“I know.”
At that moment, a faint sound like a steady growl became audible, and it grew louder. “That’s an airplane,” Kelly said. Now she knew how these people would take them away. Her heart dropped.
The front sliding barn door was too tight to see out of the cracks, so Kelly went to one of the small rooms and peered through a window with iron bars on the inside. She craned her neck to the side and watched the big silver plane land in a puff of reddish dust around its wheels. It slowed until the tail wheel was on the ground, then it taxied up the flattened ground to stop thirty yards from the barn.
The two propellers whirled for a bit longer, then the pilot cut them off and they feathered to a stop. The plane seemed big to Kelly, but not as big as the jets flying overhead, the ones from American and Southwest. She could tell it was old, too. Kelly remembered seeing a photo in a magazine of a plane from the nineteen-fifties. The article said the plane was a DC-3. That plane looked like this one, only this one was unpainted, just the silver color showing.
She watched as the man rolled out a tall set of stairs to the plane’s door, and the pilot opened it, looked around, and descended them in quick steps. He wore a Hawaiian shirt with red flowers and parrots on it, and brown pants. Kelly thought he looked fat.
The two men walked toward the barn and Kelly lost sight of them. Trotting to the front door, she couldn’t see, but heard the Kit talking to the man.
“Hey, Paul, good to see you again.”
“Same here, Kit. How many do we have this time?”
“Ten.”
“I thought we were supposed to have around thirty.”
“The damned Border Patrol caught two big loads. This is all we have this trip, but one of them is very special, worth more than the whole bunch together. She’s already been picked and paid for ahead of time.”
“And the others?”
“They’re like the last ones, a few better than others in the looks department.”
“Any trouble?”
“A little, but we got that straightened out. We lost one doing it.”
Kelly felt her stomach flutter, Bobbi.
“Did she get away, or did you have to take care of somebody?”
“TCB, Taking Care of Business. Just like Elvis.”
“You do it?” Paul asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’d you use?”
“The knife. I hit her while she was running. Dropped her like a sack of meat.”
“You don’t mess around, I’ll give you that.”
She rubbed the fingers of one hand together, “It’s all about the Benjamins.”
“Every time.”
Kit said, “Come on, I’ll show you the merchandise.”
She opened the sliding door and both entered the barn, closing it behind them.
All the girls huddled together, and they moved behind Kelly so she stood in front, facing Paul and Kit.
Paul said, “You the leader?”
“No.” Her voice sounded small, even to herself.