Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “This ain’t no Garvin Poole,” Carlton said. “This here is a man name of Will Robb . . .”

  Lucas showed him the mug shot and he scratched his head and said, “Damn. That sure looks like Will.”

  He’d rented the house to a man he knew as William Robb, he said, and he didn’t know why the phone would be in the name of a Marvin Toone. “I didn’t pay for a phone, or have anything to do with it,” he said.

  He collected two thousand dollars a month from the man he called Robb, and said that Robb had told him that he was a disabled veteran who’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was living on a government disability pension from having breathed in poisonous gas.

  “Pretty nice house for two thousand,” Rae remarked.

  Carlton flushed and said, “He was a war hero, I gave him a break on the rent.”

  “That’s real patriotic of you,” Rae said.

  Carlton had no idea what kind of vehicles Robb and his wife owned, except that one was a white pickup. “He’d drop the rent off at my office, that’s the only time I ever saw the man. I came by every six months or so to check on the property and there was never a problem. They seemed like a real nice couple. The kind of renters you hope for.”

  —

  WHEN CARLTON LEFT, everything slowed down: there was no record of a Marvin Toone or a Chuck/Charles Wiggin with the DMV, although there were several William Robbs. Lucas called Forte to get him working on Dallas-area William Robbs, but told the others, “Won’t be one of them. I can feel it.”

  “Fake names are cheap, like burner phones,” Bob said. “They got a different one for everything. Phones and names.”

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “We need to get on these guys. In twelve hours of driving, Texas speeds, they could be a thousand miles from here. By tomorrow night, they could be in California or Florida and we’ll be starting all over.”

  “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” Rae said.

  Lucas scratched his cheek, looked blankly at the back fence, then said, “Well, first, go change into some marshal clothes. Then, we all knock on doors. Talk to neighbors. We can at least find out what kind of vehicles they’re driving, and what color they are.”

  “I got the old guy across the street,” Rae said. “He seems like a curtain-peeker.”

  —

  THERE WERE five properties that touched Poole’s: one on each side, one directly behind, and two at the back corners; three more houses across the street had a straight look at the driveway going back to the garage. Nobody in any of the houses had useful information, including the old guy across the street.

  Robb, they said, had a gray car—or maybe dark blue—his wife had a black convertible, and they also had a white pickup, a Ford. Then a teenager who’d heard the cops were looking for information about Robb’s car came down and told them that it was a metallic gray five-liter Mustang, less than a year old. A beautiful car, he said, and Robb’s pride and joy; and Robb was a cool guy, played a mean guitar.

  All of which added up to slightly more than nothing.

  Forte called: “You got him. The prints are a direct hit—Garvin Poole and Dora Box.”

  “We knew that, but good to know for sure,” Lucas said. “Trouble is, by now they could be two hundred miles from here.”

  —

  THE CRIME SCENE PEOPLE were still working the house, and Lucas, Bob, and Rae were standing in the driveway, comparing notes, when the old guy from across the street came ambling over. He had a furry white mustache and clear blue eyes. Rae said, “Mr. Case. How’re you doing?”

  “You said if I thought of anything, let you know. I thought of something,” Case said.

  “Yeah?”

  He pointed across the street, to the house next to his: it was an imposing place, faux-Colonial with white pillars hovering over a circular front drive. “That’s the Smith place . . .”

  “Talked to them two hours ago,” Bob said.

  “They tell you about the wedding last year?”

  Bob, Rae, and Lucas exchanged glances: hard to tell where this might be going. Rae asked, “The wedding?”

  “Their daughter got married. About time, in my opinion, she was getting long in the tooth and had sort of passed herself around town. But that’s neither here nor there. They got married down at St. John’s and then they had a reception out to the country club and then they had an ‘at home’ pool thing for members of the wedding party.” He pointed again at the Smith house and the circular drive. “The wedding party was all in limos, maybe ten, twelve black limos, and they all came up that circular driveway, one at a time, two or three minutes part. All the people were getting out, kissing each other, going inside. A wedding photographer was out taking movies of them coming up and getting out of the cars.”

