 
## Border Tales Too

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

### Elvis T. Mahoney & Co-Conspirators

Book I

by

James Whitesell

Copyright@2015 by JamesWhitesell

Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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### Border Tales Too

Book I

Table of Contents, (not as Elvis' brother Crispus says, Table of Crap)

Prelude In The Beginning

Chapter 1 Dr. George Washington Carver Littlejohn

Chapter 2 San Luis The Unsinister Minister

Chapter 3 Margie Jo

Chapter 4 Fenwick

Chapter 5 The Trainees

Chapter 6 Fenwick At Work (Sic)

Chapter 7 The Guardian Angel

Chapter 8 The Morley Gate

Chapter 9 Mango Tea

Chapter 10 Sister Slap Ass

Chapter 11 Mr. Escalade (Sample Chapter from Book II)

### Border Tales Too

### Book I

### Editor's Advisory

### Beware!

### This is NOT a non-fiction book

### Prelude

### In The Beginning

"Hey," Elvis said to the CBP--Customs and Border Protection--human relations specialist who was completing his employment paperwork. "You're kinda cute. Are you available? How about a date?" This set the employment specialist, Zaluchia Mbonge, to chuckling and then into a belly laugh that eventually caught the interest of everyone in the HR room when she started snorting and thumping on her work table. Zaluchia 'Chocolate Chip' Mbonge was nearly seventy years old and packed two hundred and sixty pounds on her five foot two frame. Besides which she had seven children and fifteen grandchildren and a hulking husband who even at seventy-two was still strong enough to bend Elvis into a human pretzel in less than a minute. Though, were he there, he would have been chortling and pounding the table in hilarity right along with Zaluchia. One of the main reasons they'd stayed together over nearly fifty years of marriage was that they had very similar senses of humor. Plus both viewed most white folk as being just downright fucking weird.

Zaluchia finally calmed down enough to be able to talk. With difficulty, still chuckling, but she got the words out.

"Honey," she said, "I heard about you from the specialist who did your hiring interview." She stopped to chuckle. "Or maybe I should rephrase that. I was warned about you."

"He wouldn't give me a date, either," Elvis said with a completely straight face.

"Welcome to the Unites States Customs and Border Protection Service, Mr. Mahoney," Zaluchia said through another round of chuckles.

"God......." Another chuckle interrupted, punctuated with a slap on her desktop

"God....help us. You're hired."

And so he was.

### Chapter 1

### Dr. George Washington Carver Littlejohn

Elvis signed up with the government dental insurance plan, along with the health insurance, when he first climbed onto the Customs and Border Protection employment express. It all sounded so good he even signed up for the vision plan, too, though he had visual acuity rivaling a (somewhat near-sighted) hawk and almost as good as the budget binoculars of his allegedly peeping tom 2nd cousin, Barnwell Mahoney Clinton. A good deal was a good deal, and a guy never knew when his eyes would go bad, Elvis figured. First chance he got, wherever the government eventually sent him, he was gonna make an appointment with a dentist who was part of the dental plan's provider network. Which meant no out of pocket costs for Elvis, at least for routine work like cleaning and simple fillings.

His first dental appointment, however, popped up before the insurance kicked in. It was in Brunswick, Georgia, where he went to have his teeth whitened for the CBP basic training graduation ceremony at the nearby Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy.

His grandmother Rattler Sue--a woman renowned throughout the hills and hollers on both sides of the old Mason/Dixon Line for having the most unique speech patterns of anyone with a masters degree in English--admonished him that "whenever you start inter somethin' new, do 'er up right with a big ol' bright smile 'n attertude ter match." So, bright smile tooth whitening in mind, Elvis asked the permanent staffers at the Academy about local dentists.

"I know a good one," said N'kiah el Mahood--formerly Philadelphia born Lawrence Leroy Smith--who taught public relations and handcuffing techniques at the Academy. "He's good and not too expensive. Just tell him that I sent you. And use my nickname, Naughty Nicky." What? _Naughty Nicky?_ Elvis decided he didn't want to know. Anyhow, Elvis took N'kiah 'Naughty Nicky' at his word and made an appointment with the dentist, who had his office in the old antebellum center of Brunswick. Heck of a location, Elvis thought, when he got there. Stately oak trees, handsome 19th Century brick buildings, flowers in profusion. Would have fit right in "with nary a glitch," as Rattler Sue would put it, with that old flick, Gone With The Wind. A movie which the branch of the Mahoney clan that emigrated to the Oklahoma panhandle, where there was no thick forest to obscure the view of things like sunsets and approaching law enforcement vehicles, claimed the movie was really about Oklahoma. Their Oklahoma family opinion:

"Gone with the wind?" Heckfire, that's Oklahoma just about every year."

Anyhow, the old 19th Century core of Brunswick made a big impression on Elvis before he even set foot in the dentist's office. Actually, two kinds of impressions. The first was that it sure was a cool place. The second was that it just might be so cool that it was also darned expensive, especially considering his dental insurance hadn't kicked in yet. Right away he spotted the sign. Dr. Littlejohn, DDS, the sign over the door announced. Yep. That must be the place. Besides which it was the only door with a sign over it on the entire block.

Elvis opened the outside door and stepped inside to a pastel painted room bathed in a soft light coming through both lightly tinted windows and an opaque skylight. Sitting behind the receptionist's desk was a world class knockout babe, with skin the color of polished obsidian, a luxurious mane of curly black hair that was almost iridescent in the muted dappled light, lips that could have been the inspiration for the inventor of Botox and the biggest pair of dreamy hazel eyes Elvis had ever seen. His suspicions were immediately confirmed. Any place that had a babe like this working the reception desk was sure to be goddamn expensive. He was half tempted to turn around and leave. But the desk dwelling beauty spoke, in a low, sexy voice, before he could move.

"You must be Mr. Mahoney," she said. "Your appointment is next." She handed Elvis a clipboard with several forms attached to it. "Would you fill these out, please, Mr. Mahoney," she said in that low, sexy tone that riveted Elvis so firmly to the spot that he might as well have had his shoes nailed to the floor. At that moment, had the desky beauty directed him to charge the wall head first, he would have done it. And smiled happily as he sank towards the floor and unconsciousness. She, however, saved him from potential serious injury.

"Please take a seat, Mr. Mahoney," she said in her sultry Southern drawl. Elvis obediently took a seat. Though, much as he would have liked to, not on her desk or even --Oh Bliss!--on her lap. In a couple of minutes he was done with the forms and handed them back to the desk bound beauty.

"If you'll just wait a bit, Mr. Mahoney," Doctor Littlejohn will be with you in a minute." Elvis dutifully sat back down. That minute had hardly passed before the desky beauty picked up the intercom, listened, then nodded at Elvis. "You can go in to the dentist's office now, Mr. Mahoney," she drawled. Sounding, _was it even possible_ , even sexier and sultrier than before. She motioned at a door with her arm.

Elvis stood up, mightily resisting the urge to rush at the desky dusky temptress and fall prostrate at her feet to beg her for a date, or at least for her autograph, and forced himself to head for the door into the dentist's inner office. He opened the door and went in, with one final glance over his shoulder at the knockout receptionist. She gave him a little wave with a sweet smile that sent Elvis' inner fantasy machine into overdrive. Inside the room, a tall dark skinned man with startling carrot colored hair and piercing blue eyes turned to look at Elvis. It was Dr. George Washington Carver Littlejohn. And his initial friendly reaction to Elvis' entry took a sharp detour when he caught sight of Elvis' skinny build, also populated with red hair and bright blue eyes.

Elvis was, in Dr. George Washington Carver Littlejohn's immediate shocked impression, a dead ringer for that goddamn red-headed peckerwood plantation owner from slavery days who knocked up most of his good looking female slaves and passed on the red-haired, blue-eyed gene to a good many of their descendants. Dr. Littlejohn included. From that moment on, despite his usual gentile nature, Dr. George Washington Carver Littlejohn's knee jerk instincts took over. He was no longer seeing Elvis T. Mahoney, erstwhile CBP trainee over at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. He was seeing Colonel Bertram St. John Spotswood, the goddamn peckerwood slave owner and Confederate officer whose statue was only recently removed from the courthouse park. Dr. Littlejohn foremost among the irate protesters who forced its removal from public property. Though the statue was immediately relocated to a piece of private property right down main street and the Sons of Confederate Veterans even had the goddamn redneck gall to hoist a Confederate battle flag over the statue. Dr. Littlejohn still hadn't calmed down over that sneaky peckerwood sleight of statue hand and seeing a Colonel Jerkwood lookalike come into his office really stoked the long slumbering resentments in his red headed, blue eyed, black skinned innards.

Colonel Spotswood, despite losing an arm at Sharpsburg, an eye at Second Manassas and a leg at Gettysburg, still managed to knock up a few more slave girls before the Yankees marched in and put an end to it. Most of it, anyhow. Though, despite the mainstream history books accounts of the so called emancipation, those same Yankee liberators had their way with more than a few of the black girls. And not always done with any kind of consent. Said dubious occurrences also making a considerable contribution to the local gene pool. Though none of it of the Colonel Spotswood/Dr. Littlejohn red hair, bright blue eyed gene packet.

Dr. Littlejohn simply could not control himself. Elvis had barged into his consciousness and become a proxy Colonel Spotswood and once there the doctor couldn't get the notion to budge. Not that he tried all that hard. It was, as the saying goes, all downhill from there. Proxy revenge forthwith ruled the Elvis/Dr. Littlejohn dental encounter.

"So what can I do for you today, Col.....er.....ah, sir," Dr. Littlejohn said, motioning as he spoke for Elvis to park himself in the dental chair. Which at that moment was seeming to Dr. Littlejohn more like the electric chair, at least potentially, than his normal dental chair, which he affectionately privately called Mr. Drill 'n Jerk.

"Tooth whitening," Elvis said. "That's why I'm here. To get my teeth whitened. Want to look my best for the graduation ceremony over at the Academy." Normally Dr. Littlejohn would have his dental assistant perform a routine procedure like teeth whitening. Not this time. This was not a normal situation. This was a Colonel Bertram St. John Spotswood proxy situation. One that required a certain kind of attention. A very _special_ kind of attention.

"Yes, sir, Col...Spot...er...ah...young man," Dr. Littlejohn said. "OK. One teeth whitening procedure coming up." Which sounded kind of strange to Elvis, the dentist seeming to him to be acting somewhat on the peculiar side. Reminding him of the time he caught his older brother Lispus in their grandpa's sheep pen with his trousers down around his knees.

"Just taking a leak," Lispus lamely lisped. The expression on Lispus's face however giving Elvis a pretty good idea what the origin of the word sheepish was.

"Maybe I should come back another time," Elvis said to Dr. Littlejohn, starting to get a touch suspicious, though his suspicions were way off the mark. Kind of like when his ex-girlfriend, Blind Maybelle Knockwirt, tried her hand at the archery range. Maybelle wasn't actually blind, but she was so near sighted that she often mistook Elvis for her pet Golden Retriever, Brutus, who had a distinct reddish tint to his coat. "If you're busy, I could come back another time," Elvis continued in a somewhat worried tone. "Maybe in a year or two." Dr. Littlejohn struggled mightily with suppressing the shit eating grin that was battling to surge onto his face. The Doctor having just had himself a real bright idea revolving around his undergraduate major. Organic chemistry.

"Just sit tight, sir," Dr. Littlejohn said. "This won't take long at all. And you'll have a smile as bright as the spotlight illuminating the statue of local war hero Colonel Bertram St. John Spotswood."

"Who?" Elvis said, sounding confused.

" _You_..... _you_......you wouldn't know." The Doctor said. "But I will say that you look a whole lot like him."

"Me. I look like a war hero? Which war? WWII?"

"Not quite," Dr. Littlejohn replied. "Long before that."

"Wow. WWI? Cuba? The Philippines? Utah?"

"No," Dr. Littlejohn answered. "Way back. The Civil War."

"Oh," Elvis replied, using the name he'd sometimes heard growing up. "The War Between the States." Dr. Littlejohn gritted his teeth so hard he cracked a filling. _War Between the States?_ That's what the goddamned peckerwoods called the Civil War. He took a closer look at Elvis, this walk-in Colonel Bertram St. John Spotswood lookalike. Could....could....could it _be?_ Could this red headed beanpole actually be a descendant of Colonel Jerkwood? Maybe the Colonel did some prolonged dallying among the white folks, too. Sure wouldn't put it past the randy bastard.

"Do you happen to have an ancestor named Colonel Bertram St. John Spotswood?" Dr. Littlejohn said with no little hopeful expectation in his voice.

"Sure do," Elvis said. "I'm a direct descendant." Dr. Littlejohn revisited his tooth gritting and nearly popped the cracked filling right out of its toothy home. It was all he could do to not grab Elvis by the neck and wring his neck like his granddaddy did with the unlucky chicken of the week every Sunday afternoon before the family sitdown dinner. Then Elvis started to cackle.

"Just funnin' you, Doc," he said. "I saw the statue of that colonel dude out on the street with the Confederate flag waving over it. Figured you'd be none too fond of him." That, Dr. Littlejohn was thinking with no little fevered irritation, was the biggest understatement he'd heard since pediatrician Dr. Chester McAdoo told Littlejohn and his wife that "she might be pregnant." Littlejohn's wife subsequently giving birth to triplets, two of them identical twins with skin the color of copier paper, carrot red hair and bright blue eyes. Which came as something of a surprise to his wife, who was blacker than the inside of Mr. Peabody's coal mine and who, being somewhat disoriented from the drugs used to assist her in the delivery of the triplets, accused her husband of infidelity. Besides which, how the hell was she going to breast feed three babies with only two boobs? That did it for Dr. Littlejohn. This red headed redneck might not be a descendant of Colonel Jerkwood, but, by jerking with Dr. Littlejohn, he had just won himself the honor of Colonel Jerkwood Preferred Proxy.

Before Elvis could say anything more the dentist leaned over him.

"Open wide, please," he said. Elvis opened wide. "OK," Dr. Littlejohn said. "I know what to do _. Exactly_ what to do." Elvis blanched. Just a bit. Maybe he really should leave. But then the dentist was back with a medicine jar and what looked like a small paint brush. "Hold still," he said. "This won't take long." Elvis closed his eyes and let his mind wander while Dr. Littlejohn busily brushed his tooth whitening compound onto Elvis' teeth. It didn't take long, though long enough for Elvis' mind to wander to coastal Bangladesh and its legendary humungous salt water crocodiles with gleaming somewhat white and very dangerous teeth. "There," the dentist said. "Done." He hit the emergency release on the dentist's chair and Elvis hurtled back to an upright position, putting a slight crick in his neck when his head bounced a couple more times than the rest of him.

"There is a pasty looking gummy substance covering your teeth." Dr. Littlejohn said. Do not eat or drink anything for at least three hours. Then brush your teeth very vigorously for at least two minutes. After that, rinse out your mouth and your teeth will shine forth in a truly dazzling fashion."

Elvis set out to do what the dentist directed him to do, leaving the outer office and the babe receptionist however with some wistful reluctance, and went back to his quarters. Three hours later he vigorously brushed his teeth for two minutes and thorough rinsed his mouth free of the gummy residue. Then he looked in the mirror and opened his mouth wide to reveal his new sparkling smile. And his teeth did indeed shine forth in a truly dazzling fashion. There was just one problem. His teeth. They weren't white.

They were red. Brilliant, florescent fire engine red.

The sound of which, that of a fire engine, not dissimilar to the one which immediately erupted from Elvis' brilliant fire engine red teeth

"Ahhhooooiiiiioooooaaaaaa!!!!"

The motel where Elvis' trainee class was billeted, with the unfortunate if inadvertent name of Chivington's Eternal Rest Motel (Bertie Joe Chivington locally famous for having failed high school grammar three years running) immediately morphed into pandemonium. Elvis' hollering even made its way across the street to Jimmy Roy Carter's Bar-B-Q restaurant and sent the patrons flying out the doors. Jimmy Roy, who was a veteran of Bosnia and Somalia, not helping matters any with his own yelling.

"Terrorists! Take cover! Quick!" Unfortunately for Jimmy Roy, the patrons all sought cover outside his Bar-B-Q and left Jimmy Roy with a bunch of half eaten meals and a stack of unpaid tabs.

The dentist's office told an irate Elvis that the tooth whitening compound had been mislabeled in the factory. They weren't sure just what the intended function of the mislabeled compound was, but a lab sample showed that it wasn't toxic. They were oh, so sorry, but there was nothing they could do. Just wait a couple of weeks or so and Elvis' tooth color would fade back to the normal more or less white.

Elvis didn't have a couple of weeks. Less than a week later he was standing in the graduation line ready to receive his diploma. A casual observer would have thought he looked strangely jumpy. Like he'd just discovered he had body lice and they were having lunch at his expense. But anyone who knew him wouldn't pay it much heed. "Just, Elvis." They'd say. "Twitchy Elvis twitching again." A few steps ahead, handing out diplomas, stood Customs and Border Protection's first black female Academy honcho, Director Lavinnia Okumba McCumber. As Elvis approached she caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye as she was handing a graduation certificate to brand new officer LaQueen Mombasa. Director McCumber's hand was out and about to grasp that of widely grinning new officer Mombasa.

"Congratulations, Ms....." The Director began. Just then Lavinnia's corner eye contact grabbed onto the face of an officer a couple of spaces back and derailed Lavinnia's diploma-handing focus. "Ms...Bombastard," she stuttered out in her temporary confusion. LaQueen Mombasa, temperamental to a fault nearly as big as the San Andreas, was not one to suffer insults lightly. Especially from some goddamn black assed uptown bitch with an attitude. Even if she was a hefty six footer.

"That's Mombasa, big mama," she spit out. "With an M." Not a B!" LaQueen then grabbed her diploma and stomped off the stage at the academy theater where the graduation ceremony was being held. Later that day she confided in her best friend, Shawree Smith, what "that goddamn Oreo cookie bitch did to me. She's lucky I didn't whup her uptown black ass but good." LaQueen might as well have done a TV interview with a Jacksonville News at Six reporter Chatty Kathi Mohamet. By the time LaQueen got to the personnel office to complete her out-processing the next day her assigned duty station had been changed from her home area, New York City, to an island in the Pacific, Guam. A U.S. territory that had a very serious problem with the exotic mildly venomous brown tree snakes. LaQueen had a deep seated fear of all snakes, and especially venomous ones, be they mildly or mightily venomous. At least that is what she'd told her formerly best friend, Shawree Smith. The same Shawree who somewhat unmiraculously received her own last minute change of duty station from miserably hot and humid Brownsville, Texas, to Washington D.C.'s Dulles International. Washington D.C. being, not so coincidentally, Shawree's home town.

As LaQueen stomped off the stage the corner of Lavinna's eye stayed riveted on Elvis' approach. Tommy Chung was next in line and Lavinnia somewhat distractedly went through the congratulatory motions with him. She couldn't keep her focus off the next guy. There was something about that guy just behind Tommy. He looked familiar. But she didn't remember anyone in the graduation class with such a big, droopy mustache. It hung down and covered his mouth and Lavinnia couldn't help wondering how the hell the guy would even eat without catching his mustache in his teeth and damn near dislocating his jaw. Then Elvis stepped forward, his face a mysterious mask in contrast to the wide self-congratulatory grins all the other diploma getters were flashing. He held his hand out expectantly, ready for either a diploma, a handshake or both. What he got was a question.

"I don't remember you," Lavinnia said suspiciously. Then she looked at the name on the diploma. Mahoney. Elvis T. Mahoney. Then it hit her. Elvis! It was that goddamn smart ass woodchip Elvis! She should have recognized him by the red hair.

"Since when did you have a mustache, Elvis?" She said with the same suspicion. I don't recall you having one."

"Just grew it," Elvis replied. "Last couple of weeks." Lavinnia's eyed narrowed.

"A couple of weeks. A mustache that long? In a couple of weeks?"

"Yep," Elvis said. "We Mahoneys are known far and wide as quick mustache men." A pause. "And also some of the women. Some kind of genetic natural selection. You know, Darwin stuff. But it sure used to come in real handy back in the outlaw days when a quick new identity was needed in a hurry." Despite what Lavinnia's acrimonious ex-boyfriend, Louisiana Creole-born Special Agent Gaston LaRue, might have thought on the subject, Lavinnia did not in fact get dropped on her infant noggin as a baby and be consequently mentally challenged from that defining noggin crunching moment on. She knew damn well Elvis was up to something. She snorted derisively and would definitely liked to have grabbed Elvis' dubious handoff and run down the field with it. But there was still a line of hopeful faces queued up behind Elvis. Reluctantly, a spastic tic suddenly taking up residence just below her right eye, she hot-eyed him as she shook his hand and grudgingly gave him his diploma. Elvis could hear her marginally audible growling and was sorely tempted to do his laughing hyena routine on the spot. But there are occasions. And then there are occasions. For once, Elvis made the right choice. The laughing hyena didn't even so much as chuckle. He did however quietly pass gas, the foul result of which hit Lavinnia's nostrils just as Elvis was exiting the stage.

Late that night, tucked in bed, Lavinnia lay awake for a good half hour trying to figure out just what the fuck that smart ass Elvis was up to.

Elvis was without doubt the first graduate of the Academy to go through the graduation ceremony with a droopy false mustache and a totally grim smile free expression. Everyone else was exuberant and grinning from ear to year. Not Elvis. He was glowering. And more. He was plotting revenge. Elvis was dead certain that Dr. Littlejohn had done this on purpose and with a little snooping around town figured out just why. Colonel Bertram St. John Spotswood was not a war hero, at least not in the eyes of the local black folk, many of whom had red hair and bright blue eyes, and Dr. Littlejohn had been at the forefront of de-warheroing Colonel Spotswood. Which was all understandable enough to Elvis. With the exception of him, Elvis, becoming a proxy Colonel Spotswood for Dr. Littlejohn's revenge. That was _not_ cool, Dr. Littlejohn, Elvis muttered. Not cool at all.

Elvis reported the dentist to the Brunswick Better Business Bureau and the Georgia State Dentist Licensing Board. He never heard from the Georgia State Dentist Licensing Board, but he did hear from the Brunswick Better Business Bureau.

"We cannot substantiate your allegations," the BBB said. "No further action is required." The anonymous chairman of the BBB complaints department was Dr. Littlejohn himself, said anonymous chairmanship a handy way of derailing any complaints against him.

Elvis then went back to the dentist's office, but didn't go in. He waited until he saw Dr. Littlejohn come out of his office at the end of his work day and climb into his Toyota Avalon. Knowing what car the dentist drove, that night Elvis went to the local grocery and bought two pounds of fresh garlic cloves. He ground some of them into a fine powder and mixed the powder in with a pint of gasoline. The rest he made into a viscous paste. The next day Elvis, using some of the dubitable skills from his teen years, picked the lock on the Toyota Avalon's gas tank in the secluded parking lot behind the dentist's office and, using a funnel, poured the garlic powdered pint of gasoline into the Toyota's tank. Then he climbed under the Toyota and smeared fresh garlic paste all over the undercarriage.

After repeated trips through the car wash failed to dislodge the obnoxious recently arrived odor, Dr. Littlejohn took his Avalon to the Toyota dealership three times in the following weeks, claiming that the strong odor in his Avalon was a manufacturing defect. The dealership denied his claims and, doing what dealerships do, charged him top dealership dollar every time he brought the Toyota in. Adding up to far more than the two hundred bucks Littlejohn had charged Elvis for the teeth whitening that turned out to be a teeth reddening. Which Elvis nevertheless considered an equable settlement and the matter therefore closed.

Though he did take a Brunswick souvenir refrigerator magnet and prominently display on his frig the newspaper article from the Brunswick Daily News. An article about how an unidentified low life sneakabout had crept into well known local dentist and community leader Dr. George Washington Carver Littlejohn's garden in the dark of night to vandalize it....

By dumping bright red paint all over Dr. Littlejohn's prize-winning wisterias.

### Chapter 2

### San Luis

### The Unsinister Minister

A handful of years passed and Elvis was a border veteran, a senior inspector on the district mobile Enforcement Team--ET--that specialized in catching drug smugglers that tried to sneak their loads of dope through the various Arizona ports of entry. He was on assignment way over on the California border at the Port of San Luis. Elvis and one of his ET buddies, Pancho Soltero, were roving behind the primary lanes coming in from San Luis Rio Colorado across the border in the state of Sonora in Old Mexico. Elvis wasn't quite sure why they kept calling it Old Mexico. Maybe over in New Mexico, at the Port of Columbus, it made some sense. New Mexico. Old Mexico. Keep things straight. But here? In Arizona? Didn't make any sense to him. Old Mexico? Why old? He sure didn't see many old people coming out of Mexico at the Port of San Luis. The whopping majority of them were young, Mexico well known for producing lots of young people on a regular basis.

"Oh, well," Elvis mumbled. "Some things in life just don't make sense."

"Just look who run the country," Elvis said to his long suffering ET buddy, Pancho.

"What?" Pancho said, not having been paying much attention to Elvis as a curvaceous Mexican of the female variety was walking by on a nearby sidewalk with a sensual swagger that Pancho thought was downright suggestive--though the actual fact was she had a pinched nerve in her right hip that made her involuntarily jerk from little needles of pain when her right foot connected with the sidewalk. Which fact Pancho completely misinterpreted as he to continued to eyeball her supposedly suggestive progress down the sidewalk. Then, Elvis' voice. Again. "Pancho? Are you listening?"

Reluctantly, a little piqued, he turned to look at Elvis with a not altogether friendly stare. "What did you say?" Adding, with extra emphasis, after he thought about the high price he was paying for listening to Elvis as the woman of his dreams (the fourth that day so far) was disappearing, possibly forever, from view, "just what in the fuck did you say now, Elvis!"

"I said, some things in life just don't make sense," a pause while Pancho waited for God knows what crazy-assed idea Elvis had come up with. "As an example," Elvis continued, "just look at who's running the country." A year earlier Pancho might have imploded. No more. He was an ES. Elvis Survivor. He just groaned, snarled just a little, and returned his attention to the most recent lady of his dreams. Too late. She was gone. Gone! That did it.

"Goddamnit, Elvis, I will never, ever forgive you!" Elvis said nothing. He merely raised his eyebrows and shrugged. And why not? At least once a day Pancho said he would never, ever forgive Elvis. Pancho's fervent anti-Elvis imprecations however invariably vanishing before they were even halfway through their initial pitcher of draft beer after work.

So long as Elvis bought the first round.

An hour later Pancho came walking back from a primary lane to where Elvis was standing intensely watching water dripping off an evaporative cooler. Pancho jabbed him in the side. "Look, El," he said.

"Ouch." Elvis retorted, rubbing his side. "You should cut your fingernails, Pancho."

"I did cut them," Pancho retorted. "Those were my fingers."

"Then you should cut your fingers," Elvis shot back. Pancho ignored him. He wasn't about to be diverted. He pointed at a Ford Minivan just being cleared on a primary lane.

"There might be a lookout on that Ford," he said. "I got one like that over in Douglas. The driver was a nun. Well, not really a nun. A teenaged boy whose voice hadn't changed yet wearing a nun's habit. Lemme tell ya, Elvis, he was one weird goddamn kid if there ever was one. Claimed ever since he was a little bit of a chamaco all he wanted to be was a nun. Not a fireman. Not a cop. Not a neurosurgeon. Not a repo dude on reality TV. Not even a fry cook. He wanted to be a nun." Pancho paused a second. Elvis meanwhile was trying to figure out if Pancho was making up a story to "give that goddamn Elvis a taste of his own frickin' medicine," as he often sputtered at Elvis during some of their calmer moments. Not this time.

"Go figure. A nun! Well, anyhow, the van was loaded in the frame rails. And I just saw the travel history on this one on the primary lane computer. No local crossings. But a bunch over at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa in California." He started to move towards the Ford van. "Come on, Elvis. Let's check it out." Which was what they were about to do, no matter what Elvis thought, Pancho being a one track minded kind of guy who was next to impossible to derail. With the exception of the appearance of a person of the comely female variety, which was where the other track in Pancho's attention was always headed. They got close to the van and saw who was inside. An ordinary middle aged couple and several kids in the back.

"Not looking too promising," Elvis said. Pancho shrugged.

"Maybe. But at least I'm gonna put the dog on it." Before Elvis could offer an opinion, one track Pancho was already at the van's door and telling everyone to climb out and stand a few feet away while a K-9 ran the van. He then turned towards a nearby K-9 officer, Melissa 'Omigawd' Trueblood, surreptitiously nicknamed Cute Butt by some of the men and a couple of the women at the port. Melissa was just finishing up with running her dog, Wilbur Too (her old boyfriend's name was Wilbur) on a Chevy Pickup. That one was negative.

"Hey, Melissa," Pancho yelled, nodding at the Ford Minivan. "Can you run this one for me?" Melissa shot him a dirty look, having noticed more than once him staring at her rear end as she passed him on a dog run. But Pancho had a darned good record as a dope man and Melissa wasn't about to pass up the chance at a positive hit and credit for a seizure. She also didn't object to having a cute butt, most of the time, anyhow, and her old boyfriend Wilbur sure didn't mind her having a cute butt, either. In fact he frequently had some interesting dreams about her cute butt, which he did not hesitate to enthusiastically share with her. His personal favorite being the dream where Melissa entered the All Arizona Cute Butt Pageant wearing a show stopper set of skimpy undies that made her look like she had a secret even better than Victoria's. Melissa didn't win the dream contest, but the contest organizers did give everyone several consolation prizes. Including a gift certificate to Red Lobster. Which not so coincidentally happened to be Wilbur's number one's all time favorite restaurant. Wilbur, however, cajole and beg as he tried, had never been able to convince Melissa to do the baloney pony routine while wearing the Halloween lobster costume he picked up at a post-Halloween sale at a San Diego costume shop.

Which might have had something to do with Melissa finally booting his lobster ass out the door once and for all.

Melissa wheeled Wilbur Too around and began her practiced loop circling the van that was the start of her K-9 routine. Whoa! Wilbur Too stopped colder than a flash frozen halibut, almost tripping Melissa as she stumbled over him and just barely kept her feet. Was she pissed at the abrupt doggy stop? Hell, no. Melissa had seen this before with Wilbur Too and she watched with a wide grin spreading over her pulchritudinous face-- that nicely complimented her comely posterior--as Wilbur Too slammed on the dog brakes, crawled under the frame rail of the Minivan and grabbed hold of the rail like it was the best chunk of choice doggie treat in the entire state of Arizona. Melissa threw a triumphant look at Pancho and Elvis.

"Omigawd!" Melissa exclaimed. "Take 'em in, boys. This puppy is loaded." And she wasn't talking about the dog. Wilbur Too at any rate being abstemious by nature. The Mexican family from the van was then politely, but firmly, escorted into the confines of the secondary inspection building by Pancho and a somewhat reluctant Elvis.

The dog had alerted. And Wilbur Too was a good dog. Reliable. Not many false positives with Wilbur Too. Unlike Linus 'Suck Up' MacGristle's K-9, Flip Off, which was always throwing false alerts which resulted in lots of fruitless searches and a lot of hot glances at both the lumpish potato shaped MacGristle and his cross-eyed K-9, Flip Off. But Melissa 'Omigawd' Trueblood was a solid officer who could read her dog's reactions like a book. She also could read her old boyfriend Wilbur's thoughts like a book, too, which Wilbur was none too fond of, especially when his thoughts were wandering on the salacious side and not involving Melissa. Still, good as Melissa and Wilbur Too were, there was something wrong here. Elvis felt it in his bones. His bones always ached when something was not right and had ever since the presidential election when he was six and one half years old and every presidential election since. This bone ache was at least presidential in intensity. Yep. Something just not right here.

"Not right," he mumbled thoughtfully. "Just.......not right."

The people, for openers. An ordinary looking middle aged Mexican-American man and woman, both on the chunky side, not looking especially prosperous, not looking especially unprosperous. Kids quiet and dressed on the conservative side. No tats, no facial jewelry, no do-rags or low riders or surly attitudes. Which actually, as Elvis thought about it, made a pretty good smuggler's cover. Yet there was still something. Something not right. Something bone achingly not right.

"I am a minister, sir," the man was saying to Pancho. "A servant of the Lord. Surely you wouldn't think I would be doing something illegal?" That got him nowhere. Even less than nowhere. Negative nowhere. Pancho lived in a minister free zone. Pancho was none too fond of ministers, going back to when the local minister refused to bless his father's corn crop and the growing season that followed turned out to be a disaster, forcing his father to give up the farm and go to work at a milk processing plant where one stormy evening he slipped and fell into a vat of 2% milk and drowned. None of which would have happened it the jerk narrow minded minister had just blessed the corn crop in the first place. At least that was the way Pancho saw it.

Pancho grumpily ignored the man's protestations and proceeded with the usual drill. Pat the man down for weapons or drugs, put his valuables in a safe box, take his shoes and belt and plunk him in one of the four secondary cells. A female officer, Tess 'No Bullshit' Mondoval, did the same with the woman, who endured it in shocked silence, though Tess did think she saw the woman wink at her when Tess' searching hands brushed over her private parts. The kids were told to sit on a bench in the secondary office, and, unlike possibly nine tenths or more of contemporary American children, did what they were told, and did it with nary a snarl nor a death glare. Which so surprised the three officers they stopped and stared at them open mouthed. Tess slipped over next to Elvis after she put the woman in a different cell.

"Somethin' about this ain't right, El," she said. "They don't seem like the type."

"But the dog alerted," Elvis replied. "You can't get around that." Tess nodded. She'd seen the dog alert, too.

"Yeah. And not that mongrel Flip Off and that blurpsucker MacGristle. Melissa's Wilbur Too. Good dog. Good handler. Got me puzzled."

"Me, too," Elvis replied. Tess refraining from saying what she was thinking. That not only was Elvis puzzled, he _was_ a puzzle.

The puzzle had more than one piece. They took the van back to the hydraulic lift in the back of the secondary lot and lifted it up. There were drain holes in the frame rails but, even with a flashlight, Pancho and Elvis couldn't see inside them.

"Drain holes that don't drain?" Elvis said. "This could well mean something."

"Goddamnit, Elvis," Pancho shot back. "You know damn well what it means. Why can't you just come out and say that the frickin' rails are loaded?"

"Because I am your friend as well as your coworker and I didn't want to diminish your thrill of discovery."

"And also full of bullshit," said a third voice. "No wonder you can't keep a girl friend more than two weeks." Melissa had put up Wilbur Too in his temporary working kennel and joined them at the lift.

"I resent that remark deeply, Melissa," Elvis replied. My third cousin twice removed Lula Belle Mahoney was my girl friend for nearly six months."

"The same six months you were away in Iraq!" Pancho chimed in.

"Well, there's that," Elvis admitted. "But it was still six months." Melissa threw up her arms in mock exasperation, and bent down to look at the van's frame rails.

"Those rails are loaded," she said firmly. "That is the strongest response I've seen from Wilbur Too since that fool white guy in the RV from Minnesota let his Siamese cat get loose in secondary last winter when I was running a car with Wilbur Too." Elvis stopped and looked at her.

"Yeah? I'd sure like to have seen that. Why that reminds me of....." Pancho jabbed Elvis again.

"Stick to the matter at hand, Elvis. We got work to do here."

So they set to work. Pancho got a power drill out of the tool shack next to the lift and started drilling into the frame rail. A noise altogether too much like a dentist's drill that made Elvis think of his dentist back in Slippery Sister Country, Fred 'No Novocain' Butler. Elvis was imagining the various creative ways to get even with the SOB when, a couple of minutes later, the bit chewed through the metal. Pancho reversed the drill and pulled it out, sending little sharp edged bits of metal flying about that would eventually find homes in the shoes of the secondary officers and the tires of cars passing through and send more than one K-9 leaping in sudden paw pain. A grin spread over Pancho's face. On the drill bit were bits and pieces of the ubiquitous green, leafy substance of the seizure narratives.

"Smell this," Pancho said, pointing the drill bit at Elvis and Melissa. Each took a whiff. And then all three high-fived each other.

"Omigawd!" Melissa exclaimed.

"MJ!" Pancho said. "Marey-gee-wanna!" And it was.

"My bones are aching," Elvis said, immediately drawing semi-hostile and partially perplexed looks from both Pancho and Melissa.

So, Elvis thought, either the guy inside was a minister down on his luck, a downright sinister minister or he was just saying he was a minister. Imagine, if he really was a minister, a man of the cloth doing something like this. Didn't he know he could have had a religious TV program and got boatloads of money legally by soliciting donations for humanitarian projects that would involve a lot of personal expenses? Like trips to the Holy Land, pilgrimages really, with only short stops at Monte Carlo and Swiss alpine ski lodges. Or a home swimming pool, purely for therapeutic purposes, or a small 9 hole golf course in the back yard to help stressed out parishioners to relax and a very well stocked wet bar in the small but state of the art bowling alley in the basement to ameliorate the heavy stresses of the day.. Darn fool. And he had to go and get his wife and kids involved. Then Elvis stopped himself in mid accusatory thought. _Wait._

His bones were still aching.

And it wasn't an election year.

"Gimme that hammer, El," Pancho said to Elvis. Elvis handed him the hammer that up to that point was lying quietly on the ground and minding its own hammer business. Mr. Hammer then descended and with a loud _whac_ k Pancho broke open a Bondoed access plate at the end of the frame rail. Then he picked up a heavy long-necked screwdriver, drove it forcefully into the first package and managed to jerk on it until it loosened up and slid slowly out of the frame rail. Another grin split Pancho's swarthy face, lifting his bushy mustache towards his nose and looking to Elvis' overactive imagination like Pancho's moustache was actually made up of a bunch of extra long nose hairs. That looked, now that Elvis thought it about, like they could use a trim.

"I have scissors on my Swiss Army Knife," he said to Pancho. "Just in case."

"That's good to know, El," Pancho answered, distracted as he was by the dope in the frame rails and also not having one goddamn clue what wild haired thoughts were bouncing around in Elvis' convoluted brain pan.

The reason for Pancho's mustache raising grin soon became obvious. The first package was connected to the next one with a thin clothesline rope. Life just got a whole lot easier. They'd daisy chained it. He began pulling on the first package, with both Elvis and Melissa joining in, but the packages came out grudgingly, not yielding nearly as easily as they would have thought, coming thick sorghum molasses slow, one at a time, reluctantly. Then Elvis noticed something. The packages had all been greased before being shoved into the frame rail. Made it much easier to put them in and pull them out again. But the grease had dried. Odd. Then Pancho lifted one of the marijuana bricks. He frowned, and looked uneasily over at Elvis.

"This dope is awful light, El," he said, handing the package to Elvis.

"Yep," Elvis replied, hefting the package in his palm and also starting to frown. "Unless they've taken to making Bud Lite in marijuana this sure ain't good." He passed the package to Melissa, who had a worried look on her face. When she took it she frowned, too.

"Omigawd," she exclaimed. "Better open one and see what it looks like." Pancho did just that. Opened one. The frown marched back on his face and was in no mood to leave anytime soon.

"This is old dope," he finally said in a low and ominous voice. "All dried out and damn near as hard as a rock. Been in the frame rail a long time. The people in the van really might not know about the dope."

"Ohshit!" Melissa exclaimed.

Right then all three of them had a pretty good idea of how the rest of their border evening was going to go. Like blasting off with Commander Zero into the Twilight Zone on the space ship Screwed. Or, more to the Planet Earth point, something on the order of an IRS audit by a bad tempered auditor who'd just found out the flood insurance had run out on his house before the nearby Perverse River flooded him out from a hundred year rain storm. Throwing an ordained minister in a cell for something he didn't do was not going to win them a lot of friends in management. Irate managers, always anxious to join a management pile on of hapless workers, would appear on the horizon like a crowd of vultures honing in on road kill. And to make things worse, it would soon turn out the wife was also a minister who wrote all her husband's homilies and ran the church youth group.

Though he actually didn't drop to his knees to pray that no muckraking newspaper twit got hold of this, Elvis nevertheless did think it with an intensity rivaling his aching bones. And he added a mental footnote letting the Great Mystery know he wasn't too fond of the idea of being the Bad Samaritan in one of the preacher lady's future homilies she was going to write for her righteous indignation-fired husband so egregiously violated by brutish government thugs. Not to mention the several dozen bottom feeding attorneys who could smell a possible law suit even farther away than the vultures could smell road kill.

This mess, Elvis glumly concluded, was on a roll to become the all time champion circle jerk of the entire Arizona border and a sure bet to not end anywhere near the hopelessly inadequate concept of 'well.'

"That's it, folks," he mumbled. "We're screwed." Which momentarily deflected Pancho's attention, Pancho a man for whom the word screwed had a very direct and personal meaning and leading Elvis to frequently refer to him as Señor Testosterone. Elvis saw the confusion on Pancho's face and figured out what he was thinking.

" _Professionally_ , Pancho. Professionally screwed." Which caused Pancho's bushy black unplucked eyebrows to arch over his deep set coffee brown eyes.

"Excuse me, sir. But I have yet to resort to hiring a companion," he said with manful pride. Followed as quick as a switched on light in a dark basement by a solid right to Pancho's shoulder joint by a totally unamused Melissa.

"Omigawd!" She blurted. "You are a fucking hopeless male chauvinist."

"We're still screwed," Elvis said glumly. "No matter how you look at it."

Tony Rivera sat in his chair in the supervisor's office in the San Luis secondary building. Despite being specially reinforced, the chair groaned at his every movement, Tony a hefty 300 plus pounder who repeatedly won the Favorite Customer of the Month award at almost all of the local restaurants. The only exceptions were Manga Manga and Mancini's Good Old Diner, the pair of all you can eat buffet cafeterias in nearby Yuma, both having banned him for life. Tony liked to eat. Tony liked to drink. Tony liked to watch reality TV. Tony liked to eat and drink some more. All of which combined to not leave much room for something like the development of a facility for critical thinking at the workplace. Which was soon to come thudding home to him like a ton of bricks–or, in Tony's case, a ton of calories.

Just a few feet outside Tony's office Pancho and Elvis and Melissa made troubled tracks back to the secondary detention area where they uneasily turned the keys on the cell doors and let the Mexican-American man and his wife out of the grim detention cells into the somewhat less grim detention area. Rooms the officers nicknamed as grim and grimmer, which was a wise choice considering calling the rooms slam and slammer might give the general population the wrong idea about what went on in the search room. The man was still looking nonplussed, but the woman's eyes were red-rimmed, both from her former tears and her slumbering volcano-a-puffin' accumulating rage. Elvis took one look at her and was convinced he was doomed to being the Bad Samaritan in one of her homilies.

"You can just call me the Bad Samaritan from now on," he said morosely to Melissa.

"What?" She replied, confused. "Call you what?" Elvis shrugged.

"Never mind," he answered. A suggestion that Melissa embraced with whole hearted enthusiasm, having already had too many mind twisting dark journeys trying to follow the meandering convolutions of Elvis' thought processes. If you could even call them that. Somehow the word hallucinatory seemed to fit Elvis better. Pancho, who had majored in Spanish Colonial History and 20th Century Literature at the University of Arizona, but, with future employment in mind, also got himself an advanced welding certificate, put it differently. Elvis' brain? It was like his stream of consciousness had overflowed its banks. Melissa had no idea exactly what that meant, but still thought it sounded 'way cool.'

"Omigawd!" She exclaimed. "That sure sounds like Elvis." A pause. "I think."

The three of them, anxiety plastered on everyone's face, sat down with the minister and his not so youthful youth minister wife, whose names were Heraclio and Minerva Vasquez, long time residents and also long time bilingual pastors in the greater San Diego/Tijuana area. Which, though not so great as super sprawling Los Angeles or its super sprawling smog spewing competitor, Phoenix, was nevertheless well sprawled and occasionally required a stop at a quick mart to fill up the gas tank while traversing from one fringe of the greater San Diego/Tijuana area to the opposite fringe.

"Tell me about your van," Pancho began. "How long have you had it?" Heraclio Vasquez answered, his face now showing a faint inkling of understanding what the heck was going on.

"Three months," he said, then adding a comment that instantly drained the color out of Pancho, Elvis and Melissa's faces.

"I bought it at a government auction," a pause, then the final blow that left all three of the CBP officers' faces as white as a newborn Laplander baby's rotund little pallid sub arctic belly.

"For seized vehicles." You could not hear the roof falling, or the ton of bricks tumbling down. They were all internal. Mental. But real as hell nevertheless.

_A government seized vehicle auction_.

The goddamned dope was in the van when they bought it! At a government auction!

"Omigawd!" Melissa exclaimed.

"¡Dios Mio!" Pancho moaned.

"I knew I shoulda called in sick today," Elvis muttered.

Melissa and Pancho stayed with the Vasquez family, now joined by their befuddled big eyed kids, doing their best to calm some increasingly troubled waters, while Elvis went to the computer with the intention of checking records but first had to go get a wet paper towel to clean the sticky bits of a jelly donut off the keys. Then he started searching the online databases. He found the Ford van by its vin--vehicle identification number. It was sold at auction all right. In San Diego. And, like the minister said, three months earlier. But a link to the vin number brought up something else. Which set Elvis' heart sinking to the lowest it'd been since his favorite hound dog back home in Slippery Sister County, Bad Girl, who had the unfortunate habit of biting at the tires of moving cars and trucks, had charged after a Digger O'Dell's Septic Sucker honey wagon and been flattened into a doggie pancake. What set Elvis' heart plummeting this time? The van? It was busted at the Port of El Paso with over a hundred pounds of marijuana and forthwith legally seized and forfeited. No problem there. The problem was that there still was dope in the frickin' frame rails that they missed at El Paso. They processed the van and put it for sale as a seized vehicle. That was just the beginning. It got worse. A lot worse.

"Oh, my," Elvis groaned. "Oh........no.......... One. Two. Three. Four. Five.....oh, God!"

With its current license plate, the van had crossed at Otay Mesa and San Ysidro in California at least a dozen times since the minister had bought it. Which meant that the officers at those ports had missed a loaded van–which it was irrespective of the specifics of the driver's knowledge–at least a dozen times. Elvis threw his hands up in the air.

"Jeez! A dozen times!" This wasn't just a can of worms. It was a whole van load of cans of worms. "Worms." Elvis snarled as he unlimbered himself from the computer. "I hate worms."

With a face as shell shocked as a guy who'd just learned his recently deceased filthy rich grandfather had left all his money to a Political Action Committee championing tax cuts for the wealthy, Elvis trudged over to where the group was hunkered down. He stopped cold at the door. Good God! Look at them! They all looked to Elvis' somewhat--by general acclimation--eccentric brain like a couple of sticks of dynamite were about to blow under their collective feet and send shredded chunks of toe, bits of shoe leather and fragments of malodorous dirty socks all over the detention room. He cleared that thought out of his head, took Pancho and Melissa aside and whispered to them what he had found out. Instantly draining every last fragment of melanin from their stunned faces and dropping their jaws as far as the jaw dropping group of muscles would allow, plus they would have won hands down any Most Pasty Faced Contest anywhere on the entire planet. They were so shocked Melissa couldn't even declare "Omigawd!" Not out loud. She did think it, though. Three times. And her lips moved just a little as she thought it, pretty much like they did when she typed a text message to her old boyfriend, Wilbur, when she was supposed to be attentively listening to the latest lecture on political correctness mandated by Headquarters. Which as far as Melissa was concerned would be better named Hindquarters than Headquarters, seeing as how she thought they mostly had their heads up their collective Hindquarters.

Just then Supervisor Tony Rivera looked up from his computer monitor in his office where he was reading the compendium of the day's strange and unusual seizures--Whoo! They hid it _where_?--and noticed something was going on over in the detention area. Which was a mere ten feet from his office, though only partly visible through the big interior window in his office, the window largely obscured by various memos and BOLOs--Be On The Lookouts--but mostly by advertisements for local restaurants. He responded to the just perceived hubbub in the detention room with his usual supervisory aplomb.

"What the fuck is going on out there?" Tony bellowed. "What the hell are you dorks up to now?" An ashen faced Pancho appeared in the door, closed it partway behind him and proceeded to fill Supervisor Tony Rivera in on what had happened. _Exactly_ what had happened.

"You did what?" Tony blurted out as Pancho finished his somber report. "You busted a fuckin' minister? Who was innocent? Yet the van is loaded? A _dozen_ times in California? You patted him down? Threw him in a cell? And his menstruating wife, too?"  
"That's ministerial wife, Tony," Pancho interjected. "Not menstruating. There is a difference."

"That doesn't change the fact it was one stupid motherfucking dumb ass thing to do!"

"Profanity is not an appropriate response to this touchy situation." Said a voice from the door. "As the supervisor on duty, you are responsible," Elvis continued as he pulled the door open and stepped in. Which caused Supervisor Tony Rivera's face to grow so crimson Elvis thought he was going to have a heart attack right then and there, making him instantly regret his words, much as he liked to screw with the pompous behemoth. Most of the first line sups were cool folks. There were exceptions. Tony Rivera was at the top of the exceptions list. It wasn't just his body that was bloated. So was his ego. Though Tony was absolutely clueless about it, his promotion to supervisor had nothing to do with either performance or ability. He was the right ethnic type at the right PC moment at the right place and got promoted by the bosses who wanted to keep their own jobs secure by making the _correct_ promotional choices. Sometimes such choices worked out anyhow. Other times they didn't. Tony was one of the didn'ts. He was a guy who was one brick short of a load who was totally unaware he was one brick short of a load. Which, Elvis had to give the guy, probably was true of everyone who was one brick short of a load. How would they know they were missing a brick? But he still was a jerk. And also pretty much invulnerable. Supervisors were like musk oxen. Threaten one of them and the whole herd formed a protective circle. But not when the threatenee was a line officer and not a supervisor. Oh, no. That was a different game. Then it was pure luck of the draw. And Tony Rivera was no one's choice for a lucky draw, with the possible exception of his mother, Tonia, who had doted on and fed him a heaping plentitude of mom's tasty cooking from infancy. But that still didn't mean Elvis wanted the guy to have a heart attack. Until, that is, Tony's next words rocketed out of his mouth.

"This is your fault, you arrogant ET jerks. Elite team? Bullshit! Prancing around thinking you are so special. And now you create this goddamn mess. My fault? My fault? It sure as hell isn't. I am not responsible for some dumb ass move a couple of ET dorks pull on my shift. How can I be responsible? I'm not your boss. You answer to your ET boss." Which was not altogether true, Elvis thought, as he changed his mind about the heart attack and sent out mental invitations to the Heart Attack Gods to go ahead and finish the job with Rivera. He stared at Rivera expectantly. Nothing happened. Not yet, anyhow. Elvis was patient. He could wait.

"Do you think you could talk to the people?" Pancho said with not much conviction. "Try to calm them down. You know. Smooth the troubled waters." Rivera's face remained crimson, giving Elvis some hope that the Heart Attack Gods might yet spring into Heart Attack God action.

"What? Do I look like a frickin' lifeguard to you?" Melissa, who had also just come into the room, heard Rivera say that and couldn't resist giggling, despite everything. Rivera a lifeguard? He was more like a beached whale. She did, however, have the presence of mind not to put that thought into words. Though she did mentally text message it to her best buddy, Hyancith Dew, her lips moving every so slightly as her mental fingers typed out 'beached whale.'

"Maybe we should call the Port Director," Elvis said. Rivera's eyes bugged and Elvis thought he really was going to have the Big One. Tony grew dizzy and had to sit down, catching the recently recovering chair by surprise and nearly causing it to collapse. But with a creaking groan the chair managed to persevere and heroically meet this most recent challenge to its load bearing capacity. This time. But the next? That would be like the Extreme Sports Ultimate Chair Challenge, the chair might have said, had chairs the power of speech as well as the re-enforced ability to withstand repeated Tony assaults

"Call the Port Director?" Tony gasped. "That might not be such a good idea." Tony was thinking that the fewer people who knew about this, the better. A vision of him at the center of a not very complimentary TV news story from that smart assed reporter flashed through his mind. She'd had it in for CBP ever since Tony had refused to let her skate with the half dozen bottles of Perocet and Oxycodone secreted in her capacious knockoff designer handbag one of the officers had caught her with.

"No way," he had said back then to her impassioned entreaties. "No exceptions. You were caught trying to sneak in controlled substances. You're busted!" Her fawning demeanor suddenly morphed into something inside out from fawning.

"I'm a reporter. A _TV_ reporter. You _really_ want to mess with me, bubba?"

"The law is the law!" Tony sputtered, irate at her attitude. "No one is above it. Including reporters!" Almost as soon as Tony said it a sinking feeling set in somewhere below his beltline and continued to sink. Now it all came back. And, were she to hear of this ministerial mess at the port, he had no trouble visualizing the headline Ms Vindictive would want to use.

Fat Tony Fucks Up!

Of course she wouldn't actually use those words, but the impact would be the same. Everyone would know that fat Tony fucked up. A headline his first ex-wife, Mandiga Lubovici, would also be more than happy to write. Vindictive witch of a woman. Never forgot a grudge. Little things, like him cracking three of her ribs when he tried to climb on top of her sleeping body to accomplish his manly necessities one night after he knocked down a few too many Tecates watching the Yankees lose a close one on TV. Ungrateful wench!

But.....back to the current mess. Think of it. Innocent minister. Seized vehicle sold with dope still in it. Missed at California crossings a dozen times. This one could be a whopper of a fuckup that could even lead to a Congressional investigation.

_Congressional investigation_! No. No. No! The port director was OK, but his gossiping gaggle of an office staff leaked secrets quicker than water through the certified 100% effective soaker hose he used at home on his tomato plants. A sturdy and reliable hose which his stepdaughter Belva furtively also used on her secret marijuana patch behind the garage. Then Tony had a thought. Actually, a revelation. A startling revelation. He never woulda thought it could happen, but now he saw it as clearly as he saw out the corner of his eye the hurtling VW bug that T-boned his classic Merc the month before. Good God! His classic '55 Merc! Classic! T-Boned! By a frickin' VW! That was bad enough. And now this. But Tony knew it now. He and Elvis and Pancho and Melissa were all in this together. That was when Tony rose and stepped up to the plate. Figuratively, that is, Tony now being pretty well wedged into the chair.

"Damage control!" Tony said firmly. "Time for damage control." He shot an authoritative look at Elvis and followed it with an authoritative voice.

"Order some pizza!"

Elvis' mouth dropped open so far an entire Hero sandwich would have comfortably fit inside it. "Pizza?" Did you say pizza?" Another authoritative look from Tony.

"That's what I said. Pizza. We're gonna feed 'em while we explain what happened and calm them down. You said they had several kids. Right?"

"Right," Pancho answered, looking both puzzled and a little apprehensive of what weird notion had crept in Tony's head. "Three of them." Yet another authoritative look from Tony.

"That's what I'm talking about. Kids. Kids love pizza. And parents love kids. Right?"

"I'll order the pizza," Elvis said, not knowing what else to say and wondering what remote Alaska will be like after this mess blows up in their faces and the big bosses, the bosses of the bosses' bosses, ship him off to Caribou Dung or Frostbite Dick or some other such place in the frigid Alaska boondocks on the Canadian border as a retribution for a big time fuckup.

"There's a coupon on the office window," Tony said. Elvis stared blankly at him. What? "Coupon, Elvis," Tony repeated in an even more authoritative firm voice. "K-e-w-p-o-n. Coupon. There. On the window with the other restaurant stuff. A coupon. For the pizza."

"Oh," Elvis replied from the frigid Alaska/Canadian border in his thoughts, wondering if they had pizza that far north. Probably. Didn't the local grocery stores here all have frozen pizza? And in Alaska they wouldn't even need a store to freeze the pizza. "Yes," Elvis replied numbly to Tony. "Coupon. OK."

But before he could get to the phone to order the pizza, Tony announced he was going to get up and go to talk to the Vasquez family. Good idea. The problem was Tony was still stuck in the chair. It was a perfectly good chair, well built to good chair standards, but was however engineered for a maximum girth considerably below that of Supervisor Tony Rivera. Tony had learned how to segue into the chair and not get stuck, but had forgotten himself in his utter frustration at the mess the goddamn dip shit ET team had made and plunked down in the chair without his usual don't get stuck finesse. So now he was stuck. Perhaps solely of Tony's doing, but, maybe, just maybe, on the outside range of possibilities in the manifold mysteries in the mysterious universe, the chair had finally had enough and decided to fight back.

Tony grunted and Elvis and Pancho and Melissa panted and puffed as they all joined together in trying to get Tony free from the iron grip of the chair in the sup's office, with Elvis thinking even as he was puffing and tugging that he wished he'd brought his cell phone camera with him to work that day. A couple of photos of Tony superglued to his chair ought to go a long way towards winning his future cooperation.

"Arrgh!"

"Pull, damnit!"

"Erg. Oof."

"Humahumaooga!"

"Harder! Ufta!"

"Chingachingachinga!"

Within easy earshot in the next room both Heraclio and Minerva Vasquez's eyeballs looked like they were about to blast out of their sockets. The noisy unseen hubbub in the supervisor's office got the immediate and totally undivided attention of mom and pop Vasquez. What the devil was going on in there? The devil behind lots of things in the ministerial minds of the Vasquez parents. Heraclio and Minerva Vasquez heard the weird groans and grunts coming out of the supervisor's office and began to get downright worried about just what kind of a kinky place they'd stumbled into. Their eyelids snapped so wide open they looked like they'd just slammed down a table full of triple espressos. They shot each other big-eyed nervous looks. Minerva shut her eyes tight and began to silently pray. Heraclio kept craning his head to see what he could see inside the supervisor's office. Their three kids were all dozing off and oblivious to what was going on. Then there was a loud thump, a sound something like a giant cork popped on a giant champagne bottle, some muted cursing and the peculiar sounds of Elvis, Melissa and Pancho rattling onto the floor after Tony popped out of the chair with such force he knocked all three of them down. That did it for Heraclio when he heard the unseen pandemonium in the supervisor's office. Heraclio promptly joined Minerva in praying to the God of their understanding to protect them from whatever lunatic world they'd blundered into. Minerva dropped to her knees and, although a Pentecostal convert, unconsciously reverted to the tried and true Catholic prayers of her childhood, which must have worked effectively back then because her mother always prayed for fertility and the Lord answered with 13 children, every one of them single births.

Next to her their oldest daughter, Maria Minerva, feel deeper asleep and started to snore in an off key soprano whine that sounded like a distant motorbike grinding through the gears. At the same time in the supervisor's office Tony tumbled over on top of Melissa and squashed her chest so heavily she went from a D cup to a B cup, thereby earning Tony the everlasting enmity of all of the multitude of admirers of Melissa's (formerly) handsome bust line, even including Melissa's old boyfriend, Wilbur, a man who admired a fine female breast nearly as much as the Harley Hog he'd completely rebuilt himself after it was severely damaged in a drive by shooting in one of Los Angeles' safer neighborhoods.

