Harp smiled, showing a row of thick teeth under the mustache. “Roscoe Winks. He’s a crook, he surely is. Always has been. Vee tells me that Roscoe might be stealing oil, and I gotta say, the only reason that he hasn’t been doing that before is that he hadn’t figuredout how to do it. He’s been bankrupt about six times, screws over people he’s hired to do work for him, lies about everything, cheats at everything, been married four times, and drinks. He does tell some good stories when he’s in his cups.”
Letty: “Is he violent?”
“Oh, no. Not because he wouldn’t like to be, but Roscoe’s yellow. A coward. I wouldn’t put it past him to hire somebody to beat you up, but he wouldn’t do it himself.”
“You’re painting an attractive picture,” Kaiser said.
“Did I mention that he’s ugly?”
Made Letty laugh.
“I made you laugh,” Harp said, reaching out to pat Letty on the knee and maybe a piece of her thigh. “But listen here: when I say he could hire somebody to beat you up, he knows people like that. I believe he would do that if you were a threat. Maybe worse. There are places not far from here that no white man has ever walked over, make good burying grounds. You don’t want to disappear.”
“We’re very up-front and careful,” Letty said. “Where would we find Mr. Winks?”
Harp got a sheet of paper out of an office printer, took a yellow pencil stub from his shirt pocket, licked the tip once, and drew a map. “You go on out north of town, and about the time you might think you’re past the last of the pumpjacks, you’ll go another mile and there’ll be this little patch of them. There’s a sign that sayswinks oil corp.You can’t miss it.”
They thanked Harp, and in the car, Kaiser said, “Nasty old man had your shirt and pants off about four times in there.”
“I liked him,” Letty said. “Old, but still got it going on. And confident about it.”
“Whatever,” Kaiser grumped.
They drove northout of town, past fields of pumpjacks and later cotton, with tumbleweeds blowing across the highway on a hot breeze, and spotted Winks Oil Corp. just as Harp said they would. Letty had grown up in the billiard-table-flat countryside of Minnesota’s Red River valley and the sprawling rectangular fields that surrounded her hometown. That had given her an eye for acreage.
The Winks property, she thought, with her country eye, covered a half-section, or about three hundred and twenty acres. Pumpjacks were scattered across the nearly perfectly flat land. A small metal building and two green oil storage tanks squatted at the edge of the land closest to the highway. A red Chevy pickup was parked outside the building, but nothing moved.
“Now what?” Kaiser asked.
“They’re right on the highway,” Letty said. “I can’t believe that they’d roll a renegade oil truck down there and start pumping oil into those tanks, during the daytime.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Lot of weeds,” Letty said, looking at the fields surrounding the pumpjacks. “You could sit in those weeds and not only wouldn’t anybody see you, they couldn’t find you, even if they knew you were out there.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Let’s head back to Midland. Didn’t I see a Dick’s store there?”
She had.
Kaiser bitched and moanedall the way through the sporting goods store, but Letty paid him little attention, picking out a Bushnell two-person tent that was mostly mesh.
“DHS ain’t gonna pay for it, no way they gonna expense that,” Kaiser told her.
“I’ll claim I spent the money on gasoline.”
“No way I’ll support—”
“Shut up.”
“What are the chances that the truck would even show up tonight?” Kaiser asked. “Fool’s errand if you ask me.”
“Do the numbers,” Letty said. She paused by a shelf of sleeping-bag liners, decided against, and pushed the shopping cart on down the aisle. “Wright thinks they could be stealing a hundred thousand barrels a year. If a full tanker holds only a hundred and ninety barrels, they’re stealing every night, and some nights, twice. We know they’re working now—so, the chances are good.”
“That fuckin’ tent you bought has an orange trimdesignedto make it more visible at night,” Kaiser said.
“Camo tape will cover it. I saw some by the checkout.”
