We sat at the kitchen table in the cool of the ranch house. Jocko had poured us lemonade, cold from the refrigerator and colder still with ice.
“My father and Frank’s grandfather, Gus Harris, were prospecting partners,” Jocko explained. “Back when they were young bucks and this was all still pretty wild country. They did a little wildcat mining together, up there in the Sonora Hills. Never got enough ore out of it to get real rich, but Frank’s grandfather used his share to buy land around here and started running cattle. My father kept prospecting, never got anywhere. When he married my mother and needed regular money, he hired on with Frank’s grandfather. When Gus died, he left my father this section of land so that he could start his own spread. We did okay, but it was a brutal life, hard on us all. My father wanted me to run cattle with him, but at the county fair when I was twelve, I took a flight in a biplane and from that moment on my heart was always in the sky. When we went to war in Korea, I enlisted in the air force, and that was that. After I retired from flying for employment, I came back home. Too old to run cattle, so I went to work for the Harrises, just like my father had.”
“You’re both Desert Angels?” Rainy asked.
“Old Turtle,” Frank said nodding toward Jocko. “Me, I’m Armadillo. How’d you get the contact email?”
“Nightingale.”
It was clear that neither of them could connect the name to a person. Peter’s plan.
“So you know all about Los Angeles del Desierto?” Harris said.
“Not all, but enough,” Rainy replied. “Is Jayne a Desert Angel, too?”
“For Jayne, putting out water and food is one thing. Helping guide these people through the desert is something else altogether. She knows that Jocko and I are involved, but she doesn’t approve. For my part, mostly what I do is give Peter a modest income working for me and give him a lot of time off to do what needs to be done. Small stuff in the grand scheme. I don’t think there’s a lot of risk involved in any of that, but it makes Jayne nervous.” He gave a little, disappointed sigh. “The only risk that interests her is the business kind.”
“When we spoke yesterday, you knew Peter was in trouble,” Rainy said.
“Not for sure. And I certainly didn’t want to say anything that might put you two in danger.”
“Moot point now,” I said. “Do you know anything about what’s happened to him?”
Harris looked to his companion. “You want to take this one, Jocko?”
The old man put down his lemonade. “You know that Peter is what the refugees call a guía?”
“A guide,” Rainy said. “Like a coyote?”
“Not a coyote.” The word was clearly distasteful to him. “He takes nothing and he cares about the people he leads through the desert. He brings them across in many different places. Those places are often at a distance. I fly him there, he leads his people to safety, I fly him back.”
“Safety?” I said.
“Sometimes to others waiting with vehicles. Sometimes to a safe location, out of the sun and the heat, until arrangements can be made.”
“What kind of safe location?”
Jocko shrugged. “Peter’s always secretive. In case of a leak. The less any of us know, the better.”
“But there was a leak,” Rainy said. “Somehow the Rodriguez family knew.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“We know Peter had a rendezvous set up two nights ago,” I said. “Did you fly him there, Jocko?”
The old man nodded. “We had a prearranged pickup time yesterday. When he didn’t show, I knew something was wrong.”
Harris said, “Then you two pop up asking about him and the Rodriguez family. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.”
“We just saw you come in for a landing, Jocko. Where were you?”
“Flew over the area where I dropped Peter. Been at it the last two days, looking for whatever. So far nothing.”
“Could you fly us there?”
“I’ve got a single-passenger biplane. I can fly only one of you.”
“Today?”
“Got to fuel up first.”
“Okay if I go, Rainy?” I said.
“I’m heading home. You can come with me and wait there,” Harris offered her.
“I’d rather wait here,” Rainy said. “If it’s all right with Jocko.”
“Mi casa es su casa,” the old man said with grin.
“You men be careful out there,” Harris said. “There are a lot of names for that desert. The one that covers it all is an old one. The earliest inhabitants called it simply Desolation.”
CHAPTER 12
* * *
I’ve been in small planes before, and choppers, but Jocko’s biplane was something else. He’d given me goggles, which helped, because in the open passenger cockpit the wind smacked me around a lot. Jocko had given me headphones so that we could communicate, but between the roar of the engine and the rush of the wind, I couldn’t hear very well. We were bounced by sudden currents, and I felt like the ball in a circus act of trained seals. Jocko flew west into the sun and south of the Coronados. I saw Sulfur Springs below us, green tendrils against a canvas that was mostly dirty yellow. Not far away was Paradiso, the trailers like Legos in a sandbox. We dropped low and followed the southern edge of yet another mountain range whose name I didn’t know. Then came desert. Real desert. Mesquite and barrel cactus and jumping cholla and saguaro and prickly pear and pipe organ. Most of these things, I knew, were covered with long thorns or short prickles or little hairs whose barbed ends, though delicate, could still drive you crazy trying to get them out of your skin. They gave no shade, no sense of comfort. Nowhere on the hardpan of that desert was there anything that might offer relief from the baking sun. I understood the ancient name for the place: Desolation.
More than an hour after we’d taken off, Jocko circled a landing strip in the middle of nowhere. He touched down, we rolled to a stop, and climbed out.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Got me. This here’s Tohono O’odham land. Some kind of old military training strip, maybe. Peter found it. He uses it as a drop-off and pickup point when he’s leading groups up from the border near Sasabe. Border Patrol knows about it, so I just drop him and take off quick. Maybe he keeps a Jeep out here or has arranged for transport, I don’t know. Could be he just walks.”
I turned in a full circle. Like everywhere else in that part of Arizona, there were mountains in almost every direction, hard walls that rimmed the horizons.
“You go far enough north from here, you hit Eighty-Six between Sells and Three Points. It’s plenty walkable, especially if you’ve got someone who knows what they’re doing, knows how to keep the sign cutters from finding their tracks.”
“Sign cutters? The Border Patrol, you mean?”
“Exactly. They’re damn good at what they do, and what they do is find people who cross that border illegally. But Peter’s every bit as good at erasing his trail as they are at cutting sign.”