Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “That could be him,” Lucas said. And, “I can’t see him. Keep me up on what he’s doing.”

  Bob called: “I’m setting up at the end of the parking lot. Right behind that rug company van. You see me, Rae?”

  “Gotcha. If he gets out and walks to the town house he’s in front of, you’ll be shooting right at me,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

  “I will take care,” Bob said.

  “Okay, he’s getting out,” Rae called. “There’s another car turning into the lot. I think he might have been waiting for it. Or maybe not.”

  “Maroon Ford?”

  “No, it’s one of those little cream-colored British Cooper things.”

  Lucas saw the Mini Cooper pulling slowly into the parking lot, driven by a heavyset, bushy-haired man wearing black plastic-rimmed celebrity glasses. He was talking on his cell phone. Lucas had never seen the man before, but he could see a short man walking on the other side of the car. The Mini paused in exactly the wrong place, from Lucas’s point of view, and Rae called, “What do you think, Lucas?”

  “I haven’t gotten a clear look at him . . .”

  The Mini Cooper driver finally picked out a parking space and pulled away. The short man climbed a stoop at the front of a town house, rang the doorbell, and took a furtive look around, peering directly at Lucas without seeing him in the Jeep. Lucas called, “That’s him. That’s the guy.”

  Bob called, “Coming in closer.”

  Lucas: “Good, but keep an eye on the guy in the Mini. Don’t know what he’s doing.”

  Rae: “I’m coming. Call it, Lucas.”

  Lucas was climbing out of the Jeep, keeping as much of the vehicle between him and the man on the step as he could. He said to the radio, “I’m going to call him down.”

  Bob: “The guy in the Mini has got keys out. I think he’s going up to that town house . . .”

  Soto pushed the doorbell again and Rae said, “Lucas, wait just one . . .”

  Lucas didn’t think he could and instead lifted his pistol and shouted “You! Stop! Federal marshals.”

  —

  SOTO TURNED toward him and his right hand dropped diagonally to the left side of his belt line: a concealed weapon. Lucas could sense Rae running in from the east side and Bob was coming from farther west, staying close to the front of the town houses where Soto wouldn’t be able to see him.

  Lucas shouted: “Federal . . .”

  And the town house door opened and a big man was standing there in a T-shirt and cargo shorts and Soto shoved him back and lurched inside.

  Bob was still coming and Lucas screamed, “He’s inside, might come out the back. Bob, cover the back!”

  Bob pivoted and ran hard toward the end of the building and a second later was out of sight. Lucas ran toward the still-open door and Rae was coming up with her M4 and Lucas got to the door and saw the man in the cargo shorts pressed against a closet door and Lucas shouted, “U.S. marshals, where is he?”

  The man called, “Out the back, he’s got a gun . . .” and pointed, and Lucas and Rae went that way.

  Lucas was at the back door and saw Soto a hundred feet away, angling toward one of the center buildings, and he shouted, “Stop! Stop!”

  Soto kept going, then Rae leveled the M4 and Lucas said, “What?” and she fired a quick burst past Soto and into the brick side of the building behind him and Bob was coming and shouting, and Soto abruptly stopped and put his hands in the air. He had a pistol in one and hastily threw it on the ground.

  Lucas called to the others, “Watch for another gun,” and Bob shouted, “Into the dirt, facedown, into the dirt.”

  Soto, his hands above his head, knelt, then lowered himself facedown into the dirt. Rae had the rifle pointed at Soto’s head, and Lucas came up from the side, and then Bob was there with handcuffs. “Bring your hands down behind you, one at a time . . .”

  He did and Bob cuffed him. A minute later, they’d taken another pistol off the short man, from an ankle holster, and a heavy switchblade from a side pocket. Lucas pulled Soto’s wallet out of a back pocket, took out a Florida driver’s license that said “Stanley Evans.”

  Lucas looked at Soto and said, “Stanley Evans? Right.”

  “He’ll be in the database,” Rae said.

  “Scared the shit out of me when you opened up,” Lucas said to Rae. “I was afraid chunks of lead would be coming back at me.”

