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Sunday, May 29
Presidio, Texas
Pilar Inez Mendoza slumped into the front passenger seat of the van, toes tapping nervously inside the dirty sneakers she’d stolen from her sister before she ran away from home.
She kept to herself. The last thing she wanted was to encourage bold advances from the men.
She’d been wearing the same filthy clothes for twelve days. Jeans and a loose-fitting shirt. Nothing remotely provocative.
Which meant she smelled as rank as the male passengers.
The van driver, Miguel, was the only one who had bathed recently and the pungent body odor wafting toward her suggested that his last shower was a while ago.
Pilar had pulled her curly black hair into a ponytail and anchored it with a rubber band. She’d wrapped the ponytail into a bun, tucked it neatly inside the hole in the back of her baseball cap and then lowered the bill to shield her face from the traffic cams.
Pilar was twenty-three years old, but she looked fifteen, which was an asset to her family’s prostitution business. She’d learned to exploit her appearance long ago. Without makeup, wearing the jeans and the cap, stinking as much as the others, she should pass for a boy. She hoped.
As the van moved north toward the border, Pilar scanned everything she could see through the dirty windows. Taking it all in. Locating escape routes amid the unfamiliar landscape and anchoring them to memory.
Just in case something went wrong.
Because things always went wrong in her world.
Pilar had never been to Ojinaga before, and she was only passing through. With luck, she’d never come this way again. She didn’t need to remember much of it. Just enough to keep herself safe.
She’d been born in a dusty Mexican village too inconsequential to require a tiny dot on the map. She’d never traveled more than ten miles from her home in all those years.
She’d still be there now if her life had unfolded as expected.
As it was, Pilar could never go back home. Not as long as that bastard was still alive.
Revulsion coursed through her body, making her skin crawl every time his cruelty crossed her mind.
Too bad Pilar hadn’t killed him when he’d tried to choke her last breath from her throat.
She’d stabbed him with the dagger she kept under the edge of the mattress for emergencies.
The doctor patched him up and let him go the next day.
He was angry and more dangerous than ever.
Pilar’s only chance of survival was to escape Mexico and never return.
If the bastard saw her again, he’d surely kill her, Pilar’s mother agreed.
And even if he didn’t kill her, another man would. She had no illusions about that.
Pilar was like a dog on the road.
It was only a matter of time before another violent bastard came along to finish the job.
She’d lost two sisters and four cousins to abusive men who thought paying for sex gave them permission to behave like savages. Which was sadly true in her village.
Pilar’s fate would have been the same if she’d stayed, her mother said when she sent her youngest daughter to Cesar Baez.
“You have only one choice, Pilar,” her tearful mother had said as she pressed a few pesos into her hands. “Cross the border and disappear. No matter what you have to do to take care of yourself, just do it. Never come back here. Never.”
Pilar didn’t cry or argue because objecting was pointless. Her mother was right. They both knew how the world worked for women like them.
She nodded and gave her mother a tight hug.
“Go!” She released her daughter and gave Pilar a hard shove in the right direction.
Pilar had stumbled across the gravel, shoving the pesos into her pocket, and scrambled into the bed of a waiting pickup truck headed out.
That seemed a lifetime ago.
Now, the van driver approached the border crossing at Presidio, Texas. As illegal crossings went, this one would be safer than most. She hadn’t been forced to swim across the Rio Grande or trudge through the hot, dry land on both sides.
Pilar had begun to hope that she might actually survive.
Because of her business arrangement with Cesar Baez.
Miguel pulled up slowly behind the big SUV already in line. He reached into the console, pulled out the documents, and passed them to Pilar low across the seat in the dark, where the cameras couldn’t see.
“The guard will ask for our passports and visas. Simply hand them over,” Miguel repeated the instructions she’d been given several times already. He must think she was stupid. “Don’t talk. Just hand him the papers.”
There were eight in the van. Four of her traveling companions had legitimate Mexican passports and work visas. The other four were forgeries.
To Pilar’s untrained eye, all eight were indistinguishable.
She nodded. “And then what?”
Miguel pulled a fat envelope from the console and placed it on her lap.
Before he closed the console cover again, Pilar spied the pistol resting inside.
She recognized the handgun instantly.
She had learned to shoot before she’d learned to drive. Her family owned a couple of pistols exactly like Miguel’s Glock 17. Traveling across the border with guns in the van was illegal as hell and made the trip much riskier.
The counterfeit documents might pass inspection undetected. A loaded gun most certainly would not.
But still, good to know the pistol was there.
Miguel said, “He’ll give you the documents back. You give him the envelope. Then he’ll wave us through.”
Pilar nodded, as if the procedure weren’t dangerous as hell. “Why me?”
“Because you look young enough. Innocent enough,” Miguel replied gruffly. “And because Baez said so.”
Pilar nodded again. She trusted Baez because she had no options. She knew that. Miguel knew that. Hell, everyone in the van knew it because they were all under Baez’s protection, one way or another.
Surely he wouldn’t callously throw them under the bus. He’d done everything within his power to get them all across without incident.
Still, if the crossing got screwed up, she’d be dead soon enough. Along with the other three illegals inside the van.
They’d been warned.
Miguel had orders to execute them before they fell into the hands of skilled border patrol agents who might persuade them to reveal things Baez didn’t want law enforcement to know.
No reason to discuss it further.
Pilar noticed her left leg was bouncing along the floor as it often did when she was stressed. She had no idea how long it had been knocking around like that.
“Relax.” Miguel reached across and placed his big hand near her knee to stop the nervous habit. “Act like you’ve done this a million times before. We’ll be through here and on the other side within twenty minutes. Can you keep it together that long?”
Pilar nodded, her mouth too dry to utter words.
There were two guards up ahead. One stood inside the booth. The other was talking to the SUV passenger in front of Miguel’s van.
A man’s hand extended through the passenger side window of the SUV, holding papers for the guard.
A tall, blond man in uniform, took the papers and glanced at them before he leaned forward to look inside the vehicle.
He nodded, handed the papers back, and said something across the hood of the SUV to the guard in the booth.
The guard raised the orange restraining arm in front of the vehicle. The driver put the SUV into gear and rolled slowly forward, past the booth, and accelerated onto the road ahead.
The whole process was smooth and easy for the SUV. Just like Miguel said it would be for Pilar and the others in the van.