Paul Levine - Illegal

Tino forked a syrupy chunk of pancakes. "I think I get it, vato." They ate in silence. Then Tino pulled an iPod from his pocket and put on the earbuds. "Where'd you get that?" Tino pretended he couldn't hear. Payne repeated the question, doubling the decibels. Tino unplugged one earbud. "Borrowed it." His tone saying, "Don't bother me, man."

"Who from?"

" El boxeador with the big mouth."

"Quinn? Cullen Quinn lent you his iPod?"

"He didn't say no. 'Course, he was sleeping."

"You sneaked into their bedroom?"

"After I went to the toilet."

"Shit. What else did you take?"

" Nada. I swear on Saint Teresa."

The boy slipped the earbud back in, listened a moment, and sang off-key, "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.?Que caca! "

"The Carpenters. That'd be Quinn."

Several yards away, the deputy patted his mouth with a napkin, stood, and hitched up his belt, loaded down with a gun, ammo, radio, flashlight, and other doodads.

The deputy sidled over to their table. His name tag read, "H. Dixon." "Morning, folks."

"Good morning, Deputy Dixon," Payne said, cheerfully. Just like picking a jury, using the man's name. A sign of friendliness.

"You're not from around here, are you?"

"Hope that's not a crime." Smiling as he said it.

"Nope. We love tourists." The cop paused a beat. "Medium rare."

Payne figured he should laugh, so he did.

"What's with your T-shirt?" The cop nodded his sunburned face toward the steroid-pumped skull of Barry Bonds.

"My Jose Canseco shirt was dirty."

"You're kind of a wise guy, aren't you?"

"As long as that's not a crime, either."

The cop turned to Tino, who'd kept his head down, forking pancakes into his mouth. "What's your name, son?"

Tino kept eating.

"C'mon now, chico. You know your name, doncha?"

Tino pulled out the earbuds. "Harry Potter."

"He's such a joker." Payne kicked the kid under the table.

Dixon kept his eyes on Tino. "Well, you have a good day, Harry." He put on his hat and nodded to Payne. "You drive real careful now, sir. We've lost tourists in some hellish accidents lately."

Payne watched the deputy walk out the front door.

Heading toward his cruiser, the cop stopped alongside the Lexus. Then he walked a full 360 degrees around the vehicle, as if sizing it up on a dealer's lot. Or maybe memorizing the license plate.

Payne was quickly losing his appetite. "Finish your pancakes, kiddo. We gotta get going."

The Lexus was purring at 75 on an empty stretch of road, and Payne could not get Deputy Dixon out of his mind. Was life so boring that the desert cop had to hassle every stranger who came through town? Or did his gut tell him that the Anglo guy in the fuck-you T-shirt and the Hispanic kid with a smart mouth made odd traveling companions?

Payne tried not to think about it as they blasted past saguaro cactus and mesquite trees and creosote bushes in the vast stretches of parched land. He swerved to avoid a raccoon waddling across the road. Turned on the radio. On a distant, scratchy station, Los Lobos were singing "The Road to Gila Bend."

Payne checked the rearview mirror. Shit. A police car, maybe half a mile back. Was it Dixon? He eased his foot off the gas.

Los Lobos turned to full-bore static, and Payne hit the dial. In a second, he heard a familiar baritone voice.

"Every wetback holds a dagger pointed at the heart of America. I no longer live in California. I live in Mexifornia."

"That's the guy who lent you his iPod," Payne told Tino.

"What a cabron, " the boy said.

"This isn't a melting pot," Cullen Quinn bellowed. "It's a cracked pot overflowing with illegals."

"That idiota talking about me?"

"If the federal government can't stop the illegals, what about us?" Quinn ranted. "The citizenry. What about the good folks who've formed well-armed militias under the Second Amendment? If a burglar breaks into your home, you can shoot him. How about aliens sneaking into our country? Should we start selling hunting licenses?"

"I don't think he got enough sleep last night," Payne said.

"And you know who's to blame?" Quinn said, picking up steam. "Everyone who hires these lowlifes and freeloaders. Right here in California, we have the biggest employer of illegals in the country. I've called him out before, and I'll do it again."

Simeon Rutledge, Payne knew. Quinn's favorite target.

"It's fat cat Simeon Rutledge in the San Joaquin Valley. Rutledge Ranch and Farms, a quarter million acres of prime valley land. He hires thousands of illegals every year. What terrorists lurk among them? What diseases do they bring with them? Rutledge doesn't care, living in his mansion, thumbing his nose at the law."

"Quinn needs new material. He's been beating this drum forever."

Payne glanced again at his rearview mirror. The cop was still there, keeping the same distance.

"Rutledge lures the wetbacks with promises of greenbacks. But you folks are the ones who pay when the illegals land in our hospitals and jails. And you foot the bill for their hordes of children in our public schools."

"What an asshole," Tino said. "A real asqueroso."

"We need to crack down on the employers as well as the illegals," Quinn continued. "Are you listening, Simeon Rutledge? I've challenged you to debate a dozen times, but all I hear from your lawyers is that you're too busy. 'Mr. Rutledge is a working man.' Yeah? Well, I've got another term for it. 'Racketeer.' Why don't the feds bust you? Because you've bought off every politician from Sacramento to Washington. If I'm lying, sue me, Mr. Rutledge. Go on. Get your high-priced lawyers to sue me, you greedy S.O.B."

Jimmy turned off the radio, looked back. The police car had picked up speed. It closed the distance, its blue bubble light flashing.

"I won't sue you, Quinn. But I sure as hell might kill you," Simeon Rutledge said.

One hundred seventy-five miles north of the Burbank studio where Cullen Quinn was shouting into a microphone and three hundred miles from where Payne was driving, Rutledge straddled a sawhorse, sharpening the blade of a ranch implement called an "emasculator." As he listened to an old portable radio perched on the railing of a horse stall, his lips stretched into a slash as angry as a knife wound. "I'll strangle you with my bare hands."

"Did I just hear you threaten Cullen Quinn's life?" Charles Whitehurst asked.

"You gonna testify against me, White bread?" Rutledge laughed, hawked up some phlegm, and spit into a pile of straw.

"As you well know, Simeon, the attorney-client privilege precludes me from ever testifying-"

"Screw the privilege. If you ever turned on me, Charlie, you'd be singing soprano the rest of your life." Rutledge gestured with the two-bladed emasculator, ordinarily used to de-nut stallions, not shysters. "If a man called my granddad the names Quinn calls me, Granddad would have killed him without a second thought."

"Ezekiel Rutledge's ways don't work anymore, Simeon."

"Don't be too sure."

"Jesus, Simeon. When are you going to stop trying to prove you're as tough as your grandfather?"

Rutledge flashed his lawyer a look that stung like a bullwhip. "Ain't too many men I let talk to me like that."

"I thought that's what you paid me for."

Rutledge laughed, the sound of a boar crashing through a tangle of brush. "My granddaddy never would have hired you, Whitehurst. Wouldn't have understood your ways."

A proud and defiant man, Ezekiel Rutledge had lost his Mississippi cotton plantation to the banks and the boll weevils before heading west to make his fortune in the 1930s. He had the foresight to hire Mexicans for his farmwork. Field hands who complained about working conditions were likely to be flogged or sent back home, sometimes sprawled over the back of a horse. Simeon Rutledge could still remember his grandfather explaining the economics of cotton farming.