Border Tales Too Book III

Border Tales Too

Book III

The Borderland (Mis)Adventures of CBP Officers

Elvis T. Mahoney & Co-Conspirators

Book III

by

James Whitesell

Copyright © 2015 by James Whitesell

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Border Tales Too

Book III

Table of Contents, (not as certain malajusts might say, Table of Crap)

Prelude Luane Androgen

Chapter 1 Juan's Shrimp Shack

Chapter 2 Embarazada?

Chapter 3 Into The Frying Pan

Chapter 4 Just Another Day?

Chapter 5 El Cientifico

Chapter 6 Alberto

Chapter 7 It's Just Business

Chapter 8 Elvis Takes A History Class

Chapter 9 Mr. Fleshmound

Chapter 10 A Quartet of Crotches (Sample Chapter From Border Tales)

Border Tales Too

The Borderland (Mis)Adventures of CBP Senior Inspector

Elvis T. Mahoney & Co-Conspirators

Book III

Prelude

Luane Androgen

A resident of Cincinnati, Luanne Androgen, was in Tucson on business. Court business. Luanne was an attorney. She formerly was the legal consultant for an adult diaper manufacturer, but a few years earlier did a nifty lawerly 180 and now was in private practice pursuing legal action against adult diaper manufacturers and other similar targets of opportunity. Her personal speciality was litigation against toilet seat makers. And she was good. A genuine legal hotshot with a well honed sense of the dramatic. Her graphic courtroom visual presentations of the injuries sustained by toilet seats, one former adversary said, would have scared the crap out of anyone. I went to the bathroom standing up for almost two weeks until I was got a guy to install one of those nextgen Japanese seatless toilets.

Luanne, who was also a regular on the gourmet circuit in Cincinatti and had a special interest in authentic ethnic foods, made the hour drive down to the border town on Nogales on a free day, a no court Sunday, to try out some genuine Mexican food on the Sonora side of Nogales. As she arrived in the Arizona half of Nogales and drove by the local McDonald's she noticed all the Mexican plated cars in the McDonald's parking lot. Luanne got curious. She parked her rental car nearby and cut through the McDonald's lot and was about to head into Mexico for some authentic Mexican food. But all the Sonora plated cars held her attention. She stopped a thirtyish woman with two small kids who'd just climbed out of one of those Sonora plated cars, a Ford Fiesta, and was headed for the McDonald's front door.

Excuse me, the hotshot Cincinnati attorney, Luanne Androgen, said. Do you speak English. The Mexican woman nodded.

Sure do. Went to school here on the Arizona side. Even got a tattoo in Tucson. She held up her sleeveless left arm for Luanne to see. Luanne looked. And looked again. All she saw was what looked like the thin opaque film on a blackboard just after it's been erased.

There's nothing there. Luanne said, both puzzled and a touch miffed that maybe this woman was messing with her in that popular Mexican game, Fuck With The Gringos. Messing with people's minds was lawyer Luane's speciality and she sure as hell didn't appreciate some frickin' amateur stepping on her mind-messing toes. She started to edge into pre-huff mode.

It was the name of my first boyfriend. The woman said with a giggle, dehuffing Luane's huff before it got rolling. My husband was none too happy with it so I had it removed. A serious expression. Tattoo removal is a big business around here. What with all the gangs and all. My brother Hernando makes a good living at it. Which is doubly good for him. Hernando specializes in doing tattoos as well as removing them. Big bucks. Good enough for him to drive a new Prism and buy season tickets to Cardinals games up in Phoenix. Luanne blinked. She was losing focus. Fast. So she regrouped and got back to her original point.

I was about to go into Mexico for some authentic Mexican food, being none too fond of fast food places like this one, and was wondering why all these Mexicans are eating here. Don't you like the food from your own country? Don't you like Mexican food. The Mexican woman laughed.

