“You particular on which one?”
“Either one of the boat guys’ll do.”
“Works for me. Let’s get out of here.”
They walked to the others and everyone moved out. Joe hopped in the rig and blew the airhorn, laughing .
***
Hunter didn’t have to work on the guy to get him to talk. He was ready. He sat in the back seat behind the protective metal screen that separated front from back and said his name was Jimmy Wilson and he lived in Odessa, Texas. He’d worked off and on in the oil fields, been arrested for petty things: public intoxication, possession of marijuana, things like that, and this was going to be his big ticket to get him back on his feet.
Hunter glanced at him in the rearview mirror and asked, “Did you look at your load?”
“Naw, why?”
“It’s trash. Not hardly a leaf in any of it.”
Jimmy scratched his head, “Well, the deal sounded too good to be true.”
“Why?”
Jimmy said, “They offered it to us for a thousand dollars upfront money, for a ton of grass. Said we could pay ‘em the rest after we sold the load in Odessa.”
“Who were they?”
“We never saw them before. We’d been in Ojinaga a couple days, trying to score,” He turned and indicated the big truck tooting its airhorn several cars back, “Nothing that big, though. We were hopin’ to get a couple kilos and take back, but we hadn’t had much luck. The last night we were there, these three guys walked up to us as we were leaving a bar and gave us the deal.”
“What’d they look like?”
It was dark, but the one doing the talking was a slim guy, the other two stayed back a little, but were big.”
“You see their faces?”
“Kinda. The slim one was nice lookin’ and the two big guys had big moustaches. Oh yeah, they were wearing some kinds of things on their heads, too.”
“What, hats?”
“No, no...More like headbands or something. It was dark and I couldn’t tell very well.”
“What was the deal?”
“They said they’d heard we were looking to score some weed, and we said, Yeah. The thin guy said he had a fresh shipment and needed a distributor up north. We told him we could do that, and he said he’d mak
e us a good deal. If we could take a ton of it, he would let us have it for a thousand up front, and when we sold it, he would take fifty dollars a kilo and we could have the rest. He said we could expand our mutual business after the first run.”
“And you didn’t think something was funny, him offering you marijuana at fifty a kilo - after you sell it?”
“All we could think about was how much money we could make. Fifty was such a bargain.”
“Did you meet with them again?”
“Yeah, next night the slim guy drove us to the river on the Mexican side and showed us where the bales were stashed and where an old boat was hidden. He pointed across the river and said that was Madrid Canyon on the U S side and we could get a truck down there easy. It sounded so good.”
“And after that?”
“After that we went back to Odessa and Gerald borrowed his brother in law’s truck...man is he gonna be pissed...”
“Go on.”