Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “Wonder if they’ve got one for low-flying drug RVs,” Annie joked; only Rosie chuckled. Annie was driving now, Rosie was putting together cheeseburgers in the RV’s tiny kitchen and the vehicle was suffused with the smell of cooking meat.

  The countryside was new to Box, who hadn’t been much west or south of Dallas, even though she and Gar had lived in Texas for five years. The Marfa area had low funky-looking mountains, lots of yellow grass and weeds, and alien-looking roadside plants with nine-foot-tall stems that stuck up out of palms, or maybe cactuses, or possibly aliens.

  They’d finished eating the cheeseburgers when the lights of Marfa came up in the gathering dusk. Then, not far ahead, they could see the red blinking lights of a checkpoint and only three vehicles waiting to go through. Annie said, “Uh-oh. Rosie, get those two out of sight. Now! Hurry! I don’t want to slow down.”

  Rosie pulled the floor up, and Box and Kort stuffed themselves into the hole, lying side by side. There was space above their heads and below their feet, but not more than six inches above their noses. When Rosie slammed the door back into place, everything went pitch-black.

  “You crazy fuckin’ bitch, you got us into this,” Kort growled at Box.

  “Shut the fuck up, I’m really fucking tired of your whining all the time,” Box snarled back.

  “Shit . . .” Kort threw an elbow into Box’s ribs, hard enough to hurt.

  There wasn’t enough height to swing, but Box reached over with one hand and grabbed Kort by the lips and twisted. Kort let go with a muffled scream and beat awkwardly at Box with one fist and then Rosie started stomping on the floor and shouted, “Shut up, shut up, we’re coming to it.”

  Box let go of Kort’s lips and Kort said, “When I get out of here, I’m gonna beat the shit out of you.”

  “Fuck you some more,” Box said.

  They felt the RV braking to a stop.

  —

  UP ABOVE, Annie opened the RV’s front door and a border patrolman asked, “Evening, ladies. Do you have any other passengers?”

  “No,” Annie said. “What’s going on? Is there trouble?”

  “We’ve had a problem with some men trying to get down to the border at Presidio. Are you on your way to Presidio?”

  Annie shook her head. “No, sir, we’re going to Marfa to see the Donald Judd exhibits. Is there trouble in Marfa?”

  “You should be okay in Marfa. Do you mind if I take a peek inside?” He lowered his voice. “We want to make sure that you don’t have a gun pointed at you or anything . . .”

  “Sure, come on in,” Annie said.

  The officer climbed the first step, looked down the length of the RV, and said, “If you’re gonna make a break from a kidnapper, now’s the time.”

  “There’s nobody else here,” Rosie said.

  The officer backed down the steps and smiled and said, “You’re fine. Have a good time in Marfa. It’s a great little place. Go see the Marfa lights.”

  “We will,” Annie said, and rolled them through the checkpoint.

  When they were well away, Rosie wondered, “If our maps are right, this museum place is all the way down to the end of town. Wonder why they’re checking vehicles coming into town?”

  “I suppose, looking for what we’re doing—maybe a rescue attempt by another person. Like Dora, or Kort,” Annie said.

  Rosie glanced back at the neat blue carpet that concealed the smuggling space. “I’m tempted to leave them in there. Of course, maybe they’re already dead.”

  “That’d solve a lot of problems . . . but I suppose you ought to let them out.”

  —

  WHEN ROSIE opened the floor hatch, Box, the smaller and more lithe of the two women—Kort was to lithe as a packing crate is to agile—virtually sprang out of the enclosure and said, “Everything’s okay?”

  “We’re fine, the cop said so himself,” Rosie replied.

  Kort was struggling to get out of the smuggling space, the bottom half of her face as red as a Coke can where Box had twisted it. Rosie finally reached down, took her hand, and helped pull her up.

  “I ought to kill you right now,” Kort said to Box. Box sat on the couch, looked at Annie and then Rosie, ignoring Kort, and asked, “What’s the plan now?”

