Hostile Borders by Dennis Chalker

minutes half-assed looking around the area by the river and the railroad tracks. That was enough for him to come to the brilliant conclusion that there wasn’t any evidence of a crime that he could find. To top his little visit off, he went on about it being against the law for a civilian to use force to apprehend or detain any illegals. We were supposed to call the authorities instead.
    â€œDamn, if this is how your local sheriff acts, I’m not calling them for anything. I had the definite impression that if I had told him that the dogs had broken up that ambush, he would have impounded them to be checked for rabies!”
    â€œI’m sorry you went through that, Reaper,” Hausmann said. “It doesn’t surprise me very much though. I’m pretty much on the locals’ shit list for the time being.”
    â€œWhat the hell did you do?” Reaper asked, “Knock up the sheriff’s daughter?”
    â€œNo,” Hausmann said with a small smile. “That would have at least been something kept private. No, I made the mistake of defending an innocent man against a trumped-up murder charge. The only problem was, the man who was killed was a very well likedBorder Patrol officer. The whole thing was covered in all of the local papers and the news. Was a nationwide story for a few days.”
    â€œSo if the guy didn’t do it,” Reaper said, “what’s the beef with you getting him off?”
    â€œAs far as the local law enforcement community was concerned,” Hausmann said. “They had their man. The Border Patrol officer was a longtime veteran of the force named Victor Langstrom. He was visiting an old buddy of his who had left the Patrol years back to go over to the DEA. There’s not a lot of love lost between the Border Patrol and the DEA, at least not among the officers in the field. They do the dirty work, tracking illegals and manning observation posts out in the desert all night. When they make a drug bust, especially a really big one, the DEA swoops in and scoops up the bad guys and they take the lion’s share of the credit. It keeps their all-important seizure rates up and that’s the bottom line with the people in Washington.”
    â€œSame shit, different day,” Reaper said. “It sounds like the old bullshit about body counts back in Vietnam. Just keep the numbers up and ignore the real hard targets.”
    â€œPretty much,” Hausmann agreed, “but the drug wars around here are different than most people back East expect. A group of mules packing a load of pot or cocaine is about all that’s ever taken. Sometimes the loads can be pretty big. But the real important targets are the leaders of the cartels. With all of their money and the influence it buys, the Mexican government does damned little to bust them. The drug traffickingtrade is probably the biggest cash business there is south of the border. The poverty down there is staggering. That’s why it’s easy to hire some mules to take the risks moving the product across the border to the people here. Offer a guy a couple of hundred bucks to carry a package, more money than he would normally see in six months, and he’s not going to ask a lot of questions.”
    â€œSo the business is worth big bucks and the bosses are hard to target,” Reaper said.
    â€œYeah,” Hausmann said. “They seem to be immune from prosecution most of the time, or at least real hard to nail down with enough evidence for a conviction. Over the last year or so, they’ve been thinning out their own ranks. There’s been a regular shooting war south of the border, north of it, too, but to a much smaller extent. Big shakeups in the cartels.”
    â€œSo that’s what the man you defended was involved in?” Reaper said.
    â€œNo, not at all,” Hausmann said. “Sam Duran, his name’s Salim but everyone calls him Sam. He was one of the good