Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  Poole nodded: “I can feel that.”

  He would shoot a box of .40s, the same stuff he’d use for the real thing, and then take a break, walk around, shake out his hands. At the end of the day, he could get off four accurate, killing shots in a little more than a fifth of a second. Good enough.

  —

  IN 2005, Hurricane Katrina went through Biloxi like an H-bomb, a thirty-foot storm surge taking out a good part of the town. North of the main harbor was mostly bare ground that once had houses. Here and there a building remained, but not in its original state; and there weren’t a lot of people around.

  Grace Baptist Church once had a fieldstone foundation up over head height, with a white clapboard structure above that, dating back to the 1890s. The frame structure, if it hadn’t been atomized, was probably somewhere up in the Kentucky woods, having ridden away on Katrina’s winds like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.

  The bottom of the church, the shoulder-high fieldstone foundation, remained in place, its original floor, now covered with tar paper, serving as the roof. The church, foundation and floor only, had been sold to a man who collected antique cars and needed a place to store them. When the Honduras cartel was looking for a place to put their bank, they made the car collector an offer he didn’t even think of refusing. Not that he was frightened: he was simply greedy and the offer was that good.

  The spot had two great benefits: there were never any cops around, because there was nothing to steal, vandalize, or hang out at, and you could walk down to your boat in five minutes.

  —

  SUNDAY NIGHT was outgoing only, with four men doing the work. For most of the evening, two of the four men would be posted at opposite corners of the former church, seated between carefully placed Limelight hydrangeas. They both were carrying guns; at least two each, Darling thought, probably high-capacity semiautos with suppressors, and were linked with radio headsets.

  Late in the evening, Darling said, one would go inside with the other two, while one remained outside, seated behind a bush by a door in the old church’s basement.

  He thought the three were probably packing the money, after the first two had counted and bundled it. Around midnight, the outside guard would go inside, and a few minutes later they’d all walk out of the building, carrying at least one and often two suitcases each. The walk down to the waterfront took five minutes. There, they’d get on a fishing boat. Two or three minutes later, they’d be off the boat and strolling through the quiet Sunday night back to the old church building.

  Three of them would wait there while the fourth man went out to a black Lincoln Navigator that they’d parked behind a building a few hundred yards away. He’d pick up the other three, and they’d drive over to the Hampton Inn, where they’d stay overnight before dispersing to wherever they lived.

  The boat with the money would ease out of the marina in the early morning hours and disappear over the southern horizon. Darling had considered the possibility of robbing the boat, but thought the money might be inside a safe, or otherwise hard to get at; taking it could get complicated and they didn’t have the time or the organization for that.

  —

  AT TEN O’CLOCK Sunday night, Poole and Darling slipped out of an abandoned FEMA trailer where they’d spent most of the afternoon and evening, eating Subway sandwiches and drinking Smartwater and pissing in the no-longer-connected toilet at the other end of the trailer.

  They were both dressed in dark clothes, but nothing unusual or too tactical—black Levi’s jeans and long-sleeved navy polo shirts. They were wearing ski masks, which weren’t often seen in Biloxi, the town being woefully short on ski slopes, and light blue surgeon’s gloves.

  Poole carried two pistols, Darling carried one, all suppressed, Nines for Darling, Forties for Poole. The guns, with the custom suppressors, were fourteen inches long in their hands. They were shooting wet, having sprayed water down the suppressors before screwing them back on the gun barrels, in the two minutes or so before they left the trailer. The suppressors would be even quieter wet than dry.

  —

  ONLY ONE GUARD remained outside. He was sitting behind a haggard pink rosebush adjacent to the door. They came in from the blind side of the foundation, Darling trailing as Poole led the way.

  At the corner, twenty feet from the access door, Poole peeked. Because of the rosebush, he couldn’t see the guard; but neither could the guard see him. Moving with glacial slowness, he duckwalked down along the wall. Ten feet out, he could smell the other man, a smoker, but still not see him. When he was three feet out, Poole rose carefully to his feet, back against the stone wall, looked down.