Take a look inside the McDonald's. All the cooks are Mexicans. They come across the border every day to work here. Another laugh, plus a gentle pat on Luanne's shoulder.

If the cooks are Mexican, how can it not be Mexican food? Then the Mexican lady took her two little kids and trundled them through the door into McDonalds. Luanne stood in the parking lot, watching them go in no little befuddlement. When she got back to Cincinnati a few days later she went to her favorite restaurant, Sefanit's Authentic Ethiopian Cuisine, and opened the kitchen door to see who the cook was.

Que busca, señora? The cook, a man with salmon colored skin, green eyes and a light brown pony tail, said. Los baños?

Luanne quietly shut the door, went home and made herself a baloney sandwich.

Chapter 1

Juan's Shrimp Shack

Elvis was working at the U.S. government's port of entry at Nogales. As soon as his 8-4 shift was over he hit the freeway north for the tantalizingly odiferous premises of Juan's Shrimp Shack in Tucson. Elvis' stomach juices were roaring for some juicy crustacean action. The shrimp season was going full blast and Juan had fresh Gulf of California shrimp, caught that very morning off the coast near Guaymas by his fisherman cousin, Marco, for the supper special. Marco express shipped the shrimp daily to Juan, who in turn sold most of it to other restaurants. Making sure however to have enough to offer fresh Gulf shrimp specials every evening at his place as long as each day's supply lasted. Which wasn't very long. So if you wanted fresh Gulf shrimp you'd darn well best get to Juan's place early in the evening.

Elvis, being a self professed shrimp afficianado, was on digestive fire to dig into one of Juan's fresh Gulf shrimp specials. He stomped on the accelerator and made the usual hour long drive up to his home in Tucson in forty-five minutes. He paused only long enough to make a quick change out of his uniform, and lather his somewhat malodorous work-sweated armpits with a generous amount of X-Tra Strong Nice Pits deodorant, and gargle some Wal-Mart, also extra strength, generic mouthwash. Then he jumped back into his old Chevy, clunked it in gear and hit the gas pedal for the potholed parking lot outside Juan's Shrimp Shack on the south side of Tucson.

The regular waitress, Juan's daughter-in-law Celsiusina Mae Moskowitz de Calzone, had a tray with two shrimp specials and two bottles of Tecate balanced on her right arm when she glanced over at the opening door and saw Elvis' red headed lanky form clumping his way in. In the time it takes for an atomic clock to tick from one second to the next her pupils dilated to maximum and her eyebrows valiantly tried to meet up with her hairline. Mickie LaSwat, her former neighbor who was a Tucson Electric Company lineman, at his moment of truth looked no more shocked that Celsiusina at that moment, Mickie having inadvertently leaned against a high voltage line and immediately qualified his wife for a nice chunk of insurance money. In Celsiusina's mind she tossed the tray of shrimp specials in the air, started screaming hysterically and lit out running for the back door. In actuality she did no such thing. It was mind stuff only. But it was close.

She took one look at Elvis and in few more atomic clock seconds detoured back into the kitchen and out of Elvis sight. She'd already had more than one Elvis encounter. One too many. Celsiusina suffered from nearly constant stress. Her fragile mental equilibrium couldn't handle another evening of Elvis. In the last one, Elvis and Juan having had a few too many brews that evening, Elvis began singing Irish revolutionary songs in what he claimed was Gaelic, with Juan attempting to harmonize in Spanish, which sounded to Celsiusina like elephants gargling in a shower--though she never stopped to wonder exactly how elephants got into a shower in the first place. Or, for that matter, how she would know what gargling elephants sounded like, Celsiusina not being one of your more reflective types going back to when she discovered the Easter bunny was actually her uncle Hector in a bunny costume. After that she just didn't want to know what other unpleasant discoveries life was waiting to dump on her.

