The Border Lords Read online

  In the motor yard they checked over the patrol unit, a late-model Crown Victoria Police Interceptor with almost two hundred thousand miles on it. Bradley, a motorhead, checked under the hood—fluids, belts, battery, radiator and brake lines—then used his own pressure gauge to check the tires. He washed the windshield twice, meticulously, nothing more annoying to him than poor view at night.

  Jerry Clovis checked the MDT and radio, then leaned on another radio car and watched Jones do his work. Clovis was a thickly built middle-aged deputy, a family guy, easygoing and unambitious, the kind of man who made Bradley Jones want to take a long nap.

  “Ready, Brad?”

  “Nope. One minute.”

  Bradley tossed the squeegee back into the bucket, then walked down the row of black-and-whites until he was out of earshot. He called Rocky to see if he knew yet where Stevie was being held, and told Rocky it would behoove them all to find out fast. Then he called Theresa Brewer of FOX News and told her the ground rules again. Then he called Caroline to make sure she knew what to do and when. He walked back to the unit with a bounce in his step.

  “Checking in with the wife?” asked Clovis as they boarded.

  “Every chance I get.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Erin.”

  “ ’Atta boy. Take it easy. Keep it clean. That’s been enough to get me through twenty-two years of this. Three more to go.”

  “Easy and clean, that’s me.”

  “I see you have an ankle gun.”

  “It’s an eight-shot Smith AirLite. Charlie Hood turned me on to them.”

  “Never had to draw my gun on duty. Not once.”

  “They’ll kill that boy if they don’t get their ransom fast enough. They might kill him anyway.”

  “Kill a kid over business,” said Clovis. “Pure animals. Nothing’s the same in this world anymore.”

  “Everything’s the same as it always was.”

  “Can’t say I really agree with that.”

  “And that’s why I have two guns.”

  “Coffee?” asked Clovis.

  “Let’s just drive fast, make something happen, arrest somebody.”

  “Oh, man, you’ve got a lot to learn. First patrol shift, right?”

  Bradley nodded, smiling. “I’m kidding, Jerry. Coffee would be good.”

  L.A. Sheriff’s Department patrol area two includes the rough territory along the broken Los Angeles River, from Maywood down to Compton, which was where Bradley Jones and Jerry Clovis were now patrolling, fresh coffees in hand. These were no longer the days of Winchell’s coffee but of specialty double espressos and low-fat lattes, which Clovis and Bradley drank respectively.

  Clovis drove. Bradley looked out the very clean windshield at the city of South Gate, unassuming and unbeautiful in the smog-muted autumn light. They cruised Tweedy out to South Gate Park, looped it once slowly with an eye for drug peddlers, but it was quiet and the cover of darkness was still more than an hour away.

  “You ever do anything heroic?” asked Bradley.

  “I actually delivered a baby once.”

  “Fantastic. How did it go?”

  “I didn’t do much, really. Put her in back with a blanket from the trunk, then drove under siren, lights on full. Then when the screams got too loud, I got worried so I pulled over and held on to the lady’s head while she screamed and pushed and thrashed around in the back. Then out it came. A girl. Bloody mess but she started bawling, too, and by the time we got to the hospital they were waiting for us and the mom was wrung out but smiling.”

  “Now, that’s a good tale.”

  “Not sure how heroic it really was.”

  “You up for some heroics tonight?”

  “Yeah, right, we’ll bust a nickel-bag crack dealer in Compton.”

  “How about we rescue Stevie Carrasco?”

  Clovis looked over at him. “Sure. Anytime.”

  “I’m going to find out where he is.”

  Clovis looked over at him again. “No, you aren’t.”

  Bradley sighed. “Old men.”

  “You’re joking again, right, Jones?”

  “You in or out?”

  “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  “Pretend we really are having it. Rescue Stevie Carrasco. Would you be in or out?”

  Clovis said nothing for a long time. “Give me more details.”

