The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (68)

“Yes.”

“Let’s go see,” the sheriff said. They all went to the building door and the sheriff looked in, then backed away, let the deputies look, then said, “Something for the crime scene people to do. Don’t think Roscoe’s going to walk away from that, though. Bad end to a bad man. A piss-poor one, anyway.”

“They were stealing oil . . .” Letty began.

The sheriff held up a hand. “Let’s go sit in my car where we can get comfortable. I want to hear the whole story.”

He told the deputies to get a medical examiner going and to get the crime scene people out there. To Letty and Kaiser, he said, “We got two trained crime scene deputies, got cameras and swabs and everything. They do a bang-up job, in my opinion. You’ll need to talk to them.”

On the walk up the driveway to his car, he took a phone call, listened for a minute, then said, “Yes, this is him. I’m with them now. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I haven’t even asked for their guns. Should I? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. All right, I’m about to get their story, but we’re already good friends. Say, is it warm out there in Washington? Uh-huh. Okay today, but it’s supposed to be hotter ’n hell tomorrow.”

When he got off the phone he said, “That was Washington, D.C., twisting my arm.”

“Sorry about that,” Kaiser said.

“Didn’t sound like much of a twist,” Letty added.

“No problem at all,” Rhodes said. “I now got the personal cell phone number for the man who runs the grants assistance office. I woulda given you a thousand American dollars for that, this afternoon, and now I got it for free. Not counting what happened to Roscoe, of course, and all the bother we’re gonna have to put up with.”



* * *





They sat in the sheriff’s Suburban, Letty in the front with the sheriff, Kaiser in the back, and Letty outlined the entire situation. When she finished, the sheriff covered his face with both hands and rubbed up and down, then said, “I don’t need this kind of monkey business.”

“I don’t really think you’ll get much of it,” Letty said. “Winks Oil is the only part of it that’s in Santa Anna County, as far as we know. The oil is actually stolen on the other side of Odessa and it’s delivered here. We would like to spend some time in Winks’s office and go through his records, bank stuff and so on.”

“We can fix you up to do that, but we’d want to get our crime scene people done in there first. You could probably get in tomorrow afternoon,” Rhodes said. “About your guns—that was what the guy from Washington wanted to talk about—I don’t think we’ll need them. From what I saw, all your shots were through-and-through, so we won’t be recovering any slugs to compare to yours. If we do, by some chance, we’d want you to come in and borrow us your guns for a minute or two, so the crime scene boys can shoot them into some Jell-O stuff.”

“Gelatin,” Kaiser said from the backseat.

“Yeah, gelatin. Y’all pretty sure they’re not going to blow up anything in Santa Anna County?”

“No reason to think so,” Letty said.

Kaiser, from the backseat: “Is there anything here to blow up?”

“Watch it,” said Rhodes, with a tight smile. “Though we are what you’d call ‘rural,’ at least for big-city folks like you.”

“I grew up in a place that makes Santa Anna County look like Los Angeles,” Letty said.

“Thought you might have some country girl in you,” Rhodes said. “Stick around tonight as long as you want, we’ll need full statements from you no later than tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, my office, would be good. Are you the pair that was with Dan Tanner when that bulldog bit him in the balls?”

“Pit bull, not bulldog, and it got him in the thigh, not the balls,” Kaiser said. “Then he shot the dog and we took him to the hospital. Tanner, not the dog.”

“Poor damn dog,” Rhodes said. “Though the story was more interesting when it was Dan Tanner’s balls that got bit.”

Letty agreed, bobbing her head like the sheriff: “Yes. It was.”

They both laughed.

Kaiser, in the backseat, said, “C’mon, guys, that’s not funny . . .”





SIXTEEN




R.J., the Odessa cop, called Hawkes at five o’clock in the morning, yanking her out of bed. “Listen: I just heard that there was a shooting at Winks’s. Two guys were killed. One was Winks and I believe the other one was your man. I’m hearing he got in a shoot-out with that DHS guy.”

“Oh my God! Max is dead?”

“I don’t have names or too many details, but somebody’s dead. The guy who killed Winks is apparently dead. I’ll try to get more, but I thought you should hear about this right now.”

“Thanks, R.J. We owe you,” she said. “What do you know about the DHS guy?”

“Only that he’s a big guy, and that’s about it.”



* * *





Hawkes didn’t have to think about the problem. She called Victor Crain in Monahans. Crain, groggy with sleep, said, “Yeah, Duran’s here, he’s bagged out in the back. He was drinking late, but he oughta be sober enough now.”