Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “I can do that . . .”

  Before she finished, the connection went dead.

  —

  BOX, POOLE, AND DARLING were still in Denton, walking around the shopping center. Darling wanted to get out of Texas.

  “If the marshals are looking for us, they’ll have brought in the local cops and probably the state cops, too,” he said. “But cops get screwed up when they have to cross state lines—bureaucratic bullshit gets them tangled up.”

  Poole asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “We oughta run up to Oklahoma. We can be there in an hour. Maybe get a motel in Ardmore. We can sit around and think about it for a day or two.”

  Poole looked at Box, who nodded: “Makes sense to me,” she said.

  They left Denton, continuing straight north on I-35, a three-vehicle caravan, crossed the state line, and a little more than an hour later checked into three separate rooms at a Comfort Suites. Three separate rooms in case the cops found one of them, they’d have a fast temporary refuge in two others. They met in Poole’s room, talked about the situation for a while, then Box said she wanted to get some decent food and went out to find a supermarket.

  As the door closed behind her, Poole asked Darling, “What are the chances of somebody randomly spotting us here? On our faces?”

  Darling shrugged: “Slim to none. You’ve never had a beard, before now, that I’ve seen, and your ID is good. Nobody knows my face anyway. Nobody knows the tags on your vehicles, and they won’t find them by looking up the name you used on the house. I’ve always had a couple spare sets of tags, and I put one on my truck as soon as I got out of Alabama.”

  Poole thought about that for a few seconds, then said, “I’m dry as hell. Let’s take my car and find us a couple of beers.”

  “Saw an Applebee’s coming in,” Darling said.

  —

  THEY DROVE a couple of minutes to an Applebee’s, got a booth in a corner away from other patrons, ordered a steak and beer for Poole and fish and chips and a beer for Darling, and Poole said, “Sturgill, I know you have fun with your shitkicker act, but you’re the smartest guy I know. I gotta run, I know that, but I don’t know where to run to. Dora thinks Florida, but I got this feeling that Florida’s one place the marshals might look. The cartel boys, too. What do you think? Someplace further on south? I don’t speak Spanish and the cartels carry a lot of weight down there . . .”

  The waitress brought their beers and they both took a swallow, and when she was gone, Darling put his elbows on the table, leaned forward, and said, “You want my opinion, and I don’t think you’ll like it, I’d say Edmonton or Calgary, up in Canada.”

  Poole opened his mouth to protest, but Darling put up a finger to slow him down, then said, “Listen. Those two places got more than a million people each. You can get lost in them. Edmonton has this shopping mall that’s got something like a thousand stores in it—it’s bigger than AT&T Stadium.”

  “Get outa here.” Poole tried to catch a Cowboys game at least once a year—AT&T Stadium was the biggest building he’d ever seen, much less been in.

  “I’m serious. Edmonton is an oil town. All kinds of people coming and going, all the time. Lots of Americans, all over the place, including oil workers from the South, Texas, Louisiana. Nobody will give your accent a second thought. It’s actually kinda like Dallas, except for the winter.”

  “Freeze my fuckin’ ass off,” Poole said.

  “You get used to it,” Darling said. “You spend most of the winter indoors. And you’re really only talking about a couple of years until things cool down here in the States.”

  “How would I get across the border?”

  “I can fix that,” Darling said. “I know a guy, honest to God, smuggles stolen heavy equipment across the Minnesota border into Ontario. Getting you across the border would be nothing—take your pickup, if you want.”

  “Canada.” Poole rubbed the side of his face. “Jesus, I got to think about that.”

  “Think about speaking the language,” Darling said. “That’s a big deal. If you don’t know the language, you’ve got to rely on somebody else for everything.”

  “How do you know so much about this?” Poole asked.

  “’Cause if I ever have to run, that’s where I’m going,” Darling said. “Canada. I worked through all of this, years ago, with Janice. We have money stashed up there and a couple of good IDs for each of us.”

