R.J., the Odessa cop, called Hawkes at five o’clock in the morning, yanking her out of bed. “Listen: I just heard that there was a shooting at Winks’s. Two guys were killed. One was Winks and I believe the other one was your man. I’m hearing he got in a shoot-out with that DHS guy.”
“Oh my God! Max is dead?”
“I don’t have names or too many details, but somebody’s dead. The guy who killed Winks is apparently dead. I’ll try to get more, but I thought you should hear about this right now.”
“Thanks, R.J. We owe you,” she said. “What do you know about the DHS guy?”
“Only that he’s a big guy, and that’s about it.”
Hawkes didn’t haveto think about the problem. She called Victor Crain in Monahans. Crain, groggy with sleep, said, “Yeah, Duran’shere, he’s bagged out in the back. He was drinking late, but he oughta be sober enough now.”
“You gotta get out to the shack and the truck,” Hawkes said. “You gotta burn them. Take some gas out there and set them on fire. There’ll be DNA and fingerprints all over the place, and the only thing that’ll wipe them out is fire. If you can’t get it done, the cops will be holding Winks and everything else over our heads forever.”
“If they were at Winks’s, they probably know about the truck,” Crain said.
Hawkes thought about the night she’d been out at the shack, and thought she’d seen a figure going out the back. She hadn’t been certain there’d really been anybody there, but now it seemed more likely. “Is Terry’s stuff still out there?”
“Most of it. We moved a box of clothes up here.”
“Listen: you get some gas and cruise the place. If there was a shooting, the cops’ll all be doing bureaucratic stuff for a while, making reports and all that. We got a chance. You cruise the place and if you can get in, burn it. Burn the truck, too. We’ve got no more use for it now. Can you get gas without buying it?”
“Yeah, I got an aftermarket tank in my truck bed, I can pull some out of that,” Crain said. “We’ll go check it out. I got a gas can. Where’s Rand?”
“He’s here at his apartment, but that’s too far away to get to the shack. You gotta do it.”
“We’re on the way,” Crain said.
He shook Duran out of bed, and the two men drove out of Monahans in the dark. They scouted the shack and the truck from the road to the north, saw nothing moving, then made a pass on the road in front of the shack.
“Still nothing moving,” Duran said.
“Could be somebody inside,” Crain said. He drove on by and continued to the first intersection, a half-mile away.
“You spooked?” Duran asked.
“Man, they killed Max.”
“Yeah. But if we don’t burn that place, we’re cooked. You and me. We gotta get back there,” Duran said.
Crain turned around, drove back to the shack, and they found it empty. They carried Duran’s boxes out to the truck, along with the AR-15, dumped all the paper garbage in the middle of the floor, piled some cotton blankets on top of it, ready to be burned.
That done, they ran down to the truck, hosed the interior with a pail of gasoline, and touched off the fire. They’d always handled the truck’s hoses with gloved hands, so that shouldn’t be a problem. At the shack, they broke the wooden kitchen bar off the wall, and stacked it on top of the blanket, along with the wooden chair.
The sun wasn’t quite up, but the sky in the east was getting bright when they moved the pickup, trailed a pail of gas out to the road, and set it off.
The interior of the shack exploded with flame, burning hot and nearly smokeless.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Duran, and they jogged to the truck and were gone.
Two miles down the road, Duran looked back. There was a wisp of smoke hanging over the shack, but he couldn’t actually see any flame.
“I think we’re good,” he said.
“Call Jane. Let her know.”
The day after the shootingswas paperwork hell for Letty and Kaiser. A couple of reporters heard about the shoot-out, apparently from Santa Anna sheriff’s deputies, and called around, asking questions.Rhodes, the sheriff, held a brief press conference in which he said that federal agents had arrived at the scene just as Roscoe Winks was being murdered, and in an ensuing shoot-out, the gunman, whose identity had not yet been confirmed, was shot and killed.
In essence, a nothing-burger for the bigger city news outlets, and the small towns no longer had newspapers or reporters.