  She shook her head: “Low penetration rounds. They hit that brick wall and turn into dust. Certainly would have chewed up ol’ Stanley, though.”

  She looked at Soto, who said his first words: “Fuck you.”

  Rae said to him, “Let’s go for a ride, Stan.”

  —

  KORT HAD TRAILED Soto to the town house complex, had checked the place out in two passes, finally agreed with Soto that he should go ahead and make the approach to the manager, whose apartment number they’d gotten from the town house complex’s website, along with a map of the complex.

  She was a block behind when Soto turned into the parking lot, and she stopped on the side of the street, watching. He sat in the car for a couple of minutes, doing God knew what, then got out and walked toward an apartment door.

  The rest of it happened like a bad dream: the cop from Darling’s place popped out from behind a car, pointing a pistol at Soto, and then she saw a tall black woman running across the parking lot carrying a black rifle, and she grabbed her phone but it was way too late and the whole thing was going up in smoke . . .

  She’d been thinking about what Soto had said about giving everything up to the cops, to avoid the needle, and she felt the panic clutching at her throat. She’d never been arrested. Soto would give her up . . .

  The big cop, Davenport, ran across the lot and disappeared into the town house like an actor in a silent movie, and the black woman went in behind him. Then she heard the shots . . . a machine gun, not Soto’s pistol. Was he dead? She put the car in gear and rolled toward the apartment complex . . .

  —

  THE MAN in the cargo shorts came out the back door and asked, “What happened?”

  “Sorry about that,” Lucas said. Bob had Soto by one arm, Rae had him by the other, Lucas was off to the side. “We had a complicated situation out front and he managed to get to your door. Didn’t want to risk a shot with civilians around. Like you.”

  “He doesn’t look all that tough,” the man said. He was built like a construction worker, thick arms with a Statue of Liberty tattoo on the right bicep, a heavy gut. “I coulda kicked his ass.”

  “He is the worst man you’ll ever see in person,” Lucas said. “He might even be worse than anyone you’ll ever see in the movies.”

  “No kiddin’?” The man was checking out Soto again.

  “No kiddin’.”

  Rae and Bob were walking Soto around the building, to the front parking lot, and Lucas hurried to catch up. Bob had his phone out and was talking to the Addison police, saying, “It would be helpful if we could have a crime scene person come by . . .” and a second later, with a hand covering the phone’s microphone, he called to Lucas, “They’ll have some cops here in five, crime scene guy in ten.”

  Lucas said, “Okay.”

  Rae was asking Soto, “Who were you trailing? We know you were trailing one of us, and thought it might be . . .”

  They had come out from behind the building and were walking toward Lucas’s Jeep. They would handcuff Soto to one of the steel seat supports and take him to the lockup at the federal building, until they could arrange something more permanent.

  At that moment, the maroon Ford stopped on the street and a woman got out of the far side of the car and looked toward Lucas and the other three and Lucas saw the gun coming up and screamed, “Down, everybody, get down . . .” and his gun was coming up and as they all dropped to the ground,
the woman swept them with a burst from an automatic rifle, and Lucas was banging away at the car with his .45 and Rae was struggling to get the M4 off her shoulder and then the woman was in the car and speeding away. Lucas’s mag was empty and he dropped it and slammed in another and he turned and looked and Rae had her M4 up but wasn’t firing, and Bob had his pistol up . . .

  The Ford made a turn at the corner and was gone. Lucas ran halfway to the Jeep, realized that a chase would be hopeless—the Ford was out of sight for too long, he’d have no idea of where she went in the tangle of streets around the airport. He stopped, said, “Goddamnit,” and turned and hurried back to the others to see if anyone had been hurt.

  Bob was on the phone again, calling out a description, and said, “Then get me to nine-one-one . . . Wait a minute, I’ll dial from here.”

  Soto lay flat on the ground, faceup, eyes open and fixed. Rae still had her gun up, looking out at the surrounding streets, shook her head as Lucas walked back, and then they both walked over and looked down at Soto. Rae said, “My God.”

