She looked wildly around the room, flipped the old turn lock on the door, grabbed the steel-legged kitchen chair at the foot of her bed, and without thinking about it, hurled it through the bedroom window. There were two layers of glass, the regular window and the storm, but the chair was heavy and went through. Running footsteps on the stairs, like some kind of Halloween movie—and Letty threw her parka over the windowsill to protect herself from broken glass, and, still hanging onto the rifle, went out the window.
She hung on to the coat with her left hand and dropped, pulling it after her; the coat snagged on glass and maybe a nail, ripped, held her up for justa second, then everything fell. She landed awkwardly, in a clump of prairie grass, felt her ankle twist, a lancing pain, and hobbled two steps sideways, clutching the parka in the cold, and saw a silhouette at the window and she ran, and there was a noise like a close-in lightning strike and something plucked at her hair and she kept hobbling away and there was another boom and her side was on fire, and then she was around the corner of the house and into the dark.
Hurt,she thought. She touched her side and realized she was bleeding under her arm, and her ankle screamed in pain and something was wrong with her left hand. She touched the hand to her face, and found it bleeding; She’d gashed it on the window glass, she guessed, but she kept going, half-hopping, half-hobbling.Cold,she thought. She pinned the rifle between her legs and pulled the parka on. She had no hat or mittens, but she pulled the hood up and began to run as best she could, and her left hand just wasn’t working right...
She was only a hundred feet from the house when she realized she wasn’t alone in the yard. There was a squirt of light and then she heard movement, a crunching on the snow. He was coming after her, whoever he was, and he had a crappy, weak flashlight to help him.
Shells. As she hobbled along, she dug in her coat pocket and found a .22 shell, but her hand wasn’t working and she dropped it. Lost in the dark. Dug out another one with the other hand, broke the rifle, got the shell in, snapped it shut. A squirt of light and then the man called, “Letty. You might as well stop. I can see you.”
That was horseshit, she thought. She could barely tell where he was and he had the partly lit house behind him. She was moving as fast as he was, because he was having trouble following her footprints through the grass that stuck up through the shallow snow—that’s what he was using the flashlight for—and there was nothing behind her but darkness. If he kept coming, though... She had to do something. She didn’t know how badly she was hurt. Had to find someplace to go.
His silhouette lurched in and out of focus in front of the house and she remembered something that Bud, her trapper friend, had told her about bow hunting for deer. If a deer was moving a little too quickly for a good shot, you could whistle, or grunt, and the deer would stop to listen. That’s when you let the arrow go.
She turned, got a sense of where the man’s silhouette was, leveled the rifle, and called, “Who are you?”
He stopped like a deer and she shot him.
Kaiser dropped Lettyat her apartment, with her briefcase and purse. After a microwave risotto, she watched the top of the news on CNN at seven o’clock, then cleared off her kitchen table, got her gun-cleaning equipment from a closet, and cleaned and lubricated the Staccato and the Sig 938. When she was sure they were right, she returned to the closet and took out her Colt .45 Gold Cup and Walther PPQ and checked them. Back to the closet for a Daniel Defense AR-10-style semiautomatic rifle.
Her father called her a shooting prodigy. Now she spent an hour pulling pieces off her guns, making sure they were functioning perfectly: a form of meditation, working with your tools. She needed an outdoor range, she thought. She hadn’t fired the rifle since she’d been in Washington—too busy, with no time to visit rifle ranges.
The thought occurred to her, then, that with her promised new license, and the military ranges scattered around Washington, perhaps she’d have access?
She’d have to ask.
She’d put the guns away and was on her couch watching the end of the fourteenth season ofSupernaturalwhen her father called. “Did you quit?” he asked.
“I tried, but Colles talked me out of it. Said he’d find me something more interesting to do,” Letty said.
“Any idea what that would be?” Lucas Davenport asked.
“Not exactly. It’s with the DHS. He says he’ll get me a government ID that will let me carry.”
Silence for five seconds. “Ah, jeez, Letty. You sure about this? Is he going to get you into trouble?”
“I hope so, but I don’t know. I’ll have to see what he’s talking about,” Letty said.
“You be careful, young lady,” Lucas said. “You get in too deep, I’ll have to ground you.”
“Like that’s gonna happen.”
“Letty...”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah... How’s Mom?”
When she got off the phone, Letty went back toSupernatural. She was thinking about moving on to the fifteenth season when Colles called.
“I got a job for you,” he said. “You’re gonna need a straw hat.”
THREE
Jane Jael Hawkes walked out of her house ten minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon, carrying her backpack, which contained two bottles of water, her wallet, and her nine-millimeter Beretta semiautomatic pistol. The day was hot—100°F—but not unnaturally so for El Paso, Texas. Rand Low was at the curb in his Ford F-150 crew cab, and she popped the passenger door and climbed in.
Max Sawyer and Terry Duran were sitting in the back and said “Hey,” and Low asked, “You up for this?”
“Yes. Drive.”
Hawkes was a stocky, hard-faced woman with muscle in her arms and shoulders, originally developed during her teen years in an after-school job lifting batteries in an AutoZone store, and later in U.S. Army gyms. At thirty-four, she had a heavily sun-freckled face and brown hair, cut short; and for all that, she attracted certain kinds of outdoorsy men. She had intelligent eyes, an engaging smilewhen she used it, and an intensity that fired her face and body and the way she walked.
