“Yeah, sure, let me look in my Rolodex...”
While he was doing that, Rae muttered to Bob, “He doesn’t have a computer.”
Bob nodded: “Probably the last guy in the country with an actual Rolodex.”
Wynn was back in thirty seconds and read off the address where he’d been shipping guitar parts. Easy as that.
—
LUCAS CAMEto the door in his shorts and T-shirt, yawning, scratching his stomach; somebody had started banging on the door at 9:12. He peeked through the door crack, saw Rae, and said, “I probably ought to put on some pants.”
“You ain’t gonna impress me, one way or the other,” Rae said.
“Okay, c’mon in. I’ll go put on some pants anyway.” He yawned again, leaving the door open behind him and asked as he walked away, “Find anything?”
“Yeah. We got Poole’s address,” Bob said.
Lucas turned and looked from one to the other. They weren’t laughing, though they might have looked a little smug. “Now I really need my pants,” he said.
—
LUCAS HEARDtheir story, then called Forte in Washington. “We’ve got an address for Poole. Haven’t looked at it yet, but it apparently was good three months ago.”
“Do not go there,” Forte said. “I got SOG on speed dial.”
“Got a couple of SOG guys with me now...”
“I know all about Bob and Rae—and I think three more deputies and a couple of technical people would be about right. Listen, this isn’t about some dim-witted gun freak. This guy can shoot and has proven he’s willing to do it. You sit there, I’ll get a SOG team to you before noon.”
Lucas told Bob and Rae about Forte’s decision and they both nodded and Bob said, “He’s right. Get a big enough team and it’s a lot safer than some knock-on-the-door small-city detective shit.”
“One thing we have to consider—Poole may know we’re here,” Lucas said. “His folks were tortured to death, and Darling might be down here after the dope guys tried to grab his wife, and TV’s been all over the Arnold murder. He’ll know it’s the cartel. He’ll know about me, too, from Darling. If Janice Darling was lying about him not having a phone, and I believe she was, he might have already run.”
“I ought to cruise the place,” Rae said. “Get an old car from some crappy rental place, colored girl with a do-rag, he’d see me as a maid.”
“We’d piss off Forte,” Lucas said. He thought about that for a moment, then said, “What the hell, he needs to get used to it. The sooner the better.”
“Let’s go,” Bob said. “Hot damn, we’re cookin’ with gas.”
“Another saying from 1945,” Rae said to Lucas. “The Stump collects them.”
—
THEY FOUNDthe right car near the airport, at Scratch’n Dent Rentals, and a half hour after they talked to Forte, Rae was squeezing herself into a Toyota Corolla with a hundred and ten thousand miles on the clock. The rental agent guaranteed that it would get through the day, at twenty dollars a day, not including gas.
Lucas and Bob trailed her toward the address they’d gotten from Wynn at Poody Parts, and a minute out of the target, found themselves driving through a low-income shopping area. Bob said, “I got a bad feeling about this.”
Lucas said, “Uh-huh.”
A minute later Rae called and said, “The address is a mail drop. U-Postem.”
“We’re coming in to talk,” Lucas said.
They sat in the Jeep outside U-Postem, arguing about the next step. Eventually, Rae went inside to see if she could wheedle a legitimate address for Chuck Wiggin out of the clerk. The clerk was willing to cooperate, but didn’t have the information.
Rae returned to the Jeep and told Lucas and Bob about her talk with the clerk. “He says if they made their customers give them an address and a phone number, they wouldn’t have any customers. He looked at me like I was retarded for asking.”
“No chance that he’s an alarm? That he’s calling Poole right now?”
