Reminding herself that these were not the people she should worry about, Joule tried to fix her massive gaff. “Jacob McQueeny knows who you are.”
“You're why they called me in for questioning!” Gretchen accused once again taking a step forward. Only this time it was her friend and one of the other younger men who put their hands out as if to hold her back.
She stopped and Joule was grateful that no greater restraint was needed. Not the best way to fix things. Shit. “I'm sorry about that. I truly am. I'm trying to find my missing twin brother. And they knew you were out here in the desert. Again.”
The conversation paused and this time Joule decided that maybe she should play all of her cards. “So that you know, he told me the DEA doesn't want to hold you. The best that they can get you on as littering and no one will charge with that. As long as you don't do anything illegal in their faces, they don't want to take you down. You're not who they're after. I think they're more concerned that you'll get in their way or that you'll wind up missing.”
She choked on the last word. Cage had been gone for far too long. Pressure dominated the back of her eyes and suddenly the desert was as gritty as the beach.
She couldn't cry now. Not in front of these people. Not when she stood in the desert alone, surrounded by people that she didn't know if they were enemies or friends. She reminded herself that if anyone could survive this long it was her brother.
“The Maverick County Sheriff's Department knows that because . . .” Gretchen Mueller pushed.
Joule remembered, these people didn’t have a connection to the DEA or the ATF. At least not that she knew. She answered as generically as she could. “They brought you in. They check your records first.”
Okay, she maybe wasn’t quite playing all her cards.
The others looked at Gretchen as if to say, maybe that's not such a bad deal.
“Can I help tonight?” Joule tried again, fully expecting them to send her away. Though Gretchen still looked like she might, one of the younger men stepped forward taking over.
“We can always use an extra pair of hands.”
Joule held hers out. “Thank you, and I promise I'm not going to give anyone your secrets.”
Within a few minutes she was trained on what to put in each of the bags, a blister pack of Tylenol, 2 peanut butter sandwiches, apples and a guava.
No bananas. Joule was thinking that they came in their own peel. They should be—
“Bananas go bad too quickly.”
She must have said it out loud. She needed sleep and food and none of that mattered. She couldn’t stop until she found Cage.
She later realized she’d never introduced herself. With her hand out, she said, “I’m Joule Mazur. My brother who went missing is Faraday. He goes by Cage.”
The kid working next to her grinned and laughed. “That's a fantastic nickname.”
Joule couldn't help her return smile. It was the first time she truly smiled about her brother since the night she'd lost track of him.
“I’m Eric.” He held up one of the guavas. “They’re heat resistant, but buying a lot of guavas generally tips people off that this is what we're doing.”
He put it into the bag along with a pair of cheap, lightweight sweatpants. Then the young woman ripped open a massive multipack of white T shirts, sorting a few of those into packs. They rationed two gallons of water for each bag.
One of the women had brought a small wagon to tug along. It had been retrofitted with all terrain wheels and looked like it belonged to a toddler trying out for the X-Games.
In a few moments she was paired with Eric and Lily, each of them loaded up with heavy bags and jugs of water. Eric hadn’t given a last name but appeared to be of Hispanic origin. They headed off in a direction the two already knew and Joule followed along. Her eyes scanned the horizon as if she might magically just see her brother tonight.
Eric quickly turned his head back and asked her, “Do you speak Spanish or Portuguese?”
Joule shook her head at both. “I had Latin in high school, so I understand some of it, but I probably can't generate enough.”
He nodded. “I do. So, I've got us covered if we run into anyone who doesn't speak English.”
“Does that happen a lot?” she asked.
“Enough,” Lily filled in.
The trio was quiet for a while, heading off in one direction as she watched other pairs go another way. After a bit, the question she’d asked before but not gotten an answer to pressed at her and she asked it again.
“Why do they do it?”
“Why do we leave out food and clothes?” Lily asked.
