7
SOTO AND KORT left the Nashville hotel at six o’clock the next morning, Soto’s pistol tucked under the front seat, Kort’s tool kit sitting behind the backseat, along with a clipboard with some magazine pages clipped to it. Kort could feel her heart thumping as they headed south on the interstate: the power flowing through her nerves caused her to tremble with something like desire.
Soto, on the other hand, grew quieter and colder. He said, “Remember the move—hit her, slide sideways to let me in, you slam the door.”
“I got it, I got it,” Kort said.
—
THEY’D HIT Poole’s parents the night before last, and the results had been disappointing. They had gotten to the Pooles’ suburban house well before nine o’clock, cruised it twice, looking for eyes, then parked in the street in front of the house.
Kort had led the way to the porch, carrying her clipboard. Unlike most clipboards, which are made from lightweight fiberboard, Kort’s was handmade from quarter-inch steel plate. After a final check, Soto had leaned against the front wall of the house, while Kort said, “Here we go,” and rang the doorbell.
Margery Poole came to the door a few seconds later, a frown on her face. By Nashville suburban standards, it was late for an unexpected visit.
She saw Kort with the clipboard, asked, “Yes?” and Kort lifted up the steel sheet and whacked Margery Poole in the face. Poole flew backward into a short hallway that led to the living room, where her husband was watching a ball game.
Kort stepped aside as soon as Poole went down, a move they’d choreographed, and Soto went past her with the gun up. Kort moved inside and slammed the door. Soto went to the living room, where Kevin Poole was halfway out of his easy chair, and when he saw Soto’s gun, he went sideways toward a magazine shelf and stuck his hand in and before Soto could say a thing, his hand came back out with a revolver in it and Soto had no choice but to shoot him in the head.
Kort said, “What?”
“He had a gun,” Soto said. “What about the missus?”
“Shit. Couldn’t you have shot him in the hand or something? Be a lot better if we had two of them.”
“You don’t fuck around when the other guy’s got a gun,” Soto said. The expert talking.
What was done, was done. They dragged Margery Poole into the living room and went to work on her.
—
CUTTING UP Margery Poole had been entertaining, but they had gotten only one name they thought might be worthwhile. That name was John Stiner, who, like Poole, was another man on the run. They didn’t know where he was, but that was what the College-Sounding Guy did.
Twenty hours later, the College-Sounding Guy called Soto with a name: he didn’t know where Stiner was but he’d located Stiner’s sister, Marilyn Campbell, wife of a hardware store owner in Franklin, Tennessee, farther down south of Nashville.
Soto called Kort and told her they’d be starting very early the next morning.
—
THE CAMPBELLS lived in a faux-historic Americana white frame house, with pillars, on West Main, with a broad green yard. Kort and Soto were outside the house early enough to see Andy Campbell leave for the store. Any kids should have already left for school, which meant that Marilyn Campbell should be alone in the house.
“What do you think?” Kort asked.
“There’s quite a few cars going by, so make sure you get right on top of her,” Soto said. “As soon as she goes down, I’ll be right behind.”
“Bring my tool kit.”
—
MARILYN CAMPBELL opened the screen door to an ungainly young woman standing on the porch with a clipboard. She said, “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. Could I speak to a Mr. Andrew Campbell?”
“Andy’s not here right now . . .”
“Good,” Kort said. A half second after Campbell realized the woman was wearing plastic kitchen gloves, Kort slammed the steel-plate clipboard into Campbell’s face.
Campbell, stunned, blinded, her nose broken, went down on the floor, on her back, and Soto was around the corner and up the porch steps and on top of her. After Kort slammed the door, they dragged her, still stunned but screaming now, blood coming out of her mouth.
Soto slapped her hard, with an open hand, once, twice, three times, screaming, “Shut up, bitch, shut up bitch . . .” and then flipped her onto her stomach and pulled her arms around behind her, and Kort wrapped her wrists with duct tape.
Soto said to Kort, “I’ll run the house.” He took out his pistol and jogged through the first floor, then up the stairs to the second floor. There were four bedrooms and a home office on the second floor. The master bedroom was empty, and so were two others, one apparently a schoolgirl’s room, with stuffed animals and a quickly made bed, and the other a boy’s room, with soccer gear littering the floor, and the bed a mass of tangled blankets and sheets.
The last bedroom was a guest room, neat and untouched, with an empty smell about it. Soto ran back down the stairs.
Kort asked, “We clear?”
“We’re clear.”
Kort was straddling Campbell’s back and now she grabbed the other woman’s hair and slammed her face into the floor hard enough to break her nose all over again, and shouted, “Where’s your brother, bitch? Where’s John? We know you know . . .”
“No, no, no, no . . .” Campbell was facedown in a puddle of blood.
“Gonna cut your foot off. Gonna cut you to pieces, and start with your foot . . .”
