Border Son Read online

  Suddenly a side door opened. El Matacerdos turned and trained his weapon on the noise. It was a woman coming out of the bathroom. When she saw the gunman before her, she screamed, her hands coming to her head as she dropped to the floor. Between sobbing and screaming, the woman was begging for her life.

  The assassin lowered his weapon and walked out the front door, leaving the crying woman behind with the two corpses. He crossed the street and got into his car. Within the hour he was heading east back toward Chihuahua, where he would await the next job.

  34

  Ed left the restaurant and headed back over to the motel. The lights of Nuevo Negaldo illuminated the southern end of the road, his back toward the random amber glow of Hurtado’s few streetlights. The air was still as he walked into the gravel lot and made for his room at the end of the building. Headlights swung behind him and a white car pulled in slowly, came to his side as its window came down.

  Before his brain could process what was happening, a voice came out of the interior. “Mr. Kazmierski?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Agent Lomas,” the man said, flashing some sort of ID that looked official.

  Ed’s mind was slow to put the pieces together. He hadn’t expected to hear from Lomas again after their conversation on the phone, least of all see him here in the borderlands a hundred miles from any noticeable American population.

  “Can we talk?” Lomas said. It wasn’t so much a question, but Ed nodded.

  The agent pulled ahead and parked the car. He got out and stretched his back as if he had been driving half the day. As he arched his spine, he looked at the beaten-down motel.

  “Fancy place.”

  “There wasn’t much to choose from.”

  “Seems an odd place for a vacation.”

  Ed shrugged. His gut still told him it was best not to say much.

  “So why don’t you tell me why you’re down here?” Lomas asked as he walked over.

  “I don’t know. Just thought I’d check it out.”

  “Tyler?”

  “I was curious. Ain’t going to lie.”

  “You said the last time you heard from him, he was in the El Paso jail several years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “That still the truth?”

  “It is.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The men stared at each other in the dark, light from the last neon tube on the motel sign casting them in a devilish hue.

  “Then how did you end up out here? El Paso seems like the place to be if you are looking to fill your curiosity?”

  Ed didn’t reply.

  Lomas walked past Ed toward the road and motioned him over. When Ed got to the road, Lomas pointed south.

  “You see that? That’s the sewer pipe that Mexico uses to dump its waste. This little checkpoint delivers more drugs in a year than most agencies will seize in a lifetime. They got people thinking about every which way to get their goods through there. Your son was one of them. If you have US citizenship, you can make a nice chunk of cash. Unless you mess up or double-cross the wrong people.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Tyler was a criminal, a druggy, a runner. Mixed up with the worst of the worst both here and over the fence. It’s what got him killed. Now, one thing those people don’t like more than a runner who loses a load is someone poking around their business. Someone going around, out of place, asking questions about their operation.”

  “That’s not what I am doing.”

  “You cross over today?” Lomas asked.

  Ed thought about the cantina, about Felipe, about his passport being scanned into the customs scanner, about the border agent’s subtle hesitation. That was why Lomas was here. He was alerted by the scanner. Ed was easily tracked by a system that was beyond his understanding. There was no use lying about where he had been.

  “I did.”

  “Mind if I ask why?”

  Ed took a breath and looked toward the checkpoint.

  “Again, just curious. I’ve never seen the border up close. Just on the news. I was just going to see the wall, come back. But then decided to step over to the other side.”

  “Last minute?”

  Ed nodded.

  “Living in the moment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh-huh. And just by the chance of it, had your passport in your pocket?”

  Ed didn’t respond.

  “Mr. Kazmierski . . . do you even know what you’re poking at? Do you have any idea the savagery of the people who would not take kindly to finding out you are here? Listen. And listen to me good. You don’t belong out here. This is beyond you.

  “I get it. He was your son. You might feel an obligation to figure out what happened. But you are starting to mess with a world that you have no experience in. If you know anything, even a hint of a rumor about Tyler, you need to let me know. You need to tell me right now what it is that brought you out here.”

  “I . . . I guess . . .” Ed was trying to think of words that would extricate himself from Lomas and end this conversation.

  “Yes?”

  “I guess, I’m here . . .”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “. . . just grasping at straws. Just . . . hoping . . . you know . . . that he’s not dead.”

  Lomas exhaled slowly, frustration evident in his posture. He started walking back to his car. He opened the door and yelled back to Ed. “I highly advise you don’t stick around much longer. This really isn’t the place to find answers. Leave it to the authorities, we’ll find out what happened.”

  Ed didn’t say anything as Lomas pulled out of the motel lot and disappeared north up the road, his taillights drifting into the night.

  35

  Ed couldn’t sleep.

  The faded curtain on the motel window flapped in the air conditioner’s recycled wake, and yet the room felt as if it were growing smaller in the late hours. He got up and ran some water in the sink, wet his hands and forehead, the back of his neck, and lay back down on the bed.