She vanished into the kitchen, convinced that she had just saved, if not her very life, at least her sanity. Theta Hematoma Bojorquez, a new waitress who had no clue who Elvis was, took up the hostess slack as Elvis came in the door and unwarily escorted him to what he demonstrably indicated with a thrusting index finger to be his very favorite and definitely only choice for a booth. Stuck on the wall next to the booth was a three foot square velvet painting of a matador and a bull hot eying each other with less than friendly intentions. Elvis was certain the figure in the painting was Che Guevarra. Che was wearing a matador's costume and was steely-eyed intent on driving a skinny sword into the thick neck muscles of a huge white bull with flaming red eyes. It was one of Elvis' favorite paintings. Elvis was a big fan of fine art. Especially fine art with a message. Elvis was dead certain that the white bull symbolized runaway capitalism and the rapacious white bread gringos of America's Wall Street. Either that, or Che had a big time dislike for large white bulls. Either way, the bull was on his way to being the main attraction at the local taco stand.

Served the critter right. No bull sympathy likely in Elvis' universe. Elvis hadn't much cared for bulls since Thelonius McQuirk's hulking one-eyed Holstein bull chased him across an alfalfa pasture back home in Slippery Sister County. Elvis in those days was a smart-assed overconfident seventeen year old who admittedly was a fast runner. Good enough to lead the sprinters on the track team at Slippery Sister Unconsolidated High and to be the school football team's occasionally star halfback. He thought he could take a short cut across McQuirk's alfalfa pasture and outrun the bull. That was the thought. Thoughts always don't always work out in reality. Elvis had his own local Slippery Sister County version of the Running of the Bulls at Pamplona in Spain when One Eye Burt, McQuirk's huge Holstein bull, ran Elvis down before he got to the fence. The bull caught him, too, and put a hole in Elvis' buttocks that was still visible to this day in good light. A few years later, Elvis having revealed the story of One Eye Burt to his Army buddies after a few too many bottles of beer, the dimpled scar was the butt of many a joke when he was in the barracks' communal shower room. But just about everything has a positive side. Elvis learned how to fight--and also to appreciate the value of the well-timed sucker punch.

Would you like something to drink, sir? Theta Hematoma Bojorquez asked Elvis as he plunked himself down beneath the Che Guevarra painting into what he called his lucky spot. But, before he gave her a drink order, he pointed at Che Gueverra skewering the white bull of Wall Street in the velvet painting.

Pretty cool painting, he said. Don't you think? Theta didn't at first say anything. How would you interpret the painting? Elvis continued. The deeper intent, I mean. Like philosophical or allegorical meaning. Big words for Elvis. But he did have a grasping fingernail hold on the edge of their meaning. Slipping, but still holding on. Theta stared at the painting, cleared her throat and looked back at Elvis.

I think the painter was hard up for money and was willing to do anything to make a buck. Theta was a student at Pima Community College and took an art appreciation class the previous semester. She was now able to pronounce more or less accurately French sounding names like Renoir and Gauguin and considered herself an appreciator of fine art. Which, Theta was damn well certain, this cheesy velvet monstrosity sure as hell was not. Then Theta drove another nail into the coffin of her as yet unplumbed relationship with this new customer, the red headed Elvis guy. Either the painter was hard up for bucks or he was mentally ill. This painting is pure crap. It should be burned at the stake of art appreciation, Theta also having taken a class on medieval Europe and getting downright irate that the dumb French bastards barbequed Joan of Arc.

Elvis's mind, however, was a very long way from a Joan of Arc barbecue. He wanted to jump up, grab Theta by the throat and compress her throat to the width of a pencil. Elvis was sure Che Guevarra was at that minute rolling over in his grave. This was blasphemous. Che Guevarra and the White Bull blasphemous. Theta forthwith took a tumble to the very bottom of Elvis' all purpose FAEE (Friends, Acquaintances and Especially Enemies) list, in a three way tie with Osama bin Laden and One Eye Burt the Holstein Bull.

You asked about a drink order, he began. Ready for it? Theta nodded.

