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“That’s right.”
Kenny: “Wul, what’s the number?”
“You don’t want to get that from me because I could be bullshitting you,” Letty said. “Look it up yourself. It’s easy enough.”
—
The older copgot Kenny moving, and when they were back up the stairs, Letty called Greet and told her about the cops. “We need them scared and obedient,” Letty told her. And “Honest to Jesus, one of those guys was dumber than a bucket of lug nuts.”
“I can handle that,” Greet said. “If you check your email, you’ll find a list of where Rose Turney has used her Visa cards in the past month. The latest was four days ago at an Albertsons Market in Taos.”
“Then they’re still around. Now: you wanted anything new from Santa Fe. We’re at the house, looking in through the windows. There are spent .223 cartridge shells on the floor, and what could be a bloodstain on a rug.”
“Uh-oh. I’ll call the Santa Fe police chief, maybe get a couple of hissmarter cops there, in case you need local badges to keep people away. Or get in the house.”
“Tell them to come in an unmarked car,” Letty said.
—
A low stonewall crossed the back of the yard, with an oversized Russian olive tree throwing shade on it, and the three of them got into the shade and sat down. Letty took out her phone and started reading through the raw material sent by Greet’s researchers.
Ten minutes later, two plainclothes cops showed up, identified themselves as Ramon Martinez and John Wiggs, and took a seat on the wall.
Wiggs: “Should we even ask?”
Lucas: “I don’t think so.”
Martinez: “I gotta tell you, it makes me nervous that you’ve got a crime scene, and you’re a marshal, and you’re not going in there. Somebody might still be alive and need help…”
“That doesn’t seem likely,” Rae said.
“Still, you haven’t gone in, and you could. And when the first patrolmen were here, you mentioned Los Alamos and said this was a security situation. If I say a word, and it’s involved in some way, could you wiggle your ears at me? Like a secret signal that nobody will even know about?”
Lucas said, “I don’t know. Say the word.”
“Plutonium.”
“There’s no plutonium involved in any way, shape, or form,” Lucas said. “Or as far as we know, anything else that’s radioactive.”
Wiggs: “You promise?”
“I do,” Lucas said.
Wiggs: “Thank God for that.”
Rae stretched, exhaled, and said, “It’s a lot worse.”
Wiggs: “Ohh…shit.”
Rae: “Don’t tell anyone. We can’t let anyone go in there, for any reason, until we get clearance from Washington.”
Wiggs: “Ohh…shit.”
Lucas: “You got it, brother.”
—
They sat fora while, increasingly restive, waiting to hear from Washington. Letty had gone to sit at the other end of the stone wall, to talk on her phone, and eventually Wiggs asked, “That young chick. It looks like she might have a gun in her pants pocket.”