  “We’re gonna get as far south as we can and see what’s going on. We’re gonna want you two sitting down, so nobody can see you from the outside. If we need to get you back in the hold, you gotta go quick, we’ll leave the door open,” Rosie said. “Nobody knows about me and Annie, but everybody’s looking for you two. We think that checkpoint was for somebody looking to rescue Poole, or kill him. Which would be you, Dora, or you, Charlene.”

  “Shouldn’t be doing this at all,” Kort said.

  “Yeah, well, we are,” Rosie said.

  They took it slow going through town, a somewhat scruffy-looking place with lots of vacant lots and tumbledown houses, but some nice downtown buildings as well. They took the turn onto Highway 67, south toward the border.

  They’d only gone a few blocks before they saw what looked like a law enforcement convention on the right side of the highway, cop cars and Border Patrol vehicles with flashing lights, and cops walking around unhurriedly.

  “Okay, that’s bad,” Rosie said. “The cops aren’t worried.”

  Box: “Are you saying . . .”

  “That’s what I’m saying, honey. I’m sorry. You knew it was likely,” Rosie said.

  Up ahead, a cop was directing cars off the highway, onto a detour to the east. They took the detour, realized that it would take them all the way out of town, and followed some other cars on a loop back into town.

  Across the highway, they could see bright lights in the parking lot of a place called El Cósmico, and a circle of cops, like a football huddle, looking at something on the ground.

  Box said, “Oh, God, oh my God . . .”

  “Easy, honey,” Rosie said.

  After a minute, Annie said, “That’s not where Poole said the truck was—it could still be out there. Think we can find it? I’m kinda lost here.”

  “Glad you asked,” Rosie said. She went back to one of the storage closets, got out her laptop and the Verizon hotspot, plugged in the hotspot, and brought up the laptop. With a few keystrokes she was on Google Maps, and then the satellite view.

  “Here’s where we are,” she said, tapping the screen. “From what Poole told us, the truck has got to be right . . . here.”

  She touched the screen. “If we go over here to Waco Street, and then west, all the way, and then down to here, and back east on Katherine Street, we ought to be able to look right at the trucks. If there are three white pickups and nobody around them . . .”

  “Gonna have to hurry, the cops will be looking for it,” Annie said.

  “Then let’s go,” Rosie said.

  They followed the line that Rosie had laid out on the map and Kort kept her mouth shut for once. Coming back on Katherine, they could look right into the parking area where the three trucks were . . . The trucks were still there, all three of them, and so was a big light generator and a dozen cops around the middle truck.

  The back of the truck was open, and Kort, peeking out through a side window, said, “Shit. It’s that guy. The Davenport guy, the cop we were tracking. They got the truck.”

  “So we’re done with it. Now we get out of here,” Rosie said. “You guys get back, we’re coming up to a cop . . . back in the floor.”

  Box and Kort scuttled back to the hidden hold and dropped inside, lying side by side again. Up above, a cop was waving Annie around the corner and away from the cops in the parking area. Annie took it slow and they left the lights behind. Rosie opened the lid on the hold. “We’re going. You’re both still alive?”

  Box and Kort climbed out of the hold, and Kort turned on Box and said, “Now it’s you a
nd me.”

  Rosie tried to intervene, but Kort, who was strong, shoved her in the chest, nearly knocking her on her butt, and a second later Kort swung at Box, hitting her in the eye. Box fell back on the couch and Kort put one knee up on the seat cushion, getting ready for a couple more punches, but Box was groping under the cushion, came up with the Phillips screwdriver, and as Kort’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second, Box drove the screwdriver right through Kort’s frontal bone, two inches above her eye line.

  Kort staggered backward and then fell on her ass, propped up against the pots and pans drawer.

  Rosie was back and she stared down at Kort. The red-striped plastic handle of a Craftsman screwdriver was snug against the skin of Kort’s forehead, the shaft of the screwdriver deep in her brain. Rosie said, “Oh. My. God.”

