Death Rattle Read online

  From the direction of Long Beach behind them came the thrum of a helicopter approaching.

  ONE

  THERE are two towns named Paradise in California: one in the north, in the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and one in the south, in the treeless desert near the border with Mexico. Mona Jimenez drove around the parking lot of the migrant detention center outside the southern Paradise, looking for a patch of shade to park in. According to her dash, it was an unseasonable ninety-five degrees outside—it was only the first of April. She’d heard someone on the radio say that on average, March had been hotter than the previous July, which would’ve worked as an April Fools’ joke if she hadn’t just spent the past four and a half hours driving over baking mountains and through parched desert, mirages shimmering on the blacktop up ahead, air-conditioning blasting. Now the air-conditioning was making an irritating rattling sound, and Mona was worried. She didn’t need it failing—home was Redondo Beach, four and a half hours in the other direction, and she didn’t think she could take ninety-five degrees for four and a half hours.

  But the Paradise Detention Center had been designed for one function only, and that function didn’t extend to providing shade trees in its parking lot for the overheating cars of migrants’ rights attorneys from the coast. In fact, a cynic might argue that the Border Security Corporation of America—the private company that ran the center on behalf of the federal government—had chosen to build its newest facility in the bleached-bone nowhere between Yuma and El Centro precisely to discourage migrants’ rights attorneys from visiting, and at that moment, Mona was feeling cynical. The BSCA legal liaison with whom she’d spoken by phone had warned her to watch her step in the parking lot.

  “For what?” she’d said.

  “Rattlesnakes.”

  There wasn’t a patch of shade to be found anywhere, so Mona parked in the baking sun as near as possible to the detention center itself. She switched off the engine, killing the air-conditioning with it. Then she pressed her forehead against the side-window glass and carefully scanned the ground. She’d never actually seen a rattlesnake in real life, only on TV, and she preferred to keep it that way.

  A moment passed. No snake rattled.

  Mona sighed, flipped down the sun visor, and checked her face in the vanity mirror. Doesn’t mean they’re not out there, she thought, refreshing her lipstick. Could be just waiting for me to get out. Could be watching from some rattlesnake hidey-hole. Did they even live in holes? How would they dig, without limbs? She checked the ground one more time before opening the door.

  Stepping from the air-conditioned car into the bakery-oven heat cut her breath.

  “Fuck,” she said, instantly breaking a sweat and regretting the pantsuit she’d put on in the near-dark that morning, dressing quietly so as not to wake her husband, Customs and Border Patrol Marine Interdiction Agent Nick Finn, who’d been working night shifts; she’d chosen the suit because it looked sharp and showed she meant business. She knew from experience that private prisons were operated by men prone to calling women they’d just met sweetheart, and she wanted to preempt that. But the suit was cut from a fabric too heavy for this heat, and she exhaled with relief when she was buzzed into the air-conditioned building. By the time she’d gotten through all the usual formalities (metal detector, pat down, briefcase inspection, surrendering her cell phone, reading the conditions of entry, signing the visitors’ log), she’d almost stopped sweating. So she was disappointed when a guard led her not to a nice cool air-conditioned visiting room but to a fenced-off visitors’ section of the outdoor recreation area, which consisted of a row of picnic tables on a concrete slab laid under a canvas sunshade rigged between pylons. The canvas blocked out the sun’s direct burn, but the air beneath it was still almost unbreathably hot.

  Mona took off her jacket, sat down at a table, took out a pen and yellow legal pad, and asked where all the detainees were.

  “In the canteen. It’s lunchtime.”

  She waited for him to bring out her client. While she waited, she looked round the empty yard; beyond the picnic tables was a long stretch of dirt interspersed with brittle bushes. A few benches with concrete legs had been installed along the perimeter fence, which had razor wire spiraled atop it.

  They needn’t have bothered with the fence, she thought; if anyone escaped, the rattlesnakes would get them.

  * * *

  Mona heard the beep of a scan card and then the clack of a heavy lock, and then a guard led out a black-haired young woman wearing an orange jumpsuit and plastic Adidas sliders. Mona already knew this much about her: her name was Carmen Vega, she was twenty years old, and she had been plucked from a sinking panga while attempting to enter the country illegally. She had had a large amount of cash on her, much of which was lost during the rescue. She was in detention because it wasn’t her first attempt—attempted reentry after removal was a felony, and the new administration had mandated that every case be prosecuted, no matter the circumstances. The new policy, which the administration had dubbed Operation No Return, had been a boon for the for-profit prison business. Carmen had been sent here to Paradise because the government’s own facility in San Bernardino was full. All this Mona had learned from her husband, Nick Finn.

  Mona stood and introduced herself. “I’m the lawyer from Juntos,” she said in Spanish. Mona worked for a not-for-profit called Together for a Safe Border. Everyone called it simply Juntos. The two women shook hands, Mona noticing how bright Carmen’s black eyes were, like stones in a shallow stream. They sat down. “First, let me ask, how are you doing in here?” said Mona.

  “Fine.” The girl shifted her gaze to the still-virgin page on Mona’s yellow legal pad.

