Letty yawned. “Good. I have to pee anyway. I ran out of the hotel without hitting the bathroom. Too cranked up.”
At the Love’s, they got gas and they both hit the restroom and then Kaiser piled up crackers and cookies and potato chips and jerky and energy bars and Diet Coke, and Letty got two six-packs of water and some black licorice and string cheese and bananas, and they both got large cups of coffee, and got back on the highway, a mile to the Pershing exit.
The Pershing highway was well maintained but crooked. It began on rolling desert, then quickly cut through the mountains, running along the top of a ridge, outcrops of reddish rock and dirt on one side, a deep fall-off on the other. Yellow and red reflectors marked danger spots, so many of them that they might have been an art installation. At some of the wider spots, they saw what appeared in their headlights to be the edges of agricultural fields, but they weren’t sure of that. In the sixty miles between I-10 and the outer edge of Pershing, they saw no more than a dozen houses, marked by pole lights.
“You still all right to drive?” Letty asked, after a series of quick left-right jogs in the highway.
“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 traffic going 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 a scattering 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.”