“My mom. I want to tell her that I’m okay.”
The woman said, “You’re gonna have to be patient, honey, like the rest of us. Hope for the best.”
* * *
Letty left the motel, crossed the highway, walked back a street, then carefully looked around the corner of a house. From there, she could see the front of the jail and a half-dozen pickups parked in front of it, several men standing outside with guns, people coming and going.
Kaiser had gotten away with it, she thought, or he was in desperate trouble.
Either way, there was nothing that she could do about it.
She turned back, recrossed the highway, walked to a street a block over, and started up the hill again, toward the downed cell phone tower. On the way, she passed a grocery store and a line of cars in the parking lot, people stocking up for a siege. As she walked by them, she noticed that each car had a sticker in the windshield, about half the size of a dollar bill—and all the cars were from Texas.
She swerved over for a closer look. Sure enough, Texas put its renewal stickers on the inside of the windshields, above and to the left of the driver. And each sticker, she found, had a tag number on it.
* * *
She continued up the hill. Two pickups peeled out of the cell tower lot as she approached it; the lot was surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence. The trucks headed east toward the roadblock—and also toward the cave where Kaiser would be holing up, if he’d gotten away with the mayor and city council.
The TV truck was still there at the cell phone tower, packing up. More pickup trucks went by on the highway, headed away from town, moving fast.
Letty checked one last time, then walked across the cell tower lot, slipping her DHS identification case out of her back pocket. Rodriguez looked up as she approached and asked, “Can we do something for you?”
“Yes. You can put me in touch with the government task force in El Paso. I’m with the Department of Homeland Security . . .” She held up her ID case so they could see the cards. “I know you can do that with this setup. One way or another, you’ve got to be talking to people. I’ve worked with these trucks before.”
Rodriguez: “Wait, wait, wait, there’s no way—”
“I’m not giving you a choice. You’ll find a way unless you want to go to federal prison for the rest of your life,” Letty said. She took the 938 out of her pocket, held it in her hand, pointing at the ground. “To make a point of how urgent this is, I’ll shoot you in the kneecaps if you say ‘no,’ so you’ll go to federal prison as cripples. Am I getting through to you now?”
Rodriguez and the camerawoman looked at each other, and then the woman said, ‘You don’t look like—”
“Because I’m trying to stay out of that jail they’ve got going down there,” Letty said. “Now: how does this work? There must be somebody from the task force looking at your signal as soon as it goes into a TV station . . .”
“You could get us killed,” Rodriguez said. “These people aren’t fuckin’ around. They could turn on us, if they thought . . .”
“That’s your problem: killed later or shot now,” Letty said. “Your choice. Besides, I don’t hardly think they’d kill their PR team. Especially if the PR team keeps their mouths shut until this is all over.”
* * *
Rodriguez got in the truck and called the station; there was some back and forth and then he crooked an index finger to call Letty over. He handed her a pair of earphones and the microphone that had been clipped to the camera.
“You’re on,” he said.
Letty said, “Don’t go away. I want to be able to see both of you. Neither one of you can outrun a nine-millimeter slug.”