A moment later in the moonlight, Hood saw them moving down in the arroyo, a man in the lead and a woman behind him. The man carried a handful of plastic shopping bags with one hand, their necks stretched and thinned by the weight of their cargo. In his free arm he snuggled an infant up close to his chest. A few steps behind her husband, the woman walked backward with a handled plastic water jug cut down to its shoulders, broadcasting sand to cover their tracks, bending to refill the jug and toeing the dirt to cover the marks made by the bottle, then hurriedly backing to catch up to her family and continuing to spread the sand in their wake.
Hood and Beth and the dog watched them traverse the dry gully south to north and when the couple was directly below Hood’s home, they stopped. Briefly they looked up at the candlelight. The woman slowly straightened and placed her hand against the small of her back. Then they continued. Hood listened to the sowing of the sand in the vast desert, and the warrior engines thrumming at the border and the thump of the helos and the thump of his heart, and to him these were one sound, the sound of human beings scratching along the pathways of their own free will.
Not long after the family had vanished into the northern darkness, a sudden wind came up and blew out the candles. It was a southern wind, monsoonal and sweet. Beth put her hand in his and they watched the lights.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A thousand thanks to John Torres and the Los Angeles field division of the ATF.
A thousand more to those who have written about this before me and often better, among them:
W. Dirk Raat and George R. Janecek, Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara
Richard Grant, God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway
William Langewiesche, Cutting for Sign
Charles Bowden, Down by the River
Frank Latta, Joaquin Murrieta and His Horse Gangs
The terrific reporting team behind the Los Angeles Times series, “Mexico Under Siege”-Josh Meyer, Tony Perry, Ken Ellington, Tracy Wilkinson, Scott Craft, Richard Marosi, Sam Quinones, Christopher Reynolds, Andrew Becker, Patrick J. McDonnell, Evelyn Larrubia, Denise Dresser, Frank James, Paul Pringle, Raoul Ranoa, Richard Serrano, Don Bartletti, Deborah Bonello, Lorena Iñiguez Elebee, Cecilia Sanchez, Miguel Bustillo, and Marla Dickerson.
Norman Mailer, who gave the devils their due in The Castle in the Forest.
Another thousand to Dave Bridgman and Sherry Merryman for answering my endless questions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T. Jefferson Parker is the author of sixteen previous novels, including the Charlie Hood thrillers L.A. Outlaws and The Renegades, and the Edgar Award winners Silent Joe and California Girl. In 2009 Parker won his third Edgar, his first in the short story category. He lives with his family in Southern California.