  Soto’s chest was soaked with blood. He’d been hit at least a half dozen times, Lucas thought. When he, Bob, and Rae had dropped to the ground, Soto had stayed upright, maybe thinking he could run out to the woman’s car. Not a good idea.

  Bob was talking to a 911 operator, giving a description of the fleeing car and where it was last seen. Rae was staring at the body. “What the hell? What the hell was that?”

  Lucas said, “She wasn’t shooting at us. She was taking out a guy who might talk.”

  Rae squatted next to Soto and shook her head. The man in the cargo shorts came out the front door, a beer in his hand, and looked at them and said, “Oh, boy. That’s . . . Oh, boy.”

  —

  AFTER THAT, it was paperwork and long conversations with bureaucrats at SOG and with Forte in Washington, and local cops coming and going, and the crime scene guy picking up the dropped revolver and brass and measuring distances. The medical examiner’s van came and Soto’s body went away, and a crew from the fire department washed away a six-foot-wide blood puddle on the tarmac.

  The local police hadn’t seen the shooter’s car, except when they saw too many of them: the Addison police department stopped eight cars of the right description, but said they could’ve stopped a hundred, or a thousand, if they hadn’t given up first.

  By nightfall, they were mostly done with the routine, and Russell Forte called from Washington and said, “We got a quick hit on the fingerprints. His birth name was Marco Obregon, born in Miami, but he changed it to Marco De Soto, maybe to get out from under the other convictions. He’s got a rap sheet about a mile long—convicted on attempted murder and aggravated assault and simple assault, acquitted on one charge of murder, nolo’d on another, convicted on possession of a firearm by a felon, acquitted on a couple of drug charges. He was like a walking monument to the credulity of parole boards. He’s got an address in Coral Gables and an FBI is on the way there.”

  “We need the name of the woman he was working with,” Lucas said.

  “We’re going for that,” Forte said. “We haven’t seen anything yet—maybe the FBI guys will turn something up.”

  —

  BACK AT THE HOTEL, Lucas, Bob, and Rae changed clothes and then met in the bar and ate nachos and drank a few margaritas, and Rae said, “This has been an unusual day.”

  “Your people giving you a hard time?” Lucas asked.

  “Nothing like that—they’re more like excited. Wish-I’d-been-there stuff,” Rae said.

  Bob asked Lucas: “This happen to you much?”

  “From time to time,” Lucas said. “The weirdest thing about today was, we might have saved Garvin Poole’s life.”

  Bob popped a handful of salted peanuts and said, “Didn’t think of that. But you’re right. As long as that woman doesn’t catch up to him. She’s the one I wouldn’t want to meet in the dark.”

  17

  LUCAS WAS normally up late, but on this night, he’d turned the lights off at midnight, then lay awake in the dark thinking about the shooting, and about Poole. At two, he rolled over and looked at the clock: he needed some sleep, but he also wanted to get going early in the morning. Or get somebody else going. Rae had said she was an early bird. Two o’clock certainly qualified as early.

  He turned on the bed light, crawled out of bed, picked up the phone, and called her room. She answered on the fifth or sixth ring and, sounding groggy, asked, “Who is this?”

  “Lucas. You got a pen or pencil?”

  “Uh, what happened?” she asked.

  “I had a thought and I need you to do something tomorrow morning early,” he said.

  “Jesus, Lucas, you know what time it is?”

  “Yeah. I’m looking at a clock. It’s ten minutes after two. You got a pen?”

  “Just a minute.” A minute later she said, “Go ahead.”

  “I need you to go back to Arnold’s house. Get an Addison cop to go with you if you need to. Look at his guitar. It’s got a weird checkerboard top to it. I want you to see if there’s a manufacturer’s name on it. Arnold called it by some name . . . had something to do with parts . . .”

  “Partscaster.”

  “Right. Like a Stratocaster. He said Poole built it out of parts. I want to know where he got the parts. When you find that out, I want you to track down the company and find out what Dallas addresses they’ve shipped parts to. Especially addresses that have ordered parts a number of times, to build entire guitars.”

