Lucas and Dean couldn’t see that, but they could hear it, the doors popping open and slamming, and they could hear a woman shouting inside and the big dog began barking hysterically, which set off the other big dog, which was apparently behind a fence. A few seconds later, a thin freckled man burst through the back door.
Lucas hit him in the eyes with the flash and simultaneously stuck out a foot. The man tripped and fell facedown in the dirt, and Dean slammed the door and said, “Don’t you dare get up, Jimmy.”
The freckled man rolled onto his back, Lucas’s light still in his eyes, and said, “Is that you, Manny?”
“Yeah, it is. You steal that Blingray, Jimmy? Probably did, you dummy. Gonna make that dentist cry a river if you already cut it up. C’mon, roll over on your stomach, let me see those wrists, you know what we’re doing here.”
Lucas said, “You’re acquainted.”
Dean said, “Oh, yeah. Jimmy here spent more time in the county jail than most of the jailers.”
“It ain’t like I enjoy it,” Jimmy grumbled. He rolled over on his stomach and lifted his wrists so Dean could cuff him.
Lucas pulled open the back door and he and Dean marched Jimmy into the Quonset, where the troopers and deputies were looking at Ralph and Natalie Parker, who were sitting on an old church pew. A gray-muzzled German shepherd sat unleashed between them, and Natalie Parker was stroking his head with one hand and holding a toddler with the other.
Ralph Parker, a stocky, red-faced man with a pompadour, had been handcuffed, but Natalie hadn’t been. The toddler, who was looking solemnly at all the cops, was teary but not quite crying. The place smelled of welding torches and engine oil.
One of the deputies crooked a finger at Lucas and they went off to a corner and the deputy asked, “What do you want to do?”
“As I see it, if this car was stolen, you gotta take Parker in. And this Jimmy guy probably stole it. You could take Natalie in or leave her with the kid. Leaving her with the kid is probably the best idea, even if she knew her old man was running a chop shop, because somebody’s got to take care of the boy, and he looks like he’s pretty well taken care of.”
“That’s my idea,” the deputy said. “I thought you might want to talk to her about her brother, while she doesn’t know what we’re thinking about doing with her. Maybe you could tell her about the Pooles.”
Lucas grimaced. “Oh, boy. Okay. Let’s walk her over to the office, talk to her there.”
—
THEY DID THAT. Ralph Parker called to his wife, as they separated them, “Don’t say nothing, Nat. Wait till we get Comfort over here.”
Comfort, the deputy said, as they left the Quonset, was a lawyer, but not a very good one.
—
IN THE OFFICE, Lucas and the deputy put Natalie in the single office swivel chair, still holding on to the toddler, who now was as silent as a cat, and pulled two other wooden chairs around to face her. Lucas said, “Natalie, the cops back there have read you your rights, so you know you don’t have to talk to us. But you need to . . .”
She put her hands over the toddler’s ears: “Fuck that,” she said.
Lucas tried to take it easy: “You don’t have all the information you need, and that information is really bad. Really, really bad.”
Natalie Parker was a lean, auburn-haired woman, pretty without makeup, wearing jeans and a plaid cotton shirt. She looked uncertainly at Lucas’s face, then said, “What happened? Did something happen?”
Lucas said, “We think your brother Gar and some other people robbed a drug counting house and killed five people. This was last week . . .”
“I don’t have anything to do . . .”
Lucas held up a finger to silence her, and continued. “. . . The drug people have come looking for their money. That’s what we think. They started with your parents.”
Parker went pale: “They didn’t hurt them?”
“I’m afraid they did,” Lucas said.
“Did they kill them?”
“Yes. We found them an hour ago,” Lucas said. “That’s why we came down here. We were afraid your mom might have given up your location.”
Parker squeezed the toddler tight, said, “That goddamn Gar. He had to go and rob some drug guys, didn’t he? He just had to go and do it.” She put her face into the kid’s neck and she started to cry, and then the kid started to cry, and he looked at Lucas and the deputy with open fear. Lucas and the deputy sat for a moment, saying nothing, and then the deputy said, “Why don’t you hand me that boy, there? I’ll hold him for you.”
The deputy took the kid, who struggled a bit before settling down, the deputy patting him on the back, and Natalie said, “I gotta tell Ralph. Let me talk to Ralph.”
“I’ll see if they’re still here,” Lucas said.
—
RALPH PARKER was still in the Quonset and Lucas got Dean to bring Parker out and uncuff him, and Lucas told him what had happened and Parker wrapped up his wife and held her for a while, but told Lucas, “We don’t none of us know where Gar is. If we did, and we told you, he’d come here and kill us. That ain’t no foolin’. He’d cut our throats in one New York minute.”
—
LUCAS AND THE DEPUTY took Natalie back to the office, sat her down again, the deputy still holding the kid. Lucas said, “I’m a U.S. marshal and I’m looking for your brother. If you cooperate, Gar will never know. If the local DA decides to charge you in this car thing, I will speak privately to the judge in your case and tell him that you cooperated in something a lot more important than a car theft. I think that could keep you out of jail and with your boy. Furthermore, given what we know now, I think we might save the lives of some of your friends.”
“How is that?”