  Lomas had spooked him, and the agent’s words heightened his anxiety about the borderlands. Ed really didn’t know what he was doing. It was the simple fear of not knowing what was going to happen, and so the mind makes up its own scenario from the bits of stories once heard as well as imagined atrocities.

  Why now?

  Why after all these years of willfully forcing every thought of his son from his mind was he now here, looking for answers to what happened to him? He had hung up the phone when Tyler called for bail money in El Paso. It didn’t prick his conscience then.

  It didn’t force him to empathize with Tyler on countless previous occasions.

  But this time was different.

  Why?

  It wasn’t some sentimentality, as Felipe talked about. He wasn’t in Hurtado over some romanticized version of Tyler conjured up from a memory when the boy was young and innocent and new. He wasn’t here to save the unsavable. The belief in personal responsibility was as wired into his DNA as his hair color.

  Now, lying in the dark at the corner of the world, he felt as if he had a hole in his person that desperately needed repair.

  The thought of Tyler being executed. That was what was driving him.

  The very idea that he might be an observer of his son’s entire existence, from start to finish, from the birthing room to the enigma of a violent end. Man isn’t supposed to know both ends of another person’s story. If you witnessed the beginning, the end was always to come after your time, or vice versa. To know both, to observe both, was not natural. His drive was to correct the imbalance. To confirm that Tyler was still out there.

  Now he knew. Tyler was alive.

  Why not go home?

  Why was he still here?

  Tyler was unredeemable, that was without question.

  Or was that just a convenient thought Ed had convinced himself of
in order to soothe his conscience to sleep? So many years of dealing with a hoodlum son. He was forever lost. Knowing that he was alive, however, made the shunning possible. Thinking of him dying, and dying horribly, started to break down the wall in his heart that he had erected.

  Ed’s head swam with the contradictory thoughts. He rose again and walked back to the sink. As he doused his face, lights passed across the room and the sound of a vehicle rolling over the gravel parking lot filled the emptiness of the desert night.

  Ed walked over to the window and looked between the crack of the curtains.

  An older sedan pulled to the end of the row of motel rooms, turned around, and idled. The lights turned off but no one got out. From this distance Ed could not see the driver through the windshield or if there was more than one person inside. The scrub behind the car glowed red from the taillights, the southern edge of the parking area illuminated like the outer rim of hell.

  Ed stood still, the curtain moving slowly, the air blowing on his bare skin, his breathing slow and deliberate.

  “People out here don’t like outsiders asking questions.”

  Lomas’s warning echoed in his mind as the rear driver’s side window came down and a high-beam light shone out at the motel room on the end. The car began to creep forward through the parking lot, its tires slowly grinding gravel as the light wandered over doors and windows. The car stopped two doors down. There was a blue pickup truck parked in front of the room. Ed hadn’t seen the owner, in fact hadn’t paid much attention to the truck before now. The light went to the truck and fixated on its rear bumper, its license plate, then back up to the motel room door.

  The car began to roll forward again, and Ed moved away from the space in the curtains. It arrived at Ed’s window, the light beam cutting through the gap in the curtain and hitting the back wall. Ed was frozen in place.

  The car moved on.

  Ed repositioned himself and watched the car come to his truck, which he had parked next to the motel office. What seemed like a mindless act of walking to his room after getting the key and not pulling his truck in front of his room now appeared to him as a lifesaving action. The car stopped and the light fell on the license plate.

  It didn’t move on.

  The rear driver’s side door opened and the man holding the flashlight got out.

  He walked up to Ed’s vehicle and scanned the interior.

  The light turned back down the line of motel rooms.

  It was confirmed.

  Ed swallowed the fear that was rising in his gut.

  They were looking for him.

  The shadowy figure walked onto the cement sidewalk and disappeared from Ed’s line of sight. He kept his position in the corner, peering out into the night, until almost instantly the figure was at the window. Ed ducked down as the flashlight was pressed against the glass. The light moved around the room, exposing what it could of the interior. The bedspread was still pulled across the mattress. Ed’s lack of confidence in the cleanliness of roadside motel sheets proved to be another serendipitous benefit. From all outside appearances, the room looked to be unoccupied.

  The man with the flashlight moved on.

  He thought of the two men who came into his shop. Were these the same guys?

  They would have killed him if Tom hadn’t shown up. But there was nobody out here to come and save him if he was found. It was just him.

  Ed didn’t move, but stayed crouched below the window, holding his breath, afraid each noise would travel and alert whoever was outside to his presence. Soon, however, he heard a car door open and close, and the sound of tires easing onto the road.

  He forced himself to rise and looked out, catching a glimpse of the car as it headed south to the border.

  36

  Ed spent the night seated in the corner, his back against the doorjamb. He drifted between stints of sleep, startled awake by every noise, both real and imagined. Soon the sun rose and the day forced its way between the curtains. He stood and made his way to the bathroom, keeping an eye on the sliver of window, half expecting to see the shadowy figure from the night before peering in.

