The Investigator, page 27
Another: “You think they’d really shoot us?”
Another: “You heard that gunfire.”
The first man said, “I’ll tell you all what: I’m going back up to my house. If they try to dig me outta there, they’ll have a problem on their hands. I got a shotgun and I’ll kill any asshole tries to come in there.”
A couple of other men agreed. One said, “That’s the best thing. Hole up in your house. They can’t dig us all out. I’ll kill a couple of them fuckers myself.”
Another: “Easy, easy, let’s see what they do…”
The argument was continuing when three men armed with AR-15s pushed through the door and one said, “Hiya, folks, hope you’re okay in here…”
One of the men near the windows asked, “What are you guys doing?”
“We’re borrowing your town for a couple of days,” the lead militiaman said. “There’s a caravan headed here and we’re not going to let it cross. But the main thing is, we don’t mean any of you harm. We really don’t want to hurt anyone. You heard that shooting, it all went up in the air, to convince the Customs people that they shouldn’t try to take us on. They agreed. They won’t do that. You shouldn’t do that, either: the fact is, you should be with us. We’ll be talking about that at a noon meeting down by the border station…”
* * *
One of the men was scanning the diner as the leader went on and his eyes stopped when they got to Letty. He looked at her for a moment, then turned to a man by the window, who said, “You know, there are a hell of a lot more guns in this town than you got…”
“We don’t want a war, no way,” the leader said. “But if you want one, we got it.”
* * *
When the militiamen left a minute later, Kaiser said quietly, “That guy was checking you out.”
“Yes. Let’s get out of here.”
They left the diner during a lull in the pickup traffic and hotfooted it up the hill to the first street, turned right, and hurried along to Mavis Thrift, which appeared to be closed. “There’s somebody in there,” Kaiser said, peering through the door window. He knocked until a woman came to the door and shouted, “We’re closed.”
“We need help,” Letty shouted back through the glass.
The woman fussed for a minute, but finally let them in. “I need some of everything and I’ll pay cash,” Letty told her.
“Are you…”
“No, we’re not with them.”
The woman, like those in the diner, was on the heavy side. She had a face that might have had a permanent worried frown graven into it, overlaid by a whole new set of worries from that morning.
“They been shooting people up, whoever they are,” the woman said. “I got a gun, but I’m no damn good with it.”
“Hiding out is the way to go,” Kaiser said. “I don’t think they’ve shot anyone yet.”
The woman nodded, then asked, “What can I do for you, young lady?”
“I need some clothes and a mirror,” Letty said.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Kaiser said, “Hell, I wouldn’t recognize you if you walked right past me. I’ve never seen pants that exact color.”
“They look nice,” Mavis said to Letty. “Don’t show off your figure so good as the skinny jeans, though. I think your dad would agree with that.”
The woman smiled at Kaiser, who said, “I guess.”
“That’s okay,” Letty said. She batted her eyes at Kaiser, then checked herself in a cracked, full-length mirror. She was wearing a flowered peasant top over what were once burgundy jeans that appeared to have had a tie-dye accident, with a pair of well-worn Keds high-tops that had once been red, but were now a rusty color.
Kaiser handed her a pair of white-framed sunglasses. She winced, put them on, and asked, “You got a cowboy bandanna I can tie over my hair?”
“Sure do,” Mavis said. “Any color you want, long as it’s black.”
Mavis gave her a brown paper sack for her regular clothes.
* * *
Outside Mavis’s door, Letty asked, “What do you think, Dad?”
“With that hankie on your head and those glasses, you look like you’re from the Ukraine. In 1944. On your way to Mass after killing a Kraut.”
“Thank you.” She touched the hard lump in her jeans pocket. The pants were looser than her skinny jeans, and the 938 was right there, easy to get at.
“Let’s get back to the motel and talk this out,” Kaiser said. “Haven’t heard any more gunfire.”
They walked back to the highway, and at the corner saw a parked pickup partially blocking the highway, with two men in the truck bed, both with rifles. The men looked at them but didn’t do or say anything. They turned downhill, stopped at Jeff’s. The waitress in the pink dress recognized Kaiser, frowned at Letty as though she should recognize her but didn’t. Kaiser asked, “Anything more happen?”
“Another one of them came in here, showing his gun off,” the waitress said. “There’s gonna be a town meeting at noon outside the border station. Everybody’s supposed to come. No guns.”
As they backed out the door, the waitress added, in a hushed voice, “They arrested the mayor and the city council. They said there’s gonna be a trial.”
“Who the fuck are they to arrest anyone?” Kaiser asked.
The waitress shook her head and let the door swing closed. Kaiser said, quietly, “Over there,” and tipped his head: Letty looked back up the street, where the pickup they’d seen, partially blocking the highway, had stopped a truck coming into town. “Checkpoint,” Kaiser said.
On the way farther down the hill, to the motel, Letty called Greet: “A woman at the local diner says they’ve arrested, detained, the mayor and the whole city council, for what that’s worth. We’ve seen one armed checkpoint coming into town.”
