 
## Border Tales Too

### Book II

by

James Whitesell

PUBLISHED BY:

James Whitesell on Smashwords

### Border Tales Too

Book II

Copyright © 2015 by James Whitesell

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### Border Tales Too

Book II

### The Further Borderland (Mis)Adventures of CBP Officers

### Elvis T. Mahoney & Co-Conspirators

### TOC

Table of Contents, (not as some malcontents may say, Table of Crap)

Prelude/Introduction

Chapter 1 Aridzona

Chapter 2 The Titanic Effect

Chapter 3 A Day In the Life

Chapter 4 Mr. Escalade

Chapter 5 The Doctors

Chapter 6 Nogales On The Job (More or less)

Chapter 7 Operation Slam Door

Chapter 8 Thornton X. Kluster Jr.

Chapter 9 Great Expectations

Chapter 10 Sample from Ausgleich: Scales of Justice

### Border Tales Too

### The Borderland (Mis)Adventures of CBP Senior Inspector

### Elvis T. Mahoney & Co-Conspirators

### Book II

### Editor's Advisory

### Beware!

### This is NOT a non-fiction book

### Prelude

It was back in the day. Cell phones were still dumb and Elvis was still a little kid. The Slippery Sister Full Immersion Last Anabaptist Church was having its annual summer camp for the parishioners' kids. Skinny eight year old Elvis marched into the camp dining hall and confronted camp director, Bernwell "Lil' Ber" McDeckle, an easy three hundred pounder who at a single sitting consumed more food that the entire kid population of Elvis' camp cabin number six.

"I ain't stayin' here no more," Elvis proclaimed determinedly (Elvis not yet having had the edifying experience of his English teacher grandmother, Rattler Sue, thumping the proper use of English into his kid's brain.) I'm a-goin' back ter home." Elvis continued. "Now!"

"Home? Why, Elvis?" Said Lil' Ber McDeckle. "Aren't you having a good time at camp." Elvis remained looking stone cold resolute, so far as a broomstick of an eight year old kid could look stone cold resolute.

"I ain't stayin' here," he said in his best shot at a resolute voice that he hoped matched his take on a resolute appearance. And then he dropped the bomb that immediately blew to tiny little pieces the well planned day for the entire resident population of the Slippery Sister Full Immersion Last Anabaptist Church Camp.

"There be copperheads in the outhouse."

Copperheads. In the (by far) most frequented point of interest in the camp. The outhouse. Divided, of course, into gender specific segments. Just two, this being back in the day before gender issues took on the cloak of serpentine Byzantium. The issue here, at any rate, either back in the day or forward to today, was not the serpentine permutations of gender but flat out directly serpent. To be exact, copperhead serpent.

Copperheads, poisonous local snakes of notoriously dyspeptic temperament who didn't display the snaky fair play of announcing their presence by rattling, nicely explains what happened next. Pandemonium. Utter goddamn pandemonium. With Bernwell McDeckle, all but three of the kid campers and at least half of the staff screaming and shrieking, four of them running away in terror into the woods where they were lost until dusk when Slippery Sister County Fire and Rescue found them later that afternoon hiding out in the forest undergrowth. Which, they would learn well before the next morning's sun peered over the forested hills of the local horizon, included a large bed of poison ivy. Two other of the panicking campers had eschewed the woods route in the copperhead stampede to clamber to the top of the camp's water tower and yell for help. Which might have worked if a helicopter happened to be passing overhead. Otherwise their hollering for help not likely to be effective, the camp a good two miles away from the nearest neighbor. And he was a deaf octogenarian hermit who'd hated Anabaptists ever since he was nearly drowned by an over enthusiastic new pastor trying to rebaptize him in nearby Stinky Creek seventy years ago come May 15th.

One of the counselors, Elvis' cousin Mildew A. Mahoney, who was the least frightened of snakes among the general camp population, headed for the outhouse. Albeit not with noticeable enthusiasm. And, sure enough, there were a pair of thick bodied and angry looking copperheads lurking inside, democratically positioned on each of the two sides of the outhouse's Great Divide. Cousin Mildew did not linger in removing himself from the vicinity of the copperhead inhabited outhouse and reporting his snaky findings to camp director Bernwell McDeckle. The pandemonium forthwith did a church camp mass migration. Elvis got to go home. So did everyone else. Including the two on the water tower, though it did take some convincing to get them to come down

"Hey!" Hollered camp counselor Luella 'Linty' Lintschmidt to the timorous pair on the water tower. "You can come down now." Luigi Goldberg, the closer of the reticent pair, eyed her suspiciously.

"There weren't any snakes?" He said, somewhat suspiciously. Linty Luella hesitated.

"Well, ah, I wouldn't say that." Luigi's suspicious eyes bugged. Luigi had been terrified of snakes ever since his toddler days when his older brother Guido tormented him with garter snakes he caught in the family garden. As a result of which Luigi was petrified by the mere mention of snakes. And also was biding his time until he got the chance to land a big time get even on his jerky-assed older bother, Guido. Preferably including at least one broken bone.

"Then there _are_ snakes!" Luigi hollered, his companion on the water tower, Mellifluous Grinder (her parents were commercial honey merchants) picking up on Luigi's panic and adding hers. Contributing no little to the volume of the water tower discontent. At which point Bernwell Lil' Ber McDeckle came lumbering up to the base of the water tower.

"What the hell is all that racket!" Lil' Ber, who was not the most diplomatic of camp directors, snarled.

"It's Luigi Goldberg and Mellifluous Grinder." Said Linty Luella. "They're scared of snakes."

"Melli what?" Lil' Ber snorted, having not paid much attention to the names of his charges. So long as every one of the little monsters was there for bed check, all was well in McDeckle's world. Linty Luella explained that Mellifluous was the girl on the water tower's name.

"Come down from there right now!" Thundered Bernwell McDeckle. "We are evacuating the camp. Now! Come down right now!" A pause. "Or would you prefer to stay up there all night?"

"I'm not moving as long as there are snakes down there," Luigi Goldberg snapped back at Lil' Ber. "No way."

"No goddamn way!" Interjected Mellifluous Grinder, who had picked up her father's irreverent and salty speech patterns and was prone to blurt them out at inappropriate times. Like now. "No _fucki_ ng way I'm coming down!" This did serve to roil Bernwell McDeckle's day even more than it already was.

"I'm gonna tell your father about your foul tongue." He blurted out.

"He'll just tell you to go fuck yourself," epithet fluent Melliflous Grinder shot back. Which, Bernwell knew, was exactly what irreverent old man Grinder would do.

"You'd best come down before dark," Linty Luella yelled at the pair on the water tower.

"No way!" Hollered Luigi.

"No fucking way!" Rehollered Melliflous.

"We identified the snakes," Linty Luella yelled. "They are arboreal copperheads."

" _Arboreal copperheads?_ " Luigi and Melliflous said almost in unison. "What the fuck does that mean?" Added, you guessed it, by Ms Potty Mouth herself, Mellifluous Grinder.

"It means they climb trees," Linty Luella said in a dark tone. "And also ladders." Luigi took one look at the water tower ladder and suddenly launched himself off the tower and plummeted straight down. Right on top of Bernwell Lil' Ber' McDeckle, both of them tumbling into a heap on the ground. Linty Luella was about to duck, but Mellifluous Grinder decided climbing down the ladder was the best option and promptly scampered down, looking nervously around her as she hit the ground.

"Where are the snakes?" She said with no little uneasiness.

"In the outhouse," Linty Luella replied.

"I'll hold it until I get home," Melliflous said with absolute utter finality as Lil Ber and Luigi untangled themselves, got up and the four of them went to get on the camp bus and head home to a land of hopefully snakeless bathrooms.

No one was ever able to prove it, but Elvis' cousin Mildew suspected that Elvis had put the snakes there himself, Elvis none too fond of the Slippery Sister Full Immersion Anabaptist Church's summer camps. What the heck? He was a kid. And kids wanted to do kid stuff and not spend their summer camp days listening to some adult drone on about stuff that mostly sailed way over summer camp kids' heads. There was far too much bone dry religious preaching and lame brained regimented activities and far too little summer camp fun for Elvis' eight year old kid tastes. Even at the tender age of eight Elvis already had a healthy sense of perspective.

And the fact was, though he never admitted it for many years, he did catch the copperheads in the woods and put them in the outhouse. Actually he caught three of them, but one managed to escape before Mildew gingerly peeked into the outhouse. Either that or it had slithered into some corner. Or possibly into the cesspit itself.

A thought even Elvis didn't want to linger over.

### Introduction

His parents named him Elvis. Not after the King, Elvis the Pelvis, as 99.999% of the human race assumed. Elvis was named after his great-great-great grandfather Elvis Hieronymus Mahoney, a legendary figure who for a half century distilled the best moonshine in the hills of home, while at the same time avoiding the federal spoilsports trying to spoil his illegal (frickin' feds!) moonshining sport.

Anyhow, Elvis was his devoluted namesake. Elvis T Mahoney, to be exact. The 'T' standing for the Celtic Tearlach but 'T' for Tumult more to the real world puckish Elvis point. Elvis was on his way to becoming a United States Customs and Border Protection--CBP officer. This fact utterly dumbfounded every single person--including his great uncle Tingweld, who nearly swallowed his--albeit admittedly "kinda loose"--false teeth in astonishment--who had known him in the various phases of his life. Beginning with his famously mischievous childhood in Slippery Sister County, his adolescent teetering balance on the line between legal and illegal and his late teenage experimentation in chemical alternatives. Which ended with his futile attempts to reach Mars, or at least the moon, without the need for mechanical assistance of stuff like space ships or rocket boosters. Though he did somehow manage, in-between liftoff attempts, to grab a degree in computer science (involving considerable "purely academic" interest in the techniques of computer hacking.) Following this he decided he wanted to see something of the world. Which was what the Army recruiting sergeant smilingly promised him. Soon thereafter he was darkly cursing the recruiting sergeant and the sergeant's progeny onto the seventh generation as he dodged RPGs and IED's in Iraq. A half dozen fragments of which buried themselves in Elvis' unwilling corpus. Resulting in his not so silently cursing all the numbnuts politicians who got America into Iraq in the first place. But it also got him a Purple Heart, an honorable discharge and a place at the CBP table.

Which was where he was at this moment. At a table. In a CBP classroom.

### Chapter 1

### Aridzona

"Arid Zone." Snarked the towering ramrod backed woman at the beginning of her Aridzona Orientation. "That's where you are going, folks. Before she could continue the classroom door popped open and Marchetta Schneeschuh, the Education Department boss, poked her head in and motioned at the tall woman to come into the hallway. "I'll be right back," Tall Woman said as she walked to the door.

"That babe sure is hot," whispered Vesper Nunk to classmate Elvis as the door closed behind Tall Woman. "I'd sure like to put the Vesper Nunk brand on that great ass of hers." Elvis stared at Vesper as though he'd just climbed up the cell phone tower next to the cafeteria and then dove off it. Landing dead center on Nunk's not so bright noggin.

"You'd cohabitate with a Florida panther before you'd bed that one, Vesper." Elvis replied. "She isn't just a handful," he added while Vesper's noggin was busy trying to figure out what the hell cohabitate meant, "she's a whole truckload of handfuls." And Elvis knew whereof he spoke. The gossip hotline at the academy wasn't up to sizzling fiber optics standards, but it wasn't far behind. Tall Woman was by general acclimation a darn good looking but seriously overbearing member of the female species whose detractors wisecracked that she walked like she had a piece of rebar stuck up her ass. Elvis couldn't find fault with that impression. She did walk like a perambulating telephone pole. At that vertical point however the analogy took a permanent detour. True, she was as erect as a Montana lodgepole pine repurposed to telephone pole duty, but with the noticeable addition of a handsome set of very untelephone pole like boobs and an equally non linear telephone pole like posterior. Nor did Elvis fail to notice the smack down visual impact of the woman's startling intense green eyes. Reminding him of the disquieting blinkless stare of a Sonora grey wolf at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum outside of Tucson, making him leery of all canines, including Dachshunds and Chihuahuas--which are known for sneak attacks on the feet and ankles of the unsuspecting--for a full two and a half months after his zoo visit.

Lawanda Lipsnitle was her name. An innocuous sounding name that belonged on an altogether different planet from what she actually looked like and who she was. Kind of like calling a barracuda prowling the shoals off the Florida Keys Mr. Fishie. To most who knew her she was flat out intimidating. Especially to her students who referred to her as, no surprise, the barracuda. One of her more imaginative students likening the psychological impact of her entrance into a classroom as "....like King Kong's twin sister crashing through the door.....but with nicer legs."

Lawanda was one of the instructors at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. A place known as FLETC by acronym and as Flea-Tick by the typically irreverent student body. FLETC was no conspiracy theorist's top secret government base. It was a genuine plain sight federal government facility. At least that part of it that was in plain sight. It lay more or less quietly plunked down in Glynn County in seacoast southeastern Georgia hardly an hour's drive north of Jacksonville. Where all the really good bars and hot night spots were--FLETC nearly emptying out on the weekends and holidays when the students, and plenty of the staff, with beady eyed eagerness thundered off the base headed for a lively time in 'Jumpin' Jack City'--otherwise known as Jacksonville. YP2 (You Play, You Pay), the local STD clinic, invariably saw a considerable up tick in business following party time in Jumpin' Jack City. Often requiring the grouchy staff to work overtime and miss important local events like Roll One Free night at Gobsmack's Bowling Alley and Medical Marijuana Clinic.

"You ain't never celebrated the fourth of Joo-lye till you done did it at Betty Sue's Sports Bar and Massage parlor in Jumpin' Jack City." Mumbled, dreamily, one of the students, Bert Alteric, through bleary eyes one Monday morning in Mortimer Beddow III's Personal Search Techniques class. No one, including the instructor, had any comment to that and for sure not a soul ventured to correct the guy's English. Bert was a bare knuckle martial artist who absolutely no one wanted to match up with in the class hands-on physical training exercises, even though his IQ wasn't exactly soaring towards the Einstein level. Call it (way, way, way) pre-Einstein--but don't say that in his surly presence. And you can bet it was another absolutely no one moment when it came to even whispering within his earshot his covert nickname of Dumbbell Bert. A name he had earned with such notions as eschewing limes, and all other citrus fruits "just in case," after hearing about the horrors of contracting Lyme Disease. Bert, however, was smart enough to know that as a Purple Hearted Afghan War vet he was perched at the top of the hiring list for a lifetime sinecure with the federal government.

"The last laugh," Dumbbell Bert would often say with a knowing smirk, "was on me."

Tall Woman, aka the Barracuda, instructor Lawanda Lipsnitle was giving a peculiar kind of orientation talk to a group of sixteen students--Dumbbell Bert no longer among them, having been recycled for remedial instruction for the third time--in the thankfully air conditioned classroom As far as almost everyone was concerned, with the perpetually grumbling exception of the team of possibly illegal Hispanics and Caribbean islanders on the grounds keeping crews, everything else could suck as long as the air conditioning was chugging away and doing its air cooling job.

"Air conditioning," a few CBP years later Elvis declaimed to his buddy, Pancho Soltero, "is the foundation of modern civilization in the southern United States. And is the direct cause of the classical flowering of our culture." To which Pancho retorted in more or less typical fashion in any attempt at communication with Elvis.

"Goddamnit, Elvis. Either get laid or get drunk. Or both. But for sure get a frickin' life, Elvis. If I was interested in philosophy I would have stayed in the seminary." Elvis blinked.

"What seminary? You got a liberal arts degree at the University of Arizona. You were never in a seminary."

"Exactly!" Pancho said. "And you studied computers. Not philosophy." Pancho snorted, making a 360 degree sweeping movement with his arms. "Look around you. We are on the frickin' Mexican border. In Arizona. And we work outdoors. No air conditioning. How does that fit into your foundation of civilization idea?"

"It fits perfectly." Elvis shot back. "We are here, sacrificing ourselves in the frying pan heat of Arizona, to save the World of Air Conditioning from being overrun by the teeming sweating masses of humanity. We are like Leonidas at Thermopylae. Or Michael Jordan defending the Bulls home court hoop. Or Missy Mentaklic's mother defending her daughter's chastity from me back in the day."

"Elvis," Pancho said somewhat wearily. "You need a hobby. Bad. Real bad. Something that will lock down that mind of yours and keep it quiet. Get a hobby!"

"I already did," Elvis spit back at Pancho. Pancho's eyebrows did a quizzical.

"You did?" Pancho skepticed. "What?"

"Tequila," Elvis said.

Back to Flea-Tick, but still on the subject of air conditioning.

"You gotta have a sense of perspective," said Vernal Bondlick at FLETC after turning down yet another promotion and transfer as a line supervisor at the sweltering port of Brownsville in the dead center heart of Double H--Humid and Hot--part of Texas. "These students need me here," he added, "and I'm much more effective at FLETC than I would be down in Brownsville."

Vernal's boss, Angie Flockwell, shook her head slowly. The students needed him? Hah! Did Europe need the bubonic plague? The students would likely rather have a root canal without anesthetic than suffer through more of Vernal's verbal classroom drones. Vernal was such a boring instructor that his students had to gobble caffeine pills and, according to a student snitch sucking up to Angie hoping to alter his provisional assignment to a frigid windblown port in the Aleutian Islands even native Alaskans tried to avoid, sometimes scarfed Ritalin to try to (usually without much success) stay awake in Vernal's so-called classroom. Angie was willing to do just about anything to get rid of him. Including promoting him upstream. Vernal was, in Angie's own heated words, "just fucking clueless and dumber than a dead carp." His classroom lectures so droningly tedious even the local cricket population in the building was lulled into deep cricket sleep. Which explained why every cricket eating critter in the neighborhood was hanging out around somnolent Vernal's classroom waiting to ambush any crickets so unwise as to come within Vernal classroom range and forthwith doze off into oblivion.

"Let me finish, Vernal," she said as patiently as she could. "This promotion and transfer to Brownsville?" She said, her voice rising to punctuate the question mark in her tone. "It is _indoors._ In the office." Vernal blinked. Twice.

"Indoors?" He repeated. "Not outdoors?"

"Nope. Indoors. And it's air conditioned," Angie added with the sure handed deftness of a veteran picador who'd learned things the hard way.

"Air conditioning?" Vernal, who to tell the truth detested teaching, said with considerable emphasis. "Indoors job?" Angie nodded affirmatively.

"When do I leave?"

At which point Angie mentally dropped to her knees and fervently thanked the God of her understanding for removing the Vernal wart from her instructional FLETC body.

Anyhow, returning to the imperious Lawanda Lipsnitle and her captive student audience.

This bunch of sixteen nicely air conditioned students had just graduated and were about to head out to their new assignments as Customs and Border Protection--CBP--inspectors on the Mexican border. Where the door out of their nicely air conditioned world would slam tightly shut behind them with the absolute humorless finality of the losing side in a Super Bowl. Their destination? America's very own geographic heat sink. Arizona. Or, as Lawanda put it, Arid-zone-a, when she gave them her "Welcome to Aridzona" orientation. Which, to those who experienced it, fell more within the reasonably delineated parameters of a disorientation.

"Arid Zone." Lawanda Lipsnitle repeated. "That is where the name of the state of Arizona comes from. Arid plus zone. With the 'd' dropped and the 'e' replaced by an 'a' thrown in at the end to make it sound like it belonged along with the other God awful hot 'a' ending places out west. California and Nevada and Utah."

"Excuse me, Instructor Lipsnitle," said a skinny red-headed guy in the front row of the class. Elvis. Who rarely knew when it was a good idea to keep his mouth shut and his foot out of it. He'd already had several sparky encounters with Lawanda in the FLETC classrooms and was none too fond of her bulldozing ways. "If the Emperor Nero had been a woman," he some time later told his brother, Lispus, "she would have been like Lawanda." To which Elvis' other brother, Lispus' identical twin, Crispus, replied.

"Nero? You mean the guy who runs the hardware store in town? Nero Bolinski?"

"No. _Nero._ The guy who fiddled while Rome burned." The light of recognition snapped on in Lispus' usually blue eyes. "Oh! You're talking about Sherman's march to the sea and his burning down the town of Rome down there in Georgia. So who was the Nero guy? Sherman's camp fiddler or something like that?" Elvis stared at the ceiling, temporarily speechless. Which was not especially unusual when he was talking with what he called the Ispus Twins.

"Never mind," he finally said. "Let's just say Lawanda was one hell of a difficult woman." Another light of recognition.

"Oh! Like mom!" Another inspection of the ceiling. Finally Elvis spoke again, having realized the futility of trying to scale Mount Ispus and taking a detour they would recognize. Elvis then intoned a sure fire Ispus rotary connection....

"Never mind. Let's go grab a beer."

Anyhow, back at FLETC, Elvis wasn't about to let this one pass. Since when did Utah end in an 'a'?

"Utah doesn't end in an a," Elvis repeated. Lawanda lasered the upstart beanpole a sizzling hostile glare, reminding him of his ex-girlfriend, Melinda Cindy Sue Mascot, when Elvis somewhat reluctantly admitted he'd picked up "a slight bit of STD" on his last deployment in the Army. In Lawanda's mind she was the guillotine and Elvis was her next customer. She even envisioned--with no little relish of the poetic justice variety--his head popping off and plopping into a basket. Looking as clueless in death as he was in life, a classic WTF expression on his recently deceased face. And then she demonstrated just why they kept her on as an instructor at FLETC despite her nearly complete disinterest in the art of teaching. She was never, absolutely never, at a loss for words and always ready with an answer that, if not correct, was obfuscating enough so that the ensuing semantic cloud bank shut down any further sailing into the Sea of Dubiety.

" _Sir_ ," she said to Elvis with a tightly controlled voice, having zero tolerance for anyone criticizing her. "The 'h' in Utah is silent. So Utah really does end in an 'a' in a directly real sense. To say otherwise is a mere splitting of hairs." A pause, while she icicled the red-headed guy again. "And you don't look like you have many to spare." This brought a welcome respite to the typical heavy tension in any class Lawanda presided over. The whole class released their tension in a series of chuckles, smirks and a couple of short-lived belly laughs. Which also locked deep in the brain of the red-headed guy named Elvis an iron clad promise to himself that one day, some way, he was gonna zap Ms Glib but good. And the zappier, the better. Belittling him in public was bad enough. But that was mere verbal pocket change compared to his touchiness about the possibility of going bald. Which was a distinct possibility. Even a sizeable chunk of the women in the Mahoney clan back in Slippery Sister County showed some degree of baldness after the age of forty. And a good half of the men were balder than the most hairless of newborns, looking to local birds passing overhead like giant golf balls teetering on the summits of the fleshy humans below. Which were, in the bird world, dandy targets for the widely practiced avian sport of excrement bombing. Given the widespread dislike of wearing hats in the Mahoney clan, in the summer months there were more men with bird dung flecked sunburned heads in Slippery Sister County than any other comparable population anywhere in the U.S. and most of alopecic Anglophone Canada. (The French speakers being more hat-oriented, especially in rural Quebec.)

But Elvis, Elvis being Elvis, couldn't just accept a small defeat and let it go. Undeterred, he pushed his foot farther into his mouth.

"None of that changes the facts of the real origins of Arizona's name. I had an Army buddy who was a Tohono O'odam Native American from the big reservation south of Tucson. He said that the name Arizona is an English language take on O'odam words for something like place of water or of small springs." He paused, while the rest of the class drew a deep breath preparatory to the imminent arrival of Hurricane Lawanda. Elvis continued, shoving his foot into his mouth at least as far as his tonsils, which, however, did not prevent him from speaking. "Arid zone might describe what the hot part of Arizona is like, but it has nothing to do with the name itself." Almost everyone in the class held their breath, expecting Hurricane Lawanda to come ashore at any minute to make landfall and forthwith hurl Elvis all the way to the outskirts of Gatorbit, Alabama. Nope. No Hurricane Lawanda.

"We'll take your word for it, sir," Lawanda said in a voice that was as close as she could get to sweet and agreeable. Well, OK. So not very close from a reasonably objective viewpoint. But close by Lawanda viewpoint. Which was in her eyes the only point that counted. "Now let's move on with the orientation." She looked at her watch. "We want to get you out of here in time for lunch." That grabbed everyone's attention away from Elvis and Hurricane Lawanda, lunch one of their favorite times of the day, right up there with breakfast, supper, midnight snacks and the Naughty Bits Hour on the Porn Channel on cable TV.

"Aridzona _is_ hot, folks," Lawanda continued, thinking to herself that she sure as hell wouldn't want to be sent to that God awful hot desert place. No water. No trees. But lots of sand and sun, not to mention rattlesnakes aplenty. Which made her wonder why there were so many rattlesnakes when Aridzona was frickin' empty of almost all forms of life. Non-human life, anyhow. What the hell did the rattlesnakes eat? Leftover fries and chunks of Big Macs littering the sides of the highways? Now that she thought about it, she remembered seeing a photo on the internet of a rattler gulping down a Big Mac. Her skeptical brother DeVonage Lipsnitle insisted it was photoshopped but Lawanda wasn't so sure. Rattlers had to be adaptable to survive the influx of several million wheeled vehicles of various types, all of them capable of flattening a passing rattlesnake into the thickness of a rattlesnake belt. Rattlesnakes were one of Lawanda's least favorites of God's critters. Up to and including rattlesnake belts. _Especially_ rattlesnake belts, considering the camouflaged way they would try to sneak up on an unsuspecting person. The rattlesnake might have been beltified, but Lawanda was certain the malevolent spirit of the snake still dwelled in the rattlesnake belt, no matter how flat it was.

She once dated one of her fellow instructors, a handsome, if by general acclimation leaning heavily on the vain side, six foot two sandy haired guy from the rattlesnake country of West Texas. Chuck Wooderfled. Whose nickname from his irreverent students, Woodchuck Chuck, was as inevitable as sandstorms in the Arizona desert from the very first time the students grabbed eyes on his substantial overbite with a pair of prominent incisors. Which prompted Woodchuck Chuck to grow a thick, bushy moustache that usually drooped well below the oversized incisors/overbite line..

Wooderfled wore a rattlesnake belt one evening when he came over to her place to take Lawanda on a date and she spotted the belt right away. Lawanda pulled him inside, unbuckled the belt and slowly pulled it loose from Wooderfled's belt loops, snapping his eyes open to maximum wide and his fantasies even wider and making him think he was about to leap belt first straight into a real good time with the intimidating but nonetheless wonderfully voluptuous Lawanda. Instead Wooderfled got a quick lesson in Lipsnitlenomics when she wrapped the rattlesnake belt around his neck and threatened to choke him to death if he ever wore a rattlesnake belt in her presence again. After which Wooderfled suddenly remembered he had an important meeting he couldn't miss and hotfooted it out the door, vowing never to enter it again.

"There's lots of fish in the sea," Woodchuck Chuck muttered to himself. "And you, dumb Chuck, have to grab onto a barracuda." Wooderfled thereafter wholeheartedly joining with the student body in nicknaming Lawanda The Barracuda. Which Woodchuck Chuck considered no nickname at all but an absolutely accurate description of the real persona hidden behind the superficial volupt of Ms Lawanda Lipsnitle.

"So accept the fact you're gonna be hot," Lawanda continued with her Aridzona lecture as the class listened raptly. "You're gonna sweat." A short pause. "You're gonna stink." Sour looks started to creep onto the faces of most of the class. "You're gonna puke from the heat." Another pause. "You're gonna get heat exhaustion. You're gonna get sunstroke." Now every single eye in the room was wide open and staring in astonishment directly at Lawanda. "Eventually you'll blow your border cork and be tempted to pull your weapon and blast away at everything in sight. Not to worry. Less than one percent of the border inspectors actually take it that far. And more than half of them couldn't hit a brick wall ten feet away with a howitzer, so they don't puncture anything of consequence when they empty their clips into the immediate surroundings." A pause, accompanied by a number of loud gulps and startled abrupt intakes of air.

"You're gonna be applying for a transfer to somewhere, anywhere, after you put in your mandatory two years on the border." She paused for another moment and what looked like the beginnings of a sarcastic smile played on the edges of what might well have been but weren't Botoxed lips that only the bravest of souls, male or female or both or undecided, dared to even consider puckering up with. "So make the best of it while you're there." Another pause. "Think about it. What choice do you have?" And that was it. The Aridzona orientation. The sixteen students filed out of the room woodenly, glumly, at least half thinking hard on the possibility of some kind of career change and the other half already making definite plans for it.

Lawanda had her reasons for the peculiar nature of her (dis)orientation. "There is Lawanda method to her Aridzona Madness," as she put it. Her goal, as she explained it to fellow instructor Mortimer Beddow III, was "to toughen those candy asses up for the hard realities of border work." Which was all the more remarkable considering Lawanda had never worked on the border and in fact knew less than zilch about the border. "No matter," she snapped back at a different obnoxious shithead of a coworker who brought that galumphing subject up. "After all, I am a very empathetic person." A statement which absolutely no one, Lawanda's doting mother Lalinda included, would have agreed with. Empathetic? Lawanda? Did a 800 pound grizzly feel bad about ambushing the white tailed deer it was having for the evening meal's main course? Lawanda? Empathetic? Not likely. Not even in the universe of likelihood. She was, however, fond of grizzly bears and had three action photos of them in her apartment. Which she fondly referred to as her grisly grizzlies.

Lawanda was right about one thing. Arizona really was hot. In the warm season at least twenty-five percent of sentences uttered by the sun blasted locals contained some kind of unfavorable reference to heat.

"Man, it sure is hot today," Daglow Klump said to his CPB coworker, Malicia Rodriguez-Rodriguez, one sizzling July day at the deep Sonora Desert port of entry at San Luis, Arizona. Malicia threw her arms high, her expression one of mock surprise.

"Hot, the man says! It's hot today, Daglow the Wise tells us." Malicia eyeballed Daglow with her admittedly seductive big caramel colored eyes that nicely matched the rest of her curvaceously seductive body that even the baggy CBP uniform couldn't hide. "It's hot every fucking day here, Flipswitch! Say something that makes sense for once in yer frickin' whitebread life." Daglow did not overreact. He understood that the intense months long heat of San Luis was beating her down. Although Malicia was Hispanic, she came from the cool mountains of New Mexico, not the hot border country, so had not developed any physical or psychological hot weather coping mechanisms of the born and bred border dwellers. So Daglow held his tongue and did not react to the insults. He was a tolerant man. And a patient one. He was a man of balance, of understanding, of compassion, he thought to himself as he smiled beatifically at Malicia's hot-eyed, fuming presence.

Besides which balanced on the very top of Daglow's Bucket List was intimately introducing Malicia 'the Babe' Rodriguez-Rodriguez to his brand new Sleepy Time double bed with its high tech ergonomic mattress and built in Relaxamatic vibrator.

"A wise man," Daglow mumbled, albeit inaudibly, "is a patient man."

Though the true fact was that whitebread Daglow actually banging Malicia The Babe Rodriguez-Rodriguez was about as likely as finding a bowl of unfrozen sweet cream butter at the exact GPS center of the geographic North Pole.

Other Arizona summertime weather comments ranged the heat-related verbal spectrum all the way from Daglow's "it sure is hot today" to an incendiary string of pithy epithets umbilicaled to the word "hot." The land border ports of entry were all lurking along the Mexican border with Sonora, some of them in the hottest parts of Arizona. But not the others. Douglas, Naco, Nogales and Sasabe were not real hot places. Not frying pan hot, anyhow, like some places in Arizona. Sure it got hot there in the summer. But nothing like Lukeville, farther west, and especially San Luis, which was close to sea level in the deep Sonora Desert. A place which even the Devil herself, according to local New Age visionary, clairvoyant and hot shot blackjack dealer at the Indian Casino, Clarinda Martinez-Kozlaki, studiously avoided in the summer months. And San Luis, thanks to a last minute reassignment that happened--not even one tiny nanobit coincidentally--just after he'd second guessed Lawanda Lipsnitle, was where the red-headed guy named Elvis found himself one week later. And in the middle of the searing heat-blasted Sonora Desert summer.

Lawanda's sudden appearance in the personnel building while he was processing out of FLETC was burned into his memory almost as deeply as the Iraqi nutcase who two years earlier a few miles outside of Fallujah--Elvis' personal name of choice for the place, which in his considered opinion "really sucked," was Fellatio rather than Fallujah--was pointing his locally made AK47 directly at Elvis. Not all Elvis luck was bad. And Mr. Good Luck picked an Elvis-fortuitous moment to make an appearance. _Click_ went the Iraqi's locally manufactured AK47's empty chamber. _Tough luck, buddy_ , Elvis muttered as his M16 recoiled against his shoulder. Elvis' USA made M16's chamber not being empty. Good luck for Elvis. But with mixed results luck for the Iraqi. He didn't get his chance to lay out an infidel with a shot to the FFF--fucking foreigner's forehead--but he did dive safely for cover when Elvis' shot sailed way over his head through an open window and on through another open window in the rear of the room. In the hurtling bullety process going right through a chunk of goat cheese on a kitchen table, neatly slicing a couple of ounces off the cheese and considerably surprising the venerable stone deaf Iraqi who was poised, knife upraised, about to cut off a hunk for his afternoon snack.

"Holy Euphrates!" He muttered in the colloquial local Arabic dialect, which was close to unintelligible to non-local Arabic speakers, especially those from places like metropolitan Cairo. "What will they think of next?" He said, softly, in genuine astonishment.

"Self-slicing cheese!"

Anyhow, in Seared Memory Number Two, Lawanda dropped by the personnel office where Elvis and the others were finalizing their travel orders.

"Good luck in San Luis, Elvis," she said with a smirk worthy of at least honorable mention in the Smirk section of the Guinness Book of World Records. Elvis blinked, but, for once, said nothing. Though his large intestine had a brief spastic moment and his windpipe temporarily narrowed to half its usual thickness.

"Bye, Elvis," Lawanda said in a saccharine voice, fluttering one hand mockingly at him. "I arranged to have you sent to San Luis." The smirk got even smirkier and her voice was loud enough for those nearby to clearly hear her. "Where you will have every opportunity to exercise your considerable talents." Elvis had a sinking feeling that her definition of an opportunity to exercise his considerable talents was considerably different from his. Which was cemented in his mind with the finality of the last stone put in place by a Persian slave in the Parthenon when she leaned forward and whispered to him--

"For survival, that is." Elvis' stomach did a half somersault. "Reality is about to bitch slap you, sucker," she hissed, then wheeled on her stiletto heels and marched out of the room, her gym hardened buttocks flexing under her tight skirt as she walked.

"Got to admit," said Chester Noster, one of Elvis' former classmates. "She might be a bitch, but she does have one helluva fine ass on her." Which Elvis, despite himself, had to agree was true. A fine ass. But one with the disposition of a King Cobra. Or, in Lawanda's case, a Queen Cobra.

Which, Elvis would soon find out, had just bitten Elvis smack in his own smart ass.

### Rattler Sue

(Back Home in Slippery Sister County)

After his Flea-Tick graduation, before heading for the Arizona/Mexican border, Elvis stopped off at home. There he dropped by the old Mahoney place to schmooze with his grandmother. Rattler Sue. And she was none too happy, as evidenced by the glower on her otherwise not unattractive freckled Mahoney face.

You jes wait 'n see, buster," Granny Rattler Sue Mahoney scolded, her dark tone of voice harmonizing with the dark circles under her eyes. Dark circles which, Elvis couldn't help admiring, made for a nicely complementary background palette to her piercing steel trap blue eyes. "It'll come to no durn good, Elvis," Granny continued. "You gone see that."

Elvis shrugged and said nothing. Not just to what she said, but also the way she said it. Elvis had long since given up on questioning his grandmother on her use of language, something which had come to her late in life after she retired from a career as an English teacher at Slippery Sister High School and, later, at Slippery Sister Community College. All she would say was that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction and that she "....was going back to my roots." Or, in Granny Rattler Sue New Speak, "gwine bak ter me ruwts."

Despite his grandmother Rattler Sue Mahoney's dire predictions of some mysterious but Herculean disaster sure to overtake him and steamroll him into a Mahoney tortilla for forsaking his hill country heritage and becoming, in her words, a curst evil federal, Elvis nevertheless managed to graduate from the Federal Law Enforcement Center in coastal Georgia. Better known, of course, as Flea-Tick.

Elvis was now a sworn licensed federal law enforcement officer. Something which most of his relatives and friends in Slippery Sister County, where he was born and received his initial introduction to the (localized) various peculiarities of humanity, found pretty hard to swallow. They received the news with open mouthed incredulity, and eyes bugged to maximum engineered eyeball capacity, in disbelief.

"Say what? Elvis did what? Elvis done gone _federal?_ _Son bitch!_ "

He was teetering on the edge, on that dangerous ground where he was almost a traitor, a turncoat, a Judas to his kith and kin. Not a merchant in town would cash his checks and they sure wouldn't give him any credit or accept his credit card. He couldn't even gas his car up and had to go to the next county to find a Quick Stop that'd service him, and even there he got more than his share of menacing stares and dirty looks. All the local girls shunned him as though he had AIDS, Super Herpes and the Green Drip all rolled together into one big ol' toxic megadose. Not even local hooker Busy Belinda would give him a paid punch. And, on top of everything, he was about to be permanently banned from the local VFW. Something that hadn't happened since his grandfather's brother, WWII veteran Waldo I Mahoney, got roaring drunk and shot up the Slippery Sister Second Southern Anabaptist Church with his antique muzzle loading double barrel shotgun after the minister refused to let him bring his pet raccoon to Sunday services anymore. The minister considerably aggrieved seeing as how at previous Sunday services the critter had a habit of getting loose and chewing up the currently out of print and hard to replace hymnals and had twice blatantly defecated on the shoes of a somewhat ornery spinster lady the raccoon, albeit with good reason, took a dislike to.

Folks were looking at Elvis with some pretty hot eyes. Elvis T. Mahoney with a federal badge and gun and even handcuffs with _him_ actually having the key? Who'd a thought it possible? But, just when he was about to plunge into the caliginous pit of being a permanent pariah to the folks in Slippery Sister County, Elvis let it be known that he was going to the Mexican border in Arizona as a narcotics interdiction officer. Which begat a momentary stunned silence.

"What _exactly_ is a narcotics in-ter-dic-tion officer, Elvis?" They asked with no little curiosity. Though there wasn't anyone in the entire county above the age of 3 who didn't know what narcotics meant, and officer was a word that flew off their lips with no little forceful disdain, no one present had a dictionary at hand and interdiction was not a word in common use in Slippery Sister County at that time. Not exactly draped with a cloak of enthusiasm at the idea of becoming the local pariah with his home folks like his great uncle Waldo had been, Elvis summoned up his considerable powers of persuasion to explain exactly what narcotics interdiction officer meant.

And the sun forthwith elbowed its solar way through the clouds of suspicion and shone kindly on Elvis T. Mahoney's life once again. He became an instant celebrity. Within an hour he was removed from the provisional banned list at the VFW, he could cash a check anywhere in town and he received three offers of consensual sex, including one from Busy Belinda for one on the house. Elvis T. Mahoney, legendary one time halfback at Slippery Sister High School who had three times taken a kickoff return and subsequently got a little confused and run the wrong way, occasioning members of his own team having to very ungently tackle him, as well as being a veteran of the War in Iraq where he spent a whole bunch of time learning how to duck and cover, accompanied by expletives in at least three languages (English, Arabic and what his grandmother Rattler Sue called 'tongues'), was going to defend his nation's borders! Which the locals took to mean that Elvis was going to help them keep up the price of their homegrown marijuana by slowing down if not stopping their main competitor, those flipping Mexicans and their goddamn cheap imported Mexican weed. They might not have actually held a parade in his honor when he left for Arizona, but they were sure thinking along those lines. Home town hero goes off to fight the drug wars. Go Elvis! Go!

Elvis went.

To Arizona. San Luis. Or, as the officers already there called it, Frying Pan City.

### San Luis

(Into the Frying Pan)

The job of a CBP officer, the FLETC instructors had enunciated with completely straight faces, was simple. Identify and intercept illegal aliens and smugglers attempting to enter the sovereign territory of the great nation of the United States of America. Otherwise known, in Mexico at least, as Gringolandia. And to many a hungry nationality, the Great Cornucopia. Plus the officers could handle a few other assorted incidentals they could see to as long as they were already plunked down there right at the border nexus. The list of incidentals however at least arm's length with an entire thick volume of associated laws, rules and regulations attached.

Said instructors' comments, to the officers arriving at the border, seemed like an understatement on the order of saying a looming tsunami born of a 9.0 earthquake on the Richter Scale just off the coast of low lying Bangladesh might create something of a problem for the locals lying low in low lying coastal Bangladesh. A human and metal tsunami of cars and pedestrians came at the officers by the scores, by the hundreds, by the thousands, every single day. And often around the clock. And among all of these thousands of cars and pedestrians, not to mention whole fleets of trucks, they were supposed to pick out those nefarious nogoodnicks that were up to no good nick? It wasn't just like finding a needle in a haystack. It was like finding a needle in a field full of haystacks. Or, as one of the more saturnine of the border officers paraphrased an old proverb:

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to secure this sandy sieve of a frickin' Frying Pan border.

When an officer caught on to this fact was usually about the same time that they started having ulcers. Plus often developing a fondness for the blissful ennui of spirituous alcohol and various types of mostly legally prescribed mood altering chemicals. Which often brought on mid-life crises, including to those still in their twenties. Leading one 25 year old border officer, Timeria Blonk, to exclaim one miserably hot evening when looking in the mirror in the women's rest room at the Port of San Luis and noting with particular emphasis the bags under her eyes and her sallow wrinkled complexion. "My God! Not only do I look like my mother. I _am_ my mother! And at 25!" That same week Timeria put in transfer requests to the five posts in the U.S. that were both the cloudiest and the most uneventful.

"Timeria, you sure you wanna do this? It's gonna be pretty boring at these places," said Mandy Chowloon, the personnel specialist who processed Timeria's transfer requests. Timeria did a double take. Her mouth actually dropped open, giving a nearby fly a chance to dive bomb a chunk of leftover kosher salami on Timeria's eye tooth, which resulted in a short bout of coughing and spitting. Then she grabbed her aplomb and brought it back home.

"Boring?" She (literally) spit out at Mandy Chowloon, then thumped on the specialist's desk. "Are you freaking crazy! Boring is good. The boringer the better!"

Even worse for the officers, at San Luis on the California border in the deep Sonora Desert where Elvis went, they had to look for the hidden figurative haystack needles in that Frying Pan City heat. After his first day of work in 115 degree plus heat, by the end of which both Elvis and his uniform smelled like an entire NFL locker room after an overtime game on a record hot Sunday afternoon, Elvis had a kind of epiphany. The turning point was during the hottest part of the afternoon, when Elvis was being introduced to the cargo entrance facility, otherwise known as the Truck Dock. AKA, to those numerous officers who were none too enthusiastic about working there, as the Fuck Dock. The supervisor on duty was former French Canadian Claude de Croquette, a lanky ungainly guy with an oversized nose, predictably earning him the nickname of Big Nose Claude by his long suffering underlings. Glued to his side like an extra appendage was his senior inspector assistant, a very strange guy named Lorenzo Pappagallo, who reminded Elvis of the guy in the Pluto costume at Disney Land. Together, wearing what Elvis was pretty sure were expressions of the definite smart ass type, they led Elvis out onto the concrete apron of the Truck Dock's receiving and unloading area. A 50 foot trailer stuffed full of boxes of tomatoes was backed up to the Truck Dock.

"OK, new guy," Supervisor Claude 'Big Nose' de Croquette--who, no coincidence, was an email buddy of Lawanda Lipsnitle from when he went to supervisor's school at FLETC--said to Elvis, with Lorenzo standing by his side with a leer on his scraggly face. "This is it." Big nose, pointing at the 50 foot trailer full of boxes of tomatoes.

"Search it."

That was the trigger that set off Elvis' epiphany. Or, if not quite an epiphany, at least one of his real good ideas.

Later that same week Lawanda Lipsnitle looked up from her desk in her nicely air conditioned office at FLETC way over on the other side of the country in steamy coastal Georgia, where the long gone Native Americans had more than a dozen different words for sweat, alligators serenaded the summer nights and hung out ready to ambush nighttime joggers and the mosquito hordes used those same nights to launch stinging assaults on local humanity. Huge bodied Tim 'Tiny Tim' Mariachi, who'd pulled security on Lawanda's building that day, came in from the front desk carrying a package. The size of a NFL nose tackle, and the FLETC weight lifting champion four years out of the last five, Tiny Tim was one of the few who were not intimidated by Lawanda AKA The Barracuda. Though he wasn't about to roil the Gods of Retribution by intentionally pissing her off, either.

"Hey, Lawanda," he said. "The FedEx guy just dropped off this package for you." Tiny Tim stopped and looked curiously at the package. "Something about it sure struck him funny. He was grinning the whole time." Tiny Tim craned his neck closer to the package. "Discriminating Lady is the sender. Some kind of company, I guess." He shrugged. Never heard of it. Neither had Lawanda. But the FedEx guy sure had. He delivered at least one package a week locally from Discriminating Lady and had a pretty good idea of what was in the package. Which was why he was grinning.

Lawanda took the package and, without really giving it much thought, knowing that it had already been x-rayed and screened by security when the FedEx truck came on the base, proceeded to take a letter opener and slice the tape securing the package's edges. As she pulled it open several of her coworkers gathered around, joking to her and among themselves about what it might be.

"Got a new admirer, La Gal?" Said Annie Garcia, another of the FLETC instructors. Though Annie in fact doubted any man had the huevos--or some would say, death wish--to try to lay any ill-fated macho moves on Lawanda.

"Your order of nunchucks finally come?" Said another of her co-instructors--and only half seriously.

"Open it up, Lawanda," added Beatricia Napolitano. "It might be something good to eat." Beatricia had a serious sweet tooth and was hoping for a big box of yummy Godiva chocolates or at least some tasty peanut butter fudge. Lawanda reached inside the box and pulled out a smaller box. She opened that one, too, and pulled out its contents before looking at it. Everyone in the room gasped, followed by more than one barely suppressed chuckle. The object in the box?

It was a dildo.

A big bright red dildo with a built in three speed vibrator labeled Regular, Fast and Nuclear. And there was a note attached to it.

"Go fuck yourself," the note said.

Pasted on the note was a single red hair.

### Time (like gas) Passes

Elvis did OK as a border officer. Better than OK. In strange fact, way better than OK. For some arcane and possibly unknowable reason no one could grasp, the puckish, sometimes off kilter and at times just plain fucking weird Elvis was a bulls' eye border natural. He sailed through his probation at San Luis, within a pair of years was promoted to senior inspector, selected for the mobile enforcement team--the ET--and worked with the ET at the various CBP border ports in Arizona. He was now a veteran. A veteran steeped in genuine border reality. Which was two, maybe three, quantum jumps away from border reality as visualized by Lawanda Lipsnitle and her Flea-Tick bunch.

This particular day he was in Nogales, a venerable town perched in the foothills in the mountainous country that lay on both sides of the border an easy hour's freeway drive south of Tucson--said city Tucson having the nearest nifty malls with self-contained food courts and the destination of a sizeable chunk of the traffic coming out of Mexico.

Some of it actually legal.

### Government Advisory

(With Rebuttal)

The men and women of Customs and Border Protection are on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. These highly trained and efficient officers are dedicated to protecting you in the American heartland from those who would try to violate our borders for their various illicit purposes. Smugglers, illegal aliens, foreign agents. All may expect to be confronted by the officers of Customs and Border Protection and stopped before they can inflict serious harm on the United States of America. You may rest content in your homes in the knowledge that CBP is out there, on the borders of the nation, ever vigilant, ever watchful, protecting you.

Senior Inspector Elvis Mahoney, one of those very same CBP border officers, happened to read the above Department of Homeland Security news release that he spotted lying on the lunchroom table. He was busily munching away on a largish quesadilla with a side of spicy guacamole from Rigoberto's Grand Avenue Lunch Cart that Elvis not so puckishly nicknamed Rigoberto's Ptomaine on Wheels _._ He very nearly puked on the spot when he read the news release. And without any help from the quesadilla and spicy guacamole.

"Who the hell writes this stuff?" He slurred as he struggled manfully with getting his words past a mouthful of quesadilla. "It sure as hell ain't one of us."

Which, all the other officers at the table heartily agreed, was a very good point.

In fact a very darned good point indeed.

### Chapter 2

### The Titanic Effect

After lunch the ET team split up. Fernando 'Pancho' Soltero and Cletus W.W. (short for War Whoop) Magellen stayed at the downtown port of entry on Grand Avenue. Elvis and ET K-9 handler Mairead O'Leary took their G ride over to the western side of town to work at the Nogales Mariposa Port of Entry. Elvis took over an entry lane from the regular line inspector--his choice of just which officer to give a break from the tedium of sucking car fumes on the line more than a little suspect in Mairead O'Leary's mind--so Elvis could cherry pick promising looking cars to send to Mairead to K-9 in the secondary lot. Elvis liked working at Mariposa. There was actually oxygen in the air. In contrast to the frenetic hemmed in port of entry in downtown Nogales where carbon monoxide was the gas du jour on most days, resulting in lots of sniffling, coughing, bleary eyes and bad attitudes. In fact, of all the ports in Arizona, Mariposa was his hands down favorite. That is not to say it was his favorite spot in all of Arizona. Maggie's Organic Massage Parlor in Tucson won that contest going away. But for the narrower subject of ports of entry the winner, by a hefty margin, was Mariposa. It was perched on a high elevation outside of town and had an eye grabbing stupendous panoramic view of the spectacular southern Arizona basin and range mountain country. A great view......

From afar.

But not so much from anear. Arizona could be nasty in an up front and personal lens. Up close Arizona was crammed full of stuff that could ruin your day. Besides deadly summertime heat able to French fry the brains of the unwary and black bears, cougars and the occasional jaguar prowling the jaggedy mountains, there were more species of venomous rattlesnakes than you might care to imagine, desert coral snakes, Gila Monsters, poisonous black widow and brown spiders, nasty looking centipedes and lethal little bark scorpions, with every other plant equipped by a feisty Mother Nature with dagger like thorns ready to impale the unwary. But Arizona at a distance? Magnificent was the word that came to Elvis' lips the first time he saw the spectacular views stretching off to beyond the horizon. If it was possible to love a landscape, then Elvis fell smack down head over heels in love the first time his eyes grabbed hold of it. Which was what he was thinking when a voice snapped him out of his reverie.

"Aguila!" Yelled out a Mexican who had just walked across the border, his arm thrust towards the sky. "Aguila!" The man repeated excitedly. Elvis knew what aguila meant. Eagle. But try as he might, squinting, covering his eyes from the sun's glare, Elvis couldn't see the raptor soaring high above.

"Some eyes you got, Buddy," Elvis said wistfully to the vanishing back of the Mexican as the guy dropped his arm and continued on into the U.S. "I'd be lucky to see the darn bird even with binoculars." Which was not an exaggeration. He never seemed to be able to focus on birds or any other objects with the Good Glimpse company's beginner's budget binoculars he bought to do what he claimed was some avocational bird watching on his days off. Bird watching. Not, as fellow officer and ET buddy Mairead O'Leary accused him--only partly in jest--of spying on the babes in his apartment complex' pool.

"What!" Elvis retorted with no little indignation. "You're accusing me of what? Of being a peeping Tom?" Mairead, herself no slouch in turning heads those infrequent occasions when she had the free time to hang by the pool in a bikini, acted as though she were recanting her accusation.

"Oh, no, Elvis. Not a Peeping Tom." She reached over and landed a good natured but still potent rap on his upper arm, making a direct hit on what was the most misnamed part of the entire human body, the funny bone, causing Elvis to momentarily see stars despite being indoors at that particular moment. "Not a peeping Tom. A pool peeking Elvis!"  
"I resent that comment," Elvis sputtered.

"Oh, come off it, Elvis," Mairead shot back. "How many birds are you going to see in an apartment complex with hardly any trees?"

"I've been thinking of moving to the country," Elvis said, somewhat defensively.

Anyhow, Elvis didn't see the eagle soaring overhead but he did see the green Toyota Camry with Arizona plates that drove up to the entry booth he was working. It was just a coincidence, Elvis declaimed to a skeptical Mairead, that the officer he spelled on the booth was also a sizzler of a looker named Zoella Vlnk. (Pronounced Vlee-nink, for reasons only the Vlnk clan knew.) Driving the green Toyota Camry with the Arizona plates was a lean and leathery middle-aged Anglo woman who, Elvis thought, would make a great before photo for an anti-wrinkle cream.

"Definite outdoor type," Elvis muttered under his breath as the Camry braked to a stop next to him. The lean and leathery woman, her sun faded blond hair pulled back in a pony tail and her ropy muscular arms grasping the Camry's steering wheel--immediately earning the additional Elvis descriptive adjective of rangy--stared levelly at him. Almost, he suspected, mockingly. She flashed a white toothed smile artificially brightened by an advanced space age technology enhanced tooth whitener that caught the sun's glare and redirected it at Elvis. Causing him to blink repeatedly at the unwanted solar intrusion and make him wish he'd remembered to bring his sun glasses to work that day.

"Eye problems?" The lean and leathery, and now, also, rangy, outdoors type middle-aged woman in need of anti-wrinkle cream said. "Do you possibly need glasses, officer? Or is it allergies? Or," a faint touch of sarcasm, "maybe too much late night TV?" Elvis, however, was thinking the reason the woman didn't pony up for the bucks for anti-wrinkle cream was because she spent all her disposable income on teeth brighteners. He, however, remained the consummate border professional and proceeded with the mandated initial border interview. Despite the glare in his Irish-American North Sea gray blue somewhat strained eyes from Ropy Arm Woman's teeth.

"What are you bringing from Mexico? Meat of any kind? Medications. Plants. Soil. More than ten thousand dollars." He glanced at the woman's open mouth and a word blasted forth from his subconscious and forced its way off his tongue, despite what may or may not have been his attempts to stop it. "Teeth?" Elvis added to the list of border crossing no-nos. Oops. Elvis stopped abruptly. The woman stared at him.

"Teeth?" She said and then, being a card carrying libertarian who considered all federal employees to be lazy bumfuck leeches who were major players in the Entitlement Age that was draining America of its economic life blood, let it fly. She lasered Elvis with a withering haughty glare worthy of the most imperious the English aristocrats could muster in the British Empire at high tide and that made Elvis forget about all the other stuff, like lean and rangy and outdoors and wrinkle cream.

"I am indeed bringing teeth. 32 of them at last count." She opened her mouth wide and stuck her tongue out. "Want to count them?" Elvis was thinking that family legend had it that his great-grandmother Thelonia had at least 34 teeth, including an extra incisor, but figured this was not the time to bring it up.

"I don't think that will be necessary, madam," Elvis said in a voice that mirrored the mental image of a really, really bad border experience about to plummet down on him. Like the rainy season California mudslide had last year at his cousin Virbus' place near San Diego. Leaving Virbus with a swimming pool full of mud. Virbus, however, as a typical chip-off-the-block Mahoney, refused to let adversity get the better of him. He hosted the First Annual Mahoney Mud Wrestling Contest at his pool that same week. Which Elvis was unfortunately not able to attend, his inflexible and unempathetic boss thinking Elvis showing up for work on the border was more important than hitting Virbus' Mud Fest.

"No sense of perspective," Elvis muttered as he left his boss' office that day. Further muttering:  
"No feel for the creative artistic side of life."

Anyhow, at the Mariposa entry lane Elvis also noticed that the woman had a weird purplish tinge to her tongue that he figured probably came from some arcane and possibly psychoactive herbal concoction she brewed up in her secret garden. An observation, however, as likely to escape his lips as the Boston Celtics voting to wear pink underwear at their home games.

"Madam!" The anti-wrinkle cream woman retorted. "Madam! Do I look like someone who runs a cat house, buster?" Her eyes narrowed and machine gunned Elvis on the spot. "I will not be insulted by a border.....border....sh...."

"What else are you bringing from Mexico?" Elvis quickly interjected, hoping to deflect Anti-Wrinkle Cream Woman from her blastoff trajectory. "Any purchases? Groceries? Turkeys? Eggs? Birds....."

"Birds? _Birds?_ My yard is full of frickin' birds. I feed them every morning. Why would I need any more birds? My terminally insensate husband already is unhappy with me for spending too much on bird feed." Elvis was thinking he sure didn't envy the guy who was married to Ms Anti-Wrinkle Cream. Then he blurted out what was one of more common inspectional statements by border officers. And instantly regretted it.

"Open your car trunk, please." This flared Ms Anti-Wrinkle Cream woman's light amber eyes so wide Elvis thought her eyeballs were going to pop loose and the force of gravity take over and plop them on the ground. Where Elvis would be sorely tempted to stomp on them. Which made Elvis wonder if there was a law against stomping on eyeballs rolling aimlessly on the pavement.

"No!" She snapped. "Not without a search warrant. This is not Russia. Or Somalia. Or mainland China. Or for that matter, closer to home with peckerwoods like you from the redneck South!" This riled Elvis some. For openers, he wasn't really from the South. Or the North. He was from the borderlands between them and was congenitally indisposed to regularly side with either. "Pick 'n Choose," Elvis, Granny Rattler Sue always had said to him in his growing up days back home. Which Elvis generally did. What riled him some was that his sister-in-law Rose Marie Mahoney (nee Pernickle) was originally from the sand hills of northern Mississippi and she had never once had her trunk searched, with or without a warrant, or with or without a peckerwood. For another thing anyone refusing to cooperate with a border search was immediately suspect. A good many officers took non-cooperation personally and could get pretty huffy about it. And what then resulted was about as far from a win/win outcome as a typical Congressional debate in the early 21st Century. As in a not uncommon Republican comment.

"You can tell that socialist stooge Obama to shove it where the sun don't shine!"

"Bloated one percenter!" The Democrat retorted. "County Club Asshole!"

"What?" The Republican snorted. "Country Club Asshole? You're in the same Country Club!"

"That's different," snapped the Democrat. "That's pleasure." He slapped his congressional desk.

"This is business!"

To which an observer in the gallery quietly opined to her husband.

"Apparently bullshit is their business." Her husband made no comment, considering as he was a run for Congress and the possibility of a nice second home in the D.C. area.

Back to Lane Three with the green Toyota Camry and the lady with the incendiary eyes. Elvis took a very deep and weary breath, reaching and energizing even the most remote and least cooperative of his alveoli, leavened with fervent silent supplications to his Higher Power for at least a bit of divine assistance, and pointed to the signs posted prominently nearby, in English and Spanish, delineating the legalities of border searches. Which boiled down to everyone and everything were subject to inspection and failure to cooperate could result in forcible action, even apprehension, to ensure compliance. And with the possibility of prosecution on federal charges for the most recalcitrant. And that was that.

Or so thought the folk in the Big Offices who dreamed all this stuff up in the first place.

Yep. Big Words in Big Offices. But, as with so much in law enforcement, one hell of a lot easier said than done. Sure, loads of non-Ivy League law school graduates from second and third tier law schools--who were fortunate to land any kind of lawyer job in a glutted market--could dream all these laws up while really piling up the billing hours and perpetually pandering Congressmen could get them passed into law. Not to mention all the rules and regulations that could fill an entire wing of a medium sized law library. Or, more likely in the computer age, zettabytes of data in the Mysterious Cloud. With backups secreted in a clandestine high tech protected warehouse disguised as a closed Best Buy somewhere in the Middle West. Oh, that was all fine and good for the lawyers and the congressmen and the suits in the (nicely air-conditioned) CBP offices. But for the officer actually there? Eyeball to eyeball with a simultaneously exploding and imploding border traveler? Easy? As Elvis' grandpa Festus would put it:

"Try catching a greased pig with one arm tied behind your back." Which made the point all right to Elvis, though he never did figure out why someone would grease a pig in the first place.

"You ain't gonna search my car, garlic breath," anti-wrinkle cream woman snapped. "Not without a warrant." This time Elvis' eyes flared. Garlic breath? Elvis hadn't used any garlic in a least a week. Where did she get that from? He brushed his teeth at least three times a day and always bought the latest innovations in mouthwash technology. According to the ads, anyhow. Why....

"Are you listening?" Anti-Wrinkle Cream Woman persisted--now in full tilt in her pre-meditated attack strategy to beat the border--the words verbally sizzling as they flew out of her mouth. "Or are you day dreaming about the lecherous activities that consume officious small minds like yours?" There was just no way Elvis could contain himself on this one. Sometimes a man has to take a stand. In Elvis' case, however, likely to be a stand with a tilt.

