On the road again, down Highway 277, then several shorterpieces of different highways, dust devils whirling ten stories high across dusty fields. They cut I-20 at Big Springs, rolling fast through country nearly as flat as Kansas, but drier, and browner, with huge pale blue skies hanging overhead.
And it was warm, but not bad, a mildly humid 87 at five o’clock.
After two hours of desultory conversation, Kaiser put himself to sleep again—saving his energy—and she kept her eyes on the highway, let her mind drift: getting on the highway to Midland had been a long and twisting journey...
Letty and her motherhad been abandoned by her father when she was a toddler, and as a twelve-year-old, she’d been at the center of a series of killings in the rural Red River valley of Minnesota.
The murders had been investigated by Lucas Davenport, at the time an agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Before the murders had begun, Letty had kept herself and her mother financially afloat, trapping muskrats and racoons and mink out of the local marshes during the winter months. She carried a piece-of-junk single-shot .22, for those times it was necessary to finish a trapped animal. That had taught her to kill without flinching.
Her mother, a sad, depressed alcoholic, had been one of those murdered, and Letty had been wounded herself. She rarely dreamt about it anymore, but sometimes she did, seeing herself in her nightmare, standing out in the dark, and the snow, the temperatures below zero, her hand not working right because of a deep gash caused by broken glass, fumbling to reload her .22 as she was stalked by the killer.
The cop Letty had shot was involved in the murders and deserved every bit of lead he’d gotten; though, as she told Kaiser, she hadn’t managed to actually kill him.
When it was all over, Davenport and his wife, Weather, had pulled some political strings and gotten appointed as her guardians, and eventually had adopted her. She never really understood why they did that, other than that she and Lucas Davenport had simplyclicked. An odd psychic connection that perhaps couldn’t be explained; it simplywas, and, she thought, always would be.
Though she was adopted, the Davenports were every bit her parents, the only ones she’d ever had. The memory of her natural mother had become increasingly one-dimensional. Letty had done more to take care of her mother than her mother had ever done to take care of her, except at the end, when her mother had given up her life to give Letty a chance to live.
Once with the Davenports, everything changed. For the first time there was somebody to take care of her, with all the love and growing-up teenage stresses that implied. In high school, connecting through one of Lucas Davenport’s friends, she’d worked as an unpaid intern at a TV station and even made it on-air occasionally. She’d realized then that she didn’t need the attention. What she liked about journalism was the research, not the talk; the action, the tension, the stress.
And there was more to it.
Before she’d become Davenport’s ward and then adopted daughter, Letty had lost her crappy .22, which had been a personal symbol of her independence. He’d trusted her enough to buy her a new rifle, a pump that she loved even better, but then she’d lost that one, too, taken as evidence after she’d shot the murderous cop a second time.
In addition to all the complicated pieces of their relationship, she and Davenport had bonded over guns. She’d always relied on one,as a trapper out in the Minnesota winter. Davenport was an excellent shot with both handguns and long guns and had trained her in both until she might have been better than he was. Hold that: shewasbetter than he was, with handguns, at punching paper, anyway.
What she envied was his ability to make instant life-and-death decisions, never a doubt in his mind and rarely a wrong decision.
One of his investigations ended with a revenge invasion of his own home, while Davenport was away, with two insane drug enforcers kicking the door to kill his wife and children. Letty had shot and killed them both, without flinching and without mercy even when she could have given it, and with no regret whatever.
Lucas Davenport had a couple of other personal peculiarities that had also clicked with Letty. Athletics, for one thing. Davenport was a jock, and Letty enjoyed running with him at night, all over Saint Paul.
And then there was fashion.
Letty couldn’t remember actually having new clothes as a child: everything came from secondhand shops. Davenport, though, was a clotheshorse who studied men’s fashion magazines and bought tailored suits from Washington and custom shoes from London.
Letty had picked that up, which had amused her adoptive mother, Weather. Weather was a plastic and reconstructive surgeon with a tendency toward the academic. Because the Davenports had money, she also dressed in expensive clothing, but with little sense of style, or even a vague interest in it. She wore hospital scrubs around the house,borrowed, as she said, from the hospitals where she was on staff. Going off to work in the morning, she often looked like an advertisement for a wealthy woman’s garage sale.
Not Letty, after the meeting of the minds with Lucas. She liked good clothes, she liked good fabrics and perfect fits, Hanro underwear. She knew what worked with her eye color and dark hairbecause they’d talked about it. She’d once convinced Weather to buy Lucas a Brioni tie for his birthday, because it perfectly chimed with his eyes; he wore it once a week until Letty stole it as a headband, because it perfectly chimed with hers.
On every birthday from age thirteen to the autumn before, Lucas had given her a ridiculously expensive piece of gold jewelry.
Now, older, as a college graduate, she was sleek, young-womanish, fashionable, with a high-end wardrobe and five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. Maybe even a snowflake... unless you happened to catch her uncovered eyes, as Colles had, at her employment interview; the cool assessing crystalline eyes of a wolf, a predator with blood on its teeth.
At six o’clock, she pulled the Explorer into the parking lot of the Homewood Suites in Midland, Texas, and woke Kaiser.
“Good trip,” he said, yawning. “I feelgreat. Icoulduse a snack.”
FIVE
The Hughes-Wright office in Midland opened at seven-thirty and was less than a mile from the hotel. Letty and Kaiser agreed that there was no good reason to get to the office before the employees had a chance to settle in, so they’d meet in the hotel lobby at seven o’clock and find a place to get breakfast before going over.
Letty got up at six o’clock, ran hard for twenty minutes, did a half-hour of yoga stretches and core work, got dressed, thought about it—thought about the hotel and maids—and put the Staccato in her briefcase with a box of nine-millimeter ammo and the Sig 938 in her front jeans pocket inside a Sticky Holster.
She and Kaiser found an IHOP in a strip mall, Letty had pancakes and Kaiser ate sirloin tips with eggs, with coffee for both, and they were out by eight o’clock.
The Hughes-Wright officewas in a single-story blue-metal building off the I-20 frontage road, five acres of rusty pipe racks and the blue building, with an oil-tank field on three sides and the interstate highway on the fourth. A dozen pickups and SUVs squatted in the parking lot outside the building.
“Gonna be hot,” Kaiser said, as they crossed the cracked blacktop to the front door. Letty looked up at the sun-faded blue sky and nodded.
