Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  So they all went inside for pulled pork sandwiches and wings and beer, and it turned out Box and Annie were both Cowboys fans, so they watched an NFL roundup channel about games from the Sunday before, until Rosie suddenly stopped eating and said, “Oh, shit. Look at that.”

  The other three women turned to a TV screen across the bar that was tuned to a news channel, on which they saw a thoroughly recognizable photograph of Kort.

  Kort couldn’t believe it: “How did they do that? How did they do that? Who told them?”

  Box said, “Don’t look at me, I don’t even know what your last name is.”

  “Did Soto keep a motel key on him? If they ran down the motel room you guys were in . . .”

  “We were in separate rooms . . .”

  “But you were traveling together . . . Maybe you left a fingerprint somewhere.”

  Box, being practical, said to Kort, “Trade chairs with me.”

  “Why?”

  “So you’re facing away from the room.”

  —

  THEY FINISHED the food in a hurry and as they did, Rosie said to Annie, “Now we’ve got two problems. Can we get them both under the floor?”

  “Probably, but they might kill each other,” Annie said.

  “Which would solve our problem,” Rosie said.

  “Come on, guys,” Box said. “I’m not a problem. I’m a solution.”

  “You’re a dead woman, is what you are, if we don’t get that money back,” Kort said. She had orange Wild Wings sauce around her lips, which made her look as though she’d been bobbing for spare ribs.

  Not a good look. Box said, “Wipe your face, for God’s sakes. You look like a pig.”

  —

  BACK IN THE RV, and on the highway, Rosie drove and Annie brought up a Verizon-linked hotspot, went online to the Dallas TV stations, and found photos of Kort, Box, and Poole, as well as a sensational story about Box’s escape, aided by bandanna-wearing outlaws.

  The story began: “In an escape reminiscent of the glory days of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a beautiful young outlaw was forcibly taken away from a Texas Highway Patrol officer as she was being transported from Weatherford to Fort Worth . . .”

  “Kind of like the ‘beautiful young outlaw’ thing,” Box said.

  “You are a little Southern rose,” Annie said. “You ever think about switching sides?”

  “Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Kort said in disgust.

  “Already played on both teams,” Box said. “That’s how I finally got together with Gar. I knew him in high school, but we never went out then, he was already an outlaw. Then me and a girlfriend picked him up in a Jackson bar, about ten years ago, took him back to his hotel room and flat wore him out.”

  “Really,” Annie said. “I thought I picked up something like that.” She turned to Rosie. “You pick that up?”

  “I did,” Rosie said. She asked Box, “Why’re you with a man?”

  “I like both, but men got that thang, you know? Women are good, but sometimes you just wanna have that thang. The muscles, too, and whiskers rubbing your legs.”

  “Stop that,” Rosie said. “You’re getting me all hot.”

  “Rosie sort of likes that thang, too,” Annie said. “Every once in a while, anyway. I’m perfectly good without it.”

  “That’s all so wrong,” Kort said. “None of you ever read the Bible?”

  They all looked at her, the torturer, and then at each other, and finally Rosie said, “Well, no.”

  —

  TIME PASSED.

  The RV’s bathroom was tiny and Box had made no move to get away, had given no hint that she might be thinking about it, so they let her in there by herself. As she sat on the toilet, she pulled out four built-in drawers, quietly as she could, to see what she might find that would help in an escape attempt, if she decided to make one. The first thing she found was a metal nail file, but it was so thin that she suspected it might break if she tried to stab someone with it.

  The bottom drawer had a selection of simple household tools, including an eight-inch-long Sears Craftsman screwdriver, with a nice Phillips point on it. Box didn’t think about it for long—she pushed it down into one of her socks, pulled up her pants, and flushed the toilet.

  Annie was riding shotgun, with Rosie driving, and when Kort went back to the bathroom, Box eased the screwdriver out of her sock and shoved it beneath the bottom pillow of the pull-out couch.

