“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 thatas 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 YOUwhere 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 ofhim 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’dhad 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 KORTleft 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.