  Bob said, “Yeah?”

  Lucas said, “The cameras were looking across the street to this driveway.”

  The old man jabbed a finger at Lucas: “Bingo. They didn’t invite me to the wedding, but they invited me over to the at-home reception because they thought I was lonely, my wife being gone, and also because they planned to play loud rock music all night and they didn’t want me complaining to the police. I was standing there on the porch watching them make the movies and I distinctly remember Will Robb coming and going in his truck.”

  Bob said, “I’ll go get the movies,” and headed across the street at a trot.

  Rae said, “Mr. Case, you are a sweetheart.”

  —

  BOB DID EVENTUALLY get the movies, but it wasn’t all that simple. At first, the Smiths weren’t at home anymore, but Case told them that Emily Smith was a realtor, and they managed to locate her. She came home and gave them a compact disc with the wedding movies on it, and watching on the Smiths’s high-resolution television, they could see license plates on Poole’s white pickup, but the movies were not quite steady enough to make out the numbers. The plates were white, so almost certainly from Texas.

  Bob and Rae wanted to send the movies to the FBI’s digital imaging experts in Washington, but Lucas suggested that they first try the wedding photographer.

  The photographer wasn’t working that day, but agreed to meet them at his studio. He turned out to be a short, stout, solemn-looking man who dressed all in black, including a black fedora and a black string tie with an onyx slide. He brought the movies up on a computer screen, grabbed several frames of each instance where the license tags appeared, and began enhancing them in Photoshop.

  The numbers never did get particularly clear, but enough numbers were clear enough in the different frames that by putting several frames together, they pieced out a good tag number.

  “If the FBI has the capabilities that they’re rumored to have, they should be able to get them a lot clearer,” the photographer told them. “But remember this—I hold the copyright on these photos, not the Smiths. You can use them, but you can’t publish them. I don’t want to see these on TV.”

  “You’re being less generous than you might be,” Rae observed.

  “I gotta eat. If somebody’s going to put them out to the TV stations, it’s gonna be me and I’m gonna get paid.”

  “Don’t do it without talking to us first,” Lucas said. “If you put them out there, and the suspects see them, they’ll ditch the plates and we’ll come bust you for interfering with a federal investigation and maybe accessory after the fact.”

  “I’ll talk to my attorney about that . . .”

  “Sure, do that,” Lucas said. “If he needs further clarification, tell him to call me.”

  —

  BACK IN THE CAR, Lucas called the Rangers at the Poole/Robb house, gave them the tag number, and they promised to wallpaper the entire state with it, and all the adjacent states. Lucas warned the Rangers that the people in the truck were armed and willing to kill.

  “So are we,” the Rang
er said.

  “Before you do that—kill them—I’d like to talk to them,” Lucas said.

  “We’ll do what we can,” the Ranger said. “I’m making no promises.”

  —

  WHEN LUCAS was off the phone, Bob asked, “What are the chances?”

  “We’re maybe fifty-fifty to get a hit,” Lucas said. “How many white Ford trucks in Texas?”

  “About a billion, give or take.”

  On their way back to the house, a crime scene cop called from the town houses where Soto had been shot. “We picked up a lot of brass from the .223 used to kill Soto. Most of it had been polished clean, but we found two almost identical thumbprints on two cartridges. We got back a solid hit for a Charlene Marie Kort. The feds have no other record of her, other than a couple of speeding tickets given to a woman with that name in Florida.”

  “If there was no other record, where did her prints come from?” Lucas asked.

  “The feds had them, but they were submitted as part of a background check by a security guard company in Tallahassee, eight years ago. That’s all we know.”

  “And we don’t know whether this Kort actually was the shooter, or whether she just handled the ammo at some point,” Lucas said.

