The Fugitive Grandma Lives

Chapter 23 - The Tent Camp

The Palm Valley Detention Center was located in a barren stretch of sand beyond the Salton Sea. Ages ago it had been a staging ground for the military, prepping for wars in far off desert lands. Several dozen Army surplus tents stood in long rows on concrete slabs, boxed in by a barbed-wire perimeter. Inside the gate, beside a mess tent and port-a-potties, new prisoners were being fitted with striped jump suits and shackled in a row under the bright noonday sun.

On paper, the Detention Center was supposed to be a way station, temporary housing for recent offenders. Most were victims of ad hoc immigration raids by local police. They were men, women and children chased down onsite at their jobs in strawberry fields, auto repair garages and restaurant kitchens. They were found to be without work permission or proof of citizenship. Others were brought in on criminal charges, mostly non-violent offenses like drug possession or traffic violations. Officially, they were to be taken into custody by local sheriff's deputies. After sorting, registering and waiting, they would be routed into overcrowded jails or deportation camps.

That was the theory anyway. In reality, Sal Holiday and El Hefe had turned the Detention Center into a much larger criminal operation, a black market for the buying, selling and bartering of people who had no rights. Sal called it "the body shop".

Here's the way it worked: Sal had a few teams of hand-picked crooked deputies who would go out and aggressively round up as many suspects as possible. Once confirmed as illegals, they would take them to the body shop for initial holding and sorting. Some of the bodies got transferred into the deportation system. Others ended up in county jails.

But many bodies got lost in the shuffle. Amid all the mayhem and bureaucracy, the paperwork for many of these bodies would disappear from the books. Missing bodies became bodies for sale, a precious product on the open labor market. El Hefe's goons became a sort of underground employment agency, earning placement fees to sell undocumented workers into the black market. Some of them ended up working in motels in Vegas, some in farms of the San Joaquin Valley, some on assembly lines in the slaughter houses of Kansas and Nebraska.

It was a good business, Sal figured, just like his other business selling lives via fake IDs and phony birth certificates. There were so many people out there trying to be somebody else. They had spent their lives on the run from a world that put a target on their backs the day they were born. There was good money to be made helping these people avoid capture. Even better money after they got caught, auctioning them off to the highest bidder.

"So what's this about?" Sal asked Tim Schlesinger. They were standing outside their parked cars on a trail in the foothills overlooking the tent camp. Both men had binoculars for a closer inspection of the prisoners.

"It's better if you don't know that details," Tim said.

"How do I know this ain't some kind of sting?"

"If I wanted to take you down I wouldn't need a sting. I'd just call it in."

"El Hefe always wants the details."

"Let me worry about El Hefe."

Sal let out a long, heavy harrumph. It wasn't clear if he was grumpy or just had something stuck in his throat.

"I need a team of about twenty people to work a farm," Tim said.

"Men?"

"Men and women. Maybe half and half. Make sure they are young and healthy."

"What's your price?"

"I don't want to haggle. Just give me good product. I'll pay a premium rate."

"A farm, huh? What you growing anyway?"

Tim wiped away the sweat that was gathering on his brow. "It's kind of hard to explain."