They were done with the range at two o’clock and went back to the hotel. “Try to sleep,” she told Kaiser. “I’ll call you around five . . . We’ll hit the McDonald’s for dinner and get out there where we can see the tanker come out of its hole.”
“Five o’clock,” he said.
In her room, Letty got on her laptop and called up a manual for the shotgun, disassembled it, reassembled it, and did it all over again. When she was satisfied she knew the gun, she spent five minutes dropping and reseating the mags. When she could do it with her eyes closed, by feel, she put the gun back in its case and crawled into bed, which felt cool and soft after the night on the ground.
* * *
At five-thirty, they hit the McDonald’s halfway between Midland and Odessa, and by six-fifteen, were running along County Road 132, which was little better than a dirt track, where Kaiser had seen the oil tanker disappear. The whole countryside was a flat wasteland of low brush punctuated by dozens of pumpjacks and hundreds of power poles, one of the ugliest landscapes Letty had ever encountered.
Kaiser thought the truck may have been driven into a borrow pit or natural swale, but as they got closer, it appeared instead to have been driven into a dry creek bed that ran generally parallel to the track. “Had to be right around in here,” he said. “I checked the GPS, I was almost straight north of them, and . . . there we go.”
He pointed at a dusty track that went over the edge of the creek bank and onto the creek bed itself. The arroyo was deep enough to hide the truck, and as they went farther along the road, they could see no sign of it. “Wonder why they’re hiding it? It’s a big company, right?”
“I don’t think it’s real. Maybe we’ll find out,” Letty said. She pointed through the windshield. “Did you see that building last night?”
On the creek side of the road, but fifty or sixty yards from the creek bed, a small corrugated steel building squatted ten yards off the road. The building showed streaks of rust down its sides, and corrosion where it met the earth. Kaiser shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t have seen it without lights inside. All I could see of the truck were its lights.”
“Don’t slow down. I’m going to make a movie with my cell phone,” Letty said. They went on by. The building was no more than twenty feet square, with power coming in from one of the poles that fed the pumpjacks. A TV antenna was mounted on a pole behind the building, and an old-fashioned outhouse stood by itself behind the building and to one side.
“What the hell is this place doing out in the middle of nowhere?” Kaiser asked.
“It’s like a line shack,” Letty said. “Maybe . . . for people working the oil? Maybe maintenance on the pumpjacks? Or ag workers? We did see that one field with the center-pivot irrigator. Actually? I have no idea.”
“I wouldn’t know a center-pivot irrigator if one was stuck up my ass,” Kaiser said. “But over there . . . See the footpath coming out of the creek? The truck is down there and those guys are walking up here. They could be in the shack right now.”
“Don’t think so,” Letty said. “There’d be at least one pickup. They’re not going out to the grocery store in that tanker.”
* * *
They went on by and continued until the road was about to disappear into raw dirt; but before that happened, they crossed another track going north, and took it, and a mile later, another road going west toward the interstate. “This is where we want to be tonight,” Kaiser said. Letty unbuckled and turned in her seat, looked past Kaiser’s head with his binoculars. “I can see the building . . .”
She pointed ahead where a waist-high clump of weeds reached almost to the road. “See if you can get behind the weeds without getting stuck.”
Kaiser drove in behind the weeds and stopped. “This will work,” Letty said. “If that truck is in there, no way they’d see us way up here. If they go out after dark with their lights on, we’ll have a front-row seat.”