The Investigator, page 24
“Try to focus, here, Billy,” Letty said.
“You think she’s on the run?” Greet asked.
“That’s what we think.”
“Okay, I admit that’s scary. Unless they just wanted the C-4 because, you know, they wanted it. Like those goofs running around with ARs.”
“Blowing up an I-beam seems like a very specific want,” Letty said.
“We can put out a request for her Jeep—if she owned it, I can get the tag number and put the Texas highway patrol on it and the El Paso police. I can probably get her credit card purchases; the bank accounts might take longer.”
“You gotta do it fast as you can; if she cleaned out her bank account…”
“Okay. I’ll get all of that today. You guys be careful.”
* * *
“I don’t know what we do next,” Letty admitted. “Guess we wait for Greet to call.”
They hadn’t gotten to the hotel before Greet called.
“First thing I tried was tracking Hawkes’s Jeep. Guess what? She sold it yesterday morning. Went down with the buyer and registered the transfer with the Texas DMV. She got almost thirty thousand dollars for it—twenty-nine, nine.”
“Billy…”
“I know, I know, that’s bad. Real bad,” Greet said.
“I just thought of something,” Letty said. “Damn it, I should have thought of it when I was talking to the general. You need to call him back, or talk to the sergeant major who sits outside his office. They’ve got a captain there, I don’t know his full name, but his last name is Colin. I need to talk to him. Immediately.”
“I’ll call,” Greet promised. “And he will call you back, because I will be screaming at them.”
* * *
Colin did call back, as they drove into the hotel parking lot. “I’m in enough trouble, with the general asking why you’re calling me.”
“I don’t care about how much trouble you’re in,” Letty said. “Listen to me. When this unknown guy was showing our suspects… the people we know about… how to use the C-4, I took some photographs with my iPhone. We were too far away from them, for the photos to be much good, but I took them on the telephoto setting. Maybe you can do something with them. If he was the guy supplying the C-4, and he probably was…”
Colin: “Send it to me! Now!”
Letty sent the best of the photos, and Colin said, “I got a guy who can work with this.”
“If you get anything, call us back,” Letty said.
“Maybe,” Colin said, and he clicked off.
* * *
“Fuck that guy,” Letty said.
“Fuck the whole Army. It’s CYA, every day.”
“Covering your ass won’t cut it, if they blow up El Paso,” Letty said, as they walked across the parking lot to the hotel. “What if they’re planning to blow up the Army headquarters?”
“From what I’ve read, the militias are usually full of ex-military,” Kaiser said. “I don’t think they’d do that.”
“Can’t see them blowing up a government building, they’re all pretty well guarded.”
“No, they’re not… not if it’s done like Oklahoma City, where a truck pulls up in the street and boom,” Kaiser said. “But the Oklahoma bomb was huge. A lot bigger than a hundred pounds of C-4.”
“If they were learning how to cut an I-beam, they must be inside some place… must be able to get inside with explosives and detonators and all that.”
“Whatever it is, I believe they’re going to do it soon, since Hawkes just evacuated the war zone,” Kaiser said. He held the door for her, and said, “Let’s find a place to sit and talk. I wonder where Low is? We haven’t heard from Low. Or even seen him.”
“Now, that’s a thought,” Letty said. She cupped her hands over her nose and mouth, thinking, then said, “Probably doesn’t have a driver’s license, at least, not a current one, or his parole officer could find him. Same goes for truck registration.”
“Greet says his cell phone has to be a burner,” Kaiser said. “We need regular bills that aren’t on a government computer that everybody is wired into, that the parole officer would be accessing.”
“Utility bills. Greet already looked at some for Sawyer and Crain,” Letty suggested. “They usually go to the address where the service is.”
Kaiser ticked a finger at her: “That might be the thing. We could get Greet to call.”
“She might be tired of us asking for her help,” Letty said. “And it’s after hours in Washington.”
“Fuck her. That’s her job. Call,” Kaiser said.
