The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (99)

“Need to run over to the convenience store, get some groceries,” Kaiser said. “PowerBars and water and all that. If we’re up there for two days, we’ll need it.”

“Might be closed before this meeting . . .”

“I should go right now,” Kaiser said.

“Gets cool at night,” Letty said. “We should pull the blankets off these beds, the pillows, stick them in the back of the truck.”

“Yes. That’s good,” Kaiser said.

Letty said, “John: You’re sure?”

“Yes. We gotta do something. They might be planning to shoot those folks,” Kaiser said.

“Maybe I should go along.”

Kaiser shook his head. “You intimidate me, but you’re not intimidating to look at. If I can’t herd the guards inside by myself, I don’t think you’d be much help. All you could do is shoot somebody, which we don’t want to do. Like I said, a gunshot’s gonna draw a lot of attention. Like the big-shot guy said, they need you at that meeting.”



* * *





Letty went outside, didn’t see the nurses, then walked down to her room, stripped the two beds, wadded up everything as best she could, carried it out to the Explorer, and threw it in the back.

Kaiser was out ten seconds later, threw his bedding on top of hers. “Okay, listen,” he said. “When I get to the cave and we’re good up there, I’ll call you, if they haven’t blown up the cell phone tower. Don’t answer, put your phone on vibrate, if it isn’t already.”

“It is.”

“Okay. If you get vibrated twice, in fast sequence, I’m good. Three vibes, find a place where you can talk, because I’ve got a problem.”

“Twenty vibrations and I won’t be thinking about problems at all,” Letty said.

Kaiser got it, guffawed, and said, “A sex joke. The first sex joke I’ve ever heard you make. I am fuckin’ shocked.”

“Not a very good joke, though,” Letty said. She looked at him, a big, tough man, worried, then she said, “Hey. We got this, John.” She lifted a hand in front of her shoulder, and he slapped it. She added, “Let the good times roll.”

“Watch yourself,” he said. “You go on down to the meeting, I’ll head up to the store and get those groceries.”



* * *





The townspeople were beginning to gather around the pickups outside the border station. Letty hooked up with a group of five women who were walking down together, to make herself less conspicuous, like a known member of the town. One of the women said, to the group. “They haven’t killed anyone. Yet. Not that I’ve heard.”

The other women agreed that they hadn’t heard of any killing. One said, “We haven’t gotten to the showdown yet. I can’t believe they’re all going to give up and go to prison, all three hundred of them.”

A pickup cruised by, a masked man in the back with a rifle. He looked at them but didn’t wave.

Somebody else, nervously: “Three hundred? That many?”

“That’s what I heard, I don’t know. There’s a lot of them.”

A hundred and five to a hundred and ten, Letty thought. Enough.



* * *





By noon, there was a sprawling crowd around the border station. The Wiki said Pershing had eighteen hundred residents; Letty tried to count the crowd, but there were too many of them. She decided that there weren’t two thousand people, though—perhaps half that. Almost no children.

Noon came and went and militiamen were running in and out of the border station, which they’d apparently turned into a headquarters. A man jogged up the hill, past the crowd, got in a pickup, and drove farther up the hill and out of sight. He was in a hurry, but not a huge hurry, Letty decided, more like a man with a mission than a man on an emergency run.

And she thought, The cell tower is up on that hill.

She walked away from the crowd, got behind a pickup, squatted, and called Kaiser.

“I got the groceries, I’m checking out the jail,” he said. “Still two guards. Something happening?”

“Guy just took off up the hill in his truck. He could be going to the cell tower.”

“Okay.”

“That’s all I got,” Letty said. She clicked off, and was about to stand up when she noticed the truck’s taped-over New Mexico license plate—and the renewal sticker in the lower-left corner. The renewal sticker had the tag number on it.

She’d vaguely known that about renewal stickers. She’d had to buy three of them for her car in California, and she’d asked about what looked like a random number on it. The DMV counter person told her that the sticker number went to the car’s registration, and that the police could check to see that the right sticker was on the correct car. The California number wasn’t the tag number, but it would identify a specific car or truck.

She pulled out her phone and took a photo of the New Mexico renewal sticker.

Did all the states do that? The next truck was from Texas—and had no renewal sticker. Neither did the next few Texas trucks. Since most of the trucks driven by the militia were from Texas, she thought, she was out of luck.

As she was walking down the line of trucks, looking for non-Texas renewal stickers, Hawkes and a man in a mask, who Letty thought was Rand Low, climbed into the back of a pickup, dropped the tailgate, and hit the switch on an amplifier. Hawkes lifted a walkie-talkie to her face and said something into it. She listened for a reply, then nodded to Low, looked at her watch, said something else to him, and picked up the microphone.