Illegal (6 page)

The car was old—very old—but clean. Orange with a white stripe, air scoops on the hood, and an engine growling like a predatory animal. Tino would probably know the name of the car. She did not, but a decal on its long hood had an illustration of a tornado and the word "Duster."

Four women—two
campesinas
from the south, one Guatemalan, and the pregnant girl—squeezed into the backseat. El Tigre motioned Marisol into the front seat, where she was sandwiched between the two men. The driver was a long-haired, bearded young man in a baseball cap. He immediately slid his hand along Marisol's thigh before grabbing the floor-mounted gearshift.

With the headlights off, the man gunned the engine, slipped the gearshift into first gear, and spun up the dirt road, and deeper into California.

They had just pulled onto a paved road when Marisol heard the sirens.

Blue lights flashing, two Ford Expeditions sped after them.

"Shit! Border Patrol!" The driver stomped on the clutch, shifted gears, and floored the accelerator. The car fishtailed, then straightened, and Marisol was thrown against the seat.

The next few minutes seemed to her to be one high-pitched scream. The actual screams of the four women in the backseat. The wail of the sirens. The shouts in Spanglish from left and right, the driver and El Tigre cursing at each other, arguing where to go.

Marisol saw the arm of the old-fashioned speedometer, as it fluttered between 105 and 110. They would crash. She was sure of it. A tire would explode. They would careen off the road and into a boulder. Her head would fly through the windshield, and Tino would be left alone. She squeezed her eyes shut and chanted a prayer.

"You are winning them!" El Tigre shouted in English. Marisol thinking he meant "losing them," as the two Border Patrol vehicles fell behind.

"Don't matter none," the American driver said. "Bastards will have a chopper over us in a couple minutes."

Barely slowing down, the Duster screeched off the asphalt and onto a gravel road that sloped upward and undulated through a series of rises and dips. Headlights still out, the car seemed to be a missile, launched into the night sky, headed toward some explosive crash landing.

The driver tugged the wheel hard and skidded off the road, coming to rest between a line of manzanita bushes and a single mesquite tree. In front of them, the outline of a mountain appeared as a menacing tower set against the soft glow of the Milky Way.

"Out! Everyone out!" the driver shouted.

"¿Aquí?"
El Tigre asked, confused.

"I'm on parole. Ain't gonna be stopped with a car full of greasers."

"Where are we?" Marisol asked. "Where do we go?"

"The trailhead." The driver pointed to a pile of railroad ties. Nothing but the darkness of the mountain beyond.

"You cannot leave us here." Marisol imagined the horrific night. Lost on a mountain with
un coyote estúpido,
whose only competence was probably as a rapist.

"It don't look like it, but there's a good trail," the driver said. "You go up one side of the mountain, come down the other. You'll cross a creek and reach another trailhead, looks just like this one. I'll be there in the morning and take you to the stash house in Ocotillo."

"Ocotillo?" Marisol said, fear creeping up her spine. "But we are going to Calexico."

"Too much heat to go that far. Ocotillo's closer."

"But my son. He will not know where I am."

"Tough shit," the driver snapped. He gestured toward the women in the backseat. "Git out!
¡Vaya! ¡Vaya!
"

Marisol grabbed El Tigre by an arm. "Take me back! Take me to my son now."

"There is no going back," he said glumly, staring at the looming mountain.

They navigated by the light of the stars. No flashlights allowed. Border agents with rifles patrolled these mountains on horseback, El Tigre claimed. Citizen militias, too. Drunken men with guns. Scurrying on all fours up a steep path, she thought she saw a mountain lion. But maybe she imagined it.

Minutes later, an animal howled in the darkness. Eerie, nearly human screams. A peasant Guatemalan woman crossed herself and chanted prayers. Claimed the animal was a
chupacabra,
the bloodsucking creature of myth.

The endless, unknowable night, Marisol thought, had hardly begun.

Waiting in the canyon near the border, Tino watched Rey answer his cell phone. El Tigre calling. Rey listened a few seconds. Stomped in a circle. Shouted,
"¡Chingalo! ¡Chingalo!"