* * *
Letty called Greet, who was still in her office and said that she would do what she could. “Problem is, places are closing down for the day. It’s getting late. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think it’ll do any good.”
“Tell me why,” Letty said.
“Because he’s gone underground. His parole officer can’t find him, you haven’t seen him. He’s got a fake ID and it’s a good one. I think Hawkes is gone, too. Do you think she sold her Jeep and now is walking around with thirty thousand dollars in her pocket? I don’t think so, either. She bought another vehicle, but she hasn’t registered one. Bought it under a fake name, with a fake ID, or a private sale, or all of that. But I’ll bet dollars to donuts that she’s got wheels.”
“How do we find them?”
“I don’t know,” Greet said. “I’ve been researching Hawkes, she was in the Army and did okay there, she’s bright, that shows up on her Army intelligence tests. We have good pictures of her now, from the Army and her college ID. If we distribute them all over, some cop will eventually spot her, but that’s not going to happen tomorrow or even next week.”
“Send them to my phone—the pictures,” Letty said.
“Yes.”
* * *
After talking with Greet, Letty called Pugh, the Monahans cop, and asked if she could go by Crain’s and Duran’s houses in Monahans to see if lights were on, if there were parked vehicles out in front of them.
“We could go back up there, if they’re around,” Letty told Kaiser.
“Four and a half hours gone,” Kaiser said.
“What would we do for four and a half hours, if we stayed here?” Letty asked. “We’re stuck.”
Pugh called back fifteen minutes later and said both houses were dark, with no vehicles around.
“They’re all moving,” Kaiser said. “It’s under way, whatever it is.”
“It’s like a fuckin’ nightmare,” Letty said. “One of those where you’re trying to find your school locker and you keep running from one to the next, and it’s never yours.”
* * *
Letty and Kaiser went up to their rooms to wash their faces and hands, then walked back to the pizza place again to get dinner.
Greet called as they were finishing the pizza and said, “I’m not getting anywhere. I can’t find anyone to talk to at the electric company; the gas company says they don’t have a Rand Low in their billing system. He has a driver’s license, he renewed it when he got out of prison, but he doesn’t live at the address on his license, not anymore, and that’s the same address that’s on his truck tag.
“His truck tag wasn’t renewed, but a guy at the state patrol office said he’s probably peeling the renewal sticker off somebody else’s truck and putting it on his own. Nothing on any of the big three cell services, he’s probably got a burner. I don’t see a Visa card under his name, but I did find an active Visa and an active MasterCard under Hawkes’s name, so he could be using one of those… The state patrol hasn’t issued recent traffic tickets to Crain, Duran, Low, or Hawkes. So far, I’ve struck out with the banks.”
“Billy, I know you gotta be annoyed with us…”
“No, no, we need you to keep pushing, I’m here all night if you need me to be,” Greet said.
“We know they’re anti-immigrant. Would the Border Patrol have anything under their names?”
“Shit. If you didn’t hear it, I just slapped my forehead. Let me see who I can wake up and ask.”
* * *
Letty and Kaiser walked back to the hotel, frustrated, agreed that if Greet called back with anything significant, Letty could wake up Kaiser anytime. “I’m going to finish that Furst book and then go to bed,” Kaiser said. “Maybe things will get clearer overnight.”
“Or blow up,” Letty said.
“Wash your mouth out with soap.”
* * *
Greet called back at ten o’clock, which would be midnight, Washington time—Letty had been confused about time zones for a bit, until she found out that El Paso was in the Mountain Time Zone, unlike the rest of Texas. “I was looking for the right Border Patrol intelligence guy, and it turns out he’s in a motel in El Paso. He’s there because there’s a big caravan of Central Americans headed your way, fifteen hundred people or so…”
“I saw something in the El Paso paper,” Letty said. “They’re supposed to get here when? Day after tomorrow?”
