26

WHEN THE SHOOTING began in Marfa, Dora Box, Kort, Rosie, and Annie were running west toward El Paso. They’d gone thirty-five miles from the intersection of I-20 and I-10, and the checkpoint, when Box’s cell phone burped. She picked it up, looked at it, and with the other women looking at her, said, “Gar! Are you in Mexico?”

She listened for a moment, then said, “No! No! Oh, Jesus, Gar . . .” She looked up at the others and said, “The cops are on them. They’re shooting it out. Gar said he doesn’t think they’re gonna . . .”

She went back to the phone. “Gar! You gotta get a car. Just run through those weeds as far as you can, down the highway . . . then crawl! Crawl! Screw Sturgill! He’s the one who got you into this! You gotta . . .”

She listened again, said, “I don’t want to hear that . . . I don’t . . . Goddamnit, Gar,” and she began to cry. Poole said something else, and sobbing, she handed the phone to Annie and dropped onto the couch and put her head down, in her hands.

Annie punched up the speaker so everybody could hear and said, “This is . . . one of her friends. What’s up?”

“Dora will tell you, but basically, we’re stuck here and there’s a good chance the cops are going to take us down,” Poole said, his voice as casual as if he were talking to a high school class about harmless germs. “We’ll try to hold out until dark, but that’s pretty . . . pretty . . . unlikely. Here’s the thing. We were driving a white pickup truck—Dora knows it—with Arkansas plates, and Sturgill dropped it off behind some kind of art place. It’s a place with big brick buildings with curved roofs. He parked it behind the buildings on the other side of the brick buildings. They’re kinda pink-colored.”

“I don’t understand that. Give that to me again,” Annie said.

Poole explained the arrangement of buildings, from what he could see from the bunker. “Okay, you got it? If you go around behind those pink buildings, the small ones, Sturgill said there were two pickups parked back there, both white, and he parked between them. If you can get in there, after dark . . . you might get to it. There’s four million bucks, more or less, cash and gold, under the floor of the camper . . .”

He explained how the camper’s floor worked, and Annie said, “Uh-huh. Got it. We can find that.”

“That’s your money back, or most of it,” Poole said. “Dora’s worth more than that, so it’s a fair trade. If you wait too long, the cops are going to find it. But if you can get here tonight, we’ll either be caught . . . or dead . . . or pulling them away from here. Then, maybe you could get at that truck.”

“We’ll take a look,” Annie said. “We’re going to throw this phone away, right now. If you got anything else to say, you better say it.”

“One thing. If we do get loose, we’ll leave a message at the Holiday Inn, in El Paso, about where we are.”

“Got it.”

“One more thing.” There was a long moment of silence, then, “Tell Dora I love her, I guess. That’s about it.”

Box looked up and screamed, “No!” and Poole was gone. Box shouted, “Call him back! Call him back!”

Annie shook her head. “He’s gone, Dora, and we’ve got to get rid of this phone. If the cops get his phone, they’ll track us . . .”

She was pulling the phone apart as she spoke, ripped the battery out, tossed the pieces on the table. Rosie said, from the driver’s seat, “I’m pretty sure we can get down there from Van Horn, which oughta be coming up quick. Somebody look at the maps . . .”

—

THEN KORT spoke up. “Wait a minute. You’re not serious? You’re not going to try to go down there.”

“Not crazy, ugly girl,” Box shouted at her. “We’ve got to get down there. Maybe there’ll be some way we can help them . . .”

Rosie said quietly, “We won’t be able to help them, Dora, because we won’t know where they are, and we don’t have any way to get in touch with them. We can go down there and look for the money, see if there’s any way to get to it . . . but we won’t find those men.”

Box said, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus . . .”

Rosie was shaking her head: “That’s the fact of the matter.”

“We know what his number is, we could call him, he’ll keep the phone if he’s on the run . . .”

Annie nodded this time: “If we can find a phone, we can do that. We’re not going to use my phone or Rosie’s, because that’s the only way we have to stay in touch with the Boss. But we could call Gar if we find a pay phone.”

“I’m laying down the law,” Kort said. “We ain’t going. We ain’t going for Poole, we ain’t going for that other guy, and we ain’t going for the money. There’ll be cops everywhere, and if anyone sees me, knows me from that TV show, they’re gonna put me in a cage until they send me to the chair. Same for Box. We ain’t going.”

“I don’t care if it harelips the Pope, we’re going,” Box said.

“Shut up and sit down, both of you,” Rosie yelled over her shoulder. “If we see anything like a cop, we’ll put you down below. You’ll be safe enough. We’ve run fifty kilos of cocaine through a crowd of dope-sniffing dogs. But if there’s any way to get our hands on that cash, we’re gonna do it.”

Annie said, “That’s Van Horn up ahead. Look for 90 South. Looks like about an hour run down to Marfa, give or take.”

Kort slumped back into the couch. “You motherfuckers. We’re gonna die down there,” she said.