“Yes. He identified them. It was the Blackburns,” she said.
“Are we over our heads yet?”
“Not yet,” Letty said.
* * *
As they drove through the city, Letty told Kaiser about the possibility of finding a buyer for the oil, rather than searching for the thieves.
“There must be dozens of small companies out here,” Kaiser said. “Guys who have, like, one well. Okay. Maybe not one well, but you know . . . small-timers.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Letty said. “But there aren’t hundreds of pipelines or hundreds of trucking companies or hundreds of railroads. Those people must have data on their customers. You’d just print out a list of oil shipments and run your finger down it, see who got a bump in the last year.”
“Could work,” Kaiser said. “Of course, with the post-COVID boom, there could be a lot of companies showing an increase.”
“Didn’t think of that, but you’re right. On the other hand, Grimes and Wright would probably know which ones are legit and which ones aren’t. We’ll see.”
* * *
Kaiser took Letty on a tour of the city and then the countryside around it, down white-dust service roads through the oil fields that not only surrounded the town but penetrated it, and then down through Midland’s near-twin city of Odessa. The Permian oil fields amounted to the biggest machine she’d ever seen, Letty decided, a level plain marked by endless acres of weeds and machinery. She said, “Those pumpjacks, the pointy top part—the way they go up and down, they remind me of herons sniping frogs off a pond.”
“The oil’s not just here—it goes all the way across the border into New Mexico,” Kaiser said. “I went past a billboard that said the Permian Basin covers eighty-six thousand square miles, and if it was a state, it’d be the twelfth largest. Ahead of Utah.”
“A little bleak out here,” Letty said, as they took a rural highway past endless rows of pumpjacks.
“It changes if you go west—cotton fields and so on. There are some nice neighborhoods in town, and some shitholes, too.”
“If you were Rand Low, where would you hide?”
“Not here. Too many people around. I looked on my iPad and there are small towns all over the place, oil workers coming and going, renting rooms . . . A lot of temporary housing for the fracking boom. He could be anywhere. About the only way you could dig him out would be to put his face on all the TV stations, or put up billboards and keep that going until somebody spotted him. Don’t think that’s going to happen,” Kaiser said.
“Depends on what he’s up to,” Letty said. “If it’s something serious and we can’t find him, maybe the TV stations would listen.”
* * *
They had dinner together at a diner, then went back to the hotel. Letty spent the evening reading oil industry websites—Oil and Gas Journal, Rigzone, Oil and Gas People, a couple of big oil associations, trying to pick up on the industry vibe.
In the morning, she ran six easy miles on the West Texas plain, did her yoga, got dressed, thought about it, and slipped the Sig 938 and the Sticky Holster in her front jeans pocket. She got a cup of coffee and she and Kaiser were at the Hughes-Wright office at eight o’clock. The two front office women were both on their feet, talking in hushed voices. When Letty came through the door they turned to her, and one of them said, “This is so awful. Are you okay, girl?”
“I’m okay,” Letty said. “Is Dick back in his office?”
“Got here one minute ago. He was talking on his phone to Mr. Wright. Go on back.”
* * *
Grimes was still on his phone, and when he saw Letty and Kaiser in the hallway, he waved them in and said into the phone, “They just got here. I’m putting you on speaker.”