11

LUCAS GOT a later start than he’d expected the next morning; no problem, he’d just slept late, and the car clock said it was nearly eleven before he rolled down a narrow rural highway to the Darling farm.

The farm stretched across a natural bowl in the land, the bottomland along a river or creek; a twisting line of trees on the far side of the farm marked out the stream. The farm itself had a prosperous, well-groomed industrial air.

A neat white single-story house sat on the left, facing the road, a dozen trees spotted around the yard, throwing overlapping circles of shade. A broad, heavily graveled driveway separated the house from a six-slot white-metal garage, and at the back, ended at a white barn. As far as Lucas could see, there were no animals: the place was purely a grain operation, with soybean fields pressing at the sides and back of the two-acre-sized residential lot. A sliding door was open on the left side of the barn, and he could see the front end of a corn-green John Deere tractor.

Farms, in Lucas’s experience, which wasn’t extensive, usually showed bits of history around the edges: old chicken coops and machine sheds, maybe a neglected clothesline in the back, abandoned machinery parked in a woodlot.

The Darling farm had none of that. Everything looked new and well maintained, with rectangular beds of pastel petunias edging the driveway and sidewalks, while marigolds laid a circle of gold at the base of a flagpole in the center of the front yard. A silver propane tank squatted like a huge silver bullet on the far side of the house.

Lucas pulled into the driveway, saw a woman’s face checking him from a side-door window. He touched the pistol under his jacket, climbed out, walked to the door, and rang the doorbell.

The woman opened the door, cocked her head: “You’re not the propane guy,” she said. She was tall, comfortably heavy, with neatly coiffed blond hair betrayed by dark eyebrows. She fit the farm.

“I’m a U.S. marshal,” Lucas said. “I need to interview Sturgill Darling about an old friend of his. Is he around?”

The woman had been smiling politely, but now the smile faded: “It’s that damn Gar Poole, isn’t it?”

“Why would you say that?” Lucas asked.

“Because he’s the only one I’ve heard of who’d have a marshal coming by. Sturgill hasn’t talked to him for years, but I knew that sooner or later, somebody would be coming around looking for him.” She hesitated, then unlocked the screen door between them and pushed it open. “You better come in if we’re going to talk. Sturgill’s gone off to Canada on a hunting trip, won’t be back until week after next.”

—

AS LUCAS STEPPED INSIDE, Darling watched from the garage. He’d heard Lucas’s truck turn in from the road, and he’d called his wife to warn her that somebody was in the driveway and that it might be the law; or it might be the torture crew. If it was the cartel crew, he’d be outside the window with a tactical shotgun. He told her to leave her cell phone turned on and lying on the couch table so he could hear what was going on.

The night before, he’d checked the Internet for news stories on the Poole murders and the assault on Stiner’s sister, and had gone into town to call Gar Poole from a pay phone to fill him in.

Poole had said, “There are only three people who know where I am and how to get in touch—I’ll call the others and warn them. You probably ought to get lost for a while, get the old lady somewhere they can’t find her. If we lay low long enough, they’ll go away. They can’t go running around the countryside cutting people up forever—they’ll get caught.”

“I’ll do that—but I’ve still got some money here,” Darling said. “It’s hid, but I need to hide it better. If the cops came in and really tore the place apart and found it, I couldn’t explain it. I got some farm work to do, too . . . but then I’ll get out. I’ll get back to you with a number on a new burner.”

“You might want to skip the farm work and get out,” Poole said. “That thing about sawing off my mom’s leg—those are not people you want to fuck with.”

Darling had almost two million dollars in cash at the farm. After getting off the phone, he’d bought a couple of sturdy, self-sealing plastic tubs, packed the money inside them, then after dark, carried them across the road to a brushy patch of ground and with his wife watching, buried them.

That done, he’d started cleaning up the barn. He’d been getting the equipment ready to bring in the beans, but now he’d have to put that off. He got the combine back together, called an outfitter he knew in Northwestern Ontario, and made arrangements to do some bear hunting.

