“No women in Delta,” Letty said.
“No, but there are in the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Some Delta guys wind up there, if they’re smart enough. Tough bunch.”
“You never were?”
“No. SOG is usually small missions, a team taking out one particular target, or maybe exfiltrating somebody from hostile territory,” Kaiser said. “If you think about them as assassins, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Or, sometimes, Boy Scouts, doing a good deed. I was more interested in bigger actions. Taking and holding something until the Rangers get there. Cleaning out a town. That kind of thing.”
“You ever get shot?”
“No, not shot. Wounded, twice, shrapnel. Walked back with the team once. The other time, they medevacked me, gave me a painkiller lollipop while they flew me in to a hospital. Assholes got me in the back of the left leg and across my butt and up my back, almost to my shoulder. Bleeding like crazy; medic stuffed bandages into the cuts. It was an IED, an improvised explosive device, made out of an artillery shell and a cell phone. I walked right past it and probably thirty or forty yards down the road before it was set off. Killed two of the team outright, wounded four of us.”
“My God. That sounds . . .”
“What?”
“Interesting.”
Kaiser laughed. “You better stay away from SOG. They’d get you killed for sure. When Sawyer was shooting at you, you stood there shooting back like bullets was flies, like you were going to live forever.”
“Hey. I had one eye exposed, and my hand. He never saw me,” Letty said. “And I’m sorry about bumping you offline. That won’t happen again.”
“Yeah, well.” He laughed again. “You sorta scare me, man.”
“Don’t mean to,” Letty said.
“I know, but you do,” Kaiser said. “I don’t want to be there if you get killed.”
“Huh. So—El Paso?”
“You’re running this boat. If you say so, it’s El Paso.”
* * *
They met at the front desk the next morning, agreed they’d slept well, stopped a last time at the IHOP for pancakes and at a convenience store for a cheap Styrofoam cooler, ice, and bottles of water, and aimed the Explorer south down I-20.
El Paso was almost due west of Midland, but they had to drive four hours first southwest and then northwest to get there, interstate all the way, I-20 and I-10. The landscape changed, the plains dwindling in the rearview mirror, sere, dirty brown mountains poking up along the highway, cut by the Rio Grande, which defined the greater El Paso area. El Paso sat on one side of the river, Juárez, Mexico, twice as big, on the other; together, two million people, with a dome of haze visible for a hundred miles.
“The mountains here . . . They look like big piles of dirt,” Letty said.
“And hardly a ski resort among them,” Kaiser said.
Letty opened her laptop on the way, combing through her notes. After a while, she said, “I knew we’d run into an El Paso address somewhere along the way. The addresses I got out of Max Sawyer’s Jeep. Alice Serrano, on Pear Tree Lane. We could swing by her place on the way into town, see what we can see.”
“What do we know about her?”
“Almost nothing. Convicted of assault in New Mexico years ago, didn’t serve any jail time,” Letty said. “Nothing since then. She’s either innocent or guilty as hell but keeping her head down. What do you want to do?”
“I’m good to go, and it’s still early, so why not?” Kaiser said. “Dig one of those waters out of the cooler, will you? I’m getting dry.”