“Can you look at airline tickets?”
“Sure, but if you want some ongoing monitoring for Lucas Davenport, it’ll cost you a thousand a day. I’ll have to check every fifteen minutes or so, if you want some warning on when he’s flying, if he does. That’s a full-time job, but if you want that, I can give you enough warning that you could get to the airport yourself. I could even make reservations for you.”
“I don’t care about that so much as where he’s going,” Soto said. “If he goes, I’d like to know what kind of car he rents when he gets there.”
“In that case, I’ll monitor flights for two hundred per day. That’ll get you a check every couple of hours until he flies. Another two hundred for the car, make, model, and tag. I also got a special, today only, for our better customers. If he has a phone from AT&T or Verizon, I can hack into the company’s GPS location server and tell you where his phone’s at, at any given time.”
Soto: “You can do that?”
“For a hundred dollars per check, as many checks as you want, but a hundred dollars each.”
“Do that, and bill us,” Soto said.
“You’re on the clock, starting now,” the College-Sounding Guy said, and he hung up.
When Kort got back in the car, Soto told her about the call. “That there’s a guy worth knowing,” he said.
“Sounds like a ratshit asshole frat boy to me,” Kort said. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I need to get a doctor to look at my buttocks. I think it hurts worse now than it did yesterday.”
“I can make a call down South and maybe they have a guy, but it also might make them unhappy to know you’ve been shot.”
Kort didn’t say anything for a bit, then, “Let’s see what it’s like tomorrow.”
—
THE THINbalding man from State Farm told Lucas that the Benz was totaled—“Seventy thousand miles and not a decent piece of metal on it—not even the roof,” he said. “The interior’s trashed, plus the engine compartment looks like somebody was pounding on itwith a ball-peen hammer, and the mag wheels look like somebody used a chain saw on them.”
“Just tell me how much,” Lucas said.
The adjuster told him and the recommended payoff was far too low. Lucas threatened legal action and the adjuster couldn’t quite hide a yawn. He refused to adjust his adjustment and told Lucas his insurance rates would probably be going up, given the nature of the claim, which involved all those bullet holes.
Lucas was still pissed when he walked into the restaurant where Bob and Rae had taken a booth; they were eating salads.
“Tell me something good,” Lucas said, as he slid in next to Rae.
“There’s one pay phone in Elkmont, and at six o’clock the day before yesterday, somebody made a call to Dallas. That was the only outgoing long-distance call from that phone, that day,” Rae said.
“Poole’s in Dallas,” Lucas said. “That’s about the time Stiner would have called Darling, and Darling went right into town and called Poole.”
“Maybe,” Rae said. “Darling does have a cell phone—Mrs. Darling was lying to you—but it’s not up on any network right now. He pulled the battery and probably has a burner by now.”
“So we don’t know if he’s running on his own, going to Canada to shoot a bear, or hooking up with Poole,” Lucas said.
Bob said, “If he is in Dallas, we’re taking all the credit for finding him. Me’n Rae.”
“If you give me partial credit, I’ll tell you what the next step is,” Lucas said.
They watched him for a minute, then Rae asked, “What you got?”
—
“WHAT I HAVEis a name in Dallas—I pulled all the paper I could find on Poole, and there are two guys he worked with, seem to have been friends, who are not in prison or dead,” Lucas said. “One is Derrick Donald Arnold and I have a Dallas address for him. The other is a guy named Rufus Carl Cake, who lives in New Orleans. We need to talk to Arnold, right away.”
Arnold had a history of violence, according to Lucas’s paper—brawling, when he was younger, jobs as a bouncer at a couple of strip clubs. He’d been busted twice and served time for strong-arm robbery and once was arrested but released without prosecution while working as a boat unloader for a marijuana ring in New Orleans. In his association with Poole, he’d apparently worked as an intimidator and the guy who carried heavy stuff.
“He a shooter?” Bob asked.
“On two of his arrests, they took shotguns out of his cars—not bird guns, but tactical pumps loaded with buckshot. No hard evidence that he ever used them.”
