BATEY AND FIELDING DROVE SOUTH IN THE MORNING WITH THE first paling light. There was snow in the foothills. The clouds were low and the color of sheet metal. Their bottoms were panned out like they were laid on a vast plate of glass.
They had driven almost an hour before either of them really said anything. Maybe because it was early or because neither of them knew exactly what they were doing. But for almost an hour they listened to a country-western station, the interstate under the tires. It was Batey who finally spoke up.
Cora made a thermos of coffee, he said, if you want some more. She also packed us a lunch in the cooler back there.
Nice of her.
Nice has got nothing to do with it. It’s out of preservation. She knows I’ll stop by a McDonald’s or something. Eat three or four cheeseburgers. Try to blow up my heart.
Ain’t a bad problem to have.
No it’s not.
Coffee yeh say?
Help yourself.
Fielding twisted open the lid and poured the coffee into his mug. He poured some for Batey too. He screwed the lid back on and set the thermos on the floor behind him and blew the steam from the coffee.
The country was lower and flatter the farther south they got. The valleys were wide and the fields were furrowed with old crops gone brown. A lot of it was flooded. There were large banks of trumpeter swans picking at the leftovers. Fielding watched a wedge of them come gliding in. Not one of them moved their wings till the very last moment.
Yeh miss it? Fielding asked.
Miss what?
The agency.
DEA?
DEA. The way of life. Gettin the bad guys.
No, Batey said. People are cruel to one another when there’s money involved. And that’s all I saw. Money and cruelty.
Now look at yeh. Drivin south with some retired hick sheriff. Two-steppin with the occult.
How about that.
They were quiet a moment. A semi passed them on the left. It sent up a cloud of dirty water and Batey had to turn up the wipers.
Fielding finally said, So that’s why yeh quit?
I suppose, Batey said. Same reason as you.
The cruelty of mankind?
What I started seeing went beyond cruelty. Things were starting to get pretty creative there at the end.
Like what?
Creative, Batey said.
They didn’t talk again for a few minutes. Fielding looked at Batey and Batey had the look like he’d rather not talk about it. So Fielding looked out the window and drank his coffee. Then Batey said,
It was me and two other guys. We were working this bust going on a year. Maybe more. Long time anyway. This was down in Arizona, right on the border of Mexico. All you had to do was mention the first syllable of this cartel to anyone in that town and they’d clamp up quicker than a nun’s legs. Real strange. I mean you’d be having a nice conversation with some dude at the café, just drinking coffee and chewing the fat, and the first whisper of that cartel and you’d think you just insulted the guy’s dead mother. No one said shit. Even the police department wouldn’t give you anything. Can’t blame them. They had three officers killed in one week. Shot dead. One of them just because he was in uniform. The other two stopped a jacked-up truck for speeding and when the two officers went up to the windows they opened fire on them with little machine guns. Little MAC-11s and Škorpions. Opened them up. Once they were dead they roped them to the truck by their feet and paraded them through town. Right down Main Street. Broad daylight. Then they noosed them up in a big tree next to a playground.
I can see why no one talked, Fielding said.
Me too, Batey said. There was a lot of that. Random shit. All of it more violent than the last.
Sounds bad.
Hell, that’s not even the worst of it. The day I quit we got a call from border patrol saying they stopped a bus of Mexicans at one of the crossings. I asked if they were illegals. Guy on the other end tells me they all have visas or the correct paperwork and that some of them are even U.S. citizens. So I ask why he stopped them. Routine, he told me. So we drive over there and I see this big bus pulled over at the station. A couple patrolmen have their rifles out. Almost looked like a standoff. I got out of the car and asked one guy why he had his rifle drawn. Routine, he tells me. Odd to me but what do I know. So I’m just standing there in that awful sun looking at this bus. I can see all these faces turned toward me. All these eyes and every one of them looks terrified. I walked to the bus and got on. Smelled awful in there. Smelled like an outhouse. And all those eyes watching me. That’s a feeling that never leaves you. All those people trapped in there and you’re the one trapping them. I don’t speak Spanish so I have a guy translating. Where are you coming from? Nogales, they said. Where are you going? Tucson, they said. Every one of them had that answer. Not out of the ordinary, it’s a bus. People in a bus are often going to the same place. As I’m walking up and down the aisle I’m keeping my eyes open. They all look innocent. Like they’ve never done so much as steal a candy bar. There’s old men and old women and younger women holding babies. Some children sitting next to each other. Just sitting there. We were there for maybe half an hour and then for some reason it dawned on me how quiet it was in the bus. There were probably a dozen babies, all of them infants. Not one of them making a peep. I walked down the aisle with my translator and asked one woman what her baby’s name was. She stammered a bit. Like she wasn’t entirely sure. Like no one had ever asked her that before. It looked like a little boy. I said, Dormido? Si, she said. I reached down to touch his head and the woman pulled the baby away. Really aggressive like. To the point that the baby should have startled but it didn’t. It just lay there. I looked at the woman and I looked at the baby and then back at her and she was starting to shake like a rattle. Esta bien, I said. I reached for the baby again and the woman let out this awful scream and lunged up and threw the baby at me and tried to run out the back of the bus. One of the guys grabbed her before she got out and I’m left holding this baby. I look down and see it isn’t alive. I’m holding this dead baby in my arms, all swaddled up. I pulled back the fabric of the swaddle and there’s this big line up the belly where the skin has been sewn together. Didn’t look real. Its little lips and its little eyes, the skin on its cheeks gone cold. Awful. I handed the baby to the patrolman behind me and he had to go vomit out the door. I walked through the bus and told each woman to show me their baby. They all acted the same except no one ran this time. Every baby was dead. And stashed away in each was a brick of uncut heroin. This cartel, these monsters, had killed these infants and opened them up and put drugs in them and forced these poor women to carry them across the border. It turned out to be a huge bust. Millions of dollars’ worth. But that was it for me. I left that very day. Turned in my badge. Told Cora what was up. Got the hell out of there.
Both men were quiet. The interstate was hissing like a frying egg. Fielding took a sip of his coffee.
And now yer here, Fielding said.
Here I am, Batey said. But that was the cartel and the cartel wants power and money, but this . . . This is something new.
To film it all, Fielding said. To put it into a movie. That takes someone special.
Yeah, Batey said. Special.
What gets me, Fielding said, is where Mr Fairlane even got it. The tape that is. Assuming he didn’t film it himself. He raised his eyebrows.
Can’t just go into the local Blockbuster and ask.
They were quiet again. Only the country music. The interstate beneath them. Then Fielding said, Maybe we can.
Can what?
Ask.
Batey gave him a look.
Maybe we make a pit stop in Seattle, Fielding said. I got a idea.
Uh-oh, Batey said.
Fielding raised his eyebrows again and poured some more coffee.