12

LUCAS PULLED on his pants and went to the door, left the guard latch attached, and peered out through the crack. A short but wide man stood outside, dressed in black high-rise jeans, a white dress shirt, and a black nylon jacket. He had buzz-cut hair and a flattened nose and muscles everywhere.

Behind him stood a much taller black woman, nearly as tall as Lucas, whose height was enhanced by an Afro of 1960s dimension. She had a sharply chiseled face, with a fingernail-sized scar on her left cheek. She was dressed in a blue shirt, tight black jeans, black suede ankle boots, and a black nylon jacket.

Lucas asked, “Who are you?”

The wide man said, “Bob and Rae. We were told you expected us.”

Bob and Rae? He’d been expecting the Marshals Service equivalent of Jenkins and Shrake, the BCA’s designated thugs. Bob fit, but Rae, not so much. “Ah . . . yeah. I’m not really quite up, but, uh . . . come on in, I guess.” He unlatched the door and let them in.

“Late sleeper, huh?” Rae said, as she came through the door. “You know what they say about birds and worms.”

“Most birds haven’t had the shit shot out of them when they get up early,” Lucas said.

“Heard it was mostly superficial,” Bob said.

“Whoever told you that probably never had the shit shot out of them,” Lucas said.

Rae was looking around the small suite and said, “How’d you get authorized for a palace like this one?”

“I didn’t ask,” Lucas said.

Bob shook his head: “There’s a rookie mistake. If you’ve made any more, feel free to tell us about them, so we’ll know what we’re up against.”

Lucas yawned and stretched, said, “Well, after two days in town, I’ve made more progress toward finding Garvin Poole than the whole fuckin’ Marshals Service did when it had him on the Top Fifteen list for five years. That ought to be good for something.”

Rae shrugged. “All we heard is that you broke your car and didn’t catch the people who broke it.”

Lucas: “Maybe you ought to wait in the lobby.”

“That’s no way to treat a brother marshal,” Bob said. “Why don’t you go brush your teeth? I’m getting some bad breath over here.”

—

LUCAS WENT to the interior half of the suite, closed the door, shaved, showered, checked to make sure none of his cuts had started bleeding again, then put on a dark blue dress shirt, a medium blue Givenchy suit, and George Cleverley oxfords, which he buffed up. When he emerged from the back room, Rae checked him out and said, “I’m going back home. Can’t compete with this shit.”

“Bet he can’t get his gun out as fast as we do,” Bob said.

“That’s why I hired you guys,” Lucas said. “I’m basically the brains behind the operation. You’re the muscle.”

“Muscle, my ass,” Rae said. “We’re the Einsteins of the Marshals Service. Let’s get some pancakes and figure out what we’re doing today.”

—

SHE KNEW NASHVILLE, and had a particular pancake house in mind, and Lucas followed them over in the Nissan. On the way, he called the Mercedes dealer in St. Paul and ordered a new SUV.

The salesman said, “I can get you a loaded GLS550 in two days in any color you want, as long as it’s black. If you can wait a couple of weeks, I could get some other color.”

“I’ll take the black one—I’m out of town right now. Get the paper ready, I don’t want to hang around there any longer than I have to.”

“Got a bunch of new Porsches in, big guy,” the sales guy said. “I could put you in a Cayenne Turbo S that would eat the 550 alive, any way you run it—straight line, curves, off the line . . .”

“Shut up, Dick. Get me the papers for the 550.”

“The Porsche’s in carmine red. Commit now and I’ll give you five thousand off. No, wait—did I say five thousand? I meant seven thousand.”

“Listen, Dick, I don’t need some snowflake SUV with two inches of road clearance. Get me the goddamn 550. I’ll see you in the next week or so.”

“How many miles you got on the trade?” Dick asked.

“The trade expired yesterday,” Lucas said. “State Farm is giving me cash, but not enough. There’s no trade.”

“Then . . . what are you driving?”

“A Nissan Armada.”

“Oh my God, I wouldn’t leave my driveway in one of those things.”

“It seems . . . sturdy,” Lucas said.

“Probably is sturdy. It’s big enough you could land an F-16 on the roof,” Dick said. “It’s just that I’d die of embarrassment.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lucas said. “Get me the 550.”

—

AT THE PANCAKE HOUSE, Lucas and Rae—Rae Givens—ordered blueberry pancakes, while Bob—Bob Matees, which he pronounced like the painter Matisse—ordered waffles because, he said, they were less fattening.

“Probably would be,” Rae said, “if you didn’t put an ice cream scoop full of butter on top of them.”

“And then drowned them in fake maple syrup,” Lucas added.

