“Fugitive.”
“Am I gonna see it on TV?” the guard asked.
“Hope not,” Lucas said.
“I’ll look for it anyway,” he said. He took a step back, spread his arms, and said, “Nice ride, by the way.”
Lucas said, “Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, huh?”
“What?”
—
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Lucas sat across the street looking at the Lakeview Mall, a collection of what appeared to be dying small businesses. He got back on the line to the AIC and asked, “That plane still up there?”
“Yes. Let me make another call . . .”
He was back a minute later and said, “Still no answer, but the phone’s in the same location. I bet it’s in a drawer or something and he uses it like an answering machine.”
“All right. I’m gonna go look.”
“Easy does it.”
The entry drive had a permanent sign that said “Space Available,” with a paint-peeling picture of a lake with a palm tree. A mostly empty parking lot fronted the mall and a driveway ran around to the back, to the stores’ loading docks.
Lucas drove around to the back, to see where a runner might go, if he found Stiner, and if Stiner decided to run. Running would be tough, though: a seven-foot-high splintering board fence separated the mall from what appeared to be a junkyard, or maybe somebody’s private collection of rusting shipping containers, no lake in view.
Lucas drove back to the front of the mall and parked. A third of the storefronts were vacant, and at the far end, a teenager sat on a tilted-back chair on the sidewalk outside a vacuum-cleaner store, peering at his cell phone. Lucas picked out a dusty-looking coffee shop called the Koffee Korner, which wasn’t on a corner. With any luck, the barista would know everybody in the mall.
Lucas made sure the Jeep was locked, patted his pocket for the enlarged mug shot of John Stiner, and walked over to the coffee shop. Inside, he found a man behind the counter peering at a computer screen that he hastily blanked when Lucas pushed through the door. He was a middle-sized man with a poorly trimmed black beard and long black hair tied back into a ponytail with blue ribbon.
He said, “He’p you?” with the kind of accent Lucas had just left in Nashville. Lucas took the mug shot out of his pocket, looked at it, looked at the man behind the desk, mentally subtracted the beard, and realized that he was looking at John Stiner.
He said, “Yeah.” He pulled out his .45 with one hand and his badge case with the other and said, “U.S. marshal, John. We need to talk.”
Stiner’s eyes went from the gun to the badge and he said, “Aw . . . shit.”
“You got a gun on you?” Lucas asked.
“One under the counter,” he said. “We don’t got much to steal, so it’s not much of a gun.”
Lucas told him to sit back down in the office chair, wheel it to a closed window, and then sit facing the window. “If you try to mess with me, I’ll beat the hell out of you and then I’ll call the FBI,” Lucas said. “If we can have a civilized conversation, none of that might be necessary.”
Stiner wheeled his office chair to the window and Lucas went around behind the counter where somebody had epoxied a cheap plastic holster to the counter wall. A chrome, long-barreled .38 revolver had been stuck into it. The .38 was probably older than Lucas, but when he dumped the shells out onto the counter, they looked reasonably new.
He scooped the shells into his jacket pocket and said, “Now, I need to ask some questions. What happens afterwards depends on the answers.”
A sandwich sign with a clock face on it, with wooden hands, under an inscription that said “Back in a mo’,” was standing in a corner. Stiner gestured at it and said, “Maybe I should put my clock outside.”
“Do it, but don’t run, ’cause if you run, I’ll chase you down and we’ll talk at the federal building,” Lucas said.
“I’m not running,” Stiner said. Lucas went with him as he put the sandwich board on the sidewalk, then they both walked back inside and Stiner locked the door and asked, “You want a Coke or a beer? I can’t honestly recommend the coffee.”
“Coke is fine.”
Stiner got a Coke and a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon from a refrigerator, twisted the top off the Pabst, and asked, “What?”
—
“I TAKE IT you’ve heard from your sister,” Lucas said.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Stiner said. “That’s the worst thing I ever heard of. They were going to cut off her feet? Jesus Christ, what’s happening in the world?”
