The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (114)

Letty looked at Kaiser and shouted, “We gotta get the kids out of there . . .”

Kaiser shouted back, “This way,” and they went to the side of the bridge, where a railing still stuck up, and they went around the railing, and now Mexican border patrolmen and members of the crowd began to follow them down where the slab was lying on the ground under the bridge.

The people who’d been on the slab when the bombs went off were all hurt; some of them badly, broken bones, broken backs, skull fractures, people screaming for help and crying. Mexican border patrolmen were swarming down the slab, trying to give aid, one man with a tiny kit of small bandages, Band-Aids, and disinfectant ointment.

The bus door was underneath the chassis and they couldn’t get to it, but the back door had popped open a few inches and one of the Mexican border patrolman unloaded his rifle and used the barrel as a crowbar, and with somebody inside kicking at it, they managed to wedge the door open eight or ten inches, but the patrolman was too thick to squeeze through.

Letty said, “Let me! Let me!” and with Kaiser and two border patrolmen prying at the door with their hands, she managed to squeeze through.

Looking down, the seats of the bus were like a sloping ladder to a stygian hell, dark, stinking of blood and sweat and desperation. Lights began to flicker inside, as people outside began shining flashlights through the windows on what was now the top of the wrecked bus. A woman was climbing the seats toward Letty, holding a small child with blood all over the kid’s head; the mother was shouting at her and Letty took the kid and pushed her upward to the back door, and a man on the other side of the door took her through the narrow opening, still screaming, and then the mother climbed past, trying to get out.

Letty went the other way, down and sideways. Forty people were piled up at the bottom of the bus, half of them children, all of them hurt, some trying to push out of the pile and pull others up. Letty shouted in Spanish, “Take the children up . . . Take them up.”

Women began climbing the seats, carrying children. Some were getting out, but in the pile at the bottom, many more were hurt too badly to move, and others had to be dead, Letty thought, twisted into impossible shapes; and some of them were small bundles of flesh and clothing.

She began to cry; cry and carry and climb, her body shaking, tears pouring down her face, handing injured children upward. Cry and carry and climb. A woman below her handed her a baby, and Letty began climbing toward the top again, and when she got to the door, three women were there. Two went through and the other started back down to bring more people up, and Letty handed the baby up to one of the Mexican border patrolmen, and as she did that, she realized something was terribly wrong with the baby’s neck and head; the baby was dead.

That nearly broke her. She slumped against a crazily tilted seat and pressed her hands to the sides of her head, weeping, and dimly heard Kaiser, “Bring the pole, bring the pole.”

The sound of his voice brought her back and she wiped the tears off her face and went back down. More women were climbing the seats, the backs of the seats functioning as narrow platforms. Children were being handed up, placed on the seats, then passed upward, and uninjured women kept trying to lift children and injured women out of the nose of the bus and pull them up to platforms . . .

As Letty was climbing upward with a little girl, a thick, rusty steel pole that might have held a stop sign pushed through the narrow opening of the back door and people outside began yelling, and the pole pried the door open to a point, and then with a sudden crack it was wrenched fully open and women began to climb out. Letty passed the little girl upward, and a woman below handed her a bloody toddler and she climbed up the seats and passed the child up and then border patrolmen began climbing down past her.

The bus was becoming jammed with rescuers and Letty crawled out, wet with blood and saliva and snot and urine, one sleeve nearly ripped off her blouse. She climbed out and found Kaiser there, who took her by the arm and pulled her up.

“They got it; we can’t help much more,” Letty said. She began to cry again, looking at a line of bloody, injured women, children, and a few dead bodies, now laid out on a tarp on the road, the Mexican border patrolmen working over them with towels, sheets, anything they could find to help.

Kaiser was still holding her arm, supporting her. “We gotta help,” he said.

“Then you help,” Letty snapped. “I’m gonna cross the fuckin’ river and kill some people.”





TWENTY-SIX




Some of the slabs hadn’t been blown free and were hanging by one end or the other from the vertical supports. The supports themselves had big chunks blown from their sides, but none had actually fallen. The two slabs over the river had gone down, so there was a bridge of sorts back to the American side. Hopping from one slab to the next, Letty and Kaiser crossed the water, Kaiser leading, then dropped onto the American riverbank, and Kaiser said, “There’ll still be some people up there with guns.”

“Can’t see us in the dark.”

“Not here, but there are lights up on top.”

They scrambled up the riverbank, Kaiser leading with his shotgun. Behind them, they could still hear the screams of the injured and dying, and the shouts of the rescuers. Dozens of flashlights and cell phone lights now illuminated the bus, and from Letty’s point of view, the rescuers were reduced to black shadows as they worked around the outside of the bus.