Death Rattle Read online

  “How’d it go with the girl?” said Finn.

  The smile slid from Mona’s face.

  “She grew up in a rough part of Mexico City. Left home young, at fifteen, and headed up to Tijuana, to work in a factory—or so she says. In TJ, she got mixed up with an enforcer for the Caballeros cartel by the name of Salvador Soto. She tried to get away from him, so he threw battery acid over her. She’s burned from the neck down.”

  Mona picked up her wineglass and poured half of its contents down her throat. She didn’t add that Carmen had been tortured after U.S. border agents had returned her to Mexico. In the anger that had consumed her in the car, Mona had felt a need to blame someone, and the people she felt were most obviously responsible were the border agents at San Ysidro who had sent Carmen back to her horrific fate. But Nick was a border agent, and she knew he would hold the cartel thug responsible, not his colleagues at San Ysidro. He’d be right, of course; the border agents were just doing their jobs, enforcing the law. But right at that moment, Mona didn’t need him to be right.

  After her shower, Mona had seen Finn’s dress uniform hanging in the closet, and for a moment had felt a rancor against him. Her work colleagues were always surprised when they learned what her husband did for a living, and when her job confronted her with the cruelty in the heart of people, as it had that day in the detention center, she was sometimes troubled by the notion that she had married the enemy. She reminded herself that it was Finn who had saved Carmen, and it was Finn who had asked her to help her.

  “Know what a ‘herper’ is?” she said finally.

  Finn shook his head.

  “It’s someone who keeps snakes as pets. Carmen says that this psychopath, Soto, is a herper. Just loves snakes. Especially the venomous ones. He collects them from Australia, Thailand, all over. She says he has aquariums filled with cobras and rattlesnakes. She says he gets them out to impress his narco buddies, scare them a little. And she says when he wants to kill someone and make a point of it, he puts them in a box with the snakes. He threatened to do it to her.”

  Mona took another sip of wine and made a conscious decision to relax and enjoy the remainder of the evening. Like any institution, the CBP had its good guys and bad guys. One thing she knew for sure, her husband was one of the good ones. “Anyway. Guess what she called you?” She smiled. “Her salvavida. Do you know what that means?”

  When he shook his head, she said, “Lifesaver.”

  He chuckled. “Salvavida. That’s my Spanish word for the day.”

  “I thought you’d like that. She also called you capitán.”

  His dimple appeared. “So you’ll take the case?” he said.

  “Of course. Your wish is my command, Captain Lifesaver,” said Mona. She took another sip of wine. It left a tingle on her tongue. She was starting to relax.

  Mischief flashed across Finn’s eyes. “Well. I just hope she realizes how lucky she is, getting the best legal counsel in California,” he said. Casually adding, “Best-looking, too.”

  About then, Mona had an urge to walk over to her husband and straddle his lap. Instead, she stripped meat off a drumstick with her teeth and gave him a look that said, You’re next.

  TWO

  SHORTLY after nine the next morning, a Tuesday, Mona was at her desk at the Juntos office in Boyle Heights when Joaquin Vargas walked in.

  Joaquin wore an open-collared dress shirt, dark pleated trousers, smart shoes. He’d recently started dyeing his hair, according to Natalie, the legal aide who also worked the reception desk part-time. “I think he does it himself,” she’d whispered.

  “How was your trip?” said Joaquin.

  “Long and hot,” she said. She pictured rattlesnakes but didn’t mention them.

  Joaquin smiled. “And the girl Finn rescued?”

  “They’ve got her on illegal reentry. Arraignment’s on Monday.”

  Joaquin settled into the seat across from Mona’s desk. “Talk me through it,” he said.

  Mona thought for a moment. “She grew up in a slum in the capital, but she’s been living in Tijuana for the past five years. She’s smart and tough. She’s also terrified. She got involved with a guy who turned out to be a psychopath. An enforcer with the Caballeros. She ran away, got stopped at San Ysidro and sent back. To punish her, he poured battery acid on her.”

  Joaquin’s features clustered into a knot of revulsion.

