River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (18 page)

But Mexico wasn’t so bad when a man had a job and a girl. Teresa was slender and pretty and she earned good tips from gringos who thought they’d be able to get with her, so that helped, too. A person could keep away from the gangsters and the government and the cops, could mind his own business and have a decent life.

So they were drinking, he and Billy and Carlos, and talking, and drinking some more, and Gilbert got to telling them stories about how many times he had crossed over, how he knew El Paso like it was sleepy little Taxco, and he could show them where the strippers from the clubs along the interstate drank when they weren’t working.

Billy was the one who challenged him first. “If it’s so easy, then show us,” he’d said. “Take us over there. Teach us how the master crosses the line.” Billy had always taunted Gilbert about being the “lucky one” of the three friends, and the fact that Gilbert had spent time in the north just added to his case. One glimpse of Teresa had fueled the fire even more. “You’re the lucky one, Gilbert,” he said now. “Show us how you get your luck.”

Carlos took up the appeal then, and after a couple more drinks, Gilbert agreed. The two younger men had come up from Taxco intending to cross the border, to look for work in the north, and if he could help them, he had to do it. Recognizing that crossing drunk wasn’t the best idea—on the concrete banks of the river, he kept slipping, falling on his ass, scraping his palms, and laughing out loud—he ignored his condition and went ahead with the plan they had discussed sitting outside Bip Bip, sometimes shouting to be heard over the loud
corridos
coming from a truck parked nearby.

There was hardly any water in the river, just a muddy stream, then a kind of island choked with tall, stiff grass, mud-caked around the bottom, and some other bushes, and then a second muddy stream. Both streams were narrow enough to jump over if you were sober—which they weren’t—and Billy, trying to clear the second, hit the bank on the far side and fell backward, landing on his hands and ass in the muddy water with a shout.

“Shut up!” Gilbert said in a loud whisper. “
Silencio,
dude! You want BP to hear you?” He had lived on the border so long that he spoke half English, half Spanish, switching back and forth between them without even thinking about it.

Billy sat in the thick stream for a few seconds, wide-eyed in the darkness, then stood up and tried to wipe his jeans off. “Forget about that,” Gilbert urged, knowing what came next. Carlos rolled on the cement bank, arms wrapped around his sides, trying to laugh silently. Gilbert envisioned border patrol agents at the fence, ready to beam those bright lights right down at them, blinding them as they climbed the bank.

But maybe there was no
migra
out tonight, because no shouts came, no piercing beams of light. Billy and Carlos calmed down, and Gilbert led them up the bank, into the Franklin Canal (this one had water they had to wade through, up to their chests, cold and swiftly flowing; this water, unlike the Rio Grande, would be confined to the U.S. side), through a gap clipped in the chain-link fence by some other crossers, earlier that night or the night before, and they were there. American soil.

They passed through a thick growth of three-meter-high brittle weeds that reminded Gilbert of corn, and found themselves in a small, grassy park. It was some sort of historical site from the early days of American control—this part was explained on a plaque standing with some other monuments and a gravesite near the parking area. The funny part, to him, was that the historic American site was now a Mexican restaurant. One of Teresa’s older brothers worked there.

They crossed the grassy field silently—Gilbert was silent because that dip in the cold canal had sobered him up and he wanted to be careful, Billy and Carlos were silent presumably because they were in awe that they had finally reached
El Norte
, so far from Taxco in every way. Gilbert led them between the various monuments, pausing to check the name on the gravestone. Major Simeon Hart it said, and the place had once been called Hart’s Mill, but no longer was. Before Major Simeon Hart,
El Camino Real
had cut across this land, connecting Mexico City with San Francisco, all Mexican territory in those days. El Paso’s name had come from the Mexicans, as another plaque pointed out: Don Juan de Oñate had called this place
El Paso Del Rio Del Norte
way back in 1598.

These days the Americans wanted to keep the Mexicans off land that had formerly been theirs, and not that long ago. A Mexican had to steal across the line in the night, like a criminal. It was insanity.

Past the gravel parking lot were a highway and a railroad track. El Paso waited for them on the other side. But Billy and Carlos hadn’t intended to make the crossing tonight; all their stuff was back in Gilbert’s apartment.

“We should go back over,” he whispered. “Before someone sees us.” He didn’t want them to get caught when they were just here on a lark.

“No way,
ese
,” Billy said. “What about those strippers you told us about? What about the stores full of everything a person could ever want? Didn’t you say there were swimming pools filled with champagne in El Paso?”

Gilbert didn’t think he had ever mentioned any such thing, although in the grip of cerveza or tequila he sometimes made claims that weren’t strictly true, things he forgot by morning.

But before he could say anything at all, Carlos clutched his arm in a painful grip. “Gilbert!”

Gilbert saw what Carlos did: a man coming out of the trees toward them. He was in the shadows, walking with purpose, and Gilbert had a bad feeling. A border patrol officer would have announced himself by now, might even have a gun in his hand. This man appeared empty-handed at first, but then he passed through the beam cast by a pole-mounted floodlight and Gilbert saw that he had something in his right hand after all, and it gleamed, metallic, in the light.

“Vamonos!”
he shouted, remembering to use Spanish so his friends would understand. He tried to break into a run, but when he swiveled to head back to the fence, his wet shoes slid on the damp grass and he flew facedown in the little circle where the monuments and plaques were.

He tried to rise, but the strength seemed to have fled from his arms and legs. He raised his head enough to see the man reach Billy. The man’s arm slashed out and then Billy crumpled to the ground, blood shooting from his neck and pattering on the grass like rain.