Bob said pleasantly, “Fuck you.” He poured more syrup and said to Lucas, “As I understand it, you’re an ex–state cop and you saved Michaela Bowden at the Iowa State Fair and she wired you up to get a special appointment to the service. Is that right? Can you introduce us to Bowden? I’ve got a few things I’d like to tell her.”

“Like what?”

“Like she’s gonna lose if she doesn’t start hustling her ass around the Midwest.”

Lucas pointed a fork at him: “Every poll in the country says you’re full of shit.”

“Not every poll. L.A. Times says she’s gonna lose,” Bob said. “They’re right, unless she starts hustling her ass around the Midwest. Why the hell does she go to states that she’s sure to lose, like Arizona and Texas, or that she’s sure to win, like New York and California? What the hell is she doing in California?”

“There’s gotta be a reason, they gotta know more than we do. They’re political pros,” Lucas said. He looked at Rae. “What do you think?”

“I think she’s gonna win, but Bob’s smarter than he looks. Actually, given the way he looks, he’s way smarter. He’s got me worried.”

“So what about your appointment?” Bob asked. “What about Bowden?”

Lucas told them about his appointment, and Bob and Rae gave him some background on their own work. They were both career deputy marshals assigned to the Marshals Service’s Special Operations Group, which tracked and busted federal fugitives. They were a cross between an investigative unit and a SWAT squad, and, as Bob said, “We got more guns and armor in our truck than a Humvee in Iraq.”

Neither one of them was married, both had a divorce in the background, and Rae’s ex-husband had custody of their two kids while she was out of town. She got them back when she was home.

“It works,” she said. “My ex is a good guy, as guys go, so I don’t have to worry.”

“He is a good guy,” Bob said. He tipped his head toward his partner. “They got a divorce because Rae . . . well, Rae isn’t.”

“Glad to hear it,” Lucas said.

—

“NOW,” said Bob, “tell me if this is right—you’ve never really had a clue about where Poole is, but you’ve been interviewing his relatives, and some of them turned up dead, and one other lady got her leg sawn upon.”

Lucas: “I also located the guy who might be the spotter who took Poole to the counting house . . .”

He told them about Sturgill Darling and the shoot-out at the Darling farm, Darling’s alleged history with Poole, and how Darling’s wife said he was on his way to Canada without a cell phone, to shoot a bear.

“Sounds like she was lying through her teeth,” Rae said.

“With that kind of insight, you could become a St. Paul detective someday,” Lucas said. “Here’s the thing. It’s possible that Darling has a burner phone. It’s also possible that he doesn’t. Most of these guys don’t keep them after they use them. Which is the whole point of having a burner.”

“We know that,” Rae said.

Lucas continued, “While I’m over doing the paperwork on my truck, I’d like you guys to do two things—check with Verizon and AT&T and any other phone services that cover Darling’s farm area and find out if he has a cell phone. If he does, we’ll call it, see where he is. With any luck, he’s planning to hook up with Poole. Or, maybe, he’s just running. If he’s just running, you guys can chase him down and squeeze him.”

“What if he really doesn’t have a phone?” Bob asked.

“He was already gone when I got to the farm. I suspect he got a call from John Stiner, my source down in Florida, and took off. But I don’t think he’d do that and leave his wife behind. I think he probably fixed it with his wife to hide out herself, but she hadn’t quite left yet. If Stiner is the one who tipped him, Darling probably took off the night before I got there, or maybe early yesterday morning. If that’s what happened, then he may well have called Poole. He wouldn’t have done that on his cell phone—he’d know that we could figure that out. If he had a burner, he could have called on that. But if he didn’t have a burner already in his pocket . . . he might have gone into this small town where the farm is and made the call from a pay phone, if there is a pay phone.”

“You want us to figure out if there’s a pay phone and check the calls out of it in the last couple of days,” Rae said.

“Exactly,” Lucas said.

Bob looked at Rae and said, “All of that should take us, what, an hour? We could meet back here for lunch.”

Lucas said, “I’m serious.”

Bob said, “So am I. This is the kind of shit the FBI has down pat. I’ve got a line straight to the guy we need to talk to. We’ll make a call and see you back here at noon.”

Lucas looked down at his plate, still half full of soggy pancakes, and said, “Tell you what—find a decent restaurant and I’ll pick up the check.”

—

SOTO HAD HAD a brainstorm: he wanted to know about the cop who was tracking Poole, because they were running out of leads themselves, but maybe the cop wasn’t. If they couldn’t find Poole, maybe the cop could.

Where would they find the cop? At the Mercedes dealer, of course—the only one around.