  “The boyfriend’s name is Salvador Soto,” continued Mona. “He’s pretty high up in the organization, according to Carmen. She says he can reach Oriel whenever he wants.”

  Joaquin raised both eyebrows, impressed. Oriel, the head of the Caballeros de Cristos cartel, was the most wanted man on earth.

  “You know Forbes put him on their rich list?” he said.

  Mona said no, she didn’t.

  “He’s worth, like, two billion,” said Joaquin.

  “They give a figure? Forbes did an audit on Oriel?”

  Joaquin scratched the back of his head. “Good point. Who the hell knows how they came up with the number.” He went quiet for a moment. Then he said, “From what you’ve told me, I don’t see much of a case.”

  One great thing about working for a not-for-profit, the hierarchy was flat. Though Joaquin was nominally her boss, he never actually pulled rank or vetoed any of her initiatives. But he liked winning, and if a case appeared hopeless to him, he always argued against taking it. She’d often heard him say that he’d worked too long in the not-for-profit sector to charge at windmills, and she’d had many robust discussions with him about various cases she had taken on. Now she leaned back in her chair and waited for him to say his piece. When he leaned forward, she noticed his gray roots.

  “Illegal reentry’s a felony, not a misdemeanor,” he began, “which means federal court, not immigration, which means you won’t be fighting just to keep her in the country; you’ll be fighting to keep her out of jail. Right there, you’ve tripled your workload. On top of all that, she has criminal associations. The court won’t like that.”

  “She’s a torture victim. If she goes back, Soto will kill her.”

  “You’ll have to prove that. You’ll have to prove they were in a relationship. How are you going to do that?”

  Mona spun her computer monitor around.

  “She gave me her Facebook password,” she said. She pointed at a photo on Carmen’s page. It showed Carmen in a bikini, standing on a beach next to an unsmiling, fully dressed man with a black mustache. Carmen had an arm around his shoulder. Her other hand was on her hip. She was arching her back, thrusting her breasts forward, posing. The photo had been taken before Carmen’s boyfriend had poured acid on her.

  “You going to show this to the court?” said Joaquin. “She looks like a hooker.”

  Not a word Mona used, but she let it go.

  Vargas looked up. “Is she?”

  Mona shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “It will to the judge. He’ll cry moral turpitude.” Joaquin looked dubiously at the photo again. “She’s smiling. She looks happy.”

  Mona shook her head. “She’s not smiling because she’s happy. She’s smiling because there’s a camera. In the picture, she’s seventeen.”

  He sighed. “I don’t know, Mona.”

  “She says he’s killed dozens of people. He’s crazy, she says. He would lock her in the closet and leave her there for hours. And that was before the acid. He threatened to kill her.”

  “Have you got any evidence? Anything at all?”

  Mona picked up her phone and keyed a code into the screen.

  “She gave me the PIN to her message service. Listen.”

  She held up her phone toward Joaquin. A man’s voice played from the phone: “Voy a matarte, puta. Lentamente, para que sufras. La víbora te va a besar.”

  He made a hissing sound.

  “‘The snake’s going to kiss you’? What does that mean?” said Joaquin.

  “He’s threatening to put her in a box fil
led with snakes. That’s what he’ll do to her if she goes back. She says he’s done it to others before.”

  “Look, I feel for her. I really do,” said Joaquin. “But I just don’t think you have a case, Mona. That’s the cold hard truth.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair. “Nothing I’m saying is making the slightest difference, is it?”

  Mona smiled.

  “No,” she said.

  * * *

  Mona didn’t see Joaquin again until the end of the day, when he said a quick goodbye and disappeared into the elevator with Natalie, leaving Mona alone in the office. She swiveled around to the window and watched the last of the light slip down the glass faces of the skyscrapers downtown. Her thoughts turned to her parents, to how, like Carmen, they’d also crossed the border, drawn to the work and the opportunity for a better life this nation had provided them. Mona was born in the United States and knew no other country. But she also honored her parents’ experience; what it had cost them to leave their homeland, and the efforts they had made once they had reached their adoptive one. She knew she’d gotten into college thanks to the solid foundation her parents had laid for her. They’d worked hard and taught her and her brother to do the same.

