Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas suspected Rae would be a better shooter than he was. Maybe a lot better: but he had the pounds and planned to use them.

  “First rebound,” he said. “Play to eleven, win by two, you put up the shot, gotta hit the rim.”

  “Brace yourself,” she said.

  Rae put up a shot from behind the three-point line, with the two of them side by side. If it went in, she’d shoot over until they got a fair rebound on the first shot. The ball came off the right side of the hoop and they both went for it. Lucas gave Rae a hip to move her off the ball, took the rebound, dribbled out of the key, drove straight over her to the basket, scored.

  With the ball again, he drove over her a second time. The third time she gave him a leg and he almost went down, lost the ball long. She brought it out and Lucas played too far off her, and she stepped behind the three-point line and stuffed it, tying at 2–2.

  That set the game, Lucas playing rough and close, Rae struggling to get free. She had a beautiful stroke and, unless he kept her off balance, deadly.

  Lucas, sweating heavily, took the lead at 8–7 and held it. At 11–10, he drove hard and with a last-second step to the left, made an over-the-head reverse layup and won, 12–10.

  From the sidelines, Bob shouted, “Whoa! Whoa! The white boy rallies for the win! Ladies and gentlemen, this was totally unexpected . . .”

  Rae scowled and said, “I got you figured out, white boy. One more game.”

  “We gotta talk about Arnold,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, now we gotta talk about Arnold.”

  From the sidelines, Bob called, “Ladies and gentlemen, is the white boy a pussy? Is he gonna pussy out of the rematch? Did our viewers know that pussy could be both a noun and a verb?”

  One more game, Rae staying well back when she got the ball, running loose until she could shake free, slowing down, taking her time. She killed him, 11–7, and it wasn’t that close.

  “I got you figured now,” Lucas said, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt. “I’ll have a hand inside your nose every time you make a fuckin’ move.”

  “Dream on . . .”

  Bob called, “Dinnertime! No rubber match! Let’s go eat.”

  —

  LUCAS AND RAE took quick showers and they all went out to a nearby Italian place that the desk clerk said wasn’t too bad, and it wasn’t. They were all stinking of garlic bread when Rae said, “I’m bored. I say we go after Arnold tonight.”

  “I looked it up,” Lucas said. “His place is over in northeast Dallas, Diceman Drive. Rear, about forty-five minutes from here.”

  “All together, or separate cars?” Bob asked.

  “How about one of you ride with me and the other bring a backup car,” Lucas said.

  “Guy could be a problem, with those shotguns, and he might be more of a problem if he’s still hanging with Poole, and is worried about it,” Bob said. “How about if Rae rides with you, takes her M4 with her, and I bring my own. That way, we got some clout in both cars.”

  That was good with Lucas.

  Rae got her gun and a vest and brought them over to Lucas’s Jeep. As they were getting ready to move, Bob came over and said, “I talked to my guy at the Dallas cops, to tell them that we’ll be around. They’re cool with it.”

  Lucas said, “I haven’t done much of this marshal stuff. What would be their options if they weren’t cool with it?”

  Rae said, “Well, somebody in the neighborhood could call them and tell them there’s a tall black person with a machine gun and armor in their front yard, send help, and the cops could flood the place with fifteen or twenty squads and the SWAT team and kill everybody they don’t recognize.”

  Lucas said, “The Dallas cops are supposed to be pretty good.”

  “They are pretty good,” Bob said. “But you know, the way things are right now . . .”

  “Good move, Bob,” Lucas said. “Let’s keep them informed.”

  —

  THE NIGHT had come down hard by the time they found Diceman Drive. They were hooked up with Rae’s cell phone on speaker and cruised the house twice. There were two structures on the lot, a small fifties-looking house with an aging gray Pontiac in the driveway, and what might once have been a garage or studio in back. Both places showed lights.

  The front house had a metal stake in the side yard, with a circular path around it: a dog, and probably a protective one, though there was no dog in sight. “Gotta watch for the dog,” Rae said into her phone.

  “I saw that,” Bob called back. “Probably ought to stop at the place in front, before we go around back.”

