An American Outlaw (20 page)

I got out of the Dakota.

Tennille watched me.

I started to count off the distance, in strides.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting the range,” I says. “From the tree line.” 

She calls from the truck. “What for?”

“Figure you're going to be in behind that freight car. I'm going to be in behind the trees, with the Dakota. I want to know you can hit 'em from back there.”

“I'm not shooting anybody.”

“Got to know the range.”

“Gil...”

“I know. I heard you.”

It was thirty two. Thirty two strides. Maybe thirty five meters, at the outside. I think in meters, when it comes to range. 

Good enough. My reckoning. 870 Remington on a full choke.

I walked back to the freight car. 

“You're in behind this,” I called to her, “on the shoulder of the car.” I showed her. Stood where I meant for her to be. “They don't see you, as they're coming up the road.”

Tennille got out of the truck. She stood there, looking at me.

“You got the rear of the van,” I says, “as soon as it passes by the freight car.”

She put her hands on her hips.

I ran back over to the line of trees. “I got the Dakota in behind here, they're not going to see me, any more than you.”

“Then what?”

I put my hands out in front of me, like I had them on a steering wheel. “I pull out from behind the trees,” walking forward, “and park it across the road.”

“That's going to work?”

“Time it right, yeah.”

“How come?”

“They got no time to make a play.”

She says, “So, what happens?”

“I get it right, they got just enough time to stop. Before they hit me.” 

I ran back to the freight car, Tennille's position. 

“Soon as they come past, you move.” I ran out, still showing her. “You get up behind the van. Shoot out both the rear tires. Boom. Move. Boom.”

“Just like that?”

“Like that. They can't see you, can't hit you. You're safe. ”

“That's going to get their attention.”

“I already did that parking a truck across 'em. Plus I shot out the windshield and put a couple on the engine.”

“They're taking fire both ends...”

“And then, we offer them a way out.”

“Which is?”

“They offload the money.”

“You can get them to do that?”

“I'll be doing my best to be persuasive.”

She looks at me. Takes a hand off one hip. Rubs at the side of her neck. “Then what?”

I bent down—picked up the imaginary flight-cases from where they threw 'em out of the van. “I get these.”

“What do I do?”

“Point your 870 the hell at 'em.”

“No shit.”

“Then I drive us out of here.”

“You?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“How come you?”

“I'll make it fast. At 10mph we put 14 feet between us and them every second.”

She looks at me.

“At 30mph, that goes up to 44 feet. Per second. Speed, speed, speed.”

“What am I doing, covering them off?”

“After the first ten seconds, it don't matter. We're already gone.”

“You sound pretty sure.”

“It ain't like, my first. It's an ambush, right?”

She stared at the line of trees. Past the old freight car.

“I ain't no criminal. But I got this
.
”

She runs a hand through her dark hair. “I think maybe you do...”

CHAPTER 22

Terrell County, TX.

From the single-engined Cessna, Whicher sees the great sweep of land stretching beyond the Edwards Plateau—Texas, the Rio Grande and Mexico. To the west, the evening sky's filled with broken cloud. In the south, a bank of solid gray approaches; a moving wall, a mile high.

The pilot works to trim the aircraft; fifth time in as many minutes.

Whicher points through the cockpit windshield. 

“We got some weather headed in?”

The pilot, name of Logan, cracks a gap-toothed grin. “Mexican monsoon,” he says. The sound of his voice metalized in the headsets.

“That it?”

“Kicking up a lot of turbulence. This plane about flies itself if you trim her right. Not tonight.”

The sheer face of the storm cell is solid. Dark as a bruise. “Everything okay?”

“Just fine,” says Logan. “Except we may have to divert.”

“Really?”

“We're on visual flight rules,” the pilot says. “Not instruments.”

Whicher looks at him.

“Can't fly if we can't see. Can't land, either.”

The marshal stares out with a brooding eye. “I came up out of Lajitas, earlier. Clear as hell, then.”

“Lajitas? Who you fly with?”

“Big guy. Not much hair. Wearing a leather jacket.”

“Sounds like Dusty.”

