Read The Dead Women of Juarez for Free Online Page A

good or ill. He drowsed for a little while and then fell asleep for less than an hour before waking to a room that looked and felt exactly the same, as if time hadn’t moved forward at all.
    He felt different, and it wasn’t just the mixture of energy and tiredness that followed a good workout and a better nap. Kelly vaguely recalled dreaming of Paloma and Estéban, too. The place and the happenings were mixed up in his memory and fading quickly, but he knew that everything he’d done this morning had to do with them.
    The telephone rang. Kelly got up naked and left the bedroom. The thin carpet felt oily and gritty on his clean soles and he resolved to borrow a vacuum cleaner from Paloma to do something about that.
    “Hello?” he answered.
    “
Hola
,” Estéban said on the other end. “
¿Qué tal?
”
    “Nothing,” Kelly said.
    “Hey, listen, I’m going shopping tonight. How’s your face look?”
    “All right,” Kelly said. The bruises were pretty much gone, though his nose was still healing up on the inside. He didn’t look like a zombie anymore.
    “That’s good. That’s good. Hey, listen: you up for shopping?Two, three hours and I’ll cut you in for the usual. What do you say?”
    Kelly looked around the apartment. It seemed too small to him now. Something was going on in his head and maybe getting out would cure it. “Okay,” he said. “What time you want to meet?”
    “Meet me at nine,” Estéban said.
    “Nine,” Kelly said. “All right.”

NINE
    A NY NIGHT IN C IUDAD J UÁREZ WAS at least busy when it came to hookers and booze. It was too easy to cross the border and good times came too cheaply for workingmen in El Paso to say
no
, despite all the warnings about pickpockets and muggers and drug dealers and AIDS. They came over the walking bridge as daylight failed, sometimes straight from work, their trucks parked in clusters in lots laid out expressly for pleasure seekers headed south. Sometimes they were already a little bent and the idea of Mexico entered their brain through the bottom of a beer mug or in a shot of yellow-tinged tequila.
    Shopping with Estéban happened on Fridays and Saturdays. These were the nights when the crowds were heaviest, the white faces most common, and cops had a harder time figuring out who was who and doing what.
    They met outside the
farmacia
where the
turista
Juárez stopped and the Juárez of the
Juárenses
began. The place was open long hours, had broad aisles and a well-lit, clean atmosphere. A tacky green-and-red “trolley,” just a bus made up to look like a streetcar, ferried Americans back and forth across the border in air-conditioned comfort and dumped them right on the doorstep. Around the
farmacia
the white people were mostly older and looking for cheap drugs to fill their American prescriptions, but there were plenty of younger folks, too, picking up steroids and Viagra and other things, things that kept the party going all night long.
    Estéban came out of the
farmacia
with two plastic shoppingbags. He crossed the street with Kelly and they sat down under the orangey splash of a streetlight to get ready. Kelly saw a flyer tacked to the lamppost:
justicia
.
    “Put five pills in a baggie,” Estéban told Kelly. “The price stays the same, okay?”
    “Okay,” Kelly said.
    From one shopping bag came little self-sealing plastic baggies of the kind soccer moms used to pack their kids’ lunch snacks in: too small for a sandwich, but just right for a serving of goldfish-shaped crackers or, in this case, five capsules of OxyContin or hydrocodone. The drugs were in the second shopping bag in clean little orange-plastic bottles with neatly printed labels.
    They divvied up the score. Kelly wore loose pants cinched tightly around his waist by a belt, the cuffs turned up on the inside so he didn’t look too much like a hick. The front pockets were roomier than they would be if he wore his size. He stowed the baggies in the front where they wouldn’t