It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Read online

  “In a bit,” he said, and then, instead of stepping through the half-open door of the warehouse, he stepped around to the fenced-in yard. The ground was just packed dirt. Spaced every few yards, some of them clumped together, were rolls of hogwire that each went about fourteen feet tall. They were in different states of rust, birds balanced on one or two. And then I saw the rabbits, and understood the dogs: in every bit of shade there was — and there wasn’t much — there was a rabbit. And they were all watching us, their eyes rolling like wet marbles.

  “The dogs can’t dig them out, they den up in there,” I said, half of my face pulling up into an appreciative smile.

  “Good,” the client said. “But that’s not all.”

  I studied the yard again, trying to follow what he was getting at. All these abandoned rolls of wire. Maybe five thousand dollars’ worth, including delivery. Which — if these were what I was carrying, I was going to need a truck, and fog so thick you couldn’t even hear through it. An ocean to sigh that fog up for me.

  But that wasn’t the feeling I was getting, either; there were too many machinations in place already for me to just be delivering some discount fencing.

  The feeling I was getting, really, was like I was the new kid, standing in front of class, trying to figure out who I was going to have to fight, who I didn’t want to fight.

  “I don’t —” I started, but then did; the yard smelled dead.

  I stepped forward, into it, and, I mean, in the song-version of all this, if there was one, I’d be walking from one corner of Laurie’s napkin to the other now, from Dodd to that fifth variation.

  Something was rotting here.

  Slowly, conserving as much energy as possible, one of the rabbits stood, slow-hopped over to the fenceline, to peel the green from a leaf. Maybe dig up the pink root.

  They wouldn’t be the smell, though. Any rabbit that the dogs got, they would eat. No, this was — maybe one of them had got jammed up in one of the rolls of wire somehow … died?

  But that would just be one rabbit.

  Instinctively, I patted my back pocket, the long plastic tube I kept two sticks of silver nitrate in.

  “Go on,” the client said, nodding ahead of me into the yard, and the way he was smiling, I didn’t like it.

  There was nothing else to do, though. It wasn’t like there were going to be landmines or covered pits or snipers or anything.

  I stepped out, my sunglasses hanging from my hand, my other forearm across my nose, and after a few steps found the source of the smell: inside one of the newer rolls of wire, in the part that, if it were toilet paper, would be the cardboard tube, was the body of a man.

  To see him, I had to look at just the perfect angle. And even then, it was hard to tell.

  I studied the rest of the rolls — fourteen — then turned back to the client, my right cheek sucked up against my molars.

  “What was his problem?” I said.

  The client smiled, looked away. “He was late.”

  “You mean — making his delivery?”

  The client shook his head no.

  “He was late getting here,” he said, his face so pleasant, and I nodded, looked out to the yard again, so he couldn’t see my eyes.

  “Like I told you,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about that with me.”

  “I’m sure we won’t,” he told me, then held the broken door of the warehouse back, let me step in blind, my eyes not adjusting for probably thirty seconds, so that, for a bit, whatever was on the metal desk seemed to be hazy, glowing, like all the windows.

  As it turned out, of course, it was what I was carrying north.

  The first thing the client — the client’s representative, anyway — wanted to know was did I prefer to be paid by the job or by the ounce? It was a thing I’d never been asked. Usually I’d just say five large for getting the stuff across, then, depending on what I was carrying, from five to ten more. If it was a couple of kilos, say, then that told me who I was working for had more money to burn than somebody who just needed some Aztec artifact moved north.

  Not that, alone in the desert, I hadn’t drilled into that ancient artifact, found the two kilos I was pretty sure were there.

  It wasn’t about weight, though. What I told the clients was that it was about how much time I’d be doing if I got caught in a spotlight, couldn’t ditch the cargo. A thousand dollars for each year, roughly.

  The bad thing for them, of course, was that, because I was already a fugitive, I could get caught carrying baggies of sugar and still do twenty-five to life.

