Читать книгу Spirit Walk - Jay Treiber - Страница 12

Five

In 1976, Kevin was a senior in high school, and Jimmy Holguin was just a name in a missing persons police report. Kevin knew nothing of the man until 2001, when he stumbled onto the name in an archived article in the Douglas Daily Dispatch when researching for his Ph.D. dissertation. Holguin had been born in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Douglas’s sister city on the border, but had lived on the Arizona side after the age of fifteen. In early November 1976, Jimmy Holguin set off a chain of events which would culminate in violent crisis on a Sunday afternoon on the Escrobarra ten days later. He had, in essence, ghost authored the life-defining moment of Kevin McNally’s young life.

The son of a fourth-generation Sonora ranching family, Holguin had decided early on that he would break from the family tradition of abject poverty. The most expedient way to do this, of course, was to mule contraband to the north side of the border. After seventeen years in the drug smuggling business, Holguin had established himself, but he made some dangerous decisions that ultimately sealed his fate. The last night of his life, his two partners asked him to join them for drinks at a small table in a tavern called Club Las Vegas in the red-light district of Agua Prieta, Sonora.

The girls working the bar that night took an interest as soon as the three men walked in. The men were well dressed and ordered Presidente and Dos Eqes chasers, and they surveyed the girls with a passing interest, glancing at smooth legs and exposed cleavages, returning the girls’ smiles with a slight nod of their heads. None of the men cared who paid for the drinks, and the money was not an issue. One of them was muy guapo, quite good looking, and the girl named Dora, who had celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday the day before, gave a look around to the others, most of whom were seated along the bar, which said: “Stay away. He’s mine.”

Isedro Leon, the handsome one, had been listening to his friend Jimmy Holguin talk for the last ten minutes, but now was only half hearing as the little auburn-haired girl at the bar with blue eyes and a scatter of freckles across her nose leered intently at him.

“By middle of March, latest, I could have the rest,” Jimmy was telling Leon. “At ten percent interest,” he said, looking down at his beer bottle as he ciphered out the figures, “it will be eighty-two five. I know that isn’t the same amount of return you would expect, but it’s the best I could do.”

Isedro waved his hand as one would shoo away a fly, a gesture that said it was of no consequence, that everything was all right. He glanced over at the girl, still staring at him. The jukebox played an old corrido that Leon recognized from his teenage years, and he felt nostalgic, sentimental enough to take the girl up on her implied offer, even though he knew it would cost him plenty. “If you have fifty right now, it’s fine,” he said to Jimmy. “I wouldn’t have had that money in circulation, anyway.”

The third man, Juan Carlos Roscon, had not said ten words the entire evening. He was a big, squarely built man with Indio features, a large heavy-skinned face, thick hair and a tuft of wispy mustache and goatee. His upper arms were the thickness of most people’s thighs and bore a tangle of green-ink prison tattoos from a coiled snake to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Juan Carlos was the homeliest of the three and paid the most attention to the girls.

“I still can’t believe it,” Jimmy said to Isedro. “We had just crossed and were going down that arroyo with all the trees, and shit, there they were, man, six migra with their pistols pointed right at us.”

“I thought you said there were five.”

“I remember it better now, and I’m sure there were six.”

“Sometimes you have to run,” Leon said.

“I can still hear the bullets, too, man, shit.” Holguin made a pop-ping-whistling noise between his teeth and lower lip. “We couldn’t run with the backpacks on.” Jimmy went quiet, pondered the bottom of his brandy glass. “I was scared, Ise, you know?”

“Shit,” Leon said. “You remember that time with Ochoa, don’t you? When I didn’t even know I had pissed my pants until I got out of the truck?”

Jimmy nodded, still fixed on the brandy glass. “I just want you to believe me.”

“Hey,” Leon said. “Look at me Jimmy.” He pushed his face closer to Holguin’s and jabbed the table with his index finger for emphasis. “You are my best friend. I never question you, even in my heart. What you say is implicitly the truth for me.”

