The Territory: A Novel Page 16

  “How bad is it?”

  “He took over department expenditures in December. I’ve gone back to check, and he’s been submitting false invoices since January. They’ve gotten more absurd each month.”

  “Didn’t you see the expense report? Or, if not you, what about the commissioners? Didn’t they question things?”

  “I never submit an expenditure report. I know your office does. Sheriff’s department never has, though. Since I’ve been in office, all I do is a monthly report. I write a one-page summary of profit and expense, and I show them a basic revenue report.”

  She smiled grimly and looked at the row of businesses across the street, wondering if the double standard would ever be lifted. “Otto used to do the same, but Moss requested the detailed expenditure report from me. He’s never asked you for one?”

  He shook his head.

  “You got no worries. You’re a man. Commissioners? Mayor? Come on, Martínez. You can good-old-boy your way through this.”

  Martínez nodded once to acknowledge her remark and then looked away.

  Josie regretted her words instantly. Martínez had never played her sex against her, and he deserved the same respect.

  “I’m sorry, Roy. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  He ignored her apology and looked out across the courtyard, his expression distant. “I found receipts for several guns the department supposedly purchased from Red. There was a receipt for a contractor that doesn’t exist, doing five thousand dollars’ worth of repairs on the jail that never happened.” Martínez looked at the ground. “I found mileage claims for Bloster driving from Texas to Florida. Two of them. He’s filched twenty thousand dollars over the past six months alone.”

  “Where’s the money coming from?” she asked.

  “Homeland Security Grant. The description on the mileage claim said he went to pick up equipment for the department.”

  “Get the paperwork together, and I’ll take it to Dillon Reese. He’s discreet. Maybe we can take care of Bloster without making a community spectacle. The commissioners won’t want to admit this to anyone any more than you do.”

  Josie stood and saw Manny step outside from his motel office and wave to her. She made arrangements with Martínez to gather all his paperwork together for Dillon by the next morning and walked across the street leaving him sitting there, staring off at nothing.

  * * *

  Manny was standing behind the counter bent over a ledger when she walked in the front door. Josie could tell by his meek smile that something was wrong.

  “What’s up, Manny?”

  “I hate like anything to ask you this, but your mother left this morning without a word. She just slipped a letter under the office door. Dropped her key in my drop box. I was up and in here by seven, so she must have left at the crack of dawn.” He frowned and slid her a piece of notepaper, with the words MANNY’S MOTEL in green block letters printed across the top. Under that, she recognized her mother’s neatly slanted cursive.

  Dear Manny,

  Thank you for a sweet time. Sorry I had to miss you this morning. Places to go—people to see. Josie owes me for the bill. Just ask her to settle up with you. You take care.

  Much Love,

  Beverly

  Josie felt her face flush and tried to keep the surprise from showing. She reached into her back uniform pocket for her money clip and pulled out her Visa card.

  He held his hand up. “If you didn’t know about this, then you don’t owe me a dime.”

  “I’m happy to pay the bill.” She slid the credit card across the counter and stared as her mother’s signature on the note she’d written to Manny. Much Love.

  * * *

  Josie turned the radio off and rolled the windows down to listen to the wind whip the sand and grit around the floor of her jeep. She had developed a taste for bourbon on bad days, a taste that she knew was not healthy mentally or physically, but she could already imagine it sliding down her throat and heating up her belly. Some days she craved the burn more than human conversation or touch.

  But at home, she bypassed the bottle of bourbon in the kitchen cabinet and changed into shorts, a T-shirt, and lightweight hiking boots and set off walking behind her house toward Dell’s. The bitter smell of the sun baking the earth and trees, and the sprawling view of the brown and white Hereford cattle roaming the field made it one of her favorite places on earth.

  Dell lived in a small cedar-planked house at the foot of the mountains overlooking his cattle. He got by on what he referred to as common sense rules for living. He didn’t believe in charity. People either provided for themselves or they perished. “We didn’t need Darwin to explain survival of the fittest. Spend a week in the desert, and you’ll see it quick enough.”

