It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

down. “I will tell you this, though. They don’t take too awful well to being disappointed. Even by a minute or two.”
    I lifted my right hand, the metal case clunking over on the table.
    “They’re not exactly fitting me for success, here.”
    “You haven’t been paying attention, Mr. Dodd. What that does” — the cable — “it guarantees success.”
    I made myself smile, looked away. Said it in my head over and over: fifty thousand, fifty thousand. Times three.
    “Oh yeah,” the rep called out then, from the door, “Odale says you’ve got a pretty mean bank shot, yeah?”
    To show what he meant, he leaned over an imaginary pool table, lined up on the missing cue. The game last night. The car I’d won.
    I didn’t say anything, just watched him back out, start the old Impala he was driving now. Odale probably had a whole stable of them. The engine was strong, untroubled, but the rep started it with too much pedal, like he expected it to give him grief.
    I lifted the case again, shook my head.
    On the way out I stopped to kick over the rep’s neck towel. Instead of cubed ice slinging across the slick concrete like I’d expected, there was dark blood. It was soaked through the outer layer, all the way to the mushy cold center.
    How long had he walked yesterday?
    I shrugged, found a different door out, and ended up skirting the fence of the abandoned yard, my face buried in the crook of my left arm.
    There were no rabbits.

    For a hundred dollar bill, the guys at the tire shop down the street were happy to clip the cuffs. They were real police issue, meaning we had to get the vice involved, but still, it was stupid. The clients had to know it was the first thing I’d do, and it wouldn’t take me five hours, either. Not in a border town. Not for a smuggler.
    Too late, then, I looked up to the tire guys, suddenly sure one of them was Odale, or Odale’s brother or cousin, and that this hundred of mine he had now was just on top of whatever else he was already getting. I should have gone to the second tire place I saw, not the first.
    Not that there was anything to do about it now. I held the cable up in thanks, dropped it in the greasy trash barrel, and slouched and squinted out into the sun.
    That there was some game being played here, I was sure. It was obvious, like they even wanted me to know. No matter how I tried, though, I couldn’t make it out.
    Behind a gas station lined with all manner of taxis, I felt all over the case for a radio rig of some kind. The idea of being tracked, this close to stepping out into no man’s land, I couldn’t shake it.
    If New Orleans was the Big Easy, then Mexico was the Big Empty. It could swallow you whole if you took even one wrong step, if you trusted even one wrong person. If you didn’t make yourself double-check every last detail.
    Not out in the street, though.
    Instead of the first motel I saw, I picked the fourth, then paid two weeks in advance, just on the chance that, when I stumbled back, I might need to crash immediately, not talk to any fourteen-year-old clerks about one bed or two.
    With the light tools I carried in my pack for dealing with fences and gates and whatever else, I opened the case. Not from the top, but by backing the hinge rivets out of their slots then wedging the screwdriver in, cracking the case like an oyster, shining my flashlight down along the foam and containers to the backside of the latches, to see if they were wired to show I’d tampered. They weren’t, so I went ahead and popped them, lifted the top of the case off.
    Inside, nestled in their dense foam, the twelve little stainless steel canisters, like metal test tubes, or big CO2 cartridges, or tiny little thermoses. The only one not baked into a thin film of hard plastic was the fourth one. I lifted it, shook it, finally screwed the top off again.
    Just the same rock as it had been in the warehouse. Its weight to the gram surely in some notebook. To the tenth of a gram.
    I