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mad thinking about it.”
    After what Jessica and I had just been through, I wanted to laugh.
    But instead I said: “So you two became coyotes. How many people have you helped across?”
    “ I don’t know.” He looked at his grandson, as if he might know, but the boy just shrugged. “I guess we’ve taken, what, a couple hundred?”
    “ A couple hundred?” I said. “No.”
    “ About that,” Frank agreed. “We don’t work cheap, though.” He said it almost as an afterthought. “We’re in this for the greater good and all, but we still gotta live, you know?”
    “ How about a truck?” Jessica said.
    The directness of her offer surprised me. I gave her a questioning look, but she didn’t acknowledge it. She was looking right at Frank.
    “ We have a Ford pickup, with a quarter tank of gas. Get us across and it’s yours.”
    Frank seemed as stunned as I was. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. He looked to his grandson, then back to Jessica. “Where is this pickup of yours?”
    “ About a hundred yards down the rise there, behind a clump of hackberry.”
    Frank smiled. He didn’t believe us. “That might be okay. You mind if we see it?”
     

EIGHT
     
    Frank’s expression changed as we pulled the vegetation away from the truck. He recognized it. That much was obvious right from the start.
    “ Where did you get this?” he said. The good natured friendliness was gone from his voice now. He was suddenly alert, scanning the dark landscape all around us for signs of trouble.
    “ They won’t come looking for it,” Jessica said. She reached inside the cab and pulled out one of the assault rifles Tommy and Jake had left behind. “I can guarantee you that.”
    “ You took this from them?” Frank asked.
    “ Like I said, they won’t come looking for it,” Jessica said.
    She let that one sit for a moment. The two men looked uncertain, maybe even a little frightened. Clearly the men Jessica had dealt with so handily had been men with reputations. But eventually their uncertainty was replaced by a grudgingly offered respect and renewed curiosity. We had changed in their eyes.
    “ You’ll give us this?” Frank said.
    “ You’ll get us across?” Jessica countered.
    Frank paused for a long moment, then smiled. “We can do that,” he said
    “ Then the truck is yours.”
    “ Okay then.” He nodded at his grandson. “I guess we have a deal.”
     

NINE
     
    I got frightened by how quickly things happened after that.
    I’ve always been the kind who plans ahead. When I go on trips, I have a schedule laid out. I’ve done my research. I know what to see and how to get there and how much I’m supposed to pay.
    But now, as Will explained to us how this was going to work, I felt panicky. My heart raced. Where were the details? I had tons of questions and none of them were getting answered.
    Jessica, meanwhile, seemed to take it all in stride. She listened to Will with a detached air I found unnerving. I couldn’t believe she was so calm about it, like we were discussing plans for dinner or something.
    I finally found my voice when he started putting bells on the dog.
    “ Why are you doing that?” I asked.
    “ This?” he asked. He had taken a harness, a lot like the kind they put on service animals for blind people, and strung bells down its length. He slid the harness into place and scratched Guthrie behind the ears. The dog seemed to love the attention. He wagged his tail eagerly, sending a wave of music through the bells lining his flanks. “Guthrie here runs diversion for us.”
    A few minutes later I saw what he meant.
    Weimar had a greenbelt that ran north to south through town, running underneath the highway. Judging from the old growth vegetation that formed around its banks I figured it must have also doubled as some sort of drainage system. It was the kind of thing a small town that relied on thru-traffic for its livelihood would have kept hidden behind a screen of tall trees.
    This was