They stepped out of the woods together, Sam holding the AK-47 rifle the way the guards held theirs and wearing the guard’s hat and pants. They walked between two of the already loaded trucks, then picked one, quickly letting their silhouettes be engulfed by the silhouette of the truck. They looked in each direction, trying to see where the other guards were, but couldn’t see any of them from there.
Then, coming along the front of the trucks, was another guard. “Guard,” Sam whispered. Remi crouched beside one of the big truck tires. Sam held the AK-47, his left hand on the forestock and his right just behind the trigger guard, pushed the safety off, and stepped a couple of paces in front of the truck in a bored, slouching posture, his eyes turned in their sockets to watch the guard’s behavior.
The guard kept coming along for a few steps, stopped, then raised his right hand to wave at Sam.
Sam imitated the gesture as exactly as he could, waving back at the man and assuming it meant that he was alert and all was well. He pretended not to be studying the man for his response, just walked a bit closer to the front of the truck and waited. If he was going to have an automatic-weapons fight, he was going to use the truck’s engine as a shield. He took a few breaths and prepared himself. The other guard turned and walked off along the perimeter.
Sam moved back to where Remi waited. They stayed low as they climbed over the gate of the truck to its bed, lifted the rear canvas cover enough to let them crawl under, then pulled it back down to hide. Once under the tarp, they moved some of the marijuana packages to build a cushioning layer beneath them.
Soon they heard footsteps and voices coming to where their truck was parked. Then Sam and Remi felt the truck sink on its springs a little as a man stood on the left step and sat in the driver’s seat, then another came from the right side and sat beside him. The doors of the cab slammed, the engine started, they began to move, and very slowly the truck joined a line of trucks on the gravel road.
Sam listened to the engines for a couple of minutes, then put his head near the canvas. He whispered, “It looks as though five leave at once.” The truck moved up about five lengths and then stopped again.
This time, Remi moved her head close to the bottom of the canvas on the left side. “We’re sitting beside a sign,” she said.
“Can you read it?”
“Estancia Guerrero.”
There was a sudden surge of movement around the truck, on all sides at once. Sam gripped the rifle, and Remi drew her pistol, and they faced away from each other. Men were climbing aboard, sitting on all sides of the canvas behind which Sam and Remi hid. The men laughed and talked, while Sam and Remi, only inches away, held their fire.
The driver shifted into first gear, and the truck moved ahead, gaining rpms, until it was time to shift into second. But, then, they could tell that other trucks were moving too. And by third gear, the workers on both sides had made themselves comfortable, with their legs through the wooden side gates and their backs leaning against the canvas-covered bales of marijuana.
Remi, then Sam, lowered the guns and lay back in uneasy immobility. The trucks kept gaining speed, bouncing along the gravel road, while the men spoke to one another in Spanish, happy that the day had come to an end. After about ten minutes, the truck stopped, and about half the men got off in the center of a small village. The truck drove on again and stopped after another ten minutes, when several others got off near a double row of buildings. Ten minutes later, more workers jumped down to the road.
Sam and Remi listened for another ten minutes or so before they were sure. Remi lifted the canvas slightly and looked out, and Sam lifted the other side. “Everybody off?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Thank goodness. I was afraid I was going to sneeze from the dust.”
“I guess the next thing is to get off the truck and make our way to a town,” he whispered.
“I can’t wait,” she said. “Let’s hope they don’t reach their unloading point before we can bail out.”
They pulled aside the canvas a little and watched the sides of the narrow road while the truck wound its way through heavily forested stretches and up onto plateaus, where, for brief periods, they could see sky above them thick with stars. The distance between trucks had grown greatly during the drive. Now and then, on a curving stretch going up or down a slope, they would see the next truck’s headlights a half mile or more behind them.
Finally, they reached a steep incline where the road wound upward for a long distance. The driver downshifted as the engine labored. Remi darted out over the tailgate and stared ahead, and said, “There’s a town up ahead, at the top of the hill.”
“Then maybe we’d better bail out before we get there,” Sam said. “Get ready to jump.” They got on the right side of the truck and looked out. There was the gravel road heading upward, and, by the side of the road, a covering of low plants and bushes that didn’t seem in the dark to be woody enough to be dangerous. They moved close to the back of the truck to be ready. The road turned, so the truck slowed, and the driver needed to be looking ahead, and Sam said, “Now.”
Remi jumped and rolled, and Sam jumped after her. They scrambled off the dusty road into the bushes, and watched the truck bounce and rumble upward away from them. At the top of the hill, they could see a church, with a pair of short, square-sided steeples on the front. When the truck reached that point, it seemed to level and disappear.
Sam and Remi stood up and began to climb. She looked down. “Your leg — is that blood?” She bent and looked closer.
He looked too. “I guess it is. I must have scraped it on something when I hit. I’m all right.”
They walked up the last few feet of the hill and around to the other side of the church and sat in the moonlight to look at Sam’s leg. The blood streak went from his knee to his ankle, but it was already drying. “No harm done,” he said.
They kept to the side of the church, sat down in the dark shadows by it, and watched the second truck make its way up to the level of the church, where the town’s main street began. The truck traveled along the street without slowing. At the end of the block of closed shops and restaurants, the road curved a little and went downward, and the truck disappeared.
Sam and Remi stayed at the back of the church building and waited while the other trucks climbed the road and passed through the town, one by one. Their small convoy had consisted of five trucks, but the Fargos stayed where they were as long as they could see headlights in the distance. They counted twenty trucks before the road was clear again. It was nearly dawn when they walked out of their hiding place and saw that there were people in some of the shops already. They passed a baker’s shop, where a man was firing up a big wood-burning oven behind the building. There were people in the yards outside their houses, gathering eggs, feeding chickens, starting fires.
Sam said, “I’m hungry.”
“Me too. Did any of our Guatemalan Quetzales survive our swim?”
“I think so. I’ll look in the bag.” He opened the waterproof bag, shuffled around in it, and found his wallet. “That’s good news. My wallet survived.” He looked inside. “The money too. Let’s see if we can buy some breakfast.”