’d taken inspiration from what he’d described of the Crockett takeover. Maybe they wanted to see how he’d react. Using duct tape, they’d tied and gagged the cop and his wife and their son to chairs. The boy was seven maybe, blue fleece pajamas, matching blue socks. The pajamas had little bucking broncos on them. The parents were naked.

El Recio made the parents watch as Hilario did the boy, using wire cutters and grain alcohol and a box of wood matches. Happy leaned against the wall, back turned to what was happening, but he could hear, he could smell. His memory emptied its sewer, he was back inside that claustrophobic room with Snell and his daughter and he would have sold his soul to get away except how do you outrun what’s inside you? Keep your eyes on the street, he told himself, focus on what’s out there, even if it’s nothing. Especially if it’s nothing.

He threw back another slug of tejuino to buck up his nerve. It scalded his mouth and throat and simmered in his gut. El Recio said the Indians fermented it by putting a ball of human shit inside a cheesecloth and burying it in the corn mash, letting it molder. He clutched the bottle, fearing he might vomit. Worse, faint. What would happen, he wondered, if I went in there, tried to stop it? Nothing. Everybody would just get to watch me die too.

The cop was bent, just not bent enough apparently. He’d talked to somebody, a shipment got stopped-of what? Migrants? Drugs? Guns? Happy wasn’t told, the wisdom of murder. He knew only this: Muffled screams howled into thick swaths of tape-the boy, his mother, his stupid on-the-take-but-suddenly-honest cop father-the rocking of wood chairs against the floor as the parents struggled to free themselves, the acrid smell of burned flesh and scorched fleece and smoke, but Happy was there and not there, unable to get the girl out of his head, like she was living under his skin, struggling to get out, her eyes so huge when he shot her old man, then kicking herself into the corner, trying to get away-from him, from her dying old man, from it.

In the kitchen, El Recio sang in a clownish baritone:

Hoy es mi día

Voy a alegrar toda el alma mía

There were no questions to ask, nothing to learn. This was a message. The killing would go slowly, over hours, then the rumor mill would kick in and every other cop in Sonora would learn that the boy died first, died horribly and slowly in unthinkable pain, followed hours later by his mother, most likely driven crazy by then, and only several hours after that, at the cusp of dawn, by the father, the man whose chickenshit conscience could be blamed for it all. After that, who with a badge wouldn’t take the money?

There was a lull in the kitchen. Happy dared a glance over his shoulder. Hilario was wiping his hands with a towel, Osvaldo lit up a smoke. El Recio stepped into the doorway, looking skeletal without the snake.

He approached slowly, almost wearily and Happy wondered what depths got tapped in the torturing of a child, then recoiled at his own phony righteousness. A birdlike hand reached out, resting on Happy’s shoulder.

“Didn’t have time to tell you,” El Recio said. “Finally got word about Lonely. Now, what I heard, it’s like secondhand, thirdhand, some don’t even make sense, all right? But word I got is damn near his whole clique went down.” His lips were drawn. A vein the size of a night crawler throbbed on the side of his shaved skull. “Cops sent the riot squad in, storm-trooper shit, snipers and dogs and choppers overhead, shut the whole barrio down, went door to door like it’s fucking Baghdad. You know how those assholes love a show. Lonely and ten other dudes, slammed with gang beefs and that’s like no bail, no luck, no hope, know what I’m saying?”

Happy had expected this explanation. It was most likely true and thus the perfect lie. The weightless hand lifted off Happy’s shoulder, vanished into a pocket, reappeared with an asthma inhaler. Two quick pumps: bob of the Adam’s apple, hiss of albuterol. He didn’t seem particularly short of breath. Maybe he just liked the taste.

“And here’s the shit, güey. Way I hear it, this Guatemalan comandante your cousin got tangled up with, this clown named El Chusquero?”

“I know who you mean.” Happy worried his hands around the tejuino bottle, the rough glass reassuringly solid. “We had to wire down money to pay him off.”

“Yeah, well, he’s the one who made the call. Maybe it’s bullshit, you know how some of these idiots think, but this is what I’m hearing, all right? Supposedly this El Chusquero cocksucker got fucked out of some deal by your cousin, they was supposed to take some boat up the Mexican coast or some shit-”

“I heard about this, look-”

“Just listen, all right? Your cousin and uncle, they skipped out, last minute, and this El Chusquero asshole said: Okay motherfuckers, try this. He picked up the phone, tapped some old pals in uniform down in El Salvador, called in a favor, whatever. And the hammer came down.”

Another thumb-punch on the inhaler, eyelids fluttering, a clenching swallow of mist.

“So, like, even if you did have some deal with Lonely, it’s useless now. I swear to God, I never heard word one, never saw a fucking dime, and now I’m not gonna, no matter what. Sorry, just the way it is.”

He slipped the inhaler back into his pant pocket, rubbed at his eye. From the kitchen, ragged sobs.

“Chécalo, there’s guys who seriously want to fuck your cousin up, given all the shit that came down back in San Salvador.”

“Look, Roque’s not perfect, I get that.” Happy again had to bite back mention of his father’s death. “But way I hear it, Roque turned down this El Chusquero to honor the deal with Lonely. So why’s he in the shit for that?”

“Law of unintended consequences, just the way it is. Besides which, there’s some girl supposedly in the picture too. I never heard about this till yesterday, some chick Lonely sent up to gain a little juice with Don Pato.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“You don’t need to know. I need to know. Right? Just like I need to know who ropes the pollos, who rounds up the guías, who watches over the safe houses and makes the bribes and launders the money. I need to know all that because they rely on me. They rely on me to enforce the motherfucking law, right? You need to know one thing-what I tell you.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“I’m just making a point, okay? Don Pato knows about this girl coming up with your cousin. He knows what’s supposed to happen. I don’t make it happen, I look weak. I can’t afford that. I look weak, next day I’m dead.”

Happy realized finally what El Recio was saying. “I don’t know why Roque would have a problem handing this girl over.” Thinking: Now who sounds weak?

“Things happen, you know? I hear she’s like crack for the eyes, güey, and she’s got a voice. You know how all the big shots down here wanna be sung about. You’re nothing unless there’s a corrido on the radio pimping you up. There’s talk this pichona and your cousin, like, connected or some such shit.”

“You want me to talk to Roque, explain what the deal is?”

“When the time comes. Maybe, yeah. Meanwhile I got some bad news on another front.”

Osvaldo appeared in the kitchen doorway, a disheveled silhouette, and made a chittering sound with his tongue and teeth. El Recio, without turning, gestured for patience. “Momentito, cabrón.” Reaching again into a pocket, this time he withdrew not the inhaler but a small plastic bag of salted plums called saladitos. They smelled like something plucked from the inside of a pig and brined in lye. He lifted one to his mouth, tilted the bag toward Happy, shrugged when the offer was declined, then continued. “This Arab dude you wanted to bring across. There’s a problem. An American showed up last week, frumpy motherfucker, kinda fat with crooked glasses, lugging this big old briefcase with him, he met up with Don Pato over dinner at El Gallo. Again, okay, I don’t know everything, but the fat guy was, like, way interested in this friend of yours and some kinda deal got made. Just so you know, the Americans are pissing blood over the way things are down here. Too many bodies, too much news about it, and the news is, like, freaky. They’re willing to go with a winner, even tip their hand, pick a favorite, if it means things calm down. None of this is official, it’s all secret-handshake spook shit, but whoever the winner turns out to be-and this guy was here to say they’d be happy with Don Pato-he’s gotta understand, we can’t be moving ragheads across the border. Them, we turn over to this frumpy fat motherfucker and his people. Hear what I’m saying?”

He saved my life, Happy thought, wondering if he should believe that anymore. “What happens to him after you turn him over?”

“Not your problem, güey.” The skeletal hand returned to Happy’s shoulder, a lingering squeeze. Deep in their sockets, El Recio’s red-veined eyes warmed. “You stepped up tonight. I wanted to see you carry your weight. You done good. You’re part of the picture now, right?” He licked bits of saladito off his teeth. “You got no place to go to up north, there’s serious heat on you there. And there’s people down south now want your fucking head, or your cousin’s head. Yours’ll do in a pinch, hear what I’m saying? Best idea you got, stay here with me. Don Pato, the others I mentioned, they’re serious cats-run the whole goddamn show, this stretch of the border. Anything moves across, it’s got their brand on it, otherwise you die. I do what’s necessary, they watch my back. Same thing with you and me. Be cool, stand up, don’t give me nothing to worry about, I’ll look the fuck after you. I’ll get your cousin across. The rest can’t be helped.”

From the kitchen doorway, Osvaldo made his tetchy little sound again. The mother was mewling hysterically behind her gag. Hilario backhanded her but she wouldn’t settle down.

“Back to business,” El Recio said, stuffing the bag of saladitos back in his pocket. “We’ll talk more over breakfast.”

THOUGH THE WATER WAS TEPID THE SHOWERS FELT LIKE LUXURY-first Lupe, then Roque, finally Samir, each of them scrubbing off the grit and stickiness and toweling dry in the small spare room, nothing but a twin bed for furniture. What else was needed, given its usual hourly occupants? Bergen took a room for himself, Pingo would sleep in the van. The tally of money owed was inching upward-three hundred dollars per person for the ride, which Bergen said would barely cover gas, even at Pemex prices, then the room, food. They’d already pooled their money and handed over what they’d had, the rest being due on credit, for which Roque gave his address, the names of both Tía Lucha and Lalo as guarantors of his debt. Bergen had never promised charity but it all added up so fast. Still, Roque supposed, better that than paying out to some salvatrucho or pandillero who’d just keep the shakedown going forever back home. He got it now, it wasn’t just that nothing was free. The moment you agreed to pay, you opened the door to hell. Bergen was simply a friendlier breed of devil.

Lupe joined him outside and they sat together beneath a roadside mango tree, gazing through the darkness and the day’s last traffic at the fishing fleet moored to its lantern-lit docks. The breeze carried the scents of sea salt and beach rot and the echoes of beery laughter.

– We should have gone for a swim before the shower, he said.

Using both hands, Lupe spread her damp hair to let the wind help dry it, lifting her face toward the starlight. The bruising from Lonely’s beating had all but healed.-It’s stupid to swim at night. You can’t get your bearings.

– There’s plenty of light from the bar, the docks.

– The waves can be dangerous. Her voice was adamant, almost shrill.-I heard of a woman whose neck was broken just a few months ago and she was a very strong swimmer. The undertow kills several people every year.

For a second, he felt ridiculous. Then he figured it out.-You don’t know how to swim.

She shrugged, shook her hair.-Let me guess. You want to teach me.

– I wasn’t trying to insult you.

– I’m sorry. It’s just… She glanced up into the dark tree.-

We both know what’s coming. I’m tired of thinking about it. Get me a mango, would you?

Climbing up a ways to one of the middling branches-the lower ones were picked clean-he tugged a plump mango from its rubbery stem and tossed it to her, then scrambled back down. Using her nails, she peeled away the skin so they could trade bites. Soon their faces were tacky with juice and pulp.

Between swallows, he said:-I’m going to need another shower.