  With Kort in the bathroom, she asked quietly, “You girls know about what Charlene does to people?”

  “We’ve heard some things,” Rosie said.

  “You’re driving around with a complete monster,” Box said. “She hacks up people while they’re still alive. She likes it. That’s what I’ve heard. She cut Gar’s mother into little pieces with a power saw . . . and here she’s talking about the Bible. She’s nuts.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” Annie said. “She shot her own partner to death. I can’t even imagine that.” She reached out and patted Rosie’s thigh.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” Rosie said. “I agree that she’s kinda mean . . .”

  “Kinda mean? For God’s sakes—” Box began.

  Rosie interrupted: “If we get the money back, we’ll drop her off somewhere. She can go be a monster on somebody else’s bus.”

  Kort came out of the bathroom and said to Box, who was sitting in the middle of the small couch, “Get off, I want to sit there.”

  “Sit somewhere else,” Box said. “I have—”

  Kort hit Box with the flat of her hand, nearly knocking her off the couch, and Annie was up between them screaming, “Hey, hey, hey . . .”

  Kort said, “She’s a fuckin’ prisoner, not a guest, and I want to sit there.”

  Box was covering her ear with one hand and looked up and said, “You better kill me, ’cause if you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”

  Kort opened her mouth to reply, but when she met the icy snake-eyed stare from Box, she shut her mouth: she’d seen the same look in Soto’s eyes.

  Rosie said to Box, “You sit on one end, and, Charlene, you sit on the other, and knock this shit off. You’re acting like children. We got enough trouble without you two adding to it.”

  The four women in the RV were south of Odessa when Poole called from Fort Stockton. He explained that he and Darling thought that Box’s phone might have been used to track them, that the phone was now riding in the back of an RV, and that they were headed for Presidio. After some back-and-forth, they agreed to meet in El Paso if Poole and Darling made it back across the border.

  Later, the women were rolling down I-20 when they saw the clutter of police light bars at the junction with I-10. They had no trouble merging west on I-10, and looking back, could see a traffic jam. I-10 had been closed off just before the merger.

  “Gar was right,” Box said. “They were tracking them with the phone. If they’d kept going, the cops would have them trapped.”

  —

  AT THAT MOMENT, Poole and Darling could see the first signs of Marfa, as a scrum of white dots on the horizon.

  “Town’s about the size of your dick,” Poole said.

  “That big? I thought you said it was nothing.”

  “Nothing we need to stop for, anyway,” Poole said. “Couple more hours, and we’re home free.”

  “I think we’re pretty good already,” Darling said. “That whole trip down here, didn’t see a single cop.”

  25

  LUCAS HAD taken three calls from Highway Patrol’s Johnson over the past half an hour. The cell phone companies had spotted the burner approaching the checkpoint on I-10, then, not moving on I-10, at the checkpoint.

  On the third call, Johnson said, “Goddamnit, Lucas, T-Mobile is saying Poole’s phone is west of us now, heading into El Paso. I can positively tell
you that Poole didn’t come through here. We looked in every car and truck including the eighteen-wheelers, and we got six illegals and probably five pounds of marijuana, but no Poole.”

  “Could have gone back north, I suppose, if he’s been talking to Box. Maybe figuring he can get Box back.”

  “Or he could be right on top of you, like we were saying—if that was him in Fort Stockton. Maybe he figured we were tracking him and he dropped the phone in one of the pickups or something.”

  “We’ll give it until dark, anyway,” Lucas said. “If he’s not coming this way, I don’t know what our next move would be.”

  —

  DARLING WAS at the wheel when they came around the curve at the south end of Marfa and saw the cars piling up and the roadblock, and Darling jabbed the brake and blurted, “Ah, shit!” and swerved hard right into the mouth of a dirt alley. Poole had been looking at the paper map and didn’t see the checkpoint and grabbed the door handle to keep himself upright and said, “What? What happened?”

