25
BRANDON RODE around the valley with Dionne at the wheel explaining that her daughter got sent home sick again because either her immune system had gone on strike or she was just allergic to this place. Brandon made listening murmurs while tracking wing strokes in the peacock-colored twilight and picturing what he’d wear to lunch with Madeline, imagining something considerably brighter than anything he owned.
When the call about the suspicious van on Markworth came in, they were already eastbound on H Street. So Dionne flipped the lights and pushed the Crown Vic up to eighty after they cleared a knoll and could safely straddle the yellow ribbon. “We’re coming home tonight,” she muttered as they hurtled past a 35 mph sign at 100.
The van could be nothing or anything. Brandon had caught sixteen distraught aliens since the angry Chinese women had crawled out from beneath Greg Dawson’s van. His latest roundup involved an old Lincoln on Jones Road. The driver, who lived nearby in Deming, handled the conversation gracefully enough and everything checked out until Brandon noticed there was no backseat. When he lifted the blanket he found six Indonesians lying sideways, head to toe, to the back of the trunk. Half of them started crying, the other half began praying.
Now he braced himself against the dashboard and hoped for a pot bust or, better yet, a false alarm.
Dionne slowed the Vic enough to make the Markworth turn and guessed right again by skidding onto Badger and sustaining her speed until they almost rear-ended a long avocado-green van with tinted square windows. It abruptly cornered onto Sunrise, squealing and rocking but making the turn. Dionne skidded to a halt, popped it in reverse, sped backwards, then shifted into drive and carefully tailed the van through a new neighborhood, nearly a block behind, not wanting to cause a crash.
“This is the difference between us and cops,” she shouted. “Cops wait for backup!” The van rocked on its shocks through the next two turns, and the neighborhood turned into farms. When Dionne closed the gap, the van bucked off-road into tall grass and stopped. “I got the driver!” she barked, the Vic grinding to a halt and Brandon’s head bouncing off the roof. “You take the van!”
Then she was out, sprinting faster than Brandon imagined she could while he felt his own body charging into the night toward that van door—before it opened. His hand wrapped around the sliding-door handle and he swung it back in a fluid, full-body yank as Dionne shouted at the fleeing driver. The door careened to the end of its track and didn’t stop there, ripping loose in a screech of crashing steel, all of which he heard but didn’t see because he was counting twelve faces warped with fear, their skin pulling back from their eyes and teeth.
He held up his big hands to try to slow their hearts. “All right,” he said, then more softly, “s’all right. Just stay. Just …”
Dionne jogged back, pushing the gasping driver in front of her, head down and handcuffed.
“What ya got?”
Brandon pointed inside.
“Jesus. You haven’t”—she rocked at her hips, waiting for oxygen—“searched ’em yet?”
“No.”
“Then why don’t you have their hands where … What’ve you said so far?”
“Asked them to stay put.”
She glanced at his empty hands. “Get it free of the leather at least, for Godsakes.” Then she shouted at them to put their hands on their heads, first in English, then in Spanish. “?Manos arriba!”
Brandon pulled his gun, pointed it at the ground, double-checked that the safety was on and looked into the childish faces. Dionne continued shouting in Spanish until he said, “They’re not Mexicans. East Indians, maybe, or Pakistanis?” Several nodded vigorously, as if not being Mexican might help. “And they’re couples, husbands and wives, I think.”
“Watch ’em!” Dionne snapped, then searched them one by one as another BP roared up, lights strobing and twirling.
Brandon finally got a clean look at the wheezing, downcast driver, a man of about fifty who’d once told him that the beauty of mathematics rivaled any sunset. “Mr. Pearson,” he said respectfully. “What’re you doing here?”
He was still thinking about him hours later while sipping his fourth pint and half-listening to Dionne tell the agents how petrified the aliens looked after Brandon ripped their door off like a f*cking sardine lid and stuck his big head in the van. “One guy’s got a knife, another’s got a thirty-two, but they didn’t budge. Isn’t that beautiful?”
She’d been talking loud and fast ever since they got to the saloon, telling and retelling their story to as many audiences as she could find. “I come back waving my Beretta, and they couldn’t have cared less. Brandon doesn’t even unsnap, just asks if they’re okay, and they shit themselves. Then he turns to this driver who’s so out of shape that even I could run him down and says, ‘Mr. Pearson?’ Turns out the dirtbag was his fifth-grade math teacher.”
Brandon wanted to explain that Mr. Pearson was actually his sixth-grade teacher, and one of his favorites, but by the time he’d marshaled the right words and waited out the laughter, McAfferty had taken the floor.
“All math teachers should be considered prime suspects,” he said. “Who better to understand just how lucrative and easy this game really is?”
Brandon could sense everyone else in the bar listening to McAfferty and sizing up the seven BPs, including three new transfers from Arizona. He sorted the faces in the back and saw Eddie Erickson jerk his head back, then twirl the shot glass in his fingers.