She slipped her sticky hand in his, their fingers interlocking. He tilted his head to venture a kiss, only to see Samir approaching, chafing his burred black hair with a towel.

– I am sorry to interrupt, he announced, sounding more flustered than contrite.-I have been thinking today, very much, very long, about our situation. I have thought of what Fatima would want of me. I have prayed. And I am here to tell you I am ashamed of how I have behaved. Yes, I need very much to reach America-not for my sake. My family’s. But I have been thoughtless, even cruel, in how I have spoken. It needn’t be so. I had a chance earlier to talk with Pingo. He knows a man at the border, his uncle, he lives in a town called Naco, who could help us get across. There would be no need to deal with this El Recio character in Agua Prieta. For all they know we burned up in the car, right? Who can say differently, how soon? Months it will take, longer most likely, for them to determine for certain who it was in that car. Again, yes, there is the issue of money and Happy has told you there is none, fine, but things change. You, Roque, can pass over as you please, perhaps you could head home, ask among friends or family. I could wait with Lupe in Naco. He stood with his shoulders folded forward, as though preparing to bow. His deep-set eyes lacked their usual indignation.-I am agreeable, is what I am saying. I no longer want us to fight among ourselves. It is wrong.

No more was said about it. But later, when the three of them settled in for the night inside the tiny stifling room, Samir took the floor in a sign of goodwill. Roque and Lupe negotiated the narrow bed, spooning though fully clothed, his stomach pressed into the hollow of her back as she pillowed her head on his arm. In time their breathing synchronized, drowsiness settled in. Samir fell asleep first, though, snoring with a chesty rasp. Perhaps we don’t know what’s coming after all, Roque thought, and shortly Lupe took his hand, nudged it inside her jeans, pressing it against the downy warm curls, holding it there in a gesture of possession, him of her, her of him.

FROM HIS TABLE NEAR THE BACK, LATTIMORE SPOTTED HIM IN THE doorway, the distinctively scruffy beard and hair, the rumpled suit, the cockeyed glasses, the clownishly fat and battered briefcase-McIlvaine, the security man from Dallas, what was his company’s name-Bayonet? The man made eye contact, offering his tea-colored smile, then began picking his way through the tables and Lattimore felt his stomach plunge with an almost punitive sense of dread. His sandwich turned into a soggy wad of nausea in his hands. Banneret, he thought, that was it. “Jim!” McIlvaine thrust out his hand. “Mind if I sit?” Lattimore nodded to the open chair, setting his oozy sandwich down and reaching for a napkin. “Let me admire your investigative skills-you found me how?”

“Inspired guesswork.” McIlvaine reached across to a nearby table where a menu sat unused and plucked it for his own use. “The receptionist said you were out, the hour suggested lunch, I decided to wander around the area, take my chances.” He pushed up his glasses, reading a nearby chalkboard listing specials.

“That’s all you wanted, company for lunch?”

“No need to sound so put-upon. I’m not expecting a fanfare but I do have news I think you’ll find useful, if you haven’t already received it.”

Lattimore, resisting a smile, took a sip of his lukewarm coffee. Since the screwup with Happy the information chain had gone into lockdown. The case was infamous, no one wanted his name near it. Memos and e-mails gathered dust somewhere out in the bureaucratic nowhere. Not one single agent outside the country would return his calls. “I’m all ears,” he said.

Folding his hands across his midriff, McIlvaine settled into his chair. “I heard the news, the bad business on your end. Quite a cock-up, as our British friends would say.”

“Yes.” Lattimore tasted the grit of his coffee dregs. “British friends, one can’t have too many of those.”

“Oddly enough, you’re near half right.” The waitress bustled past and he caught her eye, tipping his menu back and forth as a signal. “Turns out my friend in the Green Zone knew a Brit journalist doing a story on the Al Tanf refugee camp. He got in touch, I scratched out a list of questions, ones I thought you’d want answered given our previous discussion. Well, unhappily but not too surprisingly, he came up empty. There is no record of a woman named Fatima Sadiq in the Al Tanf refugee camp, nor any woman named Fatima with a daughter named Shatha, or more generally a woman married to an interpreter working for the coalition, the Salvadorans in Najaf specifically. Nothing, nada. Sorry. Now who knows how doggedly this Brit asked his questions-it wasn’t really his focus, after all, just one of those quid pro quos one accepts in a war zone.”

The waitress materialized. McIlvaine ordered a grilled liver-wurst and Swiss on corn rye with pepperoncini and onions, mustard not mayo, coleslaw side, iced tea with extra lemon, then handed her the menu and watched her flee.

Lattimore, prompting, “Andy?”

“Where was I…” He adjusted his glasses, glanced at his watch. “Ah yes. Perhaps your Samir’s Fatima, if she exists, has moved to another camp, Trebil for instance. Maybe she’s gone back to Baghdad, meaning she could be God only knows where.

These are not people who trust the government or the press, the Palestinians, I mean. They feel very much hunted and betrayed. But there’s something else too. Something rather curious.”

A busboy delivered a dewy tumbler of iced tea and a saucer of lemon slices. McIlvaine fussed the straw from its wrapper. The busboy, a Latino, vaguely reminded Lattimore of Happy’s cousin Roque and he suffered a sudden flash of misgiving, wondering where the kid might be.

“My friend spoke to a contact he’s developed, a man once very well appointed within the Mukhabarat. Obviously, this is very sensitive. I can’t tell you any more than that about the man.”

Like I could burn him from here, Lattimore thought.

“But he remembered a Palestinian named Salah Hassan from the al-Baladiyat neighborhood. The man was arrested for trafficking in foreign currencies sometime after the end of the Iran-Iraq War.” He began squeezing lemon into his tea, one wedge, two. “Curiously enough, this Salah Hassan had a wife named Fatima and a daughter named Shatha. And after her husband’s imprisonment-they cut off his hand, like they do with thieves, then stuck him in a prison somewhere to be forgotten-the woman, this Fatima, she not surprisingly fell on very hard times. There are brothels in Baghdad, obviously, though they’re known to favor green lights, not red. Apparently this Fatima had a small but very devout clientele. But once Saddam’s regime fell and the Mahdi militias began their persecution of the Palestinians, which became quite indiscriminate after the bombing of the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra, she grabbed her daughter and fled the area and no one is willing to admit they know where she ran off to. Assuming anyone knows. Maybe one of those devoted patrons stepped up, whisked her off to his tent in Araby.”

The waitress returned to the table, this time with McIlvaine’s sandwich and coleslaw. Setting it down, she turned her attention to the remains of Lattimore’s lunch and cocked an eyebrow. He leaned back so she could clear. Earlier, he’d considered flirting-innocently, of course, unless she responded-but McIlvaine was like a sexual black hole. Once she was gone: “This source of your friend’s, any chance he got a look at the document you showed me, the one linking Samir to the Mukhabarat?”

McIlvaine stuffed a paper napkin into his collar, gripped half his sandwich in both hands and leaned forward over his plate. “It’s a contact sheet, that’s all. At some point he was brought in for an interview. That’s all you can infer from it reliably. Whether there were others-contacts I mean, interviews-it’s impossible to tell. Sorry, nothing else on that end to report.”

Lattimore smiled absently, wondering how long courtesy would demand he sit there watching the other man eat. Hearing the unmistakable popping growl of a Harley 110 V-Twin outside, then the distinctive potato potato potato of its idle as it backed to the curb, he felt an immediate pang of longing-the empty road, freedom. It occurred to him that Samir might have been one of this Fatima’s devoted johns, one whose ardor went haywire, to the point he married her in his mind, plotted to get her and her daughter out of Iraq forever. He was clawing his way to America, trying to find her the future she deserved, one for which she would be slavishly grateful, if he could ever find out where she was. Weirder things had happened, he supposed, especially when pussy was involved.

“By the way,” McIlvaine said, speaking through a mouthful of liverwurst, “any idea where our would-be terrorist might be at the moment?”

Forty-One

THEY ROSE EARLY AND DROVE THROUGH MILE AFTER DEEP-GREEN mile of banana, papaya and mango groves on their way north from Lázaro Cárdenas with its massive industrial port.

“They used to call this stretch of road Bandido Alley,” Bergen said at one point. “The whole state of Michoacán was pretty much a playground for the Valencia cartel. Then the army came in, put up roadblocks, cracked down on drug labs, burned pot fields. Drove the trouble off the coast and into the hills, at least until after dark. No guarantee it won’t come back, of course, but for now I think we’re safe.”

The checkpoints grew fewer in number over time and the Eurovan invariably got waved through. As the sunlight hit its noonday pitch the terrain grew dramatic, the road winding steeply along mountainsides that dropped off into crashing waves. When the road leveled out again the vine-covered hills to the east were wreathed in filmy cloud, the palm-rimmed beaches to the west almost monotonous in their perfection, untouched by tourism or development. On some the surf was wild and unwelcoming, on others it dissolved in a rumbling hiss onto vacant sand. Roque began to understand the stubborn pride of Mexicans, as well as their despair.

They stopped for gas in a beachfront hamlet, buying it from a bowlegged woman smoking a pipe who siphoned it from a drum. A little farther on they lunched on fresh ceviche at a seafood bar and stocked up on water for the afternoon heat.

The hours grew hallucinatory, dissolving into sweaty sunlit dreams of roadside shrines, wild hillsides, makeshift cornfields, thatched enramadas and palapas, interspersed with signs marking iguana crossings, armadillo crossings, warnings against hunting raccoons.

Once, they found themselves bestilled inside a pastel cloud of butterflies.

When they struggled through Manzanillo with its cruise-ship crowds, Bergen told the story of a woman known as Mountain Girl, one of Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who gave birth to her daughter Sunshine in the decrepit local hospital, only to flee her room one night when beach crabs, crazed by the full moon, stormed the newborn’s bed.

Colima dissolved into Jalisco, the villages thinned out and the Costa Alegre began, with its sculpted mansions on the cliffs and scowling guards at the gates: crisp uniforms, wraparound shades, machine guns. “Nice place to visit,” Bergen cracked, “if you’re Mick Jagger.”

As the sun dropped into the ocean beyond the Bahía de Banderas, Puerto Vallarta came and went in a blur of colonial-era cobblestone streets, roadside market stalls, the rebuilt promenade. “Just a little ways more,” Bergen said, to explain why he wasn’t stopping. “I know I’ve warned off driving at night but we’re so damn close. Keep your fingers crossed.”

They took the main highway toward Tepic, then cut off toward the coast, the road a rustic two-lane obstacle course of cavernous potholes, fearless chickens, slinking dogs. Here and there between nameless hamlets a bar appeared, nothing but a box of concrete trimmed with Christmas lights and barbed wire, a jukebox throbbing inside-cumbia, chuntaro, grupero-while outside jubilant drunks wandered the roadbed or stone-eyed men stood with arms crossed, watching the strange van rumble past.

The isolated stretches grew longer, the darkness so thick it felt like their headlights were boring a tunnel and they were barreling through it, jostled by the bad road, swarmed with dust.

It was in one of those mid-hamlet stretches of pitch-black night that the headlights appeared behind them. They seemed to float independently, buoyed by the darkness like fireflies, then the engines could be heard and Roque realized they were motorcycles. Shortly everyone turned around to look.

