CHAPTER 17 #2
It is beautiful. Set against a Mexican canyon, an expanse of graves, all white or pale stone.
Crypts with statues and crosses abut and overlap each other like crooked teeth.
Figurines stand, frozen in time, some damaged and beaten by weather.
There are trinkets and dried flowers and poems written in Spanish.
Simone wanders around, then finds shade in a little gazebo.
It’s bright white, benches inside covered with old and rotting outdoor cushions.
She sits on the bench in the open air and closes her eyes, unsafe but not caring.
She keeps the bag on her back; she can’t risk it being taken.
She eats four chocolate brioche buns, three oranges, and drinks two litres of water.
She stretches her legs out. She rests her head eventually on the bag, and, within seconds, she can feel sleep coming for her.
As she is pulled under, she thinks that she can’t sleep, no, bad things will happen, but she has to.
She tells herself, in the hot shade, the bench hard underneath her, that it is safe to sleep here – the dead are, after all.
A lizard wakes Simone, skittering across her legs and disappearing behind the wall.
She startles, then checks the time: three hours have passed, the sun having moved around, shining through the gazebo and on to her stiff body.
Half her face is tight with sunburn. She stretches and tries to calm the rising adrenaline.
Both bags are still here, sports bag behind her head, and maybe it was stupid to sleep, but she couldn’t help it.
She stands and stretches, then begins walking once more, heading off to her fate: getting a million dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine into America. As she walks, the bag’s zip keeps coming loose, just an inch or two, and she keeps doing it back up.
When she arrives back at the pickup point, the coach is standing like a sentient being in the dusty car park it emptied them into this morning at sunrise, now nearly sunset.
The only difference is Simone is worth a lot more than she was, but she feels like she is worth absolutely nothing; she’s a sell-out, a despicable criminal, a drug-dealing loser.
Plenty of the tourists are holding bags, and she joins the queue to add hers to the luggage. It’s still hot out, the air dry as kindling.
It’s quarter to seven, her limbs stiff from sleeping, her face pink with sunburn.
There are three people in front of her, and she watches them put their bags into the empty luggage area above the exhaust, the driver standing nearby but not watching closely.
She wonders how common what she is doing is.
To justify that she’s only added a minuscule amount to the total cocaine circulating in a vast underground industry.
To feed addicts who will buy it and harm themselves, and those who love them.
Her turn, and she heaves the bag into the back with a conspicuous thump. As she does so, she thinks about that open zip.
She puts the carrier bag slightly away from the sports bag.
She needs anonymity. She is doomed if they begin to investigate the bag: her DNA is surely on it and there has got to be CCTV somewhere of her carrying it.
All her subterfuge is ill-thought-through, easily discoverable.
She is a child hiding behind a curtain, expecting not to be discovered.
Nevertheless, all she can do is hope, so she moves her food away from it, separating her goods from the drugs.
She intended to turn around and see if anybody noticed which bag was hers, but she doesn’t. It gives more away to glance over her shoulder, to lock eyes with the coach operator or anybody else.
The engine is already running, and the exhaust heats and blackens her legs as she moves away from it.
She stares at that bag, full of cocaine, from several feet away.
She thinks about the people in the graveyard and wonders how many of them died directly or indirectly because of drugs imported from South America.
She glances around at her companions and wonders if any of them are involved with drugs, too.
She doubts it; nobody would be as foolish as her.
She boards the coach and she wonders, when she next touches those drugs, what will have happened, who she will be.
Four hours in, five. The border looms ever closer and, with it, Simone’s fate.
What next? Where do the drugs go? How does she get her daughter?
How do they hand her over? What if they have killed her and it’s all been for nothing?
Has she fallen into a trap? Become a drugs courier, a foot soldier for a gang that she will forever owe?
What if they want more? What if they demand that she do it again?
What if she is arrested at the border and Lucy is murdered?
The questions her brain requires her to answer go on and on.
Simone can only hope that this is a real, true ransom, that the value is drugs. The quid pro quo is Lucy’s freedom.
By midnight, they’re closing in on Del Rio once again from the other side. Simone checks the flip phone but there is nothing. No confirmation she’s collected the bag, and the texts still come from Unknown, so she can’t call them back.
Progress as they approach the crossing is slower and perhaps seems more formal. The officers are in different uniforms, green with US BORDER PATROL written in yellow, with armed police pacing among them.
One of the officers is absent-mindedly stroking the length of his gun, a grotesque and uniquely masculine move, and Simone watches him, thinking of the power he holds.
The coach driver pulls into a lay-by where they idle for several moments before moving off again and joining a queue. Simone’s hands begin to sweat. The flip phone tumbles out of her grasp. What if they check that, see the instructions?
