The Baker's Daughter

Chapter Eleven

US CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION

8935 MONTANA AVENUE

EL PASO, TEXAS

NOVEMBER 10, 2007

“I tried to call you on the radio,” said Agent Bert Mosley. He picked his teeth with a wooden toothpick.

Riki tossed the remnants of his Taco Cabana breakfast burrito in the trash. “Sorry, must’ve been off on the way in. What’s up?”

“We received a call from a resident. Says she’s seen a couple Mexican kids on the trail behind her house. Real young ones. A couple junkers are parked nearby. She thinks the parents have set up camp in them. Lady doesn’t speak no Spanish so she wanted somebody to come check. Figured since you were already out,” Bert explained. He handed Riki the address.

“I’m not out now, though.” Riki took the paper and read. “Westside?”

Bert nodded.

“All right, but you owe me.” He picked up his car keys. “Mind sprucing up the detainment room while I’m gone. That fellow from Tolentino looked pretty sick when I handed him to the Chihuahua police.”

“Old man had some kind of Mexican plague. Did you see the sores on his arms? He’s crazy to think we’d let him walk into our country—infect everybody with Ebola or something.”

“It was shingles,” said Riki.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize I was talking to Doctor Chavez,” Bert scoffed.

“The point is, he was sick. We should air out the room.”

“Call me Martha Stewart. I’ll be sure to iron the linens and arrange the tulips.”

“Don’t be a lazy Anglo,” Riki joked to lighten the mood. After working together for three years, their inside jokes and quips could be reduced to a handful of ringing statements.

“Fat and ignorant’s my gig. Laziness is all yours. We got to stick to our roles, otherwise—what will become of things.” Bert laughed. Riki grinned.

On the drive, a Shakira song came on the radio. It reminded Riki of Reba. He always said she looked like a dark-haired version of the singer, especially in the mornings when her hair lay uncombed and wavy on the pillow. He’d just left her that way, messy and beautiful. Sometimes it took all the strength he had not to climb into bed beside her and bury his face in her hair and skin and sleepy smells. But he knew the moment he did, she’d wake and push him away. He couldn’t have both the Reba he saw and the Reba who saw him. They were different women, and he supposed he’d rather have one than neither.

He turned off the music and checked the address. The area was vaguely familiar. A new development of Easter-egg-colored homes strung along streets with providential names like Via Del Estrella and Via Del Oro. Behind the large neighborhood was an agriculture canal, and beyond that the river, smudge sodden and rusty as a penny. A concrete jogger’s trail whimsically snaked along beside, heat rising from it in clear currents. A realty sign boasted the subdivision as LUXURY LIVING ALONG THE RIO GRANDE! A couple years ago, you couldn’t have paid someone to live there. Nothing but scrub grass, dirt, and gopher burrows as far as the eye could see. Now, big windows and manicured yards glistened under the desert sun. Unnatural yet beautiful. He pulled up to the resident’s home, a two-story, pink palace with iron balconies lacing the upper levels like a tiered Quinceañera birthday cake.

Before he’d had a chance to turn off the truck engine, a petite woman came to the front door in pressed khakis. He got out.

“They’ve been there for over a week,” she immediately began. “My husband said to let them be, and I would have—I really would have—but there are children involved, and it’s simply unhealthy for them to be living out of a car and bathing in that muddy river like animals! So I told my husband I was calling you guys for their own good—the children that is. They need proper care. Their mother should be ashamed.” She ran a hand through her bobbed hair. Diamond-drop earrings shimmered against her neck. “She’s out there, too. Every morning, washing dishes—dishes!—in that muck. You’d think if she was going to hop the border like this, then she’d at least try to be more inconspicuous. I mean, seriously. Every day, I look outside and there they are, acting like it’s the 1800s.” She gestured for Riki to follow her into the house. “Then yesterday, there was a little girl—a toddler—crawling in the dirt with no adult supervision and I said to myself, what if a snake or a coyote came along? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I had a dead child in my backyard and did nothing to prevent it.”

Inside, a miniature schnauzer yipped at Riki’s heels. The house smelled like new paint and vanilla candles, like the ones Reba lit when she took long baths.

“Hush it, Teeny.” The woman moved the dog away with a foot. “Hope you aren’t afraid of dogs.”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’m Linda Calhoun, by the way.” She stuck out her hand.

“Agent Riki Chavez.” Her fingers seemed to slip right through his clasp, soft and slick with oils.

“We’re from North Carolina. My husband’s with Union Pacific—the railroad. We moved here a couple months ago. I’m still getting used to … everything.” She waved a hand round like she was swatting flies, then led Riki to the back door. “The cars are over there.” She pointed to the river-bank but stayed inside her refrigerated air.

Down the Rio, a weathered, four-door Dodge parked off the concrete trail. He couldn’t see the second vehicle.

“Are they there now?”

“I guess,” said Linda. “I don’t know where else they’d be.”

“I’ll go talk to these folks.” He slipped on his cap and went out around the stone fence separating the Calhouns’ green turf and the sandy West Texas dirt.

A quarter of a mile down, the new development of adobe homes and green sod abruptly ended with a half acre of horse pasture between it and a scattering of trailers on cinder blocks. Reaching the car, he noticed a second set of thick tire tracks leading up to a trailer with a padlocked front door and plasterboard over the windows. He pulled out his handheld receiver.

“El Paso, do you copy?”

