The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (96)

They were threatening, she thought, by their very heavily armed presence, without issuing any specific threats. She heard a woman on the bridge team call out to the Mexicans on the other side, in fluent Spanish, and the Mexicans called back, and then both sides laughed.

She wasn’t close enough to hear what they actually said, but she thought, Very organized and well thought out.

Senator Colles called her twice, Greet twice more, and she ignored the calls, her phone on vibrate, with the ring silenced. When she’d walked the full town, she called Kaiser: “Where are you?”

“On the way back,” Kaiser said. “I talked to the militia at the roadblock, and I’m kinda impressed. They know what they’re doing.”

“Same here. I’ll be at the motel. It’s after eleven o’clock now and we need to talk. I want to go down to the town meeting at noon.”

“See you back there.”



* * *





When Letty returned to the motel, she found that two rooms had been taken over by the militia’s medics, all but one female, all dressed in medical whites, all wearing white N95 masks. The militia had a thing about uniforms, she thought. She asked the medics if they thought people would get shot, and a woman told her, no, they didn’t expect that.

“We’ve got a lot of people running around in the hot sun. We’re thinking heat stroke, dehydration, that sort of thing. But we’re all nurses here, so we can handle everything except major trauma. If somebody gets shot, we’ll do what we can here and call in a medevac chopper from El Paso.”

“Sounds like you got it under control,” Letty said.

“We do,” the woman said. “You from around here?”

“I’m from Midland, my boyfriend and I were headed across the river,” Letty said. “We decided we better stay put, after . . . you know . . . you guys got here. Americans might not be too popular down there for a while.”

As they were talking, Kaiser pulled into the parking lot and Letty said good-bye to the nurses and went to meet him. “I’m your girlfriend, we’re going to the same room,” she said, as she walked up. “The people I was talking to are militia, their medical team. Nurses.”

Kaiser looked over at them: “Man, they’ve got it together. A medical team.”



* * *





In Kaiser’s room, he pulled his carry gun out from under his shirt and dropped it on the tiny desk, went over and sat on the bed. “No way anybody’s going to get across that highway barricade in a hurry,” he said.

He told her how the palm tree trunks had been woven together into an immovable mass. “A bulldozer could push it out of the way, but you’d have to get one down there and that’ll take a while. The guys manning the barricade are flashing their guns. There are cop cars on the other side and people have been yelling back and forth.”

“No way to get around it?”

Kaiser shook his head. “The mountain comes right down to the road on the west side, the east side is a steep downhill, and it’s all stone rubble down there. You’d have trouble getting anything bigger than a trail bike through, even if you didn’t have people shooting at you. A Delta team or SEALs could hike in overland. They could take out the guys on the barricade, no problem, but that’d mean killing a lot of people. I don’t think we’re there yet.”

“What about that checkpoint? I saw it stopping cars.”

“They waved me through when I was going out, stopped me when I was coming in. I guess they don’t care if you go out, there’s nothing out there, you’re not a threat. Actually, there’s a back way around the checkpoint, on the west side of the highway, that they haven’t blocked off. Not yet, anyway.”

“We need to brief Greet on what we’ve seen,” Letty said. “I walked all over town, I’ve got numbers they need to know. The biggest thing right now is, they’re talking about having a trial for the mayor and the city council. For treason. The way they’re talking, they could hold the trial this afternoon or tonight. I don’t think the council’s gonna get found ‘not guilty.’?”

“That . . . doesn’t sound good,” Kaiser said. “The nutso militia guys usually talk about the penalty for treason being death.”

Letty nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of. So far, they’re saying they don’t want anyone hurt. But a trial . . . they might be backing themselves into a corner with their own people.”

“You know where they’re holding the council?”

“The jail. There’s a jail here,” Letty said. “I talked to this old lady who pointed it out to me. It’s a little brick building with two guys sitting outside the door with ARs.”

Kaiser dropped flat on the bed, crossed his ankles, wrenched a pillow around under his head, and said, “Okay. Here’s something. On the way back down here, about, mmm, a mile this side of the barricade, there’s this turnoff with a sign that says mescalero cave trail. I went in to take a look. I thought if it was a trail out of here, maybe the cops or the Army could come in around the barricade. But it’s just a campground, a couple of picnic tables, with a trail going out the back side. I walked up the trail and it dead-ends at a bluff. There’s a cave there, more like a rock shelter. It’s maybe fifty feet deep and probably that wide, with a lot of rubble in front of it, rocks that fell off the bluff. Boulders, big ones. If we got the mayor and council out of the jail, we could hole up in that cave and there’s no way anyone could get at us. If I’m back there with my shotgun . . . if we took the ARs away from the guards . . . it’s a perfect defensive site. We’d need about a five-minute lead getting out of town.”