  She found Dell’s banged-up green pickup truck parked in front of the horse barn, and while it signaled he was home, he could be nearly anywhere except inside the four walls of his house.

  Josie found him behind the barn with a massive cigar hanging out of his mouth, bare chested, his cowboy hat cocked back at a forty-five degree slant. He wore dusty cowboy boots and cutoff jean shorts that revealed his bowlegs. A shotgun hung from a tool belt. The tip of the shotgun almost touched the dirt as Dell bent at the waist, peering into a hole in the ground.

  Dell waved as Josie walked toward him. “Go slow. Don’t want to wake them till I’m ready.”

  Josie pointed to a mason jar filled with a translucent yellowish liquid that she recognized as gasoline sitting beside Dell. “You think you ought to put the lid on that?” she asked.

  Dell pulled his hat down to shield his browned faced from the sun. “You think I’m going to blow my damn self up pouring fuel with a lit cigar?”

  Josie smiled. “What’s up?”

  “Damn rattlers killed another calf yesterday. Found her dead in the creek. Bit in the head. Probably grazing and stuck her head down to sniff out something moving in the grass and the rattler got her. I never seen them so bad as this year. It’s like the lack of rain has dried up their holes and made them crazy.” He pointed to Josie’s feet. “Take your boots off.”

  Josie gave him a wary look.

  “Take your damned boots off, you pansy. I won’t light up the hole until you got them back on.”

  Josie did as instructed, trusting Dell over common sense.

  He pointed to a patch of dirt several feet from the hole. “Walk quiet and stand right there.”

  Josie did so, and a shiver ran the length of her body. She could feel a slight vibration under her feet.

  “You’re standing on top of a whole colony of rattlesnakes roiling around under your bare feet.”

  Dell laughed at the look on her face.

  “I’ve seen them get to be five feet or better.” He pointed at the hole, lowering his voice. “They all come out of that hole, and you’ll be a dead woman in five minutes. Might be a hundred snakes or better in that den.”

  Josie cursed Dell, shoved her feet in her socks and boots, and walked backwards with a wary eye on the hole.

  He told her to move back another thirty feet and stubbed his cigar out. He stuck a three-foot-long PVC pipe into the hole with a funnel on the top and dumped the gas down the pipe. He pulled up the pipe and backed up ten feet, hollering that the sons of bitches were madder than hell. Josie wished she’d had a camera to catch the joy on the man’s face. He grabbed his shotgun from his tool belt and trained it toward the hole. As snakes twisted out of the hole, Dell blasted a dozen shells, reloading like an infantryman.

  A half hour later, they sat at a picnic table behind the cabin, looking at the twenty-five rattles he had cut off the dead snakes and cleaned up with the garden hose. While Josie checked out the bounty, Dell poured himself a glass of dark sun tea and brought Josie a beer. A reformed alcoholic, Dell wouldn’t allow the hard stuff on his property, but he kept the beer cold for Josie.

  “We’ll make you a dream catcher out of those rattlers. I’ll show you how to stretch
the sinew from a deer to make the web.”

  Josie smiled and slipped the bottom of her T-shirt over the beer cap and twisted. Life was so uncomplicated with Dell. She would have fallen for him years ago if he hadn’t been forty years older. The man was a lifelong bachelor with seemingly no desire for intimacy.

  “I saw that accountant’s car parked down at your place the other night. That a good thing?” he asked.

  “It’s good.”

  “How come he’s been gone so long, then?”

  She sipped at her beer to consider the question and settled on the short version. “Something about my heart being in a box. I think I’m missing some key relationship gene. Things that everyone else understands make no sense to me.”

  “Well, I got a whole list of things wrong with me, but by god, I’m a good judge of character. And I know for a fact that you got a heart of gold, and if that accountant so much as thinks of breaking that heart of yours, he’ll have to answer to me.”

