The Fall Moon Page 14

  “You rested?”

  I nodded. “I wish I had a bathing suit.”

  She shrugged. “I tore the legs off a pair of jeans. You could do the same.”

  “That’s my Dehan. Where is Penny?”

  “She went to the store.”

  She pulled herself out of the pool and stood gushing water from her cut off jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt while she squeezed more out of her long hair. She looked somewhere between a street urchin and a Californian throwback to the ’60s. There was a round garden table in the shade of a small cluster of palms. I sat in a canvas director’s chair and watched her finish drying off. I realized I was smiling and wondered why. I was supposed to be mad at her.

  She came and sat with me, across the table. “We should move to Arizona,” she said. I didn’t answer and after a moment she looked at me. “You made up your mind?”

  I looked her in the eye and was struck for the millionth time by how beautiful she was. And yet somehow, in that moment, I knew I could not be a party to an operation that deemed it acceptable to murder suspects. However much I loved her as a person, I could not be a party to law enforcement that decrees itself judge, jury and executioner. I couldn’t deny that I understood her arguments. She was passionate and articulate about them. And she was right. The system, as it stood, too often failed the victim and favored the ruthless, but that didn’t mean that her answer was the right answer.

  I nodded slowly. She must have read the answer in my face because her cheeks colored and she looked away at the pool. “What are you going to do?”

  I drummed my fingers on the table for a moment and looked where she was looking at the glare on the pool. I heard my voice as though it was somebody else’s, and wondered if I had lost my mind. I said, “You have to promise me, Dehan, no more vigilante bullshit.”

  She looked away, so I wouldn’t see her smile. I said, “I am serious. For all your justifications, and I admit some of them make sense, I do not approve of what you did in Vinton. That is not the law we swore to uphold.”

  “Hey!” She turned to look at me. “The case will be closed within the week and the Camachos will be behind bars. Even if I wanted to shoot the son of a bitch, I probably wouldn’t get the chance. Stop bleeding from your liberal heart. The issue won’t even arise.”

  “Dehan? This is a deal…”

  “OK! OK! I promise. Even if I get the chance, I promise not to shoot him in a form or manner not approved by the U.S.A. Bleeding Hearts Association.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Satisfied?”

  “Not really, but for now it will have to do.” I hesitated, feeling vaguely sick, feeling that something shapeless and nameless was coming between us. “Dehan, please don’t trivialize this. I am serious. The day law enforcement starts executing people without trial is the day the Camachos of this world have won. So don’t go down that path.”

  She gave me the dead eye for fifteen seconds, which is a long time to get the dead eye, and finally gave a single nod. “I hear you.”

  We sat in silence for a bit, listening to the pool and the buzz of the cicadas. Then she asked, “You think Brad the Man Tucker will let us go along for the ride? Thanks for that, by the way.”

  “Probably. I don’t think he wants to be obstructive. He’s just looking out for his team. You’d do the same…”

  “That heart of yours ever going to stop gushing, Mahatma?”

  “Cut it out, Dehan, you’re being a pain in the ass. And if you think you ever stood an ice-cube’s chance in a supernova of getting on that team, you are out of your mind.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “He took one look at you and thought ‘I ain’t lettin’ that there gun-totin’, trigger-happy cowgirl anywhere near my boys, ’else she’ll fair shoot ’em all dead for me!’”

  She considered me a moment while I chuckled. “What is he now, from China? He was Chinese? I didn’t notice. ’Cause that accent was from China, right?”

  “Sure was, Annie. Git yer gun, Annie. Who you gonna shoot t’day, Annie? You gonna shoot them Chinese Commies?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  While I laughed, she went and jumped in the pool again. I sat and watched her long, sleek form go beneath the water and thought about going into the kitchen for a pair of scissors, but before I could make up my mind, I heard a car pull up, the engine die and the single slam of a door. A moment later, D.C. came around the side of the house.

  “You ain’t swimmin’ there, boy!” He laughed. “The lady’s got more sense. You want a beer?”