Far to the East. Headquarters. The Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington D.C. Close enough to the Smithsonian buildings on the Capitol Mall that an education minded employee could slip over and imbibe some knowledge and history and patriotism on their lunch break. Not that they actually did that. But they _could_ have. And that counted for something in their terse 'doin' fine' emails to the folks back home. Bidwell Tomsen Mack III, assistant to the assistant Southwest Port Management Section Assistant Director, was talking to his own assistant, Thelma Lou Gupta, a recently recruited graduate of Nebraska State Alternative University, a student friendly institution that had trimmed its tuition costs to the bone by doing away with all classrooms, most staff and going completely internet based. As he talked Bidwell was trying hard not to stare at the ugly black pimple almost dead center in her left check. Well, actually, her right check. His left. Her right. _Good God_. Had no one taught this girl the basics about personal hygiene? He averted his gaze to the photo on his desk of his beloved tabby, Felix, as the rotund feline happily devoured a can of Kitty Delite bird-flavored organic cat food.

Their conversation was centered on the officers who worked the line at the southwest border ports. Thelma Lou was a newbie and he was filling her in on the basic facts of their job, their august institution and their mission. Well, he didn't actually get into the mission part right away. There was the official mission. And there was the real mission. Which was to grab onto a cushy government job and ride it all the way to retirement. But you didn't say something like that to a newbie, who might be some head in the clouds romantic who might rat you out.

"Nerds," Bidwell was saying. "They are a bunch of nerds." He leaned conspiratorially towards Thelma Lou. "I should know. I was there." Another thought. "Well, not all of them. There were a lot of thugs, too. Thick-headed thugs. That's what they are. Nerds and thick-headed thugs. So how the hell are we going to protect the border with a bunch of nerds and thick-headed thugs?"

Thelma Lou was thinking that if there were only nerds and thugs on the border, and Bidwell was there, he must have been one of them. Her own personal evaluation of the Bidwell nerd/thug dichotomy was a rock solid 100% nerd. Thelma Lou might be new, but she was a quick study. She had to be. Working full time at the family Laundromat, having three kids and a lazy ass dickhead sports freak husband who didn't believe in sharing household chores hadn't left her much time for studying. She'd learned how to be quick. And also, frankly, how to bullshit. An ability that would be of great help as she advanced in her career with the government.

Bidwell continued with his soliloquy. "The trouble is, Thelma Sue..." He noticed the hot look. "Er...Thelma _Lou_. Sorry. Anyhow, this bunch of nudnicks on the border have got this union that keeps messing with us about working conditions. Never mind their duty to their country. Never mind patriotism or personal responsibility or the concept of self sacrifice for the greater good...." That one stopped Bidwell in his own verbal tracks while he both wondered over and admired this unexpected sudden burst of self-described eloquence. He actually managed to throw himself off his own verbal track and it took a few moments for him to retrack. But then he came back. And on a roll.

"Working conditions. Imagine! Working conditions. Our border is as porous as a....as a...as a....well, it's pretty darn porous. And these burpelicks are worried about working conditions. Where is the patriotism? Where is the pride of office. Where....."

_Burpelicks?_ Thelma Lou thought. What the hell is a burpelick? Bidwell swiveled in his three hundred and twenty five dollar nicely padded genuine leather desk chair that he'd managed to have his good buddy and frequent bedtime visitor Velma Lipshurz over in Logistics slip by on an annual furniture requisition for the big bosses in the big offices on the upper floors. "We are doing our damnedest to secure our border, not only against the threat of a flood of illegal aliens who threaten to undermine our entire civilization with unhealthy Mexican cooking, but also the drug dealers who are poisoning our youth with their drugs and sending my portfolio of distillery stocks on the Dow Jones plummeting."

A pause while Bidwell took a deep breath, then launched forth again on the latest in his dreaded and, by a close to 100% co-worker consensus, way too frequent Bidwell soliloquies. "And, now, the terrorists who want to sneak into our country and blow up Denver International Airport when it isn't already closed by crummy weather and possibly try to flood the Bay Area Rapid Transportation System during rush hour. Here we are trying to accomplish what is probably the most important mission of an agency in all American history." He brought his fist down hard on the standard government issue desk he felt he had to live with in order not to seem ostentatious. His face actually turned red. Not a lot. But enough to show intent. Bidwell was after all a law school graduate and had excelled in the Courtroom Histrionics class. He did in fact graduate from law school. Never mind his class standing. Or how he did on the state bar exam.

"And these twerploids on the border are only concerned with working conditions!"

_Twerploids?_ Thelma Lou thought, unconsciously reaching up to touch the beauty mark on the center of her cheek that Bidwell thought was a pimple _._ She was also thinking that in the two weeks she'd been assigned as Bidwell's assistant she hadn't really seen him do much of anything. Except pontificate on various subjects, the most favorite being the salaries and benefits being paid to the border officers who mostly just sat on their butts and did nothing. Money and resources that could be better spent other places. Like salary increases for the hard working men and a few women in the Ronald Reagan building and maybe some improvements to the employee lunch room. Not on those nerdalots. By God! They did nothing. He should know. He was _there_. Though in fact his border experience consisted of being an intern in the Tucson office and only visiting the border once, when he went into Mexican Nogales to get some prescription pain pills and snuck them back across the border tucked into his capacious Boxer brand underwear.

"I should know," he repeated emphatically to Thelma Lou, who would have been already thinking about trying to get a transfer somewhere, anywhere, away from this fruitcake, had she not already got a transfer from a different fruitcake two weeks earlier. "I should know," Bidwell repeated yet again. "I was there! Those kruppburgers just sit on their butts and do nothing! They're sitting twiddling their thumbs bored as hell and we're paying them big bucks for it! Nothing," he repeated hotly. "They just sit on their butts and do nothing." Another vigorous fist on his bare bones government issue desk, and, delivered with unusual vehemence even for Bidwell....

"Absolutely nothing!"

That same day, over two thousand miles to the southwest, Elvis and Pancho and Melissa were sprawled on the floor of the San Luis secondary building supervisor's office with rotund Tony Rivera rolling over each of them in turn, squashing Melissa's size D boobs, nearly herniating Pancho's abdominal muscles and cracking Elvis' genuine Navajo squash blossom silver belt buckle supposedly snuggled safely underneath the protective cover of his gun belt. Which really pissed Elvis off. Genuine Navajo squash blossom silver belt buckles weren't all that easy to come by. Though the fact was that the Chinese knockoffs were as ubiquitous as sand fleas and looked OK, questions of authenticity aside.

Elvis, Pancho, Melissa and Tony began to untangle themselves on the supervisor's office floor and hoist their somewhat mangled bodies to their feet one by one. That is until one by one reached a total of three. Then the upright three heaved mightily and number four, Supervisor Tony Rivera, also made it to his feet. Though he did teeter uncertainly for a moment. Just then Melissa noticed her crushed breasts and blasted off at Olympic speed towards the rest room to check the extent of the damage. She came back a few minutes later with a malevolent look in her eye that she wore for the next eleven weeks until a plastic surgeon in Phoenix had a weekend special and restored Melissa to her former admittedly handsome D cup prowess. She did, however, never forgive Tony Rivera and from then on was looking for ways to get him.

"I'll order the pizza," Elvis said, for the second time in a few minutes not being able to think of anything else to say. Tony shot him a hot look.

" _No_ anchovies this time, Elvis. _Capiche?_ " Elvis nodded and got on the phone to order the pizza. "And don't forget the coupon!" Tony said as he started to walk through the door into the detention area where the Vasquez parents looked up from their fervent and possibly ineffectual prayers, the beginnings of clinical paranoia plastered on their apprehensive faces while their three kids were still blissfully snoozing away. "We have a small problem here, folks," Tony said in a voice meant to be sympathetic and compassionate but seeming to Pancho more like a warden telling a condemned man on death row his last minute appeal has been denied by the Supreme Court and it was time to take a stroll.

While Tony sat down with the Vasquez family, careful not to wake the kids until after the pizza delivery man arrived so as to avoid any distraction the goddamn little brats might stir up, Pancho went to the Ford van in the secondary lot, soon joined by Elvis, his pizza ordering task completed successfully, and a few minutes later a hot eyed vengeful Melissa. One thing was certain. They had to go over the frickin' van from one end to the other. If there was more dope in the van? And they missed it? They didn't even want to _think_ about the consequences of that. And if the media ever got wind of it? To say it would be a career buster would an understatement on the order of saying that Mount Saint Helens might be nothing more than just a real big hill with a smoldering Boy Scout campfire on top.

They had already pulled the baked, dried out packages from one frame rail.  
Bud Lite, as Elvis sardonically called them. No surprise the same was true of the other frame rail. They pulled the dope out of that one, too. The three gloomy officers jerked the uncooperative bricks of marijuana out of the second frame rail. One by one the recalcitrant dried out bricks of dope grudgingly reappeared.

"All Bud Lite," Elvis muttered. "Every damn one of them." Then, suddenly--albeit not so unusually--the synapses in Elvis' possibly miswired brain started synapsing and a whole new idea broke through the ring of doom.

"Maybe we're reading this wrong, guys," he said. "Maybe this is some new trend we don't know about. From Bud to Bud Lite. Cut down the calories and other unhealthy stuff in the fresh bud. And it oughta make some great tea, too, dried out as it is, and put a whole new face on the marketing of green teas. Not to mention dry seasonings for a real big variety of dishes." Then Elvis scratched his head, looking thoughtful, at least thoughtful in a purely Elvis and therefore somewhat inscrutable sense.

"You know," he continued, the thoughtful look making its way to his voice box. "Maybe we've got this wrong. Maybe they didn't miss the dope in El Paso. Maybe it wasn't loaded all those times it came through San Ysidro. Maybe this really is a new trend and these people really are smugglers." A pause while Pancho and Melissa had their various internal reactions to Elvis' words. "These so called ministers really are smugglers. Bud Lite smugglers. We've stumbled on a brand new smuggling trend here." Then he looked directly at Pancho, who Elvis well knew lived in a personal minister free zone. "After all, the guy _is_ a minister." A short pause, for emphasis, then, "and so is his wife!"

"Elvis," Melissa, said in a voice not noticeably hanging out on the friendly side. "I have never met your mother, but I sure do have a very deep sympathy for what she must have gone through with you."

"I have met her, Melissa," Pancho said, not falling for the sinister minister idea, though he did have to mull it over for a moment or two. "No need for sympathy for Mother Mahoney. She's been celebrating ever since Elvis left home."

"Very funny," Elvis snapped. "A pair of comedians. Here we're supposed to be serious professionals doing our job and you're making smart assed remarks."

"You started it, slurpstick!" Melissa said with such Melissa determined finality that all conversation ceased and they focused on the task at hand. Jerking the goddamn stubborn dried out lumps of Bud Lite marijuana out of the uncooperative second frame rail.

A pizza delivery car pulled up outside the secondary office while they were working and a dorky looking kid with a baseball cap on backwards got out, took the pizzas inside and then left again, peeling out of the secondary lot. Almost hitting an old woman driving a venerable Pontiac, the old woman forthwith letting fly an amazingly creative string of Spanish epithets at the kid. Thereby garnering the admiration of Pancho, who was himself the unofficial Arizona CBP champion in creative Spanish language epithets. Pancho, hearing what she said, stood straight up, turned in her direction, cupped his hands and yelled after the old lady in the Pontiac.

"Give the little shit head hell, Grannie!" He hollered in Spanish, followed by a big grin when the Pontiac's horn blared out three times in succession in old lady acknowledgement.

"Give recognition where recognition is due," he said as he turned back to Elvis and Melissa. "That's my motto." Elvis shot him a sour look.

"I thought you motto was Love 'em and Leave 'em."

"That, too," Pancho answered, followed almost immediately by another solid Melissa right hand to his shoulder.

"Chauvinist! Goddamn male chauvinist." To which both Pancho and Elvis wisely had not a single word in response.

Elvis and Pancho and Melissa stuffed the dried out lumps formerly called marijuana bricks into big transparent plastic bags and took them into the secondary office, passing by the Vasquez family, all of whom were eating pizza, the kids now all awake and hungry, as most kids mostly are. Seven pieces of pizza froze in mid-air, five in the hands of each of the Vasquez family and two in the hands of Supervisor Rivera, to wide eyed looks of the whole bunch as it dawned on them what had been in their van all this time.

"Oh, my," Minerva Vasquez moaned. "Is that what I think it is?" Fat Tony nodded a mute yes.

Minerva then dropped her piece of pepperoni pizza, laced with extra anchovies as Elvis had ordered, and again reverted to the comforting Catholic prayers of her childhood. Heraclio Vasquez also put down his pizza, having lost his appetite at the thought of how this mess could really have gone wrong. What if those humorless hard cases in Mexican customs or the Federales had discovered the marijuana in the van? Oh, no! _You say you didn't know the marijuana was in the van._ That would have been bad. Thrown in a cell with thirty perverts and a single bucket for a toilet. It made him sick to his stomach just to think of it. His three kids, however, continued to blithely munch away as most hungry kids mostly do.

While Elvis and Pancho weighed and labeled and secured the 18 packages of Bud Lite, nine from each frame rail, Melissa took Wilbur Too out of his temporary working kennel to do a thorough K-9 run on the van.

"OK," Wilbur Too, do your thing." Wilbur Too, not being an English speaker, had no freaking idea what that meant, but he did read her body language. And that told him to energetically leap into his tried and true K-9 routine--even if he was in one of his doggie moods and didn't give a rat's ass about any kind of routine and had to fake it--and make doggie tracks around the van. But then he froze in place a few steps into his routine. He never could complete it. Wilbur Too kept coming back to the frame rails. Melissa double checked to make sure they were empty of dope. They were. Just too much residual odor, Melissa figured. Which really made her wonder how the hell the preacher had driven the van through the border a dozen times in California and never been stopped. Wilbur Too picked up the odor the first time quicker than he'd zeroed in on the bitch in heat two doors down back in the main kennel and subsequently caused himself some fairly considerable injuries to his personal parts in his ardor to close the distance with the odiferous female. If there were any more dope in the van it would have to have a weaker odor that what was lingering from the empty frame rails. Dope still in the van with less odor than the residual odor in the frame rails after the Bud Lite was removed? That didn't seem possible. Melissa concluded there couldn't be more dope in the van.

But. But. But. "Never assume," as her instructor at K-9 school, Tomazck Wudwochek--known to all as either Tom or Woody or, occasionally, Woody Tom--said just before he released his pet skunk just behind them as Melissa blithely started on a practice run with Wilbur Too. "Never assume," she muttered now, her mind drifting back to what had turned out to be one hell of a memorable afternoon at the K-9 academy. So she also made a mental note to run the van again after a few hours had passed and the residual odor dissipated even more. Just in case. She was a very careful person. Which explained why she was the only one in her entire unit in Iraq to not come down with at least one case of STD while on deployment at home and overseas. Melissa put Wilbur Too back into his temporary working kennel, which was inside her K-9 van. With a pan of water in the kennel and a fan blowing over him, Wilbur Too stuck his nose as close as he could to the fan and opened his mouth to the cooling breeze, the resultant sight of his lips flapping in the fan's breeze one not easy to forget. Supervisor Tony Rivera saw it once and remarked it reminded him all too much of his perpetually chattering second wife, Magdalena Ipwits. Elvis had actually met Magdelena, before the divorce, and had to admit that, for once, Tony wasn't exaggerating much in his description. Strange as it sounded. Her lips really did flap. Tony's not altogether fond nickname for her was Flapper. She had a secret nickname for him, too, which by comparison made Flapper seem like a high class compliment. Though she would tell no one outside of her RFDSH support group what it was. RFDSH the acronym for Recovering From Dip Shit Husbands.

Calm now, after his third piece of pizza–with a disgruntled interlude while he surlily picked out the pieces of anchovy–Tony was actually making progress with the Vasquez family. The parents, anyhow. The kids didn't give a damn one way or the other, ignoring the adults, as most kids mostly do, and immersed themselves in a vigorous and borderline vicious sibling rivalry bout of rock, paper and scissors. The Vasquez parents, who were after all both ordained ministers for whom vindictiveness was not usually a preferred emotion, at least not publicly, were being understanding, even forgiving, under Tony's guidance. At least of the clumsy but well meaning officers at San Luis. Tony adding a handy diversion by saying that the El Paso zombies and the lunkheads in California were altogether different and certainly worthy of the Vasquez' righteous indignation. As Elvis hovered nearby, Tony looked over at him and spoke in the most polite voice Elvis had ever heard come out of Rivera's mouth. Making Elvis at first wonder if one of the Vasquez bunch was a ventriloquist and looking suspiciously from one to the other for the tell tale sign of moving lips. There were none. Not even Melissa's unconscious text messaging lips--her being not in the room, anyhow.

Nope. It really was Tony. And he really was talking in a polite voice to Elvis. Something which in Elvis' experience was about as common as a calving glacier in mid-summer Death Valley.

"Officer Mahoney," Supervisor Rivera said in that unfamiliar tone of voice. "Would you see to it that the Vasquez family van is put back together the way it was when they first came into secondary." A pause. Then he added, emphatically. " _Exactly_ as it was."

"You mean put the dope back in the frame rails, too?" Which is what immediately came to Elvis's mind. But not to his lips. Though it was close. As in the width of a single hair on Tony's chin close.

"Yes sir, Supervisor Rivera." Elvis said. The first time he had addressed Rivera that way and very likely the last one, too. "Get right on it."

But things were not to be so simple. As so frequently happens the unseen Lords of the Simple were torpedoed by the adversarial sneaky Lords of the Not So Simple. No one had noticed that it was approaching midnight and that the night shift was about to come on duty for the midnight to 8 AM shift. Maybe with no great enthusiasm. Working from midnight to 8 am in the morning wasn't a top o' the list favorite with many of the port's officers, most of whom viewed midnight as a great time to jump into bed and not such a hot time to drag their tired bodies in to work. But, like it or not, they were grumpily on their way. Both Melissa and Pancho were busy starting their seizure narratives on the secondary computer terminals. Elvis was inside with Rivera and the Vasquez family. All the other officers were out on primary. No one had noticed Winona de la Mordure show up with her K-9, Feng Shui, for the night shift. Or the arrival of two night shift inspectors, a couple of new guys, Teddy 'Cheese Boy' Lasagna and Benito 'Big Baloney' Torres-Torres.

When Winona let Feng Shui out of her K-9 van the dog took off like a shot for the Ford van, climbed up into the open passenger side door and took a death grip on the underside of the blower unit under the dash. The two new officers immediately hotfooted it for the van and, in the excitement of the dog alert, proceeded to tear the blower assembly apart. Being new and inexperienced, which meant they hadn't had their butts reamed out very much yet, they trashed the van in their single minded fervor to find the dope. They couldn't find any. Feng Shui apparently had hit on the faint residual odor of where the dope had been during the first seizure months ago in El Paso. Pretty good work for a K-9. Picking up such a faint odor. Unfortunately, in this case, not with such great results.

Elvis came walking out into secondary and found the inside of the van trashed and Winona, Teddy and Benito with sheepish looks on their faces. Even Feng Shui seemed to pick up on it and had a doggy version of a sheepish look, too, which in his case was a hangdog look rather than a sheepish look, dogs very particular about not being confused with other animals, sheep or otherwise. Elvis' first thought was to throw himself on the ground and ask the Great Architect to send down a thunderbolt and end his misery. That not being too likely, Elvis instead turned to option number two. Which was to give Teddy and Benito their first really good butt reaming, Winona getting off easy since she insisted they did it on their own over her objections. Which was, surprisingly, a true statement, true statements often somewhat unusual---thanks to legions of hungry attorneys, more legions of muck raking journalists and even more legions of buck-passing bosses--in the paranoid knee jerk CYA cover-your-ass mentality of all law enforcement officers on the entire planet and possibly well beyond to the alien planets circling the distant star Mungus. Elvis wheeled on his heels and stomped in to get Pancho. Pancho was the seizing officer of record–not to mention him having the frickin' lamebrain idea to search the goddamn van in the first place–and therefore having to find a way through this ever deepening pool of border quicksand.

But, since they were a team, it was as much Elvis' headache as Pancho's–which set Elvis' mind to visualizing a definitely team ending event--like 'assisting' Pancho in leaping from a Cessna 150C at 6000 feet without benefit of a parachute. Elvis stomped up to the door, then opened it slowly, tried to look nonchalant and sidled over to Pancho to whisper in his ear to come outside for a moment. He didn't say why. Not yet. Partially because he hadn't decided yet whether he was going to tell Pancho about the van or just jerk out his Glock and kneecap or at least footcap Pancho for getting them into this goddamn mess in the first place. And he sure wasn't going to send Tony Rivera into outer space by telling him, either. Though Tony did eye them dubiously as they tried to--not very successfully--look unobtrusive as they slipped back outside, Elvis nearly giving it away by unconsciously whistling the bridge from an old ragtime tune, _In the Jailhouse Now._ Fortunately, Tony had never even heard of ragtime, much less _In the Jailhouse Now_.

He had, however, heard of jails. Having been in one the previous week visiting his incarcerated dip shit brother-in-law Filiberto, who had tried to steal Girl Scout cookie money from a ten year old girl who, unfortunately for Filiberto, had just got her brown belt in karate the day before and was itching to try out her newly honed skills.

"You got your ass whipped by a ten year old girl!" Tony snarled condescendingly to his brother-in-law, Filiberto. "You're dumber than a banana."

"It was a sucker punch," Filiberto snapped back defiantly. "She didn't fight fair. Plus she's big for a ten year old."

At which point Tony decided it was time to terminate his jail visit, which he had only done in the first place because his wife threatened an orchidectomy in his sleep if he didn't "see what you can do for poor Filiberto." So much for helping poor Filiberto. If Tony was one brick short of a load, Filiberto wasn't even loaded yet. Grumbling, he lumbered out of the jail cell thinking that when Filiberto arrived on planet Earth the best thing for everyone concerted would have been for his parents to send him back.

Back to the ripped apart Ford van in San Luis.

Once outside the secondary building and out of Tony earshot, Elvis told Pancho what had happened. Elvis had never seen Pancho implode before. He did now. Pancho morphed into a reasonable approximation of a Pancho-sized Incredible Hulk as he thumped over to the van, looked at it with eyes that were burning coals of the distilled spirit of retribution, then proceeded to let everyone know in no uncertain terms why he was the unofficial Arizona CPB champion in creative Spanish language epithets. Winona de la Mordure, who knew some Spanish, listened with a mixture of surprise and stupefaction. Teddy Lasagna, who knew very little Spanish, stared at Pancho dumbly, but with no little panic, knowing without understanding the words that it must be pretty bad and he was in deep kimchi. Benito Torres-Torres, who was a fluent Spanish native speaker, got the full brunt of Pancho's tirade. Elvis watched as Torres-Torres' face went from swarthy to roseate to the color of store brand bleached flour, Torres' mind moving in tandem with his facial kaleidoscope to conclude a career change might not be a bad idea. Pancho ended his tirade in plain English.

"Now put the goddamn van back exactly the way it was before you dickwads messed it up."

There was more. Both he and Elvis already had something else in mind. How the heck were they going to break this to the volcanic Tony Rivera, who had an infamously touchy stomach and who was prone to projectile vomiting in stressful situations? They didn't want a repeat of the time a pregnant woman didn't make it the hospital and gave birth on a couch in the squad room. Tony lost his chicken enchilada lunch all over the floor in the squad room over that one. And another time when a guy stabbed in a bar fight in Mexico staggered over the border to collapse at a pedestrian entry gate just as Tony was walking by. He lost his entire Greek salad from the night before as well as his breakfast burrito that time, contributing to a big mess that closed down the pedestrian entry for nearly a half hour while they performed emergency first aid on the wounded guy and then had to clean up after both the guy's blood and Tony's recently returned meals. Tonight's mess was already bad enough. They sure didn't need Tony puking pizza all over the detention room and the Vasquez family to add to it. Yep. Things were bad enough. But they could get worse. Which was an old adage that someone in Elvis' family always said, be it Granny Rattler Sue or spinster Aunt Thela or his lisping brother, Lispus. "When things get to goin' bad", one or the other of them would mutter. "It done gone slide downhill real quick from there."

And it did. Or 'done did', as Rattler Sue would put it, strange though it seems for such arcane use of language to escape the lips of a woman who had a Masters Degree in English from a genuinely nationally accredited college.

Whenever the officers at the port caught a load of dope they were mandated to contact the duty agent. Failing to do so, the rumor mill claimed, was reputedly punishable by summary execution, though Elvis never for a moment believed it. A hard blow to the twins, maybe. A painful removal of a fingernail or two, perhaps. A playful temporary near strangulation, maybe. But execution? Nah. Headquarters wouldn't go that far. After all, this wasn't the CIA. The duty agent would take over the case and carry it all the way through the court system from throwing the hapless smuggler in the slammer to the actual trial. If there was a trial, some feckless judge having granted bail and the defendant promptly disappearing into Mexico, where substantial portions of several Mexican states were inhabited by various types of fugitives of a variety of absconding nationalities. By far the most common of which was failure to pay child support, the fugitives indignantly refusing to recognize either the connection between coitus non interruptus and conception or the responsibility to provide sustenance to a child a mother on her own volition willingly popped into the world. No matter what the opinion of the original sperm donor was.

"No vote, no bucks," was the way Virgilio Legaspi put it to his buddy Marco in a cantina in Hermosillo. "I had no say in this kid being born. Absolutemente nada. So why should I be held responsible?"

"Fucking gringos," Marco answered, putting down his bottle of San Miguel. "They're always putting it to the Mexicans."

"Damn straight, Marco," Virgilio replied. "So how about another beer?" The barmaid, Marta Benevides, overheard their conversation. She pointed a manicured hot pink fingernail at him.

"What did you do, Virgilio? Tell the poor girl to have an abortion?" Virgilio was temporarily taken aback.

"Why...er....ah.....yes. Yes I did." He sprang back from his confusion. There was hostility in this voice. "What's it to you?"

"What's it to _me_? What's it to any girl who gets pregnant. It takes two to make a baby." The fingernail flicked Virgilio's chin. "You play, you pay." Marta's eyes bored into Virgilio and looked like she was about to let fly with a bunch of fiery and not very complimentary comments.

Marco, who had up until then harbored the notion of putting some serious moves on Marta, did an abrupt mental about face and grabbed Virgilio by the arm.

"Time to go," he said in what was at least a runner up in the Sonora Understatement of the Month Contest. He got no argument from Virgilio.

Or Marta.

In San Luis Tony Rivera had grabbed the office phone, the phone almost slipping out of his hands which were still slippery with residual extra virgin olive oil from the bottle he kept in a desk drawer he'd pulled out to add to the pizza, and called up the duty agent as soon as they confirmed there was marijuana in the van. And now the agent, as the agents almost always did, came rolling into the secondary lot in his agency ride, in this case a seized Lexus that needed a paint job and at least two new tires. Elvis and Pancho saw him drive in. So did Melissa, who had just come out to see what was going on. And Tony Rivera was right behind her, sensing that the ET dickheads were up to something again and wanting to find out what the hell it was. When they saw who the agent was, Elvis, Pancho, Melissa and even Tony blanched. Oh, crap. The agent. It was Nastur. Nastur Baltheezer. Known universally among the port's officers by a nickname:

The Prick.

Baltheezer unlimbered his lanky 6'7" height out of his paint-peeling Lexus, dressed in his personal take on the cowboy look. Western style shirt, boot cut jeans, string tie, alligator skin cowboy boots and cream colored Stetson, with a huge brass belt buckle of a charging bull. Nastur had lived in Chicago and was a long time Bulls fan, only adopting his western getup after being transferred to the southwest as his way of fitting in. Though a 6'7" guy with skin the color of egg shells and with a thick non-Hispanic foreign accent didn't go a long way towards fitting into mostly swarthy skinned and much shorter Hispanic San Luis. He was a native of Bosnia and, although a naturalized American, still had his thick accent and a sometimes imperfect grasp of the cul de sacs and back alleys of the American vernacular English language.

He also had one hell of an arrogant surly attitude going back to when he was the high point man on the Zagreb Snakebites, a semi-pro European League basketball team that held the League record for the most turnovers forced from opposing teams as well as the most disabling injuries to opposing players. Plus Elvis wouldn't have been one bit surprised to learn Baltheezer had some dark history from the nasty days of internecine warfare in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Elvis could just about close his eyes and see Baltheezer gunning down some screaming Albanian who tried to object to Baltheezer kidnapping his wife and stealing his motor scooter and maybe even his pet white-fleeced lamb, which may or may not have had other uses in Baltheezer's mind than the yearly provision of curly lamb wool. Baltheezer strode, cockily, as always, having modeled his stride from watching old John Wayne movies, to where the four officers were standing.

"So you guys finally stumbled on a load, 'ey," he said, making a show out of looking up at the heavens. "This one fall out of the sky, too?" He added in his thick Bosnian accent, chuckling to himself at what he thought was a witty thing to say. He was greeted by a silence so complete even the resident population of boat tailed grackles in the secondary roof stopped their grackling and stared in silence at Nastur Baldeezer's recently arrived unwelcome presence. At that moment a flu epidemic would likely have been more welcome in the secondary lot than the lanky form of Nastur Baltheezer. Or, from the parochial boat tailed grackle viewpoint, a bird flu epidemic.

Earlier that day Baltheezer was leaning back in his chair in the agents' office--the acronym for the investigative agents being ICE, for Immigration and Customs Enforcement--in Yuma, his size 14 cowboy booted feet plunked on his desk and chatting with Monique 'Alabaster' le Bastringe. Monique was new to the border and Baltheezer was trying to impress her and not at all coincidentally get her into his special ordered extra long Snooze Time super king sized bed with its patented Magic Fingers foam mattress and built in vibrator and custom sound system.

"Money Gal," Baltheezer began, trying to sound knowledgeable. "You have to be careful here on the border. Lots of bad schtof out there." Monique, who absolutely detested the nickname of Money Gal that this too tall jerk with the strange accent pinned on her, at first didn't get it. Schtof? Bad schtof? What the hell did that mean?

"Bad schtof?" She said, puzzled. Baltheezer nodded, and, his long neck in more or less agreement with the rest of his stretched out bodily proportions, showed a very prominent and animated Adam's apple. So prominent and animated that he looked like he'd swallowed a jumping bean the size of a golf ball and Monique couldn't help staring at it. Baltheezer, noticing her stare, completely missed the point, which everyone, even including his own long suffering parents, agreed he had an preternatural ability to do, assumed the stare meant she was dazzled by his obvious manly charm.

"Schtof," he said. "You know, Money girl gal. Schtof. Things that are out dere." Monique, whose preferred nickname was Alabaster, which referred to her milky white translucent skin that almost made her look like an albino, suddenly figured it out.

"You mean _stuff_."

"Right," Baltheezer replied, adjusting his pronunciation. "Stuff." A lot of things flashed through Monique's un-Alabaster mind. Were all her coworkers at her new job like Baltheezer? Was every day going to be like this? This was the third day in a row with dickheads like this and every day was worse than the one before. Having no clue that Darla 'Tick' Tok, the ICE station head, didn't want to use her good officers on breaking in a new agent and assigned the bottom of the barrel agents to the chore, Monique assumed that San Luis was the dumping ground for all the hopeless fuckups they couldn't fire because of civil service protections. And, what really got her steamed, then why the hell did _she_ get assigned to the dump? Her, with her sun sensitive delicate alabaster skin plunked down in Melanoma Central Sonora Desert southwestern Arizona. Monique leaped to her feet in one athletic fluid motion.

"See ya, dude," Monique spit out. "I got something to do." She exploded into motion and in a twinkling was around a corner and out of sight.

"Hurry back!" Baltheezer called after her.

"Not frickin' likely," Monique mumbled as she threw open a door and disappeared, then said in loud voice. "Hold your breath until I get back."

An hour later, Money Gal having not returned, Baltheezer, after recovering from passing out from holding his breath too long, went to the reception desk where Martina Morales-Kazantzakes was womaning the desk and the phones.

"Hey, Merina," Baltheezer said as he arrived at Martina's CBP work niche at the reception desk. "Have you seen that new agent? Mon.....Mon... Well, Mon something. I call her Money. Money Gal." Baltheezer leaned forward onto Martina's desk, way too far into her personal space in Martina's mind which made Martina glad she had decided against bringing along her lady size, but still plenty lethal, .38 that morning. "Do you know where she went?" Martina, who was long past grabbing a slow burn at Baltheezer's total klutzhood, including him never remembering her right name, shrugged and allowed herself an interior groan at this nutball's cluelessness.

"She went to the boss' office," Martina replied with a touch of a smirk. "She told me she was going to request an immediate transfer." Baltheezer's bushy eyebrows levitated a full half inch.

"Well, Morlinda. Where to?" Martina answered with a dead serious expression.

"She threatened to cut off my boobs with a dull knife if I so much as gave you a tiny hint of where she was headed."

" _Oh_." Baltheezer said, at first confused. But then he realized that Money Gal was so smitten with her uncontrollable passion for him that it would threaten her, and maybe his, career and she had no choice but to vanish into the mists of unrequited love for both of their professional goods. What a sacrifice! What a woman!

"Girl has guts, Malinda," Baltheezer said. "Real guts." Which left Martina thoroughly confused but also very relieved when Baltheezer wheeled on his size fourteen cowboy boot heels and stomped off down the hallway.

"I think we're doomed," was all she could say. Wondering at the same time if the drug cartels had somehow managed to get this dickhead hired and assigned on the Mexican border as an agent. "Kind of like a double agent who doesn't know he's a double agent," she said with a eclectic mixture of humor and dead seriousness.

Elvis had his own take on it. "Baltheezer as a CBP border agent was about as effective as a football team's punt return specialist whose right and left foot shoelaces were tied tightly together," he uttered in a tone that was a near clone to Martina's.

"You could give him the ball," Elvis muttered, "but he sure as hell wasn't going anywhere with it.

Baltheezer's arrival at the Port of San Luis was met with stony silence. Then it suddenly hit Elvis like a ton of peanuts. That's right. Peanuts. Others are usually hit with a ton of bricks. Not Elvis. He preferred peanuts. Not as painful. And they were edible. So he always visualized peanuts instead of bricks. Anyhow, whatever it was, it hit him. What better agent to hand this mess off to than the Prick? It could very well be a career buster. And what better career to bust than that of Mr. Prick, himself? If he and Pancho were gonna go down for this one, taking Baltheezer with them would ease the pain some. At least something good would come out of it. Not much. But something was better than nothing. A smirk that again was very similar to the one on Martina's face when Baltheezer wheeled and left her was on Elvis' face.

"Sure am glad to see you, Baltie," Elvis said. "This is a tough one." Baltheezer lasered Elvis with a lethal glare. He hated being called Baltie. Which was why Elvis said it.

"Baltheezer, _not_ Baltie," he hissed at Elvis, adding. "A Baltie is someone from Baltimore." He thumped on his Bull belt buckle. "I'm from Chicago." So, Elvis was thinking to himself, are a whole bunch of former Illinois government officials now wiling away their days in jail cells, many of them also in Illinois. Which fit right in with Elvis' jaundiced view of Nastur Baltheezer. And a Baltie is someone from Baltimore? That was a new one. Tony Rivera stepped forward and, for once, won the approval of the people on his shift.

"Don't screw this one up, Nastur. It's a hot potato if there ever was one." That sent Baltheezer's beetling dark eyebrows soaring in indignation and he was about to let Rivera have it with both arrogant barrels when Rivera blurted out the bare outline of the case and stopped him cold. The arched hairy eyebrows stayed arched, looking to Elvis like a couple of wooly caterpillars hanging out just above Baltheezer's devious deep set eye sockets bracketing a protruding nose that reminded Elvis of a dromedary camel's hump. An impression considerably enhanced when seen in profile with his long and scrawny neck. Baltheezer staccatoed out the words as he grasped them.

"Seized vehicle? A _minister_? Dope _still_ in it? Sold at auction? SOLD AT AUCTION! California? A dozen crossings. What? Loaded? A DOZEN CROSSINGS LOADED!"

"Oh, shit," Nastur said. "This really is as a hot tomato."

"Potato," Pancho, the English major chimed in. "That's potato. Not tomato."

"Go fuck a javelina, Poucho," Nastur shot back. Nastur as a matter of principle detesting Mexicans as a group because they reminded him of those goddamn no good swarthy Albanian bastards who had been muscling in on Slav lands going way back to Ottoman times and the days of the eunuchs, the very thought of a eunuch sending shivers up his spine. Plus, everyone knew the Albanians were the best dancers in the Balkans and always got the hottest looking babes. Meanwhile, Pancho was sizzling. He launched into a white hot string of Spanish epithets that roughly translated as 'Call me Poucho again and your dick will be relocated to your left nostril and your nuts will end up in a heavily seasoned Chinese soup.' Fortunately, no one stepped forward to actually translate it. Said translation, if effected, fully capable of instantaneously transplanting the Balkan Wars to the San Luis secondary inspection lot.

"Excuse me," a thin voice said from behind them. "Can we go now?" It was Heraclio Vasquez, now grown increasingly impatient since his hemorrhoids had started acting up from sitting on the hard benches in the detention room. Heraclio didn't much care for having hemorrhoids, but had woefully accepted them as being God's righteous punishment for him banging Minerva's spinster sister Malandria six and a half times when Minerva was off on a church mission to Guadalajara. "We really do need to be on our way," Heraclio said. "We have sermons to prepare for next Sunday." Every single one of the officers, even including Nastur Baltheezer, immediately saw themselves as the Hell bound negative example to be used in the moral lesson in the minister's next Sunday sermon. Elvis and Pancho glanced over at the van where Teddy Lasagna, Benito Torres-Torres and Winona de la Mordure didn't seem to be making much progress in putting the van back together. Lasanga and Torres were in the middle of a heated argument over which part of the blower assembly pointed up and de la Modure trying to figure out where the glove box compartment fit under the dash or whether to just toss it.

"Not lookin' real positive over there, Pancho," Elvis whispered. "Not positive at all." Pancho whispered back.

"I'll go over and threaten them with a fate worse than death if they don't speed up," he said.

"Which is?" Elvis said, half jokingly. Pancho grinned back at him.

"Permanently assigning them to Tony Rivera's shift," Pancho replied.

"That ought to fire up 'em, all right," Elvis said, and he wasn't grinning. There was a time a while back before his ET days when he was assigned to Tony Rivera's shift. Not fun. Life as Atilla the Hun's shoe shine boy would have been a step up.

By this time the rest of the midnight shift had sleepily stumbled in and most of the rest of the swing shift had drifted back to secondary, traffic having just about completely dried up. Which dovetailed nicely with desert withered San Luis, where just about everything was dried up most of the time and where water even sometimes evaporated from the heat while still inside supposedly sealed bottles. Which caused plenty of vindictive remarks from customers at the local Quik Mart when they found their recently purchased bottles of water were empty. The San Luis police force even added a new call code to their response list, EWB, for Empty Water Bottle.

Everyone at the port was standing around sweating and wondering what the heck was going on. More than one had their hot little hands on their latest iteration of what is euphemistically called the smart phone, a device capable of forever changing civilization as we know it and which combined at least 47 seven different audio, video, texting, internet, surfing, GPS, games, chat, social media and numerous other functions--the new Spy on the Spouse app being the current favorite--with the ability to instantaneously communicate with a full three quarters of the earth's population in over one hundred different languages. The permutations of that idea hit Baltheezer like a ton of Albanians. Viral Video! Social Media! Disaster!

_"Cell phones off!"_ Nastur screamed out as he saw one guy fingering the buttons on his Big Brother II 7G Super Cell. "Now!" Then he wheeled to where Elvis, Pancho, Melissa and Tony were clustered together, Pancho having just returned from going to a primary booth for reasons as yet unknown. "Who the hell is responsible for dis mess?" Tony took a determined step forward, being after all the supervisor on duty and therefore responsible for whatever happened on his shift. He then, with surprising agility for a man of his bulk, did a half turn on the heels of his boots and pointed a meaty finger at Pancho, Elvis and Melissa. " _They are!_ " He said with responsible supervisory finality. Then a big smirk creased Elvis' face.

"Beg to differ with you on that one, Tony." He was looking at Nastur Baltheezer. "But as the special agent taking over this case, Nastur here is now the responsible party." A more serious look replaced the grin. "Although we will certainly do everything we can to assist Mr. Baltheezer in avoiding a sudden end to his otherwise possibly somewhat maybe just a little promising career."

"Oh, no, you don't, bister." "You're not going to lay dis one on me!"

"That's buster, Nastur," Pancho said. "Not bister." Baltheezer's arched eyebrows stretched out to maximum arch, nearly reaching to his low hairline and somehow reminding Elvis of the surly howler monkey he saw at the San Diego zoo a while back.

"Bister, buster, baster. Who the hell cares. You guys fucked dis up. Not me." A grin spread over Pancho's face that could be described as an exquisitely displayed Pancho iteration on the quintessential proverbial shit eating grin. He waved a piece of paper in Nastur's face. "You wanna know why I picked out that van to search?" He waved the paper again. "There was a lookout for a brown Ford van posted in the primary booths." He motioned towards the rear of the secondary lot where de la Mordure, Torres and Lasanga were fretfully trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. In this case Humpty Dumpty being a brown Ford van.

"A lookout phoned in by......" He looked around at everyone in the tight circle in the secondary lot, each in turn, stretching it out for maximum dramatic effect...... _"You! Nastur Baltheezer."_ Elvis almost grabbed Pancho and gave him a big kiss. Salvation! Maybe he wouldn't' get assigned to Frozen Eskimo Junction on the Canadian border in remotest Alaska after all. Even better. Maybe Nastur Baltheezer would get sent there. Even better than better. Maybe a grizzly or a polar bear would catch Nastur taking a dump in the Frozen Eskimo Junction port outhouse and give him a _really_ good whipping.

"Excuse me," a tiny female voice said from behind them. "But I need to use the restroom." Minerva Vasquez had joined her husband just outside the secondary office's door. Then the real Minerva Vasquez elbowed aside the façade of the timid Minerva Vasquez and bellowed it out. "And I mean _now_!" That was when Elvis, Pancho, Melissa, Tony and Nastur all realized in moments of crystalline, if fragile, clarity that it was still possible for this mess to get even messier. Like Grandma Rattler Sue might say, Master's Degree in English from an accredited institution held in mysterious linguistic abeyance. "It done gone slide downhill real quick..."

Elvis slipped over to Tony Rivera's side. "Should I order more pizza?" He said. Rivera gave him a look that could have melted a wax candle two and a half feet away.

"Get that goddamn van put back together, Dickwad!" He hissed. "And fast!" By this time Heraclio Vasquez caught sight of his van, his chronic high blood pressure starting to edge higher as he noticed important parts of the van on the ground outside the van rather than where there were supposed to be snuggly fitting in their proper designated places located within the van. Heraclio was no mechanic, but he knew this sure couldn't be right. The heater was supposed to be _inside_ the van. He looked over at Elvis.

"Excuse me, sir," he began. "But what is going on with my van? Why is part of it sitting on the ground?" Elvis was about to calmly explain to Mr. Vasquez that a second dog had alerted to a location where there had once been more marijuana and some over enthusiastic new officers had misunderstood the situation and removed a large part of the van's dash before realizing their mistake. The officers, Elvis would have continued, were now busily working to return his van to exactly the condition it was in when they first drove into secondary. That would have been the simple way to deal with it. And probably the best way. But that was not Nastur Baltheezer's way. He interjected his towering presence into the conversation before it even got started.

"Butt out, Bevis," he snapped. "I'll handle this." Which is exactly what Elvis and Pancho were hoping for. Nastur turned to glower down at Heraclio Vasquez, who was a full foot shorter than Baltheezer. "Dere was marijuana in your van, sir," he said. "Like it or not. Whether you knew it or not. It was dere. And it is your responsibility." Then he said something else that shocked everyone within earshot. "And how we do know you _really_ were unaware the marijuana was in the van? It surely couldn't have come through Olay Mesa and San Ysidro a dozen times without being caught." Elvis and Pancho shot each other surprised looks. Nastur was going to try to wiggle out of this by blaming this poor guy for something he knew absolutely nothing about? Pancho leaned towards Baltheezer.

"That's _Otay_ Mesa, Nastur. Not Olay." Baltheezer answered him with a string of forcefully spit out words in Serbo-Croatian that could have left scorch marks on Pancho's uniform shirt had he been much closer. Then he switched back into English and really laid a shock on everyone in earshot.

"Take dis man back inside and put him in a detention cell. I'm not at all convinced he is innocent." At that moment Elvis added an adjective to Baltheezer's nickname. No longer just The Prick. Now he was The Dumbass Prick. Something that not a single person in the secondary lot that evening and in most of Baltheezer's extended family would have disagreed with even the tiniest bit.

"That's not such a hot idea, Nastur," Elvis said. "Not at all."

"Who the hell asked you? Now take the guy and put him in a detention cell!"

"Nope," Elvis replied. "Ain't gonna happen."

"What!" Exploded out of Nastur's mouth. "You're refusing a direct order? That could get you fired." Elvis was so quick with his answer that the words had hardly left Nastur's mouth before Elvis fired back.

"On the contrary, Baltie. Other way around. It'll get me fired _if_ I do it. And I ain't about to do it." Baltheezer then proceeded to order every single officer in secondary, at least those not quick enough with their vanishing acts, to put Heraclio Vasquez into a detention cell. Every single one refused. By then Baltheezer, who sure was not the brightest bulb in the bulb factory, figured out he'd stepped in it big time and he'd better try to slip out if it in a hurry. The dim light bulb finally lit up. He turned to Heraclio with a forced smile as wide as the Bosporus at moon tide.

"Just kidding, Mr. Vasquez. Ha ha. Balkan humor. My crazy idea of a little joke. Let's go inside and discuss dis further. Would you like a soda or a bottle of spring water from the vending machine? Or perhaps an ice cream sandwich?" Elvis sidled over to Baltheezer's side.

"Should I order pizza?" Baltheezer eyes snapped wide in a total lack of comprehension. Pizza? Pizza? He was even more befuddled when he went inside the secondary office and saw the Vasquez kids chowing down on the last of the Tony Rivera's pizza. Woe! Oh, Woe! He knew he shouldn't have taken the duty slot this evening. Oh, to be back in Zagreb again throwing elbows and dunking baskets for the Zagreb Snakebites as they roared to yet another bloody victory on the basketball court.

About that time Minerva Vasquez came out of the restroom, eyes blazing fire, reminding Baltheezer of the charging hordes of Ottoman Janissaries who overran Constantinople back in the bad old days considered to be the Triumph of Evil by a good many practicing members of the Greek Orthodox Church. He knew right then and there that his mother had been right all along. He should have gone to dental school instead of becoming a special agent.

"Gestapo ees net gud," his mother had said. "Net gud at all." He never had been able to convince Mama that being a special agent was nothing like the Gestapo. "Dentel Skul, Nastur," Mama had said. "Dat's da teeket. Net de Gestapo." Looking at the fire-eyed Minerva Vasquez coming at him Nastur had the unsettling fleeting hallucinatory image of his Mama ratting him out and telling Minerva he was with the Gestapo.

"Get thee behind me, Satan!" Minerva spit out hotly, throwing her arms up with the palms pointed towards Nastur. Nastur, taken aback, stopped cold and turned around to see what there was behind him that reminded her of Satan. She said it with such powerful emotive force than even Elvis and Pancho turned around to see if Satan was hovering there somewhere behind them in the secondary lot. Possibly hiding behind one of the scarred thick cement pillars holding up the secondary metal roof canopy that only leaked when it rained. Then Nastur turned back again and saw her staring heatedly directly at him. _Me?_ He thought. Satan? I'm Satan? Maybe a bad boy sometimes. But....Satan?

"Now wait a minute, Mrs. Vasquez," Nastur began. "Just calm down and...."

"Satan! Satan! Satan! Beezelbub! The Horned Devil!" Just then Heraclio Vasquez slipped around them and took his wife gently by the arm.

"You forgot to take your meds again, Minnie," he said gently. "Where's your purse? You'd best take them now."

The sharp crack of the monumental sigh of relief that escaped Nastur's mouth was said to have been audible all the way to the Quik Mart on the ramshackle outskirts of town. And more. Even across the nearby Colorado river where an Iraq war vet California farmer working in an alfalfa field in the relative cool of the night had a flashback and thought it was incoming hostile fire and dove for cover off his tractor into a patch of Scottish thistle. And also audible to a line worker on the SoCalAZ natural gas pipeline just north of San Luis who almost panicked when he thought the pipeline had sprung a leak while he was nearby breaking the company rules by taking a smoke break. Nastur was so relieved he would have bought Heraclio and Minerva a brand new van out of his own pocket at that moment. A moment which, however, didn't last long. Two seconds, maybe. Possibly three.

"Let's get 'em the hell outta here," he said. "Before she cracks again." Tony Rivera couldn't agree more. Tony was still there because he was splitting the midnight shift with the day supervisor. On overtime. Which could add up to some nice dollars in a paycheck hurry and would have the bean counters in Washington DC gnashing their teeth, scraping by as they were in Washington's economy with its expensive luxury apartments and pricey exclusive restaurants. Tony had grabbed the slower moving officers going off the swing shift and promptly ordered them to stay and help put the Ford van back in normal working order.

There were soon a half dozen bodies besides Elvis and Pancho and Melissa buzzing around the van and reminding Elvis of when he drove through a herd of donkeys that hung out in the barren empty boondocks on Highway 95 going north towards Quartzite. A knot of donkeys plunked in the middle of the road that often stopped traffic cold. One of the brazen critters having the donkey gall to try to eat Elvis' radio antenna. Made worse when Elvis rolled down the window and grabbed the nearest solid object on the front seat to whack the offending donkey's intruding protruding proboscis. The object happened to be Elvis' brand new Whang Brothers Deluxe Super Mobile, which the donkey dexterously caught in its huge shovel like front teeth and proceeded to crush into Whang Brothers Deluxe Super Mobile oblivion. Which caused Elvis to have a permanent simmering dislike for all donkeys everywhere and to take to spending his days off whenever he was on TDY in San Luis cruising Highway 95 to Quartzite with an open window and an extra high powered paintball pistol in his left hand. The paint balls loaded with commercial grade hunters' mountain lion scent. The scent that of an ovulating female mountain lion. Which Elvis was pretty sure would bring a whole lot of excitement to the Highway 95 roadside donkey world, there being a population of hungry and presumably horny mountain lions in the nearby Kofa and Castle Dome Mountains.

Officer Domenica Quillvik took Pancho aside one day in the San Luis secondary lot. Dominca's husband was a hulking Marine with a nasty disposition, and Pancho was very un-Pancho like in his reticence to be seen in a head to head with Dominica. Who, most everyone agreed, was a 10.5 on the 10 point Babe Scale. Pancho might be a late stage Lothario, but, considering Dominica's giant Jarhead husband, neither was he suicidal. But Dominica grabbed Pancho's arm and wouldn't let go.

"This is about that weirdo partner of yours," she began. Pancho's paranoia immediately took flight and his rigid body derigidified. "I was driving back from Quartzite the other day and I saw him parked by the side of the road. I could swear he was saying 'here, donkey, come here little donkey friend.' Or something like that. And he had some kind of pistol in his hand." Domenica looked quizically at Pancho. "Is there a hunting season on donkeys? Is this guy making carne asada out of donkey meat?" Pancho said he'd check it out. The next week Pancho followed Elvis on their day off and he saw for himself what Elvis was doing. A couple of days later he saw Dominica again and she hotfooted over to him.

"Well? What was Elvis up to?"

"Not what you thought. He's a volunteer with the Mountain Lion Survival Project."

"Oh," Domenica said, then turned and walked away, muttering under her breath.....

"He's just as frickin' weird as that wacko Elvis. No wonder they're a team."

Back to the sinister minister. Tony and Nastur now were growing confident that the bunch of officers working on the van would get it back together in just a few minutes. At that moment a great hubbub rose from where the crowd of officers were thick around the van. Tony looked at Nastur. Nastur looked at Tony. That didn't sound good. It didn't sound like any kind of relief at finishing a task. _Oh-oh_. It had an altogether different sound. _Oh-oh_ , again. That was the sound the officers made when they found dope and which was supposedly a close relative of the famous Rebel Yell from back in the War Between the States days. A war which the vast majority of the Mahoney clan did their best to avoid, several even dodging the draft by hiding out in the California gold fields along with Confederate deserter Mark Twain. Which fact accounted for Mark Twain being the hands down all time favorite author of just about all the Mahoneys. Even Masters Degree in English Rattler Sue.

Tony and Nastur glumly headed to the crowd around the Ford van looking like a pair of very reluctant mourners at a funeral march for someone they didn't much like. From a distance, with tall and lanky Nastur on one side and the large rotund figure of Tony on the other, Elvis thought they looked like a large version of the number 10 had come to life and was lumbering his way. He tapped on Pancho's shoulder.

"Look," he said, pointing at the approaching pair. "Here comes 10." That was the moment when Pancho finally realized--Pancho called it the Not So Great Awakening--he had been around Elvis too long. He actually understood what Elvis meant.

"I think I need a vacation," Pancho said. Elvis looked at him hopefully. "Alone," Pancho quickly added.

Tony Rivera and Nastur Baltheezer did the death march in perfect syncopation to the pipes and drums that weren't there but would have fit in very nicely. The occasion grim enough to warrant them. They stepped reluctantly up to the brown Ford van and saw Pancho and Elvis removing more Bud Light packages from the heater ductwork. Feng Shui was right after all. A fact that his handler Winona de la Mordure triumphantly repeated so often for the next hour that Elvis looked over at Pancho in exasperation after her most recent "I told you so!"

"Hey, Pancho. Why don't you go find a needle and thread somewhere so we can sew her mouth shut?" Pancho patted at the can of pepper spray in a pouch on his gun belt.

"This would be quicker," he said. And not completely in jest, either.

Tony and Nastur stood and glumly looked on as Pancho and Elvis pulled out a bunch more Bud Light packages.

"What the fuck could possibly happen to make this any worse?" Tony said in a voice to match his grim expression. As soon as he said it, he got a bad feeling in his stomach. The phrase self-fulfilling prophecy sliding malevolently into his mind. Not a minute later there came a horrific shrieking from inside the secondary office, shortly followed by the entire Vasquez family streaking out the door, Minerva hotly pursued by Heraclio and all three of their kids.

Minerva Vasquez had just discovered she had forgotten her meds.

"Now you know that the fuck else could possibly happen to make dees worse," Nastur said to Tony with a hostile voice and an icicle look. "Please don't say anything more, Mr. Fat Man. Things are bad enough as it be." Tony resisted the temptation to grab Nastur Baltheezer by his scrawny neck and shake him until his fillings popped out of his goddamn Balkan smartass mouth. Elvis, Pancho, Melissa and Nastur Baltheezer. All at one time. On his shift. The Four CBP Horsemen (and woman) of the Apocalypse. What the hell had to done to deserve this kind of punishment? It wasn't fair. Just not fair. Then he wheeled on his boot heels and headed into the supervisor's office, picked up the office phone and hit the San Luis Police Department's dispatcher's number on speed dial.

"Hello," said Zenia Terramontes, the relief dispatcher on duty. Carmen Flores, the regular dispatcher deciding it was a great idea to take a few days off while she was in the Yuma Regional Medical Center giving birth to her second set of twins in less than two years and vowing never, never, ever to take fertility drugs again. "San Luis Police Department," Zenia continued. "How shall I direct your call?"

"This is Supervisor Antonio Rivera at the San Luis Port of Entry. I have a woman here who forgot her medications and is having a meltdown. Please send an EMT team over to calm her down."

"There is no EMT team any longer," Zenia said. "Budgetary cutbacks, you know. Everyone has to bite the bullet." Tony actually held the phone away from his face and stared as it as though it were a person. No EMT team? Budgetary cutbacks? "But I could send over Buddy Kowalchek, our maintenance man here at the PD. He was a Boy Scout. Back in the day, of course. He's close to sixty now and about to retire." Tony continued to stare in open mouthed astonishment at the phone. Port maintenance man? Boy Scout? Tony shook the phone, as though the phone was somehow responsible for what he was hearing.

"Who is this?" Tony finally said. A guarded voice answered.

"This is the San Luis Police Department relief dispatcher."

"So where's the regular dispatcher? Carmen?"

"She's in the hospital. Having twins. _Again_."

Again? Tony thought. Twins? Again? "So who are you?"

"I already told you," Zenia answered. "The relief dispatcher." Tony started to get riled up.

"I got that much. But who are you? What is your name?"

"We're not at liberty to give out that kind of information, sir. But I will contact Buddy Kowalchek and ask him to pop over to the port and see what he can do." Tony's eyes narrowed.

First Elvis. And Pancho. And Melissa. And Nastur. Now this. And he just had a pretty good idea who he was talking to.

"This is Zenia! Zenia Terramontes!"

"Give that man a seegar," Zenia said in a sharp edged voice.

"You still bearing a grudge?" Tony said, trying to sound conciliatory without really meaning it.

"For the hundred and twenty three bucks worth of fireworks you grabbed out my car the day before the last 4th of July? You're damn right I'm bearing a grudge."

"The fireworks were illegal, Zenia. You couldn't bring them into the U.S."

"I heard that there was one heck of a fireworks display at your place on the 4th," Zenia shot back, this time her voice a very long way from being even in a distant exurb of neighborly. Tony blanched. Damn! How the heck did she know about that? He lived a good fifteen miles from her place.

"I _really_ need that EMT team," he finally said, desperation in his voice.

"Already on the way, Firecracker Man," Xenia snapped back. Tony slammed the phone down so hard he almost split the phone wires.

The San Luis EMTs came screaming into the port with sirens wailing with their typical high speed dramatic entrance. Especially on slow nights like this one. Minerva Vasquez with her pursuing panicking family had drifted over to the employee parking lot where they had her cornered between a fence and a Ford pickup. Sergio Miramontes, the lead EMT, calmly walked up to Minerva and, talking softly, deftly moved around behind her and got her arms in a hammerlock while Sergio's partner Angelina Rigeur--who was such an unenthusiastic lover that her ex-boyfriend, Benito 'Lao' Tzu not so fondly nicknamed her as Rigeur Mortis--needled Minerva's arm with an all purpose mild sedative. Two minutes later Minerva was singing children's songs and tap dancing as they led her back to the port secondary office. By that time the officers had put the Ford van back into its--more or less--original condition and the Vasquez family departed. Everyone, the Vasquez family included, was happy to see them go. Which was an understatement on the order of Carmen Flores' husband's reaction when she brought home a second set of twins to their tiny two bedroom house. Especially when he had only had sex with Carmen twice in the last year. But even once was enough to produce another pair of Flores kids. Or at least that was Carmen's story. And she was sticking to it.

