Above The Law Page 13

  The chief leaned into the open truck, and said, "You want to come with me, don't you, girl? You got work back at the ranch waiting for you."

  "You do what you want, Amelia," Jose said.

  She looked over at them, eyes wide and lips crushed together. She shook her head.

  "I don't want to go," she said, cringing as if she expected a slap.

  Gage jabbed a thick finger at her.

  "You walk away, you're walking away from a job and a place to stay. You leave now, you're leaving for good," he said. "You want that?"

  Amelia's eyes lost focus. She stared straight ahead, but nodded her head yes.

  "Everything you say," Gage said, "everything you do, you'll answer for it. That's the law, no matter what this slick spic tells you."

  Gage stepped away and Jose climbed back into his truck. The shadow beside Amelia melted away and Jose watched Gage's huge figure as he holstered his gun, then diminished in the side mirror. Jose pulled away from the cop car with its flashing lights and blinding high beams and out onto the open road.

  When they reached the highway and headed north, Amelia said, "They will kill me."

  Jose glanced at her, then returned his attention to the road. After a minute he said, "Not if they can't find you."

  CHAPTER 37

  CASEY FINISHED HER RUN AND DIDN'T BOTHER TO TOWEL OFF before she fired up her computer, got the phone number of the first boyfriend she'd had after her divorce, and called him at his new home in Washington, DC.

  "Tommy? Casey Jordan."

  She heard him clear his throat. In a groggy voice he said, "It's six o'clock."

  "I know," she said, speaking fast. "I'm sorry. I had a client deported. Well, she went voluntarily, but that was because they were holding her two-year-old daughter. She's near Monterrey. That's where they sent her and I need your help to get her back."

  "Is this really Casey?" he asked. Tommy Gillespie worked for the State Department, a mid-level administrator, and a former standout baseball player at A &M. While unmarried, blond, and handsome, he was too young for Casey and too committed to a career that kept him bouncing from place to place.

  "I know I haven't been good about staying in touch," she said. "But I think about you."

  "I saw that thing on TV," he said.

  Casey felt her cheeks warm.

  "Yeah, it was pretty good," he said. "Happy ending and everything. The girl I'm seeing, she got a little choked up. She actually wanted to call you, but I told her no."

  "I thought the whole thing was stupid," Casey said.

  "Well, she liked it."

  "I didn't mean it like that," Casey said. "Anyway, can you help me?"

  "I'll try."

  Casey explained what happened to Isodora, then told him about the lawsuit she had already put in motion.

  "I remember the DA had a witness for a case I tried in Austin a few years ago," she said. "The guy was an illegal from Mexico. I didn't want him testifying and I tried to make something of his status to the judge, but it was all by the book. They went to the State Department and got him some kind of a visa I guess you have for people involved in legal matters."

  "Sure," he said. "A visitor's visa for business, a B-1."

  "Well, this is a lawsuit," Casey said.

  "You think we could do business in this country without lawsuits? Litigation is covered under a B-1. It's no big deal."

  "And it supersedes this voluntary deportation?"

  "Sure," he said.

  "What if she's on some kind of watch list?"

  "Is this like that time you asked me if I liked to see justice being served and I ended up as an expert witness in that crazy trial with the woman who stole her kids?"

  "Those kids were hers, and you know it," Casey said. "The senator in this case called in some favors. Evidently, the dead husband has a brother who's a Latin King. They painted her with the organized-crime thing."

  "I'd like it if every bit of information got referenced and cross-checked between agencies by now, but the truth is, there's a lot less information sharing than you'd think," Tommy said. "I'm not saying you could fly her in. TSA is linked up pretty good. But if you bring her back in a car with a B-1 from the State Department? Customs won't think twice. A visa's a visa."

  "Perfect."

  "Not for me if someone catches it, but it works for you."

  "So how do we do this?" Casey asked.

  "I'll have it drawn up and faxed to you for your signature and your input of information on the lawsuit," Tommy said. "You send it back and I'll have it waiting for her in-where'd you say she was? Monterrey?"

