Then She Vanished

Thirty-Eight

Tola’s red Jeep was easy enough to track with the blacked-out taillight. South down the interstate. I didn’t really care if she saw me or not. I was bent to do what I could for her. The PI Roland — knight-errant, by love inspired, the tools of his trade within easy reach. Steering down Interstate 15 south in the service of his queen.

To the 8 East and into the mountains of Cleveland National Forest, down the long grade past Virgil Strait’s rocky stronghold and on into Imperial Valley. Wind and blowing sand and big rigs bound for Arizona. Off at Bonds Corner, then into Buena Vista.

She parked on the U.S. side, on a potholed boulevard in the restaurant and bar district. Turned off her lights and called me.

“I knew you’d pull this,” she said.

“You didn’t fight it very hard.”

“I made a specific request.”

“I don’t work for you,” I said. “What is this?”

“Calderon told New Generation about my appointment at the Buena Vista Credit Union. Providing an opportunity on Palomar in my absence and the skeleton crew at the grow. My own trusting stupidity failed to foresee and prevent what happened. His unhappy notary is an acquaintance of mine.”

“They should have taken us out at the credit union,” I said. “Or the Hotel Casa Grande. Easy target, easy money.”

“Kirby meant nothing to them except a warning to me,” she said. “New Generation wants everything I’ve worked for. My money, my plants, my retail, my savings and loan. My mail-order start-up and my California regulator you told me not to trust and by the way you were right. That craggy sonofabitch I trusted is FBI. The cleanest way for New Generation to get all that is to get me on their payroll. I’ve turned down some awfully lucrative advances. Leading to what happened. But I’m coming to the table tonight at the Casa Grande at their invitation. We’re going to clear it all up.”

“It can’t all be cleared up tonight, Tola.”

“Some of it, then,” she said.

A flat tone to her voice. I wondered what part she was hoping to clear up and what she’d let slide.

“I accept your offer of help tonight, Roland. Be a calming influence. If things don’t go well, we’ve got a way out, east of town. Ride with us or you might never get back across.”

Virgil Strait picked us up in an old Econoline commercial van, once white, few windows but lots of rust. Plenty of Bondo above the taillights but a capable growl at idle.

Virgil peered at me through faint interior lamplight, a take-it-or-leave-it expression on his tortoise face. A passenger beside him, more riders in the bench seats behind. “Make room,” he said.

The slam of the door, then grumbles, grunts, and names. I was placed in the middle bench seat between Tola and one of her Strait Shooters from the Nectar Barn, Gar. Behind me sat Marcus from the Palomar grow, flanked by two other large, stone-faced braves, Erik and Eli. Up front in the passenger seat sat Archie Strait — father of Tola, Kirby, and Dalton — the once proud patriarch seriously injured in contest with his eldest son. The face of a hundred billboards. Dressed in a yoked black cowboy jacket over a white shirt, and his signature red bandana in place. Groomed and alert looking but motionless as a manikin, just as when I’d met him in Virgil’s eyrie.

I noted the others’ business-meeting attire: suits or sports coats. The van smelled of hair product and nerves.

“You should have told me about the dress code,” I said.

“You just shut up and do what Tola tells you to,” said Virgil.

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Dumb jarhead,” he said.

“Dumb Okie,” I said.

“Men,” said Tola. “Please, let’s bow our heads in prayer. This is our practice, Roland. We welcome your participation but it’s not required.”

I looked at the floor carpet, worn down to metal between my feet. And listened to Tola’s low smooth voice in prayer over the idling engine.

“God in heaven we ask your blessing upon us. We believe in you but we don’t claim to know who you are or what you want. We know that you might not like us very much. Which makes us humble before you, heads bowed in hope that you will protect us, but fearful that you might choose not to. We deserve nothing. But we desire the best of your earth and want your permission to take it. In return we will be kind to the poor, and brave against the wicked. And we will honor your name, God, our silent and invisible partner, forever. Amen.”

An easy crossing south at the border. The young U.S. agent studied Virgil and his famous passenger without a trace of recognition, focused on Virgil’s passport, looked up, said nothing and waved us through.

The Mexican border guard did likewise, but gave Archie a smile as the crossarm lifted. “Welcome to Mexico,” he said.

