Above The Law Read online

  "Let's try," Casey said. "I'd like to at least make it across the border before we stop."

  Jose fell back into his seat and ground the gears, bringing the jeep back up to speed. They crept toward the brown cloud of smoke and soon saw that its source lay just beyond a low rise of hills where the land began to dip toward the Rio Grande. They had nearly reached Nuevo Laredo when Casey sniffed the air and poked Jose's shoulder.

  "You smell that?" Casey said, shouting above the whine of the jeep and the flap of air.

  Jose nodded. "Stinks like hell."

  "I can taste it," Casey said, studying the hills and just making out the glint of a metal stack.

  The road soon rose and in a cleft between two hills, the factory made itself known on the plain below. Power lines running alongside the road detoured down to it and a wide stone road ran perpendicular to the highway. Shiny metal gates guarding the road and the fence, all of fourteen feet and capped with loops of concertina wire, stretched off into the distance, marking the boundaries of the place. Casey squinted and stared at a single pale blue sign whose words she could not read. Beyond, the storm rolled toward them. Above, the heavy brown swell of filthy air swirled and grew.

  Jose pulled off the road and rose from his seat. Casey stood on the back of her seat, a full foot higher than Jose.

  "The priest said a factory up north," she said, her face directed into the coming wind. "You don't think?"

  Thunder rumbled from a distance.

  "I think most times people wouldn't smell it like this," Jose said, "but the wind's just right, coming out of the east with this storm. A drug factory? Why not? That smell, God, it's awful."

  Casey had her hand over her mouth and nose. She took out her cell phone to take a picture. As she did, the bark of a siren made her jump. A black police car with white doors had pulled off the highway behind them, its blue-and-red lights flashing. Two federales in blue uniforms and shiny midnight hats jumped out and scrambled up alongside the jeep with their hands on the holsters of their guns.

  They barked out orders that Casey didn't understand. She looked to Jose, who glared back at the cop closest to him. Isodora clutched her baby tight and whined.

  "What the hell do they want?" Casey said.

  Before Jose could answer, the cops drew their guns and began to shout.

  CHAPTER 40

  THE COP BEHIND CASEY SNATCHED THE PHONE FROM HER HAND and dropped it to the ground before he stomped and ground it, crackling, beneath his heel. Jose had his hands in the air and Casey did the same. Jose talked calmly to the cop pointing a gun at him.

  "Jose?" Casey said, her voice frantic.

  "Relax," he said. "Get out slow and keep your hands up."

  Jose stepped out of the jeep and away with his hands in the air. Casey did the same and Isodora climbed out, too.

  "Where's your ID?" Jose asked.

  "My purse," Casey said, nodding. "It's on the floor."

  Jose spoke to the cops. The second cop fished Casey's purse from the floor of the jeep while the first kept his gun trained on Jose. Isodora stood beside Casey with the baby in the gritty roadside dust. The cop threw the purse on the hood and rifled through it, finding Casey's passport as well as Isodora's visa. He found Casey's wallet and extracted the cash, holding it up for his partner, who offered only a stony nod. The second cop then removed Jose's wallet and passport from the front pocket of his jeans, studied the picture, and took his cash as well.

  The cops patted them down, then Jose went back and forth with them for several minutes as they examined the documents. At one point the first cop looked Isodora's way and barked a question at her. Startled, she replied in barely audible Spanish. They turned their attention back to Jose and their conversation got heated before eventually cooling. Finally Jose lowered his hands and stepped toward the jeep.

  "Come on," he said to Casey. "Come on, Isodora. Get in the jeep."

  "Didn't you tell them you were a cop?" Casey asked in a low voice as they climbed aboard the jeep. Some of her hair had escaped and the hot wind whisked it across her face until she tucked it back.

  "That's why they were so nice about it," Jose said, reaching back to give Isodora's leg a reassuring pat before he started the engine.

  "What? Not shooting us?" she asked.

  "They let us go," Jose said, looking back. "That's what counts."

  "Swell."

