The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (83)

Hawkes marveled. When she was sitting in a McDonald’s with him, Low came off as a Texas hick, white trash, gobbling fries with oil-stained fingers, chewing with his mouth open, spitting pieces of Quarter Pounder around the table, dribbling ketchup on his shirt . . .

On a rifle range, he was a dangerous man, to himself and everyone around him. He never seemed to know quite where his gun was pointed, whether it was a rifle or a pistol, and if you sat next to him long enough, the muzzle would inevitably track across your nose, with his finger on the trigger . . .

But.

Get him to talk at a meeting, and he came alive. He couldn’t write his speeches, but he could deliver them, working into a kind of controlled frenzy that animated crowds and made even the skeptical pay close attention.

“. . . goddamned wetbacks taking over our country? I don’t think so, that ain’t gonna happen, as we say up in Crocket County . . .”



* * *





When he climbed down from the truck to continuing applause, Crain cut the generators, and the lights snapped out. Overhead, the stars were tiny suns, pouring their light over the gathering, bringing out another long sustained ooooo . . .

Hawkes wrapped an arm around Low’s waist and said, “You did it. You got them. Now, tomorrow morning, we got to keep them.”

“I’m worried about the first part of that, where you tell them we’ve been lying to them . . .”

“It’ll grab their attention . . .”

“It might be better if you started off sayin’ we’re worried that there are spies among us. Even one would be too many. So I lied to you a little last night.”

Hawkes considered, and said, “You could be right. I think either way is okay. I’ll sleep on it. You worry about what you’re gonna say. I’ll take care of mine.”

Low nodded and, looking out over the encampment, where people were crawling into their truck beds, or standing around talking, or smoking, random laughs and giggles, and said, “I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life.”

“We all will.”



* * *





Hawkes lay awake for a long time, lying on a yoga mat next to Crain, in the back of Crain’s truck, both of them wrapped in lightweight sleeping bags. Crain, from long practice in prison, was asleep almost immediately, and snoring. Hawkes ran through the whole scheme for the next day.

She remembered a quotation she’d seen in one of her history books, from a German general: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

She was thinking about that when she dozed off; hours later, she heard her phone beep at her, opened her eyes, and saw the night sky, and down to the horizon, Orion’s Belt, pointing down at the town of Pershing, Texas. Her mouth was dry and tasted bad; she sat up, kicked out of her sleeping bag, looked again at Orion’s Belt. An omen, she thought, and it gave her confidence.

Pershing was named after Black Jack Pershing, an American general who chased Pancho Villa all over northern Mexico, and never did catch him.



* * *





By dawn, the encampment was awake, eating breakfast. There wasn’t enough cereal to go around, though she’d bought fifty boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and twenty gallons of milk that had been kept cool in a stock watering tank full of ice. There was a little early-morning grouching and bitching, the group winding up for the action in El Paso, though it wouldn’t exactly be in El Paso.

The militias rekindled a couple of fires, burning the last of the pinewood, people spitting toothpaste into the sand and scuffing more sand over it, and there was a line at the latrines for a while.

Hawkes let that go on for forty-five minutes, then climbed up on top of the truck with the microphone and amp. “If we could crowd in around here, we’ve got some important stuff to talk about this morning. I’m going to start things off and I’m going to tell you three shocking things. First thing. I would not be totally surprised if there was an FBI informant among us. Or, maybe, an out-and-out FBI agent, a spy. That is just the way it is. That’s life. Because of that possibility, that we have a flea in our ear, here’s the second shocking thing. We lied to you last night, getting you whipped up for an action in El Paso. We’re not going to El Paso. We’re going to a town called Pershing, Texas.

“You remember Pershing. A year and a half ago, a caravan from Central America, more than a thousand people, came up here, like it was headed for El Paso, planning to rush the border. At the last minute, the whole caravan swerved down a side highway, used mostly by trucks headed for the eastern part of the States. That highway runs through the town of Ochoa, Mexico, on the Rio Grande, and across the bridge to Pershing, here in the States.

“The whole thing was stopped on the Mexican side, all those illegals packed into a parking lot. The mayor of Pershing declared a human disaster and invited them across the bridge, and the gutless men at the Customs and Border Protection station allowed them through. We have word that the same thing will happen again today, this evening—a caravan has already turned off the main Mexican highway and is headed for Pershing. We’re gonna go down there and we’re gonna stop them. I can promise you, this will be a great day for our kind of people. I’ll tell you something else: we’re not gonna get arrested, we’re not going to jail. Some of our El Paso people are walking around right now, putting duct tape on your license plates, covering up the numbers.