Listened some more. "What am I supposed to do with them?"

Two more
"chingalos."

"No time to babysit, Uncle. I got my own delivery to make."

"Where's
mi mami
?" Tino demanded when Rey hung up.

"Sucking a border agent's cock," Rey taunted him. "Now, shut up,
chilito
!"

All my fault, Tino thought for the hundredth time. Blaming himself, for who else could he blame? Because of him, they had to run. He wanted to race through the canyons all the way to the border. Desperate to find his mother. Wanting to feel her arms around him.

Rey wouldn't say what had happened. Just waved his pistol and screamed at Tino and the four men to get in the truck. They sped back to La Rumorosa along the same winding road, sliding through steep turns, Tino scraping his elbows in the cargo bed.

Once back at the stone house, Rey grabbed a submachine gun—a Mac-10 Tino recognized from TV shows—and herded the four men into the house, locking them in a back room.

"But you,
chilito . . .
" He waved the gun barrel toward Tino. "You are coming with us."

Before Tino could answer, Rey swung the gun toward a small tree and fired a burst, nearly cutting the trunk in half. Rey's two friends—the morons he called "Mundo" and "Chuco"—laughed like donkeys. They all rapped knuckles and passed around a bottle of wine. Rey offered Tino a sip, but he shook his head, and all three brayed some more, calling him
"lambiscón."

"I'm no suck ass," Tino said, and they laughed some more.

After several minutes of shooting the gun and drinking the wine, Rey grabbed Tino's backpack and yanked it open. Three T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, some socks. "Nothing but shit here,
cabrón.
"

Tino remained silent. Unwilling to show his fear, hoping they could not see his knees wobbling like a broken bicycle.

Rey pulled out Tino's prized baseball glove. A Vinny Castilla model. Soft brown leather with an aroma better than fresh-baked bread. He had bought the glove with the money he earned delivering lunch to workers at his mother's job site.

Rey smacked Tino across the face with the glove. Turned to his friends. "Ay! Mama's boy thinks he is a baseball player."

He tossed the glove to Mundo, who tossed it to Chuco. All of them seemed to be around the same age. Nineteen or twenty. Shaved heads. Dirty clothes. Stinky bodies. Scratchy facial hair like grass trying to grow out of sand. Now all three pawed through Tino's belongings, mangy dogs at a garbage can.

After finding nothing of interest other than the baseball glove, Rey ordered Tino to take off his shirt. Tino shook his head, and the two others grabbed him, stripped off the shirt, and pinned his arms behind his back.

Mundo grabbed the chain around Tino's neck. Attached to the end was a clear plastic envelope, and inside, a photo of his mother. "Look,
chilito
still sucks his mother's tit."

More laughs, all around.

Rey disappeared into the house, while Mundo and Chuco pushed Tino to the ground. Mundo ripped Tino's sweatpants down to his knees. Tino squirmed and yelled, fearing they were perverts. He got one arm free and flailed at them. He would die fighting before he would let the filthy
maricóns
soil him.

Chuco pulled the sweatpants completely off, then took a knife to the material that enclosed the drawstring. When the cloth tore open, four twenty-dollar bills, rolled up tight, popped out. Tino had put the money there, just as El Tigre had advised, to keep it safe from thieves. Chuco grunted his pleasure and grabbed the bills. Mundo pinned Tino to the ground, the boy screaming, "Give it back! That's all I have!"

Rey returned, straddled Tino, and placed a plastic bag filled with white powder on his chest. It took Tino a moment to figure out what was going on.

¡Cocaina!
They were not perverts. They were drug traffickers.

Rey wrapped a long strand of tape around Tino's chest, securing the bag in place. They flipped him and taped two more bags on his back.

Chuco and Mundo carried Tino, still struggling, onto the cargo bed of the truck, opened the toolbox, removed a false bottom, and placed him inside.

"Me and my
carnales,
we're
Eme,
" Rey said.

Mexican Mafia. Tino didn't believe it for a second. These guys were stupid peasants who sold drugs without kicking up a percentage to
La Eme.

