Read It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles for Free Online Page B

to find that, by matchlight, I’d mistaken ‘9’ for ‘4.’
    It was an honest mistake.
    Walking away from my sandy bank at nightfall, I wondered if it was maybe the same kind of mistake Sebby Walker had made.
    Alone in the dark, it made me think things like I already had fifty thousand, right? What was to keep me from just burying the pack, fading into some new identity? Maybe even, as a token of peace, sending the client rep a postcard detailing where the pack was buried.
    It would be late, though, that would be the thing.
    And for some reason, that mattered.

    Just to allow for any mishaps — a bad ankle, a big police bonfire out in the pasture, alien abductions — I pushed through dawn, went until the sun was almost straight up. It was like getting two nights out of one. I was nearly halfway to Uvalde, I was pretty sure. If I’d had a bottle of anything other than stale water, I might have celebrated.
    As it was, I just sat in place for thirty minutes, committing each bush and rock and rise in the land to memory, so I could know right off, later, if anything had changed. Then I said goodnight to Laurie and rolled up under a poisoned bush, my head wrapped in the netting.
    The next time I opened my eyes, the sun had hardly moved, it looked like, but I’d been asleep long enough for my legs to stiffen up anyway.
    I sat up into the bush, which tangled the netting still wrapped around my head, and jerked away from it harder than I had to, finally just rolled from the bush and stood up fast, the netting tearing.
    “Like watching a cat try to get out of a bag,” a voice said, behind me. In Spanish.
    I closed my eyes, trying to place the man the voice went with.
    “And here I thought you never got caught,” he added.
    I shook my head, amused as well, and turned.
    Refugio. Officer Refugio.
    “Didn’t think they sent you out anymore,” I said, not looking to my pack, still tucked under the bush.
    “Even old horses need their exercise.”
    He was still speaking Spanish.
    The last time I’d seen him, we’d been in a wood-paneled real estate office, the movable kind, down toward Laredo. It had been an accident, too, us being in the same room at the same time. The clients then had been smart, though: they were paying both sides. One opened the gate, one walked through.
    It had been bad luck for Refugio, good luck for me. For nearly two years now, Refugio had been my fallback, the name I was going to say into the microphone in some interrogation room, so that, once they got hold of him, showed him my mug shot and told him that I wasn’t talking, he’d understand the deal I meant: get me out of this, and I keep on not saying anything.
    Only, now, here, he could wipe the board clean.
    “You coming or going?” he said.
    “Second leg,” I said, shrugging, looking vaguely south. “Return trip.”
    Refugio laughed, spit a brown line into the dirt and rubbed it in with the toe of his boot.
    “That’s why you didn’t leave any tracks to the north?”
    “I don’t leave tracks.”
    “Then there won’t be any to the south either, qué no?” He could make this last all day if he wanted.
    “I thought maybe you were a short-timer,” he said. “Or that you’d retired. Never thought it would come to this, I mean.” I cased his truck, half a section away, its exhaust muffled by the netting my head had been wrapped in. “You’re a ghost, I mean,” he said, in English now.
    “Thing about ghosts,” I said, because I had to try, “is that they don’t exist.”
    Instead of smiling about this, Refugio smoothed his thick, chollo moustache down. It was probably supposed to make him look like a Texas Ranger. Less Mexican, anyway. The gun on his hip was standard issue, auto .45. The leather catch was thumbed back. Of course.
    “Well what do you got, then?” he asked, finally.
    “What do you mean, what do I got?”
    “If you’re coming, you’re carrying something. If you’re leaving, then you’ve been paid.”
    I