The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (64)

“Gotta hurry now, gotta hurry,” Coffey said. He used a pocketknife to cut the tape on the top of the four heavy boxes, and began lifting out bricks of C-4. “The smaller boxes are the timers and the detonators. You use them like I showed you, like you made those videos with your phone. It’s all here and that’s all I got to say.”

He looked at his watch. “Time’s about up. Gimme the money.”

“What are you talking about?” Hawkes said. “Why the rush?”

“Because you got the guy with the gun here. I thought you might decide there wouldn’t be any more money . . .”

“And . . .”

“I snuck into your yard fifteen minutes ago and buried a brick of C-4 next to your house and it’s going to go off in . . . eight minutes. There’ll be a hundred cops here five minutes later. If you shoot me, or don’t give me the money, that brick is gonna blow the ass off this house, and probably the neighbor’s,” Coffey said. “If the shock wave is strong enough, it could detonate this stuff inside here and then the whole block will go up. So . . . I gotta run . . . When I get in my car, I’ll call you and tell you exactly how to find the C-4 and you can pull the detonator and the timer. Not hard to find.”

“You motherfucker,” Sawyer said, pointing the rifle at Coffey’s chest.

“Gimme the money,” Coffey said to Hawkes.

“How do we know you’ll call?”

“Because if I didn’t, the brick will blow and the cops will come and you’ll probably tell them who sold you the stuff . . . I sure as shit don’t want that to happen, but it won’t make any difference to me if gunboy shoots me.”

Hawkes shook her head, then said to Sawyer, “Lift up the door.”

She ran inside, got the manila envelope off the kitchen counter, ran back out, and thrust it at Coffey. “Maybe you’d like to count it later?”

Coffey thumbed the money in the envelope, then hurried out to his truck. He got in, leaned his head out the window toward Hawkes and said, “Fuck a phone call. The brick is right at the back corner of the garage. There’s a white plastic poker chip sitting on top of it so you can see it. Pull the detonator, yank the timer off like I showed you. You got . . .” He looked at his watch. “About five minutes.”

They found the poker chip in one minute and pulled the detonator and then the timer. Coffey hadn’t been bluffing; the time showed 3:45 when they killed it. Hawkes began to laugh: “Didn’t see that coming. He’s a smart guy, to set us up like that.”

“I’m not laughing,” Sawyer said. “Scared the shit out of me.”

“Yeah, well . . . Let’s go talk about Roscoe Winks.”

Sawyer said, “I gotta move if I’m going to get there tonight. One good thing—I was at Ironsides until an hour ago, so I got a built-in alibi. Bartender can put me here in El Paso.”

“You might like this killing thing too much,” Hawkes said.

“Does give me a little woody,” Sawyer said. And, “Hey, that was a joke.”

“But neither one of us is laughing,” Hawkes said. “You better get going.”

Inside, it occurred to her that Sawyer had been asking her permission; and once again, she’d nodded.





FIFTEEN




Letty and Kaiser talked to Billy Greet at DHS, as they were driving back toward Midland. Greet was appalled to hear about the explosives.

“My God, they could be planning something like Oklahoma City. Or worse, if they were learning how to cut I-beams. They could be planning to bring down a whole building.”

“That’s why we need the FBI on this, and ATF,” Letty said. “We probably need an FBI SWAT team and an ATF explosives team, in case, you know . . .”

“Worst-case scenario,” Greet said. “Listen, you know what time it is here?”

“Six?”

“Yes. People are gone. I’ll start raising hell, but it’s hard to get anything done at dinnertime. It’s hard to get people to answer their phones.”

“I don’t know what to say. That’s your territory,” Letty said.

Greet: “The other thing is, they’re still apparently stealing and selling the oil to support their militia and whatever they’re planning to do, right?”

Kaiser said, “Right. That’s what we think.”

“They can’t have gotten paid yet for the oil you saw them stealing,” Greet said. “It might not even have been delivered to wherever this Winks guy takes it. And they gotta know we’ll be all over them if they pull off this attack . . .”

“So if they’re still stealing, they’re probably not ready to pull the trigger yet,” Letty said. “That’s good, Billy. That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“It’s when they stop the oil that we’ve got to be worried,” Greet said. “I’ll get things going here tonight, but I can tell you from past experience, we’re not going to get much done until day after tomorrow at the earliest. Tomorrow there’ll be a bunch of meetings, the FBI guy there in Midland will probably want to talk to you . . .”

“We’ll talk to him,” Letty said. “They’ve got the C-4 now, John is familiar with the stuff from the Army, and he says that’s what it is. I agree about the oil deliveries, but I think they’re not far away from whatever they’re planning. Probably ought to get a surveillance team down here.”