There were a total of 27 previously undiscovered packages of marijuana, now universally referred to as Bud Lite, in the Ford van, weighing a mere 35.2 pounds because of their desiccated condition. No one outside of the Service ever got wind of it, which brought a whole bunch of sighs of relief from San Luis to El Paso to San Ysido to Otay Mesa to the Great Center Itself, D.C. No heads rolled because even rolling heads could bring unwanted attention.

Eventually Heraclio Vazquez got a new van from CBP in exchange for dropping his damage claim and threatened lawsuit. "Should I call up the LA Times?" worked very nicely to get CBP's undivided attention. He did, however, drive it over to the Port of San Ysidro and ask the them to K-9 it for him. "Just in case."

Two weeks later Nastur made his Mama happy when he applied to the Ronald Reagan Memorial School of Applied Dentistry in Pomona, being pretty sure he'd get accepted, since his uncle Thelium was the associate dean in charge of admissions. Tony Rivera put in a special request, even though he knew it was hopeless, with the San Luis Port Director to _never, never, never_ be the supervisor on duty when Pancho and Elvis were working TDY's at San Luis. Melissa transferred to another, nascent, ET unit where she became the regular K-9 officer assigned to that team, "seeing as how," in her words, she'd "been through so much with the ET already." Elvis and Pancho were considered local heroes in the Port of San Luis and well beyond for getting rid of Nastur Baltheezer once and for all. They even received special attention from the Port of El Paso in Texas, where they missed the dope in the first place, and from the ports of San Ysidro and Otay Mesa in California, where they had missed the loaded van a dozen times. The three ports expressed themselves to Elvis and Pancho with just a few simple words. Though not exactly in an officially publicized sense.

Don't you Mf'ers _ever_ come here.

### Chapter 3

### Margie Jo

Marjorie Jo Binderdinger was a small town girl from Prickly Pear, Arizona. Her home town of Prickly Pear wasn't exactly a bustling cultural locus. There was probably not a single person on the entire planet who woke up on a sparkling spring morning and said, "Hey, I want to go to Prickly Pear, Arizona, today!" And that included the residents of Prickly Pear. Some because they were already there. Others because they wanted to relocate to someplace, anyplace, that had trees, a regular supply of water and dependable cell phone coverage. At least 99.9% of the residents of Phoenix and Tucson, plus nearly that many in Flagstaff and Yuma, had no clue Prickly Pear even existed. But it did. Exist. The town just barely managing to hang on by its municipal fingertips.

Prickly Pear started out in the late 19th Century like a whole bunch of other Arizona towns. Wandering prospectors--that is those who managed to avoid being barbequed by the local Native Americans or get gunned down in a frontier saloon in gunfights over important stuff like spitting tobacco juice on somebody's boots--stumbled on gold and silver and copper deposits. Usually by something like accidentally discharging their horse pistol and having the bullet ricochet off a rock. Thus exposing the gold or silver or copper underneath the brownish desert patina of the rock and of all other rocks that all looked the same as far as the eye could see in all directions and which caused many a prospector to spend their entire prospecting career going in circles and dreaming solely in the single color of brown desert patina. The Brown Desert Patina (BDP) Syndrome, however, had yet to be diagnosed and the multitude of untreated BDP sufferers were doomed to wander the desert. Mostly in circles.

Prickly Pear's beginning was a typical story of Arizona's early mining days. The prospectors were quickly marginalized, a few slick easterners got rich and a whole bunch of miners ended up in the three-times-expanded Prickly Pear town cemetery.

Then, again fitting in nicely with the flow of early Arizona history, the mines played out, the few who got rich moved to San Francisco or New York and most of the population drifted away and only a few hardy ranchers remained. And so it was all the way through the 20th Century and on into the 21st. Ranching was a hard life, and kept getting harder, but had managed to hang on. Until the rise of the vegetarian movement, which had the citizens of Prickly Pear both worried and hopping mad. Imagine! Eating tofu instead of a prime medium rare T-bone? What the hell was the world coming to? They did, however, have a weather eye on the lucrative export market to China and the numerous developing countries of Asia and the hungry meat eating populations of part of the European Union. When the government of mainland China proposed putting both a quota and a higher tax on imported beef, the entire population of Prickly Pear--plus a couple of totally confused Chinese tourist backpackers who happened by--signed a pledge never to eat at a Chinese restaurant unless the Chinese government backed down. There, however, wasn't a Chinese restaurant within a hundred miles of boondocks Prickly Pear. And those that were more than a hundred miles off had absolutely zero to do with Chinese government policy. Which one curmudgeonly prickly Pricky Pear senior citizen sourly noted to Honorary Mayor and pledge author, Wilmer 'Studs' Sturmlicker.

"It's the principle of the thing," said Honorary Mayor Wilmer 'Studs' Sturmlicker. "Sometimes you just got to take a stand."

To which the prickly Prickly Pear senior citizen snorted and reprickled. Twice.

Prickly Pear was a wide spot in the road deep in the Arizona boondocks that had a hundred head of cattle for every inhabitant of the human variety. Including Lisa Rodriguez' as yet unborn twin girls. The human local population was nearly equal in numbers to the resident mule deer herd. The numerical equality plummeting every year during deer season when the mulies were the frequent guest of honor at local family suppers. And sometimes outside deer season. Occasionally way outside. The countryside around Prickly Pear was the kind of place where game wardens habitually wore bullet proof vests, sometimes even to church, and had high dollar life insurance policies.

Marjorie Jo--Margie--was no longer home in Prickly Pear. She was in her final year at the University of Arizona's business school in Tucson. Casting a prudent eye on a secure future, she majored in banking and financial planning. Margie had a scholarship, but being the valedictorian in a 15 person senior class at Prickly Pear High School--where the staff had one idea about what the 'high' in high school meant and the students a whole different idea--didn't bring in a whole lot of scholarship bucks. Sure not enough to cover all her bills. She picked up part time jobs wherever she could. In this, the last semester of her senior year, she landed a job at the Greater Tucson Business Call Center. It only paid a dribble beyond minimum wage, and she didn't much care for the job, but at least it was a job and it did help her make ends meet. And, since a sizeable percentage of the people who got unsolicited calls were no little irritated at being interrupted in the middle of important life decisions like arguing over who got the remote, she also was getting some subsidiary training in dealing with pissed off people for when she embarked on her chosen career field. A loan officer at a major bank. With medical coverage, a 401K, paid vacations and an air conditioned office. Air conditioning perched on the top of the want list for most desert dwelling Arizonans.

Having grown up on a ranch in Prickly Pear, Arizona, where medical coverage, 401K's and paid vacations weren't even in the local vocabulary, she was understandably interested in a secure and stable adult life. Unlike her father, Bucking Bobby Binderdinger, who sucked every last ounce of local notoriety he could for making the finals three years in a row in the Arizona State Rodeo's Bull Riding Competition. He never won, but he did come in second once and third twice. Or was that second twice and third once? Well, whatever the details, he was the bull riding toast of Prickly Pear for years afterward. Not that that did much towards supporting the family. Making the state bull riding finals three years in a row (and not making it three more years in a row) didn't do a whole lot to support a wife and kids. Marjorie Jo's mother--who was as likely to call him Fucking Bobby Binderdinger as Bucking Bobby Binderdinger--had to take a job waitressing at Cowboy Jack's Meat Eaters Restaurant and work a second job in the Prickly Pear Unconsolidated School District cafeteria to make ends meet.

Marjorie Jo was born with good looks, a quick brain and a sound body. But the Powers Above have a habit of sometimes slipping in trump cards and Margie had a big one in her otherwise congenial state of corporeal being. A mouthful of snaggled teeth that never got Margie's biological central processing unit's tooth message to line up in the prescribed order. She was a poster child for braces. Her big brother habitually called her piranha until one day she knocked him cold as the vegetable drawer in the family refrigerator with a rock solid right to his jaw. No more piranha.

But there still was no money in the skeletally lean Binderdinger family budget for something like braces and getting braces teetered on the top spot of her bucket list for when Marjorie Jo got her banking job with it's nice salary and benefits. Her school nickname of Snaggletooth still grating on her despite the fact she'd long ago learned to talk and even laugh with her mouth mostly closed and her snaggled teeth out of direct embarrassing sight. Though Marjorie was not so riveted on the idea that she wanted to mention it in her job interviews on the senior year near horizon.

"What is your main interest in wanting employment at this bank?" The interviewer might ask.

"Dental insurance. Braces. I need braces," might get to her tongue first and jump out from the top of the list. Oh, no! Margie! No! That wouldn't work. She'd have to remember that when the job interviewing session came around just before graduation. Remember that, Marjorie Jo. Don't say braces. She told herself. Something else. But not braces. Lately she'd taken to watching local and national TV news programs with an eye to picking up tips on how to effectively bullshit.

So a future in banking was just around Marjorie Jo's almost graduated corner. At least it was until she talked to her college roommate, not very virginal Virginia Venable, who paid for her college tuition through a website that was a knockoff from Craig's List and that made her a lot of (temporary) new friends. Virginia graduated with a similar banking and financial industries emphasis the previous spring. A degree. Lots of interviews. No job. "Not in this economy," they said. And said. And said. When months went by and no job popped up she got involved with her boyfriend Mingo Martinez in his promising entrepreneurial startup. Mingo was going to open a medical clinic. Well, a kind of a medical clinic, anyhow.

A medical marijuana clinic.

Marjorie Jo, like the whopping majority of her peers, didn't mind the occasional visit with Sister Mary Jane, and the idea of combining business with pleasure got stuck in her mind and refused to leave. Not that she tried all that hard to hurry its departure. But...but....did they have medical insurance, 401K's and paid vacations? And especially the Big One--dental insurance. She'd have to remember to ask Virginia and Mingo the next time she saw them. Until then she'd have to stick with her current career track. And her current part time job at the Greater Tucson Business Call Center. She plunked herself down in her work nook and took a look at her script for that evening's solicitations. She read it and nodded understanding, then flicked on the automatic computer controlled dialer.

On the third ring Elvis picked up the phone.

"Hello," Elvis said expectantly.

"Mr. Mahoney," Marjorie began. "This is Margie calling for the Pima County Wellness Center. "How are you this evening, sir?"

"Margie was my mother's name," Elvis replied. "It brings back memories." Marjorie smiled to herself. It looked like this person was going to be congenial. Which was not nearly as frequent as she would have liked. Not like the last guy she talked to the night before who threatened to hunt her down and pull out her toenails one by one if she interrupted him again in the middle of watching a UFC title match on Pay TV. A match which cost him some big bucks and made him come up short on his car payment.

"Well, that is certainly nice to hear," she said to Elvis. "I hope they are pleasant memories."

"Not exactly." Elvis answered. Marjorie blinked and, despite an inner urge to the contrary, stayed with Elvis.

"I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Mahoney. I certainly don't want to stir up unpleasant memories." Then, again despite an even stronger inner urge to retrack, she persisted.

"Are they really bad?"

"She kept pet animals," Elvis replied. Margie smirked.

"That doesn't sound bad, Mr. Mahoney." She said, smiling at the memory of her own pet tabby, Ebenezer Scrooge. One heck of a ferocious tabby, he was. Thought he was a mountain lion. Until that day he actually did meet up with a genuine mountain lion and lost all nine lives in less than forty seconds. "Pets are nice, Mr. Mahoney," she said, Ebenezer Scrooge's image--before the mountain lion, that is--lingering in her mind. "Nice." She repeated

"Not if they're poisonous reptiles," Elvis answered. "Including a small alligator in the fish pond. Which was bad enough, I kept losing pet fish and the occasional kitten and small dog and when it got cold mom would bring the gator inside and put him in the bathtub. During one really long cold snap I once went for nearly five weeks without a bath. And when I got to be a teenager, it really got bad." Marjorie was now just about transfixed. Being called Snaggletooth in school, with Fucking Bucking Bobby Binderlinger as a father, and her mother serving up half pound burgers at Cowboy Jack's Meat Eater Restaurant, was small change compared to sleeping with venomous reptiles and an alligator in the fish pond.

"How so, Mr. Mahoney?" Margie said.

"Call me Elvis," Elvis replied.

"OK, Elvis. How so?"

"Think about it," Elvis continued. "You're in high school, you meet a really nice girl and she wants to meet your family." Elvis paused for a moment to let that thought find its way into Marjorie Jo Binderlinger's already transfixed noggin. "Am I gonna bring a girl into a place with an eight foot boa constrictor hanging from a chandelier and an alligator in the bathtub? Could you imagine what would happen if she asked to use the bathroom?" Elvis paused again. "Which actually did happen. Once. Just frickin once. But once as all it took." He paused for a moment and groaned.

"Ellie Mae Blyncke was one of the better looking girls in my class. Plus she was put together like a br...bri.....well, she was pretty well constructed in the feminine pulchritude department."

"Puchra what?" Margie said.

"Just say God was in a pretty good mood when he drew up the plans for Ellie Mae's body." Margie stared at her computer console, as though it were Elvis, and shook her head slowly.

"You have a ....er...a...a strange way of putting things."

"Yeah," Elvis replied. "Well there was sure no any kind of putting things with Ellie Mae Blyncke when she, Ellie Mae being a rather forward type, said she had to use the john and promptly jerked open the bathroom door before I could stop her." Elvis paused. Maybe to remember. Or maybe for effect. Either way, he soon continued.

"As soon as Ellie Mae saw Chester the five foot alligator in the bathtub they heard her hollering on the other side of town. Not a big town, I'll admit. But still a darned loud holler. Another pause. "And then Ellie Mae took off for the door and hit it going full stride, darn near ripping it off the hinges as she set what had to be a local door exiting speed record." Yet another pause. "Well, Margie, you can guess what happened after that. By the next morning I was the most famous kid in school by a factor of at least ten. And there went my chances with the high school babes for the rest of my school days." He stopped to either chuckle or maybe just clear his throat. "Except for a couple of Goth babes with some really, really strange ideas." Margie wasn't sure, but she could swear it sounded as though Elvis was smacking his lips. Kinda like someone slurping up a fork full of spaghetti.

OK, Margie thought. Time to regroup. They'd been on this subject long enough and she'd best get back to business. Especially with her supervisor Grothwell McLink--privately known to his employees as 'Go To Hell McDink'--eyeballing her suspiciously from across the room. Grothwell was an obnoxious asshole who kept hitting on her. Until one evening she'd finally had enough. She sidled up to him, opened up her mouth as wide as she could to clearly display her mouthful of dangerous looking snaggled teeth and offered to meet him after work "to give you a blowjob you'll never forget." After that he would have voluntarily joined a leper colony before he'd come within ten feet of Margie. Though he did keep a closer eye on the quality of her work output. Quality of work output concerns of primary interest to Grothwell only with old and/or ugly women and most men. With special emphasis on the babes who blew off his advances.

"Back to the subject of my call, Mr. Mahoney," Margie said.

"That's Elvis," Elvis replied.

"OK. Elvis. Back to the subject of my call for the Pima County Wellness Center. We are conducting a health survey and would like to ask you a few questions. That OK with you, Mr....er....Elvis?"

"Sure. Shoot."

"Shoot what?"

"What do you mean, shoot what?"

"What do you mean what does shoot what mean?"

"It means go ahead," Elvis said, beginning to wonder if Margie had a few dead brain cells from sniffing paint thinner or breathing Tucson's formerly (make that early 20th Century) salubrious air.

"OK. Got it." Though she really didn't quite get it, Margie having been raised a country girl where the word shoot had a direct connection to guns, not survey questions. And, Margie was more than a little vain to admit, she was a pretty fair hand with both handguns and long guns. An ability that might come in handy if she landed a job in an inner city after graduation.

"First question, Elvis," Margie began. "Are you between the ages of 18 and 35?"

"More or less," Elvis answered.

"I'll take that a yes," Margie said with a touch of a smile at Elvis' oblique way of talking.  
"You are male. Height? Weight?"

"I am male. Usually, anyhow. I am a God given 5'10", but an even six feet in heels. I weigh 155 pounds. I have red hair, blue eyes, a slight astigmatism in one eye, floating bits of turquoise green in the other and a nagging ingrown toe nail."

Margie smiled again and noted the relevant answers on her survey sheet.

"Do you drink or smoke?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On what I am drinking or smoking. And on who is asking the questions." A pause while Margie drummed her fingers on the table and Elvis tried to catch a pesky fly that somehow got in the apartment and was dive bombing him while he was on the phone.

"Oh, damn! Almost got him that time." Margie hadn't learned her lesson.

"Got who?" She said.

"A fly. Pesky fly." Margie groaned.

"OK. Back to the survey. What is your answer then?" Margie continued.

"I don't smoke and rarely drink to excess, though I do sometimes over indulge on fresh Gulf shrimp when it is in season." That got Margie's attention. She was a big fan of fresh Gulf shrimp, too. She let her mind drift to fresh Gulf shrimp season for a moment, even so far as pleasantly revisiting the mouth watering taste, then abruptly got back to reality--or 'on task' as that jerk Grothwell always was saying--did another drum roll on the desk with the fingertips of her left hand and decided it was time to move on. Way past time, actually.

"How would you rate your current health?" She continued. "Excellent? Good? Average? Fair? Poor? Or Not Good?"

"Do you have any other options?"

"Other options?" Margie said with a touch of confusion. "What kind of other options would there be? These already are all of the options."  
"Well," Elvis replied in a thoughtful sounding voice. "There's always 'It sucks.' Plus, there are gradations and variations."

"Gradations and variations?" Margie said in a combination of doubt and confusion. "Isn't that already covered in the list I read off to you?" Elvis cleared his throat

"It doesn't go far enough. Into enough detail. Like on a mountain road that is mostly good but has a few really hairy spots where there is no guard rail and a three thousand foot drop straight down which could really mess up your day. Or like if most of my body is in excellent health but I have a case of really irritating dandruff. Or when my brain is clear and picking up on everything around me but my stomach is about to explode from a cheeseburger tainted with salmonella. Or if I'm as healthy as a horse but the horse has chilblains. Or they took out my wisdom teeth and now I feel dumb. Or....."

"I get the point, sir," Margie interjected with a rapidly sharpening razor edge of impatience. "Can we just say average or something like that?"

"Yep. That'll fly." Elvis said. The only word Margie heard clearly was 'fly'.

"What fly?" Margie said, remembering the earlier pesky fly. "Is the fly back?"

"No," Elvis answered. "What I said was that'll fly. Which means average is OK for the health question. Next question, Marge?"

"That's Margie, not Marge," she retorted in a not especially friendly tone. By this time Margie was thinking that working at a medical marijuana clinic would be a hell of a lot more laid back than working at a call center or, and this was the kicker, as a bank loan officer. Who needed the stress? And, if any place ought to be stress free, it ought to be a medical marijuana clinic. Anyhow, it was time to move on with this weird Elvis guy.

"Considering your responses to the health questions," Margie continued, reading from her script, "we recommend you make an appointment to see a specialist at the Pima County Wellness Center. I'll transfer you to the appointment desk right now. And thank you very much for participating in our survey, Mr. Mahoney. Now I.....

"Please, don't hang up," Elvis said in a distinctly stressed tone. "I'm so alone. So.....so....alone. I feel like ending it all." Margie's first thought was, _well don't let me stand in your way._ That, however, was not the Binderdinger way. Compassion. That was what her mother always used to tell her. Show compassion for people. With, however, at least in the view of her mother, the possible exception of Fucking Bucking Bobby Binderdinger. So Margie settled in to follow her mother's advice.

"Mr. Ma....er.... _Elvis._ Wait! Don't do anything foolish. You have so much to live for." She paused, then added. "What can I do to help?"

"What can you do to help?" Elvis said with a voice pregnant with what would soon be a brand new arrival in Margie's world. "Well......"

Elvis met Margie for coffee at Mandy's Kick Butt Caffeine Blast & Organic Deli after she got off work from the Tucson Call Center that evening. It was the beginning of a relationship that lasted until Margie took a job with the medical marijuana clinic later that year after she graduated and couldn't find a job in the banking industry. Elvis figured it was not such a hot idea for a CBP officer whose major function was drug interdiction on the Mexican border to be hanging out with a girl who worked at a medical marijuana clinic. But it was fun while it lasted. What with Margie as often as not out shooting him on the recreational shooting range outside Tucson and overeating fresh Gulf shrimp with him during the shrimp season.

But he never could quite get over his apprehension when she was pissed off at him, exposed that mouthful of treacherous looking teeth and said "do that again and I'm going to give you a blow job you'll never forget." A point which Elvis got with the immediacy of the lightning bolt that struck a golf foursome on the 7th green at Tucson's Valle Dos Ricos Country Club golf course and forthwith opened up three and possibly four memberships to hopeful Valle Dos Ricos Country Club applicants. And Elvis' Snaggletooth Margie apprehension grabbing an extra level considering he'd already shredded his tongue twice when he and Margie got carried away with some heat-of-the-moment possibly over enthusiastic French kissing. Even so, he still missed her.

Especially in shrimp season.

### Chapter 4

### Fenwick

Fenwick Bentthruster was just another anonymous face in the human crowd, a man who at best could only hope to claw his way upward to grasp the bottom rung on the ladder of mediocrity. And even then he'd be just as likely to forget himself, reach down to scratch his balls and loose his grip. He was so nondescript that sometimes he didn't recognize his own reflection when catching a glimpse of himself in a store front window. Often thinking when he saw the reflected image "Oh, that poor guy." Winglow Zanglit, a Tucson city bus driver and part time conspiracy theorist and avocational phrenologist, who frequently analyzed the appearance of passengers, noticed Fenwick frequently riding his bus and mentally remarked to himself--

"When they handed out the good looks in the DNA Line Up Yonder this dude must have been at the end of the line. Yep. That would explain this weird guy's jumbled up physiognomy. They ran out of the good looking genes and threw in the leftovers. Possibly including some from the reconstructed Neanderthal DNA sequence." Which might not have been all that descriptively accurate, Winglow's nickname to those who new him best being 'Wingnut,' but did clearly convey that Fenwick was not likely to catch the eye of even the most desperate of females. Or even grab the bottom rung of the physiological ladder and make in onto one of the regionally infamous 'before' ads for Derwin Cinderflock's downtown Tucson fitness center.

Like a whopping percentage of his fellow humans, Fenwick's opinion of himself on the self-worth scale didn't exactly soar towards the ego heavens. It was much closer to a fizzle than a soar. Like a rocket that flopped over on the launching pad and failed to ignite. Or, even more to the Fenwick point, a rocket that didn't even make it to the launching paid and was still at the factory being rewired. Or maybe even back to ground zero where they scrapped the whole project and went back to the drawing board. Fenwick was a pre-fizzle fizzle. The last thing his battered and besieged ego needed was a humiliating public embarrassment. Like now. At the Tucson Mall....

But first, slamming into reverse and backpedaling in Fenwick time.

Life did not start out well for Fenwick. He arrived on planet Earth assisted in his entrance by Flemish immigrant Doctor Bernard de Bled at the University Medical Center in Tucson. The dour Dr. de Bled, known to his co-workers as Dr. Irascible, took one look at Fenwick as he escorted him from the womb and promptly slapped Fenwick's mother instead of the newborn, despite baby slapping rather than mother slapping being the accepted medical practice of the time. Dr. de Bled's coworkers however considering the doctor's slap action appropriate under the Fenwick-just-arrived circumstances. Good God! Look at the kid! So who else could be responsible if not the child's mother? One of the nurses present, Febrese Ng, predictably nicknamed No Vowels Ng by her smart assed co-workers, even went so far as to reconsider her previous fervent opposition to abortion. Nurse Ng, who suffered from diverticulitis and had recently had a surgical resection of her lower intestine, however never failing to take virulent exception when one of those obnoxious smart ass coworkers of hers called Febrese No Bowels NG instead of No Vowels Ng.

At any rate, Fenwick's life did not begin well, though it did have a proper beginning viewed from the perspective of consistency. Which meant that it sucked from day one.

Fenwick was one of those hapless kids who everybody picked on in school. His puffy nerd appearance made it as inevitable as rain in Seattle or the appearance of pellucid jugs of home made mule kick at one of Elvis' Mahoney family reunions. It started with his unfortunate name, Fenwick Bentthruster, which absolutely demanded derision from the vast majority of your garden variety normal and therefore typically mean spirited kids. Most of whom passed through the mean spirited phase onto normal lives. Which, however, didn't do Fenwick any good when they were still in the mean spirited little kid mode.

"Hey, guys," a square built freckled little kid with the totally relevant nickname of Knuckles yelled out, pointing at Fenwick. "This is Fenwick. Fenwick. Ever hear of anyone named Fenwick?" The kid turned to Fenwick. "And what did you say your last name was?" Fenwick muttered out his last name so indistinctly that it was inaudible. The freckle faced kid persisted. "What was that? Louder."

"Bentthruster. Fenwick Bentthruster," Fenwick said in a cowed and barely audible voice. But loud enough for the other kids to hear.

"Did you hear that?" Freckle Knuckles sneered. "Fenwick. Fenwick Bentthruster." Followed by general hoots of hilarity, jeers and catcalls. Fenwick was totally humiliated. And that was just the first day of public school after several years of home schooling. He went home that day and begged his mother to change their name.

If Fenwick's mother had a stack, she would have blown it right then and there. But, being a typically stackless human (and also not well stacked in another sense, which didn't help her attitude any) she clenched her fists so tightly her fingers were begging for mercy and her voice was like the ancient heirloom tea kettle that sounded like incoming mortars when it set to steaming.

"Change our name!" She tea-kettled. "How could you say such a thing, you ungrateful snerdlet! Family history. Heritage. All out the Bentthuser window. And why? Just became some sniveling brat made fun of you?"

"But mother," Fenwick slipped in between tea-kettling mother deep breaths of anguish, "it wasn't just one kid. It was the whole school." With flaring eyes Mama Bentthruster glared at her shamefully selfish son, "And," Fenwick continued, "I think some of them were armed, seeing as how this is not the greatest of neighborhoods. The only thing I learned at school today was how to flash gang signs." Fenwick then made what was one of his typically inappropriate moves when he flashed the series of gang signs he'd learned that day at school and in typical Fenwick mode several times at school flashed the wrong symbol at the wrong gang and had to run for his life. No matter. This served only to set the tea kettle to puffing even more.

"Now, listen, buster boy. We might possibly be heirs to the Bentthruster family fortune and it certainly wouldn't do for us to change the name. It might cost us our inheritance. Which I am told includes a genuine Stradivarius violin Flobius Benttthruster the Elder allegedly played in a symphony orchestra somewhere in Europe, possibly Zagreb or eastern Cornwall, and brought to America with him." Fifteen years later they did indeed inherit the Bentthruster family fortune. Which turned out to be an old farmhouse that had been condemned and a stack of unpaid bills. The Stradivarius was indeed a genuine Stradivarius. Made in 1921 by Billy Joe Stradivarius in Little Rock, Arkansas, in his wood shop and eventually sold at a yard sale for twenty bucks and a new home on the wall of a Cracker Barrel restaurant.

And so Fenwick's life went. In gym class he was always the last to be picked for team sports. And only then grudgingly picked at the stern eyed insistence of the gym teacher, Myron Modality, who personally didn't give a rat's ass about Fenwick but damn well didn't need any more parental complaints after getting just a touch too friendly with the players on the girls' soccer team. Fenwick asked eleven different girls, none of them popular or anywhere even remotely close to any generally accepted concepts of babehood, to the school prom and was turned down flat by all eleven. And not gently, either, including one indignant buck toothed girl with the beginnings of a wispy mustard colored mustache who took a swing at him a split second after he uttered the words "...prom with me."

Fenwick's unfortunate experiences with flashing the wrong gang signs at the wrong gangs had at least served to develop a quick duck reaction in him. He did a wrong gang sign quick duck and Ms Bucktooth's fist sailed over his head and connected directly on top of the sizeable proboscis of Xenia Yellow Stick, a full blooded Yaqui with a mercurial temper who forthwith launched her mercurial temper and hurled herself at Ms Bucktooth. A general brawl followed after which everyone blamed Fenwick for starting it and Principal Desiderata Mooncalf booted his butt out of school. Such was the way Fenwick's life went. Even his own mother didn't much like him and his high school class voted him the "Least Likely." He'd hardly got his diploma home before the registered letter came in the mail. Greetings from the United States government. Good God! This was the last straw. Even the government was out to get him.

He was drafted.

Fenwick had never so much as fired a gun, much less had one of his own, even to the point of not being quite sure which end to point at whatever he was supposed to be pointing at. It was therefore as inevitable as summer sunburn in the Florida Keys that the Army would plunk him in the infantry. This might not have been such a big deal had not a certain misunderstanding been currently underway on the sunset side of the Pacific Ocean. At a place called Viet Nam. A place where a draftee either quickly learned which way to point his rifle or else was in for a quick return to the United States in a condition quite unlike that of his arrival in the place officially called Viet Nam but unofficially called all kinds of other, not so nice, names by the draftees. A country that was bursting at the national seams with gorgeous scenery, but which Fenwick forever after would only remember as a place with more biting inspects for square foot than anyplace else on Planet Earth and maybe beyond.

But maybe the Viet Nam gig wouldn't be so bad. He would serve his year and come back a war veteran and finally break his string of ignominy. A glimmering of hope slipped into his otherwise gloomy existence. Nope. Not to be. Another fizzle. Captain Lars 'Gonzo' Gonzalez, his company commander, took one look at him and decided this was sure as hell one guy he wasn't about to let loose on a combat patrol. This was cemented in Captain Gonzo's mind with the finality of the last brick laid in the Great Wall of China when Fenwick inadvertently pulled the pin on an aging M26 hand grenade and caused a whole lot of momentary excitement in his immediate vicinity. Private Fenwick therefore spent an entire year on kitchen and guard duty, with a particular emphasis on guarding the kitchen. The kitchen actually just being the bunker where the MCI "C" Rations and other necessities like the company's well thumbed stained stash of Playboys were stowed. When he was assigned on the night perimeter by the perennially undermanned Captain Gonzo, who had no choice but to scrape up every available body, including Fenwick, he fired his AR a bunch of times for no reason anyone else could discern, earning himself the not so complimentary nickname of Private Jumpy.

He never once saw a single human being that he was firing at. He did however score direct hits on at least three monkeys, one purportedly an endangered species. At least according to fellow draftee and recent graduate in Ecological Science from the ultra liberal Berkeley campus of University of California, Bertram 'Ecofreak' Sokomaki, who had to be physically restrained from strangling Fenwick with his bare hands. Sokomaki's recourse to physical violence coming as no little surprise to the other soldiers, Ecofreak notoriously disinclined "as a matter of principle" to point his rifle at anything, including enemy humans with guns, but especially monkeys on the endangered species list. Ecofreak would later completely lose his cool when a Viet Cong mortar round rearranged the previously intact components of Lady Bird, a non combatant water buffalo the company had adopted as a mascot, into several dozen chunks of various sizes. Ecofreak went berserk, charging the Viet Cong position and taking out the mortar crew and most of the rest of an entire Viet Cong platoon for which he was awarded a Silver Star and permanently banned from the Berkeley campus.

On another misperceived occasion Fenwick emptied an entire clip into a thick broken branch he mistook for a king cobra. The slugs from Fenwick's rifle, however, did not bury themselves harmlessly in the fecund Vietnamese dirt--to be found and wondered over 10,000 years in the future by an archeological survey team from the sub-tropical Antarctic People's Republic--but instead ricocheted zinging from a tilted flat stone under the shattered branch and peppered the latrine where Captain Gonzo was at that precise moment in the very middle of doing his business. Which consequently caused a mess that had Captain Gonzo wishing he had the authority to order an immediate firing squad with Private Fenwick as the sole invited guest. But Fenwick did manage--barely--to save himself from being fragged by his own side when he blasted off one night at a shadow made by a cloud passing under the moon.

"There!" Fenwick said in an excited not so whispery whisper. "There's something there." Nobody so much as even looked. Fenwick exclaimed at least three times a night that there was something out there in the brush. There never was.

"Cool it, Private Jumpy," Private Lavon Jefferson Washington III from Mudflap, Missouri, snapped. Lavon totally convinced that all white people were dumb as turnips and Fenwick the "Champeen Dumb Turnip" of them all.

"Shut the fuck up, Fenwick," Private Tommy Ray Trammel from Burnt Biscuit, Alabama, muttered in his Burnt Biscuit drawl.

"Hey, putzburger, fer gawdsakes, not _again_ ," added Private Israel Levenson, a native born Bronx boy who never missed a single day complaining that Army food wasn't real Kosher and who, Levenson, not being one who kept up with current events, thought he was being drafted to "finally teach those goddamned Arabs a lesson" and was more than a touch put out when he ended up in Viet Nam instead. Which left him perennially pissed off. Whenever he pulled trigger in Viet Nam he visualized the target being the members of the local draft board back home in the Bronx.

.

"There ain't nothin' there, Fenwick", said a tired sounding Sergeant Dominic Palesotti, born and raised in the Third Ward in Chicago where deceased people had the amazing ability to vote Democratic in every election. "Calm down." Palesotti said, trying to be calming but sounding more like he had a bad toothache. All to no avail. A cloud moved under the moon, throwing a shadow that seemed to Fenwick to be moving.

"No!" He said. There _is_ something there." And Fenwick once again let loose a burst from his rifle. For once Fenwick was right. Well, not really right. He did shoot at a genuine moon shadow. But the shadow also happened to fall on a Viet Cong assault platoon that had crawled almost to the perimeter and about to launch a surprise attack when Fenwick blasted away at the moon shadow.

"Chinga!" Hollered excitable Viet Cong Lieutenant My Thang in Spanish, the bilingual lieutenant having been an interrogation specialist who studied Inquisition technology in Spain, confusing the hell out of the other VC who were all monolingual and most of whom had never been to Laos or Cambodia, much less Spain or even the Canary Islands. But when the lieutenant let fly with his AK it didn't take a linguistic rocket scientist to figure out what was shaking. The other VC forthwith blasted away with their AK's which, once again, caused a whole lot of excitement in the immediate vicinity.

Inadvertent or not, Fenwick blew the VC's ambush plans all to hell and kept Fenwick's company from being overrun. Captain Gonzo was so grateful he gave Fenwick an entire half day off from kitchen duty and five bottles from a six pack of Vietnamese '33' beer an ARVN lieutenant--South Vietnamese Army officer--gave him, the Captain opining after tossing away most of the first bottle that "it tasted like donkey piss." One of his platoon commanders, Lieutenant Swanton 'Irish Mick' O'Mulrooney, made the mistake of asking Captain Gonzo how he knew how donkey piss tasted and from that exact moment on Irish Mick was at the head of all the hairiest patrols outside the company perimeter. Two years later, both men now out of the Army and using their GI bills at the University of Southern California, they happened to stumble across each other just outside the Edgar Cayce Social Science Building on the East LA Alternative Learning campus. Former Lieutenant Irish Mick O'Mulrooney, who had both an Irish temper and a long memory, laid out the former Captain Gonzo with a straight right to the jaw, leaving the various bystanders and passersby to wonder what the hell Irish Mick meant when he muttered "....and now you know what a donkey's kick is like, too, Captain Dickhead."

Fenwick never did know either what donkey piss or 33 beer tasted like. He rarely drank. So he gave the five, formerly six, beer pack of 33 to Sergeant Dominic 'Iron Gut' Palesotti who would drink damn near anything that had alcohol in it. Donkey piss or not, it disappeared down Iron Gut's gullet quicker than Fenwick could spell Mississippi backwards. Which actually wasn't all that quick, Fenwick usually missing at least one of the 's' letters.

Fenwick did however spend enough time with the combat unit to win--much to the bemusement of his fellow soldiers--What? Private Jumpy got the CIB?--the coveted CIB, Combat Infantryman's Badge, as well as a Purple Heart courtesy of a half dozen splinters from a Viet Cong mortar round that peppered his butt as he was just a touch too slow in diving into his bunker. He was in and out of the aid station almost as quick as the future Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry with his own trio of war wounds.

When his year was up and he rotated back to the World, as the soldiers called the U.S., Fenwick climbed out of the contract Eastern Airlines 727, fell to his knees on the tarmac at Travis Air Force base, pausing momentarily to remove the good sized tarmac pebble that had just then lodged in his left knee, kissed the ground and then wept for a good three minutes before an unsympathetic sergeant pulled him up and unceremoniously booted him on his way. Also done so ungently as to remind Fenwick of the buck toothed girl with the beginnings of a mustard colored mustache who took a swing at him back in high school when he asked her to the school prom. So. That was the way it was going to be, he thought as he sighed wearily. He was back in the U.S. And it was looking like his heretofore life of perpetual ignominy hadn't changed so much after all. He was still the guy always picked last.

If he got picked at all.

The rest of Fenwick's life lumbered along as serial imprints from the original template.

"The kid is dumb as a termite mound," Fenwick's grandfather Flobius Bentthruster II said to Fenwick's mother, wondering how the hell Fenwick the Termite Mound made it through Viet Nam in one piece. "Are you sure he's really yours? Babies got switched in the hospital nursery? Something like that?" Mama Bentthruster was remembering the moment of Fenwick's planetary arrival when she reached out to hold her newborn son and first saw his face.

"No mistake, Flobie," she said morosely. A groan. "We're stuck with him."

Fenwick wasn't really dumb as a termite mound, as his testy and cantankerous grandfather Flobius Bentthruster II said about him, and he used his GI bill to get a college degree in police science, figuring his military experience would get him a cop job. Nope.

"Sorry, Mr. er, ah, um, how do you pronounced that, Ben Thruster? We have no openings at this time." As Fenwick left the human relations waiting room he heard the hearty whoop of the person who came in behind him receiving the news he's just been hired. Just like the eleven girls that turned him down for the school prom, a bunch of different law enforcement agencies, federal, state and local, turned him down. The local Indian casino wouldn't even pick him up as a security guard at minimum wage. The only other job he could get was working at a McDonald's, and that was because his cousin Melvin was the manager and his mother pressured Melvin into hiring Fenwick. Burger flipping didn't set well with Fenwick, who at times drifted off into a reverie where he saw himself as a selfless heroic figure who single-handedly saved his platoon in Viet Nam from being overrun and wiped out to the last man. Such reveries also causing Fenwick to loose his focus and burn bunches of hamburgers, which really leaked off his cousin Melvin, who unsuccessfully tried to salvage the situation by selling the burned meat as Charburgers and call them "the latest development in burger science."

"Fenwick," cousin Melvin said one day to him after another in a long series of irate customers buttonholed him about a hamburger order than looked more like a couple of chunks of charcoal, "I think the burger world is not for you." Which was another of the world class understatements that had a habit of creeping into Fenwick's life. Fenwick and Melvin therefore made the mutual decision that burger flipping was not in Fenwick's future. What to do? He'd always had a head for numbers, which had really burned the jocks and bullies back in high school math class when Fenwick the Nerd figured out stuff that sailed farther over their heads than an outbound Mars probe. An unwelcome side effect of which was Fenwick going without lunch for his entire time in high school, the soreheads from his math class always grabbing his lunch money as a kind of math envy retribution. But, despite those lunchless years, he still had his math ability. He therefore went back to college and got a degree in accounting. So nobody would hire him? To heck with 'em. He'd be his own boss.

Easy to say. Not so easy to do. Being his own boss meant landing clients and he ran head on into a whole new string of rejections. Fenwick was actually a competent accountant, in fact was well above the average in his accounting skills, but his total lack of interpersonal skills made convincing anyone of that about as likely as Martin Luther King joining the KKK and being elected Grand Wizard of the State of Alabama. H&R Block did pick up him as a floater during tax season. Not enough to live on, though. Then he applied for a federal job using his purple hearted veteran's preference and accounting degree and that won him a ticket into the Customs Service as a seizure custodian, a mostly administrative inventory managing job that did however require him to carry a firearm. He had to go through a basic training course at the Federal Law Enforcement Center in the steam bath of coastal Georgia where he learned a little about being a seizure custodian and a whole lot about sweating around the clock and avoiding alligators. Then it was back to an off border post in the Southwest and to his new job as a seizure custodian. Not great pay. But enough to live on. And, true to form, whenever promotions or performance bonuses were up for grabs, he was turned down.

As usual, he was the guy who didn't get picked.

He also tried various places to meet a woman. Singles clubs, church socials, bars, quilting bees, mall walkers. He even tried picking up female hitchhikers but gave up on that idea after the second mugging. Finally he tried singles groups on the internet. He did meet one really nice sounding and very good looking Filipina woman named Alice Guapa on the AAL--Available Asian Ladies--internet singles site. She had very large breasts, but swore "on my sainted mother's grave" that she was a very modest virginal person and her breasts were natural, the curved lines beneath each of her peculiarly erect breasts being actually birth marks of a rare type. She did, however, have some pretty sexy clothes in her internet photos that Fenwick thought didn't fit real well with the modest, virginal idea. After considering the thought for a while Fenwick's genetic tea kettle started to heat up and he figured he liked the sexy clothes after all and consequently got even more juiced up to meet her.

Alice was really hot to come to Tucson and meet Fenwick. But she didn't have the bucks to make the trip from the Philippines. Could he help her out? Help her out? Fenwick actually laughed out loud over that one. Help out this sumptuous babe with the dynamite chest who was hot to meet him? Could he help her? Could Abraham Lincoln grow a beard? Could his cousin Melvin make hamburgers? Damn right he'd help her out. He sent the money, though $7500 seemed a little high for round trip airfare from the Philippines to Tucson. But meeting Alice in person was going to be worth it. Boy. Was it ever going to be worth it! Fenwick went to the Tucson airport to meet her. He'd even bought a new suit and made his first ever visit to a tailor to have it altered to more or less fit his somewhat irregularly shaped body. He got to the airport. With a Fenwick version of a salacious expression on his face--which to a casual observer would look more like an eight year old kid telling fart jokes--and Great Expectations that took the directly palpable form of an erection that flat out refused to obey his commands to let Fenwick Central choose the time and place for such outboard erectile presentations. He tried to hide it but only managed to freak out an old lady waiting for a cab when she noticed a newspaper dangling over Fenwick's middle while his hands were busy holding a dozen red roses and a box of Swiss chocolates. He made quick tracks into the terminal just as she started to scream, though a nearby cab driver who saw Fenwick said to another cabbie "....that guy must be a magician of some kind. Man, that is some cool trick! I wonder if it works to get chicks?"

He made it to the arrivals concourse, newspaper still in place, and positioned himself in the hallway of the arrivals concourse where, true to Fenwick form, was not noticed by a single passing soul. With the exception of the bored middle aged woman in a back room womaning the surveillance cameras, and even she barely noticed him. He waited. And waited. And waited. Expectations shrank. As did his newspaper holder. Which the no longer bored woman watching the surveillance cameras definitely did notice, copies of the surveillance tape making the rounds of the surveillance staff within a hour. The video, though absolutely one hell of a great candidate for it, did not go public, which would be a violation of their security mandate and be a firing offense. But she did grab a copy for herself and watched it at home on slow evenings when she needed a chuckle, her couch potato of a husband snoring away as usual on, what else, the couch.

Back to the arrivals concourse. No Alice. She never showed. Like the feeble dawn that slowly makes its appearance after a long Arctic winter, Fenwick finally caught on there was going to be no Alice to envelop in his anxious embrace. He stomped out of the terminal, pausing only to deposit the dozen red roses and box of Swiss chocolates in the hands of a just arrived Chinese tourist who would later return home and tell everyone about the wonderfully gracious welcome she received from the City of Tucson and not so coincidentally secretly begin making plans to emigrate.

"You never gave me chocolates," she said in Chinese to her dumbstruck soon to be ex-husband when she got back to their apartment in Beijing. "I'm going to America where they even give chocolates to strangers," she thumped a fist off his chest, "unlike you, noodle brain, who are about as romantic as a bucket of night soil." After which the soon to be ex-husband decided he would join the Chinese Army and volunteer for assignment at an isolated frontier post where there were absolutely no females anywhere in the Chinese border vicinity.

Fenwick went home and fired up his computer to go online and demand an explanation from No Show Alice. No Show Alice didn't show there, either. Her account had been cancelled. The slowly dawning Arctic sunrise completed its ascent.

It could have been worse. At least he still had his fantasies. He would never know that Alice Guapa was actually a forty three year old Kiev born computer hacker named Ivan Stroganoffov. The Alice Guapa photos were from an escort website in Manila that Ivan hacked. Nor was he in the Philippines. He lived in an oceanfront condo in Thailand and had recently expanded his business activities from identity theft to internet dating sites and was investing his substantial profits in a chain of organic veggie restaurants in middle sized southeast Asian cities. Mostly in Thailand and neighboring Malaysia.

And so went Fenwick's life as he slid towards an undoubtedly uneventful retirement. He did, however, become a deadeye at darts and even reached competitive levels, finding that imagining No Show Alice's face to be in the center of the dart board bull's eye had a considerable impact on honing his accuracy. Though he did learn to quit audibly mouthing "Take that, bitch!" when throwing the darts and in doing so causing some consternation about his fellow dart hurlers, one even wondering if Fenwick would one day blow a fuse and start gunning down the bystanders at the annual Tucson Dart and Urban Renewal Festival.

About then was when he got the idea that maybe a career change within Customs would bolster his flagging spirits.

Move forward nearly a half year. The Tucson Mall. Fenwick's eyes were wide with terror. A very particular terror. Like the time he licked at a bit of spilled ice cream on the inside of his parents' freezer and his little kid's tongue stuck so tight to the freezer he couldn't get his tongue and associated speech parts to cooperate in even a faint holler for immediate parental assistance. Which, his grandfather Flobius would later wryly note, resulted in what was certainly the first time in the entire Bentthruster family history when one of its members had to gurgle for help. This time, like that one long ago, Fenwick was unable to yell of help. But for an altogether different species of reason.

Like a whole different universe species of life-or-death reason.

Fenwick was terrified and his terror was real. And not without genuine direct corporeal reason. In his dash for dignity he barely made it. Fenwick tore open the stall door in the men's room at the Dillard's Department Store and pulled down his trousers just as the alimentary flood gates burst. A few moments earlier he'd been browsing through the sales aisles in the men's section at Dillard's when the bathroom urge came out of nowhere, barreling into his bowels with an urgency that sent the pudgy, aging bachelor on an urgent lope for the nearest bathroom after frantically asking a nearby sales person where the closest one was. Fenwick launched himself in the direction of the pointed finger and almost knocked over an elderly lady in his desperate rush for the bathroom. He was so intent on his bathroom buddy mission that he didn't hear the old woman launch into a long string of expletives in Spanish. Fenwick thundered by within a couple of feet of a skinny red headed man and the old woman, whose hair had mysteriously remained as shiny black as the obsidian feathers of a Chihuahua raven without a single gray hair despite her being on the shady side of 80. The Spanish-speaking associate cashier's mouth dropped in astonishment at the profanity coming out of the mouth of what a moment earlier she thought was a sweet old lady that reminded her of her abuela--her grandmother. Who also had not a gray hair in her head. In her case however because she was as bald as a peeled muskmelon.

Leaving the cursing abuela, the startled skinny guy and the astonished Dillard's employee in his wake, Fenwick tore through the door of the men's room with the distilled focus of an Olympic sprinter going for the finish line. And he made it. Barely. An exquisite look of relieved triumph was on his pudgy face. He'd won the race. For once in his life. By God. He'd made it.

"Goddamn food courts," Fenwick muttered to himself as a sizeable portion of his person was noisily relocating from his body into the Tucson sewer system. "I should have known better than to eat that greasy crap." Actually, he had known better. It didn't stop him. It never did. His cousin Melvin had introduced Fenwick to the pleasures of a big juicy, greasy hamburger with cheese and fried onions and a hefty shot of hot sauce or fiery spicy mustard which now was one of his few pleasures in life. And the fact was, despite his current alimentary adventure, it would remain that way. But that was the future, and this was the present. And, for now, with his bowels still busy with a reasonable approximation of a Space Shuttle Discovery blast off in reverse, he wasn't going anywhere. He pulled his legs up and planted his feet on the stool's edge to relieve the pain in his stomach, balancing precariously on the toilet and balled up like someone about to cannonball off a diving board into a swimming pool and irritating the hell out of everyone within splash range. Which Fenwick had once actually done at a city pool in Tucson, splashing a tattooed black guy the size of a Range Rover, who had some definitely unfriendly things to say to Fenwick that permanently relieved Fenwick of any future urge to launch extemporaneous cannonballs at the city, or any other, pool.

The restroom door opened and shut. Somebody came in and opened the stall door next to him. Fenwick's eyes blinked when the guy stood there and his trousers stayed up. Then there was the sound of a cell phone ringing.

"Hello," the unseen man in the next stall said in what sounded like an eastern European accent of some kind. Hungarian? Serbian? Possibly Rumanian? "This is Mr. Revanche. I got your voice mail. What do you want?" Silence, while the unseen man listened to the phone. Then, suddenly, an explosive expletive.

"Goddamnit!" He snarled. What the fuck do you think this is, some jerk off back room deal at the country club? You're going to try to fudge on the fee at the last minute? Who the hell do you think you're dealing with here? I'm a businessman, not a used car salesman. You want an amateur who'll screw things up, go find one. I'm a professional. I do clean hits. No trace. No footprints. No evidence. No forensics. Nobody will ever know. The fee is firm. $100,000. Half now. The other half when it's done. Hitting a local big shot like this guy is going to bring lots of heat. And that heat will burn your hairy white bread ass if you don't have a professional do the job. It's up to you. Pay the price or look for another contractor. Think it over and call me back. You've got five minutes." Then Fenwick heard what sounded like the cell phone disconnecting.

The terror revisited him. And no longer an internal one. This one was external. A professional killer in the next stall who had said himself he left no traces behind. With pupils dilating and nostrils flaring, a bug eyed Fenwick realized that he qualified as a trace and that there was a figurative trace removal target painted in the middle of his sweaty forehead. Then he suddenly realized that the sound of his labored breathing might give him away. He struggled mightily to quiet his breathing to a whisper, one part of him silently terrified he might choke himself to death trying to stifle the sound of his breathing. Something he'd seen on a made for TV movie on the Discovery Channel a while back about a serial killer in a yoga meditative breathing commune in upstate New York. As he struggled with quieting his breathing while not suffocating himself doing it, his gaze was focused on the shoes of the man in the next stall. The guy was wearing loafers. Brown loafers. A strange thought hit him. These were the shoes of a killer? Brown loafers? He was about to be killed by a pair of brown loafers attached to a professional hit man? Then the phone rang again.

"Revanche here," the brown loafers in the next stall said. "Your answer? Excellent! When the first installment arrives in my account, I'll proceed with the contract. Make sure you have a solid alibi." A pause, and the voice of the brown loafers dropped a tone and became distinctly threatening. "And if you don't pay the second installment, you may expect a visit from me." An ominous pause. "A very unpleasant visit." By now Fenwick was pretty sure he'd heard a similar accent to Mr. Revanche's in an old Dracula movie and that this guy must be from Dracula country. Either Romania or Hollywood. Then the phone disconnected again, the brown loafers left the stall and closed the bathroom door behind him and Fenwick began to slowly decompress from his horror. He had never said a rosary. But he did now. Fervently. Beads or no beads. All the more remarkable, considering he was no kind of Catholic and only on the far indistinct edge of any kind of mainstream definition of Christian. He did, however, believe in a spirit world, one that was largely anti-Fenwick in its spirit world proclivities.

The skinny man in the brown loafers walked out of the Dillard's store in the Tucson Mall. He headed for his car outside in the fetid Tucson heat sink euphemistically called a parking lot where the first drops of perspiration would appear on the hatless dome of a shopper exiting the air conditioned mall into the blast furnace heat of the Sonora Desert on the average of 1.3 seconds after stepping outside. The man had just put on the loafers he'd bought in Dillard's when Fenwick went tearing past him in his urgent dash for dignity. The man smiled to himself as he went out the mall's big double doors into the sprawling sun-blasted parking lot. He got in his old Chevy and headed back home. Good. The pudgy dude in the bathroom would have a great tale to tell for years to come. Who knows? Maybe it was even one of the high points in his life, courtesy of the skinny man's extemporaneous leap into his whimsical far out--sometimes so far out that it bordered on the extraterrestrial--puckish side. The man with the brown loafers pulled his old car out into the Tucson traffic on Wetmore Road. Yes. Good. A good deed. He smiled with an inner satisfaction at bringing some dash into an otherwise humdrum fellow human's life. And then he hit Oracle Avenue and made the right turn that would take him home.

A satisfied smile lay comfortably on Elvis' face.

A smile with a short shelf life that would soon vanish as the doomed Comet Elvis plunged into the abyss of the Fenwick Sea.

He would sure as hell not have been smiling at all had he known about the supersized Fenwick speed bump that lay ahead, or anything about Fenwick, or that Fenwick had transferred within what was now Customs and Border Protection from his seizure custodian job to that of a line inspector. Fenwick was thinking about retirement and figured that the extra money from working overtime as an inspector would build up both his social security and his pension fund. He was old for a line officer's job, but he had been in the system long enough to know to use federal regulations about age discrimination to wangle his way into a second trip to the training academy at the Federal Law Enforcement Center in Glynn County, Georgia. FLETC, for short. Though nobody who knew him thought he'd make it through the academy.

"Fendick is going to FLETC?" His supervisor, Bertha 'BS' Schlugticker, said with a snicker to co-worker Anisette Tsunami-Suzuki, using the name 'Fendick' or the alternate 'Fensick' which just about everyone used about Fenwick behind his back.

"Do you think Fensick could possibly make it through?" Anisette Tsanami-Suzuki said in a doubtful voice.

"The Pope will play center field for the Boston Red Sox before you'll see Fendick make it through the inspector school," Big Bertha said, her snicker snickering into a smart assed grin.

_"The Pope plays baseball?"_ Replied an amazed Anisette, who, though congenial company and a snappy dresser, wasn't the ripest apple in the bin.

Fenwick proved them all wrong. He didn't make it by much. But he did make it and had just flown back to Arizona that week. He was to begin work the next Monday. At Nogales. As a CPB officer. The next time Elvis would see him Fenwick would be wearing a CBP uniform. And it wouldn't be long. The following Monday Elvis saw a vaguely familiar guy walking towards him at the Grand Avenue Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales. A strange lumpy late middle aged guy with very white skin and wearing white socks and a dark colored CBP uniform so new he seemed to glitter in the sunlight. Which brought into Elvis' mind an image of a mentally challenged zebra carrying a holstered pistol and wearing sunglasses. The gun toting zebra walked up to Elvis and held out his hand.

"Hi," he said, adding what was about as obvious as an adult sperm whale requiring more maneuvering room than was available in even an Olympic sized swimming pool. "I'm new here."

Suddenly Elvis remembered where he's seen the guy before.

He then completely befuddled Fenwick by raising his arms, balling his fists, face turned upwards to the heavens, and hissing in a not very soft voice.

"This is not funny, Big Guy!"

Then things got even unfunnier. Lisbeth Og, a Nogales CBP student intern doing desk duty that morning, called Elvis on his personal radio.

"Officer Elvis," she began. Trainee Og called him Officer Elvis because Mahoney sounded way too much like baloney and she didn't want do a verbal slip up and inadvertently call Elvis Officer Baloney. Which she knew to be definitely a no-no in her current provisional student trainee status. If she did land the job and got her permanent civil service status, then she could blast whatever asshole stoked her up. But until then she held her tongue in check. Though the tongue did have something of a mind of its own. "Your bosth wanths you to call him at theth Tucson office," she said in her moderately lisping voice--which had instantly earned her the nickname of Lisping Liz.

Elvis was at first intrigued. Maybe some cool new assignment was on the ET horizon for him and Pancho. Or maybe it was just routine, like the arrival of the crotch and groin body armor they had ordered. He went inside and hit the numbers on the office phone to call his boss, Manfred 'Manny' Kuribachi, at the Tucson CBP office.

"What's up, boss?" Elvis said in an expectant voice.

"El," Manny said. "You and Pancho grab a G ride and come on up to the Tucson office." Something in the tone of his voice didn't quite seem right to Elvis. "There's something I need to discuss with y'all," Manny said. Elvis' eyes narrowed. Manny was from Oahu and only used southernisms when he thought he needed to sound gracious and non-threatening. Which was about as effective as putting a leash on a Komodo dragon. "Something really important," Manny added. ''Y'all come on up right away." The second y'all iced it. This was not good. Not good at all. Elvis and Pancho made the hour drive to Tucson with no little uneasiness. Elvis had no idea what was up. But he get a bad case of nerves that settled in his stomach. His glib lip, however, remained unaffected by his alimentary grumblings.

"Is that you rumbling?" Pancho said as they drove towards Tucson. "Don't tell me you got Montezuma's revenge again, El. Did you order a burrito from Pablo's Ptomaine Palace on the Mexican side again?"

"Nah," Elvis replied. "I had my usual breakfast of mangoes and Gatorade." Pancho shot Elvis a dubious look.

"You serious?" Pancho said. "Mangoes and Gatorade?"

"Yep," Elvis answered. "Mangoes for Vitamin C and various trace metals to keep my tendons supple and responsive should there be a sudden need for law enforcement immediate action. Gatorade to replace any electrolytes I might lose during the course of a long and arduous work day." Pancho's expression turned into amusement.

"You just can't help being a wise ass, can you, Elvis?" Which was not an altogether critical remark, Pancho himself no way lacking in the wise ass complement in his own multi-faceted personality. Which was one part prankish, two parts cop-like and many parts just plain horny. Pancho and his brother Pepe had once snuck up on Padre Eusebio Manriquez, who suffered from narcolepsy and was wont to fall asleep just about anywhere in their ejido, Siempre Pobre. Certain that the Padre was fast asleep, Pancho and Pepe proceeded to superglue the Padre's sandals--the Padre's feet still fastened firmly in the sandals--to the tile floor of the parsonage where he'd taken his lunch and fallen asleep. Then they snuck back outside and banged loudly on the parsonage window, yelling "Fuego! Fuego!" (Fire! Fire!) The result of what then consequently happened caused a 50/50 split in the ejido. One half of the ejido thought it was absolutely hilarious, Padre Eusebio not very popular for his regular fire and brimstone excoriations of his parishioners during confession. "You did _wh_ at? With _who_? You're going straight to _hell._ Not even purgatory. No stops in between. _Straight_ to hell." So Pancho and Pepe had plenty of supporters.

