The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (60)

“That woman . . .” Letty said.

“Yeah.”

“Right body shape, judging from the photo in the ResistUS! book.”

“That’s something . . . and, hey, stay back,” Kaiser said. “The interstate is a pipe, once they’re in it. We don’t have to be on their bumpers.”

Letty said nothing, and a moment later, Kaiser said, “I may have mentioned that before.”

“Yes. You have,” Letty said.

“Getting snippy.”

“John . . .”



* * *





They stayed close enough to see the two vehicles, moving as a loose convoy, turn south on I-20. Maybe going to the shack, or the arroyo with the hidden truck? With Letty and Kaiser a mile and a half back, they watched as the convoy went through Pecos and Toyah and a couple other small towns, and then another fifty miles onto I-10, the Jeep leading.

“Goddamn it, we could pass them and get the Jeep’s plate, but we’d have to pass Crain first, and he saw this truck in his alley,” Letty said.

“Gonna have to do something. If they head west, like they’re going to El Paso, we’re gonna need a gas stop,” Kaiser said. He leaned over toward Letty, looking at the gas gauge. “We got maybe another eighty or hundred miles.”

The landscape got rougher and drier as they went farther south, mountains ahead, plains fading behind them; all of it was desert. Shortly after merging onto I-10, and with Kaiser and Letty still undecided about what to do, the convoy got off at a local highway, turned left under the interstate, and continued south.

“Way back, now,” Kaiser said. “Way back. Nobody else out here . . .”

Letty stayed way back, barely in touch, but close enough to see the two vehicles slow and turn off the highway on a dirt track that went east toward a range of low mountains.

“Now what?” Letty asked.

Kaiser was peering at a satellite image on his iPad. “That road goes nowhere. It’s a dead end, up in the mountains. There’s a whole snarl of tracks up there. No sign of a house or water or anything, it’s like something for off-roaders, a recreational trail.”

“Follow?”

“Well, they’re going over a big hump, and then straight until they get into that snarl. Once they go over the hump, they won’t be able to see us coming. Of course, if they’re luring us up there . . . it’s a great place for an ambush.”

They were coming to the turnoff. “Talk to me,” Letty said.

Kaiser had his binoculars out. “They’re over the hump. I can still see some dust . . . If we follow them, take it slow. We don’t want to kick up a cloud behind us.”

“Fuck it,” Letty said. She took the turn.

Kaiser looked through the binoculars for another minute, then said, “I don’t see anything moving. But . . .” He unbuckled his seat belt, knelt on the seat, and fished the shotgun case off the floor in the backseat. Turned around again, extracted the shotgun from its case, slapped in a load of five slug rounds, and put the rest of the magazines on the floor between his feet.

Letty said, “Now I wish I had my AR-10 with me.”

Kaiser: “Yeah, that’d be the one to have. Scoped?”

“Leupold variable. My dad took me to a junkyard in the countryside north of Saint Paul and we spent some time shooting at junked cars, to see what would happen,” Letty said. “The .308s went through everything, like the car doors were tissue paper.”

“Hunting rounds?”

“No, Dad had some steel core stuff he got somewhere,” Letty said. “Might even have been AP.”

“Which is illegal in a lot of places,” Kaiser said.

“I was with a cop.”



* * *





Three-quarters of a mile off the highway, the track pitched up onto what Kaiser said was the hump. “Don’t go over it . . . When it starts to flatten, let me out,” Kaiser said.

They went on for another twenty seconds, then Kaiser got out and jogged ahead with the shotgun. As Letty watched, he got to the top of the slope, knelt, glassed the road ahead, then jogged back. “They’re around a turn up ahead, but I don’t know how much farther they went. It’s a half-mile or more to the snarl and the dead end. If we want to watch, we need to hide the truck and walk in.”

“Can you see her plates?”

“Nope. She’s sideways again,” Kaiser said.

“Miserable bitch.”

“You said it, not me.”



* * *





Letty turned the Explorer around and they coasted back the way they came, until Kaiser said, “Probably could get in there . . .”

He pointed at a crack in the rugged rock, filled with dried weeds. Tire tracks from what must have been an off-road vehicle were barely visible in the brush.

“Avis is gonna kick our asses,” Letty said, as she made the turn and drove through the scratchy brush. The new trail curved into the mountain, and she stopped as soon as they were out of sight of the main track. They got out, Letty put on her straw hat and got two warm bottles of water from the floor and put them in her pack, next to the Staccato case.

Kaiser was walking out toward the main track, kicking the occasional clump of weeds back to an upright position. At the trail they stopped to listen, then started up the hill. They were approaching the crest when . . .