  "Yes."

  "At the consulate there," he said.

  "Can you get it done by tomorrow?" she asked.

  "Tomorrow?" he asked.

  "I need to get this done," she said. "Can you have it waiting at the consulate in Monterrey?"

  Tommy chuckled and said, "You're so bashful."

  "Please."

  "Okay," Tommy said. "One favor."

  "Name it."

  "My girlfriend, Lauren? Just give her cell phone a call and leave a message. Say anything. 'Hi, this is Casey. Tommy says you're great.' She's in love with you."

  "Jesus, Tommy."

  "Hey, I'm the one manipulating the federal government."

  "I thought it was standard to issue a B-1 for a litigation?"

  "Yeah, and it takes about six months to process. You're going to get it in about six hours."

  CHAPTER 38

  CASEY LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW AND GRIPPED JOSe'S KNEE as a thermal column buffeted their plane. They banked wide, circling to land, and she could see the cluster of downtown buildings and high-rises, dark and lifeless under a heavy pancake of brown-and-yellow smog. From factory stacks, plumes of blackened air flowed upward like hellish geysers, while orange flames licked at the soot, burning off vents of methane. The signs of industry and progress promised cheap goods, processed food, and electric power, all the same comforts offered across the border to the north. Jagged mountains looked on from a distance, dead as slag.

  "My God," Casey said.

  She tightened her belt and was glad she had when they hit the runway hard enough to bounce and rattle the bins in the small pantry. Jose pried her fingers from his knee.

  "Sorry," she said.

  "I didn't know you hated flying," he said. "You turned white."

  "Flying is fine. Crash landings I don't like."

  Jose teased her about her pallor all the way to the car rental counter, where he argued with the woman in Spanish for a time before turning to Casey and explaining in frustration that the luxury sedan they thought they had reserved was actually a jeep.

  "That's not too bad," Casey said. "Like a small SUV."

  "I don't think it's that kind of jeep," he said, scooping the keys off the counter and signing his name.

  Jose led her outside to the parking spot that matched the number on his keys.

  "At least it's got a roll bar," Casey said, rounding the machine and eyeing the patches of chipped red paint that showed the original color to be a drab army green. She looked down at her Donna Karan pantsuit, sighed, took the jacket off, and tucked it into her shoulder bag before stowing the bag behind her seat, rolling up her sleeves, and getting in.

  "If it was any hotter I think the tires would melt," Jose said, tossing his own bag onto the floor beneath the tiny back bench seat and stripping off his outer denim shirt to reveal a snug V-neck T-shirt tucked in to the narrow waist of his jeans.

  "We'll get a nice breeze," she said, undoing the scarf around her neck and using it to fasten down her hair.

  "Like a hair dryer," he said, gazing up through a pair of Oakley sunglasses at a sun that burned orange through the dirty haze.

  Jose navigated with a map he kept pinned beneath his leg, weaving through traffic and down side streets until they found the American consulate, where Isodora's and her daughter's visas were waiting as promised for Casey to pick up. The sun crested, angry and
red at its apex as they finally broke free from the city. Its final destitute slums spilled to the edge of a barren brown landscape littered with rocks, garbage, and bleached animal bones. Despite the deafening wind, the oppressive heat had Casey sweating by the time they turned off the main highway and began a long climb into the mountains on a road of stone and oil, baked and broken by the heat. A slick milky mud in the bottom of the potholes spoke of a recent rain. Otherwise, dry dust coated all, prickly pear, mesquite, cactus, and jeep.

  At first, Jose eased the jeep over the rougher terrain, but after a time they simply held tight and he plowed over it all. As they climbed, the sun lost its colorful hue and glared blindly down, a hot white eye. Casey looked back at the dust cloud that extended like a bushy tail, disappearing into the smog below. The only traffic they met was a battered white minivan, empty except for two bearded men with eyes hidden behind sunglasses. When they stopped for Jose to ponder a fork in the road, her teeth felt loose and finding solid ground beneath her feet had an unnatural quality she had never noticed before.