  The sun dropped below the horizon, and the sky turned bruise purple. She thought about her older brother, Diego. She remembered how angry she’d been when he’d gotten out of the navy and promptly joined the border patrol’s air and marine unit at Long Beach, which her college-student self had insisted on calling la migra out of a sense of solidarity. Diego justified his action by saying there weren’t many jobs for ex-navy personnel that allowed him to stay close to home. “It’s either that or the coast guard,” he’d said. “And I’m done with the military.”

  Then, a year later, it was Diego who had introduced her to Nick. Not that she’d been looking to meet anyone; she had recently graduated law school and had just been recruited full-time to Juntos. When Diego had badgered her into coming to a family barbecue at the Long Beach Air and Marine Station, she’d done so reluctantly and had gone determined to make sure the irony of her presence was lost on no one. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding, I’m here to support Diego. I’d rather die than date a border agent,” she’d said to Finn when Diego introduced them. Finn had simply smiled his dimpled smile and asked if she was hungry. Then he’d gone off to fetch her a plate of barbecued beef and pinto beans. Mona ended up dating him anyway. And then it was Diego who died.

  Three years had passed since Diego had been killed in the line of duty, but the grief still sometimes flooded through her in waves so powerful, they left her out of breath. She waited for the feeling to subside. Outside, the city’s lights twinkled like stars on the surface of the sea. Her pulse settled. She swiveled back around to her desk, switched on the desk lamp, and got back to work.

  The hours passed. She reviewed the relevant laws and made notes of those that might be helpful. She reviewed summaries of pertinent cases. When she caught herself rereading the same line three times without registering it, she looked out the window again. The moon was high. The clock on her computer told her it was two in the morning. Enough. She grabbed her handbag, switched off the lights, and took the elevator down to the underground parking garage.

  Mona walked past a gleaming, pearl-white Porsche Macan. It belonged to the guy who ran a tech start-up on the top floor. Mona felt a twinge of envy. The guy looked like he was twenty-five, tops. She’d once sat at her desk and calculated that if, instead of going into the not-for-profit sector, she’d joined one of the big firms that had tried to recruit her out of law school, just the late-night billable hours she clocked as a matter of course would’ve paid off a Porsche outright. Instead, she made monthly payments on the Toyota. She was thirty-two.

  She pressed the Unlock button on the fob. The RAV honked like a startled goose and switched on its headlights, illuminating the concrete wall of the parking bay. At least her car was a better color than the Macan, she thought. The RAV4 was a tawny red that the dealer had told her was called, tautologically, hot lava, whereas the Porsche was a cold, almost blue shade of white. It occurred to Mona that it was the kind of color a sociopath might choose, and in her tired and cranky state of mind, the thought was pleasing to her. She found the tech entrepreneur objectionable. She’d shared the elevator with him a couple of times, a tall, scruffy boy who wore cargo shorts to work, for heaven’s sake. In the elevator, he’d carefully avoided making eye contact, as if meeting her gaze would cause him to explode like a volcano.

  Mona sighed, got into her RAV, and turned the key. The car started right up, reliable as ever. Well, Finn had told her that it was a mechanically sound automobile, and Mona had pretended that it was his advice, and not the color, that made her decide to buy it.

  THREE

  WHILE Mona was working late, Finn was at a bar. Six days had passed since the rescue operation, and he was concerned that the close call with the freighter had rattled everyone’s confidence. He was conscious that he had pushed the envelope out there. So he had organized for his crew to get together outside of work. He wanted to give everyone a chance to decompress. Plus, he had a problem he had to deal with.

  They met at Catalina’s, a sports bar behind the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center. Finn, who no longer drank, but who’d started following the Rams since they’d returned to LA, appreciated the signed jerseys and photos of Rams legends past and present: Vince Ferregamo, Jack Youngblood, Isaac Bruce, Deacon Jones. The number 80 Isaac Bruce jersey in particular brought up strong feelings in Finn. He sat at a long wooden table beneath it. On the wall opposite was a bank of flat-screen TVs. Chinchilla sat to his right, Gomez and Figueroa opposite him. He turned to Chinchilla.

