Borderline by Nevada Barr Page B

death. One arm floated free, the other was threaded up through the tangle as if she was trying to hold her face above the water.
    Anna started to wade in.
    “Don’t!” Carmen ordered. “Let me.”
    Anna knew what she was thinking. “Law enforcement ranger, EMT,” she said, then pointed at Paul. “Sheriff.”
    Carmen nodded and Anna thought she saw a flicker of relief in her eyes. Guides were better equipped to deal with the emergencies of the living than the dead. “Wait till we get a line on you,” Carmen said. “The undertow on a strainer can be something. Sucks you right in with the rest.”
    Anna suffered a vision of a thorny cavern filled with corpses and was about to send Steve back to the raft for the line when she remembered.
    “No line,” she said succinctly. “No raft.”
    “Jeez,” Carmen said. She had forgotten as well. The guide should have looked silly: fingerless gloves, black silk long johns worn under her shorts to protect her legs from the sun, Mexican-made hat, brim sagging with water. She didn’t; she looked in her element, at home with the rain and the river. “Human line then. I’ll anchor. Cyril, Steve, Paul, then you.” Chrissie wasn’t included in the roster but, this time, there were no complaints.
    Steve loped back upriver to collect his sister from where she’d been left with Lori and the sacred cow.
    Anna waded a ways into the river, Paul at her side.
    “To get her out we’re going to have to cut the hair off,” Paul said.
    “That should be fun.” Anna’s Swiss army knife had scissors but the blades were scarcely an inch long. “Did you lose your pocketknife?”
    Paul patted the many pockets of his cargo shorts. “No.”
    Paul kept his blade sharper than Anna kept hers.
    “She’s either been dead awhile or died recently,” Anna said, realizing she sounded like Maxwell Smart playing at Sherlock Holmes. “I mean rigor has either not set in or it has passed off.” She pointed to where the woman’s free arm waved easily in the current, the hand and fingers undulating as if they’d already abandoned human form and become part of the river.
    “We should leave her where she is,” Anna said. “I doubt she is a rafter nobody bothered to mention went overboard. Crime scene and all that.”
    “She’s probably from Mexico,” Carmen said. “And got washed down the river trying to cross to have her baby in the U.S. In the villages there isn’t a doctor or hospital, pharmacy, nothing like that. If they have the baby here, they get some medical attention and the baby is an American citizen. Pretty nice birthday present.”
    “A wetback,” Chrissie said, and Anna wanted to slap her till she realized the girl wasn’t insulting the dead, she understood for the first time where the slur had originated. Swimming the Rio Grande.
    “If we leave her, the next raft down will have a nice surprise,” Paul said.
    Anna hadn’t thought of that.
    Steve clambered over the rocks upstream, Cyril with him and, drifting in their wake like a sorry little ghost, Lori.
    Carmen stood on the bank and held Cyril’s wrist in both her hands. Cyril and Steve locked hands on each other’s wrists, beginning the links in the human chain. Paul didn’t take Steve’s proffered arm but began unbuckling his belt. As he buckled it around Anna’s waist, she said, “You’re going to lose your pants.”
    “Better my pants than my wife,” he answered.
    Gripping the leather in one hand, he took Steve’s in the other and Anna waded in.
    The water where the woman had been caught in the strainer nearly reached Anna’s sternum. She could feel the hungry strainer trying to swallow her, drag her feetfirst beneath its ragged teeth, and was glad of the sturdy leather belt around her and the feel of Paul’s knuckles against the small of her back.
    “Pieta,” Paul murmured behind her.
    Up close, the woman’s youth and loveliness shone through the graying mask. Eyes closed, features relaxed, her face