Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas pulled it open. Inside was some paper, two passports, and enough cash, as Guiterrez put it, “to choke a Texas hog.”

  O’Brien said, “We know about cash seizures. Bring that bag outa here, and I’ll have a couple of our guys count it, with witnesses.”

  Rae said, “That might not be all of it. Lucas thinks he knows where Darling ditched his truck.”

  Lucas swiveled his flashlight across the dark field to the buildings, to a line of white pickups parked behind it. “Let’s get that museum lady out here. She should know who belongs to which trucks.”

  The museum lady did know: the two trucks on the ends were a museum truck and a truck that belonged to a museum worker. The one in the middle—the one with the Arkansas plates—she didn’t know.

  But she didn’t want to talk about that—she wanted somebody to take her down to the two dome-topped buildings that were at the center of the fight. “Why won’t you let me down there? Why—”

  “Crime scene,” O’Brien muttered, and then they ignored her.

  —

  LUCAS TRIED the truck’s driver-side door and it popped open. He shone his flash around the inside, spotted the keys on the floor. Two border patrolmen took a long look at the truck’s interior, then they all went around to the back and popped the hatch on the camper top.

  There were some bags inside, full of clothing and paper, but no money. Then one patrolman said to another, “Carlos . . . does that floor look right?”

  Carlos squatted by the back of the truck, squinted at the floor, then looked beneath it, and then at the floor again, and finally said, “It’s a few inches high. Not much, but a few.”

  The first patrolman crawled into the truck and with the rest of them watching, began pulling and tugging and prying at pieces of the interior, and finally popped up a hidden hatch. “That’s good work, right there,” he said, of the hatch. “Somebody give me a flashlight.”

  He shone the flashlight into the hatch, then got his head down closer to the floor: “Madre de Dios.”

  Rae: “Mom sees money?”

  The patrolman looked up: “Mom sees a buttload of cash and what looks like a pile of gold coins in a plastic box.”

  Lucas said to O’Brien, “Gonna need more counters, more witnesses.”

  Rae said, “Hot damn.”

  Nobody noticed the RV crawl past them, a couple hundred yards away.

  —

  BECAUSE OF all the accounting rigmarole, they didn’t know until ten o’clock that they’d found three-point-two million in currency and about six hundred thousand in gold coins, the amount of gold value dependent on the market.

  O’Brien pronounced himself pleased. He linked his fingers across his ample belly and said, “I’m pleased.”

  Rae said, “Fuckin’ A.”

  Lucas called Forte at home with the count. Forte said, “I’m far too suave to say it gives me a hard-on, but right now I definitely got a party in my pants.”

  —

  LUCAS PAID no attention to O’Brien when he finally told the persistent museum lady that he’d have a patrolman escort her to the domed buildings. She and a patrolman disappeared a moment later.

  Bob called from El Paso. “They didn’t want to let me talk, but I am anyway. They’re telling me I’ll be down for a couple of months, including rehab. They’re gonna take me into the operating room as soon as this nurse stops washing off my dick . . . yes, you are, you’re washing my dick, don’t try to sneak around it . . . and it’ll be a while before I come out. I’ll call as soon as I wake up tomorrow. You find any money?”

  They were telling him about the money when a woman started screaming. Lucas said, “Oh, shit,” and picked up his armor and Bob’s rifle and followed Rae at a dead run around the buildings and then around the second set of buildings . . .

  And saw the museum lady shrieking while a patrolman tried to placate her.

  Lucas and Rae stopped running and took it slower and when they came up with their guns, the wild-eyed woman looked at them and screamed, “You killed my Judds. You killed my Judds.”

  The milled aluminum boxes they’d seen behind the glass were neither kitchen appliances (Rae) nor boxes for holding the art (Lucas) but were, in fact, the art itself. Of the hundred boxes in two buildings, twelve had either through-and-through bullet holes or bullet gashes. All the windows in the first building had been shattered or cracked, but the woman wasn’t worried about the windows.

  Rae asked her the wrong question: “You’re sure this happened tonight?”

