Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  Rosie said, “Moving now.”

  —

  ROSIE WAS on Allen Street, where she could get easily to either of the two most likely highways. When she got the call from Annie, she pulled the RV onto Bankhead, a block ahead of the highway patrol car, and accelerated away, six miles over the speed limit, headed for a street called Lake Forest Drive. Lake Forest had a big clump of trees north of Bankhead . . .

  Annie saw the RV pull out ahead of them and ahead of the patrol car. They were a couple of hundred yards back, with one car between them and the cop. She said, “All right, pass now.”

  Kort had stopped complaining. She was hanging on the steering wheel with both hands, arms tense as ski-lift cables. She pulled up close to the car ahead of them, then swung out, across the double-yellow no-passing stripes, and back in behind the cop car.

  “Faster now,” Annie urged from the back. Kort heard her drop the window. “Faster now, faster, faster, faster . . .”

  Kort was coming up fast, could sense the cop watching them in his rearview mirror. She couldn’t see his eyes, but his head was turned toward it.

  “Take him,” Annie shouted. She’d pulled a blue cowboy bandanna up around her face, under her sunglasses. She was wearing a long-billed fishing hat to cover her hair. “Take him, goddamnit, take him . . .” and she touched the back of Kort’s neck with the barrel of the gun.

  Kort accelerated again, hard, pulling alongside the cop car. The cop was looking at them now, frowning, his face only six feet away, and Annie swung the machine gun out the window and blew his front tire, and as the cop car screeched off the road, she shot out the rear tire and simultaneously screamed, “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  Kort jammed on the brakes and Annie banged against the front seat and swore, and then she popped the car door and she was out and running to the cop car, which had swung in an uncontrolled circle off the highway, and she was on it, the machine gun pointing through the driver’s-side window at the cop, who was trapped in his seat, and she was screaming, “Let her out or I’ll kill you. Let her out or I’ll kill you . . .”

  The cop’s face was ashen with fear, looking down the barrel of the M16, two feet from his head. Annie heard the lock pop on the back door, and she yanked the handle, and she moved the gun toward Box and shouted, “Out. Out and get in the red car. Out and get in the red car. Get out or I’ll kill you right here.”

  On the highway, a brown Porsche SUV had slowed, the driver watching the scene at the cop car. Box got out of the backseat of the cop car, hands still cuffed behind her, and jogged toward the red car. The Porsche had now stopped in the road, and Annie lifted the rifle and blew out its front tires, then fired another quick burst at the back fender of the cop car, rattling through the metal like a steel drum.

  Box was in the backseat of the red car, and Annie piled in behind her and Kort took off.

  She drove hard for two minutes, pulling fast away from the cars now piled up behind the Porsche. “Faster,” Annie shouted. “Faster, goddamnit, or I’ll kill you.”

  Kort had the gas pedal welded to the floor, then braked hard at Lake Forest Drive, took a left, accelerated past the trees, then off the road and into them. As she did it, Rosie was coming down the street in the RV. The three women in the red car, led by Kort, with Annie running hard, half-dragging Box, piled into the RV that was already rolling back to the corner.

  Rosie took a right, back toward the place where the highway patrolman was now standing outside his car, talking into a radio. A half dozen cars, including the Porsche, were now off the road beside the cop car. Annie was kneeling next to the driver’s seat and said, “Don’t speed, but gotta hurry before they shut off traffic, gotta hurry . . .”

  They went past the cluster of cars as two cop cars, light bars flashing into the afternoon, screeched around the corner off Fort Worth Highway. Rosie turned on Allen, drove out on the Fort Worth Highway, turned left. They passed the jail, and then Main Street, going straight west out of town.

  Kort and Box were lying on the RV’s floor, and now Box asked, “Who are you? Who are you?” though she was afraid she knew.

  Kort said, “We want our money back.”

  Box said, “Oh . . . fuck . . . no.”

  —

  A HALF HOUR LATER, as they pulled into the Walmart Supercenter in Mineral Wells, the College-Sounding Guy called to say, “The cops don’t have any idea of what you might be driving. And don’t tell me. You’ve stirred up a hornets’ nest and I’d get as far away from there as you can, as quick as you can.”