Jimmy smiled at Ise’s words. Leon could take on such a comforting, almost fatherly, tone so quickly. Jimmy put out his hand, and Leon hauled back and clapped his fist around Jimmy’s, loud enough to draw notice. Both men’s eyes had teared up.

“Hermanos,” Ise said, his hand tight around Jimmy’s.

“Hermanos,” Jimmy came back, Ise working his hand so hard his whole upper body shook.

Dora had kept her eye on the handsome man with the gray at his temples and goatee. He had not looked her way in several minutes and seemed more interested in his friend than in her now. She would probably have to make a move soon if she was to have any chance. She lifted her small Naugahide purse, hung from her shoulder on a faux gold chain, and assessed its contents: a little over a thousand pesos and a half gram of cola, about half the money needed for two hours of crib space and enough coke for one more night. Dora snatched out her compact, snapped it open, and quickly checked the makeup around her eyes. For the past year, she’d saved up for the blue-tinted contacts, and she felt sure they made her the prettiest girl in the club.

When she climbed off the barstool and stepped up to their table, both Holguin and Rascon were annoyed, but neither man was surprised. In the fifteen years Jimmy had partnered with Isedro, he’d seen this sort of thing dozens of times: they’re at a bar and some lady asks Ise to dance, or if she could talk to him a minute, or how his sister or mother or brother was, or did he have any cola, or was he going to the quinceañera reception later on, or could she have a ride home. Anything to get closer to him, because, clearly, Isedro had it—the looks, the money, and something more. It wasn’t just the fancy words he used sometimes but the way he looked at you and the way he phrased what you were thinking already, as though to reach inside with a warm hand and gently touch the middle of you. Jimmy Holguin was one of the few who understood it was at that moment that one should be most afraid. A few times, and Jimmy had been there to witness, that warmth meant he (sometimes she) had maybe ten, fifteen seconds to live.

“¿Qué ondas, mija?,” Jimmy said to her. The girl stood between Rascon and Jimmy, directly across from Isedro.

“Hello,” she said, awkwardly trying her English. She had known immediately the men were American.

Ise sat back in his chair, linked his hands behind his head as he looked up at the girl. “¿Le puedo ayudar?” he asked her, may I help you, and his two companions jeered his politeness.

“Hay, ‘¿Le puedo ayudar?,” Jimmy mocked gently.

Dora waited for the chuckling to die. “¿Podemos hablar?” she answered in kind, Can we talk?

“Hey,” Jimmy said, getting Ise’s attention, and speaking English the first time that evening. “Let this be my treat.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Leon said, the English feeling strange, incongruous to the sounds one hears in a Sonora red-light cantina. He nodded toward the girl, now blank-faced amid the garble of Anglo-Saxon schwas and diphthongs. “You pick up the tab on this kind of shit for your little brother, not your partner.”

“Just thought I’d offer,” Jimmy said. “She looks like she wants to give you a discount, anyway.”

“Discount?” Rascon said, breaking a ten-minute silence. “Free, is more like it.”

Isedro spoke again to the girl. “Siéntate,” he said, gesturing at the empty fourth chair.

She moved her head slightly toward the bar. “Pa’ allá,” she said, as though she would have it no other way.

Ise rose and followed her to the bar where she regained what seemed to be a familiar perch on the barstool, and he stepped up close. Her perfume was a midline knock-off but smelled expensive on her young skin.

“¿Presidente?” he asked.

“¿Por qué no?” she said.

Ise held up two fingers, and the bartender was quick to respond, the snifters and smell of brandy at their elbows within seconds. The girl took only a sip before she had out her handbag. She removed a threadbare cotton change purse that still bore the semblance of some design in blue ink and drew out ten one-hundred peso bills rolled into a neat tube. “That’s half for the room,” she told him.

“No, no, mija,” Ise said. “I can pay for the room myself.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, pushing the money into view of the bartender who managed the room transactions. “It is my proof that this is not just business.”

She smiled at him, and he saw she was young, not much over twenty. “Bueno,” he said. “I see now.”

