Triple Crossing (14 page)

“It took half an hour to get out there,” Pescatore told Isabel Puente. “The road to Tecate. There’s a turnoff in the mountains
takes you to the ranch. The shooting range is in a complex
behind the ranch house. They got a soccer field, tennis courts, a zoo. Lit up like Padres stadium.”

“Garrison knew his way around?”

“Like he owned the place. It must be where he trains them. Him and Buffalo did most of the shooting. The Egyptian tested out
a few guns, the fancy machine pistols and whatnot.”

“Do we know he’s Egyptian, Valentine?” Isabel asked, nibbling her pen, leaning over her notebook.

“Whatever he is. With the black guys he spoke Portuguese. I could tell right away Moze and Tchai weren’t American. All they
said the whole time was
‘Tudo bem, tudo bem.’
”

“Brazilians.”

“Sure. They reminded me of the Brazilians we been catching at IB, but tougher. The old-time journeymen say that’s like catching
a Martian. They never saw Brazilian aliens before.”

“Anything else referring to Brazil? Or Paraguay? Did Garrison say where they were from?”

“Nope. The older boss-guy, Mr. Abbas, he spoke pretty good English.”

“How did it work? The van with the weapons stayed at the ranch?”

“Yep. Sounded to me like that was just a sample, Garrison has plenty more guns if they want.”

“Stolen from the military base up north.”

“I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I know he’s got contacts there. Hey, the sandwiches are ready, I’ll get them. Remember,
it’s my treat today.”

It was the day after the gunrunning expedition. For security reasons, Puente had decided to choose a new meeting place to
replace the café in La Jolla. Pescatore had insisted on picking it. She vetoed Little Italy because it was too close to the
Federal Building. They settled on an Italian deli in Encinitas, a placid beach town on an idyllic stretch of coast. There
were just a few tables in a side room half-hidden behind grocery shelves, an appropriately discreet setup.

“Now, let me tell you something,” Pescatore said, returning to the table with a well-stocked tray. “This is a bona fide old-school
sandwich.”

Puente, who had her hair pulled back and sunglasses propped on her head, rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, here we go.”

“No, really, you might know about fried bananas and everything, but I’m the expert on
ginzo
food. This joint and Little Italy are the only places in San Diego County where you can get a decent sandwich. See how fresh
the bread is? You don’t need no mayonnaise or junk on good Italian bread like that. And the mortadella: It’s the real thing,
not some nasty plastic Oscar Mayer mutant lunchmeat. What’s so funny?”

“You never stop eating, Valentine. I don’t understand why you aren’t fat as a house. I guess it’s because you’re young.”

“What are you, Granma Isabel?”

“Young-
er,
I meant.”

“You’re what, a couple years older than me.”

“There’s a difference between twenty-five and around thirty. Hey Valentine, this is pretty good.”

“Told you. Stick with me, baby, I promise you won’t starve.”

They grinned at each other. He looked forward to every debriefing as if it were a date. The relationship felt like an affair:
laughing furtively, whispering, watching over their shoulders. She appeared to enjoy herself, but no doubt that was the way
a female handler was supposed to treat a male informant.

“I’m still getting used to the idea that you pulled a thorn out of Omar Mendoza’s paw,” she said. “His cousin’s paw, anyway.”

“Garrison didn’t say much ’cause he likes to be the big boss, but you could tell he was happy about that.”

“It works out well for us,” she said. “You’re really doing good.”

“I feel good. You were right, it’s easier dealing with Garrison now that I’m spying on him.”

“You have a knack for undercover work.”

“Yeah? I guess I always felt like I was impersonating a Border Patrol agent in the first place.”

Isabel laughed. Pescatore felt a charge of exhilaration.

“When Buffalo and Rufino were whispering and everything, I thought I was history,” he said. “I thought that humongous throwdown
jailbird was gonna march over and crush my skull. But he totally changed when we got to talking. At the ranch he let me shoot
this laser-sight pistol. The Buffalo seems pretty cool to me.”

“Uh-huh. Remind me to show you his sheet. He started killing people in middle school. He was in a gang in the worst housing
project in the San Fernando Valley. The Gardens. Hasn’t stopped since. Be really, really careful, Valentine.”

