“If it was the same van I saw them put Gabriel into, it was a cream-colored cargo van with a sliding side door. No markings on it. Not a new van, old, boxy. I heard only one voice, but there must have been more.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled. Pete answered for her. “Because Ana wouldn’t have gone unless they overpowered her. Believe me.”

  Agent Miller said, without a pause, “We don’t know she did go. She betrayed this guy, Pete. They’re not afraid of leaving bodies. Let’s check upstairs, okay?”

  “I want to go,” said Teresa, and she followed them up the stairs, a silent shadow in her long black dress.

  There were no bodies upstairs, but Agent Miller’s assessment was deadly accurate. Ana was missing, and these men were killers.

  It was just a question of where she would die, and when, and how.

  Things were getting complicated at the command center. Agent Miller arrived to discover that there were four agents from Washington, D.C., who outranked him, fresh off a military transport; he was thanked for his service and put on the bench, along with Pete. In fact, all of the local Border Patrol were benched or sent out on fence duty, even the special investigators. Pete figured the only reason he wasn’t sent, too, was because they didn’t know what to do with him. They didn’t want him in reach of the media, but they didn’t want to use him, either.

  He had the feeling that they were going to assign him to coffee detail, and that wasn’t going to do, not with Ana missing. She had very little time, and they were planning to waste it all.

  He was debriefed by an agent named Nelson, near fifty and balding and so sharp that his glances gave paper cuts. Nelson told him everything was being done that could be done. He wasn’t told the details.

  “What do they think’s going to happen?” Pete exploded after he and Agent Miller and a couple of other Border Patrol investigators were put in a room to write up reports. “Do they really think he’s going to keep her alive? Or do they even care?”

  “Of course they care. Look, Pete, I understand how you feel, but you’ve got to sit down and write this out. They need every bit of information you can think of. Anything about Ana, anything about Cruz. Most of the initial investigative reports were destroyed in the bombing, so they need you to reconstruct things for them. Cruz’s hangouts, his methods, his associates. You can do that I know you can.”

  Pete put down his pen and stood up, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. Miller leaned back to look at him.

  “You really think they’re going to let you walk out of here?”

  “You really think they’re going to want to try and stop me?” Pete leaned over the table, picked up the pen, and wrote five or six lines. He passed the paper to Agent Miller. “This is every address we turned up for anyone connected to Cruz, and believe me, It’s nothing. They won’t go back that way; the drugs were strictly fund-raisers. They’re autonomous now, and It’s a military operation.”

  “So what’s your plan?” Miller asked.

  “How did they know Ana was at the clinic?”

  Miller was silent. He knew exactly what Pete was thinking.

  “They’re somewhere in sight of the building,” Pete finished. “And I’m going to find them.”

  As he started to go, one of the other Border Patrol officers stood. “What’re you carrying?”

  “A nine.”

  The other man unsnapped a leather holder on his belt, removed a magazine clip, and slid it to him. “Don’t go light.”

  The other investigator added a clip, too. Agent Miller watched him pocket the extra ammunition with a trace of a smile.

  “No donations?” Pete asked.

  “Look, I managed this thing right into a hole in the ground. I’ve got a city in riot, scores dead, officers dead, agents dead—believe me, I’m not coming out of this alive, career-wise. I might as well go swinging.” Agent Miller stood up and put on his own jacket.

  “What about your report?”

  “I can write my obituary later.” He opened the door for Pete and looked outside, then gestured for him to follow. “I figure it’ll sound better after I save your ass.”

  Chapter 30

  November 27, 1996

  Dr. Ana Gutierrez

  The smell of the explosives made her throat dry, and eventually made her sick, but they didn’t seem to care. Of course they don’t care, she told herself in disgust. You’re the walking dead. Her health was the least of their concerns.

  Except for Rámon, of course, who seemed to care too much. She flinched away from him when he brought her food, but he wouldn’t let her have her hands free to feed herself, and she knew she needed to eat to keep her strength. More tortillas and beans for lunch, now cold and not as appetizing. She asked to be taken to the toilet again, and Rámon allowed it, but she was given no chance to break free.

