Illegal (27 page)

Jimmy and Tino were headed north through the Los Angeles National Forest toward the town of Rutledge in Kings County, home of the far-flung empire of Simeon Rutledge. They had begun the day below sea level in the desert. Now, they ascended to over 4,000 feet, the temperature dropping 35 degrees. Tino began to shiver. He declined Payne's offer to put the top up and sat quietly while the radio filled the car with the throbbing guitars and hoarse voices of the Gipsy Kings playing "Pasajero."

They passed a lake, far below them in a valley, boats stirring up foamy wakes. Tino barely seemed to notice.

"Everything okay, kid?"

"Sure, Himmy."

Payne tried to decipher the boy's serious look. Nothing apparent, but consider the last few days. Back home, Tino had stabbed his mother's abusive and dangerous boss, who then threatened to cut the boy's heart out. He'd run from the cops in Van Nuys and rescued Payne from the sheriff's deputy along the highway. Then the run-in with El Tigre and the horrors of two stash houses. He'd heard how his mother fought off a rapist at the slaughterhouse. Just this morning, he'd escaped a pedophile ex-con and been shot at by a pint-size cowboy.

"What are you thinking about, kid?"

"Back at the chicken ranch, when Chitwood started shooting, why'd you jump on top of me?"

Payne shrugged. "If anyone was gonna take a bullet, I wanted it to be me."

"Because you're a
valiente
."

"It doesn't need a name. It's just what a man does."

"A man does it for his own
hijo
. But you did it for someone who's not your own blood, and that makes you a
valiente
."

"If you say so, kiddo."

Tino squinted into the windstream, then blurted out, "You think
mi mami
's pretty?"

"From the picture,
muy bonita
. Why?"

"Maybe if Sharon marries that
cabrón
Quinn, and you like
mi mami,
you can marry her."

"You left something out, kid. Your mother would have to like me, too."

"She will," Tino said. "She's never met a man like you."

Jimmy and Tino were twenty miles south of Bakersfield. Payne turned on the radio and picked up a Dodgers game from Shea Stadium, the Mets leading by a run. They heard the
cra-ack
of bat on ball and listened to the melodious Vin Scully describe Rafael Furcal banging a double off the left field wall.

"¡Sólido conectando!"
Tino chimed in. "Furcal's my favorite."

Payne smiled. Tino loved baseball. That made two of them.

"I gotta pee, Himmy."

"You sure?" Payne remembering the boy's gotta-pee distractions.

" 'Course I'm sure. Can you stop in the next town?"

"As long as you're not gonna rob a bank."

They took the exit at Route 223 and headed east. They passed the freshly painted wooden barracks of Weedpatch Camp. A forlorn settlement of Okies during the Great Depression, the place was made famous in
The Grapes of Wrath
. A banner hung limply in the still air, inviting folks to the upcoming Dust Bowl Festival, promising corn bread, chili, and tri-tip steak.

Close to the restored camp, bare wooden shacks were still occupied by migrants—Hispanics, not Okies— tending nearby onion fields. The shacks weren't as nice as the freshly painted Weedpatch barracks. Payne wondered if anyone noticed the irony.

A roadside sign announced the dusty little town of Arvin, the "Garden in the Sun." They found a sporting goods store with a rest room in the back. While he waited for Tino, Jimmy bought two baseball gloves, a big-webbed, Wilson brown steerhide for himself, and a Mizuno black pigskin youth model for Tino. Then he grabbed two handfuls of Pony League balls.

Payne was already in the driver's seat, engine running, when Tino hopped in and found his new glove waiting. "For me?"

"You look like a shortstop to me. Lots of range."

"Oh, man!" A smile rippled across the boy's face like a cool breeze on a mountain lake. "After those
cabróns
stole my glove, I didn't know when I'd ever get another one."

"Once we find your mom, we'll play some ball, see what you've got." Payne thinking of Kevin Costner in
Field of Dreams
saying, "You wanna have a catch?"

