The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (71)

“Who?”

“Google. Or Bing.”



* * *





Google and Bing did have a lot of information on border militias, but none mentioned a woman as a leader, though there seemed to be a lot of women in the militias in general. “We’re gonna have to go down there,” Letty said.

They were sitting in the hotel lounge with Kaiser’s iPad on the bar. Letty got carded every time she ordered alcohol in Washington or Virginia, but the Texas bartender hadn’t even looked like he was going to ask. He slid a margarita across the bar with Kaiser’s beer, and Kaiser asked, “You’re only gonna have one, right?”

“Right. I don’t like alcohol, but this day made me thirsty. For more than water.”

“Good. Have one and quit,” Kaiser said. “I’d hate to see what you’d do if you were liquored up. Probably start fights in the parking lot.”

“My mother—my natural mother—was an alcoholic. She didn’t wait to get into the parking lot. She’d fight you right in the bar,” Letty said. “I’ve done some reading and some authorities think alcoholism might run in families. Not because of culture, but because of DNA. Something in the genes. So I’m careful.”

“I was an alcoholic for a while, but it was cultural,” Kaiser mused. “Right after I re-upped for the first time, with the Army. I was twenty-four, just made sergeant, thought about quitting, but the thing was, I was good at it and I liked it. I re-upped for six years and I started drinking. Like everybody else. This was up in North Carolina. Then some guys and I went to this crappy resort on the Outer Banks when we were on leave, I was with this chick who didn’t drink . . . We had this little cabin to ourselves and there was a garbage can out back. We weren’t cooking, we were eating every meal in a diner or restaurant, so I wasn’t putting anything in the garbage can. This girl would clean up my beer cans and throw them away every morning. Toward the end of the week, I picked them up myself one morning and took them out back and the damn trash can was half-full of beer cans. Just beer cans. I thought, Holy shit, I’m an alcoholic.”

“And you quit?”

“Not right away, but yeah. Then I got made a staff sergeant and I was already Ranger-qualified, and decided to try out for Delta. And I made it. Culture changed. Figured I could drink two beers a day and I’ve stuck to that.”

“No women in Delta,” Letty said.

“No, but there are in the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Some Delta guys wind up there, if they’re smart enough. Tough bunch.”

“You never were?”

“No. SOG is usually small missions, a team taking out one particular target, or maybe exfiltrating somebody from hostile territory,” Kaiser said. “If you think about them as assassins, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Or, sometimes, Boy Scouts, doing a good deed. I was more interested in bigger actions. Taking and holding something until the Rangers get there. Cleaning out a town. That kind of thing.”

“You ever get shot?”

“No, not shot. Wounded, twice, shrapnel. Walked back with the team once. The other time, they medevacked me, gave me a painkiller lollipop while they flew me in to a hospital. Assholes got me in the back of the left leg and across my butt and up my back, almost to my shoulder. Bleeding like crazy; medic stuffed bandages into the cuts. It was an IED, an improvised explosive device, made out of an artillery shell and a cell phone. I walked right past it and probably thirty or forty yards down the road before it was set off. Killed two of the team outright, wounded four of us.”

“My God. That sounds . . .”

“What?”

“Interesting.”

Kaiser laughed. “You better stay away from SOG. They’d get you killed for sure. When Sawyer was shooting at you, you stood there shooting back like bullets was flies, like you were going to live forever.”

“Hey. I had one eye exposed, and my hand. He never saw me,” Letty said. “And I’m sorry about bumping you offline. That won’t happen again.”

“Yeah, well.” He laughed again. “You sorta scare me, man.”

“Don’t mean to,” Letty said.

“I know, but you do,” Kaiser said. “I don’t want to be there if you get killed.”

“Huh. So—El Paso?”

“You’re running this boat. If you say so, it’s El Paso.”



* * *





They met at the front desk the next morning, agreed they’d slept well, stopped a last time at the IHOP for pancakes and at a convenience store for a cheap Styrofoam cooler, ice, and bottles of water, and aimed the Explorer south down I-20.

El Paso was almost due west of Midland, but they had to drive four hours first southwest and then northwest to get there, interstate all the way, I-20 and I-10. The landscape changed, the plains dwindling in the rearview mirror, sere, dirty brown mountains poking up along the highway, cut by the Rio Grande, which defined the greater El Paso area. El Paso sat on one side of the river, Juárez, Mexico, twice as big, on the other; together, two million people, with a dome of haze visible for a hundred miles.

“The mountains here . . . They look like big piles of dirt,” Letty said.

“And hardly a ski resort among them,” Kaiser said.