Spy by Ted Bell

disturbed.”
    “Yessir, I did check.”
    “And he didn’t go out either door.”
    “We’d have seen him, Sheriff.”
    Dixon removed his hat and ran his fingers through his thinning brown hair.
    “There was a lot of dust when he pulled over.”
    “I guess he could have run, Sheriff.”
    Franklin told Homer to have a look in the glove box. Get his registration. Jot down all the numbers on the VIN plate screwed into the door-jamb.
    “Well. He must have run,” the sheriff said to Homer and jumped to the ground. “I’ll go have a look around.”
    Dixon did a three-sixty, bending down to look under the trailer a few times, between the axles, and shook his head. Then he walked away from the truck, a few hundred yards into the desert. There was a rocky mound rising to about thirty feet high where he could see the plains better. The wind had come up, and there were scattered tumbleweeds blowing across the highway. There was a sound on the wind, too, but it wasn’t any speed-freak trucker beating feet through the desert.
    No. It was horses. Maybe a dozen of them.
    Franklin looked up, squinting his eyes, and saw a cloud of dust rising out on the plain.
    His posse?
    He moved quickly to the top of the hill.
    The riders were tightly bunched about a half-mile away. Headed right at him at full gallop. Ben’s ranch, where they’d left from, the stables were just up the road a piece. Well. The boys were a full day late but at least it looked like they’d all come back safely. When he’d sent them off, he hadn’t so sure about the thing at all. It was dangerous down there, real dangerous. All he knew was, he had to do something for those girls.
    He’d have ridden down with them if he hadn’t been so worried about his town.
    There was a full-blown war raging on this border. An invasion. Illegals and drugs both. All hell had broken loose down in the little border town of Nuevo Laredo. Lots of people on both sides had died in the crossfire. Two Border Patrol Agents had been gunned down here in the last six months. Couple of tourists, too, who’d gotten lost after crossing over the International bridge at Laredo. Pretty bad. He’d heard a rumor they were sending some fellas down from Washington to look into it. Well, it was about time.
    Way past time.
    Apparently Laredo PD had found a stash of IEDs under the bridge. Improvised explosive devices, just like the ones used in Iraq to kill Marines. Al-Qaeda on the border? He’d heard crazier things in his life.
    The Mexican border was flat broken. And nobody had a clue how to fix it. Ranchers and Minutemen wanted to put up a 2,000-mile-long fence. Money was pouring in, people wanting to put fences on their property. Nothing made sense any more. A border was a border. Any fool knew that. Folks in Washington just looked the other way. Didn’t want to upset anybody. Give Texas back to the Mexicans without firing a shot. That’s what was happening to his state.
    But not to his town. Not if he could help it.
    He had no idea if it was Mexican narco-gangbangers or even dirty Federales behind all these abductions. Or, even if the young ladies had been spirited away to Nuevo Laredo bordellos. But Nuevo wasn’t a bad place to start looking, he knew that for sure. It was the most lawless town on either side of a lawless border. Not that that was saying much these days.
    Something had spooked the horses. Maybe one of the riders had seen him standing up here on a hill. Anyway, they’d changed direction and now the posse was headed right for him.
    He couldn’t understand why they were riding so bunched up like that. He strained his eyes, trying to see. Even in the cold moonlight they were still just a tight black mass kicking up a single dust-cloud behind them.
    “Sheriff? I hear horses.”
    He’d been concentrating so hard on the strange spectacle he hadn’t even heard Homer coming up the hill behind him.
    “You’re not going to believe this,” Dixon said, turning back to the horses.