Yes, sir. What would you like?

Well, Elvis replied. How about a Diet Gatorade? Theta's coffee brown eyes blinked and she cleared her throat again. Twice.

A Diet Gatorade? She said uncertainly, thinking somehow she must have misunderstood him. Who would come into a seafood place and order a Diet Gatorade? Theta had never encountered Elvis before. Nor, and this was what had her teapot starting to heat up, had anyone warned her about him. She looked puzzled. And a touch pissed.

I don't think we carry Diet Gatorade, sir, Theta said in a thin voice. Have you had it before? The simple omission of the word 'here' was Theta's second mistake. The first one being badmouthing Che and the Bull. Elvis looked innocently up at her from his lucky spot and all that registered in Theta's mind was a mess of fire alarm red hair, blue eyes the color of the ice in her noisy old refrigerator and a protruding nose that would have passed muster in the heyday of the Roman forum. For some reason she fixated on the nose. From there her mind jumped to an image of a ski jump.

And stayed there.

Had it before? The mouth that was a constant companion with the ski jump replied, looking a bit put off. I had it several times while visiting the tasting room at the stockyards in South Sioux City and also while watching humpback whales humping off the coast of Baja California. And I even had it once when the Diamondbacks whipped the Padres, though I will admit I snuck it into the stadium in my baggy shorts. Which, I have to confess, did impart something of a peculiar odor to the Diet Gatorade.

Theta's lower lip trembled. She suddenly remembered how the other waitress, Juan's daughter-in-law Celsiusina, had done a vanishing act when Elvis came in the door. Now she understood. Celsiusina! Sneaky Bitch!

I'm sorry, Mr. Ski....er, ah...., she blushed deeply, "ah...ah...sir, Theta finally said, as her frazzling equilibrium continued to frazzle. We don't carry Diet Caterglade."

Gatorade, Elvis replied a bit peevishly. Theta's eyes blinked again. That's Gatorade, Elvis said, his face and voice vaguely accusatory. Not Caterglade. Before Theta could answer Elvis spoke again. Never mind. I'll have something different. Do you have any European virgin spring water? Preferably Magyar or perhaps even Carpathian? Theta's mouth dropped open. She tried to force out some words but nothing came. But then, like a ringside attendant at a boxing match hitting the end-of-round bell just when the referee's count was nearing ten, Elvis put up his hand and patted Theta reassuringly on the shoulder.

Just bring me a Bud Light, he said. Theta wheeled on her heels and made the trip from Elvis' booth to the kitchen so fast the bottoms of her shoes heated up.

Elvis was studying the special board on the wall when a commotion exploded in Juan's Shrimp Shack's cramped kitchen. Theta Hematoma Bojorquez and Celsiusina Mae Moskowitz de Calzone were snarling at each other with hot eyes and hissing some very unladylike but remarkably colorful creative remarks. Elvis kicked himself for not bringing along one of his gray market distant audio enhancing devices. That kitchen caterwaul had to be titillating. Maybe even soap opera level titillating.

Drat! Elvis exclaimed, miffed that he couldn't hear what was going on. Elvis might have been offended had he known that the argument was about who was--or more to the point, who wasn't--going to wait on him. Elvis might have been offended. But probably not, Elvis being after all, well....Elvis.

After a few more moments a middle-sized, middle-aged man with a bald dome trailing a salt and pepper pony tail came out of the kitchen and thumped towards Elvis. The kitchen dilemma was solved. Theta and Celsiusina stayed put in the kitchen. Juan, still in his stained apron and with a hair net over his pony-tailed bald dome, stomped up to Elvis where he sat in his lucky spot under the painting of the matador who was really Che Guevara trying to skewer the white Wall Street bull.

OK, Elvis, Juan said in a veiled tone of voice, though it didn't take much of an imagination stretch to figure out the veil was a thin one and barely covered his irritation with Elvis.

