Immediately, the men standing behind the trucks began firing their weapons, all pointed above the station and downriver. The din was terrific and a number of the townspeople began running back up the hill, away from the station. Letty noticed some of the men firing their guns were laughing.
A demonstration, she thought.
After ten or fifteen seconds, the shooting stopped, and the man who’d been shouting through the door walked back up to it and began shouting again. A minute later, he waved toward two other men who were standing behind trucks, and the men put down their rifles and walked up to the station and followed the first man inside.
Kaiser had eased into Letty’s group of women, and said to her, quietly, “The border guys quit.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be at the diner.”
* * *
Letty followed him five minutes later. Nothing more had happened at the station—the men who’d gone inside hadn’t come back out—and as she walked past the motel on the shoulder of the road, four pickups went by, moving fast, one of them flying a pale blue flag with a bright green triangle on it, another flying a Confederate battle flag. Two of the trucks had men sitting in the back, holding rifles. One of the men waved at her.
* * *
The diner was a low red building with wide windows facing the street. It was half-full, or half-empty, depending on your philosophical view of things, but almost all the customers and two of the waitresses were crowded into the brown leatherette booths with windows facing the highway, watching the pickups going by. Everyone turned to look at Letty as she walked in, then looked back outside as somebody called, “Here come some more.”
Three more pickups streamed by, another one flying the Land Division flag.
Kaiser was sitting in a booth on a side wall. They could still see enough of the street that they could count pickup trucks, they could watch the front door, and were far enough from the crowd that they could speak quietly.
Kaiser leaned across the table to Letty and said, “You’re the Fed who shot Max Sawyer. I have to think that they got a description of you from somebody, if not your whole name and address. From the cop you think they’re talking to. There were a couple pictures of you on the Internet. I mention this because . . . if you look around . . . you don’t look like a single other woman in this town. Nobody that I’ve seen.”
A dozen women were standing at the windows; they tended toward bulk, with elaborately coiffed hair, mostly wearing yoga-style pants and loose tops meant to disguise the extra weight. Kaiser was right. She looked like none of them, and if the militiamen had seen her Internet photos, they’d pick her out in a minute.
A waitress drifted over, wearing a pink uniform with a white apron. “We’re having some excitement here, hons. Jeff says we’re still serving, though, so . . .”
“Tell Jeff to put a dollar in Roger’s jar,” Letty said.
“You’re not with . . .” The waitress tilted her head toward the windows.
“We’re not,” Kaiser said. “We’d like to get out of here if we could. We heard some shooting.” He didn’t say they’d been there.
“Down to the border,” the waitress said. “I don’t think you can leave town. One of the guys here has a wife on her way to Van Horn and she called and said the road is blocked about five miles out of town . . . There’s a big stand of palm trees there, we call it Palm Grove Corner, because you go around a corner there . . .”
“Saw it when we came in last night,” Kaiser said.
The waitress: “Lucy, this guy’s wife, said they cut down all the palm trees and piled them across the road and they’re behind the palms with guns and not letting anyone through.”
Letty said, “That’s not good.”