Tell My Sorrows to the Stones Read online

  Army or Guard, didn’t matter that much in the scheme of things. None of it was anything like he’d imagined as a kid. All just waiting around. If he’d earned a trip to Hell, he was living it. Never mind the heat, or the grit and desert dust in his hair and every fucking orifice . . . the boredom was Hell enough. It was all just so much waiting around.

  Once upon a time, he’d have been excited about a detail like tonight. Border Patrol and DEA were working together to take out a cocaine caravan, bouncing up from South America on the Mexican Trampoline. The traffickers were doing double duty—taking money from illegals to smuggle them across the border, and using them as mules, loading them up with coke to carry with them. Where the DEA got their Intel was none of Weston’s business. He was just a grunt with a gun. But from the way the hours were ticking by, it didn’t look good. They hadn’t seen shit all night, and it had to be after two A.M.

  South of the ditch, Weston couldn’t see anything but desert. Out there in the dark, less than half a mile off, locals had strung a barbed wire fence that ran for miles in either direction. The idea that this might deter illegals from crossing the border made him want to laugh and puke all at the same time. Yeah, Border Patrol units traversed this part of the invisible line between Mexico and the U.S. on a regular basis, but if you were committed enough to try crossing the border through the desert, you had a decent shot at making it. Border Patrol captured or turned back hordes of illegals every day, but plenty still slipped through.

  And that was just the poor bastards who didn’t have transport, a bottle of water, or a spare sandwich. You had a little money and wanted to get some drugs across, all you needed was a ride to the border and a pair of wire-cutters. Came to it, you didn’t need the cutters, either. If you drove a little way, you’d find an opening.

  The whole thing was a game. That was what bothered Weston the most. Over in Iraq, the other guys were full of hate and trying to take as many Americans out of action as possible. That was war. This whole business, sitting around in the ditch, was hide-and-fucking-seek.

  “Weston.”

  He blinked, turned and glanced at Brooksy. The guy hadn’t been in Iraq with Weston’s unit. He was brand new to the squad; eighteen years old and thinking this shit was war. Grim motherfucker, skinny as a crack whore, hair shaved down to bristle, and twitchy as hell. The squad leader—Ortiz—had made Weston the kid’s babysitter, which meant they were sharing the ditch tonight. Six other guys in the squad, but Brooksy had to be Weston’s responsibility. He wasn’t sure if Ortiz was punishing him or complimenting him, making him look after the kid.

  “Shut up,” Weston said, voice low.

  He held his M16 at the ready and glanced around to see if anyone was picking up on their chatter. No sign of movement from the rest of the squad, never mind the Border Patrol grunts or the DEA crusaders.

  “I gotta piss, man,” Brooksy said.

  Weston’s nostrils flared. “Not in this ditch.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Hold it, dumbass.”

  “And when I can’t?”

  “You piss in this ditch, I swear to God I’ll shoot you.”

  Brooksy’s eyes narrowed. He gripped his M16 and scanned the desert in the direction of the border.

  Weston rolled his eyes. He turned and looked north. In the moonlight, the black silhouettes of a dozen or so small buildings were visible. They were all single-story, slant-roof shacks, most of which had once been houses. One had been offices, one a gas station, and one a saloon. The tiny desert town had never had a name—though one clever prick had painted a sign and planted it at the south end of the cluster of shacks. It read WELCOME TO PARADISE.

  From what Ortiz had told the squad, passed down from the DEA briefing, the place had been hopping back in the days when heroin production had been huge in Mexico—before they’d realized that their greatest asset wasn’t crops, but the border itself, and started putting all of their efforts into trafficking instead. There’d been a big operation going in this little shithole, but the DEA had compromised it then and it had been abandoned ever since. The few people who’d actually tried to live there had long since wandered off.

  Paradise Lost.

  “Seriously, man,” Brooksy began.

  Weston laughed softly, reached out with his foot, and kicked the kid’s pack. “Drain your canteen and piss in it.”

