Illegal

SIX

An hour after fleeing the courthouse, Payne's hands were still shaking. Either that, or a 5.0 trembler had rocked the Chimney Sweep, a windowless tavern squeezed between a Lebanese restaurant and a discount dentist in a Sherman Oaks strip mall. Payne wrapped a hand around the leaded base of his glass, trying to steady it, but the Jack Daniel's swirled between the ice cubes like molten lava through porous rocks.

"Good work, Payne," Rigney had told him on the phone, minutes earlier.

A pimp high-fiving a hooker, Payne thought, cheerlessly.

"I knew you'd make a great bag man." Rigney's laugh jangled like steel handcuffs.

Bag man.

In Payne's mind, other names floated to the surface, like corpses afer a shipwreck.

Snitch.

Rat.

Shyster.

If word got out, no client would ever trust him. And word always got out. Gossip was the coin of the realm in the kingdom of justice.

He drained the sour-mash whiskey, slipped a small vinyl folder from inside his coat pocket, and removed a business card,

J. ATTICUS PAYNE, ESQUIRE

Rigney had nailed it. Not even the name was real.

Payne bummed a pack of matches from the bartender, set the card on fire, watched it disintegrate, ashes drifting into a bowl of peanuts. No ashtrays. You had to cross into Mexico to smoke legally these days. He lit a second card, stared into the orange flames. Why not burn them all?

The only other patron at the bar was a TV writer who had been unemployed since they canceled Gilligan's Island. Camped on his stool as if he had a long-term lease, the guy's faded T-shirt read: "Say It Loud. Say It Plowed."

Payne hoisted his glass, saluted the fellow, and took a long pull. The liquid gold delivered warmth without solace. He struck another match. Immolated another card, inhaled the acrid smoke, let the flame burn until it singed his fingertips.

Two hundred miles southeast of the tavern where Payne planned to drink the day far into the night, just outside a cantina in Mexicali, Mexico, a wiry twelve-year-old boy named Agustino Perez stood with his mother as city traffic clattered past. The boy had caramel skin and hair so black and thick that women on the street grabbed it by the handful and cooed like quail. Tino's eyes, though, were a startling green. A teacher once said he reminded her of verde y negro, a local dessert of mint ice cream topped with chocolate sauce. Boys at school started calling him "verde y negro" with a lip-smacking nastiness. It took a flurry of fists and a couple bloody noses to convince the boys that he was not a sweet confection.

Marisol, the boy's mother, was sometimes mistaken for his older sister. The same smile, the same hair with the sheen of black velvet. But the boy did not inherit his light, bright eyes from her. Set above wide cheekbones, her eyes were the color of hot tar.

Glancing from side to side as if someone might be spying on them, Marisol handed her son a business card. He ran a finger across the embossed lettering and read aloud, "J. Atticus Payne, Esquire. Van Nuys, California."

"That is Los Angeles. Mr. Payne is a very important man. One of the biggest lawyers in the city."

"So?"

"Put the card in your shoe, Tino."

The shoes were new-Reeboks-purchased that morning for the crossing.

"Why, Mami?"

"If anything bad happens and I am not there, go see Mr. Payne. Tell him that you are a friend of Fernando Rodriguez."

"But I am not his friend. I don't even like the cabron."

His mother raised an eyebrow, her way of demanding: "Do as I say." The stern look would carry more weight, Tino thought, if she weren't the prettiest woman in Caborca.

He was used to men complimenting his mother on her adorable son. He knew it was their way to get close to her, smiling wicked smiles, panting like overheated dogs.

"Fernando Rodriguez sits on a stool at La Faena, drinking tequila and bragging about things he has never done," Tino said.

"And what were you doing at La Faena, little boy?"

"?Mami!"

Why did she have to baby him? Maybe that's how it is when you're an only child, and you have no father to toughen you up, often at the end of a leather strap.

Tino decided not to tell his mother that the barman at La Faena was teaching him to mix drinks, and that blindfolded he could already identify several tequilas, both reposados and anejos. They were going to try some blancos next week, but then, Tino's life changed in an instant. What his mother called "nuestro problema."

Our problem.

Even though he caused the problem. It all happened yesterday, as quick as the chisel that drew the blood. Then, last night, they packed everything they could carry and ran for the bus, traveling north from Caborca to Mexicali.

As for Fernando Rodriguez, he was a campesino with bad teeth who returned from El Norte driving a shiny blue Dodge Ram with spinning wheel covers. Rodriguez claimed he bought the truck, almost new, in Arizona, after working a year in a dog-food processing plant. Tino was sure the cabron stole the Dodge, along with the ostrich-skin cowboy boots he liked to park on a table at the cantina.

Rodriguez boasted of one other thing that happened to be true. He did not die when he was crammed into the back of a sixteen-wheeler with thirty-five other mojados who crossed the border two summers earlier.

Tino could remember every detail, as Rodriguez told the story nearly every evening. The truck had stopped somewhere in the California desert, baking in the sun. The people tried to claw their way out of the locked metal doors, leaving patches of scorched skin and trails of blood. Rodriguez swore that he saw a woman's hair burst into flame. No one at the cantina believed that, but one thing was certain: Eleven Mexicans died inside that truck.

Still, Tino could not understand why Rodriguez would be acquainted with one of the most important lawyers in Los Angeles, or why he'd returned to Mexico, passing out the business cards of such an abogado brillante.

"When we get inside," his mother told him now, "if the coyote asks why we must cross over tonight, say nothing."

"Ay, Mami. I know what to do."

"I will do the talking. You will be quiet."

He let out a long sigh, like air from a balloon. No use arguing with his mother. No way to make her understand that he was the man of the house. Now he wondered if his actions back home-criminal, yet honorable-were somehow intended to prove his manhood to his mother.

Marisol turned toward the street. An army jeep snaked through traffic, a soldier manning a. 50 caliber machine gun. The drug wars, which were only stories on television in Caborca, were very real here. Yesterday, a local police station had been attacked with grenades and rocket launchers. When they had arrived after midnight, the army was sealing off the bus station.

Now Marisol placed an arm around her son's shoulders. "Let's go, Tino. Let's get out of this godforsaken country."