I got pandemonium in the kitchen. Juan continued in that same thinly veiled tone of voice. My daughter-in-law is the back room crying over the phone to her New Age therapist and life coach. Juan paused briefly. Whatever the fuck that means. And my waitress is threatening to quit and narc me out to the Food Nazis of the Tucson Department of Health for some of my so called questionable kitchen procedures. Another short pause. Can't you just come in and act normal for once in your life? Just come in, order a meal, eat it and leave without leaving a trail of destruction behind you?

She started it, Elvis said defensively.He pointed at the painting.

She bad mouthed Che Guevarra." This comment would have sailed over the heads of the entire billionshood of humanity and fuddled them all had not Juan and Elvis been poker playing buddies for a good while. There was therefore a single exception to the otherwise total global fuddle. Juan actually knew what the hell Elvis was talking about. Juan looked at the velvet painting of the matador and the bull. A stunned expression was on his face.

She didn't like the painting?

More than that, Elvis said, still riled by the impudent young woman's blasphemy. She called it crap! Juan started into a slow burn. Not only had he bought the goddamn painting in the first place at a tourist shop on the Sonora side of Nogales, he actually was really fond of it.

He looks like me as young man, he confided in Elvis one evening when they were drinking beer and talking about the matador in the painting. I was good looking back then. The girls all gave me a second look. Sometimes a third.

At that friend moment, the cool thing for a friend to say would be something like you're still good looking, man. But not Elvis. His mind didn't usually register concepts like cool things to say. Not that he was snide or mean spirited. He was, well, again, just....Elvis.

The aging process sucks, man. Especially when you're breathing shrimp fumes every night back in the kitchen. Fortunately, Juan's mind was wandering off on another subject, his recent run of bad luck with his shrimp soufflés, and didn't react. And he had another subject on his mind this time, too. Theta's parenthood.

I'll talk to her, Juan said as he started to head back into the kitchen.

Not too harshly, Elvis said. She's just a kid. Which Juan knew all too well. She was a kid, all right. His kid. Which Juan's wife Hysteria knew zilch about. And Juan sure wanted to keep it that way.

Don't worry, Juan said, again in a veiled tone, thinking of what would happen if Theta blew and ratted him out to Hysteria. I'll go easy.

And he did.

A little later Theta came back to Elvis' table with a Bud Light and a--very--provisional smile.

Here is your Bud Light, sir, she said in a provisional voice to match the provisional smile.

Now what would you like to order? As Elvis answered the provisional smile slid off her face like a formerly promising sunset suddenly vanishing behind a bunch of impudent horizon hugging dark clouds with the strong possibility of a big storm behind them. Kinda like what Noah saw just before he burst into frenzied action finishing up his Ark.

I'll have the Venezuelan Sea Bass in white wine sauce with the Alsatian grappa alla ruta.

Theta stared at Elvis with a face grown as pale as her name brand white running socks. At least before she started the half marathons that invariably turned them to a smelly dingy gray. But then Theta stopped and her expression registered what looked to be something approximating a genuine Eureka moment. The clouds on the horizon tattered away. She remembered what Juan had told her before she embarked on her Elvis waitressy revisitation.

She nodded and a grin slowly spread over her face as she turned to face the kitchen, yelling at the unseen staff inside.

"One Shrimp Special, heavy on the hot sauce."

Elvis nodded happily. Juan had done good and clued the girl in. From then on Elvis and Theta got along OK, though Theta prudently kept her distance. Which Juan had also clued her in on.

Elvis ate his fill of the spicy Shrimp Special and went home with superheated taste buds to a night of vividly entertaining dreams. Neptune, God of the Sea, and Theta Hematoma Bojorquez were the leading characters, Snoop Dog, Brad Pitt, Lady Gaga and One Eye Burt the Holstein Bull all making guest appearances. He woke up early the next morning refreshed and ready for another day on the border. He steeled himself to the daunting task that lay ahead.......

