Campbell screamed again and Kort smashed her face into the floor a few more times, and said, “Give me the DeWalt and the tie-off.”
Kort knelt one knee on Campbell’s back and said to her, “We’re gonna explain here. We need that information, where John is right now. We need a phone number, we need an address. You don’t tell us, we’re gonna start by cutting off your foot, and we ain’t giving you another chance . . .”
As he spoke, Soto was cinching a tourniquet around Campbell’s right foot. Campbell screeched, “Don’t know, don’t know . . .”
“All right, let’s do it the hard way,” Kort said, and she pressed one of Campbell’s legs to the floor and began sawing off her right foot.
—
CAMPBELL NOW WAILED like a fire engine, a long screech that quavered but never quit, and was one reason that neither Soto nor Kort detected the fly in the ointment, which arrived in the form of eleven-year-old Douglas Campbell, who’d been lying asleep, sick and mildly feverish, in his second-floor bedroom.
When Soto and Kort came through the front door and his mother began screaming, Doug woke, disoriented by the screams; but then he recognized quickly enough what they were, that something dangerous was happening, and heard somebody running up the stairs. He rolled off the bed and lay between the bed and the wall. Somebody ran down the hallway, stopped outside the door, then went on, and finally, back down the stairs.
When he was sure the intruder was gone, Doug crept out of the bedroom and down the hallway to a balcony over the living room, where he peeked around a banister and saw his mother facedown in a lot of blood, and a man tying a rope around her ankle.
Doug dropped to his knees, then his belly, and slipped on down the hall to his parents’ bedroom, where he got the Ruger 10/22 rifle out of his father’s closet. He’d shot it with some regularity since he turned six, under his father’s strict eye. His father kept two extended magazines separate from the rifle, stuffed into cowboy boots at the back of the closet. They were hidden as a precaution for when the cousins came over, which they did a couple of times a week. The cousins were a rough bunch, and if they’d found a loaded rifle in the closet, they’d be shooting the place up, and maybe each other, bigger than shit.
Doug was more responsible and so knew about the magazines. He got them from the boots, punched one into place in the rifle, put the other in the back of his Jockey shorts, jacked a round into the chamber, reminded himself about the safety, clicked it off, and walked back to the balcony.
He didn’t know that he should have simply opened fire. He only knew about shooting people from movies, so he poked the rifle over the banister and shouted, “STOP THAT!” and then he opened fire.
The genuine Ruger 10/22 extended magazine held twenty-five rounds of high-speed .22s. Kort and Soto lurched sideways when Doug screamed, and one second later, the .22 slugs were flying around them like so many bees as they scrambled for the door.
Kort made the mistake of slowing to grab the tool satchel and felt one of the slugs slap her across the butt and then they were tumbling across the porch and into the yard and still the bullets didn’t stop. Soto pulled his holstered Sig and said, “I think it’s a kid . . .”
But Kort groaned, “I been shot . . .”
“How bad?”
“Hit in the hip, in the hip . . .”
They were in the yard, thirty yards from the door, when Doug stepped onto the porch with the rifle. Soto yanked his Sig up, way too fast for accuracy, did a little calming thing he’d trained himself to do, and was drawing down on the kid’s chest when a .22 slug slapped past his ear, so close he could feel the breeze. He flinched, yanked on the pistol’s trigger, knew it was way off target, saw the kid drop the rifle magazine and punch in a fresh one, long as a banana, and Kort screamed and they piled into the car, with .22 bullets banging through and ricocheting off the doors, fenders, and window glass.
They sped away, straight down West Main, and the kid didn’t stop shooting at them until they were a hundred yards up the road and he’d run out of ammo.
—
THE CAR was a rental, but there was no possibility of taking it back to Avis with all the bullet holes and dents in it. They’d rented it with fake IDs, so that wasn’t a problem. Knowing that the cops would be looking for them within a few minutes, they took a snaky route across town, Kort screaming with pain: “Jesus, slow down, slow down, take it easy, you’re killing me . . .”
