A half second later, the trucks took ten or twelve incoming shots from a different angle, from the northeast. “Everybody okay? Everybody okay?” Lucas shouted. Everybody was unharmed except for one truck driver, who’d taken some windshield glass in his shoulder above his vest but said he was okay.
O’Brien, who was with the trucks north of the big buildings, called: “Did you get a fix on those shots?”
“Came down from the northeast... but can’t say exactly where from. There’s a whole bunch of concrete bunkers over there, must be part of the old fort. I think he could be in one of the northern ones.”
O’Brien said, “Those aren’t bunkers. They’re artworks.”
“What?”
“Artworks. But they’re perfectly fine bunkers, if you think of them that way.”
Lucas was looking back at the area next to the building, andagain, thought he saw movement. He shoved the phone in his pocket and brought his rifle up, and at the same instant two other border patrolmen fired from behind the trucks...
Lucas added two shots...
—
THE FIRST SEQUENCEof three shots whistled over Darling’s head, and he thought, then, of throwing up his hands and quitting. If Poole was killed, there’d be no witnesses to the shootings in Biloxi, and if he hadn’t killed either of the cops he’d shot at... He’d be looking at years in prison, but maybe not the needle. With his wife on the outside, with a ton of cash, he’d have at least a possibility of busting out of prison. A corrupt guard, a prison gang with connections...
Then the second deck of four shots came in, three narrowly missing. The fourth hit him right in the asshole, he thought, knifing up into his guts and then out, around his navel. The pain was blinding, and he curled up against it and cried out once, “Ahhhh...”
He kicked, once, twice, against the pain, and two more shots came in, one hitting him in the leg, the other knocking the heel off his boot and twisting his ankle.
He couldn’t crawl anymore. He heard the trucks coming, the relentless sound of their engines. He touched his stomach and his hand came away soaked with blood. He got the phone out, called Poole, said, “I’m done for. I’m hit bad, my guts are all over the place. If you need to make a move, I’m gonna sit up and hose down everything I can see. Ten seconds and that’s probably all I got.”
Poole, after two seconds of silence, said, “See you in hell, man.”
Darling choked back a laugh, because laughing would hurt too badly. “See you in hell.”
The line of trucks was only fifty yards away, some of the Border Patrol shooters knew about where he was, Darling thought. He got a grip on his rifle, which was greasy with his blood, pointed it in the general direction of the trucks, and began firing, emptying the rest of a thirty-shot magazine toward them. He hurt so bad that he didn’t think he could go on, but managed to pull out the other thirty-round magazine, dropped the first one, got the second one seated, and he rolled over toward the glass buildings and dumped the entire magazine into them...
He was hit in the head by a shot from behind one of the trucks, and was killed instantly.
—
LUCAS WASshouting at the patrolmen, “Easy now, easy, I think we got him... Easy now, watch for that guy out front, in case he tries something crazy... watch him.”
Another ten seconds and Lucas saw Darling’s body in the weeds to his left, and when they’d pulled even with the body he shouted, “Stop! Trucks all stop.”
Without real brakes, the trucks rolled to a ragged stop in the yellow weeds, with Darling off to their left. Lucas called, “I’m going to step over to the left. I think I’m covered by the trucks, but you guys, give me more cover. If you see motion over there, kill him...”
When it seemed that everybody was ready, Lucas risked five fast steps over to the body. He recognized Darling from the photo back at the farm—the one with the girls on his lap.
He didn’t look at all peaceful in death; he looked like he’d fallen in a meat grinder, his shirt and pants soaked with blood, with a gaping exit wound over one eye.
Lucas turned: “We got one.”
A minute later, he was back behind the trucks and they were rolling toward the area where he thought the second shooter was hiding. Lucas was sweating heavily and smelled of sweat and blood, both his and Bob’s, and probably some of Rae’s. He wiped his face with a shirtsleeve and brought the rifle back up.
“Let’s finish it. Drivers, let’s go.”
—
WHEN DARLINGopened up on the trucks and then the buildings, Poole crawled out of his concrete bunker, flat on the ground, and around to the other side of it. From behind it, he couldn’t see either of the two domed buildings, but they couldn’t see him, either—and he was visually protected from the highway by the line of trees that ran parallel both to the line of bunkers and to the highway.
He could hear the trucks pushing closer up the open field toward his position. He didn’t think the cops knew exactly where he was, but he had no margin for error. He had to move. He stayed flat, pushing mostly with his toes, for a hundred yards, his rifle in front of him, toward the trees.
Tough going: more sandburs, other thorns and insults. He took a few seconds to wonder if the snakes had already gone underground. He hadn’t seen any, up to this point, but he didn’t want to run into a rattler in the weeds. He didn’t. When he’d gotten into the trees, hecarefully moved into a clump of heavy brush where he could stand up to see what was going on.
