The Border Lords by T. Jefferson Parker Page B

Bradley was to Vega’s left and he quietly popped the holster snap and rested his hand on the forty-caliber. He heard the leather squeak and felt the tapping of his own heart against his uniform shirt. He looked down at the screen door—old, bent, ajar. Caroline looked at him, her hand on her gun also, then rapped on the screen door with her knuckles, and the woman came down a short hallway toward them, both hands working a kitchen towel, shaking her head.
    “No here. Nobody here.”
    “We have a report of a prowler in this neighborhood,” said Vega. She said it again in Spanish. “Can we come in?”
    “Nobody here.” She had high cheekbones and a flat nose and black eyes. Her teeth were very white. She wore a shapeless gray smock and her hair was bunched into a shiny black ponytail. She was barefoot.
    She closed the door and locked it. Bradley heard her walk away.
    Vega rapped again. And again. The latch slid and the woman swung open the door and the dish towel was still in one hand.
    “Nobody is here.”
    “There is a report of a prowler in this neighborhood,” said Vega. “A prowler in this location. Can we come in, please?”
    “No. No persona .” Then the woman rattled off a paragraph in Spanish. Bradley got the gist: There is nobody here I’m cooking my dinner I am from El Salvador I have a green card I work in a factory in the garment district I am skilled and legal. I make the high fashions. You can go away and I will be very much okay.
    She closed the door in their faces again and locked it again. Bradley heard her move into the house.
    “I wonder exactly who isn’t here,” said Bradley.
    “I do, too.”
    “I smell the yerba, very strong.”
    “I smell it, too.”
    “Next time she opens that door I’m going to get my foot inside.”
    “I’ll ask her one more time if we can come in.”
    “Be really careful, Caroline.”
    Vega rapped on the door and waited, then rapped again. It was quiet for a long moment; then Bradley heard the muffled thud of feet on the floor. The latch slid and the door opened and Bradley opened the screen and placed his foot against the door frame.
    “No here, please. No here. Legal. Fashion.”
    “Do I have your permission to come in?” he asked.
    “No permiso .”
    “I smell marijuana. Do you smell it?”
    “I smell marijuana,” said Vega.
    “No marijuana. No here, nothing . . . You go. You go.”
    Bradley eased his shoulder into the doorway and the woman backed up. Vega followed him in. The living room was small. To the right was a hallway leading back to the bedrooms and to the left was a dining room that opened to the kitchen by a pass-through and an open doorway. In the living room was a small brown sofa and a large TV cabinet with shelves of pottery and paper flowers and figurines carved of onyx and glass and wood. Bradley saw the dust on the glass figures and he saw the black stains inside the white clamshell inverted as an ashtray. He looked down the right hallway and saw that the bedroom doors were closed and there was no light coming around them. He stepped to the threshold of the dining room, and beyond the pass-through he saw the stove with the skillet heaped with onions and chilies cooking down, and the pot of peeled potatoes boiling, and the pan that held a pork roast recently removed from the oven, enough meat to feed several adults.
    “You go!” She made as if to slap him with the dish towel but apparently realized the uselessness of it.
    “Smells good,” he said, smiling. He drew his gun and moved quickly back into the living room so he could see down the hallway to the bedrooms.
    “You go! No one!”
    “No one what , lady? No one who ?”
    The woman unleashed a string of curses and hit him with the dish towel very hard, and when the towel fell to the floor the potato peeler was planted high up into the left side of Bradley’s chest. The first gunman came not from the hallway but up into the pass-through from the kitchen where he had been