"You got some work to do for us,
chilito,
" Rey continued. "And if you fuck it up, you're gonna get tagged and bagged." He slammed a piece of plywood into a slot, sealing off Tino.

The plywood groaned above Tino's head, tools clattering into the upper half of the box to cover up the false bottom. Then, the
click
of a padlock. Silence. Tino was as alone as a corpse in a coffin. The only light seeped through tiny airholes drilled in the side of the box.

He felt the fear close tight around his heart, fought against it, could not conquer it. But then he came to a realization that startled him, made him feel the passage from boyhood to manhood in one moment of flaming brilliance, as if from a shooting star. He cared for another person more than for himself. So he was not afraid to die. But he could not stand the thought of his mother's heartache if tonight he vanished from the face of the earth.

Jimmy Payne clawed through the cobwebs of sleep and awoke on the sofa in his office. His stomach felt as if he'd eaten the shells along with the oysters the night before. His mouth seemed to be full of burrs.

It was the morning after Judge Rollins committed suicide, but Payne had little time to grieve or examine his own complicity in the death. A smear of the morning sun peeked through a dirt-streaked window.

He was late for court.

Payne got up stiffly, his right leg feeling as if someone had filled it with sand. Ever since his femur was patched together with a metal plate and screws, it took half a day to loosen up the muscles and ligaments. A headache dug in like the infantry on D-Day. Popped three aspirin, swallowed them dry. Grabbed his emergency dark suit and a clean shirt from the top of a bookcase.

Tossing aside a mountain of legal papers and unpaid bills, he dug out the file labeled
People v. Scirotto.
Then J. Atticus Payne, Esquire, headed to court, certain this was going to be a six-aspirin day. Unshaven and unshowered, his head throbbing and shirttail flapping, Payne limped along a corridor of the Van Nuys Courthouse.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, Payne was in this very building, on this very floor, in the chambers of the not-so-Honorable Walter Rollins. Less than twelve hours ago, Rollins put a bullet through his temple, rather than face bribery charges. The news had already spread through the courthouse—a beehive of fluttering wings and wagging tongues—that Payne had set up the judge in a sting operation.

Now it seemed that every lawyer, bailiff, secretary, jail guard, probation officer, and three-time loser was glaring at Payne.

"Fucking rat." The words were spat by a rotund, oafish P.D., a young man who thought he'd been ordained by the gods of justice to spring every robber, rapist, and burglar in Southern California.

"Unbelievable, Payne," said a court clerk, a pretty African-American woman who admonished jurors each day not to speak to lawyers, lest some communicable disease be transmitted.

"Asqueroso,"
hissed Maria, Judge Kelton's stenographer, a woman Payne had thought about asking out. Calling him an asshole probably ruled out margaritas after work.

Payne quickened his pace, and nearly ran into the blocky backside of Mel Grossbard.

"Yo, Suds," Payne greeted him. The lawyer earned the nickname after beating a DUI rap for a drunk truck driver who overturned his rig and spilled twelve hundred cases of Budweiser. "What's up, pal?"

"Morning, douche bag."

"Not you, too, Suds."

"You think a judge will ever appoint you to a case? It's over, Payne. You'll never eat matzoh in this town again."

"I'm not Jewish."

"Thank God. We got enough schlemiels without you."

Judge Gordon Kelton had a weak chin, a weedy mustache, and a pasty face with the grayish hue of a towel in a cheap motel. He wore rimless glasses perched on a nose as pink and pitted as a strawberry. Thin shreds of dishwater brown hair were raked up and over, but failed to cover his egg-shaped skull. To Payne, he resembled Heinrich Himmler, though without the sense of humor.

Payne had never had much luck in Judge Kelton's courtroom, but today was a no-brainer. A quickie guilty plea in the case of
People v. Scirotto.
Three years in the can plus three years probation for a botched 7-Eleven holdup.

Maybe if Payne hadn't been hung over, he would have heard the hoofbeats and sensed the ambush coming round the bend.