  The food came, and when the waitress had gone again, Poole asked, “How about Phoenix or Vegas?”

  “Mmm, if I had to choose, I’d say Phoenix. That’s another place with a lot of tourists going through, people moving in and out all the time, and it doesn’t have the surveillance that Vegas does. Vegas has a million cameras all over the place, and I gotta believe that the feds monitor the video feeds with their face-recognition technology. That place is like a sump hole for old Mafia guys.”

  “Okay. Not Vegas. How about California?”

  “About a billion cops,” Darling said. “You move there, you’ll have fifty government workers looking at you, checking your tax records, asking where you moved there from, where you work now, how long you’ve been there. California is like a Nazi state with palm trees—‘Papers, please.’ Seriously, I’ve looked into all of this.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “You got another problem,” Darling said. “I don’t want you to get pissed when I say it.”

  “Dora.”

  Darling twitched a finger at him. “You’ve been thinking about it.”

  “Yeah. If they’re looking for faces, hers is . . . distinctive. She’s pretty, and lots of guys look her over. Including cops. If I stay with her, spotting her could mean spotting me.”

  “I didn’t want to mention it, when she’s around.”

  Poole ate silently until his steak was nearly gone, then said, “You know, I’ll take the chance with Dora. I’m not leaving her behind. People get to know me, they don’t like me—I can feel it. Dora knows me and she still likes me.”

  “I like you,” Darling said.

  “And I like you,” Poole said. “But we are rare people. I mean, what would you do without your wife and kids? Who would your friends be?”

  Darling looked out the window at the parking lot, then shook his head. “I don’t know. I’d be pretty goddamn lonely.”

  “So we’re stuck with what we got, and who we are,” Poole said. “That’s what we got to work with.”

  Darling chewed on his lower lip for a few seconds, then looked across at Poole and said, “You can’t walk away from Dora, but you could shoot that little girl.”

  Poole said, “Yeah, well . . . I don’t know what that is. I guess it means that I’ll take care of me and mine, but I don’t so much give a shit about anyone else. You yell for help, I’ll come, no questions. Some stranger catches on fire, I wouldn’t walk across the street to piss on him.”

  —

  THAT NIGHT they got together in Box’s room and ate roast beef sandwiches she’d bought at a supermarket, and argued about their next move. Darling mentioned Edmonton, and when Box found out where it was, she shook her head. “No way in hell,” she said. “My uncle was somewhere up there during the Cold War, at a radar station. He said it got dark in November and didn’t get light until March. Even if I could handle the cold, which I couldn’t, I couldn’t handle all that dark. I’m a Southern girl.”

  They ran again through the other possibilities—Arizona, California, Florida. Darling even mentioned the possibility of simply moving thirty or forty miles over to Fort Worth, or down to Houston or San Antonio.

  “You’ve already got a few good sets of Texas IDs, you wouldn’t have to go through that routine again, getting new ones in Arizona, getting new tags and all that,” Darling said.

  “Wasn’t that big a problem,” Poole said. “You got
these illegals coming across the border, there’s a whole industry out there making good phony IDs. The guy I got my Texas IDs from could probably get us good Arizona IDs.”

  “Texas is too scary now. Especially since we’ve left the house. I think it’s Arizona,” Box said. “That’s good with me.”

  Poole turned to Darling: “You think you’re still okay in Alabama—and I know you’re anxious to get going up to Canada.”

  “Got to go,” Darling said. “I need the alibi if the feds come around again.”

  “Could you go with us to Arizona?” Poole asked. “You and me in your truck? I’m thinking you got that hideout spot in your camper back. I’ve got three million in cash and a million and a half in gold I got to hide. If the cops pull me over . . .”

  “What is it? Two days’ drive down there? I can do that,” Darling said.

  “What about me?” Box asked.

  “I need you in a different car,” Poole said. “I’m going to put some of the gold and cash under your spare tire. If something happens to me and Sturg, you’ll still be outside with some resources.”