She eventually knelt on the front seat, because she couldn’t bear to sit on it. Once on I-65, they stayed in the slow lane, because the bullet-pocked doors were on the passenger side. On the highway, their car was no longer distinctive—another one of about a billion Toyotas.
They’d taken rooms at a Super 8, where they also had the second car. The motel had been chosen because it was old-fashioned, with room doors opening directly onto the parking lot, so they’d never have to walk through a lobby. Soto let Kort out and as she waddled painfully into her room, he parked the bullet-marked side of the car close enough to their second car that nobody would likely walk between them and see the bullet marks.
He glanced around—nobody paying attention to him—and then took a closer look at the side panels on the car. Three bullets had gone through the trunk and four through the back fender on the passenger side, and one through the glass in the back window. Two more had bounced off the side of the car, and one off the window glass. He couldn’t believe neither he nor Kort had been hit in the car, but the kid had been shooting too low and at too much of an angle.
He collected everything from the car—water and Pepsi bottles, wrappers from a couple of Hostess cupcakes and three Slim Jims, and a Walking Dead comic book, anything they might have touched with bare fingers—and followed Kort into her room. She was in the bathroom, naked from the waist down, and said, as he came in, “I can’t see anything—you’re going to have to look at my ass.”
Not an inviting prospect, but had to be done. Either that, or kill her. He thought about it. He could tell their employers that she’d been mortally wounded and he’d had to bury her body in the woods. They’d probably believe him. On the other hand, they might send another Kort-type to talk to him about it. He decided not to kill her. Not immediately, anyway. He really did hate the bitch.
“It’s killing me,” Kort moaned. “Help me, you fuckin’ moron.”
Soto pulled a washcloth off the rack in the bathroom, soaked it in the sink and squeezed out the excess water, and said, “Lay down on the bed.”
She did and he used the washcloth to wipe away a lot of blood and took a look, a memory he wouldn’t cherish. “Went through one cheek, across your butt crack, and into the other cheek but not through. I think I can see it. There’s a black bump below the skin.” Purple blood was seeping from the three wounds.
“Where? Put your finger on it.”
Soto put his finger on the bump and Kort reached back and felt the bump, kneading it, and said, “It’s the bullet. You gotta get it out.”
“Ah, man, how am I supposed to do that?” Soto asked.
“Knife,” she said.
“I got a knife,” he said.
—
BEFORE HE OPERATED, he walked out to a Walgreens drugstore and bought a bottle of alcohol, a box of extra-large medicated Band-Aids, a roll of extra-wide surgical tape, a bottle of Aleve, a tube of Neosporin, and, almost an afterthought, a pack of single-edge razor blades, which he guessed would work better than his knife. Back at the motel, Kort was still lying on the bed. Soto looked at her butt, shook his head, took one of the razor blades out of the pack, poured some alcohol over it, and said, “This is gonna hurt.”
“It already hurts. Just fuckin’ do it, okay, dipshit? Do it. Gimme a wet wash rag, first. Not the dirty one, a fresh one.”
He handed her a wet washcloth and she rolled it into a tube shape and bit down on it. Mumbled something tha
t sounded like, “Go ahead.”
Soto, with the razor blade in his hand, looked at several approaches—straight in, from the side, a kind of scalping move . . .
Kort spit the washcloth out and demanded, “What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck?”
“Trying to figure out the best way,” Soto said. “I gotta tell you, your ass ain’t the prettiest sight I’ve ever seen. Looks like two basketballs doing a revenge fuck.”
“Fuck you.”
“Put the cloth back in your mouth. I’m gonna cut.”
Kort lay back down and Soto bunched up a layer of fat, with the slug at the top, like an unpopped pimple, and then with the corner of the razor blade, went straight in.
Kort screamed into the cloth, but Soto squeezed up the lump of yellow butt fat and the bullet popped out. So did a lot of blood, though the wound was small. Kort stopped screaming, spit the cloth out, and asked, “You get it?”
