Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “What happened was, you slammed a motel medicine cabinet door too hard and the mirror broke and cut your arm. Medicine cabinet looked dirty to you, you’re afraid you’re going to be infected . . . that’s why I drove you to the emergency room.”

  “Emergency room?”

  —

  AT THE EMERGENCY ROOM, a nurse practitioner put a half dozen self-dissolving stitches in her arm, took the same credit card they’d used to rent the Tahoe, and sent them on their way with prescriptions for antiseptic cream, penicillin pills, and pain pills. They filled the prescriptions at a Walgreens and headed for Texas.

  “Could have thought of a better way to do it,” Kort grumbled from the backseat. The pain pills made her more comfortable and her arm had not hurt that bad to begin with. The penicillin pills, she thought, might even cure her aching ass.

  “Don’t bother to say ‘thanks,’” Soto squeaked at her, and she didn’t.

  That night, as they crossed the Red River, the College-Sounding Guy called and said, “That Davenport dude spent an hour out in a Dallas neighborhood. He was at a house in northeast Dallas. Actually, there are two houses. I don’t know this for sure, but I think he went into both of them.”

  “You got an address?” Soto asked.

  “I not only got an address, I can get you a picture of the place. Give me a few hours, I might be able to get you names from the gas company, run them to see who they go to. Davenport’s staying in a hotel over toward Fort Worth . . .”

  Two hours later, he called again. “The people in the front house, the house closest to the street, are named Bennett, and I don’t find any association with Poole, but they could be Poole and his girlfriend, since Poole’s probably using a phony name. Now, the guy in the back, that’s a different story. He was definitely involved with Poole in the past . . .”

  “How do you know that?” Kort demanded.

  “Everything is data now,” the College-Sounding Guy said. “Give me your real names and I’ll tell you your bank balance and what hour you were born.”

  “I don’t need to know when I was born, because I already know that,” Soto said. “What I need is another car when we get to Dallas. Find one for me . . .”

  —

  AS LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE were flying into Dallas, and Kort and Soto headed southwest toward Dallas, Sturgill Darling showed up at Poole’s place. He, Poole, and Box sat in Poole’s living room, talking.

  “I’m not quitting the farm. That’s my home and I’m not leaving,” he told Poole. “When I get out of here, I’m going up to Canada. Shoot me a bear, build an alibi, and then head back home as innocent as one of the Lord’s angels. I gotta believe they’ll be all over me, though. It’s gonna be a grind, getting through it.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re doing here,” Box said.

  “We got two problems. The feds aren’t going away, but they don’t know about me—not really. Not the way they know about you guys.” Darling nodded at Poole and Box. “If they put your faces on TV, I might be able to do things you can’t. The other problem is these cartel killers. I don’t know how they got on to us, but they are. We need to get them off our backs, and I know something that you don’t.”

  “What’s that?” Poole asked.

  “I know where they come from. I know who they work for. I got a phone number. Knowing that, we might be able to figure out a way to set them up, wipe them out. I can’t rest easy knowing that they’re looking at my farm, at me and my wife.”

  “Wipe them out and they’ll send two more,” Poole said.

  “Maybe, and maybe not. Maybe they’ll cut their losses, especially if we tip the feds as to who’s running them. We’ve got to get rid of these two, first thing. After that . . . well, you’ll be hid again and I’ll spend a hundred grand putting a security system around the farm—radar, the whole works. Best I can do.”

  Poole nodded. “I buy all that.”

  Box: “So do I. What they did to Gar’s folks . . . they’re nuts.”

  “How do we get this going?” Poole asked.

  “Make a long-distance phone call to Honduras,” Darling said.

  “I’d have to think about that,” Poole said. “They haven’t gotten to anybody who knows where we’re at—not yet. Dallas is a big place.”

  They talked about it during the evening and Box went out to a Whole Foods and got some ribs and organic sweet corn and they barbequed in the backyard, talking about everything, and nothing, and working through it.