  Jose must have guessed right because after another five twisting miles they topped a rise that looked down over a river valley punctuated by a town of mud, slat, and adobe buildings set adjacent to a modern factory. Metal piping wrapped itself around a white building that took up nearly half the space of the entire town. A lifeline of high-tension power lines stretched from the factory upstream, presumably to a dam, along a trickle of mountain-blue water that glittered like a ribbon of steel.

  Where the blue sky and water met the factory, nature came undone. Dual metal stacks churned out a diabolical plume of their own, rivaling their city cousins, and several foaming discharges left the stream shabby with filth. The plumes, which rose like twin spires, quickly dispersed to the south, following the strangled yellow river and cloaking the valley in an unending cloud of sulfur, carbon dioxide, and soot.

  "Isodora said something about a soap factory," Casey said, climbing back in beside him.

  "That's a hell of a mess to make soap," Jose said, taking his foot off the brake and beginning the bumpy descent.

  They rolled to town on the factory road, passing storefronts haunted by gaunt dirty keepers who stared at the jeep. Women in soiled white dresses, mostly hatless, made up the sparse foot traffic in the streets. The church spire stood taller than anything this side of the factory. With the dark smoke as its backdrop, the ancient bronze cross glowed pale green. A blackened bell lurked in the tower like a watchful eye. The rim beneath the tower's arched opening wept with the mess of pigeons. Jose parked the jeep and they mounted stone steps worn smooth by countless feet.

  He pushed open one of the massive wood doors clasped in iron and allowed Casey to enter first. Cool air and the smells of incense and burned candles welcomed her. Above the altar glowed a single arched pane of stained glass. Widows in black sat scattered about, hunched over or kneeling with their gnarled hands clasped. Chanting over them, a priest in a white hat invoked God in Spanish too rapid and low for Casey to catch even a word. From the corner of her eye she saw Jose cross himself and briefly dip his chin. From the wall, faded images of saints looked down from their frescoes and the bullet holes, chips, and cracks bestowed upon them from a time before Texas earned its statehood. Casey and Jose stood waiting for Mass to end, then swam upstream against the current of black crepe to meet the priest.

  Jose spoke Spanish to the priest, whose eyes flickered between Jose and Casey before he inclined his head toward Casey as if to greet her. When Jose mentioned Isodora's name, the priest considered them thoughtfully for a minute with dark smoldering eyes, then launched into an explanation that painted a bitter look on Jose's face.

  "What?" Casey asked.

  "When the factory came, they used pamphlets to spread word of jobs all across the countryside, all the way down to Costa Rica. Those the factory pays get paid double what you could get anywhere else, but the acid burns the workers' skin and the men drop dead young from cancer. But with the money the factory pays, every time a man or woman goes down, there are hundreds more waiting in these huts out back for the chance to take their place."

  "What huts?" Casey asked.

  Jose shrugged and said, "I don't know. He said 'huts,' like a hovel."

  Casey swallowed and asked about Isodora.

  "She showed up the way a lot of them do," Jose said quietly. "They hire a ride to Higueras from the airport. Crooked drivers bring them to the ridge, rob them of everything they own, and send them walking down into town. By the time they get here, the crooks are long gone."

  The priest chattered in an undertone.

  "Isodora did better than most," Jose said. "He says they left the baby alone and for that he praises God."

  Casey's mouth dropped open. She directed her gaze at the priest, who nodded appreciatively and said something she didn't understand.

  "He says lots of small towns across Mexico have American factories in them and he thanks God they all have churches to help the people," Jose said. "He says as bad as the soap factory is, there's worse."

  "Worse?" Casey asked. "How?"

  Jose raised an eyebrow. He turned and spoke with the priest, back and forth for a minute or so. The priest grew quite animated before Jose finally turned back to Casey.

  Jose frowned and said, "He says some of the peasants who come in from the north say there's a drug factory where they use people for experiments."

  "Drugs like cocaine and heroin?" Casey asked.