  The guard never knew what hit him: Poole reached over the rosebush and shot him in the head, a golf-clap pop from the gun.

  Darling came up, quiet as Poole had been. Didn’t even glance at the dead man. Three more men inside. They needed instant control; couldn’t abide with chaos, with some crazy gunfight. Needed to get on top of the other three immediately.

  Darling took the door: he breathed, “Ready?”

  The door would not be locked. They’d seen the guards go in and out without knocking or using keys. Poole got square to it, a gun in each hand.

  “Now,” Poole whispered.

  Darling reached one gloved hand out to the doorknob, turned it, pushed. It squeaked and then Poole was inside, both guns up. He could see the three men thirty feet away, sitting side by side at a table. They all looked up, maybe expecting to see their outside man, but all they saw was a stranger in black who said not a single word but simply opened fire.

  Darling was backup: Poole did the killing. Darling kicked the door shut as Poole shot each of the three men once, in a grand total of a half second, two shots from his right hand, one from his left, a little slower than he’d been on the paper targets. A half second was almost fast enough but not quite. One of the men grabbed a Nine from the counting table and got off a single wild shot.

  The bullet pinched the underside of Poole’s left arm, but the man who fired it was already dead by the time Poole realized he’d been shot. He was striding toward the counting table when a young girl, maybe six years old, bolted toward the back of the building from where she’d been sitting on the floor with a golden-haired Barbie doll. She knew she wouldn’t make it, though, stopped, turned, and said, “You killed Grandpa.”

  “Sorry, kid,” Poole said, and shot her in the head.

  Darling, coming up from behind, said, the shock riding through his voice, “Fuckin’ A, Gar, did you have to do that?”

  “Yeah, I did. She was old enough to raise the cops,” Poole said. He felt nothing for the kid, but needed to mollify Darling. “If we tied her up, she might starve to death before somebody found her. This was the best.”

  Darling stared at the Raggedy Ann body of the kid, wrapped in a white dress now spattered with blood that looked like red flowers woven into the pale fabric. “Fuckin’ A. We coulda called somebody . . .”

  “Wake up, man! It’s done! Get the fuckin’ suitcases,” Poole said. “We gotta move! Motherfucker got lucky and hit me.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Bad?”

  “No, but I’ve got to look. Get the suitcases going.”

  —

  POOLE COULDN’T PUSH the shirtsleeve up high enough to see the wound, so he pulled the polo shirt over his head. He found an inch-long groove on the underside of his arm; it was bleeding, but the bullet hadn’t actually penetrated. A flesh wound, as they said on the old TV Westerns.

  Darling was shoveling loose cash from the tabletop into a suitcase, stopping every few seconds to peer at the dead girl, as though hoping she’d show a sign of life. He brought himself back, glanced at Poole, and asked again, “How bad?”

  “Not bad. Need to rip up a shirt or something. Not much more than a Band-Aid job.”

  “We got a bunch of shirts, laying on the fl
oor. Rip one up,” Darling said.

  Poole ripped a piece off the girl’s skirt, figuring that probably had the least body contact with its former owner, and was less likely to carry an infection: Poole thought of things like that, even under stress. He made a neat tie bandage out of it; it was really all he needed. He pulled his shirt back over his head, and together he and Darling checked the take. Poole had nothing more to say except, “Holy shit.”

  “You got that right, brother,” Darling said. “Way more than I thought. Heavy, though. Can you carry?”

  “Hell, yes. It hurts, but it’s not bad.”

  He was wrong about carrying the money. The suitcases must have weighed forty or fifty pounds each, about like a deep-cycle bass boat battery, and there were six of them, instead of the three or four they’d expected. He could carry one with each hand, but not run with them; the one on his shot arm dragged him down, the grazing shot now burning like fire. Darling, carrying four suitcases, one in each hand and one bundled under each armpit, hurried ahead and kept hissing back, “C’mon, c’mon.”