This restored Gilbert’s strength, and he pushed off the ground, regaining his footing. He started for the fence again. Carlos reached the tall weeds before he did, and when they both tried to shove through at once, sharp leaves sliced his skin. The two friends got tangled together and Gilbert fell again. This time he caught himself on the plants and didn’t go all the way down. Before he could free himself, however, he felt a powerful hand gripping his collar, wrenching him back to his feet. Not Carlos, who was several inches shorter than he and had never been so strong.

The man’s blade flashed again. For a moment, Gilbert couldn’t feel anything. Had he missed? Or was it so sharp, the slice it must have made so fine that air had not yet penetrated the cut, blood not yet found passage to the outside?

It was, he realized, the latter. The pain came all at once, searing, as if he had leaned into a white-hot wire, and when blood began to spray from his throat, the world went dark, as if the border patrol had decided to shut off all the floodlights after all, and every other light, too.

The light didn’t fade away fast enough, though, to keep him from seeing the man catch up to Carlos at the fence. Down in the wet grass again, feeling his life slip away a little more with every pulse of blood that burbled through his throat, Gilbert heard Carlos’s long, final screams, and he decided that Billy, who hadn’t even seen what was coming, had been the lucky one.

TWENTY

Molly had spent the day before sweating the Gretchen Fuchs story. Murder wasn’t her usual beat by a long shot, and the more she worked on it, studying what little she’d been able to get from the cops—which, perhaps unfortunately, included crime-scene photos, sharp and distinct—the more it disturbed her. She understood that tackling new things was the key to growing as a reporter, and that if she wanted to make her bones, she would have to prove herself in a variety of ways. So she did what she was told, and tried to think of it as a résumé builder.

Gretchen Fuchs had been a single woman, just like her. Was that what made it so awful? Or was it backlash from Byrd’s prolonged death, making her more attuned to the mortality of every human being?

Gretchen had entertained some friends at her home, something Molly had also done. Her guests left and Gretchen started the after-dinner cleanup, another familiar activity. Then something horrible happened. Was it just the wrong person happening by at the wrong time? Or had Gretchen been stalked, followed, observed by someone waiting for the perfect moment to strike?

Molly hadn’t been able to figure that out. She wasn’t Brenda Starr or Lois Lane, and she couldn’t solve, through a simple examination of the dry facts of murder, a mystery the police hadn’t.

Inside Gretchen’s house, Officer Kozlowski had left her alone for a few minutes, and Molly had managed to copy numbers out of Gretchen’s address book. Today her plan was to call some of Gretchen’s friends, to try to get more information about who Gretchen had been in life. That, as Frank had suggested, would be the focus of her piece.

Gretchen had worked in a small travel agency, which was getting smaller as the Internet replaced travel agents. Besides the owner, only Gretchen and two other employees had kept their jobs through the most recent downsizing. Molly would be calling them today, too.

She had swung by Providence Memorial on her way in this morning. For most of her life, she had never imagined that the nursing staff of a hospital’s oncology unit would know her by name, but as she walked down the halls (marveling, as she always did, at how squeaky the floors were under rubber-soled shoes, and didn’t most people who worked here wear rubber soles?) several of them greeted her cheerfully.

Wade was already there. She had known because she’d parked next to his rented Ford Focus, which she recognized by the books and magazines he had already strewn on the passenger seat, in the parking lot behind the Hilton Tower, one of the hospital’s three main buildings. Mud caked the car’s lower side, around the bottom of the driver’s door, and she wondered briefly how this had happened on the short trip between the hotel and the hospital. By the time she got upstairs and found the two of them engaged in a loud and obscene recollection of women they’d known over the years, she had forgotten all about the mud. Deciding that discretion was, after all, the better part of valor, Molly simply stopped in for a quick hello before leaving the boys to their memories.

The abbreviated visit allowed her to get to her desk early. The downside was that Gretchen Fuchs, who had haunted her dreams, making for a restless night, lingered at that desk—in spirit, if not in fact. She seemed to be hunched over Molly’s computer, waiting for Molly to reach conclusions about why she couldn’t be there in the flesh.

Molly was immersed in Google listings, having searched for Gretchen’s name just to see what turned up, when Frank startled her by touching the back of her chair.

“Sorry,” he said when she wheeled around. She figured she looked like she’d been kicked. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Maybe I just scare easily when I’m digging around in the pasts of murder victims.” She hadn’t quite forgiven Frank for assigning her to this story.

At the same time, she couldn’t deny that a certain fascination with it was setting in.

“Funny you should mention murder.”

“Oh God, Frank, what now?”

He pulled a chair over from an unoccupied desk and rolled it close. He smelled like coffee and a hint of some citrus shampoo or soap. “Three men were killed, late last night or this morning. Two of them had their throats cut. The third…well, it sounds like the killer tried to push him through a chain-link fence. Not through a hole in the fence,
through
the fence.”

Molly wasn’t able to quite picture it, but the image she got was bad enough. “Oh my God. Who were they?”

“Migrants, it looks like. They were still wet from swimming across. You ever been to La Hacienda, that Mexican restaurant by the river, just east of downtown?”

“Off Highway 85. Sure.”

“They were killed in that little park there.”

She pictured a grassy swath with a few mesquite trees around it, the little circle of plaques that she had read once and then completely forgotten, the mud and gravel parking lot, mostly mud during the summer storms and this time of year. Then she envisioned the fence at the back, through which Mexico was just a stone’s throw. Visualizing that fence in her mind allowed her to get a better sense of what someone might look like after having been pushed through it. Kind of like garlic going through a press, she imagined, only with blood and organs and lots and lots of pain.

“Last night?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.