“No. I put the cards in the box.”
“Isaac, that didn’t seem strange to you?”
“I don’t know what goes on outside,” he says. That’s what he’s always called the rest of the world: outside.
She considers her son. He’s absolutely right. He doesn’t know. How could he?
“Get your things,” she says. “Let’s go. We have to go right now.”
“But my box—”
“We have to go. We have to leave it buried.”
We’ll get Cooper, she thinks, trying to calm herself. We’ll get to Cooper and we’ll get in the truck and we’ll just go. That’s what he’s always advocating. She hasn’t thought much further past that. But she knows if she asks him that he’ll take them.
Isaac starts to cry now, fully. Softly at first, disbelieving, then he lapses into quiet hysterics. “I need those cards. I need them.” Isaac’s sputtering now, his face snot-streaked, his voice careening into the highest frequencies of childish urgency.
“We can’t, Isaac—”
“But the robots. The robots will protect us. They have rocket-arms and lasers. They’ll protect us and we can’t leave them behind.”
She looks at her son. She tries once again, for the one millionth time, to climb inside the workings of a child’s mind. To know what’s best to do right now. She has no idea. Finally, she grabs his arm.
A minute later, they’re both outside, on their knees, together, Fran glancing every few moments up and down the empty street. The two of them, scrabbling with their fingers at the dry Texas dirt, digging up their modest yard, unburying a treasure.
Cooper stares at the door of the police trailer, crisscrossed with yellow SECURITY LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, and thinks, finally, Fuck it.
He pulls out a jackknife and slices through the tape, clears it away, then tries the knob.
At least they didn’t padlock it.
The trailer’s dark inside, but otherwise more or less how he last left it. The bloodstained chair, Gerald Dean’s final resting place, still sits opposite his desk. He opens the desk drawer where he keeps the extra boxes of .38 rounds, but the boxes are gone, which he figured they would be, but he’s no less disappointed.
He pulls his revolver out of his holster and flips the cylinder open.
He fired two bullets at the coydogs, missing both times, shoulder barking.
Dietrich fired two more bullets that hit.
Then there was the bullet for Gerald Dean.
Which leaves one bullet in his gun.
Just one.
Goddammit.
He rummages around in the drawer again, sifting the contents, searching, but finds nothing.
All right, then.
One bullet.
One bullet is worse than no bullets, he thinks, because at least with no bullets, you know you’re beat.
One bullet can give you foolhardy ideas.
He flips the cylinder shut and holsters the pistol.
There’s no reason to think your story isn’t just as likely to hold up today as it was last night, he thinks. As long as Robinson and Dawes stick to the facts, we should be done with these agents by nightfall, tomorrow at the latest. Maybe we can even get rid of Dietrich in the bargain. This could all work out okay.
Then you take Fran, and the boy, and the money, and go.
Dawes appears in the doorway of the trailer behind him.
“They’re ready for you,” she says.
“Just give me a minute,” he says, still hunting for anything else useful in his desk.
“Cal, they told me to send you right away.”
Cooper looks up. “I believe that’s the first time in recorded history you’ve ever called me Cal. Now you’ve got me good and nervous.” She says nothing, so Cooper presses her. “Anything you’d like to share with me, Sid?”
Dawes looks him over. She feels, in this moment, very sad. And more than a little scared. She expected to find opportunity in that trailer. Maybe to find a way out. A path to something better, even. She found something else instead. Dawes thought about this on the walk over here—what she would say to him, and how much. She thought about what she knows about him. And as he stands waiting for her to answer him, she thinks—and is sure that she is right—he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what I know. He’s like the rest of them. He doesn’t know.
“I think they’re here to take the boy,” she says.
“What?”
“They asked me about Fran. Not Colfax. Not Gable. Not Dean. Just Fran.”
“What about her?”
“Where she is.”
Cooper considers what Dawes is saying. He considers the truck. He considers the gun. He considers what it would take to find Fran and Isaac and go, now. He considers what he saw in the black cases in the intake trailer.
“So what did you tell them?” he says.
“I said I don’t know. But I don’t think that’s going to slow them down. They know she’s in the town. They just have to figure out which house.”
There is no history between Dawes and Cooper now, no backstory, no hidden motives, no secrets, just the two of them, in the trailer, just this moment.
Cooper asks her, not sure what he’ll do if she says no: “Are you with me? Or with them?”
She nods. “With you.”
She’d thought about this on the walk over, too.
Cooper unholsters his pistol and holds it out to her grip-first.
“You ever fired a gun before, Deputy?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, don’t tell anyone that. Take this. Find her first. Start at her house. You know where it is. Go now and when you get there don’t let anyone else in. Not until I get there. I’ll come with my truck soon.”
Dawes takes the gun. She’s never even held a gun before. It’s heavier than she expected.
“There’s only one bullet in there,” says Cooper. “Don’t tell anyone that, either.”
“And what about you?” she says.
Cooper takes off his heavy gun belt and lays it coiled on the desk. It’s no use to him anymore. He thinks about taking his star off as well, but leaves it in place for now. “You said they want to see me, right? I guess I should go find out what they want.”
28.
WAITING, WAITING, WAITING, he hates waiting, Dietrich thinks. Back in his bungalow, he stands in front of the full-length mirror on the wall. Head shaved, shirt off, at rest and calm and ready. Fingers tingling. He jangles his arms in front of the mirror like a boxer before a fight, watching himself. This is something they never let you have in solitary, he thinks—a full-length mirror. To see yourself. If there was a mirror in solitary, then there would be two of you. A companion. He looks over all his tattoos, the portraits etched on his skin, their eyes turned up to him admiringly. At least I have all of you, he thinks, and the portraits listen to him intently.
In solitary, all they give you is a concrete floor and concrete walls and a metal door and a hole to piss and shit in and two books to read and one hour a day to walk in circles in a cage outside. Otherwise, NO HUMAN CONTACT.
It said so right on the door to his cell.
He waited there, too. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Only his tattoos to keep him company.