Paul Levine - Illegal

Maybe I can blame her for this whole goat fuck. Tell Internal Affairs she vouched for her ex as the bag man.

Not that it was true. But desperate times call for shitty measures.

He drove past a yellow sign with the silhouettes of a man, a woman, and a little girl running. "CAUTION" printed across the top. Warning motorists to avoid turning wetbacks into roadkill on the melting asphalt. Bullet holes peppered the sign, a welcome-to-California from the local yokels.

Ten minutes later, Rigney was sitting in front of Deputy Howard Dixon's desk in a trailer adjacent to a bone-dry drainage ditch. The trailer was a sorry excuse for a sheriff's substation, situated within sight of the Mexican border as part of the futile attempt to keep mules-the human variety-from carrying drugs north. Rigney could barely hear the deputy over the whine of a window air conditioner that dripped rusty water but did nothing to cool the place. He was dying for a beer.

Next to a poster was the taxidermied head of a wild boar. Damn thing stank. Wide-eyed, as if surprised to be decorating a cop shop, the boar stared into the face of Governor Schwarzenegger, whose photo hung on the trailer's opposite wall, a measly six feet away.

"I thought Payne might give me trouble," the deputy was saying, "but not the little beaner. I guess I lost track of him."

On a video monitor, they watched the tape from the cruiser's camera. There was Payne, handcuffed and blabbering a mile a minute to the deputy, the Mexican boy ducking out of the picture.

"The kid said he had to pee," the deputy explained.

Violating Traffic Stops 101, Rigney thought. Letting one of the subjects out of your sight.

"The kid has this innocent look," the deputy continued. "Speaks good English. Neatly groomed. If he'd been the typical beaner, I'd have been more careful. You think that's prejudiced, Detective?"

No, but it's fucking stupid, you sunburned hick.

"Don't sweat it," Rigney said. "Could happen to anyone."

On the monitor, the image jumped and so did Payne. Rigney squinted at the screen. The first shotgun blast had blown out a front tire. The second blast knocked out the picture for a moment. When the grainy image returned, Dixon was giving up his gun.

"Why didn't you shoot Payne when you had the chance?" Rigney asked.

"He wasn't armed."

"Neither was that five hundred pounds of bacon on your wall, but you blasted him." Gesturing toward the boar.

"I wasn't in fear of great bodily harm from Mr. Payne," the deputy said, as if practicing for the sergeant's exam.

"You have any idea what Payne was doing in this godforsaken place?"

"Said he was looking for the kid's mother. She disappeared or something."

"Bullshit. Royal Payne doesn't do diddly-squat for anyone else unless there's an angle."

The deputy's phone rang. He picked it up, said "Yup" a couple times, hung up. "Five hours ago, cameras picked up Payne's Lexus crossing the border into Mexico at the Mexicali station. That'd be about thirty minutes before our bulletins went out."

"Great. Just great." Sweating a river, seething with anger.

"Not to worry, Detective. He'll come back, sooner or later. When he does, we'll grab him."

"You're pretty confident for a guy who lost his gun to a half-pint wetback."

"I want Payne as much as you do. The way I see it, Payne's the cricket, and I'm the spider."

"Actually, Payne is more like a cockroach," Rigney said. "Just when you have the bastard cornered, you learn he can fly."

Sitting cross-legged in the shade of a corrugated metal sheet propped on wooden posts, Marisol traced letters in the dust.

"T-I-N-O"

Again and again. Leaving a trail of Tino s as she yearned for her missing son.

My boy, my boy. I am so sorry I left you behind.

The driver who brought her here-the old Mexican from the Sugarloaf-called the place "Hellhole Canyon." A farmhouse, a chicken pen, a fenced yard smelling of animal droppings and creosote. An American man with a rifle paced in the sun, guarding the migrants, though the surrounding mountains and canyons seemed sentinels enough. Chickens pecked the ground near the man's feet. He kicked a skinny hen that looked diseased. Sent it squawking, frayed wings flapping.

Marisol tried to focus on her surroundings. Knew she must survive yet another day. She counted eighteen other migrants sitting or crouching or lying in the shade.

Waiting. They had been waiting for hours.

"Don't be thinking I'm gonna feed you." A rifle slung over a bony shoulder, the Americano guarding them had the emaciated look of a drug user. "I ain't no KFC, even if I got chickens coming out my ass."

He was shirtless and wore filthy jeans, with a red bandanna around his neck. A bandolier filled with bullets crisscrossed his bare chest like suspenders. His scratchy little goat's beard was spotted with specks of dribbled food. He had several tattoos, but the one on his forehead drew the most attention. A crudely drawn, blue-green swastika. Marisol avoided looking into the man's eyes, which seemed to float in their sockets.

"Ain't my fault you're starving," the man continued. "Vans are late."

He stomped through the chicken droppings, chewing on a green apple, surveying the migrants. "You people eat roadkill, doncha? Hushed puppies. Asphalt armadillo. Pavement possum."

He cackled at his own stupid joke, drool trickling down one corner of his mouth.

It had been several hours since the old driver had rescued her from the slaughterhouse. As he drove, she tearfully told him about the attack in the locker room and how she had fought off the foreman, perhaps even killing him. Alarmed, the driver called Wanda, repeated the story, then listened a moment before hanging up.

" La jefa says it is too dangerous for you to come back," he told Marisol.

He had driven along a lake, through a desert, across dry washes, and into the mountains. He turned onto a dirt road and stopped at the old chicken farm, virtually surrounded by steep mountain walls. Vans were supposed to be there to take a group of migrants to farms upstate.

"Watch out for the encargado, " the driver had warned her, before driving off. "A drogadicto who thinks he is a Nazi. Probably insane. Just wait for the van and stay away from him."

With that, Marisol was left in the shade among defecating chickens and snoring migrants, the corrugated roof hot as a griddle.

She heard a scream. A woman yelling, "No! No! No!"

Marisol squinted into the sunlight. The woman's husband, a Mexican of perhaps forty, stood with his back against a tree, his hands up by his ears, holding onto a squirming, squawking chicken. Thirty feet away, the Nazi aimed his rifle at the man.

No, that's not it!

The Nazi was trying to shoot the chicken off the man's head. A surreal sight, a scene from a nightmare, a hallucination.

"Hold still, Pancho!" the Nazi yelled. "Christ! Hold that bird still before it shits on your head!"

Trembles shook the man's body. The chicken flapped its wings and screeched.

The man's wife wailed in Spanish, invoking the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

"Stand up straight, goddammit!" the Nazi ordered.

The man's knees buckled.

"I can shoot the freckle off a rabbit's nose at fifty feet. But you gotta hold still, Pancho."

The man squeezed his eyes shut.

The sound of the gunshot echoed off the canyon walls. The man fell to the ground, screaming, his face covered with blood.

"You ain't hit, Pancho! If you was hit, you wouldn't be yelling."

The decapitated chicken flopped on the ground, spurting gore.

"Who's next? Who wants to be in the circus?"

The driver was right, Marisol thought. This man is insane.

"C'mon now! Deadeye Dickie Chitwood is just warming up."