Hawkes and a man named Coffey drove west toward El Paso, while Duran and Crain went back north toward Monahans. On I-10, driving into the sun, Hawkes asked Coffey how long it would take to get the C-4.
Coffey said, “I need to set up an alibi and I didn’t want to do that until I knew you had the money.”
“There’s two envelopes in the center console,” Hawkes said. “Take the top one, count it, then put it back. Count the second one, put it in your pocket.”
Coffey did that, smiled, put the second envelope in his leg pocket and said, “Pleasure doing business with you. How late do you stay up at night?”
“As late as I have to.”
“I’ll knock on your door at ten o’clock, sharp. Have the first envelope there. If I can’t get it tonight, I’ll call on your burner phone. If I don’t show up and don’t call, I’ll be in the stockade.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” Hawkes said.
“Yeah, well, you get caught stealing C-4 in the Army, you’re shit outta luck,” Coffey said. “Not only prison, I’d get a dishonorable, lose sixteen years of good time and my pension. So: I won’t get caught. Won’t even take a chance of it.”
“I understand that,” she said. “Where’d you get that stuff we set off today? Why didn’t you take it all then?”
“Because it would be missed,” Coffey said. “The stuff we set off today, the Army thinks was set off during training last year. I picked it up then. Never hurts to have a little C-4 around.”
“Okay.”
“All said and done, I’ll be at your garage door at ten o’clock. You should erase my demo from your cell phone,” Coffey said. “If you get caught, they might find a way to link it to me.”
“All it shows is your hands,” Hawkes said.
“That might be enough. Who knows? So erase it after you’ve run through it enough. A goddamn three-year-old could do it.”
“I’ll look at it a couple more times, then get rid of it,” she agreed.
Hawkes dropped Sergeant First Class George Coffey at a strip mall where he’d left his car, across Highway 54 from the Cassidy Gate at Fort Bliss, then drove home. She and Coffey had worked over the plan to steal the C-4 a half-dozen times and she could see no fault in it. The Army checked the explosive dump only about once a month, so they should be long gone before the Army even knew the stuff was missing—a hundred pounds of plastic explosive, plus detonators and digital timers.
In the very coldcome-to-Jesus talk they’d had before the deal was made, Coffey had asked, “Why the extra detonators and timers? You want thirty, that’s way more than you’ll need.”
“Because after you deliver, we’re going to pick out detonators atrandom, and timers at random, and a chunk of C-4, take it out in the desert, and we’re going to set them off ourselves. If they don’t work, we’re gonna call off the attack and then three of our people will come looking for you. They’ll kill you. They’ve killed before—one was an Army sniper—and they’ll put you down. You screw us on anything, C-4, detonators, timers, we’ll kill you. You turn us in, we’ll kill you.”
“Go easy, there,” Coffey said. “There’s no way the Army can trace me on this if they don’t catch me right in the dump. They won’t do that. I got that all figured out and I’m not exactly a virgin. After your attack, I’m sure as shit not gonna talk to anyone about it.”
“Just sayin’ how it is,” Hawkes had said.
Now the plan was rolling, and Coffey had the first hundred thousand dollars in his pocket. Whether or not he got the additional hundred and fifty thousand remained to be seen. The handover could be delicate, but from the research they’d done on Coffey, he appeared to be an experienced black-marketeer of government supplies and equipment.
At home,Hawkes made a chicken sandwich and spent a half-hour sitting in the bathtub, staring up at the bubbled paint on the ceiling. Everything in the rented house had been painted or repaired with the cheapest possible materials, but that wasn’t a huge problem because she’d never lived in anything much better and because she’d soon be gone.
She toweled off and was putting on shorts and a T-shirt when R.J., the cop from Odessa, called. “I spent some time watching that DHS guy today, after my shift. They went to a McDonald’s and then drove down to Monahans and parked down there. I couldn’t tell what they were doing, and I couldn’t hang too close or theywould have spotted me. After a while they headed south down I-20 and I had to break off. I lost them.”
“No! What time was this? Where were they parked in Monahans?”
R.J. didn’t know the exact street, but said it was on the south side of town. The time, Hawkes realized, fit the time she was there with Duran, Crain, and Coffey. Had they been tracked down I-20? Were they being watched? Was Crain’s house bugged? They’d seen no sign of a tail, and Duran said he’d watched for one.
“Listen, is there any way you can get up to their hotel right now? See if they’re there?”
“I guess. My shift starts in two hours, I haven’t eaten...”
“R.J.! This is critical. I was in Monahans...”
She told him the story, and when she finished, he said, “I’m walking out to my car right now. I’ll be up there in twenty minutes. I’ll call you.”
As she waitedfor the cop to call back, Hawkes went over the day—the meeting at Crain’s place, the C-4 demo, the return to El Paso. There’d been no sign of being tracked. At Crain’s, halfway through the meeting, she’d seen a cop car a block away, lights flashing, probably a traffic stop, nothing to do with them.
