Stalking Moon Read online

  Stalking Moon

  David Cole

  for Deborah

  Many thanks to Marco Lopez, Jr., Mayor of Nogales, Arizona, and his office staff, especially Press Secretary Juan Pablo Guzman. In Tucson, thanks to Dr. Katrina Mangin; Dr. Vanessa Olsen; Cynthia Dagnal-Myron, teacher and writer; students at Pueblo High School; Sinclair Browning; and Heather Irbinskas. Dr. Marc Becker, one of my colleagues at www.nativeweb.org gave continual advice on Mexico, maquiladoras, and the Zapatista political movement. In Syracuse, Nancy Priest is my ever-reliable consultant, Rosemary Pooler a true supporting angel; this book wouldn't exist without Drs. Dennis Brown and James Blanchefield. Thanks also to the continual support of my agent, Jessica Lichtenstein, of Joelle Delbourgo Associates. Jennifer Fisher (Avon Books) and Clarissa Hutton (HarperCollins) are every writer's dream editors.

  All the errors are mine alone.

  Adventure most unto itself The Soul condemned to be;

  Attended by a Single Hound—

  Its own Identity.

  —Emily Dickinson, The Single Hound

  chat room

  ROZAFA4bluedog: > in new york, how i find the money sender?

  LUNA13: > take train a to meet Liliana

  ROZAFA4bluedog: > please, what is train a?

  LUNA13: > subway to Washington heights

  ROZAFA4bluedog: > is it safe?

  LUNA13: > the water man can NOT find you

  ROZAFA4bluedog: > please, is it safe?

  LUNA13: > safe, my sister

  ROZAFA4bluedog: > how much to send dollars? how much?

  LUNA13: > trust the money sender, he will help you<

  ROZAFA4bluedog: > after the water man, who can I trust?

  LUNA13: > my sister, if you do not trust me, then who?

  ROZAFA4bluedog: > is it safe?

  LUNA13: > sister, from this day, you are free

  1

  One of my cell phones rang at 4:15 in the morning.

  Scrubbing sleepiness from my eyes, I sat up from the leather couch where I'd fallen asleep. My ears crackled as I yawned. The phone rang and rang, tones from a three-note chord rippling down and up. I had six cell phones scattered around the penthouse suite, each with a different call pattern, but by the time I found the right one on the bathroom sink, it had stopped ringing.

  I carried the cell past my unused master bedroom. Still too sleepy to bother with putting in my contact lenses, I found my work glasses with the fake abalone-patterned frames and put them on.

  My suite was on the top floor of the Las Vegas Hilton. I pulled back the drapes from the living room window wall, squinting through the work glasses at blurred streaks of dawn light shooting in from the east. Below me, Desert Inn Road was half in neon, half in darkness. I took a fresh water bottle from the minibar and waited for the cell to ring again. When I got back to the couch, the sunlight and neon glow outside backlit the window wall. Twenty feet long, ten feet high, the plated glass window shimmered from the vibrations of my footsteps on the oak parquet floor, the glass itself a half-inch thick and slightly tinted, so that while it admitted lights from outside, it also reflected the bluish screens of my twelve computer monitors. Since without my glasses I could only focus up to three feet, all the lights blurred together.

  Neat. Out of focus means not having to absorb details. The combination of colored lights reminded me of an LSD trip at the Grand Canyon during my crazy teenager rebel years. But that was so long ago that the memories of hallucination were themselves fuzzy and uncertain.

  I cracked open the water bottle just as the cell rang again. “Check CNN,” Bobby Guinness said abruptly. “They arrested him in Madrid.”

  “Hello to you too,” I said, coughing as the water went down the wrong way.

  Bobby didn't bother with pleasantries. Not that he was unpleasant. Just too busy to bother. I liked that in him, since I didn't have many social skills either.

  “Turn on CNN.”

  Fumbling for my TV remote and wincing at the amazing streaks of pain through my arthritic right shoulder, I grabbed my vial of Vicodin pills, but realized it was too early in the day to go down that route. The station I found was running a dog food commercial. A puppy skidded on kitchen tiles and hit some stacks of toilet paper, bounced off, changed direction to his food bowl.