  The woman began screaming incomprehensibly, literally tearing at her hair, dashing from one aluminum box to the next, looking for more damage.

  When she’d finished her survey, only slightly calmed down, she said to O’Brien, the senior officer in uniform, “You don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “We were fighting it out with crazy killers,” he said.

  “You managed to destroy millions and millions of dollars’ worth of irreplaceable art.”

  A patrolman in the back muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Shit, I could get a load of those up at the Home Depot.”

  They all turned to look at him. Not at all embarrassed, he added, “In a variety of decorator colors.”

  Somebody laughed, which made the woman cry again, and then everybody felt bad, for a while.

  —

  THEY WERE still milling around, checking periodically with the Highway Patrol for possible sightings of Dora Box, when O’Brien hurried out of the foundation office and said to Lucas and Rae, “We need to get over to the Stripes station.”

  “What for?”

  “A woman’s been stabbed, in the head. A sheriff’s deputy thinks she might be this Kort woman you’re looking for.”

  They made it to the Stripes station in five minutes, where the two overworked EMTs were staring at a woman who was seated on the concrete next to a gas pump. They walked past a cop who was keeping rubberneckers away, and one of the EMTs said, “We called for the chopper again . . . I don’t know what we can do here.”

  Lucas took a look. The woman was Kort, all right, sitting straight up, her eyes fixed and peering straight ahead, with a screwdriver handle sticking out from her forehead. Lucas asked, “Is she alive?”

  “Yeah, she blinks every twenty seconds,” the EMT said. “We’ve tried to communicate with her, but nothing happens. We ask her to blink or move a finger if she hears us, but she doesn’t respond, she doesn’t blink on command. When we try to pick her up, her legs don’t work. We need the chopper and a neurosurgeon. This is not something you throw a bandage on.”

  “Anybody know how she got here?” Rae asked.

  The EMTs shrugged, and a sheriff’s deputy, who’d come over to listen in, said, “A tourist found her. He thought the station was open and pulled in, and saw her sitting by the pump. He thought she was a drug addict, until he saw the screwdriver handle. Nobody knows how long she was sitting here, or who dropped her off.”

  O’Brien leaned down and waved his hands in front of Kort’s eyes. She didn’t blink. He took his hand away, and a few seconds later, she did blink. “Every twenty seconds,” the EMT said. “You could set your watch by it.”

  An hour later, she was flown out of Marfa for El Paso, still blinking every twenty seconds.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, Lucas spoke to a doc in El Paso, who said that Kort had died an hour earlier during an operation to remove the screwdriver. “She had some brain function and the neuro guy had her coked to the gills with antiseizure medicine, but as soon as they removed the screwdriver, she had a massive seizure and died. She also has a recent bullet wound in her butt, and apparently self-treated that. Anyway, she’s gone.”

  Lucas hung up and as he punched in Forte’s phone number to report Kort’s death, he thought, Coked to the gills?

 
When he told Rae about it, she said, “Ah, that’s just Texas.”

  Later that day, Lucas and Rae went to El Paso to see Bob, who was looking good, given the fact that he’d been shot through both legs. “Biggest question now is whether I have vascular damage,” he said. “I can wiggle all my toes, and if somebody pinches my knees, it hurts, so no major nerves were killed off, as far as anyone can tell. Take a while to find all that out, but I won’t lose any legs. I could be back in a couple of months.”

  “That’s good, because our boy Davenport wants us to work with him on his next big one,” Rae said.

  “Business class, suites hotels?” Bob asked.

  “Count on it,” Lucas said.

  When they left Bob, they both went to the emergency room, where a nurse practitioner rewashed their not-very-bad wounds and pronounced them okay, although they should have gotten more comprehensive treatment about fifteen hours earlier. On the way back to Marfa, Lucas said to Rae, “Bob’s hurt worse than he lets on. He’ll be doing good if he’s back by next summer. He might even be able to cash his chips on a disability, if he wants that.”

  “He won’t, he’ll be back.” Rae teared up. “I wish I could shoot that motherfucker Darling again.”

