Company. Now he passed a cotton gin, a flour mill, and even a few dilapidated mansions with gingerbread trim. All of them long ago abandoned to the rats and spiders and tumbleweeds.
Up ahead, he saw the phantom’s brake lights flash and he hit his own, mashing down on the pedal. There were no side streets so the trucker couldn’t be fixing to make a turn. He was going to stop right here in the middle of a ghost town.
Stop? For what? There was nothing here.
But the trucker was pulling up out front of a big old two-story brick building up ahead on the left. An old factory maybe, covering an entire square block. And with black holes upstairs where all the windows used to be and a wide arched entrance of some kind on the far end, like you might see at a fire station.
He swerved the Vic off the road and nipped in behind an abandoned Texaco gas station that was half burned down, almost hitting the one remaining pump with a busted gumball light on top. The Vic rolled silently over to the empty repair bay and came to a stop right under an old Hires Root Beer sign that had made it through the fire.
Homer shut the Vic down and quickly pocketed the keys, thinking: You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.
Homer wore a star, and, over his head, a faded red Texaco star was swinging in the breeze, making a creaky noise. It was shot through with rusty bullet holes. Time to go. He checked his sidearm. He checked his mini- flashlight, too, just to make sure the batteries hadn’t wore out.
He eased his car door open (even new, it tended to squeak) and climbed out of the Vic. Then he ran quickly toward the street, keeping the crumbling station building between him and the trucker’s cab. He stopped short, and peered around the edge of the building.
The Yankee Slugger was parked just outside the building. Blacked-out windows gleaming in the moonlight.
Damn. He’d been right. The Slugger had turned all its exterior lights off and pulled up outside the arched entrance to the building. Homer figured the guy (or the spook anyway) couldn’t see him now and he started moving along the deserted road beside the burned-out gas station.
Suddenly, there was a loud hiss of air brakes and then a big diesel engine growled and he saw that the wide factory door was going up. There still was not a single light shining in that building. But clearly someone was home to open the big old wooden door. Homer couldn’t hardly believe it, this was after all, a ghost town, but now the red, white, and blue cab was backing inside, was through the door, and now the door was coming down again. In the wink of an eye, the ghost rider was gone. Disappeared off the face of the earth.
Homer ran across the street, right up to the heavy door that had just slammed shut. He reached out and touched it, and it wasn’t wood at all. Solid steel. Somebody had painted it to look like old wood. Not only that, made it look like it was fading and the paint was peeling off, too. Now, why go to all that trouble? So no one passing through the ghost town would pay it any mind. That was why.
He ran quickly around the far side of the building, sidearm still holstered, but he had the Mossburg. There was a rusted out fire escape going up to the second floor. Windows up there, open. Maybe the stairs were still strong enough to hold him. No lights showing anywhere in the building. He scanned the building a second and then he saw it.
What looked like a tiny red eye up there in one of the darkened windows.
Somebody was standing up there, having a smoke. You couldn’t see anything but the cigarette’s burning coal floating in the blackness.
Another damn ghost?
A ghost didn’t worry too much about cancer sticks, Homer reckoned.
39
KEY WEST NAVAL STATION
A t three o’clock that rainy afternoon, Hawke, Congreve, and Pippa Guinness stood talking quietly. They stood just inside an alcove off the crowded hallway of the old Marine Hospital. The sleepy naval base was now a beehive of activity. At least a hundred other people jammed the hall. All were moving toward a pair of double doors leading to the cavernous base gymnasium. The crowd was restive, and a certain nervous excitement could be felt in the hall. Overnight, Conch’s Latin security conference had seen a dramatic increase in size. There was a palpable sense of urgency about the meeting. And, as Ambrose was explaining, there was a very simple reason for it:
Mexico had invaded the United States.
Rumors were swirling on Capitol Hill about a possible armed incursion by uniformed Mexican Army forces. A credible witness had reported uniformed troops moving north across his ranch at the Texas border in broad daylight. When confronted by the rancher and two of his hands, the men jumped back in their Humvees and hurried south, retreating across the border.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Border Patrol chopper, on routine patrol, had surprised a convoy of drug mules attempting to cross the border. Someone, reportedly driving a Mexican Army Humvee, had opened fire on American agents. It was common, now, to hear of Border Patrol agents being gunned down by Mexican Federales with AK-47s.
These startling episodes had naturally generated an immense public outcry in the hinterlands and capitals of every southern border state. As a result, a new sense of national urgency now surrounded the secretary’s security conference in Key West.
The voracious radio and TV pundits, and the vast blogger armies, all sensed a huge story. And all were happy to have fresh meat for the insatiable twenty-four-hour media machine. “Let’s go live to the border!” this or that anchorman would say, and then you’d see ruggedly handsome and epauletted correspondents riding right alongside the Border Patrol. The media was flocking to the border, in choppers and Humvees; or, more dashing yet, galloping through arroyos on horseback to the site of the latest attack.
The on-scene reporters noted again the woeful lack of security on America’s borders. Some, naturally, blamed the president for not securing them. Why hadn’t he just ordered a wall erected? How hard could that be? Some blamed government officials in Mexico City. Others blamed the apparent willingness of scattered Mexican field commanders to ignore our borders and accused these officers of being complicit in drug smuggling. A few thoughtful journalists actually understood that a border war with Mexico had been threatening to erupt for more than a century.
And now it seemed imminent.
In a few Washington circles, at Langley and the Bureau, it was an open secret that the vast drug gangs wielded enormous power within some Mexican military units and most certainly the Mexican police. Long simmering resentments, leftover from the War of Independence in 1846, were rising to a boil. And the American people, at least it seemed to Hawke, might be waking up at last to the real dangers along the southern flank.
In Alex’s view, everybody with an earbug and a microphone seemed to be having just a bit too much fun playing Cowboys and Indians along the Rio Grande. So far, no one had documented any of these “military” incursions on videotape. But that didn’t stop FOX NEWS, CNN, and the rest from trying to scoop each other. It was just a question of who would be first to get the story on film.
When the broad auditorium doors at last swung open, Hawke glimpsed a large oval table and rows of chairs inside a cavernous room. This vast, and pungent, location was apparently the only space large enough to accommodate the growing number of attendees. History, it seemed, was going to be played out on the sailor’s newly gleaming basketball court.
The room was filling up. Conch, trailing members of her staff, DSS, and Secret Service agents, had moved inside ten minutes earlier. She had not paused to speak to the aggressive media types pressing in around her. Nor had she even glanced at Hawke as she passed. This was hardly surprising, given recent events upstairs in her office.
Hawke, on a purely personal level, was feeling lifeless and numb, more than ready for the bloody session to get under way. From his own point of view, this pilgrimage, begun at C’s insistence, had already gotten off to a rocky start. He had meant to mend fences. Instead, he’d managed to put up a fresh wall.
He was grateful to have gotten out of Conch’s darkened office alive. Miss Guinness, who did not know the fiery Consuelo de los Reyes, was an innocent moth with no idea just how close she’d come to the flame. Her ill-
