27

LUCAS MOVED close to the windows, looking in at the storage area, or whatever it was—he had the feeling that he was missing something important about the building, but he didn’t know what it might be. In any case, he could see past the aluminum boxes and out into the field where the gunfire had come from, north and east of the building.

O’Brien called: “We can’t come in at you like we were trying, but we can come in from the back side of the place and that’s what we’re doing. We’ll have a half dozen guys with you there in five minutes. They’re bringing an extension ladder. We think we can get up on top of the artillery buildings with a sniper.”

“Be good if we can do it . . .”

He was cut off by three quick shots from the side of the building and then Rae screaming, and Lucas shoved the phone in his pocket and ran down the length of the building where Rae was dragging Bob toward the back corner.

She saw Lucas and shouted: “He’s hit! He’s hit hard! We gotta get him outa here, we gotta get him to a medic . . .”

Lucas ran toward them and squatted over Bob, who looked up at him and said, “Hurts bad. Legs. He got me in the legs.”

Rae took a folding knife from her pocket and began cutting his pants off, and Lucas saw Bob’s rifle on the ground near the front corner of the building and asked, “Where was the shooter?”

“Down there.” Rae waved south and east. “Never saw him. We were looking in the other direction, up north. We were sitting ducks.”

“Poole’s either got a way to get around without being seen, in which case we’re in trouble right here, or there are two of them,” Lucas said. “I bet that fuckin’ Darling’s down here with him.”

“Then move me,” Bob groaned, and he said, “Ah . . .”

“I’ll carry him,” Lucas said. “Try to help with his legs.”

Lucas lifted Bob from under his arms and Rae lifted his thighs, and they trundled around to the back of the building and put him on the ground.

Bob groaned, “Ah, man,” and Rae had the pants cut off, and they found two large and heavily bleeding through-and-through wounds, on both of Bob’s thighs, eight inches above his knees, apparently from the same shot. He was bleeding steadily, rather than in pulses, so no major arteries had been taken out.

Lucas got on his phone and called O’Brien: “We need guys here right now,” he said. “We got a guy hit bad in the legs. We need a chopper out of El Paso, I know they’ve got one . . .”

“Oh, gosh. Oh, gosh. I’ll get it going,” O’Brien said. “You should see our guys coming at any minute.”

Bob was saying to Rae, “Not a tourniquet, not a tourniquet, plug the holes best you can, I don’t want to lose a leg . . .”

Then they saw a half dozen Border Patrol guys running toward them, all carrying rifles. One of them knelt next to Lucas and Rae, and he said, “We’ve got an EMT on the way. Where’s the shooter?”

“Could be two of them,” Lucas said. “Both out in the field, one right, one left. Stay here behind the buildings. Let’s move Bob to one of your trucks.”

“Better to wait for the EMT, they’ll bring a stretcher . . .”

Lucas nodded and said to Rae, “Stay with him until they take him . . .”

Rae’s rifle was back where she’d dropped it while dragging Bob. Lucas scrambled on his hands and knees toward the gun, figuring if Rae hadn’t been shot at, she’d probably been out of the shooter’s sight when she dropped the rifle. He picked it up and scurried back behind the building with the others.

“What are we doing?” Rae asked.

“I’ll talk to O’Brien and get something worked out.” Lucas looked up at the sky. “It’ll be dark in an hour or so and then we’ll have a real problem.”

“Couldn’t be much worse than this,” Rae said. She looked down at Bob, who was lying back, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands curling and uncurling with the stress and pain.

“Yeah, it will be. Those guys will sneak out of here, or try to. If they get out of that field, there’s only one way they get completely away—find somebody with a car, kill ’em, and drive away. We either get them now or we could have some dead civilians on our hands. Maybe a lot of them.”

Lucas took five minutes to place the border patrolmen along the corners of the two domed buildings, plus one in the middle of each building, looking through the glass walls, trying to spot the shooters. The patrolmen included the sniper, who was carrying a bolt-action .308, but had no way up on the roof. “When we heard the shooting, we left the ladder with the trucks. Think we should get it?”