The girl lifted her brandy snifter and threw back its contents like a dose of medicine.

“Hijuela,” Leon remarked.

She slapped her hand down and looked at the bartender. “La llave,” she said, the key.

Two hours later, a little before 1:00 a.m., Isedro and the girl stepped back into the bar. Her hands were linked around his elbow as though he’d been her steady the last six months. Holguin and Rascon had been inspired in kind but neither transaction had taken over thirty minutes, and the girls with whom they had consorted sat along the bar with their friends, no more interested in either of the men than they had been before.

Leon, ready for a drink, stopped at the bar and ordered a house tequila and a Dos Equis, then, with the girl still attached, stepped up to his two friends. He emptied the tequila glass and chugged back half the beer.

“¿Listos?” he said. Are we ready?

Jimmy and Juan Carlos glanced at each other. “We’re still doing it tonight?” Juan Carlos asked in English.

“Simón, pues,” he said. “Don’t you think, Jimmy?”

Holguin shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “Just as long we don’t wake up my grandmother.”

“You think we can be quiet enough?” Juan Carlos asked.

“I think so,” Jimmy said. “It’s pretty far from the ranch house, and she doesn’t hear good anyway.”

Jimmy had to use the bathroom before they left, and when he had gone from the table, Rascon rose quickly and approached Isedro. “Por favor,” he said to Dora, who reluctantly gave up Ise’s elbow and stepped over to the bar to give them a moment’s privacy.

“The chick’s going with us, man?”

“Why not?”

“You know what we gotta do. We can’t have her around for that.”

“She’ll wait in the car. No big deal. We’ll say, ‘Jimmy’s grandmother wasn’t feeling well, or she needed his help, so Jimmy had to stay out there tonight.’ Right? No problem.”

“But it’s an unnecessary risk.”

“How good would life be if you didn’t take unnecessary risks.”

Damn good, Rascon thought, but didn’t dare say it.

When Jimmy came out of the bathroom, the three others were waiting for him at the door. They had come there in Jimmy’s GMC Suburban, and when they climbed in with their extra passenger, it was late and the clubs in the red light square had quieted. A few neon signs and lighted windows still glowed out into the plaza, where in its center stood a small and solitary police station, about the size and construct of a San Francisco toll booth, which most nights sat empty. A thin strain of Tejano music, from an indeterminate direction, leaked from a jukebox somewhere, and weaved into the music was the faint sound of men’s laughter and the smell of cooking masa, torillas, and chile meat as the late-night restaurants were serving the empty-bellied drunks who, this time of night, stumbled around for that something more all humans seek.

Jimmy and Juan Carlos sat in the front seat, and Isedro and Dora in the back where she was free to run her hand along his thigh. As she pressed herself up against his left side, she could feel the steel lump of his nine millimeter under his leather coat. She’d done business with men carrying guns before.

They took Calle 14 south until it intersected with Avenida Industrial, a main street that headed out of town. Isedro and Juan Carlos had been born US citizens on the Douglas side of the line. Jimmy had been born in Cananea, Mexico, a town about forty miles south, within three years of the other two.

“How far is it?” Juan Carlos asked.

“Not far,” Isedro answered from the back seat. “What, about three miles out of town, Jimmy?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, “about three or four miles—just before the hills start.”

“Do you still run cattle?” Juan Carlos asked, renewing Leon’s admiration of him for working so deftly at putting Jimmy at ease. The guy may have been quiet, but when things got tight, when it came down to the wire, he always came through.

“No, not since my grandfather died. Two horses and my grandmother, and sometimes my niece, and that’s it.”

“¿A dónde vamos?” Dora asked Ise. Where are we going?

“Un ranchito,” he answered.

“¿Por qué? ¿Más pisto?”

“El Jimmy necesita hablar con su abuela.” Jimmy needs to talk to his grandmother. “Right, Jimmy?” he said into the front seat.

“Sî” Jimmy came back.

