Then She Vanished

Twenty-Nine

The wall is old-school — vertical iron columns spaced wide enough to see and talk through, ten feet high, no concertina. Because the city predates the wall by over a hundred years, its historic downtown, retail, residential, and industrial neighborhoods are divided roughly in half. Small shops, rough cobbles, and dogs. People meet along the wall, trading news and gossip and shopping bags of goods and produce. They talk energetically and touch each other through the rough iron bars.

I spent some time here, helping Charlie Hood, a friend who’d taken the job of chief of police on the American side. His was not an easy assignment, with Buena Vista being a plaza perennially contested by drug cartels, and Hood himself a troubled soul. I hadn’t told him I’d be coming into his jurisdiction with the outspoken marijuana maven Tola Strait. The less people who knew about this, the better.

The Buena Vista Credit Union was located in the newer outskirts of the U.S. downtown, in a humble strip mall home to two restaurants, a photography studio, and electronics shop from which Mexican and American pop songs blared, and a women’s boutique with colorful dresses on racks outside the entrance.

Inside, the building was brightly lit and smelled of new carpet and paint. A counter with three tellers but no customers. On one side of the tellers was a steel gate leading to the vault, on the other side an open seating area built around two impressive wooden desks. No managers on duty. Hand-painted oil copies of Diego Rivera paintings on the walls hung almost straight, potted artificial saguaro cactus with strings of LED lights, magazines on the coffee tables. All three Indians seated and waiting.

The armed guards, each with a machine gun in one hand, pulled the luggage into the desk reception area, then stopped and looked at the Indians for direction.

From an open doorway beyond the desks came a stout older Latino in a gray suit, white shirt, and a red tie, who stopped, considered us briefly, then waved us to follow. With him was a young woman he ignored. He introduced himself to each of us as we walked past him into his office — Robert Calderon, general manager, my pleasure to meet you, please have a seat.

His office was spacious, with hardwood floors and a low ceiling. A wooden desk even larger than the ones out front and plenty of chairs. A sophisticated digital scale, apparently new, sat on the immense desk. Tola and the Indians sat in a line before the desk, the guards retreated to stand on either side of the doorway. I loitered near the guards and their rolling treasures, near the door, another hired hand. PI Ford. Has guns, will travel.

Then a flurry of folders with metal top-clips, distributed by Señor Calderon’s assistant, the documents signed by all parties, notarized by the woman, who then collected and arranged them on a far corner of the big desk. I detected that she felt this ugly business was beneath her. Next she pulled a sturdy metal cart with plump pneumatic tires into position to her boss’s left.

The guards rolled the suitcases to the desk, and at Calderon’s nod, tilted them onto the floor, unzipped them and began handing the bundles to him. He in turn handed several randomly chosen bundles to the notary, who counted the bills with blistering speed and placed them on the cart. Calderon himself weighed the others.

When he was done, Calderon sat down again and slid to Tola a wooden presentation box, open to reveal three tooled-leather checkbooks, six packets of checks, and three elegant-looking pens. He set a business card inside and swung shut the lid.

“It’s so nice to deal with professionals,” said Tola, to no one in particular. Polite assents. She looked back at me with a demure smile.

A few minutes later, deep in the shiny steel vault that smelled faintly of burning metal, we watched Calderon and his never-introduced assistant transfer the bundles to the racks.

Back outside in the bright Imperial County sunshine, we loaded the empty suitcases into my truck. I set Tola’s security shotgun and my uncomfortable ankle cannon in the steel utility box and locked it.

“I’m starved and coming down,” said Tola. “There’s a great place to eat on the Mexico side. If we use the pedestrian crossing, we won’t get stuck in the traffic.”

She requested a shady table in the courtyard restaurant of Hotel Casa Grande. Potted palms, eye-shivering violet bougainvillea, a central fountain in which a pair of spotted towhees splashed. As we were being seated, Tola remarked on the English translation of the hotel name, as pertaining to Kirby, and their old running joke about how much longer he could manage to stay out of the “big house.”

