The boat with the money would ease out of the marina in the early morning hours and disappear over the southern horizon. Darling had considered the possibility of robbing the boat, but thought the money might be inside a safe, or otherwise hard to get at; takingit could get complicated and they didn’t have the time or the organization for that.
—
AT TEN O’CLOCKSunday night, Poole and Darling slipped out of an abandoned FEMA trailer where they’d spent most of the afternoon and evening, eating Subway sandwiches and drinking Smartwater and pissing in the no-longer-connected toilet at the other end of the trailer.
They were both dressed in dark clothes, but nothing unusual or too tactical—black Levi’s jeans and long-sleeved navy polo shirts. They were wearing ski masks, which weren’t often seen in Biloxi, the town being woefully short on ski slopes, and light blue surgeon’s gloves.
Poole carried two pistols, Darling carried one, all suppressed, Nines for Darling, Forties for Poole. The guns, with the custom suppressors, were fourteen inches long in their hands. They were shooting wet, having sprayed water down the suppressors before screwing them back on the gun barrels, in the two minutes or so before they left the trailer. The suppressors would be even quieter wet than dry.
—
ONLY ONE GUARDremained outside. He was sitting behind a haggard pink rosebush adjacent to the door. They came in from the blind side of the foundation, Darling trailing as Poole led the way.
At the corner, twenty feet from the access door, Poole peeked. Because of the rosebush, he couldn’t see the guard; but neither could the guard see him. Moving with glacial slowness, heduckwalked down along the wall. Ten feet out, he could smell the other man, a smoker, but still not see him. When he was three feet out, Poole rose carefully to his feet, back against the stone wall, looked down.
The guard never knew what hit him: Poole reached over the rosebush and shot him in the head, a golf-clappopfrom the gun.
Darling came up, quiet as Poole had been. Didn’t even glance at the dead man. Three more men inside. They needed instant control; couldn’t abide with chaos, with some crazy gunfight. Needed to get on top of the other three immediately.
Darling took the door: he breathed, “Ready?”
The door would not be locked. They’d seen the guards go in and out without knocking or using keys. Poole got square to it, a gun in each hand.
“Now,” Poole whispered.
Darling reached one gloved hand out to the doorknob, turned it, pushed. It squeaked and then Poole was inside, both guns up. He could see the three men thirty feet away, sitting side by side at a table. They all looked up, maybe expecting to see their outside man, but all they saw was a stranger in black who said not a single word but simply opened fire.
Darling was backup: Poole did the killing. Darling kicked the door shut as Poole shot each of the three men once, in a grand total of a half second, two shots from his right hand, one from his left, a little slower than he’d been on the paper targets. A half second was almost fast enough but not quite. One of the men grabbed a Nine from the counting table and got off a single wild shot.
The bullet pinched the underside of Poole’s left arm, but the man who fired it was already dead by the time Poole realized he’d been shot. He was striding toward the counting table when a young girl, maybe six years old, bolted toward the back of the building from where she’d been sitting on the floor with a golden-haired Barbie doll. She knew she wouldn’t make it, though, stopped, turned, and said, “You killed Grandpa.”
“Sorry, kid,” Poole said, and shot her in the head.
Darling, coming up from behind, said, the shock riding through his voice, “Fuckin’ A, Gar, did you have to do that?”
“Yeah, I did. She was old enough to raise the cops,” Poole said. He felt nothing for the kid, but needed to mollify Darling. “If we tied her up, she might starve to death before somebody found her. This was the best.”
Darling stared at the Raggedy Ann body of the kid, wrapped in a white dress now spattered with blood that looked like red flowers woven into the pale fabric. “Fuckin’ A. We coulda called somebody...”
“Wake up, man! It’s done! Get the fuckin’ suitcases,” Poole said. “We gotta move! Motherfucker got lucky and hit me.”
“Oh, Jesus. Bad?”
“No, but I’ve got to look. Get the suitcases going.”
—
POOLE COULDN’T PUSHthe shirtsleeve up high enough to see the wound, so he pulled the polo shirt over his head. He found an inch-long groove on the underside of his arm; it was bleeding, but thebullet hadn’t actually penetrated. A flesh wound, as they said on the old TV Westerns.
Darling was shoveling loose cash from the tabletop into a suitcase, stopping every few seconds to peer at the dead girl, as though hoping she’d show a sign of life. He brought himself back, glanced at Poole, and asked again, “How bad?”
“Not bad. Need to rip up a shirt or something. Not much more than a Band-Aid job.”
“We got a bunch of shirts, laying on the floor. Rip one up,” Darling said.
Poole ripped a piece off the girl’s skirt, figuring that probably had the least body contact with its former owner, and was less likely to carry an infection: Poole thought of things like that, even under stress. He made a neat tie bandage out of it; it was really all he needed. He pulled his shirt back over his head, and together he and Darling checked the take. Poole had nothing more to say except, “Holy shit.”
“You got that right, brother,” Darling said. “Way more than I thought. Heavy, though. Can you carry?”
