“Seat belt,” he says. “We’re going where it’s quiet, you either say what we want or you don’t. You don’t got what we want, we kill you.” He checks his watch. “Yes or no?”
“Yes,” I say.
Rey drives. Nobody talks. We take Ina to I-10 and head south until Rey exits onto I-19. Soon I see my past rising in front of me. Mission San Xavier del Bac, a gorgeous white mission, the white dove of the desert. Mission San Xavier del Bac, where Rey and I were once responsible for killing and burning a teenager.
Five years ago.
Or seven, I don’t want to think about it.
Rey slows at the edge of the mission parking lot, a barren, uneven and unpaved stretch of ground, just a few hundred yards from the Tohono O’odham Tribal Police center. We swing past the W: ak shopping center, the People of the River, the gates open but nobody in sight. The Escalade bumps past some of the concrete block houses, moves briefly along a dirt road with, amazingly, a sign. Gok Kawulk Wog. Tohono O’odham words. No sense to me.
Dial’s cell rings. He motions Rey to stop next to an ancient saguaro cactus with seven arms and two huge holes up where somebody’d shotgunned it in the main stem. Dial listens, murmurs a word, flips the cell closed, and holds up a hand at Rey.
Engine running, aircon set at meat locker, we sit there for two hours or so, gas gauge near empty. Dial occasionally leans forward between the seats, studying my face. The full tats on his arms are layered three deep, the most faded seem to be 81st Airborne tats from Nam. On the left arm, Killing Is Our Business, on the right arm, Business Is Good.
A family of Gambel’s quail bustles across the road, Dad in front, Mom behind, both sandwiching a dozen new chicks the size of fluffy walnuts, urging them from a creosote bush to shelter under a clump of teddy bear cholla. Dial lasers the chicks one at a time, smacking his lips in a silent pow, and then he centers the red dot on my left eye. His cell rings again. He listens, nods at my computer bag.
“Is that enough equipment?” he says to me as Rey checks out the bag.
“The laptop and the satellite phone,” I say. “Yes, maybe. I can try. But not until you guarantee my daughter’s safety. And my granddaughter. Why are you doing this, Rey?”
“I work for Verónica Luna de los Angeles Talancón,” Rey answers quickly; he wants to get her name out there and over with.
“Verónica Talancón? The drug cartel woman?”
Dial slaps the back of my head. “Show some respect. Respect for La Bruja de los Cielos.”
“Rey? You work for Sonora’s biggest drug cartel?” My jaw slack, mouth open.
“Listen.”
“The drug lord? You work for her cartel?”
“Yeah,” sighing, shrugging, “yeah, okay? Jesus, will you just listen to me?”
“La Bruja de los Cielos? The Witch of the Skies?” Dial slaps my head again; Rey turns away, nodding, his chin so low it bumps his chest. “You’re threatening my family because of a vicious woman who runs a drug cartel?”
“Listen,” he says. “I mean, just listen to this, okay? I mean, I’m just a go-between. Just a connection, a fixer. Just trying to stay alive here.”
“You’re wasting time,” Dial says. “You’re useless. Let’s go. Drive.”
“Wait, wait a minute. What do you want?” I ask again. “And where are you taking me?”
“What Talancón wants, what she needs, Laura,” Rey says quietly, but looking me right in the eyes, “what Talancón needs is a brand-new, best-quality, never-fail, platinum-grade U.S. identity. What you call, in your business, you call it creating a legend.”
“I don’t do that anymore. I’m legitimate. I do computer forensics on corporation databases. I’m completely, totally legal. Rey. Listen to me. This is a bad idea.”
“This is way past a bad idea,” Rey says.
“You’re not listening to me.” Dial flips open his cell, a finger on the keypad. “I’ve got five minutes left to call Sedona. I don’t call, a sicario pops your daughter.”
“Jesus Christ, Rey. You’re just making this up.” I talk directly to Rey, I won’t acknowledge that Dial is in charge. He doesn’t care what I acknowledge or think or whatever, he just dials, listens, puts the cell on speaker-phone. “Five minutes my ass. This is a bluff.”
“Eating dinner at L’Auberge de Sedona,” a voice says. “Down by the creek. Kid’s in a high chair, wearing a pink jumpsuit, Mommy’s in a yellow tank top. Nice tits.”
“Okay, okay,” I say into the cell. It’s not a bluff. Panic, trying to sound calm, hoping I project willingness to go along instead of terror at the situation, and in the back of my mind, nothing forming, but back there, trying to figure a plan to get out of this alive. “Okay, I’ll do it. Don’t—”
Dial flips the cell closed, motions to Rey who just nods and shifts into drive.
“Where are we going?”
“Talancón is hiding in Sahuarita. She got across the border, but no time for plastic surgery, so she’s got to fly out of Tucson quick, like, tomorrow. She can’t do that without a whole new identity. And you’re the expert.”
“Just to find the right connections will take days. A week, maybe more.”
“Talancón figures she’s got eight, maybe ten hours to arrange a safe out.”
“Impossible. Ugh.” Dial slaps the back of my head. He knows the sweet spots back there, three times he’s whacked the same place and it’s starting to vibrate with pain.
“I’m nothing here, Laura,” Rey says. “Don’t you see that? If you do this, Talancón will pay whatever you ask.”
“Don’t shit me, Rey. You’ve already threatened my daughter, my granddaughter. If I give this woman, this Talancón, if I give her a new identity, she’ll kill me. She’ll kill you, she’ll kill anybody in her way just like those two back there.”
“Yeah. Well. I don’t bring you to Talancón right now, Mr. Dial here will pop me and you, no hesitation. That’s your choice. Come with us or die.” The sunset lights up his face, his color bleaching to white, corners of his mouth sagging. “Yes or no?”
Dial slaps my head again.
“Yes,” I say finally. “Yes. I’ll do it.”
Sahuarita, Arizona. Just south of Indian reservation lands. Bustling with new houses going up, their framed skeletons crowded with carpenters, plumbers, electricians, everybody trying to get rich.
Rey winds along a narrow street, twisting through smaller roads until we stop at the dead end of Calle Zapata at the edge of a pecan orchard. A Ford crew-cab pickup faces out to the street and a woman sits at a battered redwood picnic table behind the gated front wall, a vivid view of the Santa Rita mountains behind her. Dial grips my upper arms, marches me in front of him toward the table.
Verónica Talancón bites carefully into a Sonoran hot dog, sipping occasionally from a bottle of Diet Sprite. A slim, tiny woman, barely taller than five feet. Gorgeous, beautiful, stunning, the Witch of the Skies.
“Miss Winslow,” a quiet voice, calm, measured, steady. She wipes bits of chili from her chin. “Thank you for coming.”
“You threatened my family. Did you really expect I’d not come?”
“Look at this,” she says, gesturing at what’s left of her food. “The all-American hot dog, made in Mexico, wrapped in bacon, stuffed inside a fresh bun and loaded up with tomato and onion chunks, grilled onions, mustard and mayo and a jalapeño sauce with a guerito pepper. Two nights ago, I had lobster flown in from Maine on my private jet. Tonight,” gesturing at the cracked adobe house and yard full of weeds, “this is my whole kingdom.”