  The stolen truck was two hundred yards away. Darling loaded his suitcases and ran back to Poole, grabbed the suitcase on Poole’s bad side, and together they made it back to the truck.

  They drove slowly—they were professionals—out of Biloxi. They left the stolen truck at a rest area on I-10, transferring the cases to Darling’s long-bed Chevy. Darling had put a false floor in the camper and they emptied the cash through the concealed hatch, closed the hatch, and threw the suitcases on top of it.

  Heading west again, they stripped off the surgeon’s gloves and threw them out the windows as small rubber balls. The ski masks went after them, one at a time, miles apart. Twenty miles farther along, Darling took an exit that curled down a side road to a bridge.

  They threw the guns off the bridge into the narrow dark river and headed back to the interstate. Farther up the way, they left the five suitcases sitting side by side on a sidewalk in Slidell, Louisiana, with a sign on top that said “Free.”

  A little more than an hour after killing the four men and the girl, they were out of Slidell, still moving west.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Poole asked, looking over at Darling, who was hunched over the steering wheel, his mouth in a fixed grimace.

  “I raised some girls. I can’t get that little girl out of my head,” Darling said.

  “C’mon, man. What difference does the age make? She’s just another witness.”

  “I know, I know. Just . . . skizzed me out, man. I . . . keep seeing her. I’ll be okay.”

  Poole peered at him for a minute, then said, “Think about it this way—it’s done. Can’t be undone. It’s history.”

  —

  THEY STOPPED at a twenty-four-hour Walmart Supercenter in Baton Rouge, off to one side of the parking lot, between two other pickups, climbed into the back of the truck, and dug the money out from under the false floor. Most of it was in hundreds, well used and a little greasy, bundled into bricks of ten thousand dollars each. There was also a pile of loose money that Darling had scraped off the counting table.

  They counted out a few bundles, agreed that they were ten thousand dollars each, despite varying in size depending on the value of the individual bills in each bundle. They counted the bundles. There were seven hundred and eighty of them. “Seven million, eight hundred thousand,” Darling breathed. “Man, those greasers are gonna be pissed when they hear about this.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Poole said, and he laughed aloud.

  Darling sat back on the truck floor and said, “Tell you what, man. Forget the sixty-forty. I never thought we’d get this much. Let’s cut it fifty-fifty and I’ll keep the loose change. Can’t be more than a couple hundred thousand there.”

  “You are a fine and honorable man,” Poole said. “Let’s do it.”

  He held up a fist and Darling bumped it and they split up the money.

  —

  BOX WAS at a Baton Rouge Marriott. When the counting was done and the money repacked in two canvas duffel bags, Poole called her. “All done,” he said.

  “I been up for three hours, nervouser than a nun at a penguin shoot,” she said. “Where you at?”

  “Right where we’re supposed to be,” Poole said.

  “You do good?” she asked.

  “Better’n that,” Poole said.

  “Ten minutes,” she said.

  She was twelve minutes. Darling went on his way, and five hours later, Poole and Box had cut I-20 west of Shreveport and rolled across the Texas border on the way back home to Dallas, listening to Paul Thorn singing “Bull Mountain Bridge” on the Sirius satellite radio.

  A ton of money in the back.

  Money, Poole thought, that would last his entire life.

  2

  THREE LOCALS were sitting on the wide wooden porch, on a green park bench, to the right of the bar’s front door. An overhead fluorescent light buzzed like a dentist’s drill but didn’t seem to bother them much. All three of them wore trucker hats and were drinking beer from plastic cups.

  They stopped to watch when Lucas Davenport rolled his black Mercedes SUV across the gravel parking lot and into a vacant slot between a new Ford F-150 and a battered yellow Cadillac sedan old enough to have fins.

  Lucas got out of the truck, clicked “Lock” on the Benz’s key fob, and took in the bar.

