The Dead Women of Juarez (24 page)

Garcia always made sure to point this out. “Don’t get the idea that you’re a real cop,” he said. “Real cops sweat. Real cops have blood on their hands. When you have blisters on your blisters from walking all day and your voice is too tired for you to say goodnight to your wife, then you’ll know.”

Enrique had no wife and no blisters. But still he sat and watched and for a long time nothing happened. His eyelids drooped.

Ortíz emerged from the building. Enrique didn’t know the man by sight, but there was no mistaking him: a man in a blazer and slacks, dwarfed by a long-limbed bodyguard in a dark athletic shirt. They moved to the pick-up and the bodyguard held the door for Ortíz. The man sat in the passenger seat. The guard went into the back.

They moved off and Enrique followed. His cell phone was on the seat beside him, and for a moment he considered calling Sevilla, but the truth was he had nothing to report. “I’m shadowing him,” he could say, but that was all. If he was pressed to arrest the man he
couldn’t; sponsoring cocks was not illegal and nor was betting on them. Ask his fighters and Carlos Ortíz was a saint. Money to the managers of the athletic clubs where those fighters graced the ring bought still more praise.

The truck went north into the tourist areas and passed the Hotel Villa Manport. Suddenly Enrique knew where they were going, and when the truck glided to a stop alongside the coral-tiled façade of El Herradero Soto he saw he was right.

Everyone in Juárez knew the restaurant: the cheap, good food and the family atmosphere. The waiters brought pork skins and spicy red salsa to the table as an appetizer and their
pico de gallo
was renowned. At lunchtime a crowd formed under the sign. People talked to each other as if they were friends until a table came available. Out of the car, Ortíz smiled broadly and shook hands and then passed through the entrance without waiting.

Parking closely was out of the question. Enrique circled the block and found a lot with room. He hurried though he had no need to hurry; lunch at El Herradero was nothing to be done away with quickly.

The truck waited on the curb the way it waited at the boxing club. Enrique looked at the crowd of patrons, considering the wait and what he intended to do once he was inside. Did a real cop linger over a meal in the same dining room as his quarry? Should he just stand among the men waiting for food and look through the window? These things weren’t taught to him and he hadn’t learned them by experience. He knew where to file paperwork and the knowledge stung.

He was at the tail of the line when he saw Captain Garcia. The man crossed the street in front of the black pick-up. He thumped his hand on the truck’s hood and made a shooting gesture at the driver. If the driver did it back, Enrique couldn’t see.

There was nowhere to hide himself on the sidewalk except to hunker down below the line of heads. Enrique dropped his shoulders and slumped as if shot. He risked a look through the
restaurant window and there was Ortíz in the back corner with his bodyguard at the same table. Garcia made his way across the dining room and joined them. Ortíz shook the cop’s hand and motioned for him to sit.

Enrique didn’t stay to see what they ate.

“T
HEY DELIVER BABIES IN THIS
hospital,” Sevilla told Kelly.

If he heard, Kelly gave no sign. He was still and the only sounds that came from him were really from the machines that monitored him and fed him fluids and ensured he still took breaths when he should and his heart beat when it should.

They were alone. Even the police guard had gone because Kelly showed no sign of waking. The nurses asked Sevilla to turn off his cell phone and to refrain from smoking. He asked them where he could find something to drink and they brought him a tray with a carton of juice and a carton of milk. He hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch and his stomach was empty.

When Sevilla spoke to Kelly he did so in English. This was always the way between them: to speak in English. With Juárez so close to America, so close that one block blended into the next, Sevilla did not understand why people didn’t learn the language of the north. Speaking Spanish and only Spanish in Ciudad Juárez was stubborn and prideful and Sevilla was having none of that; he spoke English with Americans whenever he met them, even if that English wasn’t always so perfect.

“My granddaughter wasn’t born here, of course,” Sevilla continued. “My wife and I, we talked about moving somewhere away from the city where we could keep a garden and maybe some goats. You can make good cheese from goat’s milk.”