  “I can do that, but you think this might have waited until the morning?” she asked.

  “Nah. I get up late and wanted to get an early start on this. You get up early, so you can get started without me.”

  “Listen, waxworks . . .”

  “I’m tired now, so I’m going to sleep. I’ll call you when I wake up,” Lucas said.

  “Listen . . .”

  Lucas hung up, turned out the lights. Grinned in the dark and fell asleep. He slept like a baby until twelve minutes after nine o’clock.

  —

  RAE STILL FELT groggy when her alarm went off at five forty-five. She’d usually do a half hour workout before cleaning up, but decided to skip it and get moving. Bob was also an early riser, so she called him, found him awake but not out of bed yet. “That fuckin’ Davenport called me at two a.m. and gave me a job,” she told Bob. “I figure if I have to start early, I might as well make you miserable, too.”

  “Did you take it lying down? Or did you show a little gumption?”

  “Lying down. Besides, he had a good idea,” she said. “I’ll knock on your door in twenty minutes.”

  —

  THE DALLAS MORNING was crisp and cool, with the nice smooth feeling that a hot place gets at night. Not quite real autumn in Texas, not yet. Rae drove, Bob yawning next to her, and they swung through a Starbucks for coffee.

  “So what do you think of Lucas?” Rae asked when they were back in the car again. She’d told Bob about looking Lucas up on the Internet, and what she’d found.

  “He’s a smart guy,” Bob said. “And he likes the pressure. You know that thing about getting too close to the fire and you’ll get burnt? He’s already been burnt a few times, and I believe deep down in his little black heart, he likes it. Likes the action. He’s been chasing Poole for less than a full week and he’s already been in two shoot-outs.”

  “Yeah. We gotta think about that,” she said, sipping at her latte.

  “I’ve already thought about it,” Bob said.

  “What’d you conclude?”

  “He’s like us,” Bob said. “If he doesn’t get killed, or get one of us killed, he could be somebody you could hang out with.”

  “A friend? You think?”

  “Something like that. Maybe. At least you’ve got somebody to play basketball with.”

>   “I’m interested in seeing how that’s going to work out—is he gonna get tougher with me, like really rough, or is he gonna back off a bit? Not polite, exactly, but you know—try to finesse me.”

  “I don’t know,” Bob said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m gonna try to cut his heart out,” Rae said. “But I don’t know if I’ll get it done.”

  —

  THE TRAFFIC wasn’t bad going across town—they got behind a car with a bumper sticker that said “OLD AND RETIRED” and in smaller letters “Go Around Me.”

  They did. They were at Derrick Arnold’s place by seven o’clock, met by an Addison cop who had a key.

  They went inside, found that it had been thoroughly scrubbed and smelled of industrial-strength lemon-scented bleach. The bird was missing, and the cop said it had been picked up by the local humane society.

  The guitar was where Rae had first seen it, sitting next to its amp. They examined it inch by inch and found several different brand names, on the bridge, the tuning machines, and pickups. All those looked specific to the parts, though; then Bob spotted the guitar case, which had been stuck in a closet, and inside, the papers for the guitar, including the guarantees for all the parts and also guarantees on the body parts from Poody Parts of Indianapolis, Indiana.

  “That’s what we need,” Bob said. He looked at his watch: “Too early, the place won’t be open yet. How about some breakfast?”

  —

  ON THE RECOMMENDATION of the Addison cop, they drove out to the Ray ’O Sun diner, ordered pancakes (Rae) and waffles (Bob) and eventually got a phone call through to a man named Cy Wynn, who said he was the owner and sole employee of Poody Parts; Poody himself was dead.

  Rae told Wynn, “What we need is addresses for people from Dallas who bought parts from you.”

  “I’d be happy to give them to you, but my, uh, computer record system isn’t exactly fast,” Wynn said. “It could take a while to search through . . . a few hundred names, at least, in a place as big as Dallas.”