The other half, consisting largely of a few who were hardcore religious borderline nutcases but mostly just those whose auditory faculties were left behind with a bunch of other--often lamented--bodily components in their long gone youth and were therefore unaware of the blistering excoriations in the confessional booth, were all for burning Pancho and Pepe at the stake. And using green wood, which would burn slowly and make the Pancho/Pepe roast that much more entertaining. The stake burning half of the ejido, having both more enthusiasm and more lethal weapons than the non-stake burning half, won the day. Pancho and Pepe forthwith made the not very difficult decision to hotfoot it north for a new life in fabled Gringolandia

"Smart ass side?" Elvis replied to Pancho. "Can't help it. Must be genetic," he said with his own touch of a chuckle.

"One of these days it's going to bite you in the genetic ass, Elvis," Pancho said, still with a chuckle. "Take my word for it, you red headed beanpole. Retribution is on its way." A smile creased the edges of his mouth. "And a well deserved retribution, at that." Both Elvis and Pancho thought he was joking.

But the uneasy feeling in the pit of Elvis' stomach was still there.

They pulled up to the CBP building in Tucson and parked the government 'G' ride in the employee parking lot. A typical southern Arizona parking lot where during a summer day an otherwise normal car, be it of domestic or foreign manufacture, could turn into an industrial strength oven by mid-afternoon. Somewhat to Elvis and Pancho's surprise, their aging Ford G ride made it all the way from Nogales to Tucson without overheating even once. What with budget cuts and sequestrations and other federal employee witch hunts, the G ride pool was getting increasingly clattery and unreliable. Which was one reason why they never took a G ride anywhere without making sure they also had a functioning radio and/or cell phone. Breaking down on the freeway was never a good idea.

For more than one reason.

"Better put on your bullet proof vest," Officer Deet Mukl said to fellow officer Carla Hemetrious. The G ride Ford they were in at that moment making mysterious noises that registered way up on the Not Good Scale.

"The Ford breaking down yet _again_?" Carla said as she reached into the back seat to grab her vest.

"Yep," Officer Mukl replied sourly as he prepared to grab his own vest after the Ford slid into an inert non-functioning chunk of metal by the side of the freeway. "It's open season." And he wasn't talking about the deer hunting season.

Passing motorists with negative border experiences in their recent memory--of which, according to the not always objective Borderlands Chamber of Commerce, there were a rock bottom minimum of six thousand in the greater Nogales area alone--would take one look at the CBP uniforms of the officers in the broken down government clunker standing outside scratching their heads or other parts of their anatomy and try to mow them down with their cars, pickups and, in at least one case, a Honda Cruiser motorcycle. The locals called it border bowling with the CBP officers fulfilling the involuntary role of being the bowling pins. The border bowlers prudently aimed for near misses, jail time not being resident in their bucket lists, but there were the occasional drunk, tweaker, severely myopic and occasionally legally blind driver or vengeful hothead that came way too close and now and then clipped an unwary officer not quick enough to dive off the freeway shoulder. And those that did make the successful dive off the freeway shoulder all too often got up close and personal with the ubiquitous assassin of the desert.

Cactus.

After one such way too close call and way too intimate encounter with a satanic cholla cactus of the variety that some perverted son of a bitch naturalist had named the Teddy Bear Cactus, Elvis had an idea.

"Hey, Pancho," he began to his ET buddy. "I got an idea." Pancho groaned.

"I could have been a minister," he said. "Instead I'm stuck with you."

"You detest ministers, Pancho. With a passion." Pancho shot a hot glance at Elvis.

"Exactly my point," Pancho said. Then, groaning again, in a resigned tone. "You're still gonna tell me your idea, aren't you?"

"Grenade launchers," Elvis responded. Pancho was often left mentally wandering on the enigmatic Plain of Elvis, which Pancho thought had to be similar to the shadowy landscape on the far side of the moon.

"Grenade launchers?" Pancho said in a marginally despondent voice. Then, hopefully. "You're gonna reenlist! Hey. Good for you. You can Skype me from whatever God forsaken place they send you this time."

"No, no, no! I couldn't leave you Pancho. You know that." Yes, Pancho was thinking, he did know that. He had long ago resigned himself to his very own personal Dark Web Trifecta. Death. Taxes. And Elvis. Or so he liked to tell Elvis. Usually while in the company of a rapidly emptying bottle of Jose Cuervo.

"Listen, man," Elvis continued. "You know how the locals like to play bocce ball with us on the freeway when our G ride is broken down?"

"What the hell is bocce ball?" Pancho snapped back, then smirked. "Anything like bed ball?"

"Mock on, Pancho," Elvis snarked. "But gimme a listen here. You know how the locals think it's great fun to buzz us on the side of the freeway and send us diving for cover."

_"Cactus!"_ Pancho snarled, having had a similar experience with the roadside assassin, Mr. so-called Teddy Bear cactus. "Right with you so far, Elvis."

"That's where the grenade launcher comes in. We both know how to use them. Most of the vets do. We could use them to warn people without hurting anyone. Use non-lethal rounds. Kind of like flash bangs. A sure cure to their nasty habit of their border bowling with us as the bowling pins." A pause. "It oughta only take a few rounds for the word to get around and the freeway bowlers to find other avenues of local entertainment." Pancho had to agree. Without a doubt that would be absolutely effective in stopping the freeway bowlers. But......

"You'd get permission to drop a smart bomb down Vladmir Putin's shorts before they'd let you carry a grenade launcher, Elvis. You goddamn well know that!"

Yes. Elvis did know that. But didn't a guy have a right to his dreams and fantasies? He knew that, like it or not, he was resigned to being a target of the border bowlers until such time as Congress dropped some bucks on CBP to get some decent G rides. And, given the mood in congress where stalemate succinctly described the current Congress and they had refined the concept of Mexican Standoff to a consummate black art, it looked like the freeway sport of border bowling would go on for the foreseeable future.

Elvis and Pancho left their G ride Ford, which had miraculously made it from Nogales to Tucson without breaking down or even overheating once in the lethal solar blasts of the Arizona summer. They walked towards the CBP headquarters building and as they walked their pace slowed and their demeanor shaded into the hesitant. Ahead lay the dreaded domain of the ODs. The Office Dwellers, which was actually a euphemism for Office Dickheads. (The female OD's having lieu Dicks in Elvis' somewhat skewed world view.) A frequently used alternate to OD was OF. Office Folk. Another euphemism for Office Fucks.

Elvis and Pancho opened the door into the Tucson CBP building and stepped into an alternate universe. Like boots-on-the-ground troops everywhere, they had an ingrained suspicion of the office dwellers. What dumb ass operation were they gonna dream up next in their air conditioned offices between lengthy coffee and/or lunch breaks? Not a soiled spot resided on the pristine civilian clothes and uniforms of the office dwellers, whereas a border officer on the job after a few hours often looked like a diesel mechanic in the middle of a major engine overhaul in a mud pit. And the office dwellers, who, truth be told, were not all the dweebs and troublemakers the line officers considered them to be, were similarly suspicious of the border troops. What dumb ass move were they gonna pull that had a congresswoman or a Washington big shot hot on their hairy asses looking for an explanation or, even better, someone to blame and consequently crucify in a public verbal pillorying that would send the media into an orgiastic frenzy of piling on that would fill the gaps between big time scandals and catastrophic natural disasters like earthquakes obliterating entire towns and generating tsunamis that engulfed even more towns. Which was why CYA was a major element of any border officer's survival kit. CYA standing for Cover Your Ass because the office dwelling drip weeds sure wouldn't be jumping in to defend them. At least that's the way they perceived it.

And the fact was that, peering through the impartial lens of objectivity, maybe they weren't so wrong in their perceptions.

Elvis and Pancho ignored the condescending and saccharinely sympathetic looks of the nattily dressed OD/OF's and made their way to ET Supervisor Manfred Kuribachi's office. The ET secretary, Florida 'Bubble Gum' Nascowitz, resided regally in her recently acquired genuine imitation leather desk chair that was adjusted by local feminist upholstery firm Delphic Oracle and Daughters to a maximum comfort level specific to the contours of Florida's body. Though notoriously penurious with any spending in the ET budget, even up to the point of half-seriously suggesting the border officers consider recycling toilet paper to save money, she did manage to justify paying Delphic Oracle and Daughters out of the ET employee health and welfare fund. Her days, Florida never failed to mention, were long and stressful and she needed all the help, human and otherwise, she could get to keep her alert and ready to efficiently handle whatever ET emergency might arise.

"Got another new chair?" Elvis said as he and Pancho walked into the ET office. "How many does that make? Every time we come up here you have a new chair."

"And how about the batteries for our radios we ordered last year. Come in yet?" Pancho chimed in with a not altogether good natured tone.

"There is nothing like a painfully aching back to diminish one's effectiveness in a high profile job such as mine," she replied to the ET pair. "Something you clods mucking about down there on the border have absolutely no clue about."

"Mucking about?" Pancho and Elvis said in unison. "What does that mean?" Florida, who had the previous month grabbed a bare bones budget four day trip to London, had managed, despite the brevity of her trip, to acquire a vaguely English accent and penchant for throwing out British slang. Some of which she actually understood.

"Tossers," she said. "You two are a pair of bloody tossers." Knowing there was not much point in further discussions with Florida once she was off into one of her not infrequent excursions beyond the borders of everyday CBP reality, Elvis and Pancho decided they'd best just bypass the faux recent English immigrant at the desk with the cool chair and go in to see the boss. Besides, penurious and often arcane as she was, Florida really wasn't a bad sort. You just had to allow her some latitude. Though often you had no clue what latitude she was in at the moment. The steamy tropics of the menses being by far the most tempestuous.

"Manny called us to come up and see him," Elvis said. Florida nodded knowingly, as though she was in on some kind of secret. Elvis looked more closely at her. She _did_ have some kind of secret. Her eyes were hooded, her lips clamped shut and her expression bordering on an accusatory glower. Pancho picked it up, too. "Go on in," she said. Adding in an ominous tone. "He is _expecting_ you." Every speck of puckishness drained out of Elvis' and Pancho's faces as they walked towards Supervisor Kuribachi's door. Made even worse by Florida's final comment.

"Good luck, boys," she said, pounding the penultimate nail into their anticipatory coffin.

"You're gonna need it."

They knocked. A voice called out from within the Great Unknown before them.

"Come on in." And, again, ominously. "I've been _expectin_ g you." They went in with the definite lack of enthusiasm frequently noted during the Spanish Inquisition of those next in line approaching the Rack. At first there was nothing to put them further on edge. The office hadn't changed much. Manny wasn't the ostentatious type. The furnishings were government Cold War Soviet style bare bones. Metal desk. Inexpensive clunky chairs. On his desk were photos of his wife and three kids, along with the usual office accoutrements. Dell computer--a laptop to save space, although still hard wired. A land line and a mobile. Inbox and outbox trays, the government, despite the electronic age, still generating lots of paper. A well used coffee cup. Stacks of documents. The walls were a different story. Manny was an officer in a National Guard MP unit and had four tours of various lengths to Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The walls of his office were covered with photos from those tours, though he had, upon the request of his prissy bosses, removed the more graphic ones.

"Photos of dead people and blown up houses and vehicles are not convenient backdrops for productive sessions in your office, Manfred," were the exact words of Assistant Arizona Director Xanthippe Beauregard. Xanthippe, who was named after her mother over her father's strangely intense opposition, was herself not a combat veteran. Nor any kind of veteran. Though she had once tried to break the 'Neanderthaloid sexism' of the Boy Scouts by attempting to join the previously all boys club. And successfully. Or so she thought. Xanthippe, who as a tween was as skinny as a cattail, as well as looking like one with her puff of mousy brown hair, was not at all amused when she found out they had accepted her only because they thought she was a boy. Which misperception happened to her far more than she would have liked and didn't do much to moderate her frequently dyspeptic personality.

Muscular and fit, with close cropped hair and a ruddy outdoor complexion from his penchant for outdoor sports and physical activities, Manny sat behind his desk with an impassive expression. Which was not at all like him, Manny an expressive faced kind of guy to go with his perpetually churning mind. This only further served to roil Elvis and Pancho's anticipatory innards.

"Boys," Manny Kuribachi started out in a very uncharacteristically mellow tone, "I got some news for you." Elvis immediately was suspicious. Manny talking sweet and mellow? This was gonna turn out bad.

"Guys," Manny continued, "we need you to take some time off from the ET for a special assignment. Both of you." This was sounding a little better, but Elvis was still suspicious. And Pancho, who had an intuitive side that had landed him more than one narcotics seizure, and also allowed for the occasional narrow escape when a cuckolded husband came home early, was more than just a little suspicious.

"What _exactly_ is this special assignment?"

"We need you to take a couple of newbies on as their FTO's."

"What? You want us to be field training officers? For new hires just out of the Academy? That's not an ET function at all. We find dope. We're not trainers." Elvis said in an incredulous voice. "What dark closet did that idea come out of?"

"Gerardo Núñez, the Arizona Director of CBP Operations, Manny said. "That dark closet." All expectations of a positive outcome immediately vanished from Elvis and Pancho's mind with the quickness of a western diamondback rattlesnake stepped on by a woozy Lithuanian tourist who'd just stumbled out of a Nogales cantina.

"We're screwed," Elvis said under his breath. A sentiment mentally seconded by a pasty faced Pancho. The Director was as hot as one of his brother Celso's welding torches to burn their CBP uniformed asses since they busted his son with a pound and a half of weed at the Lukeville Port of Entry southwest of Tucson a little over three months ago. The memories came racing back into their brains quicker than the radar gun of an Arizona highway patrolman with a bad case of hemorrhoids.

"Do you know who I _am_?" The kid said to Elvis after Elvis found the weed underneath the kid's front seat. "Or _whose_ car this is?" The fervency of the kid's protestations made Elvis think he'd better check. They didn't want to be blind sided by something that could fry their butts but good. Sure enough. The kid did have some juice. The car? It was the Director's car. And the kid? Yep. He was the Director's kid. The kid called his dad. His dad called Elvis. "Just let it slide," the Director said. "He's not a bad kid. Just a little on the naive side. Immature. Somebody must have left the weed in the car when my son was partying on the Gulf at our place at Rocky Point." A pause, for effect in the Director's official mind, but actually for intimidation in his real unofficial mind. "He told me he had no idea it was in the car." Sure, Elvis was thinking. And cows roost in chestnut trees and George Washington was the inventor of the electric garage door opener.

"I trust I can rely on you in this matter, Officer Mulrooney," the Director said. "We all know you to be one of our very best officers." That did it. Officer Mulrooney? No more equivocation.

"You can rely on me to do the _right_ thing," Elvis answered into the phone. "Absolutely."

"Good," the Director answered. "We will be certain to acknowledge your contributions."

Even then Elvis knew that there was a flip and very negative side to this that would clearly acknowledge the contribution he was about to make. A few quick words with Pancho and it was agreed. They busted the Director's acne faced son and watched with veiled expressions as the hubris drained out of the kid's face like coolant out of a busted radiator. Pancho's youngest brother Mercato had once been prosecuted at the Director's insistence for being caught with a mere fifty grams of weed at the San Luis Port of Entry. A minor offense that nevertheless ended up causing him to be deported. Pancho took no little pleasure in shutting the cell door with the ashen face of the Director's son staring blankly at him.

"How you likin' them apples, Señor Director?" He muttered to himself.

They later heard just what the Director thought about 'them apples.' Everyone in the entire CBP building in Tucson and half of the office building next door, where six illegal Russian immigrants ran credit card scams from the Chicken Kiev Importations Inc. office suite just opposite the Director's window, could hear the Director yelling when he got the news Elvis and Pancho had busted his son. Very few heard the words that followed the initial yelling, though a good many could have guessed at what the livid Director angrily hissed.

"I'll get those two ET fuckheads for this! _They're dead meat!"_

Manny Kuribachi was another one of those bosses the line officers called a stand up guy. He was not easily intimidated. The Director, whose favorite flicks were the Godfather and Terminator movies and who privately was a firm believer in the Biblical Eye for an Eye justice system, started putting pressure on him to punish Elvis and Pancho in some way. Manny did manage to keep the mess out of the media and was therefore able to work a deal with the Director. He'd find some way to cool their heels in a way they'd know they were being disciplined but without leaving any kind of paper or electronic trail to show it. Which was why the ET pair were in Manny's office at that moment. Skinny Elvis sitting next to Pancho's mesomorphic weightlifter's body made for an incongruous looking pair. Except for their faces. Which were identical in a bloodless pallor usually reserved for the slabbed supine residents of the county morgue.

"Look," Manny said to them frankly. "We all know what this is really all about. This is the best deal I could make for you guys. The Director wanted you fired. He knew he couldn't get away with that so he pushed me to kick you out of the ET and have you transferred to some godforsaken place like Frozen Balls, North Dakota. I managed to save you for the ET, but had to do something." He reached down to his desk and picked up a pair of files.

"And this is it. Your new trainees." He handed one file to Elvis, the other to Pancho. At first Pancho's eyes lit up. His aroused gonads not far behind. A woman! They were giving him a female trainee. Then he opened the file and saw her picture.

"My God!" Pancho blurted out. "It's Tyrannosaurus Rex's kid sister."

Elvis was just opening his file. He didn't know the name. But then he saw the face. A face he knew. Elvis' complexion took on the pallor of commercial grade bleached flour. Things couldn't be any worse. The Big Guy and the Director were in collusion. The face?

It was Fenwick Bentthruster.

The Director had arranged for the two most unlikely candidates he could find in CBP to be the trainees under the tutelage of Elvis and Pancho. And they had to successfully pass their training period or Elvis and Pancho would indeed find themselves in someplace like Moose Turd, Montana. The Director even wanted to have the training sessions secretly taped for him to enjoy in the privacy of his home office, probably in company with his vengeful--and usually stoned--acned son, but Manny balked.

"Too much," Manny said to the Director. "That's taking it too far."

"How about that transfer back to your home in Oahu to be near your aging parents? That work for you?" The Director said.

"Still too far, Chief," Manny replied. "I can't condone secret illegal taping of my men."

"It is not illegal, " the Director snapped back. Only quasi-legal."

"Still can't do it Chief," Manny said in an even, but firm, tone.

"How about a mandatory transfer to Igloo Bay, Alaska, where you can oversee the importation of Russian whitefish and enjoy the three week summer where the world's largest mosquitoes feast on everything in sight? That work for you, Manny?"

"How about the phone number of that Arizona Daily Star reporter investigating government corruption?" A pause, for effect. An effect immediately reflected in the Director's eyebrows raised to maximum extension and a sudden spike in his already high blood pressure. "Which includes nepotism." Manny then added without need to specifically mention how the Director had used his influence to have the charges against his son dropped. "That work for you, Chief?"

So it was a standoff. Elvis and Pancho didn't have to go to Permafrost, Alaska or Manny to Last Gasp, Idaho. But Elvis and Pancho still had to take the two most unlikely employees in the last tens years in CBP and make them pass their field training regimen. It was either that or off to the CBP boondocks. Permanently. It was the best deal Manny could make, considering that the Director was past minimum retirement age and could retire with full pension should the media get wind of the mess with his kid and consequently pounce on it in as their weekly media feeding frenzy. And a sudden retirement wouldn't be all bad, the Director long having had the desire for a lengthy revisit to SE Asia where many years earlier he was a young airman at Tan Son Nhut air base outside Saigon. He was ground crew and didn't see any combat. But he did manage to survive Saigon's lethal traffic. Plus getting the clap three, possibly four, times.

And he couldn't help wondering if that pregnant bar girl back then was really carrying his child when he rotated back to the States.

Stunned, chastened, shocked and downright really, really pissed off, Elvis and Pancho accepted Manny's suggestion and took the day off. They took the G ride back to Nogales and returned to their homes in Tucson. Elvis picked Pancho up and by late afternoon they were in their favorite hangout, Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub, over by Tucson's sprawling Reid Park. Elvis was no longer a drinking man. At least temporarily. In fact he may or may not have had a drinking problem. Something he wasn't sure about himself. But he had enough doubt to somewhat reluctantly embark on an abstemious life sans booze. Irregularly practiced, maybe, this being the fourth such no-booze excursion, but at least that was the intent. This Director directed morass, however, darn near had him back with a shot of tequila in one hand and a slice of lemon in the other with a salt shaker nearby ready for duty. It was close. Abstemious won. But not by much. Instead he ordered an O'Doul's non-alcoholic beer while Pancho had a Guinness dark ale and they ruminated over the vagaries of fate as exercised by the Director, who they now referred to with heated verbal vigor as Little Hitler, Adolph Jr. or just Little Adolph. They didn't say much for a while. Then Pancho suddenly jerked his head towards Elvis and hissed out in a low whisper.

"Let's firebomb the motherfucker's house." Elvis actually had to pause to mull over the idea. He finally answered.

"Not good. He's got a family. And his wife is OK. Danced with her at the annual Christmas party. She hit on me, too. Twice. Which means she obviously is a woman of some discernment and therefore deserves to live." Pancho was not distracted. His eyes narrowed.

"How about his car? When he's alone?" Elvis again had to ponder the thought for a while before answering.

"Pancho," he began with a stern tone. "We are federal law enforcement officers. Sworn to defend and uphold the law. And you want to firebomb Little Adolph's car and possibly endanger innocent bystanders?" He leaned closer to Pancho and dropped his own voice to a barely audible whisper.

"What do you know about poisons?"

### Chapter 5

### The Trainees

The next day Elvis and Pancho were at the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry at Nogales. The place was named after a former Arizona U.S. Senator who had offered a friendly ear to the needs of border law enforcement. They were about to go inside and climb the stairs onto the second story of the Admin building that straddled the car lanes. A sight that looked to Elvis' somewhat tilted perception like a dystopian monolith spewing out a non-stop string of potentially lethal carbon belching motorized vehicles. He stopped to look.

"Do you think that Cristobal Colombo would have envisioned this back in 1492?" Pancho threw a provisional pre-sour look at Elvis.

"What? What the fuck are you talking about now?"

"Never mind," Elvis said, turning towards the door. He reached over to tap Pancho's arm.

"Brave it up, Pancho. Time to go face the firing squad."

They climbed the stairs and went to the meeting room where they were to begin their stints as Field Training Officers. Elvis with Fenwick Bentthruster. Pancho with Suzette 'Salty Suzy' Jaworski. Fenwick was already in the room waiting. Salty Suzy was nowhere in sight.

"Hi, again." Fenwick said, reaching out to shake Elvis' hand. "I'm here and ready to blast off." Elvis took Fenwick's lily white pudgy hand that was devoid of any signs of calluses--with the exception of the tips of his fingers where he held his darts during his daily practice sessions. Elvis managed to suppress the groan that battled mightily to escape his pursed lips.

"I am Senior Inspector Elvis T. Mahoney, Elvis said through those pursed lips. "And I am your FTO. Your Field Training Officer. He glanced over at Pancho. "My colleague Francisco Soltero will be working with the other trainee." He glanced over at Pancho. "Who is?"

"Suzette Jaworski," Pancho replied.

"Sounds Polish," Fenwick said.

"Ya think?" Pancho shot back, being as he was still more than a little steamed about being pulled off the ET to be an FTO for what was sure to be a problem child. "And," Pancho added. "Speaking of Suzette Jaworski. Have you seen her this morning? She off in the head or in the break room?" Pancho looked at his watch. "It's after 8:00 and we're supposed to start at 8:00." Fenwick shook his head negatively.

"Haven't seen her, sir." Elvis looked at Pancho, then back at Fenwick.

"Well, I'm going to go ahead and start with Mr. Bentthruster here."

"You can call me Fenwick," Fenwick chimed in with a hopeful tone, hoping to smooth over any rough edges there might be with his brand new FTO. "My friends all call me Fenwick." That was an exaggeration of considerable magnitude, considering that he had few acquaintances and no close friends, and that his former coworkers always referred to him--albeit not usually to his face--as Fensick or Fendick.

"OK," Elvis replied, not wishing to prolong the agony. "Fenwick it is. And you can call me Elvis."

"Oh, I love that name!" Fenwick blurted out. I am a big fan of Elvis Presley's music. Are you named after him?" Elvis gritted his teeth, this being possibly the one thousandth time someone had asked him that question.

"No," he said with only a faint trace of a snarl. "I'm named after my great-great uncle Elvis Zebediah Mahoney, a bear of a man who could eat more sausage links at one sitting than any man in all of Slippery Sister County and well beyond." This had the immediate effect of shutting up Fenwick Bentthruster, who had no clue how to respond to a comment like that. Which was just fine with Elvis, who was not about to explain that he actually had been named after his great-great uncle, Elvis Zebediah Mahoney, who in turn had been named after his own 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 admittedly illegal (thanks to the freakin feds) moonshining sport. Though the sausage link thing was a last minute Elvis creative embellishment. Great-great Unc was actually locally (in)famous for slamming down Herculean quantities of home brew.

Elvis took Fenwick over to a table and begin to explain to him the outlines of his six week FTO training period, Elvis having studied the FTO training manual the night before for a full twenty minutes during halftime on Monday Night Football. He was already into limning the third week when a figure arrived at the door. Or, more descriptively, loomed in the door with the abruptness of a rogue wave in the Caribbean. Everyone gulped and stopped to look. It was a giant of a woman. An easy stocking-footed six footer. With the build of a Miami Dolphins linebacker. And a face that Elvis immediately thought was what a female Sasquatch would look like. It was Suzette 'Salty Suzy' Jaworski.

"Which one of you male chauvinists is Poucho Solo?" She said in a bass voice capable of reaching the farthest broom closet in the Metropolitan Opera building without benefit of amplification. Pancho took a long look at her and then immediately began to privately mull the possibilities of a career change. And quick. After a moment he stepped forward. Not with enthusiasm. Not even the tiniest scintilla of enthusiasm. But he braved up, as Elvis put it, and stepped forward to face the virtual firing squad. A one woman firing squad as it was, but nevertheless an undeniably imposing one.

"I am _Francisco Soltero_ ," Pancho said in a strictly controlled voice, his facial muscles twitching with the effort to not start yelling. "I am your FTO. And the nickname is Pancho, n...n...no......," Pancho couldn't stop his lips from hurling out the word with the emotive force of a small to medium sized hurricane, "....NOT POUCHO!"

"Pancho. Poucho. No difference. You're still just a male chauvinist out to fuck me over." Pancho was thinking even King Kong would have a hard time fucking you over, Supersized Woman. But he didn't. He'd just had one of those brilliant flashes of insight that only rarely come to a person.

"Then I am certain it is best for both of us that you request another FTO." And, with finality. "Go to the office and request another FTO." Then, with a look of absolutely genuine pleasured relief. "Goodbye."

Salty Suzy did an abrupt and very precise about face, being a former military policewoman who'd done two tours in Iraq and a TDY to Afghanistan and thoroughly intimidated the local male chauvinists, winning her the unqualified admiration of the downtrodden local women, most of whom cried when she left to go back to the U.S. One feminine eye on the departing Salty Suzy and the other nervously watching the retribution minded local male chauvinists.

Within five minutes she was back.

"You're it, buster," she said to Pancho. Pancho's shoulders visibly drooped. "The office says you're my FTO and that's that." She eyeballed Pancho. "So let's get on it with it. Time's a wasting, Pouch....er.....a....Poncho." Pancho clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles turned as white as his underwear--at least when he first got dressed that morning.

Elvis was having mixed thoughts. Pancho was a notorious womanizer for whom the line between flirting and sexual harassment was at times faint to the point of invisibility. And if the line failed to fade into invisibility, he'd try to find a way to erase it.

It was a few months ago. At the apogee of the yes/no cycle when Elvis didn't think he had a drinking problem. They were at Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub. Elvis was pretty well looped on his favorite drink. Tequila with a tequila chaser. If anything, Pancho was even farther into the loop than Elvis. Suddenly Elvis had a thought.

"Pancho, ol' bud," he slurred. "If there were anything in your life you could change, what would it be?" Pancho stared back at Elvis with thoughtful, if somewhat blurry, eyes.  
"Hm. Change? What would I change?" Suddenly his face lit up, thereby matching the rest of his lit up stage of alcohol being. "Got it, El ol' pal. The one thing I would change." Elvis leaned expectantly towards Pancho, his sensory organs deadened by the tequila to the point where he couldn't smell the onions and garlic flavored hard boiled eggs on Pancho' breath that otherwise might have knocked him smack off the barstool.

"My dick," Pancho said. Elvis blinked.

"You would change your dick?" He blurted, surprised. "Not big enough?" This comment, taken the wrong way by Pancho, could well have resulted in an immediate fight to the death. He, however, had something far different on his mind.

"No, man. Not that. What I would change is the number."

"The _number_?" Elvis said, now completely fuddled.

"Right," Pancho answered. "The number. I wish I had two dicks." A pause while he slapped Elvis' shoulder hard enough to cause Elvis' entire neck column to vibrate and send immediate neural messages of complaint to Elvis' central circuit board. "My secret dream is to take on the Garcia twins at the same time."

To which Elvis had absolutely one hundred percent for sure nothing further to say.

Pancho sometimes embarrassed Elvis, who was only a male chauvinist in the overall general cultural sense, having been raised in a family of strong willed women who carried bigger sticks than Teddy Roosevelt ever dreamed of. But Pancho was his partner, and a damn good dope man, and one part of him commiserated with his rotten luck at getting stuck with Salty Suzy. But another part of him thought that Pancho was getting what he deserved.

Elvis stepped forward and held out his hand to Suzette. "Greetings and welcome to Nogales CBP. I am Senior Inspector Elvis T. Mahoney and a long time feminist fellow traveler, coming as I do from downtrodden country people of both genders." Salty Suzy didn't take his hand.

"Ain't gonna work, buddy. That's just bullshit." She bent her considerable bulk forward and spit out the words. "Get this straight, Elvis the Pelvis, you ain't gonna fuck with me either." At that exact moment Elvis' thoughts revisited the conversations about firebombing and poisonings he had with Pancho the night before. He turned to look at Pancho.

"Maybe Alaska wouldn't be so bad, Pancho. You know. The Aurora Borealis. No need for refrigerators or freezers. Stuff like that." He returned his attention to Salty Suzy. His eyes reflected what was about to happen. The gloves were off.

"Listen, big mouth, we didn't survive Iraq to be belittled by a goddamn foul mouthed trainee. They can take their goddamn job and shove it before we'll put up with any more of your crap."

"Damn right!" Pancho said, jumping in. "You can go straight to big mouth hell."

Salty Suzy's reaction caught them all completely by surprise.

_"You're Iraq War vets, too?"_ She said, her hostile expression changed quicker than the sea around the notoriously fickle North Atlantic waters off the Isle of Sky. In a blue-eyed twinkling going from an angry roiling steel gray to placid cobalt blue. "That makes things a whole lot different." She reached over and clapped each of them on the shoulder. And a very, very sturdily delivered clap, at that.

"What was your unit? Where were you? Did you know that....."

Pancho and Elvis were suddenly thinking that this wasn't going to be such an ordeal after all.

And then they heard a small voice coming from Fenwick Bentthruster.

"I was in Viet Nam," he said almost timidly. First Cav. Purple Heart. CIB."

All three of the others turned to look in utter astonishment at who they had moments earlier considered to be a nondescript lump of a superannuated trainee. A rabbit in the domain of hawks--or at least chicken hawks.

Each of them, in turn, walked over and solemnly shook his hand. The hand of a fellow combat veteran. Fenwick was thunderstruck. He had a uncommon moment of feeling good about himself. And he sure wasn't about to blow the moment and go into the hoary details of his troubled days in Viet Nam. He was sure no hero. But he was in the Army and he was in a combat zone in Viet Nam and he did have a Purple Heart and he did have a CIB and all of that was a quantum jump beyond the exploits of even the most fervent and valiant of the anti-war protesters back in the World. For the first time since his long ago days in Viet Nam that realization seeped into the light of day in his conscious mind. A wide toothy grin split his face. Which, Fenwick after all being Fenwick, put an instant damper on the others' enthusiasm, Fenwick obviously none too fond of dentists and badly in need of the services of a competent orthodontist. Plus the breath coming out of his opened mouth reminded Elvis of the odor when he was driving by the Pima County sewage treatment plant. Fenwick's five favorite foods were powdered garlic, onions, diced garlic, Limburger cheese and fresh garlic cloves. Elvis held his breath and gently grasped Fenwick's shoulder.

"Fenwick," he began, trying not to breathe. "Do us all a big favor. Go across the street to the pharmacy and get yourself some mouthwash. We'll start when you come back." Fenwick was at first taken aback. Was buying Elvis some mouthwash was some kind of weird bribe Elvis wanted? A practical joke, maybe? But then he thought it more likely it was part of some CBP border initiation ritual for newbies. The Mouthwash Initiation. That was probably it, though he was a bit concerned with what exactly they planned to do with the mouthwash. With an unsure shrug he left the room and headed for Ubaldo's Pharmacy where Ubaldo supplemented his income by selling Mexican auto insurance to tourists heading into Mexico. The insurance actually was just about worthless, but almost no one had ever come back to him to complain. The reason was that most tourist accidents in Mexico were settled not by insurance payments but by paying 'processing fees' to the responding police entities. The officers mostly chosen for their beefy imposing presence with their ominous gleaming assault rifles and thereby very effectively short-circuiting even the thought of argument. "No problem, officer. I'm more than happy to pay," in various paraphrases the most frequently used words.

Hardly ten minutes later Fenwick was back. Salty Suzy, Elvis and Pancho were still telling Iraq stories and hardly noticed him come in. Fenwick walked up to Elvis and plunked down the mouthwash.

"Here's your mouthwash, Mr. Elvis," he said. "Though I don't think you really need it. At least not now. You had coffee and a donut for breakfast and they have a pleasant residual odor on your breath." Elvis was momentarily speechless. The fact was that he did have a cop's breakfast, coffee and a donut, that morning.

"What kind of donut?" Pancho interjected, thinking he was being humorous.

"Chocolate," Fenwick said after mulling it a moment. "Not filled. Either a cake donut or maybe a cruller." Both Elvis and Pancho stared dumbly at Fenwick. They'd had breakfast together. And Elvis' was coffee and a chocolate topped cake donut. Finally Elvis spoke, changing the subject since he didn't know how to react to Fenwick's peculiar olfactory abilities.

"The mouthwash. It's for you, Fenwick. Your breath is pretty stinky. People might think you're really dead and are a government zombie, which could cause considerable consternation among the large number of conspiracy theorists who live around here. My maternal grandmother Rattler Sue Mahoney's old outhouse smelled considerably better than your breath. Can't be meeting the traveling public smelling like a honey wagon. Go in the head and do some rinsing. Then come back and we'll get started." Fenwick finally caught on, although he wasn't quite sure what a honey wagon was and didn't grasp how the odor of honey could be any way offensive. He went into the men's restroom just down the hallway, cracked open the top on the mouthwash and stared at his opened mouth in the mirror.

"Fenwick," he said to his mirrored reflection in what was undoubtedly the least disputable statement of the day and possibly the entire week as his breath, complete with odor, bounced off the mirror back at him. "You really could use some mouth work." Then he rinsed out his mouth, once, twice, three times, and put the cap back on the mouthwash. He felt so refreshed that, staring at his refreshed mouth in the mirror, along with the pleasant fruity odor as his breath again rebounded back at him from the mirror, and thinking of his new FTO, Mr. Elvis, he unconsciously launched into the lyrics of one of his favorite Elvis Presley songs, which Fenwick glumly considered somewhat auto-biographical, complete with air guitar riffs.

You ain't nothing but a hound dawg

Cryin' all the time

You ain't never caught a rabbit

And you ain't no friend of mine

At that moment Fenwick, who thought he was alone in the restroom, noticed another face in the mirror. Not his face. A familiar face. Oh-oh. It was Salty Sally.

"Hopefully you weren't directing that at me, officer Fenwick," she said with a smirk. "Although I will admit I haven't caught many rabbits lately." She leaned over and tapped Fenwick on the shoulder.

"By the way, Fenwick, in case you didn't notice." Another tap. Harder.

"This is the _women's_ rest room!"

Despite that unfortunate rest room misstep, from that moment on Fenwick was never without some kind of mouth freshener and invariably smelled of mouthwash of various flavors, wanting as he did to make a positive initial impression on the traveling public. Said mouthwash odor, everyone agreed, was one hell of a welcome change to his former mouth odor that was pretty close to that of the rotting carp on the shores of Bonita Lake--known in the popular vernacular as Lake Stinky--on the California/Arizona border.

They spent the rest of the morning in going over the basics of the job of an inspector on the Mexican border where 'It's hot!' was the generally recognized opener to any conversation. This stood in definite contrast to being an inspector on the northern border where all winter time conversations were punctuated with a teeth chattering 'Jeez, it's co-co-co-cold' and summertime conversations punctuated with a slap and a sputtering "Damn mosquitoes!" Elvis and Pancho tried to synopsize the work day of a border officer for their trainees.

"You work on a lane where cars arrive from Mexico." Elvis began. "Or you work a pedestrian lane. You can break it down into a single idea. Are they doing something illegal? Either trying to smuggle something or not having legitimate documents to cross the border." While that slowly sank into the noggins of Fenwick and Salty Suzy, Pancho chimed in.

"You'll be doing the same thing in the secondary inspection lot. Something made the officer on the lane suspicious, so the officer sent the car and/or person back to secondary, where you'll have more time to dig into things for a closer look." The blank expressions that took residence on the faces of Salty Suzy and Fenwick looked like they weren't about to unblank anytime soon. Further attempts at explanation collided impotently with the same blank wall. The clock had hardly ticked off ten more minutes before Elvis and Pancho knew in the marrow of their possibly-soon-to-be-Alaska bones that this pair of trainees, war veterans or not, were gonna need all the help they could get. Fenwick's voice would prove to be so soft he had to repeat himself at least twice, often three times, to the Mexicans coming through the port. And Suzette was so intimidating that hardly a day would pass without someone at least considering filing a tort claim against the port for the cost of new underwear, trousers or seat covers for Suzette literally scaring the crap out of them.

On the second day Elvis and Fenwick took a regular rotation slot on a car lane at Grand Avenue and Pancho and Suzette went into the secondary inspection lot. Elvis logged onto the border kiosk computer and made sure the license plate reader was working. Or at least functioning, the plate readers notorious for giving inaccurate results and engendering yet another of the infinitum of border circle jerks. On a few occasions an inaccurate reading hit on a plate number linked to some kind of lookout. More than one harmless Mexican going across the border to buy a gallon of milk or hit the sales at the local stores found themselves being eyeballed by border officers with grim expressions and hands on their holsters after the misreading plate reader blitzed out some kind of electronic warning like "Armed and Dangerous." Which did not do a whole lot towards improving cross border relations.

Most of these misidentifications were harmless. Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo, who was a somewhat talented ping pong player but totally untalented as a CBP officer, reacted to the port's computer system erroneously identifying an Armed and Dangerous lookout. Pappagallo, who relied on computerized lookouts for what few enforcement actions he effected, put his hand on his service weapon and charged the offending vehicle. It was a Ford Econoline belonging to the Catholic Church. Inside were three elderly nuns from the Our Sisters of Solitude convent. When Pappagallo, whose prominent Adam's apple stick figure profile conjured up images of Icabod Crane, ran at the van with his hand poised menacingly on the butt of his 9mm Glock, the sisters were at first terrified. For about ten seconds. Until they recognized the comical figure of Pappagallo, who had recently become the number one topic of parochial interest in the local priest and sisterhood when he asked to have his three previous marriages annulled "by reason of temporary insanity."

"I could believe temporary insanity on the part of the women," one of the nuns said.

"And I could also believe grounds for annulment based on the marriages never being consummated," said another nun with no little humor in her voice, "after the women saw him bare naked the way God made him."

"Which goes to show that even God can make the occasional mistake," interjected Sister Bella Magna, known as both the most iconoclastic and outspoken in the Sisterhood and frequently in trouble with the more ossified among the church hierarchy.

All illusions about them being Sisters of Solitude tattered as they couldn't stop slapping their sides and laughing hysterically at Lorenzo's histrionics. Which did, however, make for a great story for the sisters back at the convent, as well as for the barstool dwellers at Dead Shot, the local cop bar. A bar where Lorenzo Pappagallo was locally famous and where he only once made the mistake of going.

But some of these computer misidentifications weren't humorous at all. Melina Gomez-Gomez was so shaken by the officers' surly response to the computer glitch identifying her as Armed and Dangerous that she later miscarried. She sued the government for a million and a half dollars to compensate for her lost child and all the pain and suffering the miscarriage caused her. It wasn't the money, she claimed. It was the principle. Mexicans had to be treated with dignity by the blunt-edged gringos at the border. Which, however, did not take into account the fact that over half of the so-called gringos at the Nogales Port of Entry were Mexican-Americans. For that inconvenient fact the always glib Melina had a glib answer, which she delivered with determined certitude.

"They've been _gringoized."_ Without, however, explaining just what that meant.

"This is correct?" Said CBP Regional Claims Adjudicator Che-Li MacDuff in excellent, if bookish, Spanish. "You are demanding the government pay you a million and a half dollars as compensation for your loss, pain and suffering?" Affirmative nods from across the table.

MacDuff was conducting a preliminary fact finding meeting with Melina Gomez-Gomez in the staff conference room at the Nogales DeConcini Port of Entry. Also present was Gomez-Gomez' attorney, Diego Sprachwitz. MacDuff, a tall and rangy caramel skinned woman, was a mixture of so many different races and ethnicities that her genealogist dancing partner, Dr. Brandon de Caligula, offered to do a free DNA makeup on her as part of his ongoing genetic research. De Caligula, however, was somewhat in disrepute in his profession since he had recently claimed to have discovered that humankind did not originate in sub-Saharan Africa, as was the nearly universal scientific opinion, but in the vicinity of what is now East Orange, New Jersey. MacDuff politely declined his offer of a DNA analysis. De Caligula was a darned good ballroom dancer, she knew for a nimble footed fact, but not such a hot geneticist. He had once publicly stated that genetically Al Sharpton and Vladmir Putin were first cousins, once removed. Which pissed off both Sharpton and Putin and made de Caligula persona non grata in both Moscow and New York.

Anyhow. Back to the conference room with Melina Gomez-Gomez.

"It doesn't seem like much," Melina said, sniffling. "How do you put a monetary amount to the loss of a child?"

"Apparently you just did," said Che-Li "A million and a half bucks."

"Yes. That should do it," replied Melina. "Though it can never bring back my lost child." More sniffling. "It was a girl, you know. That's what the ultrasound found. A little girl. I was going to name her Laura Michelle or Michelle Laura after the last two President's wives in this great country of yours." MacDuff responded.

"So. A million and a half. Are you willing to negotiate?" At this moment Diego Sprachwitz, Melina's attorney and well known in southern Arizona legal circles as among the very fastest of the ambulance chasers, interjected.

"We are not inclined to negotiate," he said in a peculiar deep and hollow resonating voice. The resonance reminding Che-Li of when she was singing arias from La Boheme in the confined space of her shower stall at home. Which she had thought sounded terrific, possibly professional level, until one day she recorded herself in the shower. With and without the shower running. After which she took up the clarinet. (But not in the shower.)

"However, we are willing to listen to your offer," Sprachwitz continued, looking quizzically at Che-Li under bushy eyebrows with so many wiry wild hairs that Che-Li was sorely tempted to grab her tweezers and start plucking. Which, of course, she didn't do. Couldn't do, anyhow. Her tweezers were still at home.

"You would like us to make a counter offer?"

"We're willing to listen."

"How about an agreement not to prosecute?" This sent Diego's bushy eyebrows into a race towards his hairline. He cast a suspicious sideways glance at his client, the still sniffling forlorn mother of a lost child. His eyes narrowed.

"And what _exactly_ does that mean?" Diego said. Che-Li tried to keep her demeanor calm, business-like and professional. Though inside she felt like leaping up and high fiving whoever was within high fiving range. But not chest butting, which, after one very painful and definitely unforgettable experience with an overly enthusiastic chest butting partner, was no longer part of Che-Li's personal celebratory toolbox. Anyhow, the high fiving and related stuff would have to come later, considering the camera above the door was at that moment recording everything in vivid HD color. Che-Li reached over to a folder next to her and opened it with, despite herself, a dramatic flourish.

"These are the findings of our district investigator, Akmed Ben-Gurion." She glanced up to grab eyeball time with first, Diego Sprachwitz, and then, Melina Gomez-Gomez. Her gaze stayed with Gomez-Gomez. "This miscarriage you had, madam, is quite remarkable. In fact, absolutely uniquely remarkable." By this time Diego Sprachwitz was beginning to think that maybe this is one ambulance he shouldn't have chased.

"Our investigator found, Ms Gomez-Gomez, that you had a major medical procedure." Gomez-Gomez shuffled uneasily in her chair.

"A hysterectomy!" Che-Li said in an understated but nevertheless triumphant and sidling towards accusatory tone. "A _complete_ hysterectomy." She leaned towards Gomez-Gomez. "They cleaned you out, lady. You couldn't be pregnant." Che-Li straightened and stared levelly at both Gomez-Gomez and Sprachwitz.

"That was _three_ years ago. You are attempting to defraud the government of the United States of America." Then, with absolute finality....

"It was not medically possible for you to be pregnant!" Diego Sprachwittz was stunned.

But not Madame Glib AKA Melina Gomez-Gomez.

"That's what the doctors told me. But doctors are just human. This was an Act of God," she said, dramatically patting her now allegedly baby-less abdomen. "A Miracle!" Then she leaned forward and hissed at MacDuff. "And your atheistic Communist thugs here at the border killed that miracle. God may forgive you. But I never will!" And with that she jumped up and hurried out of the building and hotfooted across the border into Mexico before anyone could--had they wanted to--stop her. Sighing with one very large sigh of relief when she was out of reach of those goddamn Communist thugs at the border. She, however, was undefeated. Deflated, maybe. But not defeated.

"I'm gonna get rich." She mumbled as she padded off into Old Mexico. .

"There's gotta be a way."

"Guess that's it," Diego Sprachwitz lamely said to Che-Li MacDuff, as he clumsily

got up to leave. "Have a nice day." And with that he was gone quicker than a pickpocket at a Super Dome beer concession.

Within three minutes a sizeable chunk of the staff in the Port's admin office were gathered around the big screen HDTV monitor where Che-Li MacDuff was about to start the recording of the interview just concluded. This being the lunch hour, someone had ordered pizza and sodas and they all settled in to watch the video. As she switched it on, Che-Li-Mo said with a wide grin. "God, I love this stuff!"

"Reality TV meets Saturday Night Live!"

### Chapter 6

### Fenwick At Work (sic)

So. Returning to Elvis and his trainee Fenwick on the border. There were no identify card readers on the primary lanes then, the management focus being on facilitation rather than enforcement. In the typically eloquent words of the CBP Director of Arizona Operations, Gerardo Núñez, to his personal staff assistant and frequent travel companion, Lorelei de Gutsteck:

"No more fucking around with those goddamn card readers. Get rid of the goddamn things."

Lorelei, who had an active imagination, at times bordering on the paranoid, was possibly ADD or maybe just bored shitless. Whatever the reason, she tuned out Gerardo about as much as she tuned in and he was at that moment mostly tuned out. But not totally. Suddenly she grabbed her wandering lert and made it alert again. What did Núñez say? No more fucking around? Did that mean she'd be going on no more cool trips to very important meetings in Las Vegas and Hawaii and Miami as Núñez' "absolutely indispensable" staff assistant? Was he getting rid of her? That was it! The randy old bastard! That new girl in the secretarial pool with the fake tits and those disgusting short skirts. The randy old bastard was dumping her for a younger woman! Lorelei leaped to her feet.

"I have videos!" Lorelei snarked as she wheeled and momentarily teetered on her spike heels, stormed to the door and slammed it so hard behind her that a picture on the wall of Núñez of his wife and four children came loose and fell to the floor, shattering the glass in what Núñez was sure as hell hoping was not some kind of perverse synchronicity about to bite him in his philandering ass.

Meanwhile, standing at a computer terminal just inside the United States in the card readerless border booth, Elvis demonstrated the second of Núñez' "don't fuck around" border one/two punches.

"Now watch," Elvis said to Fenwick. He typed in a name and birth date he knew from a recent narcotics seizure. A guy who'd struck Elvis as being one of the big losers in the genetic lottery. "This guy," Elvis later told Pancho after he'd busted him, "had the smarts of a chunk of creosote." And a name Elvis would not soon forget. Gongo Herrera, 02/29/1976. Up popped Gongo Herrera on the computer screen with a short synopsis of his arrest two weeks earlier.

"See, Fenwick," that is what happens when you take an ID from somebody coming in from Mexico and run it in the computer.

"Pretty cool," Fenwick said, having had plenty of experience with computers as an accountant. And especially as a seizure custodian, where even a small computer mistake could bring the modern day Gestapo of Internal Affairs pounding on the seizure custodian door threatening the alleged miscreant with virtual water boarding.

"Really, cool, Mr. Elvis." Fenwick said again, and with genuine interest. "I'm sure I can make darn good use of this."

"No." Elvis replied. Fenwick stared uncomprehendingly at Elvis.

"No? But...."

"I'm showing you this because this is exactly what the bosses _don't_ want us to do."

"I don't understand, Mr. Elvis," Fenwick said, still confused. "It seems like it would be a handy tool to use in what you and Mr. Pancho call enforcement."

"It is," Elvis answered. Fenwick was even more confused.

"But.....then......why don't they want us to use it?" A sour look came onto Elvis' face.

"Because the name of the game here is facilitation, not enforcement." Fenwick remained confused, which, to be frank, was not unusual with Fenwick.

"What exactly does that mean, Mr. Elvis?"

"It means they don't want the line officers holding up traffic by taking the time to run names in the computer. Facilitation. Move the traffic through. Keep the wait times at the border to a minimum."

"I don't think I understand," Fenwick said uncertainly.

"Welcome to the Mexican border," Elvis said sourly. "A conundrum if ever there was one." To which Fenwick said nothing, not able to grasp how one of the variant pronunciations of condom had any kind of relevance to the Mexican border. Until he finally caught Elvis' meaning when his initial misunderstanding morphed into a more or less accurate understanding via the arcane convolutions of Fenwick's brain. What Elvis meant, in Fenwick's mind was....You're Fucked.

Which at that point in Fenwick's personal life was a largely abstract concept.

And he was still confused.

Elvis couldn't miss the utter bewilderment on Fenwick's face, making Elvis think of the stupefied expression of a skydiver who'd just stepped out of an airplane and suddenly remembered the comfortable cushion he had been sitting on in the airplane, and which he left in the airplane, was actually his parachute. He gave another shot, hopeless as it seemed, to bring at least a hint of understanding to Fenwick's face.

"You've heard of the fog of war?" Elvis said. To which Fenwick outvigored anything he had vigored since winning the dart competition at the Regional Darts and Urban Renewal Festival in Tucson the previous year. Did he know about the fog of war? He'd spent a whole year blundering around in the fog of war and never got out of it until the Eastern Airlines 727 took off from Tan Son Nhut air base and took him back home where the fog at least partially lifted. Or at least was replaced by the fog of peace.

"Well, Fenwick," Elvis continued. "There is the fog of war," he reached over to tap on Fenwick's shoulder for added emphasis. "And there is the fog of the border."

That did bring a glimmer of comprehension to Fenwick's pallid face. A comprehension that there _was_ no comprehension. There was no understanding it. The border world was a riddle with no answer. Fenwick therefore began the typical border transition, morphing into the long term typical border officer mode:

Keep your mouth shut and hang in there until retirement and then get the hell out.

"An identity check takes time, Fenwick," Elvis went on, "and time is what you don't have. You only have a handful of seconds to spend on each car. That doesn't leave you any time to pound on the computer keyboard with an ID check. Holding up traffic to check names is the opposite of management's idea of speedy facilitation and will earn you the first of what is likely to be a good many butt reamings."

_Butt reamings?_ Fenwick was thinking, not knowing the colloquial meaning of the phrase as Elvis was using it. What did going to a proctologist have to do with working a car lane at a port of entry? He did, however, have the sense not to inquire of Elvis if these future visits to the proctologist would be covered by CBP's health insurance.

"I'm still confused," Fenwick said, adding, totally unnecessarily, "even more than before." Elvis' mind took a break to wander for a few distracted moments. To various places and concepts. Alaska. Siberia. Permafrost. Glaciers. Career nosedives. Mandatory reassignment. Or, taking a tangent of a very different but nonetheless relevant tack. Hit men and contract killings.

"Facilitation," Elvis said sourly. "The operative word de jour of the Mexican border." Although it didn't seem possible that Fenwick's fuddle could hold any more fuddle, this did indeed becloud Fenwick even further. He knew about soup du jour. And he knew about operations, having had a couple himself. His tonsils removed when he was a kid. And a half dozen mortar splinters removed from his posterior at the battalion aid station in Viet Nam. But "operative word du jour?"

Fenwick, confused or not confused, figured now was a good time to keep his mouth as firmly shut as when company commander Captain Lars 'Gonzo' Gonzales back in Viet Nam asked for volunteers to dig a new latrine--and also cover up the old one. But, and Fenwick knew it was coming as sure as mosquitoes at sunset in a Louisiana bayou, he was involuntarily volunteered by Captain Gonzales anyhow.

Meanwhile, Elvis, his mind drifting from the Fenwick Conundrum, was remembering the previous evening at home and the sensuous, dulcet tones of the mysterious woman he knew only as Land Line Sarah.

### Sarah And The Telemarketer

### The Land Line

Elvis was settled into his refurbished factory reject Tom Sawyer Ergonomic Recliner, laid back and about to watch the debut of another reality TV series, the Real World of Los Alamos Trash Haulers, when the phone rang. It was his land line, which he stubbornly resisted getting rid of despite the blandishments of friends, family and several dozen cell phone companies. He had his reasons. After some difficulty in getting the Tom Sawyer Ergonomic Recliner to release him from its refurbished ergonomic clutches, he managed to make it over to the phone before it reverted to voice mail. Which really wasn't that likely, since he had set the controls on the phone to ring twenty-five times before switching over to voice mail.

This didn't set any too well with his recently moved in next door neighbors, a octogenarian couple named Botswana and Mabel Pliny, who, despite being both deaf as a pair of cedar stumps, could nevertheless still hear a dull incessant ringing from Elvis' long winded phone. Especially when they had their Dr. Snoop Easy Listening Device fastened to the wall between their apartment and Elvis' place. Botswana was the oldest in a family of fourteen who after the tenth kid popped out of his mama's well wrinkled belly couldn't stand the thought of any more diapers and baby puke and ran off to join the circus, where he learned from first hand experience why sword swallowers don't have tonsils. Mabel was an only child and way too wrapped up in herself to descend to motherhood. So it was no kids for the Plinys. Just the two of them. Which worked out OK for twenty or thirty years, but by forty was growing thin. Now, at near to sixty years together and counting they were downright sick of each other but too prim and prissy to admit it. At least in public. So, instead of doing daily battle with each other, they turned their soured dispositions to the world in general.

This fact did not portend well for next door neighbor relations and Elvis often came home to find nasty notes duct taped to his door or even nastier messages left on his voice mail. Usually they were anonymous, but Mabel's voice, which had the distinct quality of sounding like a soprano voiced random combination of hiccups and belches, was about as hard to miss as a chain saw coming straight at you in the hands of a guy wearing a Halloween mask. Botswana, for his part, often affected a Russian accent on the phone and claimed he was a former KGB agent from the old Soviet Union and knew how to take care of troublemaking guys like Elvis "....budt guud!" Elvis generally ignored them. Though he did contact every cremation service, funeral home and funeral insurance business in southern Arizona, using the Pliny's address and phone number, requesting they send the Plinys all the information they had on their services and whether they had any lay away plans. And, as an afterthought, Elvis also contacted the Hemlock society and asked them send the Plinys all the information they had on assisted suicide.

Elvis' relationship with the Plinys had started out OK when they first moved in. He always tried to respect old folks, figuring that if he was lucky, and the asteroid that his Uncle Lewister Copernicus Mahoney, who prided himself on his mathematical abilities, having taken and passed both math classes at Slippery Sister County High School, predicted 'with one hundred percent certainty' would smack into the earth, missed the target after all, he might well be an old folk himself one day. The Plinys, like a good many other of the old folk contingent in the general population, liked to dwell on the good old days and how modern America sucked. Elvis politely nodded his head and could only think of offering the nostrum his own granny used to pronounce when the subject of the Great Mysteries of Life came up. "Life is a paradox," she would say. So Elvis called up his granny's phrase, not knowing what else to say, anyhow. What are you supposed to say when the old folk catch you in the hallway and want to get philosophical?

"Life is a paradox," he said.

Suddenly Botswana Pliny grabbed Mabel's arm and stomped off to their apartment, opening the door and then slamming it hard behind them. From that day on Elvis was on their Pliny Shit List. He never could figure out why.

Inside their apartment, Botswana Pliny looked his wife Mabel in the eye and spoke very slowly and distinctly, so that she could understand him.

"Can you imagine that goddamn redheaded asshole making fun of us like that!" He said in an outraged voice. Mabel's face was blank. She hadn't heard what Elvis said, being even deafer than her husband, who she claimed "probably would have snored right through Hurricane Katrina had they been in New Orleans." Though she was still pretty good at hearing the refrigerator door open when Botswana tried to sneak a secret nibble or two of tasty goodies that were no-no's on their (her idea) latest diet.

"What did he say?" She replied. Botswana whacked the wall with a balled fist so hard he cracked a metacarpal, which required a visit to the doctor, the bill for which he sent to Elvis, further confounding Elvis.

"That son of a bitch!" Botswana said, shaking his injured hand. "Making fun of us....."

"Well, damnit," Mabel retorted. "Just what the hell did he say?" Botswana shook his head in anger. "What did he say?" He answered. "What did he say? We're trying to have a serious conversation and he was mocking us. You wanna know what that jerk said?" Botswana hissed and was about to whack the wall again before he caught himself. He said....

"Life is a pair of socks." Mabel's face was as blank as their refrigerator door since her jerk water husband somehow managed to demagnetize all the refrigerator magnets.

"Maybe he's into Zen, Botsie," she said, trying to soothe her frothing hubby.

"Bullshit!" Her frothing hubby replied. "That dipstick wouldn't know Zen from a Maytag washer/dryer on the spin cycle." Mabel had to admit he was probably right. She already figured Elvis for being on the slow side. All redheads in Mabel's mind were slow thinking folk, going back to her childhood when she got her red headed neighbor Verga Sue Malinger to believe that the earth rotated around the sun when Mabel knew full well it was really the other way around. Anyhow, from that day forward the Plinys were convinced that Elvis was a no good redheaded smart ass agist son of a bitch and they weren't about to cut him any slack on anything. Especially his long winded goddamned phone.

