Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “Gotcha,” Poole said, laughing at the memory. “What’s up, man?”

  “A federal marshal came by my house tonight. He thinks you’re in Dallas, but he doesn’t know where. They came after me because I’m living in Dallas, too.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Poole said. “Where you at?”

  “Got a place over in northeast Dallas,” Arnold said. “Rather not say the address, on the phone.”

  “You say anything to them?”

  “Of course not. For one thing, I don’t know anything but this phone number,” Arnold said. “I don’t even know that they’re right, that you’re here in Dallas. I thought you were still in Mississippi. I can’t tell you much, except that they’re here and they’re looking hard. They think you were involved in some kind of dope robbery.”

  Another moment of silence. “You think they have any specific idea of where I’m at?”

  “I’m pretty sure they don’t. That’s what they wanted from me. They didn’t say why they were here, or why they thought you were here. They didn’t give me much at all.”

  More silence: “Okay. Thanks, man, I owe you. I’ll send a few bucks your way, when I get a chance. How will I get in touch? Don’t say your number on the phone . . .”

  “My dad’s got a number, if you remember him,” Arnold said.

  “I do. Still working oil?”

  “Yup. Retires next year. Give him a call, if you need to get in touch,” Arnold said.

  “Thanks again,” Poole said. He sounded like he meant it, and he was gone.

  14

  LUCAS WAS in a deep sleep when somebody began pounding on his door. He sat up, blinking, saw a streetlight through a crack in the curtain. Still dark outside. He’d turned the overly bright clock away from him, and as the pounding started again, turned the clock and saw that it was 6:12.

  “Coming,” he called, thinking, Fire?

  He looked through the peephole and saw Bob, and Bob did not look happy; he looked frantic. Lucas opened the door and asked, “What?”

  The words sputtered out: “Got a call from the Dallas cops. One minute ago. Somebody chopped Arnold up, he’s like fish bait, and killed Mitch and his wife, whatever her name was.”

  “What!”

  Bob started to repeat himself, but Lucas waved him off and said, “I got it. Let’s get over there. You wake Rae up?”

  “That’s next.”

  “Meet you in the lobby in five,” Lucas said.

  “Make it ten. I wanna brush my teeth and I gotta get my gear out of here . . . I’ll get Rae moving. She’s pretty quick.”

  As Bob trotted off down the hallway, Lucas noticed that he seemed to be wearing nothing but a pair of thigh-length underpants and a T-shirt; no shoes. Lucas went back inside, cleaned up, and was out of the room twelve minutes after Bob trotted away.

  Bob got to the lobby at the same time he did, carrying the oversized bag that he used for the ordnance, and Rae showed up two minutes later, trying to get on some lipstick as she walked. “This is fuckin’ crazy,” she said. “We all going together? We need to figure this out before we talk to the cops.”

  “Your car’s the biggest,” Bob said to Lucas.

  “The drug guys found Arnold,” Lucas said, as they walked out to the parking lot. The day before had been hot, but the predawn air had a sharpness to it: autumn coming to Texas. “They’ve got to have a source somewhere. It seems to me the only way they could go straight to Arnold is if they knew we were talking to him.”

  “Walk me through that,” Rae said.

  “If you work through the sheets on Garvin Poole, you’ll come up with a lot of names of people who’ve been associated with him. Arnold is one of the more obscure—the only reason we went for him, the only reason we came here, is because Sturgill Darling made a phone call to Dallas. We weren’t even sure that Poole was here until we went to the gold stores. That’s when we decided to go to Arnold. How are a couple of thugs going to figure that out? Only one way—they have a source who told them what we’re doing.”

  “Where’s the source?” Rae asked. “In the Marshals Service? How many people in the service knew we were going to see Arnold?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” Lucas said. “I told my guy about the phone call by Darling, and he switched me over to a woman named Mary who takes care of travel.”

  “I told my chief at SOG and asked him if he knew Arnold. He didn’t,” Bob said. “I’d trust him with my life. Hell, me and Rae both have.”