  Annie, Rosie, and Kort gathered around Box, and Annie said, “You’re going to have to tell us where the money is. ’Cause if you don’t, this lady”—she tipped her head at Kort—“is going to go to work on you with some, you know . . .”

  “Home improvement tools,” Kort said, with a gleam in her eye. “You know—hammers, saws, drills, box cutters. That sort of thing.”

  Rosie said to Annie, “We might need some plastic sheets.”

  “We’re at a Walmart, what better place to get them?”

  Box, still cuffed, said, “I’ll tell you where your money is, if you take the cuffs off. I’m not going to try to run, you’re all meaner than I am. My arms and shoulders are killing me.”

  Rosie and Annie looked at each other, and then Annie said, “If you try to run, we’ll kill you. We’re not fooling about this, Dora.”

  “I believe you,” Dora said.

  “I’m okay with taking them off,” Annie said to Rosie. To Box: “We’ve got some handcuff keys. I don’t know why.”

  “Sure you do,” Rosie said. “Because of April.”

  “Let’s not talk about April,” Annie said. “If I never see that chick again, it’ll be way too soon.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds sorta hot,” Box said.

  Rosie and Annie looked at her, and Annie said, “Interesting.”

  —

  WHEN THE CUFFS were off, and when Kort had stopped complaining about how that made everything harder, and working on Box with her tools would get some straight answers, Box rubbed her wrists and said, “It’s this way. My boyfriend and I . . .”

  “Gar Poole,” Kort said.

  “. . . yeah, Gar. We split up and we are looking for a new place to hide, after Dallas came apart. Gar’s got the money. We’re supposed to meet in New Mexico, tomorrow or the next day. He thinks the cops have me now, but I have a phone number for him. We can call, you can listen in. He’ll trade the money for me.”

  “You sure of that?” Annie asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  Annie took out a cell phone, but Box shook her head. “Not that phone.” She pointed her finger in the general direction of Walmart. “They got all the cheap phones we need, right in there. We make one call, we throw it away.”

  Kort, for once, was on her side. “That’s right,” she said. “Everybody tracks phones.”

  “I knew that,” Annie said. “Let’s go get some phones.”

  23

  LUCAS, astonished, got off the phone and turned to Bob and Rae and said, “Well, the dope gang showed up.”

  Bob: “Where?”

  “The cop who was taking Box to Fort Worth—they shot up his car, grabbed Box, and took off. Nobody has any idea where they are.”

  Rae opened her mouth but nothing came out for a minute, then she sputtered, “You gotta be . . . How?”

  “Pulled up beside the guy on the highway, blew his tires out with an automatic weapon, stuck the gun in his face, grabbed Box, and took off. Two women did it, one of them was probably this Kort, don’t know the other woman, they were both wearing masks. Nobody got hurt, but the highway patrol’s deeply pissed.”

  “There’s one glass ceiling that’s gone—now we got dope cartel gun-women,” Bob said.

  Rae said, “She’s dead. Dora is.�
��

  Lucas ran both hands through his hair and said, “Losing my shit, here. Nothing we can do about it right now—let’s move.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever he is. Poole. Gotta get the posse going,” Lucas said.

  They talked to Forte, who already had the posse moving.

  “We’ve had a complication,” Forte said. “That burner that Poole’s carrying is T-Mobile and their coverage isn’t so good in southwest Texas. He shows up, then he drops out. Still looks like he’s heading toward I-10, he ought to be there soon, but right now, we can’t see him.”

  “Can’t sit on our ass, Russ. Goddamnit, we need to get on top of him. Help us out here.”

  “We’re talking to the Texas Highway Patrol people about a roadblock on I-10, and they’re willing to do it. Once he gets past a certain point, he won’t be able to get off. The guy who’s organizing things for the patrol is a Captain Tom Johnson. He wants to meet you at a Shell station out on the interstate . . .”

