The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (45)

She’d made a mistake on the original surveillance site, the tent, she thought, as she moved slowly through the night. She should have gone farther across the field, which would give her a view down the length of the driveway loop, instead of the side of it. She would have been able to see what the driver was doing, but now he was hidden by the tanks.

No way to fix that. She ghosted through the night, no sound except the grinding of a pump, coming from the area of the tanks. She moved a hundred yards in a circle, toward the head of the driveway loop, but still fifty yards out. From a clump of weeds, she looked down toward the tanks. She could see the nose of the truck and a single man standing outside the cab, talking into a cell phone, a splash of light on his face.

She moved closer, took the binoculars out of her backpack, and studied the man. The cell phone light was bright enough to illuminate the side of his face, but the front of his face was turned away from her. She sat, not moving, five minutes, seven minutes, then another man walked around the end of the truck and said something to the man with the phone. She couldn’t see his face. The man with the phone nodded, turned it off.

They walked out of sight, to the back of the truck, did something she couldn’t see, then walked separately to the driver and passenger doors and climbed inside. She saw the second man’s face in the cab light, but not clearly. They started the truck and drove through the driveway loop, the headlights playing off the weeds above Letty’s head.

When the truck was broadside to her, she risked getting to her knees. She could make out a logo on the side of the tank, a faux-antique script that said Yorktown.

When it had gone through the bend, she turned her back to the truck, did the inside-the-shirt trick, and called Kaiser: “They’re leaving. They’re going south.”

“I’m on it.”



* * *





Kaiser wouldn’t be able to pick her up before tracking the tanker. She was tempted to walk down to check out the Winks building, but resisted the impulse. Instead, she walked carefully and silently back to the tent, pulled the sweatshirt over her head, and called Kaiser again.

“I’m not behind him,” Kaiser said. “I’m running parallel off to the east. We’re still headed south. I’ll call when anything changes.”

Still under the sweatshirt, she used her phone to look up Yorktown trucking and found Yorktown Oil Services Ltd. out of Midland. She opened up the website and read, “The largest independent oil trucking company in the Permian Basin, with more than a hundred clean, modern trucks . . .”

She closed the phone and pulled the shirt back down, lay back on the pack, and dozed. Sometime later, she heard what she thought was a voice. Her phone clock said 5:14. She pushed herself up, peering through the mesh toward the road. She could see a flashlight coming toward her down the side of the road, and when it was closer, saw two men half-walking, half-jogging along the shoulder.

They went on by, and eventually out of sight. She never learned why they might be out there, running in the night.

Kaiser called: “I think I spotted that address on Highway 132. There’s some kind of pit out there. Maybe a gravel pit, I don’t know. I’m not on the same road . . . I’m north of it. The truck drove down in the pit where I can’t see it anymore. I marked it on the nav’s GPS. You want me to sit here and watch, or head back to you?”

“What can you do if you watch?”

“Not much. I can’t get close without tipping them off that I’m here.”

“Then head on back,” Letty said. “We’ll check it tomorrow.”

“Okay. I won’t make it there before sunrise. Stay hidden.”

“Call when you get close. I’ll get some sleep.”



* * *





Kaiser called when he estimated that he was fifteen minutes out. Pickups had been passing on the road, but none had turned at Winks. Letty folded up the tent and put it in its carry bag, did her duckwalk away from the Winks building past the pumpjack to the fence, waited until there were no trucks coming from either direction, then crossed the fence and the road, and sprawled in weeds. The sun was fully above the horizon, promising another hot day, when Kaiser called again.

“I’m a minute out. You should be able to see me.”

She got to her knees, saw him, and a minute later was in the truck.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Got some sleep. Been a while since I’ve slept outside, it was kinda nice. No rattlers as far as I could tell. Want me to drive?”



* * *





Kaiser was happy to stay behind the wheel, so Letty got on her phone and called Greet in Washington. “We saw an oil tank truck delivering oil to a company that is probably selling it for the thieves,” Letty told her. “I don’t think the truck is legit—they hide it, and we know where they’re hiding it.”

“We might want to bring in the FBI,” Greet said.

“We still don’t know where they’re getting the oil,” Letty said. “If you want to wait for a couple of days, we’ll probably get that.”

“I’ll talk to my boss. Things get complicated when we go to the FBI, so it’s not like they’re going to show up at your hotel tomorrow morning.”