Because the cop in the Benz would recognize Kort but might not recognize him, Soto left Kort in a shopping center and walked across a divided highway to the only Mercedes dealer in Nashville and cruised the parking lot as though looking at the cars. He spotted a black Mercedes-Benz SUV parked behind the building and wandered past it. He didn’t have to get too close before he knew he had the right truck: there were no other SUVs that had been shot to pieces with a machine gun.

A thin, balding man in tan slacks and a blue sport coat was examining the truck and making notes on a clipboard. Soto walked past it, checked the license plate and the state. Minnesota? What was up with that? If the guy really was a cop, what was he doing in Tennessee?

His phone chirped and Soto answered and Kort said, “Get out of there. The cop just walked into the front of the store.”

Soto hurried away, cut through a line of cars, and recrossed the street.

“I saw the car, got the tag,” he told Kort. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

—

THEY CALLED the College-Sounding Guy. Soto said, “I need a license tag run. From Minnesota. When we get a name, we need to check the name out, see who he is.”

The College-Sounding Guy crunched on something that might have been a Cheeto and said, “Two hundred.”

“Bill us, as usual.”

“Call you back in fifteen minutes,” the College-Sounding Guy said. Soto imagined he was tall, soft, wore glasses, and combed his heavily gelled hair straight back from his forehead. And he had pimples and was surrounded by sacks of Cheetos. How he got wired up with the people in Honduras would remain a mystery.

Kort and Soto sat and waited.

Kort said, “My buttocks . . .”

“I don’t want to hear any more about your ass,” Soto snarled. “It’s my ass, my ass, my ass, all the time my ass. I know your ass hurts, now shut up.”

“You’re such a motherfucker,” Kort said. “I’d like to get ten minutes with you and my Sawzall.”

Soto looked at her with interest. This was something new: “Really? You really want to cut me up? I’ll tell you what, bitch, you look at me sideways . . .” A switchblade appeared in one hand and the serrated blade flicked out. “. . . I cut your fuckin’ nose off.”

“Yeah, I . . . There’s the cop.”

Lucas walked out of the Mercedes dealership and around to the back where his car was, and out of sight. “Not gonna fix that wreck,” Soto said. He sounded proud of himself.

“He’s outa sight. I gotta get out of this car,” Kort said. The pain wasn’t so bad when she was standing up. She waited outside the car, partially concealed by a bush, and thought about Soto, and what a miserable jackass he was. Here she was, really hurt, because of his failing—his job had been to check the house, and instead he’d let a kid get the drop on them, like the worst fuckin’ amateur in the world.

Jackass.

—

FIVE MINUTES after Kort got out of the car, Soto’s phone rang, and the College-Sounding Guy said, “What you’ve got there is a federal marshal named Lucas Davenport. New on the federal job, but a longtime cop in Minnesota with a history of killing people. He is not somebody to toy with.”

“To what with?”

“Toy with. Mess with,” the College-Sounding Guy said.

“Can you look at airline tickets?”

“Sure, but if you want some ongoing monitoring for Lucas Davenport, it’ll cost you a thousand a day. I’ll have to check every fifteen minutes or so, if you want some warning on when he’s flying, if he does. That’s a full-time job, but if you want that, I can give you enough warning that you could get to the airport yourself. I could even make reservations for you.”

“I don’t care about that so much as where he’s going,” Soto said. “If he goes, I’d like to know what kind of car he rents when he gets there.”

“In that case, I’ll monitor flights for two hundred per day. That’ll get you a check every couple of hours until he flies. Another two hundred for the car, make, model, and tag. I also got a special, today only, for our better customers. If he has a phone from AT&T or Verizon, I can hack into the company’s GPS location server and tell you where his phone’s at, at any given time.”

Soto: “You can do that?”

“For a hundred dollars per check, as many checks as you want, but a hundred dollars each.”

“Do that, and bill us,” Soto said.

“You’re on the clock, starting now,” the College-Sounding Guy said, and he hung up.

When Kort got back in the car, Soto told her about the call. “That there’s a guy worth knowing,” he said.

“Sounds like a ratshit asshole frat boy to me,” Kort said. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I need to get a doctor to look at my buttocks. I think it hurts worse now than it did yesterday.”

“I can make a call down South and maybe they have a guy, but it also might make them unhappy to know you’ve been shot.”

Kort didn’t say anything for a bit, then, “Let’s see what it’s like tomorrow.”

—

THE THIN balding man from State Farm told Lucas that the Benz was totaled—“Seventy thousand miles and not a decent piece of metal on it—not even the roof,” he said. “The interior’s trashed, plus the engine compartment looks like somebody was pounding on it with a ball-peen hammer, and the mag wheels look like somebody used a chain saw on them.”

“Just tell me how much,” Lucas said.