  But they didn’t come for me because I was cheap. They came to me because I was good. Maybe even, in 1986, the best. Not counting Sebby Walker, anyway, with his horse trained to lie down on command. But Sebby was a coyote, not a mule. His cargo was people, whole families sometimes, all the way out to cousins.

  You’d never catch me at the head of a line like that, though. It was just asking to get picked up. And, I mean, it’s not the people’s fault, it’s just that, if you’ve got a string of heads ten long, then you’re already visible, right? You might as well drape a paper dragon across all of you as umbrella, so at least you’ll be cool until the border cops show up.

  And anyway, Sebby, on this side he was a hero, but in South Texas, he was a slave trader. The people he sneaked up, by the time he got them there they were so close to dead that they’d get into whatever cattle truck or van he had lined up. Word was, he got two hundred for men, up to one-fifty for women. And that anything like a soul that he’d ever had, it was gone years ago.

  Which isn’t to say the stuff I carry north could be mailed through the post office. But that’s just business. If it wasn’t me, it’d be somebody else, and if it wasn’t somebody else, then another person would step in.

  This time, though, I was thinking that maybe I was that other person, stepping in.

  As to why being perfectly on time mattered so much, I had no idea, just figured they ran that kind of operation.

  For a moment, I considered the possibility that I was delivering an ostrich egg or something, that would hatch on me if I wasn’t fast enough. Except, of course, that was stupid.

  Never mind that it wasn’t far off.

  “So?” the client’s rep said, pulling me back to the warehouse.

  On the table by the steel briefcase was a bathroom scale, one of the high-dollar jobs.

  Did I want to go by the job, or by the ounce?

  I had no idea, but figured it had to be a trick of some kind. Like that Egyptian guy — probably Miles Davis or Charlie Parker too, for all I know — who, when the king or pharaoh or whoever asked him if he wanted this hill of gold or that box of rubies, he said he’d rather have some corn. Only paid out in a special way, on a chessboard: put one kernel on the first square, then double it each time, until each square was filled.

  A trick question, yeah. That Egyptian broke the bank.

  “Weight,” I said, and the client rep smiled, nodded, started to unlatch the case. “I’ll be carrying that too, won’t I?” I said.

  For a second, his eyes unfocused in thought, but then he shrugged, latched it back.

  “You don’t want to know what it is?”

  “It’s something you don’t want to risk putting under your backseat,” I said, my fingertips to the case now — it wasn’t aluminum, was … what? “Something that’ll put me on the front page of the Austin Chronicle. Stop me if I’m lying, here.”

  The rep just smiled a bit.

  “All that matters to me is how much that bad boy weighs,” I finished.

  He nodded, balanced the case up on the scale, then pushed down on it an extra three or four pounds, looked up to me again. “This was my idea, y’know? Weighing it out?”

  The air between us was all static, and things said with no words. But we understood each other.

  “Ten percent,” I said, just whispering in case the place was wired, and scraping my boot on the rough concrete, too, under m
y words. Hopefully on top of them. It wasn’t the DEA I was worried about. It was whoever he was representing. I was offering ten percent off the top if he’d lean down just a touch more.

  “Thinking more like twice that,” the rep said back, shrugging, leaning down a pound or two heavier just to show he could.

  “How much are we talking per ounce?”

  “Five hundred’s as high as I’m authorized to go.”

  “Make it seven and a half.”

  He laughed through his nose, said, “Five.”

  “Can’t do it for less than six, I’m afraid.”

  If that scale hadn’t been new, we’d have been able to hear that spring creaking for a few seconds there.

  “Half now, half there,” he finally said. “And my cut’s on this side.”

  I pretending to be weighing this as well. Stared at the scale long enough that he leaned down another couple of pounds — twenty-thousand dollars, better than fifteen of them mine.

  It was hard not to smile.