"Lecherous activities?" Elvis replied, looking indignant. "I will have you know, Ms Traveler Person, that Customs and Border Protection only hires people of the highest moral and ethical character. On the Clinton/Cosby moral and ethical character 100 point scale CBP accepts only those who score above 90." Adding, somewhat thoughtfully. "Though there are rumors they do have a waiver procedure for defectors from hostile foreign intelligence services and the children of judges and big time campaign donors." He leaned closer, a quizzical look on his freckled Celtic face. "Did you possibly apply for a job with CBP?" Even closer. "And get turned down?" Then, adding, "don't be discouraged. Give it another try. I hear they're going to be lowering the hiring standards soon. You might get lucky." Elvis had not just pulled the pin on a verbal grenade that would eviscerate his career. Nor was he climbing out on any kind of bite you in the ass limb. He had been down this road more times than he could count, and he was pretty good at counting. The woman was hiding something. Elvis was as sure of that as he was that some day he was gonna finally beat Mairead arm wrestling with their respective non-dominant arms.

At that point Ballistic Missile Ms Anti Wrinkle Cream woman ignited and was about to blast off. Elvis beat her to it.

"I don't need a search warrant," Elvis said in the hard-edged tone that took over when civility tattered into tiny pieces and blew away in the coming ill wind, still pointing at the signs. "All that the law requires is mere suspicion, and since you are coming from a country known as a source country for illegal drug smuggling, you have already reached the level of mere suspicion." He reached to open the Camry's door. "Now open your trunk, please." Had LeRoi Grabser, Elvis' instructor in border law back at the Academy in Georgia, heard Elvis at that point, he would have given him a B+ for accurately articulating border law. Though he would have knocked him down from an A because Elvis was holding his right hand behind his back with the middle finger prominently extended.

"I want to talk to my lawyer," Ms Anti-Wrinkle Cream snorted, resorting to another premeditated strategy. "I refuse to cooperate until I talk to my lawyer."

"You are not being arrested and do not have a right to lawyer." A short pause before Elvis continued with considerable difficulty trying not to hiss through his now clenched teeth. "If you do get arrested you may call your lawyer. I'll even punch the numbers for you. I'll even give him a ride if his car has been impounded again for parking in the judge's parking spot at the courthouse." Ms Anti-Wrinkle Cream woman was not to be deflected.

"I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me." The woman sputtered, also regretting what she'd said almost as soon as she said it, but still adding, "I'm taking the Fifth." Elvis was thinking he could use a fifth himself, preferably at least eighty proof and the hell with how long it had been aged as long as it did the job--and quick.

"This has nothing to do with the 5th Amendment," Elvis replied in a tight voice. "Please open your trunk or I will have to forcibly remove you and detain you in our office while I search your car, including the trunk." Ms Anti-Wrinkle Cream glared at Elvis and he thought he could hear her fingernails raking her palms in anger. He wasn't sure of it, but he could swear that she was so fired up that the split ends of her sun bleached blond pony tail were starting to glow a reddish orange. "So what will it be?" Elvis continued. "Voluntary or involuntary? Either way, we _are_ going to look in your trunk." The woman pounded the Camry's steering wheel and spit out the words.

"All right, damnit! But you will be hearing from my lawyer. And _soon_." She leaned towards Elvis and hissed out the words. "I'll have your badge for this, you neo-Nazi thug." As a veteran border officer, Elvis had been called a lot of names over the years. Just about an entire small to medium sized book of mostly not so nice names. But neo-Nazi thug was a new one. He kind of liked the ring of that one. Neo-Nazi thug. Even his grandpa Festus, who'd had plenty of for real Nazis trying to perforate his corporeal Mahoney being during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, would have chuckled over it. Elvis thought he'd have to make a mental note of it for the next time when the off duty officers got together at Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub to swap Irate Traveler stories over cold pitchers of draft beer. The best ones tending to spill out after the first pitchers of Helmut's strong draft beer had already made their way to the rest room.

"Shall we proceed with opening your trunk, then, Mad......er,...Ms....?" The woman threw open the Camry's door and clambered angrily out onto the blacktop of the entry lane. She was indeed tall and rangy and reminded Elvis of the kind of woman who would be nailing down a triathlon in southern California or running a wildlife park full of hungry carnivores and giant mean spirited near sighted herbivores in the interior of South Africa. Under different circumstances he would have found her interesting and even attractive in her rangy, outdoorsy anti-wrinkle cream way. But not now. Oh, no! Cut Nose Kate, the Mountain Gorilla with world class funky body odor at the Phoenix Zoo, would have been a whopping improvement over Ms Anti-Wrinkle Cream at this particular Elvis moment. She stomped back to her trunk, opened it with a deft turn of a key, and then closed it again before Elvis could look inside. That was when the sinking feeling hit him.

Oh-Oh. He thought to himself. The Titanic.

What he called the Titanic Effect. Elvis was about to be sunk. She had something in the trunk she didn't want Elvis to see. And that almost certainly meant something illegal which in turn would mean some kind of seizure and thereby greatly extend the length of his not so pleasant interactions with Ms Wildlife Woman, AKA Ms Anti-Wrinkle Cream Woman. Elvis was now actively cursing himself for the dumb ass idea of spelling Zoella Vlnk on the car lane, even if she was a knockdown sizzler of a babe he'd sure like to get to know better.

"Good move, Elvis," he muttered. "Never know when to leave well alone, do you? Mairead was right. Your brains are in your pecker."

"I'll second that one, Beelzebub," sputtered Ms. Wildlife Park, who overheard his mumbling.

"Please reopen your trunk," Elvis said through now tightly clenched teeth.

"Nope," Wildlife Park shot back at him. "Only one opening per customer. Now I'll be on my way."

By now Willemina Ng, the officer womaning the adjacent car lane, along with three pedestrians and a guy in a Chevy pickup in Ng's lane, had stopped as still as the pigeon decorated statute outside the Santa Cruz County Courthouse from whatever they were doing and were staring at Elvis and Wildlife Woman. And offering various prognostications on the outcome of the Elvis/Wildlife Woman Saga. Officer Ng was conflicted. Which wasn't an uncommon occurrence with Officer Ng, who often missed breakfast because she couldn't decide if she should tacitly accept inhumane diary industry practices by having milk with her cereal. Ng was a dedicated CPB officer, but also an outspoken feminist. Having recently seen an indie documentary by a shadowy group called ARISE exposing the diabolical on-going male conspiracy against women, particularly within the U.S. government, she had a chip on her feminist shoulder the size of a Hawaiian surfboard. So it was with mixed--conflicted--feelings that she watched a male fellow officer, Elvis, being confronted by an obviously strong-willed woman.

Wildlife Woman stomped back to the opened driver side door on her Camry and slid with an agile, athletic quickness into the driver's seat. Willemina Ng raised her fist in triumph. "You go girl! Woman power!" Fernando Mata Jauregui, the guy in the Chevy Pickup in Willemina's car lane, didn't understand much English. He looked in astonishment at Ng's histrionics, actions that he associated with wild-assed hooting soccer matches between his home team, the Magdalena Maniacs, and some bunch of serial killers masquerading as a visiting soccer team. He even looked to both sides to see if there was a pickup soccer match going on nearby. Nope. Then, when Wildlife Woman started her car and noisily started to put it in gear, Ng couldn't control herself. She threw her arms up, jumped and hollered "Score!" Which was one of the few English words that Fernando Mata Jauregui knew. And served to befuddle him as thoroughly as his wife's mysterious notions about evil spirits residing in the canned goods sold at Beto's Mercancia just down the block from their small but comfortable adobe cottage in Magdalena.

The three pedestrians from Mexico who were watching also had a conflicted moment. One of the three had a fake ID and had managed to get by the worn out and weary officer processing pedestrians. They were talking, lowly but animatedly, in Spanish.

"I think we should get going," said one of the three, an older man with a balding head and a ponytail. "This is going to bring more of the Gringo La Migra and maybe one of them will discover Maria's document is not genuine."

"I want to see how this ends," Maria snapped back. "This is as good as a Mexican soap opera, but done Gringo style."

"Do you want to go to a Gringo style _jail?"_ Responded the older man. Who, not so coincidentally, was also Maria's father.

"A Gringo jail would be a a step up from that miserable hole of a ejido you raised us in." She snapped back. "No indoor plumbing. No central heating. No air conditioning. Dirt floors and dirt streets. No electricity. No TV." Then she really got hot. "And an outhouse that stank so bad I had to change my clothes after going to the so-called bathroom!"

"Goddamnit, Maria," the third person, who was her father's brother and also had the family balding head and ponytail look, chimed in. "You can watch stuff like this all day long at our place. We got cable TV--with the premium package, even." And with that dad and uncle each grabbed an arm and removed a still reluctant Maria towards a new life in fabled Gringolandia.

As they walked off Maria's father leaned towards her and whispered in an apologetic voice.

"No outhouse any more. We got an indoor bathroom. With a shower. And hot water, all the time." Maria's response surprised him. A fiery glare and a low growl. But then how could he know that Maria, having leaped into the teenage years with considerable enthusiasm, still would be changing her clothes at least once a day, outhouse or no outhouse.

As the three pedestrians receded from view Elvis' complexion did a chameleon change that incandescently complimented, if not quite matching, his Celtic mane of reddish hair. He literally leaped after Wildlife Woman, reached inside the still open driver's side window as she was about to drive away and--noticeably ungently--took it out of gear, turned the car off and jerked the keys out of the ignition. This brought fire to Wildlife Woman's eyes and a string of pithy expletives spilled out of her mouth that even stupefied Willemina Ng, who was until then watching with undisguised glee from her nearby car lane.

"No. No. NO!" Willemina NG muttered as dismay slid onto her face and made itself at home for the foreseeable future. " _Goddamn that fucking Elvis prick_!" She muttered loud enough for Fernando Mata Jauregui, the guy in the Chevy Pickup in Willemina's car lane, to hear. Further beclouding Fernando's already cloudy day, the Gringo slang words for the sex act and the masculine member being two of the few English words he knew, and, along with that 99.999 % of humanity, recognizing Elvis as a man's name associated with one guitar thumping chortling Elvis in particular. Fernando had heard tales about Elvis coming back to life many times. But never one about him coming back apparently engaged in what Fernando's self-described poetically inclined grandfather referred to as "pollinating the flower." Mata locked eyes on Elvis and the Wildlife Woman. Whatever the hell was going on, it was gonna make for a great story for the boys while knocking down cold Tecates at Benigno's Taberna in Magdalena.

Elvis wheeled and stormed back to the Camry's trunk. He slipped the key into the lock and turned it. Wildlife Woman jumped back out of the car and ran after him, grabbing at his arm as he turned the key it the trunk lock. _Click._ The trunk was open. Elvis began to lift it. Wildlife woman grabbed the trunk lid and tried to keep Elvis from pulling it open.

"Go woman! Do it. Do it _now._ Show your Woman Power!" Ng hollered. Fernando Mata Jauregui was now completely puzzled. But he was also as mesmerized by the antics on the next car lane as Willemina Ng was. Albeit for very different reasons. Watching Gringos fight each other was a rare treat for a guy from the Mexican interior, especially when it was between a man and a woman. Being both a Mexican chauvinist _and_ a male chauvinist, Fernando was as conflicted as Ng over who he wanted to win. Anyhow, it was a hell of a good show. And with no admission charge. Not like those dip shit Magdalena Maniacs who charged for their games but had yet to win one all goddamn season. Not one win. Not even a frickin' tie.

It was close. Elvis withstood a combination of a flood of invective and pummels on his shoulders--as well as on the Camry trunk--but he managed to finally jerk it open.

And there, curled into a fetal position and trying to think himself through a space time wormhole to land somewhere, anywhere, else--with the exception of the tiger cage at the Hong Kong Zoo--or possibly become invisible by cleverly blending in with the trunk decor, was a youngish man who looked to be of the Chinese variety. And that he was, as it turned out. Chinese. An illegal Chinese with no ID of any kind. Elvis ignored the sobbing coming from Ng's adjacent lane and turned to look at Wildlife Woman. At least a dozen different expressions were elbowing each other trying to grab Elvis face time. But, being the consummate professional that he was, Elvis remained true to himself. Professional? No. Just more or less vintage Elvis.

"My God," _Madame,_ " he said in passable shot at a shocked tone. "This is the very first time I've caught a car thief from the inside out." Wildlife Woman's eyes blinked. Three times. "Good thing I found him before he could overpower you and steal your car." For the briefest moment Wildlife Woman thought that maybe this border lummox was just dumb enough to......

"Looks like you were right after all," Elvis continued. Three more Wildlife Woman eye blinks.

"What...what....right about what?" She stuttered, confused. Elvis took her firmly by her rangy outdoorsy Wildlife Woman arm and forthwith ruined her day and gloomified plenty more yet to come.

"Being arrested."

On the next lane Willemina Ng wailed so plaintively and with such volume--Willemina was locally famous for her high decibel pithy commentary at local sports events--it got the attention of two Chihuahua ravens winging their bird way overhead. The ravens immediately did a nifty airborne reverse loop to divert their course and dive down and take a closer look at what was possibly some terrestrial critter in it's death throes. Which was therefore a potential fresh meal for the ravens, who, being young adult ravens, were always hungry. In a word, ravenous. They dove, cawing with a noisy abundance of youthful raven raucousness, towards Ng who, seeing them diving at her and thinking they were mockingly cawing at her distress, morphed from grief to anger and came within a Ng whisker of drawing down on them, blasting away and thereby creating one of the Great Legends of the Port of Mariposa. Willemina, barely, kept her semi-auto in its holster. She did, however, jerk out her three cell carbon composite flashlight and hurl it at the smart ass ravens with all her Ng might. Willemina did in fact play softball in a local league, but she was a catcher, not a pitcher. The flashlight missed the ravens by a margin so wide even the most near sighted of the local league umpires, Manco Opoclips, wouldn't have called it a strike and plummeted into the windshield of the ancient Dodge Lancer behind Fernando Mata Jauregui's pickup. Elmer Chou "Chou Mein" Martinez, the owner of the Lancer, filed suit before dusk slammed shut its daily door on the town. A suit for window replacement cost, plus the horrific personal trauma he suffered from the lethal object hurled at him by the crazed out of control border officer. An object, thank God, heroically intercepted by his now defunct windshield.

"$10,000, should cover it," he told lawyer Morris Splenk, who had sailed through his Arizona state bar exam on just the third try, "plus your fee."

Elvis animatedly waved at Mairead O'Leary, his ET partner, who was working the secondary lot with her K-9, Wilbur Too. Wilbur Too at that moment taking a doggy break in his cage, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth and his eyes half closed as he luxuriated in the fan Mairead set up outside his cage and lolling deep in doggie daydreams. Which to Wilbur Too had little to do with K-9's of the female type but a whole lot to do with the various odors wafting about in the air, with a particular emphasis on those odors associated with human food. Wilbur Too had nothing against Mairead, she was OK for a human, but he did resent the crappy tasting dry dog food she gave him while she gobbled down a wonderfully aromatic shrimp taco or a Big Mac. To his K-9 way of thinking the very least she could do was throw him a scrap or two of leftovers. Even better, go for the two for one McDonalds burger sales and lay one of the burgers on her trusty and faithful, but very hungry K-9 buddy, Wilbur Too.

As soon as she saw Elvis waving at her Mairead made tracks for him on the car lane, wanting to get as far away from Charlie Plink, the regular K-9 officer at Mariposa that day, as she could. Officer Plink, whose nickname was "Slim"--something that confused Mairead, since Plink was a good thirty pounds overweight, though she suspected the nickname Slim alluded to Plink's success rate as a K-9 officer. A success rate that was none too hot and in port fact was sole possessor of last place. Anyhow, Officer Plink had named his K-9 Thomas Jefferson III. This somewhat perplexed Mairead. Thomas Jefferson III? He named his K-9 Thomas Jefferson III? Which is what she asked Officer Charlie 'Slim' Plink a little while earlier.

"Thomas Jefferson III?" How did you....."

"Shhh. Don't call him that," Plink interrupted with a very serious expression, his voice almost a whisper. "He thinks it is pretentious. Just call him Tom."

Tom? Maired thought. Call him Tom? A dog that thinks calling him Thomas Jefferson III is pretentious? Mairead took a step back from Plink, thinking he just might be somewhat unpredictable, if not downright dangerous. At which time Elvis saved the day by motioning at her to join him. She was gone so fast that at first Officer Plink thought she'd had an attack of sudden onset diarrhea. Which was known to sometimes happen when an officer got their lunch from the Mexican side. Or, in the case of officer Orville Nougat, in a sandwich he brought from home, one made by his wife, Isabella Manx de Beauchamps Nougat, who was looking for some way, any way, out of her marriage to that "frickin' dripweed Orville." Who, she told her best friend and confidante, Magda Marie Muglia, "has a pecker like a shriveled up pickle and, even worse, farts all night long in bed." Magda Marie meanwhile thinking that this was not the best time to mention that Orville had been a regular visitor at her place the last few months when her own dripweed husband was out of town on business.

Mairead quick footed it up to Elvis and immediately grasped what was going on. She was after all a veteran officer like Elvis and graduated in the same class at the Academy--Mairead perched at the top of the class and Elvis upside down from the top, a subject Elvis was none too fond of discussing. Mairead's grasp was physical as well as mental when Elvis handed Wildlife Woman's rangy ropey muscled arm to Mairead's equally muscular grasp--Wildlife Woman meanwhile rapidly recovering and up to almost level three in the six level Mendeleyev Outrage Scale--and himself took hold of Trunk Boy's Chinese arm. The four of them, oblivious to the anguished sobbing in Officer Ng's lane, then marched towards the Mariposa secondary office where certain realities and consequences were about to be come under serious discussion.

The supervisor on duty that day at Mariposa, seriously overweight Antonio 'Fat Tony' Rivera, was sitting in his specially reinforced custom leatherette chair pretending to be researching work related topics on his Dell desktop PC. Two windows were open on the PC. One was the daily compendium of border events. The other was Spider Solitaire. When the door to the secondary building flew open and in thundered Elvis, Mairead, Wildlife Woman and Trunk Boy, he immediately minimized Spider Solitaire and maximized the CPB border summary. Then he noticed the incendiary attitude of Wildlife Woman and the sulking demeanor of Trunk Boy. His day promptly plummeted to the depths of another "Goddamnit, Elvis, what the fuck have you done now?" Which, no surprise, is what he blurted out.

"Goddamnit, Elvis, what the fuck have you done now?"

"My job," Elvis snapped back. "Something you might consider doing from time to time." This exchange between a GS-11 inspector and a GS-12 supervisor was not what you would call typical. More like insubordinate. Even slap ass insubordinate. Except Elvis was on the Enforcement Team and answered to his ET supervisor, not Tony, the shift supervisor at Mariposa that day. Which fact would definitely have given Tony ulcers had he not already had them. But it was always good for a flare up, as Tony grabbed at this stomach and let out an involuntary but very loud belch just as Wildlife Woman laid eyes on him.

"Oh, Jesus!" Sputtered a fully recovered and now fuming Wildlife Woman. "It's the Pillsbury Doughboy in a uniform!" Immediately after her remark Tony and Elvis became instant allies, along the tried and true traditional lines of _the enemy of my enemy is my friend._

"Should I take her outside and make her disappear?" Elvis retorted, suppressing a grin. "Like the last one?"

"Not yet," Tony shot back, adding. "But it's still on the table."

"What table?" Said another voice, that, considering the source, grabbed the instant attention of everyone in the room. The voice? It was Trunk Boy.

"You speak English?" Elvis said, thinking the Titanic Effect was now really starting to slide into the depths of the unknown abyss.

"Of course." Trunk Boy spit back. "I'm from Hong Kong. I still consider myself to be a British citizen, despite what the commie bastards in Beijing might say." To which absolutely no one, Wildlife Woman included, had a single word to say. Though they had plenty of--mostly jumbled--thoughts. Tony's thoughts, on the other hand, were anything but jumbled. The moment he saw Elvis and his Amazon friend--Mairead was a tall and muscular woman, as well as being a generously endowed looker--show up on his shift he knew his day would end up going to hell.

Which it just did.

"I am a British citizen," Trunk Boy continued, "persecuted in China," metamorphosing from sullen to adamant. Then, dropping an iron curtain on Tony's day, "and I demand political asylum." At this moment Wildlife Woman interjected her own heated words into the already rapidly warming moment.

"My name is Sylvia Montague Weatherby." Her eyes bore into Tony's. "Does that name mean anything to you, _officer_?" Tony, caught off guard, only stared speechlessly back at her. Then she nailed shut the iron curtain on Tony's day. "As in _Governor_ Weatherby." At first Tony was speechless. The governor? Good  
God! But then a thought came charging into Tony's definitely troubled and overtaxed brain. He suddenly brightened.

"Aha! Gottcha!" Governor Weatherby isn't married." Tony's triumph, however, was as short lived as the lifespan of a mayfly, which sure isn't much.

"But his _brothe_ r is," retorted the former Wildlife Woman AKA Anti-Wrinkle Cream Woman, now known as Sylvia Montague Weatherby. "Who also happens to be _my_ husband."

"Oh-oh," said both Elvis and Mairead in near perfect unhappy unison as the Titanic plunged to the bottom.

"I will never in a hundred, no, a thousand, years forgive the Iraqis!" Spouted a fuming Tony, completely befuddling every one in the room, including Trunk Boy, whose name was--the British version, anyhow--Eddie Chang.

"Iraqis?" Elvis said, looking suspiciously at Tony, already having figured out that this was going to do a boomerang move and loop around to whack him in the head. "How so, Iraqis?" Elvis said in an even more suspicious tone. Tony leaned towards Elvis and waggled his large blimp-shaped index finger at him, reminding Elvis that sausages were on sale that week at the local Fry's grocery store. "Tony. How so?" Elvis repeated. The words flew out of Tony's mouth, accompanied by the occasional drop of ostensibly non-venomous Tony saliva.

"Because they had a whole goddamn year to blast your red-headed ass into oblivion and fucked it up."

Though it was probably one of the least appropriate moments for levity in the recent history of the Port of Mariposa, Mairead couldn't help herself. She started to chuckle, then slid without much effort into a genuine Mairead guffaw, which, everyone agreed, was definitely on the raucous side and not at all ladylike. Ladylike an adjective no one, with the exception of her grandparents when she put on her best behavior face and went to visit them in their retirement cottage on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, would have used to describe Mairead.

"Sure glad you think it's funny, Butch," snarled Sylvia Montague Weatherby, AKA the governor's sister-in-law. "You won't think it's so funny when my friends in the federal government hammer your fat ass." Butch? Fat ass? Mairead went into Red Alert. She called me _Butch?_ _Fat ass Butch?_ Her eyes were smoldering volcanoes of Irish ire. Mairead had what the uninitiated might refer to as a hot Irish temper. The initiated, however, would be more likely to refer to it as nuclear. But, before the Mairead dam burst, Tony Rivera suddenly grabbed his chest, groaned, and, slumping to the ground, mumbled as he went down, "I think I'm having a heart attack."

Elvis, who had some basic first aid military training, immediately dropped to his knees and bent close to Tony looking for symptoms of a heart attack. Instead he got a big theatrical wink that only Elvis and Mairead, who had also had leaned over to look, saw. Tony, for once, had used his imagination to defuse what was about to become a colossal circle jerk. Elvis then slowly looked up at Sylvia Montague Weatherby and Eddie Chang. Elvis' face was distorted with outrage (an expression he'd honed when doing a couple of plays back in high school and absolutely perfected when he was in the Army and learned his tour in Iraq was being extended for three more IED and RPG dodging months.) Sylvia was momentarily caught by surprise and was mutely staring wide eyed at the prostrate, groaning human behemoth writhing on the floor in front of her. Eddie Chang, however, was more fixated on Mairead's bent over shapely rear end, wondering how anyone possibly could call that wondrous work of Mother Nature a fat ass as Sylvia had done a moment earlier.

Elvis hot eyed Sylvia. "You've killed him." "I don't think he'll make it this time."

"Your brother-in-law the governor and your buddies in the gated communities won't get you out of this one." Mairead snapped at Sylvia. "You're going to jail."

"Going to jail.......?" Sylvia, who could grab onto some decidedly salty language when riled up, sputtered. "I can't be responsible for this overstuffed obese Pillsbury Doughboy having a heart attack. That's fucking ridiculous!" Tony heard the Pillsbury Doughboy insult and lurched in mid-writhe on the floor. Elvis held him down and threw Tony a cautionary look and slowly waggled his head negatively. Tony refrained from leaping to his feet to grab the governor's sister-in-law and commence to reducing her neck to one tenth of its normal girth, but it was close. Elvis pushed down on him again. Hard. Then he looked up again at Sylvia Montague Weatherby.

"You were resisting a lawful search and then a lawful arrest and in so doing precipitated this poor man's heart attack. You were caught smuggling an illegal alien into the United States. The best you can hope for is an aggravated misdemeanor charge, which carries with it a two year jail term and/or a $10,000 fine." Which may or may not have been accurate, but in Elvis' mind made his point just fine. But not in Sylvia's.

"Oh, bullshit," Sylvia spit back. "I was helping a persecuted Chinese man achieve political asylum in the United States." She shot daggers at Elvis with her fireplace incendiary--formerly light amber--eyes and doubled the dagger dose with Mairead. "Our neighbors and _very_ good friends in Scottsdale are the publishers of the Phoenix newspaper. And they'll be sure to publish the truth about this heavy handed harassment by you border bastards." Another venomous look. "You're screwed, Bubba. You and your Amazon buddy here with the Arnold Schwarzenegger biceps. Kiss your careers goodbye."

Elvis expected Mairead to blow and possibly break every bone in Sylvia Montague Weatherby's body. At least once. Maybe twice. He was about to try to stop her when instead he stopped as abruptly as that time when he was a teenager learning to drive and accidentally backed daddy Mahoney's cherry Chevy pickup into neighbor Absalom Munchlinger's century old dry stone wall at thirty miles an hour. Which soon occasioned a considerable amount of unwanted attention from daddy Mahoney, whose face was as red as the paint on his (formerly) cherry Chevy pickup.

But....what was this? Mairead had a great big grin plastered on her face. Even Sylvia was taken back. Eddie Chang, however, was still stuck on eyeballing Mairead's rear. Mairead took a giant step towards Sylvia, right up smack against the outer perimeter of her personal space. The grin was still on her face. And getting grinnier. She pointed at something fixed to the upper corner of the room.

"See that, Ms Governor's Sister-In-Law? That is a camera. Just one of several, including at least two that caught your actions on the car lanes outside." This even got Tony's attention. He sat up and stared raptly at Mairead with obvious admiration. "The videos-- _and_ audio--of you here and on the car lanes are admissible as evidence in a court of law." Then the knockout punch.

"And they'd sure make for some really, really great reality TV."

Into Sylvia's mind flashed a horrifying image of the video on the Phoenix TV evening news. Next came images of her husband and his brother, the governor, watching the video. Sylvia's expression imploded and puckered up like a dried peach. She was now completely deflated. So deflated that even her industrial strength whitened teeth lost some of their luster. Things would only get worse.

And it wasn't long in coming.

Special Agent Sherry Butt--who had long ago heard one too many jokes about her patronymic--came to the port to take over the case and move it through the legal system. It didn't take her long to flesh out the facts. The first was that Sylvia really was the governor's sister-in-law, which set the fires of poetic justice alight in Special Agent Sherry Butt. Sherry's work nickname was No Buts Butt, referring to her near maniacal single mindedness in pursuing an investigation. Most special agents, when they found out that a bunch of Big Shots were involved with a case like this, would have dropped to their knees and begged for salvation. Not Sherry. She, and Sherry was not alone in this opinion, considered the jerk governor to be a pompous plutocrat and a patronizing male chauvinist. He was a silent partner with his brother and Sylvia in a western style guest ranch near the town of Wickenburg. Which is where Sylvia got her rangy outdoors look. But they also were partners in a trendy restaurant in Phoenix that specialized in Asian cuisine. A restaurant regionally famous for its culinary excellence. The guy in the trunk was a hotshot chef from Hong Kong who was barred from legal entry to the U.S. because he had a criminal record in China for being way too interested in underage girls. Laurie grasped it immediately. Either she was gonna be a champagne star in the Service or else be press ganged into early retirement. The latter was her preferred course because of the prospect of whistle blower talk shows and the consequent big bucks on the lecture circuit as she "told all." It was, she would later confide--while in a state of advancing dishabille--to her real good friend, Amos Big Buffalo Swenson, "like hitting the Lotto."

Eddie Chang, the hotshot Chinese chef, went to an immigration detention center where he would be detained for several weeks while his petition for political asylum was carefully considered, the food in the employee cafeteria meanwhile taking a mysterious great leap forward in lip smacking culinary quality. Sylvia, the governor's sister-in-law, was given a summons to appear in court and then--on the acidly delivered direct order of the politically connected CBP regional director--released. Willemina Ng went into a week long depression and Elvis and Mairead went to Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub that evening with another good story for the barstool gang. Tony Rivera went home that evening, ate almost a whole chicken and half a pecan pie and went to sleep on the couch while watching a TV show about the Real World of Seattle's Leaf Blowers. But it wasn't all bad. He had one heck of a terrific dream....

About Elvis and Mairead parboiling in a steaming hot vat of canola oil.

While Elvis and Mairead were hauling Wildlife Woman and Trunk Boy to their destiny in the secondary office, Fernando Mata Jaurgui, the guy in the Chevy Pickup in Ng's lane, was woodenly waved on by a crestfallen, puffy eyed officer Willemina Ng. He was soon on his way to Tucson. An hour later he pulled off Interstate 19 onto Valencia Road and then to a side street in South Tucson. Fernando drove right through the opened doors of a ramshackle garage almost hidden from view behind stacks of used tires. _Se Venta Llantas_ proclaimed the rusty and faded sign over the rundown place's doors. A guy inside guided Fernando as he drove the Chevy pickup onto a hydraulic lift. Fernando turned off the ignition and climbed out of the Chevy. His cousin Bernardo Gomez Juaregui grinned and shook his hand.

"Made it again, hey, bro!" He said in Spanish. Fernando grinned back at him.

"And this time with entertainment!"

"Entertainment?" Bernardo said, looking confused. Fernando slapped him on the shoulder.

"I'll tell you about it later over a cold Tecate at Mamacita's Taberna. After we've finished."

The two cousins raised the pickup on the hydraulic lift and set about dropping the saddle tanks on the Chevy. They popped open the Bondoed access plates and carefully removed the brown tape wrapped kilo sized bricks of marijuana, twenty five in each tank, from the secret compartments built into them. Several fragmented bits of various colors of old Bondo meant that this was not the first time the cousins had popped the access plates on the tanks. They stacked the marijuana bricks in the tool room at the back of the shop on top of at least as many marijuana bricks already there. A dingy, dirty room that nevertheless had an overpowering attraction from a nostril blasting potent odor no one who has ever been around quantities of marijuana would misinterpret. Nor the contact high that tagged along.

"When I get depressed I go into the back room and hang out for a while," Bernardo told his cousin during the previous gas tank adventure two weeks earlier. "Then I put an Antonio Banderas bandito DVD on my Sony player, pop the top on a cold one and munch a bunch of shrimp tacos. Works every time. Voila! No more depression."

The cousins returned to the pickup, pulled the spare out of the truck bed and proceeded to break the bead on the Chevy's spare tire using Bernardo's old fashioned but still effective manual tire tool. A tool that, while effective, had it's engineering deficiencies. A few months earlier the tire tool lever slipped and whacked Bernard in the nose. It didn't break his nose but it did dent it some. It had a upside side, though. Which Bernardo, being a recent convert to the concept of positive thinking, soon discovered. The bent spot in Bernardo's otherwise convex beak provided a dandy niche for his reading glasses to perch on as he perused his online computer for the latest in smuggling trends.

The cousins continued opening the tire. No problemo. They were, after all, pros. With practiced care they removed the tape wrapped plastic boxes inside the tire. Boxes crammed full of pills. Ecstasy pills.

"Gonna be party time this weekend for the kids in Tucson," Bernardo said with a wide, semi-toothed grin. "Touchy feely all over town." Fernando didn't say anything, but he looked like he'd just taken a giant bite out of an extra sour lemon. He'd tried Ecstasy once and all it did was make him hug the big mesquite tree in his back yard for over an hour. Which in itself might have not been so bad had not his wife come home and found him stroking and crooning love songs to the mesquite. On top of which he got a bunch of splinters.

An hour later they were at Mamacita's Taberna belly laughing over the red headed beanpole gringo officer and the skinny crazy woman with the Chinese guy in her trunk.

"And, also," Fernando added. "That nutball woman La Migra who was jumping up and down and hollering and then waved our load of dope on into the U.S. without a fucking clue."

"It was," Fernando declaimed to his chortling cousin, thinking of their storeroom piled high with marijuana bricks and mentally calibrating the big bucks in profit that lay in their immediate future, "a hell of a lot more real than those lug nut drug cop dickwads on reality TV!"

Which definitely grabbed the interest of the shaggy undercover DEA agent nursing a Bud light at the next table.

### Chapter 3

A Day in the Life

Elvis came home from another twelve hour day on the border at Nogales. He was whipped. If nothing else from changing clothes. Winters in Nogales were as unpredictable as the trajectories of the bullets fired by Elvis' cross-eyed, fidgety cousin Thermal on the firing range. When Elvis got to work at the Mariposa Port of Entry at 6:00 that morning he felt like he had been somehow teleported into the vicinity of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. It was below freezing, the wind was building towards gale force and a mixture of tiny pellets of rain and sharp edged bits of sleet peppered the officers working outdoors like a bunch of nasty dystopian nanotechnology daggers. A phrase Elvis picked up from an online National Geographic article, the meaning of which was none too clear to him. But he thought it sounded real cool and dropped it on his coworkers from time to impress them with the breadth of his knowledge. To no avail. Were he able to rattle off the latest NASCAR race results or the vital statistics of the latest hot movie stars they would have been impressed. But dystopian nanotechnology? It left them cold. And a touch hostile. Like the last time he got a chance to drop his new pet phrase during a disagreeable day of swirling hard pellets of wind driven icy snow.

"These nasty hard pellets of ice sure remind me of tiny dystopian nanotechnology daggers." Elvis said. "How about you?"

"Get a friggin' life, Elvis," was the way officer Lomalinda Pokwick not so gently put it.

Elvis had nothing further to say on the subject. Though the tiny dystopian nanotechnology daggers, or whatever the hell they were, continued to bombard his mostly defenseless stuck outdoors person. It wasn't all bad, though, he thought with just a touch of poetic justice of the Elvis variety.

The bitch Lomalinda Pokwick was stuck outdoors, too.

These nasty bits of wind driven icelets were kind of like a wintry version of a sandstorm. The real iteration of which the hapless officers over at Elvis' former duty station at the Port of San Luis on the Arizona/California border with Mexico experienced with far more regularity than they would have liked.

"Another bad one building up," muttered Elvis back when he was still a trainee at the Port of San Luis as he almost literally flew through the door, propelled as he was by the bad one building up on the other side of the door. "I hate these goddamn sandstorms. Why couldn't they have sent me someplace with better weather? Like New Orleans."

"New Orleans has hurricanes, Elvis man," intoned Senior Inspector Placido Laguna (whose nickname, no surprise, was Lake Placid.) Elvis however was not to be denied his one tracked train of thought.

"OK. How about San Francisco." He said. Nice view. The bridge. All that stuff."

"San Francisco has earthquakes. One of them destroyed the city and killed thousands of people."

"Then Washington D.C." Elvis countered. "Dulles Airport. That would be cool."

"Washington D.C. has an endemic plague, Elvis man." Placido replied.

"A plague? What kind of plague?"

"Politicians," Placido said. "Lots of 'em."

"Oh."  
"Elvis man," Placido continued, "these particulars are all just manifestations of the Great Power showing we are mere infinitesimal bits in the overall Master Plan. Just accept things the way they are. Ride out the storm. It'll be over soon." Placido considered himself a Wise Man in the vein of Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mark Twain and especially Jimmy Hendrix. As he looked at Elvis with a beatific smile, the supervisor on duty, 6'3" Mary Sue Anagram, leaned out of her office and pointed at Placido.

"Hey, Placido, it's your turn to work the secondary lot." She pointed at the door, the same door that had so recently propelled Elvis inside. "Best get out there now." Placido jumped straight up in the air, coming down hard with both feet and thereby physically punctuating his words.

"Go out in that storm? Are you crazy? No way. No freakin 'way!" 6'3" supervisor Mary Sue Anagram continued to point at the door, her finger now morphed into something considerably more menacing than a simple pointing digit. Elvis stepped up, opened the door and motioned for Placido to go outside.

"The Great Power awaits you, Placido man," he said, adding "just ride it out. It'll be over soon." Placido's eyes flared wider than a tent flap in a force six wind storm.

That was it. Elvis and Placido weren't exactly on friendly terms after that.

But that was summertime San Luis. This was wintertime Nogales. As the sun rose over the border at Nogales, and the day began to warm, Elvis warmed up along with it. First he took off the Navy pea hat he was wearing. Then the heavy parka. And the thick gloves. Before long the wind stopped, the sun came out full, the day warmed up nicely and Elvis stripped off his light jacket and finally his regulation sweater to work in his shirtsleeves. In the late afternoon the clouds and the wind reappeared with a gray sky vengeance as a cold front came whistling in. The temperature plummeted as precipitously as the hungover diving board repairman in a YouTube video Elvis watched the night before as the guy lost his balance on the edge of the high dive at Sea World. Which at this particular frigid moment was no more humorous to Elvis than it was to the hapless guy who took the plunge. Elvis and the other officers shook their fists at the Weather Gods, and also at upper level management, who were always screwing with them and were sure as hell not above bribing the Weather Gods out of pure orneriness. Grumbling, the officers, Elvis included, did the clothing routine from earlier, but in reverse, pulling on layers of clothes as the weather continued to worsen.

Meanwhile, the narcotics traffickers on the Mexican side of Nogales kept track of the CBP officers on the American side with powerful binoculars, purchased with preferred customer discounts at Tucson's Cop Shop, and sent through their load cars when the Americans were all busily preoccupied either taking off or adding a layer of clothes. The traffickers, who were not without a sense of humor, gleefully referred to it as the Nogales Strip Club. And with no little ironic hilarity used their ensuing drug profits to pay for their visits to a more traditional strip club, Angelina's Body Boutique, where they also received preferred customer discounts and had themselves a rollicking good time. What they could remember of it, anyhow.

By the time Elvis left work at 6:00 that evening it was snowing. When he got home he was so disgusted from all the clothing changes that he turned the thermostat up to 80 and stripped down to his underwear. He might have gone ahead and stripped naked but for the habit of his octogenarian neighbor, Beata 'Girlie' Girfoil, of popping up unannounced to ask for a cup of white vinegar and not so coincidentally try to flirt with him. Elvis was very open minded and democratic in his more intimate dealings with women, but an eighty four year old widow with no teeth and the body odor of an unwashed donkey was beyond the pale even for him. For her part, Beata was often confused, coming not so much from the beginning stages of dementia as from being half swacked on Wal-Mart's store brand cough syrup. The Wal-Mart syrup was OK, but it couldn't compare to the jolt she got from sniffing Mario's Deluxe Superglue. It was good stuff, Mario's Deluxe. Darn good. Sure to launch her into orbit. Yet she had no choice but to kiss Mario goodbye after she superglued her nose to the Mario's Deluxe tube for the third time. Emergency room visits being pricey and glued noses invariably drawing the attention of Medicare's watchdogs.

"No way! One nose a year is all you get," snarked Medicare CCA--Cost Control Analyst--Mai Tai de Medici on seeing Beata's latest emergency room nose degluing bill.

So that was it. No more Mario's Deluxe.

"Three strikes and you're out, Buddy," Beata said, somewhat wistfully, as she wound up like the Big Unit with the Cardinals back in the day and whipped her last tube of Mario's Deluxe out her living room window with all her octogenarian might. Which also didn't work so well since the window was closed. Plus she dislocated her shoulder.

Whatever the clinical reasons, the fact was that her mental peregrinations short circuited somewhere in the Beata gray matter labyrinth and she got it in her head that Elvis was her old high school boyfriend from long ago, Elijah 'Sweet Drawers' Honeycutt. Beata was hell bent on reawakening the long slumbering passion from the days when they would float on inner tubes on her father's fish pond, drink Mogen David wine straight out of the bottle and scandalize the local population of pumpkinseed sunfish and bullheads with their acrobatic sexual antics. Did you see _that?_ In an inner tube! In fish speak, of course.

With fifteen seconds of meeting Beata for the first time Elvis vowed to avoid her with the fervency of an Irish monk praying that the Almighty Sword would smite low the boatload of approaching beady-eyed Vikings. But, like the soon-to-be martyred Irish monk, there would be no such providential luck for Elvis. Unfortunately for Elvis, Beata had been a locksmith in her working life and Elvis eventually had to deadbolt his door from inside. Even then Beata would pound on the door and yell that she was drowning and needed his help. Immediately! When he wouldn't answer she'd call 911 and say Elvis was about to sexually assault her and please hurry before it was too late and her feminine honor was violated. After the responding officers from the Nogales Police Department sorted it out the first time the subsequent recurring 911 calls became a source of constant amusement to the local police. Few of them missed the chance to jab Elvis with some pithy comment about it whenever they chanced upon him.

"Hey," one of them would say to him. "What do Elvis' girlfriend and a carp have in common?" Another would answer. "Neither of them have teeth." Or..."Hey, Elvis, we hear you and Girlie are going to do a photo shoot for AARP Magazine." Or..."Hey Elvis, got any nude photos of Girlie we can share with the guys at the nursing home?" This eventually led Elvis to loathe the local police force, every man and woman of them, living or dead, those not yet hired or even those as yet unborn. Woe to the local cop who went to Mexico and encountered Elvis when he or she came back into the U.S. at one of the Nogales ports of entry–which eventually led to an unofficial ban on all cross border traffic by members of the Nogales PD whenever Elvis was on duty. AE was the watchword. Avoid Elvis.

During one such occasion of Beata thumping on Elvis' door and yelling for Elvis AKA Elijah 'Sweet Drawers' Honeycutt to let her in, Elvis sidled up to the door and answered the pounding.

"He is not here," Elvis said in his best take on what he thought Vlad Dracula's voice would have sounded like.

"Then who are you?" Beata shot back in a suspicious tone. "You sound like some kind of foreigner."

"I am," Vlad Elvis replied.

"From where?"

"Utah."  
"Oh. Uh.... Okay. So where is Elvis?"

"He went to the Boys Club to mentor underprivileged kids and teach them how to play ping pong." Beata had to think about that one for a moment.

"So exactly who are you and what are you doing in Elvis' apartment?"

"I'm fixing his air conditioner," Vlad Elvis replied.

"Air conditioner!" Beata snapped back at him. "This is midwinter!"

"Midwinter special, 'mam," Utah Vlad Elvis replied. "Half price in the off season."

"Oh," Beata said. "Do you know when he'll be back?"

"No idea," Utah Vlad Elvis answered. "He didn't say."

"OK, then," Beata said resignedly. "I'll try again later."

After convincing Beata he was a repairman come to service the air conditioner at a rock bottom low special mid winter rate, Elvis sat down to his genuine refurbished high speed laptop computer purchased online from the eastern European branch of RepoDude.com. Whoever had the computer before hadn't had the chance to delete all of his personal stuff and the sellers at RepoDude.com hadn't removed it so Elvis had to wade through several gigabytes of photos of Bulgarian peat bogs, Romanian folk dancers and pictures of Vlad Dracula's castle from every angle imaginable. Which, when he looked at it earlier that day, was where he got the Vlad accent idea He deleted everything–except for a couple of really cool photos of Vlad's castle shrouded in a fog turned blood red by the sunset behind the castle. Elvis almost thought he could see Vlad in an upper castle window just beneath a crumbling battlement. "Tricky devil, that Vlad," he murmured at the photos. "And he made some real cool movies, too."

Elvis punched up the social networking website "All of Me" and typed in his password Boeing 777 and his user name, Hot Socks. Up popped the New Messages screen and Elvis saw that he might be a winner to the Nigeria National Lottery or in the drawing for the 72" Chinese Bamboo brand HDTV. He also could buy deeply discounted Viagra from an online pharmacy in Honduras or be able to 'last longer' with an absolutely guaranteed non-prescription drug not available in stores. He ignored the messages, having learned by bitter experience that deeply discounted Viagra from online pharmacies in Honduras was about as potent as wet powder in a firecracker and that 'last longer' was actually measured in milliseconds.

He typed in "Hi. This is Hot Socks. I'm back." He got an answer, maybe not at the speed of light, but certainly at the speed of type.

"This is an event of moment unequaled in modern times, with the possible exception of my cousin Thelton's first pubescent pimple."

'Hi, Mom," Elvis typed back. "How's things back in Slippery Sister County?"

"I wouldn't know," his mother typed back.

"Wouldn't know?" Elvis typed, confused. "What the heck does that mean?"

"It means I'm at the airport," she answered, texting into her new _I'm Here_ smart phone she had just bought at Charlie Flomenstricker's Discount Electronics and Other Stuff Store back home in Slippery Sister County.

"The airport?" Elvis answered, hesitating. "What airport? Was there something he had forgotten?

"The _Tucson_ airport," she added, hitting her smart phone's 'speak' icon and dropping her voice to a universally recognized tone perfected through uncounted generations of mothers honing the fine art of guilt tripping their kids.

"Waiting for YOU to pick me up."

"Oops!" Elvis blurted out in double surprise at hearing her voice and what she was saying. He'd forgotten she was coming to visit!

And that was why Elvis ran smack into Beata 'Girlie' Girfoil, who was still hovering outside his door, suspicious about the air conditioner repairman story, as he went tearing out on his way to the Tucson airport. He fell over right on top of Beata and she tumbled spread eagled beneath him.

"Oh, Sweet Drawers," she said. "Take me. Take me now."

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on one's frame of reference, there was a security camera in the hallway that captured the entire event, from Elvis throwing open the door and bowling over Beata to him hot footing in terror down the hallway with her running after him yelling. "Rape! Help! Rape!" The Nogales police responded and soon discovered the security camera, the details of which were known in less than an hour to every officer in the department, even Manny Perez visiting his incarcerated brother-in-law Heriberto in Guadalajara and vacationing Klaus Periwinkle photographing and documenting the winter distribution of mammal scat in Grand Teton National Park.

From that day forward the officers of the Nogales Police Department rarely attempted to cross the Mexican border even when Elvis wasn't on duty, since he soon adopted the habit of showing up unexpectedly. Elvis was not amused by what had happened. Elvis' mother, however, thought the video was just about the funniest thing she'd ever seen and even tried to take a copy back with her to Slippery Sister County. Elvis managed to have a Tucson airport police officer confiscate the video as being important evidence in an on going investigation. But Elvis' mom wasn't upset. Not hardly. It made the telling of the story that much juicier. It'd turned out to the best darn vacation she'd ever had.

That same week Elvis took out a lifetime membership in Mary's Forget Me Not Call Service.

### Chapter 4

### Mr. Escalade

The guy in the new hybrid Cadillac Escalade was no two dimensional cardboard cutout. He didn't just look prosperous, he _was_ prosperous. One look at him and the label One Percenter would likely jump into the minds of any passersby. Said jump being literal when a couple of pedestrians, schlepping across the street in an illegally marked crosswalk, had to leap onto the sidewalk to avoid an imminent human/metal encounter with the Escalade's front bumper. In this leaping pedestrian case the extemporaneous leapers were long time buddies Max and Freddy. Who, before their "leap for life," as Max would later term it, were heading across the street in north Tucson to Luigi Castorini's Bavarian Beer Garden for a cool dark ale on a hot bright day.

"Did you see that guy?" Maxwell Rotor said to his buddy, Freddy Beeble, as they hotfooted it off the road to avoid being Escaladed. "Goddamn one percenter capitalist asshole parasite. _Look_ at his lordship. Driving that goddamn gold plated Cadillac Escalade. What do you think he does for a living? Corporate raider? Buys up businesses, strips them of their assets and then shuts them down and lays off the employees." Which, as the direct cause of Max' vitriol, had actually happened to Max not once, but twice, and left him considerably jaded on the subject. Not so much that he'd grab an assault rifle and start blasting away at a 100,000 bucks a plate Republican fund raiser extolling the virtues of right to work laws. But he had recently purchased a second hand pump Remington shotgun and some double 00 shells, assault rifles being out of the reach of his currently cash strapped, laid off a second time, budget. Though, should it ever come to some kind of violent protest, Max wasn't really the violent type and would most likely settle for a well placed stink bomb.

"You're just bitter, Max," Freddy answered. And he was. Max. Not Freddy. Freddy had long ago decided that a safe government job was the wise way to go. Maybe not the big bucks that nerd techies like Max could make. But reliable, with a strong union that wasn't noticeably corrupt, at least not was so much as to headline the evening news, paid sick days and three weeks of paid vacation after twenty years service and with a decent retirement package and pension. Working for the City of Tucson sanitation department might not be the most glamorous of careers, but it was dependable employment.

"There will always be trash," Freddy solemnly opined, usually to whoever were on the bar stools next to him and too snookered to escape Freddy's rambling boozy soliloquies. Most of the inebriated co-inhabitants of the bar stools completely missed Freddy's "there will always be trash" point.

"There will always be trash," Freddy repeated.

"I didn't know you were acquainted with my in-laws," said one.

"They should all be deported," said another.

"Survival of the fittest," snorted a different guy.

"DNA sucks," blurted out another one. "Just look at my kids and my ex-wife."

"I'll have another beer," said Freddy, any further discussion obviously pointless.

"The guy has realized the American dream," Freddy said to Max as the Escalade disappeared around a corner. "Why blast him for it? He made the bucks. Although I can sure understand why you feel the way you do." Freddy reached over to soothingly pat his friend's shoulder. The two had been best buds since way back in the day as a couple of incipiently prurient 14 year olds when they donned midnight black ninja suits they'd got at the yearly going out of business sale at a local costume shop and crept through the neighborhood looking for windows with views of ladies in various stages of--hopefully well advanced--states of undress. They were very democratic in their viewing choices, ranging from Andalacia 'Liberty' Bell, who had made a recent and very spectacular entrance onto the stage of puberty, to 'Granny' Alice Smelt, who was still pretty well put together even at the advanced age of 39. They did, however, draw a very firm line when it came to Herta Zertle, an 85 year old who unfortunately was the one most likely to not close her blinds when undressing. Possibly--make that probably, no, make that definitely--intentionally, Herta invariably having a wide grin on her face as she stripped in front of her bedroom window and saying things like "....how 'bout them boobs" and "....not bad for an old broad, 'ey". Which her 87 year old boyfriend, Stanislaus Chan, sure did agree with. At least those times when he could remember what the secondary recreational 'fun bags' function of boobs was. Stanislaus as often as not mentally stuck in WWII days, when he bravely held down the home front milking dairy cows on the family farm while his older brother Willibad paid a very untouristy visit to Guadacanal and returned home with a bad attitude and a definite lack of understanding of Stanislaus' contribution to the war effort.

Well, as the country song Wildwood Weed lamented, _All good things got to come to an end_. And so it was when Max and Freddy's boyhood ninja suited window peeping avocation took a ninety degree nosedive into oblivion. One dark evening they peeped into a promising window and inadvertently caught Max' father boning Freddy's mother. And not quietly, either. After that Max and Freddy figured they were kind of like step brothers or something like that and the bond between them was cemented right up to this very day. Though the cement did crack some when Max tried to put some moves on Freddy's kid sister, Inez Beeble.

Back to Mr. Escalade. Mr. High Dollar. Mr. Big Bucks. Mr. One Percenter. Or, at the very least, Mr. Two Percenter. Prosperity oozed from this guy's pores so much that on hot days he smelled like old money. He was a poster boy for self-assured prosperity. Over the top self-assured prosperity. The guy was as comfortable with his place on God's Green Earth as Tiger Woods was at the top of his game. And he had the address book in his mobile to prove it. Suitably password protected, of course. He was perched on the cutting edge of arrogance. This guy was hubris in human 3D. He wore expensive buff-colored slacks he'd had done by a London Seville Row tailor, a sporty Tommy Banana tropical silk shirt and soft brown leather Italian loafers hand made in Genoa. His capped teeth were as shiny and white as a Greenland iceberg, in fact so glaringly shiny that he either had to brush his teeth with the extra bright bathroom lights turned off or wear sunglasses while scrubbing away on his gleaming oral glaciers.

Which really freaked out his eleven year old daughter one morning when she saw her father wearing sunglasses while he was brushing his teeth. The daughter had watched one of the Godfather movies on cable TV the night before and immediately jumped to the conclusion that her father was a mafioso. Wasn't it obvious, she nervously confided to her best friend, Floribella Nuz, whose school nickname was Floribella Bad News Nuz. Who else, Mr. Escalade's daughter whispered glumly to Bad News Nuz with her own version of bad news, would brush their teeth wearing sunglasses? He had to be mafia. Just like on TV.

"You could come live with us," Bad News Nuz said, trying to sound soothing. "I'll ask mom." But then Bad News Nuz had second thoughts. Mafia? "Maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea. What if your father put out a concrete on us?" Daughter Escalade frowned. A concrete?

"Do you mean contract?" She said.

"That, too," Bad News replied, sounding almost as nervous as Daughter Escalade.

Mr. Escalade, though in the age of mobiles fully aware that wearing wristwatches was fast vanishing into the world of the archaically uncool, habitually wore a $10,000 Rolex on his wrist that he'd bought at Trimingham's in downtown Hamilton on the island of Bermuda. He often bragged to his wealthy friends at the exclusive Rincon Country Club in Tucson about how he'd smuggled the watch under the very noses of the Customs officers without paying duty.

"All I did was strap it on my wrist and breeze right through Customs." He confided to his country club clique of golfing, drinking and recreational drug use buddies. "Breezed right by the dumb shits without so much as a question about the watch." Then he paused and chuckled, reaching over to tap one of his friends on the shoulder and holding up his arm while he took the tapping arm and retapped it on the Rolex on his other wrist.

"I even did this, checking my watch for the time, right in front of the goddamn government sludge brain." That set Escalade's buddies to chuckling, too. All of them had their own stories to tell about outwitting various government and non-government dim light bulbs.

Oh, ho! Did that ever rumble his high roller funny bones. No officious government prick was ever going to intimidate or outwit Mr. Escalade. That was for damn sure. He didn't get where he was by being outsmarted by bumblefuck dolts, government or otherwise. He'd made his money speculating in the real estate boom and was smart enough to get out before it all tanked. His money was all now safely snuggled into secure conservative investments and anonymous offshore bank accounts. No one doubted this guy was smart. Including the Customs officer in Bermuda who spotted Mr. Escalade's Rolex right away and pretended he didn't notice, having been told in no uncertain terms by his boss "....do not, I repeat, do NOT fuck with the rich tourists. The last guy who did ended up on the Canadian border in Frozen Dick, North Dakota, where blizzards can and do happen every month of the year, including the stump of a season they call summer."

But being brainy and high powered does not confer upon Mr. or Ms High Roller an all purpose vaccine against the perfidiousness of Brother Fate and Sister Slap Ass. In this case, Mr. Escalade was laid low by a tiny little critter that had him by the proverbial balls. No. Not what you might think. Not an STD virus or bacteria that he'd picked up on one of his 'business' trips to the Philippines. Nor any kind of sneaky little microscopic pathogen. A pill. A tiny little pill. Or, to be exact, a bunch of tiny little pills taken more or less one at a time, that added up to a lot more than a bunch of tiny little pills.

Trouble was, smart and successful as the guy in the $85,000 Escalade might be, he had himself a serious drug habit. Mr. Escalade was a millionaire junkie. The only difference between him and a homeless addict in downtown Tucson was somewhere between fifty and one hundred and twenty million dollars, depending on whether one took Mr. Escalade's tax return or his confidential assets statement as the source document for his net worth. Which, whether looking at the high figure or the low one, does on reflection seem to constitute considerable difference between Mr. Escalade and the homeless addict, after all. Though the homeless addict would certainly have been willing to pool their assets and split 50/50 or at least 60/40, but realistically shoot for agreement at 99.9/.1 or maybe just a free day old ham sandwich. Hopefully with mustard and onions.

Filthy rich or not, Mr. Escalade had run out of legal options for obtaining the Oxycodone, Hydrocodone and OxyContin that he'd become addicted to after he injured his back in a freak sailing accident off the coast of San Diego. Even the rich have their life style hazards. An ordinary guy playing softball might break a leg sliding into home plate when Huge Hugo was the over enthusiastic defending catcher with untreated adult ADHD. Or Mrs. Ordinary might have her foot run over and reduced to one third of its former thickness when her dripweed husband backed out of the garage while fiddling with the radio dial and neglecting to look in the rear view mirror. A rich guy, on the other hand, might wave at his knockout babe girlfriend in the stands, lose his focus for a moment, tumble off his polo pony and break an arm. Or, as with Mr. Escalade, get blindsided by a swinging boom in a hotly contested sailboat race and have his vertebrae permanently rearranged in ways the Great Architect never intended.

So, Mr. Escalade and hosts of others from all over the economic spectrum, were caught in what he would call "a legal conundrum" but most of the others would simply call being "butt fucked by the government." Their heated opinion being that the goddamn self-righteous meddlers in Arizona state government--a sizeable chunk of them by no means averse to hoisting many a glass of their own perfectly legal and absolutely justifiable version of painkiller, Señor Booze--had instituted closer oversight of the dispensing of addictive prescription painkillers. Escalade's formerly compliant doctors balked at prescribing him enough of the drugs to sate his needs. So he'd taken to pointing his Escalade down the freeway towards the border at Nogales to pick up the drugs he needed--make that _craved_ \--at the Mexican pharmacies. A craving as strong, maybe stronger, than sex. Escalade's grandpa craved Maureen O'Hara. His dad craved Marilyn Monroe. Escalade started out with a generational craving for Angelina Jolie but, thanks to a swinging sailboat boom, made the chemical jump from Angie to Oxy. OxyContin. Money bought anything you wanted in Mexico. Prescription drugs were no exception. Actually, there really were no exceptions in Mexico. Lucifer himself would have little trouble finding people in Old Mexico willing to sell their souls for a few quick bucks.

"Hey! Manny! Want to cut a deal?" Beezelbub says with a devilish smirk.

"Talk to me, Beez," Manny replies with no little interest.

An exaggeration? Not to Escalade. Those Mexicans, Escalade thought to himself. Corrupt as hell. And they were. Corrupt. Damn near as much as his financial industry golfing buddies at the exclusive Rincon Country Club and the high dollar law firm, Barnwickle, Flick & Chernobyl, he used to shelter his income.

Many Americans were more than a touch reticent to drive their cars into Mexico. Besides the long waits often encountered to cross in the car lanes, they were spooked by the border tales of crazy drivers, insurance shakedowns, corrupt cops and rampant drug-related violence. And that was on a quiet day.

"What? You _wha_ _t_?" The typical non-local gringo driver might exclaim. "You want me to drive into Mexico _. Into_ Mexico. No freakin' way, dude. NO WAY!"

So the amateurs who were trying to smuggle personal use prescription painkillers into the U.S. usually tried to do it on foot rather than in a car. But not the guy in the splashy Escalade.

"Good evening, officer," Mr. Escalade would say as he reached a border crossing booth in his sparkling, invariably recently washed and waxed, Escalade. The officer, knowing something about cars, looks at Mr. One Percenter and his Caddy and runs it over in his or her border officer mind. The border officer thought process would go something like this.....

Hmm. Cadillac Escalade. Platinum version. All the trimmings. This guy is sure not wanting for bucks. He's not worried about the price of gas. Or mileage efficiency. And he's got some guts, driving a ride like this into Mexico. Top of the list for local car thieves. Must park it in a secure area in Mexico. Likes to be in control, perched behind the wheel of the Escalade with its commanding view of the road. Confident. _Real_ confident. Like a fighter pilot with enough onboard ordinance to incinerate a medium sized city.

The officer comes up with a couple of conclusions. First, that this guy could buy absolutely anything he wanted and would have zero need to try to sneak something into the country. Second, if he was up to something it couldn't amount to much---so who was going to risk an $85,000 Escalade to try and sneak something through the border? Especially with drug sniffing dogs continually prowling the entry lanes with their seizure hungry handlers.

