Border War Read online

  John separated from Andre when it came time to cross the border. His friend was more by the book and had nothing to hide. He crossed legally, showing his ID. John paused as he looked at the short line of people headed across the border. This was tricky because he didn’t want any record of him crossing one way or the other. He decided the best defense was a good offense, so he walked through the main line, where he knew the chief Customs inspector, then waved to the man as if he had just rolled across the border for a moment. The inspector nodded back to him, and just like that he was on U.S. soil.

  He realized it should be harder to get back into the country than that. He also needed a drink badly. He popped a little orange pill the doctor had prescribed him for anxiety. That would hold him until he found some tonic to go with the bottle of gin he had at his apartment.

  * * *

  Ramón Herrera sat comfortably in the back of his armored Chevy Suburban as it tooled through the streets of Chihuahua, Mexico. The Chevy was the third car in a row of five vehicles, each with at least three armed men riding in it. The last car in the motorcade was an unmarked military Humvee with the ability to launch rocket-propelled grenades. He spent so much time in Chihuahua that the people were no longer awed by the motorcade. But that only made things go more smoothly. It probably wasn’t necessary from a security perspective here in the heart of his own state. The motorcade was like his haciendas; it projected power. He often thought of himself as a Roman ruler, with the haciendas as his fortresses and this motorcade as his horsemen.

  He settled back with his secure phone and started to look up the name Pablo Piña. He had concerns about his man in Juárez. He had always been a little odd, acquiring the title Dark Lord of the Desert for killing six police officers and their families. It was a stupid name, but it helped to spread terror and control the populace. If that was all he needed Pablo to do, Herrera wouldn’t worry so much about him, but their plans to expand into other businesses, especially into the United States, made him wonder if Pablo could handle it. His pleasure at showing off his acid pool made Herrera wonder about his man’s stability.

  Herrera put the phone back in the console on the extended rear seat of the Suburban. Maybe Pablo wasn’t the right guy to handle something sensitive like this. That was the problem with so many employees. He had plenty of killers; his security force, the Zetas, street thugs, assassins, even the Mexican Army in some situations, but he never liked to get his hands dirty. He had never killed a man himself and didn’t intend to start now.

  Herrera kept a cadre of men separate from his chain of command. Men no one in his security force realized existed. He never knew when someone within the chain would have to be dealt with severely. None of these men knew each other. Pablo and other middle managers had no idea Herrera could so easily go outside of the organization if he needed dirty work done. It was essential to keep control and stay above the fray. Even with equals who were rivals, like the heads of some of the cartels, relations were cold, but rarely violent. They were basically the heads of state.

  He was trying to use his contacts within the Gulf Cartel to clean up its image. They had too many nuts. People who considered themselves witches. That was one of the things that led to the massacre at Matamoros, which got so much play on the U.S. news. It looked bad from a public relations standpoint. Mexico was already floundering in a quagmire of negative media coverage.

  Herrera wanted to correct that, and he wanted to keep the United States from interfering in Mexico’s business. Once that was accomplished, his investment could shift from cocaine and heroin to oil and other legitimate companies dealing in the high tech industry both in the U.S. and Mexico. This would provide a stable basis for long-term expansion. The drug business was too profitable to ignore, but he needed more capital to move into other industries.

  The other big moneymaker that was emerging was “protection,” or as he called it, “insurance.” Once he got everyone paying the proper premiums, kidnappings and extortion would become extinct and the U.S. media would have much less to complain about.

  After careful consideration he snatched the phone from the console and called his most reliable independent contractor. After three rings, a male voice answered, and Herrera said, “Hola, Hector.”

  * * *

  Sitting in the obsessively neat office of his supervisor at the FBI, Tom Eriksen fidgeted in his hard chair. He had spent surprisingly little time in the FBI office since moving to El Paso. There were only three main squads and the task-force squad supervised by Mike Zara. All the agents on that squad were scattered across the various task forces every city had. The areas for investigation were broad: fraud, Internet crimes against children, and terrorism—the domain of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF.

  Eriksen looked around at the plaques and photos that covered the walls. He noticed the plaques were all for time spent on different units, not for exemplary work. Sort of like a participation medal in sports.

  Eriksen noticed the wide grin on his supervisor’s face as the Department of Justice inspector general, head of a watchdog agency that could cripple an agent’s career faster than a DUI, said, “You’re going to have to stay on this Border Security Task Force for the foreseeable future.” The pudgy IG was all business and seemed to have put some thought into everything he said.

  Eriksen didn’t want to sound like a whiny kid, but he had to say, “Why? If you’re closing the case and I’m not being charged, why do I have to stay on the rubber gun squad?”

  The inspector general was a trim, neat man of about forty-five, who looked like he had been born wearing his Brooks Brothers suit. “The reason there are no criminal charges is that Mexico has not been very cooperative and we haven’t even seen the bodies of the dead coyotes. And although you may not care about a couple of dead Mexican traffickers, others do. Your assignment to the intelligence task force keeps you low-profile and mitigates some of the hostility being expressed on the Mexican side of the border.”