  “Happy to: Carlos Herredia’s North Baja Cartel has an old alliance with La Eme and Florencia Thirteen. A loose alliance. They’ve been here in L.A. awhile, low-profile, doing business, building market share. But the Gulf Cartel has moved in. Benjamin Armenta and his MS-13 gangstas mean business. They’ve taken out six Florence boys in four months but nobody has figured the why. That’s because our brethren in law enforcement think the cartels are still safely confined south of the border. Well, guess what? Armenta and the Salvadorans have pretty much sewn up the east side and now they want South Central. Stevie’s dad is Rocky Carrasco, an Eme favorite. The Salvadorans grabbed his kid. Rocky’s already gotten a ransom demand for half a million in small dirty bills that smell like herb, crack, crank and Mexican brown H. With me?”

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You’re serious.”

  “I’m serious. What if you got a chance to do something good tonight? To use all your training, all your preparation, to do a good act. Delivering the baby? Absolutely fabulous, Jerry. But now you’ve got a chance to take it up a notch. Pull over, please.”

  Clovis pulled the prowler to the curb of Firestone Boulevard. The Los Angeles River dribbled before them, a trickle in a concrete channel.

  “Let me tell you what I see in you,” said Bradley. “I see a cautious man with the heart of a warrior. I see a man who knows right from wrong. I see a man who took an oath and meant it. Am I right?”

  “Well, sure, okay.”

  “Jerry, sometime tonight I’m going to find out where Stevie is. And when I do I’m not calling in SWAT or hostage negotiation or backup. I’m calling in me. And that could mean you, too. I’m going to get that boy out alive. I’m going to make sure the world knows about it, too. Because I don’t work for free. Are you in or out?”

  “I’m in.”

  Bradley bored into Clovis’s eyes but liked what he saw. “I can leave you out. You can sit it out.”

  “I’m in.”

  “Sweet, Jerry. Good. Okay, let’s drive.”

  Clovis had just pulled back into traffic when Bradley’s cell phone buzzed. Rocky told him no news yet, all his men were working it hard, they’d grabbed a Salvadoran who was bleeding a lot but talking not at all, and Rocky’s wife was out of her cabeza with worry. Rocky said if they hurt Stevie, he’d kill every Salvadoran kid in L.A., every single last one of them.

  “You be cool,” Bradley said. “You get that address for me.”

  8

  Rocky’s call came in at nine thirty-eight P.M.

  “The Salvadoran cracked when we started breaking off his teeth,” he said. “They got Stevie in Maywood.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Three Maras. Experienced guys.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “I’m on my way to drop the ransom at a church parking lot in Maywood. After they pick it up, the Salvadorans are gonna leave Stevie at Freeway Liquor in Bell Gardens.”

  “They think you’re dumb enough to do that?”

  “They have my solemn word I’m dumb enough. Bradley, man. You do this for me . . . You get Stevie outta there okay . . .”

  “I’ll get him.”

  “I can be there with some of my best friends. I’ve done this kinda shit before.”

  “Stevie will end up dead and you’ll end up in prison again. I’m the one for this job. My partner and I. Now, is there a dog at that house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I need to know if there’s a dog. I need to know if it’s between other h
ouses, or on a corner. Now, give me the address, man.”

  When he’d gotten the street and house number, Bradley hung up. Perfect good luck, he thought: The Maras had Stevie in unincorporated territory patrolled by LASD—no jurisdictional problems. He asked Clovis to pull over so he could make some calls in private.

  He stood in a 7-Eleven parking lot and told Deputy Caroline Vega where and when to meet; then he told Theresa Brewer that they would be there in ten minutes. He went into the store and got an enormous energy drink and a pack of chocolate chip cookies and drank and ate them while looking at the covers of the car magazines in the stand. Too many fuel-efficient dinks, in Bradley’s view, but the new M5 looked otherworldly. He thought of his mother, who had taught him to drive fast cars. He’d buy her that M5 if she were alive. Would have been thirty-five this year. He looked at his watch. According to plan, Rocky would call back in a minute or two, to confirm that his last call was of his own free will and not a setup.

  The call came. No dog, corner house. Bradley popped the last cookie into his mouth and walked back to the prowler.

  “We’ve got what we need,” he said.

  Clovis popped his holster strap. “This is good. I’m glad we’re doing this.”

  “Be cool.”

  “From a twenty-year-old deputy on his first patrol.”

  “I’m twenty and a half, Jerry.”

  Clovis smiled and shook his head.

