“Absolutely. I’m going to walk away, now, and across the street... Please don’t come outside until I wave at you.”
Lucas and Bob saw her walk to the driveway, get in her car, and then she told them, “I’m going to knock on Poole’s door. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that they’re gone.”
“Don’t do that,” Lucas said. “We need to talk about it first.”
“I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do,” Rae said. “Might as well get used to it.”
Bob looked at Lucas and said, “Really—get used to it.”
Rae backed her car out of the driveway, backed far enough down the street that she could pull into the target house, got out, and said, “I’m doing it,” and they heard her banging on the door. No answer. She said, “There’s a slot in the front drapes.”
She moved sideways and looked in a window and said, “Looks like a lot of furniture is missing. I’m coming out.”
Lucas said, “Okay, we’ve got a reasonable ID from that old man,whoever he was, and a telephone number, that ought to be enough for a judge.”
“Got a mass murderer and a baby killer and a cop killer, ought to be good enough for anybody,” Bob said. “Call your man in Washington and see how fast he can get a warrant.”
They had the warrant in an hour, delivered by two Texas Rangers who brought a crime scene team with them.
18
WHEN KORTfled from the town house shooting scene, she hadn’t done anything clever, because she wasn’t a clever woman. After turning a couple of corners, she ran straight south, as fast as she reasonably could, to I-695 and got lost in the traffic. She’d picked that up from Soto: getting out is almost always the best thing to do. There are more eyes around than you know and if you try to hide, somebody will see you.
She’d freaked herself out by shooting Soto, though she didn’t regret it. She’d changed hotels, and that night she’d driven carefully out into the countryside and had thrown the black rifle in a roadside slough. She thought she’d done the right thing: the federal marshals would know that she and Soto had killed Poole’sparents, the Bennetts, and Arnold, and Bedsow, the old guy in Roswell, Georgia.
And Soto had told her he’d give up anybody and everything to avoid the needle.
Would the Boss accept that? She didn’t know.
She sweated it out for twenty hours, all the possibilities. Kort wasn’t sophisticated in the ways of the world, but she’d seen Mafia and cartel movies, and accepted the movie premise that organized crime was like a huge FBI or CIA, that they would find you everywhere, that they had eyes on every street corner and every bar. She could imagine somebody dropping a quarter in a pay phone and saying, “I found that broad you been looking for.”
Ridiculous, but she didn’t know it.
Twenty hours after the shooting, she’d decided that honesty would be the best policy. She had a phone number that she’d written on a piece of cardboard that she kept in a wallet. It was fifteen digits long, all that would fit on the cardboard, to disguise the starting point. She’d never used the number herself, Soto had always done the calling, but now she lay on her stomach, on the hotel bed, and punched the number into her last burner.
And quickly hung up.
Lay with her eyes closed for ten minutes, choking with fear. No choice. She dialed it again, and a man answered on the second ring:“Si?”
“Soto died.”
“Is this the lady who travels with him?”
“Yes.”
“I will pass the message. Is this phone good?”
“First-time burner,” Kort said.
“We will call you back at this number in less than one hour.”
In less than one hour, a different man called back, and she thought it was the Boss himself, the soft, remote voice, the electronic hum in the background.
“Tell me...”
“On the phone?” Kort asked.
“It’s safe enough.”
