“How do we get this going?” Poole asked.
“Make a long-distance phone call to Honduras,” Darling said.
“I’d have to think about that,” Poole said. “They haven’t gotten to anybody who knows where we’re at—not yet. Dallas is a big place.”
They talked about it during the evening and Box went out to a Whole Foods and got some ribs and organic sweet corn and they barbequed in the backyard, talking about everything, and nothing, and working through it.
Late that evening, Arnold called. Box answered, and then handed the phone to Poole. When Poole got off, he said, “The feds are here.”
Darling: “Here in Dallas?”
“Yeah. You remember Derrick Arnold? D.D.?”
“Didn’t know him, but heard the name.”
“That was him on the phone. He’s here in Dallas, too,” Poole said. “I didn’t know that, and he didn’t know that I was, but the feds paid him a visit, names were Davenport... Givens, and something else. Federal marshals.”
“Davenport’s the guy who shot up the drug guys at the farm,”Darling said. “I heard him introduce himself to Janice. She estimates that he’s not somebody you want to fool with.”
“Gotta get out,” Box said. “Gar, we gotta go. Real soon.”
“I think so,” Poole said. “Tomorrow morning.”
“How about calling Honduras?” Darling asked. “We could feed them Arnold, and when they show up at his place, take two assholes off the plate.”
“Let’s keep hold of the idea, but if we’re getting out, and they don’t know where we’re going... then they’re back to square one. And how can they know where we’re going, if we don’t?”
—
POOLE AND BOXgot up early the next morning, both a little groggy, and found Darling sitting in a chair in the backyard, smoking a cigarette.
“Those will kill you faster than the feds,” Box said. She and Poole came out and took chairs.
“Only smoke one a day,” Darling said.
“That’s okay then. Don’t see how you do it, though,” Box said. “If I smoked one, I’d smoke thirty-nine more.”
They’d decided to move whatever they could, the really valuable stuff, to a secure storage unit.
“Can’t do anything about the furniture,” Box said. She was bummed by the evacuation of their house, the first house she’d lived in that she actually liked. She’d bought the furniture herself, with the help of an Ethan Allen design consultant, and still got a little thrill looking at it, like something from a Sunday newspaper magazine.
“Even if we had time, there’d be moving people who’d knowwhere we put it, and people in the neighborhood who’d know what movers we used. We could get ambushed if we ever tried to pick it up,” Poole said.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But I love the stuff.”
“We’ll get more stuff when we get to wherever we’re going,” Poole said. “Better stuff.”
—
THEY HADfour vehicles, an Audi A5 convertible for Box, a Mustang for Poole and a Ford F-150 pickup, plus Darling’s pickup. Poole had shied away from the idea of a flashy car when they first got to Texas, but didn’t take long to figure out that flashy cars in Dallas were like Kias in Jackson, and hedidlike fast cars.
This morning, though, he went back and forth to the pickup, loading up tools and guitars from the workshop, computers, televisions, stereo equipment, guns, silverware, dishes, all crammed into U-Haul boxes as fast as Box and Darling could do it.
Arnold had told Poole on the phone the night before that the feds didn’t actually know their specific address, only that they were in Dallas. Arnold didn’t know how they knew that: they must have some kind of source. Poole, Darling, and Box thought they had some time, though it was impossible to tell how much: it would be best to get out as soon as they could. They’d store the Mustang and the F-150, Poole decided, until they could come back and retrieve them. Box would take her convertible, because a single woman in a convertible looked harmless, and Poole would ride with Darling, because nobody was looking for Darling in Texas, as far as they knew.
They were done packing up the valuable stuff by mid-morningand still had more room in the storage unit, so Box got them to take over a dining-room table with chairs, the bed stand, a bureau and mirror, and two big chests of drawers. That was it, that was all the place would take. They moved the Mustang and the F-150 into separate units, and then Poole and Darling went into the management office and paid cash for two years’ storage. While the owner was writing out a receipt—they got ten percent off for the cash, because the owner didn’t plan to pay taxes on it, and everybody knew it—Darling was looking up at an overhead TV, and bumped Poole with his elbow.
Poole looked up at the TV screen, which showed a bunch of cops and lots of yellow crime scene tape around a house in Northeast Dallas. A female newscaster was saying, in a voice-over, “Unofficial police reports say that two people were executed in the Bennett house, and that the man in the rear house was tortured to death...”
