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Rae: “Yes, she does.”
“She’s the best pistol shot I’ve ever known,” Lucas said.
Rae: “Says her father.”
Wiggs to Lucas: “You’re her father?”
“Yup.”
Martinez: “When I first saw her, she looked kinda familiar. I thought she might be from town, here.”
Rae: “Remember the girl on the Pershing Bridge?”
Martinez: “Really? I knew I’d seen that face.”
Wiggs laughed: “Boy, she sure shot the shit out of those guys.”
Letty took a call, listened, clicked off, got up and walked over. “Alec Hawkins, the MI5 guy, just landed in Santa Fe. I’m going to get him. He wants a ride-along, instead of driving on the wrong side of the street. There’s not much for me to do here. I think Alec and I should go up to Taos.”
Lucas nodded, glanced at the cops: “You get a sniff of…our guy…call. Don’t go after him yourself until we hear back from the…fort.”
“I will.” She looked at the two Santa Fe cops. “My Dad was trying not to give you any information.”
“He did it well,” Wiggs said. “For my part, I’m glad he did. I don’t think I want to be involved in this.”
—
Letty left. Fifteenminutes later, Greet called Lucas and said, “They’re talking at Fort Detrick. Trying to figure out what to do, what the exposure is. They said they’d get back to me, no longer than a half hour. You gotta be patient.”
“I can be patient for half an hour,” Lucas said. “But push them. We need to get up to Taos before it gets dark. Taos is more than an hour away…”
“I’ll push them,” Greet promised.
The half hour passed, Lucas and Rae talking with the cops, reading their phones, and walking restlessly around the lower yard.
Lucas was about to call Greet when Greet called. “They’ve got a committee arguing about it. Bottom line is, most of them don’t think there’s a problem if you go in, as long as you don’t mess with anything that looks like lab equipment. If somebody got shot, it is what it is, but it’s not infectious. I wouldn’t touch the bloodstain, if that’s what it is. It’s your call.”
Lucas said, “Fuck it. I’m going in.”
—
“This is notthe brightest idea,” Rae said. “But I fully support it. We don’t have the time to screw around. If there’s anything inside there, we need it now.”
Rae looked at the Santa Fe cops and said, “The Marshals Service is always looking for qualified applicants to work in task forces.”
Wiggs said, “Uh, no.”
To Lucas she said, “We should kick the front door, where nobody can see it. It looks like an antique, so it’ll kick easier.”
“Then let’s do that,” Lucas said.
Martinez said, “We’ll wait in the yard. If there’s anything we can do for you, you can holler.”
“Or scream, if that’s what it’s all about,” Wiggs said.
—
They trooped backup the exterior stairs, walked past the cars and around the house, to the ancient front door. “Try not to kick the Virgin,” Rae said.
