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Eleven seconds later, they were out the door with Letty leading the way up the street, Cartwright next to her shoulder, both of them running easily. One of the feds saw them running and shouted something at the other two agents and began running after them, but fifty yards back.
The warehouse was a full block long and Bogard wasn’t a runner: he was overweight with the red face of a longtime drinker and smoker; but, he was carrying.
As they came up to the alley, Letty split left and Cartwright went right, and when Bogard staggered out from behind the building, Letty screamed, “Stop! Stop or we’ll kill you!” Bogard turned toward them, almost fell, saw three guns pointed at him as the fed came up, and put his hands over his head.
“I’m having a heart attack,” he said, and to prove it, he toppled over, hitting the ground facedown, like two hundred and fifty pounds of uncooked beef; he half rolled, clutching his chest, and groaned.
The agent said, “Good gosh! I think he really is.” He pulled back Bogard’s shirt and dug a chrome revolver out of his belt.
Bogard groaned again. “Call an ambulance...”
Letty was already on her phone, calling 9-1-1.
“Another beautiful day in the American Southland,” Cartwright drawled, looking down at Bogard as Letty finished the 9-1-1 call. She turned to Letty and asked, “What would you have done if he’d pulled?”
“Shot him,” Letty said. “I would have tried not to kill him with the first shot.”
“Then you’re a better woman than I am,” Cartwright said. “I would have shot him in the eye.”
“You think you could have hit him in the eye from thirty or forty feet, when he was moving?” Letty asked.
“You’re looking at the best shot in North Carolina right now,” Cartwright said.
Letty slipped her 938 back in her jeans, smiled, showing some teeth, and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Cartwright, cocking her head: “Really.”
Letty nodded: “Yes. Really.”
Bogard belched, loudly, and the fed said, “Maybe it was just gas.”
Bogard moaned and cried, “Help me...”
Cartwright: “Gotta stay away from that barbeque, man.”
Made Letty smile, but she turned her face away so Bogard wouldn’t see it.
A week later,Letty was sitting in her closet-sized office behind a half-open yellow metal door, in the basement of the Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. She was struggling with the executive summary of the full report she’d just finished writing. She’d learned that if you want your report noticed by a Senate panel, keep the summary under two hundred words. Longer than that, and the senators started getting chapped lips, which they didn’t like.
“...intelligence reports indicate that all five hundred tents were being used in a tent city operated by JuFen Industries, a Chinese construction company working on the new Pacific Ocean port being built by the Chinese in Chancay, Peru. The eight forklifts had been illicitly purchased from FEMA stocks by the same company...”
Cartwright knocked onLetty’s door and Letty turned to look at her: “Barbara. Where’d you come from?”
“Across the river. I have an invitation for you.” She thrust an ivory-colored, heavy-paper envelope at Letty.
Letty took it. “An invitation? I...”
Cartwright was already walking away, turning to say only, “Come or not.”
Letty looked at the outside of the envelope. “Letty Davenport” was written in a neat female hand, in blue-black ink from a fountain pen.
Beneath her name was another legend:
Washington Ladies Peace-Maker Society: You’re Invited.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Letty said aloud. She called her friend Billy Greet. “I got an invitation from the Ladies Peace-Maker Society.”
“I thought they were... a rumor. What does it say?”
