Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  She tied the blue-and-white-checked material around his forehead and said, “There you go. You look like that picture of Geronimo.”

  Lucas got to his knees, his head aching, his scalp tightening, and said, “Okay, now we know where he’s at. He’s north of the building and east of it. He’s stuck there, because the Border Patrol people are looking out at him. He might be able to crawl in the weeds, but he can’t run.”

  “If I go around to the back end of the building, I can see out there,” Bob said to both of them. And to Rae: “You sit here until you’re sure Lucas is okay. We need to pin this guy.”

  “I’m okay,” Lucas said.

  “We’ll see about that,” Bob said. He jogged away with his rifle, paused at the far corner of the building, then turned it and was out of sight.

  Lucas pushed himself up against the side of the building, his forehead burning from the impact of the brick dust. “When Bob’s in position, we’ll move some Border Patrol people down from the north and across from the highway. We’ll start to squeeze him—it’s just a matter of taking it slow, now. He’ll break and run and then we’ve got him.”

  “Then we’ll kill him,” Rae said.

  Lucas: “That’s what I said.”

  Rae nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You go with Bob. If the guy tries to run, it’ll be handy to have two guns down there.” He handed her the rifle: “Take this back. I can’t even stick my head around this corner. Better that you have it.”

  She took the gun. “What are you going to do?”

  He pointed: “We’ve got these glass windows on both sides of the building. I can stand halfway down the building where I can see up and down that field on the other side. He’d have to be pretty lucky to both see me and be able to hit me through two big layers of glass—but I could see him, clear enough. If I do, I’ll call you and Bob. You’ve got the rifles.”

  “That’s a plan,” she said. She peered through the glass. “Looks like the place is full of what?—washing machines or something? Look like expensive washer-dryers.”

  “It’s supposed to be an art place,” Lucas said. Inside the building, he could see aluminum boxes, probably waist high, several feet wide, and deep. There were a lot of them, in three rows down the length of the building. “Maybe those are vaults, or something. Boxes that the art’s in.”

  “Huh. Weird way to do it. Okay, I’m gone. Don’t get yourself shot again.”

  26

  WHEN THE SHOOTING began in Marfa, Dora Box, Kort, Rosie, and Annie were running west toward El Paso. They’d gone thirty-five miles from the intersection of I-20 and I-10, and the checkpoint, when Box’s cell phone burped. She picked it up, looked at it, and with the other women looking at her, said, “Gar! Are you in Mexico?”

  She listened for a moment, then said, “No! No! Oh, Jesus, Gar . . .” She looked up at the others and said, “The cops are on them. They’re shooting it out. Gar said he doesn’t think they’re gonna . . .”

  She went back to the phone. “Gar! You gotta get a car. Just run through those weeds as far as you can, down the highway . . . then crawl! Crawl! Screw Sturgill! He’s the one who got you into this! You gotta . . .”

  She listened again, said, “I don’t want to hear that . . . I don’t . . . Goddamnit, Gar,” and she began to cry. Poole said something else, and sobbing, she handed the phone to Annie and dropped onto the couch and put her head down, in her hands.

  Annie punched up the speaker so everybody could hear and said, “This is . . . one of her friends. What’s up?”

  “Dora will tell you, but basically, we’re stuck here and there’s a good chance the cops are going to take us down,” Poole said, his voice as casual as if he were talking to a high school class about harmless germs. “We’ll try to hold out until dark, but that’s pretty . . . pretty . . . unlikely. Here’s the thing. We were driving a white pickup truck—Dora knows it—with Arkansas plates, and Sturgill dropped it off behind some kind of art place. It’s a place with big brick buildings with curved roofs. He parked it behind the buildings on the other side of the brick buildings. They’re kinda pink-colored.”

  “I don’t understand that. Give that to me again,” Annie said.

  Poole explained the arrangement of buildings, from what he could see from the bunker. “Okay, you got it? If you go around behind those pink buildings, the small ones, Sturgill said there were two pickups parked back there, both white, and he parked between them. If you can get in there, after dark . . . you might get to it. There’s four million bucks, more or less, cash and gold, under the floor of the camper . . .”