“As it turned out,” said Tola, “not that long at all!”

We drank a small pitcher of margaritas. Tola paid cash from a fat roll in her purse, turned her face up to the palm-slatted sunlight, and closed her eyes.

“I am content right now,” she said. “To be imagining pleasant things behind my rose-colored eyelids. And I’m proud that I remind you of somebody you loved.” Her eyes were heavy on mine. “I got us a good room here. We can continue this discussion inside. Or not. Está bien?”

“More than fine.”

Twenty emotional, pleasure-soaked hours later we were back in the truck and heading for Tola’s pot-growing acres near Palomar Mountain. She consulted the visor mirror and said she looked like a tart, well used.

The highlight reel kept playing through my mind, courtesy of three or four hours of sleep, if that. We made love as soon as we closed the room door, a trail of clothes marking our way to the bed. Followed by a tender, more civilized event. A nap and a time-out for shopping, dinner, and later some Nectar Barn “Love Bomb,” which lived up to its name. Our third engagement took place in a downy time-warp that seemed to last hours, followed by our hysteria over the room’s focal oil painting, a basket of canna lilies appearing to levitate above a table rather than rest upon it. The French-milled soap just floored us. Tola laughed like a scrub jay. You had to be there. We came together again deep in the morning, sleep-deprived and delirious. At sunrise when I tried for another rematch, Tola locked herself in the bathroom and told me to grow up.

I felt taken from and added to at the same time.

In the truck she rambled about girlhood days in the Imperial Valley, how she ran away for San Diego at sixteen, got a job at Taco Bell and a weekly rate room at the Southern Hotel. The job paid $7.25 an hour and no tips, but they’d only give her thirty hours, so the $200 room left her twenty-five bucks for everything else. Wouldn’t have penciled out for long. She’d been eating nothing but Taco Bell until Virgil and Kirby found her a few days later and brought her home. She’d actually put on weight from all the rice and beans and tortillas, had real boobs for the first time, she said. Her mother hadn’t showed for Tola’s homecoming. Mom had divorced Archie by then and had long shed the duties of motherhood.

“I’m extra hard on Mom because she didn’t like me,” said Tola. “But Dad thought I was a rock star. Daddy’s little girl all the way. When Kirby did that to him I was nine years old and riled up enough to want revenge. In the end, the planning did me in. I just couldn’t decide what to do to him — poison him or let the brake fluid out of his motorcycle or maybe just shoot him in the kneecap. After a few weeks of that I realized, well, he’s my brother and it was an accident and I’d never seen Kirby that depressed and disgusted as then. He was punishing himself. So I let it go. It felt good to forgive him. Blood forgives, for better or worse.”

I steered up the mountain toward her property as a black-and-white helicopter hovered in the blue a mile away. Found the shortcut around Kirby’s elaborately padlocked gate, bouncing my truck onto the rutted road with a metallic grate of shocks. In the distance I could see Kirby’s gigantic military tent billowing slightly in the breeze, the Indian motorcycle, the four-wheeler, and the pickup truck were all where I’d last seen them.

The tent door flap blew open and closed and open again. No rifle in the sapling.

And the young woman, Charity, working on her tan again, looked uncomfortable on her towel in the little meadow.

“Get the guns,” said Tola.

I’d already swept my binoculars from under the seat. Saw the bloody body of Charity on her beach towel. Flies and meat bees already at their tasks. Saw the glint of brass in the grass and more near the lilting door flap. Gave Tola the field glasses, hopped into the truck bed, handed her gun through the back window, and loaded the legal ten shot shells into my own security weapon. I saw the helicopter hovering far out.

“You can stay here,” I said.

“Wrong.”

“If you’re not used to this kind of…”

“Roland, I’m going in with you. So go.”