Pescatore spent the rest of the lunch telling Puente about the evening’s activities in detail. He watched her fill her notebook
with careful ornate scribbles, her mouth half-open in concentration. Her legs were tucked up under her, smooth muscles bunched
in a short crimson skirt.

“If this was Taylor Street in the summer, now we could walk over to Mario’s Italian Ice, sit on a stoop and have a couple
of lemonades,” Pescatore sighed, digging caffeinated granules of sugar out of his espresso cup. “But around here they never
heard of Italian ice. And you’d probably have to drive fifty miles for it.”

“You’ve got a serious case of homesickness,” Puente said, pointing the pen at him like a teacher.

“I guess home always seems better when you’re far away,” Pescatore said, running a hand through his curls.

“I get the idea your neighborhood wasn’t that great.”

“Yeah. The Italians and the Mexicans and the blacks were always brawling. A three-way hatefest. For me, not hanging with any
one group was good sometimes. But other times it sucked. I had to stay in the house or run like hell. I got good at running.”

“And boxing?”

“You know about the boxing?”

Puente responded with a look that said “Silly Question.”

“I boxed a little. I wasn’t exactly great. What about you, Isabel? You never get homesick? You don’t go someplace reminds
you of Miami?”

Puente smiled. “This is classified, Valentine. I go to a Cuban restaurant on Morena Boulevard. A family place. They treat
me like a queen. I don’t order, they just give me whatever they think I’ll like.”

“Sounds great. When we going there?”

“I never take anybody there.”

“So I guess when you take me, that’d be a big step, huh?” He said it fast and breezy, caught up in the moment.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I hope we go there, that’s all.” He had decided it was ridiculous not to give it a shot. What was she going to do,
fire him? He said: “We could even not talk about work, for once. We could spend the whole night not talking about work.”

“Valentine.” They stared at each other, both leaning on their elbows. “You’re not getting distracted from your assignment,
are you?”

“No way. But I’m not gonna hide my feelings, Isabel.”

She tilted her head warily.

“Really,” she said.

“Can’t help it.” He grinned apologetically. “That’s the way it is.”

“I’m not going to hide the way I feel either,” she said, her smile disappearing. “Mainly I feel worried. You’re my best informant
and you’re infiltrating this organization better than I thought you would. The last thing we want is distractions. Understand?
The better you do, the more dangerous it gets.”

At roll call at the Imperial Beach station the following Sunday afternoon, the field operations supervisor and the assistant
station
chief went through a typical litany: a new overtime policy, more sniper threats, a tip about backpackers who were paying their
coyotes by carrying marijuana. The bosses outlined procedures for using on-call interpreters of exotic languages—Mandarin,
Arabic—who had been hired to handle all the OTMs. Intel reports said the smugglers had warehouses in Tijuana full of hundreds
of aliens from far-off places waiting to cross. And keep the agents in report-writing hell.

Pescatore half listened as they ended the briefing with an alert for three inmates who had escaped hours earlier from the
penitentiary in Tijuana during a shoot-out that left five dead. One of the fugitives was the former chief of the state police
in Tijuana, the supervisor said: Regino Astorga. Aka the Colonel.

By the time Pescatore registered the name, the agents were getting up from the tables and heading out into the warm and rainy
evening. Pescatore knew that Isabel Puente was interested in the Colonel. She was helping her secretive Mexican cop friends
on an investigation related to him. But that was all she had told him.

Garrison met Pescatore, Dillard and Macías for a dinner break at Adalberto’s, a hole-in-the-wall taco place in San Ysidro.
Usually, Garrison high-fived, bullshitted and cheerfully terrorized every Mexican in the place, employee or customer, Americanized
or border brother. But tonight he slumped, silent and ornery, next to Dillard in the scarred wooden booth.

“We got an urgent thing tonight,” Garrison said. “I need all three of you. Full operational mode.”

Garrison ordered them to meet at the parking lot overlooking the beach in Border Field State Park. As the appointed time approached,
Pescatore heard Garrison on the radio deploying agents to the east and north. Pescatore assumed he was clearing the way for
whatever he had cooking at the beach.

