The Territory A Novel

ELEVEN



By noon, the temperature was triple digits. The two-day reprieve had made life more tolerable, but the heat was back like a furnace on full tilt. The Bishop watched the waves of heat radiating up from the desert floor and let the sun bake his skin. He stood on the back veranda of his home and listened to his elderly uncle drone on. Familial obligation dictated that he allow his uncle a place to live out his remaining days with family. His uncle had moved into his home a month ago and begun telling the Bishop how to run the family business.

“If you do not gain control of this now, the future of this family is as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise. We cannot show this weakness. The Americans have slapped us into submission. Your father would never have allowed this.”

The Bishop turned to face his father’s older brother. He sat in a wheelchair under the awning with a light blanket covering his emaciated legs. His body tilted to one side, like a knickknack askew on a shelf, and the Bishop found himself torn between pity and revulsion. Once king of the world, his uncle was now relegated to drool and impotence and a colostomy bag. The Bishop paid little attention to his uncle, but had already come to the same conclusion regarding the Americans. He needed no guidance. The small-town police had made a mockery of his organization.

“It is taken care of,” he said.

His uncle laughed, a wet gurgle from deep in his lungs. “You lost a trailer of explosives. How is that taken care of?”

“I’ve sent two men to the police chief. She will pay the price for her arrogance. She will learn what happens when you don’t play by our rules.”

* * *

Josie woke disoriented, her head heavy with sleep. She felt Dillon’s leg draped over her own and tried to figure out what day it was without opening her eyes. She lay on her back and moved her fingers lazily over his chest and allowed the drama from the night before to filter back into her thoughts as if through a deep fog. She thought she smelled a cigarette and imagined her mother sitting out in her living room, chain-smoking, and waiting on her to get out of bed.

She heard a noise and the scrape of a boot against the wood floor just before she opened her eyes. Two armed men stood at the end of the bed. Instantly awake, her body was rigid with fear. The room was dim, but she could easily distinguish that they were two males in their twenties, one stocky with a short military cut and a bushy mustache, the other taller and wearing a camouflage bandanna around his head and a long gold earring. The stocky man held his gun at his chest, removed the cigarette from his mouth, and dropped it on the floor, grinding it into the wood with his foot.

She forced breath into her lungs and pulled the sheet up, clenched it between her fists at her chest. Take me, she wanted to say. Leave him be. She wanted to stand with her hands in the air and surrender. Walk out of the bedroom with them as Dillon slept on, undisturbed. He did nothing to deserve this. But her body was frozen, her eyes unblinking, her mind barely able to separate dream from reality.

“You made a big mistake,” the man with the bandanna said, and Dillon jerked awake beside her.

“What the hell?” he said, his voice confused.

Under the sheet, Josie squeezed his forearm but kept her eyes on the two men.

“You got two choices and thirty seconds,” the man in the bandanna went on. “You choose to let Gutiérrez and the other three go and you live. You keep them locked up and you die. You choose. Now. Ten seconds.” He spoke with a northern Mexican accent she associated with the border towns.

She spoke with no hesitation. “They go free tonight.”

“You go inside and unlock the cell and it’s done, huh? They walk free to their ride home?” the other gunman said.

Terrified, Josie watched as both men raised their guns and pointed them directly at her and Dillon. She heard him gasp beside her and throw his arm over her, as if his arm could protect her from the spray of automatic gunfire facing them. Then, in tandem, both men swung their guns up toward the wall above the bed and opened fire. Wood and plaster and glass from framed pictures sprayed over them, piercing their bodies. Josie heard screaming but couldn’t tell if it was coming from her or Dillon. He had rolled over on top of her, his body covering hers, his arm cupped around her head as the gunfire continued. She closed her eyes to the white fire coming from the end of the weapons. It felt as if the noise and the debris falling around their bodies lasted for hours. When they had finished, one of the men yelled above the ringing in her ears, “Tomorrow, midnight, you die if our men aren’t free. You count on that.”

Dillon slowly lifted off her as plaster and wood and glass fell from their bodies. Both gunmen were gone. They heard the bloodhound howling outside, and Josie leaped from the bed, running to the front door. She envisioned the dog being shot as an afterthought, but they were already in their vehicle, a black Mercedes sedan, pulling out onto the road.