  He quickly shaved and showered and resumed his sentry position near the window.

  The parking lot was empty, save for the truck to the room three doors down and his own truck parked by the motel office. He thought he could make out the tire tracks of the desperados’ car . . . its marks looking more menacing than all the other marks in the gravel.

  The sky was deep blue and cloudless, the traffic from the south proceeding in a slow trickle as Hurtado came to life.

  He checked his watch. It was past ten.

  Ed never slept that long, but a full night’s sleep is not what he had experienced.

  His stomach began to growl and he thought of going over to La Casa de Irma to get some food but decided against it. They could still be out there. Somewhere. The thought of the men in the vehicle the night before waiting for him to step outside checked his desire for food.

  He knew they were looking for him. And he knew they found him the same way Lomas had found him.

  Hunger eventually won out, and Ed opened the door. The heat from outside blasted his face, and he felt as if he was stepping into hell. Nervously he made his way over to the restaurant. There were a few seats taken, but the place was quiet. He sat at the same table, his table, the same as the night before. The continuity brought him some comfort.

  His eyes went to the two customers sitting independently of each other. One was Hispanic, the other white but tanned to a burnt leather by desert life. Neither one was much interested in Ed’s arrival, nor appeared to be much interested in anything besides eating their food and being left alone. A man came up and took his order, and Ed was a bit deflated that it wasn’t Camilla.

  He suddenly wanted to be back in his motel room. He was hungry, no doubt about that, but it dawned on him that what ultimately forced his hand to go outside was the small hope of seeing her in the restaurant. He was drawn to her, not only for the obvious reasons of attraction, but also for the simple fact that she was the only one he had interacted with in Hurtado. Every hour he spent here, isolated with his own thoughts, made even the most benign conversation more valuable.

  He placed an order and then told the man that he wanted it to go. When the brown bag arrived, he went outside, crossed the street, and soon was in the safe confines of his motel room.

  The TV relayed only two stations, one playing an endless assortment of Spanish-language game shows with wildly obese male hosts accompanied by scantily clad models. The other was running black-and-white shows from an era America had long since left behind. He found himself clicking between the two when his patience with one ran out.

  Back and forth.

  Hour after hour.

  Evening was coming on and with it the growing worry of the men with flashlights returning.

  With the last fading lights of day, Ed heard a vehicle pull into the lot. He quickly shut off the TV and ran to his spot against the wall, resuming his surveillance from the gap in the curtain. He heard a car door open and close, though he could not see the vehicle. Soft steps walked toward his door, and then a tentative knocking.

  Ed slid to the door and through the peephole he saw Camilla.

  His heart both eased and quickened at the same time, as if the organ was bifurcated and supplying different parts of his mind.

  He opened the door.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hola,” she responded, a hint of smile in her dark eyes. “I spoke to Felipe and he says he’s ready for you.”

  “Ready?”

  “Yes. He said that I should drive you over tonight. Tomorrow, someone will take you to Iglesia de Señor de la Misericordia.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it safe?”

  Camilla looked at him as if she was suddenly trying to contain a level of frustration that she was not used to. “I don’t know what is going on. Robe
rto asked me to send you to Felipe, Felipe asked me to bring you to Nuevo Negaldo. Only you three know why.” She looked nervously behind her as if the night air was haunted. “Whatever it is you are doing here, I know it is because of Roberto. Roberto is attempting to do a noble thing. I do not know what it is, he won’t tell me. All I can do is help him succeed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, perhaps one noble deed will birth another . . . and another,” she said softly. “And eventually, my boy will realize that he can do the right thing by habit.”

  “Maybe I’m not here for a noble cause?” Ed said.

  Camilla’s response was quick and sure. “That could be the only reason you’re here.”

  Ed just stood there and nodded slowly. Perhaps she was right.

  “But hurry. We must be off.”

  Ed followed her out, locking the door behind him. He walked to her car and got into the passenger seat. The old car started up reluctantly, the fumes of burning oil filling the interior briefly before clearing out. Camilla put it in gear and headed south.

  Behind them, another car pulled onto the road from the far side of the restaurant and began to follow them.

  37

  They were halfway between the motel and border crossing when the car behind them gained speed and pulled up alongside them. Camilla kept her eyes forward, but Ed looked over at the driver. It was Lomas. The agent waved his hand and pointed to the side of the road, then fell back.

  “Pull over,” Ed said to Camilla.

  She looked at him with stern eyes, but eased off the gas and came to a stop on the shoulder. Lomas parked behind them, got out of his car, and walked up to Ed’s door. Ed rolled the window down.

  “I thought you were going home,” Lomas said, more a statement than a question.

  Ed shrugged but said nothing.

  “Mind if I ask where you’re going?”

  “Who’s asking?” Camilla piped in, her sonorous voice now edged like a woman who could slice the air with her tone.

  Rather than with words, Lomas pulled out his government ID and flashed it. Ed tried to ease the tension.