The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (88)

The old guy said, “Up the hill, on this side. Jeff’s. Food is decent, but I’d stay away from the open-faced beef sandwich, that sucker will repeat on you. If you tell them that Roger sent you, he’ll put a dollar in a jar for me.”



* * *





Kaiser asked, “Diner? Given the situation . . .”

“Best place to hear stuff in a small town,” Letty said. “Diners and beauty shops. Beauty shops won’t be open yet. But first . . . there’s people walking down the hill. Let’s get in with them.”

A couple of dozen townspeople were walking, in small groups, in fits and starts, down toward the Customs and Border Protection station.

“We should split up, in case somebody saw us in Midland or Monahans,” Kaiser said. “We’re more conspicuous together. Watch your phone.”

Letty joined a group of women walking down the hill, Kaiser went off on his own. They stopped at a concrete wall that marked the edge of the parking lot around the border station. Letty did a quick count of the pickups that clustered around the station and came up with fifty-two, almost all of them black. One or two men with rifles were standing behind each of the trucks. Another truck came down the hill, and one left.

A man dressed head-to-foot in camo, and wearing a heavy military-style bulletproof vest, was standing near the front entrance of the Customs station and was shouting through the door. Letty couldn’t make out the words but could hear somebody inside shouting back.

After several minutes of that, the man in the vest turned and walked away from the entrance, between two trucks, where he joined three men and a woman; Letty thought the woman was Hawkes. The woman was masked with a cowboy-style bandanna but had Hawkes’s build.

The group talked for a moment, then two of the men walked away, stopping at each pickup in the cluster, to speak to the militiamen standing behind the trucks.

“Oh, no. They’re going to shoot,” said a woman in Letty’s group.

As Letty watched, the woman—Hawkes?—raised a pistol above her head, pointed it at the sky, and then fired a single shot: Bam.

Immediately, the men standing behind the trucks began firing their weapons, all pointed above the station and downriver. The din was terrific and a number of the townspeople began running back up the hill, away from the station. Letty noticed some of the men firing their guns were laughing.

A demonstration, she thought.

After ten or fifteen seconds, the shooting stopped, and the man who’d been shouting through the door walked back up to it and began shouting again. A minute later, he waved toward two other men who were standing behind trucks, and the men put down their rifles and walked up to the station and followed the first man inside.

Kaiser had eased into Letty’s group of women, and said to her, quietly, “The border guys quit.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be at the diner.”



* * *





Letty followed him five minutes later. Nothing more had happened at the station—the men who’d gone inside hadn’t come back out—and as she walked past the motel on the shoulder of the road, four pickups went by, moving fast, one of them flying a pale blue flag with a bright green triangle on it, another flying a Confederate battle flag. Two of the trucks had men sitting in the back, holding rifles. One of the men waved at her.



* * *





The diner was a low red building with wide windows facing the street. It was half-full, or half-empty, depending on your philosophical view of things, but almost all the customers and two of the waitresses were crowded into the brown leatherette booths with windows facing the highway, watching the pickups going by. Everyone turned to look at Letty as she walked in, then looked back outside as somebody called, “Here come some more.”

Three more pickups streamed by, another one flying the Land Division flag.

Kaiser was sitting in a booth on a side wall. They could still see enough of the street that they could count pickup trucks, they could watch the front door, and were far enough from the crowd that they could speak quietly.

Kaiser leaned across the table to Letty and said, “You’re the Fed who shot Max Sawyer. I have to think that they got a description of you from somebody, if not your whole name and address. From the cop you think they’re talking to. There were a couple pictures of you on the Internet. I mention this because . . . if you look around . . . you don’t look like a single other woman in this town. Nobody that I’ve seen.”

A dozen women were standing at the windows; they tended toward bulk, with elaborately coiffed hair, mostly wearing yoga-style pants and loose tops meant to disguise the extra weight. Kaiser was right. She looked like none of them, and if the militiamen had seen her Internet photos, they’d pick her out in a minute.

A waitress drifted over, wearing a pink uniform with a white apron. “We’re having some excitement here, hons. Jeff says we’re still serving, though, so . . .”

“Tell Jeff to put a dollar in Roger’s jar,” Letty said.

“You’re not with . . .” The waitress tilted her head toward the windows.

“We’re not,” Kaiser said. “We’d like to get out of here if we could. We heard some shooting.” He didn’t say they’d been there.