—
UP ABOVE,Annie opened the RV’s front door and a border patrolman asked, “Evening, ladies. Do you have any other passengers?”
“No,” Annie said. “What’s going on? Is there trouble?”
“We’ve had a problem with some men trying to get down to the border at Presidio. Are you on your way to Presidio?”
Annie shook her head. “No, sir, we’re going to Marfa to see the Donald Judd exhibits. Is there trouble in Marfa?”
“You should be okay in Marfa. Do you mind if I take a peek inside?” He lowered his voice. “We want to make sure that you don’t have a gun pointed at you or anything...”
“Sure, come on in,” Annie said.
The officer climbed the first step, looked down the length of the RV, and said, “If you’re gonna make a break from a kidnapper, now’s the time.”
“There’s nobody else here,” Rosie said.
The officer backed down the steps and smiled and said, “You’re fine. Have a good time in Marfa. It’s a great little place. Go see the Marfa lights.”
“We will,” Annie said, and rolled them through the checkpoint.
When they were well away, Rosie wondered, “If our maps are right, this museum place is all the way down to the end of town. Wonder why they’re checking vehicles comingintotown?”
“I suppose, looking for what we’re doing—maybe a rescue attempt by another person. Like Dora, or Kort,” Annie said.
Rosie glanced back at the neat blue carpet that concealed thesmuggling space. “I’m tempted to leave them in there. Of course, maybe they’re already dead.”
“That’d solve a lot of problems... but I suppose you ought to let them out.”
—
WHEN ROSIEopened the floor hatch, Box, the smaller and more lithe of the two women—Kort was tolitheas a packing crate is toagile—virtually sprang out of the enclosure and said, “Everything’s okay?”
“We’re fine, the cop said so himself,” Rosie replied.
Kort was struggling to get out of the smuggling space, the bottom half of her face as red as a Coke can where Box had twisted it. Rosie finally reached down, took her hand, and helped pull her up.
“I ought to kill you right now,” Kort said to Box. Box sat on the couch, looked at Annie and then Rosie, ignoring Kort, and asked, “What’s the plan now?”
“We’re gonna get as far south as we can and see what’s going on. We’re gonna want you two sitting down, so nobody can see you from the outside. If we need to get you back in the hold, you gotta go quick, we’ll leave the door open,” Rosie said. “Nobody knows about me and Annie, but everybody’s looking for you two. We think that checkpoint was for somebody looking to rescue Poole, or kill him. Which would be you, Dora, or you, Charlene.”
“Shouldn’t be doing this at all,” Kort said.
“Yeah, well, we are,” Rosie said.
They took it slow going through town, a somewhatscruffy-looking place with lots of vacant lots and tumbledown houses, but some nice downtown buildings as well. They took the turn onto Highway 67, south toward the border.
They’d only gone a few blocks before they saw what looked like a law enforcement convention on the right side of the highway, cop cars and Border Patrol vehicles with flashing lights, and cops walking around unhurriedly.
“Okay, that’s bad,” Rosie said. “The cops aren’t worried.”
Box: “Are you saying...”
“That’s what I’m saying, honey. I’m sorry. You knew it was likely,” Rosie said.
Up ahead, a cop was directing cars off the highway, onto a detour to the east. They took the detour, realized that it would take them all the way out of town, and followed some other cars on a loop back into town.
Across the highway, they could see bright lights in the parking lot of a place called El Cósmico, and a circle of cops, like a football huddle, looking at something on the ground.