In the morning, he finished cleaning up the barn and had been loading the truck with his hunting and traveling gear when Lucas turned up. He could watch the house from a corner window. Janice was a smart woman and would be okay with a lawman, he thought.

In case the very worst happened, and the big man in the suit wasn’t the law at all, he waited with the shotgun in his hand.

—

THE WOMAN introduced herself to Lucas as Janice Darling, Sturgill’s wife. She took Lucas to sit in the living room and offered him a glass of water or a Diet Coke, and he accepted the Coke.

After she’d settled into the chair opposite him, Lucas told her about the robbery in Biloxi, and the apparent response by the cartel, including the murder of the Pooles and the assault on Marilyn Campbell. Janice knew all of that, but pretended that she was hearing it for the first time.

“My God,” she said. “They did that because they thought maybe these people knew where Gar Poole is? Are they coming for us? We’ve got four children, they’re all grown up, but they could be found . . .”

“I don’t know if they’re coming for you or not, but it’s not a risk you should take, especially with your husband gone,” Lucas said. He’d been watching her closely as he told the story, and had seen her eyes glaze: she’d heard it before, he thought. She was lying: Sturgill Darling was probably somewhere close by. If he was gone hunting in Canada, he’d probably just left.

It might, he thought, be worth hanging around, somewhere out of sight, to see if Darling appeared . . .

If Janice Darling knew anything about Gar Poole or the Biloxi robbery, she was stonewalling.

“I can tell you that Sturgill has nothing to do with those people, at least their criminal activities, and never did. He did used to play some guitar up in Nashville, and hung out on Broadway, but that didn’t go anywhere and he came back here. That’s where he knew them from and that’s the last he’s seen of them. He’s been farming for twenty years since then.”

Lucas asked her to call her husband, but she said he didn’t have a cell phone. He didn’t believe that, either.

—

AS THEY WERE TALKING, Kort and Soto pulled to the shoulder on a hillside road a quarter mile away, looking down a bluff toward the farm in the green valley below. A creek meandered across the landscape, lined with trees. Soto didn’t know shit about trees, and Kort was no better. Off in the distance, a couple of farms away, a train was rolling by, like a bunch of golden caterpillars racing to lunch.

The farm itself was a tidy rectangle, the row crops were dark green and low, with some of the leaves turning to gold as autumn crept into the South, and off to the right, at an adjacent farm, a couple of dozen rough acres were given over to pasturage, on which they could see two dark brown horses.

“That sorta looks like cotton down there, but I don’t think it is,” Kort muttered. “Don’t know what it might be, though. Can’t be corn. Corn’s taller.”

“It’s wheat,” Soto said of the soybeans.

“Yeah? Don’t know about that. Never seen any wheat. Or oats.”

Soto’s head bobbed, and he said, “I can tell you one thing about Tennessee farmers for sure.”

“We’re in Alabama,” Kort said.

“Same exact thing,” Soto said irritably. “Anyway, one thing about Tennessee or Alabama farmers is, they’ll have a gun handy in the stairwell. Somebody breaks into your house, won’t be any cop close enough to save your ass. They got guns, like that kid in Franklin and old man Poole.”

Kort shifted uncomfortably. She was sitting on a soft donut pillow intended for hemorrhoid sufferers, and while it helped, her ass still felt like she’d been hit with a baseball bat, and she was still seeping some blood into the Kotexes they were now using as bandages. “What are you sayin’ here?”

Soto had a cinnamon-flavored toothpick rolling around in his mouth and stopped to pick out some obstruction in his lower jawline. “I’m not saying we can’t do it, I’m just saying we got to be careful. We’re not dealing with some street kids, here. These guys are hard-core criminals.”

“Who must be doing well,” Kort said. “That looks like a Benz sittin’ in the driveway.”

“Well, we know we’re looking for a few suitcases full of hundred-dollar bills. A Benz is small change.”

