10

WHEN LUCAS left Stiner, he called Forte in Washington, arranged to get an airline ticket back to Nashville, and filled him in on Sturgill Darling.

“That’s the guy I need,” Lucas said. “There’s a chance that he’s the one who spotted the Biloxi counting house, and even if he didn’t, there’s still a chance he knows where Poole is hiding. He could be the planner, the spotter. You got the name, and it’s unusual—get me an address.”

Forte said he’d get that going, and added, “I got a call back from Louise on your travel. You’ve got a ticket back to Nashville, but you gotta hurry.”

Lucas’s next call was to the FBI. He told them that he’d spoken to Stiner, but hadn’t had time for an arrest and the processing. “If you really want him, he’s probably still around.”

“We made some calls about him. We don’t want him all that much, but if we get a break, we’ll go over and pick him up,” the AIC said.

Lucas said good riddance to the Jeep at Hertz, checked his bag and the .45 with Southwest—he hadn’t taken the training for Law Enforcement Officers Flying Armed, so couldn’t carry aboard—and made it to the gate early enough to buy an Esquire Black Book magazine and a Snickers bar.

Two hours after he left Stiner, he was sweating at the back of the plane, holding tight to the armrests during takeoff. When they survived that, and got up in the air, he managed to relax enough to open the magazine. By the time he finished working through the men’s fashion articles and discovered he’d need a new suite of neckties, they were descending into Nashville, and he was sweating again.

On the ground, he found an e-mail from Washington. They had a rural address for a Sturgill Darling, outside the small town of Elkmont, Alabama, not more than an hour and a half from where he was. The location was right, as Poole’s pals seemed to come from the Greater Nashville area.

He could drive halfway there, bag out in the same motel where he’d been the night before, have a leisurely dinner and a nice breakfast, and still get to Elkmont before ten o’clock.

He also had a text message with a new phone number for Stiner. So far, so good.

—

WHEN LUCAS walked out the door at the Koffee Korner, Stiner, suffused with gloom, finished the Pabst and threw the bottle toward the trash can. He missed and it shattered on the concrete floor. He didn’t bother to sweep up. He fished the last three bottles of PBR and two Cokes out of the refrigerator, looked around the office, got his baseball cap, and walked down the street to his apartment.

The apartment had come furnished, and while initially it had smelled strange, his own personal odors had taken over in the six months that he’d had the job and now it felt like home. No option, though. Maybe Davenport hadn’t been telling the truth and the feds were on the way to pick him up, but maybe he had been telling the truth and Stiner had some time.

Over the next hour, he moved his personal possessions into the camper back of his aging Ford Ranger, said good-bye to the apartment, left a message for the owner, and took off. As he was passing a swamp, he threw his phone out the window. In the next hour and a half, he acquired two new prepaid phones, one from Walmart and the other from Best Buy.

A while later, as Lucas was bracing for the crash landing at Nashville, Stiner took out one of the new phones and punched in a number from memory. He didn’t get a recorded message, just a beep. After the beep, he said, “A .270 is way better on deer. Call me on this number and soon. I’m serious, man.”

Darling called back ten minutes later. He asked, “Better than what?”

“Better’n a .243.”

“Long time, no hear,” Darling said. “What’s up?”

“You could be in deep shit. By the way, this is a brand-new prepaid phone I’m gonna throw away in the next five minutes, so you can’t call me back. I was visited by a U.S. marshal and he was asking after you by name, in connection with a major job,” Stiner said. “He knew you’d been at a party at my place, years ago. I told him I didn’t know where you lived now, or what your phone number might be. I said I just knew you from hanging around lower Broadway.”

“What exactly did he say?”

Stiner laid it out: About the murders of Poole’s parents, about the two killers who’d started working over his sister. “Somehow they got you-know-who’s name, and they’re looking for him. They’re going after anyone who knows about him. I told this fed I didn’t know anything about it, that I hadn’t seen any of you for years. Anyway, the marshal’s looking for you. He really wants your friend, but he doesn’t know how to get to him.”

“Damn it. And you say these greasers are looking for my friend?”

“It’s like a race. Your friend would do well to get far out of town, right away, and not tell anybody where he’s going.”

“But that wouldn’t stop the greasers from looking, would it? If they get my name, they could be all over my family . . .”

“I hadn’t worked it out that far,” Stiner said. “I don’t know your situation there. But they didn’t stop at torturing anyone else’s family. If they find somebody else who knows that you and your friend were tight . . . they could be coming.”

Long silence, then, “Anything else?”

“No except that I’m on the run myself,” Stiner said. “I got nothing to do with any of this, but I don’t want them coming for me. I’m crawling in a hole and pulling the dirt over my head.”

“Tell you what, buddy,” Darling said. “I owe you. When this all blows over, come and see me. I’ll take good care of you.”

“Yeah, well—thank you. I’ll check in a year or so . . . if you’re around.”

They hung up simultaneously and Stiner waited until there were no headlights on the back of his truck and dropped the phone onto the interstate, where it’d get run over nine hundred times before daylight.

That done, he called Lucas from the other phone, and when Lucas didn’t answer, left a text message with his new phone number. Then he turned his truck around and headed south. His thinking was this: the cops would expect him to run, and since he came from the north, they might expect him to go back that way. If they checked the phone call he’d made to Davenport, they’d see it came from north of Orlando. He didn’t have to run that far, though. Tampa would work. If the marshal ever called him back, he planned to string him along until he had a feel for what to do and then either run or hold tight.

The main thing was, he had to stay away from the two hired killers: the marshal wouldn’t be sawing his leg off, whatever else he might do.

—

AS HE WAS DOING THAT, Kort and Soto were at work on the outskirts of Roswell, Georgia. Kort looked into the empty blood-clotted eye sockets of an elderly man named Henry Bedsow. Bedsow’s eyeballs lay on the floor like a couple of bloody squashed grapes. She shouted, “That’s all you got? Sturgill Darling? What kind of name is that? I don’t believe that shit. You got ten seconds to tell me or I’m gonna rip your motherfuckin’ tongue out by the roots, and then I’m gonna let you drown in your own blood. Who else? I don’t believe this Darling bullshit. Who else, motherfucker?”