  “I’ll never get it clean, man. I’ll never be able to use it.”

  That might be true. Weston gave him a hard look. “Go in the corner over there. Dig yourself a little hole, piss in it, then cover it up again. And you better hope the wind doesn’t shift.”

  Brooksy nodded, propped his weapon against the side of the ditch, and went over to the corner. He used the heel of his boot to dig into the ground, then got down and deepened the hole with his hands. When he stood and unzipped, Weston laughed.

  “Keep your head down, Brooks.”

  The kid bent his head and his knees, half-crouched, and it was just about the most foolish-looking thing Weston had ever seen. For a few seconds, it seemed inevitable that Brooksy would stumble into his hand-dug latrine.

  From out across the desert came the distant growl of an engine. Weston swung round, propped the barrel of his M16 on the top of the ditch, and sighted into the darkness. The sound of the engine cut off abruptly. Maybe there had been more than one. Regardless, it had come from the other side of the border, and no way anyone was joyriding the Sonoran in the wee hours of the morning.

  “It’s on,” he whispered.

  Brooksy might have been a kid, but instead of losing his cool and flopping all over the place, he turned pro. Quietly, he sat backward on the floor of the ditch, used his boots to cover the hole he’d made with dirt, then lay back and zipped up. He was back at his post with his weapon up in a handful of seconds, eyes gleaming in the dark. All the nervous energy that made him so twitchy had gone away. Weston nodded to him, then settled in to wait. Maybe the kid wouldn’t be a liability after all.

  He imagined he could hear the twang of the barbed wire being cut, but at this distance, that might have been in his head. For long minutes they sat in the ditch, barely breathing. The other six members of the squad were broken into three two-man teams in different locations, but all on the obvious approach to the empty husks of Paradise.

  At first, the rhythmic sound was so muffled that it could’ve been his own pulse in his ears. But when it grew louder, Weston knew the mules were on the move. Ortiz had told them the DEA expected a couple of dozen, but as the noise of running feet multiplied, it sounded like a hundred or more. The illegals would all have backpacks full of coke. They’d been warned some of them would be guards sent along to protect the coke—coyotes herding the mules—and those guys would be armed. Weston tried to do the math. If he figured twenty-five pounds of coke per mule—over ten kilos—at a hundred mules, they were talking about over a thousand kilos of cocaine.

  How the DEA knew about the whole setup, he had no idea. That was their job. But obviously the traffickers had to be pretty confident to risk that kind of product on a bunch of desperate Mexicans looking for a better life in the goddamn desert.

  Shadows out on the desert began to resolve into running figures. They were coming, but after crossing through the hole they’d cut in the fence, they’d spread out. DEA and Border Patrol were set up in the ramshackle buildings of Paradise, hiding behind and inside them, just waiting. There were big black Humvees and somewhere—not far off—a DEA chopper was waiting to be deployed.

  Weston sighted down the barrel of his M16. He almost felt bad for the mules. They didn’t stand a chance. They expected to show up in Paradise, get a meal and a blanket, and transport deeper into the U.S. But their ride wasn’t ever going to show up. DEA had already taken care of that.

  A night wind blew over the desert and Weston shivered. During the day, the Sonoran was a frying pan. But at night, it could get
cold as Hell.

  He watched the tiny figures running closer, moving in and out of patches of moonlight. The night played tricks on the eyes. It was hard to track them closely from this distance. But the sounds of their running grew louder and pretty soon he motioned to Brooksy to duck down inside the ditch.

  They slid down, their backs to the dirt wall. The mules started running by, some of them so close he could hear their laboured breathing and their grunts of exertion. A voice snarled, let off a stream of abuse at one of the mules. Had to be one of the shipment’s guards. Weston forced himself to take his finger off the trigger to fight the urge to rise up from the ditch and blow a hole in the bastard’s skull.

  He kept his own breathing steady. Their assignment was simple. Let the mules and the coyotes pass on by, then close ranks behind them so that when the shit hit the fan in Paradise, none of the coke fled back across the border.