  “Goddamn roadblock. See anybody coming after us, anybody?”

  Poole looked in the wing mirror as they rattled down the alley and a dog on a chain lurched out at them, barking, and Darling hooked left into a clutch of trailer homes and Poole, looking left, saw flashes of red on the highway, which was parallel to them, and said, “Two trucks, silver SUVs, pulling out. Shit, they’re coming fast as they can. Get us out of sight . . .”

  “Lots of white pickups back here, that’ll slow them down if we can get around another corner . . .”

  They were on a dirt road that appeared to lead into the trailer park, and Poole shouted, “There!” and Darling took another right, weaving between closely parked mobile homes and cars and more pickups, including some that were white, and then Darling charged left through somebody’s bone-dry yard and around behind a trailer and then back on a road . . .

  Poole had both hands braced on the dashboard and was chanting, “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  He popped open the glove box and took out a .40mm Glock, shoved it into his belt, then popped his safety belt and knelt on the seat, pulled out a .223 rifle that they’d stuck in the back. “They don’t know you, so you could still talk to them, maybe. I’m gonna bail,” he said. “Find a place to park and play it cool.”

  “What? What?”

  “I’m gonna bail.” They were shouting at each other as Darling wheeled crazily between the mobile homes. He ran over a plastic Big Wheel that crunched like an egg, banged across an automobile bumper that was lying in a side yard. “Park the truck, find a place to hide. If it looks like they’re about to get you, ditch the phone. If I make it out, I’ll call your wife and we can hook up.”

  “Man, man, I dunno . . .”

  —

  LUCAS HAD passed the word to the border patrolmen, and to Bob and Rae, who were now sharing a truck, about the phone being west of the I-10 checkpoint. He was gnawing his way through a package of Snackimals animal crackers when he saw a white pickup truck hit the brakes two blocks up the highway to the north, then swerve, nearly out of control, into a side street to the west.

  Bob rolled up next to him and shouted, “You see that?”

  “We’re going,” Lucas shouted back. He had O’Brien, the Border Patrol boss, on speed dial and punched him up, and O’Brien picked up and said, “We saw it, we got guys who’ll be coming up behind you. We’ll get some more going around the south end of town so they can’t get out that way. You think that’s him?”

  “Find out soon enough,” Lucas shouted, and he dropped the phone on the passenger seat and focused on keeping the car under control. Bob had swung past him as he was talking to O’Brien and led the way to the point where the white pickup had turned off.

  And found themselves in a short dirt alley, and at the end of the alley, a T-intersection. A half dozen white pickups were scattered around a trailer park, on both sides of them, nothing moving.

  Bob and Rae went right and Lucas went left, then took the next right deeper into the trailer park past a burned-out trailer and a loose dog. He bounced through a deep swale, his head banging off the roof of the truck, and he realized the beeping sound he kept ignoring was the safety-belt warning alarm, and then he was on a real blacktopped street . . . and nothing was moving.

  He stopped, and looked out his passenger-side window, and saw Bob and Rae’s truck a couple hundred yards away, also at a full stop.

  Where had the pickup gone? Two Border Patrol trucks came up behind him, and Lucas got out and ran back to them and told the drivers, “Keep an eye on those white trucks, the parked ones, it might be one of them. Otherwise . . . I dunno. And keep your guns up. This guy is a killer, and I don’t want him riding off in one of your trucks, and you dead.”

  Bob called: “There’s a road going south and some dust in the air, I think he might have gone down there.”

  Lucas: “I can see it, I’m coming, I’m right behind you.”

  —

  POOLE BAILED OUT of Darling’s truck at a T intersection. On the other side of a fence was a shed with a sign that said “Mañana.” The ground was cut to stubble on the right side of the shed, but on the left there was enough grass to cover him. He took his rifle and said, “Be cool, buddy, and if I don’t see you again, it’s . . . been real.”