A light steady rain fell as Pescatore drove into Border Field State Park. He waved at a park ranger in a yellow slicker who
sat
in a guardhouse by the entrance. The road slanted southwest through a grassy field. Sheer hills topped by mansions with satellite
dishes and cupolas, the exclusive Playas de Tijuana neighborhood with its beach-and-border view, marked the international
line. The rain and mist blurred the bowl-shaped hulk of Tijuana’s seaside bullring in the distance. Three Patrol Wranglers
were parked in the lot overlooking the southwestern corner of the border.

When Pescatore had arrived in the San Diego sector, a retired agent had told him about what the beach was like in the years
before the border fence. On sunny weekends, the retired agent had explained, an unspoken agreement between The Patrol and
the beachgoers caused the border to temporarily disappear. Extended families arrived in contingents, some from San Diego and
some from Tijuana. They camped out on blankets and towels. Kids chased soccer balls in the surf. Vendors carried Styrofoam
coolers and pushed ice cream carts. Musical trios known as
conjuntos
lugged instruments across the sand to perform serenades. All of them breaching the unmarked international line as Border
Patrol agents lounged in the parking lot above the beach.

The agents sunned themselves, propped on their vehicle hoods in wraparound dark glasses. They permitted the foot traffic between
First and Third worlds as long as no one strayed off the sand or too far north. It was a peaceful scene. Only on rare occasions
did some lowlife
cholo
ruin the mood by removing his shirt, hoisting a boogie board over his shoulder as camouflage, and trying to sneak toward
downtown San Diego, which rose out of the Pacific like an apparition in the distance.

But then the U.S. Army had constructed a specially engineered metal fence at the state park. The fence extended down the dune,
across the sand and several hundred yards into the ocean. And it put an end to transborder weekends at the beach forever more.

Pescatore climbed into Garrison’s Wrangler with Dillard and Macías. Garrison was on the phone and smoking furiously. Garrison
said the name Mauro and wrapped up the conversation.

“Listen up, gentlemen,” Garrison said, peering south through the rivulets on the windshield. “You know this Colonel Astorga
that busted out of the penitentiary in TJ? Well, he’s coming across in a couple minutes. We’re giving him a escort north.”

“Here?” asked Macías, who was in his early twenties and had a crew cut. “Be less fuss to have him come through one of our
lanes at the port of entry, wouldn’t it?”

“This guy’s all over the news,” Garrison said. “It’s too hot for him to show up at San Ysidro or Otay. Macías, I want you
out by the park entrance. Anybody shows up, you shoo ’em off. Me and Valentine and Dillard are gonna meet our guy. Door-to-door
service.”

Garrison said he planned to stash the Colonel at the safe house in Imperial Beach until the end of the shift. Then they would
give him a ride north past the Border Patrol freeway checkpoint at San Clemente. Somebody else would take over from there.

Macías departed. Garrison, Pescatore and Dillard sat in the Wrangler listening to the rain on the roof. Pescatore’s hand gripped
the belt sheath holding his cell phone. He cursed himself for not having called Isabel Puente when he had had the chance.
He had resisted his initial instinct that Garrison’s “urgent thing” involved the Colonel. It had seemed too brazen, too risky.

Garrison checked his watch.

“Ready?” he said.

His phone rang again. Pescatore slumped, restless, exhaling forcefully. He watched Garrison. The supervisor closed his eyes
momentarily as he listened. He muttered one word into the phone: “OK.”

Garrison closed the phone and clipped it to his belt. He did not look at Pescatore or Dillard.

“You guys get going down there in Valentine’s vehicle,” Garrison said. “The Colonel is about five seven, one seventy-five,
late fifties. Wearing a fatigue-type jacket and a Pittsburgh Pirates cap. He’s with a subject in a Padres cap named Rico.
You just put ’em in the vehicle. I’ll cover you from my little command post up here, buddy.”

His door open, water hitting his sleeve, Pescatore started to ask Garrison where the third escapee was and, more important,
why Garrison wasn’t coming down to the beach. But as he studied the bulging gray eyes, the controlled savagery with which
the supervisor stubbed out his cigarette, Pescatore understood. He’s scared, Pescatore thought. That’s why he’s not taking
the lead, shaking the Colonel’s hand, the big-shot bullshit. It doesn’t make sense—unless somebody just told him it’s not
such a hot idea to get close to the Colonel right this minute. And if he’s scared, I’m scared.