The Investigator, page 17
She was about to unsling it when her phone buzzed. Kaiser: “Somebody’s coming in. Get out here.”
“I gotta, I gotta…” The boxes were still on the floor. “Kaiser: Go. Go now. I’ll run out the back and get in the creek bed. I’ll call you and tell you where to meet. I got a thing I gotta do, or they’ll know we were here. Go. Go.”
“Going.”
Letty heard him pull away, scrabbled across to the boxes, and began repiling them. One tried to fall off the top of the pile, but she pushed it back, stepped toward the back door. Saw the ResistUS! book on the floor, picked it up. Nothing else seemed to be out of place. She turned the flashlight off, went out the back door and pulled it shut, heard the lock click. As she did that, headlights swung across the front of the building.
She walked straight away from the shed, toward the creek bed. There wasn’t much cover, so she broke into a careful jog, unable to use the flashlight. A light came on in the building and she could see her shadow on the ground in front of her. Had to hurry…
She nearly fell into the creek bed. There was little warning, nothing but a sharp dirt edge and then the arroyo below. She couldn’t see how deep it was. She sat down, her feet over the edge, and turned back to the building, saw a tan Jeep sitting on the shoulder of the road, bathed in the light from a window. Then the back door popped open and a woman stood there in the light, the rifle in her hands. The woman shouted, “Vic? Vic? That you?”
Letty slipped over the edge of the cutbank, flicked the flash on and off. The bank was steep, but walkable, crumbling dirt, heavily cut up by foot tracks going up and down. The woman at the house shouted again, “Vic! Terry! That you?”
At the bottom of the creek bed, she turned right and began walking east as quickly as she could; dropped the book, stooped, snatched it off the ground, and hurried on. The creek bottom was eroded and uneven and the going was difficult. She was a hundred yards or so up the creek bed when a light cut across the creek. She pressed herself into an eroded crevice, squatted, and froze. The woman was standing above the truck’s parking spot, shining a brilliant white light along the arroyo.
She’d stopped shouting: if there was anyone in the arroyo, she’d apparently realized it wasn’t Vic or Terry.
After scanning the creek bed, she shined the light down the arroyo wall directly in front of her, examining something. Tracks, Letty thought. She was looking at the place Letty had gone over the side. Then the woman turned, and the flashlight went out, and the woman fired a shot down the arroyo, past Letty, and then a dozen more shots, quickly, spraying them down the creek bed, first one way, then the other.
One came close enough that Letty could differentiate between the crack of a slug breaking the sound barrier ten feet away and the boom of the shot itself. She didn’t move.
The shooting stopped, the light came back on, scanning the creek bed. Then it began to fade in a stuttering way, as if the woman were running away from the creek bed but shining the light back toward it as she ran. Letty waited, heard what sounded like the building door closing, then a car started. She got up and began to walk again. On the way, she called Kaiser.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “I was afraid to call, afraid I’d give you away. I saw the muzzle flashes, there were so many that I figured he didn’t know where you were…”
“It was a she… and I’m good. I’m in the creek bed, heading east,” Letty said. “When I cross that road, the road going north, I’ll come up and run along it.”
“I’ll come down there. I’ll pick you up.”
“Don’t let her see you. She’s got a .223.” Letty clicked off, worried that the lighted face of the phone would pinpoint her.
In the pale moonlight, Letty could see the rim of the arroyo wall above her. Another hundred yards and it curved slightly to the north. When she could no longer see the glow of lights from the shack, she turned the flashlight on and began to run. The bottom of the arroyo was studded with water-worn stones the size of her fist; she’d been lucky not to twist an ankle.
She’d gone only a short distance when her phone vibrated again: Kaiser. “Where are you?”
“Still in the creek.”
“You gotta run. She’s turned her truck down the creek bed, she’s behind you and I think she’s coming in your direction.”
“I’m running.”
