No apparent reason to worry. No apparent reason for Ed Henry to send her here. Despite that, she pulled her vehicle up beside the new building where it was partially concealed. When she got out to explore, she made sure her pistol was safely in its holster.
The front door that had been installed on the building was of heavy hardwood and secured by a substantial lock. Except for that, there wasn’t much remarkable about the building. It had been placed on a concrete foundation and the front and side windows covered with plywood panels. Bernie walked around behind it, looking for a back door. It had been boarded over too, but high windows on both sides of the door were still glassed. Bernie considered this, decided the need for security had been partly offset by the need to allow some fresh air and daylight to reach the interior. The slope of the land made the windows high enough to prove some safety from intruders.
She drove through the weeds and gravel to the back door and then parked with the front bumper as close as she could get it to the wall under a window. She climbed on the hood, clutched the window ledge, pulled herself up, and looked in. By the time her eyes had adjusted to the darkness inside her hands were aching from the strain, but she could see the building was a single room, mostly unfurnished. She lowered herself, rubbed her hands and wrists, kept her eyes tightly closed, and hoisted herself again.
The center of the room was occupied by an odd-looking structure made of pipes, some very large, others smaller. The purpose of this contraption seemed to Bernie to be support of a central pipe, which curved upward from the floor and terminated at a large diameter cap—reminding her of the screw-on cap of a huge peanut butter jar. This biggest pipe, and several smaller ones, were equipped with valves, perhaps to open or close them, and she could see faces of several dials. For what? She was considering that and thinking of the pain in her fingers and wrists when she heard a voice behind her.
A man’s voice. It said: “Young woman. What are you looking for?” And this was followed by a laugh.
Bernie, still clinging to the windowsill, looked over her shoulder. She saw a stocky man wearing a tan hat, sunglasses, an expensive-looking hunting jacket, and boots standing behind her car, looking up at her. He held a rifle with telescopic sight cradled on his arm and sort of pointing in her direction. Behind him and to the side stood two other men. One, still wearing a neatly trimmed mustache and the military fatigues in which she had first seen him, was the Mexican driver of the Seamless Weld truck. The other was bigger, taller, short-cut reddish hair, and a dark blue shirt, and was staring at her. And when their eyes met he smiled. It seemed somehow sympathetic.
The stocky man wearing the sunglasses gestured at her with the rifle barrel.
“Get on down from there now,” Sunglasses said. “If you’re looking for something, come on in the shed with us and we’ll show it to you.”
“I’m coming,” Bernie said. “Who are you? Are you Mr. Tuttle?” She lowered herself to the truck hood, jumped off in the direction away from the rifle, unsnapped her holster, saw the rifle barrel was now pointed exactly at her, and let her hand fall to her side.
“Good thinking,” the man said. “Diego,” he shouted, “get over here and help this young lady with her pistol.”
Bernie was certain now. He was the man with the Seamless Weld truck she had followed here. He walked around the car, lifted the pistol out of her holster, said, “Sorry, madam,” examined the pistol, and stuck it in his hip pocket.
“This is Mr. Diego de Vargas,” Sunglasses said, “and this man over here is Budge C. de Baca.” He laughed. “That ‘C. de Baca’ means ‘Head of a Cow.’ ” And I am the owner of Jacob Tuttle, which makes me owner of this ranch, which puts you in distinguished company. But we want to know what you are doing here, trespassing on my property. So we’ll all go inside and talk about it. Bring her along, Budge.”
“You’re the ranch owner?” Bernie asked. “I’d been hoping to meet you. I wanted to ask you about Mexican trucks coming in here.”
“He’s Rawley Winsor,” Budge said, and motioned her forward. At the front of the structure, Winsor took off his sunglasses, unlocked the door, and gestured for them to follow him inside. Budge leaned against Bernie, whispered something. Bernie said, “What?”
“Do you understand Spanish?”
“Yes,” she said. This wasn’t what she’d expected. Wasn’t what she’d been dreading. Or maybe it was.
“Tell him you’re with the DEA,” Budge whispered. “Tell him you can be bought.”
Bernie nodded.
Winsor dusted off a wooden chair, sat himself on it.
“Set her down on the bench by the table,” Winsor said. “We need to ask her some questions.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “And we cut this awful short. Diego, get that trap set. It’s just about time for our precious pigs to begin arriving.”
De Vargas was standing beside the pipe contraption in the middle of the room. He spun a valve, causing a hissing sound, spun another. The sound this time was more like a sigh. He seized the handles on the round cap that closed the end of the master pipe, strained, turned it, and then spun it off. Bernie smelled a rush of stale air, and then de Vargas lifted what might have been a soccer ball from the pipe. It was a dirty yellow with two thick black rubber strips around it. Gaskets, perhaps, to make it fit tightly inside the pipe. Diego put the ball on the table behind Bernie, reclosed the pipe valve, and wiped his hands on the legs of his pants.
Winsor made an impatient gesture with his hands, said: “Get the cap off.”
Diego unscrewed a round cap, dropped it on the table, reached into the hole, began extracting transparent plastic sacks. He lined them on the tabletop, reached back, and brought out more. “I see they sacked it,” he said.
“That’d be enough for now,” Winsor said, and looked at Bernie.
“You’re Officer Bernadette Manuelito, now of the Customs Service Border Patrol. Used to be Navajo Tribal Police. But we don’t know why you made the switch. Explain that.”
“I don’t know myself,” Bernie said.
Winsor decided to let that drop. He pointed to the sacks beside her.
“Do you know what that is?”
Bernie cleared her throat, glanced at Budge. He was staring at her, frowning, looking tense.
“If I had to guess I’d say those little packages contain what we like to call one of the ‘uncontrollable substances.’ And since it’s a white powder, I’d guess it’s cocaine. If it’s good refined nose candy, uncut by cake sugar and the other stuff you mix it with, it should bring you something like twenty-five thousand dollars a kilo.”
Winsor showed no reaction to that.
“So what are your intentions?” he asked.
“Are you asking what is my duty, or what do I intend to do? My duty is to get my pistol back from that man over there and put you all under arrest for possession of an illegal substance. However, my intention is to try to calculate how many kilos you have there, and how many more of those yellow balls you have stored in that crazy-looking pipe, and multiply all those kilos by twenty-five thousand dollars, and then multiply that by ten percent. Then I will tell you that’s what my fee would be, just ten percent, for reporting to my superior that there was nothing in this shack but old furniture and rusty junk pipeline stuff.”
Winsor waved Diego out of the folding chair in which he had been sitting, moved it over in front of where Bernie sat on the table, and seated himself.
“Who is your superior? Name and position.”
Bernie managed a smile. “If you’re thinking of my Customs Patrol Officer uniform, thinking of the Border Patrol, then the name is Ed Henry, and he is supervisor of the unit I was loaned to, to do some checking into things—such as this. But if you’re thinking of my actual boss, my superior in the Drug Enforcement Agency, I don’t intend to tell you until we have some sort of arrangement.”