Though the fact was that sometimes that could get interesting when two sets of dogs and handlers alerted to the same drug load and both the handlers and the dogs hard-eyed each other over who was going to get credit for the alert. The sight of two drug sniffing dog/handler teams doing a border face off one not easily forgotten. It even being rumored that a Chinese film producer doing the tourist thing saw one of the border doggie face-offs and got the Hong Kong movie industry interested in making a flick roughly along those dog/handler confrontation lines. Albeit set in a border village in ancient Han Dynasty days using Shar Peis and Kung Fuing handlers who were bitter enemies since childhood. The search was already on, the rumor went, for dogs with at least some martial art training.

.

The Nogales dog/handler border confrontations were invariably won by Wendy Jamba and her K-9 Dalai. Wendy was of the farsighted sort and had trained Dalai with a surefire argument buster. _"Crotch, Dalai!"_ Was the action command. Not an especially linguistically colorful command, but, anyone who saw crotch-grabbing Dalai in action agreed, as effective as a state of the art smart bomb. And it was no surprise that Wendy and Dalai were the port seizure leaders, as well as providing some lively entertainment on otherwise slow days.

Anyhow, the port officer's conclusion at observing Mr. Escalade driving up was simple enough. If this guy was trying to sneak something trivial through the border, busting him, considering he likely had friends in high places and pricey lawyers on retainer, would not be just a big pain in the ass. The high places powerful folk would put on the pressure and there would be a big ol' hubbub up yonder in the management aeries. As King George III once said, after first condemning all rebel Americans to summary beheading, and translated from the colloquial German, "....shit flows downhill." So this up yonder hubbub could also be a career breaker. Something the officer's supervisors, as sure as there was salt in the Great Salt Lake, would punctuate said enforcement blunder with plenty of well seasoned border profanity in at least two languages. So Mr. Escalade invariably coasted right by.

Until the day he came through the lane Elvis was working.

Elvis had taken an overtime slot as a regular line inspector as a favor to the sup on duty, Benny 'Sniper' Franklin, who was seriously understaffed on his shift. Not something Elvis did often, but it did help to nicely fatten up the paycheck. Nice for Elvis. Not so great for Mr. Escalade as he blithely drove up to Elvis' lane expecting to be waved right through. As always.

"Good evening, sir," Elvis began as the Escalade rolled up from Mexico to a stop at the Satellite--Elvis sometimes called the border inspection booth the Satellite because its shape reminded him of an portable outdoor Satellite toilet, which caused no end of confusion with officers new to the border who wondered what the hell a satellite had to do with working a car lane. The local conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, had zero trouble in connecting a border booth with an overhead satellite and top secret government surveillance operations. Though they were somewhat hazy on the details of exactly how it all worked.

The guy in the Escalade hit the power window on the driver's door and dropped the window about a quarter down from the top. He tilted his head back slightly to give the appearance of speaking over the top of the minimally opened window. He didn't bother to turn down the volume on the CD player. An old Pentangle tune was playing a rhythmic counterpoint to his voice. There was not a veteran officer on the entire Mexican border who wouldn't get Mr. Escalade's message loud and clear. _Big shot_. Second message. _Don't_ fuck with the big shot.

"Good evening, _officer_ ," the Escalade guy said, flashing his dazzling Greenland glacier smile at Elvis. A phony smile. Everything about him sent a crystal clear, unmistakable message of condescension. It was almost literally palpable. Elvis blinked and took a step backwards. This guy should make training videos for maitre d's at exclusive big city restaurants. He began softly humming the melody to Jimmy Buffet's _You're An Asshol_ e song. The guy in the Escalade was at first surprised, then caught himself and looked directly at Elvis with a haughty undisguised amusement.

"Are we _boring_ you, officer? And what are you humming?" A haughty smirk. "Some quaint little off key tidbit to wile away your tedium?" Elvis was ready. More than ready,

"Not at all, sir," he said, winking mischievously at the man. "Just a little tune that seemed to fit the occasion." Then he put on his serious border face. "And what exactly is it you are bringing from Mexico this evening, sir?"

"Nada," Mr. Escalade replied over the top of the window. "Nothing. Zilch. Not a thing. Absolutemente nada." A lot of border officers develop a kind of intuitive sixth sense after a few years on the border. Elvis' was better than most. In fact he was arguably the best. The only officer who demonstrably out six sensed him was Sally Torgodtsen, nicknamed by the other officers as Psycho Sally, who was struck by lightning while innocently feeding chipmunks on the Brainerd, Minnesota, golf course at the age of sixteen and had been scarily clairvoyant ever since.

"Are you all right?" Said golf course manager Lars 'Walleye' Hendrickssen as he bent over the prostate form of the lightning flattened Sally. "Sally! Can you hear me?" Sally's eyes suddenly popped wide open.

"Wow! That was _some_ rush. What the heck did you put in the water cooler? I want some. It'd make a big hit at school." Lars Hendrickssen gently stroked her shoulder. He would liked to have stroked more, and would have, had she not awoke and started talking. Which was a clear indication she might notice his roving hands.

"Sally," he said. "You were hit by lightning." Sally sat bolt upright.

"What about the chipmunks," she blurted out. "Did they make it?" Both glanced over at the 7th hole flagpole melted down into a metallic clump and a pair of charcoal lumps next to it. "Guess not," she said sadly. Then she looked at Lars 'Walleye' Hendrickssen with eyes bugged out to maximum.

"You've been stealing golf balls! And they're going to catch you."

Two days later Lars Hendrickssen was caught red handed stealing golf balls by golf course security officer Friedrich 'Deutschie' Hohenlauten. And that was the way it was with Sally from that day on. After a while just about everybody avoided her. Including her parents, who, after she pointed out their various tax evasion scans, peccadilloes and flat out steamy extramarital affairs, claimed that Sally was adopted, her real parents being inmates at the State Mental Hospital in the small town of Absolute Zero just below the Canadian border. She, however, proved to be a straight A student at the University of Minnesota satellite campus in Big Carp County, the instructors there being without exception scared shitless of her. She graduated in three years Magna Cum Laude (the University president, Ho Chi Greenberg, privately referring to Sally's graduation as Get The Hell Outa rather than Magna Cum Laude) with a criminal justice degree. And her talents pointed directly towards a very productive career as a U.S. border officer.

She didn't last long as a border officer, though. On her first month on the job Psycho Sally clairvoyed load cars eleven days straight, after a provisional first few days of calibrating her clairvoys for border use. After number eleven the pissed off and also panicking Nogales drug cartels put out a contract on her life. This psycho broad was cutting into their profits big time. She had to go. But, before they could get her, someone else did. The CIA grabbed her right off a car lane one morning and whisked her off to an undisclosed location which, if the rumors were true, was in an ultra high secret group reporting directly to the President.

Second best was still pretty good, and Elvis' intuitive six sense was pounding on the window of his perception. He knew right away that Mr. Escalade was lying. And he was pretty sure he knew the reason why. The guy, despite his appearance, was probably a pill head who'd gone to Mexico to get some prescription drugs. What Elvis' brother Lispus called Whoopie Pills. Or alternately, Feel Good Pills. And on special occasions, like when he was with his squeeze buddy Loralinda Sue Teltersluck, Feel Real Good Pills.

What Elvis didn't guess was that Mr. Escalade also had an eye for very young Mexican girls. His Mexico trips generally included a stop at the Palladium, a high class brothel a couple of miles down the road in Mexico that specialized in the nubile young girls Mr. Escalade preferred.

"Good evening, Mr. Bush," Madame Angelina de la Mata said to Mr. Escalade. Mr. Escalade preferring to hide his real identity and calling himself George X. Bush while visiting the Palladium. "I have a new girl. Just for you." She turned and said something to someone inside the next room. In a few seconds a diminutive girl with huge brown eyes, shiny raven black hair cascading below her shoulders, sleekly muscled but still very shapely legs and a set of bazooms that would send hardcore boob men to falling on their knees and weeping. A sly wink at Mr. Escalade/George X. Bush. "This is Petite Marie. She was trained by the Mexican National Circus." Another sly wink. "As an acrobat." Escalade/Bush's endocrine central let fly with a tsunami of adrenalin that rolled right over the beta blockers in his Atenolol high blood pressure medicine and his blood pressure took off like a 4th of July bottle rocket. Even his Rolex speeded up.

Albeit certainly in the top five of Palladium experiences, it was nevertheless another one in a series of his evenings in Mexican Nogales. That was his routine. A stop at the pharmacy, a couple of hits of OxyContin to lighten things up, a trip to the Palladium, then back through the border and home to Tucson's exclusive gated northern suburbs and his trophy wife and towheaded kids. He always told his wife it was a business trip. That was his usual border routine. He'd done it nearly two dozen times. It was routine. At least--it _had_ been routine. Routine BE. Before Elvis.

Elvis was not one of those shit-for-brains CBP officers who messed with pill heads trying to sneak in a few dozen hits of some prescription pain killer. Why hassle the addicts when there were serious smugglers literally all around him? Besides, he'd known lots of chemically compromised people, the majority from booze, but more than a few others, too. Pill poppers, mostly, though he'd come across a few tweakers and junkies on the border. Hassling addicts was only a half step above harassing cancer patients in Elvis' eyes. He preferred to get rid of the amateurs as quickly as he could so he could focus on the real smugglers. Which the underground world of Nogales did an outstanding job at regularly providing. But once in a while a pill head got Elvis' attention. Something piqued his interest. Something like Mr. Escalade's hauteur. Which hung imperiously on Escalade like a Holy Roman Emperor's ermine trimmed royal purple cloak.

Elvis closed his eyes for a moment. And into his mind popped the face of his grandpa Festus Mahoney back when Elvis was a kid relating to him the oral family history of the family's life in the old hardscrabble antebellum days in the Mason Dixon Line border country teetering precariously between North and South. Civil war times. "Them pestercrats"--Festus' word for aristocrats--"treated us'n poor folks not much better'n the black folk. And yet the durn struttin' bigheads expected our kin to go and fite their dadburned war fer 'em!"

Mr. Escalade sure did remind Elvis of Festus' high fallutin' pestercrats. Not words Elvis would use, but he grasped the meaning all right. And Iraq vet Elvis had not the tiniest lingering shadow of a miniscule doubt that Mr. Escalade had never set foot in Iraq or Afghanistan and had never so much as worn a military uniform for a single day, with the possible exception of a costume party at the local high dollar country club.

Elvis' eyelids snapped open and his ancestral Doggerland clear blue eyes stared unblinking, and very much unintimidated, at Mr. Escalade. Though Elvis understood all too well that in real America men were definitely not created equal, he still bridled at the reality when it popped up right in front of him. Like this guy who thought his high roller status demanded special, hands-off, treatment. Mr. Escalade had just thrown a red flag at the border bull.

"You are bringing nothing from Mexico, sir. Is that correct?" Mr. Escalade nodded an impatient negative. "And what was the nature of your trip to Mexico, sir?" Elvis continued. The man began drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. So loud that Elvis was tempted to do his Crazy Monkey routine to the beat of the drumming fingers. But The Doorman--what he called his inner behavior bodyguard--intercepted the temptation and kicked it back into the dusty interior of Elvis' mental catacombs _. Cool it, Elvis_ , The Doorman growled. _This is not the time. Or the place. Wait until Fat Tony is giving his usual dumb ass lecture at the morning briefing._ Elvis actually nodded to the suggestion of his inner guardian and all too frequent nemesis. Yes. That would be a better time. Fat Tony almost had a heart attack the last time Elvis pulled his Crazy Monkey routine at a briefing. Maybe this time the top of his head would blow off and make the world a better place.

"A far better place, actually," Elvis unwittingly said out loud. Mr. Escalade looked at Elvis in a combination of irritation and puzzlement. Had this border cop gobbled down one too many donuts? Had he slipped over the edge into the babbling incoherence of donut poisoning? Then he got back to the immediate moment and this red headed beanpole hick with a badge and a gun and teeth that were a pale shadow of his own gleaming glacial mouthful.

"I was in Mexico on business," Escalade replied, not even trying to hide his irritation. "Personal business." A hint of a lecherous smile played on his lips as he remembered his _very_ personal business with Petite Marie from the Palladium. He managed--just--to keep the lecherous hint of a smile from exploding into a full blown lecherous self satisfied leer.

"Are you bringing any prescription medicines from Mexico," Elvis said. That caught Mr. Escalade by surprise. But only for a moment. The phony Greenland glacier smile was back on his face, a stray ray of evening sunlight bouncing off his shiny teeth, then reflecting off a secondary lot mirror, thereby considerably gaining in intensity and blitzing across the lot and temporarily blinding southbound driver Maricio Ventilius. Causing Maricio to slam on his brakes. Which caused the car behind him to hit the brakes, too. But not soon enough. Five cars piled into the rear bumpers of the cars ahead of them before VW bug driver Beata Lechuga finally hit the brakes in time and stopped the chain reaction from chain reacting cars all the way to Tucson. Mr. Escalade ignored the hubbub in the southbound lanes. No matter. None of his affair. Besides, he was in a hurry to get home and get over to the Rincon Country Club in time for his Wednesday night poker game with Tucson's movers and shakers. One or two of them he might even confide in how he'd once again beaten a border buffoon smuggling oxys.

"No pills, buddy," he said. "I do my medical business only in the U.S." He dropped the window down half way and leaned a conspiratorial few inches closer to Elvis. "Safer that way."

"So." Elvis continued. "You are bringing no medicines from Mexico. That is correct?"

After Elvis asked Escalade again if he had any prescription medications from Mexico, the guy's face took on a purplish tinge, reminding Elvis of the ripe plums at Hernando's Solar Powered Organic Fruit Stand on East Speedway in Tucson. "Completely off the grid," Hernando proudly declared to his customers, without bringing up the fact that a roadside fruit stand wasn't usually connected to the grid in the first place or that in his fruit stand case Solar Powered referred to the sun shining down on them all. "It's the sun. How can it not be solar powered?" Hernando said somewhat defensively when Elvis cornered him on the Solar Powered claim.

Now Mr. Escalade was downright pissed. He bristled at the question being repeated, with the inherent doubting of his honesty it implied, doubly so since it was actually warranted, and blurted out an irritated.....

"No. No. No! Damnit! No means just that. NO!"

Elvis looked at him, thought a moment, then pulled out a referral slip. He wrote 'undeclared prescription medicines' on the slip, stuck it under the Escalade's driver side windshield wiper and pointed towards the U.S. Mr. Escalade's bushy eyebrows curled up over the tops of his eyebrow ridges and hung there in astonishment. This border peckerwood had the foolish gall to be fucking with him?

"Pull your car over into the secondary lot for further inspection," Elvis said in a flat tone. No 'sir' this time. Mr. Escalade looked at him in mild shock. No one had ever sent him to secondary before.

Secondary? The man thought to himself. This border lummox is sending me to secondary for an inspection? _Me!_ Why....why....that.... He was about to argue the point, but a timely thought padded into his mental inbox. Wait. Think about this. He wasn't likely to encounter another jerk like this border officer in secondary. Whoever met him in the secondary inspection lot would quickly send him on his way like the border goofs had always done before on the primary lanes. So he kept his tongue, shot Elvis a withering look that in Escalade's fevered imagination had the power to melt the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup in Elvis' shirt pocket, and pulled away from the entry booth towards the secondary lot. He gunned the engine as he went and arrowed another venomous rattler look at Elvis as he left. Whoever this border dickhead was he was going to find his boss, or his boss' boss or even the boss boss' boss and let them know just who Mr. Border Dickhead was screwing with. Tomorrow morning or, at most, the day after, Mr. Border Dickhead would be lucky to find a job hawking peanuts at the Diamondbacks games.

Ah, serendipity. The asteroid of Bad Luck plowed right into Mr. Escalade and his Cadillac. What Mr. Escalade thought would happen in secondary almost certainly would have happened but for the eternal rolling dice of serendipity. Everyone in the secondary lot was already busy with inspections. And Elvis' stint on the primary lane ended so he came sauntering back to work the secondary lot. And there, sitting still uninspected, was the big, shiny, high-dollar Cadillac with Mr. Escalade sitting impatiently behind the wheel. Even from twenty feet away Elvis could see--and even faintly hear--his fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Oh-oh! Any experienced border officer would take one look and know that this would be a difficult inspection. A pain in the ass. A no-win pain in the ass. They all saw it and they all understood it quicker than the high speed shutters on the red light cams in traffic choked Phoenix intersections. LaShonda MLK Buscemi, whose middle name actually was MLK, was just coming into secondary and also saw the Caddy, spotted the guy inside it and nearly tripped herself in her hurry to detour away from Mr. drumming fingers Escalade. Feet, take me outta here! And quick! But not Elvis. He never forgot grandpa Festus' tales about the pestercrats and their goddamn irritating puffed up aristocratic attitudes. The guy in the Escalade stopped his fingers in mid-drum and his eyes went wide when Elvis spoke to him through the driver side window in a voice of dubious civility.

"We have to stop meeting like this," Elvis said. "People will talk." Escalade wasn't expecting that. It flustered him. "By the way," Elvis continued. "You said you were in Mexico on business. What business are you in?"

"Business?" Mr. Escalade said, almost in a stutter, surprised at Elvis' words. "I'm a real estate broker." Elvis' eyes bugged out. Real estate! The rapacious industry whose collapse fueled the Great Recession and sent hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of homes into underwater mortgages and eventual repossessions. Including his former neighbor in Tucson, Bertie Jeff Manischewitz, who was now living with his wife, two kids, three dogs, a cat and a pair of lovebirds in his father-in-law's two car garage in Green Valley. Then the guy caught himself. " _You_ again. I told you! I was in Mexico on personal business. Which makes it none of your business." He held up his $10,000 Rolex watch and pointed at the dial. "I really must be on my way, _officer_. Don't you have more important things to do than harass ordinary citizens?" He paused to look at Elvis' nameplate. "Mahoney," he said, his voice now starting to approach menace. "You may be sure I'll remember that name. And mention it to the _appropriate_ people."

"While you are at it, tell them I could use a raise," Elvis retorted. "Times are tough." Another pause. "Thanks to the real estate industry." A slight grin came to his face. "Present company excepted, of course." Mr. Escalade was about to launch into a vituperative tirade. Elvis cut him off.

"You say you are bringing no undeclared prescription medicines from Mexico, is that correct?" Mr. Escalade was a shade nonplussed by the quick change in subject. But his tone of voice remained angry, gearing up to roar off into outrage.

"Why, I already told you that, damnit! No! No prescription medicines. Nada!"

"Exit your vehicle, please, sir." Elvis said, this time really catching Mr. Escalade off guard.

"Exit the car? Why?" A pause, and Elvis had a pretty good idea what was next. "Do you know who I _am_?"

"I do indeed. You're a guy crossing the international border from Mexico and therefore subject to inspection like every one else." Elvis turned and pointed at the posted signs in the secondary lot denoting in English and Spanish the federal statutes about border inspections. "Get out of the car, please, sir. Now." Mr. Escalade hesitated, then saw the steely look in Elvis' eyes and thought better of resisting. But there was more than one way to resist.

"I want to talk to your supervisor," he said. Elvis nodded.

"OK. No problemo. Chat up a storm with the sup all you want. But first get out of the car while I finish with a quick inspection." Another steely look. " _The_ n you can talk to the supervisor." Elvis tried the Escalade's door. It was locked. The small triumphant look that began to bloom on Escalade's face was stillborn when Elvis reached over the half lowered window, found the door lock, popped it off and promptly opened the door. "If you would, sir," Elvis said, gesturing to Escalade to get out of the car. Escalade hesitated again, debating the odds of what would happen if he physically resisted. Grounds for a police brutality charge? Possible. Or a charge against him for resisting a lawful inspection? Also possible. He suspected there was a video camera somewhere nearby recording them. Either way he'd likely get some publicity, which might not be such a hot thing for a supposedly respectable mainstream businessman. Not to mention the wifely curiosity of Mrs. Escalade about just what the hell he had been up to in Mexico. If she ever found out about the Palladium she'd set her shoes on fire hot footing to the nearest divorce lawyer with the resultant catastrophic drop in his net worth. Reluctantly, and with a genuine snarl on his face, he climbed out of the Caddy.

"I _demand_ to see your supervisor! Right now!" Mr. Escalade said in a voice just a shade under a shout. "Now!" Elvis ignored him. But Elvis was no more immune to the dirty tricks of Mama Serendipity than Mr. Escalade was. And Mama S was winding up and about to deliver one of her signature Mama S sucker punches. Though Elvis didn't know it, the supervisor on duty, Benny 'Sniper' Franklin, a stand up dude Elvis was tight with, was called away on a family emergency. Another supervisor was hastily brought in to take over. And the new supervisor was none other than Tony Rivera. Fat Tony himself. Supervisor Antonio 'Fat Tony' Rivera. And if Fat Tony Rivera had a Public Enemy Top Ten List, Elvis would take the top spot. Maybe the top two or three. Or, on really bad days, the top nine, the tenth one permanently reserved for his ex-mother-in-law. Fat Tony was watching the secondary monitor and saw Elvis in what appeared to be a confrontation with some rich guy in a Caddy.

Tony's face lit up, making him look something like a carved Halloween pumpkin with a burning candle inside. He began to softly chuckle. Which, to anyone nearby, would sound more like a gurgle than a chuckle. But good enough for Tony. A smile slowly spread across his face as he hoisted his three hundred plus frame out of the specially re-enforced chair he always brought with him and began to move towards the confrontation out in secondary between an honest, God-fearing citizen and that goddamn buttwipe jerkoff, Elvis. He pulled open the door and stalked towards Elvis and Mr. Escalade like a hulking mountain gorilla who'd finally cornered Tarzan and was about to turn him into a human pretzel. Which analogy wasn't a real big stretch from what was actually going through Supervisor Rivera's stoked up get-Elvis mind.

Elvis had Mr. Escalade stand nearby while he searched the vehicle. Escalade stood still as a statue--albeit one with an angry reddish tint that made him look sunburned, which was a nifty trick for a statue of any kind--and glowered. Mr. Escalade had bullied his way through the border numerous times with his ostentatious and imperious ways. There was no need to go to great lengths to hide the painkiller pharmaceuticals he'd bought in Mexico. Why bother? No one ever looked. Until now. He had only stuffed the bag of painkillers under the front seat.

"What the hell is going on here!" A voice suddenly boomed out, making Elvis jerk up and thump his head on the Escalade's dash while he was bent down reaching under the passenger seat. A feeling something like plummeting earthwards on what Elvis' kid cousins called the Puke Express at Disney World grabbed Elvis' innards. That voice. He knew that voice. Fat Tony! What the hell was he doing here? What happened to Benny Franklin? "Damnit, Elvis," Tony bellowed, "what the hell are you doing now?" Mr. Escalade didn't make his bucks by being a slow learner. He jumped right in.

"This border bully has been harassing me. And he refused to let me talk to the supervisor on duty." Mr. Escalade looked at Tony and said in his idea of an innocent voice what he already knew as sure as he knew he'd be visiting Petite Marie again real soon. "Are _you_ the supervisor on duty?" Tony had to pause for a moment to get control of his emotions. His visible emotions. A world class gloat was doing deadly serious battle to win control of his face, suspecting as he did that he finally had that goddamn jerkoff Elvis by the short hairs. He just barely managed to keep Mr. Gloat at bay and tried to appear properly supervisory and dispassionate. Which came out looking something like he had bad gas and nowhere to leave it.

Mr. Escalade continued his rant.

"This is a free country. And I'm a free American citizen. I will not be treated like a common criminal who this bully verbally and phys...." Mr. Escalade caught himself before he finished saying physically abused, just remembering that there might be video cameras recording what was going on. "....er, ah, abused." He did such a good job of acting outraged that he actually got himself steamed up and began to stamp his feet.

"I am going to file a formal complaint!" The fired up Mr. Escalade went on. "And you may be sure it will go straight to the right people." Then, the second of Mr. Escalade's mistakes (the first being going through Elvis' lane).

"Way above _your_ head."

Tony Rivera was not well known among his coworkers for his humility. Any more than George Washington was well known for his collection of croquet mallets. Tony Rivera had an ego to match his humungous bulk. And for this rich bastard to snidely lay on him the fact, true though it may be, that he was relatively low on the supervisory food chain, did not set well with Tony. Not well at all. Almost as not well as the digestive uproar the anchovies and Limburger cheese he'd had at Jorge Mercado's Super Bowl party caused to Tony's delicate transverse colon. But, on the other hand, there was the matter of Elvis. Was this going to push Tony over the edge into the absolutely unthinkable? So far as to actually side _with_ Elvis?

No. NO. NO! Too much. Way too much. Tony couldn't go that far. So, even though Tony would like to take the rich asshole's head remark and stuff it along with the rest of him into the genuine head in the men's room, Tony played along. Opportunities to get Elvis, _really_ get Elvis, didn't come along very often. And this rich dude looked like he had the chutzpah to finally put some serious hurt on that wiseass Elvis. A man had to grab onto opportunities when they popped up. "Make hay while the sun shines," Tony's grandfather Patrocinio used to say. Which always seemed kind of strange to Tony because it never rained in the Sonora Desert where grandpa Patrocinio lived and the Sonora Desert could hardly grow a single blade of parched grass, much less an entire hay field. Plus Tony seriously doubted whether Gramps Patrocinio had ever even seen a hay field. Though Tony didn't doubt for a moment that Gramps knew every cantina, bartender and barmaid within a twenty-five mile radius of his home village of Caliente Pie.

"I couldn't agree with you more, sir," Tony said, gritting his teeth as he said it in a lingering slow burn over the 'way over your head' remark. "This officer is a problem officer and it is about time for a public spirited citizen to make an example out of him." Tony's ideas of making an example of Elvis were admittedly extreme, even to Tony himself. Boiling Elvis in recently reclaimed engine oil seemed like a pretty good idea to Tony, though he knew that was too much to ask for. But he would be willing to settle for Elvis' being given an everlasting Super Viagra implant and banished to a small village in Somalia populated solely by nymphomanical domineering ugly old women with bad breath and no teeth.

"Elvis!" Tony bellowed. "Get out here." It was Elvis' turn to grit his teeth. Although he was a member of the semi-independent ET--Enforcement Team--he was working an overtime shift as a regular line officer and therefore at least arguably under the authority of the shift supervisor. Tony Rivera. Then he reached under the seat again, felt something solid, a bag, pulled it out and took a peek inside. A very wide and, to Tony, infuriating, grin was on his face as he climbed out of the Escalade with the bag hidden behind his back.

"You were saying, Supervisor Rivera?" Elvis said in his best take on a properly obeisant tone. Which was obeisant to no one else's ears. Including Tony's. Which stoked up Tony ever more.

"This citizen maintains you have been harassing him. Knowing you and your bullying tactics, I don't doubt what he says. Do you have anything to say for yourself before I write this up and pass it on to the port director." Elvis grinned again.

"Do I have anything to say?" Elvis said though his grin. "Yes. Just one word." He pulled the bag from behind his back and held it out.

"Look."

Tony's expression faded from provisional triumphant to _oh, shit._ Escalade's sunburned statue glower deepened but he said nothing. Elvis put the bag on the nearby search table and looked inside and made a very dramatic show of slowly opening the bag. He glanced inside and groaned softly.

"Oh, my," Elvis said to Mr. Escalade. "Didn't you say-- _three_ times--that you weren't bringing any prescription medicines into the U.S.?" Mr. Escalade's voice remained silent, but his face had taken on the color of a late August ripe apple from Elvis' grandmother Rattler Sue's orchard. "Oh, what _do_ we have here?" Elvis said as he pulled one pill bottle out of the paper bag with another dramatic flourish. "This does appear to be a bottle of prescription medicines. Something for your bad heart, perhaps. Or maybe for your allergies or your high blood pressure." A pause while he glanced at Escalade's feet. "Or possibly for your long suffering gout problem." What went unsaid, though it came close, was Elvis' further mental observation that the medication might be for his serious hemorrhoid problem, which would explain why he was such a pain in the ass. Elvis made a show of carefully reading the label, which set Tony to grinding his teeth so forcefully that that enamel on his driver's side incisor got a hairline crack.

"O..ox...oxy...oxycon...oxycontin." Elvis continued, reading the label. "Oh, my. OxyContin. Not heart medication. Oh! Gosh! Pain killers. These are painkillers." Another careful reading of the label. "80mg each. Top of the line dosage. And a count of 100 pills." Elvis glanced back into the bag. "I count four more of these." A closer look. "All of them 80mg 100 count OxyContin. You sure could kill a lot of pain with 500 hits of 80mg Oxy." Elvis turned to look evenly at Tony Rivera. Tony meanwhile feeling like the top of his head really was going go blow off. Either that, or he'd pull out his Glock 9mm and empty the entire clip into Elvis and be done with him once and for all.

"500 hits of 80mg OxyContin, _Supervisor_ Rivera, is enough to stone the entire city of Rio Rico and the southern outskirts of Green Valley." He continued to look levelly at Fat Tony. "You gonna put that in the report you're going to write up to send on to the port director?"

"Live to fight another day," was something else that Tony's grandfather Patrocinio used to say. And, for once, something that really made sense. It was time for a strategic retreat. Some day there would be another chance to get Elvis. And Tony would be ready. But not now. No. Not now.....some day. Some day....

"I had no idea those pills were in my car," Mr. Escalade blurted out, looking at Tony. "This thuggish officer of yours must have planted them." Third mistake. Elvis was no officer of Tony's, thuggish or otherwise. "This is absolutely outrageous. You're as bad as the CIA or the FBI or even Oprah Winfrey. First thing tomorrow morning you'll be hearing from Barnwickle, Flick & Chernobyl."

"What's Barnwickle, Flick & Chernobyl?" Tony said somewhat suspiciously.

"A magic act in Las Vegas," Elvis chimed in. "They specialize in creating illusions." Adding, "and don't you go bad mouthing Oprah. That's off limits, dude. Way, way off limits."  
"Barnwickle, Flick & Chernobyl is my law firm!" Spit out Mr. Escalade. "And a darn good one."

"Customs and Border Protection has 158 lawyers in Washington DC and a building full of paralegals on staff." Elvis said, though he had no clue how many lawyers CPB actually had. But he knew there had to be a bunch. Somebody had to write that endless stream of obfuscating and marginally intelligible legalese about a bunch of policies, directives, rules, regulations and interpretations the officers were continually inundated with.

"Elvis," Tony said, knowing it was time to make as graceful an exit as he could, "you can take care of this. Give this gentlemen a complaint form if he wants one." Then, with a very unfriendly glare at Mr. Escalade, mostly because the rich asshole blew Tony's chance to get Elvis but good, Tony wheeled and lumbered away. "Finish the seizure and get him out of here." As Tony stomped away Elvis and Mr. Escalade were left looking at each other with very different expressions. Elvis' was maybe a touch smug, but mostly just ready to get this over and done with. But Mr. Escalade was still close to the boiling point.

"Look, buddy," Elvis began. "I doubt you are trafficking in OxyContin. You're using it." Mr. Escalade's eyes blinked once, twice, three times. He knew he was caught out. But should he just come right out and admit it? His tongue was still hovering in indecision when Elvis' voice launched into action and beat him to it.

"According to the computer, you've been crossing the border at least once a month. If you're buying--and _using_ \--this much OxyContin in a month's time, then you've got yourself one hell of a big-assed problem. I don't know how the devil you are still on your feet with a heavy habit like that. My own cousin nearly killed himself on this stuff. Your wealth won't protect you from OxyContin addiction. But it might help you overcome it." Elvis took a step closer to the man, dropping his voice lower so that no one could overhear them.

"I'm going to seize four of these bottles. You can keep one. Use the time one bottle gives you to get yourself some treatment for your addiction. I'm also going to put your name and license plate number, as well as all the vehicles licensed in your name, into our computer database as an OxyContin smuggler. The next time you come through the border you'll be stopped and searched." Elvis stopped and looked closely at Mr. Escalade. "Do you understand what I'm saying?" He did. Mr. Escalade nodded without saying a word, though his complexion was so flushed with outraged indignation that he looked like he he'd just come down with a full blown dose of roseola. Elvis reached out and put his hand lightly on Escalade's shoulder. His cousin's poor sliver of an existence was still in his mind.

"This is a wake up call, buddy. I hope you have the sense to answer it."

The next morning Mr. Escalade made two wake up calls of his own. The first was to the Palm Springs Holistic Center, an exclusive facility specializing in treating cash flush folks with chemical dependency problems. The second was to Chester Irvington III, his old real estate broker buddy who had parlayed his real estate millions into a Congressional seat. The reason? To lodge a formal Congressional complaint against an abusive CBP officer. His name? Mahoney. Elvis T. Mahoney. Mr. Escalade had given it no little pondering in his self-described smart brain before he reached a conclusion. In the end, despite the admittedly powerful extenuating circumstances of Elvis' somewhat foolhardy humanitarian gesture, one conclusion stood out and presided firmly over all the rest. Mr. Escalade phrased it like this to his buddy Congressman Chester Irvington III in language any of the Chester Irvingtons, I, II or III, could fully appreciate.

"Common people like this Mahoney border thug need to know their place in the real world."

Elvis knew Mr. Escalade might do something like that. But Elvis also knew that if Mr. Escalade did successfully make it through treatment, he just might end up doing some real cool things with his big bucks. At least he could hope that was the way it worked out. As Granny Rattler Sue often said...."You kin switch the light on. Or you kin switch it off." Then one of those inscrutable stares of hers that always left him marginally befuddled.

"The choice be yers."

### Chapter 5

### The Doctors

### Dr. Waldemar Hokkanen

### The Shrink

At the age of 21 Waldemar Hokkanen left his native Finland for graduate school in the United States. After he finished his doctorate in psychiatric counseling at the University of Arizona he declared his intent to remain in Arizona and applied for U.S. residency. At the same time he legally changed his middle name from Lothar to the more professional sounding Sigmund Freud, even though he personally thought Sigmund Freud was more of a nut case than his patients. But the name did have a certain public recognition value. Free advertising, to Waldemar's way of thinking. So why the heck not?

Finland had one big drawback. One hell of a great big drawback. Hulking just to the east was Russia. The chunks of Russia abutting Finland having once been part of Finland until the Russians marched in and, in the true spirit of a Russian take on the Conquistadores of the fabled Golden Age of Spain, announced to the startled local Finns that they were now Russian. Plus the Russian eye was still on what was left of Finland, that eye having it in mind to repeople Finland with God's chosen children. The Russians. Which made even the least paranoid of the Finns more than a little uneasy when they settled their contemplative minds on the Russian border.

Anyhow, even without the Russian Bear national paranoia, Waldemar doubted he'd miss Finland much. The land of the Finns might have a lot of great scenery, with rugged sea coasts, whole bunches of impressive looking evergreen forests and plenty of sparkling pristine lakes. But it also had what seemed to Waldemar like perpetual winter and an equally perpetual doom and gloom native population. There was sure to be an inexhaustible supply of potential clients in what he came to refer to as Bipolar Land, but Waldemar didn't think he could handle the combination of long dark winters and an endless parade of somber humorless patients.

About the only good things he could find in Finland were lots of cheap Aquavit and the aurora borealis. After an evening of generously partaking of the former, a bottle of Aquavit he'd won in a three-legged toboggan race, he'd once tried having sex with his undergrad girlfriend at the University of Helsinki, Helga Makipukiki, in a supposedly arctic-rated sleeping bag on a winter night under the aurora borealis. Seemed like one heck of a great idea at the time. It didn't turn out so hot. From that day on Helga was as frigid as Waldemar's refrigerator. And Waldemar nearly lost the business end of his Best Buddy to a serious case of frostbite. Nor would he forget the barely suppressed hilarity of Dr. Drogling Sprichlitz who treated him for the frostbite and chuckled his way through the entire examination. Especially when Waldemar got into the details of how it happened. Which nearly brought down the house of hilarity on Dr. Drogling Sprichlitz' guffawing shoulders. Pretty darned unprofessional to treat a patient like that. An entire goddamn country without a sense of humor and he had to come up with the only physician in all of Bipolar Land who was a wise ass. Right then and there Waldemar decided he'd leave Finland and only come back for funerals and maybe an occasional visit to the Russian border when he would yell insults at the Russian border guards and throw lumps of reindeer dung at them. Like a lot of Finns, he was none too fond of the Russians.

When Waldemar put out his open-for-business shrink shingle in the Docs R' Us medical clinic building on Orange Grove Road in the prosperous north of Tucson, he wanted to put up a No Russians sign, too. His attorney, who was his regular handball partner and happened to be none other than the fireplug built Lavonda Heraklion, advised against it. With a slap on Waldemar's back that almost rearranged his collar bone, she told him that he was asking for a lawsuit. And, sure as hell, Lavonda declaimed, he'd lose. There were lots of attorneys out there looking for slam dunk discrimination lawsuits. Plenty of them with few scruples. Lavonda Heraklion ought to know. After all, wasn't she was one of them?

"But," she continued, trying to leaven Waldemar's disappointment. "This ain't Brighton Beach, Waldie," she said. "Not to worry. We got gringos in abundance. Mexicans. Blacks. Asians. Native Americans. Homeless. The occasional mountain lion. But no Russians." The first week of Waldemar's practice in the medical strip mall in the well fed north of Tucson a guy named Varcjik Borganevich from Vladivostok walked in and wanted some psychiatric counseling. Varcjik telling Waldermar that he was plagued by a series of nightmares about being lost in a dense Siberian forest known to be the home turf of Vladimir, the local man eating Siberian tiger. So much for legal advice. Good thing that Lavonda Heraklion was a much better hand ball player than attorney. He'd thought about trying sex with her a time or two, but was pretty sure his good buddy the somewhat delicate frostbite victim wouldn't be up to Lavonda's athletic vigor. He felt he had to explain that to her after some obviously suggestive remarks she made after they'd beaten a pair of transsexual Pima County bailiffs in a particularly heated handball match. The transsexual bailiffs, Zena Snil and Bernardo Mortiltz, having been in a long term intimate relationship before they switched genders and roles and now had a "...whole new perspective on intimate relationships." However, sex with Lavonda, unisexual, bisexual, transsexual or otherwise sexual, didn't seem anywhere near even a far distant horizon to Waldemar.

"Ectomorphs and mesomorphs are not usually congenial carnal partners," he said in reply to Lavonda, trying to not be offensive and using neutral medical terminology.

"What the fuck does that mean?" Lavonda shot back.

The subject never came up again.

Chun Lee Bojourquez-Moskowitz de O'Quinn had just left Waldemar's office after her weekly appointment. Waldemar felt they were making progress in helping her work though a prolonged identity crisis. Chun Lee was convinced her muddled self image reached back to the in vitro fertilization of her origin, which she referred to as the Little Bang Theory, and was caused by an anonymous rogue sperm donor. She had several times asked Dr. Waldemar Hokkanen to access the NCIC--National Crime Information Center--database or the CODIS DNA database to see if he could match her DNA with someone in their store of DNA profiles. She had a hard time believing him when he insisted that he couldn't just up and go surfing the NCIC and CODIS data bases for an anonymous rogue sperm donor. She confided to her hairdresser, Consuela Vinca-Floribunda, that she thought Waldemar wouldn't do it because he wanted to keep her coming in every week and dropping a couple hundred bucks a counseling pop.

"Hell's bells, Consuela," she said to the hair stylist. "I'd probably do the same thing if I was in his shoes. Those two hundred dollar sessions add up real quick." She poked at Consuela's arm and winked. "Buy a whole lot of tortillas and refries with that kind of cash." Which brought a frown to Conseula's face. She detested tortillas, which reminded her of a limp frisbee, even more than she disliked refries, which she always confused with spackling paste. She didn't much care for Mexicans, either, even if she was one, which caused no end of arguments with her husband Huatemoc, who was the president of Chinga Los Gringos, a shadowy organization that was plotting to return Arizona to Mexico, and not necessarily peacefully. But Conseula kept her tongue. With Huatemoc, who was a terrific ballroom dancer despite his dark side. And with Chun Lee, who was a pretty darned good tipper. One had to have a sense of perspective, as her maternal grandfather, Diego 'El Pistolero' Beltran, used to say during the family's visits to his jail cell in Durango. "Don't piss off the local alcalde," he said sadly. "Especially by doing something like boning his wife and then letting slip the admission after one too many drinks at the cantina." A weary sigh. "Look at what happened to me," he said, motioning around him at the prison walls. "Let that be a lesson to you." A serious look took command of his heavily mustached face. "Alcohol loosens the tongue. "Learn this lesson well." He leaned closer.

"Do your drinking at home."

Following Chun Lee's appointment, waiting patiently to come into Doctor Waldemar Hokkanen's office, was a new client. A tall and thin red headed man whose manner and appearance struck the doctor as kind of odd. But, then, when you're a shrink, odd is good. Especially at two hundred bucks an odd person session. He held out his hand to the new patient.

"I am Doctor Waldemar Hokkanen," he said. "And you are?"

"Just call me Elvis," was the answer. Waldemar motioned Elvis to come into his office and have a seat. Elvis looked around in confusion.

"No couch?" He said in a puzzled voice. "I thought you were supposed to have a couch." He glanced around at the rest of the room. "What happened? Business slow? It got repossessed?" A knowing look. "I know those leather couches sure can be expensive."

Waldemar wasn't about to go into an explanation of how couches, leather or otherwise, and female patients--especially good looking young ones--were an open invitation to big trouble. Couches were just about unheard of in the main stream psychiatric counseling world. Plus Waldemar had personal reason not to have a couch. His old friend and classmate, Doctor Jean Paul La Tortue, got himself into some big couch trouble. Waldemar warned Jean Paul about having a hidden camera above the couch. The video in the wrong hands could well turn into a disaster. And the wrong hands did glom onto those videos and Dr. Jean Paul La Tortue became an overnight local media sensation. Jean Paul was now driving a Yellow Cab in Montreal and moonlighting as a psychic investigator of the paranormal, of which Montreal had plenty, some of it, Jean Paul had to admit, pretty entertaining. It turned out being a shrink was pretty good training for a psychic investigator of the paranormal. He segued right into it with nary a perceptive hiccup, though he did keep a wary eye out for snoops and always carried a pocket size state of the art electronic Frere Jacques Hidden Camera Detector with him.

Waldemar pointed at a comfortable looking armchair and motioned to Elvis to sit down. Elvis promptly plunked himself down.

"Hey!' Elvis said. "This is a comfortable chair. I could use a comfortable chair like this for when my maternal grandmother Rattler Sue Mahoney calls." He winked at Dr. Hokkanen. "She's a windy one." Another wink. "In more ways than one." Waldemar managed a polite chuckle, then pointed the conversation towards where it was supposed to go.

"So, Mr. Elvis," he began in the sonorous baritone he used as a relaxation and break-the-ice tool with his patients. It was basically just an extension, in English, of his younger days in the towering spruce forests of Finland when he practiced the ancient Finnish art of moose calling. Who would have thought back then in his moose calling youth that one day he'd be a psychotherapist in a desert city in far off Arizona? His mother always told him that his moose calling would come to no good end. Where was he going to find a job as a moose caller? So much for maternal wisdom, Waldemar thought. But he still missed her and often thought back with sad regret at watching her sink out of sight in that peat bog. Well, maybe five thousand years in the future someone would dig her up and write a scholarly paper on the Peat Bog Lady who was the tragic victim of a pagan sacrificial rite. At least that would give her some kind of immortality, even if the truth was that she'd warned up her innards a bit too much with cheap Russian vodka before going out to pick wild berries and staggered into the peat bog and got herself mired in that bog but good. Waldemar was with her and just barely was able to extricate himself. He would never forget that final moment when she was about to sink out of sight and she began to sing the Finnish national anthem. To this day Waldemar couldn't listen to the Finnish national anthem, or, for that matter, any national anthem, without bursting into tears. And from that day onward he detested cheap Russian vodka just as much as he disliked Russians. _Goddamn Russians! Goddamn cheap Russian vodka!_

"Doc," Elvis began. "It's about these dreams I've been having lately." Waldemar's interest was piqued. Dreams intrigued him. Had ever since that numinous one he'd had a few years back where Tarzan--who looked remarkably like Sigmund Freud--was sitting in the back seat of a Ford Mustang convertible in a victory parade in New York City. When he got to Central Park, Sigmund Tarzan leaped out of the convertible and disappeared into the park yelling at Waldemar, who had been driving the Ford convertible, to follow him. Just then Waldemar woke up. He'd been trying to figure the dream out ever since, even so far as to visit Central Park every few months hoping for some kind of hint. So far, nothing. But he did twice have close calls with would be muggers and once see a pack of nude joggers yelling out "Say No to Fur"' as they ran by. But nothing from Tarzan Freud. Not even a whisper.

"Ah, yes," Waldemar said dreamily, remembering. "Dreams. And what have you been dreaming about?" Elvis leaned forward, his voice low, almost like he was embarrassed.

"Sasquatch," Elvis said in that low voice. "I've been dreaming about Sasquatch." Elvis leaned even closer to Dr. Waldemar Hokkanen, his voice down to a whisper. "I think he's real."

"And I'm pretty sure he's trying to contact me."

Just then the secretary in the anteroom looked at the clock and then thumped on a big Chinese gong. Elvis jumped straight up in the air.

"Good God, Doc! What the hell was that?" Waldemar nonchalantly answered.

"Your fifteen minute free initial consultation is over." He rose to show Elvis to the door.

"But what about Sasquatch, Doc?" Elvis said. Dr. Hokkanen merely shrugged and pointed at his secretary's unseen presence behind the closed door.

"If you wish to make another appointment, arrange it with my secretary." He opened the door for Elvis to leave, adding as Elvis started into the reception area. "We accept all major credit cards."

"OK," Elvis replied, somewhat miffed at the abrupt end to the counseling session and what he considered Dr. Hokkanen's uncooperative and suspicious attitude. Then he really messed up Waldemar's day, despite Waldemar having already had many a strange experience in his psychiatric practice, when he was left to wonder just exactly what Elvis meant when he trailed the words behind him as he went out the door.

"But next time I'm bringing Sasquatch with me."

### Dr. Mackwell O'Sullivan

### Cryptozoologist

That was what the sign said. It was on a nondescript building in a fading strip mall on Oracle Avenue in Tucson. The sign over the door was cracked and fading just like the door itself, the building, the strip mall and the entire neighborhood. Including a good many of the local inhabitants, who ranged from the merely cracked to the criminally cracked to the permanently cracked, thanks in no small part to the nearby local crack house. Despite the venerable strip mall being on busy Oracle Avenue the place had a vaguely spooky, abandoned, even menacing, feel to it. Which got Elvis' juices flowing but good. Reminded him of all the crazy times at Grandma Rattler Sue's spooky place back in Dead Yankee hollow in a typical Mahoney family reunion. Gleefully anticipating the adventure of discovery awaiting him behind the splintering door, he grabbed the door handle and pulled. Nothing happened. He pulled again. Nothing. The door was locked. Elvis was about to curse his luck at the place being closed when....

"Pull harder!" Boomed a deep voice from inside. "Use the strength the Gods above gave you."

Gods? Elvis wondered. Plural? Boy, this was starting to look interesting. He gave the door a hefty tug and it swung noisily open on hinges that were unfamiliar with even the concept of lubrication.

"Greetings," Elvis said as he stepped inside. "I am with the Oracle Avenue Door Lubrication Consortium and I have come to fix your door."

"Ah! A sense of humor! Come on in, Mr. Elvis," the deep voice said. "I've been expecting you since you phoned this morning." He pulled a bottle of Jack Daniels out of a drawer and plunked it on his desk. "And speaking of lubrication, how about a quick belt?" He poured himself a shot and looked quizzically at Elvis as he motioned at a second glass. On the wall behind Dr. O'Sullivan was his diploma from the Jersey Barrens School of Alternative Science. Which in actual fact O'Sullivan obtained for two hundred bucks and a case of bootleg tequila with zero coursework. Which actually was irrelevant, since the Jersey Barrens School of Alternative Science offered only diplomas. There were no classes. Or classrooms. Or instructors. Just diplomas. They sold several thousand every year and so far gotten away with it by the tiny, nearly microscopic, fine print at the bottom of the diploma describing the diploma as a novelty item.

"No thanks," Elvis replied to the offer of the booze. "Not before lent." Dr. O'Sullivan, whose real name was Oskosh 'Half Pint' Thermidian, a name long ago supplanted by a series of aliases and identities, and whose diminutive physical presence was in direct conflict with his booming voice, said. "You mean _during_ lent."

"No," Elvis replied. "I meant what I said. I only drink during lent." This brought a big laugh from the little man.

"Ah, a man after me own heart," he said in a phony fake Irish accent. Then he downed the shot of whisky in one gulp and poured himself another. "Now, tell me, Elvis. Just what is it that you want from a certified Doctor of Cryptozoology?" Elvis moved over and sat down in a creaky wooden chair opposite Dr. O'Sullivan's ancient Army surplus metal desk. A desk piled high with folders and papers, books and videos, more than a few of which were not suitable viewing for minors and a few pretty shocking even to majors.

"The Big Guy. Bigfoot. Sasquatch," Elvis began. "I need help in finding Sasquatch," he continued. "And how to contact him." The big voiced little man, who had beetling brows of thick chestnut colored hair that blended nicely with his crinkled sunburned bald dome making him look like a mossy tree stump with bloodshot eyes, nodded with what he thought was the appropriate interlude for reflection.

"And what makes you think I can give you this information," he finally said. Elvis gave him a perplexed look.

"Because that's what your ad in the Tucson Paranormal Times said." The man nodded again, thinking to himself that this strange guy could be no kind of cop and therefore was a lamb ready to be fleeced by none other than Dr. Mackwell O'Sullivan, the master fleecer himself.

"Oh, _that_ ," he said in his best take on an unctuous laid back voice. "Yes, it did say that." Elvis's own fire red brows lowered.

"Are you backing off from that now?" He said in a sharp voice. "False advertising in any medium, including the Tucson Paranormal Times, is a class II gross misdemeanor punishable for up to 48 hours in jail and/or one hundred hours of community service removing graffiti from Planned Parenthood clinics' rest rooms." He paused for a moment. "Though the truth is some of the graffiti is really interesting."

"And exactly how would you know that, sir," the deep voiced Dr. O'Sullivan snapped back, though he was already certain that this twit had done his own one hundred hours of community service for some arcane infraction and furthermore thinking that if being stupid wasn't against the law then it sure should be. But Elvis would not be deflected.

"Can you or can you not help me locate and communicate with Sasquatch?" He insisted.

"That depends," Dr. O'Sullivan said, thinking but not saying that it mostly depended on the size of Elvis' bank account and the degree to which he was willing to part with a substantial chunk of it. "It is rather complicated," O'Sullivan added, then innocently dropping "and it can get expensive." Elvis stared at O'Sullivan with a fervent, earnest and, to O'Sullivan's eye, a wonderfully hopeless naiveté that had dollar signs written all over it.

"I am willing to pay any reasonable amount. And then some." Elvis said. "The thought of finding Sasquatch has been bugging me for years and it's way beyond time to do something besides just wonder. It's time for action. So how do we go about it?" O'Sullivan tried to hide his glee at finding a golden goose just when he was most desperately in need of one. He was about to be evicted by his heartless greedy landlord with the crippled child and have his car repossessed by those humorless money grubbing drones at the bank down the street that had been robbed three times in the last month. He hoped to bilk enough from this Elvis twit to finance a move to the Bahamas where he was going to open Psychic Treasure Hunting, a new business he'd dreamed up with his mother, who was just getting out of the Dade County Correctional Center in Miami.

O'Sullivan's Mama was just finishing a stint in jail for trying to bilk nursing homes by pretending to be a state inspector willing to accept certain 'considerations'–cash only, please–for overlooking flagrant code violations. She was caught out when the regular state inspector, recently returned from a lengthy sick leave for an infected rabid bite from a dementia patient who thought he was a werewolf, showed up one day to collect the substantial unpaid bribes she innocently thought were nicely accumulating while she was out sick. She flew into a rage over the thieving bitch who'd stolen her payoff money and vowed to grab her the next time she showed up to collect. She did just that and O'Sullivan's mama, who went by the name of Contessa Mata Harriman, ended up in the slammer. But only for five months after she cut a deal with the prosecutors over testifying on the nursing home scams. The original inspector caught wind of it and made tracks in a hurry out of Miami's Dade County and moved to Albuquerque where she changed her name to Maribel O'Bama Tinderfuss and got a job with Bernalillo County as a welfare fraud inspector. Within a year she was able--in her own words-- "through rigidly self-disciplined thrift" to save enough from her modest salary to buy a brand new Ford SUV and take a vacation with her new good buddy, welfare recipient Mohammed Greenburg, to Jamaica where they scuba dived for empty beer bottles in the motel pool and tried out twenty-six different types of rum in less than 48 hours.

The Bahamas thing was still just an idea and O'Sullivan needed the cash to make it a reality. Cash, it now turned out, in the form of this gullible Elvis character that the Gods above had sent through his front door. "It sure pays to advertise," O'Sullivan mumbled to himself of his ad in the Tucson Paranormal Times. "Yep. Sure does." He turned to look at Elvis with a smile–-this time a very genuine hit-the-Elvis-jackpot smile.

"The specifics, sir. I can arrange for a certified Sasquatch guide to meet you at the Vancouver, British Columbia, International Airport in our custom stretch limo. From there he will guide you to our own secretly discovered Sasquatch territory deep in the British Columbia mountains and set you up in a climate controlled blind, outfitted by the way with an insulated cooler stocked with a variety of local British Columbia micro brewed beers and certain unnamed powerful consumable and/or smokeable substances, where you can observe at your leisure Sasquatch lazing about, chewing on shrubs and twigs and doing some pretty disgusting things I'd rather not mention, and at your leisure decide when would be the best time to contact them. The guide will give you a book--written by me, by the way--of simple statements you can make to the Sasquatch. Such as, 'I friend', or, 'you hungry?' If you want to go beyond simple statements, I have phoneticized questions into Sasquatchian such as 'how are you with interspecies relationships?' or 'do you use bathroom tissue?' The guide will explain it all to you. But," and then O'Sullivan paused for a second. "This has to be paid for in advance. $10,000 will cover it all. Air fare, camping gear, beer, Sasquatch trip insurance, the guide and the teaching materials."

"$7500 and it's a deal", Elvis said.

"$9000 and I can't go any lower."

"$8000", Elvis replied.

"$8500," came the quick reply.

"Done," Elvis said. "When do I leave?  
"As soon as you're ready," O'Sullivan answered.

"I'm ready right now." O'Sullivan could hardy contain himself. _Bahamas, here I come!_

"I'll write you a check," Elvis said. _Check?_ O'Sullivan's eyes began to twitch.

"Please, sir," O'Sullivan shot back, now a little worried. "This has to be cash only."

"Why is that?" Elvis answered.

"Business reasons," O'Sullivan said, not wanting to admit that banks had him on their lookout lists of possible bank scammers and that cashing a check could be a real big problem for him. One that could very well end with a one way trip to the local slammer, which would put a definite crimp in his Bahamas plans.

"Okay," Elvis said. "I'll go get the money. Don't go away." O'Sullivan actually blanched.

Go _away_? Hurricane Katrina couldn't blow him out of the place before he got his bucks. "I'll be waiting here for you to bring the money," he said, still trying to appear calm. "Then we'll start making the arrangements immediately." In hardly a half hour Elvis was back with a bank envelope from Wells Fargo. He handed it to O'Sullivan, who took it and, despite mentally doing exuberant dollar sign pirouettes and somersaults, tried to look nonchalant as he counted it out. He finished and looked up at Elvis. "All there. $8500." He put the envelope into his jacket pocket. "I'll be in touch with you as soon as the arrangements are made," he said, trying his best to sound sincere, but, despite himself, his thoughts already shifting gears to brown skinned babes on Bahamian beaches in barely visible bikinis.

"Might not be as simple as that," Elvis said. O'Sullivan froze. And blinked.

"What? But.....but.... Why? Why do you say that, sir?"

The explanation promptly arrived in the form of two detectives from the Tucson/Pima County Joint Fraud Task Force who burst through the door and promptly cuffed O'Sullivan, one of them hauling him out, O'Sullivan sputtering and cursing and yelling Judas Iscariot repeatedly at Elvis, to their unmarked car for transport to the county jail.

"Thanks, Elvis," one of the officers, Zachariah 'No Slack Zach' Pietowski said. No Slack Zach was a poker buddy of Elvis and knew--no Slack Zach was a pretty good poker player himself and paid a good chunk of the tuition for his night school origami classes with his poker winnings--that Elvis had a world class poker face. "We were pretty sure you'd fool him." No Slack Zach said, thinking without saying it that an off kilter personality like Elvis was a slam dunk natural. Who'd expect off the wall Elvis to be a wired up undercover operative? Off kilter? Off the wall? Says who? Pancho, for one. Elvis' ET buddy Pancho told No Slack Zach that a while back Elvis, right in the middle of making a major drug bust of a guy driving an old Pontiac with the back seats stuffed full of marijuana bricks, suddenly stopped in mid drug seizure and started to do impressions of various late night talk show hosts. Elvis later somewhat lamely explaining that the Pontiac's driver kind of reminded him of a Hispanic version of David Letterman. "And Elvis' imitations weren't bad, either," Pancho added with definitely mixed feelings about the incident. Which also went a long way towards explaining why No Slack Zach could never pin down whether Elvis was bluffing or not in a poker game. Trying to read Elvis' poker face was like trying to grab a chunk of fog in your bare hands.

"But just how to I go about this, Zach?" Elvis had asked No Slack before the sting began. His poker buddy thumped him on the shoulder.

"Just be yourself, Elvis," he said with a grin and absolute total confidence. "Trust me. That'll work just fine." So Elvis did what Zach said and acted like himself which ended up working fine. For just about everybody. Except for Dr. Mackwell O'Sullivan.

The Task Force had a standard obey the law cop view of O'Sullivan's scam. Elvis took a whole different view of it. He jumped at the chance to take a temporary assignment as an undercover officer with the Joint Fraud Task Force when he found out the details of the sting. He was downright disgusted con men like O'Sullivan were making a mockery out of the genuine cryptozoological search for Sasquatch. And one day, Elvis was sure, someone was really gonna find Sasquatch. He sure wished he'd be the one. That was the way Elvis wanted to be remembered by posterity. As the man who found Sasquatch. He could see it now. They'd call him Sasquatch Elvis. The man who brought cryptozoology out of the closet into the mainstream scientific community. What the heck more could a guy ask for? Elvis walked out to the unmarked police car where O'Sullivan was sullenly inhabiting the back seat. He walked up to the car, leaned over and waggled his forefinger at O'Sullivan.

"Shame, shame," he said loud enough for O'Sullivan to hear through the closed window of the police car. O'Sullivan snarled and returned the finger wave.

With a different finger.

### Chapter 6

### Nogales

### On The Job

### (More or Less)

Elvis was standing behind the turnstiles at the Grand Avenue pedestrian entry gate in Nogales. Well, not exactly standing. He was slumped over leaning against a pillar and looked like he was about to doze off and maybe slide to the ground and thunk his head on the floor. Not so. Even if he'd wanted to grab a quick snooze, the irritating grinding of those goddamned noisy turnstiles would have kept him awake. Elvis hated those turnstiles. Couldn't the turnstile engineers have built turnstiles with a pleasant sound? Didn't Turnstile Engineering School have courses in Customer Ergonomics? No. Those freakin' turnstile engineers just didn't give any thought to workplace quality of life issues for the people who worked their turnstiles. No humanity. No compassion. No grease for the turnstiles. Elvis three times wrote letters to his congresswoman, Magda Louise Matushita, about the turnstiles. And he got three form letters from Congresswoman Matushita thanking him for his interest and saying she'd look into it. Nothing happened. No grease. Not a drop. If anything, the turnstiles were noisier than ever. Which Elvis suspected might be an intentional act of vengeance by Congresswoman Matushita when she found out Elvis had voted for her opponent, Bernardo Sin Agua, in the last election. After the third impotent form letter Elvis joined the Libertarian Party and signed a petition to disband Congress, adding a personal footnote that 'Matushita didn't give a shita' and ought to be tied to a chair for a full work day next to the turnstiles at the Grand Avenue pedestrian gate in Nogales. Elvis never did hear from Congresswoman Matushita.

Though he was called in for an IRS audit soon after.

