The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (43 page)

Beau regarded the high fence, the watchtowers and the spotlights. It had changed a lot over the years. He had been working the border for all of his adult life. He had graduated from the Border Patrol Academy in 1975 and had been stationed in Douglas. His work had taken him across the continent and then to the Caribbean in the immigration service’s anti-drugs task force, eventually returning him full circle. For two decades, he had been a customs special agent in this wild and untamed corner of the frontier, patrolling the border on horseback, a shotgun strapped onto his saddle.

He looked out at the guards circulating between the cars and trucks. Those boys doing the job today would have thought he was an anachronism, relying on a horse when he could have had one of the brand-new Jeeps they were driving around in. The pimpled little shit who had given him his cards had said that he had a “John Wayne complex.” Beau couldn’t see what in the hell was wrong with that. How could those boys get down and read tracks in their four-by-fours, see the evidence that said that smugglers had been coming through? They called it “cutting for sign,” and Beau was an expert at it. You needed to know the difference between a starburst and a chevron imprint, when a mat of some sort had been attached to shoes, when the footprints had been brushed away by the last person in a convoy. He could read the signs that told him exactly when movement occurred, whether his quarry was near or far. Those were the kinds of things a man could learn from whether the track of a bug ran under or over a footprint. You couldn’t do any of that from a Jeep.

But Beau was a realist, too, and he knew that time had moved on. A man like him was from a different era. He’d fought regular battles with the narco traffickers of Agua Prieta over the border. During his career, he had seen the territory between Nogales and Arizona’s eastern border with New Mexico become known as “cocaine alley” and then quickly get worse. Juárez was the worst of all. The dirty little border
pueblo
was a place where greed, corruption and murder had flourished like tumbleweed seeds in souring horse manure. Now, with the cartels as vast and organised as multinationals, with their killing put onto an industrial scale and with the bloodshed soaking into the sand, Beau was glad to be out of it. In comparison to that line of work, hunting down bounties was a walk in the park.

But perhaps not this one.

His thoughts went to Adolfo González. On reflection, fifty grand was probably a generous quote for a job that was fixing to be particularly difficult.

He had heard about the six dead Italians on the news this morning. Ambushed in the desert, shot to shit, and left out for the vultures. He had seen the video on YouTube before it had been taken down. He recognised Adolfo’s voice. The cartels were all bad news, but La Frontera was the worst. Animals. And Adolfo was the worst of all. Getting him back across the border wasn’t going to be easy.

He wondered whether he should have turned the job down.

There were easier ways to make a living.

He edged the Jeep forwards again and braked at the open window of the kiosk.

“Ten dollars,” the attendant said.

Beau handed it over.

“Welcome to Mexico.”

He drove south.

MILTON PAUSED in the restaurant’s locker room to grab an apron and a chef’s jacket. He sat down on the wooden bench and smoked a cigarette. The room was heavy with the musty stink of old sneakers, greasy linens, body odour, stale cigarette smoke and foot spray. Familiar smells.

He changed and went through into the kitchen.

It was a big space, open to the restaurant on one side. The equipment was a mixture of old and new, but mostly old: four big steam tables; three partially rusted hobs; two old and battered steamers at the far end of the line; three side-by-side, gas-fired charcoal grills with salamander broilers fixed alongside; a flattop griddle. The double-wide fryer was where he would be working. The equipment was unreliable, and the surfaces were nicked and dented from the blows of a hundred frustrated chefs. Most of the heat came from two enormous radiant ovens and two convection units next to the fryer station. A row of long heat lamps swung to and fro from greasy cables over the aluminium pass. It was already hot.

Gomez came in and immediately banged a wooden spoon against the pass. “Pay attention, you sons of bitches. We got a busy night coming up. No one gets paid unless I think they’re pulling their weight, and if anyone faints, that’s an immediate twenty-percent deduction for every ten minutes they’re not on their feet. And on top of all that, we got ourselves a newbie to play with. Hand up, English.”

