CHAPTER 18
Simone doesn’t react; she’s an animal too, trained to survive by – sometimes – doing nothing, by playing dead.
The officer turns her mouth down, looking uninterested, likely with no idea what Simone has brought on to the coach, but perhaps also knowing exactly what’s going on and having sent a sniffer dog to deal with it.
Panic fires missiles around Simone’s nervous system.
She stretches her arms above her head, fakes a yawn and uses the opportunity to look around. And there they are: two German shepherds just across the way, heads tilted to the side, fur glossy under the powerful white lights in the night. Simone’s entire body begins to sweat even though the coach door is open, piping in the cooling desert air.
How far can they smell? Should she have disguised the drugs’ smell somehow?
Simone closes her eyes. It’s hardly a lot of cocaine at all in the grand scheme, she tells the universe. Handfuls, nothing more, and they’re the price of her daughter’s life, and perhaps her own. Can’t the officers just let her do it? There must be some that gets through here every single day. There just must.
The sniffer dogs could be routine. Maybe her packages are taped up so well to contain the smell. Simone thinks with a flash of the one she took out. No. She didn’t unwrap it. Stop thinking this way.
Maybe Lucy is already dead. Maybe Damien is here, hastold the police, has rescued her, and Simone is about to be arrested, all for nothing. An almost infinite number of possibilities play out around her, the scenarios swirling on to the coach with the border police methodically checking passports and the sniffer dogs just out there, trained to detect the items she has.
Michaela the officer moves towards the front of the coach and addresses everyone. ‘Anything to declare?’ Why is she saying this? They weren’t asked this crossing into Mexico. And, for some stupid reason, Simone hesitates, like a woman in the congregation at a wedding standing up to say the couple shouldn’t marry. She has to tell herself not to, that it is a delusion that confessing now would spare her.
It’s something about the official nature of it. International laws and borders and Interpol and ‘nothing to declare’ and guns and the threat of prison. Something about being alone. Something about it being night. Something about being displaced here, in nightmare Texas.
Nobody says anything. Michaela hesitates, then turns to the driver, talking in a low voice. Time is on slow, and Simone knows she is tense, her shoulders up, gaping, but she can no longer hide it. Her body is vibrating, a plucked violin string, her knees jangling up and down.
She hears the wordsluggage checkmove from Michaela to the driver and she’s going to be sick, she’s going to faint, she’s going to die. Lucy is going to die. Then Simone has a thought so painful, so brutal, and so true it is hard to look at: if Lucy is murdered, Simone will kill herself. She simply will.
The Border Patrol colleague’s radio blares, joined-up words that could be English, could be Spanish, Simone can’t tell. The crackling static, the panic, and one of the dogs is barking again, a singular sound that echoes around the crossing, and do they bark to alert, or is it just random, and shouldn’t theybe better trained than that if so? Simone is floating up outside her body; she isn’t here, she isn’t here, she isn’t here.
She remains in the dead centre of the coach, the luggage glowing radioactive underneath her, her heart beating, her lungs breathing, but otherwise she is gone. Someplace else, where none of this is happening.
And all she can think, as the net closes in, is: will Lucy at least know she tried?
CHAPTER 19
Simone has rushed to the toilet to be sick after more than forty hours of sustained fear. She is retching over the sink, the door swinging open. She closes it with a thunk and tries to calm her breathing. Her upper lip is sweating, her head, the backs of her knees. She runs a hand through her hair and it comes away wet.
She can’t do this. There is too much at stake. It is too much for one woman and she misses Damien and Lucy with a ferocity that makes her heave again. They’re going to find her out. Of course they are. Of course they will search every vehicle. It takes five minutes. Why wouldn’t they search a coach from a known region of cocaine smuggling? She’s been so stupid.
Lucy is going to be murdered. Maybe she already has been, and Simone will never hear her voice again, touch her soft skin, twirl her hair last thing at night on the landing while Lucy says, ‘Get off, you’re so weird!’
She stands there, her hands braced on the metal sink, staring into the dark eye of the plughole, trying to calm down. Eventually, as it always does, adrenaline ebbs away a little, her shoulders drop and reality clicks back into place. A real, true panic attack.
‘You OK there?’ a voice says. And it’s the man, the British man from the trip out. He’s on the return trip, too, and here he is, hovering outside the toilet.
‘Fine,’ Simone says dully.
‘Something you ate?’
‘No, no,’ Simone says, but then corrects herself; food poisoning is a much better explanation than the truth. ‘Yeah. Maybe.’
‘I got the same one time in Mexico,’ he says, but he comes to the gap in the door and holds Simone’s gaze a little longer than is necessary.
Simone lets the conversation peter out, uncomfortable with a man loitering outside the toilet, and eventually he moves away, back to his seat, where he opens a phone and begins typing frantically on it.
Simone pushes the door open further and stares out. Damage control: have they searched her bag?
Michaela is still at the front, talking in a quiet voice to the driver.
She turns, raising a hand to somebody outside, then says something else into her radio. ‘Coming, over,’ Simone catches. ‘Got an illegal on coach 702.’