  He explained how the camper’s floor worked, and Annie said, “Uh-huh. Got it. We can find that.”

  “That’s your money back, or most of it,” Poole said. “Dora’s worth more than that, so it’s a fair trade. If you wait too long, the cops are going to find it. But if you can get here tonight, we’ll either be caught . . . or dead . . . or pulling them away from here. Then, maybe you could get at that truck.”

  “We’ll take a look,” Annie said. “We’re going to throw this phone away, right now. If you got anything else to say, you better say it.”

  “One thing. If we do get loose, we’ll leave a message at the Holiday Inn, in El Paso, about where we are.”

  “Got it.”

  “One more thing.” There was a long moment of silence, then, “Tell Dora I love her, I guess. That’s about it.”

  Box looked up and screamed, “No!” and Poole was gone. Box shouted, “Call him back! Call him back!”

  Annie shook her head. “He’s gone, Dora, and we’ve got to get rid of this phone. If the cops get his phone, they’ll track us . . .”

  She was pulling the phone apart as she spoke, ripped the battery out, tossed the pieces on the table. Rosie said, from the driver’s seat, “I’m pretty sure we can get down there from Van Horn, which oughta be coming up quick. Somebody look at the maps . . .”

  —

  THEN KORT spoke up. “Wait a minute. You’re not serious? You’re not going to try to go down there.”

  “Not crazy, ugly girl,” Box shouted at her. “We’ve got to get down there. Maybe there’ll be some way we can help them . . .”

  Rosie said quietly, “We won’t be able to help them, Dora, because we won’t know where they are, and we don’t have any way to get in touch with them. We can go down there and look for the money, see if there’s any way to get to it . . . but we won’t find those men.”

  Box said, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus . . .”

  Rosie was shaking her head: “That’s the fact of the matter.”

  “We know what his number is, we could call him, he’ll keep the phone if he’s on the run . . .”

  Annie nodded this time: “If we can find a phone, we can do that. We’re not going to use my phone or Rosie’s, because that’s the only way we have to stay in touch with the Boss. But we could call Gar if we find a pay phone.”

  “I’m laying down the law,” Kort said. “We ain’t going. We ain’t going for Poole, we ain’t going for that other guy, and we ain’t going for the money. There’ll be cops everywhere, and if anyone sees me, knows me from that TV show, they’re gonna put me in a cage until they send me to the chair. Same for Box. We ain’t going.”

  “I don’t care if it harelips the Pope, we’re going,” Box said.

  “Shut up and sit down, both of you,” Rosie yelled over her shoulder. “If we see anything like a cop, we’ll put you down below. You’ll be safe enough. We’ve run fifty kilos of cocaine through a crowd of dope-sniffing dogs. But if there’s any way to get our hands on that cash, we’re gonna do it.”

  Annie said, “That’s Van Horn up ahead. Look for 90 South. Looks like about an hour run down to Marfa, give or take.”

  Kort slumped back into the couch. “You motherfuckers. We’re gonna die down th
ere,” she said.

  27

  LUCAS MOVED close to the windows, looking in at the storage area, or whatever it was—he had the feeling that he was missing something important about the building, but he didn’t know what it might be. In any case, he could see past the aluminum boxes and out into the field where the gunfire had come from, north and east of the building.

  O’Brien called: “We can’t come in at you like we were trying, but we can come in from the back side of the place and that’s what we’re doing. We’ll have a half dozen guys with you there in five minutes. They’re bringing an extension ladder. We think we can get up on top of the artillery buildings with a sniper.”

  “Be good if we can do it . . .”

  He was cut off by three quick shots from the side of the building and then Rae screaming, and Lucas shoved the phone in his pocket and ran down the length of the building where Rae was dragging Bob toward the back corner.

  She saw Lucas and shouted: “He’s hit! He’s hit hard! We gotta get him outa here, we gotta get him to a medic . . .”

  Lucas ran toward them and squatted over Bob, who looked up at him and said, “Hurts bad. Legs. He got me in the legs.”

