THEY FLEWout of DFW an hour later, in an aging Learjet. Lucas knew it was aging because of the worn paint around the door and the worn seats in back. “How old is this thing?” he asked the copilot.
“Don’t know exactly,” said the copilot, who looked like he was twelve. “It’s a good, reliable aircraft most of the time.”
“Wait a minute...”
“Pilot joke,” the copilot said. “But I really don’t know how old it is.”
“Were you born when it was made?”
The copilot said, “Better question would be... was my mom born?Just kiddin’.But really, I’ve flown this thing all over Texas and it’s solid.”
“If it starts to crash, I’m going to shoot you before we hit the ground,” Lucas said. “Try to keep that in mind.”
“You got guns?”
“Yeah, we got guns.”
“That shooting thing... that was a marshal joke?”
Lucas gave him a hard look: “Maybe.”
—
LUCAS STRAPPEDhimself into one of the worn seats and cursed himself once again for not going to Mass more often than Easter Sunday. He braced himself for the crash as they lifted off, and when there wasn’t one, tried to sleep but failed. He wound up rereading the paper on Poole. Bob did sleep and Rae took a compact camera out of her gear bag and took some photos of the landscape below and one of Lucas reading the paper. “You are a picture of diligence,” she said.
“I’m a picture of abject fear. If I had my choice between flying to El Paso or getting a colonoscopy, I’d have to think about it.”
“Oh, my,” she said.
They were on the ground, still alive, in El Paso at one o’clock on a hot October afternoon. Lucas had been there once before, when one of his men at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Del Capslock, had been shot by elderly gun smugglers.
Bad history.
Bad omen?
He wasn’t sure.
None of them had looked at their phones while they were in the air. On the ground, Lucas looked at his and found a message from Highstreet, the highway patrol major, that said only “Call me immediately.”
22
THE WOMENwere not getting along.
Annie and Rosie were not exactly fashionistas, but they hadstyle. Tight black jeans and high-tech boots, silky-looking blouses, Rosie in pale blue and Annie in coral. They both wore expensive, masculine-but-feminine Aviators. Even the prison tats were keys to a hipness unachievable by the likes of Kort.
Kort, on the other hand, looked like she’d just been wheeled out of a Salvation Army store, after cutting her own hair with a jackknife. She could have spent three days in a beauty salon and it wouldn’t have changed her face, her body, or the scowl she’d worn since birth—part of the burden she’d carried with her. The sadness and unfairness of her plight was somewhat understood by Rosie andAnnie, who had had harsh upbringings of their own—Rosie had been turned out by her stepfather when she was fourteen, Annie had simply been kicked out by her parents when she was eighteen—but living with Kort’s constant complaining, her fundamental evilness, her joy at seeing other people suffer, and her chain-saw voice, was becoming a trial.
The complaints never stopped: “What happened to the fuckin’ air-conditioning? Must be a hundred degrees in here... The coffee really sucks, you think you might stop somewhere? I’m getting sick riding sideways... Can’t believe you’re doing this, you’re dragging me into this...”
They’d driven from Dallas to Weatherford, where Box was supposedly being held in the county jail. They had towed Kort’s rental car to Weatherford; it made them look even more harmless than the RV did, and they had the towing equipment to do it. At Weatherford, they’d looked at the situation, and then Annie and Rosie had cooked up what Kort called a harebrained scheme, and the other two women admitted that it might be.
On the other hand, it seemed like it might work.
They were watching the jail from the RV, and at that point, hadn’t seen much except a lot of cops coming and going. Kort continued to bitch, and Rosie finally said, “You don’t want to be part of it, we’ll drop you off at a bus station. We do need your car. And if the Boss asks about you, we’ll have to tell him that you split.”
Kort thought about walking away, decided that as crazy as the rescue attempt might be, she’d rather not have the Boss on her neck, especially not if he had another Kort stashed away.
Still, it was worth arguing about, and Kort was still doing that when they saw Davenport leave the jail, trailed by two other plainclothes cops—“Those are the marshals from the parking lot where Soto got shot,” Kort blurted.
