Kaiser took Lettyon a tour of the city and then the countryside around it, down white-dust service roads through the oil fields that not only surrounded the town but penetrated it, and then down through Midland’s near-twin city of Odessa. The Permian oil fields amounted to the biggest machine she’d ever seen, Letty decided, a level plain marked by endless acres of weeds and machinery. She said, “Those pumpjacks, the pointy top part—the way they go up and down, they remind me of herons sniping frogs off a pond.”
“The oil’s not just here—it goes all the way across the border into New Mexico,” Kaiser said. “I went past a billboard that said the Permian Basin covers eighty-six thousand square miles, and if it was a state, it’d be the twelfth largest. Ahead of Utah.”
“A little bleak out here,” Letty said, as they took a rural highway past endless rows of pumpjacks.
“It changes if you go west—cotton fields and so on. There are some nice neighborhoods in town, and some shitholes, too.”
“If you were Rand Low, where would you hide?”
“Not here. Too many people around. I looked on my iPad and there are small towns all over the place, oil workers coming and going, renting rooms... A lot of temporary housing for the fracking boom. He could be anywhere. About the only way you could dig him out would be to put his face on all the TV stations, or put up billboards and keep that going until somebody spotted him. Don’t think that’s going to happen,” Kaiser said.
“Depends on what he’s up to,” Letty said. “If it’s something serious and we can’t find him, maybe the TV stations would listen.”
They had dinnertogether at a diner, then went back to the hotel. Letty spent the evening reading oil industry websites—Oil and Gas Journal,Rigzone,Oil and Gas People, a couple of big oil associations, trying to pick up on the industry vibe.
In the morning, she ran six easy miles on the West Texas plain, did her yoga, got dressed, thought about it, and slipped the Sig 938 and the Sticky Holster in her front jeans pocket. She got a cup of coffee and she and Kaiser were at the Hughes-Wright office at eight o’clock. The two front office women were both on their feet, talking in hushed voices. When Letty came through the door they turned to her, and one of them said, “This is so awful. Are you okay, girl?”
“I’m okay,” Letty said. “Is Dick back in his office?”
“Got here one minute ago. He was talking on his phone to Mr. Wright. Go on back.”
Grimes was stillon his phone, and when he saw Letty and Kaiser in the hallway, he waved them in and said into the phone, “They just got here. I’m putting you on speaker.”
Wright said, “Letty, John. This is a terrible thing. Boxie had kids, and now they’ve lost both their parents; this is... this is a fuckingcatastrophe. Now, Dick and I are talking about your idea. Looking at the sales end of things. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. Getting old, I guess.”
“How are your knees?” Kaiser asked.
“I’m told they’ll work fine, but I’ll have the scars from hell. Anyway, the best way to figure out this oil sales idea of yours is for me to start calling people I know,” Wright said. He stopped to cough, cleared his throat. “Every time I go to a hospital, I get sick. Anyway, I’ll get Jessie—you met her, my secretary—to put together a list of phone numbers. I’ll be calling them all morning, if I don’t cough up a lung, first.”
“If we’re right, and it’s a wildcatter, how does the oil get to him?” Letty asked.
“Truck. That’s the only way I can see it happening. Once it’s at a known company, they’re probably shipping it out by a commercial trucking company or pipeline. I can’t see them trucking it out of there themselves, a tanker truck only carries about a hundred and ninety barrels. They’d need a lot of trucks, too many for a small operator. They’re probably using several of the commercial trucking companies, so none of them notice the sudden production increase. I’ll hit them all. We use them ourselves, so they’ll talk to me.”
“How about refiners?” Letty asked. “They’d have to have computerized accounts...”
“Yeah, I’ll do them, next,” Wright said. “The doctors here are gonna have me walking around later today, so... I don’t know how far I’ll get. Give me your phone numbers—I’ll call you direct when I have something.”
“We have to talk to the cops,” Letty said. “We made statements yesterday, after we found the bodies. We’ll have to go in and read them and sign them. We won’t talk to the cops about this sales thinguntil we hear back from you. If we told the cops, they’d start calling everybody and people would start freezing up.”
“Guess you’re right about that,” Wright said. “We can hold that between us for now.”
Outside, Kaiser glanced upat the clear blue sky and said, “Too nice a day to talk to the cops.”
“We’ve got other possibilities,” Letty said. “Rand Low had some buddies out here before he went to prison. His FBI file has a list—a couple of them testified against him at his trial.”
“Right here in Midland?”
“No, let me look.” She took her laptop from her briefcase, called up the file that Greet, the DHS briefer, had given them. “One is a guy named Brody Rivers, also known as Stony Rivers, last known address was in Lubbock, which I don’t think is too far from here. Another is named Victor Crain, don’t know much about him, except he may have been in a militia with Low.”
“One thing I learned when I was down here in the Army—nothing in Texas is close to anything else,” Kaiser said. “Lubbock is a couple of hours from here. El Paso is quite a bit farther, bet it’s four or five hours.”
“It’s early,” Letty said. “Why don’t we hit up Tanner at the police station, if he’s there, sign our statements and take off? We’ll be back before Wright will have anything on the sales.”
That’s what they did. The Midland police station was a tan cube with a high set of stairs out front and a couple of long-haired kids sitting on them, like they were waiting for either a ride or their dealer. Inside, they were told that Tanner was at the Blackburn house and would have to be present when they signed. Letty told the uniformed sergeant they spoke to that they were going toLubbock, and asked her to tell Tanner that they’d be back in the afternoon.
On the road out of town, Kaiser behind the wheel again, he fished around on the satellite radio until he found the Red Hot Chili Peppers doing “Scar Tissue” and he said, “Ah...”
“One of my favorite old-timey bands,” Letty said.
