“Just sayin’ how it is,” Hawkes had said.
Now the plan was rolling, and Coffey had the first hundred thousand dollars in his pocket. Whether or not he got the additional hundred and fifty thousand remained to be seen. The handover could be delicate, but from the research they’d done on Coffey, he appeared to be an experienced black-marketeer of government supplies and equipment.
* * *
At home, Hawkes made a chicken sandwich and spent a half-hour sitting in the bathtub, staring up at the bubbled paint on the ceiling. Everything in the rented house had been painted or repaired with the cheapest possible materials, but that wasn’t a huge problem because she’d never lived in anything much better and because she’d soon be gone.
She toweled off and was putting on shorts and a T-shirt when R.J., the cop from Odessa, called. “I spent some time watching that DHS guy today, after my shift. They went to a McDonald’s and then drove down to Monahans and parked down there. I couldn’t tell what they were doing, and I couldn’t hang too close or they would have spotted me. After a while they headed south down I-20 and I had to break off. I lost them.”
“No! What time was this? Where were they parked in Monahans?”
R.J. didn’t know the exact street, but said it was on the south side of town. The time, Hawkes realized, fit the time she was there with Duran, Crain, and Coffey. Had they been tracked down I-20? Were they being watched? Was Crain’s house bugged? They’d seen no sign of a tail, and Duran said he’d watched for one.
“Listen, is there any way you can get up to their hotel right now? See if they’re there?”
“I guess. My shift starts in two hours, I haven’t eaten . . .”
“R.J.! This is critical. I was in Monahans . . .”
She told him the story, and when she finished, he said, “I’m walking out to my car right now. I’ll be up there in twenty minutes. I’ll call you.”
* * *
As she waited for the cop to call back, Hawkes went over the day—the meeting at Crain’s place, the C-4 demo, the return to El Paso. There’d been no sign of being tracked. At Crain’s, halfway through the meeting, she’d seen a cop car a block away, lights flashing, probably a traffic stop, nothing to do with them.
There’d been no sign of being tracked when they were up the mountain checking out the C-4 sample, and that should have been pretty obvious. She hadn’t been home for more than an hour when R.J. called, so if the DHS people were back at their hotel, there’d be no way they could have tracked her to El Paso.
“We’re too close, we’re too close,” she said aloud.
Then R.J. called back. “They’re at the hotel. Their car is there.”
“Man! That’s like you lifted a boulder off my back.”
“Yes. Still, I don’t know where they went down I-20 . . .”
“Maybe . . . I dunno. At least they’re not on top of me.”
“If you’re really under heavy surveillance, there’d be more than one set of watchers. But that’s not the feeling I’ve gotten from talking to the guys up at Midland. After Dan Tanner got hurt, the murder investigation was taken over by another guy and I talked to him about the case. He said the DHS guys signed their statements and never came back.”
“I hope you were careful about talking to the cop.”
“Oh, sure. His old lady runs a bar up there, and I knew he usually goes there at night. I went up there and played it like I was just bumping into him and was interested because of Dan Tanner getting bit by that dog.”
“Okay. Okay, that’s good. If anything comes up . . .”
“I can’t watch them full-time. You really ought to have somebody who can.”