They arrived at the small, disheveled ranch, lighted only by the headlights and what appeared to be a single lantern or candle burning from within. The shakewood shingles of the main house had rotted and all but fallen off. Two clapboard out buildings and small barn had never seen paint and stood at a slant as though to topple with the slightest nudge. The small rough-hewn ocotillo corrals held two plug bay geldings that shied at the headlights, which Jimmy immediately snapped off as they parked in front of the house.

“What’s that light inside?” Leon asked. “I thought you said she’d be asleep.”

“She is. She just burns a candle at night to keep the evil spirits away.”

Isedro kissed the girl and told her firmly she must stay in the car, that they would be back in less than an hour. He fished in his pocket and found the gram vial of coke and left it with her.

“Remember,” he told her. “Stay in the car,” at which she nodded reluctant assent and looked down at the vial in her palm.

Jimmy brought a flashlight out from under the seat, and the three men walked past the ranch house to the ramshackle barn where, after some searching, Jimmy found two shovels and a digging bar. He led them about a hundred yards back of the house to a lone mesquite tree, the ground around it trampled bare and flaked with dried manure from generations of starving cattle. Once at the tree, Jimmy oriented himself a moment, then counted out ten paces to the west. “Esto es,” he said, This is it.

Isedro, not shy of hard work, broke the ground with the digging bar and the other two used the shovels. The hole they dug was about five feet in diameter and after three feet and half an hour’s work they came to the strong box, twenty inches long and ten wide and deep, wrapped in a burlap sack.

Jimmy dropped to his belly and drew out the box and unwrapped it. The lock had long since broken and he opened it immediately and shined the light on several rows of bundled, new hundred-dollar bills. “It’s all there, Ise. You can count it if you want.”

“No,” Leon said behind him. “I don’t need to count it.”

When Jimmy rose, Isedro had the nine millimeter pointed at his forehead.

“Sorry man,” Rascon said, sincerely remorseful that he had to be part of this.

“Where’s all my dope, Jimmy?” Isedro asked.

“Ise, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jimmy held out his hands as one would in a hopeless attempt to stop a flood or avalanche.

“You’ve been taking mordiditas out of our business for fifteen years and you don’t know what I’m talking about?” He stepped up close to Jimmy, then, pressed the gun into his gut and grabbed him behind the head by a handful of hair.

“Ise, man,” Jimmy said, his voice breaking. “Think about this. Think about what you’re doing.”

“Mi hermano,” he said, the affection in his voice genuine. “You don’t know how long I’ve thought about this.” He shook Jimmy’s head, almost playfully. “Remember our days in Hermosillo, when we first met.” He drew Jimmy close then, whispering in his ear, “When we were young, all the money and good food and dope, all the women we wanted until we got sick of having them. Remember when we would drive for days, no destination, no worries. There are things we lose in youth that we can’t call back. Do you ever think about things like that, Jimmy?”

“Oh, Ise,” Jimmy said, his frantic thoughts broken mid-sentence by his sobbing. He gave way to weeping, loud inconsolable moans with no more dignity than a ten-year-old. Finally, he recovered himself enough to speak. “It’s in the house, Ise. All of it. My grandmother sleeps on it under her mattress. But please, man, it was like a savings account. I was going to split it even with you.” Jimmy was breathing hard now, though hopeful he’d at least scratched the surface of empathy. “Man, I made some trades, some investments. There’s ten times more than I ever took.”

“Oh, my sweet Jimmy,” Isedro said in his ear, then kissed him on the cheek. “Adios.”

The report of the pistol, pressed as it was into Jimmy’s belly, was so muffled as to be perverse. Jimmy yelped, took a step backward, and fell into the hole where he lay moaning. He had dropped the flashlight beside the hole and Isedro picked it up and shined it down on him.

“Don’t feel bad, Jimmy,” Isedro said. “I would have shot you whether you lied or told the truth.”

Isedro looked over at Juan Carlos. “Bury him,” he told the big man.

“Fuck, man,” Juan Carlos said. “Finish him.”