  “Sure do.”

  The lady erupted from the depths, saw D.C., shook the water from her face and said, “News?” Then she grinned. “Hi, also. Hello, D.C.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, news. Drag yourself out of the pool and join us here at the table, Carmen, while I get some beers.”

  She got out and he went to the kitchen. He returned a minute later with three cold bottles, which he set on the table while Dehan sat down.

  “Here’s the thing.” He opened them, sat and took a long pull from his bottle. “Brad called your deputy inspector at the 43rd, they had a long talk, then he consulted with Angel and Randy and me…”

  Dehan scowled. “He is aware that between us, we have half a century of experience…?”

  D.C. raised both hands. “I’m on your side, but to be fair, he is playing with people’s lives here. Everyone who goes on that operation has a family waiting for them to come home on Friday. So every decision that varies even a little from the norm has to be very carefully thought through.”

  He considered her a moment, then sighed. “Carmen, Brad is one of the best team leaders we have. You can imagine that, situated where we are, on the border, we do a lot of this kind of operation. Brad has never lost an agent, because his preparation is so meticulous. His guys all love him, because we all feel safe in his hands.

  “Now, with this operation, he is facing last minute action where he has had very little time to prepare, a lot of unknown variables—not least how many men he is up against, so a new team member that he knows practically nothing about is something he does not need.”

  She nodded and forced a smile. “OK, I know. I get it.”

  “His go-to response is, ‘no’. It’s an unnecessary risk.”

  “It’s OK, D.C. I get it. It’s his operation and he is doing the right thing. It makes sense.”

  “However, he has agreed to have you come along as observers. I’ve been instructed to make it very clear that you will not participate in the operation in any way, shape or form. You will stay back with the vehicles and simply, strictly, observe.” He frowned at her. “I need your word that you will do that.”

  She smiled. “You have my word that I will behave appropriately. How much can you tell us about the operation?”

  “I don’t want your promise that you’ll behave appropriately, Detective Dehan.” Suddenly the amiable face was gone and in its place there was the hard face of a Federal Agent who had spent almost forty years working the Arizona-Mexico border. “I assume that as a Federal Agent, you will behave appropriately. I was very specific that I want your word that you will not participate in the operation in any way, shape or form. This operation will be clockwork, and you will stay out of it. If I have the slightest inkling that you are going to interfere, you don’t go. It’s that simple.”

  I smiled at Dehan. “He’s saying, stop trying to be a wiseass and make an unambiguous promise, Dehan. Let them do their job.”

  “OK!” She held up her hands. “I promise. I will not interfere in any way, shape or goddamn form. What the hell did the chief say about me?”

  D.C. laughed and the amiable host was back. “He said you were a brilliant detective with a hot head. I’ve been there, I’ve done it and I have the wet T-shirt. We all have. In my case, it got me badly mangled and I was lucky to make it out alive. But you know why I count myself really lucky? Because what I did didn’t cost anybody else their life. Your own scars you can live wi
th, but another person’s life? That I could not live with. Especially a partner, a colleague, somebody you’ve worked with for years…”

  He shook his head. Dehan nodded. “I get it, D.C. Sold. You don’t need to sell it anymore.”

  “Good.” He studied her face a moment and smiled. Then he shifted his gaze to the long shadows of the palms that were now reaching across the pool. “We’ll leave here at two thirty AM sharp. I’ll drive you to the field office, where you will join the team. You won’t be part of the briefing. That is strictly need to know. You will then be driven down to Nogales, where a field base will be set up near the Beyer Ranch. ETA is five-fifteen AM. That is pretty much all I can tell you.”

  “Good enough.” She looked at me. “What do you say, Stone?”

  “No less than I asked for. Thanks, D.C., we appreciate it.”

  At that point, Penny turned up with her arms full of shopping bags, and we started discussing an early dinner.