  Rae took a folding knife from her pocket and began cutting his pants off, and Lucas saw Bob’s rifle on the ground near the front corner of the building and asked, “Where was the shooter?”

  “Down there.” Rae waved south and east. “Never saw him. We were looking in the other direction, up north. We were sitting ducks.”

  “Poole’s either got a way to get around without being seen, in which case we’re in trouble right here, or there are two of them,” Lucas said. “I bet that fuckin’ Darling’s down here with him.”

  “Then move me,” Bob groaned, and he said, “Ah . . .”

  “I’ll carry him,” Lucas said. “Try to help with his legs.”

  Lucas lifted Bob from under his arms and Rae lifted his thighs, and they trundled around to the back of the building and put him on the ground.

  Bob groaned, “Ah, man,” and Rae had the pants cut off, and they found two large and heavily bleeding through-and-through wounds, on both of Bob’s thighs, eight inches above his knees, apparently from the same shot. He was bleeding steadily, rather than in pulses, so no major arteries had been taken out.

  Lucas got on his phone and called O’Brien: “We need guys here right now,” he said. “We got a guy hit bad in the legs. We need a chopper out of El Paso, I know they’ve got one . . .”

  “Oh, gosh. Oh, gosh. I’ll get it going,” O’Brien said. “You should see our guys coming at any minute.”

  Bob was saying to Rae, “Not a tourniquet, not a tourniquet, plug the holes best you can, I don’t want to lose a leg . . .”

  Then they saw a half dozen Border Patrol guys running toward them, all carrying rifles. One of them knelt next to Lucas and Rae, and he said, “We’ve got an EMT on the way. Where’s the shooter?”

  “Could be two of them,” Lucas said. “Both out in the field, one right, one left. Stay here behind the buildings. Let’s move Bob to one of your trucks.”

  “Better to wait for the EMT, they’ll bring a stretcher . . .”

  Lucas nodded and said to Rae, “Stay with him until they take him . . .”

  Rae’s rifle was back where she’d dropped it while dragging Bob. Lucas scrambled on his hands and knees toward the gun, figuring if Rae hadn’t been shot at, she’d probably been out of the shooter’s sight when she dropped the rifle. He picked it up and scurried back behind the building with the others.

  “What are we doing?” Rae asked.

  “I’ll talk to O’Brien and get something worked out.” Lucas looked up at the sky. “It’ll be dark in an hour or so and then we’ll have a real problem.”

  “Couldn’t be much worse than this,” Rae said. She looked down at Bob, who was lying back, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands curling and uncurling with the stress and pain.

  “Yeah, it will be. Those guys will sneak out of here, or try to. If they get out of that field, there’s only one way they get completely away—find somebody with a car, kill ’em, and drive away. We either get them now or we could have some dead civilians on our hands. Maybe a lot of them.”

  Lucas took five minutes to place the border patrolmen along the corners of the two domed buildings, plus one in the middle of each building, looking through the glass walls, trying to spot the shooters. The patrolmen included the sniper, who was carrying a bolt-action .308, but had no way up on the roof. “When we heard the shooting, we left the ladder with the trucks. Think we should get it?”

  Lucas asked, “How many guys to carry it?”

  “Two can carry it, but we can’t go up the sides. The bottoms of those curved roofs are too steep. I’d have to get on at one of the ends.”

  Lucas looked at the buildings, shook his head: “Can’t guarantee that he couldn’t see you, if you went up at an end. If he can, you’d be a sitting duck on the ladder. Let’s stay on the ground.”

  “Your call,” the rifleman said.

  —

  TWO EMTS came sloping from behind the smaller salmon-colored buildings, carrying a stretcher. They bent over Bob and one said, “Not as bad as I was afraid of. Let’s block up the holes and get him the hell out of here.” And to Bob, he said, “You’re gonna be all right, pal. We’ve seen worse than this at a Saturday night cockfight.”

  “Not that they’re good,” Bob said.

  “No, no . . .”

