“No, we’re not,” Lucas said. “We need to talk, so we’re coming in. If you want to stand back?”
—
ARNOLD STEPPED BACK,and Lucas and Rae moved inside. The house was like a hunting shack, one big room with a bed in a corner, a dinette kitchen, and a clothes rack covering one end of the place. There were two enclosed spaces: a tiny bathroom and a floor-to-ceiling wire cage, in which a cockatoo sat on a tree branch.
The cockatoo peered at them and said, “Onk Gurty.” The place smelled heavily of Campbell’s Chunky Hearty Bean with Ham soup, a touch of the consequent flatulence, with a subtle overtone of newspaper-and-bird-shit. Two overstuffed chairs faced a TV, and an electric guitar was parked in a corner, with a bright orange lunch-box-sized amp. The guitar had a psychedelic twisted black-and-white checkerboard inlaid on the top.
Lucas pointed at one of the chairs and said, “Sit.”
Arnold sat and asked, “What the heck is going on, man? I been clean forever.”
“Except for the weed,” Rae said.
“It’s medicinal,” Arnold said. “I’m in the compassionate use program.”
“We’re talking federal,” Rae said. “We don’t care what the law says in Baja Oklahoma.”
“Everybody calm down,” Lucas said. He took the chair next to Arnold, crossed his legs, and said, “We need some help. We didn’t come to bust you on the weed.”
“What kind of help?” Arnold asked.
“When was the last time you saw Garvin Poole?”
“Oh, shit,” Arnold said. He looked at Angel, which clucked a couple of times and said, again, “Onk Gurty.” Back to Lucas: “Man, I ain’t seen Gar in six or seven years. I don’t got any idea where he might be. He do something lately?”
“For one thing, he moved to Dallas,” Lucas said. “Since you’re right here...”
Arnold was shaking his head: “Man, if he’s in Dallas, that’s news to me. I don’t want to have nothing to do with him. The last time I seen him, he didn’t actually see me. I walked into this bar in Jackson, Mississippi, and Gar was sittin’ in with the band. He had a beard, but I knew it was him. I snuck out the back door and took off. That was like I said, six or seven years ago.”
“I’m not sure I one-hundred-percent believe you,” Lucas said. “We’ve heard you two were tight.”
“We were tight for a while—Gar and some other guys were providing protection for some dope dealers, and I was... well, I was working for them, and got busted for it. But anyway, that’s when I got to know Gar. We both played a little guitar and we both like the music... we’d jam a little bit.”
“Didn’t know he was musical,” Rae said.
“He can play country. You know he builds guitars? He built mine. They’re called partscasters, because he makes them up from commercial parts, but then he decorates the body, you know, the soundboard and the headstock, he does some custom inlay on the fret board...”
Lucas: “He does it commercially? He has a website or something?”
Arnold shrugged. “Don’t know, anymore. Back when I knew him, he used to do it like a hobby. He’d sell them, got some good money for them, too. But it was all word of mouth. You had to know him to get one.”
“It’s like a talent,” Rae said. “Like his talent with guns.”
“Yeah, like a talent,” Arnold agreed. “I’ll tell you, though, I never worked with him. He had this reputation—people who worked with him, they died. Got killed. He supposedly killed some of them, and some other ones, well, Gar would pull some crazy fuckin’ stickup and wind up shooting it out with somebody. I didn’t want anything to do with that shit. My idea of a perfect crime is getting a rub from one of the girls at the club.”
“You had a reputation for carrying a shotgun,” Lucas said.
The shrug again: “Listen, guys, when you did what I did, you were expected to carry a shotgun. It was like a lawyer with abriefcase... or a cop with a pistol. But I wasn’t going to get in any big shoot-outs. If the cops showed up while I was working, my plan was to throw the shotgun in the ocean and give up. No fuckin’ way I wanted to fight the DEA. Those guys got bazookas and damn little mercy.”
Lucas’s phone rang: Bob calling. “I think we’re okay in here,” Lucas said.
“Want me to come in?”
Lucas looked at Arnold: “Nah. We’ll be out in five minutes. We got a possible felony here, but we’re talking.”
Lucas got off the phone and Arnold, sweating, said, “Man, it’s not a felony. I don’t even got an ounce.”
“We need you to check with your friends, find out where Poole might be,” Lucas said. “We need to hear from you.”
