Borderline [On hold for major revision]

Chapter 15: Confessions of a California Detective

Chapter 15

            Wolfe’s eyes widened in an evident mixture of guilt and alarm. I spun around in my seat to see Vasquez’s small frame hovering in the doorway. He looked just as surprised as I was at Wolfe’s words.

            “How much did you just hear?” Wolfe finally asked.

            “Where’s Terra?” I said. I didn’t want her to know that I’d been keeping half of my life from her for over two years now. If she found out, things would never be the same between us again.

            He didn’t answer either of our questions; he seemed to have enough of his own. He shut the door to the conference room and stepped forward. “How long has this been going on?”

            “Since last year,” Wolfe answered. “Remember that case we worked with all those murdered immigrants?”

            Vasquez paused a moment. “Yeah. The guide was the killer.”

            “Yes, and he’s not the only one. You know he’s not. Most of the guides out there take advantage of the people desperate to get over here. They’ll trade ‘safe’ passage to the U.S. for anything they or their employers want: money the immigrants don’t have, servitude that’s practically like slave labor, prostitution, smuggling, the list goes on and on. It’s been happening for a long time—that case just woke me up to the truth.”

            I got the feeling that he’d rehearsed this before.

“So now you break the law so that you can help other people who are breaking the law? How could you possibly think that’s the right thing to do, Mark!”

            Suddenly, a light bulb went off in my head. In my side business, we only went by first names, and now I remembered Hector accepting a Mark about eleven months back for a recruiting job. It was only supposed to be temporary, but from what I heard Mark found real pleasure in helping out, so we kept him on board.

Before he was accepted he confessed that he was in law enforcement, so he was met with suspicion by everyone but me. Being a Border Patrol agent myself, I recognized that it’s often the people most concerned about justice who end up breaking the law trying to help people, not to mention the most devoted to their work. So I convinced Hector to let him in, and he had never betrayed us like everyone else feared. I found a new respect for Detective Wolfe that hadn’t been there when we first met.

“Just think about it,” he said. “I’m not helping anyone cross who wouldn’t have done it without me. I just find the people who are about to put their lives in the hands of an unreliable guide and help them find someone trustworthy. I’m not convincing them to commit a crime, I’m just making it safer for them to do what they would have done anyway.”

“That’s the same excuse drug dealers give for trying to make narcotics street legal!” Vasquez shot back.

“But drugs ruin people’s lives. By doing what I do, I’m helping people make new lives for themselves and their families, giving them a chance to do things they would have never thought possible. How can you say that’s a bad thing?”

I could tell that I had taken a background role in this conversation. I sat back and silently waited to see how this would play out.

“Because it’s the law.”

“Yeah, well, the law is wrong. It’s a broken system.”

Vasquez clutched his head in his hands and began pacing back and forth. I could tell that this was a bad sign; he was on the verge of losing it.