She is in the very centre of the coach, at a window seat, and suddenly she wants to disappear again. To pretend to be asleep, to get right under the seats and hide. To go into the toilet and refuse to come out.
To confess.
She picks the phone up and squeezes her eyes shut instead. Fuck the kidnapper. Fuck the ransom. Fuck her own stupid, tired body and mind that didn’t wake up when her child needed her; her maternal instinct unpractised due to the passage of time.
The drugs are somewhere directly underneath her, and she swears she can feel them burning upwards, a volcano popping ferociously, about to blow. A hot coal pulsing and glowing for everybody to see.
They pull to a complete stop and one of the older people sighs.
‘Takes forever going back,’ he says, American accent, irritated tone.
He’s alone, and speaking to nobody in particular, and everybody ignores him.
Simone wants to clutch at his clothes, ask him how often they’re searched, ask him to ship the drugs instead of her, please, oh please, but she doesn’t.
The driver stands up, the coach’s suspension creaking with the movement.
A female Border Patrol officer gets on, exactly the same as before, but this time tasked with protecting America and not Mexico, and says, ‘Passports,’ authoritative and loud, uniform on, an official of the state, and, suddenly, it’s time.
Just don’t kill Lucy, she is thinking, panicked.
Take me, but give the drugs to the kidnapper, and get Lucy.
The officer is next to her, now; she’s tall and broad, staring down, making a hand-it-over kind of gesture, and Simone holds up her passport.
She’s in a green uniform, gun in holster, but has on a cowboy hat, something Lucy would find absurd and wonderful and so very Texan, and there is still a little glimmer of her humour in the dead of this awful, awful nightmare.
Simone’s entire body tenses as the officer looks at her passport, and then at her, thinking of the questions she filled in on her ESTA.
Where she was intending to stay, that she’d never been arrested before, never stayed longer than her visa anywhere, had never shipped drugs nor been convicted for drugs offences.
Questions she and Lucy had WhatsApped about in the family group, laughed at, thought over the top.
Lucy had created a poll, saying ‘Have you ever beheaded somebody? Yes, No, Maybe,’ and Damien, so earnest, had voted No.
And does Simone imagine something passing across this officer’s features, now, virtually unseen? Does she have radar for nervous people, for people making single day trips?
‘A Brit?’ she says conversationally.
‘Right, visiting from London.’
‘Seeing family and friends?’ she says, passing her passport back to her. Her name badge says MICHAELA.
‘My daughter. She stayed in Texas. Mexico just – by myself.’
‘Nice. I have a daughter, just one,’ she replies, rubbing briefly at her eyes.
She must be in her fifties, looks tired, no doubt working long hours for not much money, hair grey under the hat.
‘She’s twenty.’ She laughs under her breath.
‘Wants to be a –’ she clicks her fingers, trying to remember the word – ‘a space psychologist – isn’t that weird? ’
‘That is so weird,’ Simone says, thinking Lucy would just love this. She’d ask all sorts of questions.
‘Yeah. It’s still all just psychology, so she tells me,’ she drawls.
‘Still. Impressive job.’
‘Well, apparently astronauts are prone to mental health issues from the isolation. So the training is all about that – solitude,’ she says. ‘Anyway, here’s me going on and on. Enjoy the rest of your trip.’
‘I will.’ Then, just as she’s leaving, Michaela turns back to her, and Simone thinks maybe she has had some sort of psychology training herself, because she says, ‘Are you, you know … you’re all right?’
‘Oh yes,’ Simone answers, her body vibrating with anxiety.
The officer waits, seemingly, for more information, so Simone gives it, as close to honesty as she can get.
‘Just miss my daughter, you know? Anyway, I’m almost with her.
I shouldn’t have gone on the day trip. It was tedious,’ she says, something Old Simone might easily have said.
Michaela throws her head back, laughs and catches her hat as it begins to slide off. ‘Ain’t that the truth.’
‘Right.’
‘Hard being apart from them,’ she adds sympathetically, and for just a beat, Simone wonders if she could tell her, this woman. Turn a blind eye; my daughter’s life is at risk.
But the moment passes, and Michaela then touches her hand to Simone’s shoulder, just like that. And Simone could weep with it. This interaction, her kindness, her understanding.
And Simone is a criminal, a fraud, but this woman has allowed her to be simply a mother missing her kid.
‘Thank you,’ Simone says, and Michaela removes her hand with the lightest, kindest brush, a mother’s touch.
She turns to leave again just as a distant sound registers itself. At first, Simone ignores it. It’s a common sound, one she hears all the time, and it takes a few repetitions for her tired, stressed brain to register it: it’s a dog barking.
A sniffer dog.