But.....back to the ringing phone. On the seventh ring, finally freeing himself from the refurbished recliner, he picked up the receiver.

"Yes?" Elvis said with a definite curiosity in his voice and on his face.

"This is Sarah calling for Credit Card Services," a very sultry voiced female said. "Our records show that you are eligible for the lowest rate available on credit card balances. Call now, as this opportunity will soon expire. This is the third time we have contacted you. If you don't want to be included in this low rate offer, press '1' now. Otherwise, press '3' and someone will come on the line to assist you." Elvis stared at the phone for a brief moment, then pulled over a nearby straight back chair that he got for four bucks at Kamikaze Lee's Second Hand Store and Asian Market. He plunked himself down as he expectantly pressed '3'. Instantly a male voice came on the line.

"Mr. Mahoney. This is Sylvester," the accented voice said. "Are you ready to sign up for the new low rate on credit card balances for those who qualify?" The guy's voice, which sounded to Elvis like a non-Englishman who was trying to sound English, reminded Elvis of a high school principal delivering a canned commencement address one too many times. Bored, as only the English, be they ersatz or genuine, can so quintessentially express it.

"Where's Sarah?" Elvis said. A pause on the other end of the line.

"Excuse me," the non-English English voice said. "What did you say?"

"Where's Sarah?" Elvis repeated. The voice was nonplussed.

"Who, may I ask, sir, is this Sarah?" The nonplussed non-English English voice said.

"What do you mean, who is Sarah? She's the one who called me in the first place."

"Oh," the voice replied. " _That_ Sarah."

"Yes," Elvis shot back. " _That_ Sarah. The lady with the great voice. I want to talk to her." What might have been a suppressed cough, or maybe a suppressed chuckle, from Sylvester the English-accented voice.

"I'm afraid she's not available sir," he said with a touch of condescension, making Elvis think maybe this guy really was a genuine English dude. "I am here to assist you."

"I want to talk to Sarah," Elvis replied. "She's the one who called me and I want to talk to her."

" _Sir,_ " English Sylvester replied. "I told you. She is not available."

"What do you mean, not available," Elvis snapped back. "She just called me a minute ago. Where'd she go? Have to take a leak in a big hurry? Grabbing a Big Mac on her lunch break? I'll just hang on and wait until she comes back." Sylvester's voice had the beginnings of something in it that wasn't exactly friendly.

" _Mr_. _Mahoney_ ," he said, trying to remain civil and for sure no longer sounding bored. "What you heard was a recording. Sarah's voice. On a _recording_. She is not here."

"Oh," Elvis replied. "I get it. When will she be back?" Elvis thought he could hear the sounds of Sylvester's fingers drumming on something hard near the phone.

"I can't give out that information," Sylvester answered. Which was a mostly truthful statement, which in itself was somewhat startling, truthfulness not being one of Sylvester's salient characteristics. In fact, on a 100 point truthfulness scale, Sylvester would be lucky to break 10.

The actual truth was that Sylvester had no clue of who Sarah was other than his company contracted with a direct dialing marketing company for her recorded services. But, now that he thought about it, maybe he ought to check her out. She did have one bloody nice sensual voice. And if the rest of her matched the voice? Then Elvis broke Sylvester's reverie.

"If I can't talk to Sarah, then I'm not going to do business with you," Elvis said, getting ready to hang up the phone. "It's Sarah or nothing. Give her the message when she comes in," adding, as he was about to disconnect. "She knows my number."

Elvis returned to his Tom Sawyer Ergonomic Recliner and the Real World of Los Alamos Trash Haulers on his repossessed wide screen Ukrainian-made HDTV. The TV was a heck of a bargain, even if the darn thing sometimes spontaneously came on with subtitles in Ukrainian. Naturally, the HDTV channel was on a commercial. So Elvis began switching through the channels to see if he could break his old record of 55 straight channels playing commercials as he surfed the TV waves. He hit the Relaxomatic switch and his Tom Sawyer Ergonomic Recliner's massage motor started in on Elvis' back and he blissfully dozed away in contentment somewhere after 40 straight channel surfing commercials. He dreamed that Sarah was actually a disbarred lawyer wanted for commercial fraud in Montenegro and also, Sarah being a multi-faced woman (according to the dream), wanted for masseuse-ing without a license in several islands in the Tongan archipelago in the south Pacific.

That evening Sylvester, who in fact was an Anglo-Irishman born and raised in London where he had at a young age acquired a Cockney accent he spent the rest of his life trying to get rid of, stopped on the way home from work at the high pressure call center and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels. Three drinks into the bottle something broke lose in Sylvester. At first he was frozen solid, eyes wide open. Then he blinked and his eyes twinkled. He started to giggle. Then chuckle. Then he started to laugh. The laugh became a guffaw and finally he doubled over in unbridled hilarity.

The very next day he set out trying to find out who Sarah was.

### CBP, Facilitation and the Port of Nogales.

Facilitation. In the bristling brusque words of Annabella Zamora. the diminutive but famously incendiary and equally famously blunt--her _very_ unofficial nickname among a certain irascible chunk of the work force was BC (Blunt Cunt)--at a staff briefing she conducted for each arriving shift--

"Quit screwing around running names on the primary lanes," Zamora snapped at the officers. "You're slowing down the traffic flow. Got any doubts? Slap a referral slip on the windshield and send the car to secondary." And then, adding what she was as certain as corned beef an cabbage in Boston on St. Patrick's Day, would be an added incentive to her work force.

"Involuntary reassignments to the port of Cold Snap, North Dakota, are always available." Which nearly caused officer Vinstake Wang to topple over in a dead faint on the staff briefing spot. Officer Wang having just three months earlier finally managed to get a transfer to Nogales _from_ the Port of Cold Snap, North Dakota, after nearly a decade of trying, and whose skin looked like wrinkled mahogany parchment after a decade of spending most of his free time under a sun lamp trying to get warm.

"Slap and Go," was Port Director's self-described 'snappy' name for her facilitation policy. Which set several sets of eyes to blinking, Slap and Go a fair approximation of what happened to several of the officers present when their soon to be ex-wives permanently booted them out of the house.

"She would have made a damned good one," Elvis whispered to Pancho after they sat in on one of her briefings out of curiosity, being on the semi-independent Enforcement Team and not part of the regular port staffing. Pancho shot Elvis one of his WTF Elvis looks. Soon with a verbal follow-up.

"What The Fuck does that mean?"

"Nazi," she'd have fit in real well. He looked over at Pancho, who was wondering what was next. "Or, in my more modern times, she'd have fit in real well in George W. Bush's

administration. Bomb the frickin' A-rabs. Stuff like that."

To which Pancho did the usual after one of Elvis' shoot form the hip comments.

A sigh. A shrug. And silence. As in long suffering silence.....

The Secondary Lot. The blacktopped and canopied chunk of official US business lingering deceptively behind the entry booths where searches were to be conducted away from the traffic flow. The reasons for this philosophy were several. The local paramount one, albeit mostly unspoken, was that Port Director Zamora was on the board of directors of the local chamber of commerce, schmoozed with them every Wednesday evening at the Santa Cruz Valley Country Club, and was therefore amenable to the chamber's desire to have traffic flow efficiently so as not to discourage the Mexicans from coming over to the U.S. side to do their shopping.

"These long border waits are bad for business," said Beltramo Benevides, the president of the chamber of commerce one evening at the local high rollers' club with Annabella Zamora.. "Can't you speed things up some, Annabella?" His eyebrows raised suggestively. "I would be more than happy to pass on to my cousin _Congressman_ Benevides our appreciation for your cooperation and efficiency." He leaned closer to her. "My cousin is a golf partner of the Assistant Commissioner of Homeland Security."

The next day traffic moved through the Port of Nogales so fast some of the more paranoid among the Mexicans thought the United States had annexed Mexico and done completely away with the Mexican border.

"Dios Mio! Exclaimed Alonzo Mendez, an excitable trinkets vendor just inside Mexico at the downtown port of entry in Nogales. "Look at the traffic. It's not backed up at all! The cars are zipping right through." He grabbed the arm of his long suffering wife, Wotafrida. "Run! We're being invaded. The gringos are taking over Mexico!" He paused for a moment, his voice as absolutely sincere as Wilfrida had ever heard it, including those times when he came home smelling of beer and perfume and tried to explain the perfume.

"But don't forget to bring the cash box!"

There was no invasion. But the traffic really was zipping right through and the wait times at the border crossing down almost to zero.

Annabella Zamora called it cross border cooperation. "F"....for Facilitation.. Elvis added a letter. "FB" .....

....for Fucking Bullshit,"

"It's a goddamn inundation!" Moaned one of the secondary officers. And she wasn't exaggerating. The officers in secondary were swamped by the relentless tide of arriving vehicles--but also pressured to not linger over them in secondary, either.

"Keep 'em movin' through," Port Director Annabella Zamora said without even the slightest whiff of her sub rosa motive. "You're not here to chat up the horseflesh. The secondary lot is _not_ a parking lot. Keep the freaking cars moving."

Which they did. Again. And again. And again......

"I feel like I'm in a chain gang," Ekaterina Chou said to fellow officer Danny Xerks, "made up of cars."

"Want me to sing one of those old chain gang work songs for you?" Said Danny Xerks, who had a Music Folklore degree from the University of California at Davis but found zero jobs in the music folklore field and grabbed the CBP job to keep his recently purchased (used, but in good condition) Mazda Miata from being repossessed. "I know lots of them," he added. "Folk songs. Might take the edge off things some."

"You are a fucking nerd, Danny!" Ekaterina growled. Then, surprising Ekaterina Chou no little, and not so coincidentally igniting a future romantic interlude, se began to sing in a passable baritone his own version of the chain gang song:

I been working on the chain gang

Searching cars all day long

I been working on the chain gang

Oh, Momma, what did I do wrong

Elvis and Pancho happened to be standing nearby and saw--and heard--the Xerxs and Chou interplay. Pancho turned and looked at Elvis with a suspicious expression.

"Did you put LSD in the water cooler?"

"I declare with utmost sincerity that I am innocent and resent the spurious implications of your statement!" Elvis shot back in a possibly offended one.

"Innocent and Elvis are not two words that fit well together," Pancho shot back. But Elvis' mind had grabbed Pancho's idea and begun to chew it over.

"You know, Pancho, that really is a danged cool idea. LSD in the water cooler. Could make for an interesting day. A _very_ interesting day."

Pancho refrained from further comment, though he was thinking that if Elvis really did something like that Pancho wanted plenty of advance notice so that he could take some leave time and be far, far away at the LSD water cooler moment. Preferably on another continent. His first choice being a nude beach on one of the Greek islands .

Wolfgang Martinez, the pastor of the Third Stone Ecumenical Non-Baptist Church, noticed a pair of stressed out officers on their knees in the secondary lot, heads bowed, as he drove through. The officers were actually on their knees with heads bent because they were looking underneath the bed of a Dodge Ram Pickup. But the pastor--whose mother's nickname for him as a kid was TC for Totally Clueless--misinterpreted the two sets of pavement residing knees.

This same pastor had recently been caught trying to sneak a Mexican woman into the country as a passenger in his aging but still somewhat spiffy Kia Sportage.

"This is not how it seems," Pastor Martinez said in a low voice to the CBP officer who spotted the woman's phony immigration document. "She's here purely for the purpose of helping me as an assistant pastor and to serve communion. There wasn't enough time to go through the regular channels. The church needs her help right _now_."

"Looks like she'd really help improve your attendance at Sunday services, all right," the smirking officer said, looking at the middle aged but athletically well proportioned woman in the passenger seat, who was doing her darnedest to look sweet and innocent. The woman not quite fitting the officer's image of any communion server he had ever seen. They were mostly either frumpish or creaking geezers and this woman looked like she could change clothes in a twinkling and run a triathlon. Things went downhill from there for Pastor Wolfgang Martinez when they found out the woman was his sister-in-law, Pastor Wolfgang however earnestly insisting she was only coming for a "short visit." The pastor not choosing to further elaborate that the short visit would be measured on the geologic time scale, meaning Mexico would be well into its Second Aztec Age before she'd even consider going back there. The worst was when the frigging CBP jerks "kicked" her back to Mexico and he watched her athletic posterior disappear across the border, immediately drawing the acute interest of every single one of those goddamn lecherous Mexican officers within athletic posterior eyesight. Including the women.

The pastor took none too kindly to his being caught and labeled an alien smuggler. Officially, that is. Unofficially, a few more descriptive and less pastor friendly adjectives were attached to his name, since more than a few officers thought she was the pastor's secret squeeze. Which was no way true. Both his wife and her sister would have thumped him into an inert pastoral lump if he ever as much as made a single move on the sister. Which made this moment all the sweeter.

_"It's about tim_ e," the pastor snarled, totally missing the reason why the officers were on their knees. "That you humorless authoritarian bastards do penance for your sins."

Adding as a somewhat heated afterthought, "may the Sword of the Righteous smite you both," pointing a finger at his crotch. "Where it hurts the most!"

Were his long suffering mother there to witness the event, she would likely have tiredly declaimed:

"TC, you ain't changed all that much."

"Call me Frazzle," bone tired officer Tyrone 'Slam Dunk' Jefferson muttered sourly to his buddy, officer Merton 'The King' Le Roi. "Inspector Frazzle." And he wasn't joking. The officers in the secondary lot were worn to a frazzle by the deluge of referrals. This system actually worked pretty well from the viewpoint of bosses in their air conditioned offices. Cars moved through quickly and efficiently. Secondary suffered few serious backups. The traveling public was accommodated, the local merchants happy to see potential customers thus accommodated.

And the Big One.

"What the heck is going on," said Nogales, Mexico, resident Grinelda Garcia-Matsui de Cho to her neighbor, Xochitl Perfides-Marquez de Biden. "Some kind of party?"

Well, kind of. Just across that not so imaginary line called The Border in Mexico the narcotics traffickers were celebrating so jubilantly that some of the neighbors thought some kind of new festival was going on and scurried inside to dress up in their party clothes. The traffickers were gleefully slapping their smuggling sides. They had so little difficulty in slipping their drug loads through the organized chaos of the port they almost thought they should slip the border officers some kind of gratuity for their assistance in inadvertently facilitating their particular form of cross border commerce. One smuggler, Wilfrido 'El Feo' Bosch, who was considered a wise ass even among his smuggling brethren, went so far as to send an anonymous bouquet of a dozen long stemmed red roses to Port Director Zamora, the attached note saying, simply:

"Thanks for Everything!"

Which did cause quite a few moments of consternation in Zamora's already overtaxed brain. A secret admirer at the top of her list of possibilities. Had something happened after she slammed one too many banana Daiquiris and either passed out or went into a blackout at the last Christmas party at district headquarters in Tucson? She gave a lot of increasingly indignant thought to that, especially to the suspiciously lecherous leers of the district director since then, but not coming anywhere near making the synaptic rotary to the port's facilitation posture and consequently unimpressive seizure statistics and the actual originator of the gift bouquet, grateful drug smuggler Wilfrido 'El Feo' Bosch.

Elvis and Pancho, their boss Manny Kuribachi and a few alert others had figured that much out. That the anti-drug smuggling measures on the border weren't much more effective than an umbrella full of holes in an Arizona monsoon downpour. That was one reason why there was an ET team. To plug in the holes left by the concept of facilitation. It was, though not even the ET folk would admit it, kind of like the fable about the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. True, they had lots more fingers than the single little Dutch kid had. But there also were lots more holes. The proof of their belief they weren't catching much of the dope coming through? A Maltese-flagged oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz might spring a leak and the world price of oil would jump twenty percent. Bust a few tons of marijuana at the Nogales border and the price of dope on the streets of Tucson an hour's drive north didn't budge even a penny. Which meant the supply was coming through regularly. Somewhere. Somehow. Which fact was the cause of many a sleepless night. On the American side of the border, that is.

The Mexicans were having no trouble sleeping.

"I keep having this recurring dream," Elvis said to Pancho one evening at Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub in Tucson. Elvis again at the apogee of his drink/don't drink cycle and well into his favorite drink of tequila with a tequila chaser.

"I have a recurring dream, too, Elvis," Pancho said over his own half full glass of frozen water floating in a tequila sea. "It's about Angelina Jolie," Pancho continued. "on a nude beach on a Greek island," Pancho sighed, "but it always ends before I can get to her." With that he emptied the tequila sea in his glass of frozen water and motioned at the bartender to refill the sea. "Either that, and this is what really locks my jaws, or I just can't remember the rest of the dream."

"In my dream," Elvis said. "We are not really CBP officers. We think we are. But we aren't. We're really working for the Mexican cartels." He paused to take a shot of tequila and chase it with another. "We catch enough of the dope to keep the price from falling." He eyeballed Pancho. "Supply and demand economics. That kind of stuff. Anyhow, we catch enough dope to keep the bottom from falling out of the dope selling business and thereby help the cartels to make lots of bucks. In the dream this Mexican guy in a real expensive suit, and who looks kinda like a cross between Cheech Marin and Antonio Banderas, pins some kind of medal on me and congratulates me on helping keep the Los Ambos cartel in business." Pancho snorted in derision.

"Christ, Elvis!" He snapped churlishly. "That is no fucking dream." He slapped the bar. hard.

"It's fucking reality."

To which Elvis had nothing further to say.

Despite that, the ET pair were in a big fat dilemma at work. They had a couple of trainees. Should they teach facilitation? Like Port Director Zamora wanted? Or teach enforcement? Which the narcotic traffickers damn well _didn't_ want.

"Both," Pancho said after they talked it over some. "We gotta do both."

"And just how are we gonna do that, Pancho?" Elvis said. Both nodded, wordlessly.

That was it, all right. Both. But....how? How to tread the line between enforcement and facilitation?

"Potemkin Villages," Pancho said to Elvis as they talked it over at breakfast. "We'll give Zamora Potemkin Villages." Elvis looked askance at Pancho. He had an idea what a Potemkin Village was from when he took a Russian history class at the University of Arizona. Not that he had any genuine interest in Russian history. Which he synopsized as "Five hundred years of beating the shit out everyone." Though he had to admit they made some tasty and darned effective vodka. Elvis might have had zero interest in Russian history, but he was definitely interested in the half dozen babe Russian immigrant chicks who were taking the class. Where he learned about the Potemkin Village scam.

"Leave it to the Russians," Elvis muttered to himself, "to come up with a scam involving an entire goddamn province." Which, in fact, they did. Or at least one conniving dude did. The Potemkin Village thing was a Russian folklore tale about creating pristine appearing villages that were in reality two dimensional phonies. A Russian official named Potemkin supposedly had them built to impress Catherine the Great while she was touring the Russian boondocks and make it look like the place was thriving under his guidance when it fact it wasn't. The Elvis and Pancho version would give the impression of teaching facilitation while actually teaching enforcement. A kind of FTO Potemkin Village. Elvis reached out and knuckle dusted Pancho's hand.

"Potemkin Village, it is, Pancho, my man."

But as he said it his mind was a very long way away from his FTO duties as he mused pleasantly over the various corporeal attributes of those half dozen babe immigrant Russian chicks in the Russian history class. Which, unfortunately, came to an abrupt end when he found out the young women were from a Russian martial arts team that defected to the United States after a rowdy match in San Francisco that led to a massive street fight between gay men and lesbian women over who was the toughest. The Russian women were so entertained by the wild street melee that they decided then and there the United States would be a great place to live. Especially when the San Francisco lesbian women won the street fight.

A fact which put the deep freeze on Elvis' Russian babe ardor.

The Port of Nogales, seventy easy freeway miles south of Tucson, was where Elvis and Pancho were doing their Field Training Officers bit. Elvis and Pancho would have preferred to do at least some of the training at Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub in Tucson, but the "humorless lug nuts" in the district office shot down yet another of their--Elvis and Pancho's--(self proclaimed) "goddamn brilliant ideas."

"Look, Manny," Elvis was saying to his boss, ET Director Manfred Kuribachi, "Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub would be a good place to start with this pair." He inched closer to Manny, his expression (hopefully) troubled. "These trainees are gonna need all the help we can give them. They need to start out in a stress free environment. Segue into the CBP world."

"Gently," Pancho added. "It needs to be done gently. Not in all the stress and noise at the Port of Nogales."

"You'll do this after hours, out of uniform and unofficially?" Manny said.

"Absolutely!" Elvis and Pancho said in absolute lockstep unison.

"Isn't this Stripper Week at Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub?" Manny said. "Bunch of traveling exotic dancers on the strip club circuit?" A pause entailing a general clearing of throats and shuffling of feet.

"Well, yes. There's that," Elvis said.

"Purely a coincidence," Pancho added. Manny stared wordlessly at them.

"OK." Elvis said.

"We go to Nogales," Pancho added

So they went to Nogales.

Nogales was by far the biggest port in Arizona, with two separate sets of car lanes, one in the old downtown of Nogales on Grand Avenue and the other on the western fringe of town on Mariposa Avenue. Adjacent to Mariposa, and the author of a constant cacophonous roaring of truck engines when it was open--creating a steady stream of customers for Dr. Berwick Benevides' Mariposa Hearing Center--was a huge cargo facility where hundreds of trucks daily entered the United States. Both Grand Avenue and Mariposa had pedestrian entries, as well, but the one on Mariposa was little used, and there was another pedestrian entry gate a hundred yards to the east of Grand Avenue on Morley Avenue, with a gate for an international railway line between them. Towering over Grand Avenue was an administration building, with another building, once the port's main building, and a parking lot just to the west. Old Nogales snuggled right up to the border and WPA era drainage tunnels ran under the border.

Which meant that the officers at Nogales had lots to worry about, which Elvis considered a new wrinkle on the concept of equal opportunity employer. From the smugglers' viewpoint, that is. And the smugglers had lots of choices. One of the port managers compared it to a football game. The port officers were the defense. The smugglers were the offense. Pancho whooped derisively at that analogy. "A football game? In this football game the Pittsburgh Steelers are taking on a local high school, and you can guess which side is the Pittsburgh Steelers. It sure ain't us." Elvis saw it somewhat differently.

"It is," he muttered to Pancho, "like a blind man playing chess with an octopus."

On this (somewhat glum, unlike Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub) FTO day, Elvis and Pancho had reserved the Big Chuck meeting room on the second floor of the administration building looming over the Dennis DeConcini port of entry on Grand Avenue in downtown Nogales for an orientation session. The more or less official name of the room was the Charlemagne Room for reasons no one really knew beyond that it sounded a little classier than Meeting Room One, but Elvis and Pancho called it the Big Chuck room. Charlemagne is French for Charles the Great and to Elvis and Pancho devolved into the Big Chuck room. Which, their brains functioning the way they did, was fully in line what you'd expect from them. Occasional contrarians and extemporaneous pranksters in CBP uniforms. Elvis stopped at the Mexican Bakery, which was actually run by a family of Cambodian immigrants from Siem Riep, on his way to work and picked up a dozen mixed donuts and two quarts of coffee. Elvis, Pancho, Salty Suzy and Fenwick were all sitting around a big table busy chomping down on donuts and slurping coffee. Then Elvis began the orientation talk.

"There are a half dozen ports of entry on the Arizona border with Mexico. Nogales is the biggest banana in the bunch." That brought a snicker from Salty Suzy. Fenwick, however, had a sudden hankering for a banana split. "Nogales has a humungous truck facility. The truck dock we call it." Pancho grinned and jumped in.

"That's one name. Some of us call it the Fuck Dock." Elvis nodded a silent agreement.

"Anyhow, you probably won't be at the truck dock. You'll be at one of the vehicle or pedestrian entries." Elvis stopped and looked levelly at the two trainees. "And your job is simply this: Move people and cars through as fast as you can but at the same time look out for a very long laundry list of no-no's."

"List of no-no's?" Suzette said. "What the frick does that mean?"

"Fast as we can?" Fenwick said, thinking of Port Director Zamora's Slap and Go mandate and looking worried. "How fast is that?"

"Maybe twenty-five to thirty seconds for a car, less for a person on foot," Pancho said.

"And we're supposed to do what in thirty seconds or less?" Suzette said, also looking worried. Pancho replied.

"If it's a car, determine if the driver is doing anything illegal. The same with a person."

Pancho nodded and took up the orientation's next subject.

"There's a whole bunch of stuff we're charged with looking for. The idea being that an entry point into the US is a dandy spot to look for things."

"What kind of things?" Salty Suzy said, confused. Pancho answered.

"Endangered species. Soil from Mexico. Foodstuffs. Plants of various kinds that have to be checked before entry. Raw pork. Undeclared pain killers. Money over $10,000. Guns and ammo. Birds. Even birdcages. Radioactive substances. Counterfeit money. Plus bulk stuff that has to go through the truck dock. And that's not everything, either. Nor by a long shot." Both Salty Suzy and Fenwick's eyes were glazed over. Fenwick gulped and a chunk of a glazed donut in his mouth tumbled down the wrong pipe and he sounded like a sputtering law mower engine until he coughed it up. Everyone stopped and stared at him until he looked in no further danger of immediate physical expiration.

"You done, Fenwick?" Elvis asked with a touch of irritation.

"You bought the donuts," Fenwick replied defensively. "I wouldn't have choked if you hadn't bought them." Elvis' eyes rolled towards the ceiling.

"How could I possibly argue with impeccable logic like that?" Elvis said.

"What?" Fenwick replied.

"What the fuck did that mean?" Salty Suzy threw in.

"Let's move on, Elvis," Pancho said.

"Good idea, Pancho," Elvis replied after a pause in which he envisioned taking Fenwick on a trip to the Grand Canyon where he would accidentally push Fenwick over the edge and listen to the lovely sound of his screaming all the way to the bottom. "Let's just

move on." And on he moved. Verbally, anyhow. Though the Grand Canyon image lingered on for a while longer.

"Now don't go getting upset," Elvis continued. "There are a whole bunch of things you are supposed to be looking for, but there is a shorter list. The long list boils down mostly to just two. Smuggling and illegal immigrants. You're mostly looking for drug smugglers in vehicles and imposters on the pedestrian entries. Though you could find both at either a car lane or a pedestrian lane."

"You could study books all day long about this stuff but what it really comes down to is experience," Elvis said. "You watch what happens and learn from it. One day it'll all come together."

"And on that day you'll be a genuine border officer." Pancho said with a grin. "Though that doesn't mean the bad guys won't get by you. It just means the playing field got at least somewhat close to level." A serious expression. "Right now you're an open door to the smugglers." Elvis leaned towards Fenwick and Suzette. He was not smiling.

"And you better believe they'll be knocking at that door." Even Suzette gulped at that one. And Fenwick turned as white as a sheet in a TV laundry soap commercial.

"Welcome to the Mexican border," Elvis and Pancho said in near perfect unison.

_Oh, shit!_ Thought Salty and Fenwick in near perfect unison.

That afternoon Elvis and Fenwick were on Lane 3 on Grand Avenue in downtown Nogales. Elvis stood at the computer inside the kiosk and Fenwick hovered uncertainly just outside it. This would be his first car. Elvis had already processed a dozen cars to give Fenwick an idea of how it was done. Now it was Fenwick's turn. A Ford Fiesta driven by a sixty year old Mexican woman pulled up next to Fenwick.

"Hi!" Fenwick said. "This is the United States of America. Welcome!" Then a more serious expression. "Are you carrying any raw pork, Mexican dirt or nuclear devices?" Elvis' groan was only barely audible and Fenwick didn't quite hear it. "What are your plans for visiting the United States today? Shopping? Visiting friends? Lunch at McDonald's?" The woman stared blankly at Fenwick. Finally she spoke.

"No hablo inglés." She didn't speak English. Fenwick blinked.

"Oh. Oh!" He grabbed the woman's border crossing card she was holding up for him to see. It looked all right.

"OK," he said, pointing at the U.S. side of Nogales. "Go ahead." The woman looked blankly again at Fenwick, then saw Elvis motioning with his head for her to go, and hit the gas on the Fiesta. The Fiesta not having been tuned up since just before the last president was elected in Mexico four and a half years earlier, Fenwick was promptly enveloped in a cloud of carbon monoxide. He began to cough and sputter.

"Quick! Call the local police, Mr. Elvis. That car certainly must not meet state and local pollution control standards. Stop that woman before she gets away and pollutes the community." Fenwick motioned at the phone in the kiosk. Elvis made no move to touch it. "Aren't you going to call?" He said in a confused voice. "Aren't we supposed to be protecting the public?"

"We're federal officers, Fenwick." Elvis replied in a calm voice. "We don't enforce state or local laws. That's up to the local cops."

"Then why don't you call them?" Fenwick. "They....."

"Hola!" A voice behind Fenwick said, startling him. He turned to see a Chevy SUV driven by a man of about forty. The next car in line had driven up while Fenwick was looking at Elvis.

"You have another car, Fenwick," Elvis said. "First things first. Slap and Go. No time for chatting."

Fenwick blinked again, shrugged and leaned towards the guy in the Chevy SUV. Like the older woman in the Fiesta, he was holding up his border crossing card. This one looked different. Fenwick took it in his hand to look more closely at it.

"Its a Resident Alien Card," Elvis said. "Means he can legally live and work in the U.S."

Fenwick seemed puzzled.

"Then what was he doing in Mexico?"

"I live there," the man in the Chevy said in English, surprising Fenwick. "Cheaper rent."

"Oh," Fenwick replied, unable to think of anything else to say. "Go on then." The Chevy SUV drove off, the driver chuckling to himself. They went through this all the time with trainees on the border. It was just another fact of life for the regular crossers. Plus another dandy window of opportunity for the smugglers once the trainees, albeit still essentially clueless, were released to work the lanes by themselves. The smugglers watched everything that was going on in the port with binoculars from nearby buildings, frequently having to pause because they couldn't hold the binoculars still from laughing too hard, and had daily reports from port maintenance employees secretly on their payroll. (So who liked trying to live on a paltry minimum wage salary?) When a new officer was released from their FTO program to work the lanes by themselves, the smugglers held a coming out party and, if there was disagreement, drew straws for who would be first get to run a load past the feckless newbie.

"OK!" Says Flaco the Smuggler. "Cross eyed Molly (they always came up with descriptive nicknames for the new CBP officers) is graduating today. Who wants to be first to pass a load on her? Raise your hand if you want to be Cross Eyed Molly's first."

Without exception every single dominant side hand in the back room at Federico's Yanqui Muerto Restaurante in Mexican Nogales shot straight up in the air.

After three more cars Elvis realized that Fenwick was in need of more training-- _lots_ more training--before Fenwick could hope to work a lane, even with Elvis at his side. So Elvis put Fenwick on the computer in the kiosk and stepped out to meet the arriving traffic. He had no clue that he was being watched from the U.S. side of the border. Port Director Zamora had set up a video camera with a live feed directly to Little Adolph's office in Tucson. Zamora had managed to talk the IT department into getting a state of the art video camera with advanced zooming technology and a high tech microphone capable of picking up conversations up to three hundred yards away. The equipment, the port director explained to the IT manager, was for surveillance of the traffickers on the Mexican side. Which was true. But she had a second, hidden, agenda. Little Adolph, who had the power to recommend a promotion for Zamora, privately asked her to record Elvis and Pancho and their trainees. Zamora, who those who knew her opined that she was maniacally career oriented and didn't care any more about her employees than she did about the blocked descending colon of Chester the ailing kangaroo at the Tucson zoo--which sure wasn't much--had no problem with secretly recording her employees. Legal? Illegal? Who the fuck cared? If Little Adolph--a nickname she might have heard but would damn well never be foolish enough to use herself--wanted it done, then consider it done. This could be her ticket to a cushy upper level management job in D.C. And maybe even season tickets for the Washington Redskins home games, the port director an avid pro football fan ever since her bumbledick first husband was run over and squashed flatter than the imitation Persian rug in her living room by a San Diego Chargers team bus on its way to a Chargers game against Dallas. And the port director, Annabella 'the Assassin' Zamora, had a willing accomplice in Senior Inspector Lorenzo 'Copro' Pappagallo, who considered Elvis and Pancho to be Public Enemies One and Two on Lorenzo's rather long and frequently redacted personal Public Enemies List.

A Dodge pickup drove up to Lane Three where Elvis stood outside the kiosk and Fenwick was inside at the computer terminal. The man in the pickup, with a droopy mustache, a stony expression and a cowboy hat plunked on his otherwise bald head, held out his border crossing card for Elvis to look at.

"Buenos Días," the man said.

"Igualmente," Elvis replied. "A dónde va, senor?"

"A las tiendas," the man answered.

"Que trae?"

"Nada."

Fenwick, knowing little Spanish, looked on mystified at what was in fact a very ordinary border exchange. Good day. Where are you going? To the stores. You bringing anything? Nothing. Elvis took the man's border crossing card and walked around the pickup, reaching down to tap on both rear tires and the passenger side front tire. Then he handed the border crossing card to the stony faced mustachioed man in the cowboy hat in the pickup.

"So....ándale pues," he said to the man. Go ahead. Mr. Cowboy Hat put the pickup in gear and drove off.

As Mr. Cowboy Hat put the truck in gear and headed into the U.S. Elvis spoke into the small personal radio attached to his collar. " _Pancho!_ Loaded pickup on your way. Tires. Dodge. Guy in a cowboy hat." Pancho, who was in secondary with Salty Suzy, wasted not a second in stepping out into the traffic lane and diverted the pickup with its startled cowboy hatted driver into the secondary lot. Before long he called Elvis on his personal radio.

"Positive, El," he said. Fenwick was totally lost.

"What just happened, Mr. Elvis?" He said from somewhere in the land of the lost.

"The Dodge pickup. It was loaded. In the tires. My guess is that it's marijuana. I don't want to upset you, Fenwick, but they probably saw you on the lane, knew you were a trainee, and specifically targeted you to run though a load." Fenwick was speechless. "Not to worry, Fenwick. I figured it was going to happen and kind of used you as bait." A gentle tap on his shoulder. "And as a very direct lesson to you about just what we are really facing here." Fenwick's face was even paler than its usual standard morgue slab pallid.

A revisit to " _Oh, shit_ ," was all he could say.

Abelardo Guzman thought he'd made it. When Flaco the Smuggler told him to make sure he drove the Dodge pickup into the lane of the pudgy, pasty faced clumsy gringo, Abelardo thought it was a done deal as soon as he saw the guy. Abelardo, whose mother was big on entertaining her little kids with fairy tales in the days before television, immediately thought of Snow White's Seven Dwarfs.

"It's gotta be Dopey," Abelardo chuckled to himself as he pulled up to the border kiosk, "or maybe Sleepy." Flaco the Smuggler was right on again. This was a no brainer. Abelardo would zip right by the clueless dude.

But then the other guy, a red headed guy every bit as skinny as Flaco, took over the lane. This guy didn't look clueless and Abelardo was flat out worried. If they caught him this would be the third time he was busted with a load and he'd likely be whacked with a prison term. Two years, probably. Two years without cervezas, without tequila, without women. Worse. Two years eating gringo prison food. Chingame! Two years of macaroni and cheese and rubberized hot dogs. Dios Mio! What a price to pay! He pulled up next to Elvis with a heart so heavy if felt like it was pressing on the upper quadrant of his left side pelvis. A tender spot on his body ever since he tried his hand at bull riding, receiving as he hurtled through the air an immediate lesson that throwing down shots of mescal and bull riding don't mix. He looked woefully over at Elvis.

What the hell? The guy almost just blew him through. Way less than a minute and he was released into the U.S. He slowly accelerated, so as not to draw suspicion, and was just adjacent to the port secondary inspection lot when a burly Mexican looking guy with a moustache in a CBP uniform stepped out in front of him and motioned at him to pull into the secondary lot. His heart dropped towards his pelvis again, but this time only liver level since it might be nothing more than a routine check of some kind. But then he saw a woman who looked like a pro wrestler in a CBP uniform and was absolutely transfixed. Abelardo was a sucker for big women. And this one had to darn near be a big woman world record holder. He almost forgot the predicament he might be in. He pulled into the lot and stopped, his eyes never leaving the wonderfully mountainous woman in the CBP uniform.

While Abelardo was staring transfixed at Salty Suzy, Pancho double checked Elvis' conclusions. He whapped the side of both back tires with a flashlight, hitting one side of the tire while holding the opposite side in his other hand. Both tires confirmed it. There was no ringing sound of an ordinary tire. Just a flat thunk. And he couldn't feel the vibration of the strike on the tire with the barrel of the flashlight that an ordinary tire would have. Elvis was right on. Pancho hit the button on his personal radio and confirmed the load to Elvis. Then Pancho walked around to the driver's side of the Dodge, reached in the window past the driver and deftly pulled the key out of the ignition. Abelardo's gaze instantly redirected from Salty Suzy to Pancho, with particular emphasis on the Dodge's ignition key that was disappearing in what seemed to Abelardo as damn near as fast as Halley's Comet out the opened window in Pancho's hand.

Abelardo's heart sank to the very bottom of his pelvis and into his mind jumped the horrific thought of two whole years of gringo prison food.

"Step out of the pickup, sir," Pancho said in Spanish. Abelardo came totally unwound. His hands started to shake, his pupils dilate and his thoughts fragment like a broken glass at Manuelita's Mi Casa Es Su Casa Cantina in his home town of Magdalena.

"No havlo español," Abelardo stuttered through his fractured consciousness.

"What!" Salty Suzy, who knew some Spanish, suddenly yelled out. "You don't speak Spanish! A Mexican who doesn't speak Spanish! Bullshit!" Pancho was locally famous for his quick reflexes. Something many a street fighter found out the hard way back in Pancho's rowdier younger days. For once his quick reflexes weren't quick enough. Before the _move_ command made it down the neural pathways anywhere near his jaw muscles Suzy was already a blur of motion. She threw open the Dodge pickup's driver side door, grabbed Abelardo by the collar and jerked him bodily out of the pickup.

"You aren't gonna pull that kind of crap on this soldier, jerk off," she said as she deposited him feet first on the secondary tarmac and proceeded to put a hammerlock on Abelardo that an adult American bison would have had a hard time escaping. "You don't screw with CBP!" Suzy snarled at Abelardo. And, Pancho was thinking, that went double for anybody foolish enough to consider messing with trainee Suzette Jaworski. Which Pancho was absolutely never, ever, ever going to do. For once in his life Pancho had encountered a woman who left him mentally and physically flummoxed. He'd rather couple with an oversized bald eagle on a straight steroid diet than try any of his moves on Salty Suzy. And that included up to and beyond being stone cold shit faced on the house brand tequila at Helmut Garcia's Irish Pub.

Pancho took one look at the Salty Suzy Death Grip trainee Jaworski had on hapless

Abelardo Guzman and realized there was absolutely no need to offer her any assistance in  
controlling him.

"Let's take him inside, Officer Jaworski," Pancho said. "We have to put him in a detention cell." Pancho and, despite himself, even Abelardo, would have never believed it if they hadn't seen--and felt--it themselves. Salty Suzy actually lifted Abelardo off the ground to the tips of his toes and muscled him towards the door into the secondary office, Abelardo's feet looking to an observer as though they were those of a cowboy ballet dancer daintily tiptoeing across the oil stained secondary tarmac. Abelardo was so impressed he momentarily forgot his predicament

### "No estás cansada, la fuerte?" He said. Translated, if not literally, figuratively, are you married, oh ye strong one? A hopeful look over his shoulder. At least as much as he was able to do with his head shoved into his sternum. "Soy soltero." I'm single.

"Shut the fuck up, you pervert," Suzette hissed. What the hell was with this guy? Hitting on her when she was about to throw him in a cell. Some kind of ploy for her to loosen her grip and for him to then tear loose and take off running for Mexico. "No way, buckwheat," She said. "You're sure as churned butter not going to get away from me." Abelardo actually could speak English. But churned butter? He looked quizzically at Pancho, who shrugged in response. He had no clue what the hell that meant either, but he was starting to think that Suzette was originally a farm girl. Maybe as a teen she made spare change to go to the local small town theater by picking up cows and depositing them on livestock trailers. Just another fanciful Pancho (or Elvis) thought? No. Suzette's 300 pound solid muscle dad, RB---Real Big--Stanley Jaworski, who was a much feared rugby player in his youth, had a pig farm in Arkansas and Suzette's farm experience included lifting 400 pound hogs and depositing them in enclosed flatbed trucks.

Just as Pancho, Salty Suzy and a currently pretzeled Abelardo were approaching the office, Elvis and Fenwick, just relieved off the primary lane, came walking back into secondary. Neither Elvis nor Fenwick failed to notice Abelardo's temporary suspension in mid-air, courtesy of Officer Suzette 'Salty Suzy' Jaworski. Both immediately making mental notes to be extremely careful about rubbing Suzette the wrong way. Just then Pancho yelled.

"No! No! Open the door first, Suzette!" Officer Jaworski, in the excitement of being involved in her first drug seizure, had gotten just a little too enthusiastic and tried to push through the door with Abelardo dangling in front of her. It might have worked OK had the door opened to the inside. Which it didn't. Supervisor Tony Rivera, who was sitting inside the secondary office in his specially reinforced chair--Tony being himself a mountainous behemoth of a man, and it sure wasn't from being bulked up by power lifting at Derwin Cinderflock's Fitness Center--looked up and saw Abelardo's cowed countenance scrunched against the secondary door's window. At first Supervisor Rivera, who had been looking at a 1000 Recipes For The Hungry Man book, had a flashback to the funhouse mirrors at Disneyland. Then he realized this wasn't a flashback. This was real. Following that observation several more realizations came in rapid fire succession, like the impotent pops on the small string of Chinese firecrackers he'd snuck in from Mexico for Cinco de Mayo. Oh, no! It was Pancho. And worse! That goddamn Elvis. And some broad who was even bigger than him and a weird looking older guy with a pasty complexion. It hit Supervisor Rivera with the force of the slow moving but inexorable cement train that sometimes came across the border from Mexico. His day was about to go to hell.

"You stay here and watch the Dodge pickup," Elvis said to Fenwick. "I'd better go inside and see if they need any help." He threw a serious look at Fenwick. "Understand? Stay here and watch the Dodge." Fenwick's head bobbed in animated agreement.

"You can count on me, Mr. Elvis." Which made perfect sense to Fenwick, him still being a certified public accountant. And who else to count on but a certified public accountant?

Pancho pulled open the door and Suzette hammerlocked Abelardo inside. She pushed Abelardo up against a counter, stepped back and told him in Spanish to put his hands on the counter and spread his legs. Then she started to pat him down.

"Hey!" Supervisor Rivera spit out. "You can't do that. It has to be a male patting down a male." Suzette shot Rivera a look that would have stopped a charging full grown water buffalo in its tracks. Or at the very least make the buffalo stop and think twice about the whole charging thing.

"Checking him for weapons, buddy," she said. "Perfectly legal. I once found a small pistol in the groin area of a guy in Iraq. He could have killed some of us if I hadn't found it." Suzette finished what the CBP manual called a frisk for weapons, although she took it several steps beyond that. When she checked his groin area, Abelardo turned to her and winked.

"Will you wait for me, Big Lady?" He said in Spanish. Which was followed at the speed of light with a shriek as Suzette accidentally rabbit punched him in the general vicinity of his right kidney.

"I think I should have taken a personal day today and gone fishing or at least hit the buffet at Pedro's Chinese Restaurant," Tony Rivera muttered. "But, no, Tony, you had to drag your ass into work today and face this bunch of weirdos!" Then, turning to Pancho and Elvis. "And what the hell are you two doing here with this pair of misfits? Aren't you supposed to be on the Enforcement Team."

"They're our trainees..." was just coming out of Elvis' mouth when Tony felt a hand reach over and squeeze his shoulder. And squeeze. And squeeze. And squeeze.

"Call me a misfit again, Muffin Man, and you just might have a sudden out of body experience." Tony stiffened.

"Listen, whoever the fuck you are," he growled. "I am the supervisor on duty and you sure as hell are not going to talk to me like that. Threaten a supervisor? Why, I'll get your fa....fa....fa..." a steely glare from Salty Suzy smothered the final 't' consonant. "I'll get your....butt fired. You are trainees still on probation and have no civil service protection."

Tony was building a head of steam and his face was turning red as an overripe tomato at Mastic Mendez' Second Hand Fruit and Vegetable stand over on First Street. Which was good and bad in Elvis' mind. Good in that maybe he'd just explode and splatter Tony bits all over the room. Bad in that they'd have to clean up the Tony bits all splattered all over the secondary office after the explosion. But, everything considered, Elvis could live with the clean up job. "In fact," Tony fumed. "I'm going to call up the port director right now." Before he could do anything Suzette pulled out her mobile and hit a number on autodial. A moment later someone answered.

"Hello? Uncle Tom? This is Suzette. Someone here wants to talk to you." She handed the mobile to a perplexed Tony Rivera. "Here," she said. Take it. Talk to him." With a dark ominous feeling starting to well up from his voluminous insides like the time he accidentally dropped his brand new pricey mobile into the piranha tank at Fribee's Fish and Pets in Green Valley, Tony hesitantly took the phone.

"Hello," he said. "This is Supervisor Tony Rivera at the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona." A pause. A nervous pause. "And who is this?" All color drained out of his face as the voice answered, making Tony look like one of the inhabitants at Madame Tussard's Wax Museum. Said decoloring immediately followed by all color draining from his neck, shoulders and entire thorax region down at least as far as the abdomen, where all color was obscured by the hairy rolling foothills of his midriff.

"This is Michael Jaworski," the voice on the phone said. "The Assistant Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, DC. Are you having some kind of trouble with my niece? She can be a handful sometimes. But she means well and is really a competent person if sometimes a touch on the overreacting side. What seems to be the problem?" Tony looked at the phone. Tony looked at Suzette. At Elvis. And Pancho. And Abelardo. And the weird pasty faced guy who was peering in from outside the door. Then back to the phone.

"No problem, sir. Just a slight misunderstanding. We'll straighten it out." He listened to the reply, nodded, then put down the phone with relief written all over his face, including noticeably wrinkling his several double chins. Suzette stared at him.

"Any questions, Count Calorie?" She said.

Tony had no further questions, though he bit his tongue so hard it drew blood. Pancho and Elvis could hardly restrain themselves from jumping up and down, hollering and chest butting. If they could have gotten away with it they would have gone outside, pulled out their Glock 9 mils and started blasting jubilantly away in the general direction of the Milky Way. Of course they couldn't, appealing as the thought might be. They had Abelardo to deal with. And the loaded tires in the Dodge pickup outside. That was when they noticed. The pickup?

It was gone.

Abelardo's older brother, Teobaldo, was in a follow up 'watch' car just behind the Dodge pickup his brother was driving. Teobaldo had been looking after his little brother ever since they were kids in the boondocks outside of Caborca in Sonora. Abelardo was constantly in trouble for picking fights he no way could finish and for the very bad habit of bringing home stuff that didn't belong to him. The family nicknames for them were Lardo and Bardo and not a person within twenty six miles of Caborca did not know that Abelardo was a fuckup. Which was why big brother Teobaldo was following close behind at the Nogales Grand Avenue entry lanes. He pulled into the secondary lot after them and parked in one of the visitor slots. When he saw them muscle his brother inside, then get all wrapped up with some kind of argument, he saw his chance. He slipped over to the Dodge, hot wired it in little more than ten seconds, Teobaldo being well known in the car stealing fraternity for his fast hands, earning him the nickname of Los Manos, then slowly drove the Dodge out of the secondary lot and into the Grand Avenue traffic. No one even noticed. Until now. Elvis whirled and saw Fenwick standing just outside the secondary door. He jerked the door open.

"Fenwick! Didn't I tell you to keep an eye on the Dodge?" Fenwick, who still didn't know what had happened, had a sheepish look on his face.

"I just wanted to see what was going on. How else can I learn?"

"Turn around," Elvis said in a voice that was a clone of a feral growl. Fenwick turned around. Very, very slowly he turned back again.

"It appears to be gone," he said in an understatement worthy of a Wall Street banker who'd just found out someone had hacked the company computers and the firm's assets had disappeared into an undisclosed location somewhere in eastern Europe.

While Elvis was hot-eyeing Fenwick, Pancho exploded into action. He was on the radio in a twinkling broadcasting an APB on the Dodge pickup to the Nogales Police, Border Patrol, Sheriff's Department and Arizona Highway Patrol. Hardly five minutes later the Dodge pickup was back, escorted by the Nogales PD, and Teobaldo Guzman joined his brother Abelardo in the secondary lockup.

"So," Elvis said to a seated and handcuffed Teobaldo, holding the Guzmans' border crossing cards and noting they both were bald as cue balls. "I see you have the same last name and lack of natural cranial covering. Both Guzmans. You guys must be related."

"Never saw the guy before," Teobaldo said, not remarking on the cranial covering remark since his English vocabulary didn't yet include the words cranial covering.

"How exactly would you know that?" Elvis replied. "Since the other guy is in a cell and you haven't seen him."

"The name is just serendipity," Teobaldo answered, using a word he did know, having heard it recently, really liked the sound of and looked up in his handy Spanish/English smugglers' pocket dictionary. "There are plenty of Guzmans all over Mexico and plenty more in Yanqui Land and even a few in Quebec. All I know is that I tried to steal that pickup and you guys caught me. That's what I do. I steal cars and pickups. And," nodding with considerable personal dignity to his own words, "I am good at what I do."

"Not this time," Elvis said. "We caught you."

"We all have our bad days," Teobaldo said. "Even artists like me."

And that was the way it went with Teobaldo. He wouldn't admit to knowing Abelardo. And he wouldn't admit to knowing anything about the Dodge pickup being loaded. That put the officers in a dilemma. If they couldn't connect Teobaldo to the drug load, what would they charge him with? Stealing the Dodge? Which, it turned out, was already stolen. Which was exactly what he had claimed, saying he was a professional car thief and had nothing at all to do with any drug loads.

"I had no idea there was marijuana in the tires," Teobaldo said with some irritation to Elvis and Pancho. "I'm just a car thief. Nothing more." Then, with another surge of dignity. "And nothing less." Then it suddenly dawned on Teobaldo what he had just said. His eyes began to nervously dart back and forth, his hands clutched tightly into handcuffed fists. He started to say something. Too late.

"How did you know there was marijuana in the tires?" Pancho shot back at him "We didn't say anything about marijuana. Or about the tires." It was Teobaldo's turn to have the color drain out of his face. "Er....a.....oh.....um....I must have heard someone say it."

"Nope," Elvis jumped in. "You didn't. In fact we haven't yet actually seen what is in the tires. We're about to open them right now." A short pause. "So. What is in tires? Marijuana?" Teobaldo sighed and seemed to visibly shrink. That was it. Busted. They had him.

"Yeah. Weed. Nearly a hundred kilos." And that was all he would say. If word ever got back to Flaco the Smuggler that Teobaldo had ratted him out, Teobaldo would end up diced along with the carrots in the prison lunchroom.

Marijuana. And so it turned out to be when they cracked open the Dodge's tires on the port's brand new pneumatic tire tool. A handy tool Port Director Annabella Zamora said illustrated her dedication to providing the best equipment for her employees, though in fact she ordered it as an afterthought after first using the bulk of the discretionary spending fund for a badly needed redecoration of her office which definitely needed the touch of a tasteful professional woman. There was 210 pounds of fresh marijuana in the tires. Both Teobaldo and Abelardo had a couple of years of gringo jail food to not look forward to. And then there was the matter of Fenwick. And the missing pickup. And a disconsolately unhappy Senior Inspector Elvis T. Mahoney. He was 95% sure there was no way in hell he could manage to get this dip shit guy successfully through the FTO program. Elvis was therefore thinking it likely wouldn't be long before he was booted off the Mexican border to someplace like Bitter End, Alaska.

### Chapter 7

### The Guardian Angel

Yet, despite himself, Fenwick had some kind of guardian angel. A jerk bucket of a mischievous guardian angel, waiting until nail biting time well into the eleventh hour to spring into Fenwick action. But a guardian angel nonetheless. The next day Elvis and Fenwick were on a primary lane. This time at the Mariposa Port of Entry on the west side of Nogales a few miles from the lanes on Grand Avenue. It was a more agreeable place than Grand Avenue, in a far more open area with broad vistas of dry grasslands and mountain ranges all around. But most everything has a downside and the Mariposa downside had two sides to the down. The first was the perpetual ear splitting roar of smelly diesel engines from the truck entry point--the Truck Dock--adjacent to the car lanes that kept a couple local audiologists busy treating CBP officers from the same truck dock with advanced hearing loss. The second was the frequent aroma of fresh cow manure from the nearby holding pens on the Mexican side.

"Man," Fenwick said, wrinkling his nose. "This place stinks." Elvis hadn't even noticed and looked mildly surprised.

"You get used to it," Elvis finally said, thinking that it didn't seem all that bad to him and he must have become acclimated to the local palette of odors. Or, in this particular truck belching and cow farting case, malodors.

Elvis was again outside the booth facing the arriving traffic, with Fenwick inside staring with a bewildered expression at the computer terminal in the booth. Fenwick looking to Elvis like a masculine version of Dorothy at the very perplexing moment of plunking down in the Land of Oz. A woman in a Honda Odyssey with three kids in the back pulled up to Elvis.

## "A dónde va?" Elvis asked the young woman as he looked at her border crossing card and those of her kids. Where was she going?

"A los perros," she replied. Which literally meant 'to the dogs' but was local slang for going to the nearby swap meet. A fact that Elvis didn't even begin to try to explain to Fenwick, knowing it would confuse the hell out of him even more than he was already confused. Elvis was still looking at the immigration cards, knowing that smugglers often tried to sneak through illegals using cards that were good but belonged to someone else. It was especially difficult to sort out kids' identities on the cards. There was a tapping on Elvis' shoulder. At first soft. Then, when Elvis didn't immediately respond, a little harder.

"Mr. Elvis," Fenwick said. And again, with more urgency. "Mister Elvis." Trying to hide his irritation, Elvis turned to look at Fenwick.

"What it is Fenwick? Have a question? Have to go the bathroom?" Fenwick shook his head negatively.

"The smell. Don't you smell it?" Elvis was caught off guard.

"Smell. Smell? What the hell are you talking about. Christ, Fenwick, are you still carrying on about the place stinking?" Fenwick pointed at the Honda Odyssey.

"No. Not that. The other smell. Don't you smell it, Mr. Elvis? It's pretty strong."

"What smell, Fenwick? What the hell are you talking about?" Elvis said, irritated.

"The stuff in the little brown packages that you and Mr. Pancho took out of the tires in that pickup truck yesterday." Elvis looked curiously at Fenwick. "You cut some of them open and took samples."

"Right," Elvis said, now a touch interested. "So what are you getting at, Fenwick?"

Fenwick pointed at the Honda Odyssey van with the woman driver and three kids in the back.

"Mr. Elvis," Fenwick said, "that van has the same smell as the packages you cut open. You said it was marijuana. Right?"

Elvis gaped at Fenwick with the growing realization of where this was headed.

"Are you saying that there is marijuana in this van? And that you can smell it?" Elvis whirled around and took a deep whiff of the van. Nothing. No odor he could pick up. He whirled around again and was about to let fly at Fenwick for being over reactive and paranoid when a thought came barreling into his mind like the Merwin & Co. dump truck that had lost its brakes on a downgrade outside of town last week and permanently interrupted the weekend excursion of a group of Tucson recreational bicyclists. The memory of the day before lodged itself front and center in Elvis' brain. Fenwick had correctly nailed what Elvis had for breakfast by the odor on his breath. Coffee and a chocolate covered donut. Elvis caught himself, looked at Fenwick, then turned to look at the woman in the van. Her face was as stony as the statue of Padre Kino on 19th & Kino in Tucson. And the steering wheel of the van. She was holding it so rigidly it looked like it was about to break loose from the steering column and whack her in the face, the woman holding onto the steering wheel of the Odyssey so tightly the blood supply was cut off and her fingers turning white. Good God! Elvis thought. Fenwick might be right. And, it turned out in the rapidly following flow of events, he was. Fenwick's jerk bucket of a guardian angel had come charging in late in the 11th hour and saved his hairy butt. The three little kids were sitting on top of seats stuffed full of marijuana.

"Let's walk this van back to secondary, Fenwick," Elvis said in a soft and calm voice, not wanting to alert the woman or get Fenwick agitated. "Sign off the computer and follow me." Holding the border crossing cards in his hand, Elvis motioned at the woman with the death grip on the Odyssey's steering wheel to follow him into secondary. Making sure, from an unfortunate previous incident, that the van was next to him and not behind him. Philo McBlug over at the Eagle Pass Port of Entry in Texas had made the mistake of having a suspect load van follow directly behind him into secondary. Philo was immediately proved right in his suspicions. Which fact was then demonstrated for all present to see when the teenaged kid in the van stomped down on the gas pedal and made a right-out-of-movies run for it. The van was loaded all right. Not that Philo was aware of it, pancaked as he was to the tarmac in the secondary lot after the van blasted over him. Elvis therefore walked the van back to secondary, prudently keeping parallel and adjacent to the driver's side to avoid repeating what had come to be known far and wide among the border officers as a "Dumb Philo." The granitic nature of the woman's face in the van now had spread to the rest of the body, almost making it look as though an immobile statute was behind the wheel, making Elvis think of Venus de Milo when she still had both arms.

By now Elvis would have bet an entire month's pay, plus his stack of X Box games, that the van was loaded. Not a single veteran officer on the entire Mexican border would have taken him up on the bet. With the possible exception of the perennially clueless Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo.

Fenwick came hurrying after Elvis into secondary, looking to a casual observer something like an ambling panda bear with a gun belt, at the same time the supervisor on duty, Jeanette LaPaluzza, came bolting out the door of the Mariposa secondary office. And she was fuming.

"Hey," she yelled at Elvis. "What the hell are you doing leaving your lane unmanned? Get back there right now!" Elvis looked at Supervisor LaPaluzza as though she had just taken a dive off the top of the Washington Monument and landed on her head.

"Got a load here," Elvis said. Jeanette, who was new to the border and only recently promoted to supervisor from her Human Resources Department job in Washington D.C., had only an academic understanding of the border. Zilch real experience. Nor did she understand the concept of the Enforcement Team, thinking that Elvis and Pancho and their trainees were part of her regular daily staffing.

"I repeat," she said with glaring eyes. "Get your butt back on the lane or I'll write you up."

"Good luck with that," Elvis replied. "You'll be instantly famous throughout the entire Service." That caught Jeanette by surprise.