  —

  LATER, in bed, Poole said, “We’ll drive separate routes down to Arizona. You drive five miles over the speed limit all the way, don’t attract any attention. Don’t take a drink—not a single fuckin’ cocktail. I don’t want you blowin’ a twelve and having the cops taking the car apart.”

  Box nodded and asked, “Where are we going, exactly?”

  “Can’t tell you that, yet. I gotta go on the Internet and do some research. After we get there, we’ll get a decent motel and lay up for a while, check out the situation. Find someplace nice, quiet, white, maybe a little older. Rent a house, settle in.”

  “Sounds right,” she said. “Could we get together at night, along the way?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll be driving a different route. I don’t want them spotting you, tracking you, then spotting me. And vice versa. I think we’re okay, but I don’t want to take any chances. That’s why we’ll split up the money—if something happens to one of us, the other one’s still outside and has some cash to maneuver with.”

  “Right now, we got one car too many,” Box said.

  “I’ll drive it back to Dallas tomorrow, store it with the truck . . .”

  “You know what?” Box asked. “I’d feel better driving the truck. Would you mind?”

  “No, that’d be fine.”

  “Maybe I’ll put a couple pieces of furniture in it,” she said.

  Poole laughed and then said, “That’s not a bad idea, actually. Antique lady, out scouting around. Cops won’t give you a second look.”

  “When do we go?”

  “Well, Sturgill’s getting antsy about going up to Canada,” Poole said. “I’d say tomorrow morning, early.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I’m a little tense, myself,” Poole said. “But what it is, is what it is.”

  She looked at the clock and said, “I’m going to sleep with you overnight, but I’ll go mess up the bed in my room before we leave. So it looks sleeped in.”

  “Why don’t we make this one look fucked in?” Poole asked.

  “Good with me,” Box said.

  —

  AS POOLE, BOX, AND DARLING worked through their next move, Kort spent a lot of time pacing. Lying faceup on the motel bed was still painful. Facedown, she couldn’t see the TV, which was rattling along endlessly about the upcoming election, and she was too cranked to watch it anyway. She still had a Ruger .357 with a belt clip, and she got it, loaded it, and clipped it to the back of her sweatpants and pulled her sweatshirt over it. The weight of the gun caused her pants to sag, but that was the least of her worries.

  What to do when the other “ladies” showed up? If they came in with guns, Kort wouldn’t go easy, but, she thought, she’d probably go.

  Made her cry, thinking about it. Life so far had been one long roll in the shit. The only thing she really liked about it was using her tools. The surge of pleasure and power she got from torture was as addictive as methamphetamine.

  She went out only once, bought a pay-as-you-go burner phone, made the one-ring call to the secret number, and stopped at a pancake house, where she bought a double stack of buttermilk pancakes with link sausages, ate until she felt nauseous.

  The knock on the door came at mid-afternoon. She was lying facedown on the bed, listening to CNN, and the knock made her jump. She slid off the bed, pulled her sweatshirt down, smacked her lips a couple of times, pushed her hair back, went to the door, and said, “Yes?”

  A woman’s voice: “Open up. It’s us.”

  —

  “US” turned out to be two women, late thirties or early forties, thin and tough like beef jerky, short hair, one blond, one brunette, small gold earrings, and ink: tattoos running up and down their exposed lower arms and legs, peeking out of the V of their blouses. The taller of the two had a triangle of three crude ink dots on her right cheek next to her eye. Some kind of secret prison symbol, Kort thought.

  The short one asked, “You got a gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, don’t shoot us,” she said. “My name’s Annie, my partner here is Rosalind—Rosie. We’re not here to hurt you.”

  “Then what are you here for?” Kort asked.

  “To help out,” Rosie said. “We don’t have all the details, but the Boss wants his money back. We understand that you’ve run into some feds along the way.”

