Crossing the Line (31 page)

THIRTY-THREE

I
crossed the border at Mexicali after putting on my stolen California plates. The drive over the mountains and then across the desert had taken all night and half the next day. A little more, actually, because I had to make a pit stop in Arizona to buy a shotgun.

The one I chose was a new Mossberg Compact. It was solid black, with only a foot and a half of barrel. A fraction of an inch longer, I was told by the salesclerk, than the legal limit for shotguns. Anything shorter and it would have fallen into the illegal sawed-off category. The gun had a pistol grip instead of a standard shoulder stock. It held eight rounds. According to the instruction manual, it was for “home-protection purposes.” That description suited me.

I bought a box of 12-gauge birdshot shells at the same sporting-goods store where I bought the gun. An hour later I fired them all off on some BLM land that was already littered with brass and bullet-scarred beer cans. The gun worked well. The cans simply disappeared when I pointed the gun at them from a few feet away. It was like they had never existed. The explosions that occurred each time I pulled the trigger seemed to tear jagged holes out of the world that I thought I knew.

In the next town I parked to the side of a gas station that advertised “Ammo.” I put on my crumpled cowboy hat and paid cash for a different brand and a different type of shell. This time I bought buckshot—shells filled with chunks of lead that are capable of knocking down large mammals.

Unlike rifles or pistols, shotguns don’t leave much in the way of forensic evidence for later identification. There is no way to “fingerprint” what comes out of the barrel. But the pellets, if recovered and matched to a manufacturer and then the buyer, can make for a sort of loose, circumstantial link to the person who might have done the shooting. That was the reason for my caution.

It was also the reason I’d left my little Beretta in Rebecca’s loft. It was too small to do the kind of damage I was planning to do, and its rifling marks were registered—as are all its employee’s guns—with Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation.

If anyone actually bothered to investigate the crime I was thinking of committing, I wanted as little connection from the act to me as possible.

The other side of the border was like the other side of the earth.

I crossed over in midafternoon. There wasn’t a queue going south, and the sole Mexican border guard just waved me through without getting out of his chair in the air-conditioned booth.

Things looked to be very different for the people who were heading north. A long line of cars and trucks steamed in the blazing heat. Horns occasionally blared, and curses were shouted from open windows as fists pounded on steering wheels. The American customs agents in their sweat-soaked uniforms questioned the occupants of each car. Every now and then they waved a car over for closer scrutiny, maybe with a dog. I didn’t envy their jobs. They were paid even less than Wyoming DCI agents, which, believe me, isn’t much.

It was easy to see why Hidalgo was able to turn so many of them. Twenty thousand dollars for simply waving through a specific car would be hard to resist.

I didn’t hit traffic until I entered the town of Mexicali, where even going south things slowed to a crawl. The cars around me that had American plates were besieged by hucksters, panhandlers, and either pleading or snarling kids. Windows were rapped with dirty knuckles and windshields were smeared with dirty rags. I was pretty much left alone despite the California tags. The Pig, with its mismatched paint, rust, and badly tinted windows, seemed an unlikely candidate from which anyone could expect a handout.

I kept the windows rolled up and the doors locked anyway. The air conditioner cranked, too, although it wasn’t doing much good because the heat outside was so intense. I switched CDs, taking out Roberto’s José Cura and slipping in the Grateful Dead. I skipped to “Mexicali Blues” and turned it up.

When Roberto and I had come through here ten years earlier, the truck was almost new and we were relatively innocent. I remembered how a nearsighted street kid mistook us for yuppie stoners or maybe college boys on spring break. He tried to lift a backpack out of the rear seat when we stopped for a light. Roberto snatched him up by the throat and curled him like a dumbbell. For several blocks he held him this way, outside the car, speaking soft Spanish and both reprimanding and teasing the terrified teenager before giving him a buck and letting him go.

The population had visibly grown since then, probably because of NAFTA and all the new
maquiladoras
that assembled electronics and industrial parts. The poverty had grown, too. There were even more people packing the narrow streets. Vendors, gangbangers, pickpockets, and a few tourists whose guidebooks must have predated the Mexican Drug Age. There were even some—but not many—regular people.