  Annie picked up the tone and glancing back over her shoulder, asked, “What?”

  “Dora stuck a screwdriver in Charlene’s brain.”

  “What?”

  Rosie bent lower and said, “She’s not dead.”

  “Let me stir it around a little bit and she’ll be dead,” Box said. “I had enough of her shit.”

  “No kiddin’,” Rosie said. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

  “Now what?” Annie called.

  “You ought to find a place to pull over and come and look at this,” Rosie said.

  Annie pulled into a dark side street, pushed herself out of the driver’s seat, and came to look. A thin stream of blood, but not really much, trickled out of the screwdriver hole and down the center of Kort’s nose.

  “She was a monster,” Box said. She was standing back a bit, her arms crossed defensively, as if anticipating criticism. “She deserved what she got.”

  “Still not dead,” Rosie said.

  “Hasn’t even closed her eyes,” Annie said. She tapped Kort on the shoulder, then gave her a little push. Nothing on Kort’s face changed and she made no noise at all. She didn’t blink.

  “Still not dead,” Rosie said. “She’s breathing. She’s got a screwdriver in her brain, a steel rod, how come she’s not dead?”

  “Don’t know,” Annie said. Kort blinked.

  “Now what?” Box asked.

  Annie shook her head. “I’ll tell you what, Dora, this really isn’t good. I’m not really up for finishing her off.” She scratched the side of her face, peering at Kort, who still hadn’t moved, except to blink.

  “What are we going to do?” Rosie asked Annie.

  “Well . . . I guess we could drop her off somewhere,” Annie said. “Wouldn’t make much difference to her, wherever we left her. Wouldn’t want anybody to see us doing it.”

  “She could identify us,” Box said.

  “If she could find us—but we’re not from around here, and she doesn’t know our last names or anything,” Annie said.

  “I say we stir that screwdriver handle around a little,” Box said. Kort blinked. “We won’t have to worry about her identifying anything.”

  “I got a feeling she won’t be doing that anyway,” Annie said.

  Rosie stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  —

  THEY WENT looking for a place, and as they did, Box cleaned her fingerprints off the screwdriver handle with a hand wipe. They eventually found a closed Stripes convenience store and dropped Kort off between a couple of gas pumps. Kort sat between the pumps like an oversized lump of modeling clay, still staring straight ahead, blinked once. As they pulled away, Rosie asked the other two, “Think she’ll be all right there?”

  Annie shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”

  —

  TEN MINUTES behind them, a tourist pulled into the Stripes, hoping that it might still be open. It wasn’t, but he saw the figure sitting between the gas pumps, and though he didn’t want to, stepped over and took a look.

  His wife called from the car, “Larry—come back. Leave her to sleep it off.”

  Larry walked around the car and said, “I think we should call the police.”

  “She’s probably a drug addict.”

  “She could be,” Larry said. “Her bigger problem seems to be that she’s got a screwdriver stuck into her brain.”

  —

  ANNIE, ROSIE, AND BOX drove north out of Marfa. They’d grown silent after the Kort incident and were thirty miles up the road before Rosie asked Annie, “What do we do about the Dora problem?”

  Box spoke up before Annie could answer. “Listen, the three of us could get along. Now, I need to tell you something and I need to ask you something. You talk about this Boss, and how he sort of cheapskates you on the money.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t mention it to his face,” Rosie said.

  “Well, the Boss is going to find out that the money is gone, right? That the feds got it,” Box said. “It’ll be in the newspapers. The cops will be showing off. Nothing you could do about that. You did your best.”

  “He won’t be happy, but he won’t take it out on us,” Rosie said. “He’s pretty rational.”

  Box nodded. “Okay. Good. He’s rational. Now, what if I told you I know where there’s almost a million and a half dollars, more or less, in cash and gold, a few hours from here. Nobody knows about it but me. Nobody knows.”

  Rosie and Annie glanced at each other, and then Annie asked Rosie, “What’s that movie line you like? From the famous movie?”

  “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Rosie said.

