Only a few more, and then I'm going to knock on that door and she's going to knock back, and I'm going to open it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rooster
The night before we cross, Razor lays it all out on the table one last time.
I stand at the back and watch all these people memorize how they might die.
The tunnel on Alejandro's property. The mile underground. The house on the Arizona side where we come up, and the trucks Vegas has staged in a barn outside Sasabe.
Two hundred miles after that, three vehicles at the speed limit with clean plates, because the fastest way to lose everything is a taillight and a bored state trooper.
The wash behind La Nada. The approach on foot from the southeast, in the dark.
"What’s the word if we abort the run?" Razor plants both hands on the table.
"Cricket," half the room answers.
Mila picked it. Nobody laughed when she did.
It's the one piece of that day Trask didn't get to keep, and now it's the word that means everybody stop, it's gone wrong, get out. There's a rightness to it. Her dog getting the last job.
"Say it again," Razor says.
"Cricket."
"You hear that word on any channel, you break contact and run for the creek." He looks around the table, slow, hitting every face. "You don't finish what you're doing. You don't grab one more woman. You fucking go."
Nobody moves.
"That's not me being cautious. That's me telling you the difference between eight of us coming home and none of us."
Amara closes the folder in front of her.
"Get sleep. We roll at four." She stands, and the room stands with her. "That's the last order I'm giving tonight. Whatever you need to do before we leave, go do it. I'll see you in the dark."
The room breaks up quietly.
I find Mila by the fire pit, which isn't lit.
None of us light it anymore. It's hers now, hers and whoever she lets sit by it, and tonight she's let me.
She's got my jacket on over her shoulders, looking north, out past the fence into the dark where the desert runs all the way to a border and past it to a hole in the ground with her whole life owed to it.
"You should sleep." I lower myself onto the bench beside her.
"So should you." She doesn't take her eyes off the desert.
"I can’t. Not the night before."
"Neither do I." She pulls the jacket tighter. "Sit down and stop hovering."
"I'm sitting."
"You're hovering while sitting. It's a skill." She looks over at me, and there's a dry twist to it. "You've done it all day. Like you think I'll come apart if you look away too long."
I put my hands on my knees and leave them there.