  “God bless you, man,” Darling called back, and Poole slammed the door and Darling dropped the pedal to the floor and headed west; when the door had been open, and Poole was bailing, he thought he could hear every siren in the world, all coming for him.

  He sped past a low white building that said something about the Border Patrol, and a bunch of Border Patrol trucks sat motionless behind a high chain-link fence. When he got to the end of the road, he could turn either north or south; north would take him back toward the sirens, so he turned south and sped down the narrow road, thinking a few seconds later that he may have made a mistake, because he was out in the open for what must have been a quarter mile; but at his speed, that was only fifteen seconds. Corners, he thought. He had to get around corners.

  He took the first one he saw, another narrow street heading west, then another going south. At the next corner he stopped, for a few seconds, to assess his position. He was breathing hard, purely from the adrenaline. He had a choice of going farther west, but from where he was, it looked like a dead end. If he turned east, he might get closer to the sirens, but he was also closer to the highway to Presidio. If he could only get back to the highway, without the cops seeing him . . .

  That was unlikely.

  He had to think logically: the truck was probably done, the money under the floor was probably gone. He really had to get away from it. His main thought was: get away, at least until he could assess further.

  He turned east. At the end of the road, he found himself looking down a long row of faded salmon-colored buildings, and off to his left, a parking area behind the buildings, with two white pickups parked in it.

  He went that way, jammed the truck into a parking place between the two other trucks. What did he need? He needed his bag, he needed his gun, his phone, he needed to simply hide, to get out in one of the surrounding fields and lie down.

  What if they brought dogs? Okay, he needed to get away from the sirens, find a car . . .

  He got out of the truck, ran around to the back, grabbed a duffel bag, spilled the clothes out of it, got his rifle, a Bushmaster Minimalist-SD in .223, stuck two thirty-round magazines and four bottles of water in the bag, hesitated, said, “Goddamnit,” jumped into the truck—only take a few seconds—pulled up the floor, grabbed a wad of cash, then another, stuffed it all in the bag, closed the floorboard, was out of the truck. He started toward the field behind him, stopped, swore again, went back to the truck and stuck the keys under the rubber mat on the driver’s side. Then he turned and ran toward the field . . .

  —

  POOL
E, out of the truck, on the ground, clambered over the fence on the left side of the Mañana shed and got down on his hands and knees and began pushing through the stiff yellow grass and weeds, moving as fast as he could while staying out of sight; it was like swimming, with thorns, and he was getting burrs in his hands and could feel them clustering on his shirt and jeans, sharp little knobs, and fifty yards into the field the palms of his hands and fingers were burning with them, and when he looked at one hand there must have been twenty sandburs embedded in his flesh . . .

  Up ahead, when he took a moment to peek, he could see a scattering of hippie-style brightly painted Airstream trailers, and some white teepees. Like Darling, he could hear what sounded like a million sirens.

  He needed a car. He needed to find a single person in a car turning south. If he could get the person to stop, for an instant, he could kill him and take the car and get out into the countryside, where he’d have some options. He might have to kill his way west, but once he got to El Paso, he could find Box. She had hidden a million and a half in cash and gold, and if that didn’t convince the lesbos . . . then he’d have to kill himself a few lesbians.

  He moved on; couldn’t see much, but he had to keep moving.

  —

  BOB WENT straight down the road where he’d seen the dust in the air, paused at an intersection to check for the fleeing truck, saw nothing, and Rae shouted, “Go,” and he went straight past a sign that said “The Chinati Foundation” and into a gravel parking lot to a low salmon-colored building with a “Visitors” sign out front and three cars in the parking lot, but no white pickups.

  Lucas went right, toward a narrow road out of the parking lot to the south—and saw Darling fifty yards away, running down the track, a canvas bag on his back. Lucas jammed on his brakes, got out, and shouted at Bob and Rae, “He’s running, he’s running.”