The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (104)

Kaiser said, “We need to get their walkie-talkies.”

“Cell phones,” one of the women said.

“Cell phones don’t work anymore. They blew up the cell phone tower.”

Lopez, the mayor, prodded the beardless guard’s leg with his boot and said, “Goddamn it, did you have to go and do that? Took us two years to get that thing built.”

“That’s just the start,” the man said.

Kaiser said to Alonso, a short, stocky guy with a tough face, “I’m gonna point this pistol”—he pulled his carry gun— “at this asshole’s head, and I want you to go through his pockets. We want everything in them, wallet, knife if he has one, hidden gun, check his socks, his ankle . . . If he shows any sign of resistance, shout it out and jump back and I’ll kill him.”

The odor of urine suddenly suffused the jail, and Alonso said, “He peed himself.”

“He has good reason to,” Kaiser said, prodding the beardless man with his boot. “My trigger is delicate as a butterfly wing.”

When both men had been searched—they were both carrying walkie-talkies and knives, but no additional guns—Kaiser kicked the uninjured man and said, “Crawl over to that cell. Go on.”

The man crawled to the cell, and then Kaiser kicked the injured man again and ordered him to crawl to the adjacent cell. He looked around at the council members and asked, “You think they’ve got more keys? Like, you know, hidden somewhere on them?”

One of the men said, “I don’t believe so. Somebody might have keys, but I don’t think these guys do.”

Kaiser told Moreno to lock the cells and to test them to make sure they were locked. When they were, he went to the door. He could see three women walking down the hill on the main street, one block over, apparently on the way to the noon meeting.

“I will tell you everything I know in a minute,” Kaiser told the council people. “Right now, I want you to walk uphill, one at a time, to the first street. There’s a Ford Explorer parked there, the doors are unlocked. We’re gonna have to get six people in it, but that’s the only transportation we got . . . You women are going to have to sit on somebody’s lap . . .”

“Where are we going?”

“Tell you when we’re on the way,” Kaiser said. He tipped his head toward the cells. “I don’t want these guys to know.”

The bearded man said, “You guys are dead.”



* * *





The five council members walked out, one at a time, the men picking up the AR-15s as they went. Up the hill, they piled into the Explorer. Kaiser went last, carrying the two pistols taken from the guards. He climbed into the Explorer and put it in gear.

“We think they won’t be here more than a day or maybe two,” Kaiser said. “I’m not sure, but it’s possible that they’ll be trying to get out of here tonight, after the caravan gets here. I don’t know what they’re planning to do about that. Anyway, I’m taking you up to the Mescalero Cave. I’ve got food and water and blankets for the night, we’ve got guns. That cave is a fort.”

“We could hide out in a house in town,” Moreno suggested. “They can’t search them all.”

“Lot of reasons not to do that,” Kaiser said. “We can talk about it up at the cave. The fact is, they could search all of them. There are a lot of militia people here and I think they’d enjoy doing that.”

The path leading to the cave was three and a half miles up the highway. Kaiser got on the gas pedal and, a mile out, burned past two pickups coming from the other direction.

“They turn around? They coming after us?” he asked. He couldn’t see anything in the rearview mirror except the women sitting on the councilmen’s laps.

The councilwomen looked out the back window. “No.”



* * *





The cave was a five-minute walk uphill from the campground, a cup-shaped hole in the soft red rock of the mountain, fifty feet across and fifty feet deep. Boulders and ragged chunks of rock from the mountain, some as big as buses, littered the ground in front of the cave, providing cover.

Kaiser loaded the council people with the food, water, and bedding he’d collected, and sent them up the hill. Running down the path to the road, he checked both ways and saw nothing. When he’d given the council people enough time to make it to the cave, he followed them up the hill, pausing to lock the doors on the Explorer.

“Now,” he said, when they were gathered in a circle of boulders, “Who here hunts? Who knows how to shoot a rifle or a pistol?”

The five council people looked at one another, then all five raised their hands.

“Outstanding,” Kaiser said.



* * *





The first militia truck pulled into the campground a half-hour later. A man got out, ran to the Explorer, peered inside, then ran back to the truck. Five minutes after that, there were eleven trucks in the campground area.

Kaiser looked down at them, then turned to the five council people and said, “You know what I said. I’ll do the talking. I want you all in your holes, behind your rocks. I’ll yell if I need you to open up. Main thing is, stay under cover. Nothing can get at you where you are.”