Illegal (17 page)

Marisol had hammered ten-penny nails through two-by-fours for hours. She had spread tar on roofs in the blistering August sun. She had cut sheet metal with hand tools. But no physical labor ever compared with this.

Drained of energy, her jumpsuit splattered with blood, her goggles steamed, Marisol felt her knees buckle. Close to fainting, she braced herself on the table. The woman to her left pointed to the clock and told her to take a break.

Back inside the locker room, Marisol took off her hard hat, apron, and gloves. She washed her hands and blood-speckled face. She saw two women taking paper-wrapped empanadas from their lockers. Marisol could smell the pork. If she spent a full day on the kill floor, she thought, she might never eat again. Certainly not meat.

She hurt everywhere, from a dull ache between her shoulder blades to a tingling sensation down her arms. How would she make it through the day? She pulled off her bloody boots, lay down on a bench, and closed her eyes.

As she drifted off, she thought of Tino. Dreamed of walking with him along a clean stream where the water splashed over rocks with the sound of chiming bells.

Marisol awakened with the sensation that she was falling.

Her feet hit the floor, and she was moving. Being pulled by the hair. Carlos screaming at her: "Break is ten minutes, not thirty!"

Calling her a stupid Mexican bitch. Dragging her across the tile into the shower room. Marisol yelling for help, other women sitting on benches, eating lunch, not making a move.

Carlos banged open a door to a toilet stall, pulled her inside, slammed the door behind them. His eyes wild and bloodshot. The eyes of a
drogadicto
.

He spoke so rapidly in Spanglish she could barely understand him. He seemed to be comparing her unfavorably to his wife, who had given him four sons and a daughter, cooked like an angel, and had an ass that smelled like roses. Whereas Marisol was a stuck-up
mamey
who should be begging to swallow his
mermelada de miembrillo
. Then he struck the side of her head with an open palm. She staggered backward and her ears rang.

"I should fire you right now."

"Fine. Do it."

"But I'll fuck you first."

"You'll have to kill me and fuck a corpse."

He slapped her again, this time across the face, blurring her eyes. He jammed his hands into her armpits, picked her up, and slammed her against the side of the stall. Once, twice, three times, her head banged the wall. She felt herself go limp.

He ripped the front of her jumpsuit open, breaking the zipper and trapping her arms in the sleeves. Slid his hand into her panties, tore through her thick pubic hair and jammed a finger inside her. She struggled, but he was too strong. He leaned close and stuck a slobbering tongue into her ear. An hour earlier, she had watched cow tongues sailing by on a conveyor, and now she thought she would puke.

He inserted a second finger into her, twisted deeper. She stiffened with pain.

"Dry as an anthill," he complained. "But a pretty mouth."

He tried kissing her. He smelled like chilled blood and decaying flesh.

She swung her head back and forth, but he used his free hand to grip her jaw. In a second his tongue was in her mouth, licking her teeth. More pressure on her jaw muscles, and her mouth popped open, his tongue darting inside. He was saying something and drooling into her mouth at the same time. She gagged.

Then bit down as hard as she could.

Carlos screamed and spit blood.

Marisol spit, too. The tip of the man's tongue flew out of her mouth.

He reached for her throat, but she ducked and clawed at his face. Found his eye socket. Dug two fingers in deep as they would go—another scream—tore downward, tried to rip out the eye. The eye stayed, but the lid opened like a zipper. Blood spurted, and Carlos howled like a wounded boar.

Marisol wanted to slip around him, escape the stall. Carlos sunk to his knees, moaning, his bulk blocking her path. She tried to climb over him to the top of the door. He grabbed her ankle and pinned it.

Struggling to his feet, Carlos wrapped both arms around her legs, immobilizing her lower body. He whipped from side to side, cursing in Spanish, calling her the whore of all eternity, showering both of them with his blood, crushing her against the metal wall of the stall. Bolts of pain shot up her spine and into the base of her skull. She fought to stay conscious, knowing that if she passed out, she would never wake up.

