Hawkes sat in the truckas the men all went inside the house. She cupped her hands over her cheeks and eyes, rocked back and forth in the truck. The men were in there killing them, killing the husband and wife who she’d never met, about whom she knew almost nothing except that the husband had made a phone call to Roscoe Winks, panicking him.
Three minutes passed, five minutes. Nothing moving in the garage. Hawkes mumbled, “Fuck it,” and got out of the truck, walked through the garage, opened the door, and saw what looked like two cocoons on the floor, Blackburn and his wife, wrapped in gray duct tape.
She said, “Oh, no...” and at the sound of a woman’s voice, the wife rolled to her side, her eyes on Hawkes, pleading. The men had plastered a strip of tape across her mouth.
Duran asked, “Max? Bags?”
“Yup.” Sawyer took two transparent plastic bags out of his hip pocket, knelt next to Boxie Blackburn and pulled one of the bags over his head, and taped it at his neck. Blackburn began to roll and kick.
Sawyer moved to Blackburn’s wife, whose name Hawkes didn’t know, and pulled a bag over her head, and Hawkes turned away: “Oh, God. Oh, Jesus.”
“You don’t have to watch. Go back out to the truck.”
“I made the call. I watch,” Hawkes said, and she turned back to the dying couple. Boxie Blackburn went first, trembling violently as his brain died. When the woman died, Hawkes went to the kitchen sink and vomited up everything she’d eaten that day. When she’d finished retching, she washed her face, dried it on her shirtsleeve, and said, “Let’s finish it. You all know what to do. Max, get the thermostat...”
FOUR
Letty and John Kaiser flew into Oklahoma City on a Tuesday morning after a long Monday getting briefings at Homeland Security headquarters in Washington. The problem involved relatively small amounts of missing crude oil from the Permian Basin in West Texas.
“Now listen,” Colles had told Letty. “I want you to talk to an old man named Vermilion Wright in Oklahoma City. He owns an oil company, or most of one. He’s been bitching and moaning about oil thefts out in West Texas, where most of his oil wells are located. That’s not really what we’re worried about. We’re worried about what the thieves are buying with the oil money. A couple of Homeland Security agents have been out there and didn’t come back with much, which is why the IG’s office is now involved. I want you to go out there and see what you can see.”
“That’s it? That’s all you know?”
“Hey, you could at least pretend to be respectful,” Colles said. “I’m a fuckin’ U.S. senator. And no, that’s not all I know. I’ve set you up to be briefed by a semi-high-level Homeland executive Monday morning. Kaiser will pick you up. I understand you two are buddies now.”
“I don’t plan to kill him in the immediate future,” Letty said.
“Good enough. Monday. Be there and be awake.”
Their briefer was a thin, sunburned woman named Billy Greet, who wore khaki slacks and square-shouldered blouses with epaulets, her blond hair pulled back in a tight bun. She might recently have been out in a desert somewhere, because her lips were thin and peeling, her cheekbones sharp and pink.
“Nobody except the oil people really gives a crap about the missing oil—it’s the equivalent to about a minute of our daily national supply requirements,” she told them. “One fundamental question that nobody can answer is, how is the oil being stolen? Are there thieves loading up trucks and selling the crude on the black market? Is somebody doing something funny with a pipeline? Or is it a purely white-collar deal, with accountants shuffling numbers?”
DHS, Greet said, didn’t care about that, because it was a problem best handled by local law enforcement and oil company security officers.
“That was until an Exxon security team picked up rumors that a man named Rand Low is involved in the thefts,” she said. “Low is a political extremist who got out of a Texas prison about three years ago.”
Greet clicked on a video screen and brought up a mugshot of Low. He was a dark-haired, dark-eyed man with a hatchet face and a prominent, battered nose. “He talked to his parole officer exactlyonce, then dropped out of sight and hasn’t been heard from since. He’s from that country out there, West Texas. He spent six years in the Army, got out as a buck sergeant, then he worked oil, as a laborer and a truck driver, before he got involved in politics and started stealing cars, supposedly to raise money for a militia.”
While most militias were composed of hapless goofs with guns and confused ideas about America and patriotism, Greet said, Low’s militia, according to rumor, had a sharper, more focused edge—anti-immigrant, antigovernment, secretive, and heavily armed.
“We’re not sure of this, but we think one of the leaders of the group is a woman, and she might have a sexual relationship with Low. We don’t know her real name, if she exists. The militia supposedly has links to other militias around the country, particularly those operating in the Upper Midwest, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan, and the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Some of the El Paso people, including Low, were in Portland during the most violent of the riots there. We think his girlfriend might have been with him. If she’s real, and we can identify her, we’dreallylike to speak with her.”
While the oil thefts weren’t important in the overall scheme of things—they didn’t threaten national energy security in any way—they had kicked off a lot of cash, by normal standards, and there were indications that the thefts were continuing.
“The oil companies want to stop the thefts. We, DHS, want to know where the money is going, and if the rumor is true, what Low and his friends are buying with it,” Greet said. “This is a heck of a lot more than living expenses—they’re probably taking in something between a half-million and a million dollars a year, and maybe a lot more. If we can figure out how the oil is being stolen, we can probably identify at least some of the thieves. Then we can turnthem over to the Texas Rangers and let the Rangers hold branding irons on their naked feet and get some answers.” Pause. “Not really. I didn’t actually say that.”
“Sounded like you said that,” Kaiser said.
“Sitting in an air-conditioned room, fully hydrated, and the poor man is hallucinating,” Greet said to Letty.
Letty nodded. “Or it could be simple dementia.”
At the end of the day, Letty and Kaiser were ushered into the office of a DHS assistant inspector general, who gave Letty two government identification cards. The first said that she was a congressional employee with an endorsement granting access to the Department of Homeland Security; the second was a DHS sidearm permit.
“We’re not too happy about this, frankly, the gun thing, but Senator Colles knows how to twist an arm,” the assistant IG said. “You donothave arrest powers. You’re not a law enforcement officer. The gun permit will allow you to carry a firearm for personal protection only. Do you understand that?”
She did. “Will it allow me to carry it everywhere?”
