“Not very much... a dab in the morning.”
“But I bet you smell like nothing that’s ever been in that fuckin’ hut. She might have walked in, and instead of smelling microwave burrito farts, she smelled a flower...”
“She thought I was Vic or Terry. That’s the names she was calling...”
“She might not have known why she thought somebody was there. She sensed it. Sometimes that happens when you go into a place. You don’t knowwhyyou know, but you know there’s somebody inside. Or was just inside.”
Letty said, “Huh.”
“If we go after her, you might switch perfume, ’cause she seems like the aggressive sort,” Kaiser said.
THIRTEEN
Letty sent an email to Greet at DHS, got towels from the bathroom, spread them on the carpet, lay down, and cleared her mind. When she’d thoroughly relaxed, she brought a couple of considerations to the surface.
First: she had to pay more attention to Kaiser. He knew things that were valuable to her, but he was not an instinctive teacher. That valuable information remained dormant until something occurred to bring it up.
She hadn’t spent any time thinking about how vehicles were seen in the night, but he obviously had, or at least he’d had training that impressed itself on him. Without any heavy thinking, he’d blacked out the Explorer so they could invisibly travel midnight roads without being seen, and he’d anticipated the need in advance.
He knew what might give her away—perfume—when surreptitiously entering a building. Or perhaps it had been sweat, she thought. She’d been restacking those boxes in a hurry.
Kaiser hadn’t panicked or argued when she’d told him to drive away from the metal building without her. He hadn’t called her when she was being shot at. He could pick locks with silent manual picks. He knew a lot about a lot of guns, she knew a lot about a few.
Second: she’d considered the trip to Oklahoma City and then to Midland as an interesting and even entertaining research opportunity. It was that, and more: tonight, she’d been shot at, and if the woman had been better at stalking, she might have killed Letty, instead of firing wildly up and down the creek bed.I am not on a lark,Letty thought.I’d better start paying attention to that.
Though shehaddone some things correctly, she thought. They’d solved part of the puzzle: who was stealing (in the bigger picture) a relatively insignificant amount of oil. She hadn’t yet learned what was being done with the money that came from the thefts. Whatever it was, it was important enough for at least three killers to have cooperated in executing the Blackburns.
That suggested that the oil thefts would continue. If the killers had simply wanted to seal themselves away from detection, and were willing to give up the thefts, they could have killed Roscoe Winks. As it was, Winks was still out there and could give them up. She would not, she thought, rest easy if she were Winks.
A new thought:
If the Blackburns had been killed because Boxie Blackburn had uncovered exactly what Letty and Kaiser had, then the killers might be coming for them.
She rolled up off the floor, picked up the towels, then got theResistUS!book she’d stolen from the shed. She sprawled across the bed, turned on the bedside reading light, and started paging throughit. The book had been written by Jael herself and there was no publication date or publisher listed. The inside pages were inexpensive pulp, the covers flimsy and printed in black-and-white.
She spent an hour with it. Jael, whatever her real name, offered economic theories of the homegrown kind: resentful, zero-sum arguments in which one group can win only if another group loses. In her examples, lower-income working Americans were losing to illegal immigrants.
Jael argued that big corporations—she mentioned chain stores and fast-food outlets specifically—promoted the inflow of immigrants to keep wages low. She argued that when any city or town sheltered enough Spanish-speaking immigrants, the immigrants naturally had to learn English to survive—and at a certain point, all the surviving retail establishments would hire only bilingual employees, and push native English speakers out of those jobs.
Jael wasn’tallwrong, but she was mostly wrong. She wrote from a ground-level perspective that included only what she could see. She wasn’t a bad writer, for a propagandist. For every example, she cited a real-world situation that seemed to support it.
Her solution was simple: seal the border, round up the illegals who were already here, and drive them back across it.
We didn’t create the conditions that made them refugees. They should go home and fix whatever their problems are, instead of coming here and making problems for good Americans.
Before she wentto bed that night, Letty called Kaiser in his room and said, “I have some instructions for you.”
“Do tell.”
“Yes. I got shot at. The Blackburns were murdered and Brody Rivers is missing. I expect that they now know about you and me, poking around. So make sure that ugly SIG of yours is loaded andput it on the floor next to your nightstand, on the side away from the door. If somebody comes through the door, you want to roll off the bed and land on top of the gun.”
Silence. Then, “Yes. I see. You’re doing the same?”
“I already have, with both guns.”
Nothing happened that night.
The next morning,Letty was getting dressed and not putting on a dab of her Tom Ford Fucking Fabulous perfume when Greet called from Washington.
