Angela hurried around a corner, a husky Hispanic woman in a red carpenter’s apron. Rojas introduced Letty and Kaiser to her, then asked, “Do you know what bar Jane Hawkes works at now?”
“She used to work at Ironsides, but I don’t think she works there anymore. I go there most nights with my man and I don’t see her.”
“You ever see her around town?” Letty asked.
“I do, sometimes . . . well, once or twice since she quit here.” She frowned. “I don’t know, I think she might have inherited money or something. Last time I saw her, she was driving by in a Jeep Rubicon. Those cost some money.”
“They do,” Kaiser said. “Like forty thousand.”
They pushed Rojas and Angela on Hawkes’s political opinions. Rojas had no idea, but Angela said, “Sometimes bad things came out. She didn’t like Mexicans and Hondurans coming across the border. She wanted Trump’s wall to be built, but she thought Trump was an asshole. Excuse the language.”
“Sort of a right-winger, then,” Kaiser said. “Anti-immigrant.”
“Yes, she was,” Angela said. “She had all these theories, about how the illegals keep the working people down. But she was friendly to us who work here in the store. Not so much anti-Mexican, or anti-Hispanic, just anti-immigrant. Lots of Mexican people even agree with her.”
“She had a problem with me,” Rojas said. “I jumped over her to the manager’s job. And, you know, I’m Hispanic, though my family’s been in Texas for two hundred years. So there’s that.”
* * *
Out in the parking lot, Letty said, “We have to do it, John. She’s Jael. We have to either talk to her or go into her house. We walk up to the door and if nobody answers, you use your picks. I’ll body-block for you.”
“That’s a watchful neighborhood,” Kaiser said. “I think it’s fifty percent that somebody calls the El Paso cops.”
Letty said, “C’mon, man. She came into that supposed inheritance and bought that Jeep about the time the oil thefts started.”
“I got that,” Kaiser said. They were leaving the parking lot and stopped to let a tumbleweed blow by. “Okay. All right, you got me. Let’s go.”
* * *
Nobody answered their knock. Letty used her body to block sight lines from one side, and Kaiser used his to block from the other direction as he worked his picks into a lock that he said was a piece of junk. Still, he took three minutes to get it open and they were both sweating by the time he did. Literally sweating, the backs of their shirts soaking wet with perspiration. When the lock popped, Letty pushed on the door with her knuckles, and when it was open called, “Hello? Hey, anybody here? Hello?”
“Quick, now,” Kaiser said, as they went inside and he pushed the door closed. “The cops could still be coming.”
One minute in the house, and Letty said, “She’s gone. She was here, there’s stuff in the garbage can that probably was dumped yesterday. There’s a milk carton that doesn’t smell spoiled yet. No clothes, no bedding, no towels, no bathroom stuff . . . nothing but junky furniture and an old TV.”
Kaiser agreed. “She’s moved on.”
“They’re close to whatever they’re planning to do, she’s already running,” Letty said. “We need to talk to Greet. We need to see her bank accounts and credit cards . . .”
* * *
They called Greet as they were driving out of Pear Tree Lane, and told her that they’d looked through the windows of Hawkes’s house and it appeared that she’d vacated the place. “Not like a standard move-out,” Letty said. “She took clothes and personal stuff, dishes and bedding, cleaned out the refrigerator, but she left behind her bed and chest of drawers and other furniture, a microwave and TV.”