“Fuck it, then. Let’s do it,” Kort said.

Soto pulled on a pair of silvered sunglasses and put the car in gear.

—

LUCAS HAD GOTTEN one valuable thing from the interview with Janice Darling. The couch table had an array of family photographs on it, including several with a husky middle-aged man that Lucas thought must be Sturgill Darling: Darling with Janice Darling, the two of them posed with three girls of elementary-, middle-school, and finally high-school age, a photo of Janice and Sturgill on a big-game fishing boat with a boy who showed Sturgill’s cheekbones and smile. If Lucas ran into Sturgill Darling, he’d recognize him.

A half hour after he’d arrived, Lucas picked up his legal pad and pen and was about to thank her for her time, when they both heard another car crunch up the gravel drive.

Darling frowned and asked, “Now who could that be? I’m not expecting anyone . . .”

She and Lucas both stood and looked out the living room window. A blue Toyota had pulled up behind Lucas’s truck and a heavyset woman was climbing out. She looked around, then reached into the car to pick something up. When she turned, she had a clipboard in her hand.

Lucas turned to Darling and asked, “Do you have a gun in the house?”

“What?”

“A gun! Do you have a gun in the house?”

“A shotgun in the mudroom . . .” she said.

“Run and get it, then get in a bathroom, load it, and point the gun at the door and don’t come out until you hear me yell for you.”

Darling looked at the woman outside, who was headed toward the side door. “You think . . .”

“Almost for sure,” Lucas said. “Now go! Go!”

She hurried off to the back of the house. Lucas pulled out his .45 and jacked a shell into the chamber and went to the door. He pulled it open as the woman was about to climb onto the bottom step. He couldn’t see her right hand, which was under the clipboard. He pointed the .45 at her chest and said, “Get back! Get back! Get on the ground!”

She was surprised, but instead of protesting, she stepped backward and sideways, and Lucas followed her with his eyes and then snapped his head back toward the car, where he saw the far door opening, and a moment later a man stepped around the door and lifted a rifle over the hood of the car.

Lucas didn’t quite think, Rifle, but the idea was there, and he threw himself back into the house, and a split-second later a burst of a half dozen slugs tore through the closing screen door as he dropped and rolled to his left and then scrambled to the living room window.

The walls of the house were almost no barrier to the bullets punching through the aluminum siding and interior drywall, but the shooter was making the mistake of sweeping the outside wall at waist level, while Lucas was rolling across the living room carpet to a window in the corner.

Another burst of bullets punched through the kitchen walls at the other end of the house, and Lucas risked standing up and then stepping in front of the window. He didn’t bother breaking the glass but simply opened fire on the man behind the car, the window blowing out as he fired. To his left, the heavyset woman had gotten back to the car and was running around the back side.

Lucas had missed the man behind the car and the rifle turned toward him and he dropped again as a gust of slugs blew through the window. The guy behind the car had a fully automatic weapon, which was not surprising but created an awkward situation for a cop armed with a handgun.

Lucas rolled back toward the door and kicked it open and emptied the rest of the magazine at the car. The man popped up again, beside the driver’s-side door, shooting over the roof now, and Lucas rolled the other direction this time, as more shots pounded through the door and the siding around the door, and crawled behind an antique Hammond organ that sat behind a side window.

He slammed a second magazine into the .45 and then peeked out the window. The woman was sitting in the driver’s seat and the man had the rifle propped on the roof of the car, apparently waiting for any motion. Then the car was moving and the man jumped in the backseat and the car screeched in reverse out toward the road.

Lucas stepped to the door, and as the car made a clumsy backing turn onto the highway, he emptied the .45 into it, saw both the driver’s side and back windows blow out; but the car accelerated away. The guy with the rifle fired a burst through the broken-out back window of the car and Lucas dodged back inside.

The car was three or four hundred yards away when Lucas ran out to the Benz and threw it in a circle out to the highway and followed. He didn’t have to catch them, he only had to keep them in sight. Catching them, in fact, would be stupid; he had nothing that would contend with a machine gun.