Lucas asked, “How many guys to carry it?”

“Two can carry it, but we can’t go up the sides. The bottoms of those curved roofs are too steep. I’d have to get on at one of the ends.”

Lucas looked at the buildings, shook his head: “Can’t guarantee that he couldn’t see you, if you went up at an end. If he can, you’d be a sitting duck on the ladder. Let’s stay on the ground.”

“Your call,” the rifleman said.

—

TWO EMTS came sloping from behind the smaller salmon-colored buildings, carrying a stretcher. They bent over Bob and one said, “Not as bad as I was afraid of. Let’s block up the holes and get him the hell out of here.” And to Bob, he said, “You’re gonna be all right, pal. We’ve seen worse than this at a Saturday night cockfight.”

“Not that they’re good,” Bob said.

“No, no . . .”

“How about the helicopter?” Lucas asked.

“On the way, or will be in the next couple of minutes,” one of the medics said. “Flying time is a little more than a half hour each way. They’re putting a trauma doc on board.”

Lucas said to Bob, “Take it easy,” and to Rae, “Stay with him.”

Bob tried to smile and grunted, “Yeah,” and, “Shoot that motherfucker.”

“Doing our best,” Lucas said. He jogged away, on his phone to O’Brien as he ran. “We need to get together,” he said.

“What do you have in mind?”

“How many trucks and guns do you have?”

—

LUCAS GOT the idea from pheasant drives: he wasn’t much of a hunter, but he’d heard enough about the drives from people who were, like Virgil Flowers. O’Brien had a few ideas of his own, and a half hour before sunset, seven Border Patrol trucks bumped off the highway down into the dry field south of where the second shooter was.

“Don’t have much time,” Lucas shouted to the drivers. “We have to move right along. You shooters, you guys stay close to the trucks—don’t stick anything out but one eyeball.”

The trucks arrayed themselves across the field, spaced fifteen yards apart, giving them a sweep of more than a hundred yards. A border patrolman stood on the back left corner of each truck carrying a rifle, using the truck for cover.

The truck drivers sat in the passenger seats, low enough that nothing but their eyes were above the dashboard. Each of them had a traffic cone on the driver’s side, the tip of the cone pressed against the gas pedal. It was ugly and awkward, but it worked. They had no way to brake, but wouldn’t be traveling any faster than two or three miles an hour. Even at that slow pace, they’d cover a hundred yards in a bit more than a minute, and only had to cover a couple hundred yards to sweep the field.

The drivers were put in the passenger seat because everybody agreed that if the shooter opened up on the trucks, he was most likely to try to hit the driver . . . in the driver’s seat. They used traffic cones to push on the pedals because it was what they had that would work.

When everybody was lined up, Lucas looked at the lowering sun and yelled, “Let’s do it.”

Lucas was behind the truck closest to the buildings, carrying Bob’s rifle. The trucks began edging forward, Lucas and the border patrolmen walking behind, their rifles already at their shoulders, ready to fire.

—

DARLING HAD shot at the two cops, the short white guy and the tall black woman, hitting one, he thought, from the way the woman screamed and the guy went down. He hoped that the Border Patrol hadn’t yet become fully involved with lots of personnel, that if he could rid himself of the cops from the silver SUVs, he might have a little more freedom of movement.

When the heavyset cop went down and was dragged out of sight, he began moving north, as quick as he could without giving away his position, snaking along in the grass. He stopped once, to call Poole and tell him what was going on.

“I don’t know where you are,” Poole said. “I think I might have hit one of the cops. I saw him peeking out from behind one of the buildings. If there were only two or three of them in those trucks, we might have knocked out two of them.”

“I’m going to get as close as I can to those glass buildings,” Darling replied. “If I get the chance, I’ll rush them, see if I can take them out. It’s about our only chance.”

“All right. I’m in this concrete bunker. I can see the tops of both of the roofs. If they try to put a sniper up there, I’ll clean him off for you. Let me know if you break through.”

