The Border Lords Read online

  “I will pay you five.”

  “Carlos, your people are getting wasted in L.A. Your earnings are down twenty percent in six months from Rocky’s network alone. That’s seventy grand a week. In six months you’ve lost almost two million dollars! Don Carlos, con permiso, but we’re talking about ten thousand dollars to reverse this damage.”

  Herredia stood and looked down at Bradley.

  Bradley stood not in defiance but respect.

  “You have a deal,” said Herredia. “And I will have American lawmen to look after my interests in Los Angeles.”

  Shit, thought Bradley, that was easy. Ten grand a week for running down some Mara thugs and letting Theresa Brewer in on a good bust or two. Cleary would love this. Cut him in for two grand. Caroline, too, another couple thousand. Bradley drew on his cigar, thinking that he might be able to pull this off.

  Bradley sat down again. He felt suddenly very excited. His head was still spinning and he already felt $520,000 a year richer. Adrenaline was better than alcohol. A majestically good feeling, he thought. He thought of Erin.

  Herredia looked at Bradley with a twinkle in his black eyes. “Now we have new business to celebrate. Tonight we drink and enjoy the women.”

  “Not tonight, sir.”

  “You will be missing magnificent tits and ass.”

  “I’ll be missing nothing.”

  “Bradley, sometimes you are such a hard man. And sometimes you are such a soft boy. You won’t take the whore tonight because you love your wife. You won’t even stay the night here. You will drive home to be with this one and only woman you can love.”

  “True.”

  Herredia smiled and wrenched Bradley up in his big arms, pounding his great paws against Bradley’s back, laughing.

  Bradley gasped in pain but he didn’t flinch or push Herredia away.

  “Oh, Bradley Jones. You son of the son of El Famoso. You stay with me and you will be bigger than him someday. Your name will be like thunder across the world! And when they cut off your head people will pay not one dollar to see it but hundreds! Thousands! There will be a TV show about you!”

  “I’m in no hurry for such a show, Carlos.”

  “No. We have many things to accomplish before we meet the devil. Let’s go get your money. I will pay you the ten thousand for the next month of protection. Then you can go home and have your woman and I can have mine.”

  Erin was waiting for him on the porch of their Valley Center home. She was wrapped against the chill in a Navajo patterned robe and in the porch light her hair was a shining wall of red from around which her fair face looked at him. He could tell by her posture and expression that something was wrong. He slammed to a stop and killed the engine and ran up the wooden steps to her. She stood and he took her in his arms and held her close. His chest throbbed where the potato peeler had been.

  Only after a long time did Bradley step back to see her. Tears ran freely down her face but she made no sound.

  “What is it, Erin? Talk to me.”

  “Nothing, Bradley. Nothing happened. I’m okay. Nothing happened.”

  “Then what? What?”

  She stepped in close and hugged him again but this time it was harder. Bradley felt the urgency in it.

  “I got off the House of Blues gig at one. And I got kinda lost in West Hollywood even though I’ve been there a million times. I finally got to the freeway and I went the wrong way. And when I got off to turn around I couldn’t get on southbound because of construction so I pulled into a gas station and the guy looked at me like . . . like I don’t know what. And, honey, right then I was so sure that something had happened to you. I felt it so strong and clear. Like I’d been kicked in the chest by a horse. And you know this, hon, I can’t call you when you leave me at night like that. Once a week I can’t call you and you don’t call me pretty much all night. And I was scared, Brad. I was so scared and I needed to talk to you and I couldn’t. And I really need to know what you’re doing out there one night every week. You have a girl, Brad? You have a poker game? You have something you can’t tell me? What’s the deal with you, man?”

  He held her firmly and stroked her back and pressed the side of his face and neck into hers. He smelled the dizzying aroma of her perfume. His heart opened and his brain tried to close it down fast but it was too late.

  “I drive a load of cash from L.A. to Mexico every week. The customs people are paid off and I make good money for my time. There’s no risk. It pays ten times what I make in a week from the Sheriffs. Ten. It helped pay for this ranch and the cars we drive and the clothes we wear.”