The Pig rattled over urban roads that were paved with cobblestones, gravel, or potholed blacktop. Or, occasionally, a mix of all three. The other cars with me in the melee of Mexicali’s streets were a mix, too. The majority were American beaters, mostly pickups and four-door sedans. But there were a few armored Mercedes and BMWs that carried managers from their homes in Imperial Valley across the border to the
maquiladoras
outside town. And there were a few of the big four-wheel-drive SUVs favored by Hidalgo’s
sicarios
and
gatilleros.
Probably they belonged to the Mexicali Mafia, but I couldn’t be sure. None I saw had the small yellow tongue-wagging sticker pasted to their back windows or bumpers.

I drove down a street of cinder-block garages covered with graffiti and cracked parking lots where older men sweated and worked in the unbelievable heat. I saw some of them refitting a truck with solid rubber tires and a huge steel grille. They were obviously getting ready for a high-speed, wrong-way run through the border crossing. It is a technique that has become increasingly popular despite the number of innocents who die in the spectacular crashes that sometimes result.

I passed some vacant lots where soon-to-be illegal immigrants camped in the shade of cardboard boxes. At nightfall they’d be making their move through holes cut in a flimsy chain-link fence. I saw more than a few of them organized into groups by either coyotes or drug smugglers.

The ones who would work for the smugglers—the
burros,
or mules—were easy to spot. Their clothes and fifty-pound packs were in the process of being spray-painted black, just as Roberto had described. Carpet was wrapped around their shoes to conceal their heavily weighted tracks. Even so, these boys in their late teens looked woefully unprepared for the desert in August.
Without someone like my brother to guide them,
I thought,
a lot of these kids are going to die.

Like the sense of imminent death and the crime and the trash and blowing dirt, the air pollution was also highly visible. It hung over the city in a brown cloud so dense even the wind couldn’t lift it.

I was enormously relieved to find my way out of the maze of city streets and onto the highway. Night had already fallen when I shook free. I popped open a can of Tecate to celebrate and put the Pig into fifth gear. The highway could take me all the way west toward Tijuana, but I intended to go only halfway there. My entire trip would be in the Border Corridor, the strip of land within a hundred or so miles of the U.S. border.

No tourist visas or passports are needed here. It is a “free-enterprise zone” in every sense of the term, where roughly one-third of all the narcotics entering the U.S. are stashed, processed, and packaged. Coca from Colombia, black-tar heroin from Sinaloa, pot from all over Mexico, and methamphetamine manufactured from scratch.

This was the place, I remembered from the documents Mary and Tom had shown me, where Hidalgo had fought his bloody war with the Arellano-Felix brothers of Tijuana on one side and the Carrillo-Fuentes syndicate of Juárez on the other. The Border Corridor is where even Mexican government officials admit that eighty to ninety percent of cops, prosecutors, and judges work for the cartels. Two months ago on this very highway, a car with three
federales
in it was stopped by narcos. The Mexican federal agents were tortured, shot, run over, and finally thrown off a cliff. It was here that a chief of police was shot to death last year with sixty rounds from an AK-47 while driving himself to work in a stolen car. The previous chief had died a similar death. So had a leading presidential candidate campaigning in the state, two governors, a score of prosecutors and judges (who either chose the wrong metal when offered
Plato o plomo,
or chose the wrong cartel to work for), fifteen state-police officers in the last year alone, along with six agents from the Mexican Attorney General’s Office, hundreds of cartel soldiers, and countless civilians.

This thin strip of Baja averaged more than a thousand drug-related murders a year. No perpetrators ever seemed to get caught. Even the few honest cops turned their backs when the corpse had a slit throat with the tongue pulled out. Signatures of the other cartels—bound hands and feet, masks, particular burns, missing limbs, etc.—were similarly ignored. Sometimes corpses were transported from the U.S. across the border and into the corridor because it was only there that no one would look into how the corpses became corpses.

