Jose glanced at Casey and said, "We don't have a plate number."
Tony tapped the tines of his fork against the spoon, looking from one of them to the other as if waiting for the punch line, before he sighed and said, "I could get you some DVDs, I guess. You'll have to watch them yourself, though."
"We'd be looking for them right away," Jose said, checking his watch. "The truck we want could've come through here any time since, I don't know, two a.m. if they were making time. Or it might come through any time now if the driver stopped, which I doubt."
"Maybe you should sit out there on the road and watch until I know I can get a copy of it," Tony said.
"I guess we'll have to," Jose said.
"I was kidding. What happens if you see it?"
"I ask for another favor," Jose said.
"And I'm going to find what in this truck?" Tony asked.
"Let's talk about that if we get to that point," Jose said. "How long would it take you to stop it if we see it heading into the border?"
"A phone call," Tony said. "Providing it's as urgent as you're making out."
"If we found the truck on the video, could you have them pull the destination?" Casey asked. "Would they have that?"
"For the right price, they'd give you a limousine ride there,'' Tony said. "Todo es para la venta, they say. Everything is for sale."
"Even women and children," Casey said under her breath.
CHAPTER 62
CASEY BLINKED AND RUBBED HER EYES WITH THE PALMS OF HER hands, clicking the pause button on the computer.
"I can't even keep my eyes open," she said, hiding a yawn in her elbow and swinging her legs off the motel bed. The room was a room like a million others, flowered bedspread with assorted stains and spots, cheap furniture, and a small television with a pay-per-view box for porn on top. Jose had dismantled the box and hooked up the laptop.
"Eight lanes of truck traffic," Jose said, his voice trancelike. "Too bad half of the hundred billion we export to Mexico comes from Texas."
He sat slumped down in the desk chair, his eyes half shut but unblinking as he stared at the screen. He picked up the menu of television choices from a little table by a bank of windows. "Lord of the Cock Rings? Must be epic.''
"You're losing it," she said. "You're running what? Thirty-six hours without sleep?"
Jose held his Rolex out in front of his face, then moved it farther away, trying to focus. "Forty."
"We have to do this," Casey said, "but we also have to sleep. You should see what you look like. Come to bed."
"You go," Jose said, his eyes glued to the screen. He flipped the porn menu into the trash can.
Casey shook her head, got up, and went into the bathroom. She examined the hint of crow's feet in the corners of her eyes, then stretched the skin taut to make them disappear. She ran the water hot enough to fill the small tiled bathroom with steam before dropping her clothes and stepping into the shower. She got clean and let the water run over her hair, covering her face.
A hand on her hip made her jump and let out a shriek.
"Jesus," she said.
Jose stepped in behind her and wrapped his arms around her middle, pulling her tight and resting his head on top of hers.
"Something about those three words," he said. "I lost my concentration."
"What three words?" she asked, turning to kiss him.
His lips grazed hers and his hands moved down the small of her back. In a whisper, he said, "Come to bed."
Casey woke with a start, sitting up in bed and feeling for Jose even as the sight of him back at the computer registered in her brain. The streetlight outside their window cast a trapezoid of pale light across the musty carpet.
"I'm guessing 'come to bed' doesn't work twice in the same night?" Casey said, sweeping the hair from her face and looking at the clock. "It's four o'clock."
"Can you come here?" he said, still hunched over, his voice laced with excitement.
Casey broke free from the covers and crossed the small room. She put her hands on his shoulders and leaned past his neck.
"Look familiar?" he asked.
Casey sucked in a breath of air at the sight of the black rooster painted on the truck's red cab.
"That's it," she said.
"Then we've got him."
CHAPTER 63
THE SUN WENT DOWN AS THEY DROVE SOUTH. THE RED CRACKS in the sky cast deep shadows across the east end of Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican sister to Laredo, Texas, just across the border. With the license plate of the eighteen-wheeler and some cash, Tony had been able to get them the truck's destination, but not the name of the facility. When Tony showed them exactly where it was on a map, they realized the eighteen-wheeler was headed for the same factory they'd passed on their way up from Monterrey with Isodora and her baby, the same place the federales had smashed Casey's camera. Jose and Casey had only been able to stare at each other and shake their heads.
While Casey argued to scope out the factory, Jose insisted that he make use of some old contacts before they made another move.
Heavy purple clouds roiled in the red light, dropping rain in sporadic sheets as they wound their way off the highway and into the city. TV antennae, water towers, and chimney pots stood out against the crimson light like sentinels atop row houses and tenements. Laundry drooped on sagging lines hung from one building to another like bunting.
"That's the place," Jose said, pointing down into a dark alley.
A green neon sign for a bar named Perro Rojo glimmered in the downpour. Garbage spilled from cans and an emaciated yellow dog trotted their way, ears flat, with a plastic bag in its mouth. A drunk peed on the crooked brick wall, steadying himself on the ladder of a rusted fire escape. At the far mouth of the alley, three men stood in dripping cowboy hats around an oil drum whose burning contents cast flickering light across their hardened faces. Jose recognized two of them, even from a distance.
"And I'm supposed to just leave you here?" Casey asked.
"I can't take you in," Jose said, "Machismo culture and all that. And no way in hell are you waiting around here. Just go back to the motel. I'll get a ride back with someone. You can watch one of those movies. I'll pay for it."
"Because you know these people," Casey said. "Right.''
"From my past life."
"I think you said something about some 'drug kingpin.'"
Jose opened the door and got out. "This side of the line, some of them are a little more reliable than the rest. Be careful backing that thing up. You gotta use the side mirrors to dodge the drunks. I'll see you back at the motel later."
He closed the door before she could say anything and turned in the rain. By the time he reached Perro Rojo's doorway at the end of the alley, the rain had stopped. Jose looked up at the thick slab of purple sky with its crimson glow, the light too weak to plumb the narrow depths or to allow Jose to read the face of the man who sat on a wooden stool just inside the yawning doorway.
"Doscientos pesos," the man said in a rough voice, holding out a large gnarled hand that glinted with thick rings until he turned it palm-up.
Jose dug into his pocket and handed the man an American twenty-dollar bill. The man snapped his fingers a few times and kept his hand out until Jose added a five. He then gave two quick double raps with his knuckles against the wood, and the door swung open. The smell of smoke and the pulse of Tejano music came from inside the building. Waves of bass and synthesizer cut through with an accordion and a twelve-string guitar. Jose let his eyes follow the counterclockwise spinning movements of the Tejano dancers in the room as he descended the long metal stairs along the far wall of the club.
At this early hour, he had his pick of several stools at the bar. Behind the shelves of liquor, fogged glass changed colors, fading from one to the next, completely out of sync with the music from the stage. Jose got himself a beer and asked the bartender if Flaco had arrived yet. The bartender, a small-breasted brunette in a spandex top, cowboy hat, and jeans, nodded toward a velvet booth in the far corner, then turned away. Jose took his beer with him. Eyes adjusted now to the low light, he became aware of the three men stationed on the lighting catwalks twenty feet above who carried, not the short-barreled MAC-10s or TEC-9s he'd come to expect from drug dealers, but what looked like M24 sniper rifles with laser sights.