“My best guess, that’s about all it is right now,” the deputy said.
The driver nodded: “Probably right. All them bullet holes don’t help.”
Lucas removed everything removable from the truck and then was taken to a local hospital, where a nimble-fingered nurse pulled two tiny slivers of glass out of his neck and back. None of the wounds required stitches, but he would, the nurse said, itch for a few days: “I’ve been there,” Lucas said.
While she worked on him, he called around, arranged for his truck to be hauled to a Mercedes dealer in Nashville and called State Farm to report the accident. When the nurse was done, he got a change of clothes from his suitcase, went into the ER restroom and put on the fresh clothes. He threw his cut and blood-soaked suit into the hospital trash.
The blue car wasn’t found that afternoon or evening; nor did the sheriff’s office find any dead farmers.
—
STURGILL DARLINGhad watched the gunfight from the barn. He’d been listening on the open phone as Lucas talked to Janice Darling and knew that Lucas was a federal marshal. When the cartel crew showed up, he’d watched, ready to intervene if the marshal had been shot down and the cartel people had gone after Janice.
When the marshal ran to his truck and went after the blue car, Janice had come out of the bathroom and asked, on the phone, “You still there?”
“Still here. They’re all gone, but they’ll be back. Probably the marshal with some deputy sheriffs. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, but the house is a mess. What are you going to do?”
“I’m gonna hide right here in the barn. They’ve got no reason to search the place, and if they do look, I’ll get up under the eaves where they won’t find me. I’ll get out of here after dark. You go on up to your sister’s place.”
“Okay. You be careful, Sturg.”
“I will. Now you go on back to the bathroom, like the marshal told you. I’ll watch everything from here.”
—
WHEN LUCASgot out of the hospital, he spent a half hour typing up a report of the shoot-out at the sheriff’s office and sent a copy of it by e-mail to Forte in Washington.
A sheriff’s deputy drove him across the Tennessee line, where he was picked up by a Tennessee highway patrol car and driven into Nashville, to the Mercedes dealer, where he was told that a State Farm adjuster would be around the next day to assess the damage.
“He says he’ll be here at noon,” the service guy said. He was looking at Lucas’s truck and shaking his head: “Seventy thousand miles and all those bullet holes, plus the interior damage and the mess under the hood... it’s totaled, man. Might save the tires.”
The amiable highway patrolman took him to the Hertz location at the airport. Lucas called Weather on the way to tell her what had happened. She was pissed, but didn’t exactly say, “I told you so.”
She said, “Be more careful. I keep telling you...”
“I’m trying and I got some help coming. They’re sending down a couple heavies from the Special Operations Group. Sounds like the federal government’s equivalent of Jenkins and Shrake.”
“Good! That’s good. You need the help, Lucas. For God’s sakes, be careful.”
Lucas got a Nissan Armada from Hertz and checked into an Embassy Suites hotel in downtown Nashville a few minutes after midnight and slept soundly, with the help of Tylenol with codeine, except for a few flashbacks to the gunfight, until ten o’clock the next morning.
At ten o’clock, he was awakened by a heavy-handed pounding on the hotel room door.
12
LUCAS PULLEDon his pants and went to the door, left the guard latch attached, and peered out through the crack. A short but wide man stood outside, dressed in black high-rise jeans, a white dress shirt, and a black nylon jacket. He had buzz-cut hair and a flattened nose and muscles everywhere.
Behind him stood a much taller black woman, nearly as tall as Lucas, whose height was enhanced by an Afro of 1960s dimension. She had a sharply chiseled face, with a fingernail-sized scar on her left cheek. She was dressed in a blue shirt, tight black jeans, black suede ankle boots, and a black nylon jacket.
Lucas asked, “Who are you?”
The wide man said, “Bob and Rae. We were told you expected us.”
Bob andRae? He’d been expecting the Marshals Service equivalent of Jenkins and Shrake, the BCA’s designated thugs. Bob fit, but Rae, not so much. “Ah... yeah. I’m not really quite up, but, uh... come on in, I guess.” He unlatched the door and let them in.
“Late sleeper, huh?” Rae said, as she came through the door. “You know what they say about birds and worms.”