But straight and well-paved, the east–west highway really wasn’t all that bad. Not, at least, if you ignored all the burnt, smashed, or otherwise abandoned cars on the sides of the road. There were lots of pretty shrines—white crosses, laminated photos nailed to them, and dried-up flowers marking the places where bodies had been discovered.

I probably drove faster than I really needed to. This place had a bad vibe.

Past a town called La Rumerosa, I pulled off the highway and onto a dirt road. I recalled that it would be all dirt from here on out. Other than that recollection, I had only vague memories of how to find my way, as Roberto had served as the navigator on that trip. But I knew the name of the last village before the deep canyon that led up into the mountains—Colonia de la Tajo. A topo map I’d bought listed the dirt road dead-ending at the village as “16.”

The road turned out to be fairly well-marked for Mexico. Every few miles there would be a bullet-ridden sign with the number 16 on it nailed high up on a cactus. If more than a couple of miles went by without my seeing a 16, or what I could make out as a 1 or a 6, or at least the stars shining through a vicious wound in a cactus, I would turn around and drive back until I found a fork I’d somehow missed in the dark.

For the next three hours I was lucky to hit third gear. The headlights lit up more broken cars, abandoned appliances, and makeshift shrines, as well as thorny ocotillo bushes, elephant trees, and giant cardon and cirio cacti that stood up to fifty feet tall. I remembered a lot more of it as the miles passed. Even some of the wrecks looked familiar. For a while it felt like Roberto was riding next to me, smoking a joint and telling me about how we were going to climb in a region he called Poor-Man’s Patagonia. Thinking of him this way was a lot better than picturing him in that hospital bed.

Then I finally hit Colonia de la Tajo. And it looked nothing like what I remembered.

Ten years ago it had been a sleepy town consisting of a few mud-brick shacks with tar-paper roofs. We’d bought beer from an old lady who kept the bottles on the end of a rope in a well, and then sat with her in the shade of a mesquite until the afternoon’s heat wore off.

But now there was a real bar, complete with neon signs and a half-dozen trucks around it. There was also a baseball field across the road that would have been the envy of any American Little Leaguer. The grass was well-tended and it had stadium-type lights illuminating it. Although it was eleven at night, there was a game going on. Kids dressed in neat, bright uniforms were playing. Their parents watched from steel bleachers while nervously eyeing the
sicarios
who’d stumbled across the street to cheer.

Just past the bar and the ballpark was an open Jeep with red and blue lights mounted on the roll bar. Two police officers in braided uniforms sat inside, keeping watch on the
sicarios
and apparently keeping them in check.

The village appeared clean and orderly. I noticed a schoolhouse and a
clínica
farther on. The single dirt road leading through it was even bordered with stones that had been painted white. It was obvious Hidalgo gave something back to the community that protected him. But it didn’t make me like him any better.

I drove through it fast, but not fast enough, I hoped, to draw too much attention from the policemen. Caught by the stadium lights, I nodded at them and grinned, doing my best to look like just another dirtbag rock climber who came this way for the remote granite walls. They may or may not have been able to see me through the cracked tint on my windows.

As I hurried past, I couldn’t help noticing that several of the pickups in front of the bar had small yellow stickers on their back windows.

Beyond the village, the road deteriorated as the earth became stonier and the relief increased. I was headed up a deep, wide canyon that I thought had to be Cañón Tajo, but there was no way to be sure. There were no more signs and, in some places, apparently no road. But at least there were no headlights in my rearview mirror. Every few minutes I would turn off my own headlights and scan behind me. Then I would study the sky, looking among the stars for the pale tombstone that would be El Gran Trono Blanco, the largest wall in Poor-Man’s Patagonia.

Sixteen hundred feet high, Trono Blanco is supposed to be a little higher than the unnamed wall nearby that Roberto and I had climbed on Hidalgo’s land. From Trono Blanco’s summit I was pretty sure I’d be able to get a view of the Hidalgo hacienda. Besides, I’d always wanted to climb the higher wall. Roberto and I would have done it that trip if we hadn’t been chased off the other wall by rifle fire.