Soto had brought a canvas tool satchel through the door with him. Now he went to it and asked Kort, “How you want to start?”
Campbell screamed again and Kort smashed her face into the floor a few more times, and said, “Give me the DeWalt and the tie-off.”
Kort knelt one knee on Campbell’s back and said to her, “We’re gonna explain here. We need that information, where John is right now. We need a phone number, we need an address. You don’t tell us, we’re gonna start by cutting off your foot, and we ain’t giving you another chance . . .”
As he spoke, Soto was cinching a tourniquet around Campbell’s right foot. Campbell screeched, “Don’t know, don’t know . . .”
“All right, let’s do it the hard way,” Kort said, and she pressed one of Campbell’s legs to the floor and began sawing off her right foot.
—
CAMPBELL NOW WAILED like a fire engine, a long screech that quavered but never quit, and was one reason that neither Soto nor Kort detected the fly in the ointment, which arrived in the form of eleven-year-old Douglas Campbell, who’d been lying asleep, sick and mildly feverish, in his second-floor bedroom.
When Soto and Kort came through the front door and his mother began screaming, Doug woke, disoriented by the screams; but then he recognized quickly enough what they were, that something dangerous was happening, and heard somebody running up the stairs. He rolled off the bed and lay between the bed and the wall. Somebody ran down the hallway, stopped outside the door, then went on, and finally, back down the stairs.
When he was sure the intruder was gone, Doug crept out of the bedroom and down the hallway to a balcony over the living room, where he peeked around a banister and saw his mother facedown in a lot of blood, and a man tying a rope around her ankle.
Doug dropped to his knees, then his belly, and slipped on down the hall to his parents’ bedroom, where he got the Ruger 10/22 rifle out of his father’s closet. He’d shot it with some regularity since he turned six, under his father’s strict eye. His father kept two extended magazines separate from the rifle, stuffed into cowboy boots at the back of the closet. They were hidden as a precaution for when the cousins came over, which they did a couple of times a week. The cousins were a rough bunch, and if they’d found a loaded rifle in the closet, they’d be shooting the place up, and maybe each other, bigger than shit.
Doug was more responsible and so knew about the magazines. He got them from the boots, punched one into place in the rifle, put the other in the back of his Jockey shorts, jacked a round into the chamber, reminded himself about the safety, clicked it off, and walked back to the balcony.
He didn’t know that he should have simply opened fire. He only knew about shooting people from movies, so he poked the rifle over the banister and shouted, “STOP THAT!” and then he opened fire.
The genuine Ruger 10/22 extended magazine held twenty-five rounds of high-speed .22s. Kort and Soto lurched sideways when Doug screamed, and one second later, the .22 slugs were flying around them like so many bees as they scrambled for the door.
Kort made the mistake of slowing to grab the tool satchel and felt one of the slugs slap her across the butt and then they were tumbling across the porch and into the yard and still the bullets didn’t stop. Soto pulled his holstered Sig and said, “I think it’s a kid . . .”
But Kort groaned, “I been shot . . .”
“How bad?”
“Hit in the hip, in the hip . . .”
They were in the yard, thirty yards from the door, when Doug stepped onto the porch with the rifle. Soto yanked his Sig up, way too fast for accuracy, did a little calming thing he’d trained himself to do, and was drawing down on the kid’s chest when a .22 slug slapped past his ear, so close he could feel the breeze. He flinched, yanked on the pistol’s trigger, knew it was way off target, saw the kid drop the rifle magazine and punch in a fresh one, long as a banana, and Kort screamed and they piled into the car, with .22 bullets banging through and ricocheting off the doors, fenders, and window glass.
They sped away, straight down West Main, and the kid didn’t stop shooting at them until they were a hundred yards up the road and he’d run out of ammo.
—
THE CAR was a rental, but there was no possibility of taking it back to Avis with all the bullet holes and dents in it. They’d rented it with fake IDs, so that wasn’t a problem. Knowing that the cops would be looking for them within a few minutes, they took a snaky route across town, Kort screaming with pain: “Jesus, slow down, slow down, take it easy, you’re killing me . . .”
She eventually knelt on the front seat, because she couldn’t bear to sit on it. Once on I-65, they stayed in the slow lane, because the bullet-pocked doors were on the passenger side. On the highway, their car was no longer distinctive—another one of about a billion Toyotas.
They’d taken rooms at a Super 8, where they also had the second car. The motel had been chosen because it was old-fashioned, with room doors opening directly onto the parking lot, so they’d never have to walk through a lobby. Soto let Kort out and as she waddled painfully into her room, he parked the bullet-marked side of the car close enough to their second car that nobody would likely walk between them and see the bullet marks.
He glanced around—nobody paying attention to him—and then took a closer look at the side panels on the car. Three bullets had gone through the trunk and four through the back fender on the passenger side, and one through the glass in the back window. Two more had bounced off the side of the car, and one off the window glass. He couldn’t believe neither he nor Kort had been hit in the car, but the kid had been shooting too low and at too much of an angle.
