Page 97 of Rooster's Remorse
Two hundred miles takes four hours because we drive like insurance salesmen.
Three vehicles, spaced, clean plates, everybody at sixty-five.
Damon's in the lead truck with Cobra and Kade.
Amara's driving the second with me in the passenger seat, Finn and Doom in the back.
Razor's got the third.
The radio's off. The heater's on. Amara doesn't try to talk to me and I love her for it.
Eventually, we come off the highway onto a county road, and I sit up so fast the belt catches me.
"Turn's coming." I put my hand on the dash. "Two miles. There's a cattle guard and a mailbox with no name on it."
Amara glances over at me. "You've never seen this road."
"I heard it." My hands have gone cold in my lap and I fold them together to stop it. "Every truck that came in went over that cattle guard. You learn what one sounds like from under the ground."
She doesn't reply to me. Her jaw works once and she puts her eyes back on the road.
We don't take the turn.
We go past it, four more miles, and pull off behind a stand of mesquite where the Vegas trucks are already waiting with their lights off and their people standing in the dark.
The creek bed's dry, the way it is ten months out of the year, and it's deeper than the satellite made it look.
Eight feet of sand and gravel cut down through the desert, running northwest to southeast.
Finn was right. There's no fence. You can't fence a creek that floods.
We go up it single file with our boots in soft sand and the banks over our heads, sixteen people moving without a sound,and nobody watches this creek, because to them the creek is nothing.
I know when we're behind the property before anybody signals it.
The ground changes under my boots.
The sand goes hard-packed.
And there's a smell coming over that bank, diesel and something sour underneath it, and every hair on my body stands up at once.
Two hundred yards up that slope is the place.
Finn moves in beside me.
He doesn't say anything.
He presses two fingers to the back of my hand where nobody can see it, and takes them away.
Amara comes down the line and crouches next to me.
"Wes." She keeps it under her breath. "Tell me about him again."
"Ten past two, and again at four." My voice comes out steady and I have no idea how. "He walks the fence line east to west. He stops at the pole barn and smokes one cigarette. Then he checks both bunker hatches by hand."
"And the others?"
"They sit in the house and watch television." I hold her eyes in the dark. "He's the only one who does it right. If we get Wes wrong, we lose everything."
