Standoff

Two

The jeep made it to the Interstate and expired there on the side of the road, smelling of fried engine oil, the needle on the temperature gauge buried in the dead zone. I called a local towing company and a couple of Border Patrol Agents offered us a ride to El Paso. They told us they had round-ups every other day like the one we stumbled across.

“I’m sure you read the headlines,” said Agent Willow Schwinn behind the wheel, a chubby talkaholic. “Keepin’ illegals out is like trying to hold back the sea. On the bright side, ain’t no damn computer stealin’ this girl’s job.”

“We might’a stopped those folks just now,” continued her equally chatty male buddy in the front passenger seat, whose name I didn’t catch, “but half a mile along the barrier fence could’a easily been another breach, a bigger one maybe, with trucks pulling up to take a hundred or more illegals. What you saw today might even have been a decoy, a diversion. Happens all the time. They used to pull the same shit with drugs till we wised up to it — send a small shipment through and set it up for a bust so that the real haul sneaked past while your back was turned filling out the paperwork. Sometimes we get lucky, like last month. Found thirty million dollars in cocaine inside bags of chicken manure — fertilizer. They thought the smell would fool the dogs. Didn’t.”

“That was a mother lode, not a decoy. The seizure would’a hurt ’em for sure.”

“Hurt who?” I asked.

“One of the cartels — Sinaloa, Juárez or Chihuahua, not a hundred percent sure. Drugs or illegals, the aim is the same: get the goods to a city with a big population. Do that and they’re gone.”

“We seen every trick in the book. Illegals pack ’emselves into everything from suitcases to containers,” Schwinn said. “Opened the hood on an SUV once and found a guy tucked in beside the carburetor.”

“I seen a woman squeezed herself into a filing cabinet,” countered Agent Passenger Seat.

“Under ‘B’ for ‘Busted’, right?” said Schwinn with a smirk. “One of these days I swear I’m gonna find one hiding in the bottom of my Slurpee.”

Ha ha ha …

The guy sitting next to me in the back looked Mexican and his name sure sounded Mexican. Maybe the folks riding in front could only spot the ones playing hide and seek. I glanced at Gomez.

He looked at me and shrugged, seemingly unaffected by the slurs, his face a mask. He asked, “Would you folks mind tuning your radio into the local police frequency?”

“Sure, no problem,” Agent Passenger Seat responded happily. He leaned forward, punched a button on the system and dialed in a freq. After a few seconds of air came continuous short bursts of frantic communications. It was all centered around a crime scene at Horizon Airport. Nothing specific, mind, but some real bad shit appeared to have gone down at the place, as Arlen had said. There were requests for multiple ambulances, forensics teams, mortuary services, the coroner’s office, investigators, patrol vehicles — essentially all available mobile units from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office were to pedal their asses to the facility, pronto.

“Shee-it,” said Agent Passenger Seat, sharing a look with Schwinn.

Fifteen minutes later we turned off the Interstate, heading north, and then east onto Pellicano, the road alive with El Paso Country Sheriff’s Office and El Paso Police Department vehicles, as well as ambulances. About a mile from the highway a police roadblock had been set up on a minor sandy side street off Pellicano. I couldn’t see any signs indicating the presence of an airport anywhere hereabouts. A chopper coming in to land and the roadblock itself, clotted as it was with various media vans and trucks that were being denied access, were the only indications that we were getting warmer on the airport location front.

On the other side of my window a knot of media photographers clicked away at us like we were stars arriving at a red carpet occasion.

“Says here that Horizon was built by a local fella by the name of Phil Barrett, now deceased,” said Gomez, reading from his iPhone as we waited in the queue of official vehicles. “His family still owns the place.”

“A private airstrip?” I asked.

“Nope, public.”

Could be that the facility was in the Barrett family’s backyard. I looked around. The terrain was about as dry and sun-stunned as any desert I’d ever seen and growing an airport out here had a lot more chance of surviving than grass or plants.

Gomez was on his cell. “Calling in,” he said, meaning Ranger HQ in Austin. “Get some clearances happening.”

Agent Schwinn showed the police officer her ID.

“Border Patrol, eh?” said the heavy-set guy, dark-blue sweat stains under his armpits and a face that looked like he’d just bathed it in cooking oil. “Names.”

Schwinn provided them and the officer jotted them into a logbook.