The most livid of Kelly’s bruises were fading. He was healing, but he would not wake.

“Ofelia was my granddaughter’s name. Her father… we won’t talk about him. The last thing he gave us was little Ofelia and it was the best he could give. I don’t think he even came to visit her in the hospital. He never called Ana or wrote. For all I know he’s dead. I heard he moved to Monterey, but there’s no way to find out. I don’t care to.

“They were alike, Kelly, my Ana and Ofelia. You could tell just from looking at Ofelia that she would grow up like her mother to be full of life and happiness. And that is saying a great deal in this city. I don’t have to tell you.”

Sevilla worked the waxed cardboard of the drink cartons while he spoke, teasing the seams apart and slowly flattening them. His hands felt the need to do something while his body was still. The smell of disinfectant and the quiet scraped at his nerves; he could not stand to be here for very long.

“When Ana and Ofelia disappeared, of course we were worried. A mother and daughter don’t vanish. Not our Ana, anyway. That
rulacho
of a husband, that was different, and it’s true I suspected he had a hand in it at first. But it wasn’t so easy as that.

“That was when we met Paloma. I knew her years before you did, Kelly. She and the other women, they made flyers for Ana and Ofelia and pressured the Procuraduría for answers. It made no difference to them that I was a policeman; they wanted only to help… and bring my girls home.”

He was silent a while then, just listening to the hushed functioning of the machines. Somewhere down the hall two nurses talked about another patient and then went on to complain about long hours and scheduling. Sevilla supposed such conversations were the same everywhere, even here.

“I wish you could talk to me, Kelly,” Sevilla said, and then he left.

O
RTÍZ AND
G
ARCIA ATE A LONG
lunch together and then they parted. Enrique followed Ortíz; Garcia would go back to his office now and spend the afternoon with the internet. Enrique burst with questions he wouldn’t be able to ask.

He tried to call Sevilla, but there was no answer. The black truck led Enrique away from the tourist centers and away from the crowded heart of the city and even away from the
colonias
clinging to the desert edge of Juárez. It passed westward along roads that grew less crowded and wound among hills dotted with trees and hardy grass. He saw tall, black-painted bars of a long steel fence marching parallel to their route and coils of barbed wire like the kind that guarded Juárez’s civil buildings.

The more open the drive became, the farther back Enrique fell until the truck was barely visible ahead of him. He almost didn’t notice the truck turn until he came closer and closer to where it stopped. There was nowhere else to go; he pulled over onto the shoulder and hoped no one would look back.

A bright white gatehouse broke the line of the steel fence, the roof cupped and spired like a little church. An armed guard in a uniform went to the truck’s window and even from a distance Enrique recognized Ortíz speaking to the man. A moment passed and the ornate gate swung wide. The truck passed through. The way was closed behind.

Enrique turned his eyes to hills. There were more trees here than anywhere along the way and the rolling terrain was greened. Great
houses were stashed here and there among the woods, shockingly bright lawns carved out of mesquites and live oaks to go along with white pillars and many windows. There was also a long pool of grass that could only be a golfing fairway. The black pick-up vanished up the road and didn’t reappear.

The gatehouse held three men with truncheons and rifles. They looked out through green-tinted windows at Enrique’s car as it approached and this time two emerged when he drew to a stop before the high gates.

“
Excúseme
,” Enrique said.

“Turn around,” said one of the guards.

“I was wondering: what is this place?”

The guard drew his truncheon from his belt. The other one held a gun. “I won’t tell you again,
pendejo
. Back up and turn around.”

“I’m with the police.”

Enrique showed the men his identification. The one with the truncheon stiffened. The second retreated to the gatehouse. Enrique saw the third talking on a telephone.

When the second man returned, he was no longer armed. He spoke quietly to the first and the truncheon went back in its loop. “What can I do for you?” the guard asked then.

“What is this place?”

“Los Campos,” the first guard replied.

