Chapter 23
Jennifer and I took a chair and waited. Jennifer said, “You think this will work?”
“Yeah, it’ll work. They’ll keep his fingerprints on file until he crosses back through that border gate. And he’s not crossing
back through, so he’s in their system. They just don’t know it.”
Jose came through the door, looking a little aggravated. He said, “What now?”
He took one look at my bruises and said, “Who lumped you up?”
I said, “You should see the other guy.”
He chuckled and said, “What do you need?”
I said, “I need to access your logs for the TO border crossing.” I held up a thumb drive, saying, “On this I have the biometrics
of the threat I’m after. I’ve confirmed that he went through your CBP gate on TO land into Mexico. You guys have his fingerprints,
and I want to know the name he’s using.”
“Your threat is a Papago Indian? Bullshit. They mule for the cartels, that’s about it.”
“Look, just run these prints into your system.”
“We don’t take prints. We scan their TO IDs. If he crossed the border using one of the walking gates, he had an ID, and if
he had an ID, he’s Papago. There’s a lot of backgrounding to those things—not from us, but from the tribe. They don’t hand
them out willy-nilly.”
“I was told that if someone loses an ID they can get a temporary, and the temporary doesn’t go through a rigorous process. I was also told that if they use a temporary, you take fingerprints because the temp ID doesn’t have an RFID chip. True?”
Jose exhaled and said, “You learned a lot in a little bit of time. Yeah, that’s true. It’s rarely ever used to cross. In fact,
almost never.”
“But it is used, correct?”
“Yeah, but our agreement is we delete the data. The TO doesn’t like the system, so we meet them halfway.”
“But you don’t delete them until they cross back over, right?”
“Yeah, but if they do, we have an agreement.”
“Okay, well, run this and see what you get.”
He took the thumb drive and said, “Okay, but it’s not going to tell you anything more than you already know. He crossed into
Mexico.”
“I don’t know the name he’s using.”
He nodded and said, “Wait here.”
He left and I looked at Jennifer, saying, “Fingers crossed.”
A minute later, he came back, making me think he had nothing. He said, “Let’s go back to my office. This’ll take a few minutes.”
We followed him, taking up the same positions we had before, but this time, he didn’t seem inclined to talk about Charleston.
He said, “Where’d you get all this information?”
“I found the guy driving the Crown Vic.”
“And he just . . . willingly talked?”
“Uhh . . . no. We had to convince him. Speaking of which, we had a little bit of a gunfight over at Menagers Dam Village.
I don’t think they’re going to complain, but just so you know.”
He leaned forward, incredulous, saying, “You had a shoot-out? And you didn’t mention that the moment you walked in?”
I held up my hands, saying, “Hey, you didn’t want to get involved, and you yourself said the police on the rez would be no
help, so I went on my own.”
“You have no jurisdiction here!”
“Everyone keeps telling me that, but they still talked to me.”
He rubbed his forehead and said, “Where is this suspect you got the information from?”
Jennifer closed her eyes, knowing what was coming, and not wanting to hear it. I said, “Yeah, about that. He’s in the trunk
of my car. He’s called Chief and he’s running a forgery scam where he gets people across the Mexican border using temporary
TO IDs.”
His mouth opened and closed with nothing coming out. We sat in silence for a moment. Finally, he said, “What the fuck, man!
Am I supposed to arrest him for stealing a van in Utah?”
“No, I just told you, he’s running fake IDs to get people across the border. Please tell me that’s in your wheelhouse, Customs and Border Protection?”
He shifted left and right in his chair, spluttering. He finally spit out, “I fucking knew you were trouble the moment you
walked in my door. Fucking Homeland Security assholes think they can walk all over everyone!”
Jennifer leaned forward and said, “They attacked a federal agent. They tried to kill us.”
“Then you arrest them. I want no part of this. I have to live here, damn it.”
I’d had about enough of his shit. I stood up and put my hands on his desk, leaning into him.
I said, “That guy is involved in the cold-blooded murder of a sheriff in Utah. They killed him and left him to die on the
side of a road. You asked who lumped me up, and I said you should see the other guy. Well, he’s the other guy. This is your jurisdiction.”
I pointed into his face, my finger inches from his nose. “Do your fucking job.”
He backed down, saying, “Okay, okay.” He exhaled and said, “Is he really in your trunk?”
Jennifer nodded, trying to give some plausible reason why, saying, “We didn’t have proper restraints. It was the best we could
do.”
He shook his head and said, “You’ll testify against him about assaulting a federal agent? Give me a statement about the incident?”
Which, of course, wasn’t going to happen.
I said, “No. I’m not going to be around.
Don’t worry about me or the assault charge.
Leave all that shit aside unless his buddies create a stink, then throw it on them, but they aren’t going to do that.
Get him for the forgery stuff and leave me out of it.
His friends aren’t going to bitch. If the TO police raise a stink, shut them down with accusations of them being complicit to the forgery stuff. I guarantee they turned a blind eye.”
He nodded, and I could tell he’d thought that the minute I brought up the forgeries. He said, “This isn’t the way we do things
in CBP.”
I said, “It is today. Trust me, I’m on the thread of someone who’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than some coyote trafficking
migrants. I’m passing all my information into the system, and if the folks in Utah want to charge him with conspiracy to commit
murder for the death of the sheriff, or accomplice after the fact, let ’em. However this sorts out, nobody’s going to care
that this isn’t the way you do things.”
A man in a CBP uniform knocked on the door, saying, “We got a hit.”
Jose waved him into the office and he laid a tablet on the desk. I looked at it, seeing a date, time, and crossing point nomenclature,
followed by a name:
TAREK NAVARRO.
I stared at it, half afraid it would disappear, thinking, Got you.