“What! Nobody told me that. But tell me, tell me . . .”
Letty gave him all the information she had, and said, “If you’ve got to talk about this, attribute it to a brave member of the Customs people. I’m sure they weren’t all in the station when they were surrounded. Some must still have phones.”
“I will. Call me! Call me!”
“That’s what everybody says,” Letty said. “Talk to you later.”
Kaiser had clipped his carry gun to his jeans, handed Letty the extra magazines he’d been carrying for her, gave her a heavy but unexpected around-the-shoulders hug, and said, “Easy does it, Letty. See you back here in an hour.” He grinned at her, added, “Laissez les bons temps rouler,” in what Letty suspected was a terrible French accent, and went out the door, dropping his blades over his eyes as he left.
Or maybe it was a good Cajun accent. She had no idea which. In any case, she thought, as she put the nine-millimeter magazines in her new/old socks, outside the motel door the good times were definitely rolling.
TWENTY-ONE
Earlier that morning:
Low looked back over his shoulder and said, “I’ve only seen one truck turning right. Chickenshit.”
“One is good, one is good,” Hawkes said. “There’ll be more.”
The sky was getting light in the east, the sun would be up before they made the turn at Van Horn. “I’m getting cranked,” Low said, after a while.
“Everybody’s cranked,” Hawkes said. They had moved left and slowed, and were now thirty trucks behind the convoy leader, with more trucks strung out behind them for a mile or more, all rolling along at eighty-five miles an hour, just above the eighty-mile-per-hour speed limit. A blond woman in a red Porsche Panamera ignored them as she passed at a hundred and ten or so, focused on the application of her lipstick. Hawkes got on the phone and called the lead truck.
“Rick: did you lose anyone in your crew back at the turn?”
“Nope. They all knew what we were in for. They’re all right with us.”
“See you there.” She called the chain saw crew, the last group in the convoy. “Lannie—you see anyone turning right?”
“I was about to call—I think we lost three trucks altogether. I thought it would be more. We didn’t lose anybody from our crew.”
“Excellent. See you at the trees.”
“Couldn’t do this first part without cell phones,” Hawkes said to Low, when she’d hung up. “When we go to the walkie-talkies, we’re gonna have some confusion.”
“Can’t avoid it,” he said.
“I know.” After a minute: “What do you have dialed in for music?”
They got on down the interstate listening to Joe Walsh and “Life’s Been Good,” part of what Low called his righteous prison mix.
* * *
The overnight meeting had taken place twenty miles northwest of Van Horn. The leading trucks made the turn and the rest followed like a loose-boned snake down the narrow highway to Pershing. Thirty miles in, they did catch an eighteen-wheeler, but it was moving briskly, a bit above the speed limit, so they let it go, and followed it toward the river as the mountain closed in beside them.
Low was silent, but Hawkes talked to the leaders of every one of the action teams. They’d all been thoroughly briefed, and everything was moving as expected, so there wasn’t much to talk about, but she wanted them to hear her confidence. “We’re absolutely on plan, it’s all nominal . . .”
“Nominal,” she thought, was a leadership-type word.