“It is a little weird, though,” Lucas said to the nurse. “I’ve been hurt a few times and it’s always thewething.”
The nurse shrugged and grinned and said, “You’ll learn to live with it. Couple days from now, you’ll be saying ‘Ourleg still hurts.’”
Campbell turned back to Lucas. “The doctors say the flashbacks will go away,” she said. “What doyouthink?”
Lucas said, “Mostly. For most people. I was once shot right under the chin, by a little girl, and I would have died if somebody hadn’t cut open my windpipe with a jackknife.” He touched the scar on his neck. “That happened ten years ago. Right after I got out of the hospital, I’d relive the part where I saw the pistol coming up and then feeling the bullet hit. Now, I’ll have moments when something will touch off amemoryof it, but it’s not the same as reliving it. Whenyou relive it, you get the sweats and you can feel the adrenaline pouring into your blood and your heart starts beating hard... When you remember it, it’s a picture in your mind, like an old movie. You’re not reliving it. That’s where I’m at now.”
“You think that’s where I’ll get?” Campbell asked.
“Probably,” Lucas said.
“You’re not sure.”
“No. I won’t lie to you, I’ve seen people who relive bad moments forever... but that’s rare,” Lucas said. “Really rare. If you’ve got a good healthy family around you, you’ll be okay.”
“What about Doug? He might have shot somebody.”
“Can’t help you with that,” Lucas said. His daughter Letty had shot and killed people, but that was Letty, and Letty wasn’t a typical naïve, well-protected kid. “I think it pretty much depends on the kid.”
Lucas took a call from Lawrence Post at the TBI: “Told you we’d find that car. They drove it out in the woods and torched it. I’m told there’s nothing left to see—apparently soaked it with gasoline and set it on fire. The chances of getting even a fingerprint are down around zero. The seats were incinerated, so we can’t tell if there was any blood inside, if they were hit by a gunshot.”
“Well, hell. The plates still on it?”
“Yeah, it’s a rental, they got it here at the airport,” Post said. “We should be able to get some video, so that might help. But I’m thinking not. Not unless they were dumb enough to go in without hats and sunglasses, and with their own credit cards.”
“Gotta check,” Lucas said.
“We will.”
—
CAMPBELL’S HUSBAND,Andy, and her son, Doug, came back as Lucas was talking to Post, and when Lucas rang off, Marilyn introduced them. Andy, a tall, rawboned man with hard hands, asked, “You think they’ll be back?”
“I doubt it. We’re hot after them—we’ve got good descriptions, your son here shot up the car pretty good, and they know the cops will be keeping an eye on you.” Lucas turned to the kid: “That was good work, by the way. Saved your mom’s life, for sure.”
Andy Campbell said, “I wish I’d been there. If they come back, I’ll kill them.”
Lucas shook his head: “Don’t even try. These guys are professionals. No matter how good you are with a gun, these guys are probably better, and not only that, they are used to doing this kind of thing. Best thing you could do is get a steel-core door on a bedroom, keep a shotgun and a cell phone in there, and if there’s even a hint of these people coming, get your family in there, lock and barricade the door, and call the cops. You really don’t want to shoot it out with them. Too much can go wrong.”
They talked about that for a while, the realities of gunfights and home invasions, and then moved on to the question of Marilyn’s brother John.
“Marilyn still thinks that John is okay, but he isn’t,” Andy said. “He was a wrong one right from the start. I knew him in high school. Rest of the family was fine, but not John. From what I hear about Gar Poole, they are two of a kind.”
“Some cops think Gar Poole may have killed more than a dozeninnocent people, and God knows how many rivals,” Lucas said to Marilyn Campbell. “He’s killed eight people that we know of, including a little girl, whom he shot in cold blood. We need to stop him. If John ran with him, he’ll know things that I need to know. I have to get in touch with him, right now.”
Andy opened his mouth to say something, but Marilyn said, “When we talk, it’s always one-way with John. He calls us from public phones. I don’t know how to get in touch, not from my end.”
Andy said, “For God’s sakes, Marilyn...”
“I don’t,” she protested. “I used to know how to call him, but that phone hasn’t been good for two or three years.” She turned back to Lucas and said, “John has a straight job now. He got all messed up on drugs for a while, that’s why he did some bad things. But he got off the drugs, he’s trying to straighten himself out. He’s not like Gar Poole—he’s never killed anyone. I made him tell me and I know when he’s lying.”
Lucas got her to give up an old cell phone number for John Stiner, but she insisted that it no longer worked.
“What about the fact that these two people even found you?” Lucas asked. “Did you know Miz Poole?”
“I never met her—but I knew of her, her family, Gar and Natalie mostly.”
“So she would have known of you,” Lucas said.