The task? He was a Customs and Border Protection officer. A member of the supposedly elite mobile Enforcement Team. The ET. Working on the Arizona/Mexican border. Elvis and the others were tasked with protecting America's border from unwanted foreign intrusion and, as his ET buddy Pancho put it, all kinds of other stuff. He thought that over a moment, pondering their--CBP, the ET and Elvis himself--august mission to protect the borders of these great United States of America. He looked in the mirror, was silent another moment, frowned, then muttered in a low voice.

We're fucked.

Chapter 2

Embarazada?

The city of Phoenix is in wide open desert country with miles upon miles of empty space all around it. A whole lot of it, especially far from the limited water sources, that is plain butt ugly. The young son of one of the early 19th Century immigrant families looked out at the flat barren expanse of the Valley of the Sun, blanched and grabbed his father's leg.

Daddy, the little kid said. Is this hell?

So why the heck did a city plumb in the middle of the searing Sonora desert suddenly explode with teeming humanity? Location. Location. Location. Looming to the north of Phoenix, so close that its northern exurbs are already steadily climbing in elevation, are a bunch of mountain ranges and the towering Mogollon Rim. All of which are nicely adept at draining clouds of their rain and, in the winter, snow. Snow melts. Water runs downhill. So what's downhill?

Phoenix.

As the newcomers piled in the city grew by leaps and bounds and bounds and leaps and spread all over creation until it eventually covered more ground than entire counties in the older eastern states and required an advanced state of the art GPS in your car or on your mobile, or for the very earliest of the early adopters, hard wired into your high tech pair of computerized eye glasses, to find your way around. Since there was so much open space surrounding the original center of Phoenix the skyscraper builders had no way of keeping up in the old downtown and the city leaked out in all directions. If you were gonna drive from one end of Phoenix to the other, best take your lunch with you. And also something to read or your state of the art mobile, considering there was always a good chance of a humongous traffic backup after some blockhead went and piled into a bridge abutment and the cops closed off the road while a team of the world's slowest accident investigators arrived to finally figure out that some blockhead had piled into a bridge abutment.

Phoenix is an absolutely modern late 20th/early 21st Century American city. Concrete and asphalt, shopping centers and strip malls and cookie cutter subdivisions, endless blocks of apartments and chain restaurants and gas station convenience stores, massage parlors and dojos and tattoo parlors and dollar stores, that stretch off seemingly to infinity. Phoenix is urban sprawl on automobilic steroids. No doubt of it. In the Valley of the Sun the automobile is undisputed King.

Ancient Egypt had the Valley of the Sun Kings.

Not so ancient Phoenix' Valley of the Sun has King Auto.

Elvis thought a better name for the place would be Valley of the Smog. Or Carbon Monoxide City. Or, in the sizzling sun blasted summer, Melanoma Metropolis. He was never in any big hurry to go to Phoenix. Why bother? He could stay at home, shut the garage door, fire up his old Chevy, turn the heater on, sit inside the car in the garage and get the same effect as being in Phoenix and save himself the long drive. But some evil-minded malevolent malefactor of a miscreant in far off Washington D.C. had long ago, possibly as an act of pure spite, ordained that the federal courthouse be plunked down in downtown Phoenix and that was where the case that involved Elvis was about to be tried. The federal subpoena pulled no punches. Cutting through the obfuscating legalese, what it basically said was get your ass up to the courthouse to testify, Elvis, or you are gonna be in big trouble. None of Elvis' coworkers screwed around with subpoenas be they local, state or federal. When they summoned you, you'd damn well better show. They summoned. You went.

So Elvis went.

Judge Matushita Nakasumi was the presiding judge. Nakasumi's wealthy Hawaiian relatives were big contributors to Bill Clinton's second presidential campaign and that sure as hell didn't hurt Nakasumi's chances on getting appointed to the federal bench. Not that he was a incompetent. He wasn't. He was more or less an average lawyer, but just happened to be one whose insider clout won him a federal judgeship and a lifetime sinecure that enabled him to plunk his kids in pricey private schools and away from much contact with the perfidious plebeian masses.