  "Said that's a military facility," Jose said. "No stopping. No pictures. They saw your phone."

  "Military, my ass," she said. "Making what? Biological weapons? They're burning off something and it isn't gunmetal."

  Jose put the jeep in gear and said, "They wanted to know about Isodora."

  "What did you say?"

  "The truth," Jose said. "Her husband died and we're taking her back to testify in a lawsuit."

  "That's all you said?" Casey asked.

  "No, I told them we were out to destroy a US senator," Jose said, flashing her a look. "Come on."

  "They gave me the creeps," Casey said. "And that place? That place is something bad."

  Jose glanced to his right, then returned his attention to the road.

  "Looks like we're going to beat the storm," he said. "It's still a ways off."

  Fifteen minutes later the Nuevo Laredo traffic got heavy. That's when Jose pointed out the helicopter.

  "What? You think it's following us?" Casey said.

  "It's not a traffic copter," Jose said. "It's not TV. It's police, or some kind of government job."

  "Because I took a picture that I now don't even have? Come on."

  Jose shrugged. "Maybe nothing to do with us. I've been watching it for about the last five minutes, though. It hasn't gone very far."

  By the time they got through the heavy traffic in town, the helicopter had disappeared.

  "Big Brother went home," Casey said.

  "Guess so."

  "Better to be aware than not," Casey said.

  "That's what I thought."

  The customs agent barely looked at their papers before swigging her Diet Coke and waving them through, one small segment in the snake of trucks and cars waiting to enter the United States. The wind had picked up enough for them to find a branch of their rental company just off Route 35 at Laredo Airport, drop off the jeep, and pick up a four-door sedan with air-conditioning that they could drop off in Dallas. No sooner had they pulled back onto the highway than the sky opened up, dousing the windshield with buckets and lighting up the darkened sky all around them with flashes of chain lightning.

  Jose drove while the rest of them dozed. He took them to Casey's place, where they all had eggs and bacon, even the baby. Then Isodora and the baby disappeared into Casey's guest room, and Casey took two longneck bottles of Budweiser from the fridge and sat down on the couch next to Jose.

  "Long day," he said.

  "Longer for you. Thanks for driving."

  They swigged their beer.

  "What was all that back there?" Casey asked.

  Jose shrugged. "Nothing to do with us."

  "Soap we buy," Casey said. "Beer bottles. Drugs. They make the same stuff they used to make here, only over there they don't have the EPA to worry about."

  "Or the unions," Jose said.

  "Jesus, the air and the water," she said. "I keep thinking about that little boy's arms. The one at the chicken stand. The whole thing feels like it's right back at our doorstep. Isodora. Her husband. Chase. Those factories. All the people who kill themselves to get here. But mostly that little boy."

  "Things happen," Jose said. "You're tired."

  "Did you think they were going to kill us?" she asked. "Those cops."

  Jose shook his head. "Didn't feel like it. If it did, I would have made a stand."

  "What do you mean?"

  He gave a quick frown. "You sense it's going down, you don't cooperate. You take a stand. Give it your best. I'll be damned if someone's ever going to put a bullet in the back of my head."

  "And y
ou think you'd get a feeling?" she asked.

  "I know."

  "You know my feeling?" she asked.

  He shook his head.

  "I feel like that storm we saw moving in, nasty."

  "It got us, but not the worst of it," he said.

  "I know, but I still feel like that," she said. "Like it's coming. Something."

  She looked at him for a while and they drank their beer.

  "Let's go to bed," she said.

  "'Let's' as in let us?" he said. "As in us?"

  "Let us."

  CHAPTER 41

  TEUCH WOKE AND WORKED HIS JAW. HIS STOMACH ACHED, BUT he was hungry for only one thing. He listened to the sounds around him, the beep of the heart monitor, the hissing rise and fall of a respirator from the next bed, the low chatter of nurses at the station outside. His eyelids glowed intermittently. He cracked them open, just a bit, and marveled at the yellow light flickering in the barren window, wondering what tricks his damaged brain played, until he heard the faint rumble of thunder.