  “Twenty-five percent,” I said, like the money was nothing, was everyday. “And, when I make it back, you tell me who I’m working for here.”

  “You won’t be able to find me.”

  “Well then you’ll be getting a bargain, won’t you?”

  He looked away, to a window, then down to the scale again. Nodded.

  Twenty-two pounds and change.

  And we were rounding up, of course.

  The client rep gave me the rest of the day to do what I wanted to with what I had left of fifty percent of the job, after his quarter off the top, that cut being mostly what he’d leaned onto the scale. So, fifty-three-thousand, give or take. The score of a lifetime. He had it ready in large, unsequential bills — this was Mexico — and that should have told me a thing or two, I suppose. But fifty thousand. It wasn’t enough to buy me out of my trouble up in America, but it would be enough to keep me from having lied to Laurie: I really could retire after this. Especially now that I knew something about managing money.

  When we’d first showed up down here, Laurie still in diapers, practically, I’d had thirty-eight thousand. Which I thought would be enough. But then there was just so much to buy: first, fifteen percent taken off the top, to wash the money as much as it needed washing, even for Mexico. Next, new identities for me and her, and then private school and a car with air conditioning — a legal car, at that — and then paying off the independent contractor who’d shown up, scratching the side of his head with the brass bead on his chrome pistol, and then, the very next day after the bounty hunter, Lem, on the run from the Texas Rangers, his leg shot to rags. It was twelve hundred to get him sewn up, then another eight to get him back on the road, with the sincere promise never to come back. And then just living, day-to-day. Cable, phone, electricity. Manuel the friendly neighborhood pharmacist.

  Now that we were set up, though, me and Laurie, this fifty-three thousand, with twice that waiting on delivery — no client rep getting his cut of that — it’d see her through high school and even college, probably, if she wanted to go.

  I carried the money in an old ammo box, and held it with both hands, and walked all over Piedras Negras until I was sure I wasn’t being followed, and then I walked straight out into the desert, committing each fencepost and hill and rock on the way to memory, so I could find this place again, and then I took the money out and wrapped it in plastic baggies and put it back in the box and buried it armdeep, where nobody would look, and peed over the tamped-down dirt, so it would make a crust, not look like something had been hidden there.

  By the time I got back to town it was dusk and I was hungry, but it didn’t matter. By three in the morning, I was supposed to be outside Ciudad Acuna, to pick up the briefcase.

  Part of the deal was that I had to walk it across. It didn’t matter where I crossed — they didn’t need to know my business (the client rep’s words) — but they didn’t want me calling up a friend, trying to drive this across the bridge, anything like that.

  I’d told the rep that I didn’t do that, and he’d shrugged, and I’d shrugged, and then I’d asked him why couldn’t I?

  His answer was that my cargo, there had to be zero point zero chance of it getting seized. Less than that.

  At which point I told him what the hell, maybe I would like to look in that briefcase.

  He smiled with his eyes, like he’d been waiting for this.

  Inside the briefcase, packed in molded grey foam, were twelve stainless steel canisters.

  Without meaning to, I stopped breathing, didn’t want to get infected.

  The rep smiled with his mouth, shook his head no, then palmed up the canister marked 4.

  “You don’t have to,” I told him.

  “It’s best you know,” he said back, and broke the plastic seal, screwed the lid off, upended the canister.

  What was inside clunked out onto the table. It wasn’t diamonds and it wasn’t some test tube and it wasn’t microfilm.

  “A rock?” I said, reaching for it.

  He stopped me.

  “Yeah,” he said. “A rock. Eight rocks, actually. And some dust.”

  I narrowed my eyes, studied the canisters.

  “The rocks are decoy for the product?” I said, shrugging to make it true.

  “The dust is just dust, Mr. Dodd.”

  “Just Dodd.”

  “But if it gets seized, it’s not something my employers will be able to regain by … by traditional means.”

