Elsie squeezed too hard on the dough ball, flattening it to a disc. She counted the balls on the sheet: one, two, three … six, seven, eight … ten, eleven, twelve. She checked the door. It didn’t take her but ten seconds to fetch an armful of kindle. She tried to continue but lost track of which she’d counted and which she hadn’t, so she slid them all into the oven. The coals blazed bright orange. She evenly spaced the rolls inside and latched the door. Her cheeks and forehead burned. Tobias still hadn’t returned.
“I should have gone myself,” she muttered. Gummy bits of excess flour clung to her fingers. She didn’t bother washing, moving fast to the back entrance.
Tobias greeted her at the threshold. “Is this enough?” His elbows trembled with the weight of five logs.
Elsie ushered him in, and he put the wood beside the oven. She sighed away her worry. When suddenly, there was a rapping sound. Frau Rattelmüller was at the back with the door wide open.
Chapter Twenty-two
EL PASO BORDER PATROL STATION
8935 MONTANA AVENUE
EL PASO, TEXAS
NOVEMBER 26, 2007
Half a dozen CBP and El Paso PD vehicles rumbled down the concrete path meant for joggers, bicyclists, and El Pasoans taking their children for twilight strolls along the Rio Grande. It was empty now, and at the sound of the convoy’s approach, the ducks waded to the underpass’s shady banks; a white crane flapped its way to a secret nest in the river thicket.
They’d gotten a tip-off from a neighbor: the padlocked trailer had new occupants. Smugglers typically kept illegal aliens in safe houses for one to three days before transporting them into the desert where they were dropped off at dusk to walk miles through the wilderness; thereby, circumventing highway checkpoints in the dark. On the other side, the smuggler would pick up the survivors and continue north.
Time was limited. The CBP had to do a roundup now or risk missing the group entirely. The El Paso Police Department helped assist in the arrests.
Riki and Bert led the motorcade. In the passenger seat of the truck, Bert checked his pistol magazine—the standard issued H&K P2000, a German semi. He holstered it at his waist.
Riki shifted in his seat. It was standard operational procedure, but loaded guns had always made him ill at ease. He’d seen one too many men get twitchy and draw their weapons prematurely, channeling Wyatt Earp, no doubt. Only the people in their sight weren’t gunslingers and outlaws but farmers and masons.
“Are we ever going to get those rubber bullets?” asked Riki. The ammunition stunned the victims, giving them a solid punch without penetrating. These weren’t menacing criminals. The CBP’s duty was to prohibit their entry into the United States, not kill them.
“What’s the point?” Bert shrugged. “Guy’s coming at me, I’m stopping him dead in his tracks. Damned if I’m going wait till he throws a fireball in my face.” He cinched the sides of his bulletproof vest. “Carol’s rather fond of it.” He grinned. “And I’ve gotten used to it myself.”
Riki kept one hand on the wheel and scratched the base of his five o’clock shadow with the other. “A lot of women and kids these days though. Guns scare them more than they help.”
Bert gave a caustic laugh. “That’s the point! Scare them so bad they won’t break the law twice! Don’t go soft on me, Rik. Americans today are a bunch of bleeding hearts. Oh, human rights, human rights, they whine. What about the rights of the law-abiding people of our country? What about them, huh? So easy to sit around talking all philosophical-like when you’re eating a cream cheese bagel in New Hampshire, but out here—shit.” He sat up quick.
A Hispanic man stood on the path directly across from the division of trailer homes Riki had scouted two weeks prior. Bert flicked on the truck’s police lights. The guy took off in a sprint down the trail. Riki slowed the truck near the targeted double-wide, and Bert opened the passenger door.
“Looks like we got a runner.” He swung himself out. A sandy mushroom rose from the braked tires. “10-33!” He said into the handheld. “Going south along the Rio. Should be easy to spot. Hispanic male in a green jacket.”
“10-4, this is Chief Garza. Sending one of our cars to rope him in.”
A police car whizzed by in pursuit.
“Copy,” said Bert. “Let’s get in the house and see what we got.”
Reluctantly, Riki drew his pistol from its holster.
A gray, windowless van parked outside. The trailer was still padlocked, but now the boards had been removed from two small windows.
“Nice find, Rik.” Bert pulled his cap lower on his forehead and extended his steel baton. “Bet we got us a real rat’s nest here.”
The men in the following CBP and El Paso PD cars joined them, then quickly dispersed around the trailer.
“Van’s empty,” called an agent.
Bert and Riki headed to the front door with a handful of armed men at their heels.
Riki pounded with his fist. “Open up! Abierto!”
Without waiting for an answer, Bert smashed the padlock with his baton butt, and it broke free from the rusty aluminum. Chief Garza jammed a metal comb into the door frame and cracked it open. Within a minute, they had infiltrated the house.
Inside, people lined the walls and huddled next to one another in the corners.
“Abajo, abajo!” commanded Riki, pointing to the dirty mattresses on the ground.
The immigrants did as instructed, instinctively lying like canned sardines, facedown.
“Put your hands up!” Bert thwacked his truncheon against the wall. “Up, goddamnit!”
“Ponga sus manos,” interpreted Riki.
The women flung their hands in the air superman-style; the men laced them behind their heads.
Agents and officers raced through the rooms, herding people into the main living space.
“Any more?” asked Bert.
“I think this is all,” said Chief Garza.
“How many?” Riki assessed the space, so full of bodies that the room’s temperature had risen considerably. He was drenched with sweat; his uniform clung to his back like sheets of hot wax.
“Twenty-five. Thirty, maybe. Not sure,” said Bert. “A shit ton.” He collapsed his baton and tucked it in his belt. “Don’t know how these people can stand it.” He wiped the perspiration from his nose. “One crapper, no food, cockroaches, and black widow nests everywhere you turn. It can’t be worth it. We’re just going to send them back where they come from and that has to be better than this.” He picked up his handheld. “El Paso, do you copy? We’re going to need a damn bus.”
A young man in a Timberland T-shirt dared to lift his head from the mattress.
“You—do you speak English?” Riki asked him.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Where are you from?”
“Mexico,” he answered quickly.
Riki nodded. Guatemalan, Honduran, they could be Chinese, but they’d all claim Mexico, hoping to only be deported a mile across the border and not any farther. Riki understood the game.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Where’s your family?”
He shrugged.
The girl to his right started to cry, and Riki noticed her eye was split and swollen.
He knelt to her. “What happened, señorita?”
She whimpered and turned her face away.
“Bert,” Riki said over his shoulder. “We need to get the medic kit from the truck. Looks like this girl—”
Suddenly, the seventeen-year-old sprang to his feet, waving a Buck knife. He kicked Riki square across the jaw, slashed the bulletproof vest of the CBP agent to his right, then made a dash for the door.
The room spun sideways and split open wet as Riki fell back against the trailer’s corrugated metal siding. A childhood memory returned afresh: eating warm watermelon in the back of his father’s pickup. Initially, his parents had been day croppers, reaping fields in Canutillo and selling the produce on I-10. For their work, the local farmer gave them lodging on his land and a percentage of the earnings. Now again, Riki tasted the melon’s sweetness on his tongue, the steely truck bed beneath his back. He spat. The seeds suspended before him, floating black spots in a sea of pink.