“Soon as it happens,” Darling said. “We’ve only got maybe thirty or forty minutes until sundown.”

Darling hung up, and still with a bit of hope in his heart, he continued crawling north, trying not to leave a rippling motion in the grass and weeds.

He was almost even with the back of the nearest building when he heard the trucks rushing down the highway. He risked a look over the weeds, saw the line of Border Patrol trucks heading south and then turning out onto the field. He said, “Goddamnit,” aloud, crawled a few feet into a dense cluster of dead dark brown weeds, and used the cover to take a longer look.

The trucks were spreading out across the far end of the field, their headlights pointing toward him. They were going to try to flush him, he thought—and they’d do it, too, if he let them get close. The brown weeds were looser than the yellow grass, and after considering his dwindling options, he carefully moved into a prone shooting position, lined up on the driver’s-side window of the middle truck, and fired a single shot.

He immediately heard men shouting. He lined up on another truck and squeezed the trigger again. The trucks stopped rolling.

Darling, satisfied for the moment, turned around to begin crawling north again. He’d moved fifty feet when he heard the truck engines working again, behind him. A few more feet and he came to a trampled area in the yellow grass. He’d have to cross it, and when he did . . .

He peeked again and saw people standing behind the glass in the nearest building—he wasn’t sure if they were inside the building or on the far side. Whichever it was, they would be able to see him when he tried to cross the bald spot.

He got on the phone: “Hey, man, I’m trying to get up north. It’d help a whole lot if you could put a few shots through the windows of the second building. There are people either in there or on the other side, looking out here at these fields . . .”

“Give me fifteen seconds . . .”

Fifteen seconds later, he heard Poole open up and the glass shattering in the domed building, and he low-crawled across the bald spot, just as he’d been taught in the Corps. On the far side, he disappeared back into the weeds, now aiming at the space between the two big buildings, the place where the two cops had been when he shot at them.

If he could get into the gap, and if there weren’t many cops, he might be able to break back through.

—

O’BRIEN WAS on the phone to Lucas, after checking by radio with the truck drivers: “Nobody hurt, we’re all okay. Keep moving, I think this is gonna work.”

The trucks began moving again, still at the slow walking pace, and Lucas kept the rifle up. Then a patrolman, two or three trucks over, shouted, “I think I saw him. I think he’s angling toward the space between the buildings. He’s maybe twenty-five yards into the field.”

Lucas shouted back, “If you got a clear line, if you’re not going to hit anything else, put a couple shots in there, see if he breaks out.”

The patrolman did that: Bap! Bap! Bap!

Lucas, who was looking toward the area, thought he saw a wavelike motion in the weeds, somebody moving on his knees and elbows. He aimed Bob’s M4 at the area and fired four more shots: Bap! Bap! Bap! Bap!

A half second later, the trucks took ten or twelve incoming shots from a different angle, from the northeast. “Everybody okay? Everybody okay?” Lucas shouted. Everybody was unharmed except for one truck driver, who’d taken some windshield glass in his shoulder above his vest but said he was okay.

O’Brien, who was with the trucks north of the big buildings, called: “Did you get a fix on those shots?”

“Came down from the northeast . . . but can’t say exactly where from. There’s a whole bunch of concrete bunkers over there, must be part of the old fort. I think he could be in one of the northern ones.”

O’Brien said, “Those aren’t bunkers. They’re artworks.”

“What?”

“Artworks. But they’re perfectly fine bunkers, if you think of them that way.”

Lucas was looking back at the area next to the building, and again, thought he saw movement. He shoved the phone in his pocket and brought his rifle up, and at the same instant two other border patrolmen fired from behind the trucks . . .

Lucas added two shots . . .

—

THE FIRST SEQUENCE of three shots whistled over Darling’s head, and he thought, then, of throwing up his hands and quitting. If Poole was killed, there’d be no witnesses to the shootings in Biloxi, and if he hadn’t killed either of the cops he’d shot at . . . He’d be looking at years in prison, but maybe not the needle. With his wife on the outside, with a ton of cash, he’d have at least a possibility of busting out of prison. A corrupt guard, a prison gang with connections . . .