Another hundred yards and a culvert pipe appeared ahead of her. She looked back but couldn’t see headlights; the truck’s lights would still be behind the curve in the creek bed.
At the culvert, she climbed the bank onto the north road, turned off the flashlight, and began running hard. Down to the southwest, she could see the light from the back window of the building, and along the line of the creek bed, the glow of headlights coming her way. No way that the Jeep could get out of the creek bed without going back, but the headlights were closing on her.
She ran faster. Another minute, a few more hundred yards, and Kaiser was there, waiting in the Explorer, lights out. Through the open passenger-side window, he said, “I’ve taped over the interior lights. Get in.”
She climbed in the passenger side, breathing hard, and pulled the door shut and he asked, “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Scared?” He stepped on the gas and they accelerated down the moonlit track.
“Give me five minutes,” Letty said. “I didn’t have time before.”
“Been there and done that,” Kaiser said. He was looking in the rearview mirror. “Was it worth the trouble?”
“Yeah. I got some stuff. I got two new names. A guy named Terry Duran, for sure—I’ve got his address and phone number. And I got a book by a woman named Jael, wearing a mask. Vic’s in the shed. Our friend Victor Crain. Not much else in the place except a .223 hidden under a shelf. The person shooting at me was a woman driving a tan Jeep. Jael? Maybe. I couldn’t see her. It’ll take a while for her to get out of that creek bed. There’s not much space to turn around—she might have to back out,” she said.
“You actually got quite a bit.”
“I’ll send Greet an email tonight,” Letty said. “We’ll have something by tomorrow morning.”
“Good,” Kaiser said. “I’m feeling kind of spooked out here in the dark. In Iraq, we were the guys in the night. It was the targets who were out driving around.”
They continued north without lights, until they could no longer see the glow from the shack. Kaiser stopped, stripped the T-shirts off the taillights, and they turned toward the interstate.
* * *
Letty was silent, thinking, then said, “I hardly touched anything in there. I dug through a bunch of boxes, but I restacked them before I left. I got out and locked the door on the way, maybe… she saw my flashlight in the window? I was careful to keep it pointed at the floor.”
Kaiser thought about that, then said, “Maybe she smelled you?”
“I smell?”
“You use a little perfume,” Kaiser said.
“Not very much… a dab in the morning.”
“But I bet you smell like nothing that’s ever been in that fuckin’ hut. She might have walked in, and instead of smelling microwave burrito farts, she smelled a flower…”
“She thought I was Vic or Terry. That’s the names she was calling…”
“She might not have known why she thought somebody was there. She sensed it. Sometimes that happens when you go into a place. You don’t know why you know, but you know there’s somebody inside. Or was just inside.”
Letty said, “Huh.”
“If we go after her, you might switch perfume, ’cause she seems like the aggressive sort,” Kaiser said.
THIRTEEN
Letty sent an email to Greet at DHS, got towels from the bathroom, spread them on the carpet, lay down, and cleared her mind. When she’d thoroughly relaxed, she brought a couple of considerations to the surface.
First: she had to pay more attention to Kaiser. He knew things that were valuable to her, but he was not an instinctive teacher. That valuable information remained dormant until something occurred to bring it up.
She hadn’t spent any time thinking about how vehicles were seen in the night, but he obviously had, or at least he’d had training that impressed itself on him. Without any heavy thinking, he’d blacked out the Explorer so they could invisibly travel midnight roads without being seen, and he’d anticipated the need in advance.
He knew what might give her away—perfume—when surreptitiously entering a building. Or perhaps it had been sweat, she thought. She’d been restacking those boxes in a hurry.
Kaiser hadn’t panicked or argued when she’d told him to drive away from the metal building without her. He hadn’t called her when she was being shot at. He could pick locks with silent manual picks. He knew a lot about a lot of guns, she knew a lot about a few.
