"God," Eleanor said, an hour later, over breakfast with Ray, "I really overdid it. I'm so embarrassed."

Ray shrugged. Significantly, he didn't try to disagree with her. "Don't worry about it," he said. "You got what we wanted."

After she had dropped Escobedo off at the county hospital; it had come to their attention that neither one of them had had any breakfast. So now they were at a little family place not far from the Alamo. Eleanor was having huevos rancheros. Ray was licking his lips over a huge steaming bowl of tripe.

"I tend to forget how powerful a senator is," Eleanor said. "I probably could have just made a phone call and gotten the same result. Instead I came in like Rambo. Used a flame thrower where I could have flicked a Bic."

"Hey, if nothing else it was great theatre," Ray said. "That's your genius, you know."

"Huh?"

Ray was studying her face interestedly. "You don't know, do you?" he said. "You just do it on instinct."

"Do what on instinct?"

Ray shook his head flirtatiously. "I don't want to make you self-conscious and ruin it."

"What are you talking about?"

"I really admire what you did to Earl Strong, you know," he said, changing the subject none too subtly.

"Yeah, you tell me that every time we see each other."

"Now what we need to do is get that flame thrower aimed at the right target."

"Aha," she said. "The hidden agenda comes out."

"I told you I was paying for breakfast. What did you think?"

"And an excellent breakfast it is," she mumbled, chewing her first mouthful. They ate in silence for a minute. Both of them were ravenous. Emotion burns calories.

"I talked to Jane Osborne," Ray said. "I was all ready to be pissed at her, but she's nice."

"Here's the part where I ask who Jane Osbourne is."

"She's a forest ranger out in La Junta."

"A forest ranger? In the prairie?"

"Funny, that's exactly what she said when she was assigned there," Ray said. "She likes forests. She went into the Forest Service hoping she would end up in one."

"Logical enough."

"She didn't count on the fact that the Forest Service owns a lot of grassland. Including the piece of land where the Ramirez family was living until yesterday. And they need people to look after that land. These people are called forest rangers. They wear Smokey Bear hats and everything. So Jane Osbourne is stuck out there, not a single tree, much less a forest, for a hundred miles, in this shitty, dead-end GS-12 position, driving around in a pickup truck chasing dirt bikers and replacing signs that have been shotgun-blasted by the local intellectuals."

"Must be disappointing."

"Yeah. But it's not as bad as what comes next."

"And what's that?"

"She's about ready to turn in for the evening when she gets a call from On High and she is ordered to personally evict about a hundred migrant workers from this patch of grazing land."

"How does a single woman do that?"

"She called in a few other rangers and brought in some federal marshals too, as a show of force."

"Who gave the order?"

"Her boss. Who got it from Denver. And they got it from Washington. I'm sure."

"Correct me if I'm wrong," Eleanor said, "but I'm sure that this wasn't the only patch of federal land in Colorado that was housing squatters."

Ray smiled. "You got that right."

"Have any other such communities been evicted?"

Ray shook his head.

"Just this one," Eleanor said.

"Just this one."

"So this wasn't a blanket order from Washington. It was targeted at this one piece of land."

"Sure looks that way."

"And why," Eleanor said, "do you suppose that some bureaucrat in D.C. would suddenly take an interest in this one parcel?"

Ray shrugged. "I can only speculate."

"Please do."

"This bureaucrat probably went to law school with one of Senator Marshall's aides. Or was his college roommate. Or their kids go to the same day care. Something like that."

Eleanor waggled a finger at Ray. "There you go making assumptions. How do you know there's a connection to Caleb Roosevelt Marshall?"

"The piece of land in question adjoins the Lazy Z Ranch," Ray said, "and the cattle grazing on it now all wear the Lazy Z brand."

"Say no more." Eleanor said. "You win."

The Lazy Z ranch was owned by Sam Wyatt. Sam Wyatt was Caleb Roosevelt Marshall's biggest private contributor. And the president of Senator Marshall's PAC. Sam Wyatt was one of a dozen or so constituents who could get through to the Senator on the phone whenever he wanted to.

But in this case, he probably hadn't. This was too much of a dirty detail for the Senator to mess around with personally. He had probably just called one of the Senator's aides. He had probably called Shad Harper, that underaged son of a bitch who had the office across the hallway from Eleanor's.

Ray was watching her in fascination. "You have this look on your face like you're plotting an assassination," he joked.

"Something like that," she said.

30

When little Bianca Ramirez was finally released from Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre after one week of hyperbaric oxygen treatment, a dozen television crews, four satellite uplink trucks, one Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, thirty print reporters, a hundred supportive protesters, the Mayor of Denver, staffers from all of the local senators' and representatives' offices, and a few lean and hungry lawyers were waiting for her. The only question was whether or not her parents, Carlos and Anna Ramirez, would actually show up to collect her.

Her progress from nameless refugee to media star could be tracked by checking the headlines on a local newspaper, which had been sliding in the direction of out-and-out tabloid journalism for a number of years, and which had been driven completely beyond the pale by the Bianca Ramirez story.

"TRUCK OF DEATH"

had been the first headline concerning the Ramirez family. Slightly less hysterical coverage of the tragedy had actually made it on to a couple of national network newscasts, which was unusual to say the least; plenty of Chicano kids had suffocated in the backs of trucks without even being mentioned in the local newspapers. But this time around, several national Hispanic organisations got into the act and managed to stir up some interest on a national level. The case of the Ramirez family was a good one for TV. The truck of death per se was sitting in a driveway in Denver and anyone could go and videotape it. There had been one survivor, who happened to be an adorable little girl, and although this didn't get reported right away, there was, as the saying goes, more to the story: a failure of responsibility by a major, rich, private hospital, and hints of potential scandal involving one Sam Wyatt, wealthy cattleman, golf partner of senators and CEOs.

"LET HER DIE!"

was the headline on Day 2. The story about Highlands' refusal to treat Bianca had been leaked to the press by Ray del Valle. Leaked was a deceptive term. A leak was a tiny seeping crevice. In this case, blowout might have been more accurate. Ray made sure everyone with a minicam, laptop, pen, or pencil knew about the story. More sober journalists just viewed it as another example of "dumping," the refusal of some hospitals to treat indigent patients. If they knew their business at all, it was an issue that they had already covered. Much more melodramatic examples of it happened in other cities.

"HANG ON BIANCA!"

was the headline for Day 3. This was somewhat meaningless. Day 3 was a Sunday and not much was going on. And Bianca's ability to hang on had never really been in question. The fact that she was still breathing when she was pulled from the Truck of Death, and when the ambulance crew had taken her to Highlands, where they had been told Let Her Die, meant that the parts of her brain that controlled breathing and heartbeat still worked. She was, in other words, stable, albeit in a coma. There was nothing to hang on to. But it made for a great headline, and it gave the tabloid (and the television journalists who functioned at the same journalistic level) a bit of breathing room. For a couple of days they had been accumulating a great mass of basically irrelevant human-interest material: pictures of the big-eyed Bianca, testimonials from family and playmates, descriptions of her favourite foods and toys. Sunday gave them a chance to unload all of that stuff on the public. If nothing else, Sunday was the day that Bianca became an official public figure, someone who could be referred to by her first name in a tabloid or on a TV broadcast, like Madonna or Di. As such, she represented a money factory for the tabloid; for at least the next couple of weeks, whenever they needed to goose their circulation figures they just printed any headline containing the name Bianca.