Still in his grip, she wrapped one arm around his neck, squarely across his Adam's apple. Pulled back as hard as she could. Carlos gasped, choked, sprayed more blood. His eyes bulged like a toxic fish. He heaved forward and back, desperate to shake her off. She summoned the last of her strength to pull her arm even tighter around his neck. A gurgle bubbled from his throat like a breath exhaled under water.

His wishbone snapped with a
cra-ack,
and his slivered tongue shot out, a bloody dart between his lips.

She slid off him just as he pitched forward, his forehead banging into the tile wall. He sank to the floor, his skull bouncing off the toilet tank and into the water, which quickly turned a foamy pink.

Marisol stood there, panting and trembling. She could pull his head from the toilet, where he seemed to be drowning, or she could run.

She opened the stall door and ran.

She expected security guards to grab her. Hadn't the noise attracted attention? But the only people in the locker room were three women on their breaks. If they heard the commotion, they did not care to investigate or sound an alarm.

Marisol stripped out of the jumpsuit, now covered with human as well as bovine blood. She climbed into her jeans, tugged on her blouse, slipped into her sneakers, and ran. She passed through the front office, the woman at the desk looking up, saying something, but Marisol was out the door before the words reached her.

Her mind was a blur. A highway ran along the slaughterhouse property. But to where?

Horrified, she looked at her hands. Bloody and shaking uncontrollably. If
La Migra
caught her, she would be deported. Or worse, sent to prison. If she walked along the highway, the police would stop her.

A van was just pulling out of the parking lot. Six migrants in the back, the driver staring at her. The old Mexican from this morning, the man who brought her here from the stash house. He stopped and waved her to come closer.

Hesitantly, she moved toward the van. The driver opened the window. She could not decipher his look. Anger? Fear? Compassion? Or merely the acknowledgment that the expected had indeed occurred?

In the distance, she heard a police siren.

"Get in, child," the driver said. "There is no time to waste."

Ninety minutes after leaving Sheriff Deputy Dixon handcuffed to his steering wheel, Jimmy and Tino drove into Mexico under a gray and sickly sky.

Nothing to it. Payne waved his passport under the nose of a border agent and Tino just waved. Easier getting into Mexico, Payne thought, than it would be returning to the States.

He had a simple plan. Trace Marisol's steps. To do that, he had to find El Tigre, the coyote who took her across. Then, to get back across, Payne needed new I.D. and a car that wasn't posted on the computer screens of every cop from San Diego to Yuma.

The starting point was the cantina where Tino and Marisol met El Tigre. Tino seemed confident he could find the place. Payne wondered, but so far the little guy was proving capable. He seemed to be a skillful burglar, and he excelled at what the law called "resisting arrest with violence."

They drove past the New River, a filthy stream bubbling with foam and rank, brown water. Payne guided the Lexus down Imperial Avenue into the urban sprawl of Mexicali. The A/C was working overtime, but he still sweated heavily. The thermometer on a bank building read 41 degrees. Centigrade. The digital readout on the Lexus dashboard was 106.

They entered a neighborhood where every business seemed to be a bar, a pharmacy, a strip club, or a shop selling purses and pottery to sunburned Yankees in shorts and sandals. Squat, dark women in long dresses strolled the sidewalks, arms outstretched, displaying fake gold chains, chanting "Bargain. Ten dollar."

Payne tuned the radio to a local station. A routine news day in the capital city of the state of Baja. A meth lab had blown up, killing some neighbors. Drug traffickers had assassinated a police chief. And a tunnel had collapsed, killing three people trying to sneak underground to Calexico.

Before long, Payne was lost. They were on a street of storefront dental clinics and doctors whose signs boasted of cheap
cirugia plástica.
They found their way back to a neighborhood of tourist-trap bars. After cruising the same block three times, Tino shouted, "There! That's where we met the
cabrón.
"

Payne found a place to park, and they walked through swinging saloon doors and into a cantina that looked like a set of a 1950s Western with Randolph Scott and John Wayne. Paddle fans stirred the air but did little to cool it. Wooden wagon wheels were nailed to the walls. On the speakers, Gene Autry was singing, "Back in the Saddle Again."