  “Evidence rooms aren’t thrift marts, yeah?” I told him, studying the rock from a different angle. Was it laced with something, some rare ore, maybe?

  “If that’s where this sample would be going,” the rep said, then lobbed the rock to me.

  I didn’t have time not to catch it.

  “It’s warm,” I said, unsure.

  “And heavy?”

  Yeah. Too heavy.

  “It’s not used to this gravity,” the rep said, taking it back from me, wiping it clean with his handkerchief, sliding it back into the canister.

  I smiled, got it: the reason these wouldn’t be getting logged into any evidence room is that they were from the moon. The most expensive few ounces of anything, anywhere.

  “And just so you know,” he added, “the market for this is rather … exclusive.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to cut and run on you.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  He put the canister back in its molded foam cradle, relatched the briefcase.

  “No later than three,” he said, hefting it up.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “And — I know I don’t have to say this either, Mr. Dodd. But, now, number four is the only one with the seal broken. Just so we’re clear.”

  “And if something happens?”

  “Something?”

  “The law. Always have a contingency. So is mine to dump these, let them mix in with the other rocks and dirt, or you want I should just hand them over?”

  The rep stared at me like I was from the moon as well.

  “Just don’t let something happen, Mr. Dodd.”

  “I’m just saying. It’s not something I want.”

  “Good. Because it’s not something we tolerate.”

  “Well then.”

  The rep eased the case around so he was holding it with both hands now, before him.

  “Didn’t you ever want to be an astronaut, Dodd?”

  “Thought it’d be a little more glamorous.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, already following his eyes out the door, “T minus ten hours, right?”

  I smiled, and, before I left, toured the wire rolls again. In the far one, one of the ones brittle with rust, was a head of hair I was pretty sure was Sebby Walker’s. I shook my head, spit into the dirt, and walked out.

  The rabbits just stared at me.

  If I did get caught — and I wasn’t even allowing the pos
sibility, because I was already banking on that other hundred and ten thousand — if I did get caught, what I had going for me was the lie that these were just rocks, officer. More than that, they weren’t in and of themselves illegal, like my usual cargo, but were only illegal because they were, I assumed, stolen.

  Which is to say, if I hadn’t already dumped them, then I could argue that the paperwork required to write them up hadn’t even been commissioned yet, so it might be better just to take my cute little geologic samples, let me fade back into whatever mystery I’d stepped out from.

  The only reason I was thinking so much about getting caught was that the clients didn’t just want me to lob the stuff across the river or magnet it to the tail of some private plane or any of that. Instead of meeting up with me in Del Rio, like sane people, they were insisting that I meet at some warehouse in Uvalde. It added nearly eighty miles to my trip. And they didn’t want to risk motor transportation. Meaning I was going to have to stick to the ridgelines, find water where I could. Sleep under the stars for maybe four days, hoof it across the baked earth at night, bats divebombing me, coyotes pacing me, grinning their blacklipped, patient grins.

  My objection was that eighty miles for them, in a car all registered and inspected and insured and driven the speed limit by somebody with a clean record and white skin, it was a three-hour round-trip. As opposed to a hundred and fifty for me.

  The rep’s objection to my objection was that each of those hundred and fifty was worth about a thousand dollars to me, yeah?

  He made a good point.

  Until then, though, I could ride in all the cars I wanted.

  At a single-story pool joint in Piedras Negras, even though I’d kept three thousand out to buy whatever car I wanted, I won a lowridered LeMans in a series of pool games, and it even started the first time, like this was all meant to be.

  From a wholesaler I knew on the way out of town, I bought some Army rations, the kind in bags — like the astronauts ate, yeah — then lined a styrofoam cooler with cool, bottled water. It was shipped in from Canada, the label said.

  At the first stoplight I turned the first bottle up, drained it.

  One of the main tricks with muling stuff north isn’t to load your pack down with water, but to get your body superhydrated before the trip, so that you can camel through the dry hours.