“You got business here?” he asked.

Gomez lowered his window, still on the phone to Austin. “Hector Gomez, Rangers, and Special Agent Vin Cooper, Air Force OSI. We’re looking for a deserter. Got word he turned up here.”

“IDs,” he said.

Gomez and I passed them over.

“Yeah, well, if he’s here the only thing he’ll be turning up is daisies.” Finished jotting down our details on his clipboard, the officer handed back our credentials.

“This is the Sheriff’s jurisdiction out here, ain’t it?” Gomez asked, now off the phone and giving me the thumbs up on those clearances.

“Yeah, but as you’re about to find out, things are a little messy around here at the moment.” Then to Schwinn he said, “Go straight ahead. A deputy will show you where to park. You need to check in with Commander Matheson from the Sheriff’s Office. There’s an Emergency Operations center parked behind the terminal building. You can’t miss it.” He pulled his face away from the window, leaving behind a few sweat drops on the sill, and tapped the roof with his hand.

Schwinn motored forward, taking it slow. A sign by the side of the road — finally — announced Horizon Airport and welcomed us to it, obviously not party to the circumstances of our visit. A little further along, the road, bordered on one side by a neat row of trees, widened into an impromptu parking lot of EPCSO black and whites, blue and whites from the local PD, plus assorted forensics vans and ambulances. A frustrated-looking deputy, head cocked to one side and hands on hips, pointed at a slice of sand for us to occupy.

“We’ll leave you guys to it,” said Schwinn, coming to a stop but leaving the motor running. “This one’s a little beyond our job description.”

We thanked the agents for the ride, got out and checked in with the deputy.

“Rangers in on this now too, eh?” he said, nodding at the polished silver “cinco peso” on Gomez’s chest, the famous five-pointed Texas star worn by the Rangers, punched from an original Mexican silver five-peso coin. “Not surprised. This is some bad shit.”

He told us to display our IDs and then provided directions to the operations center parked behind the departures building.

Out of the AC in Schwinn’s vehicle the sun beat down with a physical force that made my shoulders slump. Marshmallows could roast in the hot air hitting the back of my throat. I glanced at the runway, the far end of it disappearing in a puddle of shimmering mercury. After a couple of minutes, my underarms were already starting to look like dark ponds.

Behind the makeshift parking lot, a line of yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off access to the ramp beyond it, as well as to the paths leading to several homes and trailers on the desert sand. The place was crawling with law enforcement. Around these residences, heavily armed PD and Sheriff’s Office tactical response personnel, as well as K-9 deputies and their dogs, searched the low sand ridges and bushes. Other police and deputies walked a grid laid out on the sand, looking for what would fall under the general headline of Clues. A Texas Department of Public Safety chopper was arriving, landing down the far end of the runway in the mercury puddle. Other helicopters hovered stationary at around five hundred feet over the desert half a mile away. Media choppers, I guessed, keen for the story behind whatever the hell had happened at Horizon.

Gomez and I headed in the direction of the airport’s main buildings. Crime scene tape extended out onto the ramp. An old military aircraft was parked inside the tape, a kangaroo in its roundel — Royal Australian Air Force. A bright-red Learjet sat fifty feet beyond it, also inside the tape. Between the aircraft, several portable sunscreens had been placed over various groups of forensics people to provide them with a little relief from the sun’s assault. They were dressed in blue coveralls and wore facemasks and white plastic booties over their shoes, CSI written on the backs of the coveralls. Some were kneeling over four or five bundles of clothing dumped on the asphalt. Others were making notes, speaking into digital recorders or standing around chatting. I’d been in this game long enough to know it wasn’t piles of discarded laundry they were photographing.

I didn’t need to prompt Gomez. He saw what I saw and neither of us liked what we were seeing.

The police tape continued all the way to the terminal building. Along the way we passed at least another half dozen tactical response officers and CSI people from both the PD and the Sheriff’s Office, their heads down, deep in thought, heading back the way we’d come.