  —

  THEY DID THAT—sitting in front of the target house for a few minutes, windows down, listening to an unidentifiable television drama leaking through the windows of the house in front. Crickets. After watching for a few minutes, Lucas called Bob and said, “Rae and I’ll knock.”

  “Got you covered,” Bob said. “If you start running, I’ll be ready to hose the place down, so don’t start running unless you’re serious.”

  Lucas said, “I’ll leave my phone on so you can hear it all . . .”

  Lucas asked Rae, “You set?”

  “Got my hand in my purse,” she said. “I’ll leave the M4, for now.” The purse was actually a holster purse and contained her Glock.

  “Let’s go.”

  —

  THE DOOR at the front house was open, as were the windows, though all the openings were tightly screened. Lucas knocked, and a woman’s voice said, “Somebody at the door. Mitch? Somebody at the door.”

  A moment later, a fat balding man in shorts, T-shirt, and bare feet peered through the screen at Lucas and Rae and asked, “Who the heck are you?”

  Lucas held up his badge and said, “Federal marshals. We want to talk—”

  The man said, “Bullshit! I’m calling the cops!” and slammed the inner door.

  Through the screened windows, they heard a woman ask, “Mitch, who was it, Mitch?” and Mitch said, “Some fake cops. I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  Lucas had his cell phone on, turned to the speakerphone, and Bob said, “I heard that. I’ll call nine-one-one and get back to you when it’s straightened out.”

  Lucas stood on the porch and Rae stood back at an angle. A woman peered out of one of the screened windows and said, “If you’re fake, you better go away, the cops are gonna be coming.”

  “We’re federal marshals, so the cops are already here, as your husband will probably find out in a minute or so,” Rae told her.

  The woman said, “Oh,” and looked back to where her husband was on the phone. “I think they might be real, Mitch.”

  Lucas’s phone buzzed and Bob said, “We’re clear with nine-one-one.”

  A minute later, Mitch came to the door, red-faced and apologetic, and said, “Sorry about that. We’ve had some problems in the neighborhood. Got my mail stolen last month.”

  “By a tall white guy wearing a suit in the middle of the night?” Rae asked from behind Lucas’s shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” Lucas said, patching things over. “Sorry if we startled you. We need to ask about the man who lives in the back . . .”

  “D.D.? What’d he do?”

  His wife had moved up to his shoulder and muttered, “I told you he was trouble.”

  “He hasn’t done anything as far as we know,” Lucas said. “We’re asking about an old friend of his.”

  Mitch said, “Well, he’s back there. Feel free.”

  “Has he been in any trouble with the law, that you know of? Or any trouble at all?” Rae asked.

  Mitch shook his head. “We don’t see him that much. He works at a gentlemen’s club during the day, sometimes he’s got a girl who stays over. Most of the time he’s back there alone with his bird.”

  “H
is bird?”

  “Yeah, you know. He’s got a bird. It’s like a parrot, sort of,” Mitch said.

  “Cockatoo,” the woman said. “Real pretty, all white. He calls it ‘Angel.’ It does look like an angel. A small one.”

  “Don’t call him and tell him we’re here,” Lucas said.

  “Sure won’t,” the man said.

  —

  THE HOUSE in back showed light at three windows; two of the windows were closed, and the third was occupied by a humming window air conditioner. Through the closed door, they could hear Florida Georgia Line’s “Get Your Shine On,” played loud. Lucas pushed the doorbell. When there was no answer, he said, “Music’s too loud,” and banged on the door with his fist.

  The music was turned down and a minute later a man in a sleeveless shirt, shorts, and flip-flops came to the door. His upper body was the size of a garbage can, and not all of it was fat, though some of it was. He squinted nearsightedly at Lucas, then at Rae. “Who are you?”

  Lucas’s badge again: “Federal marshals.”

  “Why? I haven’t done nothin’,” the large man said, though a thin trail of marijuana smoke had accompanied him to the door.

  “We need to ask you about an old friend of yours,” Rae said. “So we’re coming in.”

  “You got a search warrant?”

