The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (50)

She went out to Netflix, skipped through two episodes of The Queen’s Gambit, one of her favorite streaming programs of all time. She paused it halfway through the finale, where the American girl beat the Russians, when R.J. called back.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “A Midland investigator named Dan Tanner—good guy, I know him—who is checking out a double murder went to Max’s place, but nobody knows exactly why. Supposedly working the murder. Max’s pit bull attacked him, bit him real bad, put him in the hospital. Dog was shot. Max got arrested for pulling a gun on the cops, but I’m told it’s probably a bad bust. Nobody was in uniform, he came out with a gun after somebody shot the dog in his front yard.”

“Goddamn it . . .”

“Yeah, but like I said, it doesn’t sound like much. One thing, there were three other people there. There was a Monahans investigator named Pugh, I know her, too, she’s okay, and then two federal people. There’s a big guy from the Department of Homeland Security and a woman who’s working with him, like an assistant, or something. Really young, doesn’t seem like much. But the guy is definitely a threat.”

“Homeland Security . . . ah, man,” Hawkes said.

“Yeah. That was my thought. Homeland Security isn’t here to see who’s stealing oil.”

“You gotta stay on top of this, R.J. This is critical.”

“I will. I’ll start checking things out. I’ll try to find where the Homeland Security people are staying. Maybe you could put some guys on them, track them, see what they’re doing.”

“Call me back if you find anything out,” Hawkes said.

She had people coming from all over the country. She had her own people armoring up.

And Homeland Security was poking its nose in.

Not ideal.



* * *





The day had been a long one, and she had a minor, familiar headache: she’d insisted on working on the road building, and the hot weather sucked the water out of her. Low had explained that she had a much higher skin-to-meat ratio than the males did, which meant that she evaporated water faster—something he’d learned as a laborer up in the oil patch.

She drank a final bottle of water with an Aleve and went to bed, lay awake, and thought of what was up ahead of her. She’d be a fugitive, for sure. She had people to pass her along, like the Underground Railroad, but she’d probably be caught in the end.

Some nights, dreaming of that end, she thought about fighting it out. She’d be armed, she knew how to use her guns, but she had no illusions about the cops who’d be hunting her. They’d know how to use theirs, too. She’d die, but she’d be a legend.

On other nights, she thought of accepting her capture—if they’d let her do that—and then standing mute during her trial and imprisonment. Once inside the Bureau of Prisons, wherever they sent her, she’d continue her writings. They couldn’t entirely stop that; her work could be smuggled out, if nothing else.

Would that make her a legend? She was unsure of that. She wrote reasonably well, she thought, but wasn’t exactly a poet. Low spoke better than she did, where the rage and hurt was right out there for everybody to see and hear. Still, as a writer, she was good enough.

Sometimes she imagined herself in movie-like visions, hiking through the mountains with a rifle on her shoulder or, alternatively, riding through the mountains on a sorrel stallion, and then she’d laugh at herself, for the vanity. She’d have a Subaru for the beginning of her run, there wouldn’t be any sorrel stallions in her future . . .

All she really wanted was for people to recognize that she’d never had a chance and that seventy percent of them were the same way—people without a chance. To understand that the bottom people were all in it together.

You might sympathize with the immigrants from the south on an individual basis, but their effect was to create an even lower bottom than already existed, she believed. There was no way to raise yourself up, if the bottom kept falling out beneath you. The Democrats bragged about the idea of a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage: How many of those Democrats could live on thirty-one thousand dollars a year? And the Republicans were worse: they pretended to believe that paying fifteen dollars an hour would cause McDonald’s to go broke. Poor fuckin’ McDonald’s.

She rolled over in the night, the anger causing her to thrash about like a beached salmon, tangle herself up in the sheets.

Not for much longer. In a week, she’d be up in the Rocky Mountains.

Or dead.





TWELVE




Hyman Drago’s Hunting and Tactical Equipment was a gun nut’s dream store, Letty thought, as she cruised slowly down two long aisles of rifles and shotguns. She’d been in a lot of gun stores, but she had to admit that Drago’s was a good one. Kaiser was walking on the opposite side of the gun aisles, totally focused. He would stop, touch a gun, move on. A clerk had asked each of them if they needed help, and they’d both politely declined, saying they would call for it when they needed it.

The guns were locked in the racks, most with metal or synthetic stocks, a surprising number with wood. Letty favored wood, found wood warm in the winter. With an inadequate pair of gloves, a metal stock would freeze your fingers . . .

Letty’s natural mother had survived on child support checks and drank away a good part of the money. Letty had eaten school lunches eagerly, unsweetened instant oatmeal at breakfast with powdered milk that came in huge blue-and-white boxes that seemed to last forever, and, too often, peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, especially in the last week before a new support check came in.