Illegal (9 page)

"Van Nuys. I can tell you how to get there," the gardener said, proudly. "The subway station is within walking distance for a strong boy."

"I didn't know there was a subway here."

"Most
gabachos
do not know, either."

The gardener gave him directions to the Wilshire-Vermont station, with instructions to ride to Universal City. There, he would take a bus to Van Nuys. The gardener could not tell him exactly which bus to take, but a smart boy can figure it out. Then he gave Tino money. Winking, he said there are no toll collectors on the subway, so save a dollar twenty-five and buy a Coca-Cola. Use the rest for the bus.

Tino thanked the man and headed toward the subway station. Soon, he thought, he would be speaking to one of the most important lawyers in all of Los Angeles. A good man who had helped the poor
mojados
cooked in that trailer truck. As he walked, Tino grew more confident. J. Atticus Payne, he concluded, must truly be a Good Samaritan.

Payne imagined swinging Adam's baseball bat.

Smashing Manuel Garcia over the head. Crushing bone to splinters, tissue to mush. Luxuriating in each
crack
and
squish
. Reveling in the blood, feeling no more guilt than a kid stomping a grasshopper.

But could he really do it? Thinking about killing was one thing. Watching the life seep out of a man was another. That was the debate raging inside him.

Payne had left Sharon at the restaurant, her face pale with worry. She had buckled him into the front seat of his Lexus, as if he were a child, giving him a little peck on the cheek. A charity kiss, to be sure.

His body aching from his run-in with the protect-and-serve crowd, Payne headed west on Wilshire. He had a notion about stopping at the La Brea Tar Pits. He used to take Adam to the museum there. All boys love dinosaurs and fossils. Adam would spend hours drawing pictures of the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, whose remains have been preserved in the tar.

A few minutes into the drive, Payne saw a Home Depot, and by instinct, swung into the parking lot. Two dozen Hispanic men in dirty jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps squatted on their haunches or sat on the curb, smoking, talking, hoping for an honest day's work. Keenly appraising the shoppers exiting the store with lumber, plywood, paint. Offering their services in an eager Spanglish.

Not a green card in the bunch, of course. A good deal for the homeowner too scared to clean his own roof gutters, too cheap to pay a licensed contractor.

The odds were great that Manuel Garcia wasn't within five hundred miles of here. But didn't Payne have to look, anyway?

Garcia was the driver of the blazing red Dodge Ram truck. An SRT-10 with the 500 horsepower Viper engine. Not the rusted-out Chevy pickup you'd expect an illegal immigrant to drive. Garcia was a solid citizen . . . of Mexico. Without papers, he'd landed a job on a sardine boat on the Monterey docks. He stayed out of trouble, manned double shifts, and with overtime was paid more than most schoolteachers. He sent money home to his wife and kids. He made a down payment on the Ram truck three weeks before driving to L.A., when the sardine boat went into dry dock for maintenance.

So it was by chance that, on a gray and misty Saturday morning fourteen months earlier, Jimmy and Adam Payne crossed paths with the hardworking and hard-drinking
mojado
. A man who would flee on foot from the crash, leaving behind his new truck and a dying boy.

Eight weeks after Adam's funeral and one day after the cast came off his leg, Payne drove upstate and waited for the sardine boat to return to port. He stood on the dock, a copy of Garcia's driver's license photo in his pocket. He watched the boat,
Fish Reaper,
enter the harbor, a blizzard of cawing gulls tailing it. Garcia was not aboard. The crew hadn't seen him. The boat's skipper said he'd been a solid crewman, nimble with the nets. Never missed a day's work. Never gave anyone any problems, not even when he put away a case of beer on a Sunday night. A clerk at the cannery said Garcia had not picked up his last paycheck.

Payne drove inland and found Garcia's trailer in the little town of Spreckels.

Payne broke the flimsy lock. The place clean, the air stuffy. Clothes folded. Small TV on a table of cinder blocks. Letters from his wife. Payne copied down the address from an envelope. The city of Oaxaca in Mexico.