  I hit the Mute button.

  “Am I going to see his face?”

  “I checked with Interpol. He was arrested. Your end of the payment will be at the usual place. Look, forget him. You got CNN yet?”

  Without my contacts in, I couldn't focus on the TV remote dial pad and kept hitting the wrong input numbers and getting a home shopping channel.

  “What is my end?”

  I sat on the floor and scrunched toward the TV until things came into focus.

  “Fifty, fifty-five. Come on, I've got something hot. You awake yet?”

  “I'd've liked to have seen his face,” I said. “After six weeks, I was getting ditzy just looking at a digitized photo.”

  “Keep checking, if you want to see him. Maybe they'll ran a spot. I've leaked info about his arrest, all the media knows where to get a live shot.”

  CNN showed a videotape of some backcountry desert road, stretching toward a midafternoon horizon. Low desert with little water. Even the creosote bushes were barely two feet high.

  “This is what you woke me up for?”

  “You watching?”

  “I'm looking at a desert. Why?”

  “Got another job. Depending.”

  “Depending on what?”

  Bobby rarely wasted words, never stayed on the phone longer than he had to. I never knew where he was calling from, didn't even know where he lived.

  “You ever track somebody through chat rooms? Message boards? AOL Instant Messenger? Peer-to-peer stuff, like Napster?”

  “Very difficult to do,” I said. “Who's the contractor? What's the fee?”

  “Gotta get back to you on that. There's a wiggle I haven't figured yet.”

  “But you're not going to tell me about it? Or who's wiggling?”

  “Can't say. Listen, um, you awake yet? You dressed?”

  “Yup. Nope.”

  “Get dressed quick. Your plane leaves in fifty minutes.”

  Now that's the kind of comment that wakes you up real quick.

  “What plane?”

  “Back to Tucson.”

  “I can't dump this job yet,” I protested.

  “Somebody else will be there about now to shut things down.”

  “Bobby, whoa. I thought that finding these online gambling hackers was a major contract.”

  “You close to them yet?”

  I looked at several of the computer screens, reading search results.

  “Canada. Maybe Manitoba. That's all I've got so far.”

  “Okay. Just pack up and get to McCarran airport.”

  The doorbell chimed.

  “He's here,” I said. “You sure about this? Why are you pulling me out?”

  “Can't say yet. But it's major. I'll call you in a day. Maybe two. Plus I'm dumping this cell number. You dump yours. Will call you back on seven minus four, two plus three.”

  “Bobby, why am I watching this CNN thing about the desert?”

  “Um. I have to be honest. Don't know yet. Client just said to watch the videotape, wait for details about the women.”

  “What women?”

  The CNN newsreader came back on the screen. I hit the Mute button, turned up the volume to hear what she was saying.

  “Four bodies have been discovered in what Border Patrol officials describe as particularly brutal conditions southeast of Yuma in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Yesterday's temperature ran as high as 115 degrees. In this part of the Sonoran Deser
t, there is virtually no shade, no water, no safety.”

  “You get that?” Bobby said.

  I muted the TV.

  “Didn't say anything about women.”

  “Keep watching when you get home.”

  “Tell me why this is important. Is it the Cabeza part?”

  I was using an ID kit with the name Laura Cabeza and wondered if I was blown.

  “Nope. Just get back to Tucson, and I'll get back to you. What do you think of this CNN announcer, the woman with the crooked smile?”

  “Brown hair, bangs, brown sweater set?”

  “She's really sexy, but not so smart. Give me that call-in talk show blonde with the wandering eye. Now she's what I call intelligent.”

  He hung up.

  Before I could get to the door, I heard the bolt slide back and the door opened. A teenage girl stood there with a hotel room lock booster. Head shaven, golden rings of all thicknesses and diameters sprouting from both ears, she wore a Running Rebels tee-shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of battered Doc Marten Classic 1490 Series 10-eyehole boots. She pulled the electronic card out of the door, wrapped the cable strap around the booster keypad, and shoved it into a purple backpack. Techno music buzzed from her headset as she tugged a six-pack of Mountain Dew from the backpack. She twisted one can free from the plastic and handed the rest to me.

