Spirit Walk. Jay Treiber

Juan Carlos said.

      “There’s more somewhere. Horse. Eighty or ninety kilos—uncut.”

      “You’re fucking kidding me.” Juan Carlos pointed to the bundles in the bed frame. “This is coke?”

      Isedro nodded. “About two-hundred keys.”

      Juan Carlos shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

      “Like I told you, he’d been siphoning off me since the beginning.” Isedro was rummaging around the room now. He stepped over to the vanity and pulled open the drawers. In the lower three he found what he was looking for, the kilo bags so heavy the drawer bottoms had collapsed from their weight. Juan Carlos marveled as Ise laid the plastic bags out on the floor.

      In the dim, greenish light of the kerosene lamp the men stood, hands on hips, surveying their bounty.

      “You want to do this all in one run?” Rascon asked.

      “We’ve got to. Jimmy wasn’t bullshitting about the border patrol. Those fuckers are all over the place. Nobody’s getting through the port either, man, so we can’t spread it out between the cops, and I don’t trust anybody anymore. We need to do this in one shot. Walk it across ourselves. I know a hook-up guy who’ll pay full on delivery.”

      “It’s gonna take a lot of guys.”

      “Five, maybe six kids, plus you and me. Pay them a couple grand apiece. It’ll take a few days to round them up, find the connection, but we can get it done inside a week—ten days max.”

      “Where do you think we can cross?”

      “They know about that brushy wash. It’ll have to be further east, man, at the Escrobarra.”

      “Shit, that’s a hard hike.” Rascon kicked at one of the bundles. “We’ll have to carry seventy—eighty pounds apiece.”

      Isedro reached over and patted him on his large belly. “You think you can make it, panzón?”

      “For that much money? Hell yes.”

      “You’ll probably end up with a couple million. You invest some of it and don’t piss it all away on party and women, you shouldn’t have to take any more hikes.”

      “You thinking about retiring, Ise?”

      Leon looked genuinely pained. “When you have to pop your best friend, and his grandmother, it’s time to hang it up.”

      Rascon thought hard before he spoke. “What was the girl’s name?”

      “I don’t remember,” Leon said. He was working his jaw, the way he did when he was upset. “I don’t want to remember. Don’t bring her up again.”

      Juan Carlos didn’t speak for a moment. “So, we’ll probably do it next week sometime?”

      Isedro nodded. “I know a little road. We’ll hike two, maybe three miles. We can take Jimmy’s truck and my Dodge out there—just leave Jimmy’s rig at the drop. They’re working on Highway 2 right now, but I know a ranch road that goes out there.”

      “You know what,” Rascon said. “I just remembered something—I think hunting season starts next week.”

      “Well,” Leon said, the same slate-colored cast in his eyes Juan Carlos had come to fear. “Hunters can be taken out, too.”

Six

      The old Douglas Library had changed little, and Kevin was glad for it. Masoned of reclaimed government brick in 1906, the structure resembled the one-room schoolhouses of its time. Inside was cavernous and ramshackle and the rafters creaked with any kind of wind. Susan Marline Murray, great-granddaughter of the place’s original librarian, had come back from her big city library post to reclaim a legacy and head the place that, in the interim decades, had idled into disrepair. For the last eight years, Murray had waged an all-but-private battle to thwart the many efforts to modernize and upgrade, some to even raze the place and put up a stucco modular. So when Kevin walked in the door that afternoon, inventory stood at some ten-thousand books, periodicals, and magazines, four microfilm scanners, and two eight-year-old computers.

      Examining the stacks and leafing through magazines no more sophisticated than Time and Newsweek, Kevin had procrastinated an hour before he went to the microfilm. It wasn’t a matter of locating the thing—he knew exactly the date it was published. He scanned the edition from the November eleventh, then the thirteenth. The font in the title head of The Douglas Dispatch hadn’t changed in thirty years. Xavier Zaragoza, a local whom Kevin had known all his life, had been head reporter for thirty-five years, and his articles tended to worry over local issues of the time, school-funding crises, labor strikes at Phelps Dodge, that the state Department of Corrections had slated a prison to be built in the area within a few years.

      Kevin found a tactile comfort in the mechanics of old-fashioned devices. He turned the film crank at a measured speed. Images from his youth, some of them faces of those long dead, conveyed past the screen like specters in a dream. And, finally, the front page from the November thirteenth issue, as if of its volition, slowed to a stop before his eyes. The top read The Douglas Daily Dispatch. The lead story was just below, but he could not will his brain to cipher the words in the headline.

      The clicks of a woman’s plastic heels turned him from the screen and he found Susan Murray, her hands politely coupled, standing at a safe distance behind him. A slim, handsome woman just shy of forty, clad in a sweater and jeans, she didn’t look anything like a typical librarian.

      She nodded at the scanner. “You like antiques,” she said.

      “I do,” Kevin allowed.

      “You’re Kevin, aren’t you.” She ventured two steps and put forth her hand. He took it and smiled at her.

      “I’m surprised you remember me.” Kevin had known Susan when she was a teenager, a passing friend of his youngest sister’s, a bright, spirited girl with wild blond hair. He pointed at his own head. “Dyed it gray.”

      Susan ran her fingers down a length of her hair, now a deep, natural auburn, touched at the edges with strands of a lighter color. “Dyed mine brown.”

      They chuckled, a bit uneasily. Susan gestured at the stacks. “Once more to the books, I see.”

      Kevin smiled. “Never left them.”

      “Well, then, that makes us kindred spirits, doesn’t it?” She tipped her chin at the scanner. “Copies are a dime a page.”

      Kevin gave his head a jerk, “Steep,” he joked. Copies in big cities were at least fifty cents.

      Susan folded her arms across her chest, nodded toward the dim light on the screen. “Find what you were after?”

      Kevin glanced back at the monitor, careful not to read any of the words there. “I hope so. Part of it, maybe.”

      He stepped onto the front porch of the Gilberts’ house on 9th street just after 6:00 p.m. and was thankful when Olivia Hallot answered the door and took the bottle of Merlot from his hand and welcomed him inside. His mother and sister, Tracy, had not yet arrived. He’d put on his least faded pair of blue jeans and sported a crisply new ivory-colored shirt, wanting for all the world to look his best for his mother and sister, neither of whom he had seen since the blowup two years before.

      “You bring me back,” Patty Gilbert was telling him. Kevin was on the couch and Patty sat curled in the love seat across from him. Approaching seventy years old, she wore a flower-print dress rife with tiger lilies. She was working on her second glass of wine and waxing sentimental. “You and Johnny used to cut up so when you guys were together. Something about you two was a recipe for trouble.”

      Kevin nodded. “J and I made some mischief.”

      “Funny,” Patty said, smiling,