“Either one week, or a month and a week. The money’s there one day a month,” Poole said.
“Where?”
“Biloxi.”
“Mmm. I like Biloxi. Like that jambalaya. Pass the joint.” He passed it over and she bit off some smoke, played it through her nose. She handed the joint back and rubbed her arms: goose bumps in the cool night.
“The thing is, we’d get cash. All cash. We could spend it without anybody lookingatus or lookingforus,” Poole said. “Stay here, figure out a way to move the gold. We get a couple mil out of Biloxi, we could take eight or ten years to liquidate the gold and when that’s done, we got a lifetime.”
“I don’t like you going back to work, but it’s better’n moving to Russia, or some weird foreign shit like that,” Box said. She stood up and stretched: she had the body for it, too, long, lanky, lightly freckled, a dishwater blonde with small pink nipples and only a wispy trace of pubic hair. “I’m going back to bed. Don’t stay up too late.”
—
POOLE BOUGHThigh-quality guitar parts, assembled them, then began meticulously carving and staining the surfaces, creating comic-book-like custom scenes. He’d learned woodworking at what Tennessee called, with a straight face, a Youth Development Center. Prison for kids, was what it was.
When Box was gone, he sat looking at his latest work, a bass-fishing comic being done for a pro fisherman who was also a guitar collector. It needed another two weeks; he’d have to put it aside, for now. He reached across the shed and picked up a twenty-year-old Les Paul, touched the power switch on an amp with his big toe, pulled some quiet blues out of the guitar. He liked the music, liked the woodwork, liked the smell of the lacquer. If he’d made abusiness of it, he figured he’d make almost half as much as an elementary school teacher.
He went to Biloxi.
—
BILOXI,MISSISSIPPI,and the smell of the sea.
Sturgill Darling was sitting at a round corner table in the oyster bar, a block off the Gulf of Mexico, amid the steam and sour stinks of both raw and cooking seafood. He looked like a slow, lazy hick, and stupid, too, with his farm-work forearms, bowl-cut brown hair, and worn, loose-cut jeans. He wore a floppy plaid shirt and yellow work boots, and sprawled back in the chair, knees locked and feet straight out in front of him, grinning at the passing crowd with teeth as yellow as his boots. A dumbass, for sure; an ignorant peckerwood. A mistake that any number of people had made to their lasting regret.
Poole took the chair beside him, held up a finger to a barmaid, and pointed at Darling’s glass and said, “Give me one of those.”
When she’d gone, Darling asked, “What do you think?”
Poole was wearing sunglasses over a gray-flecked-red week-old beard, and under a long-billed fishing hat, the better to defeat surveillance cameras. He’d spent most of the day scouting the scene of the would-be job. “We can do it, if it’s no more guys than you say. How in the hell did you find this?”
“I knew the blow was coming in through Galveston but I couldn’t see any money going out. They’re bringing in anything up to five hundred kilos at a time, that’s, let’s see, about eleven hundredpounds, off big game fishing boats that meet with these boats from Honduras. Anyway, I found a guy in Houston who could sell me an ounce, and then I watched. Watched him, watched the guy he got his product from, and watched the guy he gothisproduct from, and by the time I got to the end of the line, I was watching guys who could sell you a hundred kilos if you had the cash. Then I watched them backwards, watched the wholesalers paying the money guys—the money guys never touch the dope—and watched the money guys move it to the pickup guys, who travel up and down the coast from Charleston around to Galveston, with Biloxi in the middle. Watched it come down here, to the bank.”
Poole thought about that, admitted to himself that Darling had a talent that he, Poole, barely understood, the ability to uncover the footprints that could lead to a treasure; but Poole also understood that he had a talent that Darling didn’t: the will to act. Darling could uncover all the dope banks he wished, but he’d never go into a robbery as the leader, the designated shooter. That took somebody like Poole.
“How do they move the dope?” Poole asked.
“RV. Couple of middle-aged lesbo chicks, got some prison tats on them. They look... competent. They got double-load tires on the truck, I believe there might be some armor on it. These girls got a look about them—I believe they’re carrying some artillery.”
“Huh.” That’s the way Poole would have done it; he even liked the lesbo touch. Cops were usually too sexist and too lazy to pay much attention to a couple of chicks. And some of those goddamn dykes could take your face apart with their teeth.
“But we don’t want the dope, even if we could take it,” Darling said. “We got no way to get rid of it. Not that much of it. And the dope handlers never see the cash, except at the lowest levels.”
“Just askin’. Five hundred kilos, what’s that...” He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then said, “Twelve million, more or less, if it’s not stepped on too hard. What about the money?”
“They take no chances with the money. They move it in increments. There are four bankers who travel around, meet the collectors who get the cash from the top-end retailers. The bankers and everybody else move in rental cars, I doubt they ever have as much as a quarter million in any one pickup. Then it comes together, down here, once a month. The people here bundle it and send it out on the last Sunday of the month,” Darling said. “Regular as a railroad. Put it on a charter boat, drop it with a Honduran boat out in the Gulf. Whole operation is run by the Arce brothers, Hector and Simon, out of Puerto Cortés.”
“Honduras?”
“Yes. The brothers aren’t real big, not like the Mexican cartels, but they’re smart and mean. Keep their heads down and their mouths shut, nothing flashy about them. Pay off the Honduran cops and army, everybody’s cool.”
Poole thought about that, in the silent, smiling, calculating way that Southerners had, and finally said, “Well. Looks like you found the honeypot, all right.”
“Probably.” Darling gave Poole his lazy look. “You sure you’re up for this? It’s been a while.”
“Yup. I am.”
“There’ll be one outside, three inside, they all got guns,” Darling said. “I’ve watched them for three months, always the same.”
