The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (47)

“Fair warning: he’ll be out by this evening,” Pugh said. “He goes out to a range up in Pecos, and some of our guys know him from there. They say he’s got a lot of guns.”

“Okay. We’re warned. Hey, Casey—Thanks.”



* * *





When she was off the phone, Kaiser asked, “What are we doing tonight?”

“I want to look at satellite photos,” Letty said. “We want to get as far away from the tanker truck parking pit as we can and still see it, if it pulls out.”

“I got the spot,” Kaiser said.

“So we can do some more recon late this afternoon, before dark. Until then . . . Let’s get breakfast, not pancakes, head back to the hotel, get cleaned up, and take a nap.”

“You know what we need to do?” Kaiser asked. “It’s so flat out here, people are visible from so far away, I’d feel better if we had a rifle with us. If these guys really are some kind of nutcake militia . . .”

“You had me at ‘rifle,’?” Letty said.

“Well, we can legally buy one, even though we don’t live here, if our supervisor gives us a letter of authorization on an official government letterhead,” Kaiser said. “If we called Greet right now, she could scan a letter and send us a PDF that we could print at the hotel.”

“Wonder if there’s a decent gun shop in Midland?” Letty asked.

Kaiser glanced at her.

“Just kiddin’,” Letty said. She picked up her phone and punched in Greet’s number. “If this works, we’ll go shopping before we go back out there.”





ELEVEN




Victor Crain had rented a house behind Max Sawyer’s for the simple reason that it’d been empty and that Sawyer knew the landlord. He’d heard a gunshot, and when he looked out his back window, he’d seen the commotion in Sawyer’s yard and decided it was time to book.

He hadn’t been in the place for long and most of his possessions were still in boxes. When no cops showed up at his door, he repacked the few things that he’d unpacked when he rented the place, hauled them out to his pickup, and left town.

On the way, he watched for cop cars, or anyone who might be tracking him, and saw nothing suspicious. He called Jane Hawkes and said, “Sawyer’s been busted. He might have tried something, I heard a shot.”

Hawkes: “Shit! Shit! Why . . .” There was a breakdown in reception, and Crain next heard “. . . now? We’re so close!”

“I bagged out of my house,” Crain said. “I’m gonna bunk down at the shack.”

“. . . R.J. can . . . ask around.”

“You’re breaking up,” Crain said. “Where are you?”

“Rand and me and . . . big hole . . . almost done.”

“Gonna work?”

“Yes. We’re gonna drive the pickup . . . today. Make sure.”

“Hope it don’t rain . . .”

“It’ll be fine. I’ll probably see you up to the shack . . . nights . . . late. I gotta get . . . Midland and . . . some of the boys up there.”

“See you then,” Crain said. “Find out about Max.”



* * *





Hawkes was standing on the side of a mountain where the only trail was cut out of the dirt by off-road four-wheelers. She could get a pickup from I-10 southeast to what they called “the hole,” and she could get the same pickup from the town of Pershing northwest to the hole, but the hole was a problem.

The hole was actually an arroyo slicing down the mountain right into the Rio Grande, created by storm runoff. The solution to the problem was to knock the edges off the hole with a Bobcat, using the loose dirt to fill in the rocky bottom, covering stones the size of footballs. Getting a trailer up to the hole with the Bobcat was a trial, and the Bobcat itself was the smallest one made, which didn’t help. They’d spent ten days working on the road, trailering the machine as far as they could, then using it to smooth entry and exit lines and knock down center mounds on the two-tracks until they got to the hole.

Not everybody would have a four-wheeler, they thought, so after knocking the edges off the hole and partially filling it, they widened the bottom, building a parking platform. If some couldn’t make it up the slope, they’d pull the truck off until everybody else was through, then they’d use a winch to pull the truck up the far side.

Once across the hole, they’d be fine, even in the dark.



* * *





“What do you think?” Hawkes asked Rand Low, looking down the hole.

“We gotta pack it better if we’re gonna put sixty or seventy or eighty pickups across it. But I could take the truck down there now and get it out. Those rocks down there actually make a decent foundation.”

“If you can’t get out, we’d have a long walk,” Hawkes said, hands on her hips.

“Ah, we’re good,” Low said. “Let’s give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, we’ll pull it out with the Bobcat.”

They were all soaked with sweat and brown with dust. Terrill Duran was wearing a bandanna around his face as he worked the Bobcat. He killed the engine and walked over and asked, “You wanna try?”