“Oh, the new waitress,” said Israel, pain in his voice. “Miranda.”
“And how is your child bride?”
“Glory be to Gloria. She’s in Puerto Vallarta with the kids. I behave. I look but don’t touch.”
As they rumbled out a rutted dirt road headed east, Coleman thought back to when they were ten years old and Israel’s father, Mikey, was shot down outside Amigos. He and Israel had watched it happen. Coleman would never forget how clean Mikey’s Suburban was. In Jacumba no vehicle stayed clean overnight and when Mikey pulled up across the street from Amigos Coleman knew that it had just been washed. Mikey was wearing new creased jeans and a blue cowboy shirt and snake-skin boots and a black Resistol. Ten seconds later a black Chevy 1500 rolled by and stopped and when it rolled on again Mikey was just a tattered rag on the street. His hat blew into the gutter. Israel’s mother had left his father years before, so at Coleman’s insistence the Draper family had taken in the boy. Three years later he moved in with a gang of traffickers living across the border in the Mexican half of Jacumba, called Jacume. Israel was drawn to a pretty girl and some very easy money helping the mules and coyotes navigate the bleak desert border. He was fast, strong and fearless. He’d married Gloria at sixteen, with the full permission of her narcotrafficante father. After the tragic death of his family, Draper had joined Israel over in Jacume.
Now they came to Draper’s hacienda east of town, just a mile from the border. Draper had named it Rancho Las Palmas. The parcel was fifty acres, mostly just dry rolling hills, but part of it was thickly wooded with manzanita and some oak, and there was a glade with a spring where Draper had seen deer and mountain lion.
Thanks to Israel and his labor connections south of the border, the structures were going up under budget and ahead of schedule. There was a main house built of concrete and iron and river rock, a wooden barn, a five-car garage with an apartment over it, and three guest cottages. The swimming pool was excavated and framed, and as Draper approached he saw that the masons were making the artificial rocks that would form an overhang and waterfall. Draper craved water and the idea of water, and his four wells were dug deep into the bountiful aquifer and ready to be plumbed for service. Dozens of Canary Island palms, still in their big wooden boxes, were positioned around the site for planting. There were queens and kings and sagos and blues, too, and a bounty of palms that Draper couldn’t even identify.
“In six months you’ll have one of the best properties in East County,” said Israel. “It’ll be magnificent. Ten years from now, when you sell it, it will be worth five times what you paid for it. Between your wells and your spring, you’ll never have to buy one pint of water. You’ll be self-sustaining.”
“You don’t have to sell me on it,” said Draper.
“And shade. You’ll always have the shade of the palms.”
They walked over to a grove of seven Canary Island palms. Draper put his hand on the big wooden box and looked up at the stunning symmetry of the fronds emanating from the center.
“Let’s go see your old house. I’m in a sentimental mood.”
“Yes, we should see it. It’s been years for you, hasn’t it?”
“Two at least.”
Using a series of perilously rutted roads and a short dark tunnel, Castro delivered them to the other side of the border fifteen minutes later. They traveled unseen by the law but were duly noted by the cartel lookouts and the human smugglers dug into the rocky hillsides with their powerful spotting scopes. These men and boys communicated by walkie-talkies because cell phones wouldn’t work down here. They scurried back and forth across the border with impunity, sometimes hourly, like fleas hopping from one part of a dog to another.
The old Castro family home was still large and rambling. It was freshly painted, white with pale green trim. Draper had lived there for the three years following the death of his family thanks to an influential Castro uncle who was rarely ever there.
As the Denali idled at the gated driveway, Draper looked at his old home and thought of the great dusty freedom of life in Jacume. There were hours out-of-doors, making trails and paths and tunnels and learning how they connected to the bustling warren of trails and paths and tunnels that already existed. There were motorcycles and ATVs and dune buggies and, of course, SUVs. There were moonless runs and flashlit sprints and elaborate distractions involving flares and even dynamite-all to throw off the DEA and the Baja Police and the Border Patrol and the sheriffs and the cops. There was easy cash and there were easy drugs and easy girls.
After the death of his parents and brother and sister, Draper had felt like a rocket launched into space. All things were blurred and indefinable by his senses. He was speeding, barely controllable, totally unstoppable. For the first time in his life he felt truly free and truly happy.
“I need a man,” he said. “Someone who can pull a trigger.”
“Jacumba and Jacume are still full of them.”
“No one close to you.”
“Oh?”
“You know. A onetime job. Someone slender, but don’t give me a boy.”
“I do know. Well, that’s another thing.”
“There’s five thousand for the work and five thousand when the work is done.”
“When?”
“Friday. I need him in L.A. by afternoon. I’ll have everything he needs. Tell him that someone will bring him back here later that night.”
Draper took the thick square of folded hundreds from the rear pocket of his jeans and gave it to Israel.
“I’ll get a man for you,” said Israel.
“To Amigos,” said Draper. “I’m starved.”
“I can introduce you to Miranda.”
“I’d like that.”
He pulled onto Laurel Laws’s horse property just before sunset. Standing on her porch he neatened his necktie, then knocked.
A moment later he heard movement behind the door and he looked at the spy hole.
“Coleman?”
“Yes. I’m sorry to just come over unannounced.”
The door opened and Laurel stood before him. Her face was puffy and her hair was a mess and her blouse was wrinkled. Draper bowed.
“Well…,” she said, and stepped back into the foyer.
Draper entered and pursed his lips solemnly and gave her a brief, formal hug. He handed her a sympathy bouquet.
“I’m so sorry, Laurel,” he said. “He’s all I can think about.”
“Me, too. It’s sinking in. Thank you for your calls.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
She looked around the foyer and back into the living room as if searching for a chore or project. “Well, oh, no.”
“Anything at all, Laurel.”
“I’m fine, really. Come in.”
“I won’t stay long. I’m sorry I didn’t call. Right up until I knocked on your door I was telling myself I’d turn around and call later.”
“It’s okay. I wasn’t doing much.”
They sat in the darkened living room, Laurel at one end of a leather nail-head sofa and Draper across the room in what he assumed was his partner’s favorite recliner. This usurpation pleased him in a way that had nothing to do with the reason for his visit. Draper told her a little about his grief, then he began praising Terry in a soft voice, telling Laurel some anecdotes from their years together. Draper had never become close to Laurel because he and Terry socialized less and less after he was married, but there was still a broad bond between them and Draper felt its natural weight and comfort as he talked. The flowers lay on a coffee table in front of her and the distant glimmer of a street lamp came through the window to land on the plastic wrapper and prompt the faint colors of the lilies.
“What about you, Laurel? Are you handling it?”
She was quiet for a moment. Draper was surprised that she was this thoughtful. And he was more surprised as he listened to her words.