Joule almost laughed. “That part makes perfect sense to me. Not what you do, what they do.” She waved her hand to the open, empty desert without a glimpse of her brother. “I mean, why do they cross? The journey is often fatal.”
She thought of Salvador's older brother, who hadn't seen seven.
Lily was ready with an answer though. “Where they come from, it's worse.”
That was hard for Joule to imagine, despite having lived on a street with the Night Hunters, and having lived with the mosquitoes. She’d thought that her home was bad, unsafe. She’d tried to figure out where she could move that would be better. But it was nothing like this.
“How is this better?” she asked.
“It's not that this is better,” Lily told her. “The journey is rough, and it might be just as bad—just as likely to hurt and kill them as where they came from. But if they can get through to the other side, that’s better.”
“How bad is it where they're from?”
“No jobs,” Eric answered. “No security nets. There's no government provided food, no housing. Not even the kind of charity that exists here in the US. People don’t have it to spare. Aid organizations can’t reach all the small communities, so they lose their homes. They starve. Families are often out on the street. So why not be on the street moving towards something better, rather than staying where things haven't been decent for a decade?”
“It's getting worse, too.” Lily added in and Eric nodded his agreement. “It’s very hard to drive the cartels out of the city. So, more and more cities are getting taken over. Border towns are prime property for activity because it's not just people moving across these borders.”
That one Joule had heard before. This time she was nodding along as she walked behind them, still scanning the desert. Still held upright by hope.
“The Rio Grande dried up last year for the first time.”
“What?”
“The first time in any of our lifetimes. Even in my grandmother's,” Lily told her.
“Yeah, there are portions of it you can walk right across.” Eric told them. Still holding his dowel on either end, helping him carry a heavier load than either Lily or herself, Joule noticed. “In the past, when it got very dry it was still muddy, but it's nothing now. Just dusty riverbed.”
“So, climate change is forcing people out of their homes?” Joule said as if to solidify it.
“Exactly. If you live in a rural area and have no steady income, you need chickens and farm animals and a garden. How do you do that when the river is dry? It’s that and horrifying government policies that create untenable situations, dangerous ones.”
Joule carried the bags on her arms, the plastic cutting into her skin. This was turning into the longest grocery run she'd ever made. Each time she set down a bag, she was relieved. But she couldn’t drop them, only place them where the other two showed her. The three of them made what appeared to be a well-known loop for Eric and Lily.
Though her load was heavy, it probably wasn’t as heavy as what those coming through carried. She told herself that and appreciated each piece she got to set down. Her back thanked her, too.
She’d been scanning the horizon and the ground all night—hell, she’d already found a body out here. At last, she spotted something and veered over to check it out.
It took longer to reach it than she expected. Enough time for Eric and Lily to really question her. But it grew clearer as she got closer: a duffel bag. It sat in the dirt in the open as if someone had dropped it and decided it wasn’t worth it to pick it back up.
“We should take this,” she said.
Immediately both Eric and Lily ushered a stern unison, “No!”
Eric held his hand out, grabbing her forearm as if his grip could stop her. “We shouldn't touch anything.”
That made sense, but Joule didn’t need sense. She needed to find her brother. Looking around, she saw no one in the vicinity. She stepped forward.
“Don't touch it!” Lily’s voice was sharp. “We really need to get away.”
“I need to see what's inside.” Joule countered. She might not have cell service out here, but she still had a camera on her phone. So she began to take pictures. Once again, she lamented not ordering the satellite phone. It would have arrived by now. But their hopeful stance had been to save the money because surely they would have found Sarah before it arrived.
Oh, the irony of that thought.
She would have been able to pinpoint her location, even out here. More than that, she should have told someone—anyone—where she was tonight. But she was almost a pro at taking evidence pictures now.
Snapping a small, crooked twig off one of the nearby brushes, she hooked the spike into the tab of the zipper, pulling it back. She was not prepared for what she saw in the bag.