  SEVENTEEN

  We hadn’t slept. D.C. made a barbecue as dusk had turned to evening, and Penny and Dehan had swum in the pool while he grilled burgers and sweet corn. Overhead, the desert sky had turned from a scorched blue-white to an infinite dark translucence, where the stars were like shards of ice, unimaginably far away.

  “When you see the moon rise,” he’d said, “that’s something else. I’ve never lived anywhere else, so I can’t compare. But people who have tell me that at night, this is the most beautiful place on Earth.” He had laughed. “I ain’t hankering to move, I’ll tell you that.”

  He’d turned then to his wife, who was sloshing water with her hands and talking quietly to Dehan. “Hey, sweetheart, how does this compare with back home?”

  “Mexico? Oh, Mexico is very beautiful, Daryl, but Arizona has something special. For me, it is the most beautiful place in the world. There was one place which was similar, you remember, babe, in the south of Spain? The Sierra de Cadiz, like Arizona with the sea! Beautiful! But not as beautiful!”

  He nodded. “Yeah, Andalucia was something. That was special.” She smiled and turned back to Dehan. I said:

  “Mexico? I would never have guessed.”

  “Oh, yeah. Came over years ago, she was like four or five. She completely assimilated. We met at high school and been married now thirty-five years. Never regretted it a day in my life.”

  “Kudos.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not for everybody, but it was definitely for me.”

  Later, we’d sat and talked while we ate. D.C. had the slightly didactic manner of a school teacher, and I wondered if he taught classes at the Bureau.

  “For me,” he had said at one point, “it’s all about loyalty. But there is a lot of political confusion in this country. Republicans and Democrats work so hard at polarizing us that things become, instead of good ideas or bad ideas, liberal ideas or conservative ideas. So if you’re a Democrat, you are required to believe a whole load of stuff, a lot of which is plain stupid, whether you agree with it or not. But if you’re a Republican, you have to believe a whole load of different stuff, much of which is also plain stupid, whether you agree or not. And suddenly your loyalties have been sequestered.”

  He had sat back and spread his hands, as a gesture that what he was about to say was self-evident.

  “I think, as normal people, our first loyalty is to our family, wife, husband, kids, even close friends. After that to our state. That’s where our home is, and those are our people. And after that to the United States, the Federation. And I speak as a Federal Agent. Beyond that, well, the parties should be loyal to me, not the other way around. But whichever way you look at it, the bottom line is, loyalty.”

  Something in what he’d said had taken my mind back to Amy and Charlie. Perhaps it had been the stark contrast between D.C.’s vision of life and family and the Redferns’. I couldn’t help wondering, futilely, how different Amy’s life might have been if she had had somebody like D.C. as a father; and Charlie, whose mother had invited Feliciano Camacho as an honored guest into their house. Would they have found happiness and fulfillment? Instead, their bones lay in a Tupperware box, waiting for a machine to give them a name and make them somebody again.

  Now, hours later, we lay huddled against the cold in the predawn dark, peering down out of the hills north of the Santa Cruz River at a complex of buildings surrounding a large swimming pool, which occasionally glinted in the floodlights that illuminated the area. The largest of these was a large palatial Spanish affair built around two central patios. Located around the driveway, there were what appeared to be a garage for at least six cars, stables, a tennis court and various other, smaller outbuildings. This was the Rancho Beyer.

  A hundred and fifty yards, maybe two hundred, east of the main complex, there was a landing strip running about two thousand feet diagonally across flats at the foot of the hills, not far from the river. It was fringed by trees, along the southeastern side and at the north end. This was barely visible in the dark, but it had been detected the day before by high flying drones with high resolution cameras, and when we had arrived, in two Jeeps and two personnel carriers, Brad had sent a scout team to confirm its location and guide in the two assault teams. Later, they would also guide in two choppers that were circling five miles to the north, ready to swoop in and provide air cover.

