“We gunned up?” Poole asked.
“Yeah. Got your favorites, bought out of Chicago brand-new, Glock 23s suppressed, loaded up with 180s. I did the reloads myself so they’ll be going out subsonic to kill some of the noise. I thought maybe... Sam Brooks if you think we need another gun.”
“Don’t need him and I don’t like him,” Poole said. “I’ll need a day to work with the guns. You got a place I can do that?”
“Knew you’d ask,” Darling said. “I got a place so far out in the woods that the fuckin’ owls get lost.”
The barmaid brought Poole’s beer and he thanked her and they waited until she moved away, then Poole said, “Shoot the next couple days, move Sunday night?”
“Sounds good. About the cut? What do you think?”
Poole grinned and tapped the beer, swallowed, and said, “I won’t argue with you.”
“I’m thinking, sixty-forty, since I did all the setup,” Darling said. “Took me nine months. I started working on it way last winter.”
“Fair enough.”
“Hot damn,” Darling said, with his yellow grin. “The Dixie Hicks are back in action. What’s left of them, anyway.”
Poole laughed and kicked back and said, “You remember that time with Ronnie outside of Charleston...”
The Dixie Hicks had all kinds of war stories, some funny, some sad. In most of them, even the funny ones, somebody wound up dead. Like Ronnie, three Georgia state troopers hot on his ass, ridinga stolen 2009, 556-horse Cadillac CTS-V down a rocky gulch in the Georgia Piedmont, rolling over and over and over until the car looked like a shiny sausage, thirty thousand dollars in bank money exploded all over the interior, along with Ronnie’s brains.
Good old Ronnie. Too bad he killed himself.
—
POOLE AND DARLINGdrove north into the trees on the following day and Poole went to work with the guns. He’d laid off for a while, but killing is like riding a bicycle: once you got it, you got it.
Darling had gotten inside the counting house one dark night when the bankers weren’t there, and said they counted at a table about thirty-two feet from the door in the outer wall—he’d checked it with a tape measure. At thirty-two feet, or any shorter distance, Poole wouldn’t have to worry about where to shoot: he’d hold dead-on and pull the trigger. They set up some human-shaped paper targets out in the woods, stapled to pine trees, and Poole worked at it, getting back in the rhythm. From the first shots, he was accurate enough, but he had to work on speed.
He did that, and he knew how to do it: slow at first, feeling the weapons, feeling the rounds going out, feeling the recoil. Then a little quicker and a little quicker, Darling looking at a stopwatch.
Darling was almost scholarly about it: “You’re at less than half a second,” he said, holding a stopwatch. “You know better than me, but it looks like you’re still trying to betoofast. You over-aim, then you’ve got to correct.”
Poole nodded: “I can feel that.”
He would shoot a box of.40s, the same stuff he’d use for the real thing, and then take a break, walk around, shake out his hands. At the end of the day, he could get off four accurate, killing shots in a little more than a fifth of a second. Good enough.
—
IN 2005,Hurricane Katrina went through Biloxi like an H-bomb, a thirty-foot storm surge taking out a good part of the town. North of the main harbor was mostly bare ground that once had houses. Here and there a building remained, but not in its original state; and there weren’t a lot of people around.
Grace Baptist Church once had a fieldstone foundation up over head height, with a white clapboard structure above that, dating back to the 1890s. The frame structure, if it hadn’t been atomized, was probably somewhere up in the Kentucky woods, having ridden away on Katrina’s winds like Dorothy’s house inThe Wizard of Oz.
The bottom of the church, the shoulder-high fieldstone foundation, remained in place, its original floor, now covered with tar paper, serving as the roof. The church, foundation and floor only, had been sold to a man who collected antique cars and needed a place to store them. When the Honduras cartel was looking for a place to put their bank, they made the car collector an offer he didn’t even think of refusing. Not that he was frightened: he was simply greedy and the offer was that good.
The spot had two great benefits: there were never any cops around, because there was nothing to steal, vandalize, or hang out at, and you could walk down to your boat in five minutes.
—
SUNDAY NIGHTwas outgoing only, with four men doing the work. For most of the evening, two of the four men would be posted at opposite corners of the former church, seated between carefully placed Limelight hydrangeas. They both were carrying guns; at least two each, Darling thought, probably high-capacity semiautos with suppressors, and were linked with radio headsets.
Late in the evening, Darling said, one would go inside with the other two, while one remained outside, seated behind a bush by a door in the old church’s basement.
He thought the three were probably packing the money, after the first two had counted and bundled it. Around midnight, the outside guard would go inside, and a few minutes later they’d all walk out of the building, carrying at least one and often two suitcases each. The walk down to the waterfront took five minutes. There, they’d get on a fishing boat. Two or three minutes later, they’d be off the boat and strolling through the quiet Sunday night back to the old church building.
Three of them would wait there while the fourth man went out to a black Lincoln Navigator that they’d parked behind a building a few hundred yards away. He’d pick up the other three, and they’d drive over to the Hampton Inn, where they’d stay overnight before dispersing to wherever they lived.