Second: she’d considered the trip to Oklahoma City and then to Midland as an interesting and even entertaining research opportunity. It was that, and more: tonight, she’d been shot at, and if the woman had been better at stalking, she might have killed Letty, instead of firing wildly up and down the creek bed. I am not on a lark, Letty thought. I’d better start paying attention to that.
Though she had done some things correctly, she thought. They’d solved part of the puzzle: who was stealing (in the bigger picture) a relatively insignificant amount of oil. She hadn’t yet learned what was being done with the money that came from the thefts. Whatever it was, it was important enough for at least three killers to have cooperated in executing the Blackburns.
That suggested that the oil thefts would continue. If the killers had simply wanted to seal themselves away from detection, and were willing to give up the thefts, they could have killed Roscoe Winks. As it was, Winks was still out there and could give them up. She would not, she thought, rest easy if she were Winks.
A new thought:
If the Blackburns had been killed because Boxie Blackburn had uncovered exactly what Letty and Kaiser had, then the killers might be coming for them.
She rolled up off the floor, picked up the towels, then got the ResistUS! book she’d stolen from the shed. She sprawled across the bed, turned on the bedside reading light, and started paging through it. The book had been written by Jael herself and there was no publication date or publisher listed. The inside pages were inexpensive pulp, the covers flimsy and printed in black-and-white.
She spent an hour with it. Jael, whatever her real name, offered economic theories of the homegrown kind: resentful, zero-sum arguments in which one group can win only if another group loses. In her examples, lower-income working Americans were losing to illegal immigrants.
Jael argued that big corporations—she mentioned chain stores and fast-food outlets specifically—promoted the inflow of immigrants to keep wages low. She argued that when any city or town sheltered enough Spanish-speaking immigrants, the immigrants naturally had to learn English to survive—and at a certain point, all the surviving retail establishments would hire only bilingual employees, and push native English speakers out of those jobs.
Jael wasn’t all wrong, but she was mostly wrong. She wrote from a ground-level perspective that included only what she could see. She wasn’t a bad writer, for a propagandist. For every example, she cited a real-world situation that seemed to support it.
Her solution was simple: seal the border, round up the illegals who were already here, and drive them back across it.
We didn’t create the conditions that made them refugees. They should go home and fix whatever their problems are, instead of coming here and making problems for good Americans.
* * *
Before she went to bed that night, Letty called Kaiser in his room and said, “I have some instructions for you.”
“Do tell.”
“Yes. I got shot at. The Blackburns were murdered and Brody Rivers is missing. I expect that they now know about you and me, poking around. So make sure that ugly SIG of yours is loaded and put it on the floor next to your nightstand, on the side away from the door. If somebody comes through the door, you want to roll off the bed and land on top of the gun.”
Silence. Then, “Yes. I see. You’re doing the same?”
“I already have, with both guns.”
Nothing happened that night.
* * *
The next morning, Letty was getting dressed and not putting on a dab of her Tom Ford Fucking Fabulous perfume when Greet called from Washington.
“Getting interesting,” Greet said, cheerfully. “I’ve been digging up everything I can find, hitting every source I know of. Terrill T. Duran and Victor Crain were and maybe still are members of a militia that might be called the Land Division or Command, and might have been running around the Big Bend area in Jeeps and pickups with guns. Jael might be its leader. That’s gotta be the militia that Rand Low is involved with.”
“Lot of ‘mights’ and ‘maybes’ there,” Letty said. “But I found a book called ResistUS! by this Jael and I’ve got a pamphlet on the Land Division, so there must be something to it.”
“Good! I’ll want to see that stuff. They were supposedly chasing down illegal immigrants and holding them for the Border Patrol, although there were rumors that they also killed some of them. That last part may be myth. Not a single person ever came forward with any serious information about killings. Something you should be aware of—they supposedly had the tacit support of some local law enforcement agencies out there. Local sheriffs. Maybe some members of the Border Patrol.”
“That sounds bad,” Letty said.
