He felt a tug at his waist as his shirt was pulled free, and then a long ripping sound. “You may need a tailor,” she said. “Sit up, I’m going to wrap this around your head to keep the blood out of your eye.”
She tied the blue-and-white-checked material around his forehead and said, “There you go. You look like that picture of Geronimo.”
Lucas got to his knees, his head aching, his scalp tightening, and said, “Okay, now we know where he’s at. He’s north of the building and east of it. He’s stuck there, because the Border Patrol people are looking out at him. He might be able to crawl in the weeds, but he can’t run.”
“If I go around to the back end of the building, I can see out there,” Bob said to both of them. And to Rae: “You sit here until you’re sure Lucas is okay. We need to pin this guy.”
“I’m okay,” Lucas said.
“We’ll see about that,” Bob said. He jogged away with his rifle, paused at the far corner of the building, then turned it and was out of sight.
Lucas pushed himself up against the side of the building, his forehead burning from the impact of the brick dust. “When Bob’s in position, we’ll move some Border Patrol people down from the north and across from the highway. We’ll start to squeeze him—it’s just a matter of taking it slow, now. He’ll break and run and then we’ve got him.”
“Then we’ll kill him,” Rae said.
Lucas: “That’s what I said.”
Rae nodded. “What do you want me to do?”
“You go with Bob. If the guy tries to run, it’ll be handy to have two guns down there.” He handed her the rifle: “Take this back. I can’t even stick my head around this corner. Better that you have it.”
She took the gun. “What are you going to do?”
He pointed: “We’ve got these glass windows on both sides of the building. I can stand halfway down the building where I can see up and down that field on the other side. He’d have to be pretty lucky to both see me and be able to hit me through two big layers of glass—but I could see him, clear enough. If I do, I’ll call you and Bob. You’ve got the rifles.”
“That’s a plan,” she said. She peered through the glass. “Looks like the place is full of what?—washing machines or something? Look like expensive washer-dryers.”
“It’s supposed to be an art place,” Lucas said. Inside the building, he could see aluminum boxes, probably waist high, several feet wide,and deep. There were a lot of them, in three rows down the length of the building. “Maybe those are vaults, or something. Boxes that the art’s in.”
“Huh. Weird way to do it. Okay, I’m gone. Don’t get yourself shot again.”
26
WHEN THE SHOOTINGbegan in Marfa, Dora Box, Kort, Rosie, and Annie were running west toward El Paso. They’d gone thirty-five miles from the intersection of I-20 and I-10, and the checkpoint, when Box’s cell phone burped. She picked it up, looked at it, and with the other women looking at her, said, “Gar! Are you in Mexico?”
She listened for a moment, then said, “No! No! Oh, Jesus, Gar...” She looked up at the others and said, “The cops are on them. They’re shooting it out. Gar said he doesn’t think they’re gonna...”
She went back to the phone. “Gar! You gotta get a car. Just run through those weeds as far as you can, down the highway... then crawl! Crawl! Screw Sturgill! He’s the one who got you into this! You gotta...”
She listened again, said, “I don’t want to hear that... I don’t... Goddamnit, Gar,” and she began to cry. Poole said something else, and sobbing, she handed the phone to Annie and dropped onto the couch and put her head down, in her hands.
Annie punched up the speaker so everybody could hear and said, “This is... one of her friends. What’s up?”
“Dora will tell you, but basically, we’re stuck here and there’s a good chance the cops are going to take us down,” Poole said, his voice as casual as if he were talking to a high school class about harmless germs. “We’ll try to hold out until dark, but that’s pretty... pretty... unlikely. Here’s the thing. We were driving a white pickup truck—Dora knows it—with Arkansas plates, and Sturgill dropped it off behind some kind of art place. It’s a place with big brick buildings with curved roofs. He parked it behind the buildings on the other side of the brick buildings. They’re kinda pink-colored.”
“I don’t understand that. Give that to me again,” Annie said.
Poole explained the arrangement of buildings, from what he could see from the bunker. “Okay, you got it? If you go around behind those pink buildings, the small ones, Sturgill said there were two pickups parked back there, both white, and he parked between them. If you can get in there, after dark... you might get to it. There’s four million bucks, more or less, cash and gold, under the floor of the camper...”
He explained how the camper’s floor worked, and Annie said, “Uh-huh. Got it. We can find that.”
“That’s your money back, or most of it,” Poole said. “Dora’s worth more than that, so it’s a fair trade. If you wait too long, the cops are going to find it. But if you can get here tonight, we’ll eitherbe caught... or dead... or pulling them away from here. Then, maybe you could get at that truck.”
“We’ll take a look,” Annie said. “We’re going to throw this phone away, right now. If you got anything else to say, you better say it.”
“One thing. If we do get loose, we’ll leave a message at the Holiday Inn, in El Paso, about where we are.”
“Got it.”