"What?" Was all she could say at first. "What does that mean?"

"It means that stopping an officer in the process of taking down a load will earn you the kind of reputation you don't want to have." That got to her. She stopped cold in her tracks, any further words frozen on her lips.

"I'll take the lane," Pancho said. Pancho left the break room with Salty Suzy, where he was supposed to be going over the FTO training manual with her but they were actually swapping Iraq stories, when they heard the commotion outside. "You don't want to take a seizure away from an officer, Ms LaPaluzza," he said, after hesitating just a moment while he read her name off the name plate on her uniform shirt. "That could get you in big trouble." Jeanette was in a quandary. Should she take this as a threat? Or as a caution to her to back off until she knew what just what the hell was going on.

"All right," she said to Pancho after a moment's hesitation. "You take the lane." Pancho and Salty Suzy started off to take over the lane Elvis and Fenwick had left. But Suzy, being Suzy, couldn't leave well enough alone.

"And I thought I was the dumb ass newbie," she said straight to Supervisor LaPaluzza's face. After which Jeanette LaPaluzza wheeled on her heels and stomped back into the supervisor's office where she forthwith plunked her rear end down at her desk and began busily pounding away on her computer's keyboard delineating in extremely fine detail the insubordination she had encountered that day. They would certainly never have tolerated such insubordination back in Human Resources in Washington D.C. The offending party would have immediately received an involuntary transfer to somewhere considerably less agreeable than the comfortably air conditioned Ronald Reagan building in Washington. Much, much less agreeable.

Probably the Mexican border.

Pancho and Suzy trudged off to take over the lane, greeted by the heated glare of Percepto Mondival, who had to wait an extra two minutes to be cleared on his way to Missy Zanoria's Lounge and a hot date with the resident pole dancer and part time bartender, Alice Sue Swack.

"What is this? Leaving a lane open and people waiting." He fumed. "Some of us have important things to deal with," he snapped at Pancho and Salty Suzy as they reopened the lane.

"Put a lid on it buster," Suzy snarled at him through his opened car window. Percepto was about to really launch into a acidic diatribe when Suzy leaned in and glared at him. "You got that, Peaches?" Percepto, being not a totally clueless dumb shit like his fraternal twin, Perfecto, whose nickname was Zero Sum, caught on.

"Yes, officer," he said, catching himself in time just before he said "Yes Sir, Officer," which would have brought the wrath of the entire feminine segment of the godhead of Olympus onto his unprepared shoulders. As Percepto drove off Pancho had not one word of criticism for Suzy. Everyone knew that Percepto was a pain in the ass jerk. Instead Pancho gave her a thumbs up, thinking as he did so that having her as a trainee was working out a whole lot better than he would have thought. He began thinking of all the jerk regulars on the border that were open season for Suzy, having as she did her Uncle Tom the Assistant Commissioner as her trump card in the border game of chance. Pancho looked at Suzy and a wide grin spread over his face, lifting his thick moustache and revealing the gap between his two front teeth and a slightly fuzzy tongue from the smoothie he had on the way to work that morning.

"I'm thinkin' we're gonna have a good ol' time together, here, Suz," he said. Suzy grinned back and landed a good natured Suzy-sized thump on Pancho's shoulder that reverberated all the way down his spinal chord and ended up in his metatarsals, and also somewhat loosened one of his state of the art composite fillings in his upper right quadrant wisdom tooth emplaced just two weeks earlier by Dr. Fred Ing, known locally as "the happy dentist." Happy Doctor Ing having the professional ability to prescribe for himself all kinds of nifty drugs and frequently availing himself of that ability. Not to mention the pharmaceutical company samples. Pancho always made his dental appointments for first thing in the morning. Before Happy Fred Ing the dentist got too happy and did something like extract the wrong tooth.

In secondary Elvis told the woman in his--not so fluent but mostly understandable-- Spanish to shut off the van and get out of it. She didn't move. He repeated it. Still no movement. Elvis reached in through the open window, shut off the ignition and pulled out the key. Still the woman didn't move. Her eyes were locked on the distant horizon as though the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were galloping straight for her. Elvis opened the door and took her arm, gently pulling on it to try to move her. A little movement. Still not much. Then he took a firmer hold and pulled her out of the van. She popped out of the van like a cork popping on a bottle of suitably aged month old Napa Valley white wine. And immediately collapsed at Elvis' feet. Elvis didn't hesitate even a splitlet of a split second. He turned to Fenwick, who was staring open mouthed at the prostrate woman as though he'd just discovered a mutilated corpse on his daily morning walk on the (usually) bone dry Santa Cruz river bed.

"Go get Suzy," Elvis said. "We're gonna need a woman on this one."

Police brutality. Excessive use of force. Inappropriate sexual contact. Elvis could already see the charges in the criminal and/or civil suit against him that some hungry opportunistic lawyer would dream up, hoping for a nice out of court settlement, at least ten percent of which would go to the actual plaintiff.

Elvis saw Pancho look quizzically at him as Fenwick hurried towards Pancho in his peculiar tilting lope and probably botched the message. Pancho pointed at Suzy with the same questioning expression. Elvis nodded affirmatively and Salty Suzy immediately launched herself out of the booth on her way to Elvis and the prostrate load driver. One thing about Suzy. She was always, absolutely always, ready for some action. Even a sizeable percentage of the local Taliban steered clear of her when she did a six week TDY tour in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan.

"OK, Boss," she huffed as she panted up to him. "Wassup?" Elvis pointed at the woman.

"More like whasdown, Suzy," he said. "Let's take her inside." Suzy bent down and lifted up the woman, who was on the chunky side and weighed in at a lumpy 150 pounds, as easily as though she was lifting a twenty pound bag of potatoes at the local Moreno Brothers Grocery and Dry Cleaners. As she headed into the secondary office with the lumpy woman, Elvis turned to Fenwick.

"Fenwick," he began. "You take charge of these kids. Take them inside to the break room. See if any of them need anything. Water. Maybe a soda. Maybe use the bathroom."  
"Use the bathroom......?" Fenwick muttered with no little consternation as Elvis turned and hurried after Salty Suzy and Lump Woman. Fenwick had just noticed that one of the kids looked like she was still in diapers. Following which he had a moment of nostalgia for his seizure custodian job, which was separate from the busy narcotics seizure facility, and where he spent many a day without encountering a single human being and never once was confronted with a diaper dilemma of any kind. Though he did once have a really sucky day when a pair of confiscated macaws escaped inside the seizure compound and mocked him with a mixture of Spanish and English obscenities as he tried to catch them. After which Fenwick could never pass a pet shop without sending ocular death threats at whatever macaws or similar parrot like creatures might be present. Up to and including lovebirds.

Once he came within a Fenwick whisker of going into a pet shop and strangling a parrot that was sticking its tongue out at him and making catcalls from its perch in the store window.

"Hey! Fat boy! Hey! Fat boy!" Fenwick had just grabbed onto the pet shop door handle, opened the door and was about to go inside and do battle with the malevolent-tongued parrot when the pet shop owner, a guy as big as a mature black bear standing on its hind legs, stepped up next to the parrot. The bear sized pet shop owner looked curiously at Fenwick

"You lookin' to buy a parrot?" He said.

"Fuck a banana, fat boy!" Said the parrot. Fenwick's eyes narrowed.

"Yes," he said to Big Bear man. "I think I am. _This one_ ," pointing directly at the offending parrot. The parrot, whose name was Manuelito and who was definitely not in the dumb parrot category, caught on right away.

"NononoNONONO!" Big Bear man shrugged.

"Reckon you'll have to pass on this one, partner. Manuelito here is pretty finicky about humans. If he doesn't like you, he'll try to make your life miserable."

_Not for long_ , Fenwick was thinking.

"He's not for sale," Big Bear Man said. "Not to you. I wouldn't do that to you. Or to Manuelito." If Manuelito had known what a great big kiss of gratitude was, he'd have planted one on Big Bear Man at that exact instant. Instead he did his Manuelito parrot equivalent.

"OKOKOKOK!"

Following which he stuck out his stubby parrot tongue at Fenwick.

Back to the port. Elvis hurried to get in front of Suzy before she tried to go the wrong way through the secondary door again and thunked Lump Woman's head on the door. He got there just ahead of her, threw open the door and Suzy trundled her lumpy burden through. Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza froze solid as a north slope Greenland glacier in the Northern Hemisphere mid-winter when she saw Salty Suzy and Lump Woman and Elvis come through the door. Jeanette did eat a lot of pistachio nuts, despite her health conscious mother--actually health conscious to the point of hypochondria--sternly warning her that they could be hallucinogenic as well as causing gout and ingrown toenails, and at first thought maybe Mama was right after all and she was hallucinating.

"No more nuts," she said to herself, but loud enough for Elvis to hear as he poked his head in the door. Elvis took it personally, though to him it was more of a compliment than an insult, not to mention that a good many of the other officers would have considered calling Elvis a nut a verbal bull's-eye. .

"This nut has got a passed out load driver," Elvis said, breaking the Jeanette glacial ice and sending a kaleidoscope of emotions colliding with each other on Supervisor LaPaluzza's face. "Call the Nogales EMT's. And also child protective services. We've got three little kids involved here." In less than ten seconds Elvis had complicated Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza's day far beyond anything so mundane and simple as untying the Gordian Knot or trying to decipher the New York Times crossword puzzle. Narcotics. Insubordination. Passed out load driver. Little kids. Nogales EMT's. Child Protective Services. Where the hell was Lorenzo Pappagallo, the shift senior inspector who was supposed to be running this shift while she supervised it? Hardly had the thought landed in her brain pan when the answer came from a totally unexpected direction, taking the Gordian Knot day to a whole new extra knotted level.

"Supervisor LaPaluzza," hollered a breathless gaunt sepulchral figure that would have fit in very nicely as the resident of an open coffin at Savadedda's Heavenly Rest Mortuary in nearby Rio Rico. None other than the missing Lorenzo Pappagallo came thundering through the secondary office's door. "I've got a load!" He yelled. Lorenzo was out in the secondary lot when K-9 officer Maribelle Nilminck and her K-9 Philbert went by the Honda Odyssey. Philbert did a K-9 double take, a triple take, and then charged at the Odyssey and proceeded to try to eat it. Lorenzo immediately jumped in, said "it's mine!" and made tracks for the office.

Elvis turned to Lorenzo in semi-amazement. _Another load?_

"A load?" Elvis said. Where?" Then Supervisor LaPaluzza's day really went to hell.

"The Honda Odyssey van," Lorenzo said. "Just outside the door. I think it's in the gas tank." Elvis took a very unfriendly step towards Lorenzo. Elvis--and several other ET members, including Pancho--had a history with Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo. Their general opinion of him was that he was so slippery that he had a hard time keeping his pants from sliding off his hips, which would explain why he wore suspenders, and that the only way he could find a load on his own was if it came gift wrapped redolent with the odor of marijuana and his name written on it in big Day-Glo letters along with 'Drugs!' in even bigger letters. And even then there was a good chance he'd still miss it. Elvis had a nickname for Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo. Copro. A nickname that was not even remotely complementary, though Elvis--and Pancho--kept its exact meaning a secret only they knew.

"That, Copro," hissed Elvis, "is _our_ load." He turned to look at Supervisor LaPaluzza. "And the supervisor here can verify that we walked it back from secondary." Jeanette was a quick study and knew to grab opportunities when they turned up. In this case the Avenging Angel had arrived in record time. _So this red headed broomstick and his gang of misfits thought they could get away with embarrassing Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza? Not today, beanpole!_

"What walk back?" She said. "I was in the can....er....ah...head...I mean lavatory."

"The surveillance cameras will tell a different story," Elvis shot back with an intense look that momentarily transfixed a curious crow teetering on the top of a telephone pole a good seventy yards away. Quick study Jeanette requicked.

"Oh, _that_ walk back," she said, pointing out to the Honda Odyssey. "Yes. This officer here," she bent to read his name plate, but, having forgotten her contacts that morning, couldn't quite make it out, "officer....er.. Malbonery, did indeed walk the van back." She looked at Copro. "But, nice try, anyway, Lorenzo. Better luck next time." Then her eyes lit up with the inner burn that had been roasting her insides for the past few minutes.

"Now, Senior Inspector Pappagallo, would you readdress yourself to the particulars of your duties on this shift." A short pause while she changed gears. "And take care of this bloody mess in the secondary office! There is a fat lady out cold on the couch and a bunch of snotty nosed little kids mucking about the place. Plus we apparently have a lard, as well."

"Lard?" Elvis said. "Do you mean load?"

"Yes, that's it, load," Supervisor Jeanette replied, secretly wishing she could get her hands on Kwame Schultz's neck, her instructor at the CBP supervisor academy, who spent a lot of time admiring Jeanette's not unattractive physiognomy but had taught her damn near zilch about being a border supervisor. Meanwhile, Elvis' mind jumped its track and landed in another one. What was with the English slang?

Elvis immediately got suspicious. Bloody mess? Mucking about? LaPaluzza must be a buddy of Manny Kuribachi's secretary, Florida 'Bubble Gum' Nascowitz. Possibly even her companion on that four day whirlwind trip to London where Florida picked up her vaguely English accent and her penchant for dropping English slang words she mostly didn't understand.

"Do you know Florida Nascowitz?" Elvis blurted out before thinking. Jeanette shot Elvis a blistering don't-go-there look.

"I thought you looked like a lady lover," Salty Suzy interjected, seemingly out of nowhere. "Welcome to the club." Adding, while she threw a hooded look at Elvis which caused his anus to make an involuntary attempt at an interior somersault. "Although I do make exceptions." Which had Elvis wondering whether sudden cardiac arrest while copulating with Salty Suzy would constitute suicide or involuntary manslaughter.

Copro was meanwhile looking around for the blood from 'bloody mess' and the muck from 'mucking about.' He could find neither and was further confused beyond his usual opaque state of conscious being. Copro might have been forgiven his shortcomings but for some unfortunate personal characteristics He was about as self aware as a mummy from an Inca tomb way above the tree line and as personable as the asp that bit Cleopatra's frequently fondled tit. He was such a jerk that on the jerk scale from one to ten he scored an eleven. He also detested Elvis and Pancho with the entire inventory of his eleven score jerkhood. Which damn well didn't make for a congenial relationship. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis would have been back slapping best buds homeboys by comparison, trading anecdotes and sipping brandy between battles.

Fenwick meanwhile herded the three little kids into the break room inside the secondary building. No little task, considering the kids didn't speak English and Fenwick didn't speak Spanish. A good thing, actually, since if the kids had the linguistic and cultural knowledge to understand it when he kept calling them "the frickin Three Little Stooges" they might have reacted in an decidedly negative fashion. As it was they thought he was just a weird gringo--and weren't all gringos weird?--and at least understood his hand movements to go inside. Which they did, mostly because the oldest, Dinero, needed to take a leak real bad and urged his little siblings inside where, presumably, the gringos had a bathroom.

"Baño?" Dinero said to Fenwick in a very urgent voice. "Dónde?" Where's the bathroom? Fenwick looked blankly at the kid. Dinero then pantomimed unzipping his fly, pulling out his unit and mimicking a waterfall from said unit. Dinero's point sailed so high over Fenwick's head it collided with the spy satellite the North Koreans swore didn't exist.

"Goddamn that Elvis," Fenwick muttered bitterly. "Ain't it just my luck?" Fenwick sputtered as he backed away from the kid.

"I get stuck with a pint-sized pervert."

"Baños," Dinero repeated with even more urgency. "Dónde están los Baños?" He said it so loudly that K-9 officer Maribelle Nilminck, who had put her K-9 Philbert back in his cage to come inside and see what was going on, heard him as she came in the door.

"Bathrooms," Maribelle called out as she headed for the chaos in the Sup's office. "The kid wants a bathroom."

" _Ohhhh,"_ Fenwick said with a whole truckload of relief. He beckoned at Dinero to follow him and walked down the hall with him to where the men's head was. He pointed at the door and Dinero didn't waste a millisecond in jerking the door open and disappearing inside with a rapidity rivaling that of the cottontail rabbit being chased by a red tailed hawk Dinero had seen at dusk the day before on the outskirts of Mexican Nogales. Had evolution provided red tailed hawks with headlights, the rabbit wouldn't have stood a chance. This rabbit, however, despite the advantage of red tailed hawks not having headlights, ran smack into a velvet mesquite tree's trunk in its haste and ended up as a tasty hawk supper. A life lesson that Dinero would take to heart later in his teenage and young adult life. Avoid mesquite trees when running from the avenging claws of the Law.

Just as that dilemma was undilemmaed, Dinero's baby sister, Dinala, began to wail back in the break room.

'"Caca," she sobbed. "Caca!" Fenwick made tracks back to the break room and looked on helplessly at the wailing toddler. He bent down to pick up her. Then his olfactory senses kicked in. A realization came over his shocked face. A face whose expression fast morphed into disgust. He knew exactly what caca was. The kid's diaper needed to be changed. His expression changed to exasperation. Change a diaper? He had no clue. Then came the second olfactory recognition. The little kid, and her four year old brother standing next to her, had a distinct odor Fenwick now could identify with seasoned confidence. Marijuana. The kids had been sitting on a seat in the van that was crammed full of marijuana, though Fenwick did not yet know where the marijuana smell originated. Oh, no! Could it be on the kids? Worse. Even in the dirty diaper?

Just as Fenwick was floundering in his new dilemma, Maribelle Nilminck came hurrying in the room. Maribelle, besides being a red hot K-9 officer and a three time state skeet champion runner up, was also a mom. She knew what caca meant and heard Dinela's plaintive cries. Maribelle hustled into the room and took charge of the wailing little kid and Fenwick was ready at that moment to sign over all of his personal assets, including his classic comic book collection, to Maribelle, as well as making her the beneficiary of his life insurance policy and buying her lunch every day for the balance of the fiscal year.

"God bless you, Maribelle," Fenwick said. "I'm sure He's watching over you at this very moment." Maribelle's eyes didn't leave the wailing toddler, but her voice did make it to Fenwick's ears just fine.

"God is a _woman_ ," she said with absolute finality. To which Fenwick, for only the second or possibly third time in his life, had the good sense to say absolutely nothing.

Meanwhile the Nogales Fire Department's first response EMT team came screaming up with sirens blazing and screeched to a halt in the secondary lot next to the Honda Odyssey van, scaring the hell out of Maribelle's K-9, Philbert, who had been snoozing in his cage dreaming about chocolate covered doggie biscuits. Philbert began to howl, adding his voice to the EMT vehicle's siren and, also just hurtling into the secondary lot, a Nogales PD SUV cruiser. Everyone, with the exception of Philbert, who continued to yowl and who was now fully awake and really pissed off at being interrupted in his cool dream, went hotfooting it for the secondary buiding and the lumpy passed out woman on the couch in Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza's no longer peaceful office. Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo stood in the door ready to take command of the situation, but the EMT's and Officer Hermilinda Ringgold thundered right by him without a word and piled into the supervisor's office.

"That's right!" Lorenzo said to their vanishing backsides. "In there!"

Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza's mouth dropped open in astonishment as her office rapidly filled up with people. Lump Woman. Elvis. Salty Suzy. Two EMT's and a female Nogales PD officer. With Copro standing in the door and Pancho, who had decided he would be needed inside and closed his lane, just coming through the outer door. Supervisor Jeanette revisited her furnace hot resentment at academy instructor Kwame Schultz teaching her zero about being a border supervisor while frequently commenting how good she would look in a bikini. A bikini in Kwame's mind being a euphemism for buck naked. In particular, buck naked on the heirloom feather bed in Kwame's designer decorated bachelor digs. Jeanette, who knew that Kwame was a reservist in the U.S. Army, vowed at that moment to pull strings in Headquarters and get Kwame called to active duty where he would hopefully be parachuted into Taliban controlled country in Afghanistan with a sign in both Pashto and Dari attached to the back of his uniform which translated into the English as "All Taliban Are Goat Fuckers!"

"Can you hear me?" EMT Adelmo Rios said, intending the comment for Lump Woman.

"I can hear you just fine," Lorenzo said from the doorway. "What do you want?"

"Not you, Copro," Pancho, who had just come up next to Lorenzo, snapped . "He's talking to the woman on the couch."

"Oh," Lorenzo said, wondering again just what Copro meant, which neither Elvis nor Pancho would explain. Though Lorenzo suspected it might be something like a corruption of the Urdu word for stalwart warrior. At one time he thought it might mean wondrous stud. But then his third wife ran off with the electric company's meter repairman and Copro dropped the wondrous stud idea.

"Miss," EMT Rios said, repeating. "Can you hear me?"

"That's Mrs." Lump Woman answered in a weak voice. "With three little kids. Do you take me for a trollop?" EMT Rios looked in confusion at his fellow EMT, Bartolo Gutierrez-Sorenson.

"Trollop?" Rios said. "What's that?"

"I think it's some kind of seafood," Gutierrez-Sorenson answered.

"You guys are a pair of cretins," said a heretofore unheard female voice. "Those are scallops, not trollops." It was Officer Hermilinda Ringgold of the Nogales Police Department. Otherwise known as RF to her wary coworkers. RF standing for radical feminist. She bent down to Lump Woman's side.

"Did anyone touch you?" She said, trying to sound concerned, but more interested in building a case for another righteous feminist bust (and not of the corporeal variety).

"Yes. Yes." Lump woman said. "All over." Officer Ringgold of the Nogales Police  
Department jumped to her feet.

"All right, let's have it. Who touched her and where." Elvis stepped forward, not at all intimidated by Officer Ringgold, the hot eyed police woman having once seduced Elvis in their apartment complex' laundry room when everyone else was in their apartments glued to their big screen HDTV sets watching the Final Four. Officer Ringgold, albeit in actual fact a radical feminist, was nevertheless determined--as a self-avowed principle of "personal stereotype liberation"--to take the concept of promiscuity to a new level. At least in the greater Nogales area.

Hermilinda," Elvis began. "She collapsed outside and had to be carried indoors. Now how could we have done that without touching her?" Hermilinda was not convinced.

"So who was the person who carried her indoors and touched her all over?" Salty Suzy stepped out of the crowd and eyeballed Hermilinda.

"I did, Ms Officer Robocop. Wanna make somethin' of it?" Hermilinda, though barely half of Salty Suzy, was not about to back down. But....then...

"I want to talk to my lawyer," Lump Woman said from her prostrate position, as she apparently was rapidly regaining her strength.

"She looks OK to me, Elvis," EMT Rios said. "But we probably should take her to the hospital for a checkup just in case."

"Is the hospital close to the border?" Lump Woman said, planning ahead. "Walking distance, maybe?" Lump woman, though a Mexican citizen living in Mexico, spoke fluent English, having spent six summers straight in her younger years working as a tour guide at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument where she told everyone she was descended from a sub tribe of Sioux Indians who fled to Mexico to avoid being stuck in a miserable reservation in boondocks South Dakota.

"That freakin' Custard got just what he deserved," Lump Woman-who wasn't so lumpy back then--used to say to the tourists.

About this time Supervisor Jeanette LaPalluza was wondering why Lump Woman wasn't inquiring about her three kids. She was the only one wondering. Not Elvis. Nor Pancho. Not even Copro. Flaco the Smuggler recruited Lump Woman from a local vegetable stand where she barely scraped by from day to day selling low cal taco salads, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument management having to let go most of the tour guides because of Congressional budgetary cutbacks made necessary to finance a Congressional pay raise. Congress ever mindful towards the goal of achieving a balanced budget. Flaco got the three kids from what was more or less a Rent a Kid business. The kids' real mother told them to keep their mouths shut in the van and if they did she'd take them all to Disneyland with the money Flaco paid her. She actually had no intention of taking the kids to Disneyland, instead planning on hitting the Indian casino north of Nogales with her deadbeat boyfriend, Nazca Morales, but she sure didn't tell the kids. She was in no way a candidate for Nogales Mother of the Month. She was a mother all right. But in a whole different sense.

K-9 officer Maribelle Nilminck sent Fenwick out to the Honda Odyssey van to see if there was a diaper bag in it. There was, though Fenwick lingered a good while sniffing around in the van until he was certain the marijuana was in the van's two rear seats. Philbert the K-9 saw Fenwick sniffing in the van and immediately got huffy. What the hell was this? A human doing a dog's sniffing work? If there had been a doggie K-9 union he would have complained. But there wasn't, dogs being, as always, second class citizens when it came to any quality of life workplace issues. In the van, Fenwick, satisfied at his conclusions, climbed out somewhat clumsily and then trundled back inside with the diaper bag. Further befuddling Philbert, who could not fathom how such an awkward creature could compete with the sleek super dog that Philbert considered himself to be.

"Took your own sweet time, didn't you, Speedo?" Maribelle said in a snit as she grabbed the diaper bag and set to diaper changing business. "You watch these two while I take the baby into the bathroom to change her." Fenwick thought that was one whopper of a great idea, not wanting any part of being involved in diaper changing, and kept an eye on the two older kids. Just one eye. The other was increasingly drawn by the hubbub in the supervisor's office. Maribelle was soon back with little Dinela smelling a whole lot better and looking a whole lot happier.

"Got to go see if they want me to run the van," she said. "The kids are yours again."

"But......" Was all Fenwick could blurt out before Maribelle was out the door and down the hall. Then he leaned out the door and hollered. "It's in the seats!" Maribelle either didn't hear him or just chose to ignore him. Which was standard procedure in most situations involving Fenwick.

"Want me to run the van?" Maribelle said in a loud voice to Elvis, upping the decibels so she could be heard over the hubbub in Supervisor LaPaluzza'a office.

"Absolutely yes!" Lorenzo, who was standing next to her, said. "It's really my load but that jerk Elvis stole it from me." Then adding, not necessarily agreeably received by Mirabelle. "But I will gracefully accept this treachery and assist you in any way I can." Mirabelle shot Lorenzo a sizzling look that could have heated the cold coffee in the port director's favorite cup to at least lukewarm, but didn't say anything.

"Yes, Mirabelle!" Elvis hollered over the noise. "Run it. Please." Mirabelle wheeled on her reinforced privately purchased sturdy and very comfortable work shoes--the government issue shoes feeling like having a couple of chunks of 2x4's on her feet--and headed for Philbert's K-9 cage. Lorenzo schlepped behind her whether she wanted him or not. Lorenzo thinking that, although life had just served him up lemons in the human form of Elvis the Asshole and Pancho the Other Asshole, Lorenzo--he modestly hesitated to say Lorenzo the Virtuoso--would find a way to make lemonade from life's Elvis and Pancho lemons.

"Let's put her on the gurney and take her to the hospital," EMT Rios said to no one in particular. Supervisor LaPaluzza was about to agree when Elvis interjected.

"We first have to determine if she is in fact a load driver," he said. "I see no immediate medical need to move her." Supervisor LaPaluzza, being very unsure of what she should do, took the well traveled route of the great mass of humanity. She did nothing. Rios, who actually wanted to get back to the fire station where they were watching TV as the University of Arizona Wildcats were locked in a close one with Southern Cal, started to take issue with Elvis. He didn't get past the first syllable. Salty Suzy reached down, grabbed Rios' shoulder and slowly squeezed until she approached the pounds per square inch grip pressure of a mature wild Borneo orangutan. Wild Borneo orangutans known throughout Indonesia and beyond as having grips like an industrial level vice.

"She's staying here until Elvis gives the all clear." She looked at him with quizzical raised eyebrows which were sending a very clear message that Rios did not fail to get.

"Roger that," he said without the slightest bit of hesitation.

Fifty feet away in the secondary lot K-9 Officer Mirabelle Nilminck hurried out to Philbert's cage on her comfortable and sturdy privately purchased shoes--the cheap ass government of course refusing to reimburse her for the out of pocket costs--and opened up Philbert's cage. Philbert was always an eager dog, but this was an occasion that went beyond the merely eager. This was like the Canine Olympics. Philbert to the rescue! The reliability and reputation of not just himself, but the entire K-9 section, was at stake. Perhaps even beyond to the entire canine universe. He could not let a clumsy doofus of a human eclipse his innate superior olfactory abilities. So who said that the humans solely occupied the top evolutionary spot? At least the sniffling ability part. This was far more than just mere job security. It was with steely eyed canine determination that Philbert faced the Honda Odyssey van sitting so sneakily innocent in the secondary inspection lot. He was determined to ignore the human's antics on the van's seats and find whatever contraband there was purely on his own considerable sniffing ability--in his opinion actually a world class sniffing ability, that is if a human could speak dog and ask Philbert his opinion.

"OK, Philbert," Mirabelle said. "Let's do 'er." Philbert actually had no idea what the hell "let's do 'er" meant, not being a native English speaker, but he could read Mirabelle's body language just fine. Not as good as Mirabelle's horny husband, maybe, but still pretty accurately. Philbert's deep brown eyes narrowed, his muscles tensed, his adrenalin fired on all cylinders. Philbert was in blast mode and ready, from the canine non-verbal viewpoint, prepared to "let's do 'er." Standing off to the side was the sepulchral Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo, causing a minor irritant to both Mirabelle and Philbert--who disliked the gawky human nearly as much as he detested border collies, cuddly toy poodles and all varieties of cats.

"It's in the gas tank," Lorenzo said to Mirabelle. "It's always in the gas tank."

"Thank you for your input," said Mirabelle in a sarcastic voice--who knew that the only load Lorenzo had ever really found on his own was in a gas tank that a drunken load driver had forgotten to cover and gave off such a strong odor of marijuana that it could be smelled at least twenty feet away. And Lorenzo still would have missed it had not the drunken driver of the load car passed out and driven smack into the kiosk Lorenzo was manning at the time.

"The gas tank," Lorenzo repeated. "Be sure to check the gas tank." If Mirabelle heard him, she ignored it. But Philbert shot him a hostile look out the corner of his dark brown canine eye. Accompanied by the enticing thought of taking a chunk out of Lorenzo's boney leg and possibly getting lucky and ripping the leg off at the knee or, if he was really lucky, all the way to the hip joint.

Mirabelle and Philbert began their practiced narcotics run. Any sour graper who denigrated the training of a CBP narcotics detection dog had never seen Mirabelle and Philbert at work. Their practiced movements, working as a well honed team, were like a graceful border ballet. Maybe not quite up to terpsichorean Nutcracker standards, but they were still darned good and they knew it. Lorenzo didn't even notice, focused as he was on the gas tank area where the dog would undoubtedly hit and prove Lorenzo once again correct.

The K-9 pair slowly and carefully circled the van, Philbert hesitating just a fraction of a moment by the side of the van and again near the front. Then Mirabelle stopped, pulled over the van's sliding door and turned Philbert loose inside the van. Philbert dove for the van's middle seat before Mirabelle even spit out the last syllable of "go, boy." To say Philbert was fired up was an understatement on the order of saying the Iowa State Fair might have corndogs at the food pavilion. Philbert lost himself in the excitement of the drug hunt and tore into the van's middle seat as though it were chock full of chocolate covered doggie biscuits. Mirabelle moved to pull him off the seat, but he jumped into the rear seat and continued with his imaginary feeding frenzy. Mirabelle reached over to pull Philbert off the rear seat before he completely shredded it. The dog surprised her again by bounding over both seats and into the front where he put his nose up against the van's console and repeatedly sniffed at it, his tail strangely wagging while he sniffed. Then he sat down, stared at the console, turned to glance at Mirabelle, then restared at the console. A look of doggie triumph took command of Philbert's canine presence. He'd one-upped the goddamn frickin' upstart human and preserved the dignity and reputation of the entire K-9 corps. It wasn't just the seats that were loaded.

So was the dash!

"Oh-oh," Mirabelle said, knowing Philbert's movements even better than the not so graceful lecherous moves of her sweet but largely clueless husband. She recognized Philbert's behavior with the van's seats as almost certainly indicating a sizeable amount of marijuana. But this? "There is something there besides marijuana," she said softly to herself, already starting to heat up with the excitement border officers felt when they caught hard drugs. "This," Maribelle repeated in a much louder voice, "is _no_ t marijuana."

Flushed with the excitement of what they had found, Mirabelle quickly put Philbert back in his cage and pulled out a handful of genuine chocolate covered doggie biscuits from her pocket and gave them to Philbert, who received them with a plenitude of doggie gratefulness. It was against K-9 unit policy to give the dogs treats, but Maribelle figured policy only went so far. To hell with the bosses. She and Philbert did all the work while the bosses sat on their hairy butts dreaming up all kinds of stupid stuff for the K-9 teams to do. Had any of them ever been down on all fours in the heat and the oil stains and sniffed out a load like Philbert did? Hell, no! He was one darned good drug dog and he deserved a treat every bit as much as she did. In her case the Chef's Choice seafood plate would share with her husband that evening at the local seafood place, Bennie's Got Crabs, as her own reward for a good job. Philbert securely in his cage--which she made darn sure of because Lorenzo was still nearby and she was well aware of Philbert's dark intentions towards Lorenzo's leg and other accessible parts of his anatomy--Mirabelle beat tracks for the secondary office to break the news.

"Did you check the gas tank?" Lorenzo said wistfully as she streaked past him, adding. "Philbrook might be wrong this time." Maribelle didn't hear him, but Philbert did, and recognizing enough human words to know the difference between Philbook and Philbert, promptly barred his teeth and snarled at Lorenzo for calling him Philbrook, which was the name of a totally useless jerk off K-9 border collie who couldn't find a load if it was strapped to his laughingly truncated border collie pecker.

"It's loaded," Maribelle said as she hotfooted it into the office. This came as no great surprise to Elvis and Pancho or even Salty Suzy, and certainly not Fenwick, who heard her from the break room where he was supervising the Three Little Stooges. The two EMT's and Officer Hermilinda Ringgold did get excited, as did Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza, who had never actually seen a real load before. Lump Woman, however lay on the couch and appeared not to notice.

"Marijuana in the seats," Maribelle said excitedly, then dropped the bombshell. "But something else in the console. Could be hard drugs. Maybe methamphetamine or cocaine or possibly even heroin by the way Philbert was reacting." That did get the attention of absolutely everyone in the room. Hard drugs! _Methamphetamine. Cocaine. Heroin._ A bunch of mental lights lit up in near unison. As Maribelle wheeled to go back outside, the room emptied after her in a scrambling hurry, though Elvis made a quick detour to the break room to see Fenwick.

"Fenwick," he said excitedly, Elvis not being immune to the rush of finding hard drugs. "Damnit, man, you've pulled off a hell of a seizure here." Elvis high fived Fenwick, which not only surprised Fenwick but also ignited his own long slumbering sense of self worth and sent a smile so wide across Fenwick's face it felt to him like the edges of his mouth touched on the back of his neck. "Stay here and watch the kids and the woman," Elvis said. "I'll let you know right away when we find out exactly what we've got." The smile on Fenwick's face faded and he was about to protest that he wanted to be there to see the drugs, too. Too late. Elvis was already gone out the door.

Nevertheless, Fenwick couldn't resist. He edged towards the door to see what there was to see in the tumult outside.

Just then a kindly and sweet little old lady Isabella Hernandez drove her aging Corolla up to the open lane at the Mariposa Port of Entry. She had the usual exchange with the officer in the booth. Where are you going? What do you have with you? Raw pork? Plants? Weapons? Over $10,000 in cash? The last question always brought a chuckle out of Isabella. $10,000? She could hardly imagine what $100 would look like, much less $10,000, she would say with her cute little old lady chuckle. The border officer almost always chuckled along with her. A poor Mexican woman have $10,000? Ridiculous.

Isabella sure wasn't about to let on, but it was a long way from ridiculous. She often handled more than $10,000. Isabella was Flaco the Smuggler's mother. She managed the organization's finances and kept the account books. She also did the occasional odd task such as check out what had happened to the Odyssey Van that had not showed up at the drop off point in the Fry's parking lot down the road a mile or so from the port of entry. The border officers never paid any attention to Isabella, all assuming she was the kindly and sweet little old lady she appeared to be. And she actually was. A kindly and sweet old lady. But she was also a kindly and sweet old lady who was the financial brains in her son's modestly sized smuggling operation. She drove slowly past the secondary inspection area just as Mirabelle was running Philbert on the van and saw the dog blast the van's seats. She hit the speed dial on her mobile. Flaco came on the line.

"Busted," she said, then disconnected.

"Chinga!" Flaco hollered out in the back room of the auto body shop where his men prepared their load cars and had their weekly blowout Bacchanal with the girls from Manuela 'Anorexia' Fimbres' Boys Night Out Relaxation Center just down the street. Flaco was out a bunch of bucks for the Mexican wholesale cost of the drugs, not to mention three to four times that much when he sold them to the distributors in the U.S. "Chingachingachingachinga!" He blurted out, throwing his mobile against the shop wall and splintering it into a dozen worthless pieces. The splintered pieces of mobile sliding into various hard to sweep nooks and crannies along the walls where already resided residual chunks of several other previously shattered mobiles. Flaco taking the concept of throw away phones literally and consequently a regular customer of the local throw away mobile vendor.

"Goddamn gringos!' He fumed, then further elaborated. "Goddamn motherfucking gringo assholes." Flaco didn't like gringos. Especially gringo CBP officers that grabbed his drugs and put a big dent in his current net worth. Thanks to them he would have to go into his cash reserves to make the monthly mortgage payment on his beachfront complex at Kino Bay on the Gulf of California. But, Mama Isabella would say when she got back from her search for the missing Odyssey.

"Not to worry, hijo. We still got lots of bucks."

Which, in fact, they did. Drug smuggling right up there with stock manipulating and insider trading as the fast track to accumulating wealth.

Demeritia Holocene, an ESL--English as a Second Language--teacher in the Nogales School District, had just been cleared at a primary lane and was driving her treasured classic--albeit notably temperamental--Yugo towards her home in the town of Rio Rico, having recently moved there from her home in Somerton on the California border. A town locally known for the number of drug smugglers and addicts living there. Many of those addicts owing their addiction to working in the fields of winter vegetables where they battled the long, weary hours of hard work and bad weather in the fields with the Siren pick-me-up of heroin or other drugs. Which sure didn't mean squat to the cops when they made their heroin busts. Illegal drug use was just that. Illegal drug use. And in no way justifiable to the long arms and harsh eyes of the Law.

Not to mention all the good paying jobs the Drug War spawned.

A knot of people burst out of the secondary office. All in uniforms. Maribelle Niminck came first, with Pancho, Salty Suzy, Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza, EMTs Rios and Gonzales-Sorenson, Nogales PD officer Hermilinda Ringgold with Elvis fast closing up on the rear. Off to the side stood Senior Inspector Lorenzo 'Copro' Pappagallo, fixedly staring at the gas tank area of the deceptively inert white Honda Odyssey.

"Look at that," Demeritia Holocene muttered as she drove by. "All those government employees screwing around doing nothing and wasting my hard earned tax dollars." Demeritia however failing to note that 1: the officers were in the middle of a major narcotics seizure and 2: that she was herself a government employee in a job she very privately considered "puro caca"--pure bullshit. She was working solely with Spanish speaking kids as an English as a Second Language teacher but, although she was fluent in Greek and Turkish as well as English, she couldn't even read a road sign in Spanish and 3: that she and EMT Rios had a thing going that left her mostly bereft of her former malady of lonely nights. And 4: Demeritia not being above smoking a joint to chill out after a long and tedious day at work.

As Demeritia drove disgustedly away in her classic Yugo, hoping that this time it made it all the way home without a mechanical emergency, the herd of uniforms arrived at the sneaky white Honda Odyssey.

"I'll move it back to the search compound," Elvis said as he caught up to the others, producing the Honda's keys from his pocket. Keys which he had prudently removed earlier. He climbed into the van and turned the ignition. Nothing. He turned it again. Still nothing. Supervisor LaPaluzza noticed Lorenzo standing by the gas tank area of the Honda.

"Lorenzo," she said. "Go inside and keep an eye on the office." Lorenzo started to protest.

"But I should really be watching the gas tank. I'm afraid they are going to miss the load in the gas tank." Supervisor LaPaluzza was starting to get the hang of being a supervisor. Look angry. And if that doesn't work? Yell.

"Go!" She said with supervisory verve, her slender and almost dainty index finger pointing at the office. Lorenzo went. Grumbling to himself. But he went. With, however, one eye still on the highly suspicious gas tank attached to the still deceptively inert Honda Odyssey.

Salty Suzy walked up to the side of the Honda and spoke to Elvis through the opened driver side door.

"Pull the hood latch, Elvis, let me have a look." Elvis, who came from an extended rural family where the women could shoe a horse, cook a tasty meal, teach at the local school, run a marathon, fix a car, and screw their menfolk into utter exhaustion, all with equal facility, was unfazed. Clunk! He pulled the hood latch. Salty Suzy went over to the front of the Honda and pulled up the hood, her head disappearing as she bent to look inside. A moment later she spoke again.

"Give it a try now, Elvis." Vra....vra... Vrooooom. The Honda started. Salty Suzy closed the hood. Officer Hermilinda Ringgold stepped out and gave Salty Suzy a high five that admirably withstood the gale force of Salty Suzy's idea of a high five.

"You are my kind of woman," Officer Hermilinda said. "Even if you did feel up the fat lady inside."

Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza would have swallowed her false teeth, had she any false teeth, on hearing Hermilinda's comment. Though in the past Jeanette would have had the sexual harassment complaint form filled out within the span it took her to inhale three, perhaps four, deep breaths had some flubbernick male so much as commented on her new nail polish, things were different now. A sexual assault complaint when she was the supervisor on duty? And as a newbie supervisor? Wouldn't look good in her personnel file. Not good at all. And, having been in Human Resources before, she knew darned well the kind of incriminating stuff the government snoops stuck in them. Jeanette wanted no black marks on her record, wondering as she thought about it whether they would be white marks if she were black. Her career plan was to do her time on the border and then transfer to the preclearance facility at Dublin's airport, an assignment she was pretty sure she could get since she hadn't burned her bridges back in Human Resources. Plus having collected some downright embarrassing, if not actually incriminating, stuff on the bosses from their confidential personnel files. Dublin was one hell of a choice assignment that would allow her enough free time to sample as many genuine Irish pubs as she could during her Dublin tour, plus possibly taking up the concertina or maybe the penny whistle and for sure checking out the legendary Irish male and/or female libido.

"Now wait a minute, ladies," Jeanette said. "Let's not create an incident where there need not be one. I don't believe any inappropriate sexual contact took place here and I did personally observe the situation myself."

"Hell, Sup," Hermilinda said. "No Problemo. Then, turning to Salty Suzy. "How about a drink after work, Big Lady. I can fill you in on all the local hot spots."

"You're on," Suzy said, laying another gale force high five on Officer Ringgold's now beet red palm.

"Don't forget the gas tank!" Yelled Lorenzo from the opened secondary office door.

Elvis steered the now drivable Salty Suzy resurrected Honda Odyssey back to the covered enclosure at the rear of the secondary lot. An enclosure meant to hide the activities of the officers inside as they searched vehicles. Which was a great piece of theoretical planning but the reality was that half the town already knew what was going on before the enclosure's gate had even slammed shut. And half of them were already texting various friends, relatives and other interested parties, including news outlets and mysterious entities that were known to pay for valid tips. Pancho went ahead into the search compound and guided the Odyssey onto the tracks of the hydraulic lift. They may or not need the lift, knowing that the seats were loaded and something was in the console. But smugglers often put their drugs in multiple locations in a vehicle and it might be necessary to inspect the underside of the van. And, yes, Lorenzo, including the gas tank.

EMT Rios had forgotten all about the Arizona/Southern Cal game in his excitement to actually see a drug load being discovered after hearing about so many of them. EMT Gonzales-Sorenson had other things in mind, having noticed that drug smugglers drove Lincoln Town cars and Cadillac Escalades while EMT's drove ancient Japanese imports that so pretzeled the 6'6' Gonzales-Sorenson behind the wheel that his friends joked that his knees almost touched the car's roof. Which actually wasn't all that much of an exaggeration. Rios was looking for excitement. But Sorenson was looking for something else. Ideas. None of the humans present had a clue what was in Gonzales-Sorenson's mind. Humans, that is. But not far away, lurking inside his cage, Philbert was staring at Gonzales-Sorenson with a suspicious canine eye and possibly wondering how humans ended up being the dominant species on Earth. Excluding mosquitoes, of course, which Philbert reviled with the same intensity as Fenwick's hatred of all things even remotely parrot. Philbert's paws were great for scratching and dandy tools in a lot of ways, but woefully inadequate at swatting mosquitoes.

Officer Hermilinda Ringgold was sticking around because she wanted to hang with her new Woman Power buddy, Salty Suzy, while doing her cop person duty by also keeping a close ear to her radio for any calls. Supervisor LaPaluzza, now that the possible sexual harassment matter was closed, and knowing that Lump Woman's complaints would fall flatter than a Weight Watchers crepe after she was found to be a load driver, became transfixed with watching her first ever experience with any kind of seizure, drugs or otherwise. Human Resources in Washington not a place where you were likely to see any seizures. At least not of the illegal contraband variety. Though there were plenty of illegal parking towaways where the goddamn smart ass DC cops were always jerking their government chains.

Pancho and Salty Suzy pulled the middle van seat up and turned it over, with Salty Suzy providing an enthusiastic 90% of the muscle power by grabbing the seat and jerking it free with one fluid muscular movement. The flying seat barely avoided a collision with Elvis' protruding curious forehead, which caused Supervisor LaPaluzza to secretly smile at the way the impudent red headed twit who'd defied her orders jumped back and wishing the seat had scored a direct hit rather than a near miss. Then a muted almost orgiastic sigh rose from the assembled officers. There they were. Bricks. The prototypical brick sized brown tape wrapped packages that usually meant marijuana.

A few years down the legal medical marijuana road, after a similar border seizure, a more prolonged and far greater sigh would later rise over the streets of Tucson when the word got out to the firmament of local dope smokers that a load of righteous bud was caught at the border.

"Goddamn spoilsport CBP assholes," muttered Vernie 'I'll fly away' Patel, voicing the universal opinion of the legions of local MJ afficionados who didn't have medical marijuana prescriptions. This opinion however was not shared by everyone in the greater Tucson area.

"Hey! Attaway to go CBP, even if you are a bunch of assholes!" Some of the smugglers slapped their sides in glee when their competitors' dope was caught by cops. Other smugglers were equally gleeful that enough dope was caught to keep the street price from falling and thereby threatening their hefty monthly 401K contributions. The third group, one that greeted effective border enforcement with even greater enthusiasm, was the one composed of the operators of medical marijuana clinics.

"Better extend the hours today, Les," said Veracula Mahoud, owner of Sail Away, arguably the biggest and most successful medical marijuana clinic in Tucson and the entirety of Tucson's enveloping Pima County. Veracula grabbed Les Ticonderoga's shoulder and grinned.

"Our good friends in CBP have done it again. Busted another load at the border. My husband and business partner Dr. Diego Mahoud will be writing scripts all day long and sending them here." She started to walk away, then turned back to face store manager Les Ticonderoga. "We won't be able to close for lunch. Better order takeout." As Veracula started to walk away, Les called after her.

"Takeout? How about Mexican?"

Which caused both of them to chuckle.

So. Head back again a few years to the CBP gaggle at the Honda Odyssey van. There was no doubt it was marijuana, one of the packages was ripped wide open by a sharp spring end as the van's seat was jerked loose by Salty Suzy, emitting the odor of fresh marijuana strong enough for all to detect and even to seep into their clothing. Which would later cause some raised eyebrows and suspicious glances for the two first responder EMTs when they returned to the fire station. From one of their buddies:

"Hey, Rios! Got another joint to share with your friends?" From another buddy.

"Whoa, TT (short for Too Tall, which is what they called the 6'6" Gonzales-Sorenson). Got the munchies?" And from the austere senior officer on duty, Sergio Manicotti, who everyone privately considered to be the most humorless person in all of Nogales' Santa Cruz County.

"Now what the hell have you two jerk offs been up to?"

Following which there was some very serious explaining, followed by a verifying phone call to the port of entry. Elvis happened to be by the phone and picked it up.

"Nogales Mariposa Port of Entry," he said.

"This is Lieutenant Sergio Manicotti with the Nogales Fire Department." Elvis' eyes narrowed. He knew this guy. He was so rigid he had a hard time sitting down to take a dump.

"Was my emergency response team present when your officers found some marijuana? With enough odor to have it noticeable on them when we came back to the station?"

"Oh, yeah," Elvis replied. "We all smoked a joint. Passed it around. That's how we field test marijuana seizures now. Brand new procedure out of Headquarters. Your men were witnesses so they had to be part of the verification process." He paused while he heard Lieutenant Manicotti make strange noises on the other end of the line.

"I am a certified marijuana verifier. Had to go through a two week course at the Federal Law Enforcement Center in Georgia to get my certification. They said it was a darned interesting time but I don't remember much of it outside of one evening eating two large tubs of buttered popcorn with extra butter and damn near wetting my trousers watching a DVD of old Saturday Night Live shows." A short pause. "The graduation ceremony concluded with flying back home." Another pause, for effect.

"Without an airplane."

"This is that goddamn Elvis!" Snapped a thoroughly unamused Lieutenant Manicotti.

"Nail on the proverbial head, Sergio," Elvis answered. "And the actual fact is that your EMTs were present when we found a load of marijuana and that there was lots of odor and it got on all our clothes. So get off their butts and let them do their job. They're good men. All three of them." After which Elvis disconnected the phone, leaving Lieutenant Sergio Manicotti to wonder for a good while what the hell the Elvis meant when he said all three of them when Sergio was pretty sure there were only two.

Back to the initial marijuana discovery. There was no more extemporizing. Not at this moment, anyhow. As a matter of a rigidly mandated legal procedure, violation of which was rumored to include punishments up to and including public emasculation, Pancho had Salty Suzy cut open a package and place a small sample in a marijuana detection pouch. Suzy broke the vial in the pouch and pressed the pouch so the liquid inside mixed with the marijuana sample. The miracle of chemistry did its thing and in a few moments the liquid did a color change. To a liquid purple. Positive for marijuana. Everyone already knew it was marijuana, so there was no jubilant round of high fives. Their thoughts were already gravitating to the front of the Odyssey and whatever as yet undiscovered substance was hidden in the console there.

Elvis thought about bringing Fenwick out to see what was going on, but then decided he'd just walk him through what had happened later on when there were no distractions, Fenwick needed all the no-distractions one on one instruction he could get. While Pancho and Salty Suzy started removing the marijuana bricks from the van's middle and rear seats and stuffing them into garbage can sized plastic bags, Elvis and Mirabelle began to dismantle the Odyssey's console that was attached to the vehicle's fire wall. Mirabelle, like almost all K-9 handlers, had a set of tools in her van that would make a shade tree mechanic grow pale with tool envy. Plus there was an adjacent shed full of enough tools to dismantle an entire car dealership. Screwdrivers, wrenches, ratchets, probes and even personal utility knives were pulled out and put to use removing the various parts in the console--the blower and heater being the biggest. Elvis popped out the glove box and peered inside, shining his mini-mag flashlight into the dark interior to illuminate whatever was there. And there was something there.

"More packages," Elvis said. "And they're _not_ brown."

Everyone crowded around the passenger side front door of the van, trying to get a view of what Elvis and Maribelle were doing. They were strangely silent. Everyone was intent on what was in the packages in the console. A somewhat hoarse voice broke the silence, catching them by surprise. No one had noticed the excited approach of the port specter. Lorenzo Pappagallo.

"I called the duty agent," Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo said to Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza. Which he was supposed to do as the shift senior inspector assigned to the office. Calling a duty agent was also standard procedure, the agents charged with taking over seizures made at the ports and guiding them through the legal system. Including arresting and hauling perps to the local slammer. "She's tied up with another case and can't make it to the port for quite a while," Lorenzo continued. "She said to turn the seizure over to the local police and she'd wrap up the loose ends when she got here." Officer Hermilinda Ringgold's cop antennae popped straight up in the air when she heard Lorenzo's words.

"I called the Nogales PD," Lorenzo continued. "The duty supervisor said that Officer Ringgold here should take over the seizure, seeing as how she is already on site." Lorenzo shot a look at Hermilinda. "It was _my_ suggestion she take over the seizure." Whatever Lorenzo had in mind with that comment, and it likely had to do with Hermilinda's reputation for indiscriminately bedding damn near anybody, it didn't connect with any rotary in Hermilinda's mind. True enough. She was the local champion in promiscuity. She was a radical feminist. She could whistle in two octaves simultaneously. She regularly bowled over two hundred in the police league. But she also was a serious minded hot shot of a police officer. Plus she would screw Boris the Unwashed Hermit who lived in a fetid culvert outside of town before she'd let Copro put his grubby hands on her. At that point Supervisor LaPaluzza told Lorenzo to go back to the office and keep an eye on things, as she had already told him, she said with some pique, once before. Lorenzo, miffed at being excluded and relegated to the office, wheeled and stomped off.

As Lorenzo disappeared inside the secondary office, Hermilinda pushed her way to the front of the crowd around the van.

"I'll have to observe this first hand," she said as she moved up next to Salty Suzy just outside the van's door. "Hearsay doesn't fly with this cop." Elvis overheard her and looked up.

"Move in closer Hermilinda. Take a look inside before I remove the packages." Hermilinda leaned in and took that look, brushing against Elvis as she did. "Just like old times, hey, Hermi," Elvis whispered, accompanied by a overly dramatic wink.

"Just another mile post on the road, El," she whispered back at him. "I won't tell you which number." Said comment, for once, completely shutting down Elvis' frequently glib tongue. She looked in at the packages, then backed away a little. Elvis reached in to grab a package.

"OK," he said. "Let's do 'er." Philbert's ears perked up over in his cage. Let's do 'er? Was that weird red-headed beanpole human talking to him? Philbert looked over at Maribelle. She wasn't making any moves towards Philbert's cage. Which thoroughly riled Philbert's doggie dander. Now there was a second upstart human trying to muscle in on his K-9 territory by usurping his let's do 'er function, even if Philbert wasn't quite sure exactly what it was other than it involved gallantly charging forth canine style to put his nose to productive drug sniffing use.

Elvis had already put on a pair of throw away plastic gloves as he pulled out the first of the aurulent heavy-paper wrapped packages in the Honda's console. "Strange," he said, a puzzled look on his face. '"Very strange feel to this package. The size of a typical brick of dope, but it feels lighter." He hefted it his right hand. "A lot lighter." Maribelle then took the package and registered a similar surprise on her face. Hermilinda reached over and took the package, having also put on a pair of the throwaway plastic gloves--gloves that the budget conscious government bought for $1.00 apiece but that Walmart somehow was able to sell for five pairs for a buck including a single spare thrown in with no extra charge--but with a different reaction, not having had much experience with bulk drug loads. The local PD mostly had only personal use amounts of dope in their drug busts, though Hermilinda led the department in all arrests, drugs included, which made her universally unpopular with the local drug experimenting teenage population, who had a bunch of very uncomplimentary names for her. Bitch cop being the most common.

"What is different about this?" She said to both Elvis and Maribelle.

"I'm thinking it is something besides what we expected," Maribelle answered. "Not pressed bricks of bulk drugs. Something else." Elvis nodded his head in agreement.

"Well, let's give er' a look, then." Which earned him another indignant hostile look from Philbert. Elvis took his utility knife and slit open the golden yellow wrapping paper taped over the rectangular shaped package. As he peeled it off the peculiar feel of the package started to make sense. Inside was a plastic box. And the plastic box was packed full of pills of some kind.

"Ooohhhh!" Said Maribelle. "Now what do we have _here_?" Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza had been standing in the rear of the group huddled around the front of the Honda. This was her first exposure to a drug seizure and she figured the best way to deal with it was to stand back and let things happen until she had a handle on what went on. But now she stepped forward.

"What's in the box?" She said with some force, trying to sound supervisory. "Any idea?"

"Whatever it is, Sup," Elvis replied. "It sure as hell ain't legal."

"Open up the box," Jeanette said. A low murmur of agreement rose from all the rest of the officers present, though Elvis privately wondered just what hell else she thought he was going to do with it. Throw it up in the air and pull out his 9 Mil and blast away for target practice.

"Open it, El," Pancho said. "I'm thinking it's either Ecstasy or Rohypnol." That got Hermilinda's attention.

"Rohypnol? The date rape drug?" Both Elvis and Pancho nodded affirmatively.

"Goddamn bastards!" Salty Suzy chimed in. "I'd like to see them try that on me!" Though several people present had some very pithy things they might have said about that comment, none of them were brave--or foolish--enough to say anything.

Elvis opened the box and took out one of the pills inside. He looked closely at the pill, then over at the officers who were all intently watching.

"I've seen this kind of pill before. It is Rohypnol. Roofies, they call them. And, as Officer Hermilinda 'Mile Post' Ringgold so vividly described it, the date rape drug."

"There must be thousands of them here," Supervisor LaPaluzza said. "This could be a very important seizure that I've made." Elvis, Pancho, Maribelle, Salty Suzy and even Hermilinda all shot very hot looks at Jeanette over the personal possessive pronoun she'd just applied to the seizure. Jeanette felt the heat, especially the hot breath of Salty Suzy who was literally breathing down her neck, and backtracked in a big supervisory hurry.

"Er, ah, I meant the seizure you folks made while I was shift supervisor. "

"Should I call the duty agent to update her on what we've found?" Said a voice from behind them. Almost everyone turned and looked. It was Lorenzo. Again.

"Why aren't you in the office, Officer Pappagallo," an irritated Supervisor LaPaluzza said. "Didn't I tell you to stay there?"

"The other guy is watching the office," Lorenzo answered. "The trainee. The weird guy who was with the ass....er, ah....ET guys here."

"Are you referring to me, sir," an indignant Fenwick piped up from just behind Lorenzo. "This weird guy is the one who found this cache in the first place."

"That is load, Fenwick," Elvis said, tying not to sound irritated, "not cache."

"Same-same," Fenwick replied, using a phrase picked up back in his Viet Nam days.

"So just who is watching the office if both these guys are out here," interjected Officer Ringgold.

"Yeah," Salty Suzy said.

"Yeah. Yeah." Said Supervisor LaPaluzza.

"Oh, shit!" Said Elvis.

Officer Ringgold, really fired up now, was on her feet and bouncing back and forth like a mixed martial arts fighter about to head into the ring. The idea of some frickin' low lives smuggling the date rape drug had her really riled. She was doubly riled that a woman would be the smuggler. And triply riled that the woman would sink so low she'd use her kids to hide her smuggling. Before anyone else could react, Hermilinda, followed closely by Elvis, Pancho, Salty Suzy and Supervisor LaPaluzza, broke out in a run for the secondary office, passing both Lorenzo and Fenwick in a hasty twinkling but nevertheless not missing throwing some blast furnace glares at them. The uniformed bunch caused a passing pedestrian, Tirso Lenticula, a tourist from Toad Junction, Idaho, to do a flabbergasted double take, Tirso a silent movie fan and the thundering bunch of uniforms looking to him like a clone of an old Keystone Cops routine from the silent movie days. Tirso stopped dead in his tracks and wheeled around full circle, thinking this must be a film set doing a modern remake.

