The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (107)

Letty opened her mouth to complain, then shrugged and took two fifties and a ten out of her purse and gave it to the woman, who said, “The batteries are another ten.” The battery package said $5.99.

“You’re doing all right for yourself,” Letty said, passing over another ten dollars. “You wouldn’t have a pair of binoculars in there?” Kaiser’s binoculars were in the Explorer.

“Got a monocular. It’s pretty good. Sixty bucks.”

The Celestron Nature monocular still carried the $39.99 price tag.

Letty passed over three twenties. To the woman she said, “You ought to be proud of yourself.”

“Gotta make hay while the sun shines, and right now, it’s shining. It’s either pay me or walk to Van Horn,” the woman said. “And for the money, I don’t tell no one that you were here, or what you bought.”

“That’s a really, really good idea,” Letty said. She put some gravel in her voice, and the woman took it in, then closed the door and locked it.

Letty walked along the side street until it ended, then found a spot behind a sick-looking shrub and broke the walkie-talkie handsets out of the clamshell and put the batteries in. The packaging said that the handsets had thirty-six channels. She clicked through them one at a time, listening, and eventually found spurts of conversation on channel twenty-two.

Listening, she eventually worked out that somebody had been shot, and, shortly after, learned that the gunshot victim was a member of the militia and that the city council and Delta troopers were holed up in a cave. Kaiser had made it. A voice she recognized as Hawkes’s said that they could use the TV van to request a medevac from El Paso and a man replied that they should do that, and that they’d be at the station in one minute. “Tell the chopper to land on the bridge.”

The handset went silent.

If Kaiser had taken out the jail guards, Letty thought, he wouldn’t have left the walkie-talkies behind, and he might well be monitoring the only channel on which they seemed to be talking: twenty-two.

She thought, then clicked transmit and blurted, “Kaiser, date we flew.”

She clicked down to channel fourteen, listened, and Kaiser said, “We good.”

Letty: “Cada media horas.” Kaiser didn’t speak Spanish, but all but one of the city council had Spanish surnames. If there was a militia listener on channel fourteen, maybe he/she didn’t.

Kaiser: “Got it.”

“Later.”



* * *





With any luck, they’d talk at every half-hour interval on the clock. Letty realized she was only a block from the used-clothing store, and she went that way, knocked on the door. The woman inside recognized her. “You’re back.”

“I’m back. I want to buy a dress. And some different shoes. Maybe a hat.”

“We got that. What are you up to, girl?”

“You don’t want to know,” Letty said.



* * *





Letty bought a loose neck-to-ankles gingham shift, a pair of worn Levi’s jeans, sandals, and a slightly battered straw hat, for twenty-three dollars. She borrowed a pair of scissors from the store owner and cut the legs off the jeans. The woman said, “You might be showing a little more than you want there . . .”

“They’re underwear,” Letty said.

She went into a tiny dressing room, checked the time on her cell phone, pulled on the shorts, transferred the Sig 938 in its Sticky Holster to one pocket, DHS ID to a back pocket, then checked the time again, took out the walkie-talkie, and called Kaiser: “Nothing here.”

She got back, “Nothing here.”

She turned off the walkie-talkie and pulled the shift over her head. She looked in the mirror—she was hippier because of the jeans—and groped for a one-word description of her new self. She came up with “helpless.”

Perfect.

One walkie-talkie went in a back pocket, the cell phone and the other walkie-talkie in her purse, which was becoming a problem: too bulky and too expensive. The clothes she had been wearing and the white-rimmed sunglasses went in a brown paper grocery sack.

She said good-bye to the store owner—“I could be back”—and walked out and down the hill to the motel. There were militia trucks at almost every corner: security had been kicked up, apparently because of the shooting. The nurses were no longer in their two rooms and she thought they might have gone to help the man Kaiser had shot.

In her room, she traded the purse for her backpack. The Staccato was there, and she was tempted, but if anyone should check the pack . . . She hid it under the bare mattress, with one of the walkie-talkies, put on her straw hat, and went out again and down the hill.

The TV truck was again parked up the hill from the border station, and she saw Hawkes and Low standing next to it. A crowd was still hanging around the station, where the meeting had been held. She eased into it and asked a woman there, “Anything going on?”

“One of their men got shot by some crazy up at the cave. I heard they’re calling for a helicopter, but . . . that’s just what I heard. I don’t really know.”

“Anything about that caravan?”

“It’s not too far away. Some guys on bicycles came down the road on the other side, and looked over at us, and went back. I think they were with the caravan and came to see what was happening.”