“You gonna buy one?” Garrison glanced over his shoulder disapprovingly. “That’s what the TJ jailbirds wear. You know where those crosses got started? The joint. The convicts pulled thread out of their clothes to make ’em.”
“Yeah, well, I think they’re cool,” Pescatore mumbled, handing her a dollar.
“Que Dios le bendiga, mi hijo,” the woman said.
At home, he hung the crucifix from a tack stuck in the cork message board on his refrigerator. And there it had remained.
Until this evening. Pescatore put on a blue denim shirt, black khaki slacks, black Timberland boots and his bomber jacket. He loaded and shoulder-holstered his Glock. He gathered up his wallet and badge and cell phone, took a deep breath and turned off a Los Lonely Boys disc as he headed for the door.
But he stopped at the refrigerator, caught up by the crucifix. He removed it from the tack. He went into the bathroom. He faced the mirror. He lifted the necklace up over his head, positioned it around his neck, and squared the cross on his chest inside his shirt. It was the closest he had come to a religious act in years. There was something about that TJ jailbird cross, about that spectral old lady wreathed in exhaust fumes, that stirred his deepest superstitions. He was going to need all the luck he could get.
Because now he was riding shotgun in the Cherokee. Garrison drove. Dillard sat in back chewing bubble gum. They were off duty, rolling south on Interstate 5 behind a Ford van loaded with a shipment of guns that Garrison had arranged to smuggle into Tijuana. M-16s,.45 automatics, Tek-9s: a smorgasbord of weaponry. A Mexican youth whom Pescatore had never met was driving the van up ahead.
“You alright there, buddy?” Garrison asked. He slowed as the big MEXICO sign above the customs booths of the San Ysidro Port of Entry approached.
“Slow motion,” Pescatore said.
Isabel Puente was pleased with his work. His apparent success at invading the Zona Norte and getting away with it had boosted his status with Garrison. They were partying together regularly. He was gathering information on how Garrison furnished intelligence on border defenses to smugglers. He had also found out about a home in Imperial Beach that was a safe house for drugs and stolen goods. And a clandestine first-aid station, as he learned one night when Garrison got carried away whacking a combative migrant over the head with his baton near Stewart’s Bridge. Pescatore had accompanied Garrison and the prisoner to the house on a semirural road. A robust cigarette-smoking blonde in a bathrobe answered the door. She was unfazed by the fact that it was past midnight and one of her guests was bleeding profusely. She prepared coffee for the agents. Then she bathed, stitched and bandaged the prisoner’s wounds, squinting over a cigarette as she worked.
“It was tripped out,” Pescatore told Isabel Puente later during a debriefing at the café in La Jolla. “She must be a nurse or something. We drove this alien back to The Line with his head all stitched up. Garrison brings him to a gap in the fence, tells him to keep his mouth shut. He gives him a little shove back into Mexico. And that was that.”
Nonetheless, Pescatore hoped Garrison knew what he was doing when it came to smuggling a vanload of guns into Tijuana. Getting caught with your service firearm alone meant Mexican federal charges and a go-directly-to-jail card.
The van in front of them was next in line at a Mexican inspection booth. Garrison had said that everything was under control. He had told Pescatore to get with the program and not to worry. But now Garrison looked as if he were about to rip the steering wheel out of the dashboard.
“Where’s my guy,” Garrison growled.
The blue-shirted Mexican customs inspector was apparently not the guy Garrison had in mind. Pescatore tensed. Entering Tijuana was supposed to be easier than leaving. But Mexican authorities had stepped up their searches of southbound traffic looking for guns, stolen vehicles and trunkloads of drug profits. The last went to money houses that the drug lords crammed floor to ceiling with cash they couldn’t spend fast enough.
“Where’s my guy, where’s my guy,” Garrison said.
The van slid forward over the international line. The Mexican inspector stepped to the driver’s window, looking imperious. Pescatore hooked his fingers into his door handle, though he knew his stock would drop in a hurry if he bailed and bolted.
Then a blue-shirted supervisor appeared, waving off the inspector. The van jumped forward with a lurch that made Pescatore cringe. Garrison relaxed his strangler’s grip on the wheel. Out of the right side of his mouth, he said, “Way too close, Nacho, you shitbrain.” Garrison nodded gravely as the Cherokee rolled alongside the supervisor. Pescatore recognized him from a party at Garrison’s house.
“Pásale,” the supervisor said, touching the brim of his cap in a two-fingered salute.
A series of ramps emptied into a tree-lined boulevard. They passed boxlike office buildings, a McDonald’s decorated by clumps of balloons, a giant, ball-shaped, concrete construction that housed the Omnimax theater of the Tijuana Cultural Center. The first intersection was a crowded traffic circle with a grass plaza in the center containing an abstract statue of what looked like tall wooden spikes. Teenage street performers in clown makeup juggled red balls and stood on one another’s shoulders in the traffic during the red light. Three dogs trotted in the crosswalk, single file, as if they had waited for the light to change.
“Eight twenty-five,” Garrison said. “Right on time.”
He pulled ahead of the van and entered the half-deserted parking lot of a shopping center. Garrison cruised around to a side of the mall near a row of apartment buildings. He drove to the center of the lot and pulled into a slot about twenty feet from a red Suburban. He flashed his headlights. The Suburban responded in kind.
“Uh, ain’t we real out in the open?” Pescatore asked, thinking that it was appropriate to come off as nervous. Which he was.
“If you’re worried about the judiciales, don’t be,” Garrison said. “They got the perimeter for us.”
Garrison pointed out the plainclothes state cops in an Impala at one end of the parking lot and in a Crown Victoria at the other. I guess downtown TJ is as good as anyplace to do an arms deal if you’ve got the police standing guard, Pescatore thought.
Dillard leaned over the seat between Garrison and Pescatore. His whitish-blond hair was wet-combed, accentuating his large ears. He popped a bubble.
“Here come them old boys,” Dillard said.
A car parked alongside the Suburban. It was a vintage, navy-blue Buick Regal with a sunroof and a lot of chrome. Five men got out.
“Buffalo,” Garrison said. “Let’s take care of business, gentlemen.”
“He a cop too?” Pescatore asked.
Garrison turned. “What’s going on with the questions, Valentine? He look like a cop to you?”
“It’s kinda hard to tell around here.”
“Listen: You’re on a need-to-know basis. All you need to know is, he’s not a cop. He’s Murder Incorporated.”
The man called Buffalo was shorter than the Border Patrol supervisor, but otherwise just as big. And while Garrison had a stiff Frankenstein-monster quality, the newcomer seemed not only rock-muscled but agile, like a linebacker, like he could chase you down and finish you off in a heartbeat. Buffalo looked as if he had done hard prison time and was ready to do more. His steely “How you doin’ ” was pure Southern California barrio.
Three of the men with Buffalo were not Mexican. The one he introduced as Mr. Abbas was bald on top, long nose, neat black beard. His outfit was casual-sharp: a beige sport jacket, pleated slacks and loafers with no socks. His accent was British mixed with something else. Pescatore pegged him for Iranian or Arab. Behind him were two muscle guys: light-skinned, foreign-looking blacks with athletic builds, loose-armed in sleeveless black canvas vests, gold chains glittering on their chests. They were cousins or brothers; they had the same blunt profiles, short curls and amused gray eyes. Buffalo introduced them as Moze and Tchai.