“I’m laughing myself sick. Listen: if somebody is stealing oil from wherever they steal it, they’re probably doing it in the deep-dark. Then, they’ve got to drive to Winks and unload. I believe they might wait until it’s real late, after midnight, before they load, and then they’d unload at Winks even later. You might have a long wait.”
“I’ll nap some. I’m close enough to hear anything as noisy as a truck.”
* * *
She did that. She’d known that the nights still got cool, so she’d folded a jacket and put it inside the pack. She hadn’t needed it. Now, left inside the pack, it worked well as a pillow. With the quiet jazz and the dark of the night—the sliver of moon was straight overhead, providing about as much light as a firefly—and the long day, she dozed, waking every hour or so when Kaiser called, or when a pickup rolled past. None of the trucks stopped at Winks, and it was nearly three o’clock when she heard the tanker truck coming in.
It slowed, turned at Winks, rolled behind the tanks where she couldn’t see it. She called Kaiser and told him about it. “Get ready. It came in from the south, so it’ll probably be going back out that way. Hey: don’t call me. I’ll call you.”
“What are you doing?” Kaiser asked.
“What you told me not to,” Letty said. “I can’t see the truck from where I am. But don’t worry, I won’t get closer, I’ll just crawl around in a circle until I can see it.”
“Goddamn it, Letty . . .”
“I’m going.”
She clicked off, unzipped the tent, and began circling through the patches of weeds. She’d been a hunter when she was young and hungry, had needed to get close to poach sitting pheasants and ducks with her little .22-short, and she knew how it was done; and in her black jeans and sweatshirt, she was close to invisible.
She’d made a mistake on the original surveillance site, the tent, she thought, as she moved slowly through the night. She should have gone farther across the field, which would give her a view down the length of the driveway loop, instead of the side of it. She would have been able to see what the driver was doing, but now he was hidden by the tanks.
No way to fix that. She ghosted through the night, no sound except the grinding of a pump, coming from the area of the tanks. She moved a hundred yards in a circle, toward the head of the driveway loop, but still fifty yards out. From a clump of weeds, she looked down toward the tanks. She could see the nose of the truck and a single man standing outside the cab, talking into a cell phone, a splash of light on his face.
She moved closer, took the binoculars out of her backpack, and studied the man. The cell phone light was bright enough to illuminate the side of his face, but the front of his face was turned away from her. She sat, not moving, five minutes, seven minutes, then another man walked around the end of the truck and said something to the man with the phone. She couldn’t see his face. The man with the phone nodded, turned it off.
They walked out of sight, to the back of the truck, did something she couldn’t see, then walked separately to the driver and passenger doors and climbed inside. She saw the second man’s face in the cab light, but not clearly. They started the truck and drove through the driveway loop, the headlights playing off the weeds above Letty’s head.
When the truck was broadside to her, she risked getting to her knees. She could make out a logo on the side of the tank, a faux-antique script that said Yorktown.
When it had gone through the bend, she turned her back to the truck, did the inside-the-shirt trick, and called Kaiser: “They’re leaving. They’re going south.”
“I’m on it.”
* * *
Kaiser wouldn’t be able to pick her up before tracking the tanker. She was tempted to walk down to check out the Winks building, but resisted the impulse. Instead, she walked carefully and silently back to the tent, pulled the sweatshirt over her head, and called Kaiser again.