“Y'all know him?”

“Ex-crop duster, I used to work with him. Now I know why you're gripping on the side of that seat there.”

“If we can't go to Alpine, where can we go?”

“Let me run a check on the weather. See how fast that thing's moving.”

Whicher turns to looking out under the high wing. He thinks of Brooke AMC. The patrol. 

Whichever way you cut it, it'd been a disaster. The report, the one he'd seen, was just the half of it. Rescue attempt was a separate action, classified—detail withheld. 

Michael Tyler was a DUI to Lafayette police. But he was a Vet. A brave one, after all. 

Whicher searches the empty desert beneath him. Tries to shut out the drone of the engine. 

Brooke had left him depressed. Before leaving, he asked Zemetti what'd happened to Captain Black. Car bomb, the doctor told him. Six months back. In Iraq.

Whicher'd handed his security tag to an army nurse—while an orderly worked a motorized cart across the floor.

“Apart from the loss of limbs and the burns,” Zemetti'd said, “there's severe head trauma. Memory loss, behavioral change. He doesn't even really know he's had a brain injury.”

“Why not?”

“He lacks the cognitive function to perceive it.”

Brooke was an incredible place, but no-one walked away unscathed. 

Whicher stares down from the plane. He thinks of three robberies. Lafayette. Alpine. An interstate gas station.

From the pilot's seat, Logan taps him on the arm.

“Word on that Mexican monsoon...”

“How's it looking?”

“Moving north-east a little fast. Could be marginal.”

“Will we have to divert?”

Logan nods his head. The sun at the horizon blazes off his gold-rimmed Aviators. 

“We'll have to run north a little. We're good for fuel.” He taps into a GPS screen, brings up a flight chart. The position of their aircraft shown in the center. “Where do you want to go?”

“North from Alpine?”

Logan zooms the scale on the chart. Scrolls north and west. “We can do Fort Stockton,” he says. “Or Pecos?”

“Pecos.”

Logan types the identifier, PEQ, into the GPS.

 “Runway 14. Elevation, two six.” He points to the top corner of the GPS screen. “That's your ETA...”

Whicher thinks of the girl; Tennille Labrea. No links. No direct evidence. 

But where was she? Where was the daughter? 

He thinks of the teacher back in the trading post. Jed Reynolds. His little speech. Standing up, defending the folks you lived among.

Something got the whole thing started. Nate Childress; it had to be on him. 

Three weeks back, he'd taken his own life. His kid brother and two ex-Marines up and get on some kind of a rampage. 

Whicher gazes at the hills to the west, deep ravines of shadow stretching out as the sun begins to slant past the horizon.

What happened to Nate Childress, after Iraq?

From a mile above, the ground begins to shift shape, the wall of rain already threatening, about to blank out everything.

Smother every point of reference.

Christoval,  South of San Angelo.

Rain. Rain full of fine dust. Of desert, the way I remembered—from night patrols, thousands of miles from there.

The wipers beat time in the Dakota. I had my window rolled, wiping my wet arm on the side of my leg. 

Tennille was by me. Her shotgun against the door of the truck.

A stitch of light. Cars moving on the highway, in the distance. Our tires hit standing water, running off the fields at the side of the county road.

Shining out of the dark ahead, is a mess of lights. 

Tennille opens her mouth to say something. I can't hear, the rain's so hard, railing on the roof.

I slowed up to where the light spilled across the wet roadway. Pulled over, to an empty gravel lot. A diner. Lit up in neon. Red, white and blue, like the flag.

“You think it's open?” she shouts.

“That's a hell of a light bill, if it ain't.”

I snapped off the engine. Stared at the bright panes of glass lit up in the black night. 

Tennille pulled the hunter's jacket around her.

“Let's get something,” I says. “We've got to eat.” 

I grabbed my jacket. Felt for the weight of the SIG. Jumped from the truck.

I ran across the gravel lot, into the diner. Nobody in there. No other customers, but it was open. I dumped my jacket on a seat. Slid into a booth

I checked the menu card. Tennille walks in. She stands by the booth. 

