“A pipeline,” Kaiser said. “How in the heck would they get the oil out of it?”
“There are a lot of thingees here . . .” Letty said, walking along the installation.
“Good. We just have to find somebody who knows what a thingee is.”
“Vee Wright would know,” Letty said. “Valves. That’s what I was thinking of. Not thingees. Stand back and put some light on this thing, I’ll try to take a picture with my phone.”
They did that. With Kaiser playing his flashlight across the pipes, Letty took a dozen shots from different angles. The photos weren’t great, but you could see the pipes clearly enough.
“Let’s go,” Letty said. “Gotta hope you were right about the POOH.”
Kaiser was correct: POOH opened the lock. They relocked the chains after they were out, and jogged back to the Explorer. As they pulled out of the hiding spot, Kaiser said, “They gotta be an hour and a half from Winks’s. We can probably get there in time to see them unloading . . .”
“We know where they’re going,” Letty said. “I want to go back to that house, that shack, where they parked their trucks. I want photos of their license tags.”
* * *
Kaiser didn’t argue. They headed back to the I-20, took a wrong turn on the way, got lost, found their way back, and turned southwest down I-20. Earlier that night at the Walmart, Kaiser had bought two on-sale black T-shirts and a roll of duct tape. Once they were onto the back roads, he pulled off and taped the shirts over the Explorer’s taillights. A half-hour later, they were approaching the metal shed, which was dark.
When they got there, Letty said, “I’ll get the photos. And I want to try the door . . .”
She hopped out, ran to the door, tried it: locked.
Next, she went to the trucks, took photos of the license tags. Both trucks were locked. Kaiser had gotten out of the Explorer, the engine still running, and said, “I got my picks, I could probably open the trucks . . .”
“Could have alarms,” Letty said. “How about the building? Could you open that lock?”
He checked and said, “I can do this one, it’ll take three or four minutes.”
“There’s a door on the back . . .”
They hurried around to the back; Kaiser looked at the lock and said, “This one is easier. This is a piece of junk.”
“See what you can do. I’ll go out to the road to keep watch.”
Five minutes later, Kaiser came around the shed and said, “It’s open. It’s a latch lock. When you come back out, if you pull it closed behind yourself, it’ll lock automatically.”
“Okay,” Letty said. “Give me the flash. You keep watch.”
* * *
Kaiser had left the door open an inch or so. Letty pushed inside and found a stuffy room with a single Army-style bunk; a counter with a microwave, two glasses, and a cup; a bowl and some spoons; a table and chair; an old fat television; a ten-gallon Igloo water tank; an office refrigerator; and a trash can. In one corner, nine cardboard moving boxes were piled atop one another, three boxes high, three wide.
The inside air held residual heat from the day, so the air-conditioning hadn’t been running. A pile of gun magazines and newspapers sat on the floor by one of the beds; the papers, Letty noticed, were from El Paso.
Aside from the printed matter, there was little paper, but one piece, from the trash can, came from an auto dealership and was a receipt for routine maintenance on a pickup truck. The owner’s name was printed across the top: （Mr.） Terrill T. Duran, with a home address in Monahans and a phone number below it. Letty stuffed it into her hip pocket.