The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (113)

Hawkes and Low were with Rodriguez, Duran, and Crain farther down the hill, all watching the bridge. They heard Hawkes call to Rodriguez and Ochoa, “One minute. One minute . . .” and then “. . . Thirty seconds . . .” and then “. . . Ten seconds.”

Ten seconds passed, nothing happened.

Hawkes shouted at Low, “What happened? Are we—”

Low interrupted her, shouting back, “I told them to add on five minutes.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Hawkes looked back toward the bridge. “You’ll kill them.”

“Gotta draw the line,” Low shouted. “We’re drawing the line. You wanted the Alamo, you got it.”

“What! What!”

Letty: “Did you hear that?”

Kaiser: “He delayed . . .”

The school bus, with one good headlight, rolled farther onto the bridge; the Mexican border patrol let it go.

And Kaiser said, “Oh, shit!”



* * *





Letty leaned the AR against the TV truck and turned into the brush, and began pushing through it, away from the highway and then down the hill. Five minutes, she thought. Now four-forty. Now four-thirty. Now four-fifteen . . . Now four.

There was a thrashing behind her and she realized that Kaiser was following, not delicately, but bulling his way through the brush. She let him come. They broke out of the thicket near the end of the bridge. On the other side, a crowd was walking parallel to the school bus, on both sides of it. Letty and Kaiser ran onto the bridge and started across it, Letty screaming, “Detente! Detente! Stop! Stop!”

Kaiser was looking at his Rolex and shouted, “Three-thirty.”

Letty continued to scream, but the bus and the crowd kept coming, and Kaiser unslung the shotgun and aimed it up in the air and pulled the trigger.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Letty began screaming, “Hay bombas abajo del puente! Detente! Regresa!”

Kaiser shouted, “Three!” and “Go back! Go back!”

The bridge was three hundred yards long, the school bus already fifty yards out from the Mexican side when they reached it. The bus was driven by a heavyset woman who looked out the driver’s-side window, which was missing, and Letty shouted at her, “Hay bombas! Hay bombas abajo el puente!”

The woman seemed confused. “Que? Hay bombas?”

Behind and beside the bus, the crowd had slowed its march, and some, not many, had turned back. Letty kept screaming “Hay bombas!” and Kaiser shouted “Two!” and Letty screamed out the countdown: “Hay bombas in dos minutos.”

There were a hundred and fifty people on the bridge, maybe more. The front of the crowd had turned and was beginning to step backward, uncertain about what was happening, as Letty continued to shout at them. The school bus was now backing up, a foot at a time, slow, too slow, with people stacked up behind it, some of them banging with their fists on the fenders to stop it. The crowd on the far side of the bus had continued to move forward or had stopped, confused.

Boom! Boom!

Kaiser fired two more shots and the crowd began to move back, a few tried to run, stumbling along the edges of the bridge. Some of the caravan members, who hadn’t heard what was happening, continued to press forward from the Mexican side, blocking the escape of people trying to get off the bridge, but then, like a turning tide, people began to get off, picking up Letty’s voice, shouting at the people behind them: “Hay bombas abajo del puente!”

The school bus was missing its front door and a woman jumped out of the bus, followed by another, both carrying and dragging kids, and Letty realized that the bus was full of women with small children who couldn’t keep up with the caravan on foot.

Kaiser screamed, “One minute,” and Letty ran to the rear door of the bus and began banging on it, but a woman’s face appeared in the window and she made a windshield-wiper motion with one finger, telling her that the door didn’t work. Two more women, each with a child, jumped off the bus at the front door as the bus continued to slowly back up.

Kaiser shouted “Thirty seconds.”

They were twenty yards from the end of the bridge and some of the crowd was still standing on the last slab, and Letty yelled at Kaiser, “We gotta get the kids off,” and Kaiser shouted back, “Can’t,” and he shouted, “Ten seconds,” and Letty started back to the bus’s forward door and Kaiser picked her up as though she were a heavy coil of water hose, holding her under one arm, ignoring her as she beat on his legs with her fists, and ran for the Mexican end of the bridge, smashing through the crowd like a linebacker.

Dropped her on her feet when they got off the bridge and he said, “Should have blown . . .”

WHOMP!

The first bomb went and a handful of people who were still on the bridge managed to leap off, as the slab nearest them tilted crazily to one side, and then, WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP!

The charges began going off, not quite simultaneously, and spans began to drop into the river and onto the riverbanks on both sides, and Letty put her hands over her ears and WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP!

The explosions stopped; Letty took her hands away from her ears, to the screams of injured and dying people who’d gone down with the bridge.

The nearest slab had fallen fifteen or twenty feet onto the riverbank and the bus and thirty or forty walkers had gone with it. The bus was nose-down, the slab canted sideways, and the bus began to tilt to the side, as though in slow motion, and then toppled over as the slab beneath it wrenched free of its moorings and fell another five feet.