“Be circumspect. Just because a guy has a badge doesn’t mean he isn’t a looney tunes,” Greet said. “We got nothing on this Jael, except the name, which has gotta be a nom de guerre. There’s a whole story about the original Jael on Wiki if you’re curious.”
“I’ve got a photograph, though she’s wearing a mask,” Letty said. “I’ll take a picture with my cell phone and text it to you.”
“Terrific. Where’d you get it?”
“At that shack where I got shot at,” Letty said.
Pregnant silence. “You know, without a search warrant…”
“The door was open when I got to it,” Letty not quite lied. She didn’t mention that it had been opened by Kaiser. “We knew a crime was in progress, perpetrated by the residents of the place. Besides, I don’t need a warrant. I’m not a law enforcement officer. What about Duran?”
“I’m not sure I agree on your status there,” Greet said. “But… Duran. We know he was there at the same time as Low. The prison rumor is that Duran was basically an armed robber up and down the mountain west, specializing in suburban banks. Nothing on his politics, if he has any. After Duran got out of Preston Smith—Low was already out—two unknown men robbed a bank in Lawton, Oklahoma, and got away with $39,000. In terms of body build and height, could have been Low and Duran. Ski masks over sunglasses, rubber gloves. They used a stolen car that was later found burning in a field outside Lawton. Very nicely done. Efficient. No DNA or prints. Nobody hurt, clean getaway.”
“So if that was them, they might not be total dumbasses,” Letty said.
“Not dumb, but probably crazy. I personally prefer dumb.”
“How about arrest warrants?”
“There’s a warrant out for Low, for the parole violation. You knew that. Nothing current for Duran or Crain. You’ve got those mugshots of Sawyer and Crain. I’ll send one of Duran.”
“Thanks. They’re the ones stealing the oil. Duran and Crain. Kaiser and I more or less witnessed it, though we couldn’t swear that they actually took any oil. We could probably set it up so the FBI could bag them.”
“You don’t think you scared them off last night?”
“I doubt it,” Letty said. “I doubt they can even be sure that there was somebody out there. They didn’t actually see me. They never saw us any other place, where they were stealing the oil or unloading it.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to the boss, and if he approves, I’ll go to our FBI liaison,” Greet said. “Tell them that we don’t want to talk to local law yet. See what they say.”
“Call me,” Letty said. “We’re going to check Terry Duran’s address. Maybe we’ll spot Crain there.”
“Careful.”
* * *
When she was ready to go, Letty called Kaiser and suggested that they hit the McDonald’s for breakfast. “Bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit, mmm-mmm.”
“My heart’s already clogging up, hearing that,” Kaiser said. “But I guess this job comes with sacrifices.”
“I’m going to call Vee Wright and Senator Colles and I want you to hear the calls,” Letty said. “We can do that from the car.”
“Am I being informed, or implicated?” Kaiser asked.
“Take your pick, John.”
* * *
In the car, Letty called Vee Wright, who was awake in his Phoenix hospital room. He was, he said, in moderate pain. “They got me out of bed and walking around. Couple of pills and I should be good to go.”
“That’s great. Listen, we might have found your oil thieves… I’m going to text you a photograph of some pipes, right… now.” She pushed a button on her cell phone.
She told Wright about tracking the tanker truck and about the scene at what she thought was a pipeline, about the men loading what looked like a scuba-diving tank into the truck.
Wright said, “I got your picture… All right, all right. That might explain some things… like a scuba tank? Did you see any fixtures on it?”
“We couldn’t see it very well—it was dark, and they were pulling a bag over it, but there was something sticking out of one end.”
“I think what they did was built themselves a pig.”
Pipelines, he said, had a variety of internal monitoring and maintenance jobs done by “pigs,” which were metal or plastic tanks that were dropped into pipelines and pushed along by the oil inside the pipes. They were also used to separate batches of oil from different companies.