  Annie pointed a finger at her: “That’s the one.”

  29

  A DEEP AND SULLEN SILENCE seemed to drape the town of Marfa after the firefight in the fields beside the highway. The Border Patrol kept people away from the buildings where the shooting took place, except for a couple of employees of the Chinati Foundation, which ran the place.

  The state cops were called in to process the shooting scenes, but wouldn’t get there until the next day. The bodies were left where they fell, covered with black plastic tarps, and watched by border patrolmen, as much to keep the coyotes away as to protect the scenes.

  Shortly after the last fight, a helicopter roared in from El Paso and took Bob away. Lucas met Rae wandering around by the foundation headquarters, put an arm around her shoulders: “How is he?”

  “Aw, he’ll be okay. Take some time, some rehab. The medics slowed down the blood loss. He was still okay when they loaded him into the chopper.”

  “You talk to your SOG people yet?”

  “No, I haven’t gotten around to it. I’m sort of stunned,” she said.

  “So’s everybody. Let’s find a place to sit, you can call your guys, I’ll call Forte and fill him in.”

  They did that. Everybody was unhappy about Bob, everybody was happy that Poole and Darling were dead. “Five people murdered at one spot, including that kid,” Forte said. “We needed to take them off the board, any way we could. Not to go all bureaucratic on you, I’d like the names of all the Border Patrol and Highway Patrol people who cooperated with you—when we put out the press release, we’ll go big-time on the help they gave us. This will be a nice story tomorrow, give us a chance to put some serious grease in the wheels. And . . . say, did you find any cash? Or gold? That could be big.”

  “Tell you about that in an hour or so,” Lucas said. “I think I know where their vehicle is.”

  —

  AFTER HE got off the phone, Lucas told Rae about the grease comment, and she said, “I don’t know about you former small-time cops, but grease is close to the top consideration with the federal government. Might even be the top. Don’t care who got killed, how many got killed, but they do care about the grease.”

  “You okay?” Lucas asked.

  “Shoulder hurts. Medic looked at it, said it’s a bunch of cuts, he gave me some antibiotic cream for it, told me to see a doc a
s soon as I can. How about you? You look a lot worse than me, that bloody rag around your head.”

  “Got a little headache, that’s about it,” Lucas said. “Scared the hell out of me when I couldn’t see at first.”

  “How’s your eye now?” Rae asked.

  “I can see fine, but my eye is watering a lot.”

  “Let’s go find one of those medics . . . take a quick look.”

  —

  THEY FOUND a medic, who looked at Lucas’s eye with a magnifier, said he couldn’t see much, but that Lucas’s eye was bloodshot. He irrigated the eye, which made it feel worse than it had before the irrigation. The medic said that was normal.

  He then washed off Lucas’s forehead, said there was a lot of brick dust embedded in the skin above his eye. He suggested that Lucas have a doctor check it. “If you get an infection, it could leave some scarring. Go see a doc.”

  —

  RAE TOLD HIM the SOG people were mostly concerned about Bob and would fly a couple of supervisors into El Paso to talk with him. “Gonna ask him if you fucked up, is what they’re going to do,” Rae said. “I already told them you didn’t, that we were all great, but there’s gonna have to be an after-action report. Hope you’re ready for a blizzard of paper.”

  “Want to see an even greater blizzard?” Lucas asked. “Follow me and listen carefully.”

  He led Rae around the buildings, to the place where he’d first seen Darling crossing a fence, into the field. “He was carrying a bag. He lost it somewhere along the way . . . and I gotta believe he’d dumped the truck right where he was crossing into that field. There are three white trucks parked by the buildings.”

  Rae said, “Money. Let’s get some lights and more witnesses.”

  They rounded up O’Brien, the Border Patrol boss, and Guiterrez, the highway patrolman who’d led them down from I-10, and a couple of other guys, everybody armed with heavy-duty flashlights. They located the place where Darling had crossed the fence by the crushed-down weeds on the other side, and six feet into the field, found a light brown canvas duffel bag.