Bob and Rae got out of their truck, both carrying their M4s, and Lucas was already running south after the fleeing man, and Bob and Rae, coming up behind him, saw the man go over a fence into the heavy weeds in an adjacent field. Lucas had his pistol out and fired two shots in that general direction, and Bob thought, Not much chance at that distance . . .
The man in the field went down, then popped up again, only six feet back in the weeds, and from the way he came up Lucas saw that he had a rifle and he screamed, “Gun,” and went flat, got some dirt in his mouth and a sudden chill, on the ground, exposed. He began rolling, scrambling, left toward the buildings, looking for anything to get behind.
He heard a series of bangs, rapid rifle fire, and Rae shouting, and when he looked back, Rae was on her back and Bob was climbing over her, covering her, and Lucas looked back down the road where the man had been and saw him jump back over the fence and run across the road into the cover of the salmon-colored buildings, which were adobe or brick or concrete, not something you could shoot through.
The man was moving fast, no longer carrying the bag, but still carrying the rifle. Lucas got off one shot, to no visible effect, and then he crawled backward, gun still pointing at the place where the man had disappeared, back toward Bob and Rae, where Rae was sputtering, “Get off me, get off me,” and Bob said to Lucas, “She’s bleeding . . .”
The shooter was nowhere in sight, and Lucas shoved Bob off Rae and found blood over Rae’s shoulder and cuts on one hand. “Get the vest off her,” Lucas said. The vest had side snaps, and they unsnapped it and peeled it back and Rae said, “Doesn’t hurt . . . much . . . hand hurts the worst.”
With the vest off, Lucas unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it aside and found a series of shallow cuts across the knob of her shoulder.
“Not bad, nothing penetrated,” Lucas said. “Looks like somebody slashed you with a knife.”
He looked around, picked up her M4. The gun had a gouge down what would have been the outside of the top-mounted Picatinny accessory rail. “Slug hit the gun,” he said. “If it hadn’t, you’d have a hole in your face.”
She sat up. “That sonofabitch. I’m gonna pop his ass.”
“You might need stitches,” Bob said.
“I’ll get them later,” she said, rolling to her feet. She flexed her right hand. “When the gun came out, it yanked on my thumb. Gonna have a bruise, but I’ll live. Where’d he go?”
“Ran behind one of the buildings,” Lucas said. “I’m going around to the other side. Try to flush him out. Bob, call the Border Patrol guys, tell them what’s going on, get them on the highway on the other side of that field, and get some more guys down here in armor.”
“Careful,” Bob said. “We’ll push him from this side.”
Rae picked up her rifle, pointed it at a phone pole, looking through the Aimpoint sight, and pulled the trigger once. A piece of reflective plastic the size of a quarter jumped off the pole.
“Sight’s still good,” she said. She asked Lucas, “You ever shoot one of these?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to take your gun,” he said.
She handed it to him. “Take it. We’ll need a rifle on both sides of the building, and I’m going with Bob down this side. We got the team thing worked out between us, and I’ve got my .40.”
Lucas took the rifle and said, “Get the Border Patrol moving. We need Poole to know there’s no way out. Maybe he’ll quit.”
“I don’t think so,” Bob said. “He thinks he’s shot a cop. That’s a no-no in Texas.”
—
LUCAS JOGGED around the building and on the far side, peeked. He could see two large brick-and-glass buildings across the way, with domed roofs, like Quonset huts. He stepped out, slid down the face of the building, watching for anything, any sign of movement.
Somebody behind him shouted, “Hey!” and Lucas nearly jumped out of his skin. He brought the muzzle of the gun around and found himself looking at a thin, long-haired woman in a light blue T-shirt. She saw the gun and threw up her hands and screamed, “No!” and Lucas shouted at her, “U.S. marshal! There’s a man with a gun out here! Get back inside and lock down! Tell everybody you know, lock down! Call everybody you know. Don’t come outside!”
