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Letty, still a little stunned, looked at Scott’s body, said, “I killed him four times, but he kept getting up…”
“No blood,” Hawkins said. He reached down and pulled open Scott’s shirt, revealing a bulletproof vest.
“He killed a cop in Lamy,” Letty said. “He took the cop’s vest.”
Hawkins tipped Scott’s body and pulled open the flap on the fanny pack: all the vials were open, two were broken, and the bag was soaked with the pink fluid. He turned and shouted to Cartwright, “Get buckets. Get buckets from the terminal. Get a cigarette lighter.”
“What?”
“Buckets,” Hawkins shouted.
Cops appeared behind Cartwright, and she warned them away, and they rapidly backed up, all of them looking down toward Letty and Hawkins as they stood over the body.
“Now what?” Hawkins asked.
“We’re healthy. We’ll make it,” Letty said.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Hawkins said.
—
Cartwright got backwith four plastic buckets and Hawkins shouted, “Get closer, then throw them toward us as hard as you can, then back away.”
“What are you doing?” Cartwright shouted. She got within about thirty yards, pushed the buckets together, nested inside each other, and threw them.
“Going to start a fire,” Hawkins shouted back. “Did you bring the lighter?”
“Oh yeah.” She pitched a Bic lighter toward them.
Hawkins picked up the buckets and the lighter, walked over to the parking garage, squatted behind a pickup and said, “Why don’t you fire about four shots into the gas tank? As close together as possible, to make a big hole.”
“Won’t it explode?” Letty asked
“Never happens,” Hawkins said.
She lay on her side, ten feet back, did what he told her to do, fired four shots into the gas tank. Gas gushed out, and Hawkins left Letty to change buckets as each one filled, as he carried the full buckets down to Scott’s body and soaked it with gasoline, paying special attention to the fanny pack. They got twenty gallons on the body and the area around it, then shot up another pickup gas tank—“Pickups are best because they have the biggest tanks,” Hawkins told Letty. They put another two buckets of gas on and around Scott, then found a rag in a trash barrel, put some gasoline on it, lit it with the lighter, and Hawkins threw the rag at the gas-drenched street and ran away as he did it.
The gas exploded in a fireball fifteen feet high; the heat was like an iron pressed to their faces. “I hope that will do it.”
“What about us?” Letty asked.
“We have more work to do,” Hawkins said. He had Letty shoot holes into the tanks of cars on both sides of the two pickups, and all the cars in between, until the whole floor of the parking garage was soaked. They set that on fire, hurrying back into the street as they did it.
Hawkins called Cartwright: “Don’t let them put out the fires. We had to burn the garage because Letty and I were inside of it. We need you to drive our SUV down the ramp until you’re thirty or forty yardsaway, then leave it. We’ll be driving it up to Taos, and the church. When we’re gone, you need to burn the part of the street we walked on.”
“You’re really that infected?” Cartwright called.
“We think we are. We have no choice but to believe that.”
Cartwright: “I’ll bring the SUV.”
30
Lucas was not an early riser under ordinary circumstances, and with the days-long stress of the virus investigation, he was still deep in sleep when his phone rang. He ignored it once—what would they want so early, when he was quarantined, and was out of it?—but when it started ringing again, one minute after the first call stopped, he rolled over in bed, looked at the screen.
Letty calling, and she knew he slept late. He was too late to catch the second call, so he tapped Letty’s number, calling her back.
When she answered, he asked, “What’s up?”