The tape went around the rear of the airport terminal, a small low-roofed shed clad with corrugated steel. Twenty yards behind it, a number of police and SO deputies were hanging around a Winnebago — the op’s emergency command center. Gomez and I walked up to the door, excused ourselves and squeezed in. A man and a woman, both in the gray uniforms of the EPCSO, had their backs to us, discussing a large overhead photo of Horizon Airport taken from a height of around fifteen hundred feet, propped on an easel in front of them. Drawn with felt pen at various places all over the picture were red circles, each given a number and a two-letter code. There were quite a few of these circles. Seeing four of them in a cluster drawn on the ramp, where the old air force trainer and the Learjet were parked, I knew each circle represented a fatality. I found a circle numbered 19, then saw another numbered 27.

“Jesus,” I muttered.

A burst of comms came through a police radio.

The female deputy turned around. Three stars adorned her collar. According to the silver tag on her shirt, her name was Foote. She was a short, barrel-shaped woman with full lips and puffy black rings around her eyes that told me she was either an insomniac or played contact sports. I decided either could have been the case. “I’m Chief Deputy Foote,” she said. “Can we help you gentlemen?” The subtext of the way she said it informed me that their help was unlikely to be forthcoming and that calling us “gentlemen” was not because she thought we were. The information I skimmed from various badges and the nametags on the man beside her told me he was Operations Bureau Commander Matheson, the number two in the room. Like his boss, the Chief Deputy, Matheson was also short. He kept himself in shape, though, and I guessed his age at about forty. A roll of thick blond curls crowned his pudgy red face. He reminded me of Richard Simmons. I wondered if he took aerobics classes.

“Ranger Gomez and Special Agent Cooper, OSI,” said Gomez, parrying Foote’s tone with practiced dull efficiency. “We’ve been informed through channels that Airman First Class William Sponson, AWOL from Lackland AFB, had been picked up at Horizon Airport. We’re here to check on that report.”

Gomez’s subtext: I’m a Texas Ranger. Fuck with me at your peril.

“Don’t you Air Force people wear a uniform?” Matheson inquired, frowning at me.

Subtext: I wonder what you’d look like in Spandex.

“Of course, we welcome Ranger support,” Foote added.

Subtext: I’m not going to fuck with you. It’s just that me and this guy beside me are completely out of our depth, and I was hoping to keep the people who are aware of that to a manageable circle I can browbeat.

“Washington sent me here, but I’m guessing if my deserter’s around, the only place he’s headed is the morgue,” I said. “And I’m further guessing along with twenty-six others.”

“Can you give us the specifics of what’s happened, ma’am, sir?” I asked when there was no response.

“We’re working on it,” said Matheson.

Subtext: We’ve got no idea whatsoever.

But then the Chief Deputy sighed, glanced at Matheson and said, “Look, your summary’s on the money. But there are no witnesses and there are also no surveillance cameras so therefore no surveillance footage. If it sounds like we don’t know what happened here, that’s because, honestly, right at this point we don’t know.”

Subtext: No more subtext, fellas.

“Almost all of the 27 DOAs have multiple gunshot wounds,” she continued. “Whoever did this even went into homes. We’ve got men, women and children murdered. And the information you have about your airman is correct. We found him — he’s dead. His identity is yet to be positively confirmed with your personnel department, but he was carrying his Air Force photo ID card.”

Maybe I was wrong about Foote. It had been known to happen. “So, everyone present at this facility was murdered sometime last night?” I asked.

“We’ve narrowed the attack to between four-thirty and six this morning,” Matheson answered.

“And we do have one survivor,” said Foote. “We believe it’s one of the Learjet pilots.”

“Is he talking?” asked Gomez.

The Chief Deputy shook her head. “We wish. He’s in a coma. They — whoever they were, and there had to be quite a few of them given the area covered by this attack — shot him in the back and left him for dead. His spinal cord’s smashed, but he’s alive. Barely.”

There was a knock on the partially closed door behind us. A woman in a blue CSI suit stepped in, the white booties still on her feet.

Matheson raised his chin at her. “Give us a minute, Liz.”

Subtext: Let’s not give these out-of-towners anything we don’t have to.

“No, tell us what you’ve got,” Foote said to her, countering the commander, sticking to her earlier decision to play it straight.

Liz was about five foot four, in her late twenties. Her hair was wavy, dark and cut shortish, presumably so that she wouldn’t inadvertently dip the ends of it into her work. Her gray eyes were clear and intelligent, her casework yet to etch its lines around them. “Chief, I can confirm that vic 5AF was also sexually assaulted,” she said. “Semen and blood in the mouth and the back of the nose passage.”