  “So I can’t conduct any enforcement activities?”

  Now his supervisor stepped in and said, “None whatsoever. No surveillances and no crossing the border into Mexico.”

  The IG added, “And it goes without saying you will make no public comment. We understand several commentators have been following this case closely and might come to El Paso. You will not appear with any of them on TV. Is that clearly understood?”

  Eriksen just nodded.

  The IG said, “Do you have anything you wish to say?” No matter how he phrased it or what tone he took, it still made Eriksen sound like a defendant.

  Eriksen said, “I’ve heard a few rumors about the coyotes that killed the Border Patrol agent.”

  Now his supervisor jumped up and said, “What rumors? Where did you hear them?”

  Eriksen said, “My old partner, John Houghton, heard it from his informants in Mexico. The wounds don’t match ammo we used, and one of the dead men may not even have been Mexican.”

  The IG took furious notes, but Zara said, “Since when does the FBI listen to anyone at Homeland Security? You worry about the job you’ve been assigned to at the Border Security Task Force and take my advice: Stay away from John Houghton and any of those morons at HSI. You’re in enough trouble already.”

  * * *

  Carol DiMetti shuffled around her cute little house doing all the chores that had piled up since she’d learned her husband, Vinnie, had been killed at the border. The three-bedroom home was in a purely residential neighborhood with a shaded backyard and a front porch like the one she played on at her grandmother’s, growing up in Chicago.

  She always kept the place tidy and the kitchen well stocked. At the moment, she was packing up a box of her dead husband’s clothes. She intended to donate them all to the Salvation Army. There was no way she wanted to schlep them back to Chicago with her. There was also no way she was headed back to Long Island, where Vinnie was from. She felt guilty more than she did sad. In fact, she felt guilty because
she wasn’t sad in the least that Vinnie was dead. It wasn’t really his fault. He was a putz, but he could be sweet. He believed he was some kind of Hollywood Mafia thug instead of a nice Italian boy from upper Long Island. His father was a dentist, for Christ’s sake. He had no reason to act the way he did and drag her all the way out here to El Paso to work for that stupid company.

  El Paso had been too much for her marriage. She’d been planning to leave long before Vinnie had gotten shot, just waiting for something to open up back home in Aurora or Chicago. Now she needed a job and didn’t want to move back in with her parents. She had to find some ready cash so she could head back to the civilized world.

  She heard the doorbell and took a second to peek through the curtain the way Vinnie had showed her. She was relieved to see it was Vinnie’s old boss, dressed, as usual, all in black. He had a nickname, but she couldn’t remember it. As Carol opened the door she said, “Hey, Joe. Come on in.” She appreciated his long face and quiet demeanor and how carefully he asked how she was doing and gave her a hug even after she said she was doing okay. He was obviously uncomfortable, but she didn’t know if it was just around her or around all women. Every time they had ever met he’d been cautious. Vinnie had said Joe was queer, but she didn’t think so.

  Finally, after she’d gotten him a cup of coffee and they sat in the living room on the decorative couch Vinnie had picked up the first day they were here, Joe said, “What are your plans?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, aware that his eyes kept drifting to her cleavage. “I guess I’ll move eventually. But I need money to move.”

  “You need money from the company?”

  She shrugged. “That would be nice.” She didn’t want to push it yet. Now he looked downright anxious.

  Carol decided to risk making him a little more uneasy. She said, “Why does the news keep saying the two men shot by the cops were Mexican nationals? My Vinnie was a New Yorker through and through.”

  Joe shrugged his shoulders and said, “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  Carol said, “Vinnie was a shitty husband, but a good provider. He usually thought things through. You know what I mean?”

  Joe just nodded like a nervous kid on his first date.

  Carol hoped he might be motivated enough to go to his bosses and negotiate a severance package.

  TEN

  Tom Eriksen wondered if his friend John Houghton was playing a joke on him. Although John clearly had a drinking problem, which was not always under control, he had never asked Eriksen to meet him at a bar before. But when he had called and told Eriksen he needed to talk to him and suggested this place called the Border Crossing, it sounded too important to ignore.

  The sprawling club was set up like an old-style disco right down to the glittering ball hanging above the giant dance floor. KC and the Sunshine Band blared over the phenomenal sound system as every possible faction of people crowded onto the dance floor. There was the obligatory bachelorette party with a dozen pretty young women swilling tequila shots and dancing as a group. The largest section of dancers appeared to be younger gay men, and a much smaller segment of the population was couples, with the male partner invariably looking somewhat uncomfortable.

  Eriksen sat in the rear corner by himself, sipping a Coors and enjoying the various styles of dancing as well as the solid beat of the music. John had said he needed to talk, not that he wanted to. There was no question that his partner was onto something. Eriksen heard his supervisor’s voice in his head saying, “Stay away from John Houghton,” but it made no difference to him.

