Paul Levine - Illegal

"I'm tired of them dying." Watching two workers haul the Indio woman away. "Give her a proper burial."

Mr. Rutledge, Marisol thought. Back at the chicken ranch, Guillermo said that Mr. Rutledge might kill Chit-wood.

This man must be El Patron. There was a tenderness in his manner. He had put a stop to the beating. He treated the dead woman with respect. Maybe this place would not be so bad.

"You're one pollo short," Rutledge said.

"Chitwood offed one."

"Shit. Did you tell Zaga to get over there?"

"Yes, sir. Said he'd take care of it."

Guillermo turned back to the migrants and ordered them in Spanish to stand in a line. He asked questions while Rutledge watched. Have you ever picked grapes? Used a backhoe? Anyone here work with wells, irrigation equipment, agricultural limestone?

The men in the Rutledge Farms shirts wrote numbers on the migrants' arms with marking pens. Assignments to the fields where they were to be sent.

"What sweetness do we have here?" Rutledge asked, when he got to Marisol. Looked at her in that way men do. Smiling eyes. Lying eyes. The tenderness seemed to have blown away with the red dust.

"Maybe indoors work, if she can cook," Guillermo said. "If she can't, we're short in the lettuce fields."

"I'm thinking about the club."

"Maybe a bit too old for that, Mr. Rutledge."

"Guillermo, I bet you a hundred bucks she's not a day over twenty-five."

"I'm thirty-one years old," Marisol said in her best English. "And I'm a carpenter, not a field hand."

Both men laughed, El Patron's eyes wrinkling. "I'm sixty-six and still filled with piss and vinegar, panocha."

Using the Spanish word for raw sugar, a slang term for vagina. Yes, she had been wrong about El Patron. At first, he had seemed compassionate. But now this disgusting side. And what was this club that she might be too old for?

Rutledge stared hard at her, his lips tightening. He grabbed her blouse with both hands, tore it open, buttons popping. She wore no bra, and her full breasts tumbled free. She made no effort to cover herself, instead glaring back with hatred.

"Like a couple scoops of toffee ice cream," Rutledge said. "And I do love my ice cream."

Jimmy pushed Tino flat against the ground, his own chest covering the boy's head.

Save the boy.

The third shot plunked into the pole.

Tino squirmed beneath him. "Stay down!" Payne ordered.

He could feel his own heart beating, unless it was coming from Tino, squashed beneath him.

Two more gunshots splintered wood from the pole, each a bit lower, a bit closer. The shooter seemed to be enjoying target practice.

The shooting stopped. Dust filled the shadowy air. Chickens squawked. From somewhere in the canyon, an owl hooted.

"Who the fuck are you!"

Hands raised, Jimmy got to his knees. "My name's Payne. This is Tino. We don't mean any harm."

"Everybody means harm." The man held a Mini-14 carbine with a curved magazine. "Give me your wallet."

Payne reached in his back pocket and tossed over his wallet. The man thumbed through the currency and took out Payne's business card.

"J. Atticus Payne, Esquire. Whoopty-do." He pocketed the card and tossed back the wallet. "Why you here?"

"I'm looking for the boy's mother. Marisol Perez."

"If she's a beaner, she's gone. This ain't no resort."

The man's eyes danced in different directions. Payne had expected a massive ex-con with a shaved head, arms pumped into tree trunks from hoisting iron. But this was a jumpy little guy with long, greasy hair and bloodshot eyes with enlarged pupils. He wore paint-stained jeans and cowboy boots and no shirt. A long, jagged scar ran across his bony chest. A tattoo, a swastika, was crudely etched on his forehead.

"Are you Chitwood?" Payne asked.

"Fucking-A."

"Wanda told us to come see you."

"The Whale? Fuck her with a fire hose. She got no right sending you up here."

"Wanda said you were a kind soul with a good heart, and you might help us." Payne hadn't told three lies in one sentence since his last trial.

Thoughts trudged across Chitwood's face like a caravan of elephants. "The fuck you talking about?"

"I have Mami 's picture." Tino reached inside his shirt and took the photo from the plastic case hanging from his neck. Fearlessly, he walked toward the gun-toting tweaker, who squinted at the photo.

"The little pistola from the slaughterhouse." Chit-wood cackled a wet laugh and focused on Tino for the first time. "You favor your mama, boy. Coulda used a teddy bear like you at Perryville."

Tino looked confused. Payne chose not to tell him that Perryville was a prison, and from his scrawny looks, Chitwood might have been passed between inmates like a teddy bear himself.

"So you remember her?" Payne said.

"The Whale sent her over after she messed up some foreman at the plant. I shipped her out today."

"Today!" Tino's green eyes went wide.

"You just missed her, chico. Hell, you probably passed each other on the highway."

"Where?" Payne asked. "Where'd you send her?"

"Same place I sent everybody the last two months."

"Tell us!" Tino shouted.

"What's in it for me, you little pecker?"

"The way I see it," Payne said, "you're an important player in the ever-changing tapestry of our nation."

Chitwood snorted. "The fuck's that mean?"

"The warp and woof of the twenty-first century. You're running the new Ellis Island, and doing it with great humanity. So, of course you'll help a boy find his mother."

Chitwood cocked his head and studied Payne as if trying to figure if someone had just tried to sell him a Nigerian gold mine. Then he showed a gap-toothed grin.

"Okay, Payne. I'm warping and woofing. Leave the little beaner here, and I'll ship him out on the next van tomorrow, right to his mama."

"Just tell us where she is, and I'll take him there myself."

Without warning, Chitwood wheeled to his left and fired the carbine, blowing off the head of a chicken scratching the ground fifty feet away. Wanda had been right. For a twitchy guy with jumping eyes and a buzz on, Chitwood was a damn good shot.

"Dinner," Chitwood explained as the headless chicken hopped in a circle, spurting blood, before keeling over. Motioning toward the barn with the muzzle, he said, "Let's the three of us talk a bit. Maybe we can work something out."

Once inside the barn, Chitwood ordered Payne and Tino to sit on a bale of straw while he leaned against a wooden staircase that led to a hayloft. Payne waited to hear how they could "work something out," keeping his eyes on the carbine.

"Nice tat." Payne stared at the man's forehead. "Nazi Low Riders?"

"San Berdoo chapter," Chitwood replied, proudly.

Maybe it was the drugs. Or the loneliness of the place. Whatever the reason, Chitwood started talking about himself and didn't want to stop. He droned on about stealing cattle, selling guns, and smuggling drugs from Mexico, all before he was twenty-one. Then prison, parole, and living off the land in the Patagonia Mountains north of Nogales. For a while, some legitimate work on isolated ranches, where the best-looking females were sheep.

Chitwood boasted that he knew the deserts and mountains better than the vultures and bobcats. That's why the D.E.A. hired him-he hawked up some spit at the thought-as a tracker.

He could "cut signs," as the trackers say, following illegals through rocky country that showed no footprints. A tiny stone turned the wrong side up. A snapped branch. A broken spiderweb or a shred of clothing on the thorns of a cholla cactus. If a man pays attention, it's amazing what his senses can tell him. "If the wind's right, I can smell their shit half a mile away."

"Now, about the boy's mother," Payne said, "where did you-"