Chapter Five of seven.
The Flying Cloud’s aluminum kept the night like a secret, but morning pried at the seams. By first light Shannon was outside, hands on hips, studying the Dodge the way a woman appraises a dress she can’t wear twice. “Too loud,” she said. “We need denim, not sequins.”
Lalo Cantu answered with a grin and the rattle of keys. “Got your Sunday work shirt.” He pointed past the fence where a long-bed Ford sat cocked on caliche like it had grown there: ’75 F-250 Highboy, blue paint baked to chalk, rust tracing the crown of hood and bedrails like dried blood.
Topher walked slow around it, whistling. “She looks like she’s been to the wars.”
“Idaho ranch truck,” Lalo said. “But she prays in Texas now.” He popped the hood. The bay swallowed light. “Three-ninety under there. Not stock, but righteous.” The two-spoke wheel creaked when Cutter leaned in and worked it left-right. The bench wore blue plaid vinyl like a thrift-store suit. The CB mic dangled uselessly; the Philco stared back with the dead calm of old technology.
Cutter slid in and pumped the clutch. “Pedal’s honest,” he said. He eyed the fuel gauge—dead as expected. “Guess we go by smell.”
Shannon climbed in last, sliding to the middle like temptation. “Just drive. If it complains, flirt back.”
Cutter twisted the key. The 390 cleared its throat, then settled into a lumpy, willing idle. He eased the four-speed into first; the lever felt like shifting a fencepost in hard ground. Outside, the clearance lights blinked awake, and the truck’s white 16-inch steels showed their BFGoodrich Mud-Terrains like knuckles. He clicked the hubs to lock and rolled.
They took the back way toward town, the Flying Cloud disappearing in the mirror like a lie they’d told well. The truck rode stiff—leaf springs and tall stance—every cattle-guard talking up through the frame. The drum brakes negotiated, never promised. Shannon smiled at that. “Good,” she said. “Police like confidence. This truck doesn’t have any.”
“Power steering helps,” Topher offered, palming the wheel when the road crowned.
Cutter grunted. “Helps us look innocent.”
They pulled into the feed store lot where Parker said the boy’s crates had first changed hands. The receiver hitch clicked as the frame settled. A rancher in a straw hat glanced once at their patinaed long bed, then looked away. Exactly as Shannon planned: a face you forget and a truck that matched it.
“Here’s your hymn,” she said, tapping the cracked dash. “We sing along and nobody hears the words.”
Inside the cab the morning smelled of rubber bed mat, sun-warmed vinyl, and the faint ghost of hay. Parker leaned in the open window and dropped a manila envelope on Topher’s knees. “The corridor’s current: warehouse times, plate numbers, names that’ll change by Friday. We take a look, you two play delivery. Cutter, you do the talking that keeps us alive. Topher, you do not get distracted by anyone with legs.”
Topher’s grin died politely. “I can be serious.”
Shannon tilted her head, unconvinced. “You were serious in the Firebird.”
Cutter put the truck back in gear. “We moving the box?”
“Not yet,” Parker said. “The Flying Cloud is our church. This”—she tapped the door—“is our choir robe.”
Cutter nodded and eased out. The 390 pulled with the same stubborn faith as a ranch hand: no questions, just work. He tested a downshift; the transfer case growled like a warning. The fuel gauge didn’t budge—good, one less tell. Above them, the cab marker lights winked across shop windows like a string of cheap rosaries.
When they reached the edge of Del Rio, Shannon pointed to a blue-tin warehouse tucked behind a tire yard. “That’s where the boy’s story starts to rhyme.”
Cutter parked two blocks away, nose in, hood angled like a shrug. They watched the loading dock in the mirror. Two men smoked in the shade, faces Eastern-hard, the kind of pale that never belonged to this county. A stake-bed Ford backed in, then out again without loading. Practice. Or code.
“Count the seconds,” Parker said. “Routine is a religion. If they keep time, we can break it.”