Sitting at tables were a few sweating, shorts-andsneakered Americans. Looking for cheap thrills or cheap Xanax. Still too early and too hot for much of a crowd. Several men who appeared to be locals sat at the bar. Tino scanned the room, then shook his head. El Tigre was not here.

The bartender, a bilingual
Tejano
in a Texas A&M T-shirt, took their order. A Pacifico for Payne, Pepsi for Tino. The beer and soda both arrived in bottles, both lukewarm.

No, the bartender said. He'd never heard of El Tigre. Sure, plenty of coyotes stopped in there. Drug smugglers, too. They think it's easier to spot Mexican undercover cops in a place like this.

Tino described El Tigre. The bartender laughed. "A fat Mexican man with gold teeth and a crucifix. That narrows it down."

The boy's face showed disappointment.

"Sorry," the bartender said. "No way to keep track of all the hustlers around here. Even if you knew his real name, it wouldn't mean nothing." He looked around, leaned closer to Payne. "But anything else you need, just ask. I got connections."

"I need to sell a car."

"I got a guy for you. A
mestizo
called 'Stingray.' What do you have?"

"Lexus SUV. Leased. I don't have the title."

"Stingray don't care. He's just gonna sell it to some
pachuco.
What do you want for it?"

"Another car."

The bartender nodded as if the request was no more unusual than asking for lime with your Corona. He took down Payne's cell number on a paper napkin and said Stingray would call him within an hour. A few seats down the bar, two middle-aged Mexican men in Western shirts and cowboy boots seemed to take an interest in the conversation.

"What's with those guys?" Payne asked.

"Local
vaquetóns.
Street guys. Petty thieves. Drivers for coyotes. Anything that pays." He lowered his voice to a whisper. "You need anything else?"

"Papers. Documents to get us back into the States."

The bartender gave them a
no-problema
shrug. "I got a
Chino
with a print shop. Green cards, driver's licenses, whatever you want. Excellent work." He rubbed a thumb against an index finger. "
Pero mucho dinero.
And this
Chino
don't take no American Express."

"Got it covered." Payne still had forty-eight hundred bucks and change.

The bartender wrote the address of the print shop on another napkin and slid it toward Payne.

One of the two
vaquetóns,
a man about forty, smelling of tobacco and beer, came up behind Payne and said, "I know three
pendejos
who call themselves 'El Tigre.' "

"Three?" Payne asked. "How's that possible?"

The man shrugged. "I know two other men who call themselves 'El León.' The Lion. Around here, everyone wants to appear tough, even when they are full of shit."

"So who are the three tigers?"

"One lives near Bataques and runs cockfights. He is perhaps seventy years old."

"Not the man," Tino said.

"Another informs for the
judicales.
A little rodent of a man."

Tino shook his head.

"And there is an El Tigre who owes me money for driving a truck across the desert and getting arrested by
La Migra.
A
pollero
who wears a crucifix but will surely rot in hell."

"That's him!" Tino cried.

"His cousin owns a cantina on the other side of the city. If you tell him you have cash and need a
pollero,
he will set up a meeting."

"What cantina?" the boy asked.

"Five hundred dollars." Looking at Payne now.

"Don't pay him," the bartender advised. "He's hustling you."

The man shrugged. "Your decision."

Payne didn't know if he was being hustled. But they'd come this far, and this was their only lead. He opened his wallet and peeled off five hundred-dollar bills.

"Try a bar called 'El Disco,' " the man told him. "A block from the bullring that's shaped like a flying saucer."

"Let's go, Tino," Payne said.

"One more thing," the man called after them. "El Tigre carries a stiletto in his left boot."

With Tino navigating, Payne tried following directions to a bar called "El Disco" but was lost within minutes. They cruised around a residential neighborhood of bungalows painted in bright blues, greens, and yellows. Every block seemed to have several one-story houses with naked rebar sticking straight up through the outside walls, awaiting the money to complete a second floor. Sagging bags of cement and piles of sand looked as if they'd been there for years. Ancient cars were propped on cinder blocks in side yards, bright shirts hanging limp on clotheslines.