She ran away and Lucas brought the rifle back around, saw a twitch in a bush, nearly triggered off a shot before he realized it was a small gray bird flitting through the branches.
He was, he thought, in an odd place, and for a moment he thought it might be the remnants of an old college campus.
He was standing beside a double curving line of buildings that must have extended for the best part of a half mile to the south, and parallel to each other. To his right, as he looked south, the U-shaped buildings looked like they might once have been dormitories, with courtyards in the middle of each U.
The buildings faced a sidewalk that defined the curve, and were spaced maybe thirty-five or forty yards apart. On the other side of the curve was the second set of buildings, small rectangular structures that filled in the forty-yard gaps between the U-shaped buildings. Together, they made two “C” shapes, inscribed inside each other.
On the far side of the two lines of buildings, two large, domed brick-and-glass structures rose out of the prairie.
Taken together, the arrangement of buildings made it nearly impossible to clear out, without taking heavy risks. He got his phone out and called the Border Patrol’s O’Brien.
“Got a problem. We need to surround these old buildings and then we need to clear them one at a time,” Lucas said.
“It’ll be getting dark soon,” O’Brien said. “Once it’s dark, it’s gonna be tough. I need to bring some lights in here. We’ve got them, but it’ll take a while. That old fort is a tangle—it’ll be like trying to clear out a block of tenements in Brooklyn.”
“It’s a fort?”
“Used to be. Now it’s an art place—Donald Judd and all that. Marfa’s pride and joy.”
“Well, whatever it is, we need to get him before dark,” Lucas said. “We won’t have to clear all the buildings, only the ones south of those two big buildings. We saw where he ran between them . . .”
“I’ll get everything going,” O’Brien said. “Give us ten minutes to get organized.”
Lucas called Bob and told him that the Border Patrol was sending more people to help clear the buildings. “Get out wide of the buildings so you can see down the whole length of them. If he makes a break to the west, you’ll see him. I’ll get over here where I can see a break to the east.”
—
DARLING WAS crouched behind one of the salmon-colored buildings. He called Poole: “I’m fucked, man. I shot a cop, and the place is gonna be swarming with more cops any second. Listen, there are three white trucks parked behind some of those pink buildings down south of you . . . southwest, I guess.”
“I know where you’re at. I heard the gun,” Poole said.
“Okay. Anyway, our truck is in the middle, the keys are on the floorboard on the driver’s side. Don’t think I’m going to make it, and I’m going to call my old lady in a minute, to tell her.”
“I’ll head down your way. If I can help out, I will,” Poole said. “I can’t go out to the highway, the Border Patrol trucks are all over the place, guys with rifles. I could take a couple of them out, but that wouldn’t get me anywhere.”
“Okay. Do what you can,” Darling said. Poole clicked off.
Darling called his wife. Before he could say anything, she asked, “Where are you?”
“Near El Paso, somewhere. I got cops all over me, I shot one of them. I’m not gonna make it back, sweetheart. They’ll be tearing the farm apart . . .”
“Sturgill, Sturg . . .” Panic in her voice.
“I’m sorry, honey, but that’s the way it is. Now listen, listen—when they identify me, they’ll be all ove
r you. Tell them the story we worked out. But the main thing is, stay cool. Don’t mess with that money, it’s safe right where it is.”
“Sturgill, you gotta get away . . .”
“I’m trying, but it’s not gonna work, I don’t think. They’ll be swarming me, any minute. I’m gonna make a run for it . . . but if I don’t make it, you’re the only woman I ever loved and I still love you, Janice. Take care of the girls . . . When things cool off, maybe move the money to Canada. You’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”
“Sturgill . . .”
“Gotta go right now, sweetheart. Take care, forever.”
“Sturg!”
He clicked off. After shooting the cop, he’d dodged behind one of the buildings, and when he came out the other side, had run as hard as he could, as long as he thought reasonable, and then one building more, expecting at any moment to be shot in the back.