  Rae: “Maybe . . . the Dallas cops?”

  “Can’t be the cops—I didn’t talk to them until yesterday evening,” Bob said. “If these two were up in Nashville—I mean, how’d they get here so fast? How would anyone in Dallas even know to tell them?”

  Rae said, “It’d have to be somebody in the service who’s not waiting for them to call. Somebody who’s looking at the same reports Lucas has, who could call them directly. Might even be runnin’ them.”

  “That sucks,” Bob said.

  —

  THEY WERE DRIVING across town with the first dawn light, but the freeways were already getting stiff. The sun was up by the time they walked past the police lines around Arnold’s place.

  Dallas crime scene people were already working in the two houses and the yard, and a cop wearing corporal’s stripes directed them toward a man in civilian clothes: “Lieutenant Hart, he’s in charge.”

  Donald Hart was a tall, tough-looking black man who gave Rae a long look as they walked up. “You the feds?”

  Lucas nodded. “Yeah. Anyone tell you what we’re doing?”

  “Not entirely. I got jerked out of bed an hour ago. We don’t get that many triples, and when we do, they don’t look like this one. What the hell are we into here?”

  Hart leaned back against the fender of a squad car as Lucas introduced Bob and Rae and then briefed him. When Lucas finished, Hart said, “The killers are professionals. No tie to anything local.”

  “I don’t believe so,” Lucas said. “I can tell you for sure if I can take a look inside Arnold’s place.”

  “That makes sense . . . that they’re professionals. I thought they might be. I’ll tell you about that in a minute. I’m not, uh, sure . . . how much do you guys deal with homicides?”

  “I spent twenty-five years chasing homicides up in Minneapolis and all over Minnesota before I joined the Marshals Service,” Lucas said. “Altogether, probably worked three hundred of them, either as the lead investigator or assisting.”

  Hart nodded. “Good. Sometimes we get federals down here who . . . get a little pukey when they see a dead one.”

  “People we deal with, we get a little pukey with the live ones,” Bob said. “Dead ones don’t bother us much.”

  “C’mon then,” Hart said.

  —

  HART SAID the couple in the front house were Mitch and Carla Bennett. They’d been made to lie down on the front room carpet, and each had been shot in the back of the head with a large-caliber weapon. Lucas told Hart that when they’d visited the night before, the windows had been open. They were closed now, and Lucas suggested that the crime scene crew print the window frames where somebody would have pushed them down.

  “We’ll do that. Most of the places around here would have had air-conditioning, so nobody heard any shots. Or any screaming, for that matter—they took their time with Arnold,” Hart said. “The thing that had us wondering about the head shots is that they didn’t go through. Big hole in the back of their heads, but no exit wound. That said to me that they were using low-power cartridges, maybe .45s with very light loads. Not much noise.”

  Bob said, “Professionals. Rolling their own.”

  Hart nodded. “I thought that might be the situation, but didn’t know who or why until you guys showed up.”

  —

  ARNOLD WAS a
mess. His legs were taped with gaffer’s tape, tough fibrous stuff that he wouldn’t have been able to rip off, even with all the power in his heavily muscled arms and legs. There was no tape around his mouth, but traces of tape adhesives. After they bound him, they gagged him and then began torturing him, with saws and what might have been a propane torch. Both of his legs had been partially severed below the knee, and his genitals had been burned off.

  When they were done with him, they’d fired a single round through his forehead.

  They hadn’t touched the bird, which shuffled silently back and forth on its perch, Arnold’s tiny Angel looking at a little piece of hell.

  Lucas looked over the scene, turned to Bob and Rae: they both nodded, and Lucas said to Hart, “It’s the same two. I can’t tell you who the shooter is, but the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has identikit pictures of the woman. Pretty good ones.”

  “Motherfuckers,” Bob said. “Don’t quote me, but they desperately need to be shot.”

  “Nobody gonna argue with that,” Hart said.

  Lucas asked, “Do you have a time on this?”