They drove off, Tino running his fingertips over the raised red seams of one of the balls. Then he pounded the ball into the pocket of the glove, over and over. Payne imagined the boy sleeping with the ball and glove.

They passed Bakersfield and Delano, Pixley and Tipton, the temperature soaring as they drove deeper into the valley. With the Mustang's top down and the hot air enveloping them, Payne was reminded of his college job in a pizza shop, manning the ovens.

In nearby fields, cows lazed under shade trees. A few lonely oil wells pumped endlessly to their own rhythm. Neat rows of grapes formed straight lines across finely tended vineyards. Fat, round peaches dangled heavily from tree limbs. Hispanic men in hats and long-sleeve shirts hauled honeydews, big as volleyballs, to waiting wagons.

There were almond trees and melon fields and berry patches. Lettuce and tomatoes, asparagus and artichokes, all soaking up the sun, crystalline water exploding in great plumes from rotating sprinklers, rainbows dancing in the mist.

Towering silos of grain stood like missiles alongside railroad tracks that paralleled the highway. Warehouses and pallet yards and fertilizer tanks and billboards with the reminder,
Crops Grow Where Water Flows.

There seemed to be nothing here that wasn't devoted to the soil and its bounty. Could migrants be blamed for believing that America was paved, if not with gold, with tasty treasures ripe for the picking?

The Dodgers game was lost to static, and Payne twirled the old-fashioned radio dial. He found a Spanish-language station and another in Portuguese, then stopped when he heard Los Lobos belting out "Good Morning Aztlán." He remembered how much Sharon loved the up-tempo song and how she once told him to listen carefully to the lyrics. All about not trying to run and hide away.
"Here it comes, here comes another day."

He was never much for drawing philosophical lessons from music, be it "Margaritaville" or "Ave Maria." But who could argue with that message? He had been running. Ever since Adam died. Running from his grief, hiding under a mountain of pain. Not caring about the next sunrise or the new day.

Helping Tino had energized and focused him. He anticipated the pure joy of the boy's reunion with his mother and his own joy of helping them, asking nothing in return. But then what? Sharon's words came back to him.
"You'll wake up the next morning, and Adam will still be gone. And you know what? Tino will be out of your life, too."

With that thought tormenting him, Payne saw a billboard along the road. It would have been hard to miss.

Dominating the sign was a three-story-high likeness of Simeon Rutledge, a crooked smile on his craggy, cowboy face. And this greeting:
Rutledge Ranch and Farms, Inc., Welcomes You to Kings County. Drive Carefully.

Detective Rigney answered the phone in his Parker Center office. Surprised to hear Deputy Sheriff Dixon calling from his piece-of-shit trailer outside Calexico. Rigney could practically smell the ratty boar's head on the wall.

"Just got a call from a waitress at the Park 'n Eat," Dixon told him. "A diner up by Thermal. Technically, that's in Riverside County, out of my jurisdiction, but—"

"Get to the point, Dixon, before global warming fries our asses."

"Payne and the kid were there. Had breakfast this morning. Want to know what they ate?"

"She's sure it's them? She's absolutely sure?" Excitement bubbling up like the oil at the tar pits.

"She I.D.'ed them from a TV report. Said the guy was a real smart-ass."

"That'd be Payne."

"He used the pay phone. Twice. One call out, one call in."

"You gonna subpoena the numbers?"

"Don't need to. My sister-in-law works at the phone company. I'll have everything in an hour."

"Can't wait to see that bastard's face when I bust him." Thinking the A-Form would report that the subject resisted arrest, resulting in his subsequent injuries.

"They left in a hurry," Dixon said. "An old blue Mustang convertible. The waitress couldn't make out the plates, except they were out of state. Car headed north toward an entrance to the I-10."

A physical sensation, Rigney's skin tingling, like the anticipation of sex. "You did great, Dixon. Sorry for busting your chops."

"It's okay. I just want a piece of that shyster."

"You got it, pal. You can have whatever's left when I'm done with him."

The teenage girl with the black curly hair threw her head back and made a sound somewhere between gargling and drowning.

