“We skipped most of the main drag circling around town. It’ll be along there, somewhere . . .”
A small town: they found the Lariat Inn in two minutes, a single-story row of twenty-four narrow rooms with eight or ten cars pulled nose-in to the doors. An aging white wooden sign said free wi-fi, and hanging under that, another sign, that appeared to be permanent, that said, vacancy. They went inside the office, rang a bell on the desk, and a sleepy elderly man came out of a back room, yawned and asked, “What can I do you for?”
“Got a couple rooms?” Letty asked. A clock on the wall clicked to six-fifteen.
“I do, but I’ll have to charge you for a full day if you check in now,” he said.
“That’s fine,” she said.
“Connecting or not connecting?” His eyes clicked between the two of them.
Letty looked at Kaiser and asked, “What do you think, Uncle John?”
“As widely separated as possible,” Kaiser said to the old man.
They checked in, and outside, Kaiser said, “I got that ‘Uncle John’ shit. Very funny. But in a deal like this, separate the rooms so one can be at least a temporary bolt-hole, if they spot the other one.”
“See, you know some criminal stuff,” Letty said.
Kaiser held the room keys separately in his two balled fists and said, “Choose. Then I can’t be accused of taking the good one.”
Letty chose. Her door came up first, and as Kaiser walked to his, he called back, “Not a fuckin’ thing going on here. Wake me up when you’re ready to go back to El Paso.”
Letty’s room was, as advertised, clean; the pillowcase smelled freshly laundered. Letty fell onto the bed and slept as though dead for two and a half hours, when her phone rang: Kaiser.
“What?” she croaked.
“Look out your window,” he said.
She rolled off the bed. A line of pickup trucks was rolling by the motel: a long line, spaced out. In many of them, an armed man or woman sat in the truck bed, rifles pointing to the sky.
Letty: “Oh, shit.”
“I left the shotgun in the truck,” Kaiser said.
“I’d get it while you can,” Letty said. “I’ll call Greet.”
* * *
Greet answered on the first ring. “I was about to call. Do you know about a refugee caravan . . .”
Letty interrupted: “We’re in a motel in Pershing, Texas, up the hill from the border crossing. A whole lot of pickup trucks are going by. I’ve counted thirty so far, and some went by before I started counting. There are guys with guns. I don’t know . . . a TV truck just went by, the kind with a satellite link, so whatever this is, it’ll be on TV. Billy, this could be bad. They keep coming. Here come some more now. There are a lot of them.”
“I’m calling everybody. You stay in touch. You say they’ve got guns?”
“Lots of guns. Long guns, ARs. I think they’re taking over the town . . .” she said. Then, “Kaiser’s calling me, he’s in another room. I’ll call you back.”
Still looking out the window, she switched to Kaiser.
He said, “Got my shotgun. What do you think?”
“We need to get out there,” Letty said. “I want to take a shower, but I’ll be done and dressed in ten minutes. Let’s ask the old guy if there’s a diner we can walk to. We’ll probably hear some stuff there, if there is one.”
“Saw a pizza place, but not a diner.”
“Gotta be somewhere you can get breakfast,” Letty said.