  Rae shook her head. “I hate to tell you this, D.D., but smoking weed is still a federal crime, and from where we’re at, we can smell it.”

  “You gotta be kiddin’ me.”

  “No, we’re not,” Lucas said. “We need to talk, so we’re coming in. If you want to stand back?”

  —

  ARNOLD STEPPED BACK, and Lucas and Rae moved inside. The house was like a hunting shack, one big room with a bed in a corner, a dinette kitchen, and a clothes rack covering one end of the place. There were two enclosed spaces: a tiny bathroom and a floor-to-ceiling wire cage, in which a cockatoo sat on a tree branch.

  The cockatoo peered at them and said, “Onk Gurty.” The place smelled heavily of Campbell’s Chunky Hearty Bean with Ham soup, a touch of the consequent flatulence, with a subtle overtone of newspaper-and-bird-shit. Two overstuffed chairs faced a TV, and an electric guitar was parked in a corner, with a bright orange lunch-box-sized amp. The guitar had a psychedelic twisted black-and-white checkerboard inlaid on the top.

  Lucas pointed at one of the chairs and said, “Sit.”

  Arnold sat and asked, “What the heck is going on, man? I been clean forever.”

  “Except for the weed,” Rae said.

  “It’s medicinal,” Arnold said. “I’m in the compassionate use program.”

  “We’re talking federal,” Rae said. “We don’t care what the law says in Baja Oklahoma.”

  “Everybody calm down,” Lucas said. He took the chair next to Arnold, crossed his legs, and said, “We need some help. We didn’t come to bust you on the weed.”

  “What kind of help?” Arnold asked.

  “When was the last time you saw Garvin Poole?”

  “Oh, shit,” Arnold said. He looked at Angel, which clucked a couple of times and said, again, “Onk Gurty.” Back to Lucas: “Man, I ain’t seen Gar in six or seven years. I don’t got any idea where he might be. He do something lately?”

  “For one thing, he moved to Dallas,” Lucas said. “Since you’re right here . . .”

  Arnold was shaking his head: “Man, if he’s in Dallas, that’s news to me. I don’t want to have nothing to do with him. The last time I seen him, he didn’t actually see me. I walked into this bar in Jackson, Mississippi, and Gar was sittin’ in with the band. He had a beard, but I knew it was him. I snuck out the back door and took off. That was like I said, six or seven years ago.”

  “I’m not sure I one-hundred-percent believe you,” Lucas said. “We’ve heard you two were tight.”

  “We were tight for a while—Gar and some other guys were providing protection for some dope dealers, and I was . . . well, I was working for them, and got busted for it. But anyway, that’s when I got to know Gar. We both played a little guitar and we both like the music . . . we’d jam a little bit.”

  “Didn’t know he was musical,” Rae said.

  “He can play country. You know he builds guitars? He built mine. They’re called partscasters, because he makes them up from commercial parts, but then he decorates the body, you know, the soundboard and the headstock, he does some custom inlay on the fret board . . .”

  Lucas: “He does it commercially? He has a website or something?”

  Arnold shrugged. “Don’t know, anymore. Back when I knew him, he used to do it like a hobby. He’d sell them, got some good money for them, too. But it was all word of mouth. You had to know him to get one.”

  “It’s like a talent,” Rae said. “Like his talent with guns.”

  “Yeah, like a talent,” Arnold agreed. “I’ll tell you, though, I never worked with him. He had this reputation—people who worked with him, they died. Got killed. He supposedly killed some of them, and some other ones, well, Gar would pull some crazy fuckin’ stickup and wind up shooting it out with somebody. I didn’t want anything to do with that shit. My idea of a perfect crime is getting a rub from one of the girls at the club.”

  “You had a reputation for carrying a shotgun,” Lucas said.

  The shrug again: “Listen, guys, when you did what I did, you were expected to carry a shotgun. It was like a lawyer with a briefcase . . . or a cop with a pistol. But I wasn’t going to get in any big shoot-outs. If the cops showed up while I was working, my plan was to throw the shotgun in the ocean and give up. No fuckin’ way I wanted to fight the DEA. Those guys got bazookas and damn little mercy.”