For the next month, Payne haunted the Parker Center downtown. Each day, he'd drop in, taking the homicide detectives to lunch, following up with tips, rumors, ideas. The police couldn't find Garcia. A friend in Homeland Security got Payne a meeting with the regional director of the Border Patrol. No record of Garcia coming in or going out.

Payne carried Adam's aluminum baseball bat in his car. Each evening, when he should have been sitting home with Sharon, holding her, consoling her, he drove through the barrios of East L.A. One night, in Boyle Heights, he thought he saw Garcia walking out of a 7Eleven. Payne yanked the car into the parking lot and jumped out, waving the baseball bat. "Remember me, asshole? You killed my son!"

The man froze, eyes blank with fear, as if Payne were insane. When he got close, Payne realized it wasn't Garcia. Didn't even look much like him. By this time, several bare-chested, tattooed young men in baggy pants had streamed out of the store. The gang known as K.A.M. Krazy Ass Mexicans. Payne jumped into his car and burned rubber, gunshots peppering his trunk.

Payne figured Garcia had returned home to avoid arrest. He called local police in Oaxaca. No help.

"I'm going to Mexico," he told Sharon three months after they had buried their son.

"Why?"

"To find Garcia."

"And then what?"

He didn't answer.

She begged him not to go. She needed him. She sobbed, shoulders heaving, even after there were no more tears. Jimmy stayed.

His grief formed its own universe, created its own gravity. Grief parched him, drained him of blood and filled him with dust. Grief encircled him like leather cinches on a madman, squeezing the breath from him. He was of no use to Sharon. Whatever she needed, he was unable to give.

A lapsed Catholic, Sharon sought peace in the stillness of Our Lady of Angels downtown. For hours, she sat alone in the sanctuary, sunlight streaming over her through alabaster mosaic windows. With its fifty-foothigh cross and its sunbaked concrete walls, the church was built to withstand an earthquake, but did little for heartache.

Sharon asked Payne to accompany her to Mass, just to hold her hand, just to feel his presence beside her. To the extent he believed in God at all, Payne preferred the pissed off curmudgeon of the Old Testament. That bearded sadist who delighted in flood and famine, plague and pestilence. Payne told Sharon that if she really believed the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost routine, maybe she should have prayed
before
Adam was killed.

It was just one of many thoughtless comments. Was he trying to salve his own pain by worsening hers? He had no idea.

Sharon seethed with anger. Payne wondered if she blamed him for the accident. She never said so, but the silent accusation hung in the air, enveloping them like a poisonous fog. He wanted to scream out:

But could Payne have avoided the crash? Was he driving too fast? If only he hadn't looked away—

She'd always told him to slow down, to be more careful. He resented her anger. She resented his resentment. They were divorced six months later.

But now, sitting in his car in the Home Depot lot, his son dead, his marriage over, his career ruined, Payne knew precisely what he had to do. This time there was no one to stop him, and no reason to stay.

He had to go to Mexico. He had to find Manuel Garcia. And he had to kill him.

The huge American woman held a rusty machete, her arm plump as a chicken. "C'mon. Git inside."

She pointed the machete at the five women and motioned toward the door of the wooden cabin.

The
Americana
was the largest woman Marisol had ever seen. Her skin was the bluish white of milk drained of its fat. Her stomach spilled out of purple nylon basketball shorts, and her bleached yellow hair was tied around rollers, like steel cables looped on spools. She must be the owner of the
clavo,
the stash house, Marisol concluded. The house was actually half-a-dozen dilapidated cabins next to railroad tracks outside the desert town of Ocotillo, a few miles north of the border. A sign out front read
Sugarloaf Lodge,
but there did not seem to be any lodgers.

"What you waiting for?" the woman bawled at them. "Git your brown butts inside now.
¡Vaya! !Vaya!
"

Dutifully, the women climbed the three sagging steps and, like cattle, shouldered their way through the open door.

"Not her." El Tigre blocked Marisol's path.