“We don’t know how much money Gar stole, but it was probably a lot. Maybe millions of dollars,” Lucas said. “These drug killers are not going to stop looking for him, not until they’ve done everything they can to get it back and punish the robbers. They’ve got to do that as a warning to anyone else who might try to rip them off. They figure the same way I do—somebody around here, one of Gar’s relatives or old friends, will know how to get in touch with him. Once they get that connection, they can find him.”
Natalie Parker’s face hardened; she didn’t have any love left for her brother: “I’ll tell you the same thing that Ralph did,” she said. “If Gar found out I talked to you, he’d cut my throat. You know his girlfriend cut off a man’s head one time? And that was just over a few dollars owed.”
“I heard that, about Dora,” Lucas said. “I have no interest in you, Natalie. I don’t have much interest in Ralph, either, but he’s in the hands of the local law, now. I think we might arrange things so that you can stay with your boy and not have to go to jail tonight. I’m going to need your help to get that done, though.”
Sullen, still breaking down from time to time, she reached out and took her son back on her lap, cupped her hands over the boy’s ears, and said, “You lawmen can be real fuckin’ assholes, you know that?”
“Wasn’t us who killed your parents,” the deputy said. “Wasn’t us who was out there cutting some honest man’s stolen car into pieces.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you, anyway,” she said. She took her hands away from the boy’s ears and said to Lucas, “I’ll tell you what I know, but it ain’t much.”
—
“I CAN’T TELL YOU where Gar is,” Natalie said. “My folks had cops coming around a couple times a year, asking that, like we’d know. Garvin left home when he was sixteen and we haven’t seen much of him since and not at all for the last five years, ever since they said he did that thing in Chattanooga—not like they ever proved anything.”
Although she hadn’t seen Gar Poole for five or six years, she had seen Dora Box, two years earlier at Box’s uncle’s funeral.
?
??I was kinda spooked, because we knew that she was probably still with Garvin and we knew the police were looking for her, too. She didn’t stay long—didn’t come to the church, just come out to the cemetery and threw some dirt on the coffin, cried a bit, and went on her way. Her mom and pop passed away earlier, so she’s the last of that line.”
She explained that Box’s parents and her uncle had once lived in adjacent houses, not far down the street from her parents, which was how Box and Poole first connected in high school, and how the Pooles got to know them. Box’s mother had died of breast cancer ten years earlier and her father had sold the house and rented an apartment in Nashville, and died a few years later of debilitation related to alcohol and drug abuse. She’d gone to those funerals, too.
“Who would have called Dora Box to tell her that her uncle died?” Lucas asked.
“That’s a puzzle,” Natalie said. “Dora don’t have any relatives left, to speak of. There were about ten or twelve people at the funeral—I guess it would have been one of them. Her uncle wasn’t a famous man, though somebody paid for an obituary in the local shopper newspaper, ’cause I saw it there. Could have been somebody who saw the notice.”
Lucas made a note: find out who was at the funeral and who paid for the obituary.
“What about Gar? He must have a few friends . . .”
She was shaking her head. “Not around here. He used to fight in school, didn’t have anybody real close. There was a guy named Jim Jacobs who came over a couple of times—he was in my class, so he was two years younger than Gar, but they both liked cars. I don’t know where he lives anymore. Gar knew some bad people that he met in reform school, but he didn’t bring them around. Then when he got caught robbing that music place . . . that’s where he was gone from us. We didn’t know either of those guys he was caught with. Never heard of them. He’d moved away from us. We were stick-in-the-muds. He wanted fast women, fast cars, and all that.”
“Dora was a fast woman?”
Natalie rubbed her nose, then said, “You know, I don’t know how that came about. She went to school with us, too, but her and Gar never got together until, well, must have been ten years later. She was popular in school, she was the homecoming queen. Then she got married to her high school boyfriend, he was a big popular guy, too. That lasted about three or four years, then they got divorced, and she was selling retail for a while . . . never went to college, or anything—everybody thought she would.”
“You knew her pretty well?”
“No . . . She lived down the street from us. I wasn’t one of the popular kids, though, so we hung out with different people. We’d stop to say hello, like that, if we ran into each other after graduation. I think that homecoming queen business . . . I think she thought that she was all set up for an exciting life and it didn’t turn out that way. She had to go to work in a Sherwin-Williams paint store. Gar changed that, he was all about excitement.”
Gar didn’t have other long-term girlfriends she knew about. He’d had that reputation for violence in high school. Not just for being tough, but maybe a little crazy. Later on, when he’d come by the house after his prison term, he sometimes had women with him, but she didn’t remember any names. “It was a different woman, every time, until Dora. I think Gar kinda got off on the idea of going out with a homecoming queen. You know, everything in life is still about high school. Then again, there was some things said about Dora . . .”
“Like . . . ?”
“She did like men, but I heard she also liked women, and sometimes she’d treat Gar to a two-fer,” Natalie said. “That’s something Gar would like. A lot. He was always sort of a hound. Anyway, that two-fer business, that was a rumor—I never asked Gar about it, or nothing.”
—
IN THE END, Lucas got a half dozen names that Natalie didn’t think would produce anything useful, plus the name of the Baptist church where Dora Box’s uncle’s funeral was held.
One of the sheriff’s deputies talked to the relevant local prosecutor, who agreed that Natalie Parker should be left with her son, but that she should be told she was still liable for any of her criminal activities.
Ralph Parker and Jimmy were taken to the county jail, and Lucas headed back to the motel to think about his next move and get some sleep.
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 d
oor 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?”