  TEN

  At 11:30 P.M. Friday night, Marta Cruz sat on the hood of her car swatting at mosquitoes. The air was damp by the river, full of life, teeming with bugs and bats, and she could smell the rank odor of decay. She preferred the dry, scorched smell of sand and rock and wind that surrounded her small adobe house in town. When Marta was a child, her mother had forbidden her and her siblings from playing in the dirty water of the river, and as she had gotten older, her mother’s superstitions took root. The river was not a place for clean, decent people. Her mother said loose girls and boys who were up to no good hung out there, away from the lights of respectable homes. Down by the river was where the no-gooders partied in shanties, stayed up all hours, and earned their money through vice. Marta had never seen the sights her mother described, but the stories instilled in her a strange paranoia about the Rio. She wasn’t happy about spending the night along its banks.

  She had arrived two hours prior and backed her car into a thicket of scrub, then pulled additional cover around the front of her car. Border Patrol had scouted out her position and agreed it would work. She was watching the intersection where Josie had seen the lookout car the night before from the watchtower, and waiting for any activity across the river on the Mexican side. Jimmy Dare and Tim Sanchez, another Border Patrol agent, had ATVs camouflaged and parked along the banks closer to the area where Josie had seen the exchange. Like Jimmy, Sanchez was a well-built agent who obviously took pride in his physical condition. Both agents were average height with short dark hair and muscular builds. Sanchez was bulkier, though, and obviously worked out heavily at the gym, almost to the point where Marta wondered if he supplemented with steroids. His biceps stretched the fabric on his uniform sleeves, and his chest was like a rock.

  Marta slid off her hood, unclipped her flashlight from her gun belt, and began walking down to the river to wipe mud on her neck and arms to help shield her skin from the swarm of mosquitoes. As she approached the river, she saw headlights coming down the access road to the river on the Mexican side. She immediately turned the flashlight off and ran back toward her car, calling Jimmy on his cell phone as she ran.

  “Looks like one car and a pickup with some kind of trailer attached,” she said. She watched the headlights approach through the thick brush and struggled to see what they were driving. “They’ve slowed way down,” she whispered.

  The vehicles drove past her on the other side of the river, creeping along, apparently looking for the access point.

  “They passed the turnoff we identified yesterday.”

  “What are they driving?” Jimmy asked. “We’re down by the river, and I can’t see anything.”

  Marta watched the lights for a moment. “It’s a full-size pickup pulling a double horse trailer. The car is a lowrider. Maybe an old Mercury or Buick. They’ve passed you guys up. It looks like they’re turning onto the Flat Rock crossing. The Rio is low enough right now, they could probably drive across it. It spreads out there and gets pretty shallow.”

  “As soon as they put a wheel in the river, Sanchez and I will approach on the four-wheelers,” Jimmy said. “I got the driver of the truck. Sanchez will block a rear exit. You block from the front with lights and siren, exit your car, and move to the rear for cover. You let us approach the truck from the rear. Clear?”

  “We’re on,” Marta said. “The lead car just nosed into the water, and the pickup is on his bumper.” She started to pull the clumps of scrub bushes from the front of her car and got inside.

  “I see them. They’ll try the car first to make sure there aren’t problems before they risk losing the load,” Jimmy said.

  Marta kept the cell phone to her ear and started her engine. She drove toward the car, leaving her headlights, flashers, and sirens off. She drove with her head out the window, listening for noise. Timing was key. If they arrived too soon, the drivers would leave on foot and run back into Mexico. They needed the car out of the river on the U.S. side without giving it time to take off. However, they hoped to keep the truck in the river, where the four-wheelers maneuvered easier and they would have the upper hand.

  Marta inched her car up, now a hundred feet from where the vehicles had entered the river. They, too, had turned their lights off. The half moon and stars still provided enough light that she could see the truck approaching the water.

