The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [64]
What made Mendez different? In the eyes of law enforcement and the prosecutors, there was nothing. Nothing at all. Mendez walked like a duck and quacked like a duck.
For his part, Mendez—if he told the truth—found himself in a Twilight Zone episode. The only thing he could argue, forever, was that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. All the evidence, all the known history of the region, all the collected cop intelligence on Coyote MO’s pointed Mendez out to be a killer. Hey, he said, just this once, all the evidence is wrong.
Whatever happened, for whatever reason, it happened at dawn on May 21.
One thing was certain: Mendez was getting sick of their bullshit. He was scared, worried, even embarrassed. But he was tired of their insults and their surliness. They called him “asshole.” They’d started to buck him, all these older men making him feel like a little kid. Those González brothers—chinga’o.
Rafael Temich kept asking, “How much longer?”
All last night, he’d been asking it.
“How much longer?”
“Three hours.”
Temich didn’t believe him.
The González brothers didn’t believe him, either.
I know what I’m doing.
Oh, yeah—you knew what you were doing last week, too.
Pendejo.
You got us busted, asshole.
I can get you out of here.
Right. Ha ha.
Don’t expect us to pay you.
Wait till we tell Negro. Chespiro’s going to ream your ass, Rockero-boy!
The other men sneered and snickered when the González clan called him out. Old Reymundo. He yelled at Mendez.
You’re killing my son.
I didn’t kill anybody. I’m saving you.
Do something!
What do you think I’m doing?
Walking in circles like a pendejo, that’s what you’re doing.
All right, Reymundo Sr. was in a panic over his son. But still, Mendez did not dig it when the old-timer snapped at him like that. What did they think he was, their maid? Mendez was in charge, not these lowlife wetbacks.
He stood there. They stood around him. The meeting, no matter which set of details you choose, had the same outcome:
“How much longer?” Temich demanded.
“Three hours.”
“Look, you said three hours last night. We’ve walked more than three hours, and we’re nowhere near a town!”
Mendez shrugged.
“Three more hours, and we’re there.”
“If it’s three hours, then you go. We won’t make it.”
“It’s probably two hours.”
Reymundo Sr. blew: “You said it would be right over the mountains. We went over the mountains. We never got there. We won’t ever get there. We’ll go all night, and morning will come, and we still won’t be at the highway. We won’t ever get there!”
Rafael Temich says Mendez would only go if they gave him two hundred dollars.
Each dollar bill that went into the Coyotes’ pockets was another augmentation of the federal counts that waited, like the mythical cool water, at the far end of the trail.
They gave Lauro a hard time, too.
You’d better come back for us.
Or what?
We’ll find you.
Yeah, yeah. Fork it over, man. Talk is cheap.
“I will come back for you,” Mendez promised.
Rafael Temich: “I said, ‘Why don’t one of you go, and the other stay here with us?’ And they said, ‘No. We’ll both go.’ We all cooperated. We all gave money because we couldn’t stand it anymore.”
Once they had pocketed the funds, they told the walkers to wait where they were. All things being equal, if the land were flat and easy, they were approximately fifteen miles north of the Mexican border, twenty miles on a diagonal from where they entered the United States, twenty miles from Ajo, nearly forty miles from I-8. They were buried in the Granite Mountains. But all things were not equal. Surrounding them were the Aguila Mountains, the Mohawk Mountains, the Sierra Pinta, the Bryan