The woman waved her machete. "Don't be messing with my wets, dickwad."

"Yours?"

"Till Ah get paid, you bet your ass."

El Tigre cursed her in Spanish. She shouted that he owed her money. He yelled that the money was owed by the
repartidor,
the labor contractor who would take these worthless peasants to the farms and factories waiting for them.

They argued for several minutes, El Tigre boasting that only his brilliance and bravery got them here at all. They were nearly captured at the border. A Border Patrol helicopter missed seeing them on the mountain, as he had cleverly placed the group so the sun would block them from view. Despite great odds, the courageous El Tigre located the trailhead and waited for the driver of the Duster to bring them here.

He grabbed Marisol's arm and tried to pull her to him.

The woman pointed the tip of the machete at El Tigre's groin. "Ah got no problem chopping your little pecker into
chorizo
and feeding it to my dog."

"¡Bacalao!"
Calling her the filthiest name a man can call a woman.

The woman barked a laugh that made her fleshy arms quiver. "Listen to the Frito Bandito. Pissy as a skunk."

El Tigre still had a grip on Marisol's arm. "This one owes me money."

"That don't give you the right to lay your hands on her. Ah've known men like you all my life, and Ah've drawn blood from more than a few. All without a god-damn regret."

She jabbed the machete between El Tigre's thighs. He hopped back a step and released his grip. Cursed once more, then stomped off.

Marisol nodded a thank-you to the large woman and climbed the steps to the cabin. Bare wooden floors, no furniture. An open toilet, one sink. Perforated metal screens sealing the windows. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, the fatigue and terror of the night seeping into her bones.

"Don't know if you gals speak American, but doncha worry," the huge woman said. "Wanda's got you covered. Welcome, one and all, to the promised fucking land."

Tino took the subway to the wrong station, then landed on the wrong bus. The street signs flew by, a blur of meaningless names.

Hollywood Freeway. Lankershim Boulevard. Sherman Way.

He asked for directions then changed buses, dozing off as an elderly couple next to him chattered in Chinese. Nine hours after heading for the subway station, the bus driver dropped him at a complex of government buildings and told him to walk the rest of the way.

The sun was setting as Tino passed the Van Nuys Courthouse. Close by, a one-story building had a flashing neon sign,
Bail Bonds.
Two young black women in very short skirts and very bright wigs walked out of the building. One wore a green stretchy top with letters as gold as melon seeds, spelling out,
"If You Think My T-Shirt Is Tight . . ."

She spotted Tino and called, "Hi there, cutie!"

The other one approached and ran a hand over his head. "What I wouldn't give to have your hair."

Next door was another small office building. A sign said,
P. J. Steele, Private Investigations.
The windows were darkened glass, the place mysterious.

Two blocks away, he found Delano Street and a sign stuck into the front yard of a small house with peeling paint.
J. Atticus Payne, Esquire.
It was not what he had pictured. In the bus, he had passed tall silver buildings, thin as blades, rising to the sky. He thought that Mr. Payne must be in one of those buildings, conducting important business.

But this?

He walked onto the front porch, floorboards groaning. The door was locked, the windows dark. A driveway led to the back of the house. What must have been a small yard was now pavement with parking for three cars. Empty.

Now what? It was getting dark. Where would he spend the night?

Then he figured that Mr. Payne would be here in the morning.

Tino went to a small side window with three glass louvers in metal slats. Too small for anyone to crawl through. Except maybe a boy.

The window was cracked open two inches. Tino muscled the glass out of the slats and squeezed through, falling onto a tile floor. He found a light switch and looked around. A messy desk. Books. Files. Empty coffee cups, a paper bag greased with French fries. On the floor, cardboard boxes marked
Storage.

He had never been in a lawyer's office, but he had seen them on
telenovelas.
Usually, a television lawyer had a fancy haircut, wore an expensive suit, and had sex with his beautiful secretary on a clean desk of polished wood. Here, the desk was dirty, and there would be no room for any fun.