At two o’clock in the morning, she called Kaiser, who answered with a groan and, “Aw, what happened?”
“Did you get any sleep at all?” Letty asked.
“Yeah, I finished the book at ten, I was sleeping like a baby until eight seconds ago,” he said.
“Get up, pack up, we need to hit the road.”
Kaiser’s voice sharpened up: “What happened?”
“Nothing, yet, as far as I know. I’ll meet you in the lobby in half an hour, we’re checking out. You’re driving. I haven’t slept at all, and I need some. Half-hour.”
She clicked off and went to get dressed and pack her clothes.
In the lobby,Kaiser asked, “Can you tell me now?”
“After we get checked out and we’re in the car,” Letty said. “This might not make you happy.”
“I’m already not happy,” Kaiser said.
Outside, the air was cool and felt a bit damp, compared to the afternoon’s blow-dryer heat. Stars were bright overhead, and while waiting for Kaiser to catch up, Letty twisted in circles, face turned to the sky. More stars than she’d seen even in deep rural Minnesota; but on the other hand, in deep rural Minnesota, in the winter, you had the rippling yellow, purple, and blue-gray curtains of the northern lights.
“So tell me,” Kaiser said, throwing his duffel and shotgun case in the back of the Explorer.
“Let’s get on I-10,” Letty said. She walked around to the passenger side, dropped the seat back so she might possibly get some sleep. “We’re going east.”
When they were moving, she laid it out for him: an anti-immigrant militia with the leader on the run for no good reason they could yet see, a town celebrated for allowing an entire immigrant caravan to cross the border, and now another caravan on the way to the same place.
“The only thing I could think of is that the caravan is triggering them. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but there’s a good chance they’ll do it in Pershing. That’s what I think.”
“How would they know that this caravan is going to turn toward Pershing?” Kaiser asked.
“If you weren’t a dumbass, and you were steering a caravan, where would you go?”
“But what if theyaredumbasses, and they reallyaregoing to El Paso?”
“Late-night news channel says the caravan split last night. I think Hawkes, or Low, or whoever is running this thing, knew this was going to happen. I think they’re going down there to block the caravan. If they’re not, well, El Paso doesn’t need the two of us. They’ve got city cops, FBI, ATF, Texas Rangers, sheriff’s deputies... The Pershing website says they have four part-time cops.”
Kaiser, blinking into the night, was silent for a minute, or perhaps two minutes, then said, “All right. I know pretty young women don’t actually have rectums, but if youdidhave one, I understand that’s where you pulled this idea from. The weird thing about it is, I believe you. Should we call the Feds?”
“At three o’clock in the morning? You think anyone would even answer?”
“Okay. We should call Greet as soon as she might possibly be awake,” Kaiser said. “More people than us need to know about this...”
“They know about the caravan. Whether they’ve linked it to this militia activity, I don’t know.”
“They haven’t,” Kaiser said. “I’ve got no way to know that, but they haven’t.”
“Unfortunately, you’re correct,” Letty said. “You’re three hours from Pershing, something less than two hours from Van Horn, where you turn. I’m going to try to take a nap. If I’m not awake when you make the turn, wake me up then. I want to see the highway into Pershing.”
Kaiser woke her at four-thirty. “We’re coming up to Van Horn. There’s a Love’s Travel Stop on the other side of town, not far. We could gas up and buy some stuff to eat and drink. I don’t know what they’ll have in Pershing. I think we should stop.”
Letty yawned. “Good. I have to pee anyway. I ran out of the hotel without hitting the bathroom. Too cranked up.”
At the Love’s, they got gas and they both hit the restroom and then Kaiser piled up crackers and cookies and potato chips and jerky and energy bars and Diet Coke, and Letty got two six-packs of water and some black licorice and string cheese and bananas, and they both got large cups of coffee, and got back on the highway, a mile to the Pershing exit.
The Pershing highway was well maintained but crooked. It began on rolling desert, then quickly cut through the mountains, running along the top of a ridge, outcrops of reddish rock and dirt on one side, a deep fall-off on the other. Yellow and red reflectors marked danger spots, so many of them that they might have been an art installation. At some of the wider spots, they saw what appeared in their headlights to be the edges of agricultural fields, but they weren’t sure of that. In the sixty miles between I-10 and the outer edge of Pershing, they saw no more than a dozen houses, marked by pole lights.
“You still all right to drive?” Letty asked, after a series of quick left-right jogs in the highway.
