The Darling farm had none of that. Everything looked new and well maintained, with rectangular beds of pastel petunias edging the driveway and sidewalks, while marigolds laid a circle of gold at the base of a flagpole in the center of the front yard. A silver propane tank squatted like a huge silver bullet on the far side of the house.
Lucas pulled into the driveway, saw a woman’s face checking him from a side-door window. He touched the pistol under his jacket, climbed out, walked to the door, and rang the doorbell.
The woman opened the door, cocked her head: “You’re not the propane guy,” she said. She was tall, comfortably heavy, with neatly coiffed blond hair betrayed by dark eyebrows. She fit the farm.
“I’m a U.S. marshal,” Lucas said. “I need to interview Sturgill Darling about an old friend of his. Is he around?”
The woman had been smiling politely, but now the smile faded: “It’s that damn Gar Poole, isn’t it?”
“Why would you say that?” Lucas asked.
“Because he’s the only one I’ve heard of who’d have a marshal coming by. Sturgill hasn’t talked to him for years, but I knew that sooner or later, somebody would be coming around looking forhim.” She hesitated, then unlocked the screen door between them and pushed it open. “You better come in if we’re going to talk. Sturgill’s gone off to Canada on a hunting trip, won’t be back until week after next.”
—
AS LUCAS STEPPED INSIDE,Darling watched from the garage. He’d heard Lucas’s truck turn in from the road, and he’d called his wife to warn her that somebody was in the driveway and that it might be the law; or it might be the torture crew. If it was the cartel crew, he’d be outside the window with a tactical shotgun. He told her to leave her cell phone turned on and lying on the couch table so he could hear what was going on.
The night before, he’d checked the Internet for news stories on the Poole murders and the assault on Stiner’s sister, and had gone into town to call Gar Poole from a pay phone to fill him in.
Poole had said, “There are only three people who know where I am and how to get in touch—I’ll call the others and warn them. You probably ought to get lost for a while, get the old lady somewhere they can’t find her. If we lay low long enough, they’ll go away. They can’t go running around the countryside cutting people up forever—they’ll get caught.”
“I’ll do that—but I’ve still got some money here,” Darling said. “It’s hid, but I need to hide it better. If the cops came in and really tore the place apart and found it, I couldn’t explain it. I got some farm work to do, too... but then I’ll get out. I’ll get back to you with a number on a new burner.”
“You might want to skip the farm work and get out,” Poole said.“That thing about sawing off my mom’s leg—those are not people you want to fuck with.”
Darling had almost two million dollars in cash at the farm. After getting off the phone, he’d bought a couple of sturdy, self-sealing plastic tubs, packed the money inside them, then after dark, carried them across the road to a brushy patch of ground and with his wife watching, buried them.
That done, he’d started cleaning up the barn. He’d been getting the equipment ready to bring in the beans, but now he’d have to put that off. He got the combine back together, called an outfitter he knew in Northwestern Ontario, and made arrangements to do some bear hunting.
In the morning, he finished cleaning up the barn and had been loading the truck with his hunting and traveling gear when Lucas turned up. He could watch the house from a corner window. Janice was a smart woman and would be okay with a lawman, he thought.
In case the very worst happened, and the big man in the suit wasn’t the law at all, he waited with the shotgun in his hand.
—
THE WOMANintroduced herself to Lucas as Janice Darling, Sturgill’s wife. She took Lucas to sit in the living room and offered him a glass of water or a Diet Coke, and he accepted the Coke.
After she’d settled into the chair opposite him, Lucas told her about the robbery in Biloxi, and the apparent response by the cartel, including the murder of the Pooles and the assault on Marilyn Campbell. Janice knew all of that, but pretended that she was hearing it for the first time.
“My God,” she said. “They did that because theythought maybethese people knew where Gar Poole is? Are they coming for us? We’ve got four children, they’re all grown up, but they could be found...”
“I don’t know if they’re coming for you or not, but it’s not a risk you should take, especially with your husband gone,” Lucas said. He’d been watching her closely as he told the story, and had seen her eyes glaze: she’d heard it before, he thought. She was lying: Sturgill Darling was probably somewhere close by. If he was gone hunting in Canada, he’d probably just left.
It might, he thought, be worth hanging around, somewhere out of sight, to see if Darling appeared...
If Janice Darling knew anything about Gar Poole or the Biloxi robbery, she was stonewalling.
“I can tell you that Sturgill has nothing to do with those people, at least their criminal activities, and never did. He did used to play some guitar up in Nashville, and hung out on Broadway, but that didn’t go anywhere and he came back here. That’s where he knew them from and that’s the last he’s seen of them. He’s been farming for twenty years since then.”
Lucas asked her to call her husband, but she said he didn’t have a cell phone. He didn’t believe that, either.
—
AS THEY WERE TALKING,Kort and Soto pulled to the shoulder on a hillside road a quarter mile away, looking down a bluff toward the farm in the green valley below. A creek meandered across the landscape, lined with trees. Soto didn’t know shit about trees, and Kortwas no better. Off in the distance, a couple of farms away, a train was rolling by, like a bunch of golden caterpillars racing to lunch.
The farm itself was a tidy rectangle, the row crops were dark green and low, with some of the leaves turning to gold as autumn crept into the South, and off to the right, at an adjacent farm, a couple of dozen rough acres were given over to pasturage, on which they could see two dark brown horses.
“That sorta looks like cotton down there, but I don’t think it is,” Kort muttered. “Don’t know what it might be, though. Can’t be corn. Corn’s taller.”