“The honorable Mr. Pearson was probably pocketing a grand or two per alien to get them to Seattle,” McAfferty speculated. “So he was looking at twelve to twenty-four thou for two hours of sweaty driving. And maybe this wasn’t his first load. Maybe it was his twenty-first, or sixty-first, know what I’m saying? If he’s been in it a while he won’t have any problem posting bail. And if it’s a big operation, they have can money for just this sort of thing and he won’t even have to post it himself.”
Dionne asked McAfferty for a smoke and stuck it behind her ear, then listed all the habits she’d been trying to swear off: the two daily scones, the three triple Americanos, the four—now six, sometimes eight—ciggies a day.
“The resolutions we make at first light are always different than the ones we make at midnight,” McAfferty said, the other agents tuning in to his mock sermon. “I mean, we all have high hopes for ourselves at sunrise. Take last Saturday: I start the day, as I often do, by weeding the cemetery and paintin’ the church. I avoid every vice I’ve ever indulged until lunch, when I cheat on my no-dessert pledge. By dinner I’m itching for just one drink. Then, of course, I head out for another, just to be out with the little people, you know? Another three gimlets into the evening, I spring for a pack of Pall Malls. At this point, f*ck the filters. Know what I’m saying? And even this dreary joint suddenly seems packed with possibilities, though we’re clearly the new pariahs around here.” He raised his voice. “Because obviously it’s our fault that everybody’s smugglin’ something.”
He dropped back into an intimate tone that had everyone leaning closer except for Brandon, who wanted to leave before something bad happened. “But see,” he continued, “you gotta understand I’m in this crazy mind-set where I think being a pariah makes me sexier. And by closing time, it’s just me and two ladies I wouldn’t notice sober if they had strobe lights in their cleavage. Know what I’m saying? So of course I close in on the one who smokes because I figure she’s living for now. And nobody, even at last call, looks at me and thinks long-term, right?” The agents jackknifed with laughter, and Brandon did his best to snort along. “But at the last minute I go for the gusto and try to pick ’em both up because I’m suddenly willing to gamble they’re a package deal.”
Talley poured another round. “So?”
“Turns out—and this will probably astonish most of you—they aren’t interested in me. I mean not even slightly. So I swerve home and call my ex again, naturally—two thirty a.m. my time, five thirty Sunday morning there.”
“How’d that go over?” Talley asked.
“Wasn’t all that well received.”
“There’s some phone service,” Dionne offered, “where you can block yourself from dialing certain numbers after a certain hour.”
McAfferty grunted. “As if that would stop me.”
The bartender moseyed up as the story ended. “Can I get you the check?”
McAfferty looked up, stroking his chin whiskers. “Trying to run us out already?”
“Not at all.” The bartender blanched, his eyes flicking to the dozen patrons standing in the back corner.
“Would you please explain to those Rhodes Scholars,” McAfferty began, as the waiter retied his stained apron, “that the Border Patrol doesn’t police drunk driving and doesn’t give a shit how impaired they get. And after you do that, another pitcher would be much appreciated.”
All the agents except Brandon turned to swap glares with the gang in the back. The bar turned oddly quiet until Eddie Erickson shouted into the lull, “Hey, Repeat! Aren’t you even gonna say hi?”
Brandon blushed instantly, desperately hoping nobody understood that the nickname was aimed at him. Certain facts or phrases used to pop out of his mouth again and again. It took years for Danny Crawford to convince him to ignore the taunts, but the end result felt the same. He caught himself rocking at the hips and went rigid. By the time he risked looking up, McAfferty and Dionne were staring at him. Then Talley said, in a low rumble, “Just say the word, big fella, and I’ll gladly shoot the douche.”
McAfferty waved silent any further commentary, and Brandon remembered to breathe. Mercifully, Dionne asked him to keep her company while she had a cigarette outside. She hooked his arm with hers while she smoked and talked about her daughter. Brandon was too rattled to follow the story, but her voice was soothing. “You’re still juiced,” she said finally, stepping toward her car and tugging on his elbow. “Let me show you my place, then I’ll run you back out here for your truck.”
She was so concerned about being quiet that Brandon felt like they were breaking into the single-story, vinyl-sided house on a corner lot in one of those new cul-de-sacs that looked so alike that he wondered how anybody could remember which one was theirs.
Dionne gave him a quick, whispering tour of a small, bland house that smelled of new carpet, then pulled him into a tidy room with stuffed animals and a framed eight-by-ten of a cross-eyed girl in a Girl Scout uniform. He was relieved to not be alone but felt dazed, then cornered.
“What if Dallas wakes up?” he whispered.
“She won’t.”
“What if the chief or somebody—”
“I’m not your trainer anymore, remember? And we’re way off duty, okay? So this isn’t sexual harassment, if that’s what you’re jabbering about. Believe me, I know what that is.”
“What if—”
“Brandon, I haven’t had sex in twenty-seven months. We are gonna have sex, understand?”
