Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “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.

  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, “Whi
le 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.