“Careful,” Bob said. “We’ll push him from this side.”
Rae picked up her rifle, pointed it at a phone pole, looking through the Aimpoint sight, and pulled the trigger once. A piece of reflective plastic the size of a quarter jumped off the pole.
“Sight’s still good,” she said. She asked Lucas, “You ever shoot one of these?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to take your gun,” he said.
She handed it to him. “Take it. We’ll need a rifle on both sides of the building, and I’m going with Bob down this side. We got the team thing worked out between us, and I’ve got my.40.”
Lucas took the rifle and said, “Get the Border Patrol moving. We need Poole to know there’s no way out. Maybe he’ll quit.”
“I don’t think so,” Bob said. “He thinks he’s shot a cop. That’s a no-no in Texas.”
—
LUCAS JOGGEDaround the building and on the far side, peeked. He could see two large brick-and-glass buildings across the way, with domed roofs, like Quonset huts. He stepped out, slid down the face of the building, watching for anything, any sign of movement.
Somebody behind him shouted, “Hey!” and Lucas nearly jumped out of his skin. He brought the muzzle of the gun around and found himself looking at a thin, long-haired woman in a light blue T-shirt. She saw the gun and threw up her hands and screamed, “No!” and Lucas shouted at her, “U.S. marshal! There’s a man with a gun out here! Get back inside and lock down! Tell everybody you know, lock down! Call everybody you know. Don’t come outside!”
She ran away and Lucas brought the rifle back around, saw a twitch in a bush, nearly triggered off a shot before he realized it was a small gray bird flitting through the branches.
He was, he thought, in an odd place, and for a moment he thought it might be the remnants of an old college campus.
He was standing beside a double curving line of buildings that must have extended for the best part of a half mile to the south, andparallel to each other. To his right, as he looked south, the U-shaped buildings looked like they might once have been dormitories, with courtyards in the middle of each U.
The buildings faced a sidewalk that defined the curve, and were spaced maybe thirty-five or forty yards apart. On the other side of the curve was the second set of buildings, small rectangular structures that filled in the forty-yard gaps between the U-shaped buildings. Together, they made two “C” shapes, inscribed inside each other.
On the far side of the two lines of buildings, two large, domed brick-and-glass structures rose out of the prairie.
Taken together, the arrangement of buildings made it nearly impossible to clear out, without taking heavy risks. He got his phone out and called the Border Patrol’s O’Brien.
“Got a problem. We need to surround these old buildings and then we need to clear them one at a time,” Lucas said.
“It’ll be getting dark soon,” O’Brien said. “Once it’s dark, it’s gonna be tough. I need to bring some lights in here. We’ve got them, but it’ll take a while. That old fort is a tangle—it’ll be like trying to clear out a block of tenements in Brooklyn.”
“It’s a fort?”
“Used to be. Now it’s an art place—Donald Judd and all that. Marfa’s pride and joy.”
“Well, whatever it is, we need to get him before dark,” Lucas said. “We won’t have to clear all the buildings, only the ones south of those two big buildings. We saw where he ran between them...”
“I’ll get everything going,” O’Brien said. “Give us ten minutes to get organized.”
Lucas called Bob and told him that the Border Patrol was sending more people to help clear the buildings. “Get out wide of the buildings so you can see down the whole length of them. If he makes a break to the west, you’ll see him. I’ll get over here where I can see a break to the east.”
—
DARLING WAScrouched behind one of the salmon-colored buildings. He called Poole: “I’m fucked, man. I shot a cop, and the place is gonna be swarming with more cops any second. Listen, there are three white trucks parked behind some of those pink buildings down south of you... southwest, I guess.”
“I know where you’re at. I heard the gun,” Poole said.
“Okay. Anyway, our truck is in the middle, the keys are on the floorboard on the driver’s side. Don’t think I’m going to make it, and I’m going to call my old lady in a minute, to tell her.”
“I’ll head down your way. If I can help out, I will,” Poole said. “I can’t go out to the highway, the Border Patrol trucks are all over the place, guys with rifles. I could take a couple of them out, but that wouldn’t get me anywhere.”
“Okay. Do what you can,” Darling said. Poole clicked off.
Darling called his wife. Before he could say anything, she asked, “Where are you?”