He had two reserve magazines in the locked center console and he managed to unlock it as he rolled down the gravel driveway and fished the magazines out. The Toyota was perhaps a half mile ahead when he made it onto the highway and started after it.

He would sweat about it later but wasn’t yet frightened. He was angry and excited, and focused on running down the Toyota. He needed to stay in touch, and he needed help.

Forte was at work in Washington. A secretary answered his phone, and Lucas screamed at her, and Forte came up, and Lucas sputtered, “I’m chasing the cartel guys. One male, one female. I’m a half minute behind them on a highway outside the town of Elkmont, Alabama. I need you to get onto the sheriff’s office whatever it is here and have them call me and I’ll vector them in . . .”

—

HE’D CLOSED the distance since he’d turned out of the driveway, and up ahead the Toyota braked and then made a hard right turn onto a dirt side road and started up a hill. Lucas would have the advantage there, with a hefty four-wheel drive, unless . . .

The “unless” happened. He was halfway up the hill, the Toyota having disappeared over the crest of the hill, when he saw the rim of blue off to one side. The Toyota had stopped and the rifleman was waiting, the gun again braced over the top of the car.

Lucas jabbed the brakes and dropped sideways onto the passenger seat when the windshield blew out, raining broken glass on his face, neck, and arms. He crawled over the center console as more rifle slugs pelted the front of the car, and pushed the passenger-side door, intending to drop onto the ground, where he’d be sheltered by the car’s tires and could return fire. He’d gotten the door open when he realized that he hadn’t shifted the car into “Park,” and it was slowly rolling backward and around toward the roadside ditch.

“Shit! Shit!” He lifted his left leg and poked at the shift lever, which was mounted on the steering column, trying to shift the truck into “Park.” He missed but managed to knock the lever upward, which shifted the truck into reverse and the slow roll accelerated and the truck backed itself into the roadside ditch, where it bounced and tilted and finally shuddered to a stop.

The gunfire had ended, but his phone was ringing. Lucas risked a peek through the shattered windshield, saw nobody on the road, nobody in front of the truck. He sat up and pushed the “Park” button on the shift lever, and crawled out the passenger-side door and dropped into the ditch behind the truck.

He could neither see nor hear anyone moving along the road or through the roadside brush. He edged around to the back of the truck and looked up the road: the blue rim of the Toyota was gone.

His phone had stopped ringing, but then started again.

He answered, as he surveyed his own truck. He was deep enough in the ditch that he doubted he could get out without help. Into the phone he said, “Yeah? Davenport.”

“This is Aaron Clark, I’m a deputy sheriff in Limestone County, Alabama. We got a call . . .”

Lucas broke in: “I’ve been in a gunfight at the Sturgill Darling farm off 132. The shooters went west on 132 maybe a half mile, then turned up a hill on a dirt road before they knocked me off the road into a ditch. I can’t get out. They’re driving a blue Toyota that’s probably full of bullet holes. There’re two of them and they’ve got at least one automatic weapon . . .”

Lucas described the woman and asked that the deputy send a wrecker to get him out of the ditch. The truck was leaning sideways, and he was afraid it would roll if he tried to move it himself.

“I’m going to run back to the Darling farm, make sure Mrs. Darling is okay . . .”

“We’ll have somebody meet you there,” Clark said, “and we’ll get on that Toyota . . .”

—

WHEN HE was off the phone, Lucas moved back into the brush and snuck up the hill, looking for the blue car or any movement. He saw none: the car was gone. His face was burning: he’d been vaguely aware of it, but now blood ran down into one eye and when he wiped it away, his hand came back bloody from the heel to his fingertips, and he realized that he’d been cut up by shrapnel and glass, but hadn’t felt it in the crush of the gunfight and chase.