  “No, we don’t. But the ammo with the prints is identical to the ammo that had been polished, and the prints look to us to be fresh. They’re very clear, they’re not interrupted by scratches or rubs that you’d expect if the shells had been handled a lot. If the shells are polished, we figure there can only be a bad reason for that—it’s what you expect from a really careful holdup guy, or a professional shooter. Like this Soto guy. Somebody else might not be so careful, pressing a cartridge down into a magazine.”

  “Okay, I get that,” Lucas said. “And since the other person is a woman, and Charlene Marie Kort certainly sounds like a woman . . .”

  “Yes. We think you should look up Charlene Marie Kort.”

  Lucas called Forte and gave him the name.

  —

  “NOW WE WAIT,” Lucas said. “Hope there’s a lot of football on TV.”

  “Could be some intense hoops back at the hotel,” Rae said.

  “Could be,” Lucas said.

  Bob was shaking his head. “Something’s going to happen,” he said. “We got momentum. Either this Kort is going to turn up or we’ll get a hit on the plates.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” Rae said.

  20

  DORA BOX woke up at four o’clock in the morning, listened to Poole breathing beside her. They’d gone to bed early—Sturgill Darling always went to bed early, being a farmer—and now she was wide awake, alert, ready to go. She lay as still as she could for five minutes, then crept out of bed in the dark, got dressed, went to the door, and peeked out. Nobody in the hall.

  She scurried down to her own room, where her suitcases were, pulled the bedcovers around, tossed the pillow to the foot of the bed, so that it looked like the room’s occupant had had a restless night, then headed for the bathroom to begin her morning rituals.

  A lot of free-floating stress, she thought, as she washed her face. This would be a tough day and potentially a dangerous one. They didn’t know anything about what the federal marshals or the drug killers were doing, so they’d be flying blind.

  On the other hand, Poole was confident in their maze of phony IDs. “They might eventually break them down, but by that time, we’ll have new ones in a new place.”

  Box believed him; or believed in him. He hadn’t been wrong about much, in the time she’d been with him. Not until the Biloxi robbery, anyway. She thought, If only he hadn’t done Biloxi . . .

  The night before, they’d agreed to stop at the storage unit in Dallas, pull out the truck for Box, and help her load a few pieces of furniture in the back.

  She’d finished her shower, got dressed, and headed back to Poole’s room. As she opened the door, the alarm clock went off. Poole shut it down and a moment later was up and looking at her.

  “Been up long?”

  She shook her head: “Half an hour. I’m all packed. You hit the bathroom, I’ll start putting your bag together.”

  “Don’t forget to search the room,” he said jokingly.

  “Never.” Wherever they went, whatever they were doing, Box always searched the motel rooms before they left. Once, years before, she’d discovered a partially read paperback that Poole would have left behind. On two other occasions, she’d found pornographic magazines under mattresses, and while interesting, they belonged to somebody else.

  “Call Sturgill, make sure he’s up,” Poole said. He yawned, stretched, and touched his toes.

  “Yes.”

  She called and Darling was ready to go. “You need help carrying stuff out to the cars?” he asked.

  “If you want to, that’d help,” she said. They’d divided the money and gold the night before, about two-thirds to go with Poole, the other third to be packed in her car, neatly layered in two carbon-fiber suitcases. Darling looked wide awake when he knocked on the door. Between them, they got everything but Poole’s duffel bag out to the cars and locked away.

  “Still dark,” she said, looking up at the bright overhead stars. “I’m hardly ever awake at this time of day, unless I’ve stayed up overnight.”

  “It’s early for me, too,” Darling agreed. “I usually get up around five-thirty. That’s the prettiest time, especially in the summer. Dew on the grass, birds waking up, air smells clean.”

  “If we can get Gar moving, we can be in and out of Dallas before it gets light,” Box said.

  They were walking back across the parking lot when Poole came down the stairs, carrying his duffel bag. “Let’s just go,” he said. “We can eat on the road.”

