On the radio, they heard the negotiator talking to the woman. “We’re leaving four guys. They can’t get out and we can’t get in. I don’t think the Delta guy was lying, I think they’ve got food, water, cover, and guns.”
“Not to worry . . . Listen, did Rick and Bob still have their walkie-talkies on them?”
“I don’t know. I can check.”
“Wouldn’t be good if they were listening to us,” the woman said.
* * *
“She was right about that,” Kaiser said.
When the chatter ended, Veronica Ruiz said, “Okay. So we’re camping out for a couple of days. If only we had some weenies and marshmallows . . .”
“As a matter of fact,” Kaiser said, “If you check those grocery bags . . .”
TWENTY-FOUR
Letty walked down toward the border station, headed for the crowd still hanging there. An elderly man was pushing a weather-worn bicycle up the hill, and as they met, Letty asked, “Is there a sporting goods store in town?”
“Ham’s Guns ’n’ Gifts ’n’ More got some stuff,” he said. “It’s over there, around the corner.”
He pointed up the hill and she went back that way. As she turned the corner, she heard a single gunshot in the distance, a boom rather than a crack, that she thought might be Kaiser’s shotgun.
She whispered, “Shit,” and hurried along to a house with a sign stuck in the dirt by the front porch, with the store’s name on it. She climbed the porch and knocked on the closed door; a woman peered out past a safety chain. She asked, “Wut?”
“You got walkie-talkies?”
“You buyin’？”
“Yes.”
“Got a package of two for one-oh-nine-ninety-nine,” the woman said. “Work on nine-volts.”
“I’ll take them,” Letty said. “And the batteries.”
“Stay there.” The woman closed the door, came back a minute later with a plastic clamshell package that still had the $79.99 price tag on it.
Letty opened her mouth to complain, then shrugged and took two fifties and a ten out of her purse and gave it to the woman, who said, “The batteries are another ten.” The battery package said $5.99.
“You’re doing all right for yourself,” Letty said, passing over another ten dollars. “You wouldn’t have a pair of binoculars in there?” Kaiser’s binoculars were in the Explorer.
“Got a monocular. It’s pretty good. Sixty bucks.”
The Celestron Nature monocular still carried the $39.99 price tag.
Letty passed over three twenties. To the woman she said, “You ought to be proud of yourself.”
“Gotta make hay while the sun shines, and right now, it’s shining. It’s either pay me or walk to Van Horn,” the woman said. “And for the money, I don’t tell no one that you were here, or what you bought.”
“That’s a really, really good idea,” Letty said. She put some gravel in her voice, and the woman took it in, then closed the door and locked it.
Letty walked along the side street until it ended, then found a spot behind a sick-looking shrub and broke the walkie-talkie handsets out of the clamshell and put the batteries in. The packaging said that the handsets had thirty-six channels. She clicked through them one at a time, listening, and eventually found spurts of conversation on channel twenty-two.
Listening, she eventually worked out that somebody had been shot, and, shortly after, learned that the gunshot victim was a member of the militia and that the city council and Delta troopers were holed up in a cave. Kaiser had made it. A voice she recognized as Hawkes’s said that they could use the TV van to request a medevac from El Paso and a man replied that they should do that, and that they’d be at the station in one minute. “Tell the chopper to land on the bridge.”