“They’re getting closer,” Roque said.

“I’m aware of that,” Bergen replied.

Soon the pack was right behind, eight of them riding two abreast, the riders’ silhouettes in the dust clouds, muscular arms slung from ape hangers, wind-raked hair. Samir stared at them, face skeletal in the joggling light. “And you said leave the weapons behind.”

Bergen dodged a rat-size tarantula scuttling across the road. “You think we’d even have gotten this far, past all those checkpoints, if there’d been a gun in this van?”

“What good will it have done,” Samir said, voice rising, “to get this far only to end here?”

“Relax, ace. We haven’t reached the end. Far from it.”

The motorcycles made no move to pass but seemed content to herd the van along from behind. Soon the salty tang of the surf broke through the smells of gasoline and dust. Just off the road, at the end of a rutted lane lined with sprawling jacarandas and guava trees, another bunkerlike building sat, barred windows glowing with caramel-colored light. Another two dozen motorcycles sat outside, a ragtag collection of café racers, dirt bikes, crotch rockets, choppers, rice burners, trikes. When Bergen hit his signal and braked for the turn, Samir leaned forward and hissed, “What in the name of God are you doing?”

Bergen downshifted and the van lurched, slowing. “Stopping for the night,” he said. “Unless you have somewhere else in mind.”

He pulled into a sandy spot beneath a sagging palm and killed the motor. The riders backed their bikes into the line outside the clubhouse, the revving engines a thunder roll in the settling dust. Some of the other members filled the lamp-lit doorway, tossing beers to the new arrivals. Beyond them, a fire roared in a barbecue pit.

Samir hand-mopped sweat from his stubbled face. “You know these people?”

Bergen opened the door and the overhead light flickered on, fixing the Arab’s expression. “I think that would be a reasonable inference.” His voice was free of mockery. “You know, a little gratitude wouldn’t kill you.”

As everyone else extricated themselves from the van, Bergen opened the back and withdrew one of the cardboard tubes with a rolled-up painting inside, then thumped it against his leg as he strolled toward the clubhouse entrance, the others straggling behind. The surf tumbled onto the shore beyond the tree line, breaking on the beach in surges of foam, the sharp scent of brine mingling with that of wood smoke and roasting fish.

A scrum of bikers waited outside the glowing frame of the doorway. Bergen held the cardboard tube aloft and called out to the nearest one, a princely muscular vato with swept-back hair and a soul patch furring his lower lip.-I have a little art for you, Chelo. A masterpiece.

BERGEN SAT DOWN AT ONE OF THE LONG HAND-CARVED TABLES AND several bikers joined him, including the one named Chelo, the leader. Roque and Lupe and Pingo and Samir, all but ignored, stood there idly until one of the bikers flashed a dentally challenged smile and gestured them grandly to an empty table. As Bergen unrolled his painting Roque took a second to get his bearings-an old Wurlitzer jukebox, two pool tables, a few bumper pinball machines. The bar looked like it had been salvaged from elsewhere and a banner hanging behind it read:

Los Mocosos Locos-San Blas, Nayarit

The bikers themselves were refreshingly stereotypical-shaved heads on some, tangled manes for the rest, a spattering of Fu Manchus, two or three chest-length beards, bandannas, harness boots, black leather chaps and vests with the club’s colors emblazoned across the back: a whorl-eyed skull over crossed six-shooters. It was like walking into a remake of Angels Unchained, except the skin shaded darker, the swagger wasn’t half as pompous and everybody spoke Spanish. Still, Bergen looked like a golf coach in their midst, with Roque and the rest his scraggly fourfold shadow.

As Bergen unrolled the painting-it was the same one he’d shown at the roadblocks, the one he compared to Chagall-Chelo reached into the pocket of his leather vest and withdrew a jeweler’s loupe and a razor blade. Bergen and one of the other bikers held the painting flat; Chelo set the loupe down onto the canvas and lowered his eye to the lens. Roque, sensing what he was about to watch but unable to believe it, traded a brief stunned glance first with Lupe then Samir-only Pingo seemed unbothered-then turned back in time to see Chelo, calm as a surgeon, razor a perfectly straight section from the canvas inch by inch. When the narrow strip was clear he handed it to one of the others, who coiled it around his neck like a chain of raffle tickets, then Chelo bent over the painting again, adjusted his loupe, found the next invisible demarcation and repeated the process, painstakingly trimming another strip from the canvas, the same width as the last.

Bergen glanced up once, winked at Roque, then returned his focus to his slowly vanishing masterpiece. One of the women, almost busting out of her leathers, came by with a bucket of iced beers and settled it onto the table for Roque and the others, while another brought a plate of mango slices, with roasted shrimp and mahimahi and pargo, marinated in lemon and chilies. The four of them dug in shamelessly, wolfing their food down with their hands, intermittently turning back to watch as bit by bit the painting vanished, carved into long shreds, each of which then got piecemealed further into squares the size of postage stamps. Fucking hell, Roque thought, backhanding the slop from his chin, we’ve been bluffing through checkpoints for two whole days with a couple hundred hits of blotter acid.

No money exchanged hands, Roque noticed, this was a longstanding deal, credit not an issue. A bit of a character, Father Luis had called Bergen, with a very storied life. That and then some, Roque thought. And what of the priest himself? Maybe he was the impersonator warned about on the poster at the entrance to his own damn church. If so, Roque thought, my uncle lies in his cemetery, consecrated by a phony sacrament. Bringing the point home was the current procession of Los Mocosos Locos idling in, approaching their leader and collecting a hit of acid into their cupped palms, swallowing it down like a communion wafer, then heading back outside for the fire pit.

Bergen ambled over to the table where Roque and the others sat, working on their third plate of roasted fish and shrimp.

– Looks tasty. He plucked a fatty charred hunk of pargo from the plate, chewed with gusto.-Everybody happy?

No one said anything. If they weren’t stunned from what they’d just observed they were tipsy from the beer, sated from the food.

Turning to Samir, Bergen lowered his voice. “You can thank me anytime.”

Samir looked incensed. “You used us.”

“That a joke? I’m doing you a favor.”

“We were a distraction. A decoy.”

Pingo, sensing the change in drift despite the use of English, excused himself, grabbing an extra beer from the ice bucket and steering a path outside. Bergen’s smile withered. “Listen, you ungrateful prick. Think of where you’d be right now without my help. If not dead, damn close. You might also consider that, should any of these good people get the idea you’ve got a problem with what you just watched-they get the vaguest notion you’re the talkative sort, as in better off facedown in a ditch somewhere-they won’t ask my permission. Now cheer the fuck up.” He slapped Samir’s shoulder like a sales manager coaxing the new guy onto the floor. “You’ve just been fed and you’ve got a place to sleep tonight. Because of me. Put it in perspective, Samir.” He pronounced it smear. “Or I’ll tell these nice folks you’ve got something you’d like to say.”

He reached for the bucket, collected the final beer, then turned to Roque and Lupe.-You two aren’t above singing for your supper, I hope.

THE GUITAR WAS BEHIND THE BAR, A GUILD DREADNOUGHT WITH fairly new strings. As Roque tuned and played a few test chords he smiled at the crisp sweet highs, the rich booming lows, a beautiful ax, Bluegrass Jubilee. He joined Lupe out among the others who circled the fire. The acid was starting to hit, a number of the bikers were staring into the flames as though seeing within them their own spirit faces; some picked through the charred crackling skin of the fish they’d just eaten, as though it held some mystic portent; others just sat and smiled, hugging their knees, heads eased back. The rest milled about, beers in hand, bestowing warm abrazos to every brother they met.

For the sake of visibility and projection above the crackling fire, they fashioned a mini-stage from four wood chairs, then hoisted Lupe onto it, perched like a surfer on an unsteady wave. Roque sat in a fifth chair to her side. He strummed the opening chords of “Sabor a Mí,” suggesting they open with that. Lupe nodded her assent and, as the introduction gently concluded, lifted her chin, closed her eyes and began the first verse.

It took a bar or two for her voice to find its center and the lyrics at first seemed lost in the roar of the fire and the distant surf. As the chorus came around, though, she had the crowd with her, a few even daring to sing along:

No pretendo ser tu dueño

No soy nada, yo no tengo vanidad

I don’t pretend to be your master

I am nothing, I have no vanity

Their voices spurred her on. The next verse bloomed with even deeper feeling and as she came back around to the chorus the others chimed in more devoutly, their gravelly voices harmonizing in tone if not pitch. As the song concluded, the klatch of tripping bikers erupted into whistling applause. A few wiped away tears.

Lupe leaned down toward Roque, gathering her hair away from her face. “‘Sin Ti’,” she whispered.

He felt stunned.-Are you sure?

She didn’t answer. Instead she stood up straight again on the rickety platform of chairs and called out:-On our way north, we lost someone. His name was Faustino. He was the uncle of Roque here. He was very kind to me. He believed in me. I would like to sing this next song in his memory. It meant a lot to him, because he too lost someone, lost her long ago.

She signaled to Roque that she was ready. He played the introductory chords, a lump in his throat-how is she going to sing, he wondered-but as her cue came around she closed her eyes, balled her hands into fists and lifted her face toward the night:

Sin ti

No podré vivir jamás

Without you

I will never be able to live

He had heard her sing often over the past few weeks, under so many different circumstances. He had not yet heard her sing like this. You’re going to break these crusty bastards’ hearts, he thought, if not mine. Had he not loved her already, he would have been helpless then. Again the bikers sang along on the chorus, their voices a growling background hum. They understood. They knew loss, they knew remembrance, even tripping their brains out, and this time, as Roque ended with a strumming flourish and Lupe wiped her face, their applause was a benediction.

That night the two of them slept in a corner of the clubhouse, tucked inside a single musty sleeping bag, pressed together, legs entwined. The others lay nearby, so there would be no lovemaking, but she lay her head upon his heart and he stroked her smoke-scented hair until sleep claimed first her, then him. Outside, the fire raged all night, bikers milling in and out, seeking beer or food, their voices subdued in a nameless reverence. Once, when Roque eased awake, startled by some sound, he noticed through fluttering eyelids that Samir was sitting against the wall, clutching his knees, staring at the two of them snuggled together, his face veiled with shadow.

Forty-Two

TWO DAYS AFTER THEY DID THE COP AND HIS FAMILY THE BOA got sick. The thing wasn’t eating. El Recio implored it, cooed to it, tried all its favorite snacks-live fetal rats, baby mice, bunnies-let it coil up in its favorite chair, stroked its mottled scales. He said they felt cold. How else the fuck they gonna feel, Happy thought, it’s a goddamn snake. But he knew what was happening, suspected even El Recio knew. God doesn’t take it out on you when you sin, that wasn’t how it worked. He’s not content with an uneasy conscience, he wants to push you into the flames, strip you of everything but the desire to die, watch you beg. And so he takes it out not on you but on those you love-wasn’t that what you’d done to him?

El Recio threw on a shirt, said they were going out. He wanted to buy a heat lamp.

“You’ll burn him up,” Happy said. “Why not just put him in the oven?”

El Recio froze. “What’d you just say?”

Happy caught the hinge in El Recio’s voice. The eyes, though, were far worse.

