The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (110)

Letty said, “Step inside for a minute.”

She stood back and the old man followed her inside. She shut the door, took out her ID, held it in front of his face, and said, “My friend and I are agents with the Department of Homeland Security. We took the city council out of the jail and up to the Mescalero Cave campground, where my friend is holding the militia off.”

He had to think about that for a minute, then asked, “What about the blankets and pillows?”

“We thought we might have to stay up there for a couple of days . . . couple of nights . . . and it gets cold at night. We needed something for people to wrap up in.”

“Are we going to get them back?”

“Yes. Or, if they get damaged, we’ll buy them from you. Do not let on to anyone that I’m with DHS. These people here, the militia, have kidnapped people, they’re committing treason. You don’t want to be on their side.”

The old man’s Adam’s apple bobbed and he said, “I’m going back to the office. I won’t tell nobody.”

“Keep your mouth shut and you’ll be fine,” Letty said.

He backed away from her, groped for the doorknob, let himself out, and very quietly shut the door.

Letty said, aloud, “Ah, God. Pillows and blankets?” and lay on the bed again. She’d been up a long hard day, most of a night, another high-stress day, and she might have to make it through another night. Young as she was, she was feeling it. There didn’t appear much new she could learn by wandering up and down the hill, at least not until the caravan got close. If she could get a couple hours of sleep before the caravan came in . . .

On the half-hour, as she was nearly asleep, Kaiser buzzed her and she picked up the walkie-talkie and said, “Going down for two.”

“Good. Same here.”

She couldn’t make calls on her phone, but its clock still worked. She set an alarm for two hours, and was gone.

When the alarm went off, she bolted upright, shut down the alarm. She had time for a quick rinse before Kaiser would check with her, and she staggered to the shower, dazed, fought an absurd fight with the plastic shower curtain, peeled open a bar of motel soap, and scrubbed up.

Steaming hot water, followed by cooler water and finally by thirty seconds of a torrent of cold, shook the sleep from her brain. She dried off, dressed in her first set of thrift-store clothing, transferred the 938 to the pocket of the red jeans, but this time, took the Staccato XC from its carry pouch, checked it, jacked a shell into the chamber and clicked the safety on, and put it, locked and loaded, into the pack.

She now had to be very careful, she thought. She had the tag numbers of at least forty-five trucks from Texas and five other states; she couldn’t risk losing her phone to the militia. And, in fact, taking a chance with that was stupid. She spent ten minutes writing down a list of tag numbers on a motel envelope, and hid the envelope under the mattress.

Just before six o’clock, she walked out the motel door, crossed the parking lot, and looked down the hill. A dozen or so people were milling around on the Mexican side and she could see bicycles. The crowd on the American side had grown, both of townspeople and militia.

At six, she stepped behind an ivy-covered trellis outside the motel, buzzed Kaiser, and said, “Caravan close.”

“Got it.”

What he would do with the information, she didn’t know—probably, if he was stuck under guard, nothing. She put the walkie-talkie in her pack and headed down the hill.

The TV truck was parked where it’d been since Rodriguez and Ochoa got back from the cell tower explosion, but the street-side door they used was shut and locked. As she got farther down the hill, she could see Ochoa floating above the crowd, and as she got closer, realized that she was sitting on the shoulders of a husky dark-haired man that Letty hadn’t seen before, a mobile video platform.

She joined the crowd, watched and listened for a couple of minutes—they were expecting the caravan at any time—and saw Hawkes, Low, Duran, and Crain standing by the end of the bridge, with a dozen militiamen with rifles braced on their hips, all looking across the river. The original crew of twenty militia were standing on the far side of the bridge, no more than twenty yards from the Mexican side.

Letty threaded her way through the crowd until she was beside Rodriguez. He didn’t see her coming up, didn’t turn until she asked, quietly, “Where did Candace get the ride?”

He glanced down at her and said, “It’s like Uber. Twenty bucks and you get a ride. Go away.”

“I’ll wait with you,” Letty said.

He sighed and said “Goddamn it” and turned away. A man with a cowboy hat moved in front of Letty and she couldn’t see past him. She poked him in the side. “I can’t see.”

Without looking at her, he said, “Tough.”

She said, “If you don’t move, I’ll take out my knife and cut your belt and your pants will fall down.”

Now he looked at her and Rodriguez said, “She’ll do it,” and the man moved sideways. Letty said, “Thank you.”

Across the bridge, a dozen people appeared on the highway behind the group already gathered by the Mexican border post, and then an old yellow school bus that resembled all the old yellow school buses in the world edged around a turn behind them.

Rodriguez said, “Here we go.”