Dillon came into the living room carrying her bathrobe. He wrapped her in it and tried to hold her, but she pushed him away to grab the cordless phone off the coffee table. She called in the incident to the dispatcher, then tracked down Jimmy Dixon through Border Patrol and filled him in. She called Sheriff Martínez and told him that DPS was on their way to conduct the investigation. The sheriff said he was on his way over. The mayor’s number went to voice mail; she left him the details of it all on the message.

After all the calls had been made, she sat down on the couch with Dillon. He had sat in silence with the shaking dog on the seat next to him.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

He held out his arms and showed her flecks of blood where glass from the picture frames over the bed had penetrated his skin.

“Let me see your back,” she said. He hadn’t spoken, and she worried he might be in shock.

They both stood and he turned away from her. A single rivulet of blood ran down the center of his back from where a larger piece of glass had lodged. She pulled the piece out with her fingernails and turned him around.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

His eyes welled up and he pulled her into his chest. “I thought we were both dead. When the noise stopped, I lay there and couldn’t figure out if I had been shot or not.”

“I’m so sorry, Dillon. I am so sorry you were in the middle of this. This isn’t your battle.”

He pushed her back and clenched his hands on her shoulders as if trying to hold her in place. “You can’t keep this up, Josie. It ends today. You can’t give up your life for this job. It’s not your battle either. You turn in your badge, we pack, and we’re out of here tomorrow. Better yet, we’ll let someone else pack for us and just leave. This town, this place—none of it is worth your life or mine.”

She sighed heavily. “I can’t do that.”

“Like hell you can’t!”

“I understand you want to leave. I wouldn’t ask you to stay.”

The light in his eyes changed. She felt the water rising around her.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” he said.

“Don’t play games with me. I’m too tired. You know that’s not what I meant. But this has nothing to do with you and me. This is my job. It’s what I get paid to do. I didn’t sign a clause in my contract that said if things got dangerous, I could just take off. If you are afraid, then leave. I completely understand it,” she said.

He leaned back angrily. “I’m not afraid for me. The woman who I—” He paused and seemed to mentally slow down. “—the woman who I care deeply about just lay in bed and negotiated with terrorists as they shot holes in her walls. You think I should just blow this off? Just another day at the office for Josie?”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said.

“You are not trained for this kind of work. I know, I have heard, you are a great cop. Outstanding, even. But what you are dealing with is beyond cop work. It’s warfare, and it’s beyond your skill set!”

“My skill set?” She squinted at him in disbelief. “Could you be a little more insulting? You don’t know what kind of training I received. You don’t know what experiences I’ve dealt with to prepare for my job.”

“And exactly how do they train you for men standing at the end of your bed with guns?”

She said nothing.

“What happens tonight when the Medrano clan finds out that you didn’t release their prisoners like you promised? You think they won’t come back and blow this house to kingdom come? You’ve dodged the bullet.” He stopped speaking. He looked as if he wanted to say more but thought better of it.

“I’m going to see this through,” Josie said. “I will not give in to these men. Look what’s happened in Mexico. The government, the police force, the good people in the country have lain down and let the cartels take over. The psychopaths are running the show. I refuse to do that here. I’d like to have your support. It means more to me than you know.”

He stared at her for a long moment before speaking. “I can’t do this. I can’t go to bed each night wondering if you’ll make it home alive the next day. I want a family someday. Kids.”

Josie said nothing.

Dillon stood and went outside on the front porch to wait for the police.

After Dillon was interviewed and told he could leave, Josie spent the next six hours of her Saturday with DPS and Border Patrol. The house was photographed by crime scene technicians who pored over the inside and outside, taking prints and casts. She went to the office and worked with a sketch artist for almost an hour and was pleased with the renditions. Later, Jimmy from BP showed up at the department with a boxed chicken dinner for her from the gas station. They sat together to look at pictures from the Mexican foreign nationals file. Not surprising to anyone, they got a preliminary ID on the suspect with the bandanna and earring as an infantryman for Medrano. Jimmy pulled up the man’s Alien File in the DACS system and found he had been deported twice, was suspected in an armed robbery in Houston, and was wanted for a series of murders in Juárez, Mexico. Josie declined Jimmy’s offer to stay at his home until things stabilized. He’d asked her out to dinner on several occasions, and she always made up an excuse. She didn’t need more complications in her life at the moment, but she did agree to stay at a motel until the prisoners were transferred out of Artemis.