There was a crackle and pitchy squeal. “10-4.”

“Bert, I’m at the location,” said Riki. He surveyed the trailer once more, then turned to the Dodge before him. Its windows were covered with blankets and dark shirts cinched up by the window glass. The ends stuck out, fluttering in the breeze.

“What’s your 10–20?” asked Bert.

“Off Doniphan, on the Rio canal about a mile from the tracks. There’s a horse farm and some trailer homes. Underpass behind me.”

Riki knelt down to the baked mud and put a finger in the second tire tread. It was deeper than a four door. It had to be a van.

“Hey, Bert, are there geophone sensors in the brush out this way?”

“Should be. Why?”

He followed the tracks up the embankment to the double-wide and scrub brush desert stretching all the way to the horizon. “Just want to make sure we’re watching this location. Looks suspicious. Could be a safe house.”

“Copy. Need backup?”

“10–23. The trailer appears empty now. If the tip-off says she’s seen kids around for a week, then I got a good feeling they were left behind. Just send a tow for the vehicle and do a 10–29. Maybe it’s tagged to the smuggler.”

The radio squawked and fuzzed.

“10-4. Be careful, Rik. Don’t try to be a hero.”

“Copy that. No hero.”

Riki undid the holster of his gun. Bert was right. He couldn’t take any chances. Last month, a patrol agent received third-degree burns and a stint in the critical care unit after an illegal alien threw a balled T-shirt at him, soaked in kerosene and aflame. The immigrant left the agent to burn in the chaparral and ran. He was probably halfway to New York City by now while the agent was undergoing his second round of skin grafts on his arms, chest, and face. His wife put on a brave face in the hospital room when her five-year-old shied away from a man he didn’t recognize. Alone later, she wept in the hallway.

Riki knocked on the driver’s window, then stood aside from the glass. “Hello? Anybody there?” He tried the handle. Locked. Near the front tire was a doll wrapped in a colorful rebozo. Small footprints matted the dust.

Linda Calhoun had described a mother and children. He knocked again. “Señora?” There was soft movement of the window blanket. “I’m not here to make trouble. I want to help. Open up,” he said firmly, then again in Spanish.

Slowly, the lock to the door clicked and opened. A tanned Mexican woman stared hard at him, tears ebbing. “Por favor,” she begged. “Mis niños.” Two small heads peeked out from the backseat.

“Do you have papers? Citizenship or visa?”

“No—no visa.”

“You can’t stay here if you aren’t a US citizen. Where are you from?”

“Para mis niños,” she repeated.

“You’re an illegal alien. I know you understand that. Are you alone or did you come with a group—a leader?”

She covered her face and sobbed.

He sighed. The woman had probably given every peso she had for a smuggling organization to transport them over the border. Once across, her paid leader had either abandoned them or brought them to this car and told them to wait inside. In either case, she’d most likely been through hell the past couple weeks, living in desert heat and dirt, hunger and fear. And now she was watching her dreams shatter for herself and her children. She’d rather stay in that car and possibly die on American soil than be sent back to her homeland. He’d seen it a hundred times over: desperation justifying the implausible.

“Señora,” Riki comforted. “This”—he pointed to the car—“is not a good life for your children. There’s a way, and this isn’t it.” He opened the door wide. “Come on now.”

She took his hand in both hers. “No deportación. Por favor, señor.”

He gulped down the knot in this throat. It came every time. “I’m sorry, but it’s the law, and you’re breaking it.”

Riki was born in El Paso, an instantaneous American. His father and mother, born less than a mile away in Juárez, Mexico, waited two years for a visa and another seven for citizenship. It was a broken system that only benefited the very wealthy or very patient. His parents had been the latter. He understood this woman’s trepidation, but he also understood duty and justice. His family obeyed the laws of their new land, and, like it or not, he thought everyone else should too. Riki believed that the only way to appreciate what life gave was to respect and honor the rules that governed it. Subvert those and you might as well steal from your neighbor and piss on the Bible. Still, the greater law of compassion made him uneasy carting a woman and her children off like criminals.

In the distance, Linda Calhoun watched from her doorway holding her dog. Her diamond earrings sparkled like bonfire licks.

Riki radioed Bert at the station while the woman collected her things.

“I’m bringing in a woman and two kids. Pretty sure they’re Mexican nationals. Haven’t seen anybody else.”

“10-4.”

A toddler in shorts and flip-flops sat on his rusted tricycle in the yard of a nearby home. He did not watch them. His eyes were fixed on the padlocked trailer next door.

“Headed back to the station,” Riki said and slid the handheld back into his front pocket clip. He kicked a wad of mud from his boot.

The Mexican woman instructed her children to gather their things. The older boy shoved a worn shirt and a pair of jeans into a duffel bag. The girl climbed between the driver and passenger seats and over her mother’s lap. She sat by the front tire, clasping her doll to her chest and sucking her thumb. Beautiful black eyes watched Riki, never blinking. He wondered if this is what his daughter would look like, only with Reba’s strong nose and fair skin.

The boy on his tricycle turned to them. “Bye!” he called out and waved. “Bye-bye!”

His mother stuck her head out of her open trailer doorway. “¡Vete aquí! Lunch.”

Smiling wide, the boy threw his tricycle to the side and obeyed. The woman glowered at Riki before closing the door. All the while, the little girl at his feet hugged her knees and continued to stare up at him. The outline of his CBP baseball cap reflected in her dark gaze.