“You might like this killing thing too much,” Hawkes said.
“Does give me a little woody,” Sawyer said. And, “Hey, that was a joke.”
“But neither one of us is laughing,” Hawkes said. “You better get going.”
Inside, it occurred to her that Sawyer had been asking her permission; and once again, she’d nodded.
FIFTEEN
Letty and Kaiser talked to Billy Greet at DHS, as they were driving back toward Midland. Greet was appalled to hear about the explosives.
“My God, they could be planning something like Oklahoma City. Or worse, if they were learning how to cut I-beams. They could be planning to bring down a whole building.”
“That’s why we need the FBI on this, and ATF,” Letty said. “We probably need an FBI SWAT team and an ATF explosives team, in case, you know...”
“Worst-case scenario,” Greet said. “Listen, you know what time it is here?”
“Six?”
“Yes. People are gone. I’ll start raising hell, but it’s hard to get anything done at dinnertime. It’s hard to get people to answer their phones.”
“I don’t know what to say. That’s your territory,” Letty said.
Greet: “The other thing is, they’re still apparently stealing and selling the oil to support their militia and whatever they’re planning to do, right?”
Kaiser said, “Right. That’s what we think.”
“They can’t have gotten paid yet for the oil you saw them stealing,” Greet said. “It might not even have been delivered to wherever this Winks guy takes it. And they gotta know we’ll be all over them if they pull off this attack...”
“So if they’re still stealing, they’re probably not ready to pull the trigger yet,” Letty said. “That’s good, Billy. That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“It’s when they stop the oil that we’ve got to be worried,” Greet said. “I’ll get things going here tonight, but I can tell you from past experience, we’re not going to get much done until day after tomorrow at the earliest. Tomorrow there’ll be a bunch of meetings, the FBI guy there in Midland will probably want to talk to you...”
“We’ll talk to him,” Letty said. “They’ve got the C-4 now, John is familiar with the stuff from the Army, and he says that’s what it is. I agree about the oil deliveries, but I think they’re not far away from whatever they’re planning. Probably ought to get a surveillance team down here.”
“I’ll get it going,” Greet said.
When Greet wasoff the phone, Kaiser asked, “You want to know what I think?”
“Probably the same thing I think,” Letty said. “Let’s get dinner, get some bottles of water and the tent, and head out to Winks’s. See if they’re still delivering. Maybe smuggle some pillows out of the motel, get some sleep while we’re out there.”
“That’s exactly what I think,” Kaiser said. “Though, you know, in Delta we didn’t use pillows. We used rocks.”
“Of course you did,” Letty said. “I’ll take a pillow, we’ll see if we can pick up a rock for you at Costco. Or you could make do with a concrete block.”
They got a recommendation for an Italian restaurant from the desk clerk at the hotel, smuggled a couple of pillows out to the car, ate dinner, and, as it was getting dark, headed toward Winks’s property.
“There’s a spot a half-mile or so out where I can hide the car,” Kaiser said. “Not where I hid the first night out. The first night, I couldn’t come out behind them. That won’t be a problem tonight.”
They got to Winks’s in full dark, cruised it once—the building was dark—then drove a long rectangle and came out, as Kaiser said, a couple hundred yards off the road and perhaps a half mile from Winks’s, with the car parked behind a pumpjack. Kaiser gathered up the tent and pillows, and asked, “Shotgun?”
“Yes.”
“You carry it, then,” Kaiser said. “I got these fuckin’ pillows.”
They loaded the shotgun with buckshot, then walked slowly in the starlight along the road, talking quietly until they got close to Winks’s. There, they crossed the fence and Letty led the way farther into the field than she’d been the first night, so they were looking down the length of the driveway and could see both the area where the oil truck unloaded into the oil tanks and the front of the building.
They set the tent up on a flat spot in another patch of weeds, as Letty did the first night, put down the pillows, and crawled inside, tight, shoulder to shoulder. “Not bad,” Kaiser said. “Unless we have to get out of here in a hurry.”