“Keep the information coming, you’re the only good on-the-ground resource we’ve got there. I’m not giving your number to anyone, I’m routing all the traffic through our command center at FEMA. If somebody needs to hook up directly with you, we’ll patch them through. We haven’t seen any media coming…”
At that moment a Black Hawk helicopter swooped in over the town, moving fast, crossing into Mexico, and then banked and came back over, moving slower, and then, bapbapbap BOOM bapbapbap. The gunfire came from scattered places around the town, and the helicopter swooped back out, climbed, swung over the town again, much higher up, and Greet was shouting into the phone, and “bapbapbap BOOM bapbapbap…”
Letty put a finger in her off ear and yelled, “What? What?”
“Was that gunfire?”
Kaiser reached out and took the phone and shouted into it: “A Black Hawk came over, way too low, took small-arms fire, almost all AR-15s, although I heard a bigger gun, could be an AR-10, and then another for sure was a .50-caliber that let off two rounds. You better tell your troops to get up higher and faster if they come back…”
Letty took the phone back. “Where’s that caravan that’s coming here?”
“They’re still coming. I can’t tell you how far out they are right now.”
“Find out,” Letty said.
Kaiser held out his hand and took the phone again: “They need to bring in Delta or the SEALs if there’s gonna be a fight. This is not something you want to try to do with the National Guard. These guys are all mixed in with local civilians.”
Letty: “We’re gonna do some recon…”
“I’ll get all that going,” Greet said. “Call me! Call me!”
* * *
At the motel, Kaiser said, “About the recon thing. We oughta split up again. If they were watching us at all, up in Midland or in El Paso, they know it’s a skinny chick with a big guy. We can cover twice as much ground if we split up.”
“Every time people split up in a movie, somebody dies.”
“Try not to do that.”
Letty nodded and said, “Most of them are down by the border station. I’ll wander down there. Why don’t you get in the truck, like you’re trying to get out of town, see what the reaction is at that checkpoint. If we’re lucky, you could make it up to the roadblock, make an assessment. Count the guns. The Feds are gonna want a live count.”
“What if they wave me through?”
“Doesn’t sound like they can. If they do, turn around, say you wanted to see what was allowed, you have to go back and get your wife and kid.”
Kaiser nodded. “Good. You take care. You get killed, I won’t get a gold star in my notebook.”
* * *
Letty’s phone rang. Senator Colles. He said, “I know you’re life-and-death busy, but give me a one-minute recap.”
“I will, but don’t let on that you’ve got a source on the ground. They’re willing to use their guns—they tried to shoot down an Army helicopter.”
“What! Nobody told me that. But tell me, tell me…”
Letty gave him all the information she had, and said, “If you’ve got to talk about this, attribute it to a brave member of the Customs people. I’m sure they weren’t all in the station when they were surrounded. Some must still have phones.”
“I will. Call me! Call me!”
“That’s what everybody says,” Letty said. “Talk to you later.”
Kaiser had clipped his carry gun to his jeans, handed Letty the extra magazines he’d been carrying for her, gave her a heavy but unexpected around-the-shoulders hug, and said, “Easy does it, Letty. See you back here in an hour.” He grinned at her, added, “Laissez les bons temps rouler,” in what Letty suspected was a terrible French accent, and went out the door, dropping his blades over his eyes as he left.
Or maybe it was a good Cajun accent. She had no idea which. In any case, she thought, as she put the nine-millimeter magazines in her new/old socks, outside the motel door the good times were definitely rolling.
TWENTY-ONE
Earlier that morning:
Low looked back over his shoulder and said, “I’ve only seen one truck turning right. Chickenshit.”
“One is good, one is good,” Hawkes said. “There’ll be more.”
The sky was getting light in the east, the sun would be up before they made the turn at Van Horn. “I’m getting cranked,” Low said, after a while.
“Everybody’s cranked,” Hawkes said. They had moved left and slowed, and were now thirty trucks behind the convoy leader, with more trucks strung out behind them for a mile or more, all rolling along at eighty-five miles an hour, just above the eighty-mile-per-hour speed limit. A blond woman in a red Porsche Panamera ignored them as she passed at a hundred and ten or so, focused on the application of her lipstick. Hawkes got on the phone and called the lead truck.
“Rick: did you lose anyone in your crew back at the turn?”
“Nope. They all knew what we were in for. They’re all right with us.”
“See you there.” She called the chain saw crew, the last group in the convoy. “Lannie—you see anyone turning right?”
“I was about to call—I think we lost three trucks altogether. I thought it would be more. We didn’t lose anybody from our crew.”
“Excellent. See you at the trees.”
“Couldn’t do this first part without cell phones,” Hawkes said to Low, when she’d hung up. “When we go to the walkie-talkies, we’re gonna have some confusion.”
“Can’t avoid it,” he said.
“I know.” After a minute: “What do you have dialed in for music?”
They got on down the interstate listening to Joe Walsh and “Life’s Been Good,” part of what Low called his righteous prison mix.
* * *
The overnight meeting had taken place twenty miles northwest of Van Horn. The leading trucks made the turn and the rest followed like a loose-boned snake down the narrow highway to Pershing. Thirty miles in, they did catch an eighteen-wheeler, but it was moving briskly, a bit above the speed limit, so they let it go, and followed it toward the river as the mountain closed in beside them.
