“Good right now, but I’m tired,” Kaiser said. “I-10 was great. Ninety miles per hour, light traffic, no cops. I was reading my phone and as far as I could tell, there’s one motel in Pershing, a Lariat Inn. A couple reviews said it’s okay. ‘Clean’ was the operative word. I doubt the militia will be there at six o’clock in the morning. If they’re not, we oughta bunk out.”
“I could do that,” Letty said. “I’d like at least to drive around town soon as we get there, see what there is to see. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”
“First light’s around six-thirty, so there won’t be much.”
Halfway down the highway, they got stuck behind a tractor-trailer headed toward the border crossing, and followed it for twenty miles before Kaiser could get around it in the face of sporadic truck trafficgoing the other way. He said, “I could be wrong, but if somebody wanted to use that C-4 to blow up one of these rock outcrops, you could probably block the highway for a week... speaking as a guy who spent too much time in dirka-dirka-stan.”
“The rocks aren’t held up by I-beams,” Letty said.
“True. But a brick of C-4 here, another one there... It doesn’t have just one use. You could make some effective IEDs out of that stuff. C-4, detonator, burner phone,boom.”
“Thank you for that. You should teach confidence-building classes when you get back to Washington.”
They saw ascattering of lights ahead, followed by a band of darkness. The lights surrounded an oversized parking lot for semitrailer trucks. “Waiting to cross, or already across coming this way,” Kaiser said. “Guys sleeping before they take on that highway.”
Then there was a long, dark strip of highway, nothing but the oncoming white lines in the headlights and the occasionally squashed jackrabbit, then a thick grove of palm trees, and after another five miles, the lights of the town.
Kaiser drove a couple of blocks into it, then began circling through the side streets. While the highway had been smooth, well-maintained blacktop, the residential streets in town were heavily patched blacktop, oiled dirt, or plain dirt. Most of the newer houses were the manufactured type, as far as Letty could tell, double-wides brought in by truck and set up on concrete slabs. Others were concrete block, with deteriorating frame houses sprinkled among them, along with bare-brick adobes from the nineteenth century. Most of the light came from scattered porch lights; only the highway, which led downhill to the well-lit Customs station, had streetlights. An oversized truck parking lot sat to one side of the station, with a single waiting truck.
“Seen enough?” Kaiser asked, as he turned away from the border.
“Yes, but I didn’t see your Lariat Inn.”
“We skipped most of the main drag circling around town. It’ll be along there, somewhere...”
A small town: they found the Lariat Inn in two minutes, a single-story row of twenty-four narrow rooms with eight or ten cars pulled nose-in to the doors. An aging white wooden sign saidfree wi-fi, and hanging under that, another sign, that appeared to be permanent, that said,vacancy. They went inside the office, rang a bell on the desk, and a sleepy elderly man came out of a back room, yawned and asked, “What can I do you for?”
“Got a couple rooms?” Letty asked. A clock on the wall clicked to six-fifteen.
“I do, but I’ll have to charge you for a full day if you check in now,” he said.
“That’s fine,” she said.
“Connecting or not connecting?” His eyes clicked between the two of them.
Letty looked at Kaiser and asked, “What do you think, Uncle John?”
“As widely separated as possible,” Kaiser said to the old man.
They checked in, and outside, Kaiser said, “I got that ‘Uncle John’ shit. Very funny. But in a deal like this, separate the rooms so one can be at least a temporary bolt-hole, if they spot the other one.”
“See, you know some criminal stuff,” Letty said.
Kaiser held the room keys separately in his two balled fists and said, “Choose. Then I can’t be accused of taking the good one.”
Letty chose. Her door came up first, and as Kaiser walked to his, he called back, “Not a fuckin’ thing going on here. Wake me up when you’re ready to go back to El Paso.”
Letty’s room was, as advertised, clean; the pillowcase smelledfreshly laundered. Letty fell onto the bed and slept as though dead for two and a half hours, when her phone rang: Kaiser.
“What?” she croaked.
“Look out your window,” he said.
She rolled off the bed. A line of pickup trucks was rolling by the motel: a long line, spaced out. In many of them, an armed man or woman sat in the truck bed, rifles pointing to the sky.
Letty: “Oh, shit.”
“I left the shotgun in the truck,” Kaiser said.