Milton did as he was told. The others looked at him with a mixture of ennui and hostility. A new cook, someone none of them had ever seen working before, no one to vouch for him. What would happen if he wasn’t cut out for it, if he passed out in the heat? He would leave them a man down, the rest hopelessly trying to keep pace as the orders piled up on the rail. Milton had already assessed them: a big Mexican, heavily muscled and covered in prison tattoos; a sous chef with an obvious drinking problem who lived in his car; a cook with needle scars on his arm and a T-shirt that read BORN FREE – TAXED TO DEATH; and an American ex-soldier with a blond Vanilla Ice flattop.

“Our man English says he’s been working up and down the coast, says he knows what he’s doing. That right, English?”

“That’s right.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gomez said with a self-satisfied smirk, his crossed arms resting on the wide shelf of his belly.

Milton went back and forth between the storeroom, the cold cupboard and his station, hauling in the ingredients that he knew he would need for the night: three hundred pounds of French fries in waxy brown ten-pound bags; fish tubs full of breaded fillets, the cod dusted with cornmeal already going gooey in the humid air; three-gallon buckets of floury batter; boxes of clam strips; and cases of calamari, rock shrimp and chicken cutlets. He looked around at the others methodically going through the same routine that they would have repeated night after night in a hundred different restaurants: getting their towels ready, stacking their pans right up close so that they could get to them in a hurry, sharpening their knives and slotting them into blocks, drinking as much water as they could manage.

The front-of-house girl who Milton had met earlier put her head through the kitchen’s swing door. “Hey, Gomez,” Milton heard her call out. “Coach of gringo tourists outside. Driver says can we fit them in? I said we’re pretty full, but I’d ask anyway—what you wanna do?”

“Find the space.”

The machine began rattling out orders. Milton gritted his teeth, ready to dive into the middle of it all. The first time he had felt the anticipation was in a tiny, understaffed restaurant in Campo Bravo, Brazil. He needed a way to forget himself, that had been the thing that he had returned to over and over as he worked the boat coming over, the desire to erase his memories, even if it was only temporary. After five minutes in that first restaurant he had known that it was as good a way as any. A busy kitchen was the best distraction he had ever found. Somewhere so busy, so hectic, so chaotic, somewhere where there was no time to think about anything other than the job at hand.

The first orders had barely been cleared before the next round had arrived, and they hadn’t even started to prepare those before another set spewed out of the ticket machine, and then another, and another. The machine didn’t stop. The paper strip grew long, drooping like a tongue, spooling out and down onto the floor. They could easily look out into the restaurant from the kitchen, and they could see that the big room was packed out. It got worse and worse and worse. Milton worked hard, concentrating on the tasks in front of him, trying to adapt to the unpleasant sensation that there suddenly wasn’t enough air on the line for all of them to breathe. Within minutes he felt like he was baking, sweat pouring out into his whites, slicking the spaces beneath his arms, the small of his back, his crotch. His boots felt like they were filling with sweat. It ran into his eyes, and he cranked the ventilation hood all the way to its maximum, but with it pumping out the air at full blast, the pilots on his unused burners were quickly blown out. He had to keep relighting them, the gas taps left open as he smacked a pan down on the grate at an angle, hard enough to draw a spark.

He sliced bags of fries open with the silver butterfly knife that he always carried in his pocket and emptied them straight into the smoking fryers. The floor was quickly ankle-deep in mess: scraps of food that they swept off the counters, torn packaging, dropped utensils, filthy towels; it was all beneath the sill of the window and invisible from the restaurant, so Gomez didn’t care. Still the heat rose higher and higher. Milton stripped out of his chef coat and T-shirt because the water in them had started to boil.