“Yeah, I did.” He sounded pleased with himself. “You can wash the holes off yourself. Don’t bother with the brown one in the middle.”
“Fuck you, you asshole.”
“Least I got only one,” Soto said, cackling at his own joke.
Kort washed all four wounds with the alcohol, weeping as she did it, at both the pain and the humiliation. When the skin had dried, she squirted on some Neosporin, put the Band-Aids on, and then a strip of surgical tape, crossing the middle of the Band-Aids.
Soto was lying on the bed, reading the Walking Dead comic book. When she started digging in her suitcase for a clean pair of underpants, he asked, “All done?”
“Fuck you.”
“You’re still bleeding a little. Try not to get it on the sheets. We don’t need any questions.”
“Fuck you.”
—
WHILE SHE got dressed, Soto went back in the bathroom to wash his hands with soap. Lots of soap.
“You know that kid?” Kort asked rhetorically, from the bedroom. “If I ever see that little fucker again, I’m gonna take him apart with my side-cutters. I ain’t jokin’, either.”
“At least you saved the DeWalt,” Soto said, referring to Kort’s battery-powered saw. “That’s a couple hundred bucks right there.”
—
THAT NIGHT, they drove the two cars to an Ace Hardware store, where they bought a gas can, then out to a Mapco Mart, where they filled up the gas can, then back out to the country, where they hosed down the Camry and torched it.
As they drove away, with Kort lying on her side in the backseat, she asked, “You believe in that DNA shit?”
“Yeah, maybe. But anyway, even if it works, some guy told me that fire wipes it out,” he said. “Smart guy, too. We got nothing to worry about.”
By that time, the rental car looked like a firefly in the rearview mirror, burning hard a mile away.
8
THE MISSISSIPPI Bureau of Investigation had e-mailed Lucas a list of people who’d gone to the funeral of Dora Box’s uncle, and he spent all morning and half of the afternoon driving around the south Nashville area, knocking on doors, doing interviews, getting nowhere, on a day that turned out to be too hot for a shoulder holster, gun, and sport coat.
The newspaper obituary, as it turned out, had been placed by the funeral home as a teaser offer for funeral services, so that lead was a dead end.
Most of the people at the funeral had at least known Box, if not well. One woman told him, “I believe that somebody who knew Dora, but didn’t know Jack very well, heard about Jack’s death and called her, but didn’t bother to come to the funeral. I told the same thing to those officers from Mississippi. Wasn’t anybody there, far as I know, who was good friends with Dora. She came alone and left alone, and I can’t recall anyone even talking to her, other than maybe to nod or say hello.”
That jibed with what Natalie Parker had told Lucas.
He’d worked his way through most of the funeral list when Lawrence Post called from the TBI at three o’clock in the afternoon. “We’ve probably got something on those people who killed the Pooles,” Post said.
The TBI had taken a call from a county sheriff’s office about a home invasion that had taken place early that morning in Franklin. The two invaders had tortured a woman by using a hacksaw on her leg.
“Her eleven-year-old son was in the house, they didn’t know about him, he was sick and home from school. When he heard his mother screaming, he got his dad’s gun and opened up on them,” Post said. “We’re looking at hospitals for gunshot wounds, but don’t have anything that sounds good yet. We don’t even know if they were hit.”
Lucas asked, “You got anybody down there?”
“Crime scene support, but no investigator. The local cops have done a decent job of working through the possibilities. The two perpetrators were strangers to Miz Campbell, so it’s not like we have to figure out which friend or enemy did it. They were asking about Miz Campbell’s brother John, who used to run with Gar Poole. I’ll e-mail you everything we got on John Stiner as soon as we get off the phone.”
“The drug people got a lead from somewhere,” Lucas said. “Maybe Miz Poole, before she died.”
“Looks like it. And something else. This kid apparently shot up the car the perpetrators were in. It was only a .22, but the car’s going to look like it was in a hailstorm, according to the sheriff,” Post said. “He said the kid had two twenty-five-round magazines. He fired most of one magazine inside the house, but the other one he fired in the yard and at the car. It could have a couple of dozen bullet dings on it.”
