“Yes. Remember when we were talking to Kaylee Turner up in Lubbock? She said the members of the militia, the gang, whatever it was, had blue stickers on their bumpers with green triangles. That’s what I saw. A sticker. Those chevrons reminded me.”
Kaiser looked up at the Chevron sign again, said, “Okay.”
“That’s why I saw the thing only once, going down the street—it was on the back bumper of a truck. When we came back, we were going in the other direction, so I wouldn’t see it.”
“We need to take another ride past what’s-her-name’s house, Serrano.”
“I don’t think... It wasn’t by Serrano’s house. It was on the other side of the street, it was on my side, not yours.”
They thought about that as they walked into the hotel, then Letty said, “I wonder if they were smart enough to put a nearby address into visitors’ navigation systems, instead of the real address they were going to. Then, you know, the nav system gets you on the block, but you have to do that last hundred feet on your own.”
“Sure, they say, ‘Go to the pink house on the other side of thestreet.’ Good security. I don’t know if they’d be smart enough to do that.”
“I don’t know, either,” Letty said. “I’m going back to the computer. Most places are online with tax assessment and collection information. I’ll see if I can spot a likely house...”
“What name are you looking for?”
“Don’t know that, either. I’ll just be browsing for something interesting.”
They said “good night,” and Letty went up to her room, got online, and found that El Paso County didn’t show a Pear Tree Lane in their records, although she was pretty sure she had the name right—and it did show up on Google and Bing. She messed around with various options, but came up empty.
They’d have to go back the next day.
Kaiser called just before she got in bed. “You know how you gave me those instructions, up in Midland, about putting my gun on the floor beside the bed?”
“Yes. We should do that here, too,” Letty said.
“Yeah, but now I have some instructions for you.”
“Okay.”
“You know the little peephole in your door? It works both ways. Make a spit wad out of toilet paper and push it in the hole so nobody can look in from the outside. As a woman, you ought to be doing that anyway. Keep the chain on the door. If somebody knocks, stand behind the wall to the side of the door, not behind the door, when you ask who it is. And just because they say, ‘Housekeeping,’ don’t automatically believe them. If you open the door on the chain, they can kick it without any trouble at all. Yank the chain right off the wall. If they do that, they’ll come down on that front foot, inside the door, and when they turn to you, they should be looking straight down a nine-millimeter hole.”
“Got it.”
As she was making the spit wad out of toilet paper, she thought,Not to be paranoid at all, but that’s why I have to pay more attention to him.
After she’d blocked the peephole, she went to her laptop and did a Google search on peephole intrusions—and learned that women were not only watched, but had actually been filmed through the peephole as they undressed inside their locked rooms.
Yet another reason, Letty thought, that all women should be issued guns at birth.
The next daythey went back to Pear Tree Lane first thing, but found no pickups parked on the street. “Damn it, I think it was about here,” Letty said, as they rolled down Pear Tree. “That’s what I’ve got in my mind’s eye, anyway. Let’s go over to the assessor’s office, see if they can help us out.”
The tax office was located in a scuffed-up brown-brick building with a scuffed-up yard; they were waited on by a scuffed-up counter clerk with a waxed black Hercule Poirot mustache and a friendly demeanor. There was nothing particularly interesting on the list of owners on Pear Tree Lane, except that a half-dozen houses were owned by the same company. The company’s mailing address was in Denver, Colorado.
“Rentals,” said the clerk. “You can buy them in there for a hundred thousand, get twelve hundred a month in rent. That’s a fourteen percent return. Try getting that from a bank.”
“Rats,” Kaiser said,when they were back outside. “Why can’t anything be simple?”
“We may have to go to the simplest thing—knock on doors,” Letty said.
“Gonna be a million degrees out there,” Kaiser said glumly.
Letty insisted, so they did it, walking along the three hundred yards of Pear Tree Lane like a couple of hopeless coupon-book salesmen, met with empty houses, people who spoke no English, and when they actually found somebody to talk to, no comprehension. “Jael? No, ain’t nobody by that name. What kind of name is that, anyway?”
But: a womanwho owned a Jeep? Yes, she worked at the Fleet & Ranch store and a downtown bar at nights, or had, anyway. Friendly sort. “Why would you want her?”
There was no Jeep in sight at the house where the woman lived—one of the rentals—but there was a garage, so the Jeep might be inside. The garage had no windows, and the house appeared to be closed up, tight, maybe even grim.