  “Why did you blow up the Black Bridge?” she asked him, a blunt question after all the endless silence.

  He gave her a hostile glare.

  “I did not.”

  “Am I supposed to believe there are two maniacs bombing El Paso?” she snapped.

  “We lost one of the packages that contained the explosive—It might have gone anywhere. We would never have destroyed the bridge, and we’d never have bombed mojados. They’re the people we try to help.”

  “The way you used them to bring explosives in on their backs? That kind of help? Rámon, you’re not only a cabrón, You’re a hypocrite. How do you know the bridge didn’t blow up because something went wrong with one of your’shipments’?”

  “Because,” he said calmly, “we have no more shipments. We have everything we need. The package we lost was the last of them, and it was really just security; we had enough already. Whoever bombed the Black Bridge is our enemy, Ana, and maybe you even know who that could be. Somebody who was there when the backpack containing the explosives disappeared. Someone who hates Mexicans enough to persecute them as a profession. Someone for whom this is personal.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your ex-husband. Peter.”

  She laughed and was glad to hear the edge of contempt in it. “Peter Ross is many things, but he is not a terrorista.”

  “I’m going to kill him,” Rámon said as if he hadn’t heard her. “Whatever happens today, I will make sure I send him to hell before I die.”

  “He didn’t set the bomb!”

  Rámon gave her an annoyed look. “Of course he did. Or someone just like him. It doesn’t matter, I promise you. You don’t have to worry. He will die.”

  There was a fever shine to his eyes, and for the first time she realized that he might be sick enough to be unreliable. That was dangerous. He carried the remote control to her bomb vest clipped to his belt, and if she made him angry enough—

  If she made him angry enough, maybe he would blow them all up. That was tempting but terrifying; she didn’t know if she had it in her to be a martyr. She’d rather save her life, she decided, if she could. If Rámon gave her the chance.

  She swallowed bile and said softly, “Good. I hope you do kill him.”

  “My little soldier. You know what today is?” he asked her. She shook her head. “Today is American Thanksgiving Day. Count your blessings, Ana. You’ve found your true calling.”

  At Mama’s house, at any other time, she and Gabriel would be sitting through an interminable family dinner, all of the cousins and aunts and uncles, the children tearing through the house just ahead of punishment. Mama would make menudo and tamales. There would be bickering and laughter and warmth, and Ana’s eyes filled with tears as she thought of Mama left alone, one child dead, the other missing.

  “I hate you,” she said to Rámon.

  He looked up and smiled. “Hate is very close to love, querida, and you love me, too. You always did.” He moved closer to her on the narrow bed; she tried to squirm away, but her hands had been bound again to the bed frame. “Don’t worry. I won’t force you. But this is the last day of your life, Ana. How do you want to end it? Most soldiers would want to make love before they die. Do you?”

  She stifled the first torrent of abuse that came to her lips, swallowed it, and said nothing. He touched her gently on the cheek, warm, rough fingers gliding down to her dun, down the column of her neck, down.

  “We were not so bad together, were we? Better than you and your Anglo.”

  “Yes,” she said through a very dry throat “Better.”

  His thumb stroked her pulse point below the ear, and her breath caught. If she could make him come closer, even with her hands tied, she might find a way to kill him. Or detonate the bomb he’d dressed her in.

  “I don’t think I can,” he said. “It’s my leg, you see. It hurts. But the thought is very nice, Ana, and I appreciate the offer. Some other time, if we both live.”

  He pulled away. She twisted her body up and kicked at him with all her strength. By luck she caught him on the wounded thigh as he rose; he collapsed against the bed with a choked scream, knocking it aside, and she used the momentum to flip the cot over. She could get to the knots now, but she had only seconds to work them. Rámon was not so badly wounded as all—

  —that. Something cold touched her, just behind the ear, like the pointing finger of Death. She froze, the first knot half undone, and felt Rámon’s fingers lock around her neck. He moved the gun to where she could see it and placed it between her eyes. His face was red with fury.