  “The crew says probably about four in the morning, give or take. The blood wasn’t completely dry, and they can tell by . . . the stickiness, I guess . . . about how long it’s been pooled there.”

  Rae said to Lucas, “If they knew we were flying down to Dallas, if they knew about the time the tickets were bought, they’d have time to drive here. I don’t think they would have flown with specialty weapons like that .45, and you said they shot you up with an automatic weapon.”

  “Makes them harder to find, too,” Bob said. “If they’d flown, we might be able to find a rental car.”

  Lucas said to Hart, “We’ll leave this with you, Don. There’s nothing here for us—we’ll coordinate with you. The main thing we need to figure out is where the leak is. Somebody had to tell them exactly where we were going, tell them about Arnold and give them the address . . .”

  Then Lucas stepped through the door, outside, cupped his mouth and nose in his hands, stood with his face looking down toward his shoes. He muttered, “Holy fuck.”

  Rae, behind him, asked, “What?”

  Lucas walked a circle around the yard, head down, Bob, Rae, and Hart looking at him. When he got back, he said to Bob and Rae, “It’s us. We told them. No, wait. I told them.”

  Bob: “What?”

  Lucas looked up now: “Listen, we know they’ve got a line into law enforcement files. That’s the only way they could have started tracking Poole. But an inside source wouldn’t know what we’re doing, not minute by minute. Bob told his SOG guy about Arnold, but says that guy wouldn’t talk.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Bob said. “I’ve known him for fifteen years. He would not.”

  Lucas: “But if they have a hacker . . . if they have a hacker, and he’s a good one . . . I mean, I know a guy up in Minnesota who can pull files out of the NCIS all day long, who can look at Verizon computers anytime he wants. There might be a lot of guys who can do that. They’ve got one. Somewhere along the line, they identified me—maybe saw my license plate number. They’ve been following my phone, like I tracked Stiner down to Florida.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Bob said.

  “That sounds kinda far-fetched,” Hart said.

  “Doesn’t to me,” Rae said. “Think about all the files that have been hacked during the presidential campaign and how high up the hackers got. Seems like everybody can hack everybody . . . you just gotta know the right hacker. With the way things are now, a drug cartel is gonna have hackers. Maybe a lot of them.”

  “What are you going to do?” Hart asked Lucas. “If you’re right, you gotta get rid of your phone, first thing.”

  Lucas’s hands were still cupped across his mouth, still head down. “Can’t help the Bennetts or Arnold,” he said. “But I’m not getting rid of my phone. We can still use it.”

  Bob: “We’re gonna suck them in.”

  “That’s what we’re gonna do,” Lucas said, lifting his head. “I’m gonna kill the motherfuckers.”

  —

  THEY FOUND a Best Buy off Highway 75. Lucas and Bob left their phones in the Jeep and Rae drove it away; a half hour later she was back for a flying pickup, and Lucas and Bob gave her a new burner phone, identical to the ones they’d bought. They thought the killers had probably tracked Lucas, but decided not to take a chance—maybe they’d tagged Bob or Rae.

  “Now what?”

  “Now we find a nice improbable and semi-trashy place for us to go, not too far from the hotel, and we spend some time there, like we did with Arnold. Then one of us drives the Jeep back to the hotel with our regular phones inside, leaves the phones at the hotel, and drives back. We’re gonna ambush their asses.”

  Rae said to Bob, “I do like the way he thinks.”

  —

  RAE WAS still driving and Lucas used his iPad to look over the Dallas area, and decided to check the town of Addison, which appeared to be a highly mixed commercial-industrial town built around a general aviation airport, and not too far from the hotel.

  Rae took the Jeep that way and they eventually spotted a town house complex surrounded by narrow lawns on all four sides, and a wraparound parking lot that was mostly empty. The front of the complex faced the concrete back side of a truck terminal. Two other concrete-faced commercial buildings stood at opposite ends of the street. If there should be any shooting, it would be as safe outside the complex as anywhere they’d seen. They cruised the neighborhood a couple of times, talking about possible setups, and then headed back to the hotel.