  This time Erin stepped back to look at him. Her face was always lovely and always readable. He saw it coming but did nothing to stop it, not even squint. Her open hand cracked into his cheek once. Then the other. Then the first again. She cried softly and her eyes bored into him. “That morning last winter when you were gone, Brad. When I told Charlie you were with me and the guys. And the gangsta that shot your mom got murdered up in L.A. Did you do that, honey? You can tell me. I’d understand if you did it. But you have to tell me the truth if we hope to make this marriage work.”

  But even Bradley’s overflowing heart was no match for the peril he sensed here, and he did not hesitate in his answer.

  “I didn’t do that, Erin. I was helping out a friend. I swear this to you and the many children I hope to have with you.”

  “You would swear on them?”

  “I do swear on them.”

  She stepped back into his arms and squeezed him gently. He could feel the tapping of her heart against his chest. “Stop the Mexico runs. We can live on less.”

  “No. I’ll do anything you want but not that.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can become.”

  “Become what?”

  “A man able to protect what he loves.”

  “You didn’t protect me last night.”

  “I can change that. There will never be another night like it.”

  She moved away again and looked at him and he saw the uncertainty in her eyes.

  He went to his knees. “When you look at me it’s like walking into a beautiful room,” he said. “The most beautiful room on earth. It’s the only place I ever want to be.”

  A tear rolled down her pale face and she wiped it away. She bit her lip and stepped forward and helped him up.

  17

  Wednesday morning Hood sat in the Buenavista ATF station watching Sean Ozburn’s videos again on the now-useless safe house monitor number four. Oz was using a Flip now, so the latest videos sent to Seliah were of better quality than the first few. Playing any of them on the good monitor made them even clearer, and more haunting.

  Hood watched the miracle healing of Daisy. It was like seeing it for the first time. Ozburn began this segment with an establishing shot and Hood now recognized El Centro. Then came a jumbled, poorly focused episode: a black, bleeding dog lying on the side of the road, a little crowd forming, Sean scooping up the animal in one big tattooed arm while holding the cell camera high in the other hand for an aerial shot as he crunched along the sun-cooked street toward his car.

  Hood noted that the actual miracle healing wasn’t caught on video because Ozburn was presumably steering with one hand and healing with the other. But Oz narrated his actions as the unmanned camera filmed the headliner of the Range Rover.

  And now I place my right hand over her head. There is blood coming from her mouth and nose. She is not conscious but she is breathing. Now I pray to you, God in heaven, that your power move through me and heal this simple blameless animal, you for whom the creation of heaven and earth was pretty much a snap . . . Yes . . . I feel your power moving through me into the beast and I feel her life returning and her name will be called Daisy . . . Wow . . . Oh, WOW, check this out!

  Phone back in hand, Ozburn focused on the dog, bouncing along with the rhythm of the vehicle, panting gently, looking up at Sean with affection and loyalty.

&n
bsp; Man, this is so cool.

  Next came a sermon delivered by Sean at an outdoor service of some kind. Hood couldn’t place the landscape: rolling hills, grassland, some oak and madrone and manzanita. Someone else was working the camera. Ozburn stood before twenty or thirty people sitting on fallen logs and a crumbling adobe brick wall. The cameraman panned the people. They were a mix of ages, half of them brown and the other half white. There was a big fire ring made of river rock but there was no fire. An orange cooler sat on a slouching picnic table, and beside it was a glass jar with a few coins in it.

  An aged evangelist introduced Sean Gravas as a “man come newly to our Lord,” but Hood saw annoyance in his craggy face. The evangelist held a Bible in one hand and wore a white shirt buttoned to the top with no tie, and a beaten black coat, and his crucifix was large and made of silver and turquoise.