  —

  THEY RENTED two GMC Terrains, Bob and Rae in one, Lucas in the other. Once on the interstate, heading east and south, they passed a sprawling industrial complex on the south side of the highway, with distant hills that Lucas thought must have been in Mexico. A half an hour after they left the airport, Lucas led the other two off the highway at the Fabens exit and found Johnson inside, chatting with a cashier. Johnson was a tall man, with a wind- and sunburned face, and a brushy blond mustache. They took a table in the back and Johnson asked, “You heard about the problem in Weatherford?”

  “We heard,” Rae said. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a problem, I’d call it a disaster. Anything new?”

  If Johnson was offended, he didn’t let on: “They found the car back in some woods, a red Camry. They must’ve had another vehicle hid out to pick them up.”

  “Of course they did,” Lucas said. “It’s Kort. Probably the same gun she used to shoot up Soto.”

  Johnson didn’t know about that, so they told him about the murder at the town houses. “Sounds like cartel business,” he said. “They’re getting bolder all the time. A few years ago, they would have written the money off. Not now. Now they come and get it.”

  Lucas outlined Poole’s probable route across Texas, and Johnson said, “We knew that much. What we thought was, we’d set up a checkpoint at the intersection of I-10 and I-20, which is down the road a way. Once they get that far, they’re locked into the highway. We see anybody turning around, we’ll run them down. I’ve got eight cars available, two men in each one, all of them with rifles.”

  “When are you setting up?” Lucas asked.

  “Soon as you say, ‘Go.’”

  “Go. And we’re going with you.”

  “After we get a couple of burritos,” Rae said. “I haven’t had anything to eat since that half-a-flapjack.”

  They ate burritos and Lucas bought a cooler, ice, and a six-pack each of Diet Coke and water, and some power bars, and they followed Johnson southeast across desert and then up into low yellow desert mountains, including one that looked like God hadn’t actually so much made a mountain as He’d emptied out a giant sack of God-sized gravel, and then they crossed more desert toward the intersection of I-10 and I-20.

  —

  JOHNSON SETTLED into an easy hundred miles an hour, but the run out to the intersection took almost an hour and a half. They passed a few buildings on the way, and an occasional gas station, but only one substantial town at Van Horn, but that was it. I-10 and I-20 came together in a wide looping knot, and the patrol had already blocked off I-10’s access farther west toward El Paso, and also the I-10 ramp to I-20.

  Johnson led them to the eastern-most checkpoint, where traffic, mostly eighteen-wheelers, was backed up a quarter mile. Lucas got out in the dirt, thought the temperature must be close to eighty-five or ninety degrees. He was still wearing a sport jacket, dress shirt, slacks, and loafers. As he stripped off the jacket, Bob came up and said, “At least it’s a dry heat.”

  Forte called: “He’s on I-10 now. We got another thing going—there was a call into his phone and he took it. The call came through a tower in Mineral Wells, which is west of Weatherford.”

  “That’s Box, trying to negotiate, if the cartel’s got her,” Lucas said.

  “That’s what we think here. The phone’s still there and we’ve got a half dozen patrol guys and some Rangers closing in.”

  “Bet it’s a burner.”

  “No bet. But Jesus, Lucas, this is the most fun I’ve had in years. I’m talking to people everywhere. This is something else . . . I’ve got four or five guys here with me, watching the action. We got a guy putting pushpins in a map, for Christ’s sakes. You need anything we can do, call.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I’m standing in the desert in a pair of Cleverley calfskin loafers that are slowly melting into the sand, so you know . . . cherish the air-conditioning.”

  “Ah, stop bitching, it’s gonna be a great story,” Forte said. “We’ve been looking for Poole since Bush 43. This is gonna be good. If you get him, of course. If you don’t, you know, I never heard of you.”

  “Glad to know that somebody’s got my back,” Lucas said.

  —

  FORTE CALLED AGAIN twenty minutes later: “We spotted him again, but only briefly. He was in Fort Stockton. Now he’s gone again, but he shouldn’t be, unless he trashed the phone.”

  Lucas got his iPad and walked over to Bob and Rae’s truck and got in the back, in the air-conditioning. “They lost him again, in Fort Stockton, but T-Mobile’s supposed to have coverage along most of I-10, even if it doesn’t on the back highways into Fort Stockton. Forte thinks he might have trashed the phone.”