“No,” Leon said. “He needs time to think about this.”

Juan Carlos handed him the shovel. “You’ll have to do it, man. I can’t.”

Ise gave him the light, but Juan Carlos snapped it off. “We don’t need to see this.”

Isedro had tossed in several shovelfuls of dirt which, in between the moans, he heard strike Jimmy’s clothing, when the sound of footsteps caused both men to wheel around. Juan Carlos caught the girl’s face and blue-tinted eyes in the flashlight.

“¿Qué pasó?” she said.

Jimmy screamed, something the way a calf bawls, then fell off into an eerie whimpering.

“¿Quién es?” she asked, who is it.

“Vete al carro,” Isedro told her, go back to the car.

It was perhaps the tone of her new lover’s voice or the nagging portent that had burned at her gut since the men had left the Suburban, but Dora suddenly arrived at her better senses. Without ceremony or hesitation, she chucked off both her pumps, turned on her bare heel, and bolted toward the thicket at the edge of the pasture. She had only covered about twenty yards before Isedro closed the distance and caught her by the hair. He dragged her back to the hole.

“I told you to stay in the car, mija.” His tone was fatherly, almost gentle.

The girl shrieked and clawed and tried to bite whatever of his flesh she could find. In her purse, she carried a medium-sized locking knife, but when she tried to get at it, Isedro yanked the purse from her shoulder, breaking the chain, and flung it into the darkness.

By the time he got her back to the hole she was begging for her life.

“Damn, Isedro,” Juan Carlos said. “I told you.”

Isedro reached under his jacket and drew out the nine millimeter.

“Shit Ise, don’t kill her.”

“What do you suggest?”

Juan Carlos had no answer.

The girl was on the ground just shy of the hole now, sitting with her legs folded under her, eyes down and rocking back and forth. “Por favor, Ise. No me mates. Por favor.” She sounded like a child pleading with her father not to be punished. Under the beam of the flashlight she looked up a flickering moment at her attackers, all the joy and love and sorrow and regrets of her young life seeming to pass from her eyes to theirs.

Isedro put the gun to the top of her head and fired. She dropped straight forward. Her arms at her sides, she looked like a subject prostrate before a king.

Isedro lifted her by the shoulders backward and tumbled her into the hole on top of Jimmy who groaned more loudly than he had the last few minutes.

“She should have stayed in the car,” Isedro said.

“Would you please finish Jimmy,” Juan Carlos pleaded. “Man, I can’t do this. I gotta get some sleep at night.”

“Shine the light,” Isedro instructed. Jimmy’s head and shoulders were still exposed and visible under the light beam. His eyes were tightly closed, and he seemed to have shut out everything but the pain. Isedro took careful aim at the base of Jimmy’s skull and pulled the trigger.

It took the two men only a few minutes to bury the bodies. They found the back door leading into the kitchen unlocked and lit a kerosene lantern. The first room they came to seemed to be that of a child, the bed no longer than five feet, and the floor strewn with toys and rag dolls. Isedro walked up to the bed, which appeared to have someone in it, and pulled back the covers only to discover a large stuffed bear.

When they walked out of the child’s bedroom, the old woman, dressed in a cotton night gown, was standing in the doorway of her own.

“Dios mío,” she said, her hands on her chest. “¿Quiénes son?”

“Amigos de Jimmy,” Isedro answered back.

“¿Qué quieren?” What do you want? She was shaking, her lower lip trembling.

Ise gestured at the big chair in the living room. “Siéntese usted, señora.” He took the woman by the elbow and politely helped her to the chair. As soon as she was seated, he reached under his jacket and pulled out the pistol, drawing a startled shriek from the old woman. She had her hands to her face and her eyes had gone wet. In the kitchen, a few paces away, was a cooking timer and a rosary, both of which Isedro took from the counter and set on the coffee table in front of the woman.

Isedro picked up the timer, set it for five minutes, and handed the rosary beads to the woman. He looked over at Rascon, who still held the lantern, and spoke to him in English. “Wait outside a few minutes, Juan Carlos.”

