Left for Dead

8

2:00 A.M., Saturday, April 10

Vail, Arizona

Alonzo Gutierrez was up early even though he had barely slept. All night long, whenever he drifted off, he’d been plagued with a recurring nightmare about being burned with cigarettes. He knew where that came from. After starting coffee, he went outside to collect his newspaper.

Yes, Al was twenty-five years old. Yes, he had grown up in a world where microwave ovens were everywhere. He didn’t remember a time when computers hadn’t been readily available. Even though he was a full-fledged member of the digital generation and reasonably computer-savvy, he still liked reading newspapers; liked the feel of newsprint in his hands. Delivering newspapers back home in Wenatchee was the first job he’d ever had.

He and three other young Border Patrol officers shared a four-bedroom house in Vail, outside Tucson. The house had been built before the real estate crash. When it didn’t sell, the developer had turned it and many of the other unsold houses in the neighborhood into rentals. It was a cost-effective place to live for four guys who weren’t making tons of money.

Al was the one who paid for the newspaper subscription. He also endured plenty of teasing from his roomies about reading a “dead-tree” paper, although he noticed that once he finished with it, the sports pages, at least, got plenty of use from guys who never helped pay for them.

That morning Al scanned the news pages of the Arizona Daily Sun, checking for any mention of the Three Points assault and wondering if the woman was alive. The paper had a reporter named Michelle Skidmore who specialized in immigration issues and wrote an ongoing column called “Crossings” that often dealt with crimes against illegal immigrants. That day’s column concerned vandals who routinely destroyed the watering stations that volunteers set up and supplied with potable water to keep migrating illegals from dying of dehydration.

The assault wasn’t mentioned there or anywhere else in the paper, either, that and the fact that there was no mention of it on the morning news while he was eating breakfast made Al wonder if Dobbs had buried the report. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time.

The whole idea disgusted him, but Al wasn’t about to run up the flag to the media or to anybody else. The brass had made it clear that contact with the media was forbidden for guys like him. The officers who had made the mistake of complaining to reporters about being told to let up on taking illegals into custody had been put on unpaid leave, and spending time on unpaid leave was something Al Gutierrez couldn’t afford. As for calling in an anonymous tip? He had a feeling those were a lot less anonymous than advertised. Cell phone calls could be traced. E-mails could be traced. And if he tried going over Sergeant Dobbs’s head, there would be hell to pay.

For right now, there was nothing for Al to do but put on his uniform and go do his shift.

Whatever had happened to that poor girl south of Three Points was someone else’s problem, not his. And with any kind of luck, over time, maybe Al’s resulting nightmares would go away.