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By Root 552 0

squirming and jerking in the dirt. Federales got on to them—the desert dropped a dime somehow and the cops came swarming, more blood, more blood—and the Tijuana sicarios fled down to the tourist area near the Gulf of California, totally screwed here in Sonora, no paid-off cops anywhere, no narco bigwigs to protect them: the only narcos for three hundred miles would torture them for days before tossing them into the Pinacate to be eaten piecemeal by coyotes and crows. But they were also totally tweaked on the buzz, the outlaw scramble. Loud music. Gunsmoke. They carjacked an SUV and tore into the Devil’s Highway, jumping the border and thinking they were clear of the Mexican cavalry. But the Federales jumped the line, too, undocumented entrants, all right, bristling with M16s and chrome magnums. As the SUV skidded into Organ Pipe and Chris Eggle got out of his vehicle, perhaps wondering what would happen, wondering how to reason with these boys, a helicopter overhead watching it all, the drug killer leaped out, all desperado, all fired up, all panicky, jazzed beyond belief with the chase and the stench of the assassination blood all over his feet, and he blasted Chris Eggle.

Eggle’s Kevlar vest could handle most rounds, but the one that went low bounced off his holstered weapon and took a ninety-degree detour under his vest and tore into his middle. The gunman must have thought he’d won the lottery; he turned to flee toward the Mexican line, perhaps thinking it all seemed like a good idea at the time, maybe thinking of home, of his lover, of shelter at the last second, when the Federales said, “Hi there.” Thirty illegal Mexican cops appeared in the brush and opened up on him. It was a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie, a hellstorm of bullets.

One of the agents complained that only one of the Federales managed to hit him.

“What’s wrong with those people?” he said. “Thirty guys opening up and nobody hits him. No wonder they’re in trouble.”

The Mexicans were warmly invited to recross their border and go home. The perpetrator died, “crying like a baby and squealing like a pig.” Observers watched the Mexican bellow and sob. They might not have rushed him to a hospital.

A border cop confessed: “I have a rule now. If it don’t speak English, shoot it.”

Summer 2002: a coffin-load was crammed into the trunk of a Mazda south of Tucson. Riders also filled the seats in the car. The Coyote sped into town and was immediately targeted by the local police. A wild chase ensued, with the driver leading Tucson cops in and out of the outskirts, banging over railroad tracks and sliding in the sand that flows onto the streets like water. The driver got to the edge of town and bailed out. All his riders jumped out and vanished into the desert. Except for the two men in the trunk.

Department of Public Safety officer Robert Telles inspected the car. There were no regulations stating that he had to jimmy the trunk open. Perhaps only a Border Patrol agent would have the kind of dark imagination to know there might be humans locked inside. Officer Telles followed procedure and slapped a yellow tow-away sticker on the windshield. Impounded.

The tow crew was slow to get out there, however. The car sat beside the road for two days. Temperatures soared well over the hundred mark. When the tow truck finally arrived, the crew noted the stench. They pried the trunk open. Two young men lay within. They were twenty-one and sixteen years old. The police reported there was evidence of “movement” in the trunk before the two young men baked to death.

Movement.

And God continued to flog his children with unusual fury. In the eastern desert of Arizona, a group of entrants was struck by lightning. Bound bodies, supposedly of Mexicans, began to appear in the brush. They had been laid facedown, with their hands tied behind them, and shot in the heads. Various theories attribute the crime to vigilante Aryan “citizens’ border patrols” free-lancing the chaos along the line, or to rival Coyote mobs exterminating walkers to make a point; paranoiac border watchers