  Simple.

  Until the screaming started.

  In the dark, he saw Brooksy glance at him, wondering who the fuck was screaming. There’d been no gunshots yet. Nobody was supposed to make a move until they got the go signal from DEA, and that wasn’t intended to happen until all of the coke-carrying illegals and their guards had marched into Paradise, putting them between the DEA and Border Patrol on one side, and the National Guard on the other to keep them from retreating. But to the south, toward the border, a grown man had started shrieking like someone had just cut his dick off. It sent a chill up Weston’s spine, and he wondered how the other guys would be taking it.

  The sound of running footsteps slowed, became hesitant.

  Voices barked, urging the illegals on. The guards couldn’t let the mules change their minds now. Whoever was hurt or dying out there, it didn’t concern the drug runners.

  Then the screaming died abruptly, a second of silence followed, and several other voices started a chorus of screams. At least one of them had to be that of a child, badly injured or at least in terror.

  “Damn,” Weston whispered.

  Brooksy flinched and stared at him, almost like the kid was judging him for breaking silence. Punk could fuck off as far as Weston was concerned. You got to the point where the terrified, maybe dying screams of a child didn’t rip your heart out, you might as well eat a bullet right there.

  The comm. unit in his ear crackled. “Go. Word is go.”

  Engines roared—the Humvees coming to life. Shouts began to arise, in English. “Go, go, go, go!” over and over. Weston took one glance at Brooksy and saw that, indeed, the twitchy motherfucker had vanished, leaving one stone cold bastard behind. No more babysitting for Weston.

  “Go, go!” Brooksy chimed in.

  They ran up out of the ditch, weapons up and ready. Instantly, Weston saw what had happened. The screams back there in the darkness of the border had made the flood of illegals hesitate. They’d slowed down. Some had maybe even started to turn back, going to check on friends or family members who were stragglers, worried that they were the source of the screams. Whatever it was, the DEA cowboys had gotten worried that they might lose part of their score—or they’d just gotten impatient, which was typical. Grunts like Weston were used to waiting around for the world to explode. From what Ortiz had said, DEA cowboys spent too much time in offices, doing paperwork, and got stir crazy enough that once they hit the field, they couldn’t wait for shit to go down.

  The mules started shouting in Spanish. Weston didn’t have to be fluent to know what they were yelling. “Fuck. We’re fucked. Get the fuck out of here.” Pretty much a universal language.

  The Mexicans started dropping the backpacks full of cocaine—mules couldn’t run very fast with kilos of blow strapped to their shoulders—and turning toward the border full speed. One of the guards—they were better dressed, healthier looking, and didn’t carry any coke—started screaming at them, raised a 9mm, and put a bullet in the head of the nearest mule who’d dared to dump his drugs.

  Weston stitched him with a few rounds from his M16 and the guy danced a little, spraying blood, and then sprawled onto the desert.

  That didn’t accomplish anything except to start more shouting and make them run all the faster, like a starter pistol. Only about two thirds of the hundred and fifty or so Mexicans had made their way past the ditches the National Guard squad had been waiting in, not even all the way into Paradise. Now they were fleeing.

  “Stop right there!” Brooksy roared.

  Like they were going to listen.

  “Hustle!” Weston told him.

  Brooksy fired a few rounds into the air and they started running alongside the illegals, watching for more coyotes—more guns. Not one of them slowed down. They all figured to take their chances that it would be some other guy who got dropped. Ortiz and the other guys in the squad were on the other side of the stampede. If it was only the eight of them, they’d have had to let most of them go.

  “Get the guards,” Weston said.

  Brooksy nodded and they started scanning the throng.

  Then the Humvees tore past them, half a dozen of the roaring machines kicking up clouds of sun-blanched desert dust as they began to herd the stampede. Two vehicles reached the far end and cut in, blocking the way. Doors popped open and DEA agents leaped out, jackets emblazoned with the bold yellow letters of their agency. Jeeps followed, loaded with Border Patrol.

