a first name to find him.”
Locano nodded, but more to himself than me.
“I would like to help you, Mr. Cole, but this business you speak of is not what it was.”
“Are you telling me no one comes north anymore?”
“Of course people come, but the guides I knew are gone. The old guides were a cousin who had come to work the seasonal crops, or an in-law who came to visit relatives. If you gave them a few dollars they would help you, as much out of friendship as for the money, but the cartels and their hoodlums have changed this. They patrol the roads like an army to control the movement of guns and drugs, and now nothing comes north without their permission.”
“Including the coyotes?”
“Transporting people is big business now. Groups from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East find passage to Central America, and are taken north through Mexico in large groups. The new coyotes don’t even call them people. They are pollos. Chickens. Not even human.”
“Coyotes eat chickens.”
“Not only chickens, but each other, and each other’s chickens. Do you know what a bajadore is?”
“A bandit?”
“A bandit who steals from other bandits. These are usually members of different cartels, a Baja stealing from a Zeta, a member of the Tijuana cartel stealing from a Sinaloa or La Familia. They steal each other’s drugs, guns, and pollos — whatever can be sold. They even steal each other.”
“Sold. As in slavery?”
“Sold as in ransom. These poor people have already paid their money to the coyote, then they are kidnapped by the bajadores. They have nothing, so the bajadores demand ransom from their families. I do not know people like this. When they are arrested, I do not represent them.”
I felt my mouth dry as I took in what he told me.
“Nita received two calls from Krista and a male individual, the man demanding a fee for Krista’s return. Nita transferred the money, but Krista is still missing.”
Locano’s eyes grew darker.
“Nita said nothing of an abduction.”
“Nita believes it’s a joke or a scam. They only asked for five hundred dollars.”
Locano looked even more disturbed.
“This is small to you and a woman with a successful business, but it is a fortune to a family counting pennies. We are talking about poor people. A few hundred, a thousand, another five hundred. The bajadores know with whom they are dealing.”
“It still seems so little.”
“Multiply it times a thousand. Two thousand. The number of people abducted would astound you, but such abductions are rare on U.S. soil. Let’s hope Nita is right.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment, neither of us moved as I listened to the voices in his outer office, his wife speaking with one of the younger attorneys.
“Mr. Locano, you may not know this man, but you might know someone who does, or who can find out. Ask around. Please.”
He stared at me, and I could tell he was thinking. He tapped the arm of his chair, then called to his wife.
“Liz. Would you show Mr. Cole to the restroom, please?”
He stood, and I stood with him as his wife appeared in the door.
“Take your time. Wash thoroughly. It is important to be clean, don’t you agree?”
“It’s important to be clean.”
“Take your time.”
Elizabeth Locano graciously showed me to the restroom, where I took my time. It was a nice restroom, with large framed photographs of the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan in southern Mexico, what the Aztecs called the City of the Gods. It was and remains one of the most beautiful cities ever built, and one I have always wanted to see. I wondered if Mr. Locano or his wife had taken them.
I washed thoroughly, then washed a second time because cleanliness was a very good thing, and it was right to be good. Mr. Locano was on the other side of the door talking over my request with his wife, and maybe making the calls I had asked him to make. I hoped so.
I was staring at the Pyramid of the Sun when my phone buzzed.
Mary Sue Osborne said, “This is your future wife speaking.”
You see how they won’t quit?
“What’s up?”
“Okay, I went through her research. I didn’t see anything about anyone named Sanchez, coyote or otherwise. Sorry, dude.”
This meant I was down to Mr. Locano. If he couldn’t or wouldn’t come through, Q coy Sanchez would go nowhere.
I was thanking her when my phone buzzed with an incoming call, and this time I saw it was Pike.
“Gotta go, Mary Sue. Thanks.”
“No chitchat? No flirty repartee?”
I switched calls to Pike.
“Elvis Cole Detective Agency, the cleanest dick in the business.”
“It’s worse than you thought.”
I stared at the Avenue of the Dead while Pike told me.
Joe Pike: six days after they were taken
11
Joe Pike watched his friend Elvis Cole leave the Burger King parking lot, then entered the longitude and latitude into his GPS. Pike was not using a civilian GPS. He used a military handheld known as a Defense Advanced GPS Receiver, which was also known as a dagger. The DAGR was missile-guidance precise, could not be jammed, and contained the cryptography to use the Army and Air Force GPS satellite system. The DAGR was illegal for civilians to own, but Pike had used it in remote locations throughout Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central and South America. These were military contract jobs for multinational corporations, mostly, but also the United States government. The government gave the DAGR to him even though it was a crime for him to own it. Governments do that.
Thirty-two minutes later, Pike slid from his Jeep onto a dirt road a hundred yards from the broken airplane and the overgrown landing strip behind it. Pike considered the airplane, then the surrounding land. The landing strip was obvious. The smugglers had smoothed a forty-foot-wide piece of desert for twenty-five hundred feet, pushing their rubble into a low berm along the runway’s length. Now, all these years later, though the creosote bushes and bunchgrass returned, the landing strip created an unnaturally flat table of land with an unnaturally straight edge.
Pike took a deep breath, and waited for the desert’s silence. The Jeep ticked and pinged, but the desert swallowed these sounds as deserts will do, muting them with its emptiness. Deserts held an emptiness that could not be filled, and as the metal cooled, the pops and knocks slowed like a clock running down until the desert was silent.
Pike took another breath, expanding his lungs ever farther, and slowed his heart. Forty-four beats per minute. Forty-two. Forty. Pike wanted to be as still and silent as the desert. The best hunters were one with the land.
Pike made his way through the cholla and creosote, and quickly located the remains of the fire Cole described and the tire print marked with an E. This would be Trehorn’s track, with his friend’s track next to it. Pike thought of these tracks as “friendlies,” and would ignore them if he saw them elsewhere in the area.
Once the two friendly tracks were identified, Pike searched for the oversized quad tracks Cole described. These signs were not easy to find, the way you could see tracks on a sandy beach. The desert hardpack was made