He dodged behind one of the salmon-colored rectangular buildings, then took another chance and scrambled on hands and knees into the grassy field on the other side, and flopped on his belly.
Got a chance, he thought. Got a chance. The cops would think he’d be holed up inside one of the buildings and would take a while to figure out that he wasn’t. From where he was, if he slowly and cautiously lifted his head, he could see men with guns on the highway, and then two Border Patrol trucks turned off the highway along a road or a track he couldn’t see, started bumping through weeds, and turned toward him. Had to move: he went north, toward the two redbrick domed buildings. If he could just work his way past them, and into town . . . into a place with cars that the cops weren’t watching . . .
—
POOLE HAD worked his way south, where he found that the weeds suddenly ended, giving away to closely trimmed ground. The highway was to his left, and he could see a Border Patrol truck a hundred yards down the way, with a border patrolman standing behind it, with a rifle pointed over the hood.
The hippie place, the trailers and teepees, were across a fence, and right there, ten feet away, was a hole in the fence. Had to take a chance, he thought, but first . . .
He lay on his back, loosened his belt, and used the leather to protect his fingers as he plucked two dozen sandburs from his hands and fingers. Hurt worse than when that dealer in Biloxi shot him. He had dozens more scratching at his legs, right through the denim.
When his hands were free of the burrs, he crawled through the fence, out into the open. His belt was still loose, and he pushed the barrel of the rifle under the belt and down alongside his leg, then retightened the belt.
He crawled behind some trees, found that he could move in a curved path, not easily visible from the highway, toward the middle of the campground, or whatever it was, the place with teepees and trailers. He was doing that when Darling called, to say he was trapped. Poole didn’t know what he could do about that, but if there was anything, he told Darling, he’d do it.
He would catch glimpses of the Border Patrol trucks down the highway as he walked along the line of trees, but nobody was looking at him: they were looking across the fields toward the low pink buildings. It occurred to Poole then that the cops might not know that there were two of them.
That they thought Darling was him.
There was a campground building off to the left of him, and if he could amble over there, find somebody getting into a car . . .
He started to make that move when he realized that there was no traffic on the highway. None at all. The Border Patrol had apparently plugged it at both ends, keeping traffic away from the ongoing shoot-out. Couldn’t pull out on the highway if that were the case.
He turned away from the highway, saw a woman walking across the campground, a cell phone to her ear. What looked more innocent than somebody walking while talking on a cell phone? He dug his phone out and put it to his ear, and limped across an open area, the limp induced by the gun down his leg.
On the far side of the campground was a parking lot of some kind. Not until he got close did he realize he was looking at a big Border Patrol facility, behind a chain-link fence. He went to his left, and when he was past the Border Patrol fence, took a quick look around and slipped into the high grass in the field behind the Border Patrol lot.
He pulled the rifle out of his belt, crossed through a clump of trees, and found himself coming up behind some kind of concrete bunker. A military facility of some kind? There was a dirt path in front of the bunker, and he looked left and right, and found several more of the bunkers trailing away to his left.
Nobody around. He settled into one of the bunkers and a moment later, saw three Border Patrol vehicles coming down a road to the north, headed toward the two big domed buildings. Had somebody seen him? He didn’t think so. Darling was down here. That’s probably who they were looking for.
Poole thought about it, thought about Darling. Brought the rifle up, steadied it against the bunker wall, thought about it until he decided it was best not to think about it and fired a burst of a half dozen shots at the first two trucks. The trucks went sideways and he settled back down out of sight.
Heard people shouting . . .
—
LUCAS HEARD the gunfire, not from where he thought it should be. The shots came from behind the domed buildings and not down the line of smaller buildings. He called Bob: “Poole’s moved. He’s on the other side of those big brick buildings.”
“We heard,” Bob said. “What do you want to do?”
“I’ll make a break for the first building. You and Rae set up where you are. If I’m wrong, and he pops up . . . take him out.”