  Kort backed away from the door, but kept her hand on her hip, close to the revolver, and the two women stepped inside. They looked around the room, then Rosie took the office chair at the small desk, and Annie settled into the one easy chair.

  Kort said, “I can’t sit so well. I got shot in the buttocks.”

  “So we heard,” Annie said. “You never got it fixed?”

  “We fixed it ourselves,” Kort said. “Cut a bullet out with a razor blade, bled like crazy . . .” She told them the whole story of the wound, and when she was done, the two women looked at each other, some silent agreement between them, and Rosie said, “You got some major balls, honey. How’s the penicillin working for you?”

  “I still hurt, but I don’t see any infection,” Kort said.

  Annie said, “We got some OxyContin out in the RV. I’ll get you some.”

  Rosie: “Let’s do that first. Then you tell us about these guys we’re looking for. And the marshals.”

  19

  LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE broke into the house through the front door, because that looked like the least used, and so the least likely to have fresh prints. The three of them walked through first, clearing the place, with a variety of Texas cops waiting outside, and as they worked through the house, Lucas realized that Poole was gone.

  There was still furniture inside, but it seemed that several pieces were missing, leaving behind leg indentations on the carpets. While there was still some clothing in the closets, it seemed to him that the good stuff was gone: no new men’s shoes, lots of old dusty-looking Nikes, and no women’s shoes at all.

  Lucas looked under the sink and found some garbage, topped by a banana peel and moist coffee grounds; he looked in the master bedroom suite, and the bathroom cabinets were mostly empty.

  Bob and Rae had gone to check the garage and a backyard shed while Lucas was poking around the kitchen and bedroom. The garage was empty, except for a well-used lawn mower. So was the shed. Rae said, “It looked like he used to have a lot of tools and stuff, but they’re all gone. There’s a homemade workbench in there and a trash bin with a broken guitar neck in it. Gotta be the right guy.”

  “Didn’t miss them by much,” Lucas said. “A few hours at the most.”

  “How do you know?” Bob asked.

  “Banana peel and coffee grounds,” Lucas said.

  “Huh?�
��

  “There was a banana peel on top of the garbage. Looked good as new. How long does that last? Not even overnight, I don’t think. I bet it was dropped in there this morning. The coffee grounds were still wet.”

  “Well, shit,” Bob said.

  “If you were really a genius, you’d have thought of that old telephone thing yesterday,” Rae said to Bob.

  One of the crime scene crew people came out and said, “They didn’t wipe anything. There are fingerprints all over the place and hair and everything else, sexual residue on the sheets.”

  “Get the prints going,” Rae said. “If you get good ones, we’ll have confirmation in a couple of hours.”

  “We can get good ones.”

  —

  THEY EVENTUALLY went out to the back of the house, to a gas barbeque and a wooden picnic table. They sat at the table and Bob said, “DNA will get us confirmations both on the murders in Biloxi and the armored car job.”

  “Take a few days on the DNA,” Lucas said. “I’ll be happy with a good set of prints, right now.”

  “So they’re running and we’ve got at least three fake IDs,” Rae said. “Let’s see if Poole has a driver’s license under any of those names, and if he does, see if we can link it up to some license tags.”

  Lucas nodded and took out his phone: “Gotta get Forte on the computer shit. And, Rae, grab one of those Rangers and see what they can get out of the Texas DMV.”

  Forte was pleased: “Man, you got them on the run. Get me those prints!”

  —

  ONE OF THE RANGERS ran down the property ownership—it wasn’t Poole—and got in touch with the owner, who showed up two hours after they broke through the front door. He was a heavyset man, red-faced, with a belly that bulged over his turquoise-and-silver belt buckle. He parked his Lincoln on the street, then wandered over to a Ranger, who brought him to Lucas. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked. And, “You busted down my door?”

  The Ranger said to Lucas, “This is Mr. Carlton, Davis Carlton—he’s the homeowner.”

  “We’re looking for a fugitive named Garvin Poole,” Lucas said.