  Late that evening, Arnold called. Box answered, and then handed the phone to Poole. When Poole got off, he said, “The feds are here.”

  Darling: “Here in Dallas?”

  “Yeah. You remember Derrick Arnold? D.D.?”

  “Didn’t know him, but heard the name.”

  “That was him on the phone. He’s here in Dallas, too,” Poole said. “I didn’t know that, and he didn’t know that I was, but the feds paid him a visit, names were Davenport . . . Givens, and something else. Federal marshals.”

  “Davenport’s the guy who shot up the drug guys at the farm,” Darling said. “I heard him introduce himself to Janice. She estimates that he’s not somebody you want to fool with.”

  “Gotta get out,” Box said. “Gar, we gotta go. Real soon.”

  “I think so,” Poole said. “Tomorrow morning.”

  “How about calling Honduras?” Darling asked. “We could feed them Arnold, and when they show up at his place, take two assholes off the plate.”

  “Let’s keep hold of the idea, but if we’re getting out, and they don’t know where we’re going . . . then they’re back to square one. And how can they know where we’re going, if we don’t?”

  —

  POOLE AND BOX got up early the next morning, both a little groggy, and found Darling sitting in a chair in the backyard, smoking a cigarette.

  “Those will kill you faster than the feds,” Box said. She and Poole came out and took chairs.

  “Only smoke one a day,” Darling said.

  “That’s okay then. Don’t see how you do it, though,” Box said. “If I smoked one, I’d smoke thirty-nine more.”

  They’d decided to move whatever they could, the really valuable stuff, to a secure storage unit.

  “Can’t do anything about the furniture,” Box said. She was bummed by the evacuation of their house, the first house she’d lived in that she actually liked. She’d bought the furniture herself, with the help of an Ethan Allen design consultant, and still got a little thrill looking at it, like something from a Sunday newspaper magazine.

  “Even if we had time, there’d be moving people who’d know where we put it, and people in the neighborhood who’d know what movers we used. We could get ambushed if we ever tried to pick it up,” Poole said.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “But I love the stuff.”

  “We’ll get more stuff when we get to wherever we’re going,” Poole said. “Better stuff.”

  —

  THEY HAD four vehicles, an Audi A5 convertible for Box, a Mustang for Poole and a Ford F-150 pickup, plus Darling’s pickup. Poole had shied away from the idea of a flashy car when they first got to Texas, but didn’t take long to figure out that flashy cars in Dallas were like Kias in Jackson, and he did like fast cars.

  This morning, though, he went back and forth to the pickup, loading up tools and guitars from the workshop, computers, televisions, stereo equipment, guns, silverware, dishes, all crammed into U-Haul boxes as fast as Box and Darling could do it.

  Arnold had told Poole on the phone the night before that the feds didn’t actually know their specific address, only that they were in Dallas. Arnold didn’t know how they knew that: they must have some kind of source. Poole, Darling, and Box thought they had some time, though it was impossible to tell how m
uch: it would be best to get out as soon as they could. They’d store the Mustang and the F-150, Poole decided, until they could come back and retrieve them. Box would take her convertible, because a single woman in a convertible looked harmless, and Poole would ride with Darling, because nobody was looking for Darling in Texas, as far as they knew.

  They were done packing up the valuable stuff by mid-morning and still had more room in the storage unit, so Box got them to take over a dining-room table with chairs, the bed stand, a bureau and mirror, and two big chests of drawers. That was it, that was all the place would take. They moved the Mustang and the F-150 into separate units, and then Poole and Darling went into the management office and paid cash for two years’ storage. While the owner was writing out a receipt—they got ten percent off for the cash, because the owner didn’t plan to pay taxes on it, and everybody knew it—Darling was looking up at an overhead TV, and bumped Poole with his elbow.

  Poole looked up at the TV screen, which showed a bunch of cops and lots of yellow crime scene tape around a house in Northeast Dallas. A female newscaster was saying, in a voice-over, “Unofficial police reports say that two people were executed in the Bennett house, and that the man in the rear house was tortured to death . . .”