I looked up at her, at the rain running down the skin of her flawless face. Hair black and wet, against her shoulders.

“Get something,” I says.

She sits down opposite. Turns her face to the window.

From a door in back, a guy comes out behind a long counter.

Tennille's just staring into the darkness, outside.

The counter guy comes over with a notepad open in his hand. He's late-fifties, a glass-cloth on one shoulder, worn-looking, but friendly. 

“Evenin' to you.”

“Evening.” I picked up the menu card. “Can I get a steak?”

“What kind of size?”

“Sixteen ounce, medium.”

“Any side?"

“Little okra. Corn. Cup of Chilli.”

“Got it,” he says. “Ma'am?”

She shakes her head. “Just coffee.”

He puts his pen behind his ear. Walks on back to the counter.

Outside, on the road, nothing's moving in the pitch black. I stared out the window. Thought of Jesse. Out there, riding through the dark land. Or was it all in my mind?

I stared at my reflection. Distorted. Like somebody I didn't even recognize. I caught her watching me, in the glass.

“Why don't you eat something?”

She didn't answer.

I thought of Michael, of dragging him the night before—getting him into Connie's Tahoe. Face drained, how it was. The weight of his body. Out of it. Unconscious. In stage four shock, from loss of blood.

I looked at Tennille. “You don't have to do this.”

Her hands were resting on the table between us. She picked at the silver bracelets.

I thought of Connie. The crawl of skin across her cheekbones. Pained eyes. Ten years burned out of her face.

You took up a gun, your world could turn upside down in a heartbeat. A bank. A gas station. A patrol, the other side of the world.

Or a robbery, the fields of Texas.

You stepped off, the fall could be an inch, a mile—unending. Nobody to save you, nobody there. Except for people like Connie. With ravaged faces, in forgotten rooms.

“You can change your mind,” I said.

She didn't answer.

“I could take that van without you.”

She messed with her bracelets. 

The counter guy brings two cups of coffee to our table.

Tennille picks up the menu card. “Can I get a slice of that sheet cake?”

“Yes, ma'am. Right away.”

The guy walks back to his counter.

I looked at her.

She says, “I want my share.”

Along the walls of the diner were row after row of old-time photographs. They were lining the place; guys in Model Ts from the thirties, box-front trucks from after the war. Walls of memorabilia. A country on the move. Everybody going some place, in farm trucks and Fords. Horses and wagons.

“Go home,” I told her.

I heard the door swing open from the kitchen in back.

“You got Michael hid away in them hills. What am I going to do? I'd give you the money anyhow...”

She didn't answer. 

The guy comes out from the counter with our order.

Tennille sat in silence staring down at the table. It was covered in knocks and scars. Everything in there clean, not new, but made the best of.

The counter guy sets our food on the table. I told him, “Thanks.”

“You got it.”

He went on in the back.

Tennille says, “The people you're planning on taking care of?” She cuts a corner off the sheet cake. “The ones you're stealing for...”

I looked at her.

“You said you're not a regular bank robber.”

“I said that.”

“They know what you're doing? In their name?”

I watched the parking lot. The road beyond it. “I'm doing it. They don't have to know.”

“It's for people you fought with?”

“Them. Their families.”

“What kind of injured are they?” She set her pressed-steel fork in the crook of her hand; balancing it on her finger like a weigh-scale.

“TBI, worst of 'em,” I says. “Traumatic brain injury.”

She's just watching me now.

“Bomb goes off by the side of the road, you're either dead or cut in half. Or the shock-wave hits your head so fast, so hard, your skull's moving like a rocket's strapped on it, but your brain, inside there, can't keep up. Like being in a car wreck. Times fifty.”

I felt the distance between us. 

She turned the fork in her hand. Cut another edge off the sheet cake. She put a piece up to her mouth.“You think that gives you the right?”

I held her look. “You think taking care of your daughter does?”

I turned back to the steak on my plate. Cutting hungry, through the fat and meat.

“Why here?” she says. “Why this place? Why a cattle auction?”

“Why Mexico,” I says, “with your daughter?”

She sat back from the table. Shook her head. Looked at me.