Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(3)

“I’m over a decade into it here, and I wouldn’t go back to Indiana winters for anything.”

Josie slowed her jeep to take a long curve in the road that hugged a bend in the Rio, and then pulled up in front of Agnes’s double-wide trailer. The trailer sat about fifty feet off the road and was the only house for several miles. Boxes and old bedsprings and tires and every kind of worthless junk Josie could imagine were piled around the base of the trailer

“I think it’s gotten worse,” Otto said. “I hope we don’t have to go inside. My stomach can’t take the smell today.”

“That’s what you get. Too many dumplings.”

They exited the jeep and a woman in her fifties with fuzzy gray hair walked outside, leaning on a cane.

“Morning, Agnes,” Josie called.

“Hello, hello,” she said. “Give me a minute.”

Agnes hobbled down the lopsided concrete-block steps and Josie cringed, afraid her cane would get caught in a crack and send the woman tumbling down.

“I hear you had some excitement out here yesterday,” Josie said.

“That man is taunting me. He makes me feel dirty in my own backyard.”

“Why don’t you tell us what happened?” Josie said.

“As you probably know, I’m a birder. I can show you the photographs in my house. I’ve spotted black phoebes, kingfishers, the great kiskadee. And my prize, the Colima warbler.”

“Were you looking for birds when you saw the man crossing the river?” Otto said.

“I wasn’t looking for birds,” she said, scowling at Otto. “There’s a difference between looking out your kitchen window at the birds in your backyard, and actually birding. I have journals filled with notes of my trips, and—”

“My apologies,” he said. Otto raised a hand in the air and spoke slowly. “Were you birding outside when you saw the man in the river?”

“Yes. I was. I’d walked out into the backyard and had traveled maybe a few hundred feet down toward the river. It’s a hard walk for me through the thicket with my cane, so I’m slow and quiet. I had my eye on a painted bunting. A real beauty. Blue and red and green. A little bird that looks like it’s straight out of the tropics.”

Josie heard Otto sigh and she glanced over at his slack face. She had noticed Otto had begun to lose patience when people being questioned about a topic relevant to the investigation rambled on about something unrelated. A significant number of people in far West Texas lived in remote solitude, so when unexpected visits happened, they occasionally got chatty. It mostly led to wasted time, but every now and then a golden nugget surfaced between the details.

“That’s when I saw a pale blob in my binoculars. I put them down and saw this man dragging a big rubber inner tube by a rope, up and out of the water and onto the riverbank. There was a woman who climbed off the inner tube and stood there onshore with a big black backpack over her shoulders. I almost screamed at them to get off my land, but then I worried they might have a gun. Well, obviously he didn’t have a gun, because he was stark-naked. But she could have. So I just stood there in the tall grass and watched.”

“He only brought one person over?” Josie asked.

“There was a man standing onshore, already waiting there. I hadn’t noticed him until the woman came ashore. Then the naked man jumped back in the river and swam over for another man. He put the rope over his arm, like a woman’s purse, and swam the man over in the inner tube like a fish. He has a heck of a strong stroke. I’ll give him that. I bet I stood there maybe ten minutes and it was over.”

“Was anyone else on the bank waiting for them? A coyote picking them up?” Josie asked.

“As soon as the last man got to the shore another fella in jeans and a shirt and cowboy boots appeared out of nowhere, and the three people followed him out toward the road. I stayed right where I was until I heard a car take off. I couldn’t see them on the road. I was down below the bank.”

“What time was this?” Otto asked.

“About five. It was about dinnertime.”

“Have you seen him here before?” he asked.

“No, sir. But I’ve heard about the naked Mexican. He charges people for that!”

“About a thousand dollars a person,” Josie said.

Agnes’s jaw dropped. “Well, I’ll swim them across for that kind of money!”

Otto smirked. “Don’t try it. It’s a bit easier to arrest you, on U.S. soil, than it is to catch a guy who just has to jump back over the river to avoid arrest,” Otto said.

“We call him Slick Fish,” Josie said. “He’s been doing this for years. He has runners up and down the river that he pays to watch for police and Border Patrol. When the area’s clear, they radio Slick and he strips down, gets his people on the inner tube, and swims them across. No engine noise, no commotion.”

“Why on earth would he come here where he has to swim across?” she asked. “There’s places in the river upstream where you can practically walk across.”

Josie looked downriver to where Agnes was pointing. “He’s got a perfect spot here. The river splits this long low hill.” She pointed to where the river dipped down a fifteen-foot bank and disappeared from view. “The cottonwood trees and the salt cedar give him cover. His scouts look up and down the road here to ensure there aren’t any cops. And he has easy access to a road. When you cross in the open desert, you can cross the border easy enough, but you’re an open target on the run. Here, it only takes fifteen minutes and he’s got three people across the border, loaded into a pickup truck, and headed north to freedom.”