1
GARVIN POOLEslipped out of bed, got his lighter off the fireplace mantel, and walked in his underwear through the dark house to the kitchen, where he took a joint out of a sugar jar, then continued to the garden door.
He opened it as quietly as he could, but it chimed once, not an alarm so much as a notification. He stepped out onto the patio and continued along the flagstone walk to his work shed.
Poole was an inch shy of six feet, with the broad shoulders and big hands of a high school wrestler, which he’d never been, and now, a hint of a hard beer gut. He still had thick reddish-brown hair over blue eyes and used a beard trimmer for the three-day look. Womenliked him: he couldn’t go to Whole Foods without picking up a conversation.
The flagstones underfoot were cool but dry; not much rain this year. The moon was up high and bright over the garden wall, and he could hear, faintly, from well off in the distance, the stuttering midnight sound of Rihanna singing “Work.” He opened the shed door, turned on the light, sat down in the office chair, fired up the joint, and looked at the guitar he was building.
He’d been sitting there for a half minute or so when Dora Box said, “Gar?” She stepped through the open door, buck naked, the way she slept. “Whatcha doin’?”
He said, “Come on, sit down.” She sat in a wooden chair and didn’t cross her legs and he took a long look and then said, “I’m going back to work. One time.”
“Oh, boy.” Now she crossed her legs. Box had a hard time getting through the day without being rubbed or squeezed, but business was business.
“It might have been a mistake, coming here,” he said, waving the joint at the workshop. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, for the last month or so. I like it, but we should have left the country. Gotten out completely.”
“There’s no other place you like that we could go,” Box said. “Costa Rica was supposed to be the best, but you thought it sucked. Snakes. Oh, God, snakes. Anyway, you don’t even like most of theStates, Gar. Where’d we go that we’d like?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Someplace crookeder than here.”
“You know a place crookeder than Dallas?”
“Sure. There are places in this world where you can pay the cops to kill people for you,” he said. His voice squeaked as he simultaneously tried to talk and to hold the smoke in his lungs. “Where you can do anything you want.”
“You wouldn’t want to live in those places. What brought this on?”
Poole took a drag on the joint and said, “I put ten years of money into gold, and now I go around trying to cash the gold out and there aren’t enough places to do that, not inside a day’s drive. Every time I cash a coin, the guys are giving me looks, you know? I’ve been back too many times. Theyknowwhat I’m doing, that I’m cashing out hot money. They don’t say anything, but theyknow.”
“We could drive somewhere else,” Box suggested. “Oklahoma City, Houston...”
“Basically the same problem. People looking at you, remembering you,” Poole said.
Silence for a while, then Box said, “I thought the gold was smart.”
“I did, too, back at the start. The cops were tearing up everything south of Kentucky, looking for me, and gold seemed... flexible. Good anywhere. Maybe I was thinking about it too much.”
They’d had variations of the talk before. Gold coins were anonymous, portable, no serial numbers. He could get small bills for gold, it kept its value over time, and it was salable almost anywhere. He hadn’t seen the problem with being looked at and remembered.
“I didn’t see that coming, cashing out month after month. We need ten thousand a month to keep our heads above water, that’snine or ten coins a month right now,” he said. “If we were in the right country, we could cash it all out at once, set up a phony company. Pretend we earned the money, give ourselves salaries, pay taxes, and maybe someday come back to the States under different names.”
“Sounds sketchy,” she said, and, “Gimme a hit.” He passed the joint, and she took a hit, held it, breathed out, bit off another one, passed it back, uncrossed her legs, and unconsciously trailed her fingers across her pussy. The soft smell of marijuana went well with the fleshy damp odor of the nighttime garden. “If you’re thinking about moving us out of the country, then why are you thinking about taking a job?”
“Because I reallydon’twant to leave here. The job’s an alternative,” Poole said.
“Tell me.”
“Sturgill called. He sees an opportunity.”
“How much?”
“Can’t tell from a distance, but he thinks at least Two or Three. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more.” He orally capitalized the numbers. “Two” meant two million. “Three” meant three million.
Box shook her head. “That much, it’s gotta be risky.”
“Sturg says it’s pretty soft.”
“Sturg... Sturg always knows what he’s talking about,” Box conceded. “When would you do it?”
