She came around the back of the car, a tall, thin, redheaded woman, a Texas-looking woman with freckles, her keys in one hand, stepping toward the car. She couldn’t go out on the highway, she must’ve checked into one of the teepees or whatever...
Poole stood up and lunged toward her. She didn’t see him coming until he was ten feet away and he said, fairly loudly, because there was nobody else close enough to hear him, “I’ve got a gun and if you make any noise or scream, I will shoot you.”
She dropped the keys and said, “Oh, no... are you...”
“Yeah, the cops are going to kill me if they catch me, so I don’t really give a shit at this point.” He was right on top of her, took her elbow, said, “Get into the backseat... We’re gonna hide out for a while. Keep quiet and you won’t get hurt.”
When she sat down, he thought, one fast hard blow to the head would take her out, maybe permanently.What it was, was what it was.
She was scared, but not quite frozen with fear, said, “My keys...”
He stooped quickly, picked them up, pushed the button that unlocked the car: “Get in.”
—
LUCAS HADmoved slowly down the fence line. Near the end, he saw a border patrolman, one of the ones standing behind a truck, watching him. He stood, waved the rifle over his head, patted his armor; the border patrolman was talking into a radio, and a few seconds later, waved him on.
Lucas moved on up the fence, hurrying now. He could see nothing along it, wanted a quick look along the front of the house andthen he’d get back to the trees. When he’d turned the corner in the front yard, he looked down to his left and saw Poole talking to a redheaded woman beside a gray foreign car. He couldn’t see a gun, but Poole was talking rapidly and the way the woman was standing, Lucas thought he probably had a gun in the hand Lucas couldn’t see.
He brought the rifle up and walked across the yard, moving as noiselessly as he could. He was completely out in the open but Poole was talking to the woman, and then bent over, and Lucas thought for a second that he’d been seen or heard, but then Poole stood and handed something to the woman—keys?—and Poole said something that Lucas couldn’t make out, and Lucas was close enough and shouted, “Poole, if you move, I’ll kill you.”
But then the woman, who’d been standing beside Poole from Lucas’s perspective, lurched between them. Poole, reacting almost instantly, swung his gun hand up around her neck and shouted, “I want a car!”
Lucas, looking at him through Bob’s red-dot sight, saw Poole’s head looming behind the woman’s, big as a gourd. He didn’t listen to what Poole was saying, but concentrated on the red dot and his trigger squeeze, and shot Poole through the nose. Poole went down as though somebody had hit him in the face with a fastball, but with his arm still crooked around the woman’s neck, and she went down on top of him.
The woman started screaming and rolled off the body, and as Lucas walked toward the fence, his gun still up in a shooting position, she got up and ran frantically back toward the El Cósmico building.
Lucas crossed the fence, while behind him a couple of Border Patrol trucks revved up.
Poole was dead on the ground.
The sun had just hit the horizon, scarlet rays playing across the gravel parking lot and over the supine body, which was leaking blood into the parking lot. The El Cósmico door slammed as the woman lurched inside, and Lucas looked down at Poole and said, “Gotcha.”
28
THE FOUR WOMENhad seen any number of unusual things on their way south to Marfa, including a huge white blimp called a radar aerostat, according to the sign outside the launch site. When Rosie looked it up on her smartphone, it turned out it was a radar platform used to search for low-flying drug planes coming across from Mexico.
“Wonder if they’ve got one for low-flying drug RVs,” Annie joked; only Rosie chuckled. Annie was driving now, Rosie was putting together cheeseburgers in the RV’s tiny kitchen and the vehicle was suffused with the smell of cooking meat.
The countryside was new to Box, who hadn’t been much west or south of Dallas, even though she and Gar had lived in Texas for fiveyears. The Marfa area had low funky-looking mountains, lots of yellow grass and weeds, and alien-looking roadside plants with nine-foot-tall stems that stuck up out of palms, or maybe cactuses, or possibly aliens.
They’d finished eating the cheeseburgers when the lights of Marfa came up in the gathering dusk. Then, not far ahead, they could see the red blinking lights of a checkpoint and only three vehicles waiting to go through. Annie said, “Uh-oh. Rosie, get those two out of sight. Now! Hurry! I don’t want to slow down.”
Rosie pulled the floor up, and Box and Kort stuffed themselves into the hole, lying side by side. There was space above their heads and below their feet, but not more than six inches above their noses. When Rosie slammed the door back into place, everything went pitch-black.
“You crazy fuckin’ bitch, you got us into this,” Kort growled at Box.
“Shut the fuck up, I’m really fucking tired of your whining all the time,” Box snarled back.
“Shit...” Kort threw an elbow into Box’s ribs, hard enough to hurt.
There wasn’t enough height to swing, but Box reached over with one hand and grabbed Kort by the lips and twisted. Kort let go with a muffled scream and beat awkwardly at Box with one fist and then Rosie started stomping on the floor and shouted, “Shut up, shut up, we’re coming to it.”
Box let go of Kort’s lips and Kort said, “When I get out of here, I’m gonna beat the shit out of you.”
“Fuck you some more,” Box said.
They felt the RV braking to a stop.