Cutter’s eyes drifted across the dash to the dead Philco and silent CB. Silence was a religion, too. The truck’s heater lever rattled in its track as he breathed. He checked the side mirror; clearance lights reflected in the glass like a line of tiny candles.
Topher’s knee started bouncing. “So what’s the play?”
Shannon leaned over the wheel, shamelessly close, and traced a circle in dust on the dash with one fingertip. “We look like exactly what we are: broke, useful, and not worth frisking. We go in later for a pallet—chicken feed on the manifest, something else under the shrink—then we follow. If we’re lucky, they lead us to the altar.”
“And if we’re not?” Cutter asked.
Shannon smiled. “Then we see whether this old Ford can take a bullet better than the van could.”
They waited until the sun turned cruel and the cigarette smoke at the dock turned lazy. Then Cutter lit the clearance lights, let the 390 clear its throat again, and eased the Highboy into the street. The mud-terrains whispered, the transfer case sang low, and the truck rolled forward like a psalm—plainspoken, steady, and ready to be believed.
The warehouse lot stank of creosote, diesel, and the kind of sweat that didn’t come from honest ranch work. Cutter let the Highboy’s 390 V8 idle low, the whole cab trembling like a preacher with a guilty conscience. From behind the bug-spattered windshield, the Ford looked like any other rancher’s battered workhorse — the kind of rig you didn’t second guess unless you were paid to. That’s exactly what Shannon wanted.
The dock foreman, a paunchy man in a Pearl Snap shirt two sizes too small, ambled over. He slapped the rust-patinaed fender, and his palm came away streaked orange. “You here for the pellets?”
Cutter gave him that slow blink he’d learned in funeral homes. “That’s what’s on the slip.”
The foreman glanced at the receiver hitch and the empty long bed. “Four pallets. You got straps?”
“Got faith,” Cutter said. “And rope.”
The man squinted, decided not to push it, and waved two dockhands forward. Forklifts coughed, pallets shifted, and soon the rubber mat in the bed creaked under the weight of shrink-wrapped feed. Except it wasn’t feed. Cutter could smell the sweet, tarry note even through the plastic. The kind of smell that made cops into landlords and politicians into ghosts.
Topher leaned against the cab, trying not to twitch, while Shannon did the talking with her hips more than her mouth. She leaned on the bed rail, hot pants catching the light, a cigarette dangling just enough to make the dockhands forget their own names. She asked questions about “shipments south,” and the men answered more with their eyes than their lips. Cutter saw it all reflected in the Ford’s passenger vent window — their tells, their stares, the way they folded when a woman asked nice.
By the time the foreman signed their carbon-copy manifest, they’d been waved out with all the indifference of a Sunday pew nap. Cutter ground the Ford into first, the clutch pedal heavy as a boot heel, and rolled onto the frontage road.
Inside the cab it was tight — Shannon pressed up against the passenger door, Parker riding middle seat with her notebook balanced on her knees, and Topher squeezed hard against her other side. The plaid vinyl bench groaned under the load of secrets.
“Easy,” Parker murmured, pencil moving fast. “Let them get used to you.”
Cutter nodded. He held the two-spoke wheel steady, feeling every crown and pothole through the steering shaft. The truck had no finesse — only honesty. It tracked straight or not at all, but when it did, it looked like it belonged.
Shannon’s eyes glittered as she cracked the wing vent for a curl of smoke. “We’ll follow. They won’t suspect. Not from this heap.”
Topher snorted, shifting his knees. “Heap rides better than that Olds. At least this one doesn’t smell like embalming fluid.”
Cutter cut him off with a look sharp enough to silence a drunk choir. “This truck has one job. To blend.”
They idled two blocks back, watching the stake-bed Ford they’d clocked earlier pull onto the highway. Cutter slipped the F-250 into gear, the manual hubs already locked, the transfer case whispering in low range. The 390 grumbled, content to lope along at convoy speed. They didn’t need speed. They needed patience.