“They did a lot worse to Garvin Poole’s folks. They didn’t get interrupted,” Lucas said. He told Stiner about the scene at the Poole house, and Stiner stared at him over the PBR, sweat trickling off the side of his nose.
“Shit, man,” he said, when Lucas was finished.
“Yeah. They’re looking for you—you might be the only clue they’ve got,” Lucas said.
“You know who they are?”
“Not specifically. Gar Poole knocked over a dope counting house in Biloxi, and the cartel wants its money back. We’re thinking that Poole may have walked with several million. They want it back and they want to make a point about people who make the mistake of stealing from them.”
Stiner said absently, “Bil-uck-see.”
“What?”
“You said, ‘Bi-locks-ee.’ It’s pronounced ‘Bil-uck-see.’”
“I’ll make a note,” Lucas said.
“Goddamnit,” Stiner said, sitting forward in the office chair. “What the hell am I supposed to do? I haven’t seen Gar in years, and I don’t know how to get in touch with him. If you bust me on those interstate warrants . . . well, you know who runs the prisons? It ain’t the guards. If the right guy down in Mexico tells them to, they will chop me up into tuna chum.”
“These guys are Honduran, not Mexican,” Lucas said. “Listen, if you had to get in touch with Poole, I mean, if somebody put a gun to your head . . . what would you do?”
Stiner thought for a bit, then said, “I know family people for a half dozen guys who are . . . connected. I guess I’d call up those family people, tell them to get in touch with their man, and tell their guy to have Gar call me. Somebody would probably be able to make a connection, or know how to get a connection made.”
“Would one of those calls be going to Sturgill?”
Stiner’s head came up. “Sturgill Darling? Is he in this?”
“Could be,” Lucas said, keeping his face straight. Sturgill Darling . . . How many could there be?
Stiner looked away again, muttered something unintelligible, then said, “Well, that makes a little more sense, then.”
“How?”
Stiner said, “Sturgill’s mostly a setup man. Or used to be. He made his money spotting jobs. When Marilyn told me about Gar’s drug job, I kinda wondered how he got onto them. Gar’s not real big on spotting. He’s bigger on the actual doing.”
“Where would I find Sturgill?”
“Don’t know. I’ve heard he’s got a farm down in Alabama. He’s like an actual tractor driver. Gar once told me that Sturgill’s hometown is so small the Laundromat has a clothesline.”
“How did you get in touch with him to get him to come to your party up in Nashville?”
“I’d see him around,” Stiner said. “We all used to hang out on lower Broadway in Nashville, going to clubs. I ran into him and said, ‘Come on over.’ Marilyn tell you about that?”
“Marilyn told me almost nothing,” Lucas said.
“Then how’d you track me?”
Lucas dug in his jacket pocket, produced his phone, and held it up. “You know why they call them cell phones? ’Cause people who use them wind up in cells.”
“I’ll remember that,” Stiner said. “What are you going to do with me?”
/>
“Tell the FBI exactly where you are . . . but I’ll wait a while. An hour, maybe. I’m going to give you my cell number. If those hitters, whoever they are, catch up with you, they’ll skin you alive. That’s the honest-to-God truth, John—that’s what they’ll do. The Tennessee cops are keeping an eye on your sister, but they can’t do that forever—it’s possible these people will be going back to her, if we don’t take them out first. So, buy another burner phone, call up who you have to, figure out how you can get in touch with Gar. When you find out, don’t call him. Call me. Gar will never know.”
“What if he calls me, instead?”
“Then call and tell me about it. We can figure out where the call came from,” Lucas said.
Stiner looked away: “I dunno, man.”
“You told me what would happen if you go to jail . . .”
“Ah, shit. Gimme your number,” Stiner said.
Lucas ripped a page out of his notebook, scribbled his cell phone number on it, and said, “Call me as soon as you get that burner. If I were you, I’d clear out of here. And right quick. I gotta tell the feds that I found you, but . . . I’ll give you three steps. And, John? Don’t make me find you again.”
