“You mean us, or him?” Bob asked.
“Us, of course,” the border patrolman said. “Come inside, our revered leader is gonna PowerPoint you or something.”
—
THE REVERED LEADERwas a tall, white-haired man name Travis O’Brien, who had colonel’s eagles on his uniform, though nobody called him colonel. He shook all their hands and sat them down in his office and said, “This is an unusual situation. I’m not exactly surewhere the Border Patrol gets involved in this, but I talked to people at our headquarters and they talked to some guy at your headquarters... a guy named Forte?... and the word came down that we should help any way we can.”
“There is a Border Patrol element in this,” Bob said. “This guy is going to try to cross the border with what will look like a good passport, but with an alias. He’s set up a bunch of fake IDs, with backup documents.”
Lucas, Bob, and Rae took turns filling in O’Brien, who finally asked, “When do you expect him to come through?”
“Probably in the next couple hours. If he’s coming, he’s well on his way.”
“All right. Well, we’ll get going, then. I’ve already talked to my folks and we’re going to set up right down the road here, on a curve where the highway leaves town,” O’Brien said. “He won’t see us until he’s right on top of us.”
“Good enough,” Lucas said. “We want to be on the line here, so... let’s get set up.”
—
THE BORDER PATROLknew all about highway checkpoints and had it set up in ten minutes. A double lane-change zigzagged through orange-and-white-striped plastic barrels, with green-and-white Border Patrol Chevy trucks at the ends of the lanes so that the lane shift couldn’t be avoided. Cars coming from the south could be waved straight through, but cars from the north had to slow for the lane shift.
Armor-wearing border patrolmen carrying Colt M4s manned theend of the lane, checking drivers against the photos of Poole. Guiterrez, the state highway patrolman, parked at the south end of the lane where he could give pursuit if anybody did try to run the checkpoint.
Lucas walked through it and was satisfied that Poole wouldn’t make it through, and with Bob and Rae, set up both of their vehicles pointed back toward town, in case Poole tried to do a U-turn away from the checkpoint.
Then they were ready.
Rae sat with Lucas, with Lucas in the driver’s seat now, Rae ready with her rifle, already zipped into her vest. She borrowed Lucas’s iPad to look at his selection of music, chose to shuffle a selection of Delbert McClinton songs, and they both sat back and waited, looking up the highway through their sunglasses.
Forte called a half hour later: “Poole’s back on the grid, still on I-10. He’s coming up to the roadblock. We ought to know something in half an hour. You want to stay there, or head back north?”
Lucas mulled it over and finally said, “Look, we’ll wait here until they’ve got him. We wouldn’t get there in time to help out anyway.”
When he and Forte broke off, Lucas hopped out of the truck, walked over to the border patrolman who was in charge of the checkpoint, and said, “We got word that he’s still on I-10. We’re gonna wait until we hear something, but we might be able to tear it down in the next half hour or so.”
Lucas walked back to his truck, stopping only to pass the word to Bob. Bob scanned the checkpoint and said, “Damn. I was kinda looking forward to this.”
Lucas checked his face, decided that Bob was serious. “You ever been shot?”
“Been shot at, not hit,” Bob said. “Not yet.”
“It’s not exactly the recreational moment you seem to think it is,” Lucas said. “I got shot in the hip one time. Six inches over, would have hit me in the balls. Sort of clarified my thinking about shoot-outs.”
“C’mon, don’t spoil it for me,” Bob said.
24
TWO HOURS EARLIER,Poole and Darling had stopped at a Burger King in Fort Stockton, and Poole said, “About goddamn time. I was getting tired of McDonald’s.”
Darling smiled, but it was only a reflex. He said, “I’m thinking on this, and the more I’m thinking, the more I believe that going into El Paso is a mistake. The cops must have been tracking Dora. I mean, how’d they know exactly where she’d be, so they could grab her off the highway? And then how did these lesbos get in a spot where they could take her away from the cops?”
“I figured they got her tags, somehow... neighbors or something,” Poole said.
“That’s a goddamn thin possibility,” Darling said. “Who looks attags? How would they have found that person? The Neighborhood Watch took your tags?”
He shut up as they got to the counter, where they ordered Whoppers and TenderGrill Chicken Sandwiches and fries and shakes, and carried them to a table away from other patrons. Darling took a bite from his chicken sandwich, chewed for a minute, then said, “Cell phones.”
“How’d they get onto the cell phones?” Poole asked. “We’ve been buying burners every fifteen minutes.”