The adjuster told him and the recommended payoff was far too low. Lucas threatened legal action and the adjuster couldn’t quite hide a yawn. He refused to adjust his adjustment and told Lucas his insurance rates would probably be going up, given the nature of the claim, which involved all those bullet holes.

Lucas was still pissed when he walked into the restaurant where Bob and Rae had taken a booth; they were eating salads.

“Tell me something good,” Lucas said, as he slid in next to Rae.

“There’s one pay phone in Elkmont, and at six o’clock the day before yesterday, somebody made a call to Dallas. That was the only outgoing long-distance call from that phone, that day,” Rae said.

“Poole’s in Dallas,” Lucas said. “That’s about the time Stiner would have called Darling, and Darling went right into town and called Poole.”

“Maybe,” Rae said. “Darling does have a cell phone—Mrs. Darling was lying to you—but it’s not up on any network right now. He pulled the battery and probably has a burner by now.”

“So we don’t know if he’s running on his own, going to Canada to shoot a bear, or hooking up with Poole,” Lucas said.

Bob said, “If he is in Dallas, we’re taking all the credit for finding him. Me’n Rae.”

“If you give me partial credit, I’ll tell you what the next step is,” Lucas said.

They watched him for a minute, then Rae asked, “What you got?”

—

“WHAT I HAVE is a name in Dallas—I pulled all the paper I could find on Poole, and there are two guys he worked with, seem to have been friends, who are not in prison or dead,” Lucas said. “One is Derrick Donald Arnold and I have a Dallas address for him. The other is a guy named Rufus Carl Cake, who lives in New Orleans. We need to talk to Arnold, right away.”

Arnold had a history of violence, according to Lucas’s paper—brawling, when he was younger, jobs as a bouncer at a couple of strip clubs. He’d been busted twice and served time for strong-arm robbery and once was arrested but released without prosecution while working as a boat unloader for a marijuana ring in New Orleans. In his association with Poole, he’d apparently worked as an intimidator and the guy who carried heavy stuff.

“He a shooter?” Bob asked.

“On two of his arrests, they took shotguns out of his cars—not bird guns, but tactical pumps loaded with buckshot. No hard evidence that he ever used them.”

“What’s he doing now?” Rae asked.

“Don’t know,” Lucas said. “No law enforcement contacts for the last three years, except for a speeding ticket. The cop who stopped him ran him, and based on his record, asked to search his car. Arnold agreed, nothing was found. Doesn’t look like he’s ever spent much time in straight jobs, though. If we jack him up and find something—anything—we can use that as a hammer. Texas has a three-strikes law.”

“I know a lot of people in the Dallas area,” Bob said. “They could help if we need it.”

“Good. Let’s check him ourselves, before we do that,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to misfire on something and have Poole warned off.”

“What about Cake?” Rae asked. “I know New Orleans.”

“We’ll check him for sure, if we don’t get a hit with Arnold,” Lucas said.

Bob: “What you’ve got is one name in Dallas?”

Lucas said, “No—I also know that before he disappeared, Poole was converting everything he had to gold coins. He supposedly was going to run to Central America or somewhere.”

“Where does that get us?” Rae asked.

“If he didn’t leave the country and if he hasn’t been working, he’s probably been cashing those coins to support himself. When we get to Dallas, first thing we do is check every gold-buying store in the area, see if they know his face.”

“There’re seven million people in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex,” Rae said. “He’ll be a needle in a haystack.”

“But if he’s there, at least we’ll have the right haystack,” Lucas said. “That’s when we go after Arnold.”

Lucas called Washington and talked to Forte, told him about the Dallas connection, and got tickets on a flight into Dallas that afternoon, with rental cars and reservations at another suites hotel.

They were still sitting in the restaurant and when he got off the phone, Bob asked, “How do you do that, man? We never stay in suites.”

“Bowden connection,” Lucas said. “Everybody’s feeling their way along, trying to figure out how tight we are. In the meantime . . . I get perks. If they ever find out we’re not that tight, it’s back to the Holiday Inn.”

“What time are we leaving?” Rae asked.

“Four.”

“Probably ought to head out to the airport after we finish eating,” Bob said. “Takes us a little extra time to get on the planes. We’re flying with all that ordnance.”

—

THEY PACKED UP and headed for the airport, Lucas with one bag, Bob and Rae with one bag each, plus a large wire-reinforced duffel full of guns and armor. They reconvened on the flight side of security at three o’clock. Rae said, “Our tickets are business class.”

“Yeah?” Lucas shrugged.

Bob looked at Rae, then said to Lucas, “Boy, oh boy, you’re my new hero, Davenport. Anytime you need help, call us. And if you only need one of us, call me—fuck Rae.”

“Goddamn short people,” Rae said.