The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (78)

“How much?”

Colin took off his hat, rubbed a hand across his head, then said, “A hundred pounds. With detonators and individual digital timers.”

“How precise are the timers? Could they be set so everything blows at once?”

“Yes. Now go away.”

Letty jogged back to Kaiser, said, “Hundred pounds.”

Kaiser said, “That ain’t optimal.”

Letty asked what he meant, then called Greet at home, who asked, “Is it bad news? I assume it’s bad.”

“They’re missing a hundred pounds of C-4, with detonators and digital timers,” Letty said. “The good news is, Kaiser says it’d probably be a smaller building. They’d need more to bring down a skyscraper, depending on how smart they are.”

“Well, that brightens my day,” Greet said, appalled. “A smaller building. You mean, like the federal building in Oklahoma City?”

“I bring the news, I don’t editorialize on it,” Letty said.





EIGHTEEN




Letty and Kaiser sat in the Explorer, in silence, until Letty asked, “How much do you really like your job?”

“A lot. I depend on it,” Kaiser said. “If I stick with it, I can retire at sixty-five with two full pensions and Medicare.”

“I mean, other than that,” Letty said.

“Does get boring sometimes. Not so much lately. Sweetie.”

“We need to go back to that Hawkes woman’s house,” Letty said. “We need to get inside.”

“Ah . . .” Kaiser shook his head. “Tell you what. Let’s go to this Fleet & Ranch store and ask about her. If she’s there, we can tell her, you know, we need help finding some people involved in right-wing activities, maybe on her street.”

“Then you’re willing to break into her house if we go to Fleet & Ranch first?”

“Maybe. I’m willing to be the lookout, anyway,” Kaiser said.



* * *





The store manager’s name was Benjamin Rojas, and they spoke to him on the store’s sales floor.

“Jane worked for us for . . . I don’t know . . . several years,” Rojas said. “She quit about a year and a half ago, but I know she’s still in town. I’ve seen her around, I think she works at a bar.”

“You know which bar?”

“Mmm . . . wait a minute.” He got on his cell phone, found a number, called it, and said, “Angela, could you come up to the contractor’s door for a minute? Right away?”

Angela hurried around a corner, a husky Hispanic woman in a red carpenter’s apron. Rojas introduced Letty and Kaiser to her, then asked, “Do you know what bar Jane Hawkes works at now?”

“She used to work at Ironsides, but I don’t think she works there anymore. I go there most nights with my man and I don’t see her.”

“You ever see her around town?” Letty asked.

“I do, sometimes . . . well, once or twice since she quit here.” She frowned. “I don’t know, I think she might have inherited money or something. Last time I saw her, she was driving by in a Jeep Rubicon. Those cost some money.”

“They do,” Kaiser said. “Like forty thousand.”

They pushed Rojas and Angela on Hawkes’s political opinions. Rojas had no idea, but Angela said, “Sometimes bad things came out. She didn’t like Mexicans and Hondurans coming across the border. She wanted Trump’s wall to be built, but she thought Trump was an asshole. Excuse the language.”

“Sort of a right-winger, then,” Kaiser said. “Anti-immigrant.”

“Yes, she was,” Angela said. “She had all these theories, about how the illegals keep the working people down. But she was friendly to us who work here in the store. Not so much anti-Mexican, or anti-Hispanic, just anti-immigrant. Lots of Mexican people even agree with her.”

“She had a problem with me,” Rojas said. “I jumped over her to the manager’s job. And, you know, I’m Hispanic, though my family’s been in Texas for two hundred years. So there’s that.”



* * *





Out in the parking lot, Letty said, “We have to do it, John. She’s Jael. We have to either talk to her or go into her house. We walk up to the door and if nobody answers, you use your picks. I’ll body-block for you.”

“That’s a watchful neighborhood,” Kaiser said. “I think it’s fifty percent that somebody calls the El Paso cops.”

Letty said, “C’mon, man. She came into that supposed inheritance and bought that Jeep about the time the oil thefts started.”

“I got that,” Kaiser said. They were leaving the parking lot and stopped to let a tumbleweed blow by. “Okay. All right, you got me. Let’s go.”



* * *





Nobody answered their knock. Letty used her body to block sight lines from one side, and Kaiser used his to block from the other direction as he worked his picks into a lock that he said was a piece of junk. Still, he took three minutes to get it open and they were both sweating by the time he did. Literally sweating, the backs of their shirts soaking wet with perspiration. When the lock popped, Letty pushed on the door with her knuckles, and when it was open called, “Hello? Hey, anybody here? Hello?”