For twenty miles they trailed across caliche and asphalt, the clearance lights faint even in daylight, like a rosary murmured under the breath. The sun hammered the cab until the plaid bench felt sticky, the cracked dash too hot to touch. Cutter drove like he’d driven coffins: slow, steady, invisible. Shannon’s perfume fought the sweat and the motor oil. Parker’s notes scratched like a metronome. Topher tapped the cracked vinyl with his boot until Cutter told him to stop.
Then the road turned south — toward the river. Toward the kind of country where boundaries blurred and law got flexible. Cutter downshifted, the gear lever clanking like a crowbar in a barrel. He caught Shannon’s smirk out of the corner of his eye. She looked like she’d won something.
“Welcome to the real hymn,” she said. “Now sing like you mean it.”
The Highboy growled low, its rust-patinaed hood shimmering in the afternoon haze as Cutter kept two truck-lengths back. Ahead, the stake-bed Ford ambled south like it had all the time in the world. To the untrained eye, it was just another work rig hauling fence posts and fertilizer. But Cutter knew the weight of a truck that was hauling more than feed.
Every time they drifted too close, the driver of the stake-bed would hang an elbow out the window, casual as a Sunday sermon. Too casual. Cutter had been around enough funerals to recognize theater when he saw it.
Topher shifted restlessly on the plaid bench seat, knees knocking Parker’s notebook. “They know we’re behind them,” he muttered, scratching at the sunburn peeling on his neck.
“They knew the minute we signed that manifest,” Parker said flatly, pencil dancing across her pad. She didn’t look up, didn’t need to. Her cigarette had burned down to the filter, balanced in the ashtray like a fuse waiting to catch. “Question is, are they leading us… or waiting for us?”
Shannon leaned against the passenger door, hot pants riding high, a smile curling where it shouldn’t. She flipped the wing vent open, letting desert grit swirl through her dark hair. “Boys, you’re both wrong. They’re testing us. Seeing if we got the guts to follow when the road gets mean.”
Cutter didn’t answer. His hands stayed steady on the two-spoke wheel, the truck’s manual steering pulling like a mule every time the caliche ruts deepened. The Highboy wasn’t built for comfort — it was built for endurance. That suited him fine.
The convoy crossed onto a narrow farm-to-market road, cotton fields ghosting out under the weight of dust. The stake-bed slowed near a crossroads, then picked up speed again, like a fisherman teasing his line. Cutter let the F-250 drop back, enough to keep their outlines hazy in the heat shimmer.
At the next curve, the stake-bed vanished behind a low ridge. Cutter downshifted, the gear lever rattling against the floorboard, and eased the Ford up the grade. When they crested, the road stretched empty ahead.
Topher swore under his breath. “Gone.”
“No,” Parker corrected, eyes narrowing through the cracked windshield. She pointed with her pencil. “There.”
A curl of black dust rose a mile off, already settling. Whoever drove the stake-bed wanted them to see it.
Cutter kept the truck steady, letting the Ford lope along in third, the 390 V8 humming like a tired hymn. His gut tightened. This wasn’t just freight running south. This was staging. They weren’t hunting — they were being herded.
“Still think it’s a test?” he asked Shannon.
Her grin widened, wicked and sharp. “Of course it is. And so far, we’re passing.”
The Highboy rattled over a cattle guard, the Airstream glinting in the side mirror where it trailed a quarter mile back. Its polished skin flashed like a beacon, impossible to hide on the open plain. Cutter knew it, and so did whoever was leading them south.
Shadows stretched long across the fields as the sun dipped lower, painting the Ford’s rust in firelight. By the time they reached the next junction, a lone road sign pointed south with a bullet hole through the “Laredo” marker. The stake-bed’s dust had settled, but its message was clear:
Keep coming.
Cutter’s jaw tightened. Parker shut her notebook with a snap. Shannon slid closer, perfume clashing with sweat. Topher stared at the horizon like it might blink first.
The Highboy rolled on.
And ahead, fate waited like a snare.