Her idea of an orgasm, Simeon Rutledge thought. Probably watched too many
telenovelas
on Univision. Taking her doggie style over a bale of straw, he continued thrusting, but his heart wasn't in it. He slapped her butt once, twice, three times. Firm as a honeydew.

She looked back over her shoulder, her tongue darting out and licking her lower lip. "Ride me,
jefe
!Fuck me hard!"

Where was she coming up with this shit? His mind wandered to the broken pump on Irrigation Culvert Number Three.

He didn't blame the girl. She moaned and whooped and wailed and chanted,
"¡Dios mio! ¡Dios mio! ¡Dios
fucking
mio!"

Put a lid on it,
chica.
Nobody's that good. Not even me.

Not that he wasn't damn proud of his virility. Funny thing about sex, the more you do it, the more you want it. The less you do it, the easier it is to do without.

That
panocha
pie he'd been breaking in at the club had stirred up the juices.
Marisol.
Passive when drugged, she'd turn into a hellcat, he figured, given enough time.

Just now, his member was barely at half-staff, but Ana or Anita or Angelita—he never quite caught her name—was caterwauling like a coyote.

This morning, Rutledge had not planned on a barn-banging. But Beatriz, the girl's mother, an assistant crew chief who'd been working for him for twenty years, brought her around when he'd been checking out the south peach orchard. Elegant Ladies, fat and firm with a pink blush, were at their peak in the summer heat. Rutledge twisted one off a tree and bit into it, the sweet juice streaming down his face. That's when he saw Beatriz's daughter. Canvas shorts and a sweat-stained T-shirt with no bra, boobs undulating as she hip-swayed through the rows of trees.

Maybe it was the intoxicating aroma of the fruit or even the memory of banging the girl's mother back in the Reagan years.

In the same barn.

Over a different bale of straw.

Slam, bam.
Gracias,
ma'am.

Back then, Beatriz had just arrived from Chihuahua and looked as if she'd walked the whole way. But she had the wide hips, the slim waist, and the pendulous breasts that Rutledge favored. Humping
el jefe
got Beatriz out of the melon fields and into the shade. She probably thought the same magic would work for Ana or Anita or Angelita.

"She's only sixteen and a virgin,
jefe
."

"Sure, Bea, and I'm the King of Siam."

But he took the bait. The girl had the same round breasts and oversize nipples as her mother. Same big ass, too. In twenty years, with five kids, she'd have to turn sideways to make it through the doorway of the double-wide.

Now the girl was wriggling her butt and tightening her pussy, trying to get him to come. But his mind was elsewhere and his dick felt as if it had been anesthetized.

His cell phone rang, and he plucked it from his shirt pocket while squeezing the girl's ass with the other hand. Enrique Zaga. Shit. Now what? Did Chitwood kill another
pollo
?

Rutledge slid out of her. She looked back over her shoulder.
"¿Una segunda vuelta, jefe?"

He hadn't come, but she was offering seconds. With as much passion as a waitress refilling your iced tea.

"Give it a rest,
chica
."

She bounced up and walked naked to a refrigerator by the stalls. Rutledge hoped she knew the difference between lemonade and horse semen. He pulled up his jeans and sank back into the bale of straw.

"What's the problem, Z?"

Zaga apologized for bothering him, then said flat out, "We had some visitors in Hellhole Canyon."

"Chitwood's asshole friends?"

"Worse, Sim." He summarized Chitwood's confrontation with a lawyer from L.A. and a Mexican kid looking for his mother.

"I don't think they'll cause trouble, Sim," Zaga said, "as long as we get the boy back with his mom."

"Fine. What's her name?"

"Marisol Perez."

"Shit."

"What, Sim?"

"She's training at the club."

"So?"

"I'm the one breaking her in, and she ain't exactly a volunteer."

"Jeez, Sim. Still thinking with your dick at your age."

Rutledge silently cursed himself. "You're right, Z. Dammit, you're right."

The men had known each other all their lives. Raced horses at the county fairgrounds. Got drunk together. Banged the same girls. Zaga was his most trusted employee.