"There's got to be a camera somewhere," he muttered.

The gang of uniforms thundered inside the secondary building to the sup's office. It was empty. Oh-oh.

Lump Woman was gone.

"The break room!" Elvis said. And everyone promptly hotfooted it for the break room, bumping into each other in the doorways and incidentally getting an inkling of each other's various physical attributes. Supervisor LaPaluzza was pushed into Salty Suzy in the rushing crush and got an immediate grin and wink from Suzy. Elvis was the first in the break room. Empty. Except for a half eaten candy bar and a couple of lukewarm sodas and the lingering odor of a dirty diaper. No one there. No Lump Woman. No Three Little Stooges. From there the officers fanned out to search the rest of the building, including the bathrooms, where Hermilinda did find the reeking source of the dirty diaper smell in the women's restroom. Otherwise, nothing. Lump Woman and the Three Little Stooges were gone. Just then Lorenzo and Fenwick came sheepishly into the secondary office. Elvis gave them a hissing steam boiler of a look.

"Good going!" He said with narrowed eyes not unlike those of a hungry cougar about to pounce on a browsing mule deer in the nearby mountains. "You've done it again." Fenwick actually staggered backward as Elvis spit it out.

"Snatched defeat from the jaws of victory."

"I just wanted to see what was happening," Fenwick said defensively. Lorenzo didn't say anything, but his dour expression mirrored what he was thinking. Serves the bastards right for ripping off my load..

EMT officers Rios and Gonzales-Sorenson had not joined the thundering herd that blasted off for the secondary building. Rios, because he had a new pair of cheap ass department issue shoes and his feet were killing him. TT 'Too Tall' Gonzales-Sorenson because he was staring at the drug load and wondering if he could maybe grab one of the boxes of Rohypnol when no one was looking. TT had a pair of thoughts that stuck in his mind like the peanut butter sandwich he had for lunch stuck on the roof of his mouth. Which he could still taste, making him think his thoughts somehow tasted like peanut butter. Sorenson the type of perpetually hungry guy who often associated various thoughts with foods. His first thought was that he could sell the Rohypnol to his seedy cousin 'Fast Eddie' Gonzales, who had a lot of friends with perpetual blank looks in their eyes, and make enough extra money for a trip to the National Polka Festival in Lutefisk, North Dakota, where the Sorenson part of his family came from. The second thought had to do with him needing all the help he could get with the ladies. But that goddamn Rios and his sore feet were in the way.

A couple of hundred yards away Lump Woman and the Three Little Stooges were already in Isabelle Hernandez' aging Toyota and driving back into Mexico. Lump Woman wondering if she would still get paid after losing the load, the Three Little Stooges suspecting their trip to Disneyland was probably down the tubes and Flaco the Smuggler's mama Isabelle Hernandez philosophically musing you win some and you lose some. Then she smiled and even chuckled.

But there's always tomorrow.

The Honda Odyssey van was a border bonanza. 152.5 pounds of marijuana in the two seats. The seat backs were loaded as well as the seat bottoms. There were six boxes of Rohypnol with a total of 2500 pills. And that wasn't all. There were four more boxes of pills that contained 1500 doses of the Rave drug, MDMA, AKA Ecstasy or Molly. The touchy-feely drug that sent users drooling over damn near anything and hugging everything in sight and then, especially with heavy doses, suddenly keeling over into a zombie like sleep. With one hell of a big-assed hangover residing at the end of the Ecstasy Adventure.

It was a major seizure and the duty agent, who really didn't have anything else going on but just was tired of piddling port seizures of twenty or thirty pounds, tried to get the seizure back from the Nogales Police Department when she finally showed up at the port and found out it wasn't a piddling seizure at all. Hermilinda Ringgold wasn't about to take that one lying down and put up a big stink when the agent, Ruth Serai, showed up at the port and tried to take over. The agent soon found not only Hermilinda opposing her but also a much larger presence in the in-her-face persona of Salty Suzy, as well as a hot eyed Maribelle. And, as something of a surprise to most of the officers, Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza also stood up for Hermilinda and in so doing sent her stock sailing upwards with the inspectional workforce.

Elvis and Pancho of course were solidly backing Hermilinda, too. Which provided a pretty good view of her back side, Elvis admiring her tastefully constructed posterior almost as much as he admired her two hundred plus average in the police bowling league. Only Lorenzo and Fenwick held back. Lorenzo because he was still thinking he should be the real discovering officer. And Fenwick because he was just generally grumpy at shooting himself in the inspectional foot by first finding the load and then letting Lump Woman get away. At least the Three Little Stooges went with her. They were a big pain in the ass, not so much that he minded the kids--after all his mother told him that he had been a kid once himself--as their having drained him of his snack money, all his change and one dollar bills, for sodas and candy in the secondary building vending machines. Which meant he either had to go without his daily snacks or hit up Elvis for a loan. Which, given Elvis' current state of mind _vis_ _-à-_ _vis_ Fenwick, would be tantamount to trying to ask an arthritic curmudgeon of a mountain gorilla to share a banana.

"This is a significant seizure," Ruth Serai said after she pulled into the secondary lot in her chocolate brown recent vintage Audi and strode purposefully into the secondary office where the officers had lugged in the heavy duty trash bags crammed with marijuana bricks and the plastic boxes of Rohypnol and Ecstasy pills. She came into the office regally, acting as though the queen was meeting a group of mere commoners, distasteful as the task might be.

"CBP policy mandates that one of our agents take charge of a seizure of this size, especially where Rohypnol is involved." She said with absolute regal finality. In her mind was something that would paraphrase as 'the queen has spoken and that's that.' In the others' minds, however was, a thought more directly related to regicide.

"Too late," Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza said. "We've already signed the seizure over to Officer Ringgold and entered it in the computer seizure database."

"Then undo it," Agent Serai shot back, looking imperiously down her aristocratic nose at the considerably shorter Supervisor LaPaluzza. "I'm taking it over."

"No you're not," Elvis said, stepping forward, knowing Serai's reputation for an arrogant and superior attitude. An attitude that didn't come close to correlating with her actual abilities. Why was she a CBP agent? Short answer. Her father was a former Congressman from Illinois and a current federal judge. Also in Illinois. A state where political influence knocked the scales of justice completely out of whack and the progeny of the influential like Ruth Serai had the inside track on government jobs. Ergo Ruth Serai was a CBP agent. Which everyone there, even newbie supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza, knew. Jeanette, who came from a working class family in Pennsylvania that fell on hard times when the steel mills closed, had at least worked hard and earned her promotion to supervisor. She resented people like Ruth Serai. And, newbie supervisor or not who was still being tested in her new position, this was one situation where she wasn't going to sit back and let things happen.

"Sorry, Ms Serai," Jeanette said. "But you're too late. The transfer to the local police is already a matter of record."

"Then break your goddamn record!" Serai snapped back. "I am in command here and I am taking over this seizure." She turned to the group of officers who were eyeballing her with a noticeable lack of compassion not dissimilar to Russian soldiers gazing at the corpse of Adolph Hitler in the ruins of Berlin. "Have you weighed and marked everything in this seizure? What are the amounts?" The room seemed to go into suspended animation. Not a voice answered. Nor a muscle moved. Not an Adam's apple bounced nor a throat cleared. Even a couple of cockroaches in the corner froze in their cockroach tracks. Fire flared in Agent Serai's amber colored eyes. "Well!?" She demanded. "How disgusting! Are you still insisting on taking Officer Pappagallo's major seizure away from him?" A whole bunch of light bulbs went on in a whole bunch of brains at that crystalline moment. With the precision of the Pope's Swiss Guards marching in the very center of St. Peter's Square, every eye in the room turned to laser Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo. Even the cockroaches glared at him with stern cockroach admonition.

"I take it you had a second phone conversation with Agent Serai, Lorenzo." Jeanette said in a tone colder than the freezer in her brand new state of the art Sears refrigerator. "One I was not aware of. And one that I did _not_ authorize." Lorenzo gulped so loudly Fenwick thought the noise was a toilet flushing in the men's room.

"It is the responsibility of the shift senior to make the duty agent aware of relevant events at the port of entry," Lorenzo said in a mechanical voice that sounded like a recording that had been played too many times and was fading towards inaudible oblivion.

"Does that include claiming a seizure that wasn't yours, you dip shit?" Salty Suzy spit out. "That is just goddamn flat out sleazy." Not a voice interjected to correct Salty Suzy. Or even to chastise her use of words. She had spoken for everyone in the room, except of course, for Lorenzo. Who now was casting glances towards the doorway and the possibility of a quick exit.

"Whose seizure it is remains open to controversy," Lorenzo lamely answered. "I was there when the dog alerted and it should be mine."

"Bull shit!" Fenwick blurted out, surprising everyone. "That seizure is mine, not yours. I referred it. Me and Mr. Elvis here. And that, Mr. Dip Shit Senior Inspector, is a fact!" Now all eyes turned to look in astonishment at Fenwick. Was this the same timid, even obsequious, guy from a few minutes before? Then he lit the fuse that really blew their minds vis a vis Fenwick the Timid.

"You know what Mr. Elvis and Mr. Pancho say about you, Lorenzo? You couldn't even find your own dick in a dark room." Fenwick's pain-in-the ass guardian angel had once again belatedly leaped in way into the eleventh hour to rescue his inept charge from permanent residency in the sub-basement of total ignominy.

At this point Agent Ruth Serai, who had heard certain grapevine rumors about the abilities of Senior Inspector Lorenzo Pappagallo, had her own crystalline light bulb moment and figured it was time to bail.

"Ooops," she said and then immediately sent a second tsunami of surprise over the assembled group of officers. "Sorry for the mistake. "Congratulations on your seizure," she said. "And now I'll be on my way." Ruth Serai, despite her imperious ways and specious political connections, was not totally a kumquat brain. She knew at least enough to understand when it was time to cut and run. Which she promptly did, wheeling on her regal heels and making quick tracks back to her chocolate brown recent vintage Audi. She started it up and punched the accelerator, screeching out of the secondary lot with a burst of speed that, had she been on a Harley, would have been a tire sizzling wheelie. Lorenzo meanwhile slithered out the door of the secondary building and with great and prolonged interest scrutinized the structural integrity of the pillars holding up the secondary canopy looming overhead.

As it later turned out, Ruth Serai wasn't such a bad sort at all. She'd been raised in comfort as the daughter of a congressman and, later, a federal judge and as a consequence didn't learn a lot of practical life skills beyond knowing how to schmooze with the one percenters. Her regal demeanor was really a defense mechanism. She'd gotten a job she wasn't qualified for and was treading professional water until she could get a handle on things. Which she eventually did, dropping the regal manner and becoming one of the favorite agents of the border inspectors. She even joined the Police Bowling League and had a friendly rivalry with Hermilinda Ringgold for best average. The two of them sometimes attending the southern Arizona female mixed martial arts contests where they ate Sonoran hot dogs with all the fixin's, drank Bud Lite and watched their buddy Salty Suzy invariably win by unanimous decision.

### Chapter 8

The Morley Gate

The day after the big seizure Elvis and Fenwick met in the break room at the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry on Grand Avenue in downtown Nogales.

"Let's give that nose of yours another try today, Fenwick," Elvis said. "Maybe make it two in a row." Fenwick's brow furrowed.

"What does that mean? Two noses? Two noses in a row? Are you saying your nose is as good as mine?" The provisional smile faded from Elvis' face. Fenwick was still Fenwick.

"Two drug seizures in a row. Meaning on adjacent days. You wanna give it a try."

"Not today," Fenwick said. Before Elvis could say another word, Fenwick pulled out a Kleenex from his pocket and commenced to make one hell of a racket as he blew his nose.

"Allergies," Fenwick said after he'd made as much noise as the entire horn section in the Nogales High School marching band. "They're bad today. Can't smell a thing. I could be holding a marijuana block in my hand and not smell a thing." The provisional smile on Elvis' face was now but a distant memory.

"That's brick, Fenwick," he said, trying not to sound overly critical. "Not block."

"Block. Brick. Same-same. Like we used to say in Viet Nam." The new, somewhat less retiring, Fenwick said, then took out a second Kleenex and began a repeat of his own nasal interpretation of a swing band's horn section. At which point Elvis had not one tiny scintilla of a sliver of a nanosecond of a doubt that Fenwick did, indeed, have allergies.

"OK," Elvis said. "We'll change gears. Do some immigration stuff, instead. How about we head over to Morley and give that a try?" Fenwick sneezed and then looked inquisitively at Elvis.

"Who's Morley? Another one of your weird friends?" Weird friends? From the lips of Fenwick the Strange? Elvis was thinking, but not saying, that if the world of weird needed a poster face, Fenwick's would be a shoo-in.

"Not a who. A what." Elvis said, struggling to be at least superficially professional and polite. "It's the old port of entry from way back. On Morley Avenue. Just a block to the east from here. It's only a pedestrian entry now. Connects the two halves of the old downtown." Fenwick nodded understanding of a sort. He'd seen all the new buildings and stores on Mariposa Avenue outside of the Mariposa Port of Entry on the western fringe of Nogales. Old fading downtowns and newer suburban shopping complexes. A story retold thousands of times across the contemporary United States. A story all too often having an unhappy ending with small businesses and mom and pop stores buried in the corporate landslide. One such small business belonged to Fenwick's maternal cousins, who then embarked on post landslide somewhat less challenging new careers as Walmart greeters.

After first checking in with the front office, Elvis took Fenwick and walked the short distance to the Morley Gate where Inspector Bert Ladle was working the entry gate. Bert was maybe the oldest GS-9 on the entire Mexican Border and less than a year away from his Social Security reduced benefits retirement date. Bert was at once one of the oldest inspectors on the border while also being one of the most outspoken. And not necessarily in a congenial way.

"Hey, Elvis," Bert said. "Who's the walking donut with you?"

"Well, you are certainly yourself today, Bert," Elvis replied with a quick grin, being long used to Bert's often abrasive and almost invariably inappropriate and/or irreverent language. He wasn't really a mean spirited guy. He just had an abrasive tongue. "Can sandpaper help what it is? Steel wool? A nail file? A commercial grade sand blaster?" Bert would say. "That's just the way I am." And so he was. Abrasive. Like sand paper. Which had a lot to do with why he was still a GS-9 journeyman inspector after more than thirty years on the job. Supervisors don't much like to be called walking donuts.

"This is Fenwick Bentthruster," Elvis said. "He's a new guy." Bert grabbed his bearded jowls and pasted a surprised look on his face.

"He's new? Really. Gosh, I never woulda guessed." The pasted on surprised look segued into a grin as Bert held out his hand to Fenwick. "I'm Bert. Glad to meet ya."

Fenwick's hand remained unmoved at his side. The expression on his face one generally reserved for such occasions as just sitting down to a home cooked meal with his grandma who was born without taste buds.

"You called me a walking donut," the new and somewhat less retiring Fenwick said. Elvis nudged Fenwick.

"That's just his way of joking," Elvis said. "Bert is one guy you won't have to worry about stabbing you in the back." Bert's words were on his tongue even as Elvis' were just leaving his, though they did manage not to collide in mid-air.

"Darn right, Fenwick. I'll stick the knife in your throat. Never in your back."

This exchange made Fenwick a little nervous. Having been a federal government employee for quite a while already, where backstabbing had reached the distilled level of a Medieval jousting tournament, he was pretty sure there was more to it than some silly adolescent-like joking. And he was right. The concept of fraternity with the border officers was mostly a fantasy worthy of Tolkien or, that grand champion of fantasy, the U.S. government's press release office. There were plenty who, Copro being one nearby example, would screw over a fellow officer in an instant if there was something in for them. Those somethings often of so little weight they were nearly worthless. But not Bert. Or Elvis or any other of the ET team. Fenwick finally held out his hand to Bert and had the sudden feeling as he shook it that he was gonna like this guy, even if he had a sandpaper tongue.

"Showing the new man some ropes, hey, Elvis?" Bert said. "I was about to say kid, but Fenwick here is sure no kid." A sudden thought darted through his mind. He looked at Fenwick curiously. "Viet Nam?" He said. Fenwick nodded his head.

"Big Red One," he said. "Third of the First."

"First Cav," Bert replied, shaking Fenwick's hand with renewed vigor. "Double Two. Second of the Second."

"Combat Infantryman's Badge?" Bert said.

"Yep."

"Purple Heart?" Again, from Bert.

"Yep," Fenwick answered, starting to feel good about the way this was going. Especially after the initial 'walking donut' remark.

"Dishonorable discharge?" Bert said with a serious expression.

Dishonorable discharge? The going good feeling took an abrupt detour. "Well, no", Fenwick finally stammered.

"Two out of three is good enough for both the major leagues and ol' Bert. Welcome to the Border War."

"So how did you screw up so bad you ended up in this job?" Bert said to Fenwick.

"Are you serious?" Fenwick replied, not being at all sure if Bert was serious. Bert laughed.

"Rarely, Fenwick. Rarely." He motioned at a willowy Mexican girl in a short skirt approaching them from the Mexican side of the Morley Gate. "There are plenty of percs to this job." The pretty Mexican girl walked up to Bert and held out her border crossing card for him to look at. "Plenty," he repeated over his shoulder to Fenwick, "of percs." He and Elvis exchanged hooded looks that Fenwick didn't notice. As the Mexican girl started to walk away, swinging her hips suggestively as she went, and Fenwick was thinking there sure were some good parts to his new job after all, Elvis surprised him. He reached over and took the Mexican girl by the arm. Gently. But Firmly.

"Take a look at her border crossing card, Fenwick," Elvis said. Fenwick took the card out of the girl's hand.

"What am I supposed to see?" Elvis tried to be patient.

"If it's actually her, Fenwick. Check it out." Fenwick checked it out. He looked at the card, at the girl, at the card again.

"I still don't see anything, Mr. Elvis," Fenwick said, now retreating somewhat back into his former more diffident persona.

"Look at the nose. The eyes. The shape of the head. The ears. The chin. The mouth. See anything different." Then Fenwick caught it. The chin. The face on the card had a square chin. This girl's was sharp and pointy. And then he noticed the eyes seemed farther apart on the face in the card.

"It not her!" Fenwick suddenly blurted out. Then Fenwick really got bewildered when the girl started to laugh and Bert and Elvis set to chuckling.

"This is Hilda Nopalo," Elvis said. "She works in the admin office. We set this up when I decided to bring you over here this morning." Fenwick still looked puzzled. "Wanted to give you an idea of what you're really facing at a pedestrian gate. Despite what Bert might appear to be, he is in fact damn good at spotting imposters trying to sneak into the U.S. using somebody else's identification."

"They call me Eagle Eye," Bert said, still smiling. "And some offer stuff not generally repeatable in polite company."

"So who's polite?" Hilda joked, then turned to head back to the admin office, mockingly swinging her hips at the three pairs of male eyes she knew were watching her as sure as there was gold locked in Fort Knox and Congress was locked in a clusterfuck impasse.

"Man," Fenwick said, shaking his head. "I would never have picked that out. She'd have gotten by me." Both Elvis and Bert looked levelly at Fenwick and spoke in unison.

"Exactly."

"And is why Bert here is working this gate."

"Right, Fen Ol' Boy," Bert chuckled. "I am so far over the hill that the hill is only a dim blur on the horizon behind me. No pretty girl is gonna get by Bert. I have the libido of a chunk of quartz."

"I had no idea that quartz even had a libido," Elvis chimed in. "Miniscule that it may be."

Bert, who was one of the very few who unfailingly appreciated Elvis' peculiar use of language, grinned.

"Very, very miniscule. In fact, miniscule to the vanishing point. It has been so long since I had a erection that I can't remember exactly what it was like, though I do recall once getting it caught in my trouser zipper." A pause. "That I remember very clearly."

Fenwick was at a loss. One Elvis was more than enough. Way more then enough. But now there was another Elvis type guy who may or may not actually have been Elvis' wise ass language mentor.

"Bring a young person over here," Elvis said, "and they're going to be looking for phone numbers instead of imposters. That's why Bert is here. To him a young girl is less enticing than your garden variety Gila Monster."

"Now, wait a minute!" Bert interjected. "That's taking it too far. Gila Monster? No way. A poisonous snake, maybe. Or a bark scorpion. Or a televangelist. But for sure not one of those goddamned Gila Monsters." He paused for a moment, his mind apparently grabbing onto some memories. "My first wife, Becky May Licq, was bitten by a Gila Monster." He thumped a hand hard onto the fat part of his upper thigh. "And the bitch lived! The goddamn Gila Monster didn't kill her." Another vigorous whack on his upper thigh. "I've hated Gila Monsters ever since."

Fenwick looked at Elvis and in all seriousness said...

"Is this guy your father?" To which both Elvis and Bert chuckled and waggled their heads nervously.

"In my family we would have booted him as a reject," Bert said.

"And in mine he would have been shot on sight." Elvis replied.

Fenwick remained completely, absolutely, lips sealed tight, silent.

"OK, Fenwick," Elvis said. "I'm going to leave you here with Bert and let him show you the ropes on the Morley pedestrian gate." All color drained out of Fenwick's face and sank all the way into his brand new cheap ass government issue boots. His silence cracked right along with his voice.

"You're going to leave me here?" He croaked. "With him?" Another round of chuckles from Elvis and Bert.

"Just funnin' you, Fenwick. I'm staying, too. Bert will still tell you how it works here." He shot a humorous look at Bert. "But you're gonna need an interpreter." Another humorous look. "And I don't mean just language."

A thirtyish Hispanic male approached the Morley Gate from the Mexican side. He was dressed in the casual style seen on both sides of the border. Tennis shoes, blue jeans, loose fitting shirt, baseball cap. The hipper ones wore their caps the way the manufacturers and major leagues intended them to be worn. Bill over the eyes. The clueless types, however, still wore their caps sideways or backwards. This guy split the difference and had his cap angled at thirty degrees from the geometric plane of his face, not including his rather prominent nose. Which made Elvis wonder if he was some kind of politician.

"Habla inglés?" Bert began. "Do you speak English?"

"Nada," Mr. Baseball Cap replied. Bert stuck with Spanish.

"Buenos días, señor," Bert said.

"Buenos días, official," Baseball Cap answered.

"Comó está?"

"Buen. Y usted?"

"Iqualmente," Bert replied.

Fenwick looked perplexed, understanding the crux of what was going on, or so he thought. He whispered to Elvis. "Kind of overly formal and polite isn't he?"

"Just watch," Elvis whispered back.

"Que classe del trabajo tiene usted?" What kind of work do you do, Bert asked.

"In los campos." In the field.

"Su tarjeta, por favor," Bert then said. Let me see you card, please. Mr.  
Baseball Cap handed Bert his border crossing card.

"A dónde va, Senor," Bert said. Where are you going?

"A las tiendas," he replied. To the stores.

"Your fly is open," Bert said in English. Mr. Baseball Cap immediately glanced down and reached for his pants zipper.

"Gottcha," Bert said as he grabbed Mr. Baseball Cap's arm, Elvis moving over at the same instant to grab his other arm. Mr. Baseball Cap tried to wrench free but Bert and Elvis held him. Barely. The guy was jerking around as though a bunch of fire ants were chewing on his ankles.

"Put the cuffs on him, Fenwick," Elvis puffed through his exertion at holding Mr. Baseball Cap from tearing loose and streaking for Mexico.

"Handcuff him? But why?"

"Just put the cuffs on him, damnit!" Elvis snapped back. I'll explain later." Fenwick pulled his government issue handcuffs--which were for sure not cheap ass cuffs, costing the government twice what the same cuffs went for on the open market--and had his first real experience of handcuffing someone outside of the training classroom. It then dawned on Fenwick with the immediacy of a flaming torch shoved into his shorts that reality handcuffing was a whole lot different that classroom handcuffing. No sooner did he get one cuff on the guy than he would jerk it loose before Fenwick could snap it shut. This border ballet was repeated at least a half dozen times, amusing the hell out of the nearby storekeepers on Morley Avenue who one by one heard the commotion and hurried out to watch, not wanting to miss a good show. Especially when it was free. They sorted themselves out and chose sides and alternately cheered and booed which ever side--the handcuffers vs. the handcuffee--made a cool move. The cheering in turn amazed a family of tourists from Chattanooga who would have a hard time convincing the folks back home that they actually watched a handcuff wrestling match on the border with spectators taking sides and cheering in at least three languages. English, Spanish and, surprise, Korean, some of the shop owners being recent--and, they pointedly proudly proclaimed _, legal_ , immigrants. Though that didn't stop them from accepting money in their shops from the illegal Mexican immigrants who made up a sizeable chunk of their clientele.

It took Fenwick a full two minutes to finally snap both cuffs shut, said scuffling and expletive larded two minutes alternately punctuated with boos and cheers, with both Elvis and Bert glaring at him and Mr. Baseball Cap jerking and twisting in his hurry to get free and scamper back the few feet into Mexico.

"There," Fenwick finally announced "Done."

"Did you lock the cuffs? Elvis said.

"Oops. Almost done, that is." He locked the cuffs with the locking knob on the end of his handcuff key. "There. Done." Out of breath, wheezing, his allergies really kicking in now, Fenwick could hardly get the words out. "Now will you tell me just what the heck is going on?"

"First things first," Bert said. While Elvis kept his hands on Mr. Baseball Cap, Bert went inside the tiny Morley CBP building next to them, Mr. Baseball Cap's border crossing card in his hand. He was back in less than a minute.

"Imposter," Bert said. "This is not his card. And, judging by the way he fought, I'm guessing there's a lot more to him than just being an imposter." Elvis looked at Mr. Baseball Cap.

"So what is your real name?"

"Fuck you, gringo! I ain't tellin' you squat."

"So much for not speaking English," Bert putting words to what he had thought from Mr. Baseball Cap's initial entrance onto Bert's Morley genuine reality stage. Fenwick said nothing, but his mind was jumping around with a bunch of thoughts. Kinda like a barefooted man on a bed of hot coals. Very, very animated.

Bert called the main office. In a couple of minutes another officer came hurrying along the border fence from the main office to take Mr. Baseball Cap to the detention area.

"Want to change cuffs?" The arriving officer asked, something that was often done so that the initial officer involved wouldn't be without cuffs should another cuffing situation pop up and the officer grab at his cuff holder and then remember it was empty. A cuffing situation which could then go south in a big hurry.

"Not this guy," Elvis replied. "He's a fighter. Fenwick here can get his cuffs back later." The other officer threw a strange look at them when he heard the name Fenwick, but said nothing. He just shrugged, grabbed Mr. Baseball Cap by the arm and headed back to the detention area in the main building, Mr. Baseball Cap struggling and cursing the entire way. A few minutes later the phone rang. Bert picked it up and listened.

"Well, that sure as hell is no surprise," he said before disconnecting. He walked out to where Elvis and Fenwick were manning the border turnstiles. "Guy's real name is Filiberto Pederales. Deported convicted felon who snuck back into the U.S. after being deported. And with a current felony warrant out on him for vehicular manslaughter in Massachusetts. They're gonna extradite him. Guy drove drunk and plowed into a family, killing two of them and leaving another one paralyzed. Some bleeding heart judge let him out on bail without an immigration hold and the guy promptly skipped bail and rabbited for Mexico. Reckon he's wishing right now he'd stayed there"

"No damn wonder he put up such a fight," Elvis said. "He's looking at serious hard time."

"Jeez," Fenwick said. "With stuff like this going on how come Bert is here all alone?"

"He's not," Elvis answered. "There are always at least two officers at Morley. They're short staffed today and pulled the other one when they heard we were going to be here." Elvis clapped Fenwick on the shoulder. "Anyhow, stuff like just now isn't that common. Mostly, imposters don't put up a fight. Only those with some serious criminal background make a break for Mexico."

"And often make it, too," Bert said. "I'm not as quick as I used to be."

"Nor," Fenwick said with no little consternation, "am I."

Bert reached over and pointed down at the stool next to the border turnstile.

"You take it now, Fen Buddy. Have a seat. Get a feel for how things go." Fenwick would have had a whole lot of trouble with that idea were not Elvis and Bert there. Which was like having not one, but two umpires standing behind him at the plate. Umpires doubling as both backstops and armed backup. In this particular instance the figurative home plate being the turnstile rotary between Mexico and the United States. No sooner had he sat down than a woman with two little kids in tow sidled up to him.

"Howdy." The woman said.

"Do you speak English?" Fenwick replied in a somewhat provisional tone.

"A little," the woman replied. "Possibly because I was born and raised in Topeka."

"Oh," Fenwick said defensively, only then noticing that the woman was holding United States passports in her hand. He took a quick look, mostly just pretending to be looking, then motioned the woman and kids into the U.S. As they walked into the U.S. Fenwick glanced over at Elvis and Bert to see if they were launched into another snatch and grab. Nope. Not this time. Fenwick, with a touch of relief, turned to the next person approaching him from Mexico. This was a middle aged man, tall, distinguished looking, wearing a suit. This immediately put Fenwick on alert, Fenwick having grown suspicious of anyone wearing a suit. The last time Fenwick wore a suit was when he went to meet No Show Alice at the Tucson Airport. And that sure didn't turn out well. Which left a bad taste in his mouth about suits

"Do you speak English, sir?" Fenwick said in a suspicious suit tone.

"Like Shakespeare herself," the man said. Fenwick blinked. Shakespeare? Herself? Fenwick shot a WTF look at Elvis and Bert. They only shrugged, with just a minor raised eyebrow movement or two.

"What is your citizenship, sir?" Fenwick said in a voice to match his feeling that he was on shaky ground. "Do you have proof of citizenship?"

"You're new, aren't you?" The man said. "And you know about Shakespeare's gender."

"Well.....yes, I am, and yes, I do." Bert came up to Fenwick and tapped him on the shoulder.

"Fenwick Bentthruster," he said. "May I introduce you to Sebastian Abouf. The mayor of Nogales, Arizona. The Mayor has a degree in English literature and is always dropping little hints about Shakespeare and such."

"Oh," Fenwick said. "Oh, my. Sorry, sir." Then the new, somewhat more assertive Fenwick again poked his nose in to mess things up and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. "But you still haven't shown me proof of citizenship or a valid crossing card." The shopkeepers on Morley near the gate could clearly hear Elvis and Bert clearing their throats. The mayor, however, took it all in with at least the appearance of equanimity, pulling out a U.S. passport from his coat pocket.

"That good enough for you, officer?" Mayor Abouf said in a not altogether pleasant tone.

"Oh, yes," Fenwick replied, knowing it was way past time to get the hell out of this. "Absolutely. Head into the good old U.S. and mayor on to your heart's content. And while you're at your mayoring could you do something about those potholes in Grand Avenue? Darn near busted an axle on my way into work this morning." The mayor shot a _who the hell is this guy_ look at Bert and Elvis and then headed off, his footsteps definitely having a stomping factor in his departing stride.

"This," Elvis said softly to Bert, "is gonna be one hell of a long six weeks," referring to his just beginning stint with Fenwick as his FTO--Field Training Officer--and his mandate to pass the guy "or else." Then he shot a serious look at Bert.

"Ever been to Alaska?"

A few minutes later a chunky young girl of about eighteen came hesitantly up to Fenwick at the turnstile at the Morley gate. Which Elvis had immediately nicknamed the Gate of Destiny the first time he saw it back in his own trainee days. The girl stopped next to Fenwick, hesitated, then held out her border crossing card for Fenwick to inspect. Both Bert and Elvis were watching her closely. She was showing behavior indicators that pointed towards her being an imposter. Nervousness. Hesitation. Jerky movements. Impassive expression. Good indicators. But there were always exceptions, which both Elvis and Bert had learned the hard way. A couple of years earlier when Elvis was still a line inspector he was about to bust a guy who he thought was an imposter because he was shaking so badly. He wasn't. He had Parkinson's Disease. Plus he was a brother-in-law of the Arizona Attorney General. You could have heard the port director yelling at Elvis all the way to the McDonald's around the corner. Lesson learned. Don't jump to conclusions. Which is something that Elvis had been trying to get through Fenwick's considerably thick head.

"Damnit, Fenwick!" Elvis said when they were going over the training manual earlier. "Is your skull made of granite? Why can't I get through to you?"

"I am actually a very sensitive man," Fenwick countered. "I just don't respond well to Gestapo tactics."

"What? Gestapo tactics? Come on, Fenwick, I'm nothing like that."

"Mirror, mirror on the wall," Fenwick replied, adding. "You would have fit in real well with the black robes in the Inquisition. Or maybe you're the reincarnated soul of the guy who was Genghis Khan's favorite hit man.

"OK. OK. So maybe I'm a little heavy handed at times," to which Fenwick's eyebrows arched to maximum, "but at least listen to me when I say not to jump to conclusions. Go slow, make sure of your facts. Look for a cluster of factors."

"I didn't have to go slow with that big load yesterday at Mariposa," Fenwick shot back.  
"I knew right away." Fenwick looked directly at Elvis and there was even a slight touch of defiance in his voice. "And I was right!"

"That isn't going to work on a pedestrian gate, Fenwick," Elvis said, frustrated and trying not to get irritated. "It won't help you sort out the real from the phony. OK, so you have one hell of a nose and can pick up odors. But that won't help you with imposters. You'll have to go slow, check your facts, look for that cluster of factors we were talking about." Suddenly the Elvis drill broke through Fenwick's thick skull. The lamp of recognition clicked on in his eyes. A dim lamp, maybe, but a lamp nevertheless.

"OK, Elvis. Now I get it. I'll be real careful. Slow and careful."

Elvis was now regretting his words. Oh boy, was he regretting his words. Slow and careful were speed of light concepts compared to what Fenwick was doing now on the Morley Gate. He studied every person that came up to him, compared their crossing card pictures to their faces, looked over the cards themselves, trying to make sure they were genuine. Plus he searched every woman's purse and every man's wallet. And now this chunky and hesitant eighteen year old girl was in front of Fenwick and he was eyeballing her with a deep suspicion. A suspicion, at least in this case, which seemed to actually have a reasonable chance of being justified.

Fenwick, who was already as slow as the return line at the local big box store, got even slower. Time seemed to have stopped cold. He looked at the girl. He looked at the card. Then back at the girl. Then back at the card. There was one small problem with the card. Well, not so small a problem. The card was almost ten years old. The picture on the card was of a girl of seven or eight. And the girl, if it was in fact the same girl, was now seventeen or eighteen. Fenwick tried to compare noses. And eyes. And ears. And chins. Even foreheads. But he couldn't make up his mind. And as he muddled along with the girl the line behind her grew longer. And longer. And longer. Muttering and murmuring started in the queue. And grew louder as the line grew longer. Finally people started to yell.

"Hey!" Hollered someone in the line. "Hurry up. At the rate you're going I'll hit retirement age before I get back into the U.S."

"Yeah!" Yelled another. What is taking you so freaking long? I was supposed to be home for supper but now I'm gonna call home and tell my wife it'll probably be breakfast instead."

"What are you, Officer Molasses?" Yelled another. "Hurry up, fer chrissake."

"I have to go to the bathroom," said another in a strained voice.

"Me, too," said another.

"So do I," hollered a different voice..

"So do..... _oops._...too late," moaned yet another.

The phone rang inside the CPB Morley building. Bert moved over to answer it.

"Yep. I know. A trainee. Dense as a Danish peat bog. OK, boss, gotcha." Bert hung up the phone and went out to where Fenwick was still lingering over the chunky girl.

"The port director just called. Seems he's getting a bunch of complaints about the Morley Gate. It's so slow some people think its closed and the Mexican radio station on the Mexican side is announcing that the inefficient and thoughtless gringos, without prior notice, have closed the Morley Gate. Teach them a lesson, the radio said. Stay home and shop in Mexico instead. (The radio message actually originated with a quick thinking woman in the Public Relations Office of the Nogales, Mexico, Chamber of Commerce.)

"I'm just doing my job," Fenwick replied, "slow and carefully. Then, looking accusingly over at Elvis.

"Just like Mr. Elvis told me to."

That evening Elvis made himself a hamburger, grabbed a Diet Coke and sat down to his

ASUS laptop. He fired it up and went straight to Google. Then he typed in a single word in the search engine and hit enter. The word? One that could well have a very important meaning in the near future of his professional career.

Alaska.

At the same time Fenwick was also sitting at his laptop, a brand new sizzler of a Toshiba that the salesman at Best Buy inferred could connect with extraterrestrials in outer space, should there be any out there to contact. Which Fenwick doubted, extraterrestrials, according to Fenwick's uncle Statius Merlin Bentthruster, an astrophysicist and avocational UFO hunter, being picky about who they messaged with on the interstellar internet. Fenwick, at any rate, was busy well into the night with researching a subject that had popped into his Fenwick brain. A Fenwick brainstorm.

Whether the storm turned out to be a gully washer or mere trickle was yet to be determined.

### Chapter 9

### Mango Tea

It was a tumultuous first week of FTO training with Elvis and Fenwick and Pancho and Salty Suzy. They had encounters of various descriptions with Supervisor Tony 'Fat Tony' Rivera and Supervisor Jeanette 'Newbie' LaPaluzza, Senior Inspector Lorenzo 'Copro' Pappagallo, K-9 Officer Maribelle 'Gottcha' Nilminck and her somewhat uppity dog, Philbert, Special Agent Ruth 'One Percent' Serai and Inspector Bert 'Eagle Eye' Ladle, plus Nogales Police Officer Hermilinda 'Mile Post' Ringgold and the somewhat pissed off mayor of Nogales, Arizona, Sebastian Abouf and a couple of Nogales Fire Department EMTs. Not to mention Lump Woman, the Three Little Stooges and Filberto Pederales, the border battler who thought being sent to a long prison term in Massachusetts was not such a hot idea. And then there was the phone call to Salty Suzy's uncle, the Assistant Commissioner, which almost triggered a near death experience in Supervisor 'Fat Tony' Rivera, and the phone call from the Nogales port director asking in a very loud voice "....what the fuck is going on with the Morley Gate?" And all this was just in the first few days. A few days they would just as soon forget.

Elvis put it in words to Pancho when they were alone after another very, very long day with Fenwick.

"Pancho, I would rather do marathons in my bare feet on three succeeding days in gale force winds than try any longer to hammer Fenwick into an passable border officer."

"You couldn't do one marathon, much less three," Pancho snapped back.

"I could if they were motorized," Elvis said, sounding offended.. Pancho just shook his head.

"Hopeless," he muttered. "Just fucking hopeless...."

"Me or Fenwick?" Elvis said, already suspecting Pancho's answer.

"Both."

Fenwick dropped the suggestion to the others. Why not all of them get together after work on the final day of Week One to discuss in casual, frank and private conservation how the week had gone? Fenwick surprised them all by graciously inviting them for light refreshments at his condo near Tucson's downtown. Fenwick's place was in an older neighborhood of idiosyncratic housing, of small and largely offbeat stores and student hangouts. It was peopled by a mixture of professionals, University of Arizona students and, to even things out, a considerable homeless population that was always good to add some zaniness to an otherwise humdrum day. Like a bearded guy in buckskins standing on the street corner handing out free red, white and blue Buy America condoms or a woman covered from head to foot with tattoos selling Mayan End of the World calendars "autographed by genuine Guatemalan Mayans."

Though the officers were working in Nogales, they all lived an hour's drive north of the border in various neighborhoods in the Sonora Desert city of Tucson. Fenwick's mixed use neighborhood being the kinkiest. Which, everyone agreed, was one hell of an ironic juxtaposition. White bread Fenwick with these digs? But it did make sense. His uncle, University of Arizona Professor Stadius Merlin Bentthruster, left it to him. Stadius having taken a definitely unplanned quick trip to the Other Side when his recumbent bicycle was run over by a fully loaded Williams Brothers cement truck. Stadius was immediately flattened right along with the recumbent bicycle and some parts of Uncle Stadius were permanently embedded in the blacktop at the corner of River Drive and Oracle. Which always brought tears to Fenwick's eyes those times when he passed through that intersection. Uncle Stadius' soul might not be there, but embedded fragments of his bicycle shorts sure were.

Elvis stepped over a mound of rags hiding a sleeping guy, who reeked of cheap wine, marijuana and a body odor so rank most of the leading brands of deodorants would have failed in even making a tiny chink in the guy's body odor armor, and rang Fenwick's doorbell. The door opened so quick Elvis thought it was operated by an electronic sensor of some type. Hopefully not one that included some kind of nasty surprise for unwanted visitors. Like a cocked shotgun taped to a chair and pointed at the door, with a thin but very strong rope running from the trigger to the door like the old horror movie he'd watched on TV last week. Not so. Fenwick was standing on the other side of the door, doorknob in his hand. And he had a very peculiar look on his face. Kind of a smile. And then maybe not. Something like a Mona Lisa smile as interpreted by a largely clueless lumpy late middle-aged white guy.

"Hey, Elvis," Fenwick said, the peculiar look still on his pasty face. "Come on in. Everyone else is already here." Elvis hesitated a moment. His gut was rumbling. Something just didn't seem right. His colorful maternal grandmother, Rattler Sue Mahoney--who put a solid three dimensions plus to the concept of 'colorful'--would  
have put it this way:

"Haul yer hairy butt outta thar right now, Elvis!"

Despite his Rattler Sue premonitions, Elvis went in. Sure enough, there were the others. Pancho, Salty Suzy, Fenwick, but....surprise! Hermilinda Ringgold and Maribelle Nilminck were there, too. Though Maribelle's K-9 Philbert, not having been invited, was not present. Which may well have pissed Philbert off, him being on the canine touchy side and one to hang on to resentments a good while. Recalibrated, of course, to doggy years.

All the folk present were drinking a sweetened mango iced tea that Fenwick had made specially for this occasion. "A very special tea," he said, "from a secret Bentthruster family recipe." In a twinkling Fenwick put a glass of the sweetened mango iced tea in Elvis' hands, too. A cold glass of iced tea was a favorite beverage in furnace hot summertime Sonora Desert Tucson. Everyone drank deeply of the tea and started to chat over the major seizures they had all been involved with that week. While they drank and chatted, Fenwick put out three platters of imported cheeses with slices of Genoa salami, smoked oysters, fresh Gulf shrimp and imported pickled morel mushrooms ''absolutely guaranteed," the Chinese importer declaimed, "not to have been fertilized with human excrement as some unscrupulous competitors have claimed."

A Nora Jones CD was playing softly in the background. Nearly a half hour passed as they drank the tasty mango iced tea, Fenwick passing among them with a pitcher of the tea several times refreshing the glasses, and chewed over both Fenwick's appetizers and the events of the seizures and commented on those involved. Fat Tony, Copro, Supervisor LaPaluzza, Lump Woman and the Three Stooges, her Majesty Special Agent Ruth Serai, the two EMTs. Pancho reached down and speared a chunk of shrimp with one of the toothpicks Fenwick put out with the platter of appetizers. He popped it in his mouth.

" _Man!_ " Pancho said. "That is the _bes_ t shrimp I have ever had!" A second, then a third, promptly followed number one into his mouth. "Hmmmm. Oh, boy, that is _good_." Salty Suzy stared at Pancho for a moment, a curious expression on her face. Then, she, too, speared a shrimp, lately of the Gulf of California but currently of Fenwick's inherited kitchen.

"Ooooohhhhhh," that _is_ good." She said in a cooing voice that reminded Elvis of a mourning dove. A mourning dove in the spring mating season. Suzy snuggled close to Pancho and began to stroke his hair.

"You have very nice hair, Pancho," she said. "And I like your mustache, too." A few feet away Maribelle stood up, stretched languorously, then began to slowly undulate to the Nora Jones CD in the background. Her eyes were closed in reverie and she was humming in synch with the music. Hermilinda ate a smoked oyster and smacked her lips so loud it sounded like someone was clapping in the next room. Then she slinked over to Elvis and let her body slide over the edge of the couch he was sitting on and onto his lap.

"You were number sixteen," she said in a seductive throaty purr. "But closer to six on the performance scale."

"Performance scale?" Elvis said in a somewhat miffed tone. "Number six?"

"Maybe five," Hermilinda said. "I'll give you that. Five. OK. Five for sure." She rubbed her hand on the side of Elvis' face. "A rock solid five. And if you give me a back rub I'll make it a four." Elvis at first thought he was hallucinating. Then, when he saw his maternal grandmother Rattler Sue Mahoney grinning at him from a photograph of a bunch of soldiers in Viet Nam Fenwick had on the wall, he _knew_ he was hallucinating. He sat up straight as a lamp post in downtown Tucson. At least one that hadn't been recently knocked out of whack by a car careening out of control when the local teens were drag racing their tricked out cars in the midnight hours.

"Fenwick!" Elvis said in a suspicious tone. "What did you put in that iced tea!" Fenwick, meanwhile, was holding a piece of Genoa salami in his hand and gently stroking it.

"I love salami," Fenwick sang rather than said, approximating the melody of Mary Had A Little Lamb.

Fenwick has a piece of salami,

a piece of salami,

a piece of salami.

Fenwick had piece of salami

and whenever Fenwick opened his mouth in the salami would go

As predicted in Fenwick's vocal paraphrase of Mary Had a Little Lamb, the piece of salami did immediately disappear into Fenwick's open mouth.

Meanwhile Maribelle was definitely sliding into her dance moves and starting to get lively. She bumped into Fenwick and he dropped another piece of his new all time favorite food, Fry's store brand Genoa salami which may or may not actually have been made in an Asian factory where a not inconsiderable number of the veteran employees were missing at least one digit from their salami making hands.

"Oops," Maribelle said. "I'm sorry I made you drop your salami." A very, very wide and lecherous grin spread across Fenwick's face.

"Speaking of salami. Would you like to see my private selection?" Fenwick's comment went flying way over Maribelle's head higher than a transcontinental jet winging over the north pole as she launched into some of the moves she remembered from her college days at the local student hangout, Oedipus Kadish's D&D (Dance and Dine). She was all elbows, hips and gyrating legs as she did the Crazy Chicken from back in the good old days. Which, in Maribelle's case, weren't very long ago at all.

Over on the other couch Salty Suzy was licking Pancho's ear and reciting some poetry she remembered from her college English class. An Edgar Allen Poe poem might not sound very sensual on the surface, but to Salty Suzy and Pancho it was darn near orgasmic.

"God, Suzy," Pancho moaned. "That is just so, so cool."

"Hmmmm," moaned Hermilinda as Elvis, determined to raise his status to at least a four and possibly even a three, was giving her a very thorough backrub. Back in this case being very loosely defined. Which was just fine with both Hermilinda and Elvis.

Just then Maribelle danced her way over to Fenwick, stopped and enveloped him in a hug.

"You remind me of my pet poodle when I was a kid," she said to Fenwick as she hugged him so hard that his airway was constricted and he had to gasp to catch his breath. "He was a really good dog," Maribelle continued. "His name was Pisser. That was because he pissed on everything. Tables, chairs, beds, washers and dryers and my school gym shoes." She stopped for a moment, sighing. "Other than that he was a good dog. I still miss him."

"What happened to him," Fenwick found himself saying, and strangely, actually caring.

"He ran off with a Great Dane named Helga," Maribelle said. "We never saw him again."

"Oooh, what a sad story," Fenwick said, almost in tears. "How sad for you."

"Goddamnit!" Elvis suddenly said, having just landed back on earth from wherever the hell he had been. "Fenwick, what did you put in the iced tea!?"

Fenwick, who was still enveloped in Maribelle's hug and not at all minding it, dreamily answered.

"Just some of those pills from the Honda. I grabbed a few out of one of the boxes. Pills that you guys called Ecstasy. I looked it up on the internet and it seemed like a great ice breaker. Make us all closer. Especially you, Mr. Elvis the Inquisitor. Make you be nicer to me. So I ground them up and put them in the iced tea. Quite a few, actually. Just to make sure."

"Goddamnit, Fenwick, Ecstasy is illegal!" Just them Hermilinda took Elvis' hand and squeezed it suggestively.

"Let's go in the bedroom, Elvis," she said. "I have a feeling your Performance Index is going to rise." That wasn't the only thing that was rising and Elvis vanished with Hermilinda into Fenwick's guest bedroom quicker than Fast Eddie, the blackjack dealer at the Indian casino, could deal twenty one for the house. They tumbled onto the bed and Hermilinda grabbed Elvis in a bear hug and began to hum. They she began to sing a Patsy Klein song, Hermilinda being a big fan of Patsy Kline, even if Patsy died even before Hermilinda's parents were born, Patsy available to Hermilinda thanks to the magic of recording technology.

"Do you like Patsy Klein?" She said to Elvis, whose mind was definitely not on the same wave length.

"Who? What?" Hermilinda then rolled over on the bed in Fenwick's guest bedroom and fell asleep so fast Elvis at first thought she'd kicked the mortal bucket.

"Hermilinda? Hermilinda! Are you alive? Herm....." Then Hermilinda let Elvis know in no uncertain terms that she was indeed alive. She launched into a rhythmic snoring that sounded to Elvis like a snow blower going up and down a driveway.

"So much for upping my numbers on the performance index," Elvis muttered grouchily. And then he, too, flopped over on the bed and zoned out, subconsciously settling into a snoring counter rhythm to Hermilinda's.

"Helicopters! It's the DEA!" Fenwick suddenly yelled when the snoring duo blasted off in the guest bedroom. "They must know about the Ecstasy. Quick! Pour out the tea." Then Fenwick thundered for the door of his town house, threw it open and leaped outside to search the sky for the DEA helicopter he was sure was hovering over the house. In a few minutes he was back.

"Man, that was _close_. They missed us this time." Then he noticed the helicopter noise was still there. Maribelle wrapped her arms around him again.

"Silly man. It's just Elvis and Hermilinda having sex in the guest bedroom. Though I must admit I have never heard love making sound quite like that before." She gave Fenwick a playful punch. "Not that I have made a study of such things." Another playful punch. "Wanna go in the bedroom and play hide the wienie?" Fenwick looked uncomprehendingly at Maribelle.

"Hide? What is hi...." Maribelle grabbed him by the crotch and pulled him towards his bedroom.

"I'll show you. I'm sure you'll catch on _real_ quick."

Then the two of them vanished into Fenwick's bedroom where Maribelle started thinking about her lost poodle, Pisser, got sad and started to cry. Fenwick caught the crying bug from Maribelle and started crying, too. Then both of them toppled over in an Ecstasy stupor and before long the town house resounded with a snoring quartet, waking up the colony of termites living under the patio and so irritating them that the entire colony packed up and moved next door where there wasn't a snoring convention going on and the civilized human beings inhabiting it kept their snoring to a decent decibel level minimum. The termite exodus was further accelerated when Pancho and Salty Suzy also feel asleep and started to snore, Pancho's wheezing jackhammer snore no match for Salty Suzy's reasonable facsimile of a ballistic missile launch repeated in an endless loop.

The next day every one of them had one bastard of a hellacious headache and were as grouchy as a misanthropic badger with both his foot and his unfortunately inquisitive nose caught in a trap. And dead center in every mind was a face. Fenwick. The fact that Fenwick had put Ecstasy in the iced tea that had them good and blitzed and doing things they sure would rather not remember put Fenwick square in the middle of everyone's attention. He wasn't just Public Enemy Number One. He had all ten slots on the Top Ten Pubic Enemy list nailed down. Even Maribelle's K-9, Philbert, who wasn't at the Ecstasy party, figured out something was up and bared his teeth and snarled at Fenwick whenever he came near his cage.

That same day Elvis sent off for a half dozen cold weather clothing catalogues, certain that he'd be in Frostbite, Alaska, just in time for the beginning of the New Ice Age.

Elvis and Fenwick were hiking under the cottonwoods along the Santa Cruz river in the back country where the river still flowed, most of the Santa Cruz long gone from Tucson's developers over pumping of the aquifer that fed the river. The famous last words of the developers being "Not to worry. We've got it covered. This river will never run dry." Not much later it looked like a serpentine chunk of the Sahara had relocated to Tucson's former Santa Cruz riverbed. It wasn't totally negative, however. The local cat population, feral and otherwise, was ecstatic in the inscrutable cat way of not overtly showing emotion with the bone dry riverbed since it provided them a linear cat box as far as the cat eye could see. The bodily particulars of cats using the cat box a lot simpler in a dry riverbed than a wet one.

As Elvis and Fenwick trudged along, keeping a sharp eye out for rattlesnakes and the ubiquitous assassin of the Sonora Desert, cactus, they bantered about their adventures of the past week.

"Man, that mayor Abouf sure was none too happy with me," Fenwick said.

"This is an understatement of the first order, Fenwick," Elvis said.

"And that fat lady sure did make tracks out of the secondary office and take the Three Little Stooges with her. Though I did think the kids were kind of cute. Anyhow, I guess I kind of messed up on that one."

"Understatement of the first order number two, Fenwick." Elvis replied grumpily.

"And I admit I was kind of slow on the Morley Gate," Fenwick added.

"Make that understatement number three, Fenwick," Elvis regrumped. Then Fenwick kicked at a rock. The rock however was not a rock but a somnolent desert tortoise and when it lurched into movement, Fenwick stumbled backwards, tripped on a dead cottonwood branch lying by the trail and tumbled over in the water.

"Help! Help! I'm drowning." Elvis glared at Fenwick.

"The water is only a foot deep, Fenwick. Even you couldn't manage to drown in a foot of water." Fenwick palpitated around him and discovered that Elvis was, indeed, correct. He was only submerged a foot or less, the majority of his lumpy body still comfortably above the water level.

"Oh. OK. I'll just get up then." Fenwick labored to his feet and started to walk out of the riverbed. He got nowhere. His feet were stuck fast in the riverbed. "Oh-Oh," he said. "Something is wrong here." Elvis matter of factly answered.

"Well, there is quite a bit of quicksand in the riverbed along this stretch." Fenwick's eyeballs threatened to pop right out of his skull and flop into the water.

"Quicksand! Quicksand!" He looked, panic stricken, at Elvis. "'Get me out, Elvis." Fenwick squirmed and twisted, but it only served to quicken his descent into the depths of whatever lurked under the riverbed. Elvis stared at Fenwick and did some quick calculations. What if Fenwick stayed alive and kicking? He'd probably fail the FTO course and Elvis would end up in Caribou Dung, Alaska. Or Fenwick would tragically expire, something for which Elvis could be in no way held responsible, and Elvis could return his cold weather clothing catalogues and buy himself some snappy cargo shorts instead. Elvis looked at Fenwick one more time. Then the decision was made. The only decision a man such as himself could make, sworn as he was to uphold all that was right and good in these great United States of America. Then he looked at Fenwick with a not noticeably compassionate expression.

"Granny Rattler Sue always said to me, "Elvis, don't ever let your sense of morality stand in the way of doing what's right." Fenwick stared at Elvis with a mixture of panic and confusion as he continued to sink, now well over his knees.

"Wha......wha....what does that mean?"

"It means goodbye, Fenwick." Elvis said. "Although I have to admit I won't miss you much."

But then Elvis' neighbor, early riser Vinca Beeglud Piccolo, fired up Nantucket Gal, her customized Harley, and woke up the entire neighborhood. Including Fred the multilingual mockingbird who was so startled he fell out of the honeysuckle bush he was overnighting in, landed on his noggin and immediately launched into a scolding bird diatribe in a whole bunch of bird dialects, including a few non-bird sounds. One being a lawn mower. Another that of a ringing telephone, which had at least two of the local neighbors stumbling out of bed to answer the phone. Elvis also woke up with a rude start and the whole lovely scene tattered away like morning fog over the river of his dreams.

"No! No! No!" He moaned, close to tears. "It was only a dream."

That set the day off with a definite negative tweak. Here he thought he was finally rid of Fenwick and it turned out to be just another of those goddamn dreams his malicious subconscious liked to torment him with. What the hell was a guy supposed to do when his own subconscious was out to get him? Even granny Rattler Sue didn't have an answer for that one. It got so bad at times that Elvis thought he should go talk to a shrink about it. Not that he had a whole lot of hope that a shrink could help him, his opinion of the world of shrinks strongly colored by his experience in the Army with Dr. Nasturtium Malpied. Dr. Malpied at that time on contract with the DOD--Department of Defense--for big bucks to counsel returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I will have no problem whatsoever in being objective, despite my personal views." She told the DOD contracting officer during her employment interview. "I am first and foremost an analytical detached professional." A few months later Elvis showed up for his mandatory appointment with her, stepping into her office and sitting down with a definite lack of enthusiasm with the self proclaimed analytical detached professional.

"What went through your mind when you aimed at another human being with your rifle?" Dr. Malpied said. "Did you feel regret that you were about to end another human life? A life that had just as much value as your own? And belonging to a person who was doing for his country exactly what you were doing for yours? What did you feel when you pulled the trigger? Like Bubba Boy's assassin? Or an NRA stooge?"

"I was hoping I didn't miss," Elvis said, adding, "which would immediately result in that person getting really pissed and therefore trying to end my life with an AK or RPG or whatever the hell nasty piece of ordinance he or she had available." The 'she' comment sending Dr. Malpied's bushy chestnut eyebrows soaring and putting a definite negative spin on the session that was already not churning along with a whole lot of progress. Which is the way it went with Dr. Malpied. Nowhere. Elvis left her office feeling like it was a complete waste of time and went back to his humble cot in the barracks. Dr. Malpied also felt it was a complete waste of time, too, but she went home to a $500,000 home in a gated community made possible by the big bucks the government contract paid her. Dr. Malpied was philosophically against the war, against all wars, actually, but thought what the heck, when she applied for the government contract, didn't she have to have a practical side, too? Though she didn't feel she made enough to offer her illegal

alien nanny from Ecuador more than room and board and a little spending money, plus at least one day off a month and the use of an ancient but still serviceable single speed balloon tired Schwinn beach cruiser bicycle.

Elvis gave up on the shrink idea and reluctantly showed up at Nogales that morning for another day with Fenwick. Fenwick was already there, waiting for Elvis in one of the conference rooms where they reviewed the FTO manual before starting their active training day. Fenwick had his nose stuck in a magazine when Elvis walked in. Elvis glanced at the cover, did a double take, and looked again.

"Muscle Fitness? You're reading Muscle Fitness Magazine?" Elvis said with no little

amazement. "Fenwick Bentthruster is reading Muscle Fitness Magazine?" Fenwick shot Elvis an indignant look, his huffed up expression making him look even puffier than usual. Making Elvis think, as he looked at Donut Boy Fenwick holding a copy of Muscle Fitness Magazine, it was a damn near perfect visual depiction of an oxymoron.

