“You’re right. You drive,” Letty said. “I need to talk to Colles and Greet on the way back. Get this rodeo started.”
FOURTEEN
Hawkes and a man named Coffey drove west toward El Paso, while Duran and Crain went back north toward Monahans. On I-10, driving into the sun, Hawkes asked Coffey how long it would take to get the C-4.
Coffey said, “I need to set up an alibi and I didn’t want to do that until I knew you had the money.”
“There’s two envelopes in the center console,” Hawkes said. “Take the top one, count it, then put it back. Count the second one, put it in your pocket.”
Coffey did that, smiled, put the second envelope in his leg pocket and said, “Pleasure doing business with you. How late do you stay up at night?”
“As late as I have to.”
“I’ll knock on your door at ten o’clock, sharp. Have the first envelope there. If I can’t get it tonight, I’ll call on your burner phone. If I don’t show up and don’t call, I’ll be in the stockade.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” Hawkes said.
“Yeah, well, you get caught stealing C-4 in the Army, you’re shit outta luck,” Coffey said. “Not only prison, I’d get a dishonorable, lose sixteen years of good time and my pension. So: I won’t get caught. Won’t even take a chance of it.”
“I understand that,” she said. “Where’d you get that stuff we set off today? Why didn’t you take it all then?”
“Because it would be missed,” Coffey said. “The stuff we set off today, the Army thinks was set off during training last year. I picked it up then. Never hurts to have a little C-4 around.”
“Okay.”
“All said and done, I’ll be at your garage door at ten o’clock. You should erase my demo from your cell phone,” Coffey said. “If you get caught, they might find a way to link it to me.”
“All it shows is your hands,” Hawkes said.
“That might be enough. Who knows? So erase it after you’ve run through it enough. A goddamn three-year-old could do it.”
“I’ll look at it a couple more times, then get rid of it,” she agreed.
Hawkes dropped Sergeant First Class George Coffey at a strip mall where he’d left his car, across Highway 54 from the Cassidy Gate at Fort Bliss, then drove home. She and Coffey had worked over the plan to steal the C-4 a half-dozen times and she could see no fault in it. The Army checked the explosive dump only about once a month, so they should be long gone before the Army even knew the stuff was missing—a hundred pounds of plastic explosive, plus detonators and digital timers.
* * *
In the very cold come-to-Jesus talk they’d had before the deal was made, Coffey had asked, “Why the extra detonators and timers? You want thirty, that’s way more than you’ll need.”
“Because after you deliver, we’re going to pick out detonators at random, and timers at random, and a chunk of C-4, take it out in the desert, and we’re going to set them off ourselves. If they don’t work, we’re gonna call off the attack and then three of our people will come looking for you. They’ll kill you. They’ve killed before—one was an Army sniper—and they’ll put you down. You screw us on anything, C-4, detonators, timers, we’ll kill you. You turn us in, we’ll kill you.”
“Go easy, there,” Coffey said. “There’s no way the Army can trace me on this if they don’t catch me right in the dump. They won’t do that. I got that all figured out and I’m not exactly a virgin. After your attack, I’m sure as shit not gonna talk to anyone about it.”