  —

  THAT SAME DAY, Rosie pulled the RV off the road near Gordon, Texas. There wasn’t anyone around, and they carefully and watchfully walked the interstate fence until they spotted the orange blouse. The three of them, Rosie and Annie and Dora, hauled the two black cases out of the weeds under the pine tree. Dora popped them open, and Annie said, “Ohhhh . . .” in what was nothing less than an orgasmic groan.

  “Let’s get them back to the RV,” Dora said. “And let me get my blouse.”

  She unknotted her blouse from the fence pole, and Annie came up from behind her, put one hand on the pole and the other on Box’s ass, and asked, “Little kiss?”

  A guy going by in an eighteen-wheeler looked up and saw them and said to himself, “Ooo, no, no, no, no way. Oh, man, don’t do that to me, not ten days from home . . .”

  —

  LUCAS AND RAE were back in Marfa, in quite a nice hotel, for the next three days, in the predicted blizzard of paperwork. The hotel people wanted them out of their rooms as soon as possible, because of an enormous influx of art lovers, there to inspect the damage.

  A good-looking young woman called Lucas, who had been identified to her as one of the lead cops, a fascist. Rae asked, “Me, too?”

  The young woman looked at the tall black woman and seemed to struggle for a moment with all the possible politically correct replies, and got off the elevator without attempting one.

  —

  WITH THE PAPERWORK done, the crime scene measured and discussed, sworn statements given, Lucas kissed Rae on the forehead at the El Paso airport and said, “Rubber match, next time we hook up. Work on your game.”

  “Like I need it,” she said. And, “You take care, big guy.”

  She took her business-class tickets and walked down the Jetway and out of sight.

  —

  THAT SAME DAY, John Stiner was hired to be an assistant manager at a new Starbucks in Tampa, Florida. The Starbucks regional man said, “We’re quite impressed with your qualifications. Year or two, you could be running your own store.”

  “I’m looking forward to it, sir,” Stiner said, and thought, privately, How in the fuck do you look at yourself in the morning, you boring, paper-pushing cocksucker? “I’m really anxious to make Starbucks my future.” And maybe getting in the shorts of one of your tight little baristas . . . or maybe more than one.

  —

  ON THE VERY SAME DAY, a team of marshals swarmed Darling’s Alabama farm. They found nothing, but one agent spotted a heap of raw dirt across the road from the house, in some brush. He brought Janice Darling across the road to look at it. “It’s a gopher, you dummy,” she told him. He was from New York City and didn’t know gophers from wolverines, and so accepted her answer.

  She’d dug up and moved the money the day before. In a year, she thought, she’d be in Toronto under a new name and still desperately missing Sturgill.

  —

  ON A BRIGHT TUESDAY a couple of days after he got back, Lucas and Weather drove to their polling place, where they voted for Mrs. Bowden for President. That night they went to a Bowden victory party, which didn’t work out all that well: by ten o’clock, people were slinking out of the place.

  “Wolf Blitzer can kiss my ass,” one of the partiers told Lucas, as they shuffled down the sidewalk.

  —

  VIRGIL FLOWERS, a BCA agent and old friend, was in town the next day, and stopped by to check on him. He cut through the post-election gloom: “Hey, man. The world goes on, you know what I mean? Go out in the backyard, burn some steaks, fire up a doobie, relax. Oh—and tell me about Marfa . . .”

  There were no doobies to be had, but they burned some steaks and with the cold weather moving in, ate at the dining table, drank some Leinies, and Lucas told them all about it.

  He said, “I’ll tell you, Virgil, things are getting strange out there. This whole case was pinned on . . . guess what?”

  “Uh, let me see. Couldn’t be intelligent investigation, we can rule that out . . .”

  “Telephones. Everybody was leaning on telephones.” Lucas took a phone from his pocket and held it up, then looked at it, at the shiny black glass. “They’re so great, these little machines are, that we all agree to be spied on for the privilege of carrying them. The phones know where we’ve been, when we were there, and lots of time, what we were doing there—what we were buying, who we were talking to, and where those people were. They can even tell how fast you were moving, in case somebody wants to prove you were speeding. They know who you talk to, who your contacts are, what credit cards you have, where you bank. We all know that, but we can’t get away from them. Even crooks know it, and even they can’t get away from them.”

