Hunter went to the waist-high rail on the outside of the walkway, put her hands on it and vaulted over, half-turning in the air so her feet landed on the outside edge. She held to the vertical struts and lowered herself until her feet dangled three feet above the ground. Dropping to the earth in silence, Hunter hurried to the far end of the hotel. A quick look at the second floor showed three soldiers checking doors. They focused on the doors and rooms, not looking at the ground below. She waited until she heard them enter a hotel room, then ran across the open area and hopped over a low fence before trotting to her pickup parked a block away, on Calle Niños Héroes.
She started the pickup and pulled from the area onto one of the main streets just in time to watch police units patrolling up and down the roads, looking for anything that caught their eye.
Hunter’s heartbeat didn’t lower to normal until she was across the International Bridge and a good four blocks into Presidio. She drove the speed limit all the way through town, then turned toward Marfa, driving the rest of the way at eighty-five, anxious to get some distance between her and the shooters, and chancing she wouldn’t encounter any Highway Patrol units on the road.
At home, she went in through the back door, stopping by the kitchen sink to grab a glass from the cabinet and fill it from the faucet. She drank two large glasses of water before going upstairs to change into shorts and a black tee shirt. She took her old MacBook Pro with her on the way down the stairs, went to the couch, opened the computer on her lap and inserted the SanDisk.
Seven images showed on the screen. Hunter enlarged each one and looked them over carefully. One was of several barrels of some sort of beans, and two others showed what looked like drones being assembled. The remaining images were of desert mountains. She couldn’t tell much more than that. She checked them again, hoping to at least recognize which mountains they were but came up with nothing.
The doorbell rang, so she put aside the laptop and opened it. Her friend, Raymond Flores, stood there in his Border Patrol uniform, grinning at her.
He said, “I got a notice from the Chief, said to come to your house after I get off work and talk to you.”
Hunter ushered him in and pointed to the living room couch. Raymond took an armchair near the couch as Hunter sat down by the computer. She said, “I got word a half-hour ago. We’ll be working together again.”
“Yay, us.” He grinned. “Since the heart attack, I’ve been walking the straight and narrow. I’ve lost thirty pounds and yesterday got a clean bill of health, of course that’s after two stents and the doctors double-checking to make sure there is no heart muscle damage. Cholesterol is down to one eighty, too. Leaving light duty and being able to go back to full duty is like getting out of prison.”
“You’ve definitely leaned down. Did you get new pants or take the others in? As much weight as you lost, if you take the pants in at the waist, you’re gonna wind up with one back pocket.”
“Har-har. I had Connie take them in. Shirts, too. Now, you want to fill me in? They didn’t tell me anything except to talk to you.”
She filled him in on everything, from finding the body in the desert, to now.
“Okay, and since Art is out of the picture because of a broken ankle, they decided to let two Border Patrol Agents do this? Without supervision?” He grinned again, “Oh, they don’t know what they have done, do they?”
Hunter patted the couch beside her, “Come over here and help me figure out what the photos are, and why anybody would hide them.”
Raymond looked at them, pointing at the barrels of beans. “Those are castor beans. I remember them from when I was a kid. Mom had the plants around for ornamentation. We used to open the pods when they dried so we could look at the beans because they were pretty. We also broke off the branches because they were straight and hollow and we would get dried okra from the garden, break them open to get the okra seeds that looked like small white bb’s, then shoot the okra bb’s out of the hollow branches like blowguns.”
“My, my, such aggressive behavior.”
“That was us kids, and look at me now, no prison tats or anything.” He studied the other photos, pointing at several, “Are they making a drone?”
“I think so.”
“They’re not very big.”
“I hear they have others that are larger.”
“Huh.” Raymond studied the mountain range in the others for a good five minutes. “These are in Mexico.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, look here,” he used his index finger to point at an area on one of the images, “Those in the distance are the Chisos Mountains, and Emory Peak. That is Big Bend State Park over there. This image was taken in Mexico, and from the angle, not that far south of Big Bend State Park. They took the picture from the south side of the mountain range in Mexico, looking north.”
Hunter checked them again, this time with the new information in her head. “I think this is the range behind Pasqual Osorio’s headquarters.”
“And look right here.” Raymond touched the photo, showing Hunter a well-hidden road angling up the mountain to stop behind a large cluster of boulders and slabs of rock covered with brush.
Hunter looked at it and said, “You think the road just stops there?”
“Looks like it. But if that’s the end of the road, what’s there?”
Hunter pulled up Google Maps, and put it in satellite mode, then worked the image to look at the same spot. She saw a darker shadow on the mountain behind the boulders where the road ended. “Is that a cave?”
Raymond nodded, “That’d be my guess.”
Hunter leaned back, smiled and said, “You ready for a beer?”