The Devil's Highway by Timothy C. Phillips Page B

would be me sticking my neck out for your cause. Are you willing to do the same for mine?”
    “Your cause? If you’re asking me to choose sides, Sheriff, I think it’s time everyone here in Delgado realized they were on the same side. That is, anyone who isn’t part of the Redemption Army.”
    “Glad to hear you say that, Longville. Meet me tomorrow morning at my office. There’s something that I want to discuss with you.”
    “I’ll be there.”
    I took the elevator upstairs, half expecting more Redemption Army members to be lying in wait for me there. What I found was a much more pleasant surprise; Andrea Herrera, loitering outside my door.
    “Roland Longville. Are you following me?” She asked, with a raised eyebrow.
    “The Fermosa is the only hotel in town, I might point out. Are you staying on this floor, too?”
    “I’m on the next floor up. I just wanted to see if you knew what the excitement in the bar was about.”
    I told her what I learned from Garrett and Hughes.
    “It’s starting,” she said, her black eyes boring into mine.
    I grabbed her shoulders. “Andrea, you’re starting to sound like Cushman when he talks about the Apocalypse. You make it sound as though this was all planned out, just waiting for me to get here.”
    “Planned? No. I don’t subscribe to prophecy in my line of work. But do I think it was inevitable, yes. Maybe it really started when Brad Caldwell came here. Delgado, the Redemption Army Compound, all of it; it’s a pot that has been simmering for a very long time. I think you added that little extra heat that’s going to finally make it boil over.”
    I just stood there and looked at her. She reached up flirtatiously straightened my lapels and walked past me. “I’m in room 343, if you were wondering.” She whispered in my ear as she walked by.
    I watched her saunter down the hall. She didn’t look back.
    I like to make my own decisions, but ever since I had arrived in West Texas, I had felt like my every move had been planned out for me. Andrea believed there was a big battle coming, and I was going to be caught in its midst. Something told me that she was right.
    A couple of minutes later, I was knocking on the door of 343. Andrea answered the door, one eyebrow arched and a little smile playing at her lips.
    “Long time no see.” She turned, leaving the door open. I walked in and closed it behind me. She turned to face me. “Something you wanted?”
    “There’s something I’ve been wondering about.”
    She came up to me, put her palm on my chest. “What’s that?”
    “Fernando Mendoza and you came to Delgado to make a documentary. That was before you ever heard of Brad Caldwell.”
    “Yes,” she said, in almost a whisper.  
    “So how did you know about Cushman, and the Redemption Army? You must have already suspected something.”
    “Fernando had heard things from immigrants. We were already working on another piece . . . . Fernando wanted to do a film on illegal immigration. Most people think illegals are all from Mexico, when the truth is there are many who make much longer journeys; they come from Mexico, Nicaragua, and points even further south. He wanted to show the public in the United States that the border that needs policing is Mexico’s southern border.”
    “And in the making of this other picture, you heard something about Cushman and the Redemption Army? Something that was big enough to draw the two of you here?”
    Andrea nodded, and put her head on my chest.
    “Some people who had been caught by the Border Patrol and sent back over the border told us about a woman they had met, who told them she had escaped from a large group that was being moved north by some militia group. It was just a rumor, and you hear many on the border. A few weeks later, though, someone told us of some traffickers in Juarez who bragged of selling women to men in camouflage clothes in the desert near Delgado. Fernando decided we needed to know more, so we