The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (95)

Low said, “Yeah, I talked to him while you were yelling at those Border Patrol guys. He says all the cops are talking about it, on both sides of the border. The caravan will be here by six o’clock or so, unless the Mexicans decide to stop them. He says that won’t happen, because the Mexicans want the caravan to confront us.”

Hawkes nodded: “Okay. That’s what we wanted, too.”



* * *





She spent the next hour walking the town, constantly on her phone. Every house already had a leaflet stapled to the front door, laying out simple rules—go about your business, no guns, the road out is blocked, we don’t want anyone to get hurt.

The border patrolmen barricaded in the house had given her phone number to the Border Patrol headquarters in El Paso, and a man who identified himself as a major from the Texas Highway Patrol called and told her that she and her militia had committed dozens of major felonies and that if they didn’t surrender immediately, people could die, herself included.

She said, “Nobody will die unless you start shooting. Then people will die, and some of them will be you.”

“Listen to me, lady . . .”

“No. You listen to me. We’re going to stop this caravan from crossing the river and then we’ll get out of your hair by tomorrow or the day after. Whenever the caravan gets turned around. You really don’t want to come in here with tanks and helicopters and all that, because a lot of people will die. Most of our members are actual combat veterans, so we know what we’re doing. You’ll get us, but there’ll be a lot of dead cops, too. Any possibility that you’ll ever have a career in the Highway Patrol, that any of you will, you high-ranking officers, you can forget about it. It’ll be another Waco massacre. We’ll be dead and a lot of you’ll be dead and you brass hats will get blamed. So shut up and sit down.”

She smiled at her phone as she hung up.

Ah. The jail. She hadn’t stopped there. She walked over to it, three blocks, and saw her two militiamen, faces obscured by bandannas, sitting on folding chairs.

“Y’all okay? Need anything?”

“We’re okay. Got relief coming in forty minutes.”

“I need to stick my head inside . . .”

The jail consisted of three cells, each just big enough for a cot, an outer space that was bare of any furnishings at all, and a windowless bathroom. The mayor and council members were locked in two cells, three men in one, two women in the other.

“Everybody okay?” she asked. “Anybody have to pee? Anybody need water or food?”

“What are you going to do with us?” one of the women asked.

“Well, we’re gonna have a trial, a little later today.”

One of the men stood up, gripped the cell bars. “For what?”

“Treason,” she said. “If anyone needs to use the bathroom or needs food, water, or medicine, just call out.”

“You can’t put us on trial . . .”

The sound of his voice trailed off as she closed the door and walked down the hill toward the border station. Low had another big speech coming up. Rodriguez and his camerawoman—Not Cherry, Hawkes thought now, but maybe Cameron?—were working remotely, linked back to the truck electronically. Some of the locals were beginning to gather around them, where they might get on camera.

Hawkes flashed back to her job at Fleet & Ranch. Lifting batteries, for Christ’s sakes. Not a woman that anyone would think about for one solitary minute; another human robot lifting seventy-pound deep-cycle batteries for nine dollars an hour.

No more, by God. Before the hour was out, maybe a hundred million people in the United States and Mexico would have seen her masked face, flashing across the screens at Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, Univision, and all the others.

Gonna work, she thought. And then, less certainly, Has to work.





TWENTY-TWO




Letty walked around the whole town, up and down every street. For a while, she watched a militia team that was stapling leaflets to the front doors of every house. The town had been heavily scouted before the invasion, she realized, because the team made no mistakes, knew how many people needed to go down each street, to get every house, with nobody standing around waiting, nobody returning for more leaflets.

Whenever she could, she joined townspeople who were mixing with militiamen, listening.

The leaflet crew was called the information team. Another, much larger, well-armed group was called the fast-reaction team. Because the town was built on a slope, virtually all the houses and businesses had a downhill side with a concrete foundation wall two or three feet tall. The fast-reaction team had begun taking positions behind those walls, with weapons facing uphill. Other teams blocked the bridge and the highway.

She lingered in the crowd that gathered to watch Hawkes’s television press conference, checked the number of men and women blocking the bridge as she did that—there were twenty of them and they all wore armored vests and helmets and sunglasses and bandannas, with tactical pants and boots. They all carried AR-15s, and, to Letty, seemed disciplined. There were thirty-five more on the fast-reaction team. She could see two other, smaller teams working around the bridge, maybe fifteen people total. Another team set up checkpoints on the highways, and the main intersecting streets; they stopped all cars to check them, but let people walk through.