At seven o’clock, Josie called Moss to ask if the request to transfer prisoners had been granted by the federal penitentiary. He said he had been in contact with the warden, and they were working on a Monday-morning transfer.

“Monday? The feds don’t work on the weekend? Medrano made it pretty clear today in my home that they aren’t messing around. If those prisoners aren’t moved by tomorrow evening, are you prepared for what’s coming?”

“Do you know what makes a great man? Perseverance and determination. The willingness to tackle the problems no one else is willing to consider,” Moss said, his tone pious. “Do you think this isn’t weighing on my chest every minute of the day?”

“That’s it, then?”

“I’m working to move the transport time up. If and when that happens, I’ll let you know.” He paused a moment, and his voice softened. “I’m sorry about your house. What happened to you is terrible, and I’ll do what I can to make things right.”

Josie heard the words but realized she was too numb to make sense of them. Usually suspect of everything he said, she was too tired to dig deeper for meaning. She thanked him, hung up, and left word with the dispatcher that she would be staying at Manny’s for the night before returning home in the morning. She walked down the block and around the courthouse to the motel. Through the plate glass window, she saw Manny sitting in his recliner under the yellow glow of his reading lamp. Cigarette smoke filtered up through the light, and his attention was riveted on the book in his lap. He looked over his glasses at her when she stepped inside the door, and he stood and approached the counter. The wringing of his hands and his worry lines reminded her of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. She half expected him to break out into song.

“How are you getting along? I’ve listened to the radio all day long for updates. Have you caught the bastards?”

Josie glanced at the radio sitting on the counter and heard the soft classical music from the local public radio station.

“I’m doing okay. We have three new guests at the Arroyo County Jail. The feds have taken over now. They’ll hopefully be moved quickly.”

He reached across the counter and clasped her hand. “You need a room tonight?”

She nodded.

“You stay in room six. Right next to my apartment. You need anything tonight, you knock on the wall and I’m at your door in two seconds.” He opened the key box on the counter and passed her a gold key on a smiley face key chain. “Anything else I can do?” he asked.

She paused, embarrassed, and looked down at her uniform. “I don’t want to go home tonight. I can’t face that house right now.”

“You need clothes? You go to your room and I’ll run to the store.”

She closed her eyes for a moment to fight back her humiliation. She finally sighed and looked at Manny. “I can’t go to the liquor store in uniform. Do you have any bourbon stocked away somewhere?”

He smiled at her warmly. “Sleep. That’s what you need.” He left her for a moment and returned from the back room with a fifth of bourbon, still sealed. “I get this question occasionally. On the house. The room, too, of course.”

* * *

Josie turned on the lamp on the bedside table and set the air-conditioning on high. The unit hummed to life and blew musty, damp air into the hot room. The paneled walls were painted a buttery yellow, and an ancient wedding ring–pattern quilt was on the bed. Hand-embroidered pillows were piled up against a wicker headboard, and a rocking chair with a lace-covered cushion sat in the corner facing a TV. It was a cozy room that reminded her of country farmhouses back in Indiana. Josie used Manny’s complimentary toothbrush and ate the cheese crackers she had brought with her from her stash at the department. She laid her uniform out across the rocker and propped herself against the pillows in bed in her underwear. She put the remote control beside her and cracked the seal on the bourbon, filling the drinking glass on the bedside table half-full. She stared into the amber liquid in the glass as if some measure of clarity might bubble up into her thoughts after the burn dissipated.

Josie wondered what her mother had done, propped up in a bed just like hers—if she had drunk her own glass of bourbon or taken pills to fall asleep. Josie had tried desperately to keep her mother’s real intentions behind the mental wall she constructed, and she thought she had succeeded. She wondered now if she had been too harsh, if she should have given her mother a chance to explain things. But what good was an explanation in the end? She had been a lousy mother. The question Josie was wrestling with now was, did that give her a free pass to be a lousy daughter? And what about a girlfriend? Did her job give her a free pass to shut out a man who obviously loved her?

Josie drank, eventually straight from the bottle, until the room tilted. She closed her eyes and imagined a chalkboard with a list of solutions. She felt sure there were answers inside her and wondered: Did she want to be a good cop, a good person, a good daughter, a good wife? It was obvious she couldn’t be all those to everyone, so she had to choose. She slipped down the pillows, set the bottle on the table, and fell asleep with the lights on. She dreamt about monsoons filling up the desert, the water closing in around her neck.