"This is the new me. You've got to start somewhere. I'm going to begin taking muscle building supplements every day. Before you know it I'll be bench pressing a hundred pounds." Elvis stared at him.

"Fenwick, a hundred pounds isn't much for a bench press. Even my grandmother, Rattler Sue, could do better than that. And she's in her 80's."

"You have to begin somewhere, Mr. Elvis," Fenwick said, still indignant. "Remember how you doubted me before, but I caught that huge seizure of ganga and pills."

"It wasn't really a huge seizure. And ganga? Where'd you pick that up?"

"Part of the new me, Mr. Elvis. I'm getting hip. Or is that hop? Or maybe hip hop? But whatever is, I'm going there. You just watch. Before you know it I'll be the talk of the border."

"That," Elvis muttered, "I can believe."

"Mock all you want, Mr. Elvis the Mocker. But you just wait. Wait and see." Elvis sighed. Deeply. It was going to be another long day.

And the distant state of Alaska was getting closer.

Elvis took two deep breaths, took two more, then two more and mentally dropped to his knees and genuflected three times. Which, Elvis being raised a hardshell Full Emersion Southern Baptist, might seem out of hardshell Full Emersion Southern Baptist character. But he figured that if he were every going to get bumble butt Fenwick successfully through the FTO program he could use all the help he could get. If he'd had a Tibetan prayer wheel he'd have given that one heck of a vigorous spin, too. And, if his other ET buddy, Native American Cletus WW--"War Whoop"--Magellan were around, he'd have asked WW to call on the Native American Spirit World for some Spirit World Fenwick help.

"Fenwick," Elvis began, trying to be hopeful and upbeat but his mind continually drifting to images of icebergs floating off the arctic coast of Alaska and polar bears stalking unsuspecting CBP inspectors, "today we're going to search cars." Fenwick's head bobbed in anticipation.

"That sure sounds cool, Mr. Elvis." Then a puzzled look. "What are we going to be searching for?" Elvis paused and mentally counted to ten. That wasn't enough so he reversed gears and counted from ten to one.

"Fenwick," Elvis said in his best shot at a forced patient sounding voice. "Search your memory. Remember the pickup truck? The one with over two hundred pounds of marijuana in the tires? And that disappeared when you were supposed to be watching it? Or do you happen to recall the Honda Odyssey van? The one that had the marijuana in the seats?" Fenwick brightened.

"Oh! Yeah! And the other stuff. The Whorewhipall. And the Ecstasy that you tried at my place. Boy, that was quite an evening!" Elvis' tanned face took on the color of milk that had turned sour and badly needed to be poured down the drain. He gulped and ducked and looked around to see if anyone had heard. He even stuck his head out the door to see if anyone was out there who had overheard.

"Goddamnit, Fenwick!" Elvis said with steam seeping out the sides of his eyeballs. "You do _not_ mention something like that. It could get us all fired."

"You didn't know, Mr. Elvis," Fenwick said, genuinely taken aback. "You can't be blamed for what I did." Elvis leaned to Fenwick and his words came out low and slow.

"But, Fenwick, I didn't report it. And if the mucky mucks found that out they'd boot our butts so hard out the door they'd hear the sound all the way to Novosibirsk."

"Novo what?" Fenwick answered, confused. "Is that some kind of birth control pill?"

"Never mind." Elvis said. "Just think Newark instead."

"That's pretty far, Mr. Elvis." Fenwick said seriously. "Do you really think they'd hear the sound that far away."

"It was a figurative statement, Fenwick. Not literal." Fenwick said nothing. What was there to say? He had no idea what kind of a figure Newark had, much less having ever even considered the possibility of a city having a figure. When he gave it some thought he could imagine Salt Lake City having a figure like a lake of salt, though he couldn't quite picture the city of Minneapolis as a town shaped like Minnie Mouse. But he could readily visualize somebody named Sue falling in Sioux Falls.

"And Fenwick," Elvis said in that same low and slow voice which conjured up the unpleasant association in Fenwick's mind of a Bengal tiger slinking through the tall grass in central India as it stalked its prey. The prey in this particular instance being a lumpy water buffalo named Fenwick. "It was _Rohypnol_ ," Elvis hissed. He leaned closer to Fenwick.

" _Not_ Whorewhipall."

Just then Pancho and Salty Suzy came into the room.

"OK, El," Pancho said. "What's the plan for today?"

"Yeah!" Salty Suzy said. "I can hardly wait to bust some more creeps."

"Clients," Fenwick said. "Not creeps. Clients." Everyone looked in a combination of disbelief and surprise at Fenwick.

"Clients?" Pancho said. "What clients?"

"What Suzette called creeps. They called them clients at the academy. We're not to use any derogatory or demeaning or prejudicial names. Like creeps. Or perps. Or any of the really nasty words I've overheard Mr. Elvis and Mr. Pancho using."

"What the fuck planet did you fall off of, Fenwick," Salty Suzy said. "You are going to call drug smugglers and criminal aliens clients?"

"That was what they said at the academy," Fenwick answered somewhat testily. "It's not my idea. Take it up with them.",

"I was at the academy, too," Salty Suzy shot back. "And I never heard any one use the word clients. Where did you get it from?"

"Well," Fenwick said, thinking back. "It was Mr. Garcia. The guest speaker we had at the Border Issues Open Forum Night at the Bonnie Blue Flag Inn in Brunswick, the one just outside the grounds of the academy. The one where they had the bougainvillea bushes trimmed to look like cannons and a mural of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson shaking hands and looking like they were cracking jokes. They also...."

"Fenwick," Elvis snapped. "Get back to the point."

"And who was this Mr. Garcia?" Pancho asked suspiciously. "One of the instructors or  
an official from CBP?"

"Not exactly," Fenwick said, squirming in his chair as he answered.

"What does that mean?" Elvis interjected. "Not exactly. What was his job?" Fenwick squirmed some more. His words came out so soft they were almost a whisper.

"Mr. Garcia was an attorney."

"An attorney?" Elvis said. "What kind of attorney?"

"An attorney....," Fenwick answered, adding in an even softer voice. "....a defense attorney. Specializing in immigration law."

Elvis grimaced in mental terror. The polar bear in his imagination had just leaped off an ice flow and headed directly towards him at his new CBP assignment at World's End, Alaska. A place that Elvis was now firmly convinced he would be seeing soon. Maybe sooner than soon.

"I would settle for citizens," Fenwick said, again befuddling the others. "Rather than clients. Kind of midway between creeps and clients. That work for you, Mr. Elvis?" A glance at Pancho. "And for you, Mr. Pancho."

"Planet Clueless," Salty Suzy said. "Now I know. That is where you came from, Fenwick. How many more are they like you on Planet Clueless?" A searing look. "And fer crissake do not invite any of them to join you. One Fenwick is enough." To which both Elvis and Pancho nodded a very vigorous mental agreement. "More than enough," Salty Suzy added.

"I will suffer your slings and arrows with manly grit," Fenwick answered with an extra dose of testiness. "Knowing as I do that I am the ET's secret weapon." Fenwick reached up and tapped the cartilaginous protuberance lingering just above his mouth. "My nose, that is." A pause, while he gathered his thoughts--which usually wandered very far afield in the vast mostly barren plain of his conscious being. "At least when my allergies aren't bad." He cast a unidentifiable look at Salty Suzy.

"Let's see you find a load with your nose, Ms Giant Person."

"Let's see you find your nose in the back of your head," Salty Suzy said with a clenched fist shaking way too close to Fenwick's nose.

"OK. OK. That's enough from you two," Elvis said. "If you don't get your act together your noses and all the rest of your various anatomies won't be searching out any drugs." His voice dropped to a rough approximation of a cross between a nail gun and a sonic boom. "Because you won't be making in through probation and they'll boot your butts right out of the service."

"And you'll hear it all the way to Novo Newark," Fenwick chimed in, shaking his pudgy index finger at Salty Suzy's clenched fist.

"What?" Suzy said. "Novo Newark? What.....?"

"Never mind," Elvis shot back. "Just never the fuck mind. We need to concentrate on your FTO program and getting you through it." Even as he said those words his mind was far off as he ran in terror from the polar bear that had just spotted him at his new post somewhere in the frozen wilds of remotest Alaska.

"OK," Salty Suzy said. "I'll stick to business."

"So will I," Fenwick piped in. Though he couldn't resist tapping on his nose again and giving Suzy another Fenwick look. Which could be interpreted various ways. To Fenwick it was a superior olfactory look. To Salty Suzy it was a typical WTF look from a recently immigrated inhabitant from Planet Clueless. To Elvis it was a reminder of the long arctic nights in someplace like Dead Seal, Alaska. And to a casual observer it was more like the look a stranger made when involuntarily passing gas in a closed space populated by a genuinely unfriendly biker gang. Pancho, however, just wanted to grab a chair and shatter it over Fenwick's head and take his chances with Dead Seal, Alaska. He even grabbed the back of a chair and curled his fists around it. But Elvis caught his movement and shot him a _don't!_ look before Pancho could put thought to action. Pancho caught himself. But not by much. It was close. Elvis revisited his Fenwick at the Santa Cruz River dream and cursed his subconscious for screwing with his head by teasing him with what was only a dream.

"OK, kiddies," Elvis said, determined to get back on track. "We're....."

"Who are you calling kiddies?" Salty Suzy snarled.

"Yeah," added Fenwick.

"Yeah to that yeah, buster." Pancho said, drawing a thoroughly puzzled look from Elvis.

"Pancho! It's just a figure of speech. You oughta know that." Pancho shrugged.

"I was just being agreeable. You know, go with the flow, as they say."

"As who says?" Elvis shot back.

"Hell, I don't know, Elvis. Somebody must have said it

"Damnit! Back to the game plan." Elvis fumed.

"What game plan?" Fenwick said. "Who said anything about a game plan? And what the heck kind of game are we talking here?" A sudden hopeful look on his face. "Darts? I'm pretty good at darts, you know. Why, in the regional Tucson Dart Hurlers Tournament, I....."

"Fenwick," Elvis said in his slow and low stalking Bengal Tiger tone. "I'm talking about your training and getting you through your probationary period."

Oh," Fenwick said, the rheostat on his mental light bulb beginning to turn towards the marginally illuminated low setting. " _That_ game plan."

"I take it back", Salty Suzy chimed in. "You are not from Planet Clueless after all." Fenwick threw her a triumphant look.

"Thank you for finally recognizing the real me," he said with perhaps a touch of doubt as to the sincerity of her remark.

"You're not from Planet Clueless, Fenwick," Salty Suzy said in a voice that was a first cousin of Elvis' stalking tiger tone. "You are from the satellite moon of Planet Clueless. Celestial Object Dip Shit #1. And you are a true native of your moon." She leaned closer to him. "In other words. A Number One Dip Shit if there ever was one."

"Oh, yeah?" A really miffed Fenwick shot back at her, his little used talent for retorts leaping out of mental exile. "And what about you? An NFL reject who the other players didn't know was a woman even when you were in the shower? A candidate for the lead in the new movie, Daughter of King Kong Trashes East LA? Or maybe a shoo in for the role of the lead bouncer Bruno the Beast in a remake of Road House?" Salty Suzy not only had the stalking tiger tone to her voice. She also had the snarl down absolutely pat.

"You're a dead man, Fenprick," she snarled. "You won't know where. Or when. Or how. But one day, one day, Fenprick, I'll be there. Waiting." Then she crashed a meaty palm onto a table and nearly cracked it in half.

At that point both Elvis and Pancho were one thousand percent certain their professional careers were sure to come to a fizzle of an ending somewhere like Permafrost, Alaska or, if in the lower 48, maybe Big Mosquito, Minnesota. Where they would spend much of their time researching early retirement options and swatting mosquitoes or dodging bears, and possibly both.

"The game plan. Back to the game plan," Elvis said with so little enthusiasm the words slid out of his mouth like a molasses-speed California foothill subdivision mud slide and slithered straight for the floor. There, however, the words, being of the resilient word type and the floor recently waxed, recovered somewhat and bounced off the floor back towards the listeners' ears and made Fenwick wonder if Elvis was sneakily throwing his voice.

"How did you do that?" Fenwick said.

"Do what?" Elvis replied in a not so pleasant voice.

"Make the floor talk," Fenwick answered. Steam rose from the top of Elvis' head.

"It's an old Mahoney family secret," Elvis said, grabbing his stalking tiger voice.

"Like the Bentthruster family secret mango tea You Put ECSTACY IN!" At this juncture in the conversation Fenwick decided it would be a real good idea to revert to a listener only posture.

"Anything you say, Mr. Elvis," he said, his final pre-listener only posture words being "back to the game plan."

So they went back to the game plan. On the surface, anyhow. Elvis and Pancho were bemoaning the imminent demise of their somewhat promising ET careers. Salty Suzy was planning revenge on Fenwick. Fenwick was thinking of how he was going to avoid Salty Suzy's revenge. Which meant there wasn't a whole lot of rapt attention being paid to the game plan. At least not the CBP game plan. But plans, no matter how carefully laid, have a bad habit of taking unexpected detours. Brother Fate and Sister Slap Ass always lurking nearby ready to muddy the waters, no matter how muddy the muddy waters already were muddied.

Sister Slap Ass' slap ass hand was already in motion.

### Chapter 10

### Sister Slap Ass

Maximilio 'Big M' Suarez drove his Lincoln Town Car south into Mexico on Grand Avenue in the old downtown of Nogales. Big M loved his Lincoln. He'd give up everything before he'd let his Lincoln go. His mistress. His three out of wedlock children. His X Box. Even his favorite handgun, a genuine antique Colt .44 Peacemaker that had made permanent peace with six rattlesnakes, a near sighted cougar and Bilbo Androgenes, his former rival for the encompassing affections of Buxom Marie Madrid. He washed his Lincoln every day it didn't rain and even some days when it did. He waxed it every week. And by hand. Himself. No amateurs were going to mess with his Lincoln. And for sure no machines were going to touch it. The Lincoln was Big M's statement to the world. No more barefoot peon from the Mexican boondocks. No more living in dirt floor hovels with no running water or electricity. No more walking barefoot through animal dung to feed the pigs and chickens morning and evening and living with their odors 24/7. No more listening to his grandmother's god-awful snoring. Big M had made it. He was a man of dignity. Respect. He had new hundred dollar shoes and indoor plumbing and a shiny new refrigerator that could easily hold a whole case of beer and two watermelons. He had his Lincoln Town Car. Big M was a businessman. Which, this being after all the Mexican border, was a pretty common type of business. Drugs.

Big M worked for the Los Ambos Cartel.

As he drove up to the border he expected the usual to happen. The Mexican officer on duty would wave him through without inspection. This was not a matter of chance. It was economics. Economics? Corruption? How was that possible? Didn't the Mexican Customs officers--aduaneros--earn a handsome salary? For 1820, maybe. But in the 21st Century? The paltry bucks the Mexican government paid them didn't stretch very far. Good enough if all they wanted were beans and tortillas and an occasional cerveza. No big screen TV's. No space age refrigerator that went way beyond merely keeping stuff cold and/or frozen and making ice. No PlayStation for the kids. No set of cool wheels. Worse, they couldn't even afford to keep a mistress or two on the side. Which meant the Mexican Customs officers were willing to make certain accommodations to supplement their income. Like arrange to wave through guys like Maximilio 'Big M' Suarez without inspection.

This waving through fact was very important to Big M. Almost as important as his Lincoln Town Car. He was the money courier for the Los Ambos Cartel that controlled much of the narcotics traffic at the Nogales ports of entry. In a metal box concealed in the side panel of his Lincoln Town Car was over a half million dollars in drug profits. Big M, as he had done every week for over two years, picked up the money in South Tucson and took it through the border to deliver it to his bosses in Mexican Nogales. A half million dollars--during the Holidays and Cinco de Mayo sometimes twice or more that amount--was a hell of a lot of money to a guy who grew up barefoot on an impoverished farm in Chihuahua without running water or electricity. Was he tempted to just take a detour, keep the money and disappear? Damn right he was tempted. But neither was he as dumb as one of the turkeys back on the family farm. He knew that the cartel would try to hunt him down and if they caught him do some really unpleasant things to his corpus before sending him on to the Great Beyond. And if they couldn't find him? The cartel would decorate the pinyons outside the family farmhouse in Chihuahua with body parts from the various members of Big M's extended family. Or they might just fricassee his grandmother and put pictures of the party on the internet. Which meant he sure didn't want to cross the cartel. That was a one way road no sane person wanted to go down.

Big M drove up to the Mexican customs booth, expecting to be waved through. What was this? There was a new guy there. Someone he had never seen before. And, instead of giving him the green light to go on, this freaking jerk hit the red light and sent Big M into Mexican secondary for an inspection. Was this a move on the part of the Mexican government to try to clean up corruption on the border by replacing all the corrupt border officers with uncorrupted ones? Yes. And no. It started out that way, but economics torpedoed the plan before it got far. The Mexican officers, new or not new, still didn't make squat. The new group of officers also were in the big screen TV wannabe market and were easily subverted by a different cartel looking to take over the lucrative Nogales smuggling corridor. The new cartel wanted Big M to be caught and his shipment of money confiscated. It would be a unmistakable message to Los Ambos that a new player was in town and the rules of the game had changed. Los Ambos would take notice for sure. And Los Ambos was as protective of its revenue as a mother grizzly is of her cubs. In a word. Ferocious.

All of which, this being the Mexican border where chicanery was as common as pastrami on rye at Guido's Italian Deli on First Street, might actually have crossed Big M's mind. Along with what would happen to him if he lost the money shipment. The cartel honed the concept of unforgiving to a dystopian dark art. Big M would likely be the one who ended up being fricasseed. Some very unpleasant thoughts were bouncing around in his brain pan as he slowly drove into Mexican secondary. As he drove he pulled out his mobile, punched an autodial number and waited for an answer.

"I'm being sent to secondary," he whispered into the phone. "For a search," adding. "New faces." He listened to the answer. "OK." He said. Then switched off the mobile.

Big M pulled into the secondary inspection area on the Mexican side and his spirits promptly sank below sea level. No frickin' doubt of it. He was in big trouble. There usually was just one bored looking guy in Mexican secondary who could give a rat's ass about doing a genuine thorough search. Just give him a few bucks and you'd be on your way. That was the way the system worked. Big M had done it several times himself as part of the cartel's deception strategy. So maybe they had the Mexican side sewed up. But they didn't have the gringo side completely compromised and the high tech equipment the sneaky gringos had--what the hell, couldn't they take a satellite photograph of a pimple on a North Korean donkey's ass from fifty miles above the earth?--might have picked up the fact that Big M in his Lincoln Town Car never went to secondary. So the cartel had him sent to Mexican secondary a few times. But, Big M thought with a black shroud of dread hovering over his balding head, this was different. This was a new guy who sent him to secondary. And there wasn't just one bored looking guy waiting for him. There were three. And two of them were armed with automatic rifles. This was going to be bad.

"Chingame!" Big M muttered to himself, as he inconspicuously hit a prearranged emergency number on his mobile. The number required no answer. Just the ring was enough.

"Out of the car!" Ordered one of the Mexican officers in Spanish. "Now!" Big M did as he was told. No matter how big Big M was, a guy with an AK47 was bigger. Another officer with a K-9 showed up. A dog specifically trained to find money. Money which often was tainted with the residual odor of drugs. The dog didn't hesitate a doggy second. She bounded to the side panel where the money box was hidden and scratched at it, causing Big M to jerk spastically as his beloved Lincoln was violated and at the same time the realization he'd been set up came sliding into the current events viewer in his brain. The Mexican officers exchanged knowing looks with each other. Chinga! They found the money. Big M was thinking this was one mess he was never going to get out of. If the cops didn't get him the cartel would. The Mexican K-9 officer let his dog into the Lincoln Town Car. The dog immediately launched itself at the interior side panel where the money box was concealed and began to shred the upholstery.

"Hey!" Big M blurted out. "That freaking dog is trashing my car." One of the Mexican officers looked over at Big M with an expression right out of a Terminator movie.

"You have other things to worry about, pendejo." Another, even more intense look.  
"You ain't gonna be needing a car." At this point Big M would have said a rosary to whatever saint could get him out of a mess like this. Any saint would do, just so long as the saint could deliver a direct physical salvation. But Big M was not a Catholic and it was just a touch late in joining the church. Instead he started to sweat out of every single sweat gland in his entire body until all his clothes were damp and water dripping off his nose and his chin. Living on the farm with the pigs and chickens wasn't seeming so bad right now. He could live without electricity or running water. He could even live with his grandmother's god-awful snoring. And that was the operative word in Big M's mind at that pivotal moment. Live. He had not one single shred of a doubt that he really preferred living to what was looking to be the very likely alternative.

"There!" The Mexican K-9 officer said as he ripped off the upholstery on the side panel inside Big M's Lincoln. Beneath the upholstery was a compartment with a plate over it. He unfastened the plate. Under it was the money box. He pulled it out and held it up for the others to see.

"Here it........"

Just then a Ford Ranger four banger pickup truck came roaring into Mexican secondary from the Mexican side of Nogales with a half dozen guys in it with a variety of weapons. Rifles, shotguns, pistols, even a couple of grenades 'in case of emergency.' Big M's inconspicuous phone call had been answered. The cartel's emergency response team had arrived. They were quick. But, like the Mexican officers in secondary, they hadn't spent much time on the gun range honing their firing skills. Bullets flew all directions. Almost all of them a good ways from the intended targets.

Alexander Pondwitz, a tourist from the suburban town of Southeast Pocatello, happened to be videoing what he intoned as he filmed was '"the colorful pageantry of Mexico." The colorful pageantry then went into vivid HD in Pondwitz's eyes when an AK 47 round zinged off the pavement next to him and ricocheted into Pablo Anastasio's nearby taco cart, putting a jagged hole in the shredded meat bin. Pablo, who was somewhat deaf and not much fond of gringos in the first place, immediately blamed the tourist from Southeast Pocatello and starting hollering at him in Spanish. Pablo, however, also immediately had a revelatory moment at close to the land speed record set at the Bonneville Salt Flats when a stray 9mm slug banged into his taco cart and sprayed him with fragments of the fresh tomatoes he ripped off just that morning from a corporate farm truck heading towards the border. Pablo disliked the ricos who ran the corporate farms almost as much as he disliked gringos. Pablo responded the way any red blooded taco cart vendor would. He pulled out a two foot machete from inside his cart, jumped up and down and screamed expletives in Spanish and his mother's native Yaqui. Alexander Pondwitz, however, felt the appropriate response was to, in his own words, "get the fuck out of here!" Which he immediately commenced to do, and with such verve he broke the 100 yard dash record he'd set back in his days on the Southeast Pocatello Community College track team. Which might not have been so remarkable under the exigent circumstances of the moment had Alexander Pondwitz not been 67 years old with a bad hip, gout and three painfully ingrown toenails. Pablo saw him run and stopped in mid shriek epithet to remark with no little anti-gringo gusto and even a belly rolling chuckle.

"Run, gringo, run."

And then Pablo recommenced his machete shaking epithet hurling taco vendor outrage.

Eliza Sue Minderbluss was just driving by Mexican secondary on her way to pass into the U.S. on Grand Avenue when she heard the sound of the shooting. The actual scene of the shooting was shielded from her view by a parked furniture delivery truck that a Mexican traffic officer had stopped for failure to display the annual furniture delivery tax sticker. A tax and a sticker which had not existed until the Mexican officer realized he didn't have any lunch money.

Eliza Sue, being a long time community reporter and sage observer of current events, turned to her identical twin sister, Sue Eliza Minderbluss, in the passenger seat and said. "Those Mexicans are something! What wonderful people! Any excuse to shoot off some fireworks. What a country!" At that moment a stray .38 slug from one of the cartel's enforcement team's .357 S&W wheel gun shattered the rear window of Eliza Sue's Super Bug. Immediately after which she, as Pablo Anastasio and Alexander Pondwitz had done, did a lightning quick reevaluation of her earlier assessment.

"Goddamn, Sue Eliza," she snarled. "Those fucking Mexicans are shooting at us." She glared at her sister. "Now what the fuck did you do to piss them off this time?" Sue Eliza did not answer. She'd hit her head on the side of the door when she jerked in surprise at the rear window of the Super Bug being blown out and knocked herself stone cold way out of any semblance of consciousness. Eliza Sue, being a long time community reporter and sage observer of current events, immediately reacted.

"Oh, God! They've killed my sister. Oh, Sue Eliza, I am sorry for everything I ever did to you. I'm sorry I stole the men's underwear from Dillards and told them I was you when they caught me. I'm sorry I ordered those male dancer porn flicks using your name. And I'm, really, really sorry I put the sleeping pills in your husband's beer the day of your wedding. I...."

"I'm not dead," Sue Eliza said as she woke and slowly sat up. The memory of her wedding night now as numinous in her mind as an incoming flaming comet. She lasered her sister with a look that could have gone straight through the planet Venus and lodged in Mercury. "But you're gonna be."

Two blocks away Enzo Stratfor was staring at a bottle of booze on his kitchen table. Fighting, as he had been doing for years, the urge to drink. A fight he always lost. He was in and out of AA so much the locals called him Revolving Door Enzo. He was just reaching over to grab the bottle when a .223 round from an AR in the secondary battle zinged right through his kitchen window and scored a direct hit on the bottle of booze. Enzo immediately fell on his knees and raised his hands towards the heavens.

"Oh, thank you great and glorious Higher Power! I understand your message. I will never take another drink for so long as I live." And he didn't. Enzo, however, would soon become one of Dino Martius' best customers. Dino the local go to guy when you needed some really righteous weed at not totally outrageous prices.

While the Mexican border officers and the cartel's emergency response team were busy missing their intended targets and shooting up the neighborhood, Big M saw his chance. The keys were still in his Lincoln and he jumped in, started it and peeled out of Mexican secondary, stomping on the accelerator so hard in his panic he put a noticeable dent in the Lincoln's floor and bent the accelerator linkage. And he made it. A few bullets went zinging after him but thankfully missed his beloved Town Car. There was only one small problem. In his panicky haste Big M turned north instead of south.

He was heading straight towards the U.S. port of entry.

Elvis and Pancho finally got their trainees calmed down enough to take them outside for some more on the job training, absurd and futile as it had begun to seem to them. Supervisor Tony Rivera was on duty that morning and gave them his usual unfriendly scowl as they passed by, actually mouthing under his breath 'bad morning.' Also there that morning was Assistant Arizona Director Xanthippe Beauregard, who was at the port at the Arizona Director's orders to get an upfront first hand view of what went on at the Dennis Deconcini Port of Entry in downtown Nogales. With particular emphasis on the dreadful state that Elvis and Pancho would be in with their hopefully hopeless trainees. Which, never mind drug smuggling and goods dumping and illegal aliens and potential terrorist infiltrations, was the Director's number one priority:

"To get those two assholes but good!"

Xanthippe didn't personally give a flying fig about the fate of Elvis or Pancho or their trainees. She was humoring the Director because she had her eye on his job. The Director was getting on in years and moving toward retirement age. Xanthippe thought the Director of Arizona Operations was the very least a woman of her obvious abilities should achieve. Although she believed that, had she been a man, she would be the National Director of CBP or even the head of Homeland Security or, her heart's secret desire, Director of the CIA. And, maybe, after retiring from the government, the really big time. The crowning achievement of a grand and glorious career.

Her own TV talk show on a major network and, God willing, maybe even cable TV.

And the fact was that she was a woman of considerable abilities. But she was raised in a patrician household that not so privately bemoaned the passing of the American iteration of the rigid English class system and waxed nostalgic for the good old antebellum days when the Beauregards lorded it over the common folk, white as well as black. The Beauregards presided over a fecund sprawling Georgia plantation, a fragment of which remained in the family and where Xanthippe was raised in the old Southern plantation style. Meaning she was an as stonily insensate as the very pinnacle of Pike's Peak. Which also meant that to the vast majority of humanity she came off as about as warm and inviting as the arctic ice cap. A character trait that didn't do much to impress the influential movers and shakers in the upward bound U.S. government world. Which fact also contributed to her unofficial nickname. The Ice Queen. There were more than a few that thought she would make a great professional assassin. And even a few who believed she really was a professional assassin. Her ex-husband would say little about her beyond stating with no little emotive energy that after going into therapy following their marital breakup and graphically describing their sex life to his clinical psychologist the stunned therapist accused him of necrophilia and threatened to turn him into the authorities.

Nevertheless Xanthippe managed to pop out a pair of sons who went from full time nannies to boarding schools and she saw only on special occasions. Catherine the Great's birthday was one and the opening of the Nascar season another. Xanthippe considered herself a 21st Century neo-Renaissance woman of many facets. Not all of which however meshed together with a lot of success. When she was sixteen she caused her mother to have a near fatal heart attack when she said something that stopped her mother's left ventricle in mid vent. Though she recovered, her mother never did forgive her, much less figure out whether her daughter was jerking her maternal chain or not. Nor did Xanthippe ever tell her, Xanthippe bearing a grudge against her mother ever since she made her get rid of her pet pot bellied pig.

"You have to get rid of that smelly animal," her mother said to tweeny Xanthippe. "The disgusting creature defecates continually and gives the house a most unpleasant odor."

"Handsome Molly (the pig's name, despite it being a boy pig) is paper trained, mother," Xanthippe snapped back.

"Well, what will the neighbors think," her mother responded. "What with a pig defecating in the kitchen and the place smelling like a rutting shed."

"We don't have neighbors, mother," Xanthippe shot back. "We live in the country. The nearest neighbor is a half mile off and I don't think anyone can smell something a half mile away. Besides which you won't let anyone in our house who doesn't have an upper class pedigree going back at least to Queen Elizabeth the First."

"You are a most disobedient child," the mother reshot. "Now get rid of that damned pig or I'll send you to live with your Uncle Flosswell at his leper colony in Zambia." That did it. Xanthippe had a reasonably nice complexion and was naturally averse to contracting leprosy. She got rid of Handsome Molly. But she never forgave her mother. A few years later, at age sixteen, she laid the bombshell on her.

"Mother," Xanthippe began. "I know what I want to do with my life." Her mother's eyebrows arched and she looked curiously at her daughter. Had the little twit finally started to get her head out of her arrogant ass?

"And what would that be?" The mother asked with no little dubiety.

"I want to star in a porn film with Bill Clinton."

Which is why at the age of 16 Xanthippe landed on a dirt air strip in Zambia for a reluctant reunion with her Uncle Flosswell Beauregard. She however did not contract leprosy, despite her mother's fervent invocations to her personal deity, and survived to return to America where she breezed through Harvard and got her MBA and without fail sent her mother a dozen withered black roses every mother's day.

Thespus Mussolini was one of the CBP officers working an entry booth when the hubbub started in Mexican secondary. At first no one reacted beyond curious stares. Outbreaks of shooting in Mexican Nogales lately not especially uncommon. But when the stray bullets started bouncing off the pavement next to Thespus' booth he was thinking now would be a great time to consider a change of location. And when one slug tore through the booth itself and lodged in the chair Thespus had just been sitting on a moment earlier his mind was made up for him in the quickest movement he had ever made--with the exception of when he stepped into a legally marked crosswalk in downtown Phoenix and within ten seconds was running for his life. When the bullet tore into his chair Thespus' mental CPU hit the emergency button. He blitzed off faster than anyone, including himself, would have believed possible of the terminally phlegmatic Thespus, and dove for cover behind a Chevrolet Blazer in the U.S. secondary lot, the sound of his size 12 feet slapping the pavement as he ran clearly audible two blocks away in the McDonald's drive by window. Not far behind him came Big M in his Lincoln Town car racing for the U.S. and blowing straight through the unmanned booth vacated so recently and hastily, spurred to atypical action by the bullets whizzing over his head, by the otherwise lethargic Officer Thespus Mussolini.

Big M in his Lincoln was not alone. Following him was the Ford Ranger pickup with three of the cartel's emergency response team. And following them was a RAV 4 with four really pissed off Mexican border officers. And, one by one and in the fog of border battle unaware of little things like international borders, they barreled through Thespus' unmanned gate and into the U.S. like the pack leaders on the last leg of the Iditarod.

Meanwhile, Fenwick, oblivious as usual and thinking there sure were an usual number of cars backfiring over on the Mexican side, walked out into the secondary lot intent of doing in a cricket that was making a lot of cricket noise. Cricket noise, along with crying babies and incoming mortar rounds, some of Fenwick's major personal irritants. He stomped over to put an end to the impudent cacophonous cricket and didn't at first notice the Lincoln Town Car that hurtled through the border and came straight at him. When he did notice it, Fenwick froze in his tracks in true deer in the headlights fashion. Big M thought the dumpy gringo would jump out of the way. When he didn't at the last possible moment Big M jerked the steering wheel to miss Fenwick, lost control of the Lincoln and it crashed loudly into one of the fortunately well engineered cement pillars in the secondary lot. Followed immediately by the Ford Ranger pickup that couldn't stop in time and the RAV 4, which also couldn't stop in time. Fenwick didn't understand Spanish, but he did figure out there was considerable discomfort in the Mexican criminals and cops (which were, at times, interchangeable identities) screaming and shouting amidst the crunching of various metallic and reinforced plastic components of a Lincoln Town Car, a Toyota four banger pickup and a RAV 4, plus several otherwise innocent parked vehicles in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Wow! Look at that! This Oxy stuff we got at La Farmacia Pinche Gringo on the Mexican side sure packs a hell of punch!" Iowa tourist Misco Lentz said to his wife of nearly fifty years, Lentle Lentz. "I just had this crazy assed hallucination that an SUV full of Mexican cops plowed into our brand new Nissan Sentra." Lentle Lentz however had the pallor of a fresh snowfall back home on the Iowa farm. (Although admittedly with a brownish tinge from the Iowa Co-op coal fired power plant on the other side of Dead Injun hill that abutted the Lentz family farm on the southwest section.)

"What did I say about your nasty habit of blasting off with that vulgar tongue of yours, Misco?" She snapped at him. "Besides which, _mister_ Lentz, it's no hallucination," she sputtered, stunned by the sudden departure of the family's brand new Nissan Sentra from the world of anywhere near drivable. Then she turned on Misco with no little vehemence and whacked him over the head with her heavy purse, buckling his knees and almost knocking out his false teeth.

"Look at our car, meathead (uttered with extra intensity, Lentle being a confirmed vegetarian)! If we'd gone to Disneyland like I wanted none of this would have happened!"

At which point Misco, yet again, dwelled on the wonderfully alluring concert of monasticism.

Fenwick, meanwhile, stood as stolidly still as a Maypole in the Bavarian village of Ober Keinkleinschmerz on May Day as he stared dumbfounded at the three vehicle wreck that had just noisily unfolded before his eyes. The bodies of the cartel emergency response team and the Mexican border officers hurtling through the air and colliding with various vehicles and structures in the secondary lot. One of the Mexican officers landing right on top of Thespus Mussolini behind the Chevy Blazer that didn't do such a good job of protecting him after all. Thespus allegedly suffered a serious back injury obviously incurred in the line of duty that would require a long recovery period under workmen's comp where his therapy was mostly conducted at the quarter slots at the Indian casino.

Xanthippe Beauregard had just stepped into the secondary lot to grab some curious eyeball time watching Elvis and Pancho with their trainees when all hell broke loose. Tony 'Fat Tony' Rivera was just behind her, not to watch Elvis and Pancho but to watch Xanthippe's rear end. Which, despite her being the Ice Queen, was, almost everyone agreed, a very well formed rear end, indeed.

Xanthippe saw the debacle unfolding in the lot before Tony did, Tony at that moment preoccupied with observing Xanthippe's well formed rear, and stopped cold in her tracks. Tony's eyes, however, were not on Xanthippe's feet. He kept going. And kept going right into Xanthippe and the momentum of his three hundred pounds plus laid Xanthippe flatter than a Kansas cornfield. Tony then lost his own balance and teetered over and just barely managed to avoid landing on top of Xanthippe, which could have had some definitely unpleasant consequences for Tony as well as Xanthippe. "Oh, boy, Tony mumbled. "That could have been bad." He stared over at Xanthippe in her recently acquired flat as a Kansas cornfield location. One way too close to where he had fallen--fortunately largely cushioned by his doughy extra poundage--in a large Tony lump. He looked again.

" _Real_ bad." He said with no little dramatic emphasis.

Meanwhile Elvis, Pancho and Salty Suzy responded instantaneously and instinctively. They were all Iraq veterans with situational awareness drilled into their consciousness, intent as they were at that Iraq time on returning to America in more or less the same condition as when they left it. They reacted with the celerity of Old West gunfighters slapping leather when hostile actions were on the menu of immediate events and made tracks to where the various bodies where sprawled. First aid was not on their immediate minds. Disarming them came first, their putting two and two together and getting the four answer that connected directly to the shooting over in Mexican secondary. A few moments later other officers responded and began to tend to the injured after Elvis, Pancho and Salty Suzy had disarmed them. Fat Tony also struggled to his feet and surveyed the disaster area that had only a few moments before been a mostly placid secondary on a quiet morning and what sure as hell was not now going to be just another uneventful day of trying not to fall asleep in his comfortable reinforced supervisor's chair. In his astonishment he momentarily forgot Xanthippe Beauregard where she still lay in her flat as a Kansas cornfield prone position. An inert prone position he had inadvertently put her in. But, inadvertent or not, Tony had laid her flat. Which he now remembered.

"Oh-oh," Tony groaned. He looked disconsolately at Xanthippe's motionless form, the realization blitzing though his brain that the motionless form was that of the Assistant Director of Arizona Operations. He no longer noticed her nicely formed rear end, which at any rate wasn't all that appealing in its recently flattened state which, with her dark hair and dark CBP uniform in its current flattened prostrate symmetry reminded him of an inkblot. He groaned.

"This is bad. More than bad. What comes after bad? Worse? Worstest? Baddest?"

"Shit creek," Elvis snarked at Tony as he hurried past on the way to help one of the bleeding injured Mexicans. "With or without a paddle." Tony whirled and threw a middle finger salute at Elvis' back. With both hands.

And it was. Bad. A bunch of armed drug traffickers and Mexican border officers lying with bloody heads and broken arms and legs on the U.S. side of the border. Phones were ringing all the way up the food chain in both the U.S. and Mexico. The universal initial response, in at least two languages, at the phoned news.

_"_ Say _what?!"_

It was further complicated by a serendipity that had Fat Tony's jowls shuddering as he ground his teeth together in frustrated anger. The port director, the assistant port director and even the big cheese, Little Hitler (Elvis and Pancho's name for him) the Director of Arizona Operations, had all flown out that morning to a conference at the Federal Law Enforcement Center in coastal Georgia. A place selected officially because it was the national training center but unofficially because it had some great resorts with reasonable (sic) government rates and artfully groomed golf courses kept mostly free of alligators. Which all meant that while the big bosses were polishing their golf clubs and stocking up on Gator Spray over in Georgia, Fat Tony was stuck with the frickin' mess at Grand Avenue.

And it wasn't getting any better. There was still shooting going on over on the Mexican side and every law enforcement vehicle within miles on both sides of the border was at that exact moment in the hurtling process of responding. The basics of what had happened went through the law enforcement radio network close to the speed of light. Every cop eye within fifty miles lit up with anticipation. Excitement! So much adrenalin filled the air that even the butterflies were pumped and cactus wrens started launching attacks on the unsuspecting red finch population. Sirens and flashing lights converged from all directions. Mexican local, state, federal and military vehicles. Fire trucks and ambulances. Even more fire trucks and ambulances on the U.S. side, along with Border Patrol, Nogales Police, Santa Cruz County and Arizona Highway Patrol units, along with a curious Domino's Pizza delivery driver, all came screeching up to the port. More than a few racing each other to see who got to the action first. Within ten minutes it looked like a law enforcement convention with so many flashing lights they actually could see them from the orbiting space station.

"Deed jew shee dhat?" Russian astronaut Yuri Rasputin said in his somewhat intelligible English. "Dhat flashe down dere een vhat djew calls Airizohna. Ish dat bhad?" Derwin Shale, a U.S. astronaut born and raised in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, was unconcerned.

"Not to worry. The U.S. and Mexico did not go to war. Nor did a North Korean missile crash down on the I-10 freeway during rush hour. We'd have heard about stuff like that. Either via the government's high speed top secret radio encryption or maybe a teenage kid in his parent's basement who hacked into the government computers and put it on Facebook. I'm guessing what happened is that the electric grid in Phoenix was finally overtaxed to the point where it blew up. A guy with a portable generator and an ice making machine could probably get rich almost overnight. I knew some day it would blow and I told my cousin Bernie Flux in Phoenix to set himself up with the right equipment and when the blowup came he'd make a killing. As usual the numbnut ignored me. He bought a matching set of new bowling balls for his family instead. So what else would you expect from a guy who votes libertarian and says Ronald Reagan was an actor who played the President of the United States in the world's longest movie?"

To which Yuri Rasputin said nothing. Mostly because his English wasn't all that hot and he hardly understood a frickin' thing this doofus Shale guy was saying. But he did grab enough comprehension to firmly cement in his mind his suspicion that the average American's IQ was equivalent to that of his uncle Vyacheslav's potato field just outside of Minsk.

Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza was working the admin desk in the office that day in the absence of both the port director and assistant port director. Until they came back, Jeanette was the acting port direction. Which fact really pissed off Fat Tony Rivera, who figured he had seniority and he should be the acting port director. And that despite the fact Tony had not clue one what the hell an acting port director was supposed to do. Jeanette might be a generally clueless border supervisor, but she was a good desk person, having put in a good many years at various desks in the Human Resources Department in Washington D.C. There was absolutely zero clutter on Jeanette's desk which to her mind denoted a definite professional level of efficiency.

Senior inspector Lorenzo 'Copro' Pappagallo, the shift senior inspector assigned to admin duty that day, had been outside seeing what small infraction he might find an officer making and consequently write the violator up, which was one of his very favorite things to do. That and catching spiders and dropping them in coffee cups in the employee lunch room. But this was different. Like from another planet different. He stood, as though frozen solid, absolutely immobile with shock as the border warfare pageant unfolded before him, looking to one person nearby as though someone had plunked a very lifelike statue of Lorenzo smack in the middle of the sidewalk. The frozen solid immobilized Lorenzo saw just about the entire border spectacle unfold. First across the street in Mexico and then in the Grand Avenue secondary lot. Then he unfroze in a global warming hurry and rushed in to tell Supervisor Jeanette LaPaluzza what had happened.

"We're being invaded!" He yelled in a panicked voice. "Terrorists in pickup trucks with all kinds of weapons. Machine guns. Grenades. Panzerfausts. IED's. IUD's. Maybe even WMD's. Call the National Guard. Quick!" Jeanette had now been around Lorenzo enough to not only take him a grain of salt, or even with a shaker full of salt but with an entire wheelbarrow of salt.

"Goddamnit, Copro," she said, unconsciously blurting out the very uncomplimentary--yet exquisitely accurate--nickname Pancho and Elvis used for Lorenzo. "Calm down. Now! You stay here and man the phones while I go out to see what the hell really happened." Jeanette didn't waste any time beating feet into secondary and eyeballing the chaos until she saw Elvis and Pancho.

"What the hell happened?" She stuttered as she looked in astonishment at the bloody disaster of a scene in what had so recently been a relatively sedate secondary.

"Gun battle in Mexico," Elvis said, his eyes roving secondary and his body ready to spring into action again at any moment. "Spilled over to here. Three vehicles came hauling ass into the U.S. and all three ended up in a wreck. Lots of guns. Some of these guys are Mexican officers. We already called for ambulances and alerted the hospital of multiple casualties. Still don't know what it as all about, though it likely had something to do with drug trafficking." Elvis leaned forward to convey the urgency of what he was saying. "You can bet the Mexicans on the other side will be contacting you real quick." Jeanette turned on her heels so fast she left scorch marks on the concrete and make quick tracks back to the admin office. As she came in the door she saw Copro talking into the phone and a sudden premonition of disaster smacked her in the intuitive gut.

"What did you just _do_ , Lorenzo?" She said with no little trepidation. Lorenzo's pupils were so dilated the whites of his eyes were obliterated and his whole body seemed to be in a state of suspended animation. His already sallow complexion took on an even more ghastly pallor, making Jeanette think of a seedy factory outlet store's second hand manikin that the local taggers had painted an eggshell white.

"I called the Mayor's office and told him to evacuate the town immediately." Jeanette blew her supervisory stack for the first--but certainly not the last--time.

"You did _what_?"

"Standard procedure in the event of an enemy attack or nuclear strike," Lorenzo answered with surprising confidence. He reached over to tap on a manual he'd pulled from the bookcase full of government rules, regulations and directives on the nearby wall. "It's all in the Emergency Manual," he said, unconsciously pausing a moment to wipe most of the dust off the manual. "Under the What If? section."

"What if I have you transferred to somewhere like remotest Kazakhstan where nearly every lethal disease known to science is endemic in the local population, the women wear moustaches and chew tobacco and indoor plumbing is only an abstract concept?" Lorenzo stared at her in surprise and could swear he saw Jeanette's hair smoldering. "Do you know what I did in Washington, Lorenzo? I was in the Human Resources Department. The department that makes assignments throughout the service. I actually can--and _will_ \---send you some place very, very unpleasant if you don't follow my orders." What Jeanette didn't say was she'd developed her considerable clout in Human Relations by covering for her philandering boss when he was sneaking off to meet his mistress and had prudently kept enough direct proof of his philandering to assure his future cooperation. And, to play it safe with some extra insurance, had expanded her Gottcha File to several other top level managers. Not all of them male.

"Does this mean you are taking exception to my emergency actions?" Lorenzo said defiantly. "The Emergency Manual also states I have the authority to take over if the supervisor on duty is incapacitated or incompetent."

"Get the fuck out of here or I'll have you shot!" Jeanette yelled so hard her vocal chords stretched beyond the suggested maximum and would dangle somewhat loosely for the next three weeks. Lorenzo hesitated an indecisive moment, then decided she wasn't really going to have him shot but that she probably would send him someplace really unpleasant. Like Brittle, Minnesota, a port on an Ojibwa Native American reservation where there was no word for summer in the local Ojibwa vocabulary, or Stone Deaf, Texas, the self proclaimed Banjo Capital of the World. Consequently he did an about face and vanished out the door quicker than a one eyed jackass with pink eye could blink his good eye. Which, despite the infirmity, was still pretty quick, jackasses of all types known to be fast blinkers. As clearly attested to by members of the United States Congress whenever asked to make a factual statement.

Supervisor Rivera was sluggish in responding to the wild-assed scene around him. He kept looking at the inert form of the Assistant Director of Arizona Operations and wondering if there were some way to avoid responsibility for her unfortunate abrupt descent to the secondary sidewalk. He was thinking damage control. Some kind of damage control. Then it hit him. That's it, he thought. A way out. It was those two ET dickheads, Elvis and Pancho. They came rushing out of the door and ran smack into Tony and forced him into the Assistant Director, making _them_ , not him, responsible. That struck Tony as a great plan. Yes. That would do it. Just then Lorenzo came stomping out of the admin building looking like he wanted to kill someone. Either that, or someone had just threatened to kill him. Which was actually closer to the truth.

"Lorenzo," Tony called over to him. "Did you see those two ET jerks run into me and knock me into Xanthippe here, causing the poor woman to fall down?" Lorenzo, who was not the brightest candle in the birthday cake, looked dimly at Tony.

"What? Why....." Tony reached over and put a meaty paw on Lorenzo's shoulder.

"Come on, Lorenzo," he said, squeezing tighter with each word. "You saw it clearly." He icicled Lorenzo with a look that sent several waves of shivers undulating down Lorenzo's spine. "Didn't you?"

"Yes. Yes. Absolutely." Lorenzo stuttered. Clear as day. They came running and ran into her and you knocked her down." Tony stopped, closed his eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and continued.

"No. No, Lorenzo. That isn't the way it happened. They ran into me and knocked me into her." He continued to squeeze Lorenzo's shoulder until Lorenzo thought he could feel the bone starting to crack.

"Right. Absolutely. That was it all right. Absolutely." Tony relaxed his grip, then squeezed one last time. Hard. Lorenzo grimaced.

"Just be sure to remember it?" Another icicle look. "OK?"

"OK, boss. For sure. 100 percent for sure."

Then, while everyone else working that shift was busy dealing with the casualties and guarding the border, Supervisor Rivera bent down, with the sepulchral figure of Lorenzo at his side, to gently touch the silent form of Assistant Director of Arizona Operations Xanthippe Beauregard.

"Madame Director," Tony said softly. "Madame Director. Can you hear me?" An unexpectedly strong female voice immediately shot back at them very clearly from the still form and surprised the hell out of both of the men.

"Oh, yes," she said. "Not only can I hear you." She suddenly flipped over onto her front and sat up. "But I also _did_ hear you." Tony's former icicle glare at Lorenzo was a mere frozen droplet compared to the Permafrost look she laid on Tony and Lorenzo. Tony's mind went blank. Copro's face went blank. Xanthippe jumped to her feet and brushed the odd bits of detritus from her pavement adventure off her uniform. "We will be having a serious conversation, gentlemen," she said with a voice that sounded to Tony like the professional assassin some people rumored she was. "And soon!" With that Xanthippe rushed out into the secondary lot to see what she could do calm things down.

"I don't think this looks good for us, Boss," Lorenzo said.

"Shut the fuck up, Lorenzo," Tony let fly back at him, making Lorenzo think of a vicious snapping turtle. And a really fat one, at that.

It was a wild scene for a good while. Confusion reigned. More wires were crossed and miscommunications dropped than in a pee wee league football game. There was more than one Copro style lunkhead who stood around as inert as a dental implant. Still, what needed to get done, got done. Emergency vehicles kept arriving, EMTs labored over the injured, including the two, Adelmo Rios and Bartolo Gonzales-Sorenson, who has earlier responded to Lump Woman, the pair of EMTs thinking that their lives had gotten so exciting that maybe they should write a book and go on the adventure lecture circuit. The bleeding of the injured was stopped, their broken limbs stabilized, and they began to be loaded onto ambulances to be taken to the University Medical Center in Tucson. No one knew who they were, except for the Mexican officers who were in uniform. One of the four was only lightly injured and he and Pancho were wrapped in an animated conservation about the circumstances leading up the chaos in the secondary lot. The Mexican officer would have made a great flight deck controller on an aircraft carrier, demonstrably waving his arms in kinetic counterpoint to his words as he machine gunned out long strings of expository sentences to a somewhat amazed Pancho. As Pancho was talking--and mostly listening--to the man, Elvis and Salty Suzy stood by watching. A now alert Xanthippe Beauregard joined them, having been told by a Spanish speaking Nogales police officer what was going on in the little huddle by a crumpled Mexican RAV 4 that lay toppled on its side in the chaotic secondary lot.

"So?" She said, the competent side of her, rather than the arrogant one, dominating her multi-faceted personality. "What did he say?" Pancho quickly translated what he had said. Xanthippe's steel gray eyes got so big they seemed to totally fill up her eye sockets.

"Wow!" Which was, _very_ uncharacteristically, all she could say. At first.

"Assistant Director Beauregard," Elvis said after Pancho finished and the shock had faded from Xanthippe's face. "Some of these guys are narcotics traffickers. Someone has to accompany them to the hospital and made sure they don't escape." A smile slowly slid across Xanthippe's rather attractive, if austere, face. One whose eyes were now back to a pre-shock configuration.

"I know _just_ the men to do it," she said, looking over to where Tony Rivera and Lorenzo Pappagallo were standing motionless like a mismatched pair of human fire plugs improbably plunked just outside the secondary office.

The chaos gradually subsided. Between Xanthippe and Jeanette it was handled with cool, professional competence, despite the constant carping phone calls from officious office dwellers far from the scene who thought they should be controlling things that didn't know a freaking thing about. In the interests of maintaining good international relations, three of the injured Mexican officers were returned to Mexico, complete with their confiscated weapons. The fourth was injured badly enough that he was medevaced by helicopter to the University Medical Center. He did not go alone. Another Mexican officer was severely injured in the fighting on the Mexican side and his supervisor requested he also be sent to the trauma center at UMC. The three men in the Ford Ranger were identified as being narcotics traffickers and also sent to UMC, not so much because they required more advanced care than at the local hospital but because the security was better. And then there was the fourth man. The man in the Lincoln Town Car. They knew who he was from the Mexican officer's conversation with Pancho, though the officer had prudently refrained from mentioning the whole thing about the money.

There was one small problem, however. They didn't have him. Big M had disappeared. Poof. He was gone. Big M made a big exit in the first tumultuous moments and made his way in one hell of a Big M hurry to the house of a cousin just a few blocks away. Big M was a big guy, which is where he got the nickname, and he was the cube root of even the most provisional of marathoners, yet he thundered for his cousin's place with such resolve that the vibration in his body from his large frame and size 13 boots bounding on the blacktop gave him a hellacious headache that six ibuprofen and two Percocet couldn't dent. Headache or not, Big M wasn't about to linger in Nogales and convinced his 'temporarily unemployed' cousin to put down the remote and drive him to his place in Tucson. Where Big M--knowing that sure as there was ice in the Arctic or chocolate in a Snickers bar the cartel would be after his hairy butt with some very unfriendly things in mind--packed his bags in a big hurry, cleaned out his bank account and grabbed a Greyhound Bus out of town, all in less than half a day. He ended up in Cold Snap, Saskatchewan, where he changed his name to Emiliano 'No Hay' Zapatos and told the locals he was a political refugee from Guatemala who had fought the corporate takeover of his small banana plantation, lost and now had a price on his head on the spurious charge that he was the notorious Banana Bandit of Guatemalan folklore. The compassionate (some would say feckless rather than compassionate) Canadians immediately granted him political refugee status and Big M took a job as a school bus driver and began saving his money to buy another Lincoln. So maybe it wouldn't be a new one. But that was OK with Big M. Better a used Lincoln for a living guy than a flashy new Town Car for a corpse. But first things first. He'd get his Lincoln. Eventually. But first he had to get some long underwear.

This was, after all, Saskatchewan.

After things finally quieted down Elvis suddenly had a thought. He looked around. And then a second time. Fenwick? Where the hell was Fenwick? The last he'd seen of Fenwick the three vehicles that crashed had all been heading straight for him. Had he been injured and hauled off to the hospital without Elvis knowing it? Elvis was about to really worry when about that time he saw the ambling koala bear figure of Fenwick coming from the direction of the employee parking lot.

"Where were you, Fenwick?" Elvis said. "I was worried about you." And, surprise him though it did, he really meant it.

"I was just so shook up, Mr. Elvis," Fenwick said, "that I had to get away. I went over to the parking lot and sat in my car for a while and listened to my Angelina Jolie meditation tape." Elvis blinked.

"Your what? Angelina Jolie meditation tape? How the heck does that work?"

"She just purrs a lot, Mr. Elvis," Fenwick answered. "Works for me." Elvis tried to think of something to say but, atypically, came up blank. "Mr. Elvis," Fenwick said, "this whole thing has me shook up and thinking maybe this is not the job for me." He sighed, looking kind of sad, and reached his hand out to shake Elvis' hand. Somewhat stunned, Elvis took Fenwick's extended hand. "I am going to have to think this over, Mr. Elvis, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to leave. Thank you for everything you've tried to do to help me. You have a good heart, even though you would have fit in real well with the Gestapo and those black robed guys back in the Inquisition Days." He shook Elvis' hand. "I'm pretty sure this is goodbye, Mr. Elvis." Then, with Elvis staring dumbfounded after him, Fenwick turned and walked away and for some reason Elvis couldn't quite fathom he seemed to have more than a touch of a swagger to his walk.

Pancho and Salty Suzy came walking up to Elvis' side.

"I heard most of that," Pancho said. "Can't say it surprises me." He glanced over at Suzy and winked at her. "Now, Suzy here is a natural. But Fenwick? He should be an usher at the multiplex or driving an ice cream truck or something like that."

"Not so sure I agree," Elvis said. "With a little help from his friends that nose of his could have been one heck of an enforcement tool."

"That is when--and if--his allergies weren't kicking up." Pancho said.

"I still think he's from Planet Clueless' satellite moon, Dip Shit #1 and that he is therefore a Number One Dip Shit."

"Guess we'll never really know," Elvis said almost wistfully, thinking of all those nose seizures they might have made. "Nope. We'll never know."

And they never did.

Things worked out OK for Elvis and Pancho. After the way they handled the crisis at the port, and with the fervent support of Xanthippe Beauregard, there was no way the Director of Arizona Operations could get away with putting the screws to them for busting his arrogant stoner kid. They stayed on the ET. Xanthippe's own handling of the situation was also noticed and she got a promotion to Director of Florida Operations, a very big promotion indeed. Jeanette LaPaluzza was well on her way to being a first rate border supervisor. Even Hermilinda Ringgold got picked up by the Arizona Highway Patrol and became the Terror of Interstate 40. Not everyone came out of it so well, though. Lorenzo Pappagallo received a mandatory transfer to the CBP Mad Cow Emergency Call Center in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and Tony Rivera got a reassignment as a CBP cultural liaison to Xanthippe's brother Flosswell's leprosy colony in Zambia. Both hired attorneys and were presently fighting the reassignments.

Fenwick was as good as his word. He never came back to the border. Fenwick had enough time with the government that he was able to take an early retirement. He remained in his town house in Tucson. Fenwick joined a gym, lost his extra weight and built up his vigor to a level he had not known even when he was in the Army. He was able to go way beyond 100 pounds on the bench press, several times making 125, though with considerable grunting and groaning, and just missed 130. He began to do a great deal of traveling, much of it to east Asia where he became a familiar face on the escort tourism circuit. Babes that made No Show Gloria look like a prepubescent stick figured tween in a Disney flick were on his arm in places like Jakarta, Manila and Singapore. And especially Bangkok, where he had himself a rollicking good time finding out just why they called the place Bangkok.

Back home at his Tucson town house he built a secret compartment in one of the bedroom walls where he kept what was his very own take on a sacred object. It was a box. A metal box. A familiar metal box. A _very_ familiar metal box. Actually the very same box that had been in Big M's Lincoln Town Car's side panel before Fenwick grabbed it, saw what was inside and them forthwith secreted it in the trunk of his car while pandemonium reigned over the secondary lot a few dozen yards away. Fenwick drove the box home, took considerable care to make certain no one saw him carry it inside, then sat down, opened the box and counted the money. $732, 458. And in old, unmarked bills.

More than enough for a bunch of trips to east Asia.

****

### Chapter 11

### Sample Chapter from Border Tales Too II

### 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."