“I said you might burn him up.”

“Her.”

Get me out of this, Happy thought. “Her. Sorry. You might burn-”

“You said stick her in the oven.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I was trying-”

“You want to eat La Princesa?”

“No. No. Look, I just came by to talk about those houses-”

“Want to eat my baby?”

On and on it went, Happy constantly trying to get back to what he came to say-an offer he wanted to make, a favor if looked at right-but the skinny calvo just turned everything into drama. Finally, like a hotheaded madrecita, he shoved Happy down the hallway, out the door, tears in his eyes, screaming not to come back until he could show some human feeling.

Happy stood there in the mud-washed street, staring across the ripening sewer trench as the door slammed shut, the noise scattering the crows that’d perched in a paloverde tree in the empty lot next door. Cupping his hands, he shouted, “Lo siento.” I’m sorry.

Through the door, El Recio bellowed back: “Me vale madre.” I don’t give a damn.

On their way back from the job the other night, El Recio had told Osvaldo to stop the car as they passed a cluster of empty houses halfway between Cananea and Agua Prieta. Ghostly in the moonlight, they were part of a project that was only half finished, like so much of Mexico, at least the parts Happy had seen. El Recio said he and a partner were going in on three of the properties and he was worried about thieves, vandals.

Happy and Godo had gotten the sense they were drawing too much attention at the hotel, sooner or later someone could come around, find out about the weapons and God only knew where that would end. So Happy had figured they’d go down, squat in one of El Recio’s houses, ward off anybody who came around to rip out the copper or the woodwork or the rebar or anything else they could turn around for cash. He didn’t exactly say no, Happy told himself. If worse comes to worst, I’ll buy him a new fucking snake.

He wandered about the fringes of Agua Prieta, bought some tamalitos at a vendor truck and headed back to the hotel. The girl, Paca, was there again, another round of English. From the sound of things, the lesson plan was a little more basic today: roof and window, shirt versus blouse, fork knife spoon. Apparently the mother had come by yesterday, thanking Godo, helping rewrap the gauze on his hand. He seemed more relaxed. Maybe he’d gotten laid.

As Godo fingered open the tinfoil wrap of his tamalitos, Happy’s cell began to trill. Their eyes met, Happy dug the phone from his pocket. Again, an unknown exchange. If anyone was using this to track where I am, he figured, they’d have found me by now. He flipped the phone open, put his ear to the welcoming hiss.

“Happy? It’s me.”

Happy mouthed Roque’s name, letting Godo know who it was. “Where are you?”

“The bus station in Guaymas.”

Southern Sonora, Happy thought, though over on the Sea of Cortez. “Not so far.”

“No. We’ll be there soon. Look, Hap-”

“Samir there?” He thought of what El Recio had said, about the Americans, the deal they’d struck with Don Pato. How to explain that, after the man had come so close.

“Yeah. He’s good. Pain in the ass sometimes but good. Look, there’s something-”

“And let’s not forget the girl-Lupe, am I right?”

The hiss surged, thrumming like a hive. “I was about to tell you about that.”

“Kinda late in the game, wouldn’t you say?” Happy felt a curious absence of anger. Still, the point needed to be made.

Roque said, “How did you hear about her?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s not like you and I had a chance to talk much the past week.”

“That’s not an answer, neither.”

“Tío and I were trying to figure something out. A way to help her. It’s complicated.”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“Who she belongs to. They’re waiting for her.”

Another silence, longer this time. “Yeah, well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“It’s not negotiable.”

“With who-them or you?”

Happy felt his chest clench, like someone had tightened a screw. “I don’t deserve that.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just, if you knew what we’d been through-”

“I could say the same. So could Godo.”

A door slammed down the hall, then footsteps. Two men tramped toward the stair, one a murmur, the other a braying laugh. Their shadows flickered in the crack beneath the door.

“What do want from me, Hap? I didn’t tell you about Lupe because I wasn’t sure what to say. I am now. This guy we met in Oaxaca, he has an uncle who’s a cop in Naco. He can help us get across, no El Recio.”

Happy went cold-a cop? “You don’t know,” he said, wrestling the memory back into its hole, “what you’re playing at.”

“As far as anybody knows, we all died in the ambush with Tío. Five bodies burned up inside our car, no way they’ve ID’d who’s who yet. You can say you got a call from Tía Lucha, she heard from Oaxaca about the car. Understand? We’re dead. There’s no one to hand over.”

The tightening in his chest loosened a little, making him feel light-headed. The thing could work, he thought. It was lunacy, it was tempting the devil. But…

“Samir there? Something I’d like to talk to him about.”

“Can it wait? The bus is leaving and I need to know where we can meet up with you.”

He glanced over at Godo, fingers smeared with cheese and grease from the tamalito. The ugly one, he thought, the broken one. And I’m the stupid, worthless one.

Then there was Roque. The magical one.

“There’s a place south of town,” he said. “I’ll give you directions.”

ROQUE HUNG UP THE PHONE, OPENED THE FOLDING GLASS DOOR TO THE phone booth and followed Lupe and Samir to the bus. Bergen had dropped them at the station, handed them some cash for tickets plus a little extra for food. Pingo had gone with him-all that talk of hooking up with the union in Nogales for a work permit, utter bullshit-but he’d given them his uncle’s name and contact information in Naco.-He’s solid, he’d said, he’s tough. He won’t screw you.

Samir glanced over his shoulder as they passed through waves of diesel exhaust from the idling buses.-What did he say? The Arab had reverted to pest since they’d left San Blas, his impatience a kind of itch that everybody was obliged to scratch.

– He’s looking forward to seeing you again.

– No problems?

After all they’d endured, it seemed the most ludicrous question imaginable.

The bus was a throbbing tube of road-worn chrome, twenty years old at least, but luxurious compared to the chicken buses they’d seen farther south. Roque and Lupe climbed on board and sat near the front, plopping down side by side in vinyl seats patched with tape, clasping hands, hers cool inside his, trading the occasional smile. Samir sat alone behind them, so restless Roque felt like reaching around and smacking him one. Not that he wasn’t anxious himself. The driver sprawled in his seat, reading a wrestling magazine as he waited for stragglers, the time of departure apparently far more fluid than they’d feared. All that rush, he thought, now we sit, knowing it wasn’t the delay bothering him. Something he’d heard in Happy’s voice-or rather, something he hadn’t heard-it unnerved him. The words over the phone had seemed adrift, beyond weary, no feeling, no heart. Everyone’s been through a lot, he reminded himself, Happy’s comeback, feeling a twinge of shame. He’d expected to get dumped on, cursed, called a weakling and a failure for letting Tío die, then felt vaguely undone when it didn’t happen. Come on, he thought, resisting an urge to bark at the driver, let’s go, feeling the nearness of home as an urgency, at the same time knowing he was simply afraid.

Forty-Three

EVEN THE BUS DRIVER SEEMED CONFUSED, NOTHING BUT A CLUSTER of half-finished houses, the middle of nowhere. Twilight only enhanced the desolation. Spidery ocotillos and crook-armed saguaros manned the surrounding plain, at the edge of which dust devils swirled in the cool winds funneling down from the mountains. Overhead, a lone hawk caught an updraft and soared in its flux, a small black afterthought in a blackening sky.

The driver rechecked his odometer, confirmed they’d traveled the distance from Cananea that Roque had mentioned, then opened the door, wishing them luck as they gathered their things and shuttled out onto the roadbed. None of the other passengers looked at them. To make eye contact was, ironically, to become visible, and everyone bore a secret, even the children. Their bodies were freight, their lives for sale. The bus pulled away in a plume of black exhaust, its headlights plowing the dusk, and Roque couldn’t help but wonder if they’d been tricked.

Shortly, he realized they weren’t alone. On the stoop outside one of the unfinished houses a scrawny huelepega with matted black hair stuffed his face inside a brown paper bag, sucking up the glue fumes inside. A pack of dogs sulked nearby, trembling, sniffing the air. Then came a pistol shot-the dogs scattered, the gluehead crushed his bag to his chest, jerked to his feet and shambled off into the scrub.

Where in God’s name is he running, Roque thought, wondering if they should follow.

The gunman revealed himself, easing around the corner of one of the nearer houses. Pistol at his side, he approached with trancelike slowness, offering no greeting.

Samir put his hand to his heart. “It has been so long, my friend. My God, you terrified us.”

Happy stopped short, no reply, only a drifting smile, cut loose from the eyes. Turning toward Roque, he said simply, “Hey,” his voice raspy and soft.

Roque said, “You okay?”

“The girl,” Happy said. “She speak English?”

“Not much.” Roque reached for her hand. “Not well.”

Happy looked at their clasped hands, then her face, regarding her as though she were a problem he couldn’t hope to solve. “Remind me, her name?”

A sudden wind kicked up whips of dust. Everyone shielded their eyes.

“Lupe,” Roque said.

Realizing they were talking about her, she offered a shy smile. Happy turned away, gesturing with the pistol for everyone to follow as he led them back to the last house, the only one with a roof as far as Roque could tell. Inside, the walls were bare-no cabinets, no trim, no fixtures-the floors naked sheets of plywood that gave a little underfoot, a spooky sensation in the gathering dark. Cinder blocks sat propped on end like stools, nails lay scattered here and there amid trails of sawdust and cigarette butts and empty pint bottles. Even with the openings where windows should have been letting in air from outside, the room stank like an ashtray.

“How you like the place?” Happy glanced around like he was thinking of buying. “You wouldn’t believe what they want for it.”

Roque wondered where Godo was, the thought of seeing him again cropping up in his mind like a stone in his shoe these past few days. Missing him, wanting no part of him. First their mother, then Tío, who to blame? Who else?

Happy went on, “Came here to watch the place for the guy who owns it. Can’t figure out if we were too early or too late.”

Roque heard it. We. “So Godo’s here somewhere.”

From behind, a thundering: “Call the law!” He filled the doorway, shouldering a duffel. A ragged slide down his arm to the floor-whatever was inside clattered dully. Noticing the look on everyone’s face, he grinned. “Hold the applause.”

Roque felt a sudden coil of inner heat, so much held in check over the last few weeks, all of it now boiling up. “You sorry motherfucker!”

“Stop sniveling.” Godo spread his arms. “Time for abrazos.”

Roque didn’t move. He couldn’t. “Stop fucking around.” His glance darted toward Lupe, who seemed baffled. Me too, he wanted to tell her.

Godo approached. “Who says I’m fucking around?”

“You’re being a dick.”

“Because I want a hug from my hermanito?”

Before Roque could answer Godo swallowed him up in his arms, a warm musty funk rising from his body as he rocked a little back and forth. In a whisper, so no one else could hear: “I know you’re fucked up about losing Tío. Don’t carry it with you. Let that shit go.”

For a moment, Roque couldn’t believe what he’d heard. Who was this person, what had he done with Godo? He swallowed a surge of weepiness and managed to say, “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” Godo pressed his head against Roque’s. “Whole lotta sorry to go around. Not just you. It was all of us. We all lost Tío. Don’t carry that alone.” He gave two fierce slaps to Roque’s back and let him go. Loudly, for the others: “There. That so fucking unbearable?”

