The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (66)

She slid out the back of the tent, and Kaiser pushed his way after her, keeping the shotgun pointed at the building’s front door. Letty moved to her right, until the nearest oil tank was between her and the front door, and then ran lightly toward it, Kaiser a step behind her. Letty looked around the oil tank, then ran on to the next one, watching the door.

As she got to the tank, the lights in the building went out and Sawyer stepped outside, pulling the door shut behind him, moving toward his truck.

Letty shouted, “Stop there! Get on the ground! Get on the ground or I’ll kill you.”

Sawyer froze, then said, “That you, girlie? Letty?”

“Get on the ground. I’m looking at your forehead with my red dot.”

“Don’t shoot, I’m going down . . .” Sawyer slowly knelt, then flattened out in the dirt.

“Take your gun out, don’t point it, push it away from you. Push it over there . . . If you fuckin’ try anything, I’ll kill you.”

“Like I said, you’re a mean little bitch. The gun’s on my back . . .”

“I know. Roll up and take it with your off hand and push it . . .”

Kaiser came up beside her with the shotgun as Sawyer rolled up on his side, reached to his back with his left hand, caught his pistol with his fingertips, and tossed it off to his left. “That’s the second time you made me throw a good gun down in the dirt.”

Letty asked, “You kill Winks?”

Without thinking, she stepped to her left, bumping Kaiser, and Kaiser said, “No,” and swung the shotgun to his left, and at that instant, Sawyer pulled a second pistol with his good hand and Kaiser said “Shit!” or something like that, and pushed Letty and followed her down behind the oil tank as Sawyer fired twice at them, the slugs whanging off the oil tank.

Letty did a quick peek and he fired again, and she switched the Staccato to her left hand, did another quick peek at Sawyer, who’d scrambled to his feet, and she shot him, low, she thought, and he screamed and went down and she shot him again as he was rolling under his Jeep and he turned and fired half a magazine off the side of the oil tank.

Kaiser grabbed Letty by the arm, jerked her away from the edge of the tank, stepped sideways and fired three rounds under the Jeep.

“That had to . . .”

“I don’t think . . .”

Sawyer, from behind the Jeep, shouted, “You a pussy? C’mon out and we’ll settle it . . . We’ll both come out and we’ll settle it head-to-head, gunslinger.” He laughed, and the laugh sounded like a scream.

Letty looked up at Kaiser, who shrugged and whispered, “What the fuck?”

“All right, I’m stepping out now,” Letty cried. “Let’s see what you got, cowboy.”

One second later, Sawyer popped up at the back of his Jeep, his gun hand aimed where Letty should have been. Nothing of Letty protruded from behind the oil tank except her left eye and left hand and she shot Sawyer in the forehead.

“Moron,” she said, as he went down. “Watched way too much TV.”

“That it?” Kaiser asked.

Seconds passed, shuffling their feet, peeking around the tank. With no movement, Kaiser whispered, “I’ve got buckshot loaded, I’m going to step around the next tank where I can see behind the Jeep, you stay here and keep focused on the hood . . .”

“I hit him above his right eye,” Letty said. “He’s gone.”

Kaiser said, “Okay, but you stay here.”

He went to his right, around the back of the Jeep, peeked to the side. “He’s . . . down.”

“I’ll go around the front,” Letty said. She followed the muzzle of the Staccato around the front of the Jeep. Sawyer was crumbled on the ground, faceup, eyes open, a massive wound above his right eye, what might have been a smile on his face.

“He’s gone,” Letty said.

“Don’t ever go walking into me again,” Kaiser said. “And don’t ever say somebody’s ‘gone’ until you stick your finger in the bullet hole. A lot of fuckin’ guys were killed by men they knew were dead.”

“Sorry.”

Kaiser looked up at the pole light, then back at Sawyer. “Gotta check Winks. I mean really—this is . . .”

They found the old man in his office chair, slumped to one side, a single bullet wound in the heart.

“Sawyer shot him quick to minimize the time he was inside,” Letty said. “Cuts down on the biologics you might be leaving behind.”

She took her cell phone from her pocket, punched in Billy Greet’s personal number in Washington. Greet answered on the third ring and groaned. “You know what time it is here?”

“Yes. It’s about five minutes after we shot a guy to death at the Winks Oil Company,” Letty said. “Oh, we shot him after he killed Winks himself, so the oil thefts are probably over and the Land Division may be rolling. You awake yet?”



* * *





Greet was awake. “There really is no point in doing anything right now, but I’ll be up at six and at the office by seven and I’ll be screaming my head off. Right now, you should find out what county you’re in down there. Call the sheriff’s office, get some cops on the scene.”

“They’ll probably want our guns and we really don’t want to give them up,” Letty said. “We’ll need some Washington heat to keep them. I mean, people could be looking to kill us after this. We need them.”