“Hell, yes. It hurts, but it’s not bad.”
He was wrong about carrying the money. The suitcases must have weighed forty or fifty pounds each, about like a deep-cycle bass boat battery, and there were six of them, instead of the three or four they’d expected. He could carry one with each hand, but not run with them; the one on his shot arm dragged him down, the grazing shot now burning like fire. Darling, carrying four suitcases, one in each hand and one bundled under each armpit, hurried ahead and kept hissing back, “C’mon, c’mon.”
The stolen truck was two hundred yards away. Darling loaded hissuitcases and ran back to Poole, grabbed the suitcase on Poole’s bad side, and together they made it back to the truck.
They drove slowly—they were professionals—out of Biloxi. They left the stolen truck at a rest area on I-10, transferring the cases to Darling’s long-bed Chevy. Darling had put a false floor in the camper and they emptied the cash through the concealed hatch, closed the hatch, and threw the suitcases on top of it.
Heading west again, they stripped off the surgeon’s gloves and threw them out the windows as small rubber balls. The ski masks went after them, one at a time, miles apart. Twenty miles farther along, Darling took an exit that curled down a side road to a bridge.
They threw the guns off the bridge into the narrow dark river and headed back to the interstate. Farther up the way, they left the five suitcases sitting side by side on a sidewalk in Slidell, Louisiana, with a sign on top that said “Free.”
A little more than an hour after killing the four men and the girl, they were out of Slidell, still moving west.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Poole asked, looking over at Darling, who was hunched over the steering wheel, his mouth in a fixed grimace.
“I raised some girls. I can’t get that little girl out of my head,” Darling said.
“C’mon, man. What difference does the age make? She’s just another witness.”
“I know, I know. Just... skizzed me out, man. I... keep seeing her. I’ll be okay.”
Poole peered at him for a minute, then said, “Think about it this way—it’s done. Can’t be undone. It’s history.”
—
THEY STOPPEDat a twenty-four-hour Walmart Supercenter in Baton Rouge, off to one side of the parking lot, between two other pickups, climbed into the back of the truck, and dug the money out from under the false floor. Most of it was in hundreds, well used and a little greasy, bundled into bricks of ten thousand dollars each. There was also a pile of loose money that Darling had scraped off the counting table.
They counted out a few bundles, agreed that they were ten thousand dollars each, despite varying in size depending on the value of the individual bills in each bundle. They counted the bundles. There were seven hundred and eighty of them. “Seven million, eight hundred thousand,” Darling breathed. “Man, those greasers are gonna be pissed when they hear about this.”
“Fuck ’em,” Poole said, and he laughed aloud.
Darling sat back on the truck floor and said, “Tell you what, man. Forget the sixty-forty. I never thought we’d get this much. Let’s cut it fifty-fifty and I’ll keep the loose change. Can’t be more than a couple hundred thousand there.”
“You are a fine and honorable man,” Poole said. “Let’s do it.”
He held up a fist and Darling bumped it and they split up the money.
—
BOX WASat a Baton Rouge Marriott. When the counting was done and the money repacked in two canvas duffel bags, Poole called her. “All done,” he said.
“I been up for three hours, nervouser than a nun at a penguin shoot,” she said. “Where you at?”
“Right where we’re supposed to be,” Poole said.
“You do good?” she asked.
“Better’n that,” Poole said.
“Ten minutes,” she said.
She was twelve minutes. Darling went on his way, and five hours later, Poole and Box had cut I-20 west of Shreveport and rolled across the Texas border on the way back home to Dallas, listening to Paul Thorn singing “Bull Mountain Bridge” on the Sirius satellite radio.
A ton of money in the back.
Money, Poole thought, that would last his entire life.
2