  “Why would he do that?” Rae asked. “If he’s negotiating for Box, he’s gotta have a phone that they can call.”

  Lucas called up a map of Texas. The Verizon data came through grudgingly, but eventually he was looking at the road network between Fort Stockton and El Paso. There wasn’t much of one. Lucas turned in his seat and said, “What if he’s turned south? What if he’s going down this way”—he drew his finger across the Google map—“and plans to cross into Mexico . . . here. I think that’s a border crossing, it looks like the road goes across.”

  He spread the map, and called up a satellite view.

  “Presidio. Never heard of it, but it’s a crossing,” he said, looking down at the satellite view. He traced a route, the only route, that would get Poole from Fort Stockton to Presidio. He touched the map again: “Whatever he does, he’s got to go through this place.”

  Rae knelt on the front seat to look: “Marfa. I’ve heard of that. It’s some kind of art town, I think.”

  “That can’t be right,” Lucas said. “It’s pretty much nowhere. Who’d go there to look at art? What kind of art?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure I’m right.”

  “Too bad we don’t have an easily accessed, widely distributed source of information so we could look it up,” Bob said.

  Lucas looked down at the iPad in his hands, said, “Fuck you,” and brought up the Wiki for Marfa, Texas. “Says it’s a major center for minimalist art,” Lucas said. He looked at the landscape in the satellite photo of Marfa. “At least that seems right. They got minimalist.”

  “Make a call,” Bob said.

  “I don’t want to miss this,” Lucas said, looking out at the traffic jam.

  “We’re gonna miss it,” Rae said. “We’re sitting here on our asses, all those cute highway patrolmen are gonna make the bust when it happens. What we’ll actually do is shake their hands and say, ‘Good job.’”

  “Screw that,” said Lucas. “If we leave right now and if that asshole is headed to Marfa, we’ll beat him.”

  “Gotta drive fast,” Rae said.

  “We can do that,” Lucas said.
“Give me a couple of minutes.”

  —

  HE HOPPED OUT of the truck, walked over to Johnson, who was drinking one of Lucas’s Diet Cokes and sweating mightily, and asked, “You got this?”

  “If he shows, we got it,” Johnson said.

  “His phone’s off the grid. I’m worried that he’s turned south, heading for this Presidio place, down on the border.”

  “Think he’s got a passport?” Johnson asked. He rolled the cool Coke bottle across his forehead.

  “His girlfriend did,” Lucas said. “A good one, under a fake name. I’m thinking that me and Bob and Rae should head down to this town Marfa, take a look at cars coming through. If we go right now, we should beat him down there. Not by much, but by some.”

  “I’ll send a car with you,” Johnson said. “Give you an extra gun and some extra speed going down. I’ll call around, see if I can shake loose some Border Patrol guys to help out at Marfa. If they’ve been planning to cross into Mexico, they might have been looking at Presidio the whole time. There are lots of people looking at faces in El Paso, on both sides of the border. And Juàrez’s got a bad rep, if that would work into their thinking.”

  “Then we’re going,” Lucas said. “Get him, though. If he comes through here, get him.”

  “We surely will,” Johnson said. “And you take care of your own self.”

  —

  THE HIGHWAY PATROLMAN who went with them was named Dallas Guiterrez, a big rangy guy who seemed happy to be moving. “There’s some interesting road between here and Marfa,” he told them. “I mean, the road surface is good, but there are some curves where you can get thrown. Don’t push me too hard and I’ll get you down there without breaking your necks.”

  “Lead on,” Bob said.

  Rae rode with Lucas, offered to drive in case he needed to talk on the phone or look at his iPad. He took her up on it, and she tucked in behind Guiterrez and Bob came up behind them.

  The countryside was as barren as anything Lucas had ever experienced, hard desert outside the car windows, with low mountains that looked like they’d been worked over with God’s own blowtorch, shimmering in the heat. About a billion squashed rabbit corpses littered the shoulders of the road, tumbleweeds were jammed into ranch fences. Despite the heat and rock, the only comparable landscape Lucas had crossed, in terms of bleakness, was on a winter run to Canada through the lowlands of Northern Minnesota, which looked like a black-and-white photograph.