Elvis might have looked like he was dozing. Well, so maybe he was. Just a little. But his eyes were roaming the faces of the people queuing up to come into the Great Cornucopia, wondering which of them was a knothead up to no good or a whacko about to blast off into inner space. Just two days earlier a guy wearing a dress and purple slippers came up to Elvis and breathlessly reported he'd just heard on the radio that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Elvis pretended to write it down, thanked the man and silently thanked the Powers Above when the guy quietly turned and walked away. Elvis never was too good at handling the nutcases. His friend and fellow border officer Mairead O'Leary said it was because he was too much like them. Elvis responded by challenging her to an arm wrestling contest, which was their usual way of settling differences of opinion. "Oh, yeah? You're calling me a nutcase?" Elvis snarled. Adding, with considerable bravado. "We'll see who the nutcase is here, woman. You're toast. Everyone knows that nutcases are notoriously poor arm wrestlers." Whatever the truth of that statement, Elvis went down to arm wrestling defeat for the sixth time in a row, not counting one draw between numbers three and four.

"OK, El," the victorious Mairead said with a-- _way_ too smug, in Elvis' opinion--big grin. "Once again the Gods have demonstrated what everyone knows. You _are_ a nutcase." To which Elvis could only emit a low and long drawn out growl.

Not that all the border crossers were rascals or whackos. Far from it. There was lots of rascal-less and whacko-less cross border traffic. There were all kinds of reasons to join the lines crossing over from Mexico to the Arizona side in Nogales. Various state, local, county and federal government offices were perennial favorites, for undisclosed but possibly somewhat suspicious reasons. And Django Weinstine's Shoe Store and Delicatessen was having a sale on genuine knockoff Nike cross trainers and a special on reconstituted pickled pigs' feet that week. Manuella Soltero's Department Store was also having its yearly sale. Everything in the store was marked down fifty percent. _Absolutemente Todo_ , the advertisement said. Absolutely everything. Elvis' girlfriend Ruby's best friend, Hestaluca Bojorquez, who once worked at Solero's, told him she was pretty sure that Manuella herself snuck into the store at night and marked up the same items fifty percent the week before the sale. And there was always that great crowd favorite that drew people across the border, Paco's Buns, a hot dog stand where Paco Ocotillo and his cousin Flustrina served spicy fifteen inch hotdogs on tasty oversized buns his uncle Pepe baked fresh every day. Pepe told everyone he used a secret recipe he'd gotten from a Tarahumara Indian bruja in Sonora when his only transportation on the primitive mountain roads, a jenny mule, ran off with a local donkey and left him stranded in a Tarahumara village. Elvis was a friend of Pepe and knew that Pepe actually got the recipe out of an old Betty Crocker cookbook. But what the hell. Wasn't that capitalism and the American way?

The Amazon

He saw her right away. Everyone saw her right away. You couldn't _miss_ seeing her right away. Thespus Mussolini, the CBP officer working the turnstile gate nearest Elvis, took one glance at her and dropped the absolutely genuine Aztec vase a tourist bought for his wife back home in Boise for ten bucks that Thespus was expertly admiring. The tourist might have been pissed, but stopped cold in pre-pissed mode when he was just as mesmerized and gawking wide eyed at her as Thespus was. The woman was an easy barefoot six footer, towering over everyone in the entry room. Maybe thirty, blond, very good looking. No. More than that. She was way beyond being merely very good looking. This woman was a 100 percent certifiable hit the brakes Babe. But what caught everyone's attention was her chest, which every single male in the room saw within milliseconds of her coming in through the doors from Mexico. The woman had a set of gazooms that when charged up with mother's milk could have fed the entire nursery of newborns at St. Mary's Hospital as well as a couple of kinky pharmacy techs. Elvis didn't mind looking at her chest anymore than anyone else in the room, but he saw something more than just a record setting pair of knockers. There were some very peculiar protuberances jutting out from the mountains of flesh a specially reinforced bra was bravely trying to contain. Elvis grinned. He was pretty sure he'd found his miscreant for the day. That heroically reinforced bra was hiding a whole lot more than mama's melons. Elvis leaned over to Thespus and whispered to him.

"When the big blond comes up to you, refer her to me for a secondary inspection." Thespus turned to look at Elvis and what started as a grin spread into a open mouthed smile so wide Elvis thought he could see his epiglottis.

"You bettcha, Elvis," Thespus said, winking. "Bet you gonna have a real good time with this one." Elvis tried, without much success, to look indignant.

"Purely professional, Thespus," he said. "Purely professional." Thespus grinned again and whispered at him in the cadence of a sarcastic rap rhythm, an unsettling habit of his that did not make him a great many friends among his coworkers at the Port of Nogales.

Gone check the girl out, that's all it's about

See if she's smugglin', see if she's jugglin'

Gone check the girl out, that's all it's about

And pigs can fly and politicians don't lie

Elvis raised his eyebrows in another lame attempt at being indignant.

"Just send her over, Thespus," he snarled. "And lay off the smart ass remarks."

The buxom blond Amazon stood in line with the others, not so patiently waiting her turn to pass through the irritating noisy turnstiles into the United States. Many of the men in the room didn't even try to hide their stares, but when she met their probing lecherous eyes with a ferocious feral glare that would have stopped a charging rhinoceros in its tracks, every one of them–with the exception of Marco Manriquez, who was blind in one eye and seriously near sighted in the other–gulped, instantly deflected their glances, and commenced to study their shoelaces and the fascinating spider webbed cracks in the concrete floor. Then she arrived at Thespus Mussolini's kiosk. The woman ahead of the blond Amazon in line was an imposter who wasn't even a near miss for resembling the photo on the border crossing card she showed Thespus. He didn't notice. Thespus was at war, fighting a losing battle with his eyes. One voice inside his head was saying...

_Thespus, for Christ's sake, act like a professional._ But there was another voice inside him saying something else. _Sweet Jesus, look at them gazooms_! No contest. The second voice won. Thespus reached into his pocket, pulled out his sunglasses and put them on. The hulking blond bombshell shot him a quizzical look.

"Eyestrain," Thespus said in a croaking voice. "These fluorescent lights in here really hurt my eyes sometimes." The woman shot him another look that convinced Thespus it would be a heck of a good idea to get rid of this imperious voluptuous blond as quick as he could. She pointed at the ceiling.

"I'll bet they get really bad when you turn the fluorescent lights on," she said in a sarcastic voice. "They're off right now."

"True," Thespus said in a low voice, being somewhat caught off guard, just now noticing that the lights really were off. "So true," adding. "But they'll be coming on any minute now. Never hurts to be prepared." The woman blasted him with a glare that could have withered the petunias in the somewhat dilapidated flower box that was one of the few things Thespus' departing ingrate of an almost ex-wife didn't rip him off for. Amazon Woman didn't say anything else. The look alone had absolutely zero need for any accompanying words. Thespus was starting to wish he'd called in sick that day. Actually, he almost had. The History Channel had an Ancient Aliens special that afternoon laying out the indisputable proof that Earth was long ago colonized by giant Martians that were the direct ancestors of both Yeti and Sasquatch. That sure was one special he didn't want to miss.

Thespus was a serial husband. He had three ex-wives and one more on the way. He'd had all the woman trouble a man could handle. Actually, more than a man could handle. The final straw was when his about-to-be ex-wife ran off with a one legged transsexual sausage maker and, to add insult to injury, ripped off his deluxe D'Allesio Brothers Italian espresso machine. He could live without the wife, who for the past three years locked him out of the bedroom every night as well as being a nagger even worse–how could it be possible?–than her mother. But he was having a hard time adjusting to the loss of the espresso machine, which always got his day off to a pleasant and, after the third cup, mildly hallucinogenic start. This Triple Z breasted blond bombshell looming over him like a berserk earth mother Viking absolutely reeked of trouble and he didn't want to be around when the bombshell burst. Just then the slightest hint of a sly smile touched his lips. _Elvis._ He'd pass her off to Elvis and kill two birds with one stone. Get rid of her in a hurry and screw with that smart ass peckerwood at the same time.

"Citizenship?" Thespus said with relief plain in his voice.

"American girl born and bred," the large woman said in a husky voice. "Born in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Where you freeze your ass off half the year and swatt frickin' mosquitoes the other half. You can believe I got the hell out of there as soon as I could." Thespus' mouth sagged in astonishment. A response like that was the last thing he would have expected. He stammered with his next question.

"Wh...what did you bring from Mexico." The large woman with the husky voice caught him by surprise again.

"I sure hope I'm not bringing a case of Montezuma's revenge from the carne asada at Pablito's Genuine Mexican Guadalajara Restaurante." Thespus blinked. Pablito's? Genuine Mexican Restaurante? A guy named Bernie Kowalski from Brooklyn owned Pablito's. Bernie had an 'authentic' Vietnamese restaurant in Tucson that flunked the city's health inspection three times in a row before he decided to make the move to the Mexican side of Nogales where the government restaurant inspectors were notoriously underpaid and therefore thankfully very cooperative when offered the right incentives. Preferably in small unmarked bills in a plain envelope. Before Thespus could say anything, she reached over and slapped Thespus on the shoulder. "Just funnin' you, officer." She plunked a couple of bags onto the counter between her and Thespus. "Just some tourist stuff. A belt, a copper Kokopelli, a couple of blouses." She peered down into one of the plastic bags. "And a bottle of vitamins and some vanilla."

"Any medicines," Thespus asked. The woman's eyes flashed. Both Thespus and Elvis saw it.

"Nope," she said in the same even, husky voice. "Don't need medicines. I'm so healthy my doctor is bored spitless." She threw Thespus a pretty good take on a genuine grin. "So far, anyhow." Bored? _Bored?_ Thespus was momentarily dumbstruck, wondering how the hell any doctor could possibly be bored while examining Amazon Woman, then turned to point to where Elvis was standing nearby at a secondary inspection table, fighting to keep the smirk from his face. Thespus' crookedy middle finger pointing like a virtual laser directly at the geographic center of Elvis' forehead. .

"Please step over to where that scrawny red-headed guy in a wrinkled CBP uniform is standing for a routine secondary inspection." The woman's eyes blinked, then flashed a second time. Anger. No question of it. Elvis picked it up, though by now Thespus was studiously avoiding eye contact with her and didn't see it. Thespus might have missed it but Elvis sure noticed the ferocious expression on her face. His memory bank leaped into action and immediately spit out the image of Snaggletooth Sue, the lioness at the Tucson zoo that had taken a violent personal dislike to Elvis ever since he'd done his crazy monkey imitation outside her thankfully very high fence and from then on charged the fence in a rage very time she saw him. Elvis groaned, so softly no one heard, and quickly pulled out his own sunglasses and put them on. The woman made a show of impatiently approaching him.

"All you guys wear sunglasses indoors?" She said. "What the hell do you do when you're outside in the sunlight? Put a black hood over your head?"

Elvis had an unpleasant flashback to his old girlfriend in Slippery Sister County. Thelma Lou Mahoney. OK. OK. So she was a relative. Not as bad as it sounds. Half the population in Slippery Sister County and adjacent Soggy Hollow was named Mahoney. She was only a distant relative. A second cousin once removed. Thelma Lou came from a family of infamously ill tempered woodsmen and moonshiners so obstreperous locals nicknamed their place back in the hills Asshole Hollow. Or, when they were feeling really nasty, Hollow Asshole. Thelma Lou was a chip off the moonshine block and gave a whole new dimension to the concept of a strong willed woman. Thelma Lou twice threatened to throw Elvis bodily out of the back seat of his old Chevy if he couldn't perform well enough for her to have multiple orgasms. Elvis didn't think it was possible for a teenage boy to actually dread sex. That is, until he met Thelma Lou. Thank God, he was saved when she got caught driving a load of moonshine for her uncle Monroe 'Moony' Mahoney and Judge Heronimous Abraham Mahoney gave her the choice of either going to jail or going into the military. Last Elvis had heard of her she was a Marine Corps drill sergeant the other Marines called the Bitch of Paris Island.

"Well," the woman said. "What is it you want?" Elvis' mind snapped back from the Bitch of Paris Island to the hulking Triple Z–chested Amazon standing before him in a defiant stance, hands on her hips and eyes sparking fire. His cousin Flosswell Mahoney, who leaned a bit too far towards the dramatic side after taking a course in classical mythology at Slippery Sister Community College and Food Bank, would have hollered out that the Greek Goddess Athena had busted loose from Olympus wearing her war face and was about to raise hell in their immediate vicinity. A lesser man would have caved in and sent her on her way. Right then Elvis was wishing the lesser man inside him would step forward, take control and forthwith cave in. No such luck. Elvis' inner lesser man never would cooperate when he was most needed, which was a constant source of irritation to Elvis. What good was an inside lesser man if he was never there at the crucial moment? He did, however, pop up at the wrong times, something that irritated Elvis even more. Like the time he was trying to explain his creative tax deductions to that suspicious IRA auditor.

"Just a routine inspection, 'mam," Elvis' regular, non lesser man, reluctantly said. "You'll be on your way in no time." The woman glowered at him, but said nothing. "What are you bringing from Mexico?" Elvis said. The woman abruptly whirled and threw a hot look at Thespus.

"What are you, the echo twins? I just went through this with Mr. Sunglasses over there. Now you're gonna do it again?"

"Still just routine, 'mam. Would you please answer the question?" The woman forcefully thudded her bags on the inspection table so hard that the copper Kokopelli in one of the bags cracked in half, the crack running right through where his privates would have been if copper Kokopellis had privates. Elvis grimaced. The woman repeated the Customs litany she'd recited to Thespus. Elvis nodded, trying to look agreeable. He did a perfunctory ramble through her two bags of Mexican merchandise.

"Hm. Clothing. Vitamins. A cracked Kokopelli. And right where it hurts." He glanced up at her. "Any hair dye?" He said, adding before she could react. "Some of that stuff in Mexico is toxic and illegal in the U.S." The woman's temper was on the launch pad and ready to ignite, but she was thrown off by his wording. Toxic? Was this guy being a smart ass or not? It was her turn to feign indignity.

"It wouldn't matter. I don't use hair dye. This is my natural color." Elvis would have sooner believed that the aurora borealis was really just a laser light show at the Nome Eskimo Casino's Winter Icicle Festival than that the woman was a natural blond. But it was all prelude. His next question.

"Did you bring any medicines from Mexico?" A thundercloud formed on the woman's face.

"Geek Boy over there with the shades on asked me the same question. How many times do I need to tell you guys!" She thumped on her bags of Mexican merchandise so hard Elvis thought she could have cracked the table like she did the copper Kokopelli. He even looked under the bag to see if the table was damaged. It wasn't. Good thing. It'd cost the government five hundred dollars, though Elvis had recently noticed that somehow the financial wizards at Wal-Mart managed to have the same table on sale for fifty bucks. Amazon Woman stared at him with lightning bolts dancing in her azure eyes. They were actually very pretty eyes, Elvis thought. Even beautiful. But, his mind telegraphed in numinous warning, a beauty like that of a South Sea Island with a typhoon looming on the horizon and about to lower its typhoon boom.

"So," Elvis said calmly. "No medicines then?" The woman glared at him.

"No! Dammit. No!" Elvis now had his third negative declaration, one to Thespus and two to him. That was usually enough. But his gut was churning with the visceral memory of at least a half dozen relatively similar past experiences where what started out as an ordinary border interview crashed and burned his border butt. Including one chunky middle aged guy who faked a heart attack and was screaming law suit until a responding paramedic who was studying to be an insurance agent caught him out, the wannabe agent happening that week to be at the Fake Heart Attack section in the insurance handbook.

Elvis decided it would be a good idea for him to have a little extra insurance, too. He pulled out a 6051 Customs form that was used to declare all items purchased out of the country, but wasn't used much on the land border. Except in situations like this one. The anger Elvis was expecting from her didn't happen. He leaned back, surprised. Instead she had a cagey look on her face. She thought her voice sounded sweet and sexy. Elvis thought it was more like the growling of Snaggletooth Sue, the Elvis averse lioness at the Tucson Zoo, when she saw Elvis. His old ex-girlfriend back in Slippery Sister County, Thelma Lou Mahoney, had often sounded just like that. And the next thing he knew all hell would break loose. Elvis leaned away from her, warily eying the heroically breasted supposedly natural blond Athena with the war face. She shifted her weight so that her Guinness World Record size Triple Z breasts shivered like two giant mounds of Jell-O. In the background, Elvis could hear Thespus moaning and smacking his lips. The woman looked sweetly at Elvis. But it was a sweetness with a sledge hammer hiding behind its back.

"Officer. Sir. You surely can't believe that I would lie to you?"

"Certainly not, madam," Elvis replied. "You are the least likely to lie person I have seen all day and possibly all week. Maybe even this entire month. And that includes six Carmelite nuns and a Jesuit priest visiting from the Canadian province of Manitoba, a place, by the way, where the winter temperature can dip to fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit and freeze your car tires to the cement in your driveway. Which is why they sell more tires per capita in Manitoba that just about anywhere else in the world." Elvis paused as the woman stared blankly at him. What? What the hell was this red headed beanpole blabbering about? "This is just a formality," Elvis continued. "Though it is a statutory requirement upon entering the United States." He stopped, still eyeing her warily. "Unless we choose to waive it." The expression on the woman's face changed to relief.

"Good. Just waive it, then." She bent closer to Elvis. A bit too far. Her Triple Z's yielded to the irresistible force of gravity and she momentarily teetered forward. Elvis knew better than to reach out to try to break her fall, though Thespus was about to leap up and jump over to assist, with the dual thought in mind of being gloriously squished by the Triple Z's and also getting injured on the job and sent home in time to catch the History Channel's Ancient Aliens special. But she caught herself right away and lurched back, the Triple Z's rebounding vigorously and stretching her specially reinforced brassiere to the limits of its engineered capacity. Elvis couldn't help thinking that if her nose had been a little longer the Triple Z's might have whacked her in the beak and caused a nose bleed or even broken her nose. How the heck would he explain that one to the responding EMTs? It reminded him of the time a pregnant Mexican woman tried to make it into the US to have her baby and grab the kid the Golden Ring of US citizenship. Her timing sucked. Elvis was working the pedestrian lane when junior decided to make his move right before Elvis' eyes at the turnstile and he had no choice but to help. Elvis was probably the only officer in the history of the service who both saw and heard the water break on a pregnant woman who was actually within a turnstile's metal arms midway between Mexico and the United States. The kid had made his memorable entrance into the US by the time the paramedics arrived and Elvis was nicknamed the Godfather for months afterward. And that wasn't all. The two countries squabbled over the kid's citizenship. Was he Mexican or American? The building was physically in the U.S., but the mother had not yet passed through the border turnstile. After an interminable squabble over the very, very fine points of border law out of desperation they finally decided to give the kid dual citizenship and a generous tuition break at the college or university of his choice, plus four free tickets to the Super Bowl the year the kid graduated from college–which everyone involved, including the kid's mother, thought highly unlikely.

Elvis was always afraid to ask if they named the kid Elvis.

Amazon Woman remained unfazed. "You really don't want me to sign that, do you, officer? She continued in that same saccharine voice. Elvis nodded his head in the affirmative. The woman's mood darkened, but she didn't explode. Not yet, anyhow.

"Yep. 'Fraid so, Madame. Please sign."  
"And if I won't? Will you make me go back to Mexico, where I might be mugged or _otherwise_ assaulted?" She said, trying to sound innocent and sweet but seeming more to Elvis like a hungry alligator cruising the canals in central Florida.

Thinking he might need a witness for what was going on, Elvis glanced over at Thespus Mussolini to see if he was watching. Boy, was he watching. Thespus was frozen in place and looked to Elvis like a ten year old kid sneaking a peak through a window at a downtown strip club. He'd stopped his line to ogle with undisguised interest the goings on with Elvis and the Bombshell. This was a definite win-win for Thespus, no matter which of the contestants won the secondary inspection match. Either Boob Woman or smart ass Elvis was gonna get zapped. Maybe, if things went really well, both of them. A Mexican woman standing at his kiosk loudly cleared her throat. Thespus turned to her and quickly waved her, and the half dozen people behind her, on into the U.S. He knew that one of them was probably an imposter, but what the hell, he'd just try again and make it somewhere else. As his mother Elfrieda used to say. "First things first, Thespus. First things first. Eat your vegetables first before you get the banana cream pie. And remember, Thespus, always wash your hands before eating and after going to the bathroom." She'd reach over then and whack him on the back of the head. "Not the other way around." First things first.

So Thespus turned and redirected his total attention--such as it was--to Elvis and Boob Woman.

"Madame," Elvis said. "If you refuse to make out this form, I'll have to ask you to write that on the form and sign it." The woman, now somewhat agitated, considered the thought a moment and then stuck out her hand. She'd had enough of this petty government crap.

"Gimme a pen, Elmer. I got places to go, things to do and people to see." Elvis had a pen out before the last syllable made its snappish way out of Amazon Woman's mouth. She promptly wrote 'refuse to fill out' on the 6051 and then signed it with a dramatic flourish. Elvis took the form and quickly signed and dated it himself. Elvis then picked up the secondary phone and spoke softly into it.

"Well, am I free to go?" The woman said, her voice now returned to its imperious normal.

"Not quite yet," Elvis said. The thunderclouds darkened on her face again and the lightning was flickering in her eyes. Athena was sharpening her sword.

"Whadaya mean, not quite yet. What the frick is with you, Elmer or whatever the frick your name is." Just then a pair of female officers walked in, one of them Sasjay Anberd, a muscular one time point guard on a U Conn squad that almost made the Final Four twice, which failing left Sasjay with a perpetual feeling of dissatisfaction and in a pissed off mood most of the time. The second officer, a slender young dark haired woman with such a prominent brow ridge she could have balanced a medium sized juice glass on it, was new to the border and was Sasjay's trainee. They walked over to Elvis' side. He leaned over to whisper in Sasjay's ear. She nodded and with the second officer beckoned Amazon Woman into an adjacent private search room. She followed them with loudly voiced reluctance. As soon as they disappeared into the room all hell broke loose inside.

"What? You're gonna _search_ me? No frickin' way you are going to touch me, lesbo. I'll report you for assault to the local cops. Lissen here, you little lesbo bitch..." Elvis couldn't hear his coworkers' low voices, but he knew that they were explaining the laws about reentry into the United States. If the woman continued to refuse to cooperate with a search, she could be detained and subjected forcibly to a search of her person. In many, if not most, cases the officers would figure it wasn't worth the hassle and just let the person go. But that was only true where petty offenses were involved. Not where something more substantial was involved. Or, as with Amazon woman, where the behavior of the subject so fired up the officers that they damn well weren't about to cut her any slack. Inspector Sasjay Anberd was sure not known as a slack cutter. Oh, no. Not hardly. Not with a nickname like No Slack Sasjay. Her day was not complete until she had put at least one person behind bars, fantasizing every single time that she'd just made a three pointer as the clock ran out to put U Conn into the Final Four. She'd even volunteer to work overtime if she'd hadn't made her daily bust during regular working hours. After Elvis heard Amazon Woman call Inspector Sasjay Anberd a lesbo, he knew what would happen. Sasjay had the hots for just about the entire half of the human species officially considered masculine and had the shot record to prove it. She'd long ago sexually sprinted way past the comparatively feeble concept of mere promiscuity. Amazon woman was gonna get searched. Hands down. Or, in this case, hands all over.

For a few moments there was utter silence. Then a voice cracked like Olympian thunder coming from Zeus' very favorite and very pissed off daughter from inside the search room.

"Goddamnit! You fuckin' bitch. Goddamn you!" A moment later Sasjay leaned around the door jamb from the search room and gave Elvis a humungous grin that exposed every tooth in her mouth and the beginnings of a receding gum line along with a vigorous 'thumb's up.' A few moments later Amazon Woman was being forcibly escorted by the pair of CBP female officers to the Grand Avenue secondary office. As they passed by Elvis she shot him a look that would have flash frozen the entire cactus garden around the governor's mansion in Phoenix.

"I'm gonna remember you, Elmer," she said with virtual venom dripping from her mouth. Thespus Mussolini had again stopped his line to gape with unbridled glee at the pageant concluding before his eyes. Elvis looked into the venomous woman's eyes with manly grit.

"You go right ahead. Bring it on." The two CBP officers were just pulling Amazon Woman out the door when Elvis called after her as they disappeared out the door.

"Remember me, lady! My name is......" Just then a motorcycle roared by on its way into Mexico and drowned out his words to everyone but those closest to him.

An hour later Amazon Woman left the Grand Avenue Secondary office with a summons to appear in court and minus the four bottles of Hydrocodone, two of Valium and two more of Xantac that she'd stuffed into her Triple Z specially reinforced bra. The day wasn't a complete loss, though. When she got home she opened up the bottle of vitamins she'd brought from Mexico and one hundred tablets of Percodan tumbled out onto the table. Then she sat down on a kitchen table chair, dropped her shorts, pulled down her panties and proceeded to extract the extra large bottle of OxyContin she'd stuffed into her Triple Z sized snapper. She popped the cap on the bottle and gobbled one of the tablets, washing it down with a big gulp off a can of Diet Pepsi, being as she was a total abstainer from all forms of alcohol. Wasn't long before the sharp edge was gone off the day and she actually started to laugh over what had happened.

But that still didn't mean she wouldn't find a way to get even with that smart assed broomstick red headed SOB that had busted her and cost her five hundreds bucks worth of pills. The bastard's name was permanently burned into her brain. She'd never forget his name. Darned good thing she'd been able to hear it over the roar of that frickin' motorcycle. She'd heard it all right. And she'd _never_ forget it. And had not one doubt in her allegedly blond head that she'd find a way to get even. She could still see the arrogant bastard calling out his name to her. Yeah. She could see--and hear--it clearly.... _very_ clearly....

Thespus Mussolini.

### Elvis and the Telemarketer

Elvis grabbed himself a healthy snack--Lars Smitdger's pricey but Certified Health Smart 100% Natural Organic Mountain Spring Water--which tasted amazingly similar to ordinary tap water in the City of Colorado Springs--and a generous handful of Akmed's reduced fat cinnamon and shrimp potato chips. He plunked his skinny red-haired rear down on his second hand marginally shabby but still functional sofa he'd picked up outside the Tucson Good Will drop off lot late one night. Elvis settled--well, in this couch it was closer to sank than settled--in to watch a Saturday Night Live rerun on Netflix. It was a darned good one. Elvis was chortling so loud the neighbor in the next apartment started banging on the wall and simultaneously called Elvis on his cell phone. Elvis' chortling, in the opinion of more than a few that knew him, including the neighbor, actually sounding remarkably similar to a braying donkey.

"Goddamn it, Elvis." The noise-challenged neighbor hollered over the cell phone. "Tell your fucking donkey act alternate persona to cut it out. I'm in the middle of rearranging my apartment in a contemporary feng shui design and you're blowing the ambiance."

"Elvis is not home," Elvis hollered back at the wall and into the cell phone. "I'm Elvis' cousin Criswell and I'm apartment sitting for Elvis while he is off fishing for bluefin tuna in the Santa Cruz River." The neighbor, Pennington Matchwood Garcia-Hernandez, rehollered at the wall and into the phone.

"There ain't no tuna in the Santa Cruz!" Pennington Matchwood Garcia-Hernandez snapped, who, though he had a PHD in Pre-Neanderthal Art, preferred to use ain't in confrontational situations for added emphasis. He banged on the wall again--this time, caught up the passion of the moment, whacking the wall with the phone and cracking its carefully polished custom faux platinum casing. Which further fired his ire. "There ain't even any water in the Santa Cruz," he spanned. "It's as dry as vermouth in the Gobi Desert."

"That could well be why he never seems to catch anything," replied Elvis aka Criswell. "Either that or cheeseburgers aren't the right bait to use."

"Goddamnit, Elvis. I know that is you. Would you please just tone down the noise?"

"OK, Penny," Elvis answered. "I'll keep it down to a dull roar." Penny was Elvis' nickname for his neighbor. And when Elvis was pissed at Pennington, the nickname expanded to Bad Penny. They had an odd fellows kind of symbiosis that often manifested itself in mostly harmless fanciful yell fests. Which was OK with both Elvis and Pennington but not so OK with the rest of the neighbors, who referred to them as conjoined twins connected at the rectum and therefore known locally as the Asshole Twins.

Both Elvis and Pennington disconnected their cells and returned their attention to what had previously occupied their somewhat undivided attention. Pennington to feng shuing his "tastefully state of the art" combination living/dining/meditation room--Pennington was fond of combining yoga and yogurt while watching vintage Film Noir movies on his DVD player--and Elvis to his TV set with the Netflix umbilicus.

Anyhow, in the SNL bit they had a guy who was a near dead ringer for Barak Obama driving a cab and thereby grabbing a wild kaleidoscope of expressions on the cab's hidden cameras from wannabe cab customers. The actor, who really had driven a cab to make ends meet until Barak Obama was elected and opened a whole new Obama look-alike revenue stream that rescued him from a penurious existence and paid for his oldest daughter's first year tuition at Oral Roberts University. SNL didn't pay all that great, but being on SNL was sure to boost business. So he put his virtual cab driver cap back on and climbed behind the wheel.

"Let's do 'er," he said in a voice that wasn't nearly as close a match to Barak Obama as his face.

A good looking, tastefully dressed, obviously professional white woman of about forty climbed into the cab. Her manner was as tasteful and gracious as her dress.

"Good afternoon, sir," she began. "Would you please take me to....."At that moment Faux Obama turned to look back at the woman in the rear seat and she got a full facial eyeful of his face.

"It's you! You bastard! I'll never forgive you for fucking over Hillary and beating her out for the nomination!" She forthwith whacked Faux Obama over the head with her purse, jerked open the cab door and stomped off with regal disdain. A maneuver admittedly difficult to do in tapered high heels.

Next up was another woman, who Faux Obama, once burned, greeted with definitely mixed feelings.

"Hey! I know you," said the middle aged woman who looked to be a mixture of all the known extant races of humanity and maybe a couple of extras. "When are you going to demand equal rights for people of color? We need a non-white in the White House. Which, by the way, we'll change to The Non-White House." Faux Obama looked at his brownish tinged skin and wondered just where the hell this woman had been the last few years.

"Look at me," he said, holding out his brownish skinned arm. "What do I look like to you? A white guy from the local country club."

"I know you, Obama," the woman shot back. "You're really a Jew pretending to be a person of color." A hot look. "And you're secretly promoting the international Jewish conspiracy under the cover of your phony presidency." A pause. "Which reminds me. What are you doing driving a cab? Trying to get a feeling for the little people? That'll sure as hell never happen!" She climbed back out of the cab.

"Go back to Lebanon where you belong." She said as she climbed out of the cab.

Faux Obama's eyes blinked six times in rapid succession. Lebanon?

"Are you sure you don't mean Israel," he said.

"That, too!" She snapped as she slammed the cab door shut behind her.

Next up was a natty haired dude of the African-American persuasion.

"This some kind of sneaky goddamn fuckhead Republican conspiracy?" Hissed the pissed off guy with bright honey brown eyes and skin like wrinkled burnt parchment when he saw Faux Obama's face. "Making fun of America's greatest president!" Said outraged Obamaphile forthwith slamming the cab door behind him and stomping off.

"Aha!" Said the next wannabe fare, an old white guy who had a big drooping mustache and not a single hair anywhere else on his head, as he pointed at the driver Obama look alike. "You're finally someplace where you belong, Brick."

"That's Barak, not Brick!" Huffed the cab driver, who, even if he wasn't the real Barak, took offense at his fake identity being verbally mislabeled.

The old white guy was, however, not a Republican or a secret member of the Old White Guys Only Club. He was a libertarian who distrusted politicians of all flavors, especially ones who were also lawyers. Which made the politician/lawyer Obama a two time loser in the Old White Guy's eyes.

Just then the phone rang. Elvis' eyes lit up. The land line! The land line that was used a good 90% of the time by telemarketers of some species or by so called non-profit solicitors, an easy 2/3 of which were no way non-profits and looking to make bucks any way they could--and to hell with mush minded niceties like ethics or legality. Elvis hit the pause button on his remote and hotfooted it for his land line telephone. This could be even better than the SNL fake Obama routine.

"Hello," Elvis said expectantly. A male voice with a thick accent, probably from the Indian subcontinent, answered.

"Is this Mr. Maloney?" A slight grin touched Elvis lips. He pulled over a straight back chair and sat down. This could be a good one.

"Mahoney," Elvis said. "The name is Mahoney. Not Maloney."

"Oh, I am so sorry," the thick accented voice replied. "Mr. Mahoney. I am calling from Microsoft's Virus Protection Office."

"Oh! Elvis said, sounding surprised. "So what in the world is this about," Elvis asked, now curious in more ways than one. An unsolicited phone call from Microsoft was about as likely as a Pacific tidal wave flooding downtown Tucson, complete with whales, sharks, for real bluefin tuna and a couple of southern California surfers getting one hell of a ride.

"As I said, I am calling from Microsoft," Mr. Thick Accent replied. "Your computer has been infected with a virus."

"Oh, no!" Elvis answered, sounding worried. "A virus! That's as bad as my Aunt Merlinda getting the clap in Las Vegas last Christmas! A virus! How did that happen?" The voice on the phone did not at first answer, having to try to figure out the whole Aunt Merlinda in Vegas bit. Finally he decided it was a puzzle and to just let it go. For now, anyhow. Though he had to wonder, not being up on his English slang, if Aunt Merlinda was a performer and getting the clap was English slang for an appreciative audience. He then spoke slowly and almost languidly into the phone, reminding himself of the Ganges in the dry season.

"Our 24 Hour Safety Net Monitors detected the virus the last time you logged on your computer." He began. "This virus is called Putin Bad Boy and is believed to originate in western Russia or possibly the Bronx. The virus is very dangerous and will erase all your files if it isn't removed."

"Oh, good God no!" Elvis said, shocked. "All my files? Even the videos from my hidden camera in the women's locker room at the community swimming pool." Mr. Thick Accent was silent for a long moment.

"What kind of videos?" He finally said.

"Let's not go into details," Elvis replied in a veiled tone. Another pause while Mr. Thick Accent, having realized just what kind of videos Elvis was talking about, was trying to think of a way he could hijack the videos for his own viewing enjoyment and put a personalized, if (hopefully, very) salacious, spin to the concept of streaming video. In the privacy of his own apartment, of course. Then he got his mind back on course. Which meant he redirected his attention to the script his boss Deepak 'Nunchucks' Chakraboty sternly warned him to follow "Or Else!"

"OK, Mr. Malboney," Thick Accent continued. "We....

"That is Maloney," Elvis shot back. "NOT Malboney." This got Thick Accent worried. If he blew this one Deepak Chakraboty would be on his ass big time. And where Deepak went his nunchucks were sure to follow. OK. All right. True. Modern India did not condone torture. At least not officially. The nunchucks were made of reinforced cotton. But they still could sting.

"Oh, I'm so sorry again, sir. I had a tongue spasm while I was saying your name and it came out wrong."

"I understand completely," Elvis replied. "You very likely suffer from STS."

"STS?" Said the surprised phone voice. "What is that?

"Spastic Tongue Syndrome." Elvis replied. "It causes you to blurt out things you didn't really mean to say. It is very common among politicians and Reality TV stars in the United States."

"Oh," Mr. Thick Accent replied, not knowing what else to say.

"So what about that virus?" Elvis said, breaking the ice of silence.

"Yes. The virus." Thick Accent replied, reorienting himself to the task at hand--though the possible permutations of STS, should he actually have it, continued to flit somewhat nervously about on the edges of his consciousness. With particular emphasis on the permutations of doing the STS bit and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time with his boss. "Now, _Mr. Mahoney_ ," Thick Accent continued, enunciating Elvis' name as carefully and clearly as he could against the possibility of an STS verbal ambush. "We need to move right along to the repair of your computer."

"OK," Elvis said. What do we have to do?"

"Go to your computer and turn it on." Thick Accent said.

"All right." Elvis answered as he stood up and stepped up and down to sound like he was walking somewhere. "I'm on my way."

"Are you at your computer yet?" Says Thick Accent.

"Not yet." Elvis replied, adding. "And which one are we talking about?" Another pause.

"Which one?" Thick Accent said. "You have more than one?"

"Yep," Elvis said. A Dell desktop, an ASUS laptop and a knockoff tablet from Sri Lanka. So....which one is infected?" This took Thick Accent aback. His ex-girlfriend, Piyumi St. John (her grandfather Waldwick St. John was an English soldier), emigrated to India from Sri Lanka. Piyumi was a knockdown babe but, as her own father put it, "....as empty as a hollowed out pumpkin." For his part Thick Accent was just fine with a hollowed out pumpkin of a babe girlfriend, but she left for England to live with her relatives in the English midlands ".....where they don't let cows crap on the sidewalks." Then Thick Accent's mind slowly returned from Piyumi and her phobia about cows crapping on sidewalks to the task at hand.

"Your personal computer," Thick Accent said after first double checking the script. "Your personal computer is infected. Open it up, please."

"What do you mean, personal computer?" Elvis answered. "I don't have any impersonal computers. All my computers are personal." This required a longer pause while Thick Accent again referred to his script. He had to admit he was somewhat flummoxed, but he was not about to ask that snagglenuts Deepak Chakraboty for help. He'd never hear the end of it. Then he found the answer in a footnote someone had penciled in at the bottom of the script. Aha! He wasn't the first caller to encounter the personal/impersonal multiple computer conundrum. Though his own choice of words on the subject would have relied with considerable more emphasis on explicit epithets in at least two languages.

"Then open up the one you use the most," Thick Accent said with a definite note of triumph in his voice. "That will be the personal computer we are talking about."

Not that it made any real difference to Thick Accent--his actual name was Charlie Brown Biswas, his parents having been big fans of the Indian version of Peanuts comic strip around the time Charlie Brown Biswas made his initial appearance on Planet Earth. Which caused Charlie Brown Biswas considerable heartburn until he finally realized he had a unique name that often got the attention of comely maidens of the more or less available variety. In Charlie Brown's case, unfortunately, quite a bit more of the less than of the more, Piyumi St. John being the very notable--and, truth be told, almost only--exception.

Anyhow, the whole point of this exercise was to gain access to the personal information on Elvis' computer, with special emphasis on credit card and bank account information and his email address book. Plus, in this particular case, some potentially very interesting videos. It nothing else they could use Elvis' infected computer as a hijacked spamming drone. Charlie Brown did this all day long, ten hours a day, six days a week, and made the company buckets of money in a variety of currencies, all convertible at favorable rates of exchange at their friendly local bank. Which the company also owned. Though not many of the bucks he made flowed back downhill to Charlie Brown Biswas's level. But it was a living and beat the hell out of shoveling animal dung like his father and grandfather did in the provincial governor's private zoo where the animals ate better than the untouchables among the zoo employees in the new democratic and independent India. His father and grandfather, however, not being untouchables, ate meat once a month and a slice of somewhat over the hill goat cheese almost every week. Though they sure as hell wouldn't touch it if untouchables touched the communal goat cheese plate before any of the touchables touched it first.

"OK." Charlie Brown Biswas said. "Open up the one you use the most."

"I use them all," Elvis replied. "My tablet while I'm out for its easy portability, my laptop when I relax on the couch or by the pool when I ogle the local babes in their really skimpy bikinis and pretend to surf the internet, and the desktop to edit my videos." Though skimpy bikinis did grab his momentary interest, the latter nailed Charlie Brown Biswas's attention but good. Videos! The desktop!

"Let's try the desktop first," he said with a little extra something in his tone as he slyly reached into his desk to pull out a one terabyte backup drive that might come in real handy could be grab some of this flubnick American's secret bathroom videos.

"You got it," Elvis said as he noisily sat back down on the straight back chair next to the land line telephone's usual place of honor on a kitchen counter. Hopefully giving the impression that he had just sat down to his desktop computer. A computer which was purely fictional, Elvis having only one functional computer, an ASUS laptop, plus a venerable borderline functional Toshiba laptop for an emergency backup.

"You got it?" Mr. Thick Accent replied. "You said 'you got it'. Got what? What did you get?" Continued Mr. Thick Accent, his knowledge of the language not quite up to grasping the various shadings of colloquial English.

"I'm almost at the desktop now," Elvis answered, moving on, figuring that Mr. Thick Accent was not quite a fluent English speaker. Not like his neighbor PHD Pennington Matchwood Garcia-Hernandez, who proudly and, in Elvis' opinion, pretty goddamned pompously, proclaimed he knew at least three synonyms and four antonyms for every single word in the English, Spanish and Aztec languages.

"Aztec! How could you know Aztec?" Elvis said with no little suspicion on the occasion of Bad Penny's linguistic prowess pronunciamento. "It wasn't a written language."

"Tape recorders," Bad Penny shot back. "Field recordings."

"Field recordings! Field recordings, you say! From the 16th Century! That is pure......"  
"Of their linguistic descendants," Bad Penny interrupted. "Who preserved the language in its pure form by handing it down through the generations in a small select company of hereditary tribal linguistic priests."

"You're making that up!" Elvis declaimed with no little vehemence. "You're at it again, Bad Penny. Your favorite pastime. Rewriting history to fit in with your fantasies." Silence for a long moment.

"OK, Elvis. Just skip the Aztec part. Would you settle for just English and Spanish?"

To which Elvis could only emit an unfriendly glare of squinty displeasure.

Anyhow, Elvis was sitting at his imaginary desktop computer awaiting further instructions from Mr. Thick Accent, Charlie Brown Biswas. Charlie Brown's kidhood nickname was often shortened to just CB, causing the occasional casual acquaintance to be taken aback when they heard the kid called CB. "Some parents just don't have a fucking clue," (loosely translated from the original Hindi) said one passing acquaintance when hearing little Charlie Brown referred to as CB. "Sticking the kid with an old fashioned trendy name like CB. They might as well have named him Neanderthal. No ones uses Citizens Band radio anymore."

"Are you at your desktop now?" CB Thick Accent said to Elvis.

"Yep."

"Did you turn it on?"

"Not yet." A slight irritation in CB's voice.

"Then turn it on, please."

"Won't that release the virus?" A little more irritation in CB's tone.

"The virus had already been released. We have to find it and disable it."

"Are you sure about this?"

"Yes. I am sure about this?"

"Could this virus be dangerous?"

"Dangerous? How?"

"Like if it escapes. You know. Like the bird flu or ebola or something like that." Mr. Thick Accent tried to hide the sound of his teeth grinding together.

"What was that sound?" Elvis said, suspicious. "Was that your teeth grinding together?"

"No, sir," Mr. Thick Accent replied. "It was my stomach. I haven't had lunch yet."

"Oh," Elvis said, unconvinced. So you say it is OK to turn on the computer? The virus can't escape?"

"It's not that kind of virus," Mr. Grinding Teeth Thick Accent responded. "It's not a germ."

"OK." Elvis said, sounding unsure. "Here goes." While CB waited, somewhat impatiently, Elvis acted as though he was having trouble turning on the computer. "Hey! Open up, buster! We're not playing games here. Turn on. Now! Damnit! Now!" Then Elvis knocked a pan off the kitchen counter, stomped his feet loudly on the floor and screamed.

"Oh, my God. The computer. It's......it's...... _growing_. Something is coming out of it....oh, God, it's the virus. The virus! It's alive. And it's.......its'.....oh, God, no. No. NO. NO!....."

Then Elvis disconnected the land line and went back to watching the Netflix SNL Fake Obama routine.

For a long time Charlie Brown Biswas stared at his own computer. He kept shaking his head and muttering. So much so that Deepak 'Nunchucks' Chakraboty noticed and stomped over to raise hell with him. To no avail. Much to Deepak's astonishment nothing, not even his reinforced cotton nunchucks, would deflect CB's riveted attention on his computer screen.

That same evening Charlie Brown Biswas applied for a job at the private zoo where his father and grandfather worked shoveling animal dung.

"A man," he told his befuddled father and grandfather, "has to have his priorities." Said statement not going very far to clear up the elder generations' befuddlement. But they still thought it was a wonderful genetic event to have all the family together again. At least they could shovel dung in syncopated unison and make up verses about the many ways they'd like to do in their upper class Brahma caste boss and his snooty relatives.

Feeding them to salt water crocodiles being their number one choice.

### Birds

"Most of the officers at the Arizona ports will do what we call working the line." These were the words of personnel specialist Dublier "Dooby" Arzola in his orientation three years earlier when Elvis' bunch of new FLETC grads arrived at the Arizona CBP office in Tucson. "This does not," he continued, for some reason staring directly at Elvis--who Dublier had not yet had the dubious pleasure of meeting, "have zilch in common with either trying to hit on a hot dancer at a line dance or selling scalped tickets to the queue outside the Arizona Cardinals football stadium." This brought snickers from the newbies and the beginning of a genuine admiration from Elvis. If this guy could handle being stuck in an office and still have a sense of humor, he must be OK, Elvis thought. And he was. OK. An OF--Office Fuck--but still OK.

"The line in this instance," Dooby continued, "being either of car or pedestrian lanes or the queues in the offices awaiting resolution of various immigration issues. Pedestrians that need more attention are dealt with just behind the pedestrian entry lanes or in the offices. The car lanes are different. Behind the entry points for the car lanes is marked area where cars are searched for various reasons, mostly to do with contraband. It is called secondary. And that, folks," Dooby concluded, "is where you will receive your CBP baptism of fire." And so it would be.

Three years of CBP baptismal fire later Elvis was a senior inspector on the district's mobile Enforcement Team. The Enforcement--ET--Team had a variety of missions, but on quiet days often lurked back in CBP ground zero. The secondary lot. Where they selected passing cars they wanted to check out and sometimes helped out the shift's secondary lot inspectors when they were swamped or understaffed.

Like now.

Pancho, Elvis' buddy and fellow officer on the ET Team, sauntered into the secondary lot as he came out of the men's restroom. He absent mindedly whistled and then segued into softly mouthing the words of one of his favorite Los Lobos tunes.

In ancient times  
To a place so far away

_Across the land  
Where the earth was  
_That was as far as he got.

" _Pancho_!" Elvis hollered. " _Watch out_!" Pancho's former military situational awareness roared back to life. Quicker than Fast Eddie, the Indian casino black jack dealer, could shuffle a deck of stiff new cards, he dove out of the way. A Nissan Altima came barreling into secondary and just missed adding Pancho's bodily fluids to the various stains on the blotchy secondary blacktop.

Pancho didn't exactly greet this sudden intrusion into the progression of his workday with a whole lot of detachment. He rolled over, leaped to his feet and was looking none too happy as he angrily brushed the bits of pavement grime off his trousers and lasered a baleful Pancho eye at the driver of the Nissan. Who, he was about to find out, was a balding and tubby middle aged white guy with bad breath and an even worse attitude.

"What is with you frickin' border jerks hassling me!" The balding and tubby middle aged white guy, whose name was Milo Rathbone, said with bared bad breath teeth in a hostile voice. "You got nothin' better to do than harass an honest law abiding citizen?" Elvis, seeing the steam rising off the top of Pancho's head, figured he better step in quick before Pancho really lost it and relocated the smart assed tubby white guy's head to somewhere south of his belt.

"Well, Mr. honest law abiding citizen," Elvis said as he walked up to the side of the Altima. "You ignored the signs warning you to go slow and instead came roaring into secondary and almost ran over a federal officer." He paused and bent down to stare into Milo Rathbone's doubled chinned face. "I think we could probably come up a with a few misdemeanor charges out of that." Another short pause, for effect. "Maybe even a felony or two. "Or," Elvis added," you might prefer to have a more cooperative attitude."

"Bully! Border bully!" Came a not at all intimidated female voice from the passenger's side of the Camry. It was Ethyl, Mrs. Rathbone, the tubby middle aged wife of Milo. But not a tubby middle aged white, like Milo. Ethyl was a tubby middle aged black with skin the color of Elvis' boots. When he polished them, that is. Which was not as often as the more hidebound supervisors thought he should. Which might have been why he didn't polish them as much as they thought he should.

"A narrow mind," he often told the long suffering Pancho, "needs the occasional stimulus to unnarrow."

"Unnarrow?" Pancho snorted. "That isn't even a word."

"It is now," Elvis said. To which Pancho, having been down this road way too many times, knew the best thing to do was to change the subject. In this case, the number one most used phrase between law enforcements--

"Let's go get a donut."

Anyhow, back to the tubby middle aged black woman with the fuming attitude.

"Why are you peckerwoods jerking with my man! He has done nothing." Elvis stopped to give it a quick mulling over. What was this all about? Why did the car come barreling into secondary in the first place? Then he noticed the referral slip the primary officer had stuck under the windshield wiper. He reached over, plucked it from the wiper's clutches and read what the primary officer had to say.  
_Bird cage in the trunk._

Jeez! Just what they needed. They're looking for sizeable loads of dope and in comes a bird cage instead. Elvis handed the slip to Pancho, who also gave it a quick look. Both men nodded their heads in recognition. Bird cages weren't exactly a rarity on the Mexican border. Maybe not as common as breakfast burritos or leaky mufflers, but still hardly uncommon. Many was the time when they'd seen a bird cage in a vehicle. A cage. No bird. Birds were not admissible to the U.S. without first going through a complicated bureaucratic process and quarantine period. Which was a big pain in the ass mostly more trouble than it was worth. Bestirring many a bird lover to take a detour around the law. Birdless bird cages on the border usually meant one thing. The bird cage owner was trying to sneak a bird into the U.S. to avoid the time and expense of a quarantine or the high prices of birds at U.S. pet stores. Which therefore meant that likely somewhere in the vehicle or on the people in it there was a hidden bird.

Bird smugglers. Not exactly something that fired up either Elvis or Pancho. They were looking for drugs. And fugitives. And deported felons. But birds? Bird smugglers were not exactly up the ET--Enforcement Team--inspectional alley. They left that kind of stuff for the regular line inspectors. Except for rare occasions.

Like when a bird smuggler tried to run over Pancho and scatter Pancho bits all over the secondary lot.

Elvis began the way he was supposed to. By the book. Which was not necessarily typical Elvis behavior, Elvis a good distance from a by the book kind of guy both on and off the job. Don't get Elvis wrong about books. Not that Elvis wasn't a reader. He was an avid reader. He was big into history and science fiction and often dreamed in sci fi, which could make for some interesting dreams. Especially when Sci Fi and History did a dream combo and out came stuff like Wyatt Earp sheriffing the Star Ship Tombstone. But when it came to rules and regulations and that kind of by the book stuff, Elvis was definitely lacking in enthusiasm. But, somewhat uncharacteristically, he went by the book this time and repeated the questions the primary officer had asked the Tubby Twins before sending them to secondary for further inspection.

"What are you bringing from Mexico?" Elvis asked, then proceeded to reel off the litany of don'ts. No pork, no soil, no animals, no guns or ammunition, money over 10,000 bucks, and so on. Elvis ending the border litany with "are you bringing any birds from Mexico?"

Mr. Tubby did a color change from blanched to red-faced.

"I told that nitwit back at the entry booth that I wasn't bringing anything from Mexico." A hard glare at Elvis. " _Including_ birds!"

"That is correct then, sir?" Elvis continued. "No birds." Now it was Mrs. Tubby's turn to do a face change, going from her usual grayish black to the angry roseate of her tubby hubby.

"No birds, you border knockwurst." She snapped. "Now we have to be on our way. I have a doctor's appointment that I can't be late for." She turned to her husband. "Milo, start up the car and put it in gear. We have to leave right now." Elvis deftly reached inside the Toyota over Mr. Tubby's protruding belly and jerked the keys out of the ignition. Which earned him an even more intense glare from Mrs. Tubby, though Mr. Tubby was caught by surprise and didn't immediately react.

"Didn't you hear me, buster," she snarled. "I have a doctor's appointment. Are you looking for a law suit? How about unlawful detention? Abuse of authority? Reckless endangerment of a sick person?" Mr. Tubby had by now recovered and, if anything, his face was even redder than before.

"I want to see your supervisor. And _now_!"

"OK," Elvis said. "You got it." Both Mr. and Mrs. Tubby looked confused when nothing happened.

" _Well_ ," Mrs. Tubby finally said in an angry voice. " _Where_ is the supervisor?"

"Right here," Elvis said, tapping on his chest. "You're seeing him. I _am_ the supervisor."

"Oh, bullshit!" Snarked Mr. Tubby. "I know the border well enough to know that there is always a supervisor in your office." Elvis leaned towards the irate tubby pair.

"Pancho and I are an independent team. We are our own supervisors. So you are talking to the supervisors right now." He nodded at Pancho, who nodded back. "Now please get out of the car while we perform an inspection." Mr. and Mrs. Tubby were in a dilemma. Once they had been referred to secondary by that suspicious jerk manning the entry booth, they figured the best defense was a vigorous offense. They'd carry on so much and be such a big pain in the ass that the secondary officers couldn't get rid of them quick enough. Which might work. Then, again it might not.

And right now the smart money was betting on the might not.

"I refuse to get out of the car," Mrs. Tubby said firmly. "This is America, you fascist thugs. You can't treat citizens like this." Pancho pointed at the signs posted in secondary that quoted the relevant laws about border inspection. Which basically said anybody and anything crossing the border could be searched. And failure to cooperate could lead to the use of force and possible prosecution. It didn't happen often, but it did sometimes happen, and it was invariably one big circle jerk no sane officer wanted to experience more than once. And the not so sane ones who got into a series of confrontations with travelers usually found themselves suddenly transferred someplace like the border ports of Frozen Solid, Montana or Permafrost, Alaska.

"So what?" Mrs. Tubby snapped after reading the signs. "You're gonna grab a woman and jerk her out of a car? In these women's rights times stuff like that'll get you fired, bucko. You'll get your fifteen minutes of fame, bully boy, but sure as hell not in a way you'd want." Elvis leaned in closer and enunciated it very clearly.

"Judy 'Monster Woman' Lafarge is on duty here, today, lady. She is a very large member of the female species who would like nothing better than to jerk a difficult and uncooperative woman out of a car." He leaned closer. "And probably not very gently."

While Pancho was trying not to snicker at Elvis' extemporaneous invention of Judy 'Monster Woman' Lafarge, the only woman actually on duty that day being petite hundred pounds dripping wet Luanne Wong-Garcia, Mr. and Mrs. Tubby very grumpily and reluctantly climbed out of their Toyota. They stood as rigidly still as the metal poles holding up the secondary lot's canopy and glared as Elvis and Pancho began to search the car. Pancho opened the trunk, reached in and pulled out a bird cage.

"No birds?" He said to the Tubby Twins? "So why do you need a bird cage?"

"For decoration," said Mrs. Tubby at exactly the same moment as her husband blurted out "for the birds we have at home." Both of whom promptly blushed in a variety of colors at their major tactical error.

"Decorative birds at home," Elvis said, trying to keep a straight face. "Must be a new wrinkle on home design we're not aware of." He looked at Pancho. "Right, Pancho?"

"Absolutely." Pancho said. "Being border fascists and ruffians we're not really up on the latest in styles, since we're way too busy being fascist ruffians to find the time to check stuff like that out."

By now Elvis and Pancho were as sure as they were that George W. Bush had at least one pair of cowboy boots that they were going to find creatures of the avian persuasion somewhere in the Toyota. Elvis climbed into the front seat of the Toyota and opened the glove box. Inside it was a sock. A lumpy sock. A sock that looked like it had something inside it. He peeked inside. Yep. A lovebird. He climbed out of the Toyota and held up the sock to the Rathbone Tubby Twins.

"Is this one of the birds you don't have?" No comment from either of them. "Are there any other birds you don't have?" Mr. Tubby broke the familial silence.

"No, officer," he said, trying to sound meek and cooperative. I apologize. We did have a bird. Just that one." Elvis believed that as much as he believed that bald eagles sometimes wore toupees. He climbed back into the Toyota and searched some more. In the console between the seats he found another sock. And, snuggled inside, another lovebird. Again he climbed out of the Toyota and held up the bird filled sock to the Tubby Twins.

"OK. You're just making things worse by lying. Any more birds? The truth." Mrs. Tubby, Ethyl, broke her silence. But not meekly.

"No, you border jerk. That's it. I sure hope you're happy. We're just a couple of poor people who can't afford the high prices of love birds in the pet stores. Big frickin' deal. That what they pay you Nazis the big bucks for? Busting ordinary people like us?"

Pancho's neck abruptly swiveled to look at Elvis.

"Big bucks? You seen any of those big bucks, Officer Mahoney? I know I sure haven't."

"Not if she is referring to money. I have however seen some pretty large mule deer bucks on the way in to work from time to time. If that is what the lady means."

"Have your fun, Officer Unfriendly," Mrs. Tubby said in a nasty tone. "You won't be laughing when the racial discrimination complaint is filed against you." This was not the first time that Elvis, or Pancho, or any other officer who spent any time at a border port hadn't heard before. Maybe a great big bunch of befores at busy airport CBP places like JFK or Dulles.

"What exactly does racial discrimination have to do with you smuggling birds?" Elvis said, curious about what kind of off the wall explanation she would come up with.

"You obviously singled us out because we're black," she shot back. Elvis thought, first of all, there was no we in black. Mr. Tubby was as white as Betty Crocker premium grade bleached flour. Elvis looked at the referral slip again. Bobby Washington was the officer who'd referred the Toyota from the primary booth. And Bobby Washington was as black as a nectar feeding bat on a moonless night.

"The guy who sent you back here is a black guy," Elvis said. "He's the one who singled you out, not us." He looked at her curiously. "How do you get racial discrimination out of that?" This temporarily perplexed Ethyl. Then she hit on an answer. Though she hadn't quite thought it through. Which unfortunately only dawned on her after the words escaped her lips and hung in the air, creating no little astonishment all around. She turned to point at Mr. Tubby.

"The black guy sent us to secondary because my husband Milo is white."

That was too much for Elvis. He couldn't help but chuckle. Which made the Tubby Twins none any too happy. Mr. spoke first.

"OK. Have your low minded fun. But get this over with so we can be on our way." A miffed short pause. "My wife does have that doctor's appointment. An _important_ doctor's appointment."

Elvis' first thought was, what is the name of this important doctor? Pancho was thinking it had to be a psychotherapist and she sure as hell needed it. But neither said anything, though they did acknowledge their mutual thoughts with eye contact and a slight raising of the eyebrows. The short form translation of which would be fruitcake.

Just then the second bird wiggled out of the sock in Elvis' hand and beat its wings out of there. To the north.  
"Look!" Pancho said in mock excitement. "An illegal alien! Its a port runner. Heading north."

"More like a port flyer than a port runner," Elvis said, amused but also a little irritated with himself for not holding on tighter to the bird.

"Hah!" Blurted out Mr. Tubby. Now it was his turn to not quite think things through. "There goes the evidence! You can't do anything to us!" Pancho's grin was so wide his mouth looked like a set of piano keys (without the black ones) as he held up the first birded sock Elvis had discovered and handed to him while Elvis continued to search the Toyota.

"Better think twice on that one, buddy." Pancho said through his grin. Mr. Tubby instantly retreated back to his sullen silence.

Elvis searched the rest of the Toyota and found no more birds.

"OK," he said to the Tubby Twins. "That's it. No more birds?"

"No more birds," said Mr. Tubby.

"Absolutely," Mrs. Tubby added. "No more birds."

Elvis and Pancho then escorted the Rathbones into the secondary office where they would write up the seizure paperwork and figure out what the fine would be. And it would be a relative whopper, considering the aggravating circumstances. As they were filling out the seizure forms Elvis noticed Mrs. Rathbone. Well, not actually Mrs. Rathbone herself. Her purse. The purse caught his eye. She had the purse pulled so tightly against her chest that a toothpick wouldn't be able to slip in the miniscule gap between Ethyl and her purse. Elvis started to get suspicious.

"Mrs. Rathbone," Elvis said in a voice that matched his suspicion. "Is that a real valuable purse?" Ethyl's eyes flashed.

"Not really," she said in an uneasy voice. "Just a cheapie. I got it for five bucks at Lucky Lorraine's Good Deal Thrift Shop on Oracle Avenue in Tucson. Like I said before. We're poor folks and can't afford a lot of things." Were Ethyl a female Pinocchio her nose would have instantly burgeoned into the size of a telephone pole in a residential neighborhood in Topeka. The Rathbones had just the previous week returned from a pricey ten day Mediterranean cruise where both got a dose of salmonella from the cruise ship's potato salad and were in the process of demanding their money back, along with adequate compensation for their pain and suffering.

"Then how come you're holding it so tightly?" Elvis said. "Something valuable inside?"

"Nothing like that," Ethyl answered, her voice almost a stutter. "Just personal stuff. You know, lady things. You wouldn't be interested." But Elvis was interested.