He turned and started jogging back toward the Darling farm. Six or seven minutes later, he was on the porch and shouted, “Mrs. Darling? The marshal, I’m coming in . . .”

He heard a muffled call from the back and then Janice Darling appeared, holding the shotgun like she knew how to use it. She gaped at him: “Oh my God! What happened? You’re bleeding, are you shot?”

“Cut up, I think. We should have some cops coming in . . . if I could use your bathroom?”

She led him to a small bathroom and he peered into the mirror. He was bleeding from a half dozen puncture wounds on his scalp, forehead, left ear, and the left side of his neck, and could feel more cuts down his back. He took off his jacket; there was blood, but not much, and several small bloody patches on the back of his shirt. One thing was for sure: his two-thousand-dollar suit was ruined.

“You need a hospital,” Darling said.

“Yeah . . . but it looks worse than it is.”

“You hope. Let me get a washcloth.”

“Better not. I’ve probably got some glass in me, better let a doc take it out. If I rub on it, I might push it in further.”

—

SHE PUT DOWN the shotgun, looked shocked, worried, and maybe softened up by the blood, so Lucas popped the question: “Is your husband really gone?”

“He was out of here at dawn,” she said, with a blink of an eye. “He’s gonna be darn upset when he gets back and sees what happened to the house.”

“Well, maybe he’ll call from the highway somewhere and you can tell him about it,” Lucas said.

She said, “Maybe.” She didn’t look even slightly embarrassed.

Lucas couldn’t think of anything else to say, so while they waited for the local cops, he excused himself to call Forte in Washington and told him what had happened.

“How bad are you hurt?” Forte asked. “On a scale of one to ten?”

“No more than a one. Maybe less. I’ll have to stop by an ER somewhere and get patched up, but not that bad.”

“Okay, listen. I’m not gonna let you run around out there alone anymore. I’ve talked to SOG, we’re sending a couple more deputies out there, Bob and Ray . . . Where do you want to meet?”

“I’ll have to call you when I find out how bad my car’s screwed up, but . . . I’m thinking Nashville, depending on what happens with running down these cartel people.”

“Call me every five minutes and tell me what’s happening,” Forte said.

“Bob and Ray . . . wasn’t that a comedy team or something, on the radio, back years ago?”

“Yeah, maybe—but these two aren’t funny,” Forte said. “Call me when you know where you’ll be.”

—

A SHERIFF’S CAR rolled up the driveway a minute later and Lucas and Janice Darling went out to meet the deputy, who introduced himself as Glen Long. When he was sure Lucas wasn’t bleeding from any major wounds, Long said, “I’ll ride you back into the hospital and get you fixed up. We haven’t seen hide nor hair of that Toyota, though.”

“We can’t leave Mrs. Darling where these guys could find her if they come back . . .”

“I’ve got a sister with a different last name across the line in Tennessee,” Darling said. “I’ll pack up right now and stay with her until it blows over.”

The deputy said they would put a car in her driveway until she was gone. And he asked, “Where’s Sturgill?”

“Gone to Canada,” she said. Her eyes flicked to Lucas: “We’re hoping he’ll think to call back before he gets there, but you know Sturgill. Once he starts rolling, he just keeps going. Probably won’t stop before he gets to the border.”

Lucas said, “Yeah, right.”

—

ANOTHER SHERIFF’S CAR arrived, this one carrying the deputy, Aaron Clark, who’d called Lucas during the fight. “We’ve got the tow truck pulling your car out of the ditch. It’s gonna take a while, they’ve got to edge it out sideways,” Clark said. “If they try to pull it straight out, they think it’ll roll. Not that I think it’ll make much difference—I’d be surprised if it’s not totaled. Every piece of sheet metal on the car has got at least one hole in it.”

“You gotta tell everybody to take care if they spot that Toyota,” Lucas said. “These people will kill you, cops or not.”

“Everybody knows,” Clark said. “I don’t know exactly how they got past us, if they did—maybe they’re hiding out in the woods somewhere. We had cars coming from all directions as soon as you called.”

