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

lined all twelve up on the air conditioner then peeled the foam up, looking for the transmitter I knew had to be there. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t in the tubing of the handle and it wasn’t sandwiched between the inner and outer walls of the case, which came apart easy, like the case was old, and it wasn’t in the foam itself, which I shredded over the trashcan then dumped into the toilet to soak. I sat back on the bed then, just studied the canisters.
    It still didn’t make any sense.
    For a hundred and fifty thousand, though — a new life — maybe it didn’t need to.
    Just for the feel of it, I took what was supposed to be the last shower of the week and came out into the thick heat of the bedroom. At first I thought it was just in comparison to the cold shower, but then finally figured out that it was because the air conditioner had conked out.
    I stared at it.
    Ten more minutes was all I’d needed from it. Just a few more breaths of refrigerated air. But my week was started, I supposed; I already had the cargo in hand. I was in transit, some stopwatch up in Texas ticking my seconds away.
    “Hundred grand,” I said aloud, as reminder. What was waiting for me up there.
    It worked.
    Before leaving, the pack slung over my shoulder, the canisters each carefully wrapped in toilet paper, I called the front desk, asked them to get the air conditioner working again, por favor.
    What the clerk told me back was that it was brand new.
    I looked at it, turned the dial again, held the phone down to the sick noise. When I pulled the phone back up, the clerk was asking me when was a good time.
    “Anytime over the next six days,” I said, then kept walking south and east, out of town.

    Because this isn’t a suicide note — more of a record, I suppose, if anything — I’m not writing down the next twelve hours, except to say they were routine: I waded across the river at one of my usual places. Or I swam, yeah. Or both, plus a clear plastic kayak I had to inflate by mouth, rebury in Texas. I got across, I’m saying, and if it cost eight hundred in folded bills, with the guarantee of four more, then nobody’s the wiser.
    The reason I can’t be more specific is that Larkin here, he’s almost gone, is just a husk of the businessman he once was. After him, then, there’s only one left, and then it might just come to pass that I need to cross back into Mexico, at one of my old places. Instead of just walking across the bridge like any other American, yeah.
    It’s not just my history with banks that’s keeping me from doing that, either, or all the fugitive years since then, and it’s not so much what I’m doing right now — I’m the last person anybody should be suspecting — it’s that, even under the cover of night, there’ll be floodlights and flashlights when I have to declare my intent.
    At that point, of course, things will deteriorate rapidly, and there won’t just be an international incident, but an event that’ll probably get picked up by whatever tabloids are still around as well.
    And I don’t need that kind of attention, don’t want any recognition for what I’m doing, what I’ve been through. Like Ambrose Bierce, I just want to walk into the Chihuahuan desert, disappear.
    Or wherever he was.
    I’m not telling Larkin any of this, though.
    After asking him the same question I asked all his associates — Remember me? — I haven’t told him anything, or listened to all his claims about family, his offers of cash, of reconstructive surgery, whatever I want.
    Like a doctor could fix me.
    I don’t need surgeons, I need a priest . Though a scientist with a working time machine would probably do the trick as well. Then I could go back, stay with Laurie, or go back even farther, push her mother out of the bank ahead of me, instead of being brave and going first.
    All that did was show them where to settle their crosshairs.
    Except, of course, I was steps ahead of there by the time they actually did