  “I try,” he said, his jaw working unevenly; she heard the grinding of his teeth under the words. “I try to make you understand, but you won’t. This is a sacred duty, Ana. And whether you like it or not, you are a messenger of the gods. We’re going to do it together, and if you resist me again, I will shoot you and drag you, do you understand me?”

  His voice rose to a rough, uncontrolled scream at the end. She held very still and felt the muzzle of the gun tremble on her skin.

  “Yes,” she whispered. Tears slipped free of her control. “I understand.”

  The gun went away. She felt him wrap his arms around her, and in that instant she could have found the remote trigger and set it off, killed him in the same blaze of fury that incinerated her, but for her soul she couldn’t do it. She was too afraid to die.

  And he wasn’t afraid in the least.

  After Rámon left, one of his silent vatos came in to untie her from the overturned bed. To her surprise, he stripped the rope off her wrists altogether and dropped it on the floor. She rubbed the chafed skin anxiously, truly afraid now because the only way he would let her go was in death.

  The man said, “Turn around.” She wouldn’t have obeyed, but there was another man in the doorway, his gun held ready. She slowly turned to face the wall, already imagining the shot, wondering how it would feel in the seconds before it ended. She had no doubt it would be clean. They were soldiers.

  God help her, she was terrified. If she hadn’t already visited the bathroom, she would have lost control of her bladder. The man tapped her on one shoulder.

  “On your knees,” he said. “Hands behind.”

  She lowered herself awkwardly to the cold concrete floor and put her hands behind her back. An execution pose. She wouldn’t know when it came, she hoped.

  A cold click around her left wrist startled her, and she jerked, but not fast enough to avoid having the right wrist captured, too.

  Handcuffs. She strained against them, unreasonably panicked, and froze as the man tapped her shoulder again.

  “Up,” he said. She couldn’t. He tugged her arm until she managed it, moved her aside and set the cot back upright. He smoothed the blankets as if it mattered to her. “Sleep.”

  He left the room without a backward look. She sank down on the mattress as the door swung shut and the lock grated closed, and in the dark, all alone, she began to laugh.

  “Pleasant dreams,” she said, and laughed louder, laughed until she was weak and gasping, and then stretched out on the hard cot on her side and waited for dawn.

  For the day of her death.

  Chapter 31

  November 27, 1996

  Esmeralda Sanchez

  Her television showed her hell. It seemed impossible that these things were happening just on the other side of the river, the invisible wall; it seemed impossible for these things to happen in America. But as she watched the confused, trembling pictures of mobs storming lines of police, of men and women being clubbed and punched and kicked, she found herself drawing her knees up to her chest and biting her lip and thinking how close she had come to being in that chaos. Of course, she knew it would not be the same everywhere—television lied that way, it showed only the worst of a bad situation. But still she had been there, not so far horn where the helicopters circled and men fought for their lives, fought in anger for nothing but more anger.

  She hoped Peter was safe, but there was no way to be sure of it. Jaime was as distant as ever, and she had no telephone to call America, and no car to drive over the border. He is safe, she told herself. He will not leave me.

  But Jaime had left her.

  She crossed the room and changed the television station to one that came in flurried with interference; the English was too rapid for her to understand; but she thought they were talking about the bombing of the Black Bridge. The ruin of it loomed on the small, grainy screen, the black trestles twisted and warped, the center of the bridge missing entirely. One side of it leaned at an alarming angle. I was there. I stood on that bridge. The thought seemed unreal. She had followed a child in a red coat, and maybe that had been God’s will and maybe blind luck, but she had survived, and she had to believe that was God’s hand at work. She turned away from the television to light a candle to the Blessed Virgin and went back to the couch to watch the news report.

