The man shouted, “Hang on a minute.” Then, a minute later, “Okay, we won’t shoot at you.”
“Good. You guys chill out,” Hawkes called. “I’m going to shout out my phone number, if you have any more concerns. Have you got a pencil?”
“Yeah.”
Hawkes called out the number of her burner phone and a man inside said he’d written it down.
“If you need anything, call me,” Hawkes shouted. “Take it easy, and day after tomorrow you can have a couple drinks with your friends and talk this all over. The TV people will probably want to interview you.”
Back down the hill, Hawkes told Low, “We’re okay. They won’t be shooting at us. You got your speech?”
“I’m cool.”
“Then you hold things here, I’ll walk around town. I want to make sure that everybody’s gotten a leaflet. Rodriguez should be transmitting my interview out to El Paso by now . . . Did you talk to Bernie about the caravan?”
Bernie was a one-legged alcoholic Iraq veteran largely confined to his house in El Paso, since the VA never quite got him walking right. He was a valued member of the militia, who spent his working days monitoring police radios, mining for tips he’d call to the local television stations and, a few years before, to Crain’s and Low’s car-theft ring.
Low said, “Yeah, I talked to him while you were yelling at those Border Patrol guys. He says all the cops are talking about it, on both sides of the border. The caravan will be here by six o’clock or so, unless the Mexicans decide to stop them. He says that won’t happen, because the Mexicans want the caravan to confront us.”
Hawkes nodded: “Okay. That’s what we wanted, too.”
* * *
She spent the next hour walking the town, constantly on her phone. Every house already had a leaflet stapled to the front door, laying out simple rules—go about your business, no guns, the road out is blocked, we don’t want anyone to get hurt.
The border patrolmen barricaded in the house had given her phone number to the Border Patrol headquarters in El Paso, and a man who identified himself as a major from the Texas Highway Patrol called and told her that she and her militia had committed dozens of major felonies and that if they didn’t surrender immediately, people could die, herself included.
She said, “Nobody will die unless you start shooting. Then people will die, and some of them will be you.”
“Listen to me, lady . . .”
“No. You listen to me. We’re going to stop this caravan from crossing the river and then we’ll get out of your hair by tomorrow or the day after. Whenever the caravan gets turned around. You really don’t want to come in here with tanks and helicopters and all that, because a lot of people will die. Most of our members are actual combat veterans, so we know what we’re doing. You’ll get us, but there’ll be a lot of dead cops, too. Any possibility that you’ll ever have a career in the Highway Patrol, that any of you will, you high-ranking officers, you can forget about it. It’ll be another Waco massacre. We’ll be dead and a lot of you’ll be dead and you brass hats will get blamed. So shut up and sit down.”
She smiled at her phone as she hung up.
Ah. The jail. She hadn’t stopped there. She walked over to it, three blocks, and saw her two militiamen, faces obscured by bandannas, sitting on folding chairs.
“Y’all okay? Need anything?”
“We’re okay. Got relief coming in forty minutes.”
“I need to stick my head inside . . .”
The jail consisted of three cells, each just big enough for a cot, an outer space that was bare of any furnishings at all, and a windowless bathroom. The mayor and council members were locked in two cells, three men in one, two women in the other.