  In any other place, Cooter’s would have been a dive. Out here it wasn’t, because it was the only bar in Aux Vases, the place where everybody went, from the janitors to the bankers. Built like an old Mississippi River Delta–style house, it featured a wide front porch with an overhanging roof, warped, unpainted plank walls, and neon beer signs in the windows. A million white thumbnail-sized moths were beating themselves to death around the light over the heads of the three men, but they didn’t seem to notice.

  In a movie, you’d expect an outbreak of rednecks. Crackers. Peckerwoods, with ropes and ax handles.

  Located two hundred yards from one of the rare exits off I-55, with a twenty-foot-wide red-and-white sign that blinked “Cooter’s,” then “Drink,” the bar also attracted anyone who might be running along the interstate between St. Louis and Memphis who might get shaky after two hours without alcohol.

  Lucas crunched across the gravel parking lot, climbed the porch steps, and nodded at the three men. He didn’t have to get close to smell the spilt beer. One of the three checked out Lucas’s suit, tie, and black Lucchese lizard-skin cowboy boots, and said, “Evenin’, sir,” slurring his words enough that Lucas thought the men might not be out on the bench voluntarily.

  Lucas said, “Evenin’, boys.”

  “Nice ride you got there,” the middle one said.

  “Thank you. Want to buy it?”

  The three all chuckled. They couldn’t afford one of the fuckin’ tires, much less the rest of the truck, but the offer gave them the warm glow of economic equality. Lucas nodded again, said, “Take ’er easy,” went inside, chose the least sticky-looking stool toward the end of the bar, and sat down.

  The bartender, a thin man with a gold eyetooth and a black string tie, came over and asked, “What do you need?”

  “Make me a decent margarita?” Lucas loosened his necktie.

  “I can do that, though some folks think the indecent ones are even better,” the bartender said. When Lucas didn’t crack back, he said, “One decent margarita coming up.”

  The bartender had started to step away when Lucas asked, “How do you pronounce the name of this place?”

  The bartender’s face took on the look that people get when they’re asked a really, really stupid question. “Cooter’s?”

  Lucas laughed. “No, no—the town. Aux Vases.” He pronounced it Ox Vasies.

  “Oh. Jeez, you had me goin’ there for a minute,” the bartender said. “It’s, uh, French
, and it’s Oh-Va.”

  “Oh-Va. Always wondered, whenever I saw the sign,” Lucas said.

  “Yup. Oh-Va.” He looked at Lucas a little more closely and saw a big, blue-eyed guy, whose dark hair was threaded with gray at the temples.

  The bartender guessed that he might be in his late forties or early fifties. His nose had been broken at one time or another and a thin white scar ran down his forehead across his eyebrow; another scar, a round one, sat just above the loosened knot of his necktie. And the suit—the suit he was wearing was undoubtedly the most expensive suit to come through the door in the last ten years.

  He went off to find some tequila.

  Lucas looked around the place. Fifteen booths, twelve bar stools, a couple of game machines in the back, plank floors that creaked when somebody walked across them, and the vagrant smell of Rum Crooks and deep-fried fish sticks. He was the only man in the place with a necktie and without a hat.

  —

  LUCAS SAT ALONE, buying four margaritas over the span of forty-five minutes, and making two trips to the men’s room, or what he hoped was the men’s room. The only identifying signs were a picture of a cat on one restroom door, and a rooster on the other.

  He was halfway through the fourth margarita when Shirley McDonald eased up on a stool two down. Lucas looked her over, smiled, and nodded. She was a skinny young blonde. Very young. Black eyebrows, too much eye shadow, crystalline green eyes, Crayola-red lipstick not quite inside the lines. She looked fragile, easily broken; might already have been busted a couple of times. She wore a white blouse that verged on transparent, no obvious bra straps, jeans torn at the thigh and knee, and sandals. Not a debutante. She asked, “How y’all doin’?”

  “I’m doing fine,” Lucas said. “For a man this far from the comforts of home.”

  “You got a cigarette?” she asked.

  “I don’t smoke,” Lucas said.