“You saw all that through the windows? The inside of a fridge?”
“Try to focus, here, Billy,” Letty said.
“You think she’s on the run?” Greet asked.
“That’s what we think.”
“Okay, I admit that’s scary. Unless they just wanted the C-4 because, you know, they wanted it. Like those goofs running around with ARs.”
“Blowing up an I-beam seems like a very specific want,” Letty said.
“We can put out a request for her Jeep—if she owned it, I can get the tag number and put the Texas highway patrol on it and the El Paso police. I can probably get her credit card purchases; the bank accounts might take longer.”
“You gotta do it fast as you can; if she cleaned out her bank account . . .”
“Okay. I’ll get all of that today. You guys be careful.”
* * *
“I don’t know what we do next,” Letty admitted. “Guess we wait for Greet to call.”
They hadn’t gotten to the hotel before Greet called.
“First thing I tried was tracking Hawkes’s Jeep. Guess what? She sold it yesterday morning. Went down with the buyer and registered the transfer with the Texas DMV. She got almost thirty thousand dollars for it—twenty-nine, nine.”
“Billy . . .”
“I know, I know, that’s bad. Real bad,” Greet said.
“I just thought of something,” Letty said. “Damn it, I should have thought of it when I was talking to the general. You need to call him back, or talk to the sergeant major who sits outside his office. They’ve got a captain there, I don’t know his full name, but his last name is Colin. I need to talk to him. Immediately.”
“I’ll call,” Greet promised. “And he will call you back, because I will be screaming at them.”
* * *
Colin did call back, as they drove into the hotel parking lot. “I’m in enough trouble, with the general asking why you’re calling me.”
“I don’t care about how much trouble you’re in,” Letty said. “Listen to me. When this unknown guy was showing our suspects . . . the people we know about . . . how to use the C-4, I took some photographs with my iPhone. We were too far away from them, for the photos to be much good, but I took them on the telephoto setting. Maybe you can do something with them. If he was the guy supplying the C-4, and he probably was . . .”
Colin: “Send it to me! Now!”
Letty sent the best of the photos, and Colin said, “I got a guy who can work with this.”
“If you get anything, call us back,” Letty said.
“Maybe,” Colin said, and he clicked off.
* * *
“Fuck that guy,” Letty said.
“Fuck the whole Army. It’s CYA, every day.”
“Covering your ass won’t cut it, if they blow up El Paso,” Letty said, as they walked across the parking lot to the hotel. “What if they’re planning to blow up the Army headquarters?”
“From what I’ve read, the militias are usually full of ex-military,” Kaiser said. “I don’t think they’d do that.”
“Can’t see them blowing up a government building, they’re all pretty well guarded.”
“No, they’re not . . . not if it’s done like Oklahoma City, where a truck pulls up in the street and boom,” Kaiser said. “But the Oklahoma bomb was huge. A lot bigger than a hundred pounds of C-4.”