  He had just looked down at his watch and noted that John was more than thirty minutes late when a tall woman in a long, shiny dress, plopped down on the couch next to him. She wore heavy eyeliner, and it took a moment for Eriksen to notice her pronounced Adam’s apple.

  She scooted a little closer, turned her head, and said in a husky voice, “Hello, gorgeous.”

  Eriksen couldn’t help but smile as he said, “Hi.”

  “Good-looking and not too talkative. You’re my kinda guy. Do you come here often?”

  Eriksen appreciated the attention, no matter who it was from, and thought she had a pretty face, but he had to ask, “You’re a dude, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” He looked dejected.

  Eriksen just nodded, not wanting to insult the tall man.

  The man said, “Would it help if I told you my penis doesn’t work anymore?”

  Eriksen shook his head and said, “Not really.”

  The man shrugged and said, “To each his own,” as he stood quickly and zeroed in on a young man sitting at the edge of the bar.

  Eriksen gave him a wave and said, “Good luck,” as the man walked away. Then he noticed John walking toward him.

  John said, “Making new friends?”

  “Not very well. I was dumped for the guy at the bar.” He could smell the alcohol on John’s breath as he took a seat on the couch where the transvestite had been sitting moments before. After almost a minute of silence, Eriksen leaned in and said, “Why are we here, John?”

  “None of your stuffy, stuck-up fellow FBI agents would be caught dead in a place like this. And the music is loud enough that I know we would never be recorded. This is one of the safest places in town to meet.”

  “I mean what’s so important?”

  “One of the coyotes was a small-time thug from New York. I want to do some more checking before I say anything else.”

  “What’s a New Yorker doing in Texas running undocumented people across the border?”

  “That’s the big question. I learned through my associates in Juárez that he sometimes worked with another guy known only as Cash. He might be Colombian and always wears black. I think your friend Dr. Martinez might know more about what’s going on.”

  Eriksen didn’t like the idea of a doctor who tried to do what was right when the Border Patrol agent was shot not being a completely stand-up guy. “What’s our next move?”

  John hesitated and said, “I’m not sure you should be involved in our next move. I heard you were told to stay away from me, and for the sake of your career you should probably listen. I just didn’t want you feeling guilty about a shootout with a wannabe mobster who was probably killed by someone on the other side of the border. You just sit tight and this’ll all work out.”

  “But I want to help.”

  “Then keep your ears open and let me know if you hear anything important. I’m gonna poke around a little bit more, and I guarantee we’ll straighten the shit out.” He reached over and drained Eriksen’s beer. As he slapped the empty bottle back down on the table, John smiled and said, “Then maybe we can go on Ted Dempsey’s show and make a big splash.”

  * * *

  Cash didn’t like being around Ari, especially at dinnertime. So he didn’t mind waiting in his two-year-old Cadillac CTS outside a little fast-food joint called Chicago Street Food. Why on earth some redneck from El Paso thought it would be a good idea to start a restaurant based on Chicago cuisine was beyond him, but Ari loved the place. Cash figured it was probably good, but to spite Ari, he refused to eat there.

  The traffic was light, but the restaurant was slammed. It might as well have been the only place to eat in the whole city. He hated crowded restaurants, but he liked this new assignment even less. What the hell was this job coming to? There used to be a certain dignity and honor to his chosen profession. At least that’s what the general public thought thanks to writers like Mario Puzo and TV shows like The Sopranos. He knew it wasn’t that way in real life, but he’d always tried to maintain certain boundaries. He didn’t go after a man’s family unless they were part of the problem, he didn’t deal with addicts, and he didn’t kill dogs to slip into people’s houses. Surprisingly, out of those three rules, it was the dog one that had screwed him up the most. He’d had to pass on two different hits because of family dogs that made too much noise, but he couldn’t justify shooting an innocent hou
nd who was just doing his job.

  He had other rules, lots of them, and now the company was asking him to cross one of his self-imposed boundaries. And he didn’t like it one bit. He’d quit this job if he thought he’d survive more than a week. But the one way out, the one chance he had to maintain his dignity and still fulfill his obligations, was a muscle-bound little Israeli who got on his nerves more than anyone else he had ever met.

  His employers had said to use Ari any way he saw fit. And this was one way he could keep the little jerk-off busy and accomplish a task he’d rather not do himself. It made him wonder how an American company like his employer came across an Israeli with homicidal tendencies like Ari. Cash supposed it wasn’t much different than him being hired, except he knew he’d been vetted through a number of sources and he was reliable, trustworthy, and professional. As far as he knew, Ari possessed none of those attributes.

  Ari used his stout, short legs to hustle out of the restaurant with a sack full of dinner and a gigantic Coke with a straw pointing straight up. He slid into the front seat and popped out a sausage-and-peppers sub without even asking permission. He jammed the leaky Coke between his legs and wolfed down a tremendous bite of the messy sandwich, dripping some kind of orange sauce onto the front of his T-shirt.