  “You tell Ella about the panga?”

  Ella was Chinchilla’s wife.

  Chinchilla gave a shrug. “I painted a general picture. I didn’t get specific.”

  “Which bits in particular did you leave out?”

  “Details like the space between us and the freighter.”

  Across the table, Gomez gave a mock look of astonishment. “There was space between us?”

  “Enough to slide a sheet of paper through,” said Chinchilla.

  She gave a nervous laugh, and Finn noticed a vein pop in her neck. She patted his arm.

  “Don’t worry, Finn. You made the right call.”

  Gomez agreed. “It was on us to do everything we could to save them,” he said.

  Finn appreciated them saying that. The decision he’d made that night had saved twenty-two lives, but could easily have gone the other way. There’d been so little in it. One thing he was certain of, defeat can always be snatched from the jaws of victory.

  In 1994, the year Finn had started fourth grade, his mother had started dating a new guy. The guy had shown up one day with a Rams jersey for Finn, one with Isaac Bruce’s number on it, and Finn had quickly adopted the team as his own. He’d sat on the carpet in front of the TV, wearing the jersey and mimicking his mom’s boyfriend’s shouts of joy and frustration, an unfamiliar feeling of belonging rushing through him. Then the Rams had quit LA and moved to St. Louis, and not long after that, the boyfriend had left, too, to eventually become just another of the many men his mom had dated, men who had appeared, then disappeared from Finn’s life. He had never worn the number 80 jersey again.

  Finn glanced at Figueroa. He looked uncomfortable. They’d only sat down a couple of minutes ago, but his beer was already empty. Finn wondered whether he should say anything about the seasickness, how it happened to everyone, but thought against it. There was something about Figueroa that displeased him. An arrogance, a sense of entitlement, a blowhard attitude. Then he told himself Figueroa was still young, and the young often seemed that way to their elders. Finn wasn’t so old he’d forgotten what it was like to be young. Plus, Finn wasn’t immune to seasickness. He knew how debilitating it could be.

  “You like the Rams, Figueroa?” he said.

  T
he young man nodded. “Yeah.”

  Finn smiled. They talked football for a while. Gomez went to get another round; Chinchilla went to lend a hand. When they were gone, Finn asked, “Where were you before you joined Air and Marine, Figueroa?”

  “I was at San Ysidro for a year, working the booths.”

  Finn nodded. “It’s a rite of passage.” Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “Listen, about what happened on the water. I’m not going to report you for insubordination. But I want you off my boat.”

  The young man looked into his empty glass. Finn couldn’t tell whether he was relieved or angry.

  “You want my advice, you should consider whether Air and Marine is the right fit for you,” said Finn. “There are plenty of land-based jobs at the CBP.”

  Now Figueroa looked up at Finn, his eyes filled with hate.

  “I don’t want your advice,” he spat.

  Just then, Gomez and Chinchilla returned, each carrying two drinks. Finn thanked Gomez for the lemonade. Gomez was in a chatty mood.

  “Does anyone else feel like there are more pangas out there than before?” he said. “That was our fifth intercept this month.”

  “All this talk about a wall, it’s pushing them out to sea,” said Chinchilla.

  “We’re getting a lot of good intel from AMOC. That’s made a difference,” said Finn.

  AMOC was the newly expanded Air and Marine Operations Center that had just opened out at the air base in Riverside. It gave the CBP the capability to monitor air and marine traffic far out into the Pacific Ocean.

  Figueroa stood. He looked like he was seething. He muttered good night.

  When he was gone, Chinchilla said, “I don’t think I can do another patrol with that guy, Finn.”

  “You won’t have to. He’s off the boat,” said Finn.

  “Bummer. I never got a chance to apologize for Tasering him,” said Gomez.

  “You didn’t write him up? For stepping up to you out there?” said Chinchilla.

  Finn shook his head. He leaned back and sipped lemonade through a straw.