Letty didn’t answer, but asked Kaiser, “Where you’d leave the car?”
“Up by the motel.”
“C’mon. Run,” Letty said. She began running up the hill toward the motel.
Kaiser caught her at the motel parking lot and said, “I’ll drive, but I’m not sure that following those pickups down the river . . .”
“That’d just get us killed,” Letty said. “We need to get to the cops, get some communications.”
“Attagirl,” Kaiser said. When they opened the car’s door, he looked across at her and said, “Your face is covered with blood.”
“Fuckin’ tree branch,” Letty said. “Stabbed myself.”
As Kaiser pulled into the street, Letty looked out the back window. Down the hill, Rodriguez and Ochoa were standing by Low’s truck, shooting video of the dead men.
* * *
The roadblock was five miles out, but they’d gone less than a half-mile up the highway when they caught the cars and trucks of the fleeing townspeople jamming up both lanes and the narrow shoulders.
“Now what?”
“We gotta talk to somebody in El Paso,” Letty said. “If the cops have cleared the roadblock . . . I can run.”
“So can I.” Kaiser pulled the Explorer on to the shoulder, parked it, and said, “Let’s go.”
They ran.
They ran, jogged, and walked four and a half miles. Back in Washington, on her regular run, which was flat, Letty could do four and a half miles in a little over thirty minutes if she pushed hard. She and Kaiser took more than an hour and a half to run, jog, and walk the four and a half miles, mostly uphill, through the jammed-up cars, with the crowds trying to move on foot between them. At places, they were simply stopped, unable to push through. From time to time, they could hear gunfire behind them, the militia, they thought, still encouraging the panic. The sound of the ARs and AKs was punctuated by the BOOM of the .50-cal.
There was a crowd at the roadblock. As they came up to it, they were told that the police on the far side weren’t letting people through, apparently worried that some of the militia would try to get out that way.
At the roadblock itself, they found that the cops on the far side had made almost no progress in moving the palm trees off the highway. Letty and Kaiser walked around to the side, jostling through the crowd waiting there, into the headlights of a half-dozen Highway Patrol cars and a man shouting, “Hold it, hold it . . .”
Letty held up her ID case and shouted “DHS . . . DHS.”
A man, invisible behind the headlights, called in a Texas accent, “DHS? That you, Letty?”
* * *
They had radios, and the radio linked to the task force in El Paso. Letty told the task force about the trucks going out along the river, to the gun range.
“They must have a way out. You need to get somebody up in the air to look for them. I talked to a woman who said the track runs four or five miles along the river and then stops. There’s an arroyo out there that apparently blocks the road. She said you can’t get up the arroyo, but I’m not sure she knew what she was talking about. You need to put some helicopters out there with searchlights. You need to put medevacs over on the Mexican side, lot of medevacs, everything you got . . .”
“That’s under way. We saw the TV crew’s video of the bridge going down, the school bus, and you and Kaiser running across there . . .”
“Lot of hurt kids,” Letty said. “Some of them . . . they’re gone.”
“Ah, no.”
A second cop: “They’re all out of Pershing? The militia?”