  “One thing we’ve got to talk about . . . do we tell the Addison cops what we’re doing?” Rae asked.

  “If we’re setting up to ambush a couple of killers, in their town, they might be a little nervous and maybe even a little pissed, if we had any other options,” Bob said. “The usual unwarranted aversion to bullets flying around.”

  Lucas: “I know you federal guys—us federal guys—like to bring the locals in whenever possible. This might be an exception. We’ve got a safe spot to make a stop, and we’re going to have to make a stop somewhere . . .”

  “Your call,” Rae said.

  Lucas thought about it, then said, “Fuck it. Let’s tell Addison we’re doing surveillance down here and ask them not to cruise the area. If it all goes up in smoke, at least we’ll have that for cover, you know—that we called them in advance.”

  “Sneaky,” Bob said.

  —

  AT THE HOTEL, they moved some of Bob’s armory around: Lucas got a heavy-duty vest, and Rae and Bob carried M4s, ammo, and vests to their separate cars. Lucas carried a battery-operated Altec miniature speaker out to his car. A quick stop at a Subway got them sandwiches and bottles of water, and Diet Coke for Lucas, and a second stop got them magazines and newspapers, and then they headed back to the town houses.

  Once there, Lucas and Rae parked at opposite ends of the front parking lot, and Bob parked in back. Lucas hooked up the tiny Bluetooth speaker to the iPad, picked out a decent playlist, and settled in to wait.

  Bob called his boss at SOG, told him what was happening, then called the Addison cops, got the chief, identified himself, told him about the surveillance, and asked that patrol cars not cruise the neighborhood too heavily. He gave his SOG boss as a reference. Lucas called Forte, his contact in Washington, told him the same thing. Then he called Rae, and Rae called Bob, to further establish their location if somebody was monitoring them.

  Two hours after they made the parking lot, Lucas called Bob and said, “Come get the phones.”

  “On the way,” Bob said.

  Bob collected Lucas’s and Rae’s phones, drove them back to the hotel, then made calls on each of them—to Washington and back to the SOG headquarters. That done, he left the phones at the motel and drove back to the apartment and set up at
his previous spot, and called Lucas and Rae on the burner phones.

  “We’re set,” he told Lucas.

  “Could be a long wait,” Lucas said.

  “Be worth it to take these sonsofbitches down,” Bob said. “What they did to Arnold . . .”

  15

  THE COLLEGE-SOUNDING GUY had spotted Lucas flying out of Nashville for Dallas. As they were leaving to follow, by car, Kort stole a couple of pillows from a Holiday Inn linen closet left open by the cleaning crew. Her ass felt like it was on fire, and when she pressed on the wounds with toilet paper, she was getting some nasty-looking fluid.

  “Might have an infection,” Soto had said. He sounded like he didn’t care, because he didn’t.

  “Hurts like hell,” Kort had groaned. “I’m going to Dallas flat on my stomach. Ten fuckin’ hours.”

  “Better get some pillows or something,” Soto had said.

  She’d done that and Soto had hauled their suitcases out to the latest rental, a Chevy Tahoe, from National. The thing should cost an arm and a leg, but since they were using a phony credit card and ID, and wouldn’t be returning it, the cost didn’t matter, and Kort could lie mostly flat in the back.

  Soto made one last trip inside and came back carrying a bottle of gin, partially wrapped in a towel.

  “What’s that for?” Kort asked.

  “Give me your hand,” Soto said.

  Without thinking, she stuck her hand out, and Soto grabbed it and pulled it toward him. At the same time he lifted the gin bottle, which she now saw had been broken off about halfway down, and jabbed the sharp broken edge into her forearm.

  She managed to stifle a scream but threw herself away from him, farther into the folded-down backseat, looked down at her bleeding arm, and cried, “What the fuck?”

  “Now you need to go to the emergency room and get sewed up,” Soto said, and he climbed into the driver’s seat. He handed her the towel and said, “Wrap this around it. Don’t get blood all over the car, it’ll start smelling bad.”