  He shifted his legs under the covers and flexed his fingers, letting the muscles fire in sequence until his shoulders shrugged beneath the sheet. Above him, the IV dripped steadily and he studied the morphine dispenser, wondering how bad the pain would be without it. He stared at the crack in the curtain surrounding his bed, listened again, then removed his hand from the sheets, feeling the edges of the bandage that covered his head like a helmet. The blood on the lip of the bandage had become crusty, a good thing, since it meant the bleeding underneath had stopped.

  From the mindless talk of the nurses during the day he knew it was Saturday and knew that meant a reduced staff on every front. He breathed deep and slipped from the bed, glad for the sensation of the cool floor beneath his bare feet. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he studied the IV, carefully peeling back the tape before tugging the needle free from the vein in his arm. He swung his legs over the other side of the bed now, careful not to pull the sensor clip free from his fingertip, and gently pushed open the curtain to learn that the person in the next bed was an old man with tufts of snow-white hair and a wrinkled face, toothless and wearing a grimace of pain.

  Teuch studied the setup until he had it figured. He took hold of the man's hand with its long nails and soft pale skin and closed the fingers around the respirator tube. He studied the cracked-open door for a moment, then yanked the man's hand, tearing the tube free from his mouth and setting off a wild scream of alarms inside the room as well as out in the hallway.

  He ducked behind the curtain and quickly tugged the sensor free from his fingertip, setting off a smaller alarm of his own. Two nurses rushed into the old man's space. The lights in the room went on. Another patient on the other side of the room groaned in agony. Teuch fished open the curtain at the foot of his bed and slipped past the nurses bent in wild motion over the dying old man. His legs felt rubbery protruding from the thin cotton robe and he gripped the rail along the wall, working his way down the hall. In front of him a door swung open and a bleary-eyed young doctor dashed toward him. Teuch pointed back at the room.

  "He's dying!" Teuch said, and the doctor sprinted past.

  Teuch didn't look back. He hurried for the exit door at the end of the hall, nearly falling flat as it swung open into a stairwell. A single flight down and he came to a metal door with a red bar, an exit, clearly marked for an emergency.

  Teuch leaned against it and spilled out onto a concrete walk, another alarm now piercing the night. Above, the dark sky guttered with lightning. Rumbling thunder filled the air with the damp smell of coming rain. Teuch glanced around at the three-story brick building, the sign that read ennis medical center, the surrounding trees and grass, and the nearby lights from the town. He began to jog away from the building, the wind blowing grit into his face, blood from the disrupted IV drizzling down the length of his hand to spot the concrete. Stray papers rattled past and the pale blue robe seemed to glow even under the waving shadows of the trees along the parking lot.

  Behind him, the wailing emergency alarm began to fade.

  His hunger did not.

  CHAPTER 42

  THE NEXT MORNING, CASEY CALLED THE BANK FIRST THING. The clinic had a little over seventeen thousand left in its account. With everything shut down, and some new donations on the immediate horizon, Casey made the decision to wire ten thousand dollars to the priest who ran the church in Higueras. She unfolded the piece of paper he'd given her and gave the specifics to her banker.

  When she hung up the phone, Jose nodded at her and quietly said, "Nice."

  Jose proposed he take Isodora and the baby to his aunt's house in the barrio. She had plenty of room and one guest, Amelia, already.

  "Why would anyone be looking for Isodora?" Casey asked.

  "I don't know," he said. "They probably aren't, but if they were, her sister's is the first place they'd check."

  An hour after he left, Jose called Casey to say that they were comfortable and safe with his aunt.

  "And," he said, "so you don't think I'm paranoid, I'm not even going to tell you about the helicopter."

  "You saw a helicopter?" she asked.

  Jose laughed and said, "No, I heard it when I got out of the car. I'm kidding, though. I heard that, a garbage truck, a 747, and a fire engine."