  “How about the helicopter?” Lucas asked.

  “On the way, or will be in the next couple of minutes,” one of the medics said. “Flying time is a little more than a half hour each way. They’re putting a trauma doc on board.”

  Lucas said to Bob, “Take it easy,” and to Rae, “Stay with him.”

  Bob tried to smile and grunted, “Yeah,” and, “Shoot that motherfucker.”

  “Doing our best,” Lucas said. He jogged away, on his phone to O’Brien as he ran. “We need to get together,” he said.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “How many trucks and guns do you have?”

  —

  LUCAS GOT the idea from pheasant drives: he wasn’t much of a hunter, but he’d heard enough about the drives from people who were, like Virgil Flowers. O’Brien had a few ideas of his own, and a half hour before sunset, seven Border Patrol trucks bumped off the highway down into the dry field south of where the second shooter was.

  “Don’t have much time,” Lucas shouted to the drivers. “We have to move right along. You shooters, you guys stay close to the trucks—don’t stick anything out but one eyeball.”

  The trucks arrayed themselves across the field, spaced fifteen yards apart, giving them a sweep of more than a hundred yards. A border patrolman stood on the back left corner of each truck carrying a rifle, using the truck for cover.

  The truck drivers sat in the passenger seats, low enough that nothing but their eyes were above the dashboard. Each of them had a traffic cone on the driver’s side, the tip of the cone pressed against the gas pedal. It was ugly and awkward, but it worked. They had no way to brake, but wouldn’t be traveling any faster than two or three miles an hour. Even at that slow pace, they’d cover a hundred yards in a bit more than a minute, and only had to cover a couple hundred yards to sweep the field.

  The drivers were put in the passenger seat because everybody agreed that if the shooter opened up on the trucks, he was most likely to try to hit the driver . . . in the driver’s seat. They used traffic cones to push on the pedals because it was what they had that would work.

  When everybody was lined up, Lucas looked at the lowering sun and yelled, “Let’s do it.”

  Lucas was behind the truck closest to the buildings, carrying Bob’s rifle. The trucks began edging forward, Lucas and the border patrolmen walking behind, their rifles a
lready at their shoulders, ready to fire.

  —

  DARLING HAD shot at the two cops, the short white guy and the tall black woman, hitting one, he thought, from the way the woman screamed and the guy went down. He hoped that the Border Patrol hadn’t yet become fully involved with lots of personnel, that if he could rid himself of the cops from the silver SUVs, he might have a little more freedom of movement.

  When the heavyset cop went down and was dragged out of sight, he began moving north, as quick as he could without giving away his position, snaking along in the grass. He stopped once, to call Poole and tell him what was going on.

  “I don’t know where you are,” Poole said. “I think I might have hit one of the cops. I saw him peeking out from behind one of the buildings. If there were only two or three of them in those trucks, we might have knocked out two of them.”

  “I’m going to get as close as I can to those glass buildings,” Darling replied. “If I get the chance, I’ll rush them, see if I can take them out. It’s about our only chance.”

  “All right. I’m in this concrete bunker. I can see the tops of both of the roofs. If they try to put a sniper up there, I’ll clean him off for you. Let me know if you break through.”

  “Soon as it happens,” Darling said. “We’ve only got maybe thirty or forty minutes until sundown.”

  Darling hung up, and still with a bit of hope in his heart, he continued crawling north, trying not to leave a rippling motion in the grass and weeds.

  He was almost even with the back of the nearest building when he heard the trucks rushing down the highway. He risked a look over the weeds, saw the line of Border Patrol trucks heading south and then turning out onto the field. He said, “Goddamnit,” aloud, crawled a few feet into a dense cluster of dead dark brown weeds, and used the cover to take a longer look.

  The trucks were spreading out across the far end of the field, their headlights pointing toward him. They were going to try to flush him, he thought—and they’d do it, too, if he let them get close. The brown weeds were looser than the yellow grass, and after considering his dwindling options, he carefully moved into a prone shooting position, lined up on the driver’s-side window of the middle truck, and fired a single shot.