23

The prison’s front gate is in fact a pair of gates, one at either end of a large cagelike sally port made of ironwork and chain link, a structure that affords visibility into it from every side as well as from up in the adjoining tower, where an armed guard operates both gates electronically. When entering or leaving the prison, a vehicle must first be cleared by a gate guard on the ground who checks the identification of everyone in the vehicle and, if he so decides, searches it. However, vehicles of regional companies under long-standing contract with the prison and whose drivers are well-known to the gate guards are rarely searched, a detail Axel has many times observed over the years of front-fence cleanup jobs. One such vehicle was the Tri-Cross Medical Supplies van, which came twice a month. It was one of the many aspects of Zanco operations he had passed on to Cacho in their Q&A sessions. In either case, once the vehicle is cleared by the guard on the ground, the tower guard opens the first gate to admit the vehicle into the sally port and then shuts the gate behind it. The second gate is then opened and the vehicle enters or exits the prison.

Axel feels the van slow down and then stop in the amber cast of the gate lights. The driver lowers his window, which is leeward of the blowing rain. From his position behind Cacho and the driver, Axel can’t see the guard who has come out to the van, but he knows that he is the third prison insider.

He sees the guard’s hand at the window to receive the driver’s Zanco pass and ID card. Rain sprays into the van on a swirl of wind, the storm gusting in thick sheets, the lightning and thunder unremitting.

The guard returns the driver’s ID and goes back into his booth to clear the vehicle with the tower guy. The driver shuts his window and they wait. Axel forces himself to take slow deep breaths. He smells the cleaning solvent on Cacho’s pistol, and the scent conjures a flash memory of the Republic Arms gun shop at Wolfe Landing.

A loud buzzer sounds and then there’s the whir of the gate as it draws open laterally. The van advances into the sally port and again halts and there’s another buzz. Through the back window Axel watches the gate draw shut behind them.

Seconds pass and nothing happens.

They know, Axel thinks. They wanted to get us in this cage. They’ll be on us in—

The buzzer blats.

The outer gate opens.

The van starts moving.

As he watches the gate slide shut behind them, Axel is profoundly aware of being free and wants to howl his elation. He knows of course that anything can happen in the next crucial hour between here and the transfer vehicle in Fort Stockton that’s waiting to take them to a private airfield outside of town and a ready plane to Nuevo Laredo, but right now, right this minute, he’s by God, no-question-about-it free.

Cacho grins and slaps him on the arm. He slips the pistol into his waistband and says to the driver, “Okay, dude. Don’t speed. Next stop, Stockton.”

They’re only a hundred yards from the prison and still in blurry sight of it—and less than a mile from where the road ahead curves west and out of sight behind a range of hills—when, through the pounding of the rain, they hear the rising wail of Zanco’s lockdown sirens.

“They’re on to us!” Axel says.

“Go! Hit it!” says Cacho.

As the van gains speed, there’s a thunk-pock of a bullet piercing the roof and forming a starburst near the bottom of the windshield an instant before they hear the rifle shot.

“Floor it!” Cacho shouts.

“It’s floored!” the driver says. “It’s four-cylinder.”

The tower guard is armed with a semiautomatic Ruger and its reports come in quick succession. It is hard to stop a fleeing vehicle when shooting at it from the rear and at an elevated angle, but the shooter is an able rifleman and his bullets punch through the rooftop, through the hatchback door and window, whang off the metal framework, and lodge in the windshield, in the center console, in the padding of the seats.

“Holy Mother!” Cacho says, his forearms clasped on top of his head.

“Cut the lights! Weave!” Axel yells, crouched behind Cacho, pressed against the panel door.

With its lights off, the van’s a tougher target, and the driver shrugs low over the steering wheel, wipers flapping at full tempo, tires whumping through puddles, the driver weaving through the rain haze but only slightly for fear of skidding off the road. Then the gate tower’s spotlight comes ablaze and its beam races up the road through the glittering rain and finds the hatchback door and the rifle shots come faster, the bullets thunking through the roof, pocking through the glass, ricochets chinging off the chassis under the floorboards. One hits the heel on Axel’s shoe and bats his foot aside.

The driver grunts and slumps over the wheel and the van veers to the right and off the road and out of the spotlight. It tears into the scrub brush, rocking and bouncing as Cacho crawls over the console and grabs the wheel with one hand and reaches across with the other to unlatch the driver’s door and shoulders the man hard against it, tumbling him out of the slowing vehicle—whether dead or alive, Axel can’t say—and slides onto the driver’s seat. They pitch and sway over the rugged ground, the spotlight beam flicking all around the van, unable to settle on it. They slew into a mud pocket and the drive wheels lose traction and for a sinking second Axel thinks they’ve mired, but then the wheels grip and the van heaves out of the muck and Cacho gets it back on the road.

Axel scrabbles over the passenger seat and unfolds its back and hunches behind it as the spotlight fixes on them again, though less brightly. The riflefire continues but now fewer rounds hit the van, and then the shooting stops.

“Wooo! Out of the fucker’s range!” Cacho says, and turns on the headlights. Through the beating wipers they see the road bend just ahead. The back window’s an opaque mesh of starbursts.

“Not for long,” Axel says. In the side mirrors they see the headlights of vehicles emerging from the prison. Coming after them.

Then the van’s into the road bend and out of the pursuers’ view.