WHEN DERRICK ARNOLDwas sure that Lucas and Rae were gone for good, he kissed his bird good-bye and walked out to the gentlemen’s club where he worked his day job. The on-duty bartender asked, “What the hell you doing here this late?”
“Can’t stay away, it’s the tits,” Arnold said. He walked around behind the bar, pulled a beer for himself, and then walked past the topless dancers in their half-glassed dancing booth, without giving them a glance—after you’ve seen the first ten or twenty thousand tits, you’ve seen them all—past the VIP areas where the chumps got lap dances, past the elevators to the Play Pens, where well-connected athletes and entertainers got more than their laps danced, past the restrooms to the kitchen. In the kitchen, he nodded to a waiter and dug around in the junk drawer, found the prepaid phone card, and carried it out in the hall to the emergency exit and the pay phone installed there, inside the door.
At the phone, he punched in the number for the prepaid card, and then the number he had for Garvin Poole. The phone rang four times before a woman answered: “Yeah?” Cool voice, with a little whiskey in it.
“Is Gar there?”
A moment of silence, then, “Who’s this?”
“A guy he gave this number to. I used to... unload. Don’t want to say names.”
“Wait one.”
A moment later Poole came on and asked, “Unload where?”
“Galveston. One time we yanked about twenty pounds of weed out of a bundle and pushed it down our pants. My balls smelled like dope for a week.”
“Gotcha,” Poole said, laughing at the memory. “What’s up, man?”
“A federal marshal came by my house tonight. He thinks you’re in Dallas, but he doesn’t know where. They came after me because I’m living in Dallas, too.”
“I didn’t know that,” Poole said. “Where you at?”
“Got a place over in northeast Dallas,” Arnold said. “Rather not say the address, on the phone.”
“You say anything to them?”
“Of course not. For one thing, I don’t know anything but this phone number,” Arnold said. “I don’t even know that they’re right, that you’re here in Dallas. I thought you were still in Mississippi. I can’t tell you much, except that they’re here and they’re looking hard. They think you were involved in some kind of dope robbery.”
Another moment of silence. “You think they have any specific idea of where I’m at?”
“I’m pretty sure they don’t. That’s what they wanted from me. They didn’t say why they were here, or why they thought you were here. They didn’t give me much at all.”
More silence: “Okay. Thanks, man, I owe you. I’ll send a fewbucks your way, when I get a chance. How will I get in touch? Don’t say your number on the phone...”
“My dad’s got a number, if you remember him,” Arnold said.
“I do. Still working oil?”
“Yup. Retires next year. Give him a call, if you need to get in touch,” Arnold said.
“Thanks again,” Poole said. He sounded like he meant it, and he was gone.
14
LUCAS WASin a deep sleep when somebody began pounding on his door. He sat up, blinking, saw a streetlight through a crack in the curtain. Still dark outside. He’d turned the overly bright clock away from him, and as the pounding started again, turned the clock and saw that it was 6:12.
“Coming,” he called, thinking,Fire?
He looked through the peephole and saw Bob, and Bob did not look happy; he looked frantic. Lucas opened the door and asked, “What?”
The words sputtered out: “Got a call from the Dallas cops. One minute ago. Somebody chopped Arnold up, he’s like fish bait, and killed Mitch and his wife, whatever her name was.”
“What!”
Bob started to repeat himself, but Lucas waved him off and said, “I got it. Let’s get over there. You wake Rae up?”
“That’s next.”
