* * *
At the roadblock, a highway patrolman told Letty that they’d been told to get her and Kaiser to the El Paso command post.
“We got stuff in Pershing, at the motel . . .”
“When we get through the roadblock, we’ll collect it for you,” the cop said. “For now, I’m running you up to Van Horn, where a helicopter will pick you up. They don’t want to land here on the highway—too iffy.”
“I’m a mess,” Letty said. She plucked at her torn blouse, a hole big enough to expose her entire shoulder.
“That’s true,” the highway patrolman said. “But you might be the only person who cares. You two are sort of a big deal, whatever you look like.”
As they got in the backseat of his patrol car, he grinned and said, “Buckle up.”
Her father had warned Letty against going for rides with highway patrolmen. “When it comes to driving, they’re a little . . . out there, I guess you’d say. ‘Fast’ isn’t good enough for them.”
Driving to Pershing from Van Horn had taken Kaiser an hour. The trip back to Van Horn took a little more than forty-five minutes. Letty suspected her fingers had made permanent grip holes in the seat in front of her. A version of the Black Hawk military helicopter was waiting at the Hampton Inn parking lot off I-10 in Van Horn, and a half-hour later it dropped Letty and Kaiser into the parking lot at the FBI headquarters in El Paso.
Two FBI agents, one male, one female, walked out to meet them and take them inside. “Got a pretty large contingent of brass hats in here . . . Got some questions,” the female agent said. She’d introduced herself as Lauren Fix.
The male agent said, “Saw you guys on TV running across the bridge . . .” His name was Rudy Fischer. “That was pretty heavy. We could see everybody crawling around the bus, then we lost the satellite feed . . .”
“You’ve got medevac people on the way, right?” Kaiser asked. “Lotta hurt people there.”
“We do,” Fix said. “We’re using everything we got to lift people out. Last count from the Mexican side is we have seventeen confirmed dead. At least thirty injured, some might not make it.”
“Ah, my God,” Kaiser said.
Letty, stone-faced, said, “We knew that, didn’t we? We got their blood all over us.”
* * *
The Pershing task force was scattered around four conference rooms, but the main center was in what looked like a classroom into which somebody had carried all the cafeteria tables and chairs, if there was a cafeteria. Before they went in, Fix asked Letty, “You want to . . . freshen up?”
“I’m okay,” Letty said.
“You’re covered with blood,” Fix said. “Your forehead is still bleeding.”
Kaiser: “She can wash her face later. We need to find out what’s going on. How many militia have you nailed down?”
“That might not be the best question to ask,” Fischer said. “Because I think the answer is not many.”
“Or even damn few,” Fix added.
* * *
When they walked into the task force center, the dozen people inside stopped talking and turned to look at them. A tall, square, fortyish man with a graying mustache said, “Well, you guys look like shit.”
Letty recognized his voice: “Didn’t have time to put on a dress.”
He smiled and said, in a dry Texas accent, “We’ve secured your rooms at the motel. We got the first cars down there a half-hour ago. There seems to be some issue about sheets and pillows.”