"Let me see your purse, please," Elvis said. Ethyl's eyes flared.

"See my purse? Why?" Elvis moved closer to her.

"I need to see what is inside it," he said.

"My purse is personal and you have no right to look in it," she said in a voice that tried to be firm but came out sounding definitely on the light side of firm.

"But I _do_ have that right," Elvis replied. "Now please hand me the purse."

"No!" Ethyl said in a voice that was almost a shriek. "It is personal!" Elvis was thinking there was all kinds of personal stuff that people didn't want anyone else to see. Like illegal drugs, naughty pictures, maybe sex toys or an undeclared purchase of some kind. But in this case Elvis was more specific.

"Is there a bird in your purse?" He said.

"Absolutely not," Ethyl shot back, pulling the purse even tighter to her chest.

"Let me see the purse, Mrs. Rathbone," Elvis insisted.

"No!" She replied. Elvis reached over and grabbed the purse. Ethyl resisted and tried to hang on. Elvis was stronger. He wrenched the purse from her hands. Unfortunately, Ethyl was pulling so determinedly on the purse that when Elvis jerked it from her hands she toppled over backwards, her skirt riding up over her thighs and revealing far more than anyone in the room cared to see.

"There it is!" Milo yelled out. "Police brutality. Assault. Assault with intent to commit bodily harm. You're toast, beanpole. Toast!" Pancho shot back at him.

"Your wife was violently resisting a reasonable law enforcement command and caused her own downfall."

"Caused her own downfall," Elvis repeated. "Hey, Pancho, that's pretty clever. Considering."

"I do my best." Pancho answered.

"You two are a pair of fucking imbeciles," Ethyl muttered as she struggled to her feet. "Hopeless fucking imbeciles. Now give me my purse back. There's private stuff in there." She reached over to grab the purse again but Pancho stepped between her and Elvis.

"Go ahead, Elvis. Look inside. What do you wanna bet there isn't another cute little birdie in there." Elvis opened up the purse and looked inside. He was standing in poor light and the purse had a dark lining.

"I can't really see," he said. "Looks like something is moving, though." Elvis reached into the purse with his free hand. Not, as it soon turned out, such a hot idea.

"Jesus!" He yelled out. "The frickin' bird has my finger!" He reached in with the other hand to grab the bird and the purse fell helplessly to the floor. Pancho moved over to look. Elvis had the bird by one hand. The bird had Elvis' finger in his other hand. If Elvis let the bird go to pry his finger loose, the bird would get free. And no one wanted to be chasing a bird around the inside of the secondary office. Especially with video cameras recording it. "Pancho," Elvis said. "Quick. Grab the bird. I need a hand here." Pancho, however, was in no shape to help. As soon as he looked in the purse and saw the parrot attached to Elvis' middle finger, he couldn't control his hilarity. And when the purse tumbled onto the floor and Elvis and the bird were revealed in a definite standoff, Pancho grabbed his head in both hands and began to guffaw, sounding to Elvis like an idling Suzuki 650cc motorcycle.

"Pancho, goddamnit! This is not the time." Pancho grabbed his sides and groaned between guffaws as he fell back against a wall and doubled over in laughter.

"Actually, I couldn't think of a better time, Elvis," he managed to blurt out between guffaws. The Tubby Twins, meanwhile, were having their best moments of the day, watching the goddamn government bully and the parrot in a wrestling match. Milo was wishing the parrot knew judo and would flip Elvis onto his red-headed beanpole back.

"Bite 'im, birdie!" Ethyl snapped. "Bite the goddamn fascist's finger off."

"And the rest of his hand while you're at it," Milo chimed in with no little Rathbone gusto.

But it was, as the old saying goes, a Pyrrhic victory for the Rathbones. Which hit them with the force of a force five straight line wind gust on a pancake flat Nebraska cornfield a few minutes later when they saw their fine.

Pancho did eventually calm down enough to help Elvis get his finger free from the clutches of Ethyl's parrot. Which was immediately plunked ungently into a cage in the agricultural officer's room. Elvis then very slowly turned to look at the woman with the birdless purse. The distilled spirit of retribution had taken over the central control board in his Elvis inner works. It was as plain on his face as the smile was on DeWayne Slook's face the previous week when he won the Arizona lottery. Which was all the more amazing to DeWayne, since he was on edge of sliding into a blackout from too many tequila shots at Jose's Upscale (sic) Bistro and couldn't remember even buying the ticket.

Ethyl's recent jubilation faded away like a wan wintertime Seattle sunset. Her day was about to go from rotten to crummy to flat out shitty. Darn near as bad as getting salmonella from the potato salad on that pricey ten day Mediterranean cruise.

She did, however, get her purse back.

### Chapter 7

### Operation Slam Door

The Department of Statistical Analysis has used mathematical computer modeling to identify probable load cars entering the United States through the southwestern ports of entry. The computer systems on the border have been reprogrammed to pinpoint those suspect vehicles as they enter the country. It is mandatory that all these vehicles be referred to secondary for an intensive inspection. No exceptions.

The CBP officers at Nogales stared in disgust and astonishment at the above announcement in their CBP emails and posted prominently on the message boards. A computer program that would usurp their inspectional functions?

Which meant that selectivity, the heart and soul of a border officer, the ability to sift through the deluge of cars and people and sniff out the skunks and the lemons, was ripped out of them with the finality of a heretic drawn and quartered in the misty Ye Goode Olde Days in jolly medieval England.

"We were lobotomized and robotized and hurled onto the dung heap of the irrelevant in the soulless and amoral modern world of high tech." At least that was the way that one of the more dramatic among the officers, Mary Beth Lungless, a theater major in college who had decided making a decent living as a CBP officer beat the hell out of being a starving wannabe actor, put it. Elvis put it somewhat more succinctly.

"Man, that sucks."

Which it did. For the line officers. And then for the ET officers, too, when there were so many cars sent to secondary that the ET teams had to drop what they were doing and help.

Maribelle Osvalde was pushing seventy and it wasn't moving much. She'd raised five kids, who had all managed to stay out of jail most of the time, some of them even going so far as to hold down regular jobs, unlike their deadbeat father who had a good old time swapping tales with his compadres in the local cantinas but made zilch for income. He was however a pretty good cook and a handy man in the bedroom, so Maribelle stuck with him until he met his end when he got sloshed one rainy night, fell into an open ditch, was swept away in a Nogales drainage tunnel under the border into the United States and disappeared. Maribelle suspected that he had actually survived and gone north to Las Vegas, but she never was able to prove it, despite the occasional unsigned post cards from Las Vegas and Reno showing sexy show girls in skimpy outfits and the heads of various ungulates on western-styled saloon walls.

Maribelle worked as a clerk and a maid all her adult life and still clerked part time at her nephew Benno's Mercado Mas Bueno on the Arizona side of Nogales. A job where her penurious jerk nephew wouldn't pay her a penny above minimum wage, pointing out to Maribelle that she was getting old and slow and he could hire a much faster younger person for the same money. To which Maribelle replied, in a surprisingly salty border Spanish, good luck with finding one who can read and write and count beyond twenty one, which was the age where they could legally drink and consequently find more lucrative employment in one of the many local bars and lounges, not to mention the perennially packed Indian casino just up the highway. To which Benno had absolutely nothing to say, sulking as he was over two of his employees that very week screeching into their 21st birthdays and forthwith plopping their resignations--way too forcefully in Benno's mind--on his cluttered desk.

Maribelle drove across the border several times a week to visit her aged but still spry nonagenarian mother in Mexican Nogales. She was on her way back when she pulled up to the entry lane on Grand Avenue in the old downtown of Nogales. Ferla Yanquishi, a fairly new and, by general coworker acclimation, largely inept CBP officer, was womaning the entry booth.

As Maribelle pulled up to the entry booth the automatic license plate reader positioned on the lane registered her license plate number and blitzed it to the computer monitor in the booth–a booth which Elvis proclaimed to anyone who would listen "....looked like a Porta-Potty with windows." Which in fact, it did. The license plate reader was undeniably efficient, especially compared to the former system of manually inputting the license plate numbers into the kiosk computer. The readers were fast--just a touch faster than Ferla when her shift was over and she lit out for home and another evening of watching dancing and singing competitions on her brand new high definition Bamboo brand Chinese HD digital television set. Ferla having far preferred a career in song or dance to thumping fenders on the Mexican border, but unfortunately being both on the clumsy side and partially tone death and also almost completely without natural talent. She could, however, whistle largely on key.

The result on the plate number? Operation Slam Door. Mandatory secondary referral.

Maribelle pulled up expectantly to Ferla's booth, assuming that, as had happened bunches of times in the past, she would be waved on through. She was after all a gray haired grandmother who only occasionally drank to excess and never missed Sunday mass or a holy day, paid her taxes without too much fudging on the return and dutifully voted in every election, though as often as not she would write in a candidate's name taken from a TV soap opera. Which was always good for a snicker, since Maribelle had a somewhat tilted sense of humor as well as being a hard core cynic about politics and politicians. But there was no humor in her face when Ferla plunked an inspection cone on Maribelle's old Pontiac's car hood and stuck an OSD–Operation Slam Door–referral slip in her windshield. She stared at Ferla with a mixture of irritation and surprise.

"Que passe, Chica?" Said Maribelle. What's going on? To which Ferla replied with an index finger rigidly pointed towards the secondary lot.

"A la Secondaria," she said, punctuating the rigidly pointing finger with a stern and firm mien. Maribelle rebroadcast her surprised irritated expression.

Ferla returned the look with an impassive expression. Ferla was actually adept at a variety of expressions, having spent many an hour–a personal sacrifice, since she would have rather have spent the time watching song and dance competitions on her new Bamboo brand Chinese HD digital TV–practicing expressions in the three way mirror in her well lit double sink apartment bathroom. Ferla was convinced that knowing the right expressions to use in different situations was one of the keys to being a successful inspector. The all purpose impassive expression number one on the expressions list.

"That's good, Ferla, honey," she said as she once again looked at herself in the three way mirror in her well lit double sink apartment bathroom, grabbing a side view as well as a frontal one. "Just turn your lips up a little more. More. OK. That's good." Her thespian leanings then adding with appropriate theatricality.

"It's a wrap."

Which was exactly the well practiced expression on Ferla's face at that primary lane moment.

"You're sending me to secondary?" Maribelle said in a voice tinged with the same mixture of surprise and irritation. "An old lady like me?" Ferla, besides being the mistress of many an apt expression, was also quick with her tongue. Quick. But often only a very, very distant second to the efficacy of her expressions, her shoot from the hip comments more often that not a verbal iteration of a Hail Mary pass by the losing team in the last ten seconds of a football game. "Lucretia Borgia was an old woman," Ferla shot back, "when she poisoned at least thirteen people in Italy. Plus maybe one or two in Switzerland." To which Maribelle said.

_"What?"_ Ferla pointed again at the secondary lot with a carefully manicured index finger.

"Please drive to the secondary inspection area," Ferla said. "An officer there will take care of you." Maribelle, not knowing what else to do, and being pretty much speechless and still trying to figure out who the fuck Lucretia Borgia was and what that had to do with her, hit the accelerator a bit too hard out of irritation. And what the hell, didn't an old lady who'd made it through nearly a half century of putting up with a jerk husband and a bunch of doofus kids have the right to a little righteous indignation now and then? Maribelle, and every single one of her friends in her Nogales Divorced, Widowed and Otherwise Single Ladies Club, sure thought so. The old Pontiac lurched forward towards the secondary inspection area less than a hundred feet ahead, nearly running over Pepito Diosthenes, an employee of Clean Folk, Inc., a company which contracted with the government to clean up the god awful mess the border officers and the traveling public managed to daily create at the ports.

Pepito was manning a broom in secondary when Maribelle came whistling in and grazed his right thigh, raising a slight "but _very_ painful" welt on it. Pepito grabbed his leg and plunged to the ground, moaning and groaning.

" _Oh, my God._ My leg! It's broken." Which, it quickly turned out, was an overstatement of considerable magnitude. There was, however, as Pepito's deposition would later claim, "a lot of interior pain and soft tissue damage that doesn't show on the surface of the wounded leg." Adding. "Or in the X-rays."

Pepito promptly filled out the paperwork for his "very serious and debilitating on the job injury" for his workman's comp claim and also retained a shady Tucson personal injury lawyer, Esteban 'No Quarter' de Gaulle. Pepito, who considered himself an enterprising optimist, spent the following evening online looking into purchasing a house in one of Tucson's better gated communities on the scenic mountain fringed tony north side of town.

Though having learned her lesson and being careful to lightly touch the accelerator and thereby avoid running into Pepito or anyone else, Maribelle was nevertheless sent to secondary the next three occasions she crossed the border. By which time she had found out who Lucretia Borgia was and was actively researching various poisons and trying to figure out how to slip them into the lunches of the flipswitch border officers like Ferla.

And not just Maribelle. It was repeated hundred and thousands of times all along the Mexican border at the various U.S. ports of entry. Folks were pissed. _Really_ pissed. It seemed that there was one glitch in the Operation Slam Door programming. One really Big glitch. There was no way to take a vehicle off the lookout list. So each time it came through it was sent to secondary. Again. And again. And again. Which set Mexican and American relations so far back Elvis half expected the Mexican Army to start shelling the Port of Nogales as the opening of Act II of the Mexican-American War.

### Father O'Rourke

Elvis was glumly hanging out in the secondary lot at Grand Avenue in Nogales, looking with no great enthusiasm at the view in the immediate vicinity. Dingy concrete pillars, oil stained blacktop, metal security fencing and a steady stream of carbon monoxide belching cars and pickups. He turned to his fellow ET buddy, Native American Cletus WW AKA 'War Whoop' Magellen.

"Sometimes I feel like a guard at a KGB prison," he said. "One built on a highway."

"Broke up with Ruby again, did you, Elvis?" WW replied. Elvis shot him a veiled look.

"How did you know that?" He said in a suspicious tone. "Ruby been talkin' to you?"

"Nah, Elvis. You always get like this when you and Ruby split the blanket." Elvis looked at WW with a blank expression.

"Do _what_? Split the blanket? What the heck does that mean? We used to split the rent and split household chores and sometimes even split a ham and cheese sandwich. But we always kept our blankets in one piece." WW rolled his eyes. He never was quite sure when Elvis was serious or putting him on or just plain goddamn clueless. Or, maybe, and this sometimes kept him up at night thinking about it, the puckish factor and the clueless factor were two faces of the same coin. Good God! Elvis didn't even know he was Elvis! But then W.W. would get up from his sleepless bed, slam down a (mostly legally prescribed) Vicodin and a couple of ounces of Jack Daniels and soon have no trouble falling asleep. Not without dreams, however. And some really strange dreams. One of them was a recurring dream like one of the old Looney Tunes Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons. But in WW's dream, which riled his innards even in the middle of deep REM sleep, Elvis was both Wile E. Coyote _and_ the Roadrunner.

"It's an old Indian expression." W.W. continued with Elvis. "Split the blanket. Means breaking up. You know. A parting of ways. Split the blanket. Haven't you heard that saying before?" Elvis stared at him indignantly.

"How was I supposed to hear that? I don't know any old Indians. You're the only Indian I know and you have an electric blanket."

WW was about to say something not particularly friendly when a shiny blue Toyota Corolla came rolling into a secondary parking slot a dozen feet away. The Corolla had a secondary inspection cone on the hood and an Operation Slam Door referral slip shoved under the driver's side windshield wiper. Elvis and WW both took a look at the driver and whatever positive outlook they had for the otherwise sunny day made an abrupt sunset. It was John O'Rourke. Father John O'Rourke. A Catholic priest. An Irish Catholic priest. A Catholic priest who crossed the border daily to say mass in both countries. A multi-lingual Irish Catholic priest with a fiery temper who was reputed to be able to let fly long and colorful curses in First Century AD vernacular Latin when his Irish Catholic priest dander was up. WW did a snappy about face on the heels of his boots and launched himself towards the secondary office.

"Got to hit the head," he said. "See ya later, Elvis." Elvis sneered back at him.

"Coward. Slacker. Priest ducker!" WW wheeled on his boot heels faster than a Russian Soyuz rocket blastoff, his hand grabbing at the holstered handle of his Glock 9mm.

"What did you say!" He spit out. "Priest _what?_ " Elvis caught WW's drift right away. WW's hand on his 9mm a wonderfully effective teaching aid.

"I said priest _ducker,_ " Elvis yelled back, very carefully enunciating ducker. WW relaxed his grip on the 9mm.

"Oh! _"_ He said in considerably moderated tone. "Guilty as charged, Elvis," WW continued. "I had Father O'Rourke in secondary before. Once was enough." And then WW jerked open the door into the secondary office and was gone. Elvis looked around for another officer to deal with the priest. Nope. Not a one. Cowards and slackers and priest duckers. The whole bunch of them. They'd all seen Father O'Rourke, and having heard of his reputation, promptly evaporated from view quicker than a politician's promises after she got elected. Elvis was alone. Father O'Rourke was waiting. And not very patiently. On his best day the Father was not a patient man. This was the fourth day in a row he'd been sent to secondary by Operation Slam Door and a Father O'Rourke light year away being his best day. As Elvis approached him he thought he could see heat rising from O'Rourke's priestly collar.

"Oh, my," Elvis muttered to himself. "This could be bad." He saw the priest's hand clenching and unclenching in a nervous frustration. "Real bad." Elvis walked up to Father O'Rourke's somewhat gracefully aging blue Toyota and tried to look pleasant.

"Good afternoon, Father," he began.

"I'm not your father," the priest snapped back. "I took an oath of celibacy." Elvis' mouth dropped open. It was one of those rare times in his life when he was absolutely, totally, one hundred percent speechless.

"Er....ah...oh...."

"You're no Catholic," the priest snapped. "Don't call me Father. Reverend O'Rourke. But not Father." That got to Elvis. The nerve of this guy, priest or not, impugning his religion. Or lack of, whichever the case might be.

"Not Catholic? Now, how the heck would you know that? You don't even know who I am."

"Oh, yes, I do, _Elvis Mahoney_ ," the priest snapped back. Elvis was momentarily stunned. How would this priest know who he was. Then it hit him. Oh-oh. _Ruby._

"Is Ruby Molina one of your parishioners?" Elvis asked, guardedly. The priest let fly a hot look.

"She is, _indeed,_ " he said in a voice to match his glare. Elvis had a sinking feeling.

"Did she happen to drop by the confessional booth lately?" He said in a somewhat subdued tone. The priest's glare went to white hot.

"That is _privileged_ information, Mr. Mahoney," he hissed back at Elvis. Which told Elvis that without a lingering shadow of a doubt Ruby Molina had been to confession recently flapping her jaws about things that should have been kept private and unsaid to anyone and sure as heck not to a priest. Elvis blanched.

"Does this mean I'm going to hell," Elvis said.

"As yet undetermined," Father O'Rourke replied. "But in your case I wouldn't be betting you'd see Saint Peter any time soon after you make the Big Jump." Elvis stepped back from the Toyota, slowly shaking his head.

"I think we might be getting off on the wrong foot here, Fa....er...Reverend. Let's start over."

Elvis turned around, walked a half dozen steps, turned again and retraced his steps to the somewhat gracefully aging blue Toyota Corolla.

"Good afternoon, Reverend," he said, carefully changing feet.

"What's good about it?" Father O'Rourke hissed. "You guys mess with me every darn time I come through the border." He leaned his head out of the Toyota and lasered Elvis.

"What do you think I'm doing? Smuggling Holy Water? Got a Mexican nun in the trunk I'm sneaking into the US? Or I'm an imposter who beheaded the real Father O'Rourke and am on my way to blow up the Santa Cruz County courthouse?"

"I think you have an overactive imagination, Fa..Fa.....Reverend. Would you please calm down some?"

"Calm down? Calm down!" Father O'Rourke snarled as he slapped the steering wheel of the Toyota so hard the whole car shook. "Calm down when you guys keep treating me like a criminal. Every day. Every da...da.... _darned_ day you send me to secondary. Haven't you figured out by now that I am not a serial killer masquerading as a priest?" That triggered Elvis' emergency response mode. Time to bail out.

"Well, actually, it had occurred to me, Reverend," Elvis began. "Though it is a documented fact that more than one serial killer has masqueraded as a priest. Mostly Catholic, but at least one Anglican and possibly two or three Greek Orthodox and for sure one Russian Orthodox faker with a big black beard that he rarely combed and reeked of borscht and sour cream." He leaned forward and said in a softer voice. "But I am convinced you are not one of them and you are who you say you are. Father John O'Rourke. And a fine priest for sure, even if you're a touch on the gullible side about believing libelous inaccuracies certain among your parishioners might say to you." Elvis took the secondary inspection cone from the Toyota's hood and plucked the referral slip from under the windshield.

"You're free to go, Reverend O'Rourke," he said with a solemn finality. Father O'Rourke stared at him for a moment, somewhat taken aback by Elvis' words, then icicled him with a final glare, put the Toyota in gear and slowly drove out of the secondary lot and out of view. Elvis could hear him muttering as he drove away.

"Very smooth," a voice said from just behind Elvis. It was WW. "Couldn't have done it better myself." Elvis turned to look at WW.

"This Operation Slam Door is a more than just a big pain in the ass. Now I've got a priest pissed off at me and I might go to hell."

WW reached over to slap Elvis good naturedly on the shoulder.

"Heck, Elvis," he said with a chuckle.

"I could have told you that long before that priest showed up."

### Chapter 8

### Thornton X. Kluster Jr.

Thornton X. Kluster Jr., known--not necessarily affectionately--to most as 'Junior', decided he was gonna drop out of Southern California University in Junior's junior year to pursue an independent business career. His choice was not one that would be wildly cheered on by the more straight laced who knew him, the upper middle and upper class folk who made up the family's professional and personal circles. People who preferred the tried and true paths to wealth. The perennially preferred favorite, of course, being inheritance, followed by stock manipulations, insider tips and cleverly hidden fees and surcharges on everything from Fortune 500 shares to wholesale fuel oil prices. But certainly nothing so crass as Junior's choice of livelihood.

"You're going to do _what_ to make a living?" Is what they would have said. Thornton's maternal grandmother who, though she spent most of her working life as a meter maid in Kansas City, was now the self proclaimed and tastefully dressed matriarch of an upper middle class shooting for one percenter California family, would have keeled over in a dead and possibly genuine faint. Would have. Had she known. Or anyone else known. Which, but for a mere half a handful of the one percenter wannabes, they didn't.

But there were plenty outside of those high roller circles who did know. And were all for it. "Whooiee, Junior! You do that sweet thing!" So who were these unhigh roller types? His clients. They might not have been high rollers, and they might not have even been rollers, but they sure were high. Junior's grateful and pleasantly blitzed clients. Many of whom personally were acquainted with at least one rock star groupie. Junior was an entrepreneur of the modern type. No, not a Silicon Valley or some similar techie geek. The other type of modern day entrepreneur. Junior was a dope dealer. And not avocational. Full time. 100 percent. Gonna get rich 100 percent full time.

Thornton T. Kluster's sense of ethnics was heavily influenced by his father, Thornton T. Kluster, Sr., and his mother, Louella Vespucci Kluster. The elder Kluster was a well known criminal defense attorney and therefore well versed in the Five D's of the Defense Attorney. Deception, Dissembling, Deceit and, if all else failed, Downright Dishonesty. When, during his adolescence Junior went through a moralistic phase (which lasted just under seventy two hours), he called out his father on the dishonest ethnics of his career as a defense attorney to some pretty dubious characters, his father answered bluntly.

"Son," Senior began in the sonorous voice he usually saved for the gravest of courtroom pontifications, an idea he'd picked up from watching TV courtroom dramas on his lunch breaks, "the American system of jurisprudence is adversarial. If defense attorneys didn't exist to challenge them, prosecutors could ride roughshod over defendants' civil rights and all of our freedoms would be diminished. It might at times seem distasteful and even unjust, but it is the best system the legal profession has been able to come up with so far." Senior's words, translated by an iconoclastic non-lawyer with the obfuscation factor removed, would have sounded more like this: "Listen, kid. Get your head out. How else are you gonna get a criminal off the hook? You sure ain't gonna do it by telling the truth."

And then Senior laid out the distilled essence of what it was really all about. "Now, do you want the keys to the Jaguar tonight?" A wink. "Or would you rather borrow the old junker your Uncle Jake the social worker drives?"

Junior got the point. Which was further superglued to his forming social persona by his mother, Louella Vespucci Kluster, who was a high dollar real estate agent known in the industry as Louella The Assassin Kluster for her aggressive and ethically challenged and sometimes downright seedy tactics. She was not about to let some bit of trivia, such as a big time termite infestation, a suspected serial killer as a next door neighbor, or a whacked out guy across the street with high tech and very high resolution zoom video cameras zeroed in on the bedroom and bathroom windows on the house for sale across the street. Not to mention a dangerously old wiring system about to burn the place down or highway department plans to put a new freeway within a couple hundred feet. No way in hell any of those inconvenient facts were gonna get in the way of a good sale. Especially a nicely high dollar sale. Are you _serious?_ Louella would snort, indignantly. Business was--and is--business. And certainly no place for sentimentality. Or, for that matter, ethics.

The Klusters, in fact, Senior and Mama, were a perfect fit. And Junior fit right in, too. Despite, or maybe because, Junior being the very direct result of a Kluster fuck.

Junior was a good looking kid, at least in his own mind. Which to him was the only mind that counted. Though, in reflective moments, he would admit that "I'm no Albert Einstein." Which never failed to send his best buddy, Harry 'Kari' Sayonara, into paroxysms of laughter, eventually leading Junior to wisely keep such thoughts to himself. "You never know," his mother Louella used to caution him, "when some scumbag former friend will use your unkept secrets against you." Her comments punctuated by flaring eyes and theatric hand gestures, Louella leaning towards the theatric side, having originally come to Hollywood to become a film actress. A career that never took off, though Louella did take off quite a bit in the private premises of numerous executives in the film industry in her attempts to make a good impression. A fact she had never forgotten and woe to the film industry executive who sought out her services as a high dollar realtor. She'd find the worst lemon on the housing market and make it sound like the deal of the century. Which didn't worry her a whole lot. Wasn't her husband a hot shot defense attorney? And who the hell said that revenge wasn't sweet? Especially when she let her mind linger over the closing that sweet, sweet day a while back of a sale to a notoriously lecherous film producer of a house with a substructure infested with more termites than there were grains of sand in all of the beaches in Los Angeles County. The revenge all that much sweeter as she soaked buck naked in her designer hot tub with a glass of Burgundy and maybe a pill or two to mellow out the evening.

Louella didn't look or act--at least overtly--like a predator. What the hell, wasn't her inner self still an actress? Which was one of her most important assets. One of Louella's disarming characteristics was a head of gorgeous curly strawberry blond hair--mostly natural, albeit with some pricey hair dresser assistance. Junior inherited the curly strawberry blond hair and another of her secret weapons, her deceptively soft amber eyes. Like his father, Junior was athletic, with shiny gleaming straight teeth, albeit with canines prominent enough to make that segment of humanity given to the spooky side feel somewhat uncomfortable. He had reasonably unstinky breath, no visible tattoos while fully clothed, and had a calculating mind not much troubled by anything remotely related to a conscience. Conscience? The word only drew a blank in his memory bank. The conscience slot was empty and showed every promise of atrophying into permanent oblivion. Junior was the love child of the human iterations of a shark and a barracuda and was therefore pretty sure he was a natural born predator.

"There are just two types of people," Thornton Senior would say to Junior. "Victors and victims. Which would you rather be?" After considerable conscience searching, prolonged mostly by first trying to find the atrophied conscience niche, he eventually gave up on searching for the conscience slot or whatever it was and grabbed onto the obvious. He sure didn't figure himself a victim, being as he was the offspring of a human shark and a human barracuda. The trouble was, conscience or not, parental predators or not, Junior was the one who got screwed in the genetic lottery. The killer instinct somehow passed him by.

But he still gave it the good old college try.

He ran with a fast crowd and soon figured out that he was even faster that the fastest of the fast crowd. Not only faster, but also smarter. At least that was what he thought, Junior being one for whom both self confidence and self awareness were not on the issue table, with the exception of looking at himself in a mirror, which was one of his favorite pastimes right up there with surfing--both on the internet and on the ocean--and sexting and slamming straight shots of Macedonian vodka. He thought he was one smart cookie. A cut above the others. The others did not generally share that opinion.

"Junior? A smart cookie?" One of his old girl friends said to another, not so old, girlfriend. "If he's a cookie, he sure isn't a smart one. More like half baked." Though both young women agreed, half baked cookie that he was, Thornton always had plenty of righteous weed to share with friends. Especially potentially naked female friends.

But one thing about Thornton was different and did more or less qualify in the smart cookie category. The difference was that the others liked to party without thinking about the future while Junior, who liked to party just as much as the next guy, also had a eye to the future. It didn't take long for him to put the two together. Partying _was_ his future. Or, more to the point, the vehicle that fueled their partying was his future. He was still in high school when the light bulb snapped on in Junior's brain. Hey! That was it.

Junior was gonna be a drug dealer.

But not like other jerk off dealers he knew, who only dealt in the drugs to finance their own partying. Junior would be approaching it like a businessman. He would still party, but with the stern admonition in mind he'd once seen on some AA literature his father had toyed with briefly during one of his heavy drinking spells.

It was just a few weeks earlier.....

Thornton Kluster Senior was uncharacteristically reticent as he opened the door into the community hall at the Hollywood Hills Ecumenical All Comers Church in the Hollywood hills. Part I of his being there was that his personal physician and drinking buddy, Charlie 'Slice 'n Dice' Kennedy, suggested to Thornton that he might want to cut down on his drinking.

"Why not try an AA meeting or two?" Charlie said, somewhat unconvincingly since he had a glass of single malt Scotch in his hand when he said it and was as blitzed as Thornton. "Maybe help you to back up some on the booze. You're not getting any younger you know, Thornie." Thornton, known as Horny Thorny back in his college days at Yale, was dubious. Drinking problem? Him with a drinking problem? Not goddamn likely!

But when he got his second DUI in a month later that same week Thornton Kluster Senior had some serious second thoughts about his drinking. DUIs were fucking serious, even to a whiz bang attorney like Thornton. So maybe he would take Slice 'n Dice Charlie Kennedy's advice and hit an AA meeting. Which was Part II of why he was standing at the door of the community hall at the Ecumenical All Comers Church in the Hollywood hills. He opened the door and stepped inside Not with giant steps. Not even normal steps. With small mincing steps. But he still made it inside, mincing or other step wise.

"Welcome," said Old Ed, the moderator of the meeting, as Senior came provisionally schlepping through the door. "Want some coffee?" Old Ed nodded over at a banged up thirty cup coffee urn with a varied cluster of people around it. "It's low caffeine and organically grown," he added, nodding agreeably at what he'd said. "In the rain forests of Nebraska." Thornton's eyes blinked. Twice. Rain forests? In Nebraska?" He was about to wheel on the heels of his $150 imported Italian loafers and make tracks out of the place when Old Ed snorted and bounced a pretty hard hand for an old guy off Thornton's shoulder.

"Just funnin' you, dude," Old Ed said, still snorting. "The coffee is the store brand at Wal-Mart. Cheapest I could find." A wink. "We're not rolling in money here, you know." A not so sly glance over at the collection baskets on a nearby table. "Which you might want to consider when we pass the donation basket around at the end of the meeting." Old Ed's not so decrepit hand squeezed Thornton's shoulder. "Please, have a seat. We are about to begin." Thornton was still about to wheel and boogie on his 150 dollar imported Italian loafers. But then he thought of that second DUI and rescinded the boogying notion, or at least put it on hold, and somewhat hesitatingly slipped over to the table and took a seat. Old Ed did the same, sitting next to Thornton who, quite naturally, being habituated to his high roller head of the table status, had subconsciously plunked himself in the head table spot.

"Let us begin with a short moment of prayer," Old Ed began, leading the group in a more or less unison rendering of the Serenity Prayer.

God Grant Me The Serenity

To Accept the Things I Cannot Change

The Courage to Change the Things I Can

And the Wisdom to Know the Difference

Thornton had heard the Serenity Prayer somewhere before, but never really paid much attention to it. Until now. What? Wisdom to Know the Difference? What the fuck? Whoever wrote this sure as hell never went to law school. A good lawyer can change just about anything. For that matter, so can bad lawyers, though they don't do it intentionally. But he kept his thoughts to himself. At least for now.

"Welcome to the Hollywood Hills Bad Actors AA Group," Old Ed said after the last echoes of the Serenity Prayer were soaked up by the recently sound proofed walls of the Hollywood Hills Ecumenical All Comers Church. Said recently sound proofed room not, contrary to the hallucinatory pronouncements of the local whacko conspiracy theorists, a secret CIA interrogation room. At least that was what the pastor, a middle-aged man into a second, mid-life career, said. The pastor having recently retired from his first career. In the CIA.

Old Ed continued. "This is an open meeting, open to all who have or--and he glanced over at Thornton--or _think_ they have, a drinking problem."

"Or drug problem," piped up a skinny kid with a bad case of acne.

"Or alcohol and/or drug problem," added a well dressed middle aged man with a carefully combed mane of silver grey hair.

"With me it's more overeating that drinking," said a chunky but not bad looking redheaded woman sitting next to the silver haired man. "What about that?"

"And what about prescription pills?" Said a tiny brown haired older woman at the far end of the table. "Lord knows there's plenty of us pill junkies," she added with a voice as tiny as her body.

"Yeah!" Acne Boy said in an overload voice. "What about all that stuff?"

Thornton, sitting as he was right next to Old Ed, felt as well as heard the long sigh coming from deep within Old Ed.

"Please." Old Ed said. " _Please_. Not again. We've been through this before." A pause. Another deep sigh. " _Way_ too many times before. This is an AA meeting. Not a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Not an Overeaters Anonymous meeting." Then, with a touch of sarcasm. Nor a Prescription Pill gobblers meeting." A stone serious expression came on his face. "This is an _Alcoholics Anonymous meeting_!"

"Hey, gramps," the kid with the bad acne piped in. "Get Real. Join the modern world. Everyone is taking everything. Pills, dope, booze, glue sniffing, bath salts, snorting zinc oxide. Whatever. That's just the way it is!" Half of the people in the room applauded. The other half sent Vulcan Death Grip looks at Acne Boy. At which point Old Ed had finally had enough

"That's one too many." He said with obvious finality. "OK. I'm done. The meeting is yours, folks. Thou protesteth too much. I'm gone." And with that Old Ed made a pretty dignified and graceful exit to the applause of the Vulcan Death Grip look half of the room and the stupefaction of the Ache Boy clique as they wondered what the fuck _thou protesteth too much_ meant. As Old Ed exited the community room of the Hollywood Hills Ecumenical All Comers Church a second figure was so close to him that their shadows melded in the early evening light into what some of the freakier drug inclined folk back inside the community room might have considered a two headed monster. But it wasn't. It was just Thornton T. Kluster, Sr., following hard on the heels of Old Ed. As they got to the parking lot Thornton caught up and gently clasped Old Ed's shoulder.

"Well done," Thornton said. "They deserved exactly what they got." Old Ed turned and actually grinned.

"This is not the first time. I'll wait five, maybe ten minutes, then go back. By that time it'll be so chaotic that they'll quiet right down and get to the point of what they're doing there. Getting--and staying--sober." Thornton smiled back at Old Ed.

"Got your point," he said through his smile and meaning it. And why not? Wouldn't a slam dunk defense attorney appreciate the well timed gesture? Then, turning to leave. "But it ain't for me." Thornton headed for his BMW and didn't hear Old Ed's voice softly speaking behind him.

"I knew that from the moment you walked in the door." And he didn't mean it as a compliment, having seen many an oversized ego that eventually was just too big to fit through the door of an AA meeting.

That evening Senior came back home from the AA meeting muttering that they were "a bunch of fucking nutcases!" But he did bring some of their handouts, like the one that got Junior's attention. 'First Things First,' the saying went. And to Junior it was sure no simple minded bromide. It was his guiding principle. First Things First. The light bulb went on again. Yeah. That was it. First things first.

And the first thing was business. Partying was a distant second. And sex? Which was always perched at the very top of the To Do List for any young dude like Thornton--who was known as Horny Thorny Junior to his college buddies. Sex would come rolling in as inexorably as a San Francisco evening fog bank, catching the unwary pedestrian on Market Street without a warm jacket and the unprepared dealer without an unused condom. A dealer who always had drugs never lacked for willing female companionship. It was like a Las Vegas magic act. Pull out a couple of grams of coke or high octane weed and an eager babe would materialize seemingly out of nowhere. Poof! A curvaceous Venus beamed in to the immediate Horny Thorny Junior locale. The only negative was that sometimes they didn't disappear after the magic act was over. Leading to conversations something like this.

"Oh, you're still here," Mr. Dealer said when waking up.

" _Of course_. I am falling in love with you and will do absolutely anything you want." She reaches over to stoke his stomach. "And by the way. Got any more of that righteous bud?"  
And it could get worse. Like when they uttered that most dreaded phrase of red blooded virile healthy young American men who had done nothing more than heed the ancient glandular imperative that was their God given duty. _"I'm pregnant."_ But Junior, for whom the idea of fatherhood was right up there with self mutilation and walking on hot coals as places not to visit anytime soon, had dealt with that problem well in advance. He got himself a reversible vasectomy from his father's country club surgeon buddy, Charlie 'Slice 'n Dice' Kennedy, who had promised to keep it secret from Junior's father. Which, however, didn't stop him from sending Senior the bill for Junior's slice job as 'a routine office procedure.' The specific nature of which of course was confidential. More or less. With an emphasis on the less

Junior's big drawback was what and who he was. He was a curly blond headed rich white kid from a tony gated community in southern California. 99.97 of the local Latino and black population would take one look at him and spit out a single word. _Surfer_. Which to the Latinos was synonymous with goddamn pinche gringo and to the blacks an iconic close relative of the N-word colored Honky white and not likely to get him past the door of the drug trafficking world. Never mind that guys who looked a lot like him in Germany and Russia terrorized a good chunk of the world and a hefty slice of the 20th Century, not to mention the English and French and Spanish and Portuguese and Dutch and Vikings in previous centuries, or that they were conversing in either the English or the Spanish of the world conquering Caucasian bastards. That was then. Tomorrow could be a lot different. But this was now.

And now most of the serious drug trafficking was controlled by nasty tempered heavily tattooed Mexican mafia types, none of whom were likely choices for an evening of genteel conversation at an upscale cocktail party in Junior's neighborhood. Not folks you want to mess with, or who a rich white kid could hope to deal with on anything but a obeisant low street dealer level. You wanna do _what_ , rich white boy? Dead end. And, if played clumsily, literally a dead end. Unlike his adventurous but seriously overweight great uncle Americus 'Dare Me' Vespucci, who put on his scuba gear and went cavalierly spelunking alone in a narrow and treacherous Belize underwater cave one day and was never heard from again, Junior was in no hurry to explore dead ends and figured he had to find another way. He found it in college, where damn near everyone used drugs as an antidote to the humdrum tedium of pontificating professors busily professing whatever the hell it was they professed. Elvis himself went to college and never was able to figure out what they were talking about. It was not altogether a bust, though. There was a cozy little college kid corner pub nearby with the weird name of The Ulysses Conundrum that had some pretty good imported German and Irish beers and ales and had karaoke every Wednesday evening. Karaoke. In Gaelic. A language which none of them spoke until the fifth or sixth beer, by which time most of the clientele had become congenially bilingual.

"Erin go bragh!" Elvis yelled out in mid fifth ale. To which a pretty dark haired girl with very blue eyes, and who was wearing a clingy and very revealing T-shirt. said.

"I'm Erin." She wiggled her chest for emphasis. "And I prefer to go braless." Elvis stared at her for a moment then, saying, "me, too," drained the rest of his bottle of Auld Sod Ale and launched into singing the Rocky Road to Dublin in what sounded to his ears like pretty good Gaelic.

At Southern Cal the high powered network of drug dealers, many of whom would go on to successful careers in business, industry and local and state government, including one or two into the ministry, as well as a bunch of others who bought some really cool sailboats with their drug profits and headed for the South Pacific, three of the boats actually managing to limp all the way to Tahiti, had eventually made reliable connections to the suppliers. Junior started pulling in some sizeable profits. And then he really began making some serious bucks. Thanks, albeit unwittingly, to his father.

"Well, son," Senior said as Junior walked off the stage with diploma in hand after graduating from high school and somewhat reluctantly joined his parents in the crowd. "Now you're off to college." Junior nodded, not really paying attention, gearing up as he was for one hell of a graduation party he was personally supplying with plenty of partying substances. "Here," Senior said, holding out a set of car keys. "You'll need transportation while you're in college." Junior did pay attention then. His father was handing him the keys to a just off the lot brand new totally unscratched cobalt black BMW.

Three years later the BMW was still a sleek impressive car. One slow Sunday afternoon, when Junior was watching a TV special on drug smuggling on the Mexican border, the idea came to him. He shot straight up from his previous slouch on the couch.

"That's it!" He blurted with no little forceful enthusiasm. So much forceful enthusiasm that he woke up Suzette 'Sexy Suzy' Rios, who had fallen asleep on the couch next to him after smoking a substantial amount of weed, consuming an entire pizza by herself and two bags of potato chips and three Diet Cherry Cokes. All of which were provided by Junior free of charge, and then she had the goddamn gall to fall asleep just when Junior was getting ready to jump her bones. Well, it wasn't all bad. At least he hadn't taken the Viagra he'd gotten a prescription for from his dad's buddy, Dr. Charlie 'Slice 'n Dice' Kennedy. That could have really complicated things. Like that first time he took one to see if it really worked and, when it didn't, headed over to the local McDonald's to get a Big Mac. That was when the Viagra, which has been known to occasionally be on the temperamental side, decided to do it's Viagra thing, and Thornton ended up getting a whole lot of attention while standing in line at McDonald's. The most memorable comment, given with no little feminine sarcasm by a good looking teenage girl.

"Big Macs must _really_ turn you on." Followed by. "McDonald's oughta hire you to do their commercials. They'd go viral in ten seconds. Every lecherous bastard like you in the whole frickin' country would be buying Big Macs before the hour was up." A pause, then her final shot.

"And hope that wasn't all that was up." Thornton snorted without replying and hotfooted it back to his car and then drove through the takeout lane. But by then word had got around and the girl in the drive by window pointed at him and yelled at the other kids working in the kitchen.

"Hey! Big Mac is right here!" Thornton said to hell with it and went home and ordered a pizza using his credit card. "The pizza," he surlily told the pizza guy over the phone, "to be left at the front door after first ringing the doorbell."

OK, Thornton thought. Never mind Suzette Rios and her downright uncooperative attitude. He'd just had one hell of an idea. Take his pricey BMW and have a secret compartment built into it. Like he'd seen on the TV documentary on drug smuggling. Then get some sweet and innocent looking girl--which sure as hell wouldn't be Ms Sex Bomb Herself, Suzette Rios, and might end up being the hardest part of realizing his idea. He hadn't known a sweet and innocent girl since Candy 'Cane' Whipple in the fifth grade at Fatty Arbuckle Alternative Elementary School in Hollywood. And even now Candy 'Cane' Whipple remained a sweet and innocent girl. She was however currently a Mormon medical missionary working at a clinic in upcountry Zambia and therefore unavailable. In more ways than one. He'd have to look somewhere else.

And he would also have to find a pair of equally sweet looking grandparenty old folks. Once he'd found them all, he'd put them into the BMW, drive into Mexico to get the secret compartment loaded with cocaine, then come back through the border. The sweet and innocent looking girl, Junior would say, was his fiancée. The old couple in the back were her grandparents who had never been to Mexico. They had just come across the border for a quick look, and maybe a taco or two, hopefully salmonella free, to satisfy the old folks' curiosity. It had to work! A rich college kid in a late model BMW. His sweet and innocent looking fiancée. Her aged equally innocent looking grandparents. What border officer would think they were actually cocaine smugglers. Cocaine? In a high dollar BMW? With his girlfriend's grandparents in the back seat? Who was gonna take that kind of risk with an expensive car like a BMW, not to mention the net worth of the grandparents who might well have been early purchasers of Microsoft stock? It had to work.

And, in fact, it did.

Three times he tooled into Tijuana in the BMW that Senior gave to him to drive while he was in college. With him was a fawn eyed, innocent looking girl he met in a remedial yoga class and a pair of senior citizens who looked like anybody's sweet old grandparents. In fact they were both convicted felons with a solid decade of jail time between them. They just looked sweet. Until they opened up their mouths and a sizeable percentage of the obscenity lexicon in both English and Spanish spilled out. Junior told them to just smile and for God's sake keep their mouths shut. He also checked to make sure they didn't have any outstanding warrants that could get them in trouble passing through the border. Nope. No warrants. They weren't exactly clean. Not hardly. But there were no active warrants. This was verified for him by one of his sub rosa clients connected to the local PD. Money and drugs sure helped a guy make a lot of new friends. In all kinds of places.

And that was the story he told the border officers when he came back into the U.S. at the Port of San Ysidro south of San Diego. He had brought his fiancé and her grandparents down to see Tijuana and Baja California.

"My fiancée's grandparents have never been to Mexico," Junior would say with his disarming college boy toothy smile, the fawn eyed girl sitting next to him meanwhile fawn eying the officer in the inspection booth. "So we thought we'd drive them down." In the back seat the pair of lieu grandparents nodded agreeably and put on their best sweet harmless old folks expressions. Though in reality they were closer to a pair of nasty tempered myopic Gila Monsters than harmless old folks.

One look at the pricey late model BMW, the wholesome looking young couple and the sweet old folks in the back seat and no one at the border was suspicious enough to check them out any further. No one had ever seen a drug smuggling profile like this before–which is not to say that it hadn't happened–and not a hint of doubt raised its enforcement head. Including the enforcement dogs' heads and the drug sniffing noses attached to the canine critters' heads. They were running K-9's along the car lanes and no loping, lolling tongue canine showed any interest whatsoever to the BMW. So down the road they went. And each time Junior made his way to a warehouse in Los Angeles, after first dropping off his passengers, where they unloaded the hidden cocaine and Junior soon banked a sizeable chunk of cash the heavy guys who sold the stuff paid him. Plus Junior's own cut of the cocaine, which brought him another fistful of cash. It was a dream of a deal, being a kind of junior partner for these heavy guys whose contacts in Mexico had developed a supposedly foolproof method of beating the drug detection dogs at the border. And their method was good. Darned good. Worked every time.

Almost.

On the third time through Junior was prudently looking in his side view mirror and noticed a passing K-9 sniff in the BMW's direction. _Oh-oh_. That frickin' dog had a canine quizzical look on his doggy snout and was about to make a move towards the BMW. This, Junior moaned to himself, is not good. Not good at all. Then, possibly at the intervention of Saint Inebria, the patron saint of alcoholics and dope smokers, Junior's luck turned solid gold. A Mexican plated Ford driven by a young woman with two little kids in car seats and a (too pungent) load of marijuana in the trunk whizzed by and grabbed the dog's sensory attention but good. The dog blitzed off after the Ford dragging the startled handler along behind it. Yikes! That was close! But it also gave him an idea. Junior took a deep breath and decided it might be time to get out of this business while he still could. The hundred pounds of cocaine in the cleverly concealed compartment behind the rear seat–the U.S. border enforcement folk had to admit some of the smuggling compartments were so masterfully built they grudgingly had to admire the craftsmanship and ingenuity of the creators--might have landed him a long prison sentence.. One even his fast talking, master of the glib and very well connected daddy couldn't get him out of. There were some pretty nasty characters in a federal slammer. Junior had heard enough tales of Bubba in the shower room and Chuy with a homemade shiv in the lunch line to know it was sure no place he wanted to be. Prison would be a nightmare. A _waking_ nightmare. Like slipping through into another dimension and smack into the middle of an alternative universe. An evil universe. But a real life universe, no matter what frickin' universe the real life was in.

Oh, no! He didn't want any part of that! Time for a revision to the master plan. He was gonna make one really big score and then retire from the drug smuggling business and get into some other less dangerous and nerve wracking profession. One that had dignity and honor. Kinda like Dad's law firm providing high dollar and high octane defense attorneys to organized crime, inside traders and other cash rich defendants of somewhat murky connections. Or, maybe he'd just switch from taking the risks to being the guy behind the scene pulling the strings. The more he thought about it Junior figured that was a pretty good idea. Kind of a venture capitalist, like his uncle Benigno 'Clean 'em Out' Vespucci was on Wall Street before he suddenly relocated to Sicily and went into hiding. Yeah. Yeah. Junior thought. That's the program, all right. But he needed the seed money. He needed that one last big drug smuggling score. Which was what set in motion the series of events that would one day soon result in him making the intimate up front and personal acquaintance of one Elvis T. Mahoney.

Speaking of Elvis, the month before, in Tucson, on Elvis' day off.

### Madame Anastasia

Elvis had just come out of Mendo Pescadora's Sinaloa Delikatessen where he'd met a lady friend, Maggie Goglianovichi, for lunch. Maggie had already left, having to get back to her job at the Tucson Chiropractic Wellness and Wart Removal Center where she doubled as a wart removal specialist and an aroma therapist. Elvis was always glad to hang with Maggie. She was easily the best smelling girl he'd ever known, notwithstanding the cross eyed albino Swedlund twins who worked at the perfume distributorship in Phoenix or even his cousin Alicia May Mahoney, who distilled a wonderfully aromatic cherry flavored white lightning in their grandfather Festus' root cellar back home in Slippery Sister County. Elvis once spent an entire afternoon with his cousin Alicia May helping her bottle her cherry flavored white lightning. For days afterward people looked at him strangely with their noses suspiciously sniffing the air around him.

Elvis was smiling at the memory of lunching with mellifluously odorous Maggie Goglianovichi as he walked back to his car. Until he spotted the flyer some sneakabout had stuffed under his car's windshield wiper. If there was one thing that really rubbed Elvis the wrong way, it was some creeping flupnut sticking a flyer on his old Chevy's windshield. A man's windshield was sacrosanct in Elvis's mind. And therefore off limits to flyers–though dung dropping birds passing over were an exception he eventually had to grudgingly accept.

Elvis grabbed the flyer and crumpled it up to throw it away when his curious side tapped him on the mental shoulder. He uncrumpled the flyer and stared at it. The smile returned to his face, bigger than before. Whoa! This could amount to something.

The flyer said, simply....

Madame Anastasia. Psychic Readings.

1410 Breedlove Circle

Twenty minutes later Elvis pulled up outside 1410 Breedlove Circle. And a circle it was. More or less. A cul de sac in an old part of town with huge trees towering over the houses that kept them in a dim perpetual shade during the leafy months--which in Sonora Desert Tucson was most of the year. Must have one hell of a water bill, Elvis thought, as he looked at the trees. Either that, or someone had tapped illegally into a municipal water line. Maybe the same creeping malfeasant who'd crammed the flyer under his windshield wiper. The house, and the neighborhood, didn't exactly look shabby, but it sure did look its age, with untrimmed oleanders and bougainvillea sticking up at odd angles and blocking most of the windows. Actually, the whole feeling to the place was kind of spooky. _Terrific!_ Elvis thought. Perfect spot for a medium. Whoever this Madame Anastasia was, she sure knew how to set the stage for action. He uncurled his lanky frame from behind the driver's wheel and walked expectantly towards the front door.

Elvis was about to knock when the door suddenly swung open and a huge man with a bushy black beard pulled the door open from the inside. Elvis blinked.

"Madame Anastasia?" He said, taking a step backward. The man answered in a gruff voice.

"Hell no, buddy. I'm the plumber come to fix the sink." Then the giant bearded man grabbed a toolbox and went out the door towards the _Fix It Now Or You'll Be Sorry_ plumber's truck parked on the street. Elvis turned to watch him leave and jumped straight up in the air when a hand grabbed his shoulder from behind. He wheeled around to see a slender thirtyish woman of middle height and luminous eyes staring at him.

"Are you the plumber's helper?" Elvis said. The slender woman smiled in a peculiar way that seemed to Elvis like a mixture of Mona Lisa and Jack the Ripper.

"No, of course not," she said, then announced in a dramatic tone.

" _I am Madame Anastasia_." Elvis held out his hand.

"Cool," he said. "I am Elvis T. Mahoney. His hand met hers as he added. "But my friends call me Rasputin." The woman's smile took on an added creepy dimension that made Elvis acutely aware of the exact location of every one of his vertebrae, as well as puckering his anus and locking both his knees in place.

"Maybe I should come back later," Elvis said, even as the strange luminous eyed woman pulled on his hand, drawing him inside the threshold. "You're probably busy," he added lamely.

"No, Mr. Elvis. Not busy. Please come in," she said, trapping his arm in a vice grip, making him wonder if she had a side job as a professional arm wrestler or on a commercial fishing boat jerking three hundred pound plus bluefin tuna onto the boat all day long.

Madame Anastasia pulled Elvis inside the door and slammed it shut behind him so hard the remaining acorns from last year's crop on the black oak tree next to the front step broke loose and thudded to the ground, instantly alerting every squirrel within falling acorn ear shot. The sound of squirrels shamelessly squabbling over the acorns filtered faintly through the purple painted door as Madame Anastasia drew Elvis further into the house. She stopped and tugged at his sleeve, motioning with her head towards a dimly lit room off the central hallway.

"The spirits are waiting for us," she said in a silky seductive voice that reminded Elvis of the wonderfully smooth feel of the aged two day old white lightning from his grandfather Festus' still hidden in the hills back home. For some reason the word stuck in his mind. Still.

"Stills?" Popped out of his mouth, the mental guardian in his brain biologically tasked with the assignment to differentiate between a thought word and a spoken one once again failing to do its job, which had been known to get Elvis in considerable trouble in times past. The most memorable one when what he was thinking about his drill sergeant during his US Army basic training went involuntarily from thoughts to words. Elvis soon learned all he ever wanted to know about pushups, jumping jacks and running long distances with full combat packs.

"I was thinking about stills," he said, trying to make some sense of what he'd said and not sound like a complete mukluk. Though, in actual fact, weird comments were hardly unusual occurrences in Elvis' interactions with other, frequently befuddled, members of what is loosely referred to as humanity. Before he could say anything more Madame Anastasia took a step closer to him. Her milk chocolaty brown eyes twinkled. "Oh, yes. Stills. And," the long purple painted nails of her right hand trailed over the top of Elvis's hand, "videos, too." The long nails stopped and pressed more than lightly into the top of Elvis' hand. "To the right person," then changing her tone and moving into the room, "but we can get to that later." For some reason Elvis' mind was dwelling on the female tarantula spider, a critter which, after mating with the male of her choice, promptly does in the clueless creature and proceeds to devour him.

"Do you like tarantulas?" He blurted out. Madame Anastasia cooed.

"Oh, yessss. Love the little devils," which made Elvis start to get really nervous. He twisted his wrist and looked at it, checking the time.

"Oops," Elvis said nervously. "Running late. We'll have to take this up at a later date." Madame Anastasia's long purple painted fingernails put a little extra pressure on Elvis' arm.

"You're not wearing a watch," she said in her usual psychic reading voice that was one tenth seductive, two and one half tenths mysterious and the rest Halloween spook house.

"Oh, that," Elvis said, trying to think fast. "It's just an old habit. My clock is internal. Always pretty close to the minute, too," he added. Madame Anastasia's thick dark eyebrows arched over her big chocolate brown eyes, making her look like a sexy but potentially very dangerous owl.

"Yes?" She said coyly. "So what time is it now?" Elvis tried to draw away from her, having just remembered watching a special on the Discovery Channel not long ago that was about serial killers. _Female_ serial killers. _Seductive_ female serial killers.

"What time? It's time to go," Elvis replied, trying to pull away from her. Madame Anastasia dug her nails into Elvis' arm and literally jerked him into the séance room.

"This is no joke, buster. I tuned into you even before you got to the door. The spirits are screaming at me to give you a reading. And a warning. You're in mortal danger." The serious look on her face caught Elvis so by surprise that he didn't try to resist her pulling him the rest of the way into the room. Spirits? Warning? Mortal danger? _Yikes_.

Elvis wasn't exactly a fan of the occult. Most of the stuff the weirded out people carried on about, like the Nazca Lines and Nostradamus and the Mayan Calendar and the end of the world, was pure nonsense to his mind. So were the animal and human figments of their imagination. Like werewolves and vampires and chupacabras. Though he was pretty sure Sasquatch was a for real critter hiding out in the boondocks who hadn't been found because the Sasquatchi were very private folk who didn't _want_ to be found. Elvis was also pretty sure the Loch Ness monster was a genuine living fossil from the days of aquatic dinosaurs. Angus MacGargle, his fishing partner and neighbor who had several years earlier immigrated from Scotland under somewhat clouded circumstances Angus refused to discuss sober or otherwise, insisted he had three times seen Nessie on his way home from the Loch Ness Dragon's Breath Pub after an evening of music and fellowship and imbibing an unspecified amount of alcohol that had the agreeable quality of tasting better with each additional drink. Angus was not a man to prevaricate–though he could get very creative with facts when the subject was money–and Elvis had no reason to doubt him. Though he did somewhat question Angus' contention that Nessie would sometimes lurk outside the Loch Ness Pub and hum along with the music inside, but always slip away unseen whenever anyone staggered outside the Pub's doors to see where the humming was coming from. Elvis was pretty sure dinosaurs couldn't hum. The proof of that being that as much as that other living fossil from the dinosaur days, the monitor lizard, had been studied, not a single researcher had heard one of them hum, though they did belch with astounding frequency and volume and emit a stench that would outstink a whole truckload of North America's stinkiest skunks.

But Elvis did believe that there was another dimension beyond the five senses of ordinary reality. No. He didn't just believe it. He _knew_ it. He had learned that at a very early age when, no matter how creative he was in presenting his reasons for the unending series of scrapes and misadventures he managed to get himself into, his mother always sensed what _really_ happened. Which she promptly told Elvis' father. Who in turn jerked out his genuine elk leather heirloom belt known to all the Mahoney kids as "Mister Whup." Which also went a long way to explaining how Elvis learned to run so fast that be eventually became the star runner on the Slippery Sister High School track team and made back up halfback on the county all star football team in his second senior year. But the worst part about Mom's psychic abilities was that it got to be downright embarrassing when he hit puberty and discovered there was a reason why there were two sexes. That was when Mom Mahoney reached her heights in the perfection of the age old maternal pursuit of the Guilt Look and convinced Elvis it was time to go downtown and sign on the dotted line with his cousin, Master Sergeant Fabian Maxwell Mahoney, who was the local U.S. Army recruiter and Slippery Sister High School track coach and ROTC instructor. Maxwell saying as Elvis signed the military contract that he would be a natural as a scout, being as how "he could run like hell" when the occasion called for it. Maxwell quietly pointed to his own rear end and gave it a sharp tap where some thunkbluster Iraqi kid with an AK 47 plunked a slug into his rather large sized rear end.

"If I coulda run like you, Cousin Elvis, he never would have plugged me," Maxwell said. A few months later it was Elvis' turn to hit the sand and try out his running shoes. Well, not shoes. Boots. Different equipment. Same idea. Elvis quickly learned lots more moves than he ever did on a football field, there being a whole bunch of locals who were definitely on the unfriendly side and had the unsettling habit of pointing guns at him. It was almost as bad as deer season back in Slippery Sister County when all the city folk showed up in the hills with their high powered rifles which most of them had no clue how to use, but still were likely to blast away at just about everything in sight. The deer were pretty much safe, but many a tree, highway sign and outbuilding were Swiss cheesed by the rifle toting city folks.

Elvis never would forget the day his Grandpa Festus discovered some town dwelling nitpluckers shot up the treasured antique outhouse he'd inherited from his own great grandfather, Yardog 'Mountain Man' Mahoney, who was one of the first settlers in Slippery Sister County and the county's very first animal control officer and certified outhouse repairman. Grandpa Festus found out who'd shot up his heirloom outhouse, grabbed Elvis and his brother Lispus to help as they filled up his pickup bed with fresh cow and horse manure, snuck in at night and filled the shiny new SUV's the two malefactors had recently purchased with genuine Slippery Sister County manure. You can bet that was the last time anybody was dumb enough to use Grandpa Festus' heirloom outhouse for target practice. But, on the upside, it did provide some much needed work for Derwood Mahoney's Car Odor Removal business, which had been definitely on the lean side until then.