“Gimme three steps, like they say in the song.” Stiner looked around the shop, the paint-shedding walls, the flaking acoustic tile on the ceiling, the plastic light fixture, the yellowing business cards and lost-cat notices on the bulletin board.
“Best goddamn job I ever had,” he said. “I was, like, in management.”
10
WHEN LUCAS left Stiner, he called Forte in Washington, arranged to get an airline ticket back to Nashville, and filled him in on Sturgill Darling.
“That’s the guy I need,” Lucas said. “There’s a chance that he’s the one who spotted the Biloxi counting house, and even if he didn’t, there’s still a chance he knows where Poole is hiding. He could be the planner, the spotter. You got the name, and it’s unusual—get me an address.”
Forte said he’d get that going, and added, “I got a call back from Louise on your travel. You’ve got a ticket back to Nashville, but you gotta hurry.”
Lucas’s next call was to the FBI. He told them that he’d spoken to Stiner, but hadn’t had time for an arrest and the processing. “If you really want him, he’s probably still around.”
“We made some calls about him. We don’t want him all that much, but if we get a break, we’ll go over and pick him up,” the AIC said.
Lucas said good riddance to the Jeep at Hertz, checked his bag and the .45 with Southwest—he hadn’t taken the training for Law Enforcement Officers Flying Armed, so couldn’t carry aboard—and made it to the gate early enough to buy an Esquire Black Book magazine and a Snickers bar.
Two hours after he left Stiner, he was sweating at the back of the plane, holding tight to the armrests during takeoff. When they survived that, and got up in the air, he managed to relax enough to open the magazine. By the time he finished working through the men’s fashion articles and discovered he’d need a new suite of neckties, they were descending into Nashville, and he was sweating again.
On the ground, he found an e-mail from Washington. They had a rural address for a Sturgill Darling, outside the small town of Elkmont, Alabama, not more than an hour and a half from where he was. The location was right, as Poole’s pals seemed to come from the Greater Nashville area.
He could drive halfway there, bag out in the same motel where he’d been the night before, have a leisurely dinner and a nice breakfast, and still get to Elkmont before ten o’clock.
He also had a text message with a new phone number for Stiner. So far, so good.
—
WHEN LUCAS walked out the door at the Koffee Korner, Stiner, suffused with gloom, finished the Pabst and threw the bottle toward the trash can. He missed and it shattered on the concrete floor. He didn’t bother to sweep up. He fished the last three bottles of PBR and two Cokes out of the refrigerator, looked around the office, got his baseball cap, and walked down the street to his apartment.
The apartment had come furnished, and while initially it had smelled strange, his own personal odors had taken over in the six months that he’d had the job and now it felt like home. No option, though. Maybe Davenport hadn’t been telling the truth and the feds were on the way to pick him up, but maybe he had been telling the truth and Stiner had some time.
Over the next hour, he moved his personal possessions into the camper back of his aging Ford Ranger, said good-bye to the apartment, left a message for the owner, and took off. As he was passing a swamp, he threw his phone out the window. In the next hour and a half, he acquired two new prepaid phones, one from Walmart and the other from Best Buy.
A while later, as Lucas was bracing for the crash landing at Nashville, Stiner took out one of the new phones and punched in a number from memory. He didn’t get a recorded message, just a beep. After the beep, he said, “A .270 is way better on deer. Call me on this number and soon. I’m serious, man.”
Darling called back ten minutes later. He asked, “Better than what?”
“Better’n a .243.”
“Long time, no hear,” Darling said. “What’s up?”
“You could be in deep shit. By the way, this is a brand-new prepaid phone I’m gonna throw away in the next five minutes, so you can’t call me back. I was visited by a U.S. marshal and he was asking after you by name, in connection with a major job,” Stiner said. “He knew you’d been at a party at my place, years ago. I told him I didn’t know where you lived now, or what your phone number might be. I said I just knew you from hanging around lower Broadway.”
