Chapter 1: Tobias Sharpton

It had all been a lark, a joke, an adventure; right up to the point where Tobias Sharpton slowed his Toyota Sequoia to a stop at the line of cars waiting to cross the border from Ciudad Acuna into Del Rio, Texas. Ten minutes earlier, tooling northwest down noisy Francisco Javier Avenue, Toby had been drumming the steering wheel and singing the parts of Smuggler’s Blues he could remember aloud to himself.

The bridge across the Rio Grande dumped him into a four-lane crossing station that looked as sophisticated as your average farmer’s market. The rundown corrugated steel apron over the four automated crossbars reminded Toby of the pickup gate at a lumberyard. It was not impressive.

The traffic lights over two of the three leftmost lanes were red. The open checkpoint was the far right lane, buttressing the Border Patrol headquarters. Toby checked his watch. It was ten thirty in the morning. They had told him that Lane Two would be open and that’s where he should be lining up. The light over Lane Two was neither red nor green. It was dark. Probably red, but the red lamp was burned out.

The closed lane was the first part of the trip that had not gone exactly as planned. Had there not been eleven cars between Toby and the checkpoint, he would have been fine. But there were eleven cars, each of which took forever to clear the three Border Patrol agents circling it with questions and mirrors on sticks.

Toby Sharpton’s armpits began to express his incremental terror in liquid form. With nine cars to go, Toby could smell his own body funk. His right knee began quivering involuntarily.

Toby found himself looking at the unimpressive border patrol station to his right. Inside that unimpressive building was undoubtedly a cell. Probably a bunch of them. They probably smelled a lot like nervous BO.

His clean cut, middle-aged dad look was evaporating in the heat and more so with the passing of every nervous minute. He checked his reflection in the rear view mirror and what he saw was bleak. The blood had drained from his cheeks. He looked guilty as fuck. The strawberry blonde stubble on his jaw seemed a full eighth of an inch longer than it had been in the motel.

Toby exhaled slowly. Pound-for-pound, cocaine would have been easier to hide, more profitable, and carry less felony prison time than the one hundred and fifteen suppressors he had crammed into the utility wells in the back of the Sequoia’s carpeted interior. Silencers. Toys for friends of the gunsmith who didn’t want to wait eight months for FFA Stamp paperwork to process. They wanted some illegal toys for their very legal AR 15s.

If Toby could make it another one hundred feet north, he’d have nothing standing between him and seven thousand untaxed dollars. Seven grand would stop his phone from ringing, the constant suckling mewl of hungry debtors. His mortgage note would be even. His wife would stop crying for a while and perhaps, after taking the kids out for a night of Dairy Queen and shopping for some new clothes, she might even want to sleep with him again.

It would even buy him almost two more months of grace to find another software engineering job.

But that Happily Ever After was still one hundred feet north of the Sequoia.