  Jose had plans with his daughter for the weekend and didn't have to drop her back with her mother until Monday morning. He was supposed to start a paying job after he dropped her off, but promised instead to put it aside in order to make contact with Chase's wife. Casey got herself a new cell phone and spent the rest of her weekend at the office, catching up on paperwork, preparing not only the request for an administrator for Elijandro's estate from the surrogate court, but the entire wrongful death complaint to be filed with the county the moment she had the letter of administration. Sharon spent four hours with Casey on Saturday and Donna did the same on Sunday. With Isodora's signatures, she had everything ready to file, but the clock read twelve-eleven a.m. before she got into bed.

  Monday morning came too soon and Casey drove down the beltway earlier than normal, planning all the things she had to do to file Isodora's case, jumpy from coffee and the excitement of taking on the senator. The crowd had already begun to form outside her office as usual. Casey waved cheerfully and pulled around back, letting herself in and getting right on her computer.

  They were twenty minutes into their Monday-morning staff meeting when someone began to pound on the office door.

  Casey rolled her eyes and said to Stacy, "Go educate whoever the hell that is, will you?"

  "Happily."

  When Stacy returned, she came with two men in dark suits and crew cuts. The shorter of the two flashed a badge.

  "Special Agent Greg Lewis with the EPA," he said. "Is one of you Casey Jordan?"

  "I am."

  Lewis slipped a document out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. "I've got a court order here. We're closing you down."

  "You're not closing anyone down," Casey said.

  "For violation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, ma'am."

  "You're out of your mind," Casey said.

  "This facility had a toxic release last Tuesday that you not only failed to report but where you ordered your employees back to work."

  "Someone clogged the goddamned toilet," Casey said, glaring at Stacy.

  Stacy wrinkled her nose in a silent snarl to say she had nothing to do with it.

  "Right," Lewis said. "We'd like to talk to you about knowingly endangering the safety and health of your employees. I'm going to ask you to come with us and everyone else to vacate the premises."

  "You're kidding," Casey said, standing and snatching the court order from the agent.

  "Wish I were, ma'am," Lewis said. "Now, if you'll come with me."

  "You're arresting me?"

  "Not yet, ma'am," agent Lewis said. "We just want to talk at this point."

  "Talk to my lawyer."

  "You
have to leave the premises, ma'am," he said, exhaling through a circular hole in his lips. "We're closing you down."

  "You mean Senator Chase is closing us down," Casey said.

  Lewis stared blankly.

  "Ma'am, it'd be best if you came with us," Lewis's partner said.

  "What if we won't leave?" Casey asked.

  Lewis looked sideways at his partner, who pressed his lips tight and shook his head as though he'd predicted the outcome.

  "Then we will arrest you and everyone in here, ma'am," Lewis said, turning to her and drawing back his suit jacket to expose a chrome set of handcuffs as well as a semiautomatic pistol. "But we'll start with you."

  Casey gritted her teeth and stared.

  "We'll get our things," she said finally.

  "No," Lewis said, holding a hand in the air. "This is a contaminated site, ma'am. No one can take anything with them. Those are the rules."

  Casey bit the inside of her mouth, but said, "Fine, we'll go."

  The agents turned. Casey began to follow them into the lobby. She passed close to Stacy and said, "Buy me some time."

  "What?"

  "I need those files," Casey said, hissing. "Do something."

  Casey kept going, staying right behind the agents. The shorter one opened the front door, the old service station bell tinkling. Casey saw the dark green government sedan and that the clinic's potential clients had already fled the scene.

  Lewis looked back at her and his face went white when Stacy screamed.

  Casey turned and saw her office manager flopped down in the doorway, writhing and clutching her chest.

  "Oh my God," Casey said. "A heart attack."

  She let the agents push past her.

  "I'll call 911," she said, then ducked into her office and threw the bolt.

  Her heart hammered at the inside of her ribs and her breath came in short strangled gasps. Her hands trembled as she pulled files from the shelf, spilling others across the floor. She tossed them down on top of the computer and yanked it free from the wall socket. Through the metal door she could hear the commotion, but she didn't know if it came from Stacy or the agents realizing what had happened.