Heat 2 by Michael Mann

Author:Michael Mann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

48

Neil walks behind Elisa in the quiet night. She’s climbing, her hips swaying, hair glossy in the moonlight. The dunes have dissipated the day’s heat. Traffic drones on I-8, distant. Mountains and canyons slice the view. The sand slides beneath Neil’s feet.

Elisa stops at the crest of the dune, hands on her hips. Her shoulders are thrown back, her chin high. She’s barely out of breath. Neil catches up.

“See what I mean?” she says.

He stops at her side. Her eyes absorb the night. The Algodones Dunes flow from horizon to horizon, a sea beneath the stars. The Mexican border is two miles south. He can’t see it.

Elisa can.

She points. “Dark scar along the west. There. It’s rock, arroyo seco. Dry creek. Cuts through to la línea.”

“Who patrols?” Neil says. “How frequently?”

“INS, Border Patrol. Federales?” She shrugs. “Once a year.”

“We plan to drive,” he says.

“Of course.” She turns. “But you want me to show you these routes.”

“I do.” He slides his arms around her.

“That arroyo,” she says. “A dirt road leads down a canyon. Too steep for most drivers. Cops ignore it. Contrabandistas hike in. Small loads. Dope. People.”

A breeze scuttles around their feet. The sand shirrs, a scrim, scintillating in the moonlight.

“That would be plan Z,” Neil says. “Backup to all the backups.”

Elisa turns. “But now you know it’s there. And why it’s plan Zeta.” She gestures, arm sweeping, at a barely visible dark track. It skirts the dunes and disappears into a ravine. “There.”

Neil puts the binoculars to his eyes. Under the moon, he can see the snaking road, rising through the rocks.

“That’s where contrabandistas get ambushed,” Elisa says. “When they’re . . .” She snaps her fingers, searching for the word. Her English is flawless, but she wants the right emotional inflection. She switches to Spanish. “Slipshod. Careless. They think they are in the clear because they’re across the border. But pow.”

Neil wonders if this is romantic tale-telling of smuggler tradecraft or a warning.

“We’ll be coming in the daytime, unlike most other smugglers out here.”

“And you’re careful. You have eyes in the back of your head.”

“On a swivel.”

She looks at the horizon, then at him. She trusts him, he knows. Trusts his skill, his focus, his purpose. Like he trusts her knowledge of this country.

She tucks her hands in her jeans pockets. “The three official crossings, you should use them all. The two in Mexicali, straight into Calexico. And the Winterhaven crossing, for Yuma.”

Elisa knows a hundred secretive smuggler’s paths into Mexico and—by different routes—back across the border. She knows every guard who takes bribes at checkpoints. She isn’t in the crew, but she is an integral part of the team that will get the crew safely back across after the score.

“What?” she says.

“Admiring you.” He turns back to the dunes. He scuffs the sand, erasing one of his footprints.

She switches back to English. “You will not cross the dunes.”

“No.” He exhales. “Just reminding myself how quickly things get erased. It all comes, it goes.”

“You philosophize?”

“We’re all footprints on a beach.

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