it your way.”
“You have to help me find Krill.”
“Why rent space in your head to a half-breed rodent?”
“I want Krill in leg irons,” Noie said, looking away from the road into Jack’s face. “That’s the only reason I’m on board. You got that?”
“You believe I killed those Thai women?”
Noie’s hands tightened on the wheel, and he looked at the road again. “Did you?”
“What’s the deal with Krill?”
“He can take me to Al Qaeda. He was going to sell me to them. Then he decided to sell me to some narco-gangsters because it was easier.”
“I think I’m seeing the landscape a little more clearly. Your sister died on 9/11?”
“In the Towers.”
“If I he’p you find Krill and maybe even these asswipes from Al Qaeda?”
“I’ll stay with you. I’ll be your friend. I won’t let you down.”
“Turn east at the highway. We’re not going back to our place. I’ll show you a road through a ranch into Coahuila. Only a few wets know about it.”
“But we leave everybody else here alone? Right? We find Krill but that’s it?”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Jack said. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be left alone. I never stole, and I never went looking for trouble. How many people can say that?”
Noie looked back at him. “I know you’ve done some dark deeds, but I can’t believe you mowed down a bunch of innocent women. I just can’t believe that.”
“Believe whomever you want. I’m tired of talking. I’ve tired of everything out there.”
“Out where?”
“There, in the dark, the voices in the wind, the people hunting and killing each other while they scowl at the likes of me. If I study on it, I have moments when I want to write my name on the sky in ways nobody will ever forget. That’s the burden you carry when you’re born different. You told me once your sister grew up bisexual or whatever in that small southern town y’all come from. Did she have a good time of it there? I think you’ve got more of me inside you than you’re willing to admit, Noie.”
“You’re wrong.”
Jack gazed silently through the front window, his forehead crosshatched with lesions, his thoughts, if any, known only to himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ANTON LING CALLED in the report on Noie Barnum and Jack Collins’s visit to her property five minutes after the two men had left. Maydeen Stoltz immediately called Hackberry at his home.
“Which way did they head?” he said.
“South, toward the four-lane.”
“Get out traffic stops ten miles on either side of where they would enter the four-lane. Then call the FBI and the Border Patrol. Did Noie Barnum seem coerced?”
“Not according to Ms. Ling. She says Barnum heard her accuse Collins of murdering Ethan Riser and the Thai women, and Barnum left with him voluntarily. You think this is Stockholm syndrome or whatever they call it?”
“I doubt it.”
“No matter how you cut it, Barnum isn’t a victim?” Maydeen said.
“Not to us, he isn’t,” Hackberry replied.