J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“Just follow the van.”

“Yeah, but Ford got into the car and now I don’t see it. I thought they were ahead of the van, but they’re not. It’s a silver four-door, a big Toyota, with tinted windows and dealer plates. Do you see it? I think we lost them.”

I crane my neck around, scanning the traffic behind us. I press myself against the window trying to see ahead of the van. No silver four-doors.

“What do we do?” he asks.

“Just follow the van.”

Maybe Ford went ahead. Maybe he’s planning to meet up with the van farther down the road. If we keep the van in sight, we have to catch up with him sooner or later. There’s no other option.

“They’re getting onto 59,” he says. “Going south away from town.”

“Keep following.” I lean over and check the fuel gauge. We have three quarters of a tank. “They’ll lead us to Ford, maybe take us to wherever they’re all staying. Just don’t let the van get away from us.”

The white van curves off the tollway, circling onto the Southwest Freeway, and thirty seconds later we do the same thing. Once the turn is made, Jeff finds a southbound truck to settle behind, letting a comfortable distance build between us and the van.

“I’m sorry about back there,” he says. “Maybe I just lost my nerve, but I could see it all going wrong right in front of me. They would’ve fought, and it would’ve gotten messy.”

“It’s fine. I’m sure you made the right call.”

But I don’t feel sure. My fist closes around the rim of my phone, mashing down hard. I had Ford in my grasp and I let him walk away. There in the storage facility corridor I had the power to end it all. Perhaps Jeff is right that I couldn’t have gotten away with it, would never have gotten Ford in cuffs and taken him into custody. He was in my sights, though. I could have stopped him one way or another. Even if it all went wrong, even if things did get messy, I would have stopped him. And now I can’t, and maybe I’ll never have the power again.

This phone is rigid in my grip. As my knuckles whiten, my palm starts to throb. There is no one to call. Not yet. Maybe never. I was wrong before; I do have to see this through. That’s what my gut tells me, my heart, my pain. This is my responsibility. Mine. And it has been since the last breath of Jerry Lorenz.

The white van pulls into a truck stop on the edge of Victoria, a couple of hours outside Houston, where the driver pumps gas. The passenger trots straight inside like he’s overdue for a bathroom break. I motion Jeff toward the opposite pump island.

“Let’s switch seats,” I say.

I top off the tank, using my credit card so there’s no need to go inside. Jeff circles around the back of the car, stepping over the hose to pass behind me.

“Looks like there’s just the two of them. Want me to run inside and take a look?”

“No need,” I say. “Just sit down and don’t call attention to yourself.”

He slides into the passenger seat and shuts the door.

“We need some way to slow them down,” I say. “If I could distract the guy at the pump, you think you could get over there and stick a knife in the tire? They’d have to change it, which would give me time to make a phone call and get some real surveillance up.”

“You’re asking me to slash his tire while he’s pumping the gas?”

I let out a sigh. “There’s gotta be some way to slow them down. We could have somebody waiting for them on the other end if I had an idea where the other end might be, but-”

“I hear you,” he says. “But if you’re making that call, it had better be a good one. You only get one shot, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

He turns in his seat. “The moment you make the call, all this is out of your hands. The moment you make the call, they take over-whoever they are. It ends the way they want it to, not your way.”

Between the pumps I watch the driver out of the corner of my eye. As he finishes pumping and screws the cap into place, the passenger returns with a couple of water bottles and a road atlas tucked under his arm. They spend thirty seconds or so consulting the map, then climb back into the van. Apparently the route is new to them.

When I get back in the car, the driver’s seat is warm and too far forward. I scoot it back, realigning the mirrors, giving the van time to get under way. They pull back onto the feeder and continue south, driving just under the speed limit, taking 91 at the split and heading straight onto Highway 77, next stop Corpus Christi. Once the switchover is complete, the van speeds up to about five miles over the limit. They’re driving fast enough to keep up with traffic without running the risk of being pulled over.

Jeff has a point. If I call Cavallo or even Bascombe, it’ll get kicked up to Wanda’s desk and I’ll be cooling my heels indefinitely. Besides, we’re already outside HPD’s grip, which would mean bringing other agencies into the picture. There’s always Bea with her Federal reach. But that underling of hers who put the flea in my ear might have known what he was talking about. I’ve taken a lot on trust from her. When I’ve had the power to check on what she’s told me, it hasn’t always added up.

My speedometer holds steady and the whine of the engine subsides as the gears shift. Apart from the thump of the tires on rough highway, we drive in silence. The sun sits far enough to the left that no matter how I reposition the visor, I can’t block it out. I rest my elbow on the door, using my hand as a screen. This isn’t silence, not when I really listen. There’s also the wind hurtling around us, an invisible envelope of white noise. And the percussive pop of fresh insects against the windshield, already scabbed from the drive out, leaving behind viscous smears.

I hold the wand down, sluicing the windshield with washer fluid, then let the wipers swish back and forth.

“If I’d had more time back there,” Jeff says, “I would have scraped some of that stuff off.”

“What’s a road trip without a few dead mosquitoes?”

He smiles. “So how far are we gonna follow them?”

Neither of us has asked the question out loud to this point, though it’s been on the air since we left the city. There are many stops between here and the border-why assume they’re heading straight to Mexico?

“We’ll follow them until we know where they’re going.”

“I have a pretty good idea already,” he says. “It’s not South Padre. This is the delivery run. Which means they’re not stopping until they hand off those guns. Are you prepared to cross the border, or are we gonna call it quits when they hit Brownsville? You’ve got one call to me. Is that where you’ll do it?”

I don’t answer because I don’t know. The possibilities have been churning at the back of my mind. Along with my driver’s license and police ID, in the recesses of my wallet there’s a passport card, good for travel to Canada and Mexico, which I applied for at Charlotte’s behest when she was temporarily obsessed with the notion of a cruise to Cozumel, a plan she dropped, much to my relief. Since I’ve never taken it out of my wallet, I have the option of crossing the border without any hassles. Back when I was in college and the six-hour drive to the border was a regular weekend jaunt, you could pass back and forth without anything but a Texas driver’s license, and sometimes without even that. Those days are gone.

“You don’t happen to have a passport on you?” I ask.

Jeff laughs. Of course not.

“What?” he says. “You do?”

I ignore him. The passport card isn’t a solution. With the Browning on my hip and the AR-15 in the trunk, I can no more cross the bridge over the Rio Grande than the men in the white van. It’s not a matter of simply flashing my badge. I’m out of my jurisdiction, and in Mexico even the U.S. cops who are supposed to be there must go unarmed thanks to the tight gun regulations.