“Ten feet forward, Gomez,” said Finn, making his voice calm. Searchlights from high above swept back and forth over the people huddled on the Interceptor’s foredeck. If it’d been day, the freighter would’ve blocked out the sun. The Interceptor came back up alongside the panga. The first of the last two guys scrambled onto the ladder and started climbing. The giant ship was blaring her horn nonstop now, so loud that Finn nearly didn’t hear Gomez shout, “We gotta go, boss!”
The Interceptor began to rise on the freighter’s bow wave, going up fast like they’d stepped onto an escalator. The last migrant now had his arms on the ladder—the moment his feet were off the panga, Finn shouted, “Go! Go!”
He hauled the guy aboard, then turned and saw the whale-sized red bulb just meters away and rushing at them.
He thought, Too late. I’ve killed us all.
* * *
Everybody in the Interceptor stared back. Only Finn, Chinchilla, and Gomez were focused forward, straining with everything they had, wishing for the Interceptor’s propeller blades to take hold of the wind-whipped water.
It came down to five meters. The freighter’s bow was no more than five meters from the Interceptor’s stern by the time the speedboat’s four propellers at last gripped the water and slingshotted her forward, sending her surfing down the ship’s bow wave. The noise of the outboards, the wind, the bow wave, and the ship’s horn were earsplitting, but through it all Finn still heard the cracking sound of the ship pulverizing the panga.
Gomez had opened the Interceptor’s throttles all the way. The Interceptor rushed ahead of the ship, launching off waves. When they had gained maybe fifty meters, Gomez started arcing the boat east, out of the freighter’s path.
A minute passed, and now they were in the great ship’s lee. Gomez pulled the throttles back into neutral; the Interceptor came off the plane and drifted to a stop. The rain had stopped, and the clouds were dispersing. No one said a word. Finn breathed what felt like the first breath of the rest of his life. The migrants stood at the rail, silver foil wrapped around their shoulders, and stared at the cargo ship parading past, a fast-moving sheer wall of steel darkly visible in what light the night sky had to offer, the ship going on and on, like it would never end. Chinchilla, Finn, and Gomez stood under the hardtop by the console. Figueroa was coming to on deck.
From the direction of Long Beach behind them came the thrum of a helicopter approaching.
ONE
THERE are two towns named Paradise in California: one in the north, in the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and one in the south, in the treeless desert near the border with Mexico. Mona Jimenez drove around the parking lot of the migrant detention center outside the southern Paradise, looking for a patch of shade to park in. According to her dash, it was an unseasonable ninety-five degrees outside—it was only the first of April. She’d heard someone on the radio say that on average, March had been hotter than the previous July, which would’ve worked as an April Fools’ joke if she hadn’t just spent the past four and a half hours driving over baking mountains and through parched desert, mirages shimmering on the blacktop up ahead, air-conditioning blasting. Now the air-conditioning was making an irritating rattling sound, and Mona was worried. She didn’t need it failing—home was Redondo Beach, four and a half hours in the other direction, and she didn’t think she could take ninety-five degrees for four and a half hours.
But the Paradise Detention Center had been designed for one function only, and that function didn’t extend to providing shade trees in its parking lot for the overheating cars of migrants’ rights attorneys from the coast. In fact, a cynic might argue that the Border Security Corporation of America—the private company that ran the center on behalf of the federal government—had chosen to build its newest facility in the bleached-bone nowhere between Yuma and El Centro precisely to discourage migrants’ rights attorneys from visiting, and at that moment, Mona was feeling cynical. The BSCA legal liaison with whom she’d spoken by phone had warned her to watch her step in the parking lot.
“For what?” she’d said.
“Rattlesnakes.”
There wasn’t a patch of shade to be found anywhere, so Mona parked in the baking sun as near as possible to the detention center itself. She switched off the engine, killing the air-conditioning with it. Then she pressed her forehead against the side-window glass and carefully scanned the ground. She’d never actually seen a rattlesnake in real life, only on TV, and she preferred to keep it that way.
A moment passed. No snake rattled.
Mona sighed, flipped down the sun visor, and checked her face in the vanity mirror. Doesn’t mean they’re not out there, she thought, refreshing her lipstick. Could be just waiting for me to get out. Could be watching from some rattlesnake hidey-hole. Did they even live in holes? How would they dig, without limbs? She checked the ground one more time before opening the door.
Stepping from the air-conditioned car into the bakery-oven heat cut her breath.
“Fuck,” she said, instantly breaking a sweat and regretting the pantsuit she’d put on in the near-dark that morning, dressing quietly so as not to wake her husband, Customs and Border Patrol Marine Interdiction Agent Nick Finn, who’d been working night shifts; she’d chosen the suit because it looked sharp and showed she meant business. She knew from experience that private prisons were operated by men prone to calling women they’d just met sweetheart, and she wanted to preempt that. But the suit was cut from a fabric too heavy for this heat, and she exhaled with relief when she was buzzed into the air-conditioned building. By the time she’d gotten through all the usual formalities (metal detector, pat down, briefcase inspection, surrendering her cell phone, reading the conditions of entry, signing the visitors’ log), she’d almost stopped sweating. So she was disappointed when a guard led her not to a nice cool air-conditioned visiting room but to a fenced-off visitors’ section of the outdoor recreation area, which consisted of a row of picnic tables on a concrete slab laid under a canvas sunshade rigged between pylons. The canvas blocked out the sun’s direct burn, but the air beneath it was still almost unbreathably hot.
Mona took off her jacket, sat down at a table, took out a pen and yellow legal pad, and asked where all the detainees were.
“In the canteen. It’s lunchtime.”
She waited for him to bring out her client. While she waited, she looked round the empty yard; beyond the picnic tables was a long stretch of dirt interspersed with brittle bushes. A few benches with concrete legs had been installed along the perimeter fence, which had razor wire spiraled atop it.
They needn’t have bothered with the fence, she thought; if anyone escaped, the rattlesnakes would get them.
* * *
Mona heard the beep of a scan card and then the clack of a heavy lock, and then a guard led out a black-haired young woman wearing an orange jumpsuit and plastic Adidas sliders. Mona already knew this much about her: her name was Carmen Vega, she was twenty years old, and she had been plucked from a sinking panga while attempting to enter the country illegally. She had had a large amount of cash on her, much of which was lost during the rescue. She was in detention because it wasn’t her first attempt—attempted reentry after removal was a felony, and the new administration had mandated that every case be prosecuted, no matter the circumstances. The new policy, which the administration had dubbed Operation No Return, had been a boon for the for-profit prison business. Carmen had been sent here to Paradise because the government’s own facility in San Bernardino was full. All this Mona had learned from her husband, Nick Finn.