“All of them,” Letty said. “Well. Except the dead ones.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Hawkes made it out.
When she saw the bridge blow up and the school bus go down, she abandoned Low, Crain, and Duran and ran down the hill to the dirt road, caught up with the last slow-moving pickup, banged on the door until the truck stopped, then climbed inside.
“Need to ride with you,” she said to the driver.
“Happy to have you.” He was from Michigan, his name was Carl Waltz, and he had a rough red beard. “Hope we can get out. I dunno . . .”
“We’ll be fine,” Hawkes said.
“The bridge went down . . .”
“Yes.”
“Think anybody got hurt?” Waltz asked.
“I hope not. That wasn’t the intention,” she said. That wasn’t her intention; she had no doubt that Low and some of the others had fully intended to blow the bridge with people on it, and no doubt that some had been killed. Low hadn’t told her in advance because he’d known she’d refuse to go along.
She’d gone along too many times, she thought now, nodding when she shouldn’t have, beginning with the killing of the two illegals in the desert. Nodding when the men had proposed the killings of the Blackburns and Winks. Sending Max Sawyer off to die . . .
For a good cause? She still thought so, but might there have been another way? One in which the Blackburns had been allowed to live? Winks . . . she didn’t care about Winks, she admitted to herself. Max Sawyer she cared about.
The pickups in front of them were running dark, barely visible in the thin moonlight, a loose caravan kicking up dust as they passed the gun range. They could see the truck in front of them bouncing over rough spots, so they could slow for them. Everything seemed to be working except . . . there were no trucks trailing them. They were the last in the long line and Hawkes kept looking back, wondering: Low in one truck, Crain and Duran in the other. They should be coming up from behind, but they weren’t.
They took twenty minutes to drive the five miles to the hole, the Arroyo Grande, where there was another ten-minute wait, the pickups slowly going over the edge, men getting out to look at the situation. When it came their turn to go over, Waltz said, “I dunno.”
One of the El Paso militiamen was standing on the edge of the arroyo, knocked on the driver’s-side window, and when Waltz lowered it, said, “You’ll be fine. No problems so far with trucks less good than yours. Don’t hit the gas hard going up the other side. Just drive up, you don’t want your wheels spinning.”
“Like I was on ice.”
“I dunno, I never been on ice. But glad you could make it, buddy,” the militiaman said. “Say hello to your folks back home. And take it easy, you got a valuable passenger there.”
Waltz took it easy, and they went down, over, and up. On the far side, they caught up with the end of the caravan and Hawkes said, “We should be good now. It smooths out.”
“I looked at the maps. I’d like to get on the interstate, but what do you think?” Waltz asked. “You’re the brains of this operation.”
“When we get up to that loop . . . the farm loop . . . we should keep going north instead of cutting over to I-10. If there are any cops hunting for us, that’s where they’ll be. The farm roads are fast enough and we get ten more miles in, there’s a whole network of roads, branches all over. Might not be the fastest, but it’d be the safest.”
“Safe is good for me,” Waltz said. “Think we made it on national TV?”
“Oh, yeah. Before we took the cell tower down, I talked to our intel guy in El Paso,” Hawkes said. “He told me we were on every network, all the time.”