“Wooo, I ain’t smart mouthin’ no one, least of all a pretty lady like yourself. How ’bout you and me having us a drink after our shifts?” He thought happily of the crisp hundred-dollar bill Cat had handed over after their quick helicopter lesson.
The Mexican was rigid in his seat, his eyes wide and shielded by a hand. He was shaking and gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were blanched.
“Por favor.” He glanced up at both Macovich and Hooter. “No buena armonia.”
Cruz Morales had a vague understanding of English and was accustomed to tossing out the simplest Spanish phrases that most New Yorkers caught immediately. But there was a sea of incomprehension between him and the cop and the tollbooth lady, and Cruz could not afford further investigation. He was twelve years old with a false ID and had driven to Richmond to pick up a package for his older brothers. Although he hadn’t looked at whatever was inside the tightly wrapped bundle hidden in the tire well, he could tell by the weight of it that he was probably transporting handguns again.
“I think the child say he’s poor and needs a favor,” Hooter translated for Macovich. “He look too little and young to hurt nobody.” Her maternal instincts wafted out on a cloud of perfume. “Maybe he need a soda or coffee. All them Mexicans start drinking coffee when they’re little babies.”
The tollbooth lady’s gold front tooth seemed the only bright spot in Cruz Morales’s existence this moment. He made eye contact with her and smiled a little, his teeth chattering.
“See,” Hooter nudged Macovich with her elbow, bumping his pistol. “He’s relating now. We getting through to him.”
She glanced up at miles of parked cars in her lane. Why, it was an endless stream of impatient headlights, and it puffed her up to think they were all here to see her. She felt like a movie star for an instant, and was overwhelmed by sympathy for the little Mexican boy, who clearly was far from home and frightened. He was probably cold, tired, and hungry, too.
Hooter reached into her coat pocket, dug through tubes of lipstick, and produced a napkin that some nice-looking white trooper had given her last year when that man with the paper sack over his head had tried to rob the tollbooth and had run into it instead. Hooter fished out a pen, clicked it open, and wrote down her home phone number on the napkin, which she handed to the Mexican boy.
“Honey, you call me any time you need something,” she magnanimously said. “I know ‘zactly what it feels like to be a minority and have folks always thinking the worst when you ain’t done nothing but collect their un-sanitarian money or drive somewhere and probably not knowing your ‘spection ticket’s espired.”
“Get out of the car!” Macovich ordered the illegal alien. “Get out slowly and let me see your hands!”
Cruz Morales smashed the accelerator to the floor and squealed rubber, flying through the toll lane as lights flashed and alarms screamed because he didn’t have time to toss three quarters into the bin.
“Shit!” Macovich exclaimed, patting around his duty belt, looking for his keys as he ran to his unmarked car and jumped in.
He flipped on his lights and sirens and flew down the interstate, reminding Hooter of a screaming, flashing Christmas tree. She returned to her custom-fabricated aluminum booth with its vandal-resistant stainless-steel coin basket and shut the Extend-A-Door. The endless river of headlights began to move sluggishly toward her and she hoped people wouldn’t be grumpy after the delay.
“What the hell’s going on?” the first driver asked from the high seat of his pickup truck. “If I sat here much longer, I was gonna turn into a skeleton.”
“Then that pretty lady friend I’m sure you got waiting at home for you won’t have as much of you to love,” Hooter teased him with a flash of a smile. “I sure do like that rainbow bumper sticker.” She nodded at his windshield. “You know, I been seeing more and more of ’em lately, like maybe people is looking for the bright side and feeling hope. I might just get me one of them rainbows and stick it on my tollbooth.”