“That’s what this guy thinks. Maybe as soon as tomorrow night. Anyway, he says that there has been a militia patrolling along the river southeast of El Paso for several years. They’ve been especially active the last year or two…”
“Because they got operational money,” Letty said.
“Maybe. They’ve actually spotted and stopped a number of illegals and called in the Border Patrol. He said that they are armed. They claim that they only carry weapons in case they should run into armed drug mules coming across.”
“That doesn’t sound so terrible, if you gotta have a militia in the first place,” Letty said.
“Maybe not. But here’s the relevant part. He thinks that the militia may be run by a woman. His border patrolmen have encountered her a few times and she does the talking, not the guys. And she drives a Jeep.”
“That’s her,” Letty said. “Jane Jael Hawkes.”
“I sent her Army ID photos and her driver’s license photos to the intelligence guy, he’ll put them in front of people who’ve met her. That won’t happen until tomorrow, though.”
“All right. Well, I don’t know what we’re doing tomorrow, but something is going on. If you can think of anything, let me know.”
“Try not to break into any more houses,” Greet said.
“I can’t promise anything,” Letty said. “You know what? I’m scared. I finally got there.”
NINETEEN
Back up in the mountains well east of El Paso, ten miles off I-10, Hawkes could see almost forever to the southeast, with the orange ball of the sun dropping toward the horizon at her right hand. Curls of pale dust rose from the wheels of the pickups winding up the desert road toward the meet. It was hot, but no longer oppressive, and would cool quickly in the night. The skies were perfectly clear, and the stars and the moon would be a spectacle.
“We already got sixty and we’re still an hour away,” Rand Low said. He was exultant, pacing back and forth on a rocky ridge above the meeting area. Down below, sixty pickups were parked in a semicircle around what would be a bonfire later in the evening, after it got dark.
Militia folks wandered among the trucks, introducing themselves, drinking a little beer, eating cheese sandwiches, men and women in jeans and boots and cotton shirts, a sprinkling of camo. The license plates were from all over, Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Arizona, four dozen from Texas. “We’ll have seventy, eighty trucks before the night’s done, more than a hundred guns.”
“Wonder how many of them are FBI?” Crain asked, with a tight grin.
“Might be one or two, but I sorta doubt it,” Hawkes said. “These are the cream of the crop. I’ve looked at every one of them six ways to Sunday. Still, we can’t take a chance.”
“Some of those boys and girls are gonna be right surprised tomorrow morning, when we tell them the truth,” Low said.
“If they want to bail, they can bail. We’ll tell them the truth then,” Hawkes said. “If there’s FBI among them, it’ll be too late for them to do anything.”
“Down there!” Low said. “Two more trucks. Goddamn, they’re coming in now.”
“Read your talk some more,” Hawkes said. Low had a speech written by Hawkes, meant to be delivered as the high point of the evening, something to get people churned. “You’re not gonna be able to read it when you get down there.”
“I know, I know, I know. I’m gonna shout it out there, gonna preach,” Low crowed. He looked down at the papers in his hand, curled into a tube. He’d already read it twenty times. Then, suddenly subdued, he asked, “How many you think will buy it?”
“All of them, until tomorrow morning,” Hawkes said, looking at the people walking among the trucks. “Some might drop out then and they’ll live to regret it. This will be the day when people will ask, ‘Were you there?’ This is where we draw the line.”
“Ah, God.” Low scrubbed at his hairline with open hands. “I ain’t felt like this since high school football.”
Duran was climbing the slope toward them, and when he came up, out of breath, he said, “I talked to Borrego. It’s definitely happening.”
“Of course it is,” Hawkes said. “I’ve known for two months.”
“Look at this,” Low said. More trucks climbing the mountain, five, six more, long rolling cigars of dust trailing behind them. Down below, a dozen men and women had clustered around a guy who was demonstrating a long, dark, heavy rifle. “That’s a Barrett fifty.”
“And that’s probably a guy we don’t need, a show-off,” Hawkes said.
