She told him all of it: she’d been wounded, that they had tracked the marshals, and therefore Poole, to Dallas. That they’d been sucked into a trap set by the marshals, that Soto had been caught. That Soto had told her that he would give up everything to avoid execution. That she thought it best that he not be given the chance. There was no possibility that she could take him away from marshals armed with machine guns, so she’d shot him. They’d been close to Poole, but now she didn’t know what to do.
When she finished, the man asked, “Where are you now?”
“A Holiday Inn...” She found the address on a room card and gave it to him.
“You waited to call us.”
“I was afraid... and running... and I had things to do. Things to get rid of,” she said.
“Listen, lady, you have done very well. I am impressed. Stay where you are. Some more ladies will come to see you, today,” the Boss said. “Throw the telephone away and get a new one. When you get one, call this number, let it ring once, and then hang up.”
“I can do that...”
Before she finished, the connection went dead.
—
BOX, POOLE, AND DARLINGwere still in Denton, walking around the shopping center. Darling wanted to get out of Texas.
“If the marshals are looking for us, they’ll have brought in the local cops and probably the state cops, too,” he said. “But cops get screwed up when they have to cross state lines—bureaucratic bullshit gets them tangled up.”
Poole asked, “What are you thinking?”
“We oughta run up to Oklahoma. We can be there in an hour. Maybe get a motel in Ardmore. We can sit around and think about it for a day or two.”
Poole looked at Box, who nodded: “Makes sense to me,” she said.
They left Denton, continuing straight north on I-35, a three-vehicle caravan, crossed the state line, and a little more than an hour later checked into three separate rooms at a Comfort Suites. Three separate rooms in case the cops found one of them, they’d have a fast temporary refuge in two others. They met in Poole’s room, talked about the situation for a while, then Box said she wanted to get some decent food and went out to find a supermarket.
As the door closed behind her, Poole asked Darling, “What are the chances of somebody randomly spotting us here? On our faces?”
Darling shrugged: “Slim to none. You’ve never had a beard, before now, that I’ve seen, and your ID is good. Nobody knows my face anyway. Nobody knows the tags on your vehicles, and they won’t find them by looking up the name you used on the house. I’ve always had a couple spare sets of tags, and I put one on my truck as soon as I got out of Alabama.”
Poole thought about that for a few seconds, then said, “I’m dry as hell. Let’s take my car and find us a couple of beers.”
“Saw an Applebee’s coming in,” Darling said.
—
THEY DROVEa couple of minutes to an Applebee’s, got a booth in a corner away from other patrons, ordered a steak and beer for Poole and fish and chips and a beer for Darling, and Poole said, “Sturgill, I know you have fun with your shitkicker act, but you’re the smartest guy I know. I gotta run, I know that, but I don’t know where to run to. Dora thinks Florida, but I got this feeling that Florida’s one place the marshals might look. The cartel boys, too. What do you think? Someplace further on south? I don’t speak Spanish and the cartels carry a lot of weight down there...”
The waitress brought their beers and they both took a swallow, and when she was gone, Darling put his elbows on the table, leaned forward, and said, “You want my opinion, and I don’t think you’ll like it, I’d say Edmonton or Calgary, up in Canada.”
Poole opened his mouth to protest, but Darling put up a finger to slow him down, then said, “Listen. Those two places got more than a million people each. You can get lost in them. Edmonton has this shopping mall that’s got something like a thousand stores in it—it’s bigger than AT&T Stadium.”
“Get outa here.” Poole tried to catch a Cowboys game at least once a year—AT&T Stadium was the biggest building he’d ever seen, much less been in.
“I’m serious. Edmonton is an oil town. All kinds of people coming and going, all the time. Lots of Americans, all over the place,including oil workers from the South, Texas, Louisiana. Nobody will give your accent a second thought. It’s actually kinda like Dallas, except for the winter.”
“Freeze my fuckin’ ass off,” Poole said.
“You get used to it,” Darling said. “You spend most of the winter indoors. And you’re really only talking about a couple of years until things cool down here in the States.”
“How would I get across the border?”
“I can fix that,” Darling said. “I know a guy, honest to God, smuggles stolen heavy equipment across the Minnesota border into Ontario. Getting you across the border would be nothing—take your pickup, if you want.”
“Canada.” Poole rubbed the side of his face. “Jesus, I got to think about that.”