  Box insisted on checking the motel room one last time, to make sure they weren’t leaving anything; Poole and Darling waited impatiently until she got back. She said, “We’re good,” and they were on I-35 by four forty-five, traveling fast.

  —

  TWO HOURS LATER, they were at the storage units. Box traded her Audi for the pickup, backed down the narrow alley to another storage unit, and Poole and Darling helped her load a favorite table and chairs in the back and covered it all with a blue plastic tarp, tied tightly into the truck bed. Poole left his Mustang in another bay and loaded his share of the gold and money into Darling’s truck.

  Darling waited while Poole and Box said good-bye. “I’ll see you in New Mexico,” he said. “Once we’re there, we’ll be okay.”

  “Goddamnit, Gar, I wish we didn’t have to split up,” Box said, leaning into him.

  “It’s safest this way. We should be okay, we’ve still got a jump on them, but if one of us gets stopped . . .”

  “I know, I know . . .” They spent a minute kissing good-bye, Box’s arms wrapped around Poole’s neck, until Darling called, “Sun’s coming up.” Poole pushed her away and said, “New Mexico.”

  “New Mexico,” she said, and got in the truck.

  —

  ALTHOUGH their separate routes would be roughly parallel, Poole and Darling took the longer run. They planned to go south from Dallas on Highway 281 to Burnet, then west until they picked up I-10 into El Paso. Box would take I-30 through Fort Worth and then I-20 most of the way across west Texas until she also hooked into I-10 to El Paso. El Paso bordered New Mexico to the north and west, and Mexico to the south. They all had passports: if worse came to worst, they might be able to hide the money in the States and cross the border to Juàrez, Mexico, at least long enough to slip the American law.

  The sun wasn’t quite up when Box left the storage units and had just peeked over the horizon when she got on I-30. From there it was smooth sailing out on I-30 and then I-20, heading southwest. She’d decided she’d stop for breakfast at Abilene, and then push on. The manhunt would be in the Dallas area. The
farther away she got, the better off she’d be.

  Poole called at eight. “We’re outa town. How’re you doing?”

  “Doing good. I’m on I-20. Thinking about breakfast at Abilene.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, babe.”

  Then everything went to hell, and all at once.

  She didn’t see the highway patrolman until she was right on top of him. She’d crossed a bridge, where low trees crowded right up to the highway, and there he stood, a radar gun in his hand. His car was parked behind him, off the side of the road.

  Box tapped the brake, saw that she was no more than two or three miles an hour over the speed limit—she was in the slow lane, being passed regularly by most of the traffic—and her first thought was, Okay.

  Then she looked in the rearview mirror and saw the highway patrolman running for his car. She was a quarter mile down the highway before he got to it, and another few hundred yards when the light bar came up and the patrol car hit the highway. She had no doubt in her mind, he was coming after her, and that was confirmed when he moved into the same lane.

  She said, “Shit,” and with panic tight around her heart, she floored the gas pedal. There was no way she’d outrun him, not on the highway—she could see him closing—and a few seconds later, saw an exit sign coming up. She took the exit, Highway 919 North, and a sign that said “Gordon.”

  There was no town at the end of the exit ramp and the cop was getting very close, hitting the end of the exit ramp as she made the turn onto 919. Still coming.

  On 919, she pushed the truck as hard as she could, tried to get the phone up to call Poole, fumbled it, saw it drop into the passenger foot well: no way to get it.

  “Oh my God,” she cried. The cop was no more than a hundred yards behind her, and still closing. To her left, a dirt road cut off into the scrubby trees, and she said, again aloud, “Fuck it,” and took the turn. By the time she got straight, the cop was right on her bumper, siren wailing into the morning. There’d been no rain for a while, and she started throwing a cloud of dust and could see the cop back a ways, and up ahead, an even narrower track. She took that one, deep into the woods, crashed across a dry creek bed, powered away, saw the cop hit the dry bed, get across it, still coming.