“Blood?” Foote asked.

“Yes, Chief. Quite a bit.”

“Hers?”

“No way to know until we test, though preliminary examination hasn’t found any wound.”

“What are you thinking?”

“She bit whoever assaulted her, and she bit him hard.”

“Anything else, Liz?” Matheson asked her.

The question appeared to deflate her. “No, sir.”

“Okay, well …”

It’s fair to say I wasn’t much liking Matheson.

He looked at Gomez and me with a dopey smile and said, “Well, anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

Subtext: Goodbye. And don’t come back with any demands.

“Thank you, Commander,” said Gomez, “For your help and assistance.”

Subtext: Fuck you.

To Foote, I said, “Thanks, Chief.”

Subtext: Thanks, Chief.

“Liz,” said Foote, “can you please take these gentlemen to DOA number one?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Liz replied.

Gomez and I followed her outside, into the furnace.

“No one got off a call before they were killed?” I asked.

“No. Maybe someone tried, but whoever hit this place cut the power and took out the cell tower. They knew what they were doing.”

“You mind explaining the number and lettering system?” Gomez asked our guide as we power walked to keep up with her toward the main terminal building.

“Five AF — the fifth victim logged,” she said. “AF for adult female. Your man was victim number one — 1AM. The first victim — an adult male. We found him slumped on the terminal building’s doorstep.”

I’d seen other victims on the overhead photo of the facility with the suffixes “MC” and “FC”, which I could now decipher to mean male child and female child. Jesus …

“Who did the logging?” Gomez asked.

“We did — EPCSO forensics with some help from PD. The woman who runs the café in the terminal building called 911 when she arrived for work and found everyone deceased.” I was about to ask where the woman was so that we could talk to her, ask a few questions, when Liz added, “She’s under sedation.”

We came around the front of the building. A shade tent had been erected over the DOA. A couple of crime scene investigators in their coveralls and booties were standing under the tent, talking quietly, while a photographer, also in CSI gear, changed camera lenses. A bloated fly flew around my face in a big hurry to join a dozen others circling the large bloody morsel curled in a ball on the stoop — Airman First Class Sponson. Numbered tags placed on the ground around him indicated the places where shell casings had landed. I counted nine tags. The photographer casually resumed what the lens change had interrupted — documenting the evidence.

Gomez and I stood in the sun, out of the photographer’s way so as not to interfere or contaminate the evidence.

“Hey, Alice,” Liz called out. “You about done?”

“Almost,” replied one of the CSI twosome. “A few more snaps for the album and we can bag and tag him.”

“Same MO as most of the others?”

“A spray on full auto; in this instance by two perps, we think. Nine millimeter rounds fired at close range — no more than ten feet from the vic. MP-5s, probably; certainly a submachine gun. We dug a slug outta the doorway. The shooters stitched him up pretty good across here and here.” She drew a line with her finger from her shoulder to hip one way and then the other — a cross. From the wide pool of blood around Sponson he hadn’t died fast, despite the amount of lead pumped into him.

A familiar-looking fly crawled into his nose and then out again, rubbed its legs together — possibly with glee — turned and went back in.

“Anything else?” Liz asked.

“Picked up a cigarette butt. Faros, a Mexican brand — might be the perp’s, might not. Otherwise, nada.”

“Looks like your guy, Vin,” said Gomez, getting down on his haunches to get a better angle on the DOA’s face.

“Uh-huh.” I pulled out the photo I had in my pocket and showed it to Gomez.

“Yep,” he said, coming up. “Might’a come here hoping to fly out under the radar. Head south over the border. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“What’s gonna happen to him?” I asked Liz.

“We have to finish doing our thing. The tape won’t come down for another 24 hours at least. Maybe you should go talk to the guy taking the lead, Lieutenant Carlos Cruz. I’ll take you to him. Once we’re done here the deceased will make the trip to the mortuary for autopsy. At that point County Coroner Sue Flores is the person to speak to.”

“Got her phone number on you?” Gomez asked, taking notes.

Liz read it off her phone contacts.

I gazed down on Sponson. He was a big African-American: two-thirty pounds, give or take. I wondered if he hadn’t spent so much time and money supersizing himself whether he might have taken a ride on the back of Whelt’s bike instead of coming here. In which case he’d also have had the opportunity to give us the finger instead of entertaining the flies.