Madame Anastasia led Elvis into the room where she gave her readings and held her popular biweekly bilingual séances on a first come, first seated, basis. Like most of the rest of the house, and Madame Anastasia's floor length flowing and recently dry cleaned gown which still emitted a vaguely chemical odor similar to a mixture of rubbing alcohol and wine vinegar, the primary color was purple. Purple drapes pulled closed over the windows. Purple carpet. Purple cover over the reading table, purple shade on the lamp in the center of the table. Elvis did a complete turn, taking in the furnishings in the room.

"Got a thing for purple, 'ey, Annie," he said. Madame Anastasia's thick eyebrows furrowed in a frown. And not just any frown. This was a frown that old Billy Shakespeare himself would have been happy to plunk into any of his plays, and was remarkably similar to the one the Shake Man's common law wife and the mother of his boatload of children regularly laid on him. _Annie?_ Madame Anastasia thought _._ Did this blurpnut just say Annie? "So what's up, Ann girl," Elvis continued. "What's the excitement all about?" Madame Anastasia dug her fingernails into Elvis' arm.

"Ouch!" Elvis said. "Those nails of yours are lethal weapons, Lady Ann."

" _Madame Anastasia,_ " she replied in a hiss. "Not Annie. Not Ann Girl. And not Lady Ann, though that one isn't so bad. It's Madame Anastasia," she repeated, digging her nails into Elvis' arm even deeper.

"Oh, yes. Yes. Yes! YES! Madame Anastasia it is," Elvis said, trying to rescue his arm from her lethal claws. "You got it. Madame Anastasia all the way." Madame Anastasia pointed at a chair.

"Sit," she said. Elvis sat. So did she, reaching across the table to take Elvis' hands in hers, something which Elvis was none too keen on, seeing as how she'd furrowed his forearms already with those menacing rakes she called fingernails. Then she looked at him for a long moment before she spoke.

"You will be dead before morning," Madame Anastasia said in that spooky voice of hers.

All the blood drained out of Elvis' face and his countenance took on the washed out white color of his favorite bed sheets that he couldn't bring himself to get rid of, even if they were getting faded and worn. His grandfather Festus had given him the sheets as he lay on his death bed as something to remember him by. Grandpa Festus, however, miraculously went on to a full recovery, but he still gave Elvis the bed sheets as a memento of some very touching moments when both Elvis and Festus thought Festus was going to go to the other side, though neither were clear about just where or what the other side was.

"Don't forget to feed the hound dogs," Festus said as he began to slip away. "They get real edgy if they miss a meal." A cough. "Don't forget. OK?"

"OK, Grandpa," Elvis replied. "I won't forget." Then Grandpa Festus closed his eyes and got still. Very still. He didn't appear to be breathing. Elvis began to choke up. The moment had finally come. Grandpa had passed.

"Goodbye, Grandpa," Elvis said, the tears welling in his eyes.

"Did you feed the hound dogs?" Grandpa said. Elvis was taken aback. Way back. Grandpa still didn't seem to be moving or breathing.

"Are you dead, Grandpa?" Elvis said in a confused voice.

"I'm not sure," Grandpa answered. "It's either that or some real bad moonshine."

Elvis never got a chance to feed the hound dogs, since almost immediately Grandpa Festus started to get better and by that evening he not only fed the hound dogs himself he rode his bicycle into Slippery Sister city and bought a double vanilla ice cream cone topped with chocolate marshmallow sauce and Georgia peanuts to celebrate his return from the land of the dead. But he still gave Elvis the sheets, figuring he would eventually be kicking the mortal bucket, anyhow.

Madame Anastasia looked directly into Elvis's eyes with her deep chocolate brown eyes and seemed to draw him into her. Come, Elvis. To me. Deep. Deeper. Deeper. She squeezed his hands.

"I'm so sorry, Mr. Elvis," she said. "You're so young to die."

"Die?" Elvis replied nervously. "Die? Why die?" Madame Anastasia leaned towards him and Elvis thought he could smell garlic and limburger cheese on her breath.

"The spirits came to me when you were outside the door," she said. "They told me your time had come. You will pass to the other side before morning." Elvis wasn't sure he should be believing any of this. And he still had no clue what or where the other side was. But, on the other hand, it wasn't exactly brightening his day, either.

"But.....how.....how will I die?" He stuttered. Madame Anastasia shook her head slowly.

"The spirits don't give out that information," she said. "They don't get into specifics. Kind of like trade secrets."

"Trade secrets?" Elvis repeated. "Trade secrets....what?" Madame Anastasia looked very somberly at him and spoke in a voice to match.

"The spirits are mischievous, Mr. Elvis. To them life on this material plane is kind of a joke."

"A joke?" Elvis replied incredulously. "Death is a joke?" Madame Anastasia managed a small smile.

"It is if you're already dead," she said in that mysterious voice of hers. "What would there be for them to be afraid of after they're dead? So to them it's kind of a joke."

"I'm not thinkin' it's very funny," Elvis said morosely. "Not funny at all." Then he got a suspicious look on his face.

"So how do you know all this stuff in the first place? Do they talk to you through your TV set or something like that? Alternate Reality TV? Hey, Madame Anastasia, the

TV says, Elvis is gonna get run over by a semi tonight and be reduced to one tenth of his former thickness. How do you know this stuff?"

"Now you are talking about my trade secrets, Mr. Elvis. I can't divulge them to you or anyone else." Elvis' eyes went wide.

"You're talking trade secrets when my life is at stake? What are you, some kind of corporate attorney for the undead?"

"They are not undead, Mr. Elvis. They are very much dead."

"Then how the heck can they talk to you if they're dead and you're not." Elvis was starting to get hot. After all, it was his life that was at stake here. "Oh, I know what you're going to say. Trade secrets. You can't divulge your trade secrets...." Madame Anastasia reached over and gently stroked Elvis' hand.

"Mr. Elvis," she began. "The spirits don't often tell me someone is about to die. And those times they do tell me they never say I should tell the person he or she is about to die. You are the first time it has happened. There must be something very special for the spirits to break their own rule of silence. Some reason why they think you should know that you are about to die."

That really got Elvis to thinking. Could this woman be for real? Were the spirits actually telling her that he was about to die and he should know about it? But why? Why should he need to know? Now he was really getting worried. Madame Anastasia threw him a long, intense look.

"You'd best tie up what lose ends you can, Mr. Elvis. You don't have much time." With that she rose and walked toward the hallway, motioning at Elvis to follow. "Come, Mr. Elvis. You'd best be on your way. You don't have much time left." Elvis got to his feet and woodenly walked towards the hallway and then followed Madame Anastasia to the front door. She opened it, reached over and brushed her long fingernails lightly over Elvis' face. Six gray squirrels in the front yard grabbed the last of the black oak acorns and lit out when Madame Anastasia's front door squeaked open, the noisy door sounding to their squirrel ears like a large and certainly dark intentioned critter of some kind that was possibly thinking of having squirrel for lunch.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I wish it didn't have to be this way." Then she motioned at Elvis to go through the door and quietly closed it behind him as he stumbled in a stupor out to his car and a very long nail biter of a ride home wondering what the lose ends were that he needed to tie up before the Big Gulp came.

Madame Anastasia returned to her reading room. "It's clear," she called out. "He's gone." Elvis' buddies War Whoop and Pancho came out of an adjoining room, both grinning so wide they looked like they were going to split their checks wide open all the way to their ears. "Did you get the video?" Madame Anastasia asked.

"You bet," Pancho answered. "And are we ever going to have a good ol' time when we show it to Elvis. Though," he added with another broad grin, "we'll for sure be wearing our bullet proof vests when he sees it." WW pulled out three crisp hundred dollar bills and handed them to Madame Anastasia.

"Thanks, Siobhan,"--which was her real name--you made all the difference." Pancho stepped up and slapped WW on the shoulder.

"Damn right!" Pancho said.

"About damn time Elvis got a taste of his own medicine."

### Chapter 9

### Great Expectations

### Junior Goes For Big Time

Junior scraped together all the bucks he could, including borrowing some money from Senior for what Junior told his father was to pay for an overseas abortion for a girl he'd knocked up. Senior didn't let on that he knew, but he was well aware of Junior's reversible vasectomy, his country club surgeon buddy being known as Loose Lips Kennedy when he had a few whiskey neats under his belt. But Senior gave Junior the bucks, considering it a worthwhile investment in his son's future even if, as Senior's legal nose strongly intimated, not exactly on the legal side. "Legal, schmegal," Senior muttered to himself. "The kid's gotta start somewhere."

Junior had managed to cozy up to a middle level cocaine supplier who had reliable sources in Sonora and decided he was going to pull off a deal all on his own. He'd make the contact, pay for the dope himself, smuggle it across, then sell it–and this was the best part–pocket all the profits himself. He managed enough cash to buy a bulk load of 115 pounds of pure uncut Columbian cocaine and to arrange to pick it up with his secret-compartmented BMW in the Sonora town of San Luis Rio Colorado. A rambling ramshackle heat blasted town that was the Mexican evil twin of Arizona's San Luis, which itself was sure no Hilton Head by the absolute furthest stretch of the most fevered of imaginations. And one of the very few places in the entire country where the Jehovah's Witnesses refused to knock on doors in the blistering summer. The typical prospective door knockers' response--

"What? Door to door? San Luis? In that heat? You're crazy. It's so hot in San Luis they're gonna think we're working for the devil, not God." A pause. "So who else would be out knocking on doors when it's 110 and rising?" As was what happened one sizzling July afternoon--

There was a knocking on the door in a residential street in San Luis. The home owner, Guadalupe O'Garcia Herrera, got up from watching a teary Mexican soap opera on Telemundo and lumbered to the door. Guadalupe was OK with San Luis' seeming lack of the refinements of civilization. Guadalupe was raised in a cardboard shack in the Mexican Sonora Desert not far from Guaymas. A place without electricity or running water and, in her opinion, a central collection point for every kind of dangerous and/or obnoxious critter in the desert. By comparison San Luis was like Versailles in Louis XIV's heyday. Even better, considering Louie didn't have Telemundo. She opened the door and was instantly blasted by a sunny 115 degree San Luis early afternoon.

"Hello," said a pair of nicely dressed Jehovah's Witnesses. "We'd like to talk to you about life everlasting." Guadalupe's eyes bugged out so far they looked like a couple of veiny marbles. The wisps of hair on the back of her neck that her cousin Magdalena the beautician had missed in her last haircut stood out as straight as a clutch of tiny hairy needles.

"It's the Devil's Children!' Guadalupe hollered, loud enough that her husband Gustavo would hear. "Call a priest! Quick! We need another exorcism!" After which she slammed the door so hard that one of the hinges sagged and nearly broke loose.

Such responses, the Jehovah's Witnesses door knocking supervisors had to agree, made the door knockers' point. The door knockers got a pass on San Luis. At least until the winter, when in came the blessed natural wonder of cooler air. Then the whole town rushed outdoors, opened their lungs wide and sucked in air that was no longer superheated. A little polluted, maybe. But not superheated. At which time the door knockers phalanx made their well-timed reappearance. Or, more accurately, attempted to. Guadalupe, and she was far from being the only one, was not fooled by the cooler air and held an antique family crucifix in their Jehovah's Witness faces before they could utter word one.

"Devils, get thee gone"! She snarled.

In both Spanish and English, in case the Devils were not bilingual.

Anyhow, back to Junior and his Great Expectations.

The Mexican supplier was the same guy who worked out the system for beating the drug dogs and promised Junior he'd give the BMW the same anti-dog treatment that he did in Tijuana. This made jangled Junior's smuggler's equilibrium some, remembering the near miss on trip three through San Ysidro. But he figured nothing was ever completely risk free and, anyhow, these CBP yahoos at this rat hole of a miserable place, San Luis, wouldn't be anywhere as good at drug busting as the experienced officers at the crazily busy port of San Ysidro in California below the magacities of Los Angles and San Diego. And he had already beaten those San Ysidro pukes not once, not twice, but three–well, a provisional three–times. He would whisk through this puny little port, drive back to California and a take home profit of, if he hit the market at the right time, of as much as nearly a million bucks. Wow! A cool million! And tax free! The first thing he was gonna do with his bunch of new cash was to fly to Peru and then ride a donkey up to Machu Picchu where he would sit cross legged chanting his personal mantras and tune into the vibes of the ancient Incas. A people who had fascinated him ever since he saw a Discovery Channel program on them narrated by a Peruvian immigrant who claimed to be a direct descendant of the last Inca emperor. Which was a somewhat suspect claim, considering that the last Inca emperor was known to have been childless, having had his gonads crushed and rendered functionally inoperative in a freak llama accident. Then, thanks to his Sonoran contact who gave him some names and phone numbers to check out in Cusco, Junior was gonna ride the donkey back down the mountain and see if he could hook up with some drug contacts in the Peruvian underworld and maybe move into the really big time. Like Senior always said to him.

"Dream big, son. Dream big." And he sure wasn't talking about big boobs.

At least not most of the time.

But first he had to get the dope through San Luis. He had a plan. Froot don' fall fahr from da tree, as Elvis' granny Rattler Sue liked to say in her peculiar back to the roots English. Just like his thespian of a courtroom lawyer daddy, Junior had an ace up his sleeve. Part of the deal was to have his Mexican contact spruce up an old junker, put twenty pounds of inferior grade but odiferous marijuana in the gas tank and make sure to do it sloppily enough to leave plenty of residual odor. "Get 'em drunk or something," he told the supplier of his dope team. "Just make sure there's plenty of odor." A pause. "But at least clean away the stems and seeds. Don't wanna be too obvious, you know."

Then he'd arrange to have a slightly seedy looking young Mexican woman, preferably one with hooded shifty eyes, along with two or three little kids, driving it and position the car just ahead of Junior in the car lane. If a dog hit on her car, or they somehow figured out it was a load car, all the enforcement activity–including the dogs–would be on the load car with the marijuana in it. Junior would drive right by them, chuckling to himself counting the ways he was gonna spend all the money he was about to make, while the CBP jerks were screwing with the woman in the car. Sound callous to the hapless woman? The odds were piled high that a female Mexican citizen with a couple of kids and only a small load of MJ would end up walking. And walking several hundred bucks richer, money that she likely sorely needed in Mexico's screw the poor plutocratic society. But the most likely scenario was that both the woman and Junior would make it through undetected by what Junior called "the semi-comatose border deadbolts" and Junior would head back to California and the Mexican woman would still walk back to Mexico with her needed cash. It was, Junior thought to himself, another win/win situation. Well....maybe yes.

But then, maybe no.

Junior recruited the same sweet looking senior citizen convicted felons he'd used in California. Manny 'Quick Fingers' Bojorquez and Hellena 'Bad Back' Edelweiss. Manny started out as a melon picker in the California melon fields and got so dexterous with his hands that he segued into a new white collar career as a pick pocket in Los Angeles County. One day, while browsing in his cousin Mango's used book store and fruit stand, he stumbled on a book about magic and decided on the spot that he would go to Las Vegas and start a career as a magician, figuring that his pick pocketing skills would make him a natural. Nope. He bombed as a magician. But he did find that reverting to his old occupation opened up a whole new adventurous world. All the wallets he grabbed from unsuspecting and usually half sloshed Las Vegas tourists might be light on cash but they were plumb full of credit and ATM cards and all kinds of personal information. Which thought fell on him like a ton of bricks–in this case, genuine gold bricks–while munching on a somewhat unappealing supper of Mama Ling's Beijing Surprise take out and drinking a tepid Lights Out beer while watching a TV special on the new phenomenon of identity theft. Identity theft! That was it! And thus a career was born. Twenty five years and three prison terms later Manny was thinking he would have been better off if he'd stuck with picking melons instead of pockets.

At least you could eat the melons.

Hellena 'Bad Back' Edelweiss grew up in a seedy section in Saint Louis and discovered sex so early in life it was almost three years before she figured out what was going on. By then she was on a roll so she just kept on rolling. Ten years passed and Hellena's career, which involved spending a lot of time on her back, was in fact messing up her back. She decided she needed a change and switched to the front. Five more years passed and her front was getting messed up, too. So she decided it was time to open up her own shop. Which she did. And it sailed on real good for another ten years until some goddamn pious frickin' do-gooders got elected to the mayor's office and the city council and ruined the fun for everyone, including the former mayor and city council members who just got booted out by the voters. Considering she already had a string of arrests for solicitation, Hellena ended up in the Missouri slammer for a two year bit. When she got out she forthwith hotfooted it for California where she applied for Social Security disability for her bad back, as well as welfare, Medicare and food stamps. It was not a fat life.

But at least her back quit hurting.

Hellena and Manny met each other at St. Marmaduke of the Elysian Fields Catholic Church's Sunday afternoon charity bingo at the Cesar Chavez Memorial Parish Hall. Hellena and Manny both got O-72 at the same moment and yelled out _Bingo_ simultaneously. Obviously, it was meant to be. Cosmically ordained. Especially considering Manny's cousin, Mango, who was an amateur astrologist as well as running his used book store and fruit stand, told them their Zodiac signs were "real compatible." From then on they were inseparable, albeit often prone to breaking out into an expletive laced cat and dog squabble no matter where they were. They were also mostly broke, too, despite occasionally winning at the St. Marmaduke of the Elysian Fields Catholic Church's Sunday afternoon charity bingo, or hitting on a punch card now and then at Aasop el Akbar's Minnie Mart and Licker Imporium. But they still managed to scrape up the bucks to more than infrequently score some sniff or some of that righteous Mexican weed as readily available on the streets of LA as 'recycled' hubcaps and fake ID's.

Which is how Junior heard about them.

The fourth person in the BMW was a new face. Silesia von Schwarzfinger was a very plain looking girl, at least when she wanted to be, which was most of the time. She was rail thin, with bird legs and minuscule breasts barely registering on the breast scale all males below the age of 96 have hardwired in the testosterone slots in their brains. She had thick glasses, mousy brown hair and eyebrows to match and a studious nerdy appearance not likely to turn any masculine heads, with the exception of a handful of sociology majors who took pity on her and one guy studying to become a plastic surgeon who thought she would be a great before photo. Not important. Not to Junior. What was important was that Silesia was a brash and brainy notoriously outspoken graduate student in organic chemistry who'd built her own basement designer drug lab while still in high school and was there to make sure the coke load they picked up in San Luis Rio Colorado was what it was supposed to be. 100 percent pure (Columbian) cocaine. She would bring along her organic chemistry tools of the not so legitimate trade test kit. Only when she verified the nature of the load would Junior make the phone call to L.A. where the money would be duly transferred. Silesia figured Junior would pay her enough to settle up her heavy tuition debt with a little left over for chocolate marshmallow latte afternoons with her grad student buddies at the local coffee shop and smoking some dynamite weed in the privacy of their student apartments. Or, even better, over a bonfire when they camped out in the Sierra Nevada mountains and practiced a secretive offshoot of Falun Gong banned in China, Malaysia, Singapore and currently under surveillance in seven counties in Utah and three in Mississippi.

But she was also there for the adventure. Silesia, despite, or maybe because of, her appearance, was a risk taker whose avocational pursuits included sky diving, bungee jumping and rock climbing, but not, at least so far, her long suffering mother said with a maternal mixture of pride and horror, snake charming or grizzly bear wrestling. And, once riled, she had the personality of a hemorrhoidal pit bull with an abscessed tooth. Got a problem with a nasty bill collector? Call Silesia. Local mechanic ripping you off? Call Silesia. Got a rattler in your garage? Call Silesia. Wanna smuggle some cocaine from Mexico? Call Silesia.

Junior called Silesia.

The four of them in Junior's BMW took Interstate 8 east from San Diego, climbing first into the mountains and then dropping into what was once a featureless desert but now, thanks to the one/two punch of the human miracle of irrigation engineering and the natural miracle of water, was packed full of farms and fields and feed lots and some of the biggest stacks of hay bales on the planet. Which Elvis knew for a fact because a week earlier he'd looked it up on internet--after he'd passed through on the way to a day off in San Diego's cool weather--and the internet sure couldn't be wrong.

Just past a city block-sized stack of hay bales and an enormous feed lot, where no matter what they tried, the locals couldn't rid their cars or their homes or their noses of the distinct odor of cow manure and uric acid, up ahead the BMW Four spotted a good sized town. Hellena squinted through the car window.

"What the frick do they call this place", Hellena said acidly. "Stink Town? Cow Shit City? Hale Bale Junction?"

"Putting up hay bales is a lot of work," one time farm worker Manny said, somewhat defensively. He preferred to say he was a _recovering_ farm worker, having picked up the word years earlier when he went to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting for the first and, when he found out the crazy bastards were pushing abstinence rather than moderation, absolutely for sure last time. Then, thinking to drive the point home in a way the often obdurate Hellena would grasp, added. "Very hard on the back." This was followed by a not very friendly hard right to Manny's shoulder.

Which ended any further discussion of the subject.

They passed through the irrigated lands of eastern California and crossed the Colorado into Arizona where the landscape looked considerably more like the Sonora Desert it was, though there were still plenty of lunatics living there and various mysterious oases of buildings surrounded by unnatural planted trees sprinkled through the desert.

"Who the fuck would want to live here?" Helena snorted, staring at the barren desert.

"I heard from a reliable source," Silesia replied in a low, possibly conspiratorial, voice, "that some diehard Nazis are out there trying to use modern DNA technology to clone Hitler's DNA and resurrect him." A pause. "And they're close to getting it done."

"Wow!" Junior said in a surprised voice. "I had no idea that was going on."

"Neither did I," Silesia answered. Perplexed, Junior glanced over at her.

"What? You said what?"

"I said I hadn't heard of it, either." Silesia replied. "I just made it up."

"Just made it up," Junior snapped back. "Why would you want to do that?"

"I was bored," Silesia replied. "You aren't much for conversation, Junior. At least not when the conversation isn't about yourself."

"You are a fucking nutcase!" Snapped Hellena, unslumping herself in the back seat. "A fucking nutcase Nerd Butt."

"I could go for a nice cool slice of watermelon right now," Manny said from his back seat slump. "Or at least some cantaloupe."

"I'll be glad with this trip is over," Junior muttered. "Real glad. Real, real, _real_ glad."

"Oh _, really_?" Silesia mocked him.

"Shut the fuck up, Nerd Butt," Hellena snarled.

Another hundred miles or so and they hit the Ajo turnoff at Gila Bend.

"Christ," Hellena muttered from the back seat as she gawked out the window. "You ever see such a godforsaken place in your whole life?" It's even worse than East Saint Louis."

"They grow melons here," Manny said, almost wistfully. "Gila Bend melons. Very tasty, but tart if you pick them too soon."

"Put a sock in it, Manny," Hellena snarked at him. "I hate it when you get nostalgic."

They dropped south at Gila Bend, going onto the huge O'odham Nation where the United States government had magnanimously given a huge chunk of land to the Native American O'odham. Pretty much worthless land. Which was why the government was willing to part with it. A few more miles and they came to the faded old mining town of Ajo.

"Ajo?" Silesia said, looking at a road sign. "Isn't that Spanish for garlic?" Manny leaned forward from the back seat.

"Yep. Garlic." Silesia was puzzled and, as always, curious.

"Why would they name a town Garlic? Does the place smell like garlic? Is there a lot of garlic around here? Does...." Hellena leaned forward.

"Who the hell cares, Nerd Butt. So they named the town Garlic. Big fucking deal." Then she stopped and thought for a moment. "Though naming it something like Last Stop or Dead End would have fit it better, some jerkwater town in Michigan already having grabbed what was for sure the best name for this frickin' place. Hell."

They drove on to the border at a place called Lukeville, where Silesia looked in vain for a town to go with the name, then past a couple of sweaty, bored Mexican Customs officers–Aduaneros–watching the Mexican sports channel on a portable small screen imported Brazilian TV and on to a popular resort destination for Americans, Puerto Peñasco, on the Gulf of California seacoast.

Manny and Hellena were smokers and, since Junior absolutely refused to let them smoke in the BMW, carried on bitterly until he grudgingly stopped just about every hour for them to have a smoke.

Naturally," Junior fumed to fellow non-smoker, Silesia, after one of their smoke breaks. "They didn't take just a puff or two and then get back in the Beamer. Hell, no. They had to take their own sweet time and smoke the goddamn cigarettes down so far they damn near burnt their fingers."

Between the two of them alternately bitching at him and squabbling with each other, and Silesia trying to explain to him first the exciting history (her words) of the Mendeleyev Periodic Table and then the mysteries of unraveling the genome of the extinct wooly mammoth, Junior was about to go nuts.

"Silesia," Junior said, trying hard to sound tolerant but not pulling it off very well, "I know you are into stuff like the gemone of the extinct wooly mammoth.

"That is genome, thickhead," Silesia hissed, punctuating her words with a patented Silesia Death Glare, " _not_ gemone."

"OK. OK. Gottcha." Elvis replied. "But I still find it kinda boring. Different strokes, like they used to say."

"Whatever kind of strokes they are, Junior, you're at least one stroke short of a stroke load."

Which, Junior, deciding that silence was once again by far the best option, said nothing. Not that he wasn't thinking. Good thing he brought along plenty of--perfectly legal, Dr. Charlie 'slice 'n dice' Kennedy prescribed--medications of various sorts to level out their moods. He also figured out that giving the obstreperous pair in the back seat some tranquillizers and a whoopee pill to Silesia would make the ride go smoother. It did. The pair in the back were snoring loudly and Silesia softly humming Grateful Dead lyrics with only an occasional air guitar riff or two by the time they pulled into Dmitri's Sea Breeze Resort in Puerto Peñasco.

Dmitri was sure glad to see them. Business hadn't been so good since the big chains put in their frickin' whizbang state of the art hulking tourist hotels. The imperiousness of the corporate interlopers so pissed him off that as a matter of principle he boycotted all the big chains. He even quit going to McDonald's, except for when they had the Monday shrimp taco specials with Jalapeño poppers. Principle was one thing. Shrimp tacos and Jalapeño poppers quite another. Dmirti was not a man for splitting hairs. He was also not a man for a lot of fancy electronic stuff. Like surveillance cameras. Though he did have a credit card machine which he cursed every time he used and had to pay the greedy corporate bastards their blood money fee for using their goddamn machine.

Dmitri settled the BMW Four into his three bedroom Honeymoon Cabin just fifty meters from the soothing rhythmic susurrations of the lapping waves of the Pacific--at least during the hurricane off season--and well within the effective olfactory range of the odor of dead fish. No one ever asked him why a three bedroom cabin was called a Honeymoon Cabin. He didn't know himself. The name came with it when he bought the place a few years back. What honeymooners would need three bedrooms? If they were like him when he married Moira Maggie McClanahan back in Boise they wouldn't even need one bedroom. He still missed Moira. But she got homesick for the cloudy skies and perpetual drizzle of the old Ireland she had never actually seen, her parents fleeing the drizzly place a full two years before she was born. Didn't matter. It was home. The ancestral homeland. Romantic Gaelic Ireland. She used her right of repatriation to Ireland and moved to Cork where she opened a handicapped accessible bed and breakfast, tended bar and played the piano at Paddy's Whack Ale Shack and sang tin pan alley ersatz Irish songs for misty eyed American tourists whose starving great grandparents took the boats to America where they still had potatoes, as well as other nourishing foodstuffs, much of it displayed in store windows along with the _No Irish Allowed_ signs. She also raised and trained sheep dogs for the domestic Irish and Scots market, but _never, never, never_ sold to those feckin' Protestant Orange phony Irish English in Northern Ireland.

Like her ex-husband Dmitri, she was a person of principle. In more ways that one, having moved in with Seamus Hickey, the principal of a local school and owner of the finest sheep dog stud in southern Ireland. Who also was part owner in Paddy's Whack Ale Shack as well as being a right handy man to have in bed with her on a blustery winter's Irish night. Light years better than Dmitri who, besides snoring as loud as a 757 coming in to Shannon Airport, walking in his sleep and falling over and occasionally breaking furniture, also talked in his sleep, reciting classic stanzas from the Romantic Period of Serbo-Croatian poetry in the vernacular Serbo-Croatian dialect of his former home just outside of Zagreb. Moira considered herself a tolerant and considerate person, but there was only so much Serbo-Croatian poetry a lady could handle before the part of her mind processing incoming messages exploded and embedded its various parts into other more fortunate non-auditory parts of her brain. Even after moving to drizzly Ireland, a land chock full of moody poets, Moira steadfastly refused to listen to even a single line of any kind of poetry. Including Gaelic. Even though she didn't understand the language. What the hell. She didn't understand Serbo-Croatian either, and it still damn near drove her nuts.

But. Back to her ex-husband Dmitri far off on the Sonoran coast of the Gulf of California. Junior took Dmitri aside and explained to him that the two senior citizens with him were a touch on the peculiar side and gave Dmitri two one hundred bills to keep an eye on them. With a couple hundred more to come when they left--so long as Dmitri kept the pair out of any serious trouble. This made Dmitri somewhat suspicious, but running a resort in Mexico wasn't exactly like teaching Sunday school at Nuestra Sonora de las Lágrimas del Oro Catholic school in Puerto Peñasco, where Padre Obaldo 'Fuerte' Garcia would threaten your life if you deviated from the mandated lesson plan. Dmitri had plenty of exposure to the kinkier side of human nature. So much so that he planned on writing a book about the weird characters he'd encountered at the resort. But only after he retired, changed his name and slipped off to an undisclosed location.

"Just what do you expect your grandparents to do, sir," Dmitri said with no little concern. "That you would want to pay me to watch them?" Junior put on his best reassuring look. Which, being after all the son of a slam dunk defense lawyer father master of the reassuring look and an accomplished obfuscator of a real estate agent mother, was pretty convincing. To most. But Dmitri had been around the block a time or two. And in Puerto Peñasco the blocks were often two kilometers or more in circumambulation. He remained wary. But Junior was ready for him.

"Old Timer's Disease," he said. "Alzheimer's. Both of 'em. Early stages." Dmitri nodded but still looked unconvinced. The two old folks were strange all right. But Alzheimer's? He wasn't so sure. Still, what the hell, four hundred bucks was four hundred bucks, so why not watch the weird old farts?

"OK," Dmitri said. "I'll keep an eye on them." But, even as the words left his mouth, he had a feeling this just might not turn out so good.

Junior wasn't about to take a pair of loose cannons like Manny and Hellena to San Luis Rio Colorado to pick up the cocaine. The plan was to load up the dope at Basco's Junque y Carnicería, a nondescript borderline wreck of a place tucked away on a dusty isolated road on the outskirts of town. There, inside and out of the view of prying eyes--although all kinds of locals had a pretty good idea of what was going on but had a well honed sense of self preservation and kept their mouths shut as tight as the door seals on the Space Shuttle--the cocaine was to be loaded into the secret compartment behind the BMW's rear seat, which was activated by a hidden switch under the carpet beneath the driver's seat. Then they would return to Puerto Peñasco and make the final border run the following morning

Silesia von Schwarzfinger, being his dope truth tester, obviously had to go with him. So off they went to San Luis Rio Colorado, with Manny and Hellena plunked in beach chairs with their feet in the surf, a cooler full of chilled Dos Equis between them and Dmitri keeping a wary four hundred dollar eye on them through the resort's office window. What could go wrong? Junior wondered as they drove off. Nothing. Maybe it was just nervousness that was bothering him. The excitement of the whole thing.

But, still......

As he watched them drive off Dmitri also had an uneasy feeling in his innards. Similar to bad gas, but with an extra twinge or two somewhere in the labyrinthine unprobed depths of his descending colon. Which reminded him of a lethal submarine sending out radar pulses searching for prey in the great unknown. Dmitri uneasy about unseen subsurface menaces ever since his scuba diving prankster cousin Alexei sank Dmitri's floating lounge chair with a Russian spear gun while they were teenagers vacationing on the Adriatic coast.

Junior and Silesia took old Mexican Highway 2 from Puerto Peñasco to San Luis Rio Colorado, driving through a spectacular desert landscape, a well known Mexican government reserve called El Pinacate. A place where back in the '60's NASA sent astronauts to train for landing on the moon because of the similarity in landscapes. A very spectacular landscape sculpted by ancient volcanoes. The stunning view actually had them pulling over several times, despite the seriousness of their trip, to gawk at the landscape. Which Silesia found fascinating but made Junior wonder if there wasn't actually an Eighth Day of Creation when God was worn out and in a real bad mood and made El Pinacate as an act of personal divine pique. Still, Junior had the presence of mind to snap some digital pictures in case they were questioned about what they did in Mexico when they tried to cross the border at San Luis the next day. "What did we do? Saw the sights. Want to see some real cool pictures of El Pina...er...Pina something. Really, really cool place."

A half hour before noon arrived in the sweating swelter of the Sonora Desert they pulled into the outskirts of San Luis Rio Colorado and found Basco's Junque y Carnicería. It was a ramshackle jerrybuilt structure of metal sheeting and wood framing, with a wheezing hopelessly inadequate old swamp cooler plunked on the building's roof. The neighborhood where it sat, a mixture of more ramshackle metal and wood buildings, homemade adobes and a few rundown trailer houses, had the general impression of the last gasp of humanity before plunging over the abyss. Like the old saying went. It wasn't the end of the earth--but you could see it from there. Junior shuddered and made a mental note to hug his parents when he got home and thank them for him not being born in Mexico. Silesia, however, was busily trying to figure out where the locals got their water in this desert environment, what they did with their sewage and garbage and what kind of services they had. Cable? Internet? Cell phone service? Streaming video? Telemundo? Junior however was looking around for the Mexican version of a Dairy Queen. Man, would a chocolate malt hit the spot about now. But then Basco opened the creaking double doors of his shop and it was time to get down to business.

The first thing Junior noticed was a thick bodied bearded guy in khaki shorts and a tank top with a Disneyland logo on it. But Junior's eyes soon locked onto a single image. The AK 47 cradled in the guy's thickly muscled arms. He had the brief thought that maybe he should have stayed in college and taken up fly fishing or competitive bowling or something like that instead of the dope dealing mess he was in now. But...but...but. Too late for that, Junior, he thought to himself. Way too late. Then Basco closed the doors to the shop behind them and walked over to Junior with his hand extended, a friendly smile creasing a handsome swarthy face featuring a full set of gleaming white teeth with only one small and nearly invisible filling. He wore beach sandals, a loose fitting Filipino barong shirt and light weight cotton trousers. He looked more like a Mexican TV star than a drug trafficker and Junior was so taken aback for a moment he thought he was in the wrong place.

"Señor Basco?" He said with some hesitation. The man actually laughed.

"No," the guy said in an easy fluent English. "Not Señor Basco. Basco means Basque, which is the country between Spain and France where my paternal ancestors came from. That's my nickname. My name is actually Hernando von Schreibenlustiglos Jauregui. Silesia suddenly was a ball of excited animation.

"Von Schreibenlustiglos? _Really_? That's a very unusual name. It was my grandmother's maiden name. She was from Germany. East Prussia. She came from....."

"Hof Ohneschlafen? In der Nähe von Königsberg? From near Königsberg?" Basco shot back, enthusiasm flushing his swarthy complexion and a huge grin on his face. Richtig? Right?"  
"Hof Ohneschlafen! The old home place! Ja! Ja! Richtig! Damn straight, cousin," Silesia said, reaching over to clap him on the shoulder so hard the guy with the AK 47 gave her a hard look and tightened his finger on the trigger. "You must be from the branch of the family that went to Mexico after the, er, ah, late 'unpleasantness' of WWII."

"Fucking Goddamn Russians!" the two hissed in heated unison, thereby absolutely cementing their family bond in perpetuity, seeing as how the Russians had booted out all the inhabitants, the entire von Schreibenlustiglos extended family among them, and obliterated East Prussia, including Königsberg, permanently from the map of Europe. Which didn't make the Russians a lot of real good friends among the Germans. And especially among the von Schreibenlustiglos extended family.

That was it for a while. Silesia and Basco lapsed into an impromptu family reunion and detailed denunciation of all things Russian in a combination of German, English and Spanish that left Junior bewildered. This was sure as hell not what he was expecting when he put the BMW into gear that morning in Puerto Peñasco and pointed it towards San Luis Rio Colorado. Worse. Much worse. The eight hundred pound gorilla of paranoia always lingering in a drug dealer's mind was starting to rattle its cage in Junior's troubled brain. Now that Silesia had discovered her long lost cousin, could Junior trust her drug testing judgment? Did she now have conflicting loyalties? Was being a von Schreibenlustiglos more important to her than honoring her deal with Junior? Would she keep her mouth uncharacteristically shut about any scam and Thornton find himself stuck with 115 pounds of cocaine cut way below strength with baking powder or Mexican or maybe Hawaiian sugar instead of 115 pounds of pure Columbian cocaine? Poof! There would go his profits. He sure couldn't go selling something like that as uncut cocaine. That was the express lane to the coroner's slab. The day was just getting too goddamned complicated, even for a quick and agile brain like Junior thought his was. His mind retreated to a trout stream in the Montana mountains–though the 800 pound gorilla did keep a wary eye out for a wandering grizzly.

Not to worry after all. Silesia and Basco hit it off so well that things went smoothly from then on. Slick as a greased pig, as Elvis' grandpa would have said. Though Elvis continued to be befuddled over why anyone would grease a pig in the first place. Didn't bacon already have enough grease in it? So why add extra grease? And none of which Junior would have had the slightest notion of, having not yet had the misfortune of encountering Elvis and his peculiar world view and the concomitant puncturing of the existential balloon of his own world. But, at least, after Silesia and Basco stopped flapping their jaws with all the family gossip they'd respectively missed out on, they got on with it. Basco motioned at a thin guy with a shaved head, a goatee and bunches of tattoos on his arms and probably a lot of other places under his clothes.

"Diego!" Basco said to the man. "Let's get started." Diego walked over to Junior and nodded at him.

"Buenos Dias," Junior said in a halting Spanish, with an accent that somehow came out sounding Australian. "¿Cómo está?" Diego shook his shoulders noncommittally.

"OK, Dude," he replied. "Good as can be expected in this fucking heat." Junior blinked, saying in surprise.

"Hey. You speak pretty good English." Diego gave him a strange look.

"And why the hell wouldn't I? Born and raised in east L.A." Junior replied...before thinking.

"Then what are you doing here?" Diego gave him a look that Junior instantly understood with the exquisite clarity of a rabbit looking up to see a diving red tailed hawk a few feet away and coming straight at him with claws extended and ready for immediate action. He dropped the subject like a hot potato. Or, more directly to the immediate human point, like a live grenade.

"Yes, it has been hot, hasn't it?" He said, as he examined with considerable interest the cuticles on his left hand, then turned his hand over to study the intricate whorls on his fingertips.

Basco took them to the cocaine, which was under a olive drab tarp with a Mexican Army logo on it in a dim corner of the garage, and Silesia broke out the tools of her trade. She took samples from a half dozen randomly chosen cocaine bricks and set about to testing them one at a time on a rickety table next to the stack of coke. She was as stone faced as a flat out guilty defendant awaiting a jury verdict. Both Junior and Basco watched with intense interest as Silesia labored with furrowed brow over the tests. Then a broad smile creased her face and she gave both of them a vigorous thumbs up.

"The real deal, Thornie," she said to Junior. "One hundred purr-scent." Basco looked at Junior, raising his eyebrows. Junior needed no words. He pulled out his cell, hit a preset number and said a single, prearranged phrase into the phone.

"The Rock of Ages has cracked!" The deal was done, despite the puzzlement that took up residence on both Basco and Silesia's faces at Junior's choice of code words.

Junior figured he'd finally get a chance to see just how they went about dog proofing the BMW. In TJ they shooed him out of the room before they set to doing whatever the hell they were gonna do. But, now, just like in Tijuana, Junior never got a chance to watch how Diego dog proofed the danged BMW's cocaine load.

"Proprietary information," Basco said as he politely but insistently escorted Junior and Silesia to a waiting room where he and Silesia resumed their family history tale swapping and Junior watched a Mexican TV game show that was maybe the strangest program of any kind he had ever seen. He was completely baffled. Just what the hell was going on? He would have asked Basco, but he was nose to nose with Silesia in an intense conversation liberally punctuated with "Fucking Russians!" Then Diego came in, liberating Junior from both the Mexican TV game show and a multi-lingual East Prussian family reunion, pointed at the car and said "C'est fini!" Which was met by a bunch of blank looks. "It's done," he said with a touch of miffed hauteur at their blank looks. The car was ready. Basco and Silesia hugged each other, exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and promised to get their families together for a regular family reunion "....so bald wie möglich!" Which translated, more or less, as real soon. And then, much to Junior's relief, they climbed into the now loaded BMW and the road back to Dmitri's Sea Breeze Resort in Puerto Peñasco. The road had loads of signs of one kind of another on it, some of which cautioned against wild animals on the road. Junior was unfazed. He kept the same moderate speed he'd been going all along.

"Did you see that sign?" Junior snapped in an irritated voice. "Animals! In this Godforsaken place. What a crock!" He said sarcastically, glancing over at Silesia.

"Watch out for the deer!" Silesia shot back at him, pointing straight ahead. Junior hit the brakes, fortunately not quite hard enough to trigger the airbags, as first one, then a second and then two more very large mule deer bounded in front of the BMW across the road. Junior did slow down then. They got to Puerto Peñasco after dark.

Dark.

What? The whole place was dark. Dmitri's Sea Breeze Resort had not a single light on. Nor, for that matter, did almost the entire town of Puerto Peñasco. Junior stomped the brake, put the BMW in park and grabbed his head in anticipation of the miserable bastard of a migraine that his brain was sure to lay on him in the next five minutes. Christ! What next? First this goddamn Nazi family reunion, a serial killer dog proofing the BMW, deer assassins on the highway, the lunatic pair of old farts in the Honeymoon Cabin, and now the entire fucking town of Puerto Peñasco as dark as the heart of an IRS auditor or of his former girlfriend Natasha Kinashski's mother, who Junior suspected of being a KGB--or whatever the hell they called it now--mole. He was about to start crying when Silesia put her arm around him and leaned over to whisper in his ear.

"Man up, Thornie! Damnit. I'm supposed to be the only pussy here!" Which definitely got Junior's attention, since it never occurred to him that the androgynous Silesia had even a hint of any kind of gender leaning thoughts in her inquisitive asexual scientific mind. His response matched the look on his face.

"Huh?" He said, shaking his head as though to clear up what he was hearing, continuing in the same vein of eloquence. "Say what?" She leaned away from him and delivered a patented Silesia 'get straight' slap to Junior's cheek that did go a good ways towards settling his thoughts and concentrating his attention.

"Business at hand, Thornie," she said. "Like you're always rattling off to me. First Things First. We've got a job to do here and we'd damn well put our shoulders to the grindstone and get 'er done." Junior looked at her with some surprise.

"Get 'er done?" He said. "And all that other stuff. That doesn't sound like you."

"OK. OK," she replied. "So I saw it in on a streaming video of an old 40's movie. Just thought it fit the moment." She pointed her open palm at Junior's cheek again, but only lightly tapped it this. "You OK now?" She said.

"Yep." Junior replied. "And thanks," he said, rubbing his cheek. "I needed that." Silesia grinned.

"Another old movie?" She said.

"Yep," Junior repeated. And knew right then and there that he had cracked Silesia's androgynous façade and aroused the passionate woman inside. The stud himself, Thornton Kluster Jr., was about to scale Everest yet again as another female peak fell to his irresistible masculine charms. But then she reached over and gave an altogether way too hard three finger flick to his gonads

"Don't get any stupid ideas, buddy boy."

So much for that idea, Junior thought as he doubled over into a self protective fetal position.

But at least his attention had returned to the present. Oh, boy, had it returned to the present, the synapses of the ultra sensitive tiny little fibers in the nervous connections in the immediate vicinity of his gonads letting him know in no uncertain terms he was definitely in the present.

"OK, Sherlock," Silesia said. "What's next?"

"Impotence?" Junior replied, his mind still riveted to the immediate.

"Come on, Thornie. Get with it. Let's find out what the hell is going on here. No lights? In a town this size? With all the tourists? Gotta be bad for business."

"All right, Silesia," he finally answered, putting the BMW into gear and guiding it into a parking spot in the Dmitri's Sea Breeze Resort's liberally potholed allegedly blacktopped parking lot. "Let's go find out what is going on." He had to admit, apprehensive as he was, that he was still damn well curious about what was going on. What could have shut off the lights in the entire town? Well, not quite all the lights. Here and there a few lights were solar powered and still on, others powered by emergency generators, some small, others, like in the hospital and police station, not so small, most of which were too far away to see. That was when he noticed the noise. A steady hum, like an advancing horde of cicadas, that actually was of a bunch of generators in the distance.

"Kinda like a science fiction movie," Silesia said as she noticed the noise. "Attack of the Giant Killer Ants. Something like that."

"You are not being helpful, Silesia," Junior replied, though he had to grant that it was kind of like that. Dark. A humming noise all around. They're coming. They're coming! Yeah, it really was kinda like that. And then it started. An unearthly moaning. A primeval wailing like they had never heard before. This really was like a science fiction movie. But it was no movie. And, whatever the hell it was, it was coming towards them. The moaning came closer and closer. Something very large was coming at them in the night. Even nerveless Silesia was starting to get uneasy. And then, looming out of the murky night, it appeared. A cow. A flipping hunk of a dairy cow, loose from its paddock and unmilked for a day by its owner, its engorged teets almost scraping the ground and plaintively moaning in udder discomfort, on a bovine search for a relieving set of human hands.

"I think I'll be real glad when this day is over," Junior said. And he meant it, even though the complaining cow walked right by them and continued on its bawling way into the darkness.

"I hate milk," he said.

"What?" Silesia said. "You drink milk all the time."

"Not any more," Junior said, flipping the bird at the vanishing rear of the bitching cow.

"Wow!" Silesia said, ignoring him. What a cool day this has been." She learned over to Junior again. "And it's not over yet."

"I know," Junior said woefully. "I _know_."

Moving at a cautious speed roughly equal to that of Bad Ice, one of Greenland's least perambulant glaciers, Junior and Silesia climbed out of the BMW into the unlit parking lot. Both were feeling more than a little uneasy knowing that there was a fortune in cocaine in the BMW and something strange was going on in Puerto Peñasco what with almost the whole freakin' town pitch black. Black was not good. Puerto Peñasco was a tourist party town where the more sober among the picky gringo tourists wanted to see what they were drinking and what they were eating. Later on, especially after an evening of hammering down margaritas, cold drafts or the town specialty, the stupefyingly potent Puerto Peñasco Meltdown, lighting took on less and less relevance until they reached the point where they really didn't want to see who--or what--their inebriated bodies were entwined with. Which of course was good for many a whopping big shock come the next morning. Puerto Peñasco led the entire state of Sonora in the number of early morning bilingual AA meetings where benumbed newcomers stumbled through the doors mumbling 'never again.' But this was evening. Just past dark. Too early for much entwining. So what the heck was going on? Junior and Silesia, having no flashlights, gingerly made their way through the darkness towards the front door of Dmitri's Sea Breeze Resort.

Junior was worried. Well, maybe not actually worried. Beyond that. More like paranoid. Was this some kind of dark plot to rip off their dope? Were some of those sleazy amoral greedy characters that lurked about in the dark corners of Mexico, some of whom were known to be currently in Puerto Peñasco vacationing from Wall Street, about to grab their dope? Pitch black was not good. Pitch black might be great for star gazing, but Puerto Peñasco was sure no astronomical observatory. They had observatories for stuff like that. And, for the real nerdy scientific types, there was the world class observatory at Kitt Peak south of Tucson. Silesia had been there twice herself. But, here? Star gazing? Not bloody likely. Not in Puerto Peñasco. So why was it dark? Something unusual? Unexpected? Even explainable? Junior wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the string and sometimes a little slow in catching on. Could they _actuall_ y be star gazing? Maybe a new festival to draw the sky watching segment of the tourist population? Folks who liked to grab a view of the Milky Way over the ocean before diving into an evening of wanton tourist revelry? Bacchanalia under the stars? Junior looked at Silesia.

"There some kind of meteor shower or something like that tonight? What do they call it? The Persecuted? Perspired? Something like that." If looks could kill, the one Silesia shot at Junior would have ripped his head right off his shoulders and sent it sailing a hundred yards off into the gently rolling Pacific surf.

"Perseid, Junior, you fathead. _Perseid_." Another hot look, this one not so intense and which would only have partially knocked his head off and left it dangling over the upper cervical vertebrae of Junior's mildly scoliotic spine. "No goddamn wonder you dropped out of college, Junior. You're fucking hopeless." This was more than Junior could take.

"Listen Nerd Butt," he said, stealing one of Hellena's lines that had struck him as cool and not at all inaccurate. "There are those of us who find other things to do with our time besides sitting in libraries and trying not to fart out loud. Normal people count sheep when they try to go to sleep. Nerd Butts like you count molecules. You are a sick woman."

"That's exactly what I mean, pinhead. You're clueless. How could I count molecules? They're microscopic." Silesia shot back at Junior. "When I try to fall asleep I do square roots of random numbers until I doze off. That usually works." Junior threw up his arms in exasperation.

"OK. OK." He snapped. It's Perseid _. Perseid_." That make you happy?" She grinned and took his arm.

"Let's go see what's happening with your weird fake grandparents."

"OK," Junior said, not at all sounding like he had much enthusiasm for the idea. God knows what that pair of lunatic geezers could be up to, especially when there were no lights. Junior groped through the dark to open the front door of Dmitri's Sea Breeze Resort. He pushed his hand farther and farther until he lurched forward, nearly falling down, and found himself on the other side of the door.

"Guess the door was open," he said sheepishly.

"Guess so," Silesia said as she stepped through the open door, knowing that she'd zapped Junior enough for a while and better lay off the wisecracks for a spell. Give him some breathing room. Time to recover. At least a full minute. Maybe even two. After all, a man could only take so much. Women, of course, which Silesia knew full well, were considerably more resilient than men. An attitude that had cost her more than one boyfriend. No matter. They were only nerd wannabes anyhow. She was saving herself for the real deal nerd man who her feminine intuition told her would drop into her life somewhere in the not too distant future. Getting her PHD and making big bucks working for a Big Pharma multi-national ought to help that process move along nicely. Super Nerd Man, get thyself ready. Silesia is on her way! But until then she'd have to make do with lots of cold showers and doing triathlons as often as she could squeeze them into her schedule. There was nothing like the utter exhaustion of completing a triathlon to take your mind off things. That, plus she sometimes wore men's underwear beneath her lab coat at the University and let her mind wander into assorted marginally kinky fantasies.

_Singing._ They could hear singing coming from somewhere inside Dmitri's Sea Breeze Resort. No power, so it wasn't a TV or a sound system. At least not a plugged in one. As they moved through the dark lobby the singing grew louder. And louder. And louder. Junior stopped and whispered in Silesia's ear.

"Do you hear that?"

"Yes," Silesia said breathlessly. "The sound of the incoming missile and the cries of the doomed begging for one last chance."

"Goddamnit, Silesia. You know what I mean. That singing. It isn't in English. Or Spanish?"

"Someone's singing in tongues?" Silesia snapped back at him. "Like when you smoke too much of that Sinaloa Slingshot weed that makes you pee green and see apricots shaped like oblate spheroids floating in the air all around you?"

"Normal people would say earth shaped, Silesia. But you, Nerd Butt, have to say oblate spheroid."

"It is a technically correct term," she retorted. Junior signed and shrugged.

"OK. OK. You made your point. But someone not far off is singing in some foreign language."

Then the idea came sailing in and whacked their brains at almost exactly the same moment. Dmitri! Serbo-Croatian! They made their way through the lobby and out the back door to where the Sea Breeze's pool and hot tub were lurking in the dark. And there was Dmitri, the crooning Croatian, whose actual name was, Dmitar Zvonimir. Next to him was Hellena 'Bad Back' Edelweiss. And next to her was Manny 'Quick Fingers' Bojorquez. All plunked in the Sea Breeze Resort's lukewarm formerly hot tub. All three in their underwear and each with a bottle of Balkan Rakia in their hand, courtesy of Dmitri's private stash, and taking turns singing. Dmitri had just finished a windy Croatian ballad about a beautiful young girl who was carried off by Cossack raiders and made to clean stables in rural Hungary until a handsome prince happened to see her shoveling horse manure and brought her to his castle where she shared his bed, made his breakfast and died soon after in childbirth. It was Hellena's turn next and, having had a deprived bare bones childhood in the cat house where her mother made sandwiches for the clientele and doubled as the house bouncer, all she could muster was Mary Had a Little Lamb. Which, however, she performed dead center in the key of D and with some added ribald lyrics going back to her cat house days that everyone agreed were amusingly entertaining. Junior started tapping his right foot, Junior being naturally right footed, and began to hum harmony to Hellena's melody line. Until Silesia whacked him in the shoulder and gave him a dirty look.

"First things first, Junior. Remember?" Junior blinked.

"Right. First things first." A blank look. "Just what was first again, Sleazy?"

"Goddamnit, pencil head, you know I don't like to be called Sleazy!" She snarled as she rabbit punched him. "The BMW. Getting it across the border." She paused for a moment. "But looks like the first thing now is getting your grandparents sobered up."

"They are _not_ my grandparents," Junior sputtered. "My grandparents live in a well kept gated community hidden away in a secluded part of Encino and rarely drink much after supper. Though I will admit sometimes they have very late suppers." He was about to return the rabbit punch but then thought better of it. Nope. Not a good idea, Junior. Silesia might be a skinny nerd, but a skinny nerd with the temperament of a Tasmanian Devil. Which in fact was what one of her ex-boyfriends called her after she rocketed off on him after he made the ill conceived and very unwise suggestion the dramatically flat chested Silesia might consider getting breast implants.

Hellena finished her song and Manny, after first pausing to take another long pull off the half empty bottle of Rakia and belch in alcoholic appreciation three times in quick succession, launched into a border corrido in Spanish about a narcotics trafficker who fell in love with the carved image of a princess he stumbled onto while doing the tourist thing at Teotihuacán with his then wife and in-laws. His obsession with the princess subsequently causing him to lose his focus in his dangerous line of work and ending with him being gunned down by Federales, tipped off by his ex-father in law, in a sordid alley in Tijuana, a photo of the princess from the Teotihuacán temple wall clutched in his lifeless fist. No one could understand Manny's Spanish well enough to follow much of what he sang, but the intensity of his raspy deep baritone caught their attention and they all stared at him. Besides which, he was singing so loud they couldn't hear each other talk.

"Anyhow," Junior continued after Manny finally wound down, quit singing and, to Junior's eyes looked like a slowly deflating hairy balloon as he slumped down in the lukewarm hot tub so far Hellena had to prop him up to keep his head above the water, "we gotta straighten these two out before we try to cross the border. Straighten them out. Sober them up. Clean them up. And maybe find some way to sew their mouths shut that isn't noticeable from the outside." Silesia looked glumly, first at Manny, who had passed out dead drunk, and then at a bleary eyed Hellena, whose sagging right boob had escaped from her imitation Chinese made Victoria's Secret brassiere and was dangling in the water. Which made Junior wonder if nipples worked both ways and women could drink through their boobs.

"This is not looking good, Junior," Silesia said. "Rome wasn't built in a day and it sure as hell is gonna take more than a day to return these two to somewhere in the vicinity of the land of the living." She looked again at the hapless pair of blitzed senior citizens.

"You think we should just leave them here and try it ourselves?" Dmitri, who had seemed lost in his own Rakia stupor, suddenly came to life. He jumped straight up in the hot tub, grabbing at his soggy shorts just before gravity returned them to the hot tub.

"Leave there here?" He said, eyes wide with horror. "No. No. Nonononono! You couldn't pay me enough!"

"Scratch that idea," Junior said morosely.

Junior and Silesia managed to get Manny and Hellena out of the tub, dried off and plunked into their beds in Dmitri's Sea Breeze Resort's three bedroom Honeymoon Cottage. Just to be on the safe side Junior took out a couple more of Dr. Kennedy's handy legally prescribed knockout pills and managed to get one down each of them. Next was the Rakia. They weren't about to let the pair hit the booze again and returned to the darkened pool and hot tub where they picked up the two half empty bottles of Balkan Rakia. Dmitri, however, was still in the hot tub nostalgically hanging out with the third bottle of Rakia and trying to remember some of the nursery rhymes his mother used to sing when he was growing up just outside Zagreb, but was unable to pluck out any memories beyond a single somewhat vague bed time story about how to catch and dismember an Albanian. When he saw that they were about to pour out the contents of the two half full bottles of Rakia, Dmitri exploded out of the hot tub, his shorts this time staying put where they were supposed to be, grabbed both of the bottles out of their hands, lit out on a run for his own bachelor apartment--personally furnished by him with mementos of the Balkan wars--adjacent to the lobby of the resort and locked himself in, repeatedly yelling, in authentic Serbo-Croation. "Not _Rakia._ No! Sacrilege! Sacrilege!" Dumbfounded, Junior and Silesia stood immobile and watched as Dmitri blazed a dripping trail for his apartment.

"Looks like he's done for the night, too," Silesia said. "What say we just get in the damn BMW and head for the border right now? To hell with your grandparents." Junior squinted malevolently at her.

"They are _not_ my grandparents", he fumed. "My grandparents are....."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Silesia retorted. "I know. Your grandparents are just sweet old farts living in Disneyland whose family has voted Republican since the days of Abraham Lincoln."

"Abraham Lincoln was a _Republican_?" Junior said, stunned. "You're putting me on."

"Goddamnit, Junior. Just shut the fuck up." She grabbed his arm. "Come on. Let's get our stuff and get the hell out of here." Which they did, quietly packing up their travel bags and sneaking out to the parking lot where the BMW with the 115 pounds of cocaine was awaiting their attention. There was just one problem. And not exactly a small one.

The parking space where Junior left the BMW?

It was empty.

Silesia stood stone cold still, her mouth open with fizzled words of astonishment that couldn't get up enough energy to make the jump from her brain to her voice box. Junior however fell to his knees and began to moan and bellow and weep with such intensity the wandering cow from earlier heard him and answered with a plaintive still unmilked 'moooo' from the parking lot across the street. Which immediately caused Junior to stop his carrying on, not much caring for the idea of the cow bitch thundering across the street and further complicate an already complicated situation.

"Now what am I gonna do?" He moaned to Silesia.

"I'm thinking a change of career might not be a bad idea," Silesia said, recovering her voice. A comment that Junior found to be irrelevant and totally uncalled for.

"That is not helpful, Sleazy. Not helpful at all." Retribution was swift. A straight right to Junior's shoulder that landed precisely on the rotator cuff that had given him trouble since that night he got roaring drunk on Macedonian Vodka celebrating the Ides of March, whatever the hell the Ides of March was, and snuck onto the University's track team practice field and decided he would try throwing the discuss. He grabbed his shoulder and sank to his knees yet again. Silesia lasered him with hot eyes.

"Call me Sleazy one more time and you will spend the rest of your life as a eunuch." Which at that moment wasn't maybe such a bad idea to Junior. Life as a eunuch, a monastic, squirreled away in a reclusive monastery on a Greek Island where there were no Silesias, or Dmitiris, or Hellenas or Mannys or Bascos or BMW's, but hopefully with some good weed or at the very least some locally produced brandy with lots of cheese and homemade bread and a steady supply of heady dark ales from the Greek interior. But then reality slapped him back to the present. Silesia was in his face. And she hadn't brushed her teeth lately. Junior wrinkled his nose at the powerful garlic order, Silesia putting garlic on just about everything she ate. Including, to Junior's utter disgust, her breakfast cereal. Which made him think that if there were one person on God's green earth, and which explained her peculiar interest in the place, who belonged in the nearby town of Ajo--Garlic--it was the Nerd Butt herself, Silesia von Schreibenlustiglos von Schwarzfinger. Then the garlic voice spoke.

"Think you'd better find a local cop," she said. Junior blanched. A cop? Over a BMW with 115 pounds of pure uncut Columbian–though he suspected it actually originated either in Bolivia or possibly Peru–cocaine in a secret compartment behind the rear seat?

"That is not such a hot idea, Sle..Sle... _Silesia,_ " he said, catching himself before he made the potentially fatal mistake of calling her Sleazy again. "Considering the circumstances." He moved closer to her and dropped his voice. "Like 115 pounds of _cocaine_ behind the back seat!"

