Moving Serafina

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42 Locket Wagner studied the map on the wall of his branch office, two doors down from the Hotel Solitario. He traced his finger along the perimeter of the vast area that he was assigned to cover as deputy sheriff of Solitario County, an expanse of land that bordered the Rio Grande River. “What am I doing in here on a Sunday?” he said. “It’s like combat duty now. Impossible to prevent a damned thing even working seven days a week.” He thought about the call on another Sunday just three weeks ago, a dispatch to a remote sidetrack of the railroad ten miles west. No one had dared open the lone boxcar, left there months prior by the rail line due to a faulty brake. When Locket approached on foot he knew immediately why someone had vacated the area and placed the anonymous phone call to the sheriff’s office over in Presidio. Even without a breeze in the heat of the day, the odor came wafting toward him, halting him in his tracks. Instinctively, he held his pistol ready as he lifted the heavy bar on the locking lever of the sliding door and pushed open a two-foot crack. But there was no need for the pistol. The stench was unbearable. Locket backed off a few feet and gagged, trying to maintain a semblance of C H A P T E R 4 MOVING SERAFINA 43 a defensive stance. Then he holstered his weapon and buried his nose in the crook of his shirtsleeve and moved forward to look inside. Even in the shadows he could count five, six, maybe seven bodies strewn about, one a child, no more that a couple of years old. “Bastards,” he hissed. He was not cursing these destitute Mexican victims inside, but rather the coyotes who, in some panic or a simple act of viciousness, had locked these people inside this inescapable oven, perhaps abandoned them at night in haste to avoid detection themselves. “Scum . . .” he said. Locket had the bodies removed to the Presidio station of the Border Patrol for difficult if not impossible task of identification, along with the help of Mexican authorities from across the border in Ojinaga. With the U.S. Immigration Service, Locket was still on the case because it was a homicide in his jurisdiction. Thus far, as usual, no one knew a thing. Locket leaned one palm against the map now, trying in vain to cover his assigned area with one hand. Then he tried using both palms. Even with two hands sprung from his six-foot-four, two hundred and forty pounds of mostly muscle, Deputy Locket Wagner still could not hide his duty area on the map. “Why in hell do I keep doing this?” he grumbled. “You gotta be nuts, Wagner.” He turned away from the map and took his hat from the rack and walked toward the door. “At least they still let me eat,” he said. “When I have the stomach for it.” He thought about Bea Hernandez and her special Sunday brunch only two doors down and smiled. Bob Cherry 44 “Maybe she’s made carne adovada today.” Outside, he turned the key in his office door and moved toward the Hotel Solitario. He thought about the time not so many years past when no one on the little main street of Solitario ever locked their doors during the day, except maybe Doc Maddox, who was only there one day a week. He paused at the hotel door when he heard Clay Elliott’s ancient pickup bump to a stop against the curb behind him. Locket glanced over his shoulder and saw the young woman in the seat beside Clay. It did not take a trained lawman to notice through the dust of the window the abrasions on her face and the disheveled hair. That she might be a Mexican national–and probably not here legally–made no difference whatsoever to Locket because he had no jurisdiction on illegal immigrants anyway, unless they had broken some local law. Or gotten themselves slaughtered in the heat of a boxcar. He simply recognized that this was another human being who might need some help and where she was from was irrelevant. When he saw Clay exit and come around to her door to let her out, Locket walked back and stood on the sidewalk in front of...