  “Put these in the refrigerator,” she shouted, head bobbing to the beat.

  Walking past me into the living room, she immediately sat down at one of the computers and ignored me completely as she scanned several monitors.

  “Hey!” I lifted off her headset. “Who are you?”

  “Kimberley.”

  Her head moved from side to side, her face always level as it slid first over her right shoulder and than the left one. She clamped her headset back on, fumbled at the volume control on her belt pack. As the music blasted, she extended both arms straight out to her sides and began undulating like a Cambodian dancer.

  “You can leave any time,” she shouted. “I've got it now.”

  I hate leaving a contract unfinished.

  2

  I lived in a small casita on the back acres of Heather Aguilar's ranch. Two large rooms connected by French doors, a bathroom hooked off the bedroom, a kitchen tacked onto the back of the living room, mesquite ramadas sheltering windows on all four sides against the fierce southern Arizona summer sun, with a swamp cooler on the roof instead of air conditioners.

  Casitas are small, contained, controllable homes.

  Just big enough for one person, small enough for only one person.

  My plane from Vegas was on time, the flight was short, and I was home before nine o'clock that morning. I brought back two weeks of dirty laundry and my six cell phones and the still-present dissatisfaction of not finishing the job, coupled with uneasiness about a new contract that was somehow connected to dead immigrant women.

  After brushing my teeth, I moved into the living room and pulled out my Pilates track. Three mourning doves fluttered onto the mesquite thatching and began cooing. I started a CD of Tohono O'odham waila chicken scratch music, cranked up the sound, and settled onto the Pilates bed, arranging my body carefully to start my series of postures and poses.

  I've never bought into the New Agers' stuff about chanting, prayer, candles, or incense stalks. Waila songs are like polkas. The beat is steady, the button-key accordions playing simple tunes against a background of fiddles, guitars, and drums. Instead of jazzing me up, the steady rhythms helped focus my breathing. All I wanted was focus, deep relaxation, body awareness, strength, and flexibility.

  By the fifth CD track, “Lemonades Verde Cumbia,” I slid effortlessly and mindlessly on the Pilates. Stress-busting without pharmaceutical enhancement.

  I am happy.

  I often focused my daily energy entirely on watching birds. A curve-billed thrasher whit-wheeting his way between mesquite and cholla, chunking into the topsoil for bugs. Red-tailed hawks and kestrels in a grove of ancient saguaro cactus within binocular range. A string of Gambel's quail babies toddling after mom, chi-ca-go-go, chi-ca-go-go, their head plumes bobbing asymmetrically while they scooped up water.

  That kind of thing.

  Sheer delight in the details of the bird's wing. The sky, the heat, the day itself.

  I never knew, you see, that life could be simple.

  What an odd discovery at the age of forty-three.

  I'd always sought, at times I'd relished, a complicated, wrapped-tight lifestyle. Pushing right to the physical and psychological edges of a thing. Pushing beyond and over the edges, when I had to. Absolutely ignoring awareness that complications might work against me. That was, once, my lifestyle.

  Now my biggest complications are only small details, small decisions.

  Like working on how to get air out of my Appaloosa's gut so I can cinch the saddle tight. Don't knee Palo like some macho cowboy, Heather Aguilar insisted. Just walk him a bit. Gently. Let him get used to breathing, then pull up the cinch strap another notch or two.

  Some afternoons my sense input cranked way down beyond having to think. I delighted in small sensations. Deciding which tea to brew. Deciding whether to drink that tea in the upland meadow, under scrub oaks, or in one of my many gardens.

  Life in the slow lane. Instead of hurdling anxieties to meet deadlines and shortcutting my paranoia of not being private enough, my heart was light, the personal orbit of my daily lifestyle reduced to the languid, hot delights of the Sonoran Desert.

