“That it?” Kaiser asked.
Seconds passed, shuffling their feet, peeking around the tank. With no movement, Kaiser whispered, “I’ve got buckshot loaded, I’m going to step around the next tank where I can see behind the Jeep, you stay here and keep focused on the hood . . .”
“I hit him above his right eye,” Letty said. “He’s gone.”
Kaiser said, “Okay, but you stay here.”
He went to his right, around the back of the Jeep, peeked to the side. “He’s . . . down.”
“I’ll go around the front,” Letty said. She followed the muzzle of the Staccato around the front of the Jeep. Sawyer was crumbled on the ground, faceup, eyes open, a massive wound above his right eye, what might have been a smile on his face.
“He’s gone,” Letty said.
“Don’t ever go walking into me again,” Kaiser said. “And don’t ever say somebody’s ‘gone’ until you stick your finger in the bullet hole. A lot of fuckin’ guys were killed by men they knew were dead.”
“Sorry.”
Kaiser looked up at the pole light, then back at Sawyer. “Gotta check Winks. I mean really—this is . . .”
They found the old man in his office chair, slumped to one side, a single bullet wound in the heart.
“Sawyer shot him quick to minimize the time he was inside,” Letty said. “Cuts down on the biologics you might be leaving behind.”
She took her cell phone from her pocket, punched in Billy Greet’s personal number in Washington. Greet answered on the third ring and groaned. “You know what time it is here?”
“Yes. It’s about five minutes after we shot a guy to death at the Winks Oil Company,” Letty said. “Oh, we shot him after he killed Winks himself, so the oil thefts are probably over and the Land Division may be rolling. You awake yet?”
* * *
Greet was awake. “There really is no point in doing anything right now, but I’ll be up at six and at the office by seven and I’ll be screaming my head off. Right now, you should find out what county you’re in down there. Call the sheriff’s office, get some cops on the scene.”
“They’ll probably want our guns and we really don’t want to give them up,” Letty said. “We’ll need some Washington heat to keep them. I mean, people could be looking to kill us after this. We need them.”
“That I can help with,” Greet said. “We shovel a lot of money out the door to sheriff’s departments everywhere. Grants. I’ll have the guy in that office call your local sheriff and whisper sweetly in his ear. I can probably get that done before I go back to bed.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
After Greet hung up, Letty called Senator Colles and got the same initial reaction: “It’s almost five o’clock here, what in God’s name . . .”
“I shot and killed a guy here in Texas, one of the guys who was stealing the oil, about a minute after he killed the guy who was buying it. Purely self-defense, but I thought you should know. I’ve talked to Billy Greet.”
Long silence, then, “Is this gonna come back to bite me in the butt?”
“Don’t see how,” Letty said. “If you want to turn on the propaganda machine—keep it in idle for now—there’s a possibility you’ll be a national hero.”
She filled him in on the investigation and how his crew of two investigators may have stopped a terrorist attack using U.S. Army plastic explosive.
“I can work with that,” Colles said. “Now I’m going back to bed.”