“Better start checking the local farms,” Lucas said. “They could have pulled into one, hid the car in a barn . . . wouldn’t be good for the farm people.”

Clark looked at him, then said, “Oh . . . shit! Shit!” He turned and ran back to his car, got on the radio.

Darling asked, “You think . . . ?”

“I worry,” Lucas said.

—

LUCAS WAS eventually hauled back to his truck by a sheriff’s deputy. The Benz was sitting up on the road again, where the wrecker driver was getting ready to pull it up on the wrecker’s flatbed. The deputy walked around the truck, shaking his head, and the driver said, “I gotta tell y’all, pulling it out of there sideways didn’t do the truck any good. But there was no other way to do it. If I’d tried to pull it straight out, forward or backward, she was gonna roll, and then . . . well, it wouldn’t have been good for nothin’ but parts.”

“My best guess, that’s about all it is right now,” the deputy said.

The driver nodded: “Probably right. All them bullet holes don’t help.”

Lucas removed everything removable from the truck and then was taken to a local hospital, where a nimble-fingered nurse pulled two tiny slivers of glass out of his neck and back. None of the wounds required stitches, but he would, the nurse said, itch for a few days: “I’ve been there,” Lucas said.

While she worked on him, he called around, arranged for his truck to be hauled to a Mercedes dealer in Nashville and called State Farm to report the accident. When the nurse was done, he got a change of clothes from his suitcase, went into the ER restroom and put on the fresh clothes. He threw his cut and blood-soaked suit into the hospital trash.

The blue car wasn’t found that afternoon or evening; nor did the sheriff’s office find any dead farmers.

—

STURGILL DARLING had watched the gunfight from the barn. He’d been listening on the open phone as Lucas talked to Janice Darling and knew that Lucas was a federal marshal. When the cartel crew showed up, he’d watched, ready to intervene if the marshal had been shot down and the cartel people had gone after Janice.

When the marshal ran to his truck and went after the blue car, Janice had come out of the bathroom and asked, on the phone, “You still there?”

“Still here. They’re all gone, but they’ll be back. Probably the marshal with some deputy sheriffs. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, but the house is a mess. What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna hide right here in the barn. They’ve got no reason to search the place, and if they do look, I’ll get up under the eaves where they won’t find me. I’ll get out of here after dark. You go on up to your sister’s place.”

“Okay. You be careful, Sturg.”

“I will. Now you go on back to the bathroom, like the marshal told you. I’ll watch everything from here.”

—

WHEN LUCAS got out of the hospital, he spent a half hour typing up a report of the shoot-out at the sheriff’s office and sent a copy of it by e-mail to Forte in Washington.

A sheriff’s deputy drove him across the Tennessee line, where he was picked up by a Tennessee highway patrol car and driven into Nashville, to the Mercedes dealer, where he was told that a State Farm adjuster would be around the next day to assess the damage.

“He says he’ll be here at noon,” the service guy said. He was looking at Lucas’s truck and shaking his head: “Seventy thousand miles and all those bullet holes, plus the interior damage and the mess under the hood . . . it’s totaled, man. Might save the tires.”

The amiable highway patrolman took him to the Hertz location at the airport. Lucas called Weather on the way to tell her what had happened. She was pissed, but didn’t exactly say, “I told you so.”

She said, “Be more careful. I keep telling you . . .”

“I’m trying and I got some help coming. They’re sending down a couple heavies from the Special Operations Group. Sounds like the federal government’s equivalent of Jenkins and Shrake.”

“Good! That’s good. You need the help, Lucas. For God’s sakes, be careful.”

Lucas got a Nissan Armada from Hertz and checked into an Embassy Suites hotel in downtown Nashville a few minutes after midnight and slept soundly, with the help of Tylenol with codeine, except for a few flashbacks to the gunfight, until ten o’clock the next morning.

At ten o’clock, he was awakened by a heavy-handed pounding on the hotel room door.