Dazedly, Roque embraced Happy as well, for the sake of symmetry if nothing else. Introductions went around. Samir, as always impatient, asked if they were crossing that night.

“I need to talk to you about something,” Happy said. The way it came out, everyone sank. “The people we arranged things through to begin with-I know, we don’t owe them nothing at this point but hear me out-they know something about you. An American showed up, talked to the patrón who runs things along this stretch of the border. You’re supposed to get handed over to him, this American. He represents some company out of Dallas.”

Samir’s deep-set eyes drew back even further. He clutched his bag. “No.”

“There’s all variety of shit going on here behind the scenes, Samir, I can’t control none of that. But Godo and me, we can’t go home no more. You don’t go with these people, this honcho from Dallas, we’re up for grabs.”

Samir looked like a touch might knock him down. “I saved your life.”

Happy looked away. “I’ve been wanting to ask you about that, actually.”

“Ask me-”

“Roque tells me you’re damn handy with a gun. Funny how I never saw that side of you. Not even when we were in the middle of a firefight.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I figured you’d say that.”

Lupe, sensing a wrong turn somewhere, looked to Roque for reassurance but he had none to give. Godo blocked the door.

“This American, this man from Dallas.” Samir pointed, as though the city were only a short walk away. “He is CIA. You give me to him”-a finger snap-“I disappear.”

“I don’t know that.”

“They will hood me, torture me. I’ll end up in some secret prison. Worse, get handed over to someone else, the Egyptians, the Thais. Let them do the dirty work.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they can.”

Happy reached into his back pocket, withdrew a mangled pack of Marlboros, shook one free, lipped it. “Maybe all they want to do is talk.” The cigarette bobbing. “That be so terrible?”

“And tell them what?”

“Whatever.” Using a Zippo, Happy lit up, shrugged. “Everything.”

“And if I have nothing to tell them, nothing they want to hear, what do you think happens? Think they believe me?”

“Could be they want you to infiltrate a mosque, maybe a sleeper cell, maybe just a bunch of deadbeats hanging around some café, talking tough about jihad. You want asylum? Looks like you’ll have to earn it.”

Samir turned one way, another, looking for a way out. “You don’t understand.”

Happy exhaled a long plume of smoke. “You keep saying that.”

A nervous laugh, disbelief. “What else can I say?”

“No one understands. Not as far as you’re concerned.”

“Why are you angry with me?”

“I’m not-”

“What have I done? Why betray me like this?”

Happy took another long drag. “Who are you, really? Let’s start there.”

Again, the hand across the heart. “I have never once lied-”

“I have no idea who you are.”

Roque glanced toward the door, wondering what if anything Godo felt about all this, but except for a vague impatience there was nothing in his expression to read. Sure the Arab was a pain in the ass but this was over the top. “Happy, what are you getting at?”

“Butt out, Roque.”

“No. You don’t tell me that, not after everything-”

“This don’t concern-”

“This isn’t necessary, okay? I told you, this guy in Naco-”

“For fuck’s sake, you stupid? He’s a cop! I don’t care whose uncle he is. You gotta trust me on this, you go to this guy to get you across, you’ll never be heard from again. Okay? Especially with our friend here in tow.” He gestured toward Samir, then Lupe. “Same with her.”

“Happy-”

“The patrón wants a songbird, Roque. They all do down here. One of the perks of being el mero mero. He’ll make her a star. Life could be fucking worse.”

“Now you’re the one who sounds stupid.”

“Not like they’re gonna pimp her out, okay? Everybody’s being so fucking dramatic.”

Again, Lupe looked to Roque for some reassurance. There was none to find. She turned to Happy, incensed, scared.-Tell me what is happening. Not him. Me.

Before Happy could answer, a caravan of four SUVs turned off the road into the development, headlights raking the forward houses as the engines throttled down for the switch from pavement to gravel.

Roque turned back to Happy, took a step toward him. “What have you done?”

Happy didn’t move. A twinge of his eye, a blink. “I have no clue who that is.”

Samir lunged toward one of the windows, hiking his leg over the sill, ducking down. He was halfway out when Godo sailed across the room, caught him, grabbing him by the shirttail first, then a crippling punch to the small of the back, like some instinct from the war had taken hold. Lupe, seeing the door unguarded, bolted, she was gone before Roque could stop her. He grabbed his knapsack, followed, glancing back from the doorway as Godo headlocked Samir, twisting him to the floor. Happy just stood there, tip of his cigarette a curl of ash as he stared in the general direction of the oncoming vehicles, looking as though to move would be an admission of something he still felt a need to keep private.

THE DARKNESS ACROSS THE DESERT FLOOR FELT IMPENETRABLE, WORSE than inside the house, but once his eyes adjusted Roque caught Lupe’s silhouette vanishing past a snarl of cacti. He hurried after her just as the SUVs braked and men poured out. Over his shoulder, he recognized the huelepega from earlier, passing through the headlight glare, looking not quite so feeble now. They’d known, he thought. They had a lookout.

He caught up with Lupe, snagged her arm. She fought back, throwing an elbow, a wild kick.-Let go!

– Quiet! Get down.

He dragged her behind a thicket of underbrush circling the base of a massive saguaro, its barbed arms snaking up and out in all directions. They both panted from exertion, trying to stifle the sound. The dogs from earlier had reappeared around the house and now skittered away as perhaps a dozen men surrounded it, all of them armed. Headlights lit up the house from two sides. From somewhere in the foothills a coyote howled, then one of the men called out, addressing Happy by his given name.

– PABLO, STOP BEING SUCH A HOPELESS ASSHOLE. COME ON OUT.

Happy, recognizing the voice, figured the Spanish was a play to the others, the men setting up the kill zone. Doesn’t matter what I say or don’t say, he thought, it’s all an act. This is what I get for mocking a snake.

Godo gestured everyone down, out of the light streaming in through the windows, then belly-crawled to his duffel, shook it open and began pulling out the weapons, the shotgun, the Kalashnikov, the pistols. He flexed his gauze-wrapped hand, then slammed a magazine into the AK, the others already loaded. To Happy, he said, “I’m assuming you know who’s out there.”

A burst of machine-gun fire ripped along the outer walls of the house, a few rounds pitching in through the window, tearing pieces of cinder block away like shrapnel and leaving clouds of chalky dust behind.

Happy said, “The ones I told you about.”

– Come on, Pablo. What, you think I wouldn’t figure this shit out, all that crap about wanting to do me a favor? You got the Arab and the girl in there. I understand, I do. Nothing terrible is going to happen to them. Nothing terrible will happen to you. Play it smart.

“Where’s Roque?” Godo asked.

“The girl ran out. He went after her.”

“They think she’s in here.” Using his teeth, Godo began tearing the gauze away from his hand, peeling it off in shreds. Shortly, he broke into a smile. “They got away, her and Roque.”

The lucky one, Happy thought. The magical one.

“I won’t go with those men,” Samir said. He lay across the room, staring at the glassless, light-filled window. “A man cannot choose when he will die, only how.”

Godo flexed his naked hand, still black and red from its burns. “That’s deep.” He wiped a smear of ointment onto his pant leg. “Kinda premature, though.”

“Don’t hand me over to them. Kill me. Say it was self-defense.”

“They’re going to kill us,” Happy said, talking to neither of them in particular. “He thinks I went behind his back. That can’t be forgiven. There’s nothing to say. I can’t make it right, not with them. And I’ve seen how they kill people.”

Godo picked up the shotgun, chuckling miserably as he racked a load of nine-shot into the chamber. “Vamos rumbo a la chingada.” We’re on our way to join the fucked. He turned to Samir and hefted the Kalashnikov. “I hear you know how to use one of these.”

The Arab began to crawl across the room, inching on hands and knees, butt high, head low, made it halfway across when another spray of machine-gun fire, this one longer, rocked the small house. He dove down, covering his head as bullets rang against the tin roof and tore away more of the wall. Once the firing stopped he scurried the rest of the way, joining Godo near the door as the dust swirled and drifted overhead.

– I’m not fucking around no more, Pablo. Hands on your head, you and everybody else, one by one through the door, or we gonna smoke you out.

“That sounds like an MP5.” Godo edged closer toward the door, hoping for a peek. “They’ll have trouble with muzzle lift. Bitchin’ little gun, though.”

“They’re off-duty cops, soldiers,” Happy said. “Maybe even special forces.”

“The Bean Berets,” Godo said.

Samir cradled the AK-47 with a kind of weary admiration. “I wish I had a bayonet.”

Godo chuckled again, a little less miserably. “Good attitude.”

“Give me the Glock,” Happy said. “It’s the one I know best.”

Godo slid the pistol across the plywood floor. “Don’t plug yourself in the leg.”

Happy leaned forward for it, dropped the magazine, made sure it was fully loaded, then slammed it home again. The chamber already held a round. Don’t plug yourself, he thought, Glock leg, they called it, the safety in the trigger, so touchy even cops shot themselves.

Godo slid the Smith and Wesson.357 after, nodding for Happy to take it, then stuck the Beretta 9mm into his own waistband. Searching the duffel for an extra mag for the AK, he found it, banged it against the floor, then tossed it to Samir. “You’ll have more firepower than the two of us combined. Otherwise I’d offer you a pistol too.”

“It’s okay,” Samir said, jamming the magazine into his trousers at the small of his back. “Pistols are for officers.”

Godo smiled. “You left-handed or right?”

Samir lifted his right hand, jiggled it.

“Okay, I’ll go first. I’ll circle left, draw fire. You circle right, aim for the muzzle flashes. Happy? From the sound of things, I’d guess the guy who’s talking out there, El Recio, he’s almost a straight shot from the door, maybe twenty yards. You focus on him. Take him out, maybe the others will call it a day. If all goes well, we’ll meet back at the pickup.”

“Godo-”

“There is no plan B.”

A canister tumbled in through the door, spinning once or twice as it spit a billowing plume of blue smoke. Godo rose into a crouch, bounced twice. “Everybody good?” He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder. “Honor, gentlemen. Think like a killer. Act like you’re already dead.”

HE WAS HIT TWICE BEFORE HE WAS THROUGH THE DOOR BUT HE’D expected that. You measure a warrior by the damage he inflicts, yes, but also by what he withstands. Gunny Benedict taught him that, just as he taught him that pain is illusion, it’s only there to fool you, hold you back. One round caught him in the ribs, the other the thigh. Adrenalin kept him upright, moving to contact. He spotted for muzzle flash, fired, pumped, fired, trying to stay out of the headlights’ center but always moving, arcing left. He saw a man spin down, another cover his face and drop his weapon, silhouettes cowering by their SUVs. The battle distortion he’d known before returned, the disconnect between sight and sound, feeling like a promise, harkening back to Al Gharraf, Diwaniyah, Fallujah, and in the sudden stillness he heard the plucking of guitar strings, “Canción de Cuna,” Roque’s Cuban lullaby. It gave him heart, even as machine-gun fire raked his knees and he twisted down into powdery dirt and razor-sharp rocks, struggled to rise, caught another round in the neck and one more in his skull. Blinding, the last. He rolled onto his side, racked, fired, racked again, aiming into the silence until there were no more rounds in the magazine and he dragged the Beretta from his waistband, tried again to sight a target, taking fire like a pincushion and unable to feel the trigger against his finger or the hand at the end of his arm, unable to hold up his head while his throat filled with blood and the headlight glow swelled like an incoming wave. Once the wave crested he saw it, suspecting it had been there all along, suspended in the young girl’s hand. The bright red blossom of the fire tree.

