“I’d like a quarter-mil,” Kort said. She thought about it, and asked, “What if we can’t find him and we get nothing back?”
“Then we get nothing. But they pick up all the expenses.”
“They know who robbed them?” Kort asked, as she sucked down a Mexican Coca-Cola.
“The College-Sounding Guy says it’s probably a man named Garvin Poole. He’s a holdup man and killer. The cops have been looking for him for ten years,” Soto said. “Problem is, nobody knows where Poole’s at. They do know he’s probably got his girlfriend with him. Her name is Dora Box.”
“How are we gonna find them?” Kort asked. “We’re not the cops.”
“The College-Sounding Guy is going to help out. He’s in all the cop files. The thing is, Poole can’t be found, but his relatives are out there like sittin’ ducks. That’s where you come in.”
Kort nodded and said, “Okay. Gonna have to think about it. Maybe read up some.”
“Read up? What’s to read up about?” He didn’t quite sneer at the idea.
“On the other jobs, the Boss just wanted somebody hurt bad, so the word would get around. We didn’t carewhenthe sucker died. If we need to get some information out of somebody, I’m gonna have to be more careful. Stretch it out.”
“Makes you kinda hot, doesn’t it? Thinking about it?” Soto said. “You ever been laid?”
“Fuck you,” Kort said. She sucked the last of the Coke out of the bottle, pulled the straw out and crumpled it in her fist, pushed it back in the bottle. She didn’t know why she did that, but always had. “When do we get the names?”
“Anytime now. The College-Sounding Guy says he has to do some research. Shouldn’t take long. Go rent a car, I’ll let you know. Oughta be ready to roll tonight.”
—
THE COLLEGE-SOUNDING GUYwas a computer hacker also employed by the Boss, and who had valuable entrée to almost any police files, and lots of other files as well. He’d gotten a half dozen fake IDs for both Kort and Soto, and credit cards that actually worked for two months. The amounts they paid for his services were fairlysmall—a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars each time, which made Kort think that he might have a lot of accounts.
They had a phone number for him and nothing else. Kort imagined him sitting in his mother’s basement, lots of shadows around, surrounded by Orange Crush bottles and sacks of Cheetos. In real life, when they called, he was usually listening to soft-rock music, like Genesis, or somebody.
When they called the Boss, on the other hand, there was no sound but the Boss’s baritone voice, and a very faint electronic twittering.
Kort didn’t mind talking to the College-Sounding Guy, because he had a workaday voice and casual attitude: pay me the money and I’ll get you the information. The Boss, on the other hand, was remote and disembodied, and extremely courteous, and for that reason, mysterious and threatening.
—
KORT AND SOTOleft the restaurant separately, Soto going first. They’d rent cars for the job, although the cars they rented wouldn’t be used on the job—they’d rent a different set of cars for that. Lots of cars meant lots of ways out, if the shit hit the fan.
Kort got hers at the airport, drove to her apartment, forty minutes away, threw everything out of the refrigerator but some bottles of water, took the garbage around back to a dumpster. That done, she watched a couple of hours of television and was getting into aFriendsrerun when Soto called.
“We’re going to Tennessee. I’ll see you there tomorrow night, in Nashville. About an eight-hour drive. You get a car?”
“Yes.”
“The College-Sounding Guy made reservations for you at the Best Western at the Nashville airport, under the Sally Thomas name.”
“I’ll call you when I get in,” Kort said.
She rang off and went to her computer: time to do a little research. Soto had been right about one thing: thinking about the jobdidget her a little hot.
5
LUCAS LEFT ST. PAULafter dinner on Sunday, driving into the rising moon. As a night owl, he didn’t mind driving past midnight, as long as he had a motel reservation. He took that one short day, plus most of Monday, to get to Nashville, watching the autumn leaves turn from yellow and red in Minnesota and Wisconsin, back to a dusty green by the time he crossed the Tennessee border.
He’d never been to Nashville. The name to him mostly meant shitkicker music, whining violins and frog-plunk banjos, and if anything, he was a rocker. The country music hedidlike mostly came from a line that might be drawn from Bakersfield, California, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Jacksonville, Florida, and south of that. In other words, not the Grand Ole Opry or anything involving theAppalachians or moonshine or whatever happens when you cross the Harlan County line.
A few minutes before six o’clock, he pulled into a La Quinta Inn off I-24, twenty miles south of Nashville, checked in, took a leak, washed his face, changed into a suit, tie, and black oxfords—a high-end cop look—and then drove northeast into the town of La Vergne, where he cruised past the home of Poole’s parents.
Kevin and Margery Poole lived in a beige two-story house with vinyl siding, few windows, a single-car garage, and a burned-out lawn. The sun had hit the horizon in the west and the evening was coming on, but no lights were showing in the house. There was a car parked in the driveway, not quite straight, as if it had been left in a hurry, or the driver was a little drunk.