  When Sean stood and faced the assembly and the camera, Hood could see that he wasn’t right. Sweat poured down his face and he looked to be in pain. He was dressed in his sleeveless biker vest and the black jeans and harness boots and he wore a black bandana pirate style. Over his left shoulder was slung a Love 32 with the curving fifty-shot magazine and the noise suppressor screwed into place. He held a white-covered book in both hands but he didn’t open it. He kept looking skyward, as if he was waiting for something to appear, something perhaps not good. Daisy stood at his feet and looked up at him with a similar expression.

  Here in this rude theater we sense God. His breath is the wind that touches our skin and gives life to our dust. His eyes are the creeping and flying and swimming things that see us better than we see them. His ears are the canyons that amplify our sounds and songs and prayers. Lord if we offend Thee, strike us down, and if we please Thee, raise us up and place our bodies upon the blade of Your truth that we may be pierced with Your spirit . . .

  Sean sweated and talked on. Blood and life eternal. The lamb and the sword.

  Hood’s heart broke some as he watched and listened. Sean was a good man. And something had gotten into him. Something had changed him. Sean had all but lost his once-kind and strong and generous self. Who was this inhabiting his body? Who in hell? Where was Sean?

  Then came the baptism of Daisy by Father Arriaga.

  Then came a long lecture on the evils of whoredom. Hood watched Sean throttle a young man, then drive him through a window of what appeared to be a bordello bedroom. A prostitute flailed at him with a red stiletto shoe and cursed in Spanish. Ozburn growled at her and she ran out. He went bar to bar and club to club in what Hood recognized as Tijuana, lecturing whoever was too afraid to scuttle away.

  Then came video that Hood had never seen before: a beautiful Mexican girl lying on a bed, wide-eyed and sobbing, a woman holding a bag of something against her neck.

  Hood checked the time and date: It had been sent to Seliah just an hour ago. Ozburn narrated:

  In the village of Agua Blanca a girl was dressing for school. She put on her hat but a huge scorpion fell from the hat to her neck and drove its deadly stinger into her flesh. Then it fell to the floor. Her mother trapped the scorpion under a glass bowl, then ran into the streets to find the curandera. The village had no ice so the curandera filled a plastic bag with peeled cucumbers, dandelions and cool well water. She viewed the scorpion and said it was the deadly variety, the only scorpion that can kill a healthy girl. The girl’s neck swelled up at the sting. I’m here in Agua Blanca on a personal matter but it can wait. Now I see that I was brought here by someone or something, for another purpose. My purpose here is to save this girl. Her name is Silvia.

  Ozburn turned his camera to the floor and got a close-up of the upended glass mixing bowl. The scorpion nearly spanned its diameter, head and pinchers facing the camera, stinger cocked up and ready for action. Daisy nosed the bowl and the scorpion swiveled on her; then she sprang away.

  Hood knew from his boyhood that the curandera was right: There was only one deadly species of scorpion in the West. But she was wrong, too: The one that had stung the girl was a much larger and darker, and less potent, creature than the slender, pale, lethal other.

  Hood watched Sean try to convince the mother to take the recorder. Ozburn said he wanted to say a healing prayer while touching the girl. Finally the mother took the camera and shot video of the curandera, a wizened woman with a troubled face and sharp teeth and a scapular festooned with the heads and tails of very large rattlesnakes. She drank from a can of orange soda.

  Ozburn sat on the bed beside the girl, his machine pistol slung over one shoulder. He held the plastic bag to the girl’s neck. In this part of the video Hood couldn’t see Ozburn’s face. All he saw was his broad back and big shoulders, and the blond hair and the fearful face of the girl. Beside the bed were a pitcher and a bowl and a rustic vanity with a mirror. Someone had draped one of the girl’s dresses over the mirror and it looked to Hood like an observer, a ghost.

  The mother spoke in rapid Spanish and the camera wobbled dramatically. Hood heard the curandera answer in a strangely low and disapproving voice. Though it was much clearer than the audio of his cell phone, Hood still couldn’t understand her words.

  Father of all days defend this girl from the venom of evil so that she may live to be an angel . . . Mother of all nights defend this girl from the poison of the devil so that she may live to be an angel . . .

  He said the sentences again and again.