“Follow me and keep the trees between you and the tent.”

“Okay.”

“Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re close enough to hit what you’re pointing at. Never bluff. The shot spreads out wide and fast with that barrel.”

“I know, I know exactly what shotguns do.”

The willows along the creek were big with foliage from the winter rains.

We kept to the streamside, rocks slippery but the gurgle covering our noise. Made a wide, slow circle around the meadow where Charity lay dead in her blood-drenched swimsuit.

Up close to the tent I could see that the big cistern had taken fire, leaked and soaked the ground around it.

I motioned for Tola to stay, then hustled to the tent, pulled open the flap and ducked inside, head low, gun up and scanning. Fallujah. If it’s armed, it’s over. Tola suddenly behind me just like Avalos, damn her. Bullet tears in the far wall, leaking sunlight. Brass on the floor and a throw of blood drops on the tent wall beyond the air mattress. No sign of Kirby or his rifle. A long gash in the north wall, where Kirby had likely slashed and dashed.

We tracked the blood drops and footprints on a rocky trail that led uphill into the forest. I guessed at least three sets of prints. The blood and prints vanished at a branching game trail, a matted pathway and no wider than the deer that made them. We picked up footprints again but no blood and I wondered for the first time if whoever was bleeding — likely Kirby — wasn’t critically wounded at all, and had maybe even found a way to out-scramble the killers. In the distance, the helicopter circled and lowered.

The forest grew taller and darker and the game trail faint. Steep enough to pull ourselves upslope by branches. Both of us breathing hard and I felt the weight of my legs, not from strain but from nerves. Fallujah again, hardwired into my memory.

The trail widened. Onward with a sinking feeling. You see the punch before it’s thrown. Avalos used to see things before they happened, saw the canal footbridge blowing up as we crossed it and two hours later coming back across the unblown-up bridge, the IED blew it in half. Now drying blood on an oak leaf, just hours old, the same age as Charity’s. Buzz of my boxing scar. Dread sharpening.

Then through the trees I saw a clearing bathed in sunlight, a tawny cloak of oak leaves over boulders of black basalt. Beyond the clearing stood a thicket of cottonwoods, dense and pale trunked.

“I see… him,” said Tola.

Just then my eyes found Kirby, too. Half-hidden within the glimmering cottonwood leaves, his white naked body dangling straight as the crowded trunks in which he hung, head cocked sharply and purple faced.

We cut him down wordlessly, laid him out on the rough rocks. Tola cried and kept touching his blood-matted red pompadour.

Certainly they had carried rope just for this purpose. His hands had been bound with a black-and-white New Generation bandana.

Holes shot through his skinny body like in the old outlaw pictures, but not just a few holes. Scores of them. The modern language of the automatic. Postmortem cartel insults, I thought. More than insults. Warnings.

“The real target is me,” said Tola. “I’m bad for business.”

“So are your growers, Tola,” I said. “We should get over there right now.”

“I’m not leaving him here.”

“Help me get him into the truck.”

“I thought of everything. I thought I thought of everything.”

“You can’t think of everything.”

“It was Calderon. I know it was Calderon.”

We wrestled her brother into the bed of the truck and tied a blue tarp over him. I cut loose his hands and put the cartel bandana in the big locking toolbox.

The San Diego County sheriffs were all over Tola’s pot grow, only two miles down-mountain from Kirby’s tent, as the crow flies.

Tola’s breath caught as we topped the rise and looked down on the vehicles and deputies. The helicopter waited, blades still. Uniforms and windbreakers, men and women moving amid the knife-sundered plastic walls of the greenhouses. Lights and frost heaters thrown to the ground. Through my binoculars I could see the plants, scorched black and limp. Flamethrowers, I thought, much faster and more dramatic than Roundup.

The deputies moved with purpose, a sense of aftermath and order, Tola staring down at them with bloodshot green eyes.

I eased the truck over the crest and began the long, rutted descent.