“Thought you might have some country girl in you,” Rhodes said. “Stick around tonight as long as you want, we’ll need full statements from you no later than tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, my office, would be good. Are you the pair that was with Dan Tanner when that bulldog bit him in the balls?”
“Pit bull, not bulldog, and it got him in the thigh, not the balls,” Kaiser said. “Then he shot the dog and we took him to the hospital. Tanner, not the dog.”
“Poor damn dog,” Rhodes said. “Though the story was more interesting when it was Dan Tanner’s balls that got bit.”
Letty agreed, bobbing her head like the sheriff: “Yes. It was.”
They both laughed.
Kaiser, in the backseat, said, “C’mon, guys, that’s not funny . . .”
SIXTEEN
R.J., the Odessa cop, called Hawkes at five o’clock in the morning, yanking her out of bed. “Listen: I just heard that there was a shooting at Winks’s. Two guys were killed. One was Winks and I believe the other one was your man. I’m hearing he got in a shoot-out with that DHS guy.”
“Oh my God! Max is dead?”
“I don’t have names or too many details, but somebody’s dead. The guy who killed Winks is apparently dead. I’ll try to get more, but I thought you should hear about this right now.”
“Thanks, R.J. We owe you,” she said. “What do you know about the DHS guy?”
“Only that he’s a big guy, and that’s about it.”
* * *
Hawkes didn’t have to think about the problem. She called Victor Crain in Monahans. Crain, groggy with sleep, said, “Yeah, Duran’s here, he’s bagged out in the back. He was drinking late, but he oughta be sober enough now.”
“You gotta get out to the shack and the truck,” Hawkes said. “You gotta burn them. Take some gas out there and set them on fire. There’ll be DNA and fingerprints all over the place, and the only thing that’ll wipe them out is fire. If you can’t get it done, the cops will be holding Winks and everything else over our heads forever.”
“If they were at Winks’s, they probably know about the truck,” Crain said.
Hawkes thought about the night she’d been out at the shack, and thought she’d seen a figure going out the back. She hadn’t been certain there’d really been anybody there, but now it seemed more likely. “Is Terry’s stuff still out there?”
“Most of it. We moved a box of clothes up here.”
“Listen: you get some gas and cruise the place. If there was a shooting, the cops’ll all be doing bureaucratic stuff for a while, making reports and all that. We got a chance. You cruise the place and if you can get in, burn it. Burn the truck, too. We’ve got no more use for it now. Can you get gas without buying it?”
“Yeah, I got an aftermarket tank in my truck bed, I can pull some out of that,” Crain said. “We’ll go check it out. I got a gas can. Where’s Rand?”
“He’s here at his apartment, but that’s too far away to get to the shack. You gotta do it.”
“We’re on the way,” Crain said.
He shook Duran out of bed, and the two men drove out of Monahans in the dark. They scouted the shack and the truck from the road to the north, saw nothing moving, then made a pass on the road in front of the shack.
“Still nothing moving,” Duran said.
“Could be somebody inside,” Crain said. He drove on by and continued to the first intersection, a half-mile away.
“You spooked?” Duran asked.