He also had a text message with a new phone number for Stiner. So far, so good.
—
WHEN LUCASwalked out the door at the Koffee Korner, Stiner, suffused with gloom, finished the Pabst and threw the bottle toward the trash can. He missed and it shattered on the concrete floor. He didn’t bother to sweep up. He fished the last three bottles of PBR and two Cokes out of the refrigerator, looked around the office, got his baseball cap, and walked down the street to his apartment.
The apartment had come furnished, and while initially it had smelled strange, his own personal odors had taken over in the six months that he’d had the job and now it felt like home. No option, though. Maybe Davenport hadn’t been telling the truth and the feds were on the way to pick him up, but maybe hehadbeen telling the truth and Stiner had some time.
Over the next hour, he moved his personal possessions into the camper back of his aging Ford Ranger, said good-bye to the apartment, left a message for the owner, and took off. As he was passing a swamp, he threw his phone out the window. In the next hour and a half, he acquired two new prepaid phones, one from Walmart and the other from Best Buy.
A while later, as Lucas was bracing for the crash landing at Nashville, Stiner took out one of the new phones and punched in a number from memory. He didn’t get a recorded message, just a beep. After the beep, he said, “A.270 is way better on deer. Call me on this number and soon. I’m serious, man.”
Darling called back ten minutes later. He asked, “Better than what?”
“Better’n a.243.”
“Long time, no hear,” Darling said. “What’s up?”
“You could be in deep shit. By the way, this is a brand-new prepaid phone I’m gonna throw away in the next five minutes, so you can’t call me back. I was visited by a U.S. marshal and he was asking after you by name, in connection with a major job,” Stiner said. “He knew you’d been at a party at my place, years ago. I told him I didn’t know where you lived now, or what your phone number might be. I said I just knew you from hanging around lower Broadway.”
“What exactly did he say?”
Stiner laid it out: About the murders of Poole’s parents, about the two killers who’d started working over his sister. “Somehow they got you-know-who’s name, and they’re looking for him. They’re going after anyone who knows about him. I told this fed I didn’t know anything about it, that I hadn’t seen any of you for years. Anyway, the marshal’s looking for you. He really wants your friend, but he doesn’t know how to get to him.”
“Damn it. And you say these greasers are looking for my friend?”
“It’s like a race. Your friend would do well to get far out of town, right away, and not tell anybody where he’s going.”
“But that wouldn’t stop the greasers from looking, would it? If they get my name, they could be all over my family...”
“I hadn’t worked it out that far,” Stiner said. “I don’t know your situation there. But they didn’t stop at torturing anyone else’s family. If they find somebody else who knows that you and your friend were tight... they could be coming.”
Long silence, then, “Anything else?”
“No except that I’m on the run myself,” Stiner said. “I gotnothing to do with any of this, but I don’t want them coming for me. I’m crawling in a hole and pulling the dirt over my head.”
“Tell you what, buddy,” Darling said. “I owe you. When this all blows over, come and see me. I’ll take good care of you.”
“Yeah, well—thank you. I’ll check in a year or so... if you’re around.”
They hung up simultaneously and Stiner waited until there were no headlights on the back of his truck and dropped the phone onto the interstate, where it’d get run over nine hundred times before daylight.
That done, he called Lucas from the other phone, and when Lucas didn’t answer, left a text message with his new phone number. Then he turned his truck around and headed south. His thinking was this: the cops would expect him to run, and since he came from the north, they might expect him to go back that way. If they checked the phone call he’d made to Davenport, they’d see it came from north of Orlando. He didn’t have to run that far, though. Tampa would work. If the marshal ever called him back, he planned to string him along until he had a feel for what to do and then either run or hold tight.
The main thing was, he had to stay away from the two hired killers: the marshal wouldn’t be sawing his leg off, whatever else he might do.
—
AS HE WAS DOING THAT,Kort and Soto were at work on the outskirts of Roswell, Georgia. Kort looked into the empty blood-clotted eye sockets of an elderly man named Henry Bedsow. Bedsow’seyeballs lay on the floor like a couple of bloody squashed grapes. She shouted, “That’s all you got? Sturgill Darling? What kind of name is that? I don’t believe that shit. You got ten seconds to tell me or I’m gonna rip your motherfuckin’ tongue out by the roots, and then I’m gonna let you drown in your own blood. Who else? I don’t believe this Darling bullshit. Who else, motherfucker?”
11
LUCAS GOTa later start than he’d expected the next morning; no problem, he’d just slept late, and the car clock said it was nearly eleven before he rolled down a narrow rural highway to the Darling farm.
The farm stretched across a natural bowl in the land, the bottomland along a river or creek; a twisting line of trees on the far side of the farm marked out the stream. The farm itself had a prosperous, well-groomed industrial air.
A neat white single-story house sat on the left, facing the road, a dozen trees spotted around the yard, throwing overlapping circles of shade. A broad, heavily graveled driveway separated the house from a six-slot white-metal garage, and at the back, ended at a white barn.As far as Lucas could see, there were no animals: the place was purely a grain operation, with soybean fields pressing at the sides and back of the two-acre-sized residential lot. A sliding door was open on the left side of the barn, and he could see the front end of a corn-green John Deere tractor.
Farms, in Lucas’s experience, which wasn’t extensive, usually showed bits of history around the edges: old chicken coops and machine sheds, maybe a neglected clothesline in the back, abandoned machinery parked in a woodlot.