He collected everything from the car—water and Pepsi bottles, wrappers from a couple of Hostess cupcakes and three Slim Jims, and a Walking Dead comic book, anything they might have touched with bare fingers—and followed Kort into her room. She was in the bathroom, naked from the waist down, and said, as he came in, “I can’t see anything—you’re going to have to look at my ass.”
Not an inviting prospect, but had to be done. Either that, or kill her. He thought about it. He could tell their employers that she’d been mortally wounded and he’d had to bury her body in the woods. They’d probably believe him. On the other hand, they might send another Kort-type to talk to him about it. He decided not to kill her. Not immediately, anyway. He really did hate the bitch.
“It’s killing me,” Kort moaned. “Help me, you fuckin’ moron.”
Soto pulled a washcloth off the rack in the bathroom, soaked it in the sink and squeezed out the excess water, and said, “Lay down on the bed.”
She did and he used the washcloth to wipe away a lot of blood and took a look, a memory he wouldn’t cherish. “Went through one cheek, across your butt crack, and into the other cheek but not through. I think I can see it. There’s a black bump below the skin.” Purple blood was seeping from the three wounds.
“Where? Put your finger on it.”
Soto put his finger on the bump and Kort reached back and felt the bump, kneading it, and said, “It’s the bullet. You gotta get it out.”
“Ah, man, how am I supposed to do that?” Soto asked.
“Knife,” she said.
“I got a knife,” he said.
—
BEFORE HE OPERATED, he walked out to a Walgreens drugstore and bought a bottle of alcohol, a box of extra-large medicated Band-Aids, a roll of extra-wide surgical tape, a bottle of Aleve, a tube of Neosporin, and, almost an afterthought, a pack of single-edge razor blades, which he guessed would work better than his knife. Back at the motel, Kort was still lying on the bed. Soto looked at her butt, shook his head, took one of the razor blades out of the pack, poured some alcohol over it, and said, “This is gonna hurt.”
“It already hurts. Just fuckin’ do it, okay, dipshit? Do it. Gimme a wet wash rag, first. Not the dirty one, a fresh one.”
He handed her a wet washcloth and she rolled it into a tube shape and bit down on it. Mumbled something that sounded like, “Go ahead.”
Soto, with the razor blade in his hand, looked at several approaches—straight in, from the side, a kind of scalping move . . .
Kort spit the washcloth out and demanded, “What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck?”
“Trying to figure out the best way,” Soto said. “I gotta tell you, your ass ain’t the prettiest sight I’ve ever seen. Looks like two basketballs doing a revenge fuck.”
“Fuck you.”
“Put the cloth back in your mouth. I’m gonna cut.”
Kort lay back down and Soto bunched up a layer of fat, with the slug at the top, like an unpopped pimple, and then with the corner of the razor blade, went straight in.
Kort screamed into the cloth, but Soto squeezed up the lump of yellow butt fat and the bullet popped out. So did a lot of blood, though the wound was small. Kort stopped screaming, spit the cloth out, and asked, “You get it?”
“Yeah, I did.” He sounded pleased with himself. “You can wash the holes off yourself. Don’t bother with the brown one in the middle.”
“Fuck you, you asshole.”
“Least I got only one,” Soto said, cackling at his own joke.
Kort washed all four wounds with the alcohol, weeping as she did it, at both the pain and the humiliation. When the skin had dried, she squirted on some Neosporin, put the Band-Aids on, and then a strip of surgical tape, crossing the middle of the Band-Aids.
Soto was lying on the bed, reading the Walking Dead comic book. When she started digging in her suitcase for a clean pair of underpants, he asked, “All done?”
“Fuck you.”
“You’re still bleeding a little. Try not to get it on the sheets. We don’t need any questions.”
“Fuck you.”
—
WHILE SHE got dressed, Soto went back in the bathroom to wash his hands with soap. Lots of soap.
“You know that kid?” Kort asked rhetorically, from the bedroom. “If I ever see that little fucker again, I’m gonna take him apart with my side-cutters. I ain’t jokin’, either.”
“At least you saved the DeWalt,” Soto said, referring to Kort’s battery-powered saw. “That’s a couple hundred bucks right there.”
—
THAT NIGHT, they drove the two cars to an Ace Hardware store, where they bought a gas can, then out to a Mapco Mart, where they filled up the gas can, then back out to the country, where they hosed down the Camry and torched it.
As they drove away, with Kort lying on her side in the backseat, she asked, “You believe in that DNA shit?”
“Yeah, maybe. But anyway, even if it works, some guy told me that fire wipes it out,” he said. “Smart guy, too. We got nothing to worry about.”
By that time, the rental car looked like a firefly in the rearview mirror, burning hard a mile away.