"What was that you said?" Came a voice from the nearby road. "Were you talking about Abel and Cain? I know a lot about the Bible, you know." A bare twenty feet away was a little old lady of the type who walk everywhere and have the sinewy muscled legs of a major college linebacker. At the end of a leash directly in front of her was a large shaggy dog that was at the moment peering across the road at a silent dark shape that looked suspiciously like a cow. "Hi," the lady continued. "I'm Margie. And I'm out walking my Alsatian/Standard Poodle mix, Boris. Did your hear about the power outage?" Silesia didn't actually groan. Not out loud. Did they hear about the power outage? With the whole goddamn town pitch black all around them? Was this a female senior citizen version of Junior the Twit?

"Actually, we did notice it." Junior, clueless as usual, answered, adding. "Do you know the reason for the blackout?"

"Happens once in a while," Margie replied in a shaky voice, momentarily distracted by having to set her legs against the surging force of Boris, the Alsatian/Standard Poodle mix, who'd just figured out the looming dark shape across the road actually was a cow. "Usually they fix it within a month."

"A _month_?" Both Junior and Silesia spit out, thinking that leaving Hellena and Manny with Dmitri in the dark for a whole month was a really bad idea. "A month!" They repeated. They were greeted by a cackle as good as any you'd hear in any Halloween special on network TV.

"Just funnin' you, kids." Margie said, still chuckling. "They generally have it fixed within a couple of hours. Usually it's caused by a transformer shorting out when some fool turkey buzzard lands on the wrong spot and is instantly caramelized." She stopped for a second. "Have either of you young people ever had caramelized turkey buzzard? It's...well....it's quite an experience." To which Junior and Silvia stared open mouthed at here and had absolutely no clue what the hell to say in reply and consequently said not a word.

"Goddamnit, Boris!" Margie suddenly yelled. Stop it!" Boris however had decided a close quarter meeting with the unmilked cow across the street was a darn cool idea and was doing his Alsatian/Standard Poodle best to make that a reality. Margie jerked on the leash another half dozen times before Boris finally backed off. Not that Margie was victorious in the age old tug of war contest between human and canine. The cow, not being particularly desirous of a nose to nose meeting with Boris, whose werewolf size gnashing teeth she could clearly hear across the road, had turned tail and cowfooted it off into the dark power-outaged town leaving Boris' bovine desires unconsummated.

"By the way," Margie said, pointing behind where Junior and Silesia were standing. "Does that happen to be your car?" Junior and Silesia looked dumbly at Margie, at each other, then slowly turned to look behind them. There slowly, ever so slowly, rolling into the darkness was the dim shape of a car. A BMW. Junior's BMW. Rolling on the slight grade leading downhill to the ocean. _The Ocean!_ "If that is your car," Margie was saying. "It might be a good idea to go get it before it turns into a submarine." Her words were heard only by Boris the Alsatian/Standard Poodle mix, who had no idea what they meant except they probably weren't related to his next meal. Which Boris was always, always, always up for. The intended recipients of Margie's admonishment, Junior and Silesia, were at that moment breaking the Puerto Peñasco 50 yard beach dash record. A long standing, albeit unofficial, record, set nearly three hundred years ago by a Seri Native American chasing a Spaniard who'd been messing with his woman.

Junior thundered up to the BMW, ripped open the door and stuffed his fairly tall and modestly muscular body behind the steering wheel and firmly grabbed the wheel. Whew! He was now back in control. The BMW however continued its glacial roll towards the foaming surf. Which was only ten feet away. And moving towards high tide. Silesia bounded up to the side of the BMW.

" _It's not stopping!_ " Junior said in a near panic, his consciousness slipping a notch or two from what was generally considered the every day Junior Normal. Which was when his dramatic side, the one he inherited from both his bombastic and very successful criminal lawyer father and his frustrated thespian mother, showed itself. "Oh, ye Lords of the Sea, I beseech thee. Please help me." Junior implored. Then, adding in a fervent tone. "I swear I'll never eat seafood again." Silesia tapped him on the shoulder. And not gently.

"Try hitting the brakes, Junior. That often will help to stop a moving car." Junior's eyes flashed.

"Oh, _that_." He hit the brakes. The BMW stopped.

But the tide was still rising.

"I forgot to mention that the transmission has been slipping a little lately," Junior admitted. "Didn't think it was important."

"Putting on the emergency brake would have been helpful, Junior," Silesia said, trying not to be sarcastic.

"I did. But that's been slipping a little lately, too."

"Not the only thing around here that's slipping," Silesia said in a sarcastic near whisper.

"What was that you said?" Junior asked.

"Never mind, Junior. Just forget it. Now start up the BMW and move it back to the parking lot." She reached over to tap him not so gently on the shoulder again. "And this time make sure there is a building between the BMW and the ocean." Junior was silent. And stayed silent. With the Pacific slowly but relentlessly closing the gap between the BMW being a car or a submarine, Silesia learned over and hissed directly in Junior's face.

"Start the goddamn car, Junior." She couldn't see the expression on his face but she could hear the equivalent in his voice.

"I think I lost the keys," he said in a voice so soft Silesia could barely hear him. But she heard him, all right.

" _You what?_ YOU LOST THE KEYS!" Rocket Woman blasted off then and launched into a tirade in her maternal native tongue, German, that would have made even the toughest Gestapo hard case blush. When she was done erupting she jerked Junior out of the car, made sure it was in neutral with the slipping parking brake off, and together with Junior, began to push the car back up the slight grade leading to Dmitri's Sea Breeze in the general vicinity of the outdoor pool and hot tub which was currently free of people. Though a near sighted wandering brown pelican had dropped in, mistaking the pool for a nearby cove well known in the pelican world as a dandy place to have a fresh fish dinner. The pelican didn't get a fresh fish dinner in the pool, but, when they got close enough for her myopia to eyeball them, she did get a pelican's eye view of two humans grunting and cursing as they pushed a car away from the rolling surf. A tale she would be sure to tell her pelican friends, were pelicans able to effectively communicate something like humans pushing a car away from the ocean, which, frustrating though it might be, she couldn't do no matter how much she screeched and gestured and flapped her wings. The other pelicans' primary reaction was to edge away from her, thinking she had gone over the pelican edge and was infected with the incurable dreaded Mad Pelican virus.

Pushing a car on a sandy beach was not the easiest thing to do and by the time the BMW was safely away from the Pacific's watery clutches, and sturdily chocked with rocks they took out of Dmitri's unenthusiastically landscaped entranceway, Junior and Silesia went back to the Honeymooner's Cottage where they collapsed in exhaustion and slept well past dawn of the next day. So much for sneaking off and leaving Manny and Hellena for Dmitri to handle. They were back to the original plan.

More or less.

By noon they were ready. Junior found the keys in the pocket of the pair of pants he'd stuffed into his suitcase the night before. After first showering and getting dressed in the prosperous looking but tasteful grandparenty clothes Junior and Silesia had brought along for them to wear when they crossed the border, Manny and Hellena were given a hearty breakfast of Huevos Rancheros and Sonoran flour tacos and each made to drink an entire pot of black coffee.

"A whole pot? But they'll be wanting to stop and piss all the way to the border," Junior said, protesting Silesia's coffee idea.

" _Look_ at them. Remember last night. You prefer the alternative? You want them to blast off into another off key corrido or cat house ballad just when we hit the U.S. border?" Oh, no! Not that. Junior had no trouble figuring that one out. She was right.

"Time for another cup," Junior said to Manny and Hellena, reaching for the coffee pot.

"I'll slip them a couple of tranquillizers about an hour before we hit the border, he whispered to Silesia. "That should do it." Silesia nodded agreement, quietly entreating the Gods of Fate that Junior didn't find a way to screw things up like he had with his car coming way too close to becoming the world's first BMW submarine. Or at least the world's first BMW submarine loaded with 115 pounds of cocaine.

The midday sun hanging overhead, Junior fired up the BMW and pointed it towards the US border and what he fervently hoped would be an ensuing era of Junior prosperity. Dmitri stood in the doorway of his Sea Breeze Resort and felt not even the slightest tingle of nostalgia or regret as the BMW pulled out of the lot. How could he possibly feel otherwise? Anyone who intentionally would pour out a half bottle of perfectly good Rakia was not a person Dmitri wanted anything at all to do with. A foolish and senseless act like that could have precipitated a war back home in the Balkans. Though it was true that almost anything could precipitate a war, or at least a century long blood feud, back home in the Balkans.

Which, truth be told, was a good part of why Dmitri had grabbed a freighter for Mexico. He liked the idea of avoiding wars and blood feuds and the strong probability of living past the age of 30.

The BMW Four retraced the route through El Pinacate on Mexican Highway 2 on the way back to San Luis Rio Colorado. Junior could have written a tourist guide book on all the places there were for traveling Americans on Route Two to stop to take a leak. The two pots of coffee in Manny and Hellena relocated at irregular intervals to their bladders and occasioned so many stops for the loudly complaining pair that Junior was thinking he was the one who should be taking the tranquillizers. In fact, as they were stopped in a turnoff where Manny and Hellena had headed off in different directions to do their business behind some helpless local cacti, Junior took out one of the tranquillizers and was about to take it. Silesia grabbed his arm.

"Not a good idea, Junior," she said. "That generic Diazepam might make you loopy enough to draw the border guards' suspicion." Junior stopped, looked at the pill, looked at Silesia, then had an idea.

"How about half?" He said. "That should work." Silesia nodded thoughtfully. Yes. That might work. She'd taken a half dose of this same tranquillizer back when she got so excited over the discovery of a suspected flesh eating bacteria in her University of California biochemistry lab that she had to calm herself down some. It had worked OK then. Even though the bacteria turned out to be only a ho hum ordinary bubonic plague one that was often found in the local ground squirrel population.

"Half is OK, Junior," she said. "Gulp 'er down." Junior promptly made a show of biting the pill in half and dropping the rejected half of the pill back in the pill bottle. That was the show. But, being after all a chip off the old block of his histrionic lawyer showman father and thespian mother, he actually palmed the second half and swallowed both halves in a dramatic gulp. After Manny and Hellena returned from watering the cacti, Junior gave each of them a different kind of moderately more potent pill, Chill Out, that Silesia had herself perfected in her home chemistry lab very few people knew existed. It was now time for Manny and Hellena to drop Chill Out tabs. They were only an hour from the border and by then the felonious seniors ought to be good and chilled out. They climbed back in the BMW and Junior hit the gas.

"Border, here we come," Junior said, as a certain vague glimmering had already started to creep into his consciousness. Junior, being Junior, had taken the wrong pill. It wasn't Diazepam. It was OxyContin. A powerful pain killer, one of whose street names was Hillbilly Heroin. Back home in Slippery Sister County, Elvis' relatives had a name for it. Mule Kick.

Or, conversely, Kick Ass.

But Junior did remember to get on his cell phone and make the call to Basco's Junque and Carniceria that would trigger setting up the decoy car he'd arranged earlier. Just ahead of the BMW as it entered the San Luis Port of Entry would be another car, as it turned out an older model slate gray Mexican VW beetle, driven by a sad eyed plain looking Mexican woman with two small children in car seats in the back. And twenty pounds of low grade marijuana in the VW's boot.

An hour ahead of the BMW Four was the United States government's San Luis Port of Entry, stuck in the far southwestern corner of Arizona, closer to San Diego than to Phoenix, and just about touching Arizona, California, Baja California and Sonora all at once. The place had all the sand anyone could possibly ever want. A place universally loved by all cats lucky enough to see it. Who would have meowed, in awestruck Feline Speak: Wow! This is one hell of a sandbox! A sandbox, however, the cats would soon learn to their dismay, liberally sprinkled with nasty tempered Mojave rattlers who were more than happy to have cat for supper.

Lebanese immigrant cum US citizen Hildegaard de Sharif was the Port Director. Hildegaard was descended from several of the ethnic strains that made up the Lebanese stew, most of them pirates, marauders or, even worse, government tax collectors. Arab, both Christian and Muslim. French. Armenian. Greek. Turkish. Even a Viking from the time of the Norse wanderings. And, way back, she was pretty sure, slippery Phoenician traders whose specialty was slickering the rest of the Mediterranean in sharp business deals and that eventually made them a whole bunch of enemies, the Romans chief among them. Which they were to find out was a really bad idea back in Mare Nostrum times. She spoke four languages fluently, Arabic, French, Greek and English, knew some Pig Latin, and had studied comparative religions in Beirut. She could handle discussions about the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and even Buddhist religions, though she personally thought they were all whole cloth fabrications. She knew in her heart that the only true God was Odin, the deity of her wandering Viking ancestor. Though she kept that belief pretty much to herself having learned that most people "just didn't get it." Still, the various religious zealots among her relatives threatened to ban her from their homes and muttered dark threats about infidels and ritual beheadings.

Despite her self professed broad education, her familiarity with the interactions of different major religions and the ability to speak English, French, Greek and Arabic, the Department of Homeland Security in its typical governmental wisdom assigned her to the Port of San Luis in far southwestern Arizona where almost everyone was Christian, mostly Catholic, and spoke Spanish. There was not a day that went by that Hildegaard didn't think about it and get really pissed off. A woman of her talents? In tacky, furnace hot San Luis? Not San Francisco. Or New Orleans. Or New York. Or back as a department head in Washington DC. Or even as a DHS liaison with a somewhat friendly foreign government badly in need of U.S. foreign aid bucks. No. She was in the superheated sandbox of San Luis. Did she have a chip on her shoulder? You bet. A chip the size of a plank off a full grown Lebanese cedar.

Hildegaard had failed to grasp that as powerful as her billionaire Lebanese politically connected father was, it couldn't get her bounced over the heads of hundreds of other upward bound supervisors more than she already was. The CBP Commissioner, having received some highly placed and very pointed phone calls about how very, very important good relations with Lebanon were, had already jumped her from a GS-9 journeyman into a GS 11-12-13 Washington job and then to the Port of San Luis as a GS-14, all in under four years and with her being the first border port director ever who had no previous first line experience in a border or any other port. But that wasn't good enough for Hildegaard. Her doting father had always told her she was special and Hildegaard was 200 percent certain he was dead right. She deserved something a whole lot better than this searing sand pit. Her father, for his part, only very grudgingly accepted that Hildegaard would want to emigrate to the United States and become a federal officer. But he knew it was his fault. He never should have let her spend much of her childhood watching all those American movies and TV shows about cops and robbers while he was away trying to save Lebanon from itself. But, on the brighter side, with Hildegaard as a US government insider, he might be able to bring in some really big foreign aid bucks from the Americans. He was even willing to go so far as to very privately whisper to a U.S. Jewish Congressman that he was actually a devout Jew, keeping it a secret for obvious political and personal safety reasons. If that didn't bring in some foreign aid, nothing would.

But at the Port of San Luis Hildegaard was huffing at the impudence of CBP management. And now they send out this bunch of misfits they call an Enforcement Team to stick their noses in her business? It was an insult to her port and her people and especially to her leadership. _Her_ leadership. Hildegaard de Sharif. A possible actual descendant of Alexander the Great, according to her second cousin Herostenes, her, Hildegaard, a woman who spoke four languages and could read two more with reasonable comprehension, and had bowled no less than three perfect 300 point games in her off duty hours. Her people were doing a damn good job, even if it was in this San Luis sand trap hell hole and even though it pretty much was just her own personal opinion they were doing a damn good job. San Luis, a place where she was convinced only condemned criminals should be sent. If her French ancestors had known about San Luis, Devil's Island might have fizzled before it ever got off the ground. Bad enough the Washington bastards sent her here. Now those dirty potsuckers in Arizona Headquarters send this bunch of usurping ET cretins to her port with the intention, which the paranoid part of her personality considered to be absolutely certain, just to make her look bad. But, by God, she sure as hell didn't have to give them any cooperation. After all....

The Lebanese had been fighting off invaders for a very, very long time.

The ET teams had been warned about Hildegaard de Sharif. Warned, rewarned and then re-rewarned again. One of the Enforcement Teams went to San Luis three months earlier. Hildegaard had harassed and stonewalled them until they finally gave up and headed back to Nogales. And without a single seizure to show for their frustrated efforts. Manfred 'Manny' Kuribachi, the Arizona ET commander, just about blew his stack when he heard what had happened at San Luis. There wasn't anything he could directly do to her, both of them being of equivalent GS-14 rank and having separate chains of command. But he sure could send in his best ET unit, Elvis and drug buster buddies, with the express direct order to not let Hildegaard stop them from doing their job. Operational independence. That much, at least, Manfred had been able to wrest from his own bosses–who were themselves somewhat intimidated by Hildegaard, her whispered and very unofficial nickname among them being the Bitch of Beirut. What were you gonna do with a woman who could vilify you in four languages, at least one of which you were sure not to know, and was rumored to have the phone numbers of Lebanese professional assassins on speed dial? Especially when her family had more money than the budgets of at least six developing nations. Though nowhere as much as the ever growing total of the debt of the entitlement capital of the nation, the State of California.

The ET bunch, Elvis Mahoney, Francisco 'Pancho' Soltero, Cletus 'WW' Magellen and Mairead O'Leary, pulled into the parking lot behind the San Luis Port of Entry one late heat drenched summer morning and parked their creaky but still usually operational government ride Ford van. They'd dropped off most of their gear at the rear of the secondary inspection lot next door and were pulling their personal on duty gear out of the Ford Econoline when a uniformed officer burst through the back door of the government building and headed with heavy footed intensity straight for where the four members of the ET were getting their gear together. He looked like a Marine Corps drill sergeant, possibly with an abscessed tooth about to pop, hell bent on tearing into a pack of new recruits. Which was no surprise, the guy having once been a USMC drill sergeant. The ET however, every one of them a combat veteran, were not a bunch of new recruits. Which he was about to find out.

"You can't park here," the man said in a harsh voice as he came close. "This is reserved parking for the Port of San Luis." WW stepped over to eyeball the man, not a bit intimidated that the man, Celso Montana, was a supervisor and outranked him.

"What do we look like to you, Bubba? Models showing off the latest uniform styles? Armed bus drivers staging an insurrection? We're an Enforcement Team sent to work at San Luis." Montana did a slow burn. No frickin' GS–11 was gonna talk to him like that. He had just made GS-13 and Assistant Port Director and was consequently a man of some station, despite what his ex-wife's mother might say to absolutely everyone within earshot..

"Who the hell do you think you are? I'm going to write you up, buster. You just burned your own ass." WW took it in his usual saturnine way.

"Make sure you spell the name right when you write me up. It's Magellen. M-a-g-e-l-l-e-n." Montana looked about to blow.

"Leave your van here and I'll have it towed." Just then Pancho stepped over and stared straight in Montana's face.

"Have it towed and the best you can hope for is that we'll find your own personal car and cut our initials in your tires. The worst will be for you to be demoted to a GS-9 and transferred to Frostbite, North Dakota, and finish off your career with your dick frozen permanently to your shorts and no need to keep your ice cream in the freezer." That got him. Montana was so far completely taken aback he wasn't even sure where his front was. But he was also sly enough to know that this bunch of GS-11 ET inspectors must have some serious juice behind them to talk like this. He started to back off.

"On the authority of the Director of Operations in Headquarters," the usually more diplomatic Mairead O'Leary said as she stepped between the glaring faces. "We have operational authority here. You can't interfere." She leaned closer to Montana. "It would be a very bad idea for you to try to interfere. That plain enough for you?"

Montana might have been a supervisor, but he was no thickhead. At least not much of one. He was also a former casino security officer who had a pretty fair eye at sizing up the odds in most any given situation. Just like the patrons at the casino, whose chances of hitting the big bucks were about as likely as Celso Montana winning a wrestling match with Bluto the alpha chimp at the San Diego animal park, the odds were stacked way against him. He had picked up by now that he was smack between a rock and a hard place. The rock being the mercurial Hildegaard de Sharif, who'd sent him out here, and the hard place being this determined looking bunch of ET officers with some obvious serious juice behind them.

"I'll let it go for now," he said. "But this is not the end of it." Just then Elvis stepped a little closer and looked at the name plate on Montana's uniform.

"Montana," Elvis said, reading the plate. "Hey! You're the guy they named the state after. I was there once. Let me tell you, sir, that the continental divide in your state is a really cool place. Great view." Celso Montana stared at Elvis in a state no where near Montana but very close to the state of stupefaction. "Say, Mr. Montana," Elvis continued. "Which one of the cars in the lot is yours? You know. Just in case." Montana's eyes flashed fire, but he kept his cool.

"This is not over yet. Not by a long shot." Then he wheeled on his heels to go back inside and have what was sure to be a white hot discussion with Port Director Hildegaard de Sharif. Who he was pretty sure would start yelling so loud they'd be able to hear her at the Quik Mart on the outskirts of town where he gassed up his Chevy pickup at least once a week and never failed to curse at the continually rising price of gas. Nor did he neglect to mull over the Beirut Bitch being from an Arabic country, the frickin' Arabs being the greedy bastards behind the continually rising price of gas and squandering the money on camel racing and air conditioned harems and other foolish vanities which he believed were God given rewards that should only be available to native born American citizens.

The ET team had their gear together and were about to head over to the car lanes and begin their day's work. Ordinarily, one or more of them would have gone into the port director's office and made the usual perfunctory remarks, which were intended to somewhat diminish the paranoia all port directors had when an ET team showed up with the looming possibility of catching a bunch of dope and thereby making him or her, and the whole port, look bad. This time, however, Enforcement Director Manfred--AKA either Manny or Nuke 'Em--Kuribachi had ordered them to go directly to work. He'd call up Hildegaard de Sharif himself and fill her in on what was what.

"I'd sure like to hear that conversation" Maired O'Leary said as they were about to head over to the lanes. 'It oughta be one hell of an ear burner."

"What do ya wanna bet the Beirut Bitch is on the phone right now trying to get us jerked out of here," Pancho said.

Not a single soul among them was about to take that bet.

Hildegaard de Sharif was indeed on the phone at that very moment calling one office after another in Headquarters. And she might have been successful had she not recently done an interview with CBS news for a special about rising star females in federal law enforcement. And that was where she screwed up. She was verbally sucker punched by a question from a (possibly Jewish?) reporter and guilelessly repeated what she had heard thousands of times growing up in Lebanon. That there was serious doubt the existence of the state of Israel had a solid legal foundation. She might as well have said that George Washington had an Icelandic sheep named Dagmar as an occasional sexual partner. She instantly zoomed to the top of a bunch of political hit lists. She was partially taken out of context, a widely practiced and career enhancing skill in the media, but the damage was done. Most of the doors previously open to her were closed. At least partially. And so were the phone lines. She finally slammed down the phone, threw back her chair and proceeded to stomp out to the secondary lot where the ET team was just setting up. She was thumping the ground so hard as she clumped towards secondary that several officers on the primary lanes thought it was another of the low intensity earthquakes that frequently visited the greater San Luis/Yuma area.

"What do you think you are doing in _my_ secondary?" She demanded. "I don't want you here. Now leave!" Mairead took out her cell phone, punched up a number and waited for the response.

"Hey, boss. She's here. Like you said. It's time." Then Mairead disconnected her cell phone and returned to putting together the team's state of the art (well, last year's, anyhow) fiber optic scope they took with them on most assignments. Hildegaard continued to rant and threaten the bemused assembled members of the ET team in at least three, maybe four, languages.

"Was that Greek?" Elvis asked of WW.

"How the hell would I know," WW answered. "I'm a Native American." He reached over to poke Elvis with a thick forefinger. "A _genuine_ Native American."

"It is Greek," Mairead interjected. "I once had Greek neighbors as a kid growing up in Richmond. They sure were a dramatic bunch. But, man, they could cook a mean leg of lamb for the neighborhood barbecues." Meanwhile, Hildegaard continued to rave, her pique further fueled by the ET team's casual indifference.

"You're fired!" She hissed out, this time in English.

"You can't fire us," Elvis replied calmly, and, knowing about her gaffe with CBS news, added. "But you should know that the U.S. ambassador to Israel has an opening on his staff for an official apologist. You might want to apply." Hildegaard really blew after that but no one knew what she was saying because she had lapsed into a randy colloquial Arabic she'd learned as a child from the lowly paid but picturesquely verbal servants in the family home.

Hardly another minute passed before Celso Montana came running out of the administration office. " _Director,_ " he said as he puffed up to her. "The _Commissioner_ is on the phone. He wants to talk to you. And now!" Hildegaard did a half pirouette on her imported French patent leather burnished charcoal black brogans and stomped off to her office to take the call and, despite having a handsomely constructed and enticingly sensuous posterior, drew not one single lecherous male, or female, glare. That was the last they saw of her.

For a while, anyhow.

Just then, only a couple of hundred yards to the south, a California plated BMW pulled up at the tail end of the line of cars occupied by mostly Mexican nationals waiting with varying degrees of patience to enter the United States of America. Just ahead of the BMW was a slate gray older model Mexican VW beetle with a sad eyed plain looking Mexican woman driving it and a couple of little kids in car seats in the back and twenty, actually more like nineteen and a half, pounds of low grade marijuana in the VW's boot.

"Here we go," Junior said in a very calm voice as they caught sight of the US port of entry. "Everyone stay cool. We'll be through this in no time and on our way home." In normal circumstances that would not have been the case with Junior. He would have been at least a little nervous. But that was before he dropped a tab of Mule Kick. Just then he jerked his head and pointed with his hand at something nearby.

"Holy Christ! Did you see that?"

"See what?" Silesia said with no little suspicion.

"The kangaroo," Junior replied.

"We're in deep shit," Silesia groaned.

"What kangaroo?" Hellena chimed in.

"The one over by the taco stand," Manny answered.

"We _really_ are in deep shit," Silesia moaned.

"Just kidding." Junior said, chuckling. "There's no kangaroo. Just my idea of a joke." Silesia's jab was instantaneous.

"This is no time to be joking, conehead. Get your head straight. And before we hit the border."

"OK, _Sleazy,_ " Junior replied, grinning. Silesia didn't respond. Junior flirting with the strong possibility of instant eunuchhood like that was sure as hell not typical Junior. He must be blitzed on that goddamn pill. Oh why, oh why, did she let the dipstick take the frickin' pill?" She leaned over next to him and whispered in his ear.

"Play this right and I'll give you a blowjob that will curl your toes for a full week." That definitely did get Junior's attention. He grabbed the steering wheel in a firm manly grip and resolutely stared straight ahead at the border. Now he really had something to look forward to. Silesia? A blow job? Not exactly images that fit together in Junior's mind. Despite Junior knowing that Silesia had boyfriends, though God knows what the particulars of that could possibly be, his main image of her was that she had the sexuality of a chunk of fossil resin. She was an asexual being in Junior's mind whose idea of a good time was probably something like inserting the genes of a woodpecker in a fertile rabbit egg to see what nature would come up with. A blowjob from Silesia? _Sure_ to be a once in a lifetime experience.

Silesia, however, knew there was no way she'd deliver on her promise. Something like that was beneath the dignity of a young woman not far from getting her PHD in organic chemistry and a lifetime of ensuing prosperity, be it legally or somewhat illegally derived. Though she might reconsider for the Nerd Man who lurked somewhere ahead in her future. But the least she could do would be to hire a hooker or bribe one of her roommates to do the job on Junior and at least somewhat satisfy him and maybe restore some credibility to the validity of her promises. A lieu blowjob would have to do, no matter how much of a hissy fit Junior might have.

Inspector Blaskwell Hornblower was having a pretty good day. His ulcer was behaving itself and his wife was still on vacation visiting her mother in American Samoa. Blaskwell had been watching the weather reports, hoping for a powerful Pacific typhoon that would keep his wife stuck in American Samoa for a while longer. Not hurt her. Just keep her there. It wasn't that she wasn't a good woman and a good wife and a good mother and also did OK at her Christmas season part-time job as a FedEx package checker. It was just that she came out of the womb chatting and hadn't stopped since. A man had to have a break from that once in a while. And, to make things worse, she also talked in her sleep. It was like having a muted talk radio going all night long in the bedroom. Which was why for every anniversary and almost every Christmas he gave his wife a gift of a round trip ticket to American Samoa. Up to this point, at least, it had preserved their marriage. And now, Blaskwell had recently discovered from his friend and fellow Rosicrucian, audiologist Dr. Thester McNumb, he was going deaf. Which, considering the particulars of his marriage, wasn't an altogether bad thing to happen. Something Dr. McNumb, being well acquainted with Blaskwell's wife, heartily agreed with, knowing from his own experience, being himself both partially deaf and being married, the wonderful benefit of the off switch on a hearing aid.

Blaskwell was one of Port Director Hildegaard de Sharif's favorite inspectors. Actually, her absolutely for sure definite number one favorite. She and Blaskwell hit it off from the very first moment they met. Blaskwell, whose maternal grandfather Hakim le Voleur had immigrated from Lebanon after the local authorities outraged the entire le Voleur family by accusing Hakim of camel stealing, was raised by his immigrant Lebanese grandparents--his Hornblower parents having vanished into the witness protection program without leaving a forwarding address--and consequently was fluent in Arabic. Knowing that the new port director was originally from Lebanon, he had greeted her at first meeting in her native tongue. And from that moment on there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that Blaskwell could do wrong in Port Director Hildegaard's eyes.

Which was a darn good thing for him. Blaskwell actually was a nice guy. He had a good heart. Probably too good to be a border officer. Tears sometime came to his eyes on those very rare occasions when he somehow blundered and actually caught somebody with a substantial amount of dope and they were hauled off in handcuffs with downcast expressions to the slammer. Good hearted, yes. But he had one problem. One very big problem. Blaskwell was certainly the most clueless officer at the Port of San Luis, a good bet for clueless number one at all the combined Arizona ports of entry and certainly a contender for the title of #1 Clueless on the entire southwest border.

Blaskwell was manning lane five at the San Luis Port of Entry that afternoon. Just over the line in Mexico he spotted a California plated BMW about to enter into the U.S. It was headed towards lane five. Blaskwell's lane.

Dang! Blaskwell muttered. A _BMW_. Cool. Real cool. Danged cool. Real danged cool. Blaskwell had long admired BMW's, though he knew he could never afford one. Not a good one, anyhow, having once bought a worn out old junker of a BMW that was nothing but a big money pit of trouble and actually ended up threatening the stability of his marriage. His wife put her foot down. It was her or the BMW. It was close, but he went with the wife and dumped the car, at considerable financial loss and no little emotional pain. Yet he still had a car lover's attachment to BMW's and never failed to admire the handsome vehicle when he happened across one. And here was one coming right at him. A captive BMW audience. Man, this day was sure going along good. Like the day he won the Arizona lottery. Well, almost won the lottery. It turned out he was reading the ticket upside down and didn't have the winning numbers after all. But it was sure a rush. While it lasted.

Blaskwell waved through the slate gray older model Mexican VW beetle with a sad eyed plain looking Mexican woman driving it and a couple of little kids in car seats in the back and twenty, actually more like nineteen and a half, pounds of low grade marijuana in the VW's boot, with hardly a glance at the beetle or the occupants. Though he did wonder a bit at what seemed like a marijuana odor coming from somewhere nearby. Probably some guy smoking a joint just over on the Mexican side. Ne Modo. Blaskwell's eyes were glued on the BMW. Startling both Junior and Silesia in that same BMW, the Volkswagen beetle gunned its engine and drove off into the United States unmolested. And there, floating before Blaskwell's eyes like the mirage of a lovely palm fringed south sea island to a shipwrecked sailor, waiting to enter lane five manned by Inspector Blaskwell Hornblower, was a glistening cobalt black late model BMW in excellent condition. Though with a bit of road grime from traveling the dusty roads in Mexico.

At least ninety-five percent of the seasoned inspectors at San Luis would have taken one look at the pricey late model BMW in the junker filled town of San Luis, which--with the notable exception of Cuba--was the slam dunk home ground of the impossible but real still somehow mobile junker, and do a double take. What was a car like that doing in a place like this? And they sure would have had some pointed questions exploring that very unusual fact. But not Blaskwell. What the heck. A guy's gotta have a sense of priorities. This was a BMW. Right here. A _BMW._ In Junker Town. San Luis. This was a nearly a once in a San Luis career lifetime event. Blaskwell was sure as heck not going to miss the chance of an eyeball to headlight encounter with a BMW and its accompanying lucky stiff owner. A grin as wide as his cheeks could stretch without serious pain creased his suntanned face.

"Get ready, Junior," Silesia said, holding his arm and squeezing it. "Stay cool. We'll get through this. Just don't do anything stupid." It had just dawned on Silesia with the force of a very large mental sledgehammer that a wrong move here could well permanently derail her from a PHD lab to the laundry room in one of the prisons dotting the landscape all over desert Arizona. The state finally having found an agreeable use for all the otherwise useless desert land and employment for the farm workers who lost their jobs when the local farmers mechanized much of their farming activity and the prison jobs saving a whole bunch of otherwise straight up honorable farm workers from turning to smuggling out of desperation to make some kind of reasonable living. It was not an usual occurrence for inmates at the local prisons to have been local farm workers who flunked the prison officer entrance exams and eventually didn't too well at drug smuggling, either.

"Who you calling stupid?" Manny snarled from the back seat, being in a kind of chemical limbo where he flashed back to his years growing up where almost everyone called him either stupid or some close variant, like lamebrain, numb nuts, dumb fuck or his all time personal most detested nickname, shit for brains. "I don't like being called stupid," Manny said. "In fact I hate being called stupid."

Silesia leaned over the seat and tried to sound convincing.

"Nobody called you stupid. Nobody would ever call you stupid. We all know you are the farthest thing from stupid. You are certainly the most unstupid person I know." She reached over and patted him on the knee. "Now just sit back until we're through the border." Then she squeezed his knee. Hard. And her voice morphed to something in the close neighborhood of a hissing boa constrictor with a human voice. "With your record if you get busted again they'll throw you in the slammer for the rest of your natural life, plus ten. And they're be no more pounding the bed springs with your snuggle buddy Hellena here." Another hard squeeze. "So shut the fuck up and prove to all of us once and for all that you're not stupid." That did get through to Manny, who still had nightmares about prison shower rooms. He clutched Hellena's hand, sank back in the rear seat of the BMW and tried not to think that less than a foot behind his back was enough cocaine to send him to prison for the rest of his natural life, plus ten. Hellena meanwhile was in her own chemical limbo, having drifted back in time to where she remembered watching her mother singing along with Liberace on a small screen old fashioned TV while she made sandwiches for the boys in the cat house.

Junior touched the accelerator, silently congratulating himself on doing it just right. Not too fast. Not too slow. A pleasant smile was on his face when he pulled adjacent to Blaskwell's booth and touched lightly, again just the right amount, on the brakes. Junior was not in the least worried. Not with Mr. Mule Kick on board. Junior was juiced. Which was why Silesia was glued to his side and putting on an innocent guileless look that was as far from her normal self as a sardine was from a great white shark.

Good afternoon, officer. Those were the words Junior was about to utter. He never got the chance. Blaskwell got there first. And didn't stop.

"Man. A BMW. What model? What year? What's the mileage like? How did it handle on the curvy Mexican roads? How........" What Blaskwell was thinking was how he'd really love to take the BMW for a test spin. But, try as he might in his searching brain, he couldn't come up with any kind of scenario that would work. Not a reasonable one, anyhow. Not one that wouldn't land him in big trouble. Which was something he sure didn't need, him getting close to the age where he could retire with his full pension and devote himself to attending BMW events of various kinds. At least those that would coincide with when his wife was away visiting relatives in American Samoa.

About that time Celso Montana came walking just behind the line of primary booths. Celso was the Assistant Port Director. That was his title. But to the line officers he was more like Count Dracula sniffing out victims, Hildegaard de Sharif's combination personal hit man, sergeant at arms and general all around day spoiler. Celso liked nothing better than to prowl the car lanes looking for some trifling infraction he could hammer the officers with. And, at least in his mind, subsequently increase his supervisory enforcement credentials in the eyes of Port Director Hildegaard de Sharif. Who the government grapevine informed him had some very influential friends in Washington and was therefore possibly the key to his own future promotion. So, though he personally despised Hildegaard, believing that no woman, and especially a non-Hispanic woman, ought to be a port director, he did his obsequious best to toady up to her. And made life miserable for the line inspectors who loathed him every bit as much as he detested the port director. Not exactly the big happy port family Hildegaard characterized San Luis as being to her own bosses at Headquarters. But, out of fairness, it was just a more or less typical working government environment found the world over, with the exception of a few places like North Korea, where you could loose your head for spitting on the sidewalk, or Somalia, where there no government existed beyond the effective range of an AK47.

Seeing Celso the port hitman lurking behind him, Blaskwell thought he'd better start looking more professional.

"Citizenship," he said in his best version of an official voice, one he practiced regularly at home, recording himself on his Sony home recorder and then replaying it looking for any flaws. And in fact he had it down pretty good. All four of the people in the BMW produced valid United States passports. Junior and Silesia's were genuine. Manny and Hellena's were phonies. The best phonies that drug money could buy. And that meant they were very, very good. They even looked more authentic than the real ones.

"And what was the nature of your business in Mexico," Blaskwell continued, trying to remember all the questions he was supposed to ask, Celso still lurking nearby with an eye on him. Celso had a particular dislike for Blaskwell, knowing that he was de Sharif's port favorite who could do no wrong in her eyes. Montana also suspected Blaskwell's allegiance to the principles of American civilization, having often heard him speaking in Arabic with Port Director de Sharif. Whose patriotism he also seriously doubted. So Montana kept a close eye on Blaskwell, looking for that one occurrence that was so flagrant he could zap both Blaskwell and de Sharif in one blow. And maybe move into the port director's job himself. A job, he knew for an absolute fact, he was far better suited for than that friggin' carpetbagging Bitch of Beirut.

"We were vacationing at Puerto Peñasco," Silesia said, making sure she got in ahead of Junior, there being no telling just what Junior would have come up with, Junior still being a resident of Mule Kick City. "Some sun. Some sand. Some seafood." Junior nodded in agreement.

"And I saw a cow," Junior said. "An unmilked cow." Blaskwell blinked. A cow?

"Well, that's nice. I didn't know they had cows in Puerto Peñasco. Milked or unmilked."

"Right," Junior said. "They sure do." Then a serious look at Blaskwell. Can we go now? I have to go to the bathroom." He scrunched up his legs. "And _bad_." Silesia jabbed him in the side. Not hard. Just enough to get his attention.

"I like cows," Manny said in a slurred voice from the back seat. "My grandmother had a cow. We called her La Llorona. She was kind of noisy, but still a real nice cow. And her milk made some of the best cheese I ever had." At first Blaskwell thought he was having an out of body experience, or maybe a psychotic episode like that time when he snuck some of his cousin Synchley's mushrooms to put in his homemade Greek salad that sure were like no mushrooms he'd ever had before. And which really pissed cousin Synchley off, him having no backup supply of mushrooms on hand at the time. But it was no out of body experience and it was no psychotic episode. This was the weirdest bunch of people he'd come across since that pickup truck load of traveling circus acrobats who came back way beyond the relatively benign concept of legally drunk from the Mexican side of San Luis and started doing somersaults and back flips all over the primary lanes. Bad enough. But at least they didn't have any of the circuses lions, tigers, elephants or water buffalos with them. Now, _that_ would have really been something.

"Are you bringing anything back from Mexico?" Blaskwell continued, remembering another of the questions he was supposed to ask.

"Nothing, officer," Silesia answered with the lightning quickness of a Mojave rattler zapping its prey. "We didn't bring anything. We just went to vacation. Like I said. Sun. Sand. Seafood."

"And sex. That's one of the staples of vacationing in Puerto Peñasco. Sun. Sand. Seafood. And Sex," came a world weary sexed out female voice from the back seat. "Except I for one would just as soon forget it."

"Have you ever tried Rakia?" Manny chimed in. "Lemme tell ya. That is some kickass stuff." About that time Junior, his mind still somewhat functioning despite being stranded in Mule Kick City, figured out that he hadn't just given the wrong pill to himself. Whatever he'd given Manny and Hellena, it wasn't having anything like the usual nearly paralyzing effect of Silesia's homemade Chill Pill. Like a double jointed broken field halfback juking around a linebacker, genuine Junior worry began to make its way around the stolid Mule Kick defensive line filter. Meanwhile, a few feet away, Celso Montana was staring at them with a mile wide grin on his face. If Blaskwell let this one go, as he was pretty sure he would, Celso would have that time bomb that could well blast both Blaskwell and Hildegaard de Sharif smack out of San Luis and maybe even government service altogether.

Just then a skinny red-headed guy rounded the secondary building corner and headed to Blaskwell's lane. Elvis strode up to Blaskwell and whispered in his ear.

"Refer this one to ET in secondary and put your name on it." Blaskwell, by now totally confused, looked at Elvis as though some saint had just descended from somewhere in the heavens above and saved his ass. Blaskwell couldn't write the referral fast enough, he being so agitated that he misspelled his own name as Blaskunwell--which might actually have been his worrywart subconscious trying to warn him. Elvis took the referral, also taking Junior's passport and driver's license, and escorted the BMW back to the secondary lot. Behind him Celso Montana was on the verge of tears and kicking so vehemently at a concrete abutment with his immaculately polished alligator skin boots that he scuffed them up so badly he never could get the marks out and was eventually forced to buy a new pair at a price that had him grumbling for a full week.

Despite the contravening calming inner voice of Mule Kick, Junior was getting increasingly jumpy. Whoever this long drink of water red-headed geeky looking guy was, he was dead serious about what he was doing. Then Junior looked straight ahead and saw the stolid and definitely menacing forms of the rest of the ET and came very close to having a involuntary bowel evacuation right then and there. This was not looking good. Not good at all. Silesia was stone cold silent and looking like she was just about to enter the mass funeral services for every member of her extended family and her entire graduate school class at the University, as well as her sweet octogenarian neighbor with the Siamese cat that regularly visited Silesia's place for a bowl of sweet milk and a vigorous scratch behind the ears and other suitable feline places.

"Are we there yet?" Manny said owlishly from the back seat. "I got to take another piss."

Elvis leaned in the BMW's window, turned off the ignition and pulled out the keys. Junior's eyes expanded to the full carrying capacity of his orbital sockets, which were pretty roomy to start with, and threatened to expand even farther. Which made Elvis think of a face so distorted in a fun house mirror it looked about to crack the mirror.

"Excuse me, sir," Hellena said from the back seat. "Are you the bus driver? I really would like to take the bus back home at your earliest convenience." She paused a second, pondering something, that something specifically being the half gallon of coffee she'd consumed that morning. "That is, if your bus has an onboard bathroom." Elvis meanwhile took his clenched hand, holding it over the roof and out of sight of the occupants of the BMW, and pointed it towards the other members of the ET team with definite emphasis on his upthrust thumb, mouthing 'good one' as he did so.

"Have you ever tried Rakia," Manny said from the back seat. "It is some righteous stuff, lemme tell ya." Silesia slowly turned and gave Manny a look closely related to the one the guy manning the guillotine had just before he dropped the knife on Robespierre.

"Let the officer do his job, grandpa," Silesia hissed. "Please be quiet."

"What do you mean, grandpa, you titless"--also taking one of Hellena's lines he admired--Nerd Butt. In my family you wouldn't even be a keeper. We'd throw you back to....to....to....well we'd throw you back to wherever you came from." Silesia was simmering toward critical mass. But she managed not to show it.

"Officer, please excuse our grandparents. They both have Alzheimer's. We thought a trip to the ocean would be good for them." She swept her hand with a flourish at the back seat. "But it hasn't worked out too well." Then, gathering dramatic momentum, she added. "And we unfortunately seem to have either misplaced or lost their medications. You can see the result."

The other three members of the ET team had approached the BMW close enough to hear what Silesia was saying. Not one of them doubted that there was something here that would result in some kind of enforcement action. Probably a load. But experience had taught them to not jump to conclusions. That was a jump that could land in some pretty nasty places, deep shit being at both the top and the bottom of the list. Nothing was certain until you actually found whatever it was someone was tying to hide. And it wasn't too unusual for it to turn out to be something they weren't expecting. Like the sweet looking elderly gentleman who'd tried to enter the Port of Nogales a few months earlier and, to the utter surprise of the officer running his passport through the automatic reader who figured the guy for a pain pill smuggler, came up with an arrest warrant. For murder. The sweet looking elderly gentleman had ambushed the IRS auditor who'd whacked him with a whopping bill over disputed back taxes, did him in and then proceeded to chop the body up into pieces, pack them in dry ice and Fed Ex them to the IRS regional office. He included a note in the package claiming to be the Avenging Arm for the Persecuted Taxpayers of America, Inc.

Elvis took the passports of all four, plus their drivers' licenses and the car registration. He handed them to Mairead, who was a whiz at searching stuff out on the confusing welter of databases the ET officers were authorized to access. Mairead took them back to the high tech encrypted laptop that was an integral part of their equipment and began typing away.

"Why here?" Elvis said to Junior. Junior, whose brain, voice box and tongue now seemed to him to be located at very long and difficult to get at distances from each other, stared blankly at Elvis.

"Here?" He repeated, confused. "Here?"

"Yep. Here. You have California plates. Your car registration is for an address very close to the California coast. Why would you go to Puerto Peñasco when the Pacific coast was almost literally next door?"

"El Pinapope," Junior blurted out, simultaneously congratulating himself at having the presence of mind at pulling up his backup plan on such short notice. "Got some real cool photos." Silesia felt like whapping Junior over the head, but held her hand in check, though it did noticeably gyrate in a rebellious quiver.

"Excuse him officer. He's not real good with names. The place is called El Pinacate. It's a Mexican national heritage area."

"I've got some real cool photos," Junior repeated. "Want to see 'em?" Just then another face loomed into view in the driver's side front window of the BMW. Celso Montana.

"Excuse us for a moment please, folks," he said to the people in the BMW. And to Elvis. "Please step over here for a moment, officer."

Elvis, caught somewhat by surprise, moved a few feet away to hear what Montana had to say. As soon as Elvis turned away from the BMW, Junior had his cell phone out, spoke his father's name into the voice activated speed dialer and left a terse message on Senior's voice mail that must have roiled Senior's digestion and triggered his chronic spastic colon.

" _Dad!_ I'm at the Port of San Luis in Arizona. I think they're going to bust me for drug smuggling. Help. Help. Help! Your loving son, Junior. PS. By the way, the car is registered in your name."

Pancho saw Junior pick up the cell phone but before he could get to him to tell him to shut it off Junior had already sent his message. Pancho of course having no clue over the specifics of what Junior had just done, though his usually reliable gut told him it probably meant some kind of pain in the ass complication.

"Does ET get its reputation by load jumping?" Montana said to Elvis. Load jumping? Stealing another officer's load and claiming it as your own. Was he accusing Elvis of that?

"What do you mean load jumping?" Elvis replied in a tone rising towards anger. "What the hell are you talking about, Wyoming?"

"That's Montana," Celso shot back. "Supervisor Montana to you, officer. And don't forget it." Then he stuck a forefinger out and jabbed it in Elvis' chest. "And that BMW you load jumped was one I had already referred to secondary." Elvis had watched the entire interchange between Blaskwell and the BMW and never saw Celso go anywhere near Blaskwell's inspection booth.

"So just how the hell did you do that, Idaho?" Elvis said. "I was watching. You never went near the primary booth."

"Montana! Montana! Supervisor Montana! Don't you know that I am the Assistant Port Director at San Luis? This kind of insubordination can't be tolerated. I'll have your badge for this." Elvis leaned towards him and put on the genuine combat face he'd earned in Iraq.

"You want me to show you exactly where on your body you'll get my badge?" Montana sputtered, but wisely backtracked a step.

"This is my load," Montana insisted. "It was a verbal lookout I took over the phone just a few minutes before it arrived and I didn't have a chance to write it up. I saw the car coming in Officer Hornblower's lane and called him on the port intercom with the lookout." Celso stopped, looking satisfied he'd made his point. "It is my referral. Mine and officer Hornblower." By this time WW had walked over to listen, Pancho staying near the BMW to keep an eye on the passengers.

"This is a bunch of bullshit, Elvis," the always blunt WW said. "And we can prove it easy enough. We'll ask Hornblower...." A perplexed pause. "Is the guy's name really Hornblower?" To which Celso nodded affirmatively. WW finished the thought. "Hornblower can set the record straight."

"OK," Celso said, starting to leave. "I'll go get him." WW grabbed him in an iron grip before he got three feet. Montana started to blast off, but the hard look in WW's eyes stopped him before he even got started.

"Elvis here can go get him," WW said, tightening his grip on Montana and cutting off most of the blood flow to Montana's lower right arm. "We'll wait here."

Elvis motioned at Pancho to accompany him and they went out to lane five where officer Blaskwell Hornblower was admiring the newly purchased Mexican oak dining set in the bed of a Ford pickup, thinking a set like this would fit nicely in his own combination living/dining room. He looked curiously at Elvis and Pancho for a moment. Then a look of dread took over his face. This could not be good. It wasn't.

"We're having a difference of opinion back in the secondary lot about the BMW. Pancho here will take your lane while you come back and clear it up. OK by you?" Was it OK by Blaskwell? What kind of a question was that? What choice did he have? He didn't know what was going on, but he figured that somehow he must be in the middle of it. And here he was so close to retirement and a laid back life of attending a wide variety of BMW events. He'd even been thinking about expanding to Jaguars and maybe even Audis, though he wasn't at sure about that. And now? All he could do was glumly accompany this odd looking tall and skinny red headed ET officer from Nogales and hope for the best.

They walked back to secondary. There was the BMW, with the weird bunch who were in it. There was a tough Indian looking guy with an iron grip on the arm of....of....oh-oh...Assistant Port Director Celso Montana. Oh, no. This was not looking good at all. For a moment Blaskwell thought of running. People running out of secondary were not an especially uncommon occurrence, usually involving a busted drug smuggler taking off with winged feet for Mexico with a bunch of hollering CBP officers chasing him or her. But just where would Blaskwell run? Sure not to Mexico, where the local cops would take a very dim view of an armed American officer hotfooting into their country. Besides, just what was it he would be running from? Curiosity, generously leavened with apprehension, won out. He continued on with Elvis into the secondary lot.

Celso Montana looked like a professional hangman about to drop the trapdoor. A trapdoor currently occupied by Blaskwell Hornblower. His eyes bore into Blaskwell with an implied threat of very serious consequences if Blaskwell did the wrong thing. Blaskwell was certain that Montana was sending him a telepathic message. "So close to retirement, Blaskwell, so very close...."

"Tell them the truth," Celso blurted out before anyone else could say anything. "I called you on the lane and told you the BMW was a lookout and to refer it to secondary." Celso let fly a look that could have lasered through three inches of solid steel and still have enough energy left to burn a hole straight through an eighteen pound frozen Thanksgiving turkey. "Right, _Blaskwell_?" Another laser look. " _Right?_ " Blaskwell felt like a rampaging steroid crazed professional wrestler had grabbed him by the privates and was trying to stuff him through a garbage disposal. This was even worse than when the Phoenix Cardinals got totally waxed on the football field at the University of Phoenix Stadium at the only game he'd attended last year.

The logical part of Blaskwell told him that he was a winner either way you looked at it. Whether the ET team had requested the referral or he went along with Celso's bullshit, either way he was the referring officer and would get credit for whatever it was they eventually found in the BMW. Blaskwell was at least one light year away from being a hotshot inspector, but even he by now figured they had to be something in the BMW. But....... Logic was one thing. The permanent daily enmity of the Assistant Port Director was something altogether different. If he lied the ET team would never really know whether he lied or not. Only Celso would know. And Celso sure as hell wouldn't be talking. But could he live with himself? Your pension, Blaskwell. Remember your pension.

Just then Port Director Hildegaard de Sharif came thundering out of the administrative office on a steely determined beeline for secondary. Everyone that saw her knew she had to be a woman on a mission. Just what it was would be anyone's guess. But not for long.

"What is going on here?" She demanded. Celso was quick to answer.

"The ET team is trying to jump a load I took as a lookout over the phone and passed on to Officer Hornblower, here. Just ask him. Blaskwell? Tell her." All eyes once again turned on Blaskwell. He felt like he was on a TV game show and about to be asked the million dollar question and he would not have clue one what the answer was. Wait a minute. He _did_ know what the answer was. Port Director Hildegaard de Sharif looked at Blaskwell Hornblower, her very favorite inspector, a man who had genuine Lebanese blood flowing in his veins just like hers. There were a lot of accusing and angry looks flying around. Poor Blaskwell looked beside himself. But the ever resourceful Hildegaard knew what to do. She asked him in Arabic.

"Is that true, Blaskwell? Did Celso give you the lookout?" The moment of truth that every man and woman must some day face in their life now came to stare directly in the face of Inspector Blaskwell Hornblower. Was he up for it? Would he be able to look his kids in the eye after this? Could he ever take them to Disneyland again and really have a good time, knowing that he carried the black mark of deception in his soul and would probably go to hell? Could he ever again administer the Boy Scout Pledge to new scouts in Troop 117 with any sincerity at all? That did it. He shook his head in a slow negative.

"No," he replied in English. "Supervisor Montana did not contact me about the BMW. It was the ET team that asked it be sent to secondary." Before anyone could react, Port Director Hildegaard de Sharif revealed the mission that had sent her stomping into secondary.

"At any rate, _gentlemen_ , it is not relevant," she said with the ring of finality in her voice. "I just received a phone call from Headquarters. This car has diplomatic immunity and cannot be legally searched." Which meant that Junior's hot shot lawyer father had received his son's urgent voice mail and started pulling strings that even he didn't know he had.

"Release the car," Hildegaard said. "What we certainly don't need here is a diplomatic incident." And she damn well meant it, especially considering her recent improvident remark about Israel that already had her name well up on the Washington Shit List.

"I don't believe it." Came a hesitant voice from the crowd in secondary. "I don't see how this car can have diplomatic immunity." It was Blaskwell Hornblower's voice and it surprised even Blaskwell when the words seemed to take on a life of their own and squirted out his mouth. The echo of his voice hadn't even died away yet before Blaskwell knew that he had managed to piss off both the port director and assistant port director in less than a minute and thereby doomed himself to a fate he didn't even want to contemplate. But he was not without allies.

"I don't believe this car has diplomatic immunity, either, and I guarantee you it is going nowhere until I see absolute proof that it does," Elvis said in his no nonsense former U.S. Army sergeant's voice. A statement loudly seconded by WW and now, Pancho, who had been relieved off lane five and Mairead, who came over from her laptop search to see what the hell was going on with the growing crowd around the BMW.

"Goddamnit!" Came a loud voice from inside the BMW. "I have to go to the _bathroom._ " It was Manny. And he was dead serious. The pot of coffee was still making its way through his kidneys to his bladder. "Either take me to the can or I'm calling CNN," Manny yelled. "And then I'm going to piss all over the shoes of the sourpuss broad with the nice ass who's yelling at the rest of you." While Hildegaard was at that moment firing up all her mental rockets to launch at Manny, who did just fine as a surrogate for the goddamn trouble makers in Israel, Elvis nodded at Pancho, who went over to the BMW and escorted Manny to the bathroom in the secondary office. Manny wasn't any too happy that Pancho stayed right next to him as he was taking a leak, but Pancho was adamant. Too many dopers had tried to dump their stash in a toilet for Pancho to take any chances. Soon after Hellena also loudly demanded toilet time and Mairead took her in tow and repeated the procedure down the hall in the ladies bathroom.

"Why are you still here, bitch," Hellena snarked at Mairead as Mairead stood in the open bathroom stall. "This ain't the late show. You some kind of pervert or somethin'?" Mairead was silent. What the hell was she going to say? Hellena, who was still well blitzed on Junior's wrong pill, then pulled her skirt up, exposing her well traveled private parts. "See this puppy, sister?" She said in a sarcastic voice. "She's seen more peckers than you have hair on that dumbass head of yours." At which point Mairead again revisited the thought of a possible change in careers.

And maybe soon.

Meanwhile, Junior was trying to think of a way, any way, to get out of this mess. He was coming up blank. There was only one chance. That his hotshot very well connected lawyer father would somehow spring him. And, judging from what he was overhearing from the loudly arguing bunch of officers standing only a few feet from the BMW, that seemed to be what was going on.

"Come on, Daddio," Junior was muttering. "Hit a grand slam, clear the bases and bring Junior home. You can do it, daddy. I know you can do it." Silesia, however, was keeping an even closer eye and ear on the arguing officers and didn't fail to notice the resolute looks on the faces of the ET team. She wasn't nearly as confident that Junior's daddy would spring them. Silesia stealthily pulled her own cell phone out, touched a flagged speed dial number, and spoke in a low voice inaudible to even Junior just a few feet away. She plastered the phone to her ear to smother the voice from being heard by anyone nearby and listened intently to whoever was on the other end, then shut the phone off and put it into her pocket, a mysterious look on her face.

Meanwhile, Mairead was back on the phone to ET boss Manfred Kuribachi, Hildegaard was back on the phone to headquarters, Junior's father was on the phone to everyone he could think of with any juice in Washington, and Celso Montana was on the phone to his lawyer, knowing that he'd been caught out in a blatant lie and his best bet was to shoot for an immediate early retirement. With, of course, full pension benefits. Meanwhile, the BMW was going nowhere. The barrage of phone calls went on for nearly an hour, during which time both Manny and Hellena hit the head two more times and were about ready for a third. Finally, it was resolved. The vehicle did _not_ have diplomatic immunity. The ET team was going to search it. Silesia picked up on the change in behavior, took out her cell phone again, pressed something, waited for a few seconds, then shut it off again.

Being shot down in no uncertain terms by the Commissioner himself, who was not one bit happy with being interrupted on the golf course with a ranking member of the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security and two shapely Congressional pages as unofficial caddies, Hildegaard stomped back into her office and slammed the door shut. She did however peek through the blinds from time to time to see what was happening in secondary. Was she worried about her career, what with her personal stock having plummeted after her gaffe about Israel? She was the favorite child of one of the richest men in Lebanon and already had a handsomely endowed trust fund. And she was certain she could go back to Lebanon and immediately become one of the top law enforcement officials in the country. Was she worried? Hell no. Was she pissed? Hell yes. She was plenty pissed off about not having her way and would get really pissed off if those goddamn ET twerds came up with any substantial amount of dope in the BMW.

Didn't they get it? This wasn't about enforcement. It was about control. Lines of authority. Order over chaos. Not to mention that biggee in the Arab world, saving face. And if there was any one thing that jerked her Hildegaard chain more than anything else, it was being made a fool of. Her eyes narrowed. The rumor was true. She really did have a professional Lebanese state supported assassin on her cell phone contact list. Not on speed dial, like the rumors said. But nevertheless there. She'd never dialed him yet, though she came close when a Hells Angel jerk on a motorcycle cut her off on a Los Angeles freeway and almost caused her to crash into a guard rail. But, try as she might as she hammered down on the accelerator on her Lexus and sped after the motorcycle she couldn't get close enough to get his license plate number. She did, however, shortly after that make a substantial anonymous contribution to the Mongols, bitter enemies of the Hells Angels, with the suggestion the money be used for appropriate weaponry "for self defense purposes only against those Hells Angels bastards."

Elvis approached the BMW. Junior stared at him through the car's window and immediately understood just how the critters that used to hang out in southern California back in Pleistocene days felt when they blundered into the La Brea tar pit and started to slowly sink into oblivion. Oh, if he had only listened to his buddy Skip when he tried to talk him into going on the provisional snowboarding circuit. The idea of snowboarding didn't do much for Junior, but it sure as heck had to be better than the mess he was in now. He closed his eyes and tried to think himself onto a snowboard somewhere in Utah with Skip and a couple of snowboard groupies. Then there was a knocking on the window. Junior opened his eyes. It wasn't Skip. He wasn't in Utah. There were no snowboard groupies. Just Elvis. And several other equally unfriendly looking people in dark blue uniforms with guns on their hips and grim expressions on their faces. _Oh, shit._ He was fucked. All that was left was the not altogether unrealistic hope that Senior might somehow get him out of this. If anyone could, it was Senior. Then his thought train was stopped cold.

"Get out of the car, please," Elvis said. Junior glumly clambered out of the car. Elvis motioned at the other three people in the car. "Everyone. Please exit the vehicle." Silesia slid out of the BMW with a fluid lithe movement that struck Junior as odd. Silesia didn't usually move like that. She was usually, well, kind of awkward. Clunky. Even clumsy. Cute but clumsy. Well, maybe not cute. Likeable but clumsy. Well, maybe not so likeable. Maybe sometimes. But she.....

