The Territory A Novel - By Tricia Fields Page 0,65

bitches were madder than hell. Josie wished she’d had a camera to catch the joy on the man’s face. He grabbed his shotgun from his tool belt and trained it toward the hole. As snakes twisted out of the hole, Dell blasted a dozen shells, reloading like an infantryman.

A half hour later, they sat at a picnic table behind the cabin, looking at the twenty-five rattles he had cut off the dead snakes and cleaned up with the garden hose. While Josie checked out the bounty, Dell poured himself a glass of dark sun tea and brought Josie a beer. A reformed alcoholic, Dell wouldn’t allow the hard stuff on his property, but he kept the beer cold for Josie.

“We’ll make you a dream catcher out of those rattlers. I’ll show you how to stretch the sinew from a deer to make the web.”

Josie smiled and slipped the bottom of her T-shirt over the beer cap and twisted. Life was so uncomplicated with Dell. She would have fallen for him years ago if he hadn’t been forty years older. The man was a lifelong bachelor with seemingly no desire for intimacy.

“I saw that accountant’s car parked down at your place the other night. That a good thing?” he asked.

“It’s good.”

“How come he’s been gone so long, then?”

She sipped at her beer to consider the question and settled on the short version. “Something about my heart being in a box. I think I’m missing some key relationship gene. Things that everyone else understands make no sense to me.”

“Well, I got a whole list of things wrong with me, but by god, I’m a good judge of character. And I know for a fact that you got a heart of gold, and if that accountant so much as thinks of breaking that heart of yours, he’ll have to answer to me.”

TEN

At 11:30 P.M. Friday night, Marta Cruz sat on the hood of her car swatting at mosquitoes. The air was damp by the river, full of life, teeming with bugs and bats, and she could smell the rank odor of decay. She preferred the dry, scorched smell of sand and rock and wind that surrounded her small adobe house in town. When Marta was a child, her mother had forbidden her and her siblings from playing in the dirty water of the river, and as she had gotten older, her mother’s superstitions took root. The river was not a place for clean, decent people. Her mother said loose girls and boys who were up to no good hung out there, away from the lights of respectable homes. Down by the river was where the no-gooders partied in shanties, stayed up all hours, and earned their money through vice. Marta had never seen the sights her mother described, but the stories instilled in her a strange paranoia about the Rio. She wasn’t happy about spending the night along its banks.

She had arrived two hours prior and backed her car into a thicket of scrub, then pulled additional cover around the front of her car. Border Patrol had scouted out her position and agreed it would work. She was watching the intersection where Josie had seen the lookout car the night before from the watchtower, and waiting for any activity across the river on the Mexican side. Jimmy Dare and Tim Sanchez, another Border Patrol agent, had ATVs camouflaged and parked along the banks closer to the area where Josie had seen the exchange. Like Jimmy, Sanchez was a well-built agent who obviously took pride in his physical condition. Both agents were average height with short dark hair and muscular builds. Sanchez was bulkier, though, and obviously worked out heavily at the gym, almost to the point where Marta wondered if he supplemented with steroids. His biceps stretched the fabric on his uniform sleeves, and his chest was like a rock.

Marta slid off her hood, unclipped her flashlight from her gun belt, and began walking down to the river to wipe mud on her neck and arms to help shield her skin from the swarm of mosquitoes. As she approached the river, she saw headlights coming down the access road to the river on the Mexican side. She immediately turned the flashlight off and ran back toward her car, calling Jimmy on his cell phone as she ran.

“Looks like one car and a pickup with some kind of trailer attached,” she said. She watched the headlights approach through the thick brush and struggled to