Then the second deck of four shots came in, three narrowly missing. The fourth hit him right in the asshole, he thought, knifing up into his guts and then out, around his navel. The pain was blinding, and he curled up against it and cried out once, “Ahhhh . . .”

He kicked, once, twice, against the pain, and two more shots came in, one hitting him in the leg, the other knocking the heel off his boot and twisting his ankle.

He couldn’t crawl anymore. He heard the trucks coming, the relentless sound of their engines. He touched his stomach and his hand came away soaked with blood. He got the phone out, called Poole, said, “I’m done for. I’m hit bad, my guts are all over the place. If you need to make a move, I’m gonna sit up and hose down everything I can see. Ten seconds and that’s probably all I got.”

Poole, after two seconds of silence, said, “See you in hell, man.”

Darling choked back a laugh, because laughing would hurt too badly. “See you in hell.”

The line of trucks was only fifty yards away, some of the Border Patrol shooters knew about where he was, Darling thought. He got a grip on his rifle, which was greasy with his blood, pointed it in the general direction of the trucks, and began firing, emptying the rest of a thirty-shot magazine toward them. He hurt so bad that he didn’t think he could go on, but managed to pull out the other thirty-round magazine, dropped the first one, got the second one seated, and he rolled over toward the glass buildings and dumped the entire magazine into them . . .

He was hit in the head by a shot from behind one of the trucks, and was killed instantly.

—

LUCAS WAS shouting at the patrolmen, “Easy now, easy, I think we got him . . . Easy now, watch for that guy out front, in case he tries something crazy . . . watch him.”

Another ten seconds and Lucas saw Darling’s body in the weeds to his left, and when they’d pulled even with the body he shouted, “Stop! Trucks all stop.”

Without real brakes, the trucks rolled to a ragged stop in the yellow weeds, with Darling off to their left. Lucas called, “I’m going to step over to the left. I think I’m covered by the trucks, but you guys, give me more cover. If you see motion over there, kill him . . .”

When it seemed that everybody was ready, Lucas risked five fast steps over to the body. He recognized Darling from the photo back at the farm—the one with the girls on his lap.

He didn’t look at all peaceful in death; he looked like he’d fallen in a meat grinder, his shirt and pants soaked with blood, with a gaping exit wound over one eye.

Lucas turned: “We got one.”

A minute later, he was back behind the trucks and they were rolling toward the area where he thought the second shooter was hiding. Lucas was sweating heavily and smelled of sweat and blood, both his and Bob’s, and probably some of Rae’s. He wiped his face with a shirtsleeve and brought the rifle back up.

“Let’s finish it. Drivers, let’s go.”

—

WHEN DARLING opened up on the trucks and then the buildings, Poole crawled out of his concrete bunker, flat on the ground, and around to the other side of it. From behind it, he couldn’t see either of the two domed buildings, but they couldn’t see him, either—and he was visually protected from the highway by the line of trees that ran parallel both to the line of bunkers and to the highway.

He could hear the trucks pushing closer up the open field toward his position. He didn’t think the cops knew exactly where he was, but he had no margin for error. He had to move. He stayed flat, pushing mostly with his toes, for a hundred yards, his rifle in front of him, toward the trees.

Tough going: more sandburs, other thorns and insults. He took a few seconds to wonder if the snakes had already gone underground. He hadn’t seen any, up to this point, but he didn’t want to run into a rattler in the weeds. He didn’t. When he’d gotten into the trees, he carefully moved into a clump of heavy brush where he could stand up to see what was going on.

Behind him, the trucks were coming on, and in front of him, he could see three Border Patrol trucks parked on the highway, with a patrolman standing behind the hood of each one, looking out over the field. Each one with a rifle. He could easily shoot one of them, but then he’d be dead.

Between himself and the highway, down to his right, he could see two long cigar-shaped white tanks that probably held propane. Off to his left he could see a white house, two stories high with a red roof, and behind it, a water tower.

