he did.”
“He killed my husband,” she said. “What more do you need to know?”
Johnny kicked at some pine needles. “So he’s a bad guy?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t the cops arrest him and throw him in jail?”
“Because they’re incompetent,” she said crisply.
Drennen said, “I hear
“Look,” she said, “he’s a wanted man. That’s why he’s hiding out. There is no chance at all he’ll call the cops, because if he did, they’d arrest him. This is as safe as anything could be. Law enforcement won’t be weeping any crocodile tears if they find out something happened to Nate Romanowski, from what I understand. Hell, if any of us are ever caught, they might want to give us a medal.”
Drennen snorted a laugh, but stanched it after Johnny glared at him.
“I’m not going to beg,” she said. “You can either do this or not. You can try to make a living playing pool, or you can run back home and live with your parents for all I care. I’ll find someone else to help me.”
They stared at her dumbly.
“What about that Mexican?” she said. “You didn’t seem to have a problem with this last night.”
It took them a moment to recall the lie. Drennen said, “That was personal.”
She turned and tap-tap-tapped her fingers along the hood of the pickup as she walked around it. As she reached for the door handle, Drennen said, “We were thinking maybe twenty. Ten each. This is a big deal you’re asking, Patsy. If it don’t go right . . .”
She turned and smiled. “It has to go right. And if you follow my instructions and do everything to the letter, it will. You can be back here by this afternoon. I’ll go fifteen. No more.”
She waited.
“We got to discuss this,” Drennen said. “Give us a minute.”
While they turned their backs to her and talked, she looked at the packing crate in the bed of the pickup. It was four feet long and a foot high. Someone had stenciled the name and address of a Crate and Barrel store on the outside so no one would be suspicious. She remembered what her associate had told her about how the rocket launcher worked. It was accurate within a thousand feet, but it would be best to get much closer than that.
Next to the crate was a case of Coors she’d bought the night before and left in the back to keep cold. She called out to Johnny and Drennen, “You boys want some hair of the dog? It might help you make up your minds.”
Drennen said, “That sounds mighty good.”
While they ambled over, she lifted the lid off the crate. The weapon was short, fat, and looked lethal just lying there in the packing peanuts.
Johnny reached for a beer, but stopped when he saw it. He whistled in admiration. Drennen saw what he was looking at and whispered, “Fuckin’ A. You weren’t kidding, were you, Patsy?”
And she knew she had them.
Laurie Talich slowed and pulled off the two-track into knee-high sagebrush and turned off the GPS unit that had guided her there. It was nearly noon and heat waves shimmered across the plains. In the distance, the Bighorn Mountains framed the horizon.
“It’s an interesting view in that you can’t even tell from here there’s a canyon between here and those mountains,” she said to Johnny and Drennen. “But there is. From what I understand, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used to hide in the caves down there.”
“I heard of them,” Drennen said.
“I saw the movie,” Johnny added.
Before they got to the canyon rim, she stopped the pickup to show them how to fire the rocket launcher. Her adviser had carefully gone through the procedure and made her repeat it back. She was not well versed in firearms of this size, but was shocked how simple it all sounded. So simple, she thought, even Johnny and Drennen couldn’t foul it up.
She climbed into the bed of the pickup and opened the lid of the crate. The boys watched her carefully, looking mainly at her butt, until she unveiled the weapon. Then they switched their interest to that. There was no disguising their visceral fascination with the rocket launcher.
She held it up and brushed clinging packing peanuts from the AT4. She was shocked how light it was. She’d anticipated something much heavier.
She showed them where to remove the safety pin so the sights would pop up automatically. She handed it over to them so they could hoist it on their shoulders and aim through the sights. They were like boys with their first air rifle, and they took to it instantly. Drennen stepped back and aimed it at Johnny and said,
Johnny wrenched it away while she looked on in horror, but it didn’t go off. Johnny said, “Knock that off, you dimwit,” to Drennen. “And don’t call me no rag-head.” Drennen grinned and shrugged.
She showed them the two remaining safety steps, the repositioning of the cocking lever, then where a thumb could press the red firing button. Her adviser had told her she needed to press on the second safety while aiming. Then when she had the shot, hit the button. She repeated the procedure to them, and watched—again in horror—as Johnny armed the weapon and squinted down the sights toward a tree in the distance. Then he carefully uncocked it and waited for additional instructions.