“Make and model?”
“Don’t know. Small, red, probably Japanese. We’ve got people looking for it all over the state and all the surrounding states, so I think we’ll probably find it,” Post said. “I just can’t tell you when.”
“Tell me where I can find the Campbells,” Lucas said. “I’m going down there.”
—
MARILYN CAMPBELL was at the Williamson Medical Center in Franklin, a hospital-looking place of reddish brick and glass, and Lucas found Marilyn Campbell in a private room reading a women’s golf magazine. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her late thirties, she had black bruises across her face, one eye was swollen half closed with corduroy blood bruises around it. Her nose was covered with an aluminum brace, and one leg was wrapped in hard plastic and elevated. Lucas followed a nurse through the door and she looked over the magazine and asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m a federal marshal,” Lucas said. “I’m looking for the people who hurt you, and also for your brother John and a man named Gar Poole, who set this whole thing off.”
Her husband and son had gone to get something to eat, Campbell said, and would be back soon. She’d be happy to tell him about the attack, but confessed that she was still frightened.
“I keep flashing back to it,” she said. “To that woman standing on the porch. I thought she was a Mormon or a Witness or something . . . maybe the gas company, she had a clipboard.”
She told Lucas about the attack, in detail, descriptions of the man and woman who’d attacked her, how the woman had hit her with the steel clipboard, talking faster and faster as she relived it, and the nurse took her hand and said, “We’re getting a little excited here, let’s slow down.” Campbell said to Lucas, “We’re getting excited. The doctors and nurses here keep saying that ‘we’ thing. Isn’t that weird?”
“Supposed to show empathy and that we’re all in this together,” the nurse said. “Of course I didn’t get attacked.”
“It is a little weird, though,” Lucas said to the nurse. “I’ve been hurt a few times and it’s always the we thing.”
The nurse shrugged and grinned and said, “You’ll learn to live with it. Couple days from now, you’ll be saying ‘Our leg still hurts.’”
Campbell turned back to Lucas. “The doctors say the flashbacks will go
away,” she said. “What do you think?”
Lucas said, “Mostly. For most people. I was once shot right under the chin, by a little girl, and I would have died if somebody hadn’t cut open my windpipe with a jackknife.” He touched the scar on his neck. “That happened ten years ago. Right after I got out of the hospital, I’d relive the part where I saw the pistol coming up and then feeling the bullet hit. Now, I’ll have moments when something will touch off a memory of it, but it’s not the same as reliving it. When you relive it, you get the sweats and you can feel the adrenaline pouring into your blood and your heart starts beating hard . . . When you remember it, it’s a picture in your mind, like an old movie. You’re not reliving it. That’s where I’m at now.”
“You think that’s where I’ll get?” Campbell asked.
“Probably,” Lucas said.
“You’re not sure.”
“No. I won’t lie to you, I’ve seen people who relive bad moments forever . . . but that’s rare,” Lucas said. “Really rare. If you’ve got a good healthy family around you, you’ll be okay.”
“What about Doug? He might have shot somebody.”
“Can’t help you with that,” Lucas said. His daughter Letty had shot and killed people, but that was Letty, and Letty wasn’t a typical naïve, well-protected kid. “I think it pretty much depends on the kid.”
Lucas took a call from Lawrence Post at the TBI: “Told you we’d find that car. They drove it out in the woods and torched it. I’m told there’s nothing left to see—apparently soaked it with gasoline and set it on fire. The chances of getting even a fingerprint are down around zero. The seats were incinerated, so we can’t tell if there was any blood inside, if they were hit by a gunshot.”
“Well, hell. The plates still on it?”
“Yeah, it’s a rental, they got it here at the airport,” Post said. “We should be able to get some video, so that might help. But I’m thinking not. Not unless they were dumb enough to go in without hats and sunglasses, and with their own credit cards.”