The thing that most interested him, though, was what looked like a border fence and trees by the house to his left. The trees led all the way from the line of trees that he was in, to the highway. There were possibilities that way, but none the other. He went left—he couldn’t stand, the trees weren’t thick enough, but he could duckwalk, which was a lot better than crawling, and it was only forty or fifty yards.

Again, his hands and arms were burning with burrs and thorns, and he could feel them poking through his sweat-soaked shirt into his chest. He tried to ignore them but couldn’t, not the ones in his hands, and he stopped long enough to pull them out.

A minute later, he was at the intersection of his line of trees, with the trees and fence going out to the highway. He made the turn and, moving with glacial slowness, crossed over the wire fence and let himself down into the yard of the red-roofed house. Anyone looking out a window could see him; he hoped they wouldn’t do that. He moved forward along the fence line, and a few minutes later, he was at the highway.

He couldn’t cross it: too many people could see him, and there was no cover whatever on the far side. But the house had a white stucco wall along the front of the lot. If he crawled north along it, he would be looking into a parking lot with a half dozen cars right across the fence.

—

LUCAS HAD reoriented the line of trucks to move diagonally northeast through the field. When Lucas had nearly gotten himself shot, the shooter must have been at the northeast side of the big field. They were moving straight toward it, on a hundred-yard front, as they’d done with Darling, but nothing was moving.

They were approaching the line of artworks/bunkers. Whatever else they might be, they were also perfect firing platforms. When they’d gotten to them, with no sign of life, Lucas got the sniper to climb atop one of them, where he could see down the arc of bunkers that extended to the south.

“If anything moves, nail it,” he told the patrolman.

On the far side of the bunker, he could see a fairly substantial line of trees a hundred yards away.

To the patrolman coordinating the trucks, he said, “I’ll bet he’s in the trees. I’m going to take a couple of guys and go over and work through there. You finish sweeping the field, and if you don’t flush him, turn around and back us up.”

“You take care,” the patrolman said.

“Yeah, and you, too,” Lucas said.

Lucas got two volunteers and as the trucks spread out for another sweep, Lucas and the other two men stayed behind them until they could step into the trees. The trees thinned to the south and were more widely spaced, so they turned north.

“Like this,” Lucas said to the other two. “Always keep a tree directly in front of you. When you get to it, stop moving, keep your rifle up, check out the area in front of you, looking around from behind the tree. When you think it’s safe, say so, and the next guy will move past you. Don’t ever go more than ten or fifteen feet at a time, so if the shooter pops up, the guy in back will take him out. Got it?”

They got it, and they began working their way north. They’d gone only a short distance when they came to a fence and a thinner line of trees, leading out to the highway, past a red-roofed house.

“What do you think?” Lucas asked, his voice quiet. “Go north, or out to the highway?”

One of the patrolmen said, “The trees look like they’re getting thicker the further north they go. If he sticks inside of them, he’ll eventually get back to town.”

“He’ll have to cross a street to do that,” the other one said.

“Yeah, but the sun will be down in fifteen minutes and it’ll get dark quick. Once it’s dark, he could get lost in town,” the first one said.

“The thing is, he probably doesn’t know where the trees lead,” Lucas said. Then he said, “Look, you two go on, in the trees. Really careful. I’m going to take a quick jog out to the highway. If there’s nothing out there, I’ll be right back. Don’t shoot me when I come back.”

“Let me call everybody and tell them what you’re doing,” one of the patrolmen said. He took a radio out of a vest pocket, made the call, describing Lucas: “Doesn’t have a hat, he’s in a light-colored shirt, and he’s wearing a vest.”

When he’d finished the call, they all agreed that they’d all be careful. Lucas climbed the wire fence and began moving out to the highway, while the two patrolmen pushed farther north in the trees.

—

POOLE HAD crossed the fence on the north side of the red-roofed house’s front yard, and sat only partially concealed by a clump of weeds. He’d been moving for a long time, and now, sitting still, his major sensory input was himself: he stank.