Virgil handed him what looked like an eight-by-ten picture of his son, the same image that had graced the highway billboards for all the years.

“Here,” said Virgil. “He wants you to have this. From back when he could still sign his name.”

The Hotel Casa Grande stood on Avenida Revolución, a building with one hundred and fifty years of history. Missions and ranchos, wealth and squalor, Indians and Anglos, revolution and reform. Pancho Villa slept here. No mention of General Pershing. The plastered adobe was two stories, built around the interior courtyard where Tola and I had eaten. All of it carefully maintained and charmingly lit.

Virgil parked the heavy-laden van opposite the hotel and a block away, aimed back in the direction from which we had come. The engine dieseled and died.

“Tola does the negotiating,” he said. “We’re here to keep things well mannered. If anything less than good manners prevails, get back to the van fast. If you can’t, the desert north of here is passable. Just stick to the riverbed and dodge the rattlesnakes. It’s five hundred yards back to the U.S.A. No wall yet, no troops anymore. They’ll want our phones, so leave them here — they can’t take what we don’t have.”

“They’ll take the whole damned van,” said someone in the dark.

“The van is secure,” said Virgil.

I followed his crooked finger pointing through the windshield and saw the men approaching, three more of Tola’s Strait Shooters from the Julian Nectar Barn.

“It’s going to go smoothly,” said Tola, her voice taut. “It’s going to go exactly how I want it to.”

“Vamos con Dios,” said a voice from behind me.

Tola and I led the way, her boots sharp on the old cobbles, her flowing duster buttoned not quite high enough to hide her plunging neckline. Behind us came the rest, Marcus pushing Archie Strait in his wheelchair, his head braced but bouncing sharply on the bumpy street, his white shirt bright under the streetlamp. His hands were folded on his lap and his face set in a serene expression.

“I can’t get free from seeing Kirby,” she said. “Hanging there in the cottonwoods. All white like the tree trunks. I can separate personal from business, Roland. I’ve always done that. But what about Kirbs? He can’t do anything at all now. They took it all away from him, right down to his right to breathe. From Charity, too. And from three more of my people. I’m having trouble shaking that from my brain.”

“Shake it now, Tola,” I said. “Vengeance later.”

“That’s what Dad said.”

“I didn’t know he could talk.”

“He tightens a finger once for yes and twice for no. It works. It just takes time for complex ideas.”

There seemed to be no end to Strait family surprises.

We were shown into the courtyard restaurant by a solemn gentleman in a black suit. Columned archways ran along all four sides, framing the tiled floor and the heavy wooden chairs and tables. Above and beyond them guest rooms, curtained for privacy, some lit and others not. In the courtyard wrought iron sconces with electric candles threw light on the profusion of potted plants that had surrounded Tola and me on what now seemed to be a very distant evening, never to be repeated.

Six New Generation gangsters took their seats at a spacious table for twelve, their jefe at one head. Virgil took the other head as his five confederates claimed alternating chairs amid the narcotraficantes. The illegals favored urban fashions and street bling, high-end watches, big rings, gold bracelets. Tola’s wannabe legals wore conservative western attire — some in cowboy boots and hats, their weapons purposely ill concealed. Tattoos for all. I stood at the wall with a nervy beat to my pulse, Archie beside me, Tola with her back to us mid-table.

The men stood and introduced themselves gravely, handshakes and fist bumps and an air of guarded conviviality: Leo was the jefe, then Matteo, Domingo, Israel, El Poco, and El Suerte — The Small and The Lucky.

Then the northerners: Virgil, who introduced his granddaughter, his son behind her, then Marcus, Gar, Erik, and Eli.

When the introductions were finished and the players had sat, a waiter pulled back Leo’s chair and El Jefe stood.

“My English no bueno,” he said. “But for to honor you, bonita Nordica, I try. We are having too much blood in your country. The United States is the customer we all need. She is the not-ending source of dollars for us. La plaza última. Can we share? Yes, but only if we share together. Not as guerreros but as friends. As businessmen. We all know this. Sinaloa knows. New Generation knows, Tijuana knows. La Familia knows. All of the politicians in Mexico and los Estados Unidos know this. You know. Many of your businesses are legal but they no can operate. So, only on native land. And the natives know. Billions of dollars grow from los Estados Unidos, like plants. The dollars are reaching up to offer themselves. So, Tola, why do we compete? Why do we not join our people — right here, tonight — a pledge of business and honor? Your brother, he is no more. But maybe we honor him, and those of New Generation, with peace. Peace and cooperation. We have many lawyers. So do you. Too many lawyers. They make the details. But only if we agree, tonight.”

