When I get back in the car, the driver’s seat is warm and too far forward. I scoot it back, realigning the mirrors, giving the van time to get under way. They pull back onto the feeder and continue south, driving just under the speed limit, taking 91 at the split and heading straight onto Highway 77, next stop Corpus Christi. Once the switchover is complete, the van speeds up to about five miles over the limit. They’re driving fast enough to keep up with traffic without running the risk of being pulled over.
Jeff has a point. If I call Cavallo or even Bascombe, it’ll get kicked up to Wanda’s desk and I’ll be cooling my heels indefinitely. Besides, we’re already outside HPD’s grip, which would mean bringing other agencies into the picture. There’s always Bea with her Federal reach. But that underling of hers who put the flea in my ear might have known what he was talking about. I’ve taken a lot on trust from her. When I’ve had the power to check on what she’s told me, it hasn’t always added up.
My speedometer holds steady and the whine of the engine subsides as the gears shift. Apart from the thump of the tires on rough highway, we drive in silence. The sun sits far enough to the left that no matter how I reposition the visor, I can’t block it out. I rest my elbow on the door, using my hand as a screen. This isn’t silence, not when I really listen. There’s also the wind hurtling around us, an invisible envelope of white noise. And the percussive pop of fresh insects against the windshield, already scabbed from the drive out, leaving behind viscous smears.
I hold the wand down, sluicing the windshield with washer fluid, then let the wipers swish back and forth.
“If I’d had more time back there,” Jeff says, “I would have scraped some of that stuff off.”
“What’s a road trip without a few dead mosquitoes?”
He smiles. “So how far are we gonna follow them?”
Neither of us has asked the question out loud to this point, though it’s been on the air since we left the city. There are many stops between here and the border-why assume they’re heading straight to Mexico?
“We’ll follow them until we know where they’re going.”
“I have a pretty good idea already,” he says. “It’s not South Padre. This is the delivery run. Which means they’re not stopping until they hand off those guns. Are you prepared to cross the border, or are we gonna call it quits when they hit Brownsville? You’ve got one call to me. Is that where you’ll do it?”
I don’t answer because I don’t know. The possibilities have been churning at the back of my mind. Along with my driver’s license and police ID, in the recesses of my wallet there’s a passport card, good for travel to Canada and Mexico, which I applied for at Charlotte’s behest when she was temporarily obsessed with the notion of a cruise to Cozumel, a plan she dropped, much to my relief. Since I’ve never taken it out of my wallet, I have the option of crossing the border without any hassles. Back when I was in college and the six-hour drive to the border was a regular weekend jaunt, you could pass back and forth without anything but a Texas driver’s license, and sometimes without even that. Those days are gone.
“You don’t happen to have a passport on you?” I ask.
Jeff laughs. Of course not.
“What?” he says. “You do?”
I ignore him. The passport card isn’t a solution. With the Browning on my hip and the AR-15 in the trunk, I can no more cross the bridge over the Rio Grande than the men in the white van. It’s not a matter of simply flashing my badge. I’m out of my jurisdiction, and in Mexico even the U.S. cops who are supposed to be there must go unarmed thanks to the tight gun regulations.
“If it comes to it,” Jeff says, “there are ways.”
“Maybe it won’t. Maybe they’ll meet up with Ford somewhere along the way.”
“That could happen,” he says, shaking his head.
– -
The landscape changes as the hours pass. We’ve left behind the pines for the desert-like plains, their flat monotony broken up here and there by a lonely mesquite. In Sarita, south of Kingsville, a line of northbound vehicles idle at the ICE checkpoint, waiting for the agents to confirm their citizenship and give their backseats a once-over. And this is about an hour outside Harlingen, ninety minutes from the Rio Grande, well inside Texas. The fact that the Border Patrol is operating this far north is a testament to the scale of the immigration problem. Not long ago, the agents stopped a minivan driving back to Houston and found illegals hunched between the rear seats, hiding under blankets. That arrest made the news.
The white van sticks to its southward heading. Instead of mesquites, the highway is lined by dried-out palm trees. The Gulf of Mexico is less than thirty miles from here, close enough that when I roll the window down, I imagine I can smell salt on the balmy, humid breeze.
When Hilda walked me through Brandon Ford’s procedure for making contact with Inferno, she said he usually took a flight from Hobby Airport down to Brownsville, then took a taxi downtown, crossing the border on foot. After collecting whatever Inferno had for him, he’d stay overnight at the Colonial on E. Levee Street, and then fly home in the morning. If the van doesn’t lead us to him, there’s always a chance he will be at the hotel. When I explain this to Jeff, he repeats what he said before: “That could happen.”
“This may sound crazy to you, but we might just get lucky. For days I’ve been feeling like there’s nothing to hold on to, and now that I have something, I’m not letting go. The big breaks are always like this. Half the time you don’t know what you’re doing, but it feels right, so you go with it.”
“So it’s not about evidence and hard work,” he says. “It’s about luck.”
“Napoleon thought so, too.”
“Napoleon?” He snorts the name, like I’ve just made the most unlikely connection he can imagine. “You mean him?” He presses his hand flat against his chest, tucking his fingers inside his shirt.
“That’s the one. You should study history sometime, Jeff, or you’ll be forced to repeat it.”
He rolls his eyes.
“Anyway, that’s what Napoleon would ask about a general. Not if he was experienced or tough or a genius. He’d ask, ‘Is he lucky?’ And right now, I think I am. The tip from Dearborn, that van right there. The initiative is finally on my side for a change.”
“Napoleon,” he says, shaking his head. “‘God is on the side not of the big battalions, but the best shots.’ Wasn’t that Napoleon, too?”
“That was somebody else,” I tell him. “But I can see why you’d like to agree with that one, being such a good shot.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Except there’s no God.”
“I should introduce you to my friend Carter. He’d argue with you on that point.”
“And he’d lose.”
“He would argue with us both about luck, too. He’d say everything happens for a reason, all part of the divine plan.” I glance over to see him react with an amused smile. “You don’t happen to be a conspiracy theorist, do you? Is the government hiding the existence of aliens from us, or denying the truth about the Twin Towers? If so, you’d be playing right into Carter’s hands. He has a theory about you foxhole atheists.”
He answers with a snort of derision.
“When you stop believing God controls everything, Carter says, then you start making up all-powerful conspiracies to take the Almighty’s place.”
“This Carter sounds like a moron. Plus, some conspiracies are real.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“And anyway,” he says, his voice charged, “I happen to be a determinist. I think things happen for a reason, too, but not because Zeus or Allah or God or whoever says so. My determinism isn’t top down; it works from the bottom up. We’re products of our environment, March, pure and simple. Genetically determined, socially determined, whatever you like. To people like me, the God hypothesis is a conspiracy theory-the ultimate conspiracy.”
“Still, there’s something to it-”