Fucking Milo. He was always crazy about seat belts. Wouldn’t ride with me if I didn’t buckle up. So the seat belt saves my ass. That and the failure of the Suburban’s bumper, which rips like pot metal while the two vehicles are turning in the air. When the vehicles land on their wheels, I stay in the seat, while the four Mexican banditos fly like broken dolls through the open doors of the Suburban. My GMC pickup is a total loss, which I hate, the rear axle propped on a small boulder in the shallow river, but I’m mostly okay. Nothing important broken, no arterial bleeding. The Suburban rests nose-down in the middle of the river, but its four occupants are scattered like so much trash on the steep slope above.
As I scrabble up to check the bodies, I hope they’re all dead, skin bags of shattered bone, burst viscera, and blood. But one isn’t. He’s dying but not dead, his flight broken by a clump of prickly pear. And he opens his eyes long enough to see me. I can’t have that, so I take his mini-Uzi, thinking I will do what I have to do. This is no time for ceremony. Although there’s no fire, the explosive dust from the wreck rises like a firestorm in the afternoon sky.
Even as I have the sights of the automatic weapon aimed into the middle of his forehead, the Mexican’s eyes cloud over. Goddamn, I’m tired. Fucker meant to kill me. But I close his sightless eyes before I leave, and find myself jerking a cluster of barbed pear spines from his forehead. Finally, I make myself leave when a red ant crawls between the slack lips. Jesus. For a moment I understand how Milo must have felt when he gave up gunfire. But Milo only has himself to think about. I hammer the license plates off the pickup, hoping it will slow the pursuit, grab a pair of running shoes out of the tool box, wash my bloody head in the river, stretch my legs, then go.
I leave the Uzi behind because I know where to safely cross the Rio Grande after dark, know where my paranoid stashes of weapons and supplies are cached, know I can run to Whitney and Baby Lester before daylight, pray I can beat the bastards to my home.