The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (90)

“Hiding out is the way to go,” Kaiser said. “I don’t think they’ve shot anyone yet.”

The woman nodded, then asked, “What can I do for you, young lady?”

“I need some clothes and a mirror,” Letty said.



* * *





Twenty minutes later, Kaiser said, “Hell, I wouldn’t recognize you if you walked right past me. I’ve never seen pants that exact color.”

“They look nice,” Mavis said to Letty. “Don’t show off your figure so good as the skinny jeans, though. I think your dad would agree with that.”

The woman smiled at Kaiser, who said, “I guess.”

“That’s okay,” Letty said. She batted her eyes at Kaiser, then checked herself in a cracked, full-length mirror. She was wearing a flowered peasant top over what were once burgundy jeans that appeared to have had a tie-dye accident, with a pair of well-worn Keds high-tops that had once been red, but were now a rusty color.

Kaiser handed her a pair of white-framed sunglasses. She winced, put them on, and asked, “You got a cowboy bandanna I can tie over my hair?”

“Sure do,” Mavis said. “Any color you want, long as it’s black.”

Mavis gave her a brown paper sack for her regular clothes.



* * *





Outside Mavis’s door, Letty asked, “What do you think, Dad?”

“With that hankie on your head and those glasses, you look like you’re from the Ukraine. In 1944. On your way to Mass after killing a Kraut.”

“Thank you.” She touched the hard lump in her jeans pocket. The pants were looser than her skinny jeans, and the 938 was right there, easy to get at.

“Let’s get back to the motel and talk this out,” Kaiser said. “Haven’t heard any more gunfire.”

They walked back to the highway, and at the corner saw a parked pickup partially blocking the highway, with two men in the truck bed, both with rifles. The men looked at them but didn’t do or say anything. They turned downhill, stopped at Jeff’s. The waitress in the pink dress recognized Kaiser, frowned at Letty as though she should recognize her but didn’t. Kaiser asked, “Anything more happen?”

“Another one of them came in here, showing his gun off,” the waitress said. “There’s gonna be a town meeting at noon outside the border station. Everybody’s supposed to come. No guns.”

As they backed out the door, the waitress added, in a hushed voice, “They arrested the mayor and the city council. They said there’s gonna be a trial.”

“Who the fuck are they to arrest anyone?” Kaiser asked.

The waitress shook her head and let the door swing closed. Kaiser said, quietly, “Over there,” and tipped his head: Letty looked back up the street, where the pickup they’d seen, partially blocking the highway, had stopped a truck coming into town. “Checkpoint,” Kaiser said.

On the way farther down the hill, to the motel, Letty called Greet: “A woman at the local diner says they’ve arrested, detained, the mayor and the whole city council, for what that’s worth. We’ve seen one armed checkpoint coming into town.”

“Keep the information coming, you’re the only good on-the-ground resource we’ve got there. I’m not giving your number to anyone, I’m routing all the traffic through our command center at FEMA. If somebody needs to hook up directly with you, we’ll patch them through. We haven’t seen any media coming . . .”

At that moment a Black Hawk helicopter swooped in over the town, moving fast, crossing into Mexico, and then banked and came back over, moving slower, and then, bapbapbap BOOM bapbapbap. The gunfire came from scattered places around the town, and the helicopter swooped back out, climbed, swung over the town again, much higher up, and Greet was shouting into the phone, and bapbapbap BOOM bapbapbap . . .”

Letty put a finger in her off ear and yelled, “What? What?”

“Was that gunfire?”

Kaiser reached out and took the phone and shouted into it: “A Black Hawk came over, way too low, took small-arms fire, almost all AR-15s, although I heard a bigger gun, could be an AR-10, and then another for sure was a .50-caliber that let off two rounds. You better tell your troops to get up higher and faster if they come back . . .”

Letty took the phone back. “Where’s that caravan that’s coming here?”

“They’re still coming. I can’t tell you how far out they are right now.”

“Find out,” Letty said.

Kaiser held out his hand and took the phone again: “They need to bring in Delta or the SEALs if there’s gonna be a fight. This is not something you want to try to do with the National Guard. These guys are all mixed in with local civilians.”

Letty: “We’re gonna do some recon . . .”

“I’ll get all that going,” Greet said. “Call me! Call me!”



* * *





At the motel, Kaiser said, “About the recon thing. We oughta split up again. If they were watching us at all, up in Midland or in El Paso, they know it’s a skinny chick with a big guy. We can cover twice as much ground if we split up.”

“Every time people split up in a movie, somebody dies.”