It was hard work, unbelievably hard, but Milton had been doing it for months now, and he quickly fell into the routine. The craziness of it, the random orders that spilled from the machine, the unexpected disasters that had to be negotiated, the blistering heat and the mind-bending adrenaline highs, the tunnel vision, the relentless focus, the crashing din, the smell of calluses burning, the screams and curses as cooks forgot saucepan handles were red-hot, the crushing pressure and the pure, raw joy of it all as the rest of his world fell away and everything that he was running away from became insignificant and, for that small parcel of a few hours at the end of a long day, for those few hours, at least, it was all out of mind and almost forgotten.

CATERINA SAT on the bus and stared through the cracked window as they moved slowly through the city. It was getting late, seven in the evening, yet the sun still baked at ninety, and Juárez quivered under the withering blows of summer, a storm threatening to blow in from the north, tempers running high. A steady hum of traffic rose from the nearby interstate, and the hot air blowing in through the open windows tasted of chemicals, car exhaust, refinery fumes, the gasses from the smelter on the other side of the border, and the raw sewage seeping into what was left of the river. The bus was full as people made their way out for the evening.

Caterina had made an effort as she left the flat, showering and washing her hair and picking out a laundered shirt to go with the jeans and sneakers she always wore.

She was thinking about all the girls that she had been writing about. Delores was different. She had dodged the fate that had befallen the others. She had managed to escape, and she was willing to talk.

And she said she could identify one of them men who had taken her.

The brakes wheezed as the bus pulled over to the kerb and slowed to a halt. Caterina pulled herself upright, and with her laptop and her notes in the rucksack that she carried over her shoulder, she made her way down the gangway, stepping over the outstretched legs of the other passengers, and climbed down to the pavement. The heat washed over her like water, torpid and sluggish, heavy like Jell-O, and it took a moment to adjust. The restaurant was a hundred yards away, an island in the middle of a large parking lot, beneath the twenty-foot pole suspending the neon sign that announced it.

Leon was waiting for her. She stepped around a vendor with a stack of papers on his head and went across to him.

“This better be good,” he said, a smile ameliorating the faux sternness of his greeting. “I had tickets for the Indios tonight.”

“I would never let you pick football over this.”

“It’s good?”

“This is it. The story I want us to tell.”

She was excited, garbling a little and giddy with enthusiasm. Leon was good for her when it came to that. She needed to be calm, and he was steady and reliable. Sensible. It seemed to come off him in gentle waves. Smiling with a warm-hearted indulgence she had seen many times before, he rested his hands on her shoulders. “Take a deep breath,
mi cielo
, okay? You don’t want to frighten the poor girl away.”

She allowed herself to relax and smiled into Leon’s face. It was a kind face, his dark eyes full of humanity, and there was a wisdom there that made him older than his years. He was the only man she had ever met who could do that to her; he was able to cut through the noise and static of Juárez, her single-minded dedication to the blog and the need to tell the story of the city and its bloodied streets, and remind her that other things were important. They had dated for six months until they had both realised that their relationship would never be the most important thing in her life. They had cooled it before it could develop further, the emotional damage far less than it would have been if it had been allowed to follow its course. There were still nights when, after they had written stories into the small hours, he would stay with her rather than risk the dangerous journey home across the city, and on those nights, they would make love with an appetite that had not been allowed to be blunted by familiarity. Being with Leon was the best way to forget about all the dead bodies in the ground, the dozens of missing women, the forest of shrines that sprouted across the wastelands and parks, the culverts and trash heaps.

“Are you ready?” he asked her.

“Let’s go.”

DELORES KEPT them waiting for fifteen minutes, and when she eventually made her way across the busy restaurant to them, she did so with a crippling insecurity and a look of the sheerest fright on her face. She was a small, slight girl, surely much younger than the twenty years she had claimed when they were chatting earlier. Caterina would have guessed at fourteen or fifteen, a waif. She was slender and flat chested, florid acne marked her face, and she walked with a slight but discernible limp. She was dressed in a
maquiladora
uniform: cheap, faded jeans that had been patched several times, a plain shirt, a crucifix around her neck. Caterina smiled broadly as she neared, but the girl’s face did not break free of its grim cast.

“I’m Caterina,” she said, getting up and holding out her hand.