The federal courthouse was in the pre-human-Tsunami downtown of old Phoenix. Elvis maneuvered his way through the spaghetti tangle of freeways in central Phoenix, took an off ramp to downtown, left his old Chevy at a nearby multi-storied parking garage and was crossing the street in old downtown Phoenix when a distracted teenaged driver texting on a cell phone came barreling down the road and damn near ran him over. Elvis leaped straight up in the air and took off like a running back with a pair of hulking linebackers hot on his tail, jumped onto the sidewalk and managed to make it safely to the federal building where he was confronted by the scowling faces of security guards hovering behind metal detectors looking for some hapless person to do a doofus move and make their day. He got past them with his badge and a forced smile and took the elevator to the third floor, where the trial was to be held. Elvis sauntered into the courtroom past a pair of bailiffs with shaved heads and sour faces who looked like bad tempered bald Sumo wrestlers. Elvis stopped for a moment and looked at one of them. Bet you guys look real cute in spandex in the ring, then walked on before the human behemoth could react. As Elvis sat down in the courtroom, the behemoth's eyes were blinking faster than the REM sleep of a meth tweaker.

Already sitting in the courtroom was Hermoine J. Lapslinder, the seizing officer in the case, and dog handler Tirso Garibaldi, who claimed to be a direct descendant of Italy's national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi's son, Tirso, who the modern day Tirso maintained was abducted as a child and raised by Spanish Gypsies. Garibaldi's dog had alerted to the narcotics that Officer Lapslinder forthwith seized. Elvis was the initial contact officer who intercepted the suspect and sent her to secondary for further inspection. Or at least that was the way the official seizure narrative read. Official seizure narratives can be as circumspect as officials themselves, which means that the same guys who dreamed up the shotgun wedding language of the subpoena also put a verbal chastity belt on the seizure narrative. And maybe with good reason. The less that is said in a seizure narrative the less some histrionic hotshot of a defense lawyer has to nitpick, twist, distort and pontificate on and then have a good laugh about over single malt Scotch at the country club that evening with his chortling lawyerly cronies. Elvis didn't know it for a fact, but he suspected he knew what one of the classes in law school had to be--

How to Bullshit a Jury.

What really happened in Elvis' case was that the suspect, Gia Maria Guzman Slipowitz de Contreras, had passed unchallenged through the pedestrian entry at Nogales' Grand Avenue. She entered through the gate manned by Poldo Alarcon, an officer locally famous for his ability to slam down Herculean quantities of chorizo enchiladas but not much else. Elvis often hunkered behind Poldo's lane, knowing that the man was not the sharpest knife in the inspectional drawer and that smugglers were fond of dull knives. Elvis' tactic only worked if Poldo didn't see him. When he did, Poldo's paranoia set in and he became as slow as the spring ice breakup off the frigid coast of Spitzbergen, an island that is even north of northern Norway. Which is so far north that the spring ice breakup hasn't finished breaking before winter sets in and it begins to freeze again. Like a typical Congressional session in the early 21st Century.

This was one time Poldo didn't see him. The Arizona Lottery had built up again to several million bucks and Alarcon was preoccupied with coming up with just the right numbers he'd rattle off when he bought his Lotto tickets after work at Pepe's Deli and Immigration Service just down the road from the DeConcini Port of Entry on Grand Avenue. Pepe's place right next door to Lady Belladonna's Exquisite Massage Parlor, which was one of Poldo's very favorite places to hang out. Especially on Monday nights when Lady Belladona's had its massage special where scantily glad young women performed acrobatics on the clientele's prone and sometimes supine (the view was better) bodies. Since he started going to the Monday night specials Poldo's chronic back pain had almost completely vanished. The fact that he'd started taking OxyContin at