  A woman clutching a microphone ended the report from the bridge, and the station began a commercial that showed a happy Anglo family eating breakfast cereal. When it ended, the news showed more of the riot—or was it the same piece? She couldn’t tell. What she could understand let her know that the pictures were old, and that there was no more fighting. Instead, the cameras showed a candlelit vigil, thousands strong, chanting in Spanish.

  Was that better, she wondered, or worse?

  Her attention was drawn by a knock at her door. She turned off the television and looked outside—not Victor tonight, or his daughter Angela, but a thin young boy of maybe fifteen who shuffled his feet and would not meet her eyes. He had a scar on his face, and a tattooed teardrop at the end of it.

  “Yes?” she asked. The boy glanced up at her, then down again.

  “I’am looking for Esmeralda Sanchez. La curandera.”

  “Come in.”

  “It’s you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He looked up now, dark eyes very bright and cold. “You know Peter Ross, la migra?”

  Dread filled her stomach, weighed her down to a nightmarish slowness. The reporters, she remembered. Taking her picture, with Pete. Our Lady of Miracles, they’d called her; Peter had tried to make a joke out of it

  The boy looking at her smiled and said, “Rámon Cruz spIt’s on you, puta,” and took his hand out of his pocket. It held a gun.

  She screamed and slammed the door; if she had not ducked away in the next second, the first bullet would have gone through her. She crouched and ran to the kitchen, unable to control her trembling or her hammering heartbeats. She heard the front door crash open and thought insanely, Jaime! Help me! But Jaime was far away, his spirit severed from her. She was alone now. No one to call on but God and her own strength.

  I have no strength. But she did. She had lived through hell, she had buried her son, she had lived and loved, and she would not lie down for this angry, killing child.

  Her flailing hand found a thin steel skewer that she had used to cook barbacoa for dinner. It was an ugly weapon, still crusted with blackened meat, but she gripped it hard and flinched back beside the wood-burning stove as the boy came into the kitchen, silent as a cat. Her arm touched the coarse black iron of the stove, and she almost cried out as it burned her. She bit her lip and blinked back tears of pain, her hands trembling almost uncontrollably, while the boy stepped closer, searching the dark room.

  She saw him stiffen and knew he had seen her. In the second it took him to react, she lunged. She was aiming for his hand, but he moved too quickly, and the skewer’s sharp point pierced his chest just below the armpit. She tried to stop it, but her fear drove it deep, and her flinch as the boy convulsively fired his gun at a wild angle buried the spike deeper in him. She grabbed for the gun. It was surprisingly easy to take it away from him; he reached out blindly for support and caught the edge of the cabinet by the sink. A dish rattled and fell. In the distance Esmeralda heard dogs barking.

  “Bitch,” he said in breathless amazement, and put his hand on the round top of the skewer that stuck from his side. His face turned the color of dirty linen. When he tried to breathe in, he coughed, and blood beaded on his lips. He pulled the skewer free with his left hand and dropped it to the floor, his eyes still on her but seeing someone else now, something distant. There was no blood, none that showed, at the wound. His heavy coat would have concealed it. She didn’t dare come closer to him until his knees buckled and he slid down the cabinet to huddle like the child he was on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” she said frantically, and knelt beside him, putting the gun aside. She reached under his coat to put pressure on the wound, her only thought now that he was only a child, only a little older than Jaime. She had killed a child. “Don’t move. You’ll be all right. I’ll get help.”

  His breath bubbled out red. She swallowed hard and lunged for the front room, but his hand grabbed her foot and toppled her and she fell stunningly hard. She hardly felt him pull her slowly back toward him. A boy’s voice was talking in the distance—Jaime? Had he come back?

  The boy said, “I’ll take you with me, you puta,” and she had only a second’s flash to recognize the skewer in his hand before he brought it down toward her, had less than that to try to roll aside. Her greater weight threw him off balance, and the skewer drove painfully into the loose flesh at her side, stitching her a wound of no more than an inch, back to front, and this time as she rolled away he did not try to stop her. She plucked the sharp metal free with shaking fingers and screamed at him, “Why? Why did you do this?” As if it mattered.