  “All you’d have to do is not have one,” Flowers said.

  “You can’t do that—listen to me, you can’t do that anymore,” Lucas said. “What if you left your phone at home and had a heart attack or rolled your car over on a back road? How would you call nine-one-one to ask for help? And if you’re a crook and leave your phone at home while you’re sticking up a bank, but you carry it all the rest of the time . . . you automatically look suspicious. You always carry the phone, and this one time, during the bank robbery, you left it at home? I don’t think so. Sooner or later some prosecutor will convict somebody of something because he didn’t have a phone in his pocket.”

  “You need another drink,” Flowers said. And, “Say, how’s Letty doing? Is she coming home for Christmas? Maybe I’ll call her up.”

  “Only at the risk of your life,” Lucas said.

  “What? You’d shoot me for calling up Letty?”

  “Oh, no, I’d just tell Frankie,” Lucas said. Frankie was Virgil’s girlfriend, and not a stranger to violence. “I’d say, Frankie? Guess what . . .”

  Flowers held up his hands: “All right, all right. Joking there about Letty . . .”

  —

  ON THE MONDAY after the election, Lucas, still with a bandage on his forehead, went into the marshals’ offices in Minneapolis carrying his briefcase, which contained nothing but the paper from the Poole case.

  Hal Oder, the U.S. marshal for the District of Minnesota, saw Lucas in the hallway, unlocking his office door, and called, “Davenport—my office.”

  Lucas finished unlocking his door and dropped his briefcase next to his desk, hearing the footfalls clacking down the hall, then Oder shoved his head in the doorway and snapped, “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear me.”

  “I heard you, but I ignored you,” Lucas said.

  “Things are gonna change around here,” Oder said. “You don’t have Bowden watching your back anymore. If y
ou expect to stay here, you’re going on the duty roster. You’re going to be pulling regular shifts and that includes prisoner transfer. I’m going to . . .”

  Lucas put a finger to his lips and when Oder stopped talking, said, “Hal. You really shouldn’t say anything more until tomorrow afternoon. After your appointment.”

  Lucas saw the fear suddenly flare in Oder’s eyes: “What appointment?”

  “You have an appointment. You just don’t know it yet. Now get the fuck out of my office.”

  —

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Oder had begun to relax. He’d checked with his secretary every fifteen minutes about unexpected appointments and there hadn’t been any. Davenport had been bullshitting him, for reasons Oder couldn’t figure out. Then, at one-forty-five, a message popped up on the corner of his computer. It said “Your appointments are here.”

  Oder went to the door, where he saw the Democratic governor of Minnesota—the man who, until the week before, had been expected to become Mrs. Bowden’s vice president—walking down the hall toward him.

  He was trailed by another man, a short man carrying a shovel. Oder didn’t recognize the short man for a moment, then realized that he was Porter Smalls, the once and future Republican U.S. senator from Minnesota.

  The governor smiled and thrust out a hand, said, “Hal, I think we’ve met a couple of times. How are you?”

  “Uh, is this about Davenport?” Oder asked, as he shook the governor’s hand.

  The future Senator Smalls said, “Yes, yes, it is. Let’s go in your office and talk about it.” His shovel still had the sales stickers on the face of the blade. Oder didn’t ask about it.

  When they were settled into the office, Smalls said, “I will now tell you a short story. Two years ago, Senator Taryn Grant, the bitch from hell, had some child porn put on my campaign computer, then murdered her way through the election and into the U.S. Senate. Into my seat. This is not a secret. Tell your children about it, if you wish. The governor here is an old friend, and though we’re in opposing political parties, he knew that I was innocent. He assigned Lucas to find out what happened. Lucas did. I was cleared of the child-porn stories too late to keep me from losing my Senate seat, but at least I didn’t go to prison. When it’s all said and done, though, Minnesotans remember. If you watched the elections last week . . . Did you watch the elections?”