Ahead of him, not more than ten or twelve yards away, several cars were parked outside a low building with a sign that said “El Cósmico.” He realized that he’d managed to run in a circle, that he was back to the hippie place with the teepees and weird trailers.

There was no traffic on the highway, which had apparently been blocked at both ends of the gunfight. He needed one of those cars and he needed the driver, because he needed the driver’s keys. If he could grab a driver, he could force him into his car, hit him on the head with his .40, shove him onto the floor. The cops would have to open the highway when it got dark, they couldn’t keep it closed forever.

If he could hold out until then.

And he saw a single driver come out of the El Cósmico place, walking toward the cars in front of him. He set his rifle aside, slipped out the .40, waited. She was walking to a car almost directly in front of him. Perfect. The nearest Border Patrol car was a hundred yards away, and if he did it quickly and quietly . . .

She came around the back of the car, a tall, thin, redheaded woman, a Texas-looking woman with freckles, her keys in one hand, stepping toward the car. She couldn’t go out on the highway, she must’ve checked into one of the teepees or whatever . . .

Poole stood up and lunged toward her. She didn’t see him coming until he was ten feet away and he said, fairly loudly, because there was nobody else close enough to hear him, “I’ve got a gun and if you make any noise or scream, I will shoot you.”

She dropped the keys and said, “Oh, no . . . are you . . .”

“Yeah, the cops are going to kill me if they catch me, so I don’t really give a shit at this point.” He was right on top of her, took her elbow, said, “Get into the backseat . . . We’re gonna hide out for a while. Keep quiet and you won’t get hurt.”

When she sat down, he thought, one fast hard blow to the head would take her out, maybe permanently. What it was, was what it was.

She was scared, but not quite frozen with fear, said, “My keys . . .”

He stooped quickly, picked them up, pushed the button that unlocked the car: “Get in.”

—

LUCAS HAD moved slowly down the fence line. Near the end, he saw a border patrolman, one of the ones standing behind a truck, watching him. He stood, waved the rifle over his head, patted his armor; the border patrolman was talking into a radio, and a few seconds later, waved him on.

Lucas moved on up the fence, hurrying now. He could see nothing along it, wanted a quick look along the front of the house and then he’d get back to the trees. When he’d turned the corner in the front yard, he looked down to his left and saw Poole talking to a redheaded woman beside a gray foreign car. He couldn’t see a gun, but Poole was talking rapidly and the way the woman was standing, Lucas thought he probably had a gun in the hand Lucas couldn’t see.

He brought the rifle up and walked across the yard, moving as noiselessly as he could. He was completely out in the open but Poole was talking to the woman, and then bent over, and Lucas thought for a second that he’d been seen or heard, but then Poole stood and handed something to the woman—keys?—and Poole said something that Lucas couldn’t make out, and Lucas was close enough and shouted, “Poole, if you move, I’ll kill you.”

But then the woman, who’d been standing beside Poole from Lucas’s perspective, lurched between them. Poole, reacting almost instantly, swung his gun hand up around her neck and shouted, “I want a car!”

Lucas, looking at him through Bob’s red-dot sight, saw Poole’s head looming behind the woman’s, big as a gourd. He didn’t listen to what Poole was saying, but concentrated on the red dot and his trigger squeeze, and shot Poole through the nose. Poole went down as though somebody had hit him in the face with a fastball, but with his arm still crooked around the woman’s neck, and she went down on top of him.

The woman started screaming and rolled off the body, and as Lucas walked toward the fence, his gun still up in a shooting position, she got up and ran frantically back toward the El Cósmico building.

Lucas crossed the fence, while behind him a couple of Border Patrol trucks revved up.

Poole was dead on the ground.

The sun had just hit the horizon, scarlet rays playing across the gravel parking lot and over the supine body, which was leaking blood into the parking lot. The El Cósmico door slammed as the woman lurched inside, and Lucas looked down at Poole and said, “Gotcha.”