Enrique nodded. “I’ve heard of it. Listen: I’d like to ask you about the truck that came through here before.”

“We don’t talk about visitors,” the second guard said. “It’s not allowed.”

“You don’t have to tell me any secrets; I know it was Señor Ortíz,” Enrique said. “I just wanted to know, does he live here?”

The guards smirked at each other. The first shook his head. “No, he’s only visiting.”

“May I ask who?”

“He comes to see Señor Madrigal,” the first guard said, and the second elbowed him sharply. “Though I didn’t tell you that.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” Enrique said pleasantly. “As long as you can keep a secret for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t mention I was here.”

“I don’t even know you,” the guard replied.

“Very good,” Enrique said. He put his car in reverse. “Thank you for your help, gentlemen.”

He turned away from the gates of Los Campos and felt the guards’ eyes on him as he pulled a u-turn in the road. They were still watching him as they shrank away in his rear-view mirror, and then both the men and the gate were gone.

Enrique did not know Los Campos specifically, but he knew of communities like it. They dotted the territory around Ciudad Juárez, well away from the unpleasantness of the city center, the crime and the violence. The big houses were owned by the men who ran the
maquiladoras
or made it in some other business. Some were ranchers whose holdings were hundreds of miles away. Others still made all their money across the border in the United States, but kept their wealth away from American tax collectors.

Ortíz was not wealthy enough to live in one of these places. This Enrique knew before he even asked. The men and women of the gated communities drove Bentleys and Mercedes and didn’t share the cab of a pick-up truck with anyone. It was doubtful any of them had even so much as touched the seat of the pick-up truck, or would even come near one.

He tried calling Sevilla again, but again there was only voice mail. “Call me when you have a chance,” Enrique said, and tossed the phone back on the seat beside him.

Enrique was excited, but he also felt a fool. He was full of inquiries and mismatched information and names and faces he didn’t know. For hours Carlos Ortíz was a ghost to him and then suddenly he was there, dining with Captain Garcia and patrolling the city as if he were tax collector to some great lord who owned all he surveyed.

The thought gave him pause. Enrique looked toward the fence still rolling past him, marking off land no one visited and where no house was built. There were not even roads leading there to make the promise of new life. The people of Los Campos owned the space because they could own it and not for any other reason.

He wanted to call Sevilla a third time, but he would wait. Instead he drove.

A
T
E
L
C
ERESO EVERYONE GOT A
little and no more: a little space, a little time, a little safety. Even those prisoners injured in one way or another got little attention, though the most serious were kept in a segregated unit of eight beds. Estéban was one of the eight, shuffled to and from the mess hall on a staggered schedule that kept the badly hurt inmates from being caught in the crush of the meal line, but still dining among the rest.

They were the walking wounded of El Cereso, with their broken bones and stitches. Estéban’s cast reached from the tips of his fingers to the middle of his upper arm. He hobbled because his legs were still sore from the beatings and his joints ached from being twisted until they nearly came loose of their sockets.

Eye contact was frowned upon in any part of the jail, and the medical exceptions were doubly bound. The others knew that these men had more space, more freedom, more quiet, than all the rest. Those who had little hated those who had more and it did not enter into their minds that abundance was bought with extreme suffering.

Estéban balanced his food tray on the artificial bend of his cast arm. He couldn’t hold it out the way the others did and the men behind the steam trays grumbled and cursed because this meant a smidgen of extra work. “Why don’t you break your other arm already?” one of the mess workers asked and then slopped black beans on the tray. “Then some pretty nurse can come feed you.”

To this and other things Estéban said nothing.

He was gone from El Cereso and the interrogation rooms and the prisoners and the guards and the police. He was gone from the city entirely. His body operated automatically, put food into itself without any guidance and did the little things to maintain itself simply because some part of Estéban’s brain knew they needed doing. He was by the concrete skate ponds of Parque Xtremo, shaded by the climbing tower. He ate spicy tamales, drank beer or got high and he talked to his best friend, the gringo.