When they got there, Letty said, “I’ll get the photos. And I want to try the door...”
She hopped out, ran to the door, tried it: locked.
Next, she went to the trucks, took photos of the license tags. Both trucks were locked. Kaiser had gotten out of the Explorer, the engine still running, and said, “I got my picks, I could probably open the trucks...”
“Could have alarms,” Letty said. “How about the building? Could you open that lock?”
He checked and said, “I can do this one, it’ll take three or four minutes.”
“There’s a door on the back...”
They hurried around to the back; Kaiser looked at the lock and said, “This one is easier. This is a piece of junk.”
“See what you can do. I’ll go out to the road to keep watch.”
Five minutes later, Kaiser came around the shed and said, “It’s open. It’s a latch lock. When you come back out, if you pull it closed behind yourself, it’ll lock automatically.”
“Okay,” Letty said. “Give me the flash. You keep watch.”
Kaiser had leftthe door open an inch or so. Letty pushed inside and found a stuffy room with a single Army-style bunk; a counter with a microwave, two glasses, and a cup; a bowl and some spoons; a tableand chair; an old fat television; a ten-gallon Igloo water tank; an office refrigerator; and a trash can. In one corner, nine cardboard moving boxes were piled atop one another, three boxes high, three wide.
The inside air held residual heat from the day, so the air-conditioning hadn’t been running. A pile of gun magazines and newspapers sat on the floor by one of the beds; the papers, Letty noticed, were from El Paso.
Aside from the printed matter, there was little paper, but one piece, from the trash can, came from an auto dealership and was a receipt for routine maintenance on a pickup truck. The owner’s name was printed across the top: (Mr.) Terrill T. Duran, with a home address in Monahans and a phone number below it. Letty stuffed it into her hip pocket.
She was uncertain about what to do with the boxes. They resembled the moving boxes that Crain had been putting in his truck when they passed him in the alley in Monahans.
She scraped her lower lip with her teeth, decided that she had to look.
She pulled a box off the top row, found it unsealed. Boots and clothing. She set it aside. Pulled another box off the top row: more clothing. A third box contained gun equipment—a green metal forestock rest from Remington, exactly like one she had—and earmuffs and ammo for a .223 and a nine-millimeter.
She was down to the second level of boxes, and moved the first boxes back a bit on the floor so she could keep them in order. The first box on the second level was heavy. When she opened it, she found propaganda pamphlets for the Land Division, which promoted a citizen patrol of the Mexican border.
She stuffed a couple leaflets into her pocket. The next box was also heavy and contained what appeared to be privately printed books calledResistUS!She thumbed quickly through one, found aphoto of a masked woman in a khaki-colored blouse and jeans, captioned “Jael.” There was a Jeep in the background of the photo and it looked contemporary.
She took a book, dropped it on the floor near the door.
The next box held more ammo and three bowling trophies.
The bottom three boxes contained clothes, boots, silverware, dishes.
As she was kneeling next to the bottom row of boxes, she thought about the bodies under the beds at the Blackburns’ and she shined her flashlight under the bunk. Nothing there but air, but, turning the other way, she caught the reflection of something under the cookware shelf. She crawled over and found a .223 rifle slung on bungee cords.
She was about to unsling it when her phone buzzed. Kaiser: “Somebody’s coming in. Get out here.”
“I gotta, I gotta...” The boxes were still on the floor. “Kaiser: Go. Go now. I’ll run out the back and get in the creek bed. I’ll call you and tell you where to meet. I got a thing I gotta do, or they’ll know we were here. Go. Go.”
“Going.”
Letty heard him pull away, scrabbled across to the boxes, and began repiling them. One tried to fall off the top of the pile, but she pushed it back, stepped toward the back door. Saw theResistUS!book on the floor, picked it up. Nothing else seemed to be out of place. She turned the flashlight off, went out the back door and pulled it shut, heard the lock click. As she did that, headlights swung across the front of the building.
She walked straight away from the shed, toward the creek bed. There wasn’t much cover, so she broke into a careful jog, unable to use the flashlight. A light came on in the building and she could see her shadow on the ground in front of her. Had to hurry...
She nearly fell into the creek bed. There was little warning, nothing but a sharp dirt edge and then the arroyo below. She couldn’t see how deep it was. She sat down, her feet over the edge, and turned back to the building, saw a tan Jeep sitting on the shoulder of the road, bathed in the light from a window. Then the back door popped open and a woman stood there in the light, the rifle in her hands. The woman shouted, “Vic? Vic? That you?”
Letty slipped over the edge of the cutbank, flicked the flash on and off. The bank was steep, but walkable, crumbling dirt, heavily cut up by foot tracks going up and down. The woman at the house shouted again, “Vic! Terry! That you?”
At the bottom of the creek bed, she turned right and began walking east as quickly as she could; dropped the book, stooped, snatched it off the ground, and hurried on. The creek bottom was eroded and uneven and the going was difficult. She was a hundred yards or so up the creek bed when a light cut across the creek. She pressed herself into an eroded crevice, squatted, and froze. The woman was standing above the truck’s parking spot, shining a brilliant white light along the arroyo.