“Yes. Go anytime.”
Lucas set himself to run, took a breath, got a tight grip on Rae’s rifle, and sprinted across the open space to the first big building. The distance wasn’t long, but he’d be exposed long enough that a good shooter might try to knock him down.
He nearly slammed into the glass wall of the building. No shots. He caught his breath, waved back at Bob and Rae. And his phone was ringing. O’Brien.
“We’ve had two trucks hit by gunfire, we got two guys hurt from glass splinters,” O’Brien said. “We’re not moving, because we can’t see exactly where the gunfire’s coming from, but we know he can see us. We’ve got to get our wounded guys out of there. We think the shooter’s probably out in the field behind the old armory buildings . . . Anyway, we’re stuck halfway down the street leading to Chinati, and one of the trucks will try to back out of there with our wounded guys. The other one has some guns pointing down into the field. If he gets up, we’ll get him.”
“Chinati? What’s that?”
“The art place. That’s where you’re at. Look north. Can you see the trucks?”
Lucas looked north and on a road leading out of the parking lot he could see the front grille of one of the Border Patrol’s Chevy trucks.
“Yeah, I see them. I’m behind one of the big domed buildings.”
“Okay. We think the shooter’s in the high weeds on the other side of where you are. Careful. He could be moving.”
Lucas got off the phone, realized that the buildings had long glass walls on both sides, and that he could see clear through the building to the field on the other side. He couldn’t see anything moving in the field. Took a moment to check the curved line of buildings behind him: didn’t see anything there, either. Bob called: “Anything?”
“No.”
“Then we’re coming. We’ll hit the other end of the building you’re at,” Bob said.
“Come ahead.”
A minute later, Bob broke from the cover of the smaller buildings, ran heavily across the street, and set up at the far corner of the building. Rae followed him ten seconds later, and then all three of them were at the corners of the building, looking out toward the field.
Lucas said into the cell phone, “Okay, I’m going up to the front end, take a peek.
See what I can see.”
He was fifty feet down the length of the building and jogged toward the front: later, it occurred to him how stupid he’d been—if he could see through the building to the field, somebody in the field could see through the building to him.
He ran past the windows to the brick superstructure and peeked around the corner to the northeast, once, saw nothing, peeked again . . .
Bang!
He went straight down, his face burning, had the presence of mind to roll deeper behind the building. The shot, he thought, had come in from an angle, had to be from the northeast, and he shouted to Bob, “I’ve been hit. I can’t see out of one eye, I’m down . . .”
Bob shouted, “I’m coming . . .”
Lucas pushed himself up and shouted in the direction where Bob had been, “He’s got an angle on us, don’t come any further than me.”
Everything in his left eye was blurry and red and then Bob was kneeling next to him, and Rae came up, and Lucas said, “Don’t poke your head around the building, for Christ sakes . . . How bad is it?”
Bob said, “You got the same thing as Rae. The slug missed your head by an inch, but must have hit the bricks. Your skin is full of brick splinters, on your forehead and in your hair. You’re bleeding, but it’s superficial, I think. You got a lot of blood rolling down into your eye, through your eyebrow.”
“Probably why I can’t see shit,” Lucas said. His stomach was tight as a drum, from the stress. Blinded?
Rae said, “Hang on,” and, a minute later, said, “Lay down in the dirt and turn your face up. I’m gonna wash your eye out. Bob, keep watch.”
She had a bottle of Dasani water stuck under her vest and Lucas lay down, and she poured a stream of cool water into his eye and off his forehead. He blinked a few times and his vision began to clear.
She asked, “So you’re wearing a really expensive shirt, right?”
“What?”
She asked again and he said, “It’s a Façonnable . . . why?”
He felt a tug at his waist as his shirt was pulled free, and then a long ripping sound. “You may need a tailor,” she said. “Sit up, I’m going to wrap this around your head to keep the blood out of your eye.”
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