But she didn’t want to talk about that—she wanted somebody totake her down to the two dome-topped buildings that were at the center of the fight. “Why won’t you let me down there? Why—”
“Crime scene,” O’Brien muttered, and then they ignored her.
—
LUCAS TRIEDthe truck’s driver-side door and it popped open. He shone his flash around the inside, spotted the keys on the floor. Two border patrolmen took a long look at the truck’s interior, then they all went around to the back and popped the hatch on the camper top.
There were some bags inside, full of clothing and paper, but no money. Then one patrolman said to another, “Carlos... does that floor look right?”
Carlos squatted by the back of the truck, squinted at the floor, then looked beneath it, and then at the floor again, and finally said, “It’s a few inches high. Not much, but a few.”
The first patrolman crawled into the truck and with the rest of them watching, began pulling and tugging and prying at pieces of the interior, and finally popped up a hidden hatch. “That’s good work, right there,” he said, of the hatch. “Somebody give me a flashlight.”
He shone the flashlight into the hatch, then got his head down closer to the floor:“Madre de Dios.”
Rae: “Mom sees money?”
The patrolman looked up: “Mom sees a buttload of cash and what looks like a pile of gold coins in a plastic box.”
Lucas said to O’Brien, “Gonna need more counters, more witnesses.”
Rae said, “Hot damn.”
Nobody noticed the RV crawl past them, a couple hundred yards away.
—
BECAUSE OFall the accounting rigmarole, they didn’t know until ten o’clock that they’d found three-point-two million in currency and about six hundred thousand in gold coins, the amount of gold value dependent on the market.
O’Brien pronounced himself pleased. He linked his fingers across his ample belly and said, “I’m pleased.”
Rae said, “Fuckin’ A.”
Lucas called Forte at home with the count. Forte said, “I’m far too suave to say it gives me a hard-on, but right now I definitely got a party in my pants.”
—
LUCAS PAIDno attention to O’Brien when he finally told the persistent museum lady that he’d have a patrolman escort her to the domed buildings. She and a patrolman disappeared a moment later.
Bob called from El Paso. “They didn’t want to let me talk, but I am anyway. They’re telling me I’ll be down for a couple of months, including rehab. They’re gonna take me into the operating room as soon as this nurse stops washing off my dick... yes, you are, you’re washing my dick, don’t try to sneak around it... and it’ll be a while before I come out. I’ll call as soon as I wake up tomorrow. You find any money?”
They were telling him about the money when a woman started screaming. Lucas said, “Oh, shit,” and picked up his armor and Bob’srifle and followed Rae at a dead run around the buildings and then around the second set of buildings...
And saw the museum lady shrieking while a patrolman tried to placate her.
Lucas and Rae stopped running and took it slower and when they came up with their guns, the wild-eyed woman looked at them and screamed, “You killed my Judds. You killed my Judds.”
The milled aluminum boxes they’d seen behind the glass were neither kitchen appliances (Rae) nor boxes for holding the art (Lucas) but were, in fact, the art itself. Of the hundred boxes in two buildings, twelve had either through-and-through bullet holes or bullet gashes. All the windows in the first building had been shattered or cracked, but the woman wasn’t worried about the windows.
Rae asked her the wrong question: “You’re sure this happened tonight?”
The woman began screaming incomprehensibly, literally tearing at her hair, dashing from one aluminum box to the next, looking for more damage.
When she’d finished her survey, only slightly calmed down, she said to O’Brien, the senior officer in uniform, “You don’t know what you’ve done.”
“We were fighting it out with crazy killers,” he said.
“You managed to destroy millions and millions of dollars’ worth of irreplaceable art.”
