* * *
Somewhat to Hawkes’s surprise, Winks’s scheme actually worked—small sips of oil from the major oil companies turned into hundreds of thousands of dollars over the two years they were working at it.
Hawkes, with serious money coming in, quit her day job at Fleet & Ranch to spend full-time organizing. She’d been right about the money. The protopopulist groups scattered around the Midwest and Northwest loved the idea of paid-for travel by air, rather than bus or pickup. Money to cover meals and rental cars, even decent motels, instead of the ratholes or back bedrooms they usually had to put up with.
Low became a celebrity among them, a tough guy who showed up at meetings with gun-toting bodyguards in off-road-equipped pickups, some with fuckin’ snorkels. And a woman, who stood behind him, her face half covered by a bandanna, who called herself Jael.
Low did the speeches; Hawkes did the thinking and the backroom negotiations.
“We need to galvanize people who think like us,” she told her conferees. “We need mythmakers. We need an Alamo. We don’t need a bunch of fuckin’ crazies running through the Capitol. We need an Alamo that people can be proud of, instead of hiding out like a bunch of chickens.”
Nods and questions. Whispered answers. Envelopes full of cash changed hands. They got organized.
More money went to the militia hardcore in El Paso. Those who couldn’t afford solid pickups got new ones, and new weapons to go with them, standardized nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols and ARs and AKs as long guns.
At the end of August, two years after they started stealing oil, they had a target and they had a D-Day. They had their symbol of resistance, their Alamo, though they were the only ones who knew it at the time.
* * *
Then, almost at the last minute:
An oil company exec named Boxie Blackburn called Roscoe Winks, to see if he knew anything about some missing oil. Winks panicked and called Hawkes.
“We’re right there,” Hawkes told Low, later that evening. “We’re at the Alamo, but we’re gonna have to disappear afterwards. We need that money. We can’t get along without it. We spent too much on . . . other stuff, and we still have to pay for the stuff from Bliss.”
She never spoke the name of the stuff from Bliss. Bliss was a U.S. Army fort in El Paso. The stuff from Bliss would cost a ton.
“Five more runs,” Low said. “We’ll tell Winks we want all the money from the last five runs, and we want it now, up front, or he could get hurt—but tell him he can have the truck, the pig, the idea, and he can get his own gang together.”
“Kind of like extortion,” Hawkes said.
“More than that,” Low said. “When Winks gives us the money . . . we’re gonna have to get rid of him.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Hawkes said.
“We’re at the bridge,” Low insisted. “The caravan is on its way. We know what they’re going to do. It’s now or never, Janey. We get rid of the Blackburns, we keep the runs going until we move . . . then Winks. The fact is, Winks could give us up. He’d do it, too, if he thought it’d save his own ass.”
Hawkes licked her lower lip.
And nodded.
* * *
Low watched Boxie Blackburn over a half-dozen weekdays, learning his routine. Although he was a manager, Blackburn was out in the field every day, usually making it home by six o’clock after a late-day stop at his office. He’d be at home for an hour or so, probably cleaning up, and between six-thirty and seven, he’d be out the door with his wife, twice to the Midland Country Club, other times to steak houses.
“He’s got a high-end F-150, a Limited,” Duran said. “His wife drives a BMW X3. Vic knows a guy who can move them across the border overnight, no questions asked. We’d get ten grand.”