The short one asked, “You got a gun?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, don’t shoot us,” she said. “My name’s Annie, my partner here is Rosalind—Rosie. We’re not here to hurt you.”
“Then what are you here for?” Kort asked.
“To help out,” Rosie said. “We don’t have all the details, but the Boss wants his money back. We understand that you’ve run into some feds along the way.”
Kort backed away from the door, but kept her hand on her hip, close to the revolver, and the two women stepped inside. They looked around the room, then Rosie took the office chair at the small desk, and Annie settled into the one easy chair.
Kort said, “I can’t sit so well. I got shot in the buttocks.”
“So we heard,” Annie said. “You never got it fixed?”
“We fixed it ourselves,” Kort said. “Cut a bullet out with a razor blade, bled like crazy...” She told them the whole story of the wound, and when she was done, the two women looked at each other, some silent agreement between them, and Rosie said, “You got some major balls, honey. How’s the penicillin working for you?”
“I still hurt, but I don’t see any infection,” Kort said.
Annie said, “We got some OxyContin out in the RV. I’ll get you some.”
Rosie: “Let’s do that first. Then you tell us about these guys we’re looking for. And the marshals.”
19
LUCAS, BOB, AND RAEbroke into the house through the front door, because that looked like the least used, and so the least likely to have fresh prints. The three of them walked through first, clearing the place, with a variety of Texas cops waiting outside, and as they worked through the house, Lucas realized that Poole was gone.
There was still furniture inside, but it seemed that several pieces were missing, leaving behind leg indentations on the carpets. While there was still some clothing in the closets, it seemed to him that the good stuff was gone: no new men’s shoes, lots of old dusty-looking Nikes, and no women’s shoes at all.
Lucas looked under the sink and found some garbage, topped by a banana peel and moist coffee grounds; he looked in the master bedroom suite, and the bathroom cabinets were mostly empty.
Bob and Rae had gone to check the garage and a backyard shed while Lucas was poking around the kitchen and bedroom. The garage was empty, except for a well-used lawn mower. So was the shed. Rae said, “It looked like he used to have a lot of tools and stuff, but they’re all gone. There’s a homemade workbench in there and a trash bin with a broken guitar neck in it. Gotta be the right guy.”
“Didn’t miss them by much,” Lucas said. “A few hours at the most.”
“How do you know?” Bob asked.
“Banana peel and coffee grounds,” Lucas said.
“Huh?”
“There was a banana peel on top of the garbage. Looked good as new. How long does that last? Not even overnight, I don’t think. I bet it was dropped in there this morning. The coffee grounds were still wet.”
“Well, shit,” Bob said.
“If you werereallya genius, you’d have thought of that old telephone thing yesterday,” Rae said to Bob.
One of the crime scene crew people came out and said, “They didn’t wipe anything. There are fingerprints all over the place and hair and everything else, sexual residue on the sheets.”
“Get the prints going,” Rae said. “If you get good ones, we’ll have confirmation in a couple of hours.”
“We can get good ones.”
—
THEY EVENTUALLYwent out to the back of the house, to a gas barbeque and a wooden picnic table. They sat at the table and Bob said, “DNA will get us confirmations both on the murders in Biloxi and the armored car job.”
“Take a few