“This is fucked up, man.”

“Go ahead,” Leon said gently. “I’ll be five minutes. We have a lot of work to do tonight.”

Rascon, incredulous, shook his head. “It’s gone bad, man. I don’t know.”

For a moment, Isedro did not acknowledge the statement or even look at him. He stepped over and stood before the woman quietly crying in the chair. Staring down at her, he addressed Rascon. “Do you think we can turn it around now? You can’t call it back halfway through, man.”

Leon looked at the woman as he might his own grandmother, then went to one knee before her and addressed her politely in Spanish: “Madam, I will allow you five minutes at prayer. I will put the kitchen timer behind you so you are unable to see it. And I assure you, you will feel no pain. I admire you for succumbing so gracefully to your fate.”

He looked up at Juan Carlos. “Please,” he said. “Five minutes.”

Rascon waited outside for what felt like an hour when the kitchen timer sounded and the shot immediately after. When he stepped back inside, the old woman and the chair she sat in had been covered with a large flannel quilt decorated with the red silhouettes of running horses.

He followed the faint lantern light into the largest bedroom where he found Isedro lifting the mattress from the bed. Packed into the frame were many kilo bundles of cocaine and heroin.

“Jesus,” Juan Carlos said.

“There’s more somewhere. Horse. Eighty or ninety kilos—uncut.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.” Juan Carlos pointed to the bundles in the bed frame. “This is coke?”

Isedro nodded. “About two-hundred keys.”

Juan Carlos shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

“Like I told you, he’d been siphoning off me since the beginning.” Isedro was rummaging around the room now. He stepped over to the vanity and pulled open the drawers. In the lower three he found what he was looking for, the kilo bags so heavy the drawer bottoms had collapsed from their weight. Juan Carlos marveled as Ise laid the plastic bags out on the floor.

In the dim, greenish light of the kerosene lamp the men stood, hands on hips, surveying their bounty.

“You want to do this all in one run?” Rascon asked.

“We’ve got to. Jimmy wasn’t bullshitting about the border patrol. Those fuckers are all over the place. Nobody’s getting through the port either, man, so we can’t spread it out between the cops, and I don’t trust anybody anymore. We need to do this in one shot. Walk it across ourselves. I know a hook-up guy who’ll pay full on delivery.”

“It’s gonna take a lot of guys.”

“Five, maybe six kids, plus you and me. Pay them a couple grand apiece. It’ll take a few days to round them up, find the connection, but we can get it done inside a week—ten days max.”

“Where do you think we can cross?”

“They know about that brushy wash. It’ll have to be further east, man, at the Escrobarra.”

“Shit, that’s a hard hike.” Rascon kicked at one of the bundles. “We’ll have to carry seventy—eighty pounds apiece.”

Isedro reached over and patted him on his large belly. “You think you can make it, panzón?”

“For that much money? Hell yes.”

“You’ll probably end up with a couple million. You invest some of it and don’t piss it all away on party and women, you shouldn’t have to take any more hikes.”

“You thinking about retiring, Ise?”

Leon looked genuinely pained. “When you have to pop your best friend, and his grandmother, it’s time to hang it up.”

Rascon thought hard before he spoke. “What was the girl’s name?”

“I don’t remember,” Leon said. He was working his jaw, the way he did when he was upset. “I don’t want to remember. Don’t bring her up again.”

Juan Carlos didn’t speak for a moment. “So, we’ll probably do it next week sometime?”

Isedro nodded. “I know a little road. We’ll hike two, maybe three miles. We can take Jimmy’s truck and my Dodge out there—just leave Jimmy’s rig at the drop. They’re working on Highway 2 right now, but I know a ranch road that goes out there.”

“You know what,” Rascon said. “I just remembered something—I think hunting season starts next week.”

“Well,” Leon said, the same slate-colored cast in his eyes Juan Carlos had come to fear. “Hunters can be taken out, too.”