Pescatore glanced in his rearview mirror: The two women were transfixed by the scene, fear flaring in enormous eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
The Wrangler in the middle of the clearing was crammed impossibly full of prisoners. Men were in the front seat, the caged backseat and the space behind it. They were stacked on one another’s laps. The mass of bodies wriggled behind the breath-steamed glass as if in an aquarium, a face visible here, a foot there. The captives pounded intermittently on the windows and roof, blows rocking the vehicle. There were complaints and curses.
The prisoners had become pieces in the Game. Garrison organized the Game now and then when he felt like gambling. The Game consisted of seeing how many prisoners could be stuffed into a vehicle during the course of a night.
Garrison welcomed Pescatore with another vigorous black-gloved handshake.
“I told you,” he declared. “I got twelve. Your two gives me fourteen. And then I collect, buddy.”
“My two?” Pescatore said, keeping his tone mild. “They’re OTMs, I gotta process them.”
“Hell with that. Where do they say they’re from?”
“Veracruz. But-”
“Hey, take ’em at their word. Transfer your prisoners to my vehicle, Valentine.”
Pescatore beckoned his supervisor aside. Garrison grinned at his discomfort.
“Listen,” Pescatore hissed, “all due respect, you can’t put females in there.”
“It’s only till the end of the shift.”
“Still. It ain’t right.”
Valentine peered at Garrison in the shadows, trying to figure out if the supervisor really intended on going through with it or was just messing with him. Both scenarios pissed him off. Garrison looked down at him as if he were about to swat a bug.
“Valentine. These people break the law every day. They spit at you. They rock you. And it’s all a big joke to them. This is the worst punishment they’ll ever get. So don’t you wussy out on me now. Get with the program.”
Coming up next to Garrison, Dillard made an exasperated noise. “Come on, Valentine, nobody’s gonna hurt your girlfriends.”
“Who asked you?” Pescatore retorted. “Take a giant step back outta my face.”
“Fuck you.” Dillard’s thin lips tightened. “I don’t understand a word you say in the first place, you crazy Chicago asshole.”
Partly because he was getting angry and partly to stall Garrison, Pescatore decided to respond as ignorantly as possible. He stepped close to Dillard and cocked his head. He felt a buzzing sensation in his face and hands.
“You gotta problem with the way I talk, you hayseed redneck punk bitch?”
Dillard’s face contorted. Pescatore blocked his shove, backpedaling. Dillard started after him and Pescatore crouched and slammed him with a gut punch. Garrison got between them. Dillard was flushed and wild, a hand on his belly.
“Now, Larry, you sure you can take Valentine?” Garrison chortled. “He’s not big, but he’s pretty mean.”
Garrison had a loglike arm extended at each of them, without urgency, like a referee about to resume the action. He’s not gonna stop us, Pescatore realized. He loves it: the brawling, those poor bastards in the vehicle, the crazy bullshit all night.
They were interrupted by a commotion. Suddenly the Wrangler disgorged its cargo, prisoners bolting in every direction. The agents spun around, yelling.
Pescatore focused on a man who crouched by a door, pulling aliens to freedom. A bowlegged man holding a pair of wire cutters, his head wrapped in a red bandanna. A man who had sneaked out of the bushes behind four PAs and sprung a vehicleful of prisoners.
Pulpo.
Pescatore lunged forward, pushing someone aside. Pulpo reappeared, closer, grimacing with effort. The wire cutters came whipping around at Pescatore. He snapped aside his head, reducing the force of the blow, but it staggered him. The smuggler ran into the brush.
“I got him,” Pescatore said, unsheathing his baton.
Pescatore pounded through the brush and down a ravine. He ran at an incredible, exhilarating, foolish speed. His head and ankle throbbed. It’s all your fault, Valentine, he muttered, they got away and it’s all your fault. He ran faster, ripping through curtains of fog. He gripped the baton like a sprinter. He noticed liquid trickling down his forehead onto his face. He tasted it: blood.
“I got him,” he said into the radio clipped to his lapel.
At the bottom of the hill, the border fence loomed up out of the mist. Pulpo made for a spot where floodwaters had washed out dirt between two boulders and created a gap beneath the fence. Pulpo scuttled through the opening and disappeared. Pescatore dropped, rolled and came back up on the other side of the fence.
He saw Pulpo glance back over his shoulder in disbelief, then plunge into the traffic on Calle Internacional, the highway that paralleled the international boundary on the Tijuana side. An orange-and-brown station wagon-taxi, elaborate script decorating its side, swerved and fishtailed and almost flattened Pulpo. A bedraggled pink bus braked and honked, the croak of a prehistoric animal. Pulpo reached the center median, which was waist high and as wide as a sidewalk. He stumbled, but kept going as Pescatore closed the gap. A truck left Pescatore a lungful of pestilential exhaust.
A group of migrants trudging single file along the median stopped and stared at the agent and the smuggler pelting by.
“I got him,” Pescatore told them.
He found the looks on their faces pretty comical. What’s the matter? You never seen a U.S. Border Patrol agent chasing a Mexican through Tijuana before? See it and believe it, motherfuckers.
Pescatore realized full well that he had crossed The Line. He had broken the ultimate commandment. He was making a suicide charge into enemy territory. He wondered what Garrison would say. He wondered what Esparza would say. But he felt dizzy liberation, as if the combined effect of the knock on the head and the incursion into Mexico had transformed him. He was a speed machine. A force of justice. A green avenger. He didn’t care if he had to run all the way to Ensenada. He was going to catch him a tonk.
Pulpo fled down the middle of a residential street that went south from the Calle Internacional. It was a quiet, unevenly paved, anemically lit street in the Zona Norte area, dense with cooking smells. Rickety fences fronted low houses painted in orange, green and blue. There was a field in the distance, perhaps a schoolyard.
Halfway down the block, Pulpo threw Pescatore another frantic glance. He zigzagged and cut left onto the sidewalk, knocking aside a gate. Pescatore pursued him into a narrow dirt lot between stucco houses, through an obstacle course of junk: bicycle tires, car parts, a lean-to fashioned from the camper shell of a pickup truck propped up with bricks. There was a wooden one-story hut at the back of the lot.
Pescatore caught up to the smuggler just as he reached the open door. He jabbed with the baton, javelin-style, connecting with Pulpo’s back below the label of the overalls. It made a satisfying thud.
The blow carried them both through a curtain of beads hanging in the front entrance and into the hut. Pescatore jabbed again and Pulpo went down, yowling, into a mangy armchair. Pescatore raised the baton with both hands to strike. A lightbulb on a chain swung above their heads, spattering images as if through a strobe: a dank cramped living room of sorts, a shrine with a Virgin of Guadalupe statuette, candles, an incongruously new and large television. A radio chattered. The bead curtain clattered in the doorway. Pescatore and Pulpo gulped oxygen in loud gasps.
A tired-looking little woman in sweat clothes had stepped out of the shadows behind the armchair. On her hip she cradled a baby boy, who was bare-chested in miniature overalls. The woman’s mouth opened soundlessly. Pulpo had one thick leg splayed over an armrest, the bandanna skewed down, almost obscuring his eyes. They looked as if they were posing for a portrait: the Pulpo family at home.