  He had then dispatched the two six-man assault teams, dressed in full battle gear, through the sparse woodland and undergrowth to take up positions on either side of the runway. They were armed with assault rifles, grenades and two heavy machine guns. So the runway was covered from the northwest and southeast sides, as well as the northern end. After the teams had been dispatched, Brad and three more men had taken the Jeeps back down the canyon to the River Road, ready to storm the runway from the southern end. The airstrip was covered on four sides.

  We were left with the personnel carriers and the binoculars, listening to the sporadic chatter on the radio in our earpieces. Brad had told us all at the final briefing, “Normally, on this kind of operation, as you know, we observe radio silence until the order to move in. That’s something we can’t do this time because we’ve had practically no preparation time. So, keep it to an absolute essential minimum. I’ll spot the plane’s approach from my position on the road. When I see it, I’ll give the order to stand by. When it has landed and the shipment is exchanging hands, I’ll give the order to go.”

  There had been no questions and the two teams had disappeared into the pre-dawn, melting into the darkness, surprisingly silent for their bulk and size.

  Brad had then pointed at us and said, “Say nothing, do nothing, just observe and wait for us to return.”

  He had climbed into the lead Jeep and they had rolled down the canyon track.

  Now we lay in the long grass, looking down into the valley below, and we watched and waited. After twenty minutes, there was a series of short bursts of radio crackle, each one less than a second, confirming the teams’ arrivals at their positions. Then more silence.

  Eventually, the sky over the Patagonia Mountains began to turn a pale, soot gray. Five minutes after that, it was tinged here and there with red, though the sky above us was still dark and speckled with stars. I nudged Dehan’s arm and pointed south and slightly east, because there was a very bright star there that was moving.

  She spoke softly. “That’s our boy.”

  The light became brighter and soon we could make out the red and blue lights to port and starboard, and then the soft drone of the engine on the air.

  We waited for Brad’s signal.

  Dehan chewed her lip. Our earpieces remained silent. The plane, now just about visible as a Cessna 172, was descending over the Patagonia Highway, clearly headed for the ranch. The teams below must by now be aware of it. Dehan grabbed my arm and pointed. Two vehicles were emerging from the ranch and making for the airfield.

  A voice crackled in my ear. “This is Alpha Team, Team Leader, what is your status? Are we on stand by? Target i
s landing.”

  Silence.

  The plane was coming in low over the trees. The radio crackled again. “This is Bravo Team. Team Leader, please confirm your status. Are we stand by or abort? Repeat, stand by or abort?”

  The plane touched down in a cloud of dust and a squeal of tortured rubber. The engine pitch dropped and groaned. The radio crackled. But this time the voice did not identify itself. It just screamed, “Abort! Abort! Abort!” Then the woods lit up with what looked eerily like sheet lightning under the canopy. It flickered red and blue under the trees, northwest and southeast of the runway, and at the northern extreme. Dimly, over the dying drone of the aircraft, we heard the sharp stutter, like firecrackers, of automatic rifles. There were a couple of explosions from the woods, probably grenades. Then more gunfire, growing sporadic.

  We watched through binoculars as the Cessna and the cars approached each other. They seemed oblivious to the slaughter that was being carried out just a couple of hundred yards away. The plane came to a halt. The airscrew thudded to a halt and a handful of men spilled from the side door. Two of them were dressed sharp. One was small, the other had a ponytail. The cars drew up and I counted six men who climbed out. One of them, dressed in a suit, seemed to move with authority. I figured he was Cesar, but I couldn’t be sure. The two groups met and there was a lot of hand shaking and back slapping. Meanwhile, in the woods, a short distance away, there were a few last, sporadic bursts of gunfire. Then silence.

  The group divided now. Three of the men moved back toward the cars. One was the man I’d pinned as Cesar. The others were the big guy with the ponytail and his small friend. The rest of the group had moved to the plane and started unloading packages into the trunk of a dark Audi. I looked at Dehan. She was filming what she could on her cell phone.

  I said, “Dehan, they knew we were coming.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Snap out of it! They knew where the teams were going to be positioned, all three of them. They knew where Brad was going to be.”