  The owner had finished with the receipt and looked up and said, “You hear about that? Some guy got all chopped to pieces by some fruitcakes . . .”

  —

  OUTSIDE, Darling said to Poole, “I think that was Arnold. One of the cops on the TV looked like that Davenport guy who came to my place. I’m pretty sure it was him.”

  “If it’s the cartel guys, and that’s Arnold’s place, and if Arnold gave them my phone number, and if they have a way to trace it . . .”

  “Gotta move,” Darling said.

  They got back to the house fifteen minutes later and they were gone in thirty, with no solid plan. They headed north on I-35E, to Denton, and rendezvoused at the Golden Triangle Mall, at a free-standing Starbucks.

  They got muffins and coffee. The place was crowded inside, but the outside tables were empty and they took one, in the sunshine. Box had brought her Mac Air from the car. “They got Wi-Fi here. Let me get online and see what I can find out about those killings down in Dallas,” she said. A minute or so after she got online, she said, “Shit. Fox 4 is identifying the tortured man as Derrick Donald Arnold, says he works at the T-Bar—A Gentlemen’s Club—and has an arrest record for assault and a variety of drug charges . . .”

  “Now we know for sure,” Darling said. “But we got a complication with that marshal being here.”

  “Not a complication anymore,” Poole said. “Maybe they’ll all find our house, but they won’t find us.”

  Box sniffed. “I really liked that place. I was thinking we might get a cat.”

  The two men looked at her, and then Poole chuckled. “I guess we could. We could still do that. We need a place to settle in.”

  —

  FORTY MILES to the south, Soto knocked on Kort’s motel room door. They’d been up until five o’clock in the morning and had slept past noon. Kort let him in, and Soto asked, first thing, “How’s your ass?”

  “Some better,” she said. She walked back and lay belly down on the bed, cranking her head up on a pillow so she could see him. “Still hurts, but I’m not getting any more of the juice out of the holes. I think the penicillin is working.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “If I have to,” she said. “Still got a dozen pain pills.”

  Soto nodded: “I’m gonna get the other car. You can wait here until I get back with it.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “The College-Sounding Guy has another place for us to check. A row of rental town houses,” Soto said. “Forty of them. Davenport was there for almost two hours, up at the west end of the place, but we don’t know exactly which one.”

  “We got a name?”

  “We got a bunch of names. The College-Sounding Guy got them from the gas company. Two of the renters have drug busts, another guy’s been up on assault. They might be guys we want to look at. But the main thing is, there’s a live-in manager, and I’ll bet Davenport talked to him. We get to that guy and we’ll have some idea of what was going on.”

  “Think he’ll talk?” Kort asked.

  “I wasn’t planning to ask him nice,” Soto said.

  “Sounds . . . funky.”

  “It is. But it’s all I can think to do,” Soto said. “You don’t have to come in with me—I want the extra car there, in case of trouble.”

  “You’re expecting trouble?”

  “No, but . . . it’s the same deal every time, dumbass. Two cars, if there’s any way to do it. Already saved us once on this trip.”

  “What if Davenport found Poole and arrested him? If he was there for two hours . . . that’s a long time.”

  Soto was shaking his head: “He went from the town houses straight back to his hotel. There wasn’t any arrest. And he was there for a long time, which makes it more interesting. And then, the Boss is getting antsy.”

  Kort: “He called you?”

  “Yeah. Wanted a full report. I had to tell him about your ass. He’s really unhappy about that—says you probably left some DNA behind, so if you ever get looked at, they’ll know you’re the tool queen. Then they’ll put some real pressure on you, and you’ll spill your guts.”

  “Wouldn’t do that,” Kort said.

  “’Course you would. Never heard of anyone who wouldn’t, if the choice was that or the needle,” Soto said.

  “Including you?” Kort asked.

