“Probably won’t find it, if we have to poke around for it,” Bob said.
“I’m not thinking about the phone, I’m thinking about snakes,” the sergeant said, with a grin.
“Tell you what, I’ll supervise the search from up here on the road,” Rae said. “I don’t do snakes.”
The side of the road was a crush of dry yellow grass, some of it with nasty little yellow burrs; a perfect hiding place for snakes, in Lucas’s opinion, though, being from Minnesota, he had no idea where a rattlesnake might hide in real life. In movies, they were usually coiled on a rock, where they were easy to spot; here, they’d come out of foot-high grass and nail your ankle. He worked his stick assiduously, and other than a bunch of grasshoppers, disturbed no wildlife.
They were sixty yards from Box’s truck, snake-free, when the sergeant spotted the phone.
—
“A BURNER,”Lucas said, as he squatted over it. “Cheapest one you can buy.”
“Might as well pick it up—we know who had it, we’re not losing anything by smudging up her prints,” Rae said.
Lucas nodded, picked it up, turned it on. There was only one number in the file of recent calls. He looked up at Bob and Rae and said, “Nowwe’re cooking with gas.”
—
LUCAS CALLEDForte in Washington, gave him the number for the phone and the number that had been called on it. Forte said he’d track it and get back to them.
The truck, Lucas told the patrolman, should be taken to wherever the highway patrol took seized vehicles. “Somebody will getback to you about it, but I don’t know who,” he said. “There’s gonna be a blizzard of paperwork starting about tomorrow.”
“Where are we going?” Bob asked.
“Back to Fort Worth. They’re running, and if they’ve gotten a long way down the road, we’ll want to be close to an airplane.”
“You want to go back in a hurry?” the sergeant asked.
“That’d be terrific,” Lucas said.
Rae: “Should we stop in Weatherford, see if Box has changed her mind?”
Lucas asked the sergeant how long it would take to get from the jail to the airport: “Less than an hour,” the sergeant said.
Lucas looked at the others, and Bob said, “I don’t think we’ll get anything more from her. Like you said, she might soften up if she’s locked up for a couple of days. If you call Forte and tell him we need a chopper or a plane, it could be waiting for us when we get there...”
“Let’s go to the airport,” Lucas told the sergeant. “Lights and sirens.”
—
LUCAS CALLEDForte and told him what they were doing; Forte said the phone search was under way. Forte called back a half hour later as they circled north of Fort Worth: “Okay, the target phone is down south of you, on Highway 84 near McGregor. You got a road map?”
“I got an iPad,” Lucas said. “But I can’t look at it right now... Just tell me.”
“McGregor is well down south and it looks to me like they’reheaded for I-10, which will take them west into New Mexico, Arizona, and California. I-10 runs along the border with Mexico, so it could be they’re planning on crossing.”
“Box had a good-looking passport in her purse, under a different name,” Lucas said.
“Okay, so there’s that. Anyway, Box was on I-20, which also intersects with I-10 near El Paso,” Forte said. “Maybe they were planning to get together in El Paso—after that, it’s a coin toss.”
“They don’t seem like people who’d be comfortable down in Mexico,” Lucas said. “Though that’s just a guess. Nothing in our paper suggests that either one of them speaks Spanish, or has ever been there.”
“So what do you want to do?” Forte said. “I have a plane, if you want one. You could be in El Paso four hours before Poole gets there.”
“Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said. And, “All right. Let’s do it. Tell us where to go.”
—