  Lucas’s phone rang: Bob calling. “I think we’re okay in here,” Lucas said.

  “Want me to come in?”

  Lucas looked at Arnold: “Nah. We’ll be out in five minutes. We got a possible felony here, but we’re talking.”

  Lucas got off the phone and Arnold, sweating, said, “Man, it’s not a felony. I don’t even got an ounce.”

  “We need you to check with your friends, find out where Poole might be,” Lucas said. “We need to hear from you.”

  “If I did that, somebody would come here and kill me,” Arnold said.

  “Not if Poole’s in prison . . .”

  “It’s more than just Poole,” Arnold said. “It’s that whole gang he ran with.”

  “Like Sturgill Darling?”

  Arnold’s forehead wrinkled: “Who?”

  They talked for another five minutes, and when they left, Lucas was fairly convinced that Arnold was a dry hole. As they were going out the door, Rae said, “If you told us one single lie, we’ll be right back in your face.”

  “I believe you, baby girl,” Arnold said.

  Rae stopped: “Say what?”

  “Ma’am,” Arnold said.

  —

  ON THE WAY back to the hotel, Rae said, “I looked you up on the Internet after I beat you up this afternoon. I wanted to look up your hockey career. Couldn’t find much about it.”

  “I was a defenseman back before the Internet. When I got ink, it was actually ink. You won’t find it online,” Lucas said. “If a guy from back then gets on the Internet, he’s either a big-time shooter who went pro, or he’s put it on himself.”

  “Anyway, I saw all that other stuff on you. Said you’re rich,” Rae said.

  “I’m well-off,” Lucas said.

  “Internet said you were really, really rich,” Rae said.

  “I don’t think of myself that way. I’m a middle-class cop who got lucky,” Lucas said.

  “This is like a sport, for you? Chasing these people down?”

  “No. It’s what I do. Having the money is . . . really nice. If I didn’t have any money, I’d still do this.”

&n
bsp; She nodded. “Okay.”

  —

  AT THE HOTEL, Lucas said good night to the other two. “Think about it—how do we find our needle in the haystack?”

  “I’ll do that,” Bob said. He laughed and said, “Never heard anything like that bird, I gotta tell you.”

  Rae and Lucas looked at each other, and Rae said, “Huh?”

  Bob looked from one to the other and said, “You must’ve heard it.”

  “Heard it squawk,” Lucas said.

  “Wasn’t squawking,” Bob said. “Maybe you could hear it better over the phone—it was saying, ‘Not Guilty.’”

  Rae: “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Lucas shook his head: “Good night. Don’t wake me up too early.”

  —

  WHEN DERRICK ARNOLD was sure that Lucas and Rae were gone for good, he kissed his bird good-bye and walked out to the gentlemen’s club where he worked his day job. The on-duty bartender asked, “What the hell you doing here this late?”

  “Can’t stay away, it’s the tits,” Arnold said. He walked around behind the bar, pulled a beer for himself, and then walked past the topless dancers in their half-glassed dancing booth, without giving them a glance—after you’ve seen the first ten or twenty thousand tits, you’ve seen them all—past the VIP areas where the chumps got lap dances, past the elevators to the Play Pens, where well-connected athletes and entertainers got more than their laps danced, past the restrooms to the kitchen. In the kitchen, he nodded to a waiter and dug around in the junk drawer, found the prepaid phone card, and carried it out in the hall to the emergency exit and the pay phone installed there, inside the door.

  At the phone, he punched in the number for the prepaid card, and then the number he had for Garvin Poole. The phone rang four times before a woman answered: “Yeah?” Cool voice, with a little whiskey in it.

  “Is Gar there?”

  A moment of silence, then, “Who’s this?”

  “A guy he gave this number to. I used to . . . unload. Don’t want to say names.”

  “Wait one.”

  A moment later Poole came on and asked, “Unload where?”

  “Galveston. One time we yanked about twenty pounds of weed out of a bundle and pushed it down our pants. My balls smelled like dope for a week.”