  Am I loopy or what? I thought. It's an incredibly giddy feeling, to be happy after so many years, so many decades of anxiety, depression, whatever. Being happy is cool, being simple is the key.

  As simple as a lazy teenager's diary. Life condensed to primal activities, each a single sentence, phrase, or word. Clean the stable. Currycomb Palo. Pilates. Cooking.

  Find the person.

  Fill the contract.

  Take down the score.

  Bobby Guinness helped simplify my work as an information midwife.

  One job a month, no more. Nonnegotiable fees in the mid-five-figures. Half in advance, half when I found the person or the hidden bank accounts or whatever digital information I needed to find. I never advertised. Clients came to me by reference through Bobby. Before him, I'd rejected nineteen of twenty skip tracing jobs, waiting for whatever seemed right.

  No, not quite that. Whatever seemed safe.

  Find the person. Fill the contract. Take down the score.

  Just like the movie Heat. Bobby Guinness was my Jon Voight.

  Bobby knew what I could do, knew what digital scores he could line up for me, each score drawing on what I already knew how to do with some new digital challenge. I'd always been able to find anybody. Now I had better techniques, a better playing field on the Internet, more dollars to purchase more information.

  Bobby Guinness wasn't even his real name. When he first contacted me nine months before, he was Bobbie McCue. We successively went through Jack Armstrong, Eddie Fast, Bruce Springsteen, and Marlon Coppola.

  I'd never met him personally. We'd arranged a coded system for changing cloned cell phone numbers, and he dumped his active number at random intervals.

  CNN played without sound while I concentrated on Pilates technique. Grace. Control. Precision. Breathing. Exercise without exhaustion. Honestly, I could sell the stuff. My friends Meg and Heather had long since given up listening to me talk about it.

  I was looking for a face. In handcuffs, in a police car, in a perp walk, a face I knew only from digital information and several blurred and altered photographs.

  My biggest job ever. Low six-figure payoff. Took me five weeks to track him across three continents, and I found him in Madrid because he couldn't live without some Swedish woman in his bed. I got his cell phone records, I got her name, I found her, and by tracking her air travel, I found him. Let the government find the money he'd stolen with his phony pump and dump stock scheme. I didn't care about that,
but it was so much money that his arrest would make CNN for sure.

  But that wasn't the main story today.

  Every half-hour CNN played the desert videotape. A typical consumer video camera, no particularly high resolution, no real concern for image quality. No titles or credits. The picture had been shot from the vehicle's front seat. From the shape of the hood, I guessed it was a large SUV, probably a Chevy Suburban. The time-date stamp in the lower right corner read:

  July 24 2002 4:44:17 pm

  It still wasn't the image I wanted, not the man in handcuffs, so I didn't bother to turn the sound on until later. The Border Patrol had covered fifty square miles of Sonoran Desert with trackers, helicopters, spotter planes, even satellite images. They couldn't find the dead women, they didn't even know if the videotape was shot in the US or Mexico.

  But seven more bodies had been found in the Cabeza desert. All men and boys, dead of exposure to the sun. Two others had been medivacked to the Yuma hospital, barely alive, seriously dehydrated.

  A media chopper followed the tracks southward, the cameras zooming in on empty water jugs, abandoned pieces of clothing, and an endless stream of lightweight plastic supermarket bags that marked the highway to nowhere.

  3

  Seven minus four. Two plus three.

  Next morning after breakfast I unstuck Bobby's magnet from my refrigerator door, where I stored it with some other pretty innocuous stuff. Recipes for never-made chile burritos, a two-armed saguaro cactus like the one Snoopy stands next to in the Peanuts comic strip, plus some business calling cards I picked up once on a trip to Atlanta and Houston. Bobby had created a magnetic advertising placard for Altamont Construction. No address, just a phone number without an area code and a message in the standard quotation marks, as though this punctuation enhanced the quality of the business.

  “No job too small”

  I unboxed a brand new Kyotera digital cellular phone and carefully cloned in a new number based on the phone number of the refrigerator magnet card and Bobby's code phrase.