  They met Theresa Brewer and a cameraman at a Shell station in Bell Gardens, around back near the restrooms and the air and water dispensers. She was a dimpled, green-eyed blonde and she greeted Bradley with a smile. She wore light slacks and a green blouse and a black leather jacket. Her face was made up.

  Bradley told her again that she was not to begin taping until he had the boy safely out of the house. Then they could shoot away. After the boy was secure in the back of an LASD patrol car, the deputies would be available for brief comments. She smiled again and he felt the energy drink bumping up against his nerves.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  “I feel like my blood’s been replaced with adrenaline.”

  “It’s quite a thing, isn’t it?”

  “Good luck, Bradley.”

  Caroline Vega and Don Klotz were waiting for them at the Downey Road railroad tracks, five blocks east and five blocks north of Stevie Carrasco and his three MS-13 kidnappers. Bradley had dealt with a Mara Salvatrucha heavy once before. The man had unnerved him—an Aztec warrior with jug ears and a hooked nose and a tattooed face who looked like he’d be happy with a beating heart in his hands.

  Clovis pulled up behind the other cruiser and cut the engine. Bradley stepped out and watched the FOX News van park behind them. The night was damp now and the sky over Los Angeles glowed dully and the power lines sizzled overhead. To his right was the concrete riverbed, a tiny wobble of water in its channeled center.

  Bradley bumped fists with Vega, then introduced the two deputies to the two newspeople.

  “Stay in the van,” said Vega. “Don’t shoot until we come out of the house with the boy.”

  “He’s told us five times,” said Brewer with a smile.

  “At least five,” said Erik, the videographer.

  Vega fixed Theresa Brewer with a look. The deputy was dark-haired and dark-eyed and there was a predatory beauty in her face. She and Bradley had graduated from the Sheriff’s Academy together, and she’d been on patrol six months now. “I hope it sunk in.”

  Klotz hooked his thumbs into his Sam Browne and looked at Brewer but said nothing.

  “They’re on our side, Caroline,” said Bradley.

  “Just making sure,” said Vega.

  Bradley cut Theresa and Erik away and walked them back to their van. It was a big Econoline with the FOX News logo on the flank. “Vega’s wound a little tight tonight,” he said.

  “A little?” asked Theresa.

  “Get in and wait here. I need to get the script straight with my people. Then we’ll caravan to the house. Park . . .”

  “I know, Bradley—we park three houses down, opposite side of the street, so we can see you coming out. Then traipse over and give you your fifteen minutes.”

  “I hope it lasts longer than that,” said Bradley, smiling.

  “Depends how good the footage is,” said Theresa.

  “If you hear shots, stay in the van and keep down. Don’t just sit and gawk like tourists. There’s no telling what kind of firepower they’ve got.”

  Theresa Brewer squeezed Bradley’s hand, then climbed into the passenger seat of the van.

  Bradley joined the other deputies and caught Caroline’s hard glance. “Clovis, you and Klotz get a five-minute head start and the backyard,” he said. “It’s a corner house, so one of you can climb the fence on street side. No dog, but who knows what the neighbors might have back there. So be quiet, go slow, be careful. Caroline and I are going to knock and talk. Caroline will do the talking. We’re responding to a silent alarm in the neighborhood. We’re not threatening or suspicious. If they let us in, we’re golden. If they don’t, we smell dope being smoked, and we go in.”

  “What makes you think they’ll open the door?” asked Clovis.

  “They won’t know what to do. Two bored young uniforms checking out an alarm? One of them a hottie? A kidnapped kid stashed in the back somewhere? They’ll have to just hope we leave. Anyone runs out the back, put them down and keep ’em down.”

  The front door was open but the screen door was closed. When he stepped onto the porch Bradley smelled frying onions and meat and boiling potatoes. Far back in the house a stout woman stood in the yellow light of a kitchen. Bradley was to Vega’s left and he quietly popped the holster snap and rested his hand on the forty-caliber. He heard the leather squeak and felt the tapping of his own heart against his uniform shirt. He looked down at the screen door—old, bent, ajar. Caroline looked at him, her hand on her gun also, then rapped on the screen door with her knuckles, and the woman came down a short hallway toward them, both hands working a kitchen towel, shaking her head.

  “No here. Nobody here.”

  “We have a report of a prowler in this neighborhood,” said Vega. She said it again in Spanish. “Can we come in?”