"Port procedure requires that you go inside the secondary building while we search your car," Elvis said. His voice sounded like the recording you get when call up the bank and want to talk to someone but only get an automated voice that sends you on a recorded verbal circle jerk that always takes you back to where you started as unrequited as a spurned lover in a pulp fiction romance novel. He'd said that line many a time. But there sure was a point to it. The point being to allay the suspicions of people they suspected to be load drivers until they could herd them into the more controllable environment inside the secondary office. It was a whole lot easier to handle people who decided to blast off for parts unknown when there was only one exit as opposed to the 360 degree possibilities outside the door in the secondary lot. They had all been in numerous foot chases when someone blitzed off from secondary. And way too many times they'd watched as the runner seemed to catch fire and shift into near Olympic speed and made it to Mexico and was immediately swallowed in the black hole just on the other side of the not so invisible line that was the border. Elvis, Pancho, Mairead and WW got next to and behind the four people from the BMW and patiently urged them towards the door to the secondary office. A door not far away. A door getting closer. A door so close....

Suddenly an older model green Chevy SUV with a damaged front fender, driven by a youngish woman with bad teeth and with a bunch of unruly kids in the SUV, caromed into the secondary lot and darn near plowed into the group headed for the secondary door. Everyone scattered like a flock of scaled quail upon the unwelcome arrival of the local hungry coyote. The woman and kids commenced to hollering something in Spanish and immediately piled out of the Chevy and rushed directly into the midst of the ET and BMW Four, creating an instant tangled mess that had everyone momentarily confused. And at that very confused moment a sleek Mazda Miata streaked into the secondary lot just as Silesia broke loose from the confused group of people all tangled up between the Chevy SUV and the secondary office's door. The passenger's door swung open on the Mazda and the car was already starting to rabbit out of the secondary lot when Silesia made a nifty and decidedly unclumsy move as she nailed a perfect dive smack through the Miata's passenger side open door. The Mazda roared through the gears as it accelerated down the exit lane out of secondary, did a tire screeching U turn onto the other side of the road leading into Mexico–which was oddly free of traffic–then raced for the Mexican border and was through it with no one on the Mexican side seeming to make any kind of move to stop it.

It happened so fast that no one could react quickly enough to stop them. Though WW broke from the tangled, confused group, grabbed a Stop Stick the ET team always kept nearby as a regular part of their equipment, and hotfooted for the southbound lane to try to hurl the Stop Stick under the Mazda's tires and hopefully blow them out and send the car into a skidding stop. Just like in the movies, where the fleeing villains' car would lurch helplessly to a stop and the forces of law and order would forthwith apprehend the malefactors. Not this time. WW watched with disgust as the Mazda roared by just as he tossed the Stop Stick. Too late. The Stop Stick slithered helplessly across the southbound lane behind the Mazda and came to rest at the feet of an elderly woman pushing a shopping cart on the sidewalk who, being seriously myopic and having forgot to wear her glasses, thought it was a strangely rigid big snake attacking her and began to scream for help.

Everyone was flabbergasted. Especially Junior. It was one of those moments when everything seemed to be in slow motion. Junior got a good look at the driver of the Mazda. The guy's face was like a stop action photo burned into his memory bank. Then everything was clear. Very clear. Supernova clear. Silesia with her secretive phone calls. Her un-Silesia like sudden athleticism. All that family reunion stuff in Mexico was for real. The face in the Mazda. It was Silesia's East Prussian cousin. Hernando von Schreibenlustiglos Jauregui.

Basco done rescued his long lost cousin.

At first he was angry and had a minor Junior meltdown. That titless bitch, that Nerd Butt, that female Judas, that ungrateful false friend Silesia had lit out and left him hanging. But Junior's anger faded almost as fast as it came. Like the match that flared and then suddenly flamed out after he'd lit in the dark a couple of weeks ago to find the car keys he'd fumbled and dropped after drinking a touch too much Macedonian vodka and for a few terrifying inebriated moments thought he'd gone blind from bad vodka. OK. OK. Admit it. Probably wouldn't have worked if Basco had tried to rescue him, too. Junior knew himself at least well enough to know he'd probably have screwed it up and got him, Silesia and maybe even Basco busted. So he let it go and silently wished Silesia the best of luck. And hoped that his daddy would come through for him just like Silesia's cousin had for her. It didn't have to be so dramatic as Basco's hurtling arrival and their heroic dash for freedom in what looked like a nifty late model Mazda Miata. No. That wasn't necessary. Junior would be happy with just about any method Senior came up with.

Just so long as it worked.

Junior, Hellena and Manny were sitting on hard benches in the secondary area with Pancho keeping a wary eye on them. Hellena thought he was cute and kept winking at him, which Pancho did his best to pretend he didn't see. Though it was true that Pancho was a man bent on seducing a sizable percentage of the female half of the human race in his virile lifetime, he did have his limits. And Hellena was way, way outside those limits. Pancho would have sworn himself to celibacy and entered a monastery and a lifetime of eating hard crackers and goat cheese before he'd have touched Hellena. After all, a man did have his dignity and self respect to consider. At least when he was sober.

WW, Elvis and Mairead went out to check out the BMW. Mairead went over to where they'd stashed their ET equipment at the back of the secondary lot before parking their van in the fenced lot behind the port administrative building. Equipment that included a cage. A cage that barked. A barking cage? No. Actually, no big surprise, it was a cage with a dog in it. A dog that often traveled with the ET team. A dog whose handler was Mairead O'Reilly. Mairead having gone both through the Federal Law Enforcement Academy in Georgia and the K–9 school in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The very same valley where Confederate General Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson became famous when, although way outnumbered and outgunned, he sure wasn't outgeneraled and he slickered a bunch of Yankee armies trying to chase him down and sent them all packing. Being originally from the Valley herself, naming her Belgian Malinois dog was a slam dunk. Wasn't no way that dog wasn't gonna be named Stonewall. And Mairead had enough confidence in Stonewall to believe that he'd slicker the drug traffickers on the Mexican border just as his namesake did the Yankees long ago in the Shenandoah Valley.

Mairead took Stonewall out of his cage, hooked up a leash and let him prance around a bit to get the kinks out of his caged bones. Stonewall was somewhat on the vain side and he made a show of prancing around. Way too big a show. "Damnit, Stonewall," Mairead thundered. "Cut out the theatrics!" Though Stonewall was not fluent in people talk, he did understand tones of voice and menacing expressions and knew he was pushing the envelope with Mairead, who after all was a pretty good handler and kept him well supplied with dog food, though it wasn't especially palatable, and lots of fresh water. With a look of canine disgust he stopped prancing.

Junior had managed to slide over on the bench in secondary, almost pushing Manny off the edge, which drew a snarl and some nasty comment in Spanish. Junior now had a fair view of the BMW in the secondary lot. Nothing much happening. Then he saw Mairead come up with Stonewall. As Mairead and Stonewall began their long practiced search routine, which began with them running a loop around the outside of the BMW, Junior's mind was riveted on the tattooed serial killer, Diego, who'd supposedly dog proofed the BMW in San Luis Rio Colorado like he had earlier in Tijuana. There was a good chance the dog and handler outside would miss the cocaine. In fact, Junior thought they probably would. But he'd studied border officers enough to know that, even if there was no dog alert, the good officers would still do a physical search of the vehicle. That was what had Junior the most worried. These guys seemed like they knew what they were doing. They just might find the hidden compartment behind the rear seat, despite it being one hell of an expertly concealed job. And if they found the cocaine inside? An old song from a movie came into his mind and kept repeating over and over.... _I'm in the jailhouse now._

"My name is Hellena," Hellena said, looking straight at Pancho. Pancho, however, was busily inspecting the ceiling for possible water damage from the last heavy rainstorm. Which, in bone dry Sonoran Desert San Luis, might have been sometime around the time of the inauguration of Teddy Roosevelt as the 26th President. "Hey!" Hellena said, louder. "You. Sugar Shorts. I'm talking to you." Manny looked up from gloomily studying the tops of the really cool brown patent loafers, with tassels even, that Junior and Silesia had given him to wear as part of his sweet, well dressed grandfatherly image coming through the border. Manny liked the shoes. He'd never had really cool shoes like these before. No matter what happened, he sure hoped he could keep the shoes. Would they let you wear brown patent leather loafers with tassels in prison?

"Answer her, Buddy," Manny said to Pancho. "She'll drive you fucking nuts if you ignore her." He paused and rolled his eyes. "And I should know!" A Sumatran tree viper wouldn't have been any quicker than the fisted right hand that Hellena planted on Manny's collarbone.

"What? _What?_ Why you......." Pancho sighed, groaned, and forthwith set to thinking of ways that he could get even with that SOB Elvis for sticking him with this bunch of whackos.

Mairead was a crackerjack dog handler. Which why she was on the ET. She felt Stonewall lurch, just a little, as they did the loop around the trunk. She threw a look over at Elvis that telegraphed her suspicion. Then Mairead stopped Stonewall at the driver's side front of the BMW and began a much slower pass around the BMW. At the driver's side rear tire Stonewall's tail stiffened, his nose took in a huge whiff of air from the vicinity of the trunk, and Stonewall charged that wheel well with every bit of the verve and gusto of Old Stonewall in the Valley against the hapless Yankees and locked his jaws onto that wheel well and wasn't about to let go of it. Mairead shot a look at Elvis that was a close relative of a lioness who'd just made a kill.

"That good enough for you, El?" It was. And for WW, too, who was already headed into the secondary office where they'd launch into the 'you're busted' drill. Pat 'em down, put their valuables in a custody box, take their shoelaces or shoes and their belts and lock 'em up in one of the detention cells. Mairead put up Stonewall and, being the only female available, went to pat down Hellena. An experience which Mairead would not soon forget. Hellena moaned and cooed through the entire patdown.

"Man, that was just wonderful!" Hellena said after Mairead had patted her down. "Could you do it again? And, by the way, can I have your phone number? You know, maybe have a cup of coffee or something some evening." Mairead had no idea if Hellena was serious or just jerking her chain. And she had no great desire to find out. She finished the patdown and got her in the cell as fast as she could. Hellena looked out the view window as Mairead was locking the cell from the outside. She was smiling.

"I'm going to have you killed for this, " she said. Mairead locked the cell and closed the view window without saying a word, though she sure could think of a few things to say. In the next cell WW was just locking up Manny, who couldn't take his eyes off his shoes, which WW had left on the floor just outside the cell.

"Be careful of the shoes, man," he said to WW. "They're genuine patent leather, you know. Loafers. With tassels." WW also locked the cell and shut the view window without saying anything. So just what was he gonna say to the guy? Nice shoes, buddy? Real nice?

Pancho had Junior, whose face reminded Pancho of a zoned out zombie in a movie he saw at the multiplex in Yuma a couple of weeks ago with his girlfriend at the time, Annamarie Zamora. A very nice girl, but a girl who was determined to remain a virgin until her wedding night. Which, after Pancho found that out, caused him to drop her so fast she damn near out dropped Newton's apple. No time to waste on dating FZ--Forbidden Zone--women in Pancho's world.

"What's in the car, man," Pancho said to Junior who was leaning against a counter, spread eagled, as Pancho patted him down and placed the contents of his pockets on the counter. "What kind of dope? MJ? Coke? Meth? Heroin? Ecstasy? Pills?"

"I want a lawyer" Junior answered.

And he knew _exactly_ which lawyer he wanted.

Junior's father came through for him, just like he hoped. Senior's team of hotshot lawyers--with soaring billing rates and including one former editor of the Harvard Law Review and another former law clerk to the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court--cooked up a coercion strategy. They argued that a lethal Mexican cartel threatened to kill Junior, his entire family, their champion Schnauzer and two Siamese cats and even their pair of pet cockatoos if he didn't cooperate and drive the load of cocaine through San Luis. They were able to produce some corroborating evidence, too, though no one was talking about just how they came up with it. The single overworked and underpaid prosecutor was hopelessly out lawyered. The defense argument didn't get Junior completely off the prosecutorial hook, but it did land him five years of probation, with only the first eighteen months supervised. Junior finished up his bachelor's degree and joined his father's firm as a legal investigator where he soon was on a first name basis with a substantial portion of the members of several organized crime groups in a good part of southern California and parts of Nevada and even members of the Mexican mafia thereafter routinely called him sir. At least to his face.

The prosecutors recognized Manny and Hellena for what they were, mere feckless pawns in the smuggling scheme, and didn't bring charges. With some financial help from Senior, who preferred to keep them happy and not so coincidentally keep their mouths shut, they relocated to Washington State where they lived comfortably enough on fake social security identities Senior's underground contacts set up with various other not so legal government subsidies. They did however continue to frequent the local Catholic Church's Sunday bingo where they soon became acquaintances of the local priest, Heriberto Salsa, who had himself started life as a melon picker in the Salinas Valley and had his own brushes with the law before finding Jesus in a jail cell one stormy night and subsequently turning his life around.

"How could you?" Manny stammered after hearing the Reverend Salsa's personal testimony of finding Jesus in his jail cell. Father Salsa's eyes blinked in non-recognition.

"Could what?"

"Come here and leave Jesus in that jail cell," Manny replied.

After which Father Salsa usually hotfooted it around a corner whenever Manny came into view.

Silesia only returned briefly to the United States. No charges were ever brought against her, although she was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. She changed her name to her mother's maiden name, von Schreibenlustiglos, transferred the bulk of her credits to the University of Bonn and finished up her PHD in Germany. She joined a Big Pharma conglomerate as a staff organic chemist at a very nice six figure Euro salary and bought a comfortable villa in upper Bavaria where she spent weekends and holidays. Often with her visiting cousin from Mexico, Hernando von Schreibenlustiglos Jauregui, who frequently entered European road races with one of his several sleek automobiles he stored at his cousin Silesia's villa in Bavaria. Often in the company of other equally revanchist family members, the two of them spent many a night trying to figure out how to recover their lost family properties in the former East Prussia, in particular the ancestral family castle, Hof Ohneschlafen, which--oh, for shame!--had been converted into a home for unwed Slavic mothers. Imagine! Trollops tromping around in Hof Ohneschlafen's' revered ancestral halls. Which elicited a unanimous Schreibenlustiglos family response.

"Those goddamned Russians!"

Celso Montoya took an early retirement from CBP and returned to his former career as a security officer for a Native American casino where he suffered severe shoulder damage throwing out a malcontent who had just lost his life savings and thereafter was mostly confined to watching security cameras and trying to stay awake. Hildegaard de Sharif left CBP to return to Lebanon, where she married the chief of national security and opened her own security consulting firm that focused on surveilling the political enemies of both her father and her husband. Of which there were plenty, it being Lebanon where even the conspirators often didn't know what the hell was going on.

Elvis and the ET team continued to work the Mexican border with a substantial amount of effectiveness. The ET team was locally famous–or, in the eyes of the Mexican traffickers, infamous. Despite his and the other ET officers' continued success there was one loose end that troubled Elvis from time to time. That woman who they had eventually identified as Silesia von Schwarzfinger. The one who made that spectacular escape in the Mazda. Now, that was Elvis' idea of a woman. He sure wished he'd get a chance to meet her one day. And, who knows....

Maybe one day he would.

####

### The following are the first sections from Ausgleich: Scales of Justice, a very different book from the Elvis Mahoney books and as serious and somber as the Elvis books are whimsical and light-hearted.

### Ausgleich

### Scales of Justice

by

James Whitesell

### Editor's Note

Skeptics may view a scholarly work on the WWII east German maelstrom by the widely respected United Nations human rights activist, Alfred de Zayas. The book is available to read online without charge at https://archive.org/details/A-Terrible-Revenge. A second free online source is a compendium of witness statements published shortly after WWII by Sudeten survivors, _Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans_ , available online at www.wintersonnenwende.com. LEMO, Lebendiges (Living) Museum Online has many online wartime documents in German. Also available are the German Federal Archives which contain thousands of corroborating documents and photos relating to what the Germans called, and still call, Die Vertreibung.

The Expulsion.

### Author's Foreword

One of my earliest childhood memories, which will resonate with me for the remainder of my days, is of my grandmother's heartbroken sobbing over the shiny flag-draped coffin of her son, an American airman killed in Europe and brought home after the end of WWII. Linda Bongiovanni, who kindly supplied the survivor's accounts from the Sudetenland in this book, was herself once stunned as a small child to see her own grandmother collapse into tears. The grandmother was looking at an old photo. Of her daughter, Linda's aunt. A Sudeten German aunt that Linda never knew because she died in the horrific Allied maelstrom that engulfed the Germans of the east at the end of WWII. This pair of grandmothers tell us something all of us should take to heart.

Grief does not know national or ethnic boundaries. Grief does not take sides.

Nor does tragedy.

### Introduction

Sections of this work are closely based on multiple sources of professionally documented history. These sections are noted as such by italics in the chapter headers and are also cited in a bibliography addendum. They are the skeleton of this work, the words of history, judiciously selected, culled, dissected, vetted. Not so with a second group of sections, many of them graciously provided by British Columbian Linda Bongiovanni & Scriptorium. These sections--totally in Italics--are more than mere words of carefully vetted history. They are first person flesh and blood accounts by witnesses and survivors of the horrors in the German east that were put to paper during, just after and, some, long after the end of WWII. Together the history--the skeleton, and the survivor's accounts--the flesh and blood, are the palette on which is word-painted this work of historical fiction. Ausgleich. A German word which means, roughly, a balancing of the scales.

The bulk of this book's chapters are fictional. In a narrow sense. The specifics are fictional. The characters are fictional. The theme is fictional. Not so the underlying matrix of the book. Some, perhaps many, will resist believing it, but Ausgleich rests in a well documented rock solid intimacy on actual historical events. There is an hoary timeworn axiom that the victors write the history books. True enough. In ancient times.

And in times not so ancient.

### Ausgleich

by

James Whitesell

_"Yes! For three weeks the war had been going inside Germany and all of us knew very well that if the girls were Germans they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction......"_ Nobel Laureate Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.

### Lake Susquah

1972

California's Governor Ronald Reagan did it again. Turned a reporter's sharp question around at a news conference and made it a joke. Good enough to make the lead story on network TV the evening before. They were chuckling about it. Two of them. Native Americans. They liked Reagan's wit but otherwise paid little attention to the politics of the outside world. As usual, the two were up early. It was one of those thickly fogged early mornings on Lake Susquah's big bay, evocative of both the spooky and the mystical. The men, lean and hard-muscled cousins who grew up together fishing and hunting in the bounteous Pacific Northwest, often rose before dawn to begin their day with the quiet serenity of fishing the bay. For reasons long lost to tribal memory the locals called it Weeping Woman Bay. Whatever the history of the bay, fishing in its mist shrouded early morning waters settled their spirits and prepared them for the remainder of their day. Shifts in the din and hustle of the Nations power plant. It was a lifestyle tradeoff, but they were comfortable with it. Literally. Where so many Native Americans struggled to survive, they had reliable and comfortable livings. They, at least, had found a reasonable middle ground between the past and the present. They still had the quiet ancestral bay to fish. And a sturdy fourteen foot fiberglass boat with a fifty horse Johnson outboard to fish it. Their octogenarian grandfather, a retired high school teacher who twenty years earlier walked out of the classroom onto the golf course and never looked back, had a word for it that he thought nicely fit their lifestyle. Which is what they named their boat.

Synergy.

They were trolling near the shore, close to the submerged piles of rocks by the lake's access ramp where the lunkers liked to lurk, when it happened.

"Hey!" One of them suddenly said, lulled out of his sleepy early morning reverie by a stout jarring jerk on the line. He was instantly alert, scrambling for solid footing and grabbing a firmer hold on the fishing rod that was bent so far over that the tip was in the water. He'd hooked something big. And heavy. But. Wait. Something was wrong. The heavy weight was inert. There was no active resistance to his line. He looked in puzzlement at his cousin and began to pull it in, puffing with the exertion of tugging on the heavy weight. Whatever it was, it sure as hell was no fish. Not a live one, anyhow. Probably a chunk of floating deadwood. As the heavy object slowly emerged from the mists next to the boat on the foggy lake, the curious expressions drained from both men's faces and were replaced with shock. This was no chunk of deadwood. It was dead, all right. But not wood.

It was Jaroslav Svoboda

### Discomfiting History

"Woe to the Germans, woe to the Germans,

thrice woe to the Germans, we will liquidate them!"

_Attributed to Czech Premier Edvard Beneš by Sudeten German victim_ M. v. W.

At the end of WWII the Czechs, who wanted to get rid of their unwelcome and troublesome German minority since they'd been dumped on them by the Versailles Treaty of WWI, set about to do just that. But not the land where the Germans lived. Nor the towns or farms or the mines or the factories or the businesses. The Czechs didn't want to get rid of them. It was the people they didn't want. Their exiled premier, Edvard Beneš, a devious man disliked and distrusted by many of those among the Allies who knew him, but who still was undeniably effective in political machinations, had repeatedly cajoled his fellow Czechs in London radio broadcasts to get rid of the Germans once and for all. The _German Problem_ of the Czechs was scarily reminiscent of the _Jewish Problem_ of the Nazis. Both were cynical euphemisms for ethnic cleansing. Make no mistake. The fate of the Germans of eastern Europe could not begin to approach that of the Jews. But it was just as horrific for those Germans unlucky to be in the path of the maelstrom. And they were legion.

At war's end Beneš returned to Czechoslovakia exhorting his fellow Czechs to ethnically cleanse Czechoslovakia of the Germans once and for all. Anti-German hysteria gripped the Czech body politic. The Germans. Get rid of them once and for all. Kill them. Expel them. Anything that worked. Just get rid of them. And they did. In scenes that were grim mirror images of the human displacements the Nazis perpetrated, three and a half million Czech Sudetenland Germans would be kicked out of their homes, often in a very barbaric way, and expelled from their ancestral lands. It was done, especially in the chaotic days of the first half of 1945, with a viciousness that equaled and often surpassed much of the vengeful Allied vindictive treatment of Germans over the German speaking lands. Many thousands among the German Sudetenlanders met their deaths at the hands of the Czech revanchists. Thousands of them directly. Hands-on directly. Murdered. Executed. Raped to death. Many others indirectly, through starvation, untreated epidemics, suicide brought on by utter despair and, finally, exposure to the unkind elements that first laid low the very young and the very old before decimating the rest.

 Ústí nad Labem

It was and still is a pretty place. The town in the Czech Republic called  Ústí nad Labem. Just a few kilometers from the German border. Closer to Dresden than to Prague. The town sits in a photographer's dream of a location, an eyeful of a scenic spot snuggled in the folds of the rolling timbered mountains of the Bohemian Highlands on the Elbe River where it meets the Bilina. Which is what  Ústí nad Labem means in Czech. The meeting of two rivers. Its population is an eclectic mixture of peoples brought in at the end of WWII, among them Roma as well as Czechs. The town was once part of Bohemian Sudetenland, the German speaking portions of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia. Its name then was Aussig an der Elbe. A German name. A German town. An area long German in language and culture. For hundreds of years. German. An area annexed to Czechoslovakia against the will of the German inhabitants by the tragically myopic vindictive Versailles treaties at the end of WWI. In 1938 the Nazis marched into the Sudetenland. Aussig came under German control and was annexed to the Third Reich. Most of the residents, bitter over the oppression, both real and imagined, of the German minority of Czechoslovakia by the Czech majority welcomed the change.

At first.

As in so many other places, the Jews of Aussig an der Elbe disappeared into the concentration camps. They were the first casualties of the war. Many more would follow. Political dissidents and those who, for whatever reason, displeased the Nazis were soon tossed into the camps. Almost all the men of military age were drafted and sent off to war. Few returned. And then hundreds more of the residents in what was then Aussig died in mid-April 1945 when the Allies bombed the town, one among the hundreds and thousands of questionable acts by the Allies at war's end when so many cities, towns and villages were obliterated and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed when everyone knew the war was almost over. After the bombing the last of the German troops retreated from Aussig and the Russians and their Slavic satraps entered. The Russians and then the Czechs took political control of the German town. A new Dark Ages descended on the Germans of Aussig and the rest of the Sudetenland. Rapes by the tens of thousands, unnumbered murders, brutal beatings, an avalanche of robberies. It was just the beginning. Worse would soon follow. Total disenfranchisement. Assets--homes, farms, businesses, factories--ripped from the owners' hands and redistributed to non-Germans. And, finally, the expulsion of the surviving Germans from their ancestral homeland, the Sudetenland. And not just the Sudetenland. In all as many as fifteen million Germans in eastern Europe suffered the same fate. No one will ever know how many, but probably somewhere between one and two million of them died either directly or in direct consequence from the expulsions.

And all this while the Allies were trumpeting to the world their righteous triumph in the unfolding of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

The Massacre at Aussig

Ill-treatment and murder of German workmen _  
_Reported by: Max Becher  Report of December 14, 1946  (Aussig)

_An ammunition dump exploded on July 31st, 1945, in a suburb of Aussig. The Germans were blamed for this and the Czechs used the excuse for an attack on them. Aussig lies on the left bank of the Elbe, and the factory where I worked, Georg Schicht-Schreckenstein, on the right bank. There is one bridge connecting the two sides. After work, at 4:30 that afternoon, we were searched for weapons both on leaving the factory and again at the bridge. Once on the bridge we were not allowed to turn back. On the Aussig end we were received by hundreds of Czechs, armed with clubs and iron bars. I received several serious head injuries, whilst my companion, a 67-year-old foreman, had his skull smashed in. I learned later that his body had been thrown into the river and washed up 10 miles downstream. Then I was told to carry the body of another man whose head had been smashed in, to a dump near by. On my return they said it would be my turn to be killed. I was forced to take off my jacket and to wipe up the pool of blood, while I was struck from all directions. I managed to get away, but a Czech followed and attacked me. He was carrying a heavy club and with it injured me severely. He did not stop until, as I suppose, he thought me dead. When I regained consciousness two Czechs helped me to a house, where the German inhabitants notified the Red Cross. I was taken away on a stretcher and was lucky enough to be admitted to the hospital at ten o_ _'clock that night. This saved my life. The following were my injuries: 3 ribs broken, left arm broken, 6 head injuries, requiring 23 stitches. My left arm, which I had used as a shield against the blows, was so swollen that the fact it had been broken was not discovered until two months later, during the course of an x-ray examination. I stayed in hospital from July 31st to October 20th, 1945, and had to continue treatment at home from October 20th to November 19th, 1945._

As a result of my injuries I still suffer severe attacks of dizziness when I move my head and look upwards, and from pains in the ribs when doing manual labour or during changes of the weather.

Aussig

On July 31, before the Nuremberg Trials began and only a few weeks after the war ended, a mysterious explosion that may have been an accident but more likely was a deliberate provocation by Czech saboteurs, possibly Communist provocateurs, triggered a massacre of the German inhabitants of Aussig. Several hundred? A thousand? Perhaps two thousand. Perhaps more. And that wasn't the end of it for the Germans of Aussig. Within a year most would be brutally kicked out of the homes their families had occupied for hundreds of years. Many would soon die from the privations of homelessness.

No one was ever convicted of war crimes for the Aussig massacre. It was kept a secret until after the Communist Czech government fell in 1989. After the Velvet Revolution of that year Czech premier Vaclav Havel's government admitted that the massacre happened. A plaque was put in place in the town to commemorate the tragedy. But plaques do not bring back the dead. Nor do they bring any kind of justice. No one was ever convicted for the massacre, although the man behind the massacre was known. His name? Bedřich Pokorný. A Czech who had been in the Czechoslovakian Secret Service and had a murky fast and an equally murky future.

### Aussig Eyewitness

The explosion on July 30, 1945 _  
_Reported by: A. U.  Report of February 8, 1951

[Due to various circumstances the author of this report was in the position to give an authoritative and objective account of the explosion and its terrible consequences:]

About 10 o'clock on the day in question I walked into the center of the town. As soon as I entered the busier streets, I discovered both in the former Dresdener Strasse and in the Schmejkal Strasse that the soldiers of the notorious Svoboda-army were attacking the Germans wearing their white armbands, driving them from the sidewalks and even knocking them down. I asked what was going on and learned that during the night the Svoboda-army had arrived at Aussig.

Judging by events in other regions of the Sudetenland I immediately guessed that now rough times would come for the Germans of Aussig and of the whole district.

I arrived at the station just as about 300 persons left the train coming from Prague; they were suspicious-looking people between 18 and 30 years of age and I had the impression that they were convicts released from a prison.

At half past three in the afternoon I sat in my apartment when there was a terrific bang. At that moment I thought that a cupboard had fallen over in the next room. I looked into it, but could find nothing. I then assumed that an explosion must have occurred and went up to the roof. There I noticed a large cloud of smoke rising behind the Marienberg. Several smaller explosions followed. I immediately ran downtown - not wearing my white armband, which proved lucky for me. The hunt after the Germans had begun. Soldiers of the Svoboda-army and individual Russians took part in it. These brutes had equipped themselves with all sorts of makeshift weapons such as fence-posts, crow-bars, shovel-handles and so on. With these they struck down all those who spoke German or wore the white badge. I had the impression that the perpetrators were not Czechs from our own district, but those who had left the train in the forenoon. My impression was strengthened by the fact that they had helped themselves to any instruments at hand to improvise their weapons.

I walked through the streets of the town for about two hours; what I saw during that time was dreadful. Of course, I could not say a word, since that would have exposed me as a German.

The factories closed at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and the Germans who worked in the Schicht-works had to use the bridges over the River Elbe in order to get home. The most savage groups therefore were active near these bridges, in the vicinity of the marketplace and the railway station. Even women with babies in perambulators were shoved into the river and then used for target practice. The shooting did not stop until none of the women rose to the surface any longer. Other Germans were thrown into the big water-tank on the market-place. Whenever one of them rose to the surface, the Czechs would push him down again and keep him under water with long poles. Only at 5 o'clock in the afternoon a number of Russian officers appeared and tried to clear the streets. Uniformed Czechs helped them in doing so. Loudspeakers announced the curfew in Czech. On July 31st, a printed poster was issued, announcing that the Germans were not allowed to be in the streets after 6 o'clock in the afternoon, the curfew for the Czech population began at 8 o'clock p.m.

In the evening of July 30 the dead were collected at three places and then taken away in trucks. About 400 corpses were counted at all three collection points. How many may have been collected elsewhere and the number of those who floated down the Elbe cannot be established. Not even the most informed members of the National Committee were able to make an estimate.

Nor was the Aussig massacre Bedřich Pokorný's only war crime. And not his first. He was the man behind the Brno--Brünn--Death March where, again, the victims were ethnic Germans.

Brno/Brünn

The war was barely over. The end of May. 1945. In Brno--German Brünn--Pokorný's men rounded up the twenty or more thousand Germans of the town, allowing them only to bring whatever they could carry, and marched them the thirty miles to the Austrian border. The Germans of the town had already suffered from the typical Russian treatment of Germans when they entered a German area. Beatings, rapes, murders, executions, looting on a massive scale. Bad enough. But the forced march to the Austrian border, made by old people, women and children, left a trail of dying people unable to keep up. And when they reached the Austrian border the Russians, who controlled the adjacent part of Austria, refused to accept them. The exhausted Germans were forced into detention camps without food, water or medicine. They died by the hundreds. Eventually the emaciated survivors were deported to Germany. The blood of many hundreds of Germans was on Pokorný's hands.

### Brünn

Death march to Pohrlitz _  
_Reported by: M. v. W.  Report of February 22, 1951

I still remember very well the proclamation made by Beneš, broadcast from Kaschau two or three days before the arrival of the Russians in Brünn. I understood all he said, since I speak Czech fluently. I will never forget his solemn vow: "Woe to the Germans, woe to the Germans, thrice woe to the Germans, we will liquidate them!" It was on April 25, 1945, about 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, when scenes of fraternization between the invading Russians and the Czechs took place in the streets. In the evening I returned to my apartment and was able to witness how the public rape of German women, beatings, ill-treatment and abuse brought the entire German population into a state of great agitation and danger.

The next morning all Germans had to report for work in accordance with the notices posted on public advertising pillars. I was assigned to the St. Anna Hospital, the men having found out that I was a Red Cross nurse. First I was given only the most menial tasks. Only through the intervention of a Czech physician who had been active in this hospital for a long time was I reinstated as a Red Cross nurse, but even then I was only supposed to go on duty in the air-raid shelter, a cellar to which all the German patients of this big hospital had been moved. In this cellar they lay on bare palliasses without blankets or pillows, and without any medical care. No medications were available for these patients. The cellar was only scantily illuminated by a little lamp and all I could do for these gravely ill people was to help them by applying wet rags or giving them water. Already on the second or third day of my activities in this cellar, human beings dreadfully mutilated, beaten half-dead and tortured almost to death were brought in. All I could give them in the way of assistance, however, were consoling words because I had no drugs whatsoever. The great dying began. All those who had been brought in from the Kaunitz College died almost without exception, and such cases came in without pause. I remember the following cases in particular:

The first to die was a man who had been brought in on the point of death with a horrible injury in the area of the genitals. I could not ascertain his name, as he regained consciousness only for a few moments before he died, and could only briefly reply to my question: "How did you get this terrible injury?" He answered: "I was kicked for having formerly sold vegetables to the Gestapo." With these words he collapsed and I could not elicit any further information before he died.

I also remember another case, that of Mr. Venklarczik, a solicitor, 63 years of age, living at Stiftgasse, Brünn. The man was delivered into the hospital and recounted the following incident: under a threadbare pretext partisans dragged him into the camp in the Kaunitz College and thrashed him there so violently that his back was one gaping wound. He was then forced to thank his torturers for the dreadful ill-treatment. In a semi-conscious state he was taken up to the third floor. In his panic he attempted, during a moment when he was not being watched, to bring his life to an end by jumping through the window. He was saved, however, by a lush tree underneath the window. Instead of being killed, one of his kidneys was torn loose. When he was brought in his excrement and urine were pure blood. It was not until a second German was delivered with his arteries cut through that I saw a physician for the first time in this cellar-camp full of wounded. The reason was that the man who had tried to commit suicide by cutting the arteries should be brought back to consciousness by a blood-transfusion in order that he might be executed later while conscious.

The physician, a Czech himself, examined Venklarczik, the unfortunate man, and was shocked to see the marks of the atrocious maltreatment and said, "But you didn't get this from your jumping out of the window, did you?" The seriously injured man did not dare to accuse any Czech by answering, as that would have meant the death sentence for him.

There is a further case which I remember: a saleswoman from Brünn, Wiener Strasse, had been brought in. She was about 50 years of age and completely unconscious. She was carried to the darkest comer of the basement, where a group of partisans, including a GPU-commissar, who was a Czech, ill-treated the unconscious woman. I was ordered to undress her, after which the Czech commissar intended to bring her back to consciousness with brutal kicks. I also remember that the Czech commissar then told a nun that the reason for the woman's ill-treatment was that she had stolen a Russian uniform complete with decorations. I myself was forced to give the dying woman a series of Coramin injections in order to get her back to consciousness. But all efforts were in vain, her condition was past all hope. Again and again the commissar returned, cursing her in the most inhuman manner, calling her a pig, a German sow, a German whore, bastard and so on, and giving me the order to bring her to speak by means of artificial respiration. I myself wished her nothing but a quick death, for I imagined what they would have done to her if she had really regained consciousness. It seemed that this woman had refused to allow some man to have his way with her and had defended herself. In revenge she had been dreadfully abused. However, she had had the opportunity to take poison, from which she had sunk into unconsciousness. When she died shortly after midnight, the commissar entered the basement and kicked her from the straw pallet with his boot, furious that she could no longer speak.

Let me also recount the following case of Schlesinger, an innkeeper from Brünn, Neugasse district. He was the owner of a restaurant. Among his guests had been both members of the Nazi Party and also, of course, Czechs. For business reasons he had decided to become an inactive member of the Party. On these grounds this rather weak man 40 years of age was now forced to do hard labour, in particular to carry heavy sacks, accompanied by horrible mishandlings. Since he frequently collapsed under the weight and was forced by blows to continue, he finally contracted a rupture of the wall of the stomach, having formerly suffered from stomach ulcers. After his delivery into the hospital he was operated on without anesthetic and submitted to a stomach resection. I found the man screaming and crying in my ward. He implored me to give him something to relieve his pain.

I decided, although being apprehensive myself, to ask at the Surgical Ward. Upon my arrival there I explained the case to the nun (who was about 60 years of age and the nurse in charge) and received the following answer: "I can hear him screaming but he'll get nothing from me - we don't have anything for Germans, just as you didn't have anything for us." When I remarked that during my eleven years of work as Red Cross nurse at the hospitals in Felsberg and Brünn I had never heard of a single case of a Czech to whom assistance had been refused, the nun yelled back at me: "Don't pontificate here, a German will get nothing - tell him that!" When I answered that I did not dare to tell him that, she replied that she would do so herself. Actually, a few minutes later, the head nurse of the Surgical Ward went to the basement and shouted at the patient as he writhed in agony: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you are a superman and roar like an animal! You won't get anything, we don't have anything for you!" The sick man clasped his hands and asked for help for God's sake. When she again refused, he said: "Then give me some poison so I can put an end to this suffering!" The same moment a partisan ran up to the bed and shouted: "It would just suit you, you swine, to take poison and so escape the gallows. The moment your wound is healed you'll be hanged. The gallows are waiting for you!" The man was in actual fact dragged away during the night of the sixth day and from what I heard from Schneider, a partisan, he was hanged in the Kaunitz College.

In order to cloak the fact that they had been murdered, it was customary to deliver persons murdered on the streets to the hospital, in the basement, so that they would be registered as though they had died in hospital.

### Brünn

Death March and Concentration Camp:  
an Old Woman's Account _  
_Reported by: M. K.  Report of July 4, 1950

_On May 30, 1945 at 8:30 in the evening Czech authorities notified us that we would have to leave our house and home within half an hour and would only be allowed to take with us what we could carry by hand. I had two old women, 70 and 75 years of age, living with me in my house and they had already gone to bed. I asked the Czech men to please let the old women sleep. And for that, I was to be beaten up. Five minutes before nine o_ _'clock we were driven with blows from cudgels out into the street, and for starters we then had to walk 25 kilometers by foot. Everyone from the old age homes, hospitals and children's clinics - everyone was thrown on the streets and had to walk with us. Many people collapsed on the way. We were not allowed to help them get up, otherwise we were beaten ourselves. The old women who collapsed were shot on the spot by the representatives of Czech authority, and when old men broke down, Czech boys about 14 years of age were called over and had to trample on the men's heads until they were dead. The bodies were then stripped right away and the clothes put on the accompanying Czech carts, and distributed among Czech gangs._

In the night it rained heavily but we had to march on nonetheless. Many people could not do it. The stretch of about 45 km which we had to walk is virtually paved with dead. At the end of the march we were locked into barrack camps. As camp leader the Czech chose a woman who had once been married to a Jew. Together with this camp leader a Czech doctor made daily visits to the barracks, and the two of them gave the sick and elderly prisoners pills. Every day people died like flies in these barracks. From 7 o'clock in the morning until 6 in the evening two men were kept constantly busy carrying corpses on stretchers to a place about 30 meters away, where the bodies were thrown into a pit. As soon as prisoners died they were stripped and their clothes were distributed among the Czechs. Our rations consisted of a four-pound loaf of bread every five days per 25 persons. That's all we got for the three weeks we spent in this camp. Early in the morning each day the young people were fetched by gendarmes to work on the surrounding farms, and were able to get some extra food there. But the old people starved to death. One thousand and seven hundred dead are officially recorded for these three weeks.

Outside the barracks a pit had been dug and a bar was placed over it, which we had to sit on in order to answer the call of nature. Sick people, approximately 450 of them, were housed in one of the barracks. In this barrack a bathtub was set up in the middle, which the sick had to use as a toilet. The tub was not emptied until it was full to overflowing. It was never cleaned, and so the stench in the barrack was unbearable.

In one barrack a young mother of four children, the youngest of which was three years old, suddenly died. The Czech physician who came to do the post-mortem barked at the dead woman's sobbing mother: "What are you howling for, you German bitch, at least one more German pig has kicked the bucket!" Once a Czech commission of five men came to determine if our rations were adequate. Only the doctor and the camp leader were interviewed, and these two people told the commission that all the camp inmates received milk and butter in huge quantities! Even though all of us unanimously denounced this as a lie, the commission chose to believe the doctor and the camp leader, and it was not until later that we found out how a Czech newspaper had announced how exceedingly well we were being taken care of.

Then we were taken another 45 km away into a different camp, where we were given horse meat from dead horses to eat. The meat was crawling with worms. I myself had to wash the meat out. I washed the meat in 4 buckets of water and was still not able to get them all out. Nonetheless the people ate it, they were so hungry. In this way we held on to our bare existence for all of 8 weeks. Only now was it possible for some people to sneak out of the camp and flee across the border to Austria.

The farmers of the Lower Austrian farmsteads cared for us with touching devotion until we had regained our strength enough to move on to Vienna.

Russians came into the women's camps on a daily basis to rape the women. Even an 80-year-old woman was raped in our camp, as well as a 7-year-old girl. I myself spent three nights sleeping over top of a 15-year-old girl because her mother had begged me to protect the girl. The Russians showed up every day by 7:30 and stayed until 2 o'clock at night.

Every day the Czechs went around to the camp inmates and collected money, with promises to protect us from the Russians in the evening, and to lock the camp so no Russians could get in. Punctually at 7:30 these same Czechs escorted the Russians in and showed them which of us they should rape. And it went on like that every day. From time to time different Czechs went around to collect the money because no-one believed the others any more.

One day it was announced that those of us prisoners who had relatives in Austria might cross the border unmolested. They were given a document to enable them to cross the border. Everyone had to pay a certain fee for it. The people lined up in droves to get a border-crossing permit and to be discharged. In the evening these people returned to the camp and told us that at the border the Czechs had taken away even the very last of their possessions, and that they had had to sign a statement saying that they were leaving Czechoslovakia of their own free will, that they had been taken care of with tender loving care, and that the Czechs had even escorted them to the border. Once they had signed that, they had been whipped and beaten back to the camp.

During the Prague Spring of 1968 Bedřich Pokorný, the Czech architect of the Aussig and Brünn atrocities, was found hanging from a tree in a forest outside the town.

The official cause of death was suicide.

### Jaroslav Svoboda

To Charlie Twofists, who lived on the shore of Lake Susquah, all the flashing lights on the squads and emergency vehicles reminded him of the light show he'd seen at a rock concert in Seattle. He didn't have clue one over what the hell was going on, but he knew he'd find out soon enough. His cousin was an EMT and likely among the throng of cops under the light show. A couple of dozen yards from where the first responders and cops clustered around Jaroslav Svoboda's body was the dead man's fishing boat, still perched on its trailer at the access ramp. The pair of Native Americans who had discovered the body and brought it to shore were still there and being interviewed for the third time. Each interview by a different agency. The tribal police, the local city police and the county sheriff's department. Locations like this one were always a pain in the ass. It was within the county. But also on the fringe of the reservation and on the edge of the city limits. That usually meant some--occasionally heated--disputations about jurisdiction. But this one was different. It wasn't who wanted it. It was who _didn't_ want it. No one. The tribal police wanted no part of it. Neither did the county. So, more or less by default, the city somewhat reluctantly became the investigating agency. A reluctance that would last no longer than it would take for the city's pair of detectives, who had just pulled up in their unmarked Ford and were walking towards the knot of people surrounding Svoboda's corpse, to eyeball the body. The recognition was instant. This man was no stranger.

" _Good God_ ," the older of the two muttered, "it's Jerry. Jerry Svoboda." There was silence for a long minute as the detectives soaked in the crime scene. Then a voice.

"It looks like a robbery gone bad," muttered Ted Melville, as he stared down at the pallid battered corpse of Jaroslav 'Jerry' Svoboda. "Somebody ambushed him out here when he was about to go fishing. Guy tried to rob him. Jerry fought back. The perp went ballistic and beat him to death and threw him into the water." Melville was the town's senior detective, a saturnine man who had dark bags under his eyes so big his boss joked he could use them as extra pockets. The expression that resided on Melville's face was more than his usual dismay at the human condition over yet another senseless death. Melville knew Svoboda. A friend, not a close one, but still a friend. Jerry Svoboda was one of the regulars at Melville's weekly Thursday night poker game in a basement room he'd renovated into what he puckishly referred to as his man cave. A cave, however, agreeably equipped with a wet bar with plenty of refreshments for those so inclined. And most, especially the cops after another long day peppered with encountering the seedier side of humanity, were definitely so inclined. The second detective, Cathy Chen, just two weeks into her promotion to a detective slot and prudently keeping her mouth shut, only nodded. But there was doubt in her eyes. A doubt, as Melville immediately noticed, plain to see.

"You don't read it that way, Detective Chen?" Melville said in a tone suspiciously close, at least in Chen's mind, to patronizing. "Not as a robbery gone bad?"

"I don't know, sir," she answered, staying tactically non-committal. "I don't have enough information to make any kind of assessment." Surprise painted her youthful face as Melville nodded agreement.

"You're right, Cathy. Absolutely. I was just bouncing my first impression off you to see how you'd figure it." A slight smile touched his face just as the blush touched hers. "First impressions, I have found all too goddamn often, are sometimes worst impressions."

"Which means what?" Cathy replied in her tactically neutral voice.

"It means we start digging and see what we come up with." Just then another figure loomed into the circle of cops staring down at the corpse. The large, paunchy and usually jovial presence of Police Chief Bobby Joe Trammel. Bobby Joe wasn't feeling anywhere near jovial right now. He knew Jerry Svoboda, too. Chief Trammel was another of the regulars at what he called Melville's Retro Good Old Boys Poker Club.

"What a goddamn shame," he said in a subdued voice after a long moment of staring at the bag of flesh and bones that was Jaroslav Svoboda only a few hours earlier. "After all he went through. To be murdered by some thug. And probably over something stupid like a few crummy bucks." Later, after the boss left, Chen asked Melville what Police Chief Trammel was talking about.

"What did he mean?" She said. "By all he went through."

"Jerry was a political refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia." Melville replied.. "Escaped from a prison camp and made it across into Austria, where he went to the American consulate and asked for political asylum." Cathy was momentarily stunned.

"Refugee? Political asylum? That sure sounds heavy."

"Even heavier, from what I heard." Melville replied. "He was tortured in the prison camp. Like something out of the Dark Ages."

"He escapes something like that and now some scumbag lowlife wannabe robber murders him when he's doing nothing more than going fishing. An utterly pointless tragic death." Cathy said, thinking she was following Melville's train of thought. Nope. She was on the wrong train.

"Maybe so," Melville said in that maddening mysterious tone of voice he sometimes got that irritated the hell out of her. "And maybe no."

Neither of them knew it, and would never know it as the case eventually became one more shelved box in the cold case room, but 'the maybe no's' won that one hands down. Political refugee Jaroslav 'Jerry' Svoboda's history went deeper than that of a political refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia. He was a conservative, true enough, and that made him an enemy of the Communist State of Czechoslovakia. And they did throw him in a prison camp. And they did torture him. But it was mere chaff in the wind compared to the hell Jaroslav Svoboda visited upon the Germans in the Sudetenland at the end of World War II.

Svoboda fancied himself a patriot and a Czech nationalist and even a folk hero in his zeal to rid Czechoslovakia of the hated Germans. Svoboda was one of Bedřich Pokorný's sycophants. Svoboda was a common Czech name and Jaroslav was no relation to the famous General Ludvík Svoboda who led the Soviet Czech Army into Czechoslovia at war's end, though he tried to give the impression he was. Jaroslav had long lived in Brünn, knew many of the Germans of the town and had coexisted with them for years. He nevertheless volunteered--probably to curry favor with Pokorný--to 'supervise' the Brünn death march where the dispossessed German population were forcibly expelled from their homes in the Sudetenland. He wasn't really any kind of boss or official, though he acted like one, and Svoboda's idea of supervision almost immediately proved so sinister that those Germans who knew him could hardly believe it. From his first steps beyond the watching eyes on the outskirts of Brünn, on the way to the Austrian border, Svoboda began to persecute his former townspeople. Before their shocked eyes an evil metamorphosis, spawned out of some dark unsuspected netherworld in Svoboda's being, took possession of the man. The formerly diffident, even obsequious, Jaroslav Svoboda became a monster.

Survivors would never, could never, forget him. As the old and infirm fell by the wayside as the death march staggered towards the Austrian border, Svoboda urged other Czechs to kill the stragglers.

"Shoot them. Stab them. Bash them with your rifle butts," he was heard to say by one of the survivors, a Sudeten German woman who was also fluent in Czech, as the gruesome spectacle played out on the road to Austria. "No one cares how you do it. Just get rid of them. Kill the German swine. Do whatever you like. They must go. All of them. Out of our homeland. One way or another." During the death march Svoboda was several times seen to stalk along the stumbling files of terrified Germans, pick out one who he disliked for God knew what twisted reason, and pull that luckless soul from the struggling throng. One of them was a German doctor that Svoboda had worked for as a menial. Svoboda hated the German because other Czechs respected the doctor but looked askance at his lowly crude self. Svoboda made the man suffer so much even some of the Czechs were disgusted at his brutality.

The same Czech-speaking woman survivor, as well as three other survivors who would later make their own statements about the Brünn death march, saw him start with each victim by screaming at the doomed person, then begin to beat him, all the while yelling vile anti-German expletives at the battered German, until the victim fell to the ground. He continued kicking the hapless victim until the person ceased moving. Then he would turn to one of the other Czechs and say "take care of him the way all these German swine deserve." Once he was seen to pull the lethal trigger himself. On the German doctor he had resented for years. And the survivors were certain that the doctor wasn't the only German Svoboda killed that gruesome day.

After the death march reached the Austrian border and was turned back, the surviving Germans were huddled into a ruined factory and left to starve to death. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No bedding. Often not even any water. The weaker among the Germans began to die almost immediately and the Germans continued to die in their hundreds and, finally, thousands, before the pitiful remnants were shunted off to Austria to spend the rest of their lifetimes trying to understand their betrayal.

A death march and a death camp were not enough to sate Jaroslav Svoboda's bloodthirst. While the Germans were being starved in the death camp Svoboda would sometimes stride into the camp and pick out a cowed German to torment. He took them into what the Czechs called their interrogation room but which the Germans called the torture room. He, and Svoboda was certainly not the only Czech who did this, would demean and berate the hapless Germans while beating them with whatever was handy--fists, chunks of lumber, wooden clubs, iron bars, rubber truncheons. Not all the Germans survived these sojourns into the so-called interrogation room. And even that wasn't enough for Jaroslav Svoboda. Nearly every night he'd go into the camp and pick out the prettiest girl he could find to beat and then rape. Or rape and then beat. At least one of them never came back. Another succumbed to her injuries on a filthy pallet in the camp.

All of the other detainees were permanently damaged--emotionally, physically, mentally and perhaps worst of all, spiritually, by the bestialities of Svoboda and the many like him who tormented the Germans in their captive misery. The Czech speaking German woman who left her vivid account of the death march for posterity to read, should posterity ever care to read about atrocities _against_ the Germans, was one of those Svoboda chose to rape. And more than once. She made a vow to herself during that gruesome time. If, somehow, she survived this hell on Earth there was something she had to do. Something that had to be done. She would find a way. She _had_ to find a way. The German doctor that Svoboda had singled out to torture and murder on the death march? He was more than one among many of the German victims of Svoboda's savagery. Much more.

He was her father.

Jaroslav Svoboda must be made to pay for his war crimes.

And one day, finally, far away on the shores of Lake Susquah, he did.

### General Freiherr von Wittendorf

East Prussia

General Freiherr von Wittendorf was born in 1905. Too young for WWI. But not for his father and uncles, nor the father and uncles of the woman who would one day be his wife, Maria von Kalinske. They all served as officers in the Kaiser's Imperial German Army. Military service was a matter of honor and duty to the Junker aristocracy of East Prussia. It was unthinkable to shirk from it. Even von Wittendorf's maternal uncle, Lothar von Kalinske, a Lutheran minister, served as a regimental chaplain in France during the war and was wounded three times by enemy shell splinters. Others were not so lucky. One of von Wittendorf's uncles died in the mud at Passchendale. A cousin of his father was in Baron von Richthofen's squadron in France when his Fokker aircraft failed in mid air and plummeted to earth. He had no parachute. And a maternal uncle was captured in Russia and never heard from again. Freiherr's own father, Oberst Graf Lothar von Wittendorf, received a serious stomach wound at Belleau Wood and very nearly died. It was three full years before he recovered sufficiently to resume the life of an active country squire in East Prussia. There were many empty places in the Lutheran churches in East Prussia where once sat proud and sturdy Prussian men. But it was nothing compared to what would come hardly a generation later. WWII. The Holocausts. Plural. The one well known in the mainstream history books. And others not so well known in the mainstream history books. One of them warranting barely a mention to those who win the wars and write the history books.

The holocaust that engulfed the Germans of the east.

### Operation Hannibal

The Titanic. Though now over a century into the past, the tragic story of the sinking of that grand luxury liner, the largest ship afloat in 1912, still lingers in the public consciousness. More than 1500 people, 2/3 of those on board, perished in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Another Atlantic ocean memory locked in the public mind from the first half of the 20th Century is the heroic evacuation by the British Navy---at the cost of nearly three hundred sunken craft of all types--of a third of a million Allied troops from the beaches of Normandy at Dunkirk. Only a generation after the Titanic, the heroic successful British effort in less than a fortnight in May and June of 1940 to evacuate hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk is one of WWII's most remembered events. Though the public memory might now be fading, it is firmly ensconced in the pantheon of the collective heroic British historical memory. Never to be forgotten so long as there is a Britain to remember.

There was a second WWII evacuation of even greater magnitude than Dunkirk. Operation Hannibal. Operation Hannibal? You won't find bunches of English language library books about it, though it dwarfed the British Dunkirk operation. And part of Operation Hannibal was the sinking of the vessels, Wilhelm Gustloff, General von Steuben and Goya. Maritime disasters that, like Operation Hannibal to Dunkirk, far exceeded the Titanic disaster (or the sinking of the Lusitania in World War I.) Why is there so little in the public historical mind said about Operation Hannibal? Or the sinking of the maritime vessels Wilhelm Gustloff, General von Steuben and Goya? Though Operation Hannibal went far beyond Dunkirk in its operational effectiveness. And the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the General von Steuben and the Goya went far beyond the tragedies of the Titanic or the Lusitania? So why such little public knowledge. Why? Because they were German. The Germans lost the war. The victors write the history books.

Including the lists of what should be remembered.

The horrors of the Russian colossus as it rolled over East Prussia were, unbelievable as it seems, even worse than what is recounted below from a Prague ethnic German. It was Genocide. Throughout the eastern German speaking communities. Genocide.

The fate of German women in 1945 _  
_Reported by: Helene Bugner  Report of June 7, 1946  (Prague)

_From the 5th of May, 1945 onwards, the Germans in Prague were not allowed to leave their apartments. On May 9th I was knocked about by the janitor in my apartment, then, without luggage, led away in order to take part in the work of removing the barricades in the streets of Prague. My labour group consisted of 20 women, among them some 60 to 70 years old. We were in the charge of Professor Zelenka. When we stepped out of the house, Professor Zelenka handed us over to the mob with the following words:_ _"Here are the German bitches for you." Calling us German whores, the mob forced us to kneel down and then our hair was cut with bayonets. Our shoes and stockings were taken off, so that we had to walk barefoot. With each step and at every moment we were inhumanly beaten with sticks, rubber truncheons etc. Whenever a woman sank to the ground, she was kicked, rolled in the mud and stoned. I myself fainted several times; water was poured over me and I was forced to continue working. When I was quite unable to do any more work, I received a kick in the left side which broke two of my ribs. During one of my fainting fits they cut a piece of about 4 square cm (about 0.6 square inches) out of the sole of my foot. These tortures lasted the whole afternoon. Among us were women far advanced in pregnancy and nursing mothers, who were ill-treated in the same way. In the course of 3 or 4 days one of the women had a miscarriage._

In the evening we went home. I was so disfigured from the maltreatment and tortures which I had suffered that my children no longer recognized me. My face was crusted with blood and my dress reduced to blood-stained rags; two women living in our house committed suicide in despair, another woman became insane. Our bodies were swollen and covered with black and blue marks, and all of us had open head wounds. Since none of us was able to move, we were kept in custody in a small apartment in our house for three weeks. During this time we were subjected to unendurable mental tortures by threats that our children would be taken away from us and that we should be deported to Siberia.

Three weeks later we were sent to the camp at Hagibor. There were 1200 persons lodged there in four barracks. All fell sick with hunger dysentery, for the diet consisted of a cup of thin water-gruel twice a day for children and for the grown-ups a cup of black coffee with a thin slice of bread morning and evening and a watery soup at noontime. The privies could be used only three times a day at certain hours, although everybody was suffering from dysentery. There was forced labour for everybody. Each evening the labour groups returned to the camp badly beaten up. Medical care was completely lacking. A German doctor, who was also a prisoner, did what was possible, but he had nothing, neither medicaments, bandages nor the most common instruments, as for instance a clinical thermometer; thus women who arrived at the camp with bullet wounds or other injuries had to remain virtually without medical attention. Epidemics of measles, scarlet fever, whooping-cough and diphtheria broke out, which could not be dealt with.

One day we were ordered to line up for roll call. We had to stand in the open air for seven hours, while a terrific thunderstorm with hail and a high wind, which unroofed two barracks, burst right over our heads. The very same day we were transported from the station in open coal wagons, which were in a bad state of repair. The space between us was so small that there was hardly room for us to stand. At 3 o'clock in the morning we arrived at Kolin while it was pouring rain. At Kolin we were lodged in the heavily damaged school. Two women died of exhaustion while marching from the station to this school. During the march we were struck repeatedly with rubber truncheons until almost everybody was bleeding. Next day we were taken from the school to the building of the Czech Red Cross. The Czech Red Cross nurse admitted groups of Russian soldiers to the camps each night and called their attention to several attractive women and girls, who were raped, sometimes up to 45 times a night, in the most inhuman and barbarous way. One could hear their desperate cries for help during the whole night. Next morning some of them showed the marks of bites on their faces, their noses were bitten off and they were lying there without any medical care, for in this camp also no professional medical attention was available.

After several days I was sent together with 45 other women, among them a woman with 6 small children, to a Czech estate, in order to work there. Here we stayed for 3½ months until all of us, including myself, broke down from exhaustion and debilitation. Receiving the same kind and the same amount of food as at Hagibor, we had to do the hardest agricultural work, even on Sundays. The children received the same food as the adults, without one drop of milk, so that three out of four died. All the children under a year old had already died in the camp in Prague.

While we were working we were watched by armed guards, who abused and tormented us every day. Became of my fractured ribs I was unable to do any work where I had to bend forward, therefore I hoed the turnips in a kneeling position. While I was working the guards would insult me and strike me. When my child, like the others, got scarlet fever and I implored the foreman to get the doctor, he simply told me, "The Národní výbor has ordered that Germans should not get medical attendance."

Every night the villagers sent groups of Russian soldiers to our lodgings, who raped the women. For 3½ months we lived in this way, working hard from sunrise to sunset, constantly mistreated and insulted, with no food worth mentioning, the children without control or care, scabby and full of lice, we ourselves delivered over to Russian soldiers during the night. Cleaning facilities were nonexistent, since we were not even allowed to have a pail. Besides vermin we all suffered from all sorts of open, festering wounds. I had one festering boil next to another on my right hand, the hand with which I had to work.

A doctor, who was one of our fellow prisoners, explained to me that he was not allowed to accept exhaustion as grounds for incapacity for work, otherwise he himself would get into very serious trouble. As a consequence of my fractured ribs I contracted pleurisy and was sent to Prague, in order to be transferred to Germany. When I arrived in Prague, the transfers had already been suspended and I stayed in a camp there until Christmas. The camp was so crowded that none of the inmates had enough room to lie down.

We and our children had to sleep in a squatting position on the bare floor, without straw, while the Czechs who had been interned were lodged in two barracks furnished with beds. Whenever foreign observers visited the camp, they were only taken into these two barracks.

The sanitary arrangements beggared description. Often there was no water for three days. Children and adults contracted scurvy of the mouth and festering abscesses. Oozing exanthemas, tuberculosis, spotted typhus, smallpox and children's diseases broke out. Every child had rickets. Women gave birth to children while wearing the same dresses and underwear they had been wearing for months. Most of the infants died. Only a few mothers were able to feed their babies.

In the camp at Prague there was a dark cell. Inmates of the camp were confined there for quite minor offences for as long as three days, without food.

As a result of an intervention by the British Embassy, by whom I had been employed as secretary for 12 years, I was released and sent to the town of Asch at Christmas 1945.

I am prepared to swear to the truth of these statements.

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