“What exactly did he say?”
Stiner laid it out: About the murders of Poole’s parents, about the two killers who’d started working over his sister. “Somehow they got you-know-who’s name, and they’re looking for him. They’re going after anyone who knows about him. I told this fed I didn’t know anything about it, that I hadn’t seen any of you for years. Anyway, the marshal’s looking for you. He really wants your friend, but he doesn’t know how to get to him.”
“Damn it. And you say these greasers are looking for my friend?”
“It’s like a race. Your friend would do well to get far out of town, right away, and not tell anybody where he’s going.”
“But that wouldn’t stop the greasers from looking, would it? If they get my name, they could be all over my family . . .”
“I hadn’t worked it out that far,” Stiner said. “I don’t know your situation there. But they didn’t stop at torturing anyone else’s family. If they find somebody else who knows that you and your friend were tight . . . they could be coming.”
Long silence, then, “Anything else?”
“No except that I’m on the run myself,” Stiner said. “I got nothing to do with any of this, but I don’t want them coming for me. I’m crawling in a hole and pulling the dirt over my head.”
“Tell you what, buddy,” Darling said. “I owe you. When this all blows over, come and see me. I’ll take good care of you.”
“Yeah, well—thank you. I’ll check in a year or so . . . if you’re around.”
They hung up simultaneously and Stiner waited until there were no headlights on the back of his truck and dropped the phone onto the interstate, where it’d get run over nine hundred times before daylight.
That done, he called Lucas from the other phone, and when Lucas didn’t answer, left a text message with his new phone number. Then he turned his truck around and headed south. His thinking was this: the cops would expect him to run, and since he came from the north, they might expect him to go back that way. If they checked the phone call he’d made to Davenport, they’d see it came from north of Orlando. He didn’t have to run that far, though. Tampa would work. If the marshal ever called him back, he planned to string him along until he had a feel for what t
o do and then either run or hold tight.
The main thing was, he had to stay away from the two hired killers: the marshal wouldn’t be sawing his leg off, whatever else he might do.
—
AS HE WAS DOING THAT, Kort and Soto were at work on the outskirts of Roswell, Georgia. Kort looked into the empty blood-clotted eye sockets of an elderly man named Henry Bedsow. Bedsow’s eyeballs lay on the floor like a couple of bloody squashed grapes. She shouted, “That’s all you got? Sturgill Darling? What kind of name is that? I don’t believe that shit. You got ten seconds to tell me or I’m gonna rip your motherfuckin’ tongue out by the roots, and then I’m gonna let you drown in your own blood. Who else? I don’t believe this Darling bullshit. Who else, motherfucker?”
11
LUCAS GOT a later start than he’d expected the next morning; no problem, he’d just slept late, and the car clock said it was nearly eleven before he rolled down a narrow rural highway to the Darling farm.
The farm stretched across a natural bowl in the land, the bottomland along a river or creek; a twisting line of trees on the far side of the farm marked out the stream. The farm itself had a prosperous, well-groomed industrial air.
A neat white single-story house sat on the left, facing the road, a dozen trees spotted around the yard, throwing overlapping circles of shade. A broad, heavily graveled driveway separated the house from a six-slot white-metal garage, and at the back, ended at a white barn. As far as Lucas could see, there were no animals: the place was purely a grain operation, with soybean fields pressing at the sides and back of the two-acre-sized residential lot. A sliding door was open on the left side of the barn, and he could see the front end of a corn-green John Deere tractor.
Farms, in Lucas’s experience, which wasn’t extensive, usually showed bits of history around the edges: old chicken coops and machine sheds, maybe a neglected clothesline in the back, abandoned machinery parked in a woodlot.
The Darling farm had none of that. Everything looked new and well maintained, with rectangular beds of pastel petunias edging the driveway and sidewalks, while marigolds laid a circle of gold at the base of a flagpole in the center of the front yard. A silver propane tank squatted like a huge silver bullet on the far side of the house.
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