He studied the carpet art on the wall, a landscape like you’d see at Denny’s. It had always puzzled him how people seemed to fill their homes with random art. In Dionne’s case, it was apparently all about matching colors with her bedspread.
When she started unbuttoning, he wanted to say he was having lunch on Wednesday with Madeline Rousseau. “I’m sort of a virgin,” he whispered instead.
“Shhh.” Two more buttons to go. “We all are.”
“What I mean is I’m not very good for this.”
She snickered. “You’re a piece of work, is what you are.”
“Really, in bed, I’m not coordinated.”
“You’re getting me going with all this hot talk, Brandon.” She unclipped her bra and groaned as her breasts swung free like pale sacks of bird feed. He’d never even seen her in civilian clothes before. He couldn’t have been more startled if an owl had flown out of her shirt.
As she reached for him, he scanned the room for hidden ledges, reading lights, ceiling fans, bedposts and other threats. He’d never heard about anyone else hurting themselves during sex. Who else bit through their lip or pulled their groin or cracked their cheekbone on a bedside table? Of the three women he’d had sex with, two of them were animal-rescue types, including the caramel-skinned veterinarian’s assistant who seduced him in the single-wide she shared with eleven cats, two cockatiels and a beagle named Gandhi. That romance lasted only slightly longer than the other two, but he missed her the most, in part because her face was so expressive that he had a better chance of knowing what she was thinking.
Dionne’s lips felt rubbery against his, her ringlets of hair fascinating his fingertips. She tasted like cigarettes and smelled like teriyaki and cotton candy. She simultaneously kissed him and finished undressing—not as quickly as she wanted, apparently, because she was groaning with exertion. He tried to focus on her face because the rest of her was science fiction. In fact, even her head didn’t look the same this close, either, so he shut his eyes and told himself to go real slow.
She stepped away, ripped back the sheets and exposed her marsh-mallow-white body diagonally across a double bed no more than six feet long and unfortunately outfitted with head- and footboards. He stepped out of his pants and leaned across the bed to kiss her, his feet still on the floor. She scooted to the far side of the bed and patted the open space beside her. He did his best, climbing in on his side and bending at the knees so his feet hung off the bed behind him.
She kissed him again. Her tongue bullied past his teeth to explore his mouth. Though trying not to panic, he felt the familiar loss of pacing and control. And his legs were tightening. He wanted to explain that he needed to be on the bottom, with his knees up, but she was pulling his right arm to coax him to roll on top of her. So he swung his right knee across, careful to keep his weight off her as he rose up and straddled her hips with his knees. He bowed his back and neck enough to kiss her, slowly, feeling his body respond, enjoying the softness of her skin, the resistance of her lips.
Keep it slow, he told himself. Make her happy. Slow and happy. But her hips were too wide to straddle for much longer and his thighs started to ache. He tried to lower himself gently, but it all happened at once.
“Brandon, I can’t breathe.”
Her weight shifted beneath him and the footboard dug into his shin. Once he realized where she wanted to roll him, he whipped his head in that direction to help and whacked his mouth and chin on the crescent moon cut into the top of the wooden headboard.
“Oh shit!” she whispered, her breasts shuddering with stifled laughter. “I’m sorry. I’m so … Y’all right?”
Brandon slid his tongue along his lip, unsure if he was bleeding.
“Mama?” The doorknob clicked.
“Just a minute, hon.”
Dionne pushed him toward the side of the bed, where he was lowering himself when a tiny snot-muffled voice said she loved Georgie but that he kept her awake when he ran on the wheel. (It was hard for Brandon not to interject that hamsters run up to seven miles a night.) So couldn’t they put Georgie in the living room, if she kept the cage so clean that Grams wouldn’t complain about the smell? Before there was a chance to respond, the little girl started listing everything that had gone wrong that day until Dionne interrupted to tell her to save that talk for the morning. “Back to bed, now, sweetie. You need even more sleep when you’re sick, remember, so—”
“What’s wrong?” a much older voice asked. “What’s all the noise?”
Dionne groaned. “Jus’ me and Dallas, Mom.”
A pole lamp by the door flashed on.
“Jesus, Mom, what’re ya doing?”
Brandon recoiled his feet and wedged as much of himself beneath the bed as would fit.
“What am I doing?” the lady asked. “You’re the one waking everybody up.”
Brandon heard heavy shuffling toward the bed. He pushed up on a crossbeam to squeeze more of him beneath it, then eased it back down, compressing his ribs.
“Let’s go back to bed,” the lady said. Then, under her breath, “Smells like a bar in here.”
“Good night, Mom.”
When she whispered for Brandon to come out, he replied in a low muffle that he couldn’t move until she got off the bed, although the truth was he was more comfortable beneath it. But then he emerged, holding his mouth so he wouldn’t bleed on her sheets and started climbing back inside his clothes.
“I’m so sorry,” Dionne said, her cheeks purple with smothered laughter.