Leo looked down at Tola, then at each of the seated norteños. He turned and nodded at Archie, then sat.

In the awkward silence that followed, an army of waiters marched in, bearing a magnum of wine, pitchers of beer, and trays of liquor bottles crowded tightly as high-rises. They were stoic and formal and served the Mexicans first.

When the last of the waiters exited through the columns of the arcade, Tola stood and raised a beer stein.

“To the future,” she said.

“El futuro!” a few voices rang out, none of them from her own people. It was then that I thought I knew why this strange convention had been called, and what was going to happen.

“And to Kirby Strait,” she added. “One more victim of New Generation greed and stupidity.”

Another silence, this one more loaded.

“Your slaughter on Palomar has done more than break my heart,” she said. “It’s made terrible trouble for us at home. The local police are investigating. The San Diego sheriffs. The Bureau of Cannabis Control. The FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security. Our sympathetic representatives and state assembly can’t help us with headlines like the ones that you have created. You have brought all this wrath upon my people in order to what? To bully me into a partnership? If any one of you in this room thinks that I’m weak and foolish enough to give in to your violence, let him raise his hand and be counted right now.”

Their eyes were hard upon Tola, and their faces set in contempt, but not a hand went up.

“Good,” she said. “You’re right, Leo. We can’t bring back Kirby or his woman, or the three fine people I lost on Palomar that day. We can only honor them. With grand words and fading memories of who they were and what they paid.”

Tola upped her stein and took what looked to me, from behind, like a measured swallow.

“With respect, Miss Tola,” said El Poco, standing and opening his hands in the air. He was a huge man with a Zapata mustache and soulful eyes. “Your brother and his amiga were not supposed to die that day. They were collaterals.”

“Which makes his dying even worse,” said Tola. “More wasteful and inept. They shot up his body long after he’d died, Poco. Is there such a thing as collateral mutilation?”

“I will discipline the guilty,” he said.

The silence was Tola’s to break or keep. “I forgive you all. I forgive you, to a man.”

El Jefe stood and raised his glass of wine. “To our friendship and new business relation!”

Tola set down her beer stein. “I said nothing about friendship or business.”

“But…”

“I simply forgave you before saying hello to you from Kirby.”

Beneath the chartreuse satin Tola’s shoulders rolled, and the back of the duster loosened and an orange flash blew Leo off his feet and back into his chair. The Honcho. She turned and shot El Poco in his face as he sat, swung the coach gun down-table to cut down half-risen Matteo. Virgil pistol-shot Israel, seated next to him, point-blank; Eli swept a small knife through El Suerte’s throat; Gar shot drop-jawed Domingo with a small machine pistol; and Marcus swung his pistol left and right through the gun smoke, futilely searching for a living target.

I pushed Archie fast for the courtyard exit, watching in astonishment as he curled a finger around the side of his wheelchair arm, launching a smoke bomb from the back frame. It rose as high as the second-story guest rooms, then fell back into the restaurant in a billowing cloud.

Barreling toward the lobby I was aware of the waitstaff and the maître d’ peering at us from behind the archway columns, and the guests proned out on the floor, and the cooks pressed to the kitchen door windows, and the lights in the guest room windows going out as the smoke hung. I muscled Archie through the lobby and down the colonnade toward the Econoline.

Virgil drove briskly toward the border, most of us chattering nervously and wiping off blood. Tola sat speechless beside me, pale as a ghost, her head lolling as I cleaned off her face with my shirtsleeve.

We got the same Mexican border guard, who was once again pleased to see the celebrity Archie Strait in the passenger seat, smartly groomed and pleasant faced.

“I give my wife the picture,” he said.

“Splendid, Pedro,” said Virgil. “Now open that gate and we’ll be on our way.”

The U.S. agent waved us through and Virgil stomped on it.