Low was silent, but Hawkes talked to the leaders of every one of the action teams. They’d all been thoroughly briefed, and everything was moving as expected, so there wasn’t much to talk about, but she wanted them to hear her confidence. “We’re absolutely on plan, it’s all nominal…”
“Nominal,” she thought, was a leadership-type word.
Five miles short of Pershing, they got to the grove of palm trees and Low pulled off and waved the rest of the convoy on. At the end of it, five trucks pulled off on the shoulder with them. The roadblock action team.
Low and Hawkes got out of their truck and Low said, “Let’s get it on, guys. Get the pulley up on the other side.”
“We got it,” somebody called back.
Twenty tall palms stood on one side of the road, three even bigger trees on the opposite side. Two men hooked a block and tackle to one of the three big palms, and somebody else fired up a chain saw. The first palm fell a minute later. One of the men working the block and tackle hooked an end of the pulley line to the top of the downed palm, and the other end to the receiver on the back of an F-250. The truck surged ahead and pulled the downed palm all the way across the highway.
The rest of the palms came down one at a time and were dragged across the road, piled atop one another, to make a barrier of heavy entwined palms six feet high. The men were working fast and efficiently. When they’d finished, they retrieved the block and tackle, and then the chain saw crew dropped the three palms on the other side of the road, on top of those already down.
“That’s a fine mess,” Low said, pleased.
A tractor-trailer was coming down the highway from I-10, slowed and stopped. The driver watched them putting the tools away, then got out and shouted, “How long to clear it?”
“Couple days, anyway,” somebody called back.
“Couple days? What am I supposed to do?”
“If I was you, I’d back it up and go to El Paso,” he was told.
One of the chain saw crew clambered atop the pile of palm logs with an AR-15 in one hand. “Nobody coming through,” he shouted at the driver.
Hawkes was watching. She clutched Low’s biceps and said, “I’m fuckin’ high on life here, Rand. We’re doing it.”
Low looked at her and said, “You know, this isn’t the real big test. The big test is tonight.”
* * *
Five trucks and six men and a woman were left at the roadblock as guards. Hawkes gave them a pep talk—“We’re absolutely counting on you. If you let anybody through, we’re screwed. We’ve all rehearsed what you’ve got to do, what you’ve got to say. Keep your faces covered and we’ll be coming for you tonight. If you get more than you can handle, either call me or get on your walkie talkie. If things go right, won’t be any phones after noon.”
“Got it,” the woman said.
“And you got your bullhorns and your food and drinks.”
“We’re good,” the woman said. “You get on down there, Jael, we got your back door.”
In the truck again, Hawkes took a phone call, listened, and said to Low, “We got the Customs people penned up. They’ve still got their weapons, but we’re working on it.”
“How about the ones who were off-duty?” Low asked.
Hawkes relayed his question to the militia man in Pershing, who said, “I know we got people at their front doors, but I don’t know what happened. Frank told me we got the mayor and the city council locked up.”
“We’ll be there in five minutes. Keep the lid on,” Hawkes said.
“We got it. We’re running smooth,” the man said. “Oh: Rodriguez and the TV truck made it. They got here a while ago.”
* * *
The town of Pershing started with a series of truck parking lots on both sides of the road, then two trailer courts, then the houses, most manufactured, some concrete-block, some wood-frame. They went by Jeff’s Diner, where they’d eaten when they were scouting the town, and the motel, where they’d gone swimming, and down the long slope to the Rio Grande, which was nothing more than a thread of water sitting in a narrow gorge thirty or forty feet below the level of the towns on either side. The bridge over the river was empty.
The border station sat on a slab with an extensive parking lot behind it, a brown building with an American flag hanging limply from a pole near the front door. The militia’s pickups were jammed around the buildings on three sides, men standing behind the trucks with rifles. A yellow concrete welcome to texas sign punctuated the cluster of trucks.
A long-haired man named Dick ran up to them as they stopped, a harried look on this face, and said, “We got the town, if we can keep it.”
Hawkes and Low got out of the truck, and Low asked, “Where’s the mayor and all them?”
“Jail. No problem.”
“Somebody watching them?”
“Two guys, on the door,” Dick said.
“Good. The Mexicans done anything?”
“Watching us with binoculars…”
“Get the first shift of bridge guys out there. Nobody goes across, either direction…”
“I know, we got that,” Dick said. “We got the Customs guys nailed down, inside, but I kept the fast-reaction team here in case there’s trouble. I could send them to their positions if you think it’s time.”
Hawkes shook her head. “Keep them here until the bridge guys are set up…”
The Customs and Border Protection employees were holed up inside the building, and some were armed. One of the El Paso militia members, wearing camo and armor, was negotiating with them, standing by the front door, shouting through it.
The negotiations went on for fifteen minutes, and the camo-clad man eventually walked away from the door and down to where Hawkes had met with Low, Duran, and Crain.
“They’re being stubborn, but they’re arguing among themselves,” the camo guy said. “I think we’ll need the demo.”
