The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (52)

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At five-thirty, they hit the McDonald’s halfway between Midland and Odessa, and by six-fifteen, were running along County Road 132, which was little better than a dirt track, where Kaiser had seen the oil tanker disappear. The whole countryside was a flat wasteland of low brush punctuated by dozens of pumpjacks and hundreds of power poles, one of the ugliest landscapes Letty had ever encountered.

Kaiser thought the truck may have been driven into a borrow pit or natural swale, but as they got closer, it appeared instead to have been driven into a dry creek bed that ran generally parallel to the track. “Had to be right around in here,” he said. “I checked the GPS, I was almost straight north of them, and . . . there we go.”

He pointed at a dusty track that went over the edge of the creek bank and onto the creek bed itself. The arroyo was deep enough to hide the truck, and as they went farther along the road, they could see no sign of it. “Wonder why they’re hiding it? It’s a big company, right?”

“I don’t think it’s real. Maybe we’ll find out,” Letty said. She pointed through the windshield. “Did you see that building last night?”

On the creek side of the road, but fifty or sixty yards from the creek bed, a small corrugated steel building squatted ten yards off the road. The building showed streaks of rust down its sides, and corrosion where it met the earth. Kaiser shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t have seen it without lights inside. All I could see of the truck were its lights.”

“Don’t slow down. I’m going to make a movie with my cell phone,” Letty said. They went on by. The building was no more than twenty feet square, with power coming in from one of the poles that fed the pumpjacks. A TV antenna was mounted on a pole behind the building, and an old-fashioned outhouse stood by itself behind the building and to one side.

“What the hell is this place doing out in the middle of nowhere?” Kaiser asked.

“It’s like a line shack,” Letty said. “Maybe . . . for people working the oil? Maybe maintenance on the pumpjacks? Or ag workers? We did see that one field with the center-pivot irrigator. Actually? I have no idea.”

“I wouldn’t know a center-pivot irrigator if one was stuck up my ass,” Kaiser said. “But over there . . . See the footpath coming out of the creek? The truck is down there and those guys are walking up here. They could be in the shack right now.”

“Don’t think so,” Letty said. “There’d be at least one pickup. They’re not going out to the grocery store in that tanker.”



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They went on by and continued until the road was about to disappear into raw dirt; but before that happened, they crossed another track going north, and took it, and a mile later, another road going west toward the interstate. “This is where we want to be tonight,” Kaiser said. Letty unbuckled and turned in her seat, looked past Kaiser’s head with his binoculars. “I can see the building . . .”

She pointed ahead where a waist-high clump of weeds reached almost to the road. “See if you can get behind the weeds without getting stuck.”

Kaiser drove in behind the weeds and stopped. “This will work,” Letty said. “If that truck is in there, no way they’d see us way up here. If they go out after dark with their lights on, we’ll have a front-row seat.”

“More than an hour to sunset,” Kaiser said. “We can’t sit here. Somebody might come by and wonder what we’re doing. But we gotta be back here when we can still see well enough to drive without headlights.”

“We can turn off the headlights if we have to. But the taillights . . .”

“Duct tape and blackout cloth,” Kaiser said.

“Let’s go up to Odessa and visit Tanner,” Letty suggested. “He’ll think it’s nice of us, and we’ll have a comfortable place to sit while we wait. Get a couple Cokes. There’s a Walmart up there, we could get the tape and the blackout cloth.”

“?’Cause we really don’t give a shit about Tanner.”

“I didn’t say that.”



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Tanner was grumpy but relaxed: he’d been given a dose of OxyContin, which he found pleasant, as had Vermilion Wright, with his knee surgery. “Not going to piss on people for using OxyContin anymore,” he said. “Doesn’t affect your thinking, but it does make the pain go away.”

“Take a dozen pills a day for a month and see how you feel,” Kaiser said. “You’ll be selling the tires off your squad car to pay for a fix.”

The conversation more or less slipped downhill from that, and after a while, Tanner said, “I gotta get some sleep. I want to thank you guys for coming by,” and so they left.

“That was refreshing,” Kaiser said, as they crossed the parking lot.

“Did what we needed and I got to pee,” Letty said. “Let’s run over to Walmart and get the tape and cloth for the taillights. It’ll be close to dark before we get back to our bush.”

By ten after nine, they were parked in the weeds at the side of the track. They hadn’t bothered to cover the taillights on the way out, because they could get stopped by cops and because they’d be a mile away from the tanker and the building that went with it. Parked in their bush, Letty spent some time hunting for a decent music station on the satellite radio. There was no traffic: not a single car or truck. In the distance, they could see the lights from I-20, but no moon, as yet.