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 of Supernatural when 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 to Supernatural. 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 smile when she used it, and an intensity that fired her face and body and the way she walked.
Low put the truck in gear and they headed out to I-10 on the way to Midland, Texas, four and a half hours away.
Sawyer said, “You didn’t really have to come.”
Hawkes: “Yes, I did. I made the call, so I go.”
She’d made the call to murder a man and a woman she’d never met, or even seen.
* * *
The U.S. Army hadn’t been what Hawkes thought it would be. When she signed up, she was thinking Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria; armored-up combat patrols on dusty mountain roads or desert tracks where you could see forever. She was thinking adventure, she was thinking movies: 13 Hours, Jarhead, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty.
Instead, she got Fort Polk, Louisiana, bureaucracy, and bugs, working in a job that, in civilian life, would have been called a “gopher.” She was supposed to be a 46Q, a public affairs specialist, but she was a gopher. She did take some Army courses that taught her how to use Microsoft programs like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. She studied hard, because those programs, she thought, would be useful in civilian life. She was wrong about that. You could earn all the Microsoft certifications in the world and still wind up making nine dollars an hour.