She took her cell phone from her pocket, punched in Billy Greet’s personal number in Washington. Greet answered on the third ring and groaned. “You know what time it is here?”
“Yes. It’s about five minutes after we shot a guy to death at the Winks Oil Company,” Letty said. “Oh, we shot him after he killed Winks himself, so the oil thefts are probably over and the Land Division may be rolling. You awake yet?”
Greet was awake.“There really is no point in doing anything right now, but I’ll be up at six and at the office by seven and I’ll be screaming my head off. Right now, you should find out what county you’re in down there. Call the sheriff’s office, get some cops on the scene.”
“They’ll probably want our guns and we really don’t want to give them up,” Letty said. “We’ll need some Washington heat to keep them. I mean, people could be looking to kill us after this. We need them.”
“That I can help with,” Greet said. “We shovel a lot of money out the door to sheriff’s departments everywhere. Grants. I’ll have theguy in that office call your local sheriff and whisper sweetly in his ear. I can probably get that done before I go back to bed.”
“Thank you.”
After Greet hung up, Letty called Senator Colles and got the same initial reaction: “It’s almost five o’clock here, what in God’s name...”
“I shot and killed a guy here in Texas, one of the guys who was stealing the oil, about a minute after he killed the guy who was buying it. Purely self-defense, but I thought you should know. I’ve talked to Billy Greet.”
Long silence, then, “Is this gonna come back to bite me in the butt?”
“Don’t see how,” Letty said. “If you want to turn on the propaganda machine—keep it in idle for now—there’s a possibility you’ll be a national hero.”
She filled him in on the investigation and how his crew of two investigators may have stopped a terrorist attack using U.S. Army plastic explosive.
“I can work with that,” Colles said. “Now I’m going back to bed.”
“Guess we should figure outwho the sheriff is here, and call,” Letty said to Kaiser. Kaiser was looking at her oddly, and she asked, “What?”
“You okay?”
“Well, yeah—no bullet holes or anything,” Letty said.
“But... you just killed Max Sawyer? I’m not seeing a reaction there.”
“He was trying to kill us,” Letty said. She shrugged. “I’m supposed to be embarrassed?”
“Never mind,” he said. He added, “Iwouldlike to keep the shotgun. I would also like to stay out of jail.”
“When the cops get here,” Letty said. “Make yourself as important as you possibly can.”
Texas has roughlya billion counties, and after pulling up a map on Kaiser’s iPad, they couldn’t decide which one they were in. They finally called the Odessa Police Department, described their location, and were told that they most likely were in Santa Anna County. The cop who answered the phone gave them an emergency number for the county sheriff’s office.
Letty called, explained the situation, and was told that an officer would be on the way. Ten minutes later, a patrol car rolled in the driveway, stopped with its headlights on them and on Sawyer’s body beside the Jeep.
A deputy got out, a pistol in his hand, and called, “Are you...?”
“Yes. We’re agents with the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.,” Kaiser called back. “We have one man shot and dead here in the driveway, you can see him. There’s another victim in the building, also dead, shot by the man out here. The dead man.”
“How did he get dead?” the deputy called.
“We shot him after he shot the man inside. We believe the man inside is Roscoe Winks, the owner of this company. We don’t know that for sure. Both men were involved in a high-level oil theft ring operating out of Monahans.”
“You keep standing there where I can see you—I’m going to call for more help,” the deputy said.
Fifteen minutes later,another patrol car rolled in, and five minutes after that, the sheriff himself, in his personal SUV. The two deputies conferred with the sheriff, still back at the beginning ofthe driveway, then they heard the sheriff ask, “You haven’t even looked?”
“We think these two are still armed...”
“They called us so they could shoot some deputies they don’t know?” The sheriff sounded exasperated and he marched down the driveway toward Kaiser and Letty, followed by the deputies, and asked, “You got ID? You say Roscoe’s in there?”
“Yes, this guy”—Letty pointed at Sawyer’s body—“walked right in and shot him first thing, didn’t even bother to shut the door,” Letty said. “Anyway... what’s your name, Sheriff?”