  The car nosed out of the water onto the U.S. side and up the low bank. Its tires spun for several seconds before grabbing hold and lurching onto land. The truck was halfway into the river when both four-wheelers appeared out of nowhere and doused the area in spotlights. Water splashed, and the ATV’s large tires slung mud and rock as they plunged into the river. Marta took advantage of the noise from the revving engines and disorienting lights. She threw on her own lights and sirens and pulled her car directly in front of what she could see now was a Buick, which was sandwiched between the pickup truck and her own car.

  The front of her car faced the Buick, so Marta swung open her door immediately, crouched, but instead of running behind her own car and staying as Jimmy had instructed, she ran to the passenger side of the lead car. She wanted to take down the driver herself while the agents took care of the truck passengers. It appeared there was only the driver. No passengers. She hoped she hadn’t miscalculated.

  Squatting behind the window of the rear passenger door, she banged on the window and yelled for the driver to step out of the car. With the sirens blaring and the truck and both four-wheelers idling behind the lead car, she doubted the driver could hear anything.

  The truck’s driver threw it into reverse, gunned the engine, and hit the front of Jimmy’s ATV with the horse trailer as he made a break for Mexican soil. The impact was negligible, as he had little traction in the water. She watched Jimmy give a thumbs-up to Sanchez, which Marta assumed meant he had not been hurt by the truck. She heard gunshots and ducked, then heard the hiss of the tires on the pickup being deflated.

  Guns drawn, Jimmy and Sanchez both left their ATVs simultaneously. Sanchez approached the driver’s side of the truck and Jimmy the passenger side. As both men yelled for the occupants to exit, the doors of the truck opened slowly. Two men wearing jeans and dark-colored T-shirts began exiting the truck and were then dragged by the agents out into the water.

  While they were securing the truck, Marta turned her back on the two agents, crouched, and moved around to the driver’s side of the car from the back. Her heart banged against her chest as she yelled again for the driver to step out, hands in the air. She was certain the vehicles were transporting weapons, drugs, or both and whoever was driving had a much different outlook on life and death than she did. She yelled in Spanish again for the driver to open his door, and then silently prayed to God to keep her safe for her daughter.

  Marta shone her flashlight in the car with her free hand and confirmed there was only one person. Jimmy and Sanchez had both men cuffed and were shoving them noisily through the water toward her. Her main concern was that they were all targets until she secured
the man in the car. Marta lifted her metal flashlight high above her head and came down hard on the driver’s window, shattering the glass into the car. She slid the barrel of the gun in through the broken window and connected with the man’s head. He threw his hands up and leaned toward the steering wheel.

  “All right, all right!” he screamed.

  Marta slowly pulled her gun back out the window, unlocked the car door, then opened it. Hearing the man use English, she shifted her response to English as well. “Slow now. Put your hands and feet out first so I can see them.”

  She watched as he shifted his body so his hands and then feet appeared in the opening.

  “You have any weapons on you?”

  She heard no response and yelled the question again, hitting one of the man’s hands with her gun.

  “No! No guns in here,” he yelled.

  “Then you ease out of the car. Slowly.” As he slid out of the car with his hands and feet in front of him, it gave Marta time to look more closely into the car’s interior: it was empty except for what looked like a coat or duffel bag on the backseat, too small for a person to hide under.

  * * *

  Within ten minutes, all three men were handcuffed and lying facedown in the dirt. Marta pulled out driver’s licenses and wallets from pockets while Jimmy drove Marta’s jeep and then the truck and horse trailer up out of the water and onto dry land.

  A grassy opening about fifty feet wide separated the river from the road, but they needed to block vehicle access to help control the situation. While Sanchez set up flares and turned his patrol car sideways in the middle of River Road to block traffic, Jimmy used chain link cutters to break the locks on the horse trailer.

  Jimmy called out to Marta. “Josie was on it. There’s enough firepower in here to blow that jail to pieces. You better get ATF and request the bomb squad. Border Patrol backup is on their way, but we’re going to need as much help as we can get. These guys had big plans with this kind of firepower.” Jimmy walked gingerly back around the trailer. “This stuff makes me nervous as hell. I bet there’s a half ton of TNT alone.”