  “Nobody here.” She had high cheekbones and a flat nose and black eyes. Her teeth were very white. She wore a shapeless gray smock and her hair was bunched into a shiny black ponytail. She was barefoot.

  She closed the door and locked it. Bradley heard her walk away.

  Vega rapped again. And again. The latch slid and the woman swung open the door and the dish towel was still in one hand.

  “Nobody is here.”

  “There is a report of a prowler in this neighborhood,” said Vega. “A prowler in this location. Can we come in, please?”

  “No. No persona.” Then the woman rattled off a paragraph in Spanish. Bradley got the gist: There is nobody here I’m cooking my dinner I am from El Salvador I have a green card I work in a factory in the garment district I am skilled and legal. I make the high fashions. You can go away and I will be very much okay.

  She closed the door in their faces again and locked it again. Bradley heard her move into the house.

  “I wonder exactly who isn’t here,” said Bradley.

  “I do, too.”

  “I smell the yerba, very strong.”

  “I smell it, too.”

  “Next time she opens that door I’m going to get my foot inside.”

  “I’ll ask her one more time if we can come in.”

  “Be really careful, Caroline.”

  Vega rapped on the door and waited, then rapped again. It was quiet for a long moment; then Bradley heard the muffled thud of feet on the floor. The latch slid and the door opened and Bradley opened the screen and placed his foot against the door frame.

  “No here, please. No here. Legal. Fashion.”

  “Do I have your permission to come in?” he asked.

  “No permiso.”

>   “I smell marijuana. Do you smell it?”

  “I smell marijuana,” said Vega.

  “No marijuana. No here, nothing . . . You go. You go.”

  Bradley eased his shoulder into the doorway and the woman backed up. Vega followed him in. The living room was small. To the right was a hallway leading back to the bedrooms and to the left was a dining room that opened to the kitchen by a pass-through and an open doorway. In the living room was a small brown sofa and a large TV cabinet with shelves of pottery and paper flowers and figurines carved of onyx and glass and wood. Bradley saw the dust on the glass figures and he saw the black stains inside the white clamshell inverted as an ashtray. He looked down the right hallway and saw that the bedroom doors were closed and there was no light coming around them. He stepped to the threshold of the dining room, and beyond the pass-through he saw the stove with the skillet heaped with onions and chilies cooking down, and the pot of peeled potatoes boiling, and the pan that held a pork roast recently removed from the oven, enough meat to feed several adults.

  “You go!” She made as if to slap him with the dish towel but apparently realized the uselessness of it.

  “Smells good,” he said, smiling. He drew his gun and moved quickly back into the living room so he could see down the hallway to the bedrooms.

  “You go! No one!”

  “No one what, lady? No one who?”

  The woman unleashed a string of curses and hit him with the dish towel very hard, and when the towel fell to the floor the potato peeler was planted high up into the left side of Bradley’s chest. The first gunman came not from the hallway but up into the pass-through from the kitchen where he had been crouching, and Bradley shot him in the middle and the man collapsed just as the second sicario came down the hallway with a machine pistol blazing, trying to control the muzzle rise with his left hand, and Caroline shot him twice and the man stopped but kept firing and the muzzle of his machine gun rose up spitting bullets into the wall, then the ceiling, then into his own face. The gunfire was deafening in the small home and the air filled quickly with smoke. When the machine gunner fell, a very small man sprung up from behind him swinging his pistol on Caroline, and Bradley shot him in the temple and the man pitched forward with his face to the floor tile and his gun still clutched in one hand. The woman came from the kitchen with a sawed-off shotgun, and Bradley took two steps and launched himself. Midair he dropped his gun. He clamped both hands to the shotgun and rammed her chest with his face like he used to as a linebacker and he felt her feet leave the floor and his airborne momentum carry them backward into the little kitchen where they crashed into the refrigerator and sank to the floor. He wrenched away the gun and dumped it into the dining room and stood over her with a boot on her wrist, panting. He wiggled the potato peeler very slightly to see how deep in it was. He’d driven it in farther when he tackled the woman, and now it hardly moved. The pain was breathtaking and the blood poured forth through the groove of the peeler as from a tiny bayonet. He thought of his wife, Erin, and vowed that he would not be forced to say good-bye to her by a potato peeler.