  Mona put down her pen. “How’s the food?” she said.

  “It’s fine.”

  One thing Mona knew, prison food was never fine. “Listen, Carmen,” she said, “I’m not from border patrol. Juntos has nothing to do with the government. We’re on your side. You understand?”

  Carmen’s gaze lingered.

  Mona could tell she was being sized up. “For me to be able to help you, I need to know you’re telling me the truth. Everything you say to me is confidential. Understand? Everything.”

  Carmen nodded. “The food here is disgusting.”

  Mona smiled. It was a small truth, a first step. “What about the guards?”

  Carmen looked over her shoulder at the dough-bellied man in uniform by the door. “The guards are disgusting, too.”

  Mona softened her eyes, waited for more. When nothing came, she said: “Carmen, has anyone forced you to do anything you don’t want to do?”

  Carmen shook her head. “Not like that. They violate us with their eyes. And they don’t respect us. They make us eat with plastic cutlery, for our own protection, they say. The knives are useless. We end up eating with our hands like animals.”

  Mona wrote it all down. Carmen was warming to her subject.

  “The toilets overflowed last night. They didn’t fix it until this morning.”

  Mona reflexively scrunched up her nose. Paradise Detention Center was less than a year old. She’d read somewhere that the BSCA had received $15 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

  Yet the toilets overflowed.

  “I bet you can’t wait to get out,” she said.

  “I don’t want to go back to Mexico. I’d rather stay here.”

  Mona nodded. She could detect Carmen’s Chilango accent. “You told the agent at Long Beach you’re from Tijuana, but you don’t talk like a northerner,” she said.

  The girl shrugged. “I grew up in Ciudad Neza,” she said, meaning Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a well-known slum east of the capital. Mona asked how long she’d lived in Tijuana.

  “Five years.”

  Mona calculated she must’ve left home at fifteen. “Did you finish high school?” she asked.

  Carmen shook her head.

  “Too boring.”

  “Why did you go north to
Tijuana?”

  The girl hesitated before saying, “To find work in a maquiladora.”

  “Which one?”

  Carmen gave the name of a company Mona had never heard of. Mona wrote it down. “What do they make?”

  “Electric components. For automobiles.”

  “How much did they pay you?” Mona asked casually.

  “Thirty pesos an hour,” said Carmen.

  About a buck eighty. Pure fiction, thought Mona. She knew the real figure the border factories paid the women they employed. And Finn had told her about the money belt and all the cash floating on the water. Far more than Carmen would’ve made working in a factory. She wrote down Carmen’s number anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Carmen shifting in her seat.

  “Are you married?” said Mona casually.

  “No.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  Mona gave Carmen a friendly smile. “I’m surprised. You’re very pretty. You remind me of someone…”

  Carmen didn’t ask who. Her guard stayed up.

  Mona softened her eyes. “Let’s talk about how you got here. It must’ve been terrifying when the boat started to sink.”

  “The man said it would be safe.”

  “Which man?”

  “The man in Tijuana.”

  She paused, and her expression changed.

  “Thank God for the lifesavers,” she said. “The captain saved my life.”

  Captain. Mona suppressed a smile. Four days earlier, her husband, Nick, had pulled Carmen out of the water. Mona thought she might try calling him Capitán when she got home, see how he liked that.

  “What made you get into that panga, Carmen?”

  “To escape poverty and misery.”

  It was a stock answer the coyotes trained their clients to give. Mona had heard it a hundred times.

  “But you had a good life in Tijuana. A good wage, no husband or boyfriend weighing on you—”

  “I don’t want to work in a maquiladora for the rest of my life.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  Carmen sat up a little taller. “I want to be an actress on television.”

  Mona’s expression didn’t change. Everybody has dreams.

  “I can imagine you on-screen. You’re pretty enough.”

  This time, the compliment outflanked Carmen’s guard. She started twirling a lock of hair. Mona tapped her pen on the pad. “I remember now who you remind me of: Do you watch Aprendí a Llorar?”

  Carmen looked coy. Aprendí a Llorar was a hit Colombian TV show about a teenager named Dolores Romero who loses her parents when their private jet crashes into a mountain. Dolores inherits their fortune but can’t touch it until she turns eighteen. Her uncle becomes her legal guardian and tries to poison her. She survives and runs away, but the toxin leaves her horribly disfigured. Penniless, she gets a job with a traveling circus, selling tickets from a darkened booth. She falls in love with a handsome young knife thrower but doesn’t dare show him her hideous face.

  “You look just like Dolores at the start of Aprendí a Llorar!” said Mona.

  “That’s just a stupid telenovela,” said Carmen. Mona shrugged. Telenovelas were her guilty pleasure. It’s how she switched off after work. That’s why she knew that the lovelorn but disfigured Dolores strikes up a friendship with a sideshow snake charmer, who works out what kind of toxin the uncle used and concocts an antidote. Dolores blooms into a ravishing beauty and becomes a target for the knife thrower, spinning on his wheel. A television producer sees their double act, signs them up, and makes them famous. The uncle recognizes Dolores on TV, tracks her down, and tries to murder her again, but the knife thrower saves her just in time, killing the uncle in a flurry of blades. Millions tuned in to watch the finale, in which Dolores returns to her family’s hacienda and marries her knife thrower on her eighteenth birthday.