“C’mon, give the guy a break,” Low said. “I wouldn’t mind trying it myself.”
“Bet ol’ Max would have loved to try it,” Low said.
“But ol’ Max is deader’n a doornail,” Hawkes said. She started thumbing her cell phone. “I heard some more about that from R.J. He wasn’t killed by that big DHS guy, he was shot by the girl. R.J. says she put three rounds in him, two in his legs and one in his forehead. The story is, her name is Letty Davenport and she’s a killer. R.J. says she’s killed before and she took Max down like he was the village ding-a-ling.”
She pushed a button on her phone and held it so Low could see the screen. “This is her, Letty Davenport. Picture’s six or seven years old. I’m going to pull it and send it around to our main guys.”
“If I see her, she’s dead,” Low said. He reached behind his back and pulled his Beretta, popped the mag, slapped it back in place, just because he liked to do it.
“Says you,” Hawkes said. “How many people you killed in an actual stand-up gunfight?”
Low glanced sideways at her: “What’s got on your tits?”
“I’m… anxious,” Hawkes said. She put the phone away. “Also tired. I spent five hours buying potato chips and weenies and ketchup and charcoal and lighter and KFC and bread and salami. I had to go to three KFCs to get all that chicken. And marshmallows and buns and pickles and Pepsi and water and beer and milk and cereal…”
“We get the picture,” Duran said. “Hey: there’s more coming up.”
Down below, more long trails of dust, more pickups rolling in.
Hawkes reached back to her days in American history: “It’s like… It’s like fuckin’ Shiloh. Good ol’ boys and girls going to war.”
* * *
Full dark came quickly, not much twilight on the desert, and pinewood fires popped up around the meeting place. A woman named July Null had set up a cafeteria off the back of three El Paso pickups, and people were lining up with paper plates for the food. A truck or two came in after dark, but Low had been right: there were eighty-two trucks altogether and maybe a hundred and ten people—seventy percent men, but a larger number of women than they’d expected.
A Honda gas generator ran smoothly off to one side and provided power for a dozen lights and a speaker and microphone, which had been set up on top of Low’s pickup bed. Several people were wearing cowboy-style bandanna masks and pulled-down hats, not wanting to show their faces. Hawkes hadn’t bothered: the Feds would know who she was if she pulled this off. She wandered among the crowd, shaking hands and taking hugs from old acquaintances, compliments from people who knew her by name but had never met her.
The place smelled like a small-town carnival, she thought; it was the odor of mustard and ketchup and chopped onions on roasting wieners that did it. And maybe a little whiff of poop—ladies in that ravine, gentlemen in the other, and watch your step, there’s a deep hole back there, and be sure to use the garden trowel to drop some dirt on top of your business.
* * *
Hawkes took the microphone for one minute and said, “We’re going to have a pep talk by one of our own El Paso boys, but right now I want to encourage you to eat—we still got plenty of KFC—and to introduce yourself around. If you’re a little shy, don’t worry about it, go meet people. We want to be a unified force when we get to town tomorrow. Now: we’ve got members of our El Paso group who will be directing traffic tomorrow. They don’t outrank you—nobody outranks anyone here—but we’ve been talking to them about directing traffic. We want everyone to sign up with these groups, so you know where you’ll be tomorrow. Something else—we’ll be getting up early in the morning, so try to get some sleep, even if it’s hard. I hope everybody has a sleeping bag, like we asked you to bring, but if you don’t, we’ve got some extras on this truck over here…”
She pointed to the next truck over, and Crain held up two sleeping bags.
Hawkes went on. “Try to stay up until we tamp down the fires and kill the lights. For those of you who come from places that are wetter than us, you’ll be amazed by the stars you’ll see tonight. So. Fifteen more minutes for dinner, you can put your trash, paper plates and all that, in the bags below this truck. Then we’ll have the pep talk. Tomorrow morning, we’ll talk about specific assignments.”
