The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (115)

On the American side now, the streetlights lining the highway down to the bridge were still on, as were lights at the border station and in town. They could see militiamen moving around, trucks pulling out, two men directing traffic, trucks disappearing down the gun range track.

“Don’t see anyone we know,” Letty whispered, as she looked over the top of the riverbank. “We need to get up there.”

“C’mon,” Kaiser muttered. He led the way, in a crouch, sideways along the riverbank and a few feet down from the crest, so they couldn’t be seen from the highway. After poking their heads up a time or two, they climbed back to the top of the riverbank and crossed the border station’s back parking lot. They stopped behind an emergency power generator, from where they could see across the highway.

“There they are,” Kaiser said.

Low, Duran, and Crain were standing in a semicircle in the light outside the open door of the TV truck, as Rodriguez and Ochoa worked inside.

“That’s them. Getting the propaganda out,” Letty said.

“Can’t get at them without hitting the TV guys,” Kaiser said. “We need to get closer.”

Letty could see cars leaving, heading up the hill toward the roadblock, townspeople fleeing what they thought might be a firefight. There was nothing coming down the hill and only five pickups waited by the end of the flood plain track. Two of the militiamen standing by those trucks pointed their weapons in the air and began firing them, bapbapbapbapbap . . .

Two full magazines went out, and Kaiser said, “Still trying to panic the town—if they get enough cars trying to get out, the cops can’t come down, even if they clear the palm trees.”

“We’re on the wrong side of the highway,” Letty said. “If we go up the hill a couple hundred feet, like we’re running away, we can cross over between the cars that are leaving and come down behind the TV truck, in the brush.”

They did that. They ran through the dark, Kaiser tripping, going down, cursing, then back on his feet. They crossed between two outgoing cars, the driver and his passenger gawking at them. They walked back down the hill, inside the brush line, to the right side of the highway, in the dark, and then, again:

Bapbapbapbapbapbap . . .

They both flinched, the shots very close, some sounding as though they were hitting the TV truck, then Kaiser said, “They’re close, but they weren’t shooting at us . . .”

They heard Rodriguez shouting something and then another man’s voice, different, that Letty thought might have been Low, but quieter, and they couldn’t make out what he was saying.

Letty stood back up, Kaiser beside her, and said, “I think we lost the last of our communications . . . I think they shot up the satellite feed.”

They moved slowly, deliberately, along the back of the TV truck and peeked around it. Rodriguez was standing there, thirty feet away, Ochoa beside him, watching Low, Duran, and Crain walking away toward the last two pickup trucks still on the highway.

“Where’s Hawkes?” Kaiser whispered.

Letty said, “Don’t know. C’mon.” They went back to the off-side of the TV truck, where Letty recovered the pack she’d dropped and the AR that was still leaning against the truck.

“What are we doing?” Kaiser asked.

Letty: “Like I said: I’m gonna kill some people.”



* * *





They pushed into the brush, the branches and tree limbs catching them, scratching; Letty walked into the end of a broken limb and felt it jab into her forehead. She touched the wound with her fingertips and came back with blood that trickled into her eyes.

“Watch your eyes,” she told Kaiser. “Watch your eyes.”

As they approached the track going onto the flood plain, Letty said, “We’ll ambush them when they come by.”

They heard truck doors slamming and Kaiser said, “Here.” He caught Letty by the arm, said, “There’s a ditch here, or a hole. Cover, if they shoot back.”

In the hole, Letty put her pack down, lifted the AR, and asked, “You jack a round into the chamber?”

“Probably is one . . .”

Letty pulled back the charging handle on the AR, let it slam forward, felt, or heard, a shell flip into the brush as she did it. “Twenty-nine now,” she said, of the AR’s thirty-round magazine. She thumbed the safety into the firing position. “You’re the ambush expert. Tell me what to do.”

“Two trucks left, with the leadership. Aim at the door of the lead truck and put fifteen or twenty rounds through it, keep ten or so in case you need them. Visualize how they’ll be sitting inside. I’ll take the second truck. If it gets past me, dump the rest of your rounds into it.”

“Wonder where they are?”

“Coming . . . I can hear them . . .”

Hear them but not see them. The trucks were rolling down the hill without lights, both black, hard to see.

Kaiser said, “Here . . .”

Letty saw the lead truck creeping toward them in the dark, fifteen feet away. She half-stood, to clear the weeds around their hole, and, when the truck was directly across from her, began firing the AR, the gun leaping in her hands, bangbangbangbangbang, half a mag going out in three or four seconds.

The truck rolled to the left, rudderless, Kaiser’s shotgun banging along a few feet farther up the hill, louder but much slower than the AR, and then, her ears ringing and Kaiser shouting, “I don’t know, he may have bailed when you opened up . . . I’m going around the back of the truck, watch this side, watch this side.”