  “Fuck you,” Soto said. And a moment later, “Yeah, including me. I met a guy in the joint down in Florida who was on death row for six years, and then they called it off and gave him life, instead. He said when he was on the row he’d sit there in his cell and imagine getting strapped into the chair—they still had the chair back then—knowing that it’s coming. Day after day, thinking about it, dawn to dark, getting closer and closer. Says in the end, he would have said anything they wanted, to get out of it.”

  Kort thought about that for a moment, then pushed herself up off the bed and said, “Okay. Let’s get it over with. We didn’t get shit from Arnold. We gotta do something.”

  16

  THE TOWN HOUSE COMPLEX was made up of forty-two separate houses in six brown-brick buildings, two ranks of three buildings each. The backs of the buildings faced each other across a rectangle of brown grass with three neglected swing sets and a large dirt square that might once have been a swimming pool.

  Each building had a parking lot out front, and the lots were connected by driveways at the ends.

  During the trap-baiting phase, Lucas, Bob, and Rae had sat with their working phones at the west end of the front lot, and hoped the killers, if they came, would have precise enough instructions that they would come to that corner.

  Lucas was on the west end of the front lot and Rae was on the east end, eighty or ninety yards away. Bob was watching the back lots, in case the cartel people came in that way. The windows in the town houses were small. Other than the small windows, they were essentially surrounded by the concrete walls of commercial buildings across the street and down the street in both directions. If it came to shooting, there shouldn’t be any collateral damage.

  They’d been waiting for an hour when Soto cruised by in the black Tahoe. Lucas couldn’t make out the driver and the truck kept going, took a right at the corner, and disappeared. Four or five minutes later, another black Tahoe went by—but Tahoes were common in Texas, so it might have been a different one. The second time, he noted the tag, which was from North Carolina.

  Between the two Tahoes, a half dozen other cars passed the front of the complex, and two turned in, and the drivers went into their homes. One of the cars that went by was a maroon Ford Fusion, driven by Kort, who was tryin
g to stay as light on her butt as possible. A motel cushion helped, as did the pain pills, but she was still tender. Her .223 sat on the floor of the backseat, covered with a black blanket. She didn’t see Lucas in the Jeep because he was lying well back, and he didn’t recognize her in the Ford.

  The maroon Ford went by a second time, and Rae called Lucas and Bob on their shared radios: “I’m interested in the maroon Ford,” she said. “The woman inside seems to be looking at the town houses, even though she’s not turning in. This is the second time she’s done it.”

  “I can’t see her face that well,” Lucas said. “I’m getting some sun off the windshield where I’m at.”

  Bob said, “Well, I saw her turn at the corner up there, turn right and come down toward me, and then she turned right at my corner, and then turned right again at the end of the block, like she’s going in circles. Want me to drop in behind her if she comes around again?”

  “I’ll do it,” Lucas said. “I looked her right in the face at Darling’s farm. I’ll recognize her if I see her again. That Ford’s been moving fairly slow, I’ll pass her and take a long look.”

  —

  THE FORD didn’t come back, not that they saw, until it was too late. The Tahoe came back, though, and turned into the front parking lot.

  Lucas called Bob and Rae and said, “Rae, you see the black Tahoe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think that’s the third time that it’s been around. It for sure has been around twice in the last fifteen minutes.”

  “All right. You gonna move on him?” she asked.

  “Doing it now,” Lucas said. “Bob, you want to come over to this side?”

  “On my way. Thirty seconds.”

  Lucas would recognize either Soto or Kort, and they would recognize him, so he didn’t try to get too close to the Tahoe. As the driver parked it, Lucas pulled into a space fifty or sixty feet away, behind another car and a pickup. The Tahoe’s driver didn’t get out right away.

  Rae was looking at the driver from the other end of the block, through a pair of Canon image-stabilized binoculars. “He’s just sitting there. All I can tell you is that he’s a short guy. His head doesn’t get to the top of the headrest. He has dark hair. Thin.”