  "No," Jose said, "I think like Lipitor and Paxil. He says they bring them in by the truckload from the States."

  "Human guinea pigs?" Casey said. "Trucking people from America? That's crazy. That can't be true. It's some wives' tale."

  "Yeah, well, this isn't the US," Jose said. "Crazy there and crazy here are two different things."

  "It's the twenty-first century, though," Casey said.

  Jose just stared at her.

  Casey turned to the priest and studied him until he crossed himself, nodded, and motioned for them to follow him.

  Several acres of packed dirt made up the church's backyard. Like mushrooms after a rain, hundreds of crate-wood and cardboard huts populated the ground where two main paths led to latrines by the back. An eight-foot whitewashed wall encompassed the yard, protecting the people from more thieves, but offering no shield against the factory managers who would rob them of their health. In the dust, children in soiled frocks squealed with delight, playing games with chicken bones, stones, and greasy lengths of rawhide while babies shrieked with hunger beneath the folds of their mothers' Indian blankets.

  As the priest swished past in his robes, the destitute people quieted and bent their heads. Halfway down the track to the left they pulled up short beside a muddy hut roofed with a rusted sheet of corrugated metal. A small army of flies milled about on a sunlit patch of the dirt-stained wall, fearlessly vying for a drink from human eyes, noses, and mouths. Casey gasped and thrashed the air, ceasing only when they had entered the hut to find Isodora lying atop a pile of rags in the corner, staring blankly at the ceiling with a tearstained face. She cradled the baby in her arms, its sleep rendered fitful by a small cloud of flies.

  "Oh, my God, Isodora," Casey said.

  She swept at the flies on the baby and pulled the young mother close, holding her tight and feeling for a sign of life from the baby. Her eyes found Jose and even though her tears distorted his face, she knew he shared her horror. She reached for him and he gripped her hand in his own.

  "Come on, Isodora," she said, helping her up. "We're taking you home."

  CHAPTER 39

  ON THEIR WAY OUT OF TOWN, JOSe PULLED OVER AT A ROADSIDE stand selling pieces of grilled chicken and orange soda in old Fanta bottles, scratched and scarred from years of reuse. The boy behind the cinder-block counter who took their money could only have been six or seven. His arms were little more than stubby claws and Casey stared back behind them at the plumes of smoke, wondering. They sat on a metal bench i
n the shade of the shack. Isodora tore into the meat, pulling away pieces and slipping them into her little girl's eager mouth.

  They wiped their fingers on bits of newspaper and climbed into the jeep. Casey rode in back so that Isodora could huddle up behind the windshield with her baby. Jose slowed for the worst of the bumps and after a while the baby stopped crying and faded off to sleep. They hit the main highway going north at about three in the afternoon. The hot pavement shed its heat, waffling the air. Casey longed for the relative coolness of the dusty and broken country roads. Blue mountains turned green and the road climbed into a pass. At its peak, the air cooled and a field of deep blue smiled down at them from beyond the treetops. The oasis quickly faded as they descended into the waiting reds, browns, and yellows of the wasteland beyond.

  The mountains were soon nothing but distant purple shadows, cloaked in hot haze. Tractor trailers made up most of the traffic on the road. Occasionally they passed a car or a pickup truck whose driver would stare at the unlikely group. Jose pulled over for gas outside a small town built from corrugated metal and crumbling concrete. He came out from paying at the station carrying a plastic bag filled with sweaty water bottles. They chugged the water and got back onto the highway. Soon, on the horizon ahead, a brown-and-yellow cloud appeared. Off toward the east, a bruised sky brooded and flickered with lightning.

  Jose pulled off the highway, stood up with his hands on the windshield, and studied the sky. Big tractor trailers whooshed by without slowing, whipping them with streams of grit and dust.

  "Weather usually comes west to east," he said, glancing back at Casey and giving her a knowing nod toward Isodora and her baby. "Why it's coming from the wrong direction and what it means, I don't know. I think we can beat it. If it looks bad, we'll have to get off and find a hotel, fast. What do you think?"