THEY WERE DRIVING A new Ford XLT pickup, white, with Nevada plates and dust-streaked sides, which only seemed to confirm Carey in his suspicions, as if every Mexican had to be driving a beater prickling with rakes, shovels and blowers, as if it were a condition of their lives on this planet, as if the stereotype was the only type. “Stolen,” he said. “Bet anything.”
Sten just nodded. But it was odd, he had to admit it. He wanted to think they were traveling mariachis, the construction crew for some millionaire building a getaway in the hills, a church group, real and bona fide, but as he sat behind the wheel of the Prius in the parking lot, Carey at his side, and watched them load the groceries into the bed of the truck, he knew he was fooling himself. He’d tried to appear casual at the checkout stand as the girl there, a Latina with heavy purple eye shadow who might or might not have been a student at the high school, scanned his items. Hovering over the counter in his jeans and sweatshirt, he went quietly about the business of bagging his forty-two dollars and thirty-five cents’ worth of groceries, nothing amiss, the most ordinary thing in the world, but out of the corner of his eye he was watching the Mexicans in the next checkout lane while Carey kept a lookout at the door. They had a third cart he hadn’t noticed before, this one filled with plastic jugs of water, half a dozen twenty-four-packs of Tecate and a couple bottles of E&J brandy, real rotgut, not at all the sort of thing you’d take on a church picnic.
The men huddled there in their askew caps and they didn’t say a word, not to their own checkout girl or to each other either. They looked at nothing, at the wall, at the floor. When the customer ahead of them—the woman with the celery—had concluded her transaction, they came to life, juggling things from the carts to set them neatly on the rolling black conveyor belt. Sten took his time so he could study them, the three young guys doing all the work while the older one stood there watching the display on the computer screen as if totting up every item in his head. The bill, which the older man paid—in cash—came to over seven hundred dollars.
There was a row of cars separating Sten’s Prius from their pickup, and if they noticed him and Carey sitting there, they gave no indication. They were focused on what they were doing, and they were quick and efficient, the groceries transferred from the carts in minutes, and then the older man got behind the wheel while two of the younger ones slipped in beside him and the third sprang up into the bed in a single bound, nimble as a gymnast. Sten waited until the Mexicans had backed out of their spot, conscious of Carey, who’d gone quiet with the tension of the moment, and then put the car in drive and slowly followed them out of the lot. The street they were on—Franklin—paralleled the Coast Highway, which was the town’s main thoroughfare and lively with traffic this time of year, what with all the tourists either coming or going, even in the morning, especially in the morning, because tourists liked to get right up, gulp down their coffee, eggs over easy, three strips of bacon and hash browns and hit the road to invade the next charmingly decrepit coastal town before everybody else got there. He was surprised when the pickup turned left—no signal, just a lurch—and headed down the block to turn right on the Coast Highway, where they’d be more visible to any patrol car that might happen by. But then—and he had to remind himself lest he get carried away—they really hadn’t done anything, had they? Aside from pumping seven-hundred-odd dollars into the local economy, and what was wrong with that?
“Watch it,” Carey said, “watch it!” and he saw that he’d come up too close on them, almost rear-ended them in fact, swerving now, at the last moment, as the pickup—no signal—swung into a gas station and he rolled on by, the blood pounding in his temples and his hands locked on the wheel, trying his best to look innocuous. And old. Old and befuddled. No problem there.
Carey’s voice came at him again, insistent: “Pull over. Here. Behind that van.”
He flicked on the signal, did as he was told. The gas station was a block behind them. Glancing in the rearview, he saw the white truck ease up to the pump there and one of the men—the one in back—jump out to flip open the gas tank and insert the nozzle before hurrying inside to pay, in cash, because what drug dealer, what grower, would use a credit card?
“Jesus, Sten, what are you thinking? You almost hit them.”