SAMIR DOVE OUT THE DOORWAY FIRING ON FULL AUTO, THE HEAVY AK rounds splintering glass, carving up metal. Targeting on muzzle flash in the drifting smoke, he spotted one gunman, fired, took him down, sighted on another, fired, resisting the upward pull of the barrel. Another kill. He caught them by surprise, all eyes focused on Godo. We’ll meet back at the pickup, he thought, daring to picture the off-campus cottage, brickwork and vines, the woman kneeling in her garden, the girl practicing clarinet inside, the library shelves lined with Don Quixote, Ulysses, Life on the Mississippi, Yo el Supremo, then a spray of bullets, like a sudden cloud of wasps, encircling, tightening, closing. He felt the slash of pain across his back even as he fired and took down one more gunman but the weakness came right after, legs jibbing, no strength. He fought to right himself and just that pause left him open. Another blistering stripe, this one up his chest and into his face, he spun backward. What he feared became what he knew-Fatima, Shatha, forgive me my lies, my weakness, my failure-even as he drew himself up, hefted the rifle above his head like an ax and charged the faceless invader before him.

Inshallah…

HAPPY GAGGED AS THE BLUE SMOKE THICKENED, REMINDING HIMSELF that all he’d wanted was to be a better son. Rising to his feet, he firmed his grip on the Glock in his right hand, then with his left drew the Smithy from under his belt. He felt a sudden terror that no one would remember him-mother, father, both dead-he would not be missed by any living thing. Roque, maybe. Run, he thought, run fucker, you and your woman, make it across and remember me.

He dove out the door and headed as best he could tell straight for El Recio, guessing the spot where his voice had come from. Sure enough, there he stood, taking cover behind the door of one of the SUVs, watching Godo convulsing on the ground. Samir was off to the right somewhere. Was Osvaldo there? Kiki? Hilario? Were there ghosts to account for? Happy charged, firing two-handed, making half the distance before the gaunt bald asthmatic even knew he was there. I’ve never loved anything, he realized, as much as this fuckface loves his damn snake. The rest of the distance collapsed and he was pounding with the pistol butts, bashing the face, erasing that smile, crushing the throat, fighting off the hands of the other men trying to drag him off and remembering the song the bastard had sung that night, in the cop’s kitchen, as they forced the parents to watch their little boy get burned alive:

Hoy es mi día

Voy a alegrar toda el alma mía

Today is my day

I’m going to fill my soul with joy

Forty-Four

THEY FLAGGED DOWN A BUS ABOUT A MILE NORTH OF THE HOUSE. Lupe, sensing the opportunity in the gunfight, had slipped off during the worst of it, when Godo went down. Roque didn’t follow, not then, he couldn’t. Instead, jumping up idiotically, he’d called out or screamed, made some sort of sound, no memory now exactly of what; his throat still felt scorched. He might as well have stayed quiet for all the good it had done; no one heard him over the gunfire. At some point he turned, scrambled after Lupe, remembering none of that, either. But on the bus his memory revived, seeking its vengeance. Images clapped and hammered inside his brain, flashes of the bloodshed, his brother, his cousin, the maddening Arab, then wave after wave of shame and guilt, panic attacks, stabbing blame: You ran. You survived.

They stepped off the bus at the turnoff to Naco, then thumbed a ride from a fat-bellied trucker in a Stetson who turned out to be an evangélico, witnessing them gustily during the drive then dropping them off at his storefront church. They stayed long enough to justify a fistful of cookies chased with scalding coffee, then muddled their way to the bus terminal, knowing they’d find phones there. Reading the number off the torn corner of a paper bag, Roque dialed Pingo’s uncle, the cop from Naco.

His name was Melchior. At the invocation of his nephew’s name he agreed to meet at a taqueria near a small park three blocks from the port of entry but he couldn’t get free until late the next day.-I’m sorry, he said, I have work, my family. But tomorrow, yes, we’ll get together.

The storefront church had closed up by the time they returned so they found a place to hide for the night in the alley around back, Lupe’s head in Roque’s lap. Neither slept.

Come dawn they bought coffee and pan dulce at a nearby panadería and breakfasted standing beneath the awning of a pawnshop catering to those needing cash to cross over. The store didn’t open until eight but already people were coming up alone or in groups, peering in through the ironwork.

Once the church opened its doors they sat near the back in folding chairs, suffering the heated exhortations of the preacher from his lectern or indulging the quieter testimonials of the churchwomen, offering sweets, bestowing unsolicited advice, reading at length out loud from their Bibles. Finally, come four o’clock, they made their way to the taqueria and waited.

He showed up with a gun on his hip and a badge on his belt, no uniform. Driving a rust-tagged Cutlass twenty years old, he took them east out of town toward the Mule Mountains, the peaks stitching north across the border, then pulled off the highway onto a rough dirt lane that trailed away among jagged rocks crowned with creosote bushes and paloverde, parking on a bluff in the middle of nowhere.

He glanced left and right, ahead and behind.-I don’t know what Pingo promised. But everything has changed up here. You don’t have coyotes working the border solo like before, they’re either dead or they’ve signed on as guías with the cartels, who use the gangs as enforcers. A man I know, a cop like me, he and his family were tortured and killed the other night-what he did or didn’t do exactly I don’t know, but everyone in the corridor heard the news. There was a boy, seven years old, the stories of what they did to him… I have a family. I will not let that happen to them.

– I’d never ask such a thing, Roque said. He glanced sidelong at Lupe sitting alone in the backseat. He doubted he had ever felt so tired.

– Life means nothing to these fucks. If you’re lucky you just get used as decoys. The others, they take your money, make you a promise, then disappear, or take you into the desert and leave you there. Even the decent ones shake you down for more once they get you across.

– But isn’t there some way, without dealing with this El Recio, that we could make the crossing?

– I know this El Recio-know of him, I should say. If you owe him? Pay.

– We did pay. Now he’s claiming we didn’t. He won’t let Lupe cross regardless.

Melchior shook his head.-I don’t envy you. But I don’t know how to help you, either.

– What if we cross somewhere else? Farther west. Nogales. Maybe California.

– It’s harder there than here. And ask yourself, can you outrun word from El Recio’s spies if you get spotted? If there’s a price on your head, you can bet there are people looking for you. Bus drivers, street vendors, cabbies, bartenders, you don’t know who’s taking the money, playing along. More than you can imagine, believe me.

With her chin, Lupe gestured to the mountains straight ahead.-There has to be a way across through there.

– Sure, there’s a way. And you can take your chances. But once you reach the border they have hidden infrared cameras, thermal sensors that pick up your body heat, seismic sensors that hear your footsteps. They’ve got border guards with night-vision goggles stationed every half mile in places, not to mention the fucking fence. At the end of this road right here, about a mile or so up the canyon, there’s a pass that runs along the western slope of those hills, straight ahead, not too steep, not too difficult, but cold as fuck at night and that’s when you have to cross. That’s also when the snakes come out, rattlers and sidewinders, the tarantulas, the scorpions. The pass disappears into those trees, then winds down on the far side beyond the border. The fence doesn’t reach that far up the mountain, that’s how you get through. But remember, most people who cross reach a designated snatch spot, get scooped up and taken to a safe house. You don’t have somebody waiting. You’ll be stranded over there with miles and miles to walk and the border patrol will be onto you before you even get to a major road-if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, you walk until you die. Your only chance is to reach someone’s house, break in and hide, maybe steal a car, head for Tucson or Phoenix. Or you can try to find a church, beg for someone’s help. But your chances are slim. The gringos have lost all pity. Ask for so much as a drink of water they’ll turn you in. Or shoot you.

Lupe leaned forward in the backseat, gripped Melchior’s shoulder.-It can’t be as impossible as you say. Thousands get across every year, every month.

– Because the cartels have millions for bribes, they corrupt the border guards. Those guards leak word about when and where a spot will be clear. Yes, thousands get across. But thousands get caught, too. The cartels determine who gets lucky, who gets screwed. And the screwed will be back, paying over and over.

Lupe moved her hand from Melchior’s shoulder to Roque’s.

– Come on. We’ll walk. He says there’s a pass at the end of this road. It’s still light enough, we can find it. What good will sitting here do us? The longer we-

Glancing up into the rearview mirror, she saw Melchior’s eyes flare with dread. Spinning around, she saw the headlights in the twilight, the churning plume of dust.

Melchior turned to Roque and raised his hands.-Take my gun, hold it on me. When Roque just sat there baffled, Melchior shouted:-Take my fucking gun and hold it on me!

Roque did as he was told, glancing through the rear window at the approaching vehicle-a black Chevy Suburban with tinted glass, lurching as it hit the rocks and ditches along the unpaved road. Melchior reached around behind him, opened his door, stepped out of the car with his hands held high so everyone in the approaching Suburban could see.-There is a flashlight in the glove compartment. You’ll need it-but be careful not to use it too much, they’ll spot you from twenty miles away coming down the mountain. Now get behind the wheel, drive like hell to the end of this road, then run for the trees up the hill. He stumbled backward in the dusty gravel.-If you ever see Pingo again? Tell him to forget my name.

The crack of a pistol shot, then the bullet whistling overhead: Melchior dove for the ground, Roque lurched across the center console, got behind the wheel, turned the ignition, lodged the gearshift into drive and shoved the gas pedal to the floor just as a second shot pierced the back window. Lupe screamed. Roque ventured a quick over-the-shoulder glance and spotted blood as the car fishtailed up the soft rutted road.

– Are you all right? He palmed the wheel, righting the car.

She didn’t answer, crouched down on the seat. The back window was webbed with fissures spiraling out from the bullet hole. The Cutlass lurched into a rut, dug out again, chewing up rocks, veiled in clouds of dust as it continued up the impossible road. Roque glanced back again, saw her right hand grabbing her left shoulder, threads of blood between her fingers.-It’s all right, she hissed.-Hurry, go!

He considered some sort of evasive back and forth but, given the ruinous condition of the road, the vagueness of the path, he feared he might just as easily wander into a bullet’s path as out of one. Speed, he thought, get away from them, create distance so you have time to run.

He gunned the engine, steering around the worst craters and biggest rocks but otherwise barreling straight ahead, checking his mirror from time to time, trying to see if, through the shifting clouds of dust, he was managing any real separation. The sound of more gunshots but only one bullet landed, hitting the trunk with a pinging thoont. He soared over a sudden crest, a brief gut-fluttering weightlessness, then the chassis crashed down again, first the rear, then the front, tires biting into the rocky sand as he regained control, accelerated out of another fishtail and charged forward.

