interfering with the tubes and your IV.”
He talked to me a little bit about my injuries, the two gunshot wounds to the chest and the damage they’d done. Then paused, frowning slightly. “Do you remember saying, ‘They were white’?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Do you know the significance of that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You said it twice. It seemed to be very important to you.”
I shook my head again, and the doctor got up from his stool. “Try to rest.”
“Wait,” I said. “You already know something about Nidia, don’t you? Is she dead? You can tell me. I’m strong, I won’t go into shock.”
He said, “You were traveling alone, Miss Cain.”
The rest of it I learned from an officer of the state judicial police. His name was Juarez. He was taller and thinner than the doctor, though with that same mustache. He took down some basic introductory details first, my full name, where I lived.
Juarez went on to tell me that I was found just outside the tunnel, alone on the edge of the road, bleeding profusely, without ID, money, or a car. The farmworkers who found me had believed that I was in a bizarre hit- and-run in which I had been walking on a remote highway. No one had realized I’d been shot until I was examined at the hospital.
“I wasn’t traveling alone,” I told him. “I was traveling with a girl, Nidia Hernandez. Even if she wasn’t at the scene, her things were in the car.”
He said, “There was no car. No luggage, and no girl. Just you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why don’t you tell me your story from the beginning.”
I did, leaving out only the fact that the friend who had gotten me involved in Nidia’s situation was a semi- notorious girl gangster in L.A. Serena became, loosely, “a friend of Nidia’s.” The rest was the unvarnished truth, from Oakland to the border to the tunnel.
“They were white,” I said, “and armed. These guys were pros. I don’t know why they wanted Nidia, but they did.”
When I was done, Juarez didn’t ask the questions I would have expected. He didn’t ask for details about the ambush, or for a more thorough description of Nidia, which would have helped the police find her. Instead, he asked about my life in America: in particular, what I did for work.
“A bike messenger,” he said, “that’s a young person’s job, I understand. Not very lucrative, no?”
“I don’t need much money.”
“Really,” he said. “I’ve heard that life in America is quite expensive, particularly California. People have high standards for what their lifestyle should be. Everyone reaching for the golden apple.”
I had a sinking feeling about what was motivating this line of questioning. I said, “Can I ask why you’re so interested in my lifestyle and income?”
He looked thoughtfully at nothing in particular. Then he turned his attention back to me.
“Miss Cain,” he said, “let me be blunt. When an American meets with violence in Mexico, far from tourist areas, and without frantic American family members demanding information-”
“I’m not a drug mule,” I said.
He looked out the window, hesitated, and began to speak more slowly and deliberately. “In my experience,” he said, “when women become involved in the drug trade, it is rarely because of their own vice. Usually they become involved at the insistence of corrupt men who hold too much influence in their lives and do not have their best interests at heart. The law is commonly gentle with such women.”
“That’s nice to know, but I’m not in the drug trade,” I said.
I’d wanted to say it since he was about five words in, but it had been obvious that nothing was going to proceed until he’d finished his little speech inviting me to fall into the sympathetic arms of the Mexican law.
I said, “You’re skeptical about my story, okay, I can understand that. But Nidia is out there somewhere and needs help. I don’t want your suspicions about me to keep people from looking for her.”
“To be honest,” he said, “it occurs to me that if you needed an explanation for why a group of armed men would ambush you on the road, and you couldn’t tell us they were in search of money or drugs, a young woman would make a sympathetic substitute.”
“You don’t even believe that Nidia
“We have only your word on that,” he said. “Look at this from my perspective: You’ve described your traveling companion as a Mexican-born teenager without money or connections. Why would she be of interest to men like that?”
“I don’t know what kind of men they were,” I said, “so it’s hard to speculate.”
“Speculate,” he repeated, leaning back a little. “You have a certain level of education.”
“I did nearly four years at West Point. I didn’t finish.”
“That’s the American military academy?”
“One of them,” I said.
“Why didn’t you finish there?”
“I was discharged. Not for using drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I told him. “Listen, whatever you think of me, Nidia needs your help. She’s only nineteen. You owe it to her to have people looking for her.”
Juarez hesitated, then said, “I must admit, you are convincing in your zeal.” He raised pen to notepad. “Tell me as much as you can about her and I’ll get her description out.”
“To the U.S. authorities, too?” I said. “In case these men took her back over the border?”
He nodded.
When we were done, I had one last question for him. I said, “The doctor told me that no one here knew my name.”
Juarez waited for the rest.
“Didn’t you identify me from missing-persons reports?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Cain,” he said, “but no one matching your description was reported missing.”
twelve
Except for this: I’d promised to see Serena on my way back north. I’d never shown up, yet she hadn’t reported me missing. Serena, who was the only person in my life who’d known where I was going. Wasn’t that an odd thing?
It was she who had asked me to do this in the first place. She’d called me out of the blue, after we hadn’t spoken in nearly a year, wanting me to take a girl I’d never met to central Mexico. Conveniently, none of Nidia’s family, nor Serena nor her sucias, could do the job. Only a white stranger in the Bay Area seemed to be able to do it.
A stranger to Nidia, that was. I was no stranger to Serena; we were friends, and now I couldn’t help pulling at the threads of that friendship, wondering how much they’d weakened in the time we’d been apart. Enough to allow her to set me up to be killed?
Some time later, a nurse came in and gave me a pill. I didn’t ask what it was. Maybe it was a sleeper, because sleep came on fast.
The next day, Juarez returned. I couldn’t tell from his long, sober face what he’d concluded about my story, but he blandly told me that when I was well enough to leave the hospital, I would be taken to the U.S. Consulate and would become their problem.