  “How much did you have in your money belt?” said Mona.

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  Mona raised an eyebrow. “You saved up $5,000 just from working at the maquiladora?”

  Carmen shrugged. “I work hard.”

  “How much did you pay the man on the beach?”

  “One thousand.”

  “Did you pay the same the first time you tried to cross?”

  No answer.

  Mona looked candidly at Carmen. “I want to make sure you understand how serious the situation is,” she said. “The first time a person gets caught trying to cross the border, it’s a misdemeanor. La migra sends you back and tells you not to try again, like they did”—Mona consulted her notes—“on August 26 last year, at San Ysidro. But the new laws mean if you get caught a second time, they can send you to prison for two years.”

  Mona paused. Then she leaned forward and said, “But it’s not just that. You almost died in that boat. You want me to tell the judge you risked your life just to go to Hollywood?”

  Mona watched Carmen closely. She really was very pretty, her black eyes gleaming beneath long lashes and attended-to brows. Mona was almost certain the girl had never seen the inside of a maquiladora. She was a pretty young woman in a coarsened world. Mona could see she was thinking hard.

  “What do you want me to say?” said Carmen.

  Mona put down her pen and took Carmen’s hands in hers. “You don’t have the hands of someone who works in a factory, Carmen.”

  The guard said, “Hey. No contact.”

  Mona let go of Carmen’s hands. “I want you to trust me.”

  “I had a boyfriend,” said Carmen.

  “He gave you the money?”

  Carmen stiffened. Her voice got sharper. “I took it.”

  Mona could tell she’d touched a nerve. “Where is he? In Tijuana?”

  “Sometimes. I don’t know. He moves around.” Carmen rubbed the back of her hand.

  “Why did you leave him?” said Mona.

  No reply.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  Carmen put her arms across her chest. “He was … he was finished with me.”

  “What do you mean, ‘finished’ with you?”

  “I mean it was finished between us. You understand?”

  Mona shook her head.

  Carmen’s black eyes flashed. “If he finds me,” she said in a whisper, “he’ll put me in with the snakes.”

  A moment passed. Mona realized she was holding her breath.

  “That’s what he did to the last girl he was finished with,” said Carmen. “Put her in the box with the snakes. When they found her body, her flesh had turned black.”

  “He threatened to kill you?”

  Carmen nodded.

  Mona made a note. “Carmen, this is important,” said Mona, her voice low. “Did your boyfriend ever hurt you?”

  Before Mona could stop her, Carmen unzipped the front of her jumpsuit, pulled up her T-shirt, and showed Mona her breasts. Where her flesh should have been smooth and beautiful, it was burned, pitted, the color of rancid milk. Mona broke out in goose bumps, as though the rec yard had suddenly turned freezing cold. She couldn’t help but avert her eyes.

  “In Hollywood, there are the best plastic surgeons in the world,” said Carmen, her black eyes glowing. “That’s why I took the hijo de puta’s money. He did this to me. He made me ugly. He’s going to pay to make me beautiful again.”

  * * *

  It was dark by the time Mona got back to Redondo Beach. The whole drive home, she’d replayed the scene in the rec yard over and over in her mind’s eye. She hoped Carmen hadn’t noticed her recoil when she had revealed her wound. Mona had never seen the effect of battery acid on human flesh before. Now it was etched so deeply into her memory that she doubted she would ever forget it.

  She got out of the car and stretched the cricks out of her neck and back. Her lower back ached from the hours behind the wheel. She was grateful for the nearness of the sea and the distance from the desert.

  Inside, Finn was at the st
ove. The rich aroma of roasting chicken filled the room. Mona put down her bag, put her arms around him, and pressed her cheek against his back. He smelled of garlic and grease. He had the TV on, watching a Lakers game. He turned around and kissed her.

  “Hungry?” he said.

  “Starving. But I want to take a shower before we eat. It was a thousand degrees out there.” She nodded toward the oven. “Have I got time?”

  Finn pulled open the oven door and examined the bird. Mona could hear its juices sizzling in the pan.

  “You’ve got time,” he said, taking it out of the oven. “You have to let it rest.”

  Mona smiled. He always said that.

  Ten minutes later, wearing comfortable jeans and a blouse, she was sitting at the table. Finn had brought the candles out. He’d turned off the TV, dimmed the lights, and tuned the radio to a smooth-grooves station. She watched him carve the bird, each piece coming away cleanly on his carving fork. He’d put a wineglass and a bottle of white wine next to her plate. Finn was drinking his usual iced tea. It’d been three years since his last drink.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Simple. Went for a run down at the beach. Went to a meeting, had lunch with some of the guys after. Then I went to the grocery.”

  It was his day off, and he looked relaxed. There’d been a time in their marriage when Mona hadn’t known what to expect on his days off, and she’d almost left him because of it; but he’d worked to fix himself, stayed off the drink and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and now when she came home, she never had to think twice before opening the door.