  Offscreen the curandera spoke in the background, and although again Hood could not make out her words, her voice was low and trembled with foreboding.

  Offscreen the mother answered her in an anxious tone.

  No! said Sean. No water for her. No agua!

  The curandera hissed something and Sean turned and ordered her to shut her foul old mouth. His eyes were crazy black, and Hood saw almost nothing in them of the man he had known. He was sweating badly. Daisy looked away from him.

  Hood was surprised by the enormity of the change in Sean, as revealed by the good video monitor. Only a small fraction of it had registered over the tiny screen on his cell phone.

  Ozburn turned back to the girl and set the plastic bag on the bed and pressed one of his great rough hands to the girl’s forehead. He kept repeating the two sentences. Gradually the girl’s eyes closed. He prayed on, the same words, the same cadence, his voice growing softer and slower until Hood could barely hear it. And still he prayed.

  A minute or two later Ozburn removed his hand from the girl’s head. Her eyes were still closed and her face was peaceful. Her chest rose and fell in the rhythm of sleep. Offscreen the curandera muttered something accusatory.

  Ozburn reached back and claimed the recorder. He turned it on the girl, zooming in close to the wound on her neck. The swelling had gone down and the skin was reddened. Hood could see the mark the stinger had left, much like a bee sting. Ozburn put the cooling sack of cucumbers back over it.

  Ozburn panned the room and settled the camera on the curandera . She spoke to him in Spanish now and for the first time Hood could both hear and understand her words.

  —Why did you come to Agua Blanca?

  —People talk of you. I’m suffering and I want you to make it stop.

  —Your suffering will stop when it is finished.

  —Tell me what it is.

  —It lives in the caves of your blood.

  The curandera moved to the vanity and pulled the dress from the mirror.

  —Bruja, said Ozburn, swinging the camera away from his reflection.

  Witch, thought Hood.

  The curandera reached up and grasped one of the snake heads on her scapular. The camera came in on it. Hood saw the glazed eyes with their vertical pupils, the enlarged nose scales, and the pits through which these vipers could sense the body heat of their prey. He was impressed by its size, though the many others were easily as big. He’d seen his share of rattlesnakes in and around Bakersfield but rarely had they been more than five feet long, as these snakes had once been. Most of the rattles se
parating the heads were blunt rectangles, at least two inches long. The curandera held it up to the camera, a matter-of-fact expression on her dark, wrinkled face.

  —You two look a lot alike, lady. You must have a hundred of those heads.

  —Come with me, white devil. I will show you how your suffering will end.

  —Let’s do it, bruja.

  Hood’s scalp crawled as the picture faded to black.

  A moment later the girl appeared, sitting up in bed with a bowl of soup in her lap and a spoon in her hand. She looked at the camera shyly, then blushed.

  Ozburn narrated:

  Two hours later. Silvia slept for almost two hours and woke up hungry. I will still not allow her to drink water in my presence. As you can see, the wound is nothing now but a very small mark. The Lord has acted again through me and in my humble amazement I am content and Silvia is cured.

  The camera zoomed in close. Even the once-reddish patch at the sting site was gone. All that was left was the small pinprick of the stinger.

  Then Ozburn swung the camera down and walked into the next room where the scorpion was still trapped under the glass bowl. He reached down and lifted it and the scorpion raised its pinchers and tail and scuttled backward. Ozburn’s harness boot crushed it into the dirt floor. Daisy sniffed the boot toe.

  —Curandera! Apúrate!

  18

  Hood made Agua Blanca by afternoon. It sat along a potholed asphalt road, ten miles below Tecate. The buildings were rectangles of blue and yellow and pink and green, and the speed bump gave Hood and his SUV a sharp bounce.

  He bought two orange soft drinks at the mini-super Ayala and asked about the curandera. The clerk told Hood that she lived at the far end of town, on a dirt road that began at a green ice cream stand and a white pharmacy. He said to drive west one hundred meters and look for the driveway marked by a hubcap and some flowers. He said the curandera had saved a girl from scorpions.