  The stampede slowed. The mules didn’t know what to do with themselves. The guards were fucked. Now it was just a matter of containing the herd and getting them all into custody. For a minute, it had looked like the operation might fall apart. But the DEA and the Border Patrol guys had moved fast.

  “Look at you,” Brooksy said, eyes bright. “Taking that guy out. You had him fuckin’ dancing, man.”

  Weston’s nostrils flared. “I did what had to be done. That shit isn’t fun for me.”

  “Would be for me,” Brooksy replied, that skittery grin returning.

  The comm. in Weston’s ear clicked and Ortiz came on, sounding like he’d climbed right inside his skull.

  “Weston, come in.”

  He adjusted the comm. so the mouthpiece was in place. “This is Weston.”

  “We’ve got plenty of runners, including at least a couple of coyotes. Take Brooks. Stop as many of the illegals still carrying as you can, but first priority are the guards. Do not let them back across the border. Improvise. You read me?”

  “Affirmative, Sergeant.”

  “Go.”

  But Weston was already moving. He grabbed Brooksy by the arm and started dragging him away from the cluster of DEA and Border Patrol officers who were closing ranks around the corralled mules.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Come on. We’re moving,” Weston said.

  “Where to?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Brooks fell into step and the two of them ran outside the circle of vehicles. A Border Patrol Jeep had slewed sideways in the dirt and sat there, engine still purring. An officer stood beside the open door, talking into a two-way radio. From somewhere far off, Weston could hear the distant staccato of helicopter blades.

  “Drive!” Weston snapped.

  He ran around the Jeep and pulled the door open at the same time Brooksy was climbing into the back. The Border Patrol officer stared into his vehicle at them.

  “Get the fuck out of there. What do you think you’re doing?”

  Weston leaned over and shot him a hard look. “We’ve got coyotes on the run and orders to stop them. You want to explain fucking that up, or you want to drive?”

  The officer hesitated, but only for a second.

  “Fine,” he said as he slid into the driver’s seat. “But I want your names.”

  He dropped the Jeep into gear and hit the gas, the tires spinning and spitting dirt behind them as they tore off across the desert. Brooksy clutched his M16 like he was bringing flowers to his mother. />
  “I’m Weston. This is Brooks.”

  “Austin,” said the Border Patrol man. He drove past the last Humvee and then they were in open desert, headlights illuminating the ground straight ahead but somehow making the rest of the landscape around them even darker.

  “That your first or last name?” Brooksy asked.

  “We on a date?” Austin snapped.

  He picked up the radio he’d tossed aside and got his boss on the line, told the guy he had two Guardsmen on board and they were running down the last of the coyotes the cartel had sent to protect the coke. He had the accelerator pinned. The Jeep jittered in the ruts and bounced across the ground, closing the gap between Paradise and the Mexican border. They passed a bunch of backpacks full of cocaine that had been tossed aside in favour of getting the hell out of the U.S.

  Austin’s boss told him to carry on, inter-agency cooperation, and some other bullshit that meant any pissing matches that were going to happen would take place above their pay grade. Let the DEA, Border Patrol, and the Guard work it out after the op was over and they jostled for credit or blame.

  The first of the strays came in view up ahead. They should’ve rabbited in either direction but they kept going in a straight line, which confused Weston until he remembered the fence. They went right or left, they’d never get back across the border before they were caught. The opening in the fence was dead ahead.

  An old man stumbled. A younger guy collided with him from behind, managed to stay on his feet, grabbed the old man by a fistful of white hair and shoved him out of the way. The old guy fell in a tangle of arms and legs, probably breaking something—bones were brittle at that age. The one who’d tossed him aside had a 9mm in one hand and was shouting to some of the other mules. Two young women and a small boy were just ahead of him. He raised his gun and fired once like he was trying to get them moving faster.

  Instead, they stopped short.