Scorpion Rain Read online

  “It’s a shotgun.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, well, that’s like saying Gucci is a dime store handbag. This is an Italian piece, it’s like the Gucci of automatic shotguns. You hit the trigger, you deliver four buckshot slugs in a second. Heavy-duty armament. These guys know their weapons, they’re…how shall I put this…they’re very curious about why that gun is in the car.”

  “Not mine.”

  She rattled off a volley of Spanish. The men looked dubious. Jo gestured at me, got angrier, spoke even louder and faster.

  “Get me out of here,” I said wearily.

  A lot more Spanish.

  “They’re kinda worked up about this piece, about this whole…this massacre. Shit, I’m no good with words. Can’t you tell them anything about this shotgun?”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Not…it was hers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your friend? It was—”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “—hers? Look at them! Nod once. Strong nod. Convince them. It was hers?”

  I looked the men over, I caught the eye of the interrogator. I nodded.

  “Good. I’m not sure he believes you, but he believes this.”

  She held up the ID card again. The crimson border had a powerful effect on everybody, like they’d just mainlined, a rush, rigid in attention, one of them actually saluting until Jo turned away.

  “They’re not going to like this,” I said. “You’re taking me away, they’ve got questions.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “I’ve never been able to get away from a policeman so easily.”

  She grinned.

  “It’s really easy with fake ID,” she said, making sure we kept walking.

  I stopped, rigid. She tried to pull me, but saw I was thinking.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m trying to remember…Meg shouted something at me…”

  “Visualize.”

  Nothing came to me. I replayed the entire scene. The cars. The people. The guns, the shooting, the police, Meg…I saw her mouth open, they were dragging her away.

  The promise, oh Christ, how could I have forgotten my promise already!

  Jo put an arm around me as we walked to her car. Kyle stood up straight, hands at his sides.

  “I’ve got to go back to Tucson,” I said, ignoring him.

  “I’ll drive you there,” Jo answered.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because that’s where we’re going.”

  Kyle held open the passenger door for me.

  “You’re in shock,” he said. “Just get in. We’ll give you a ride. We’ll talk later.”

  “Talk about what!”

  “For now,” Jo said, “just trust me. Trust Kyle.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Why not?”

  “I need a drink,” I said, still giddy with shock.

  Jo opened the glovebox, took out a pint of Cuervo Gold.

  “Here,” she said, gripping the screwtop between her teeth as she started up the Land Rover. We drove down Mariposa Avenue in Nogales, swigging from the bottle.

  The Fujiyama beeped and the screen came alive. Donald Ralph, on videocam, talking to me from somewhere in an airplane.

  “I’ve got the bank accounts,” he said. “We’ve been offered a contract in Caracas, if you want to go down there.”

  He waited, patient, but I didn’t have the headset hooked up, couldn’t answer.

  “All right,” he said finally. “When you download this video, call me. We’ve got fourteen hours to vote up or down.”

  His image disappeared.

  “Jesus Christ and the pope,” Jo said in awe. “Is that a computer?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “Sort of a computer. I’m testing it.”

  “Is that what you do? Play with funky computers?”

  “I don’t…”

  “Because if you’re a computer hacker—”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “—and have some big-time badass hacker friends…”

  “Not me,” I said dismissively. “I’m just a beta tester.”

  “Bullshit. I’ve got every kind of portable computer toy on the market, but I’ve never seen that one. Listen. Are you a hacker?”

  “Yeah. How did you know that?”

  “Outstanding!” she said, pounding her fists against her chest.

  “Why?” I asked again, but she didn’t answer, and we started north, out of Nogales, away from where I wanted to be.

  “Stop,” I said.

  She looked at me so long the Land Rover wavered again, an air horn shrieked behind us, and a mammoth eighteen-wheeler semi swerved around the car, barely a foot to spare.

  “Got to go back,” I said.

  “Not there, not that crossing.”

  “The other place. The main crossing. Gotta go back, find Meg.”

  She pulled off at a gas station, turned off her engine.

  We stared at each other for several minutes.

  “I know you. From…I don’t know how I know you.”

  She nodded.

  “Why do you want to go back across the border?”

  “She’s over there.”

  I flipped open the Fujiyama.

  “What is that thing?” Jo said.

  I didn’t want to explain, but she kept staring at the Fujiyama.

  “Later,” I said impatiently. “Oh shit!”

  “What?”

  “Got to go back…got to get something else out of the truck.”

  “You go back now, they’ll keep you there. What do you need?”

  “Some drugs.”

  She looked at me so sharply that the Land Rover swerved halfway into the left lane and another truck air horn blared at us.

  “Drugs?” Laughing as she wrestled the Land Rover away from the semi. “You want drugs, you came to the right place. I run my own pharmacy, open twenty-four seven, we never close, we aim to please. What do you need?”

  “Ritalin.”

  She drained the Cuervo, threw the empty pint bottle into the backseat, and fumbled around underneath her legs until she found another pint.

  “Crack that sucker open,” she said.

