“Shut up.”
“I’ll be on the phone, sweating . . .”
“。 . . like a nun in a Delta barracks.”
“I wasn’t going to say that, but that would be the case,” Kaiser said. He was worried, and showed it. “Talk to me, goddamn it, Letty. You got both guns? I know a guy who lost his sidearm crawling across a field. Try not to do that. I can be back here in two minutes. So talk to me. Talk to me. When you’re out there, call me every fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll call when it’s necessary. I’ve got you on my favorites list.”
“Okay, we’re coming up on it. I don’t want to hit the brakes and show the brake lights, so I’ll roll to a stop. Goddamn it, what am I doing? Here we go . . .”
They rolled to a stop, and Letty slipped out of the Explorer, carrying her pack and the tent, and squatted next to the ditch on the right side of the road as Kaiser accelerated away.
There was no moon and only a hint of light on the western horizon; the ditch smelled of gravel dust and mold. When Kaiser was well down the road, Letty scuttled across it into the left ditch, then duckwalked across the ditch to the fence.
She watched, listened, stood up, crossed the fence, stooped, and walked a slow, careful four hundred yards across the open field, past a slowly cranking pumpjack smelling of oil, into an acre-sized patch of bone-colored, thigh-high weeds that smelled of herb-flavored dust. Again she waited, then took the tent out of its carry bag and set it up, crawled inside, snake-free. Fifty yards away, through the tent’s mesh, she could see the oil tanks next to the Winks building. The building was dark, with a single pole light by the road.
Time passed, nothing happened. Two hours after she settled into the tent, a narrow crescent new moon poked over the eastern horizon; two hours after that, the Milky Way was rising overhead. Letty was wearing a dark sweatshirt, and she pulled the neck opening over her head, slipped an arm out of the sleeve so her arm and hand were inside the shirt, opened her phone, the light contained by the shirt, and called Kaiser.
“I was sitting here sweatin’ . . .”
“Like a nun?”
“No. Bullets. Why didn’t you call?”
“Because nothing happened. Nothing. I’ve seen two pickups and they didn’t stop. Anyway, I’m set here,” she told him. “You good?”
“I’m good as long as nobody is checking pumpjacks. I was afraid to call you because I wasn’t sure you had the phone’s ringer turned off.” Kaiser was parked behind a pumpjack on a parallel road a mile away. “You got that 938 in your pocket?”
“I do. And the phone’s on vibrate.”
“Okay. Now, don’t move. That’s what people see: movement.”
Letty clicked off, sprawled across the tent, plugged an earbud into one ear, and called up a playlist of quiet music, an old “Jazz for a Rainy Day” that a college friend had suggested.
She waited. At some point, a light-footed animal walked by, she thought possibly a coyote, because it was sniffing at her; she didn’t try to see it, because it might also have been a skunk, if they had skunks in Midland. As a trapper, she’d learned that skunks were not to be messed with, as they tended to shoot first and ask questions later. For the buck-sixty she’d get for a skunk carcass, the stress wasn’t worth it.
Her phone vibrated and Kaiser asked, “Nothing?”
“Haven’t even seen another car. There’s nothing out here.”
“All the better to steal the oil,” Kaiser said. “I’ve been sitting here thinking . . .”
“I hope they don’t hear the grinding noise out at the road.”