In the backseat Lupe was breathing fast and shallow but made no other sound, lying flat to keep from getting shot twice. Roque thought of his uncle, wondered what advice he’d give, thought about Godo too, Happy and Samir, vowing to himself he wouldn’t punk out now, wouldn’t shame them, then saw ahead the pine and oak trees marking the first ascent of the foothills. A low outcropping of marbled rock loomed a mere hundred yards ahead, he reached for the glove compartment, slapped it open, rummaged around for the flashlight, all the while gripping the wheel with his left hand, steering straight ahead at full speed. Over his shoulder, he shouted at Lupe: “¡Listo!”

As he approached the road’s end he fishtailed the car around so that it faced the way they’d just come. He shouted for Lupe to get out, waited for her to shove open the rear door and flee the car, then got out himself, found a rock the size of a melon, lodged it onto the gas pedal, threw the gearshift into drive. Following Lupe, he scrambled up the rocks toward the tree line. The Cutlass lumbered off, picking up speed as it lurched downhill, forcing the approaching Blazer to stop, turn, dodge the huge bouncing downhill missile until it slammed into a sprawling jut of scrub-nested saguaros with a dusty clanking thud.

Lupe faltered as Roque came up behind and he caught her sleeve, dragged her upright as still another shot rang out, the bullet whistling past them into the trees-a snapped branch, a shower of dry pine needles. He pulled her roughly after him, the rocks beneath their feet razor-edged in places, in others soft and flinty, powdered with dust, littered with pellet-shaped acorns. As they reached the edge of the forest he caught the welcoming tang of resin.

Below, the Blazer careened to a lurching stop, followed by three more gunshots, strangely wild, then a sudden silent impulse told him: Stop! He drew up in his tracks, used his body as a shield to keep Lupe behind him, just as he felt the rippling concussion of air, like an invisible current pulsing in front of him. The bullet missed by inches.

A clipped throaty voice called out:-Roque Montalvo! We’ve got your cousin.

He hurried beneath the tree canopy and pushed Lupe behind him before turning back, thinking: Spanish, clever, work on both our consciences, play one against the other. A tall spidery man with a shaved head leaned against the SUV, clutching his mid-section, his movements stitched with pain. A smaller man dressed in black with long flowing hair climbed out from behind the wheel, flourishing a pistol. A third man in a suit and cowboy boots dragged from the backseat a fourth and final man, this one with his hands tied behind his back: Happy. He staggered blindly, weak from a beating, his shirt dark with blood. The man in the suit pressed a pistol to his head and drove him to his knees, the spindly bald one calling out:-Come back down, you and the girl. Otherwise…

Roque still held Melchior’s pistol. From this distance, though, he doubted he’d hit anyone, no matter how carefully he aimed. He might be able to slow them down if they chose to climb up after them but that was the best he could hope for. The air felt cool in the tree shade. Another hour or so, the sun would set.

Happy threw back his head, a soulless voice, “Fuck them, chamaco. Run!”

Using his pistol, the one in the suit cracked down hard, the back of the skull. Happy crumpled, toppling onto his side in the dust.

– Is this what you want? The tall one bent over, coughed, waved a limp hand toward Happy.-Come on. Think. You won’t make it, you know that, right? I know just where that trail comes out.

All I gotta do, make one call, they’ll be there on the other side, waiting. Stop dicking around, give your cousin a chance here.

From behind, Lupe, her voice tight with pain:-I can’t ask you to do this.

He could smell the stale coppery odor on her breath.-Then don’t ask.

She tried to brush past.-I owe it to his father.

Roque stopped her with his arm, holding her back-he could feel her draining strength.-They’re going to kill you, if you’re lucky. Kill us all. Who’s that repay?

Her eyes met his and yet he couldn’t feel himself within their gaze.-I’ve brought nothing but sorrow to your family.

– What’s happened, we brought on ourselves. Happy knows that better than anybody.

– It’s asking too much.

– You’re not asking anything. Now trust me.

He braced himself against one of the trees, lifted Melchior’s gun and steadied it, closing one eye, squinting to aim with the other. For the merest instant he revisited the day that Tío Faustino moved in, bringing his fourteen-year-old son along with him. He wasn’t known as Happy yet, that would come later, but even then he was cool and watchful and defiantly sullen. Godo hated him at first glance but that was Godo. Roque wondered if he’d bother to laugh if somebody told a joke. Tía Lucha made pozole for dinner, a hominy stew with chunks of pork, and no one spoke during the meal, spoons traveling from bowl to mouth uninterrupted except for Tío Faustino’s increasingly hopeless stabs at chat. At one point, Roque’s eyes rose from the table and he caught the taciturn newcomer, the boy named Pablo, staring. The eyes were black and deep and hard. Roque couldn’t help himself, maybe it was fear, maybe it was daring, maybe the simple human need to connect, but he smiled. And for a fleeting second he saw a softening in that unavailing gaze, the slightest lifting of the mask.

If I can just hit one of them, he thought, Happy will know I didn’t simply abandon him. The one in the suit presented the best target. If he missed, he might hit Happy, but he doubted whatever agony he caused would add much to what was sure to follow. He drew a bead, fixing the middle of the man’s chest in the V-shaped notch of the sight. He took in a breath, held it, pulling gently, slowly, three times in succession. As always, he was amazed at how loud it was. Even more astonishing, the one in the suit flinched and staggered and clutched at his neck, tripping over his own feet and toppling clumsily to the rocky ground as though suddenly butted by an invisible goat. The other two scattered, searching for cover.

I won’t stay and pretend I can do better than that, he thought. I won’t stick around and watch as they kill him. He turned toward Lupe. She was clutching her shoulder and the bloodstain on her shirt had grown beyond the spread of her hand. If we can get halfway by nightfall, he thought, we might have a chance. He no longer bothered with hope. Everything now reduced to will and luck. He took her free hand, pulled her behind him as he resumed their climb through the trees.-My cousin understands.

Forty-Five

THE CHOPPER SET DOWN A HUNDRED YARDS FROM THE CIRCUS OF strobe lights swirling across the desert plain, the law-enforcement vehicles encircling a small enclave of unfinished houses, the capital of nowhere. Lattimore and the others aboard crouched and ran through the rotor wash and churning dust toward the nearest of the houses while the Mexican PC-6 that had escorted them since crossing the border tailed away, puttering off in a northerly loop.

It was just past sunset, not quite dark, the western sky a crimson fantasy of low swirled cloud getting swallowed up by night. He’d flown from San Francisco on a moment’s notice aboard an agency Gulfstream, a rare extravagance, arriving in Tucson a mere hour ago, met at the airstrip by an FBI liaison named Potter who’d steered him immediately to the helipad. They were joined there by a crew of ICE agents, like Lattimore wearing raid jackets with their agency affiliation emblazoned across the back, plus a few brush-cut military sorts Lattimore learned were DIA, two tight-lipped civilians who were clearly spooks, bringing Andy McIlvaine to mind-he’d dropped off the planet since their impromptu lunch-all of them sent here to lend some form of credibility to what he could only assume would be a dog and pony show of inimitable Mexican overkill.

They were met by a uniformed police officer who snapped to with a crisp salute, then led them through the idling crowds of chattering cops to the one roofed house in the tiny development, inside which a battery of tungsten lights transformed the shoddy interior into a brilliant if sordid photo shoot. Near the far wall, the bullet-riddled body of an Arabic-looking male lay sprawled in conspicuously little blood amid the scattered cinder blocks, the sawdust, the litter of nails. Beside him, in even worse shape if such a thing was possible, lay Happy Orantes’s cousin, the ex-marine with the torn-up face, Godo. The whisking hum and whirr of cameras battled with the rumble of generators and a wafting stentorian narrative provided by a jefe de grupo of the MFJP, the federal judicial police. The jefe, bedecked in stiffly creased khakis, hands clasped in the small of his back, appeared to be in control of the proceedings.

With the arrival of the Americans he took a break from his interview and swept forward, hand extended, face crafted into a catlike smile. The cameras followed him as though drawn by gravity. His name tape read “Orozco.”

“Welcome, gentlemen.” His English was soft, Southwestern. “I was just telling the members of the press about our operation, our good fortune in discovering a suspected terrorist before he was able to cross into your country.”

Lattimore only half listened to the rest-the anonymous tip that led them to this house, the fierce standoff and eventual commando assault, the regrettable but unavoidable death of the terrorist and a gang member who’d fought to protect him. Out of some nagging perversity he wanted to point out how obvious it was the bodies had been dragged in from somewhere else but doubted anyone would care much. The skin of the story would never get peeled back, no one wanted to see what festered underneath. It was one of those tales, the kind all sorts of people want too much to hear-why bother much over details? And though Lattimore finally had in his possession the paperwork from the Baghdad office that could lay waste to the vast edifice of bullshit the jefe was erecting, he lacked authority to share. The bureau wanted no part of making its efforts in this farce a matter of public record. Let the Mexicans claim victory. Let them raise the specter of terrorists at our door, without us or them having to prove much. The feigned threat served the purpose of truth-or what the geniuses in D.C. wanted known as truth. Besides, Lattimore knew he’d bargained on much the same indifference to what was real, what was pumped-up nonsense. There were no innocents in the room.

Regardless, it would matter only to him that a woman named Fatima Hassan with a teenage daughter named Shatha, both using forged papers and assumed names, had finally been located and interviewed at the refugee camp at Al Tanf. The pseudonyms accounted for the delay in proper identification. Fatima confirmed she was the widow of Salah Hassan, who had disappeared in the custody of the Mukhabarat when her daughter was a child. Her husband was charged with money laundering and never emerged from prison. She further confirmed, after evidence was provided, that she worked at a Baghdad brothel after her husband’s arrest, did so for some years, and that her forged identity papers had been provided by the criminal syndicate that ran the brothel and provided protection for her and the other women working there.

Asked if she knew of a Samir Khalid Sadiq, she conceded that she did; like her, he was part of the Palestinian community in Iraq. Pressed on the matter, she admitted as well that he had been a client, a particularly loyal one-obsessive, perhaps, was a better word, but his generosity not just to her but to her daughter had convinced her to look past his infatuation. She said she knew he had been a soldier during the war with Iran, was fluent in both English and Spanish, and worked for a local TV station translating news wire items or so he had always told her. After the U.S. invasion, he made a promise to help her emigrate to America. With the war’s dislocations, however, she lost touch with him.

When asked if she was aware that this same Samir Khalid Sadiq had been the informant who had identified her husband to the Mukhabarat, she fell silent for several minutes. When she finally spoke, she said simply, “I forgave him long ago, just as he forgave me.” She declined to say more.

“We have reliable information,” Orozco announced, turning toward the cameras with that same feline smile, “that the Arab was in contact with local pandilleros.” Gang members. “This was how he expected to get across, with their assistance. And as I have said, one of them died here with him. We are following up on this and hope to have more arrests in due time.”

A predictable move, Lattimore thought, keep the thing open-ended, so you could draw it out until memories faded, the next god-awful whatever stole the headlines. If necessary, nail a few tattooed bozos, drag them past the cameras and call it a day.

He wondered what had become of Happy, what had become of his cousin, wondered if he would ever know or if, in the final analysis, it mattered. He turned away from Orozco and the wall of lights, murmured a path through the other Americans and headed for the door, hoping the oppressive closeness of the scene wouldn’t follow him outside as he tried to think of how he might get Godo’s body shipped back to his aunt.

COME NIGHTFALL THEY WERE STILL CLIMBING. LUPE’S BREATHING HAD become more labored, her skin felt cool to the touch. Even with his arm around her she stumbled and staggered and nearly fell when the path veered sharply or a tree root rose up through the dusty bed of bullet-shaped acorns and dry pine needles. He tried not to use the flashlight too often. Once, though, as they’d come upon what he’d thought was a dung pile, a sudden stab of light had caused the thing to stir, then slither off-a sidewinder, coiled to strike. He’d once heard that a pregnant woman causes snakes to sleep as you pass and he wondered if he should take this as a sign. Another time, hearing the low snarling growl of a mountain lion, he’d fired the pistol into the tree canopy, scattering birds and scaring the animal off into the underbrush.

They couldn’t stay lucky all night, he thought, nor risk so much noise. His skin tingled with imagined bugs, against which he just kept walking, arm locked tight around Lupe’s waist, their hips pressed flush, moving along the narrow twisting hillside trail like a single clumsy four-legged beast. Every ten steps or so, he switched on the flashlight, got his bearings along the path, turned it off.

The path had led them across one rise after the other, sometimes a leisurely upward grade, other times as steep as a ladder, descending only briefly before resuming uphill, to the point he would have given anything to feel the ground dropping off into a reliable, continuous downgrade. His leg muscles burned, the small of his back was a tight ball of pain. He could only imagine what misery Lupe was enduring in silence.

They’d brought no water. They’d had no time, they hadn’t known Melchior would drive them out to the foothills and leave them to run or die. Roque wondered if the man was still alive, if his act, the feigned robbery, had fooled the others. He had no such doubts about Happy. He’d heard the gunshots as he and Lupe climbed beneath the tree canopy deeper into the hills. There’s no one left but me and Tía Lucha, he thought. Me and Tía and now this one, Lupe.

They came to another rock face, rising like a wall from the truncated path. Flipping on the flashlight briefly, he saw exposed roots and small rock ledges that might provide a fingerhold here, a foothold there. He would have to feel for them in the dark. The bluff extended indefinitely in each direction, there would be no getting around it that he could see. It rose only twenty feet or so, hardly an impossible climb.

Switching off the light he turned to Lupe.-What do you think?

His eyes readjusted to the dark as he waited for her reply. He could just make out the lines of her face. Though quick, her breath had settled into a rhythm and her left arm hung limp, the shoulder of her shirt crusted with blood.-I can try. She licked her parched lips.

– You can hold on to my belt, watch where I put my hands and feet.

She flexed her left hand, testing its strength, wincing.-Let’s hurry.

On again briefly with the flashlight-he mapped out his strategy in his mind’s eye-then off. He reached for the highest root he could without jumping, dug into a crevice in the rock with his toe, waited for Lupe to grab his belt, then hoisted himself up. Catching his balance, he felt for the next exposed root, got his hand around it, found a second foothold and pulled himself up again, this time feeling Lupe’s weight until she scrambled for her own hold below him.

– You’re okay?

– I’m fine, yes. The words a hiss of air against her teeth.-Quick. Please.

He patted and pulled his way upward, until finally his hand reached the top of the bluff. He searched the ledge blindly, hoping for another root to grab hold of, only to encounter a scaly scuttling thing. Before he could pull back his hand the poisonous sting flared down into his arm like a streak of molten wire. He shouted in pain then said, “¡Bajo! ¡Bajo!”

They tumbled to the bottom, her first, him on top, tangling up as they tried to scramble to their feet. His hand burned, he shook it as he reached for the flashlight, flipped it on. The wounds were small but deep, two of them, vaguely parallel. A spider not a scorpion, he thought, probably a tarantula. It would be painful, not dangerous but he couldn’t imagine trying the climb again-he doubted his grip would hold, especially with Lupe’s added weight, and for all he knew there was a nest of them up there, not just one.

– Let’s wait here a moment while I think things through. He cradled his bad hand, chewing his lip.-Maybe there’s another way. But he knew there wasn’t. They could try their luck, slash through the trees, see if somehow, somewhere, they stumbled upon another path down the mountainside. But if such a path existed why would this one be here-who forged dead ends up the sides of mountains?

He tried the flashlight again, looked left, looked right, saw only the dense forest and the mountain wall, the twenty-foot bluff that might as well be a mile high. His hand felt afire, his whole arm had turned weak but the pain was only half of it. He remembered his Day of the Dead benedictions with Tía Lucha, her steadfast conviction that her sister, his mother, lay just beyond a veil of incomprehension-someday they would all gather together again, laugh, sing, weep. When young, he had believed, not so much now. But maybe that wasn’t the point. Could there possibly be anything waiting beyond death that would be so much worse than this?

He heard a rustling off to his left. Another mountain lion, he thought, or the same one, it had been tracking them all along. That’s how it will happen, he thought, a predator smelling the blood. He moved the flashlight to his left hand, his good hand, then drawing Melchior’s pistol from his belt with his swollen aching right. He didn’t know how many bullets were left.

To hell with being seen, he thought, turning the flashlight on and pointing it at the noise, discovering not a mountain lion but a small raccoonlike face protruding from the broad-leafed greenery-immense and probing eyes, a whitish snout, a long curling tail like a monkey’s. A coatimundi. He’d never seen one except on nature shows. They stared at each other for a moment, long enough for Roque to believe he heard someone say the single word: Here.

To Lupe:-Did you just say something?

She stirred from a daze.-No.

The animal withdrew into the underbrush and Roque puzzled at that, wondering why he’d not seen a way to escape in that direction before. Here, he thought, remembering the voice, unable to place it, following its direction, breaking through the scrub and pointing the beam of the flashlight down into a deep and narrow ravine, terraced with rock, dotted with scrub and spindly trees, opening at the bottom into a densely overgrown blackness.

Only then did he remember the dreams, especially the second, that night at Rafa’s service station before they crossed from El Salvador into Guatemala-the image of his sickly mother beckoning him forward, the tarantula.

– We’re going this way. He gestured with the flashlight for Lupe to follow. They would scoot down the rock ledge into the crevasse, come out somewhere lower on the mountainside, take their chances that way, forge a path of their own through the forest if need be.

– I’ll go first. He got down on his haunches, tucked the pistol away, clutched the flashlight. The drop was long and steep and he could almost feel himself tumbling head over foot but he kept his weight back, plummeting like a sled. He crashed into tree roots and nettled plants, sharp outcroppings of rock, finally hitting bottom with a crunching thud.

He bounced up, fearing he might be bitten by something unseen, then pointed the flashlight up the cluttered rock face. The beam caught her peering fearfully over the ledge.

– It’s all right, he called upward.-Follow the light down.

It took her a moment to get into position and when she rocketed down it seemed for a moment she too might begin to tumble head over heels but she stiffened into a blade, continuing down. At the bottom he broke her fall and the two of them hurtled recklessly into nearby scrub. Dazed, they untangled themselves, rose to their feet, swaying.

Roque pointed the flashlight toward the mouth of the ravine.-This way.

There was no path to follow, no way to tell the right direction, an excellent plan for getting lost, but he focused on one tree and then the one behind it, fashioning as straight a line as he could, taking heart from the downward slope of his footfalls and figuring once they were off the mountain he’d get his bearings. Maybe they’d still be in Mexico when that happened, if so they’d somehow turn themselves north and go. It was the best plan he had now. An idle touch of Lupe’s shoulder revealed the wound was seeping again. Her breath came in coughing gasps more often, her steps fell heavy, she tripped and staggered to keep up, sometimes gripping his belt.

Time dissolved. The minutes dragged like hours and the hours collapsed into minutes. He heard only the rush of blood in his ears and the crunching monotony of his footsteps, hers behind him, the chafing rustle of her breath in her throat, interrupted now and again by the yipping barks of unseen coyotes. He couldn’t pinpoint when it happened, but the oaks and pines gave way to mesquite and paloverde and tormented Joshua trees, the earth turned a coppery red in the flashlight beam, thickets of spindly ocotillos and tall agave spears rose up from the desert floor. For the first time in hours he realized how cold it was, his shivering a kind of irritated happiness, forcing him awake.

In the distance he saw a pinpoint of light-maybe from a house, maybe a church. It remained unchanging and he set his course by it, keeping it always in sight, increasing his pace.

They came to a barbed-wire fence-the border?-struggled through it, shirts snagging, and ten steps beyond she finally collapsed, falling first to her knees then her side. She winced from pain and curled up, teeth clenched, rocking, trying to will herself into numbness he thought as he stood over her, grabbing at her wrist, her arm, telling her to get up, please, try. He barely recognized his own voice. To the east, dawn smeared a cold white line along the hillcrests. A raven soared overhead, black against blue, tilting wing to wing in the tumbling wind. In the distance, a lone mule grazed in the scrub.

– You have to get up. We’re almost there.

She said nothing, struggling to find some purchase, gathering strength, pulling herself to her knees. Hooking her good arm around his shoulder, he hoisted her the rest of the way up but her eyes rolled back, her knees buckled. He nearly fell, dragged to the ground after her, but he redoubled his hold and pulled her upward, leaning her body against his.-Let’s sing, he said, something we both know. The way you sang for the bikers, you were so beautiful, so brave. You’re my hero, know that? You’re so much stronger than me. Come on. We’ll sing.

In a tuneless whisper he flailed at the melody-“Sin Ti,” what else?-butchering the lyrics. By the time he realized a dog was barking he’d been registering the sound in the back of his mind for a minute or longer-like the wind, the cold, and yet a haunting reminder too of his dreams-twilight, the stickiness of blood, the barren plain. Something precious he’d have to fight to keep. He redoubled his focus on the old sad song, on her dragging steps, her sliding weight. He could see it now in the dawn light, a sprawling ranch-style house. The dog was lurching at the end of a chain, frothing as it barked. He opened his shirt in order to get to the gun. The one last thing in his dream not yet revealed: a gun blast. But he didn’t want to shoot the dog, wanted no harm to anyone or anything now. He wanted only to stop, rest, have someone look at Lupe’s shoulder, clean and dress the wound. And after? That was impossible to picture.

“¡Alto! Tengo una escopeta. Esta es propiedad privada.”

Roque glanced up. For the first time he saw the tall lean silhouette marching forward. A man. His voice had mileage on it but his Spanish was wooden and nasal. He held a weapon-una escopeta. A shotgun. No, Roque thought, please, trying with all his might to pick up his pace. If the man can just see us up close he’ll understand.

“I said stop! Alto, damn it. Won’t say it again. Next thing I do is shoot.”

Roque remembered the first time he saw her, sitting in the corner of Lonely’s makeshift recording studio, her face bruised, her eyes fierce and untrusting. He remembered hearing her voice that day, the throaty heartbreak in it, the way it awakened something tragic and gentle and wise inside him. We’ve come too far, he thought. Not even God is that cruel.

The tall rangy man with the shotgun charged forward. He shouldered the weapon.

Summoning the words from a place inside him, a place he couldn’t be sure existed even a few hours ago, Roque called out: “Don’t shoot! Help us… please… I’m an American…”

He felt the full force of her weight against him as she lost consciousness. He buckled sideways with her fall, then the shotgun blast.