  15

  I really wanted a mint julep, made with Maker’s Mark bourbon, served in a balloon snifter and brought by my favorite waiter to my table at Kingfisher, on Grant near Tucson Avenue.

  Tequila would do.

  Suddenly remembering, hoping, I thrust my hands into my jeans pocket and pulled out the vial of Ritalin. I washed down three pills with the Cuervo.

  She looked at my prescription vial. I turned it upside down. Almost empty. The last four white pills fell into my palm.

  “What are they?”

  “The last of my Ritalin.”

  “I live on speed,” she said, her mouth a tight, straight line.

  I handed her the four pills.

  She washed them all down with a long swallow of the tequila.

  “Let’s get some more of these,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Laura. Why do I know your face?”

  “CNN. I’m an investigative reporter.”

  CNN, I thought. Why am I in the car with a TV reporter? Why was she interested in me? And then I recognized her from the desert. She was the woman who’d confronted Michelle Gilbert.

  “I need some more of these,” I said, throwing the empty drug vial out the window. “Plus…since we’ve both got a drug problem, I figure we’re going to want more of these sometime today.”

  “You want to go across the border, just to get some drugs, even though you’re so whacked out right now with shock you hardly know what you’re saying?”

  “That’s really not why,” I said. “I’m trying to remember…”

  “Remember?”

  “Meg shouted at me…when they took her, she shouted.”

  “Shouted what?”

  “I don’t know.” />
  “A name? A place? What?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “And somehow…you’re thinking, if you go back across the border…you’re thinking, that will help you remember?”

  It was a stupid idea. I wasn’t thinking too clearly, I knew that.

  “Okay,” she said after a while. “I can relate, believe it or not. Let’s go.”

  “Yeah.” I grinned, lopsidedly.

  “I know just the place.”

  But I did remember what Meg shouted at me, I did remember my promise to find her.

  I had absolutely no idea how to do that.

  I needed to talk again to Rey and find out why he’d treated me like dirt.

  But first, I needed some more Ritalin.

  Without hesitation, Jo drove to the regular border crossing into downtown Nogales.

  I’d never gone through so quickly, but she’d guessed right. The Mexican policia had blocked off all traffic for half a mile south of both crossings. All lanes were eerily empty of vehicles. At the U.S. side, the INS man waved us back, but Jo showed him a laminated ID card. When he called over his superior, Jo showed them both two more IDs, and the senior officer waved her through without question.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She tossed the IDs on my lap. CIA, DEA, INS.

  “You’re really all that?” I said.

  “Fakes. I never bother with fake driver’s licenses, low-level crap like that. Go right to the top, wow their pants off. Men get hard-ons when they see these IDs, they want to be important, they want to help me. You’ve started bleeding again.”

  She stopped at a farmacia. A hand-lettered sign said

  DOCTOR ON PREMISES

  Medico en el local

  NO WAITING

  Sin esperar

  IMMEDIATE CONSULTATIONS

  Consultos inmediatos

  IMMEDIATE PRESCRIPTIONS

  Recetas inmediatas

  Other signs were Scotch-taped inside the windows.

  VIAGRA AQUI

  VIOXX y OXYCONTIN y PRILOSEC y mas

  The doctor was a young woman in a white nurse’s gown. She swabbed my temple with some alcohol and held up a thick gauze patch, cutting it to size. She swept through a drawer, couldn’t find any hospital tape, held up a dispenser of Scotch tape, experimentally, shook her head, and took out a roll of gray duct tape.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “forget that. Just get me some Ritalin.”

  “No no no,” Jo said. Reaching inside her chinos, she pulled a KA-BAR army knife from a tooled leather sheath and sliced off two pieces of duct tape to fix the bandage against my head.

  “I don’t want you bleeding in my car.”

  “Looks like shit,” I said, catching sight of myself in a small mirror set out for people to view themselves in souvenir sunglasses.

  “Actually, you haven’t looked at the cuts yet, but they’re these three lines, kinda jagged, right across your temple.”

  “Great.”

  “An I Ching trigram. Can’t remember which one.”

  “I Ching?”

  “A good one though. I think.”

  I started to rip the bandage off so I could see it in the mirror.

  “Don’t do that, Laura.”

  “I’m freaking out here.”

  “Yeah. Well. You’re in shock. I heard you shouting back there. At your friend. At the woman they took away? You promised to find her.”

  “I what?”

  “She yelled at you…she said, something like…”

  “Exactly,” I said, my face only inches from hers. “I need to know exactly what she said. And what I said.”

  “She said, ‘Laura, promise you’ll find me.’ And you said, ‘I promise.’”

  “I promised to find her?”

  “And I can help you do it.”

  I remembered writing something…the McDonald’s bag, where was it? I fumbled in my handbag, nothing, finally found the crumpled bag in a rear pocket of my jeans.

  “I pledge, I promise to find Meg,” I read aloud.

  I staggered against the counter. The clerk recoiled in shock, thinking I was either drunk or, more likely, already high on whatever drugs I bought in Mexico. My head banged against the glass countertop, my left cheekbone cracking against the metal-edged corner, and I collapsed on the floor. Hysterically giggling.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Jo said to the clerk.

  Everybody in the farmacia stared at me, but Jo helped me to my feet and led me outside, where I threw up in the gutter, spasms racking my body so fierce that I thought I was going to pass out. When I was through retching, Jo helped me sit down to lean against the dented Fiberglass front fender of an ancient Ford pickup.

  “You’re in shock,” she said.

  Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

  16

  I knew, you see, I knew I was in shock.

  Taá Wheatley, wanting to shoot me. The butcher, wanting to carve me up, Meg killing them both. A year before that, Meg killing Audrey Maxwell. The carnage at the border crossing just brought it all back, all that therapy no good anymore, bye bye therapy, hello blood, hello dead bodies.

  “Taá Wheatley,” I said to myself.

  “Who’s that?” Jo asked.

  “A U.S. Marshal,” I said stupidly, woozy, nauseous. “Almost killed me. Meg killed her. Meg killed…uh…Audrey Maxwell.”

  “You’re not making any sense. Look. Chill a bit, here. Calm down. I think you’re starting to freak these people out.”

  “Just help me get this bandage off.”

  “Yeah, well, leave it on so you don’t bleed in my car. It’s a rental.”

  She went back into the farmacia, bought a thousand Ritalin pills and a one-liter plastic bottle of Mountain Dew. While she headed north, I chugalugged half of it with some of the Ritalin.

  “Jesus, Laura, how many of those do you take a day?”

  “The Ritalin? Or the Dew?”

  “Both. Ritalin is speed, it’s just a legal amphetamine. Dew is…what?”

  “Caffeine.”

  “Speed, caffeine. You’re kinda wired, aren’t you? Kinda fucked up?”

  It wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer.

  “I am totally fucked these days,” she said. “I grind up about twenty of these a day. Twenty…thirty, I don’t even know anymore.”

  “You grind them up?”

  “I snort it. I snort Ritalin.”

  “Why?”

  “That woman who was kidnapped?”

  “Admiral?”

  “Margaret Admiral. And it’s true. Her hand, buried in the desert. The Federales got a tip-off where to look. The Perazas, they run the kidnapping scheme, they want people to know when somebody doesn’t pay the ransom.”

  “But her husband did pay.”

  She jammed on the brakes, pulled off the road.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t tell me?” she said, mostly to herself. “Well, I’ll tell you something. I was kidnapped by those same people.”

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes, her face contorted.

  “I paid the ransom, but they kept me for almost three weeks.”

  “When?”

  “Not long enough ago so I can forget it.”

  She suddenly brightened, the Ritalin hit, she threw her head around with another of those wild dog shakes.

  “But I don’t want to forget it. Not yet. Not till I get some revenge.”

  “For what?”

  “For three weeks of being raped every night.”

  At the border crossing, the Mexican official tried to stop us, but when Jo waved all of her ID cards, the official shrugged and turned away from us without protest.

  Across. Again.

  “Now what?” I said.

  Everything blurred, nausea swelling and retreating like tides.

  “Somebody to see,” Jo said without explanation.

  Half a mile later, across the b
order and atop a small hill, Jo parked behind the Paul Bond boot shop. She started to get out, but I pulled at her elbow.

  “What’s your whole name?” I asked.

  “Kanakaredes. Iohanna Gianna Kanakaredes.”

  “I know somebody named Johanna.”

  Remembering Johanna’s wedding at Lodge On The Desert, remembering my sadness at the time that I’d probably never be married again.

  “Well, I hate that fucking long name. Just call me Jo. Who are you, really?”

  “Laura Winslow,” I said, accentuating the first syllables, liking the sound of my own name, liking that here I was, in front of God and everybody, giving out my real name. “Laura Winslow.”

  I drew out the vowels, said the words to myself, silently.

  “Laura,” Jo said, extending a hand for a shake. “So here we are. Two speed freaks. Come on. Somebody inside here we need to talk to.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You go. I need to find a friend.”

  “The one who was kidnapped?”

  “No. Her husband. But how do you even know she was kidnapped?”

  “What’s her name again?”

  “Meg. Meg Arizana.”

  “Trust me. She was kidnapped. I recognized one of those men back there. They kidnapped me two months ago, took me to their camp somewhere down in Sonora. Somewhere on one of those mountain ranges that rise out of the desert, you can see them everywhere down here.”

  “Some people call them sky islands.”

  “Campo de sequestration. That’s where I was held. The name comes from Colombia, where people get kidnapped for ransom. The Peraza drug cartel got the idea it would be easier than smuggling heroin or people.”

  “I know of some other people who were kidnapped,” I said.

  “How did you ever find that out? Have there been stories in the Tucson and Phoenix newspapers? I’ve looked at back issues for the last six months, I saw nothing at all.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” I finally answered. “Part of what I do. I can’t talk about it with you. But, it’s curious, because of what I do, your name never came up in my…my computer searches.”

  “Computer searches.” She waited for me to explain, but I kept silent. “Well, what kind of people did you search for?”