Scott and Benny stepped down from the city bus into a derelict neighborhood in northwest Laredo. Beater cars lined the streets and local punks stood in clusters, most of them looking like they were still wearing their pajamas, doing a lot of nothing except smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. And eyefucking the newcomers.
Across the street from the bus stop Scott saw a Section Eight apartment complex where he and his team had execut-ed a series of search warrants during his second month as resident agent in charge. They had pulled out five kilos of cocaine, three pounds of meth, two AK-47s that had been converted to fully automatic, arrested nine people, and seized $22,000 in cash. Garza was the case agent and Kat had made some of the undercover buys that led to the search warrants. It was a good case and convinced Scott that he had done the right thing transferring down to the border. This was the front line of the War on Drugs. This was where he belonged.
Except now everything was different. Scott had seen the video. He had peeked behind the curtain and knew that a U.S. official had made a deal with the Sinaloa cartel and was actively helping the cartel smuggle tons of illegal drugs into the United States. How much of the cocaine and meth that his team had seized in that apartment complex been sanctioned by elements within his own government?
And now that he knew, what was he supposed to do with that information? As a frontline soldier in this so-called war, what was he really fighting for? What had his fellow agents died for? Was it nothing more than a holding action, like the last years of Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, places where thousands of American troops had continued to fight and die long after the politicians had given up?
A train whistle blew in the distance.
"We need to go," Benny said.
Scott realized he had been staring at the apartment block across the street in a kind of nostalgic daze. He smiled at Benny. "I'm waiting on you."
She smiled back and led the way down the sidewalk.
The local shitheads gave them some hostile stares, but Scott and Benny ignored them.
After a couple of blocks, Scott said, "You still haven't told me how we're going to get across the border."
"Only because I didn't want to scare you."
He laughed. "Too late for that."
The train whistle blew again. This time closer.
"How do you feel about trains?" Benny asked.
"I've never actually ridden a train. Why?"
Benny turned right at the next corner.
* * * *
Gavin raced the Suburban north on Highway 1472, zig-zagging between cars, even once passing on the shoulder when he got jammed up behind two slow-movers.
"Next right," Jones said, staring down at the GPS track-ing app on his iPad. "We're less than two miles from them."
After banging a hard right, Gavin slowed. The sudden change of speed made Jones glance up from his screen. "Why are you slowing down?"
"We're in a neighborhood."
"The targets are a mile away."
"And we'll never make it if we crash."
Jones looked back down at the screen. "Take the third left."
The neighborhood they were in may as well have been on the other side of the border. There wasn't one sign written in English, and Mexican gangbangers were hanging on every corner. Half of them had no shirts, most of the other half wore tank-top undershirts, what the trailer park set called "wife beaters." All of them showing lots of ink, their hands holding nothing but cigarettes and quart-sized bottles of beer. Gavin had never used drugs, not even marijuana, and didn't know much about them, but he suspected that some of the cigarettes he saw these punks sucking on probably weren't packed with tobacco. He also knew that this wasn't America anymore, at least not the America he had grown up in.
"Left, left, left!" Jones shouted, jabbing his finger at a fast-approaching side street.
Gavin jerked the wheel hard over. The tires squealed and the centrifugal force tossed them to the right as the Sub-urban slid through the turn.
"What were you doing," Jones snapped as soon as they were back on course, "taking a nap?"
Gavin stared at him. He was getting tired of this pencil-necked spook. "I made the turn, didn't I?"
"Watch the road," Jones said. Then he turned back to his iPad screen. "We're only half a mile from them."
Gavin kept driving.
* * * *
Benny dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through a hole in a rusted chain-link fence behind an aban-doned furniture store. Scott had to take off the straw hat he had appropriated from the man in the hotel and get down on his belly to squeeze through.
Two teenaged boys sat on the loading dock at the back of the store, their feet dangling over the ledge as they shared a joint. Scott could smell the burning marijuana. The boys eyeballed them but didn't say or do anything. Just kept hit-ting the joint and passing it back and forth.
The loading dock was covered in graffiti, most of it in Spanish, a lot of it gang related. The concrete apron behind the store was cracked and sprouted weeds.
Scott followed Benny toward the rear of the property, away from the old store, to where a set of train tracks ran, twenty yards beyond the edge of the concrete. Out there the grass was waist high. "Where are we going?" Scott said. Then he heard the train whistle again. This time much closer.
"To Mexico," Benny said.
They stood in the weeds, ten feet from the tracks. Scott could see a freight train rumbling toward them from the right. He pulled the brim of the straw hat down even lower across his eyes. "They're going see us."
"It doesn't matter," Benny said.
"Why not?"
"People jump on and off the trains all the time. It's a cheap way to get across town."
"I didn't know that."
"That's because you have a nice truck."
"But if the engineer sees us, won't he call somebody?"
"Who?"
"I don't know," Scott said. "The railroad police maybe."
"He's not going to call anybody," Benny said. "The train company doesn't want him to stop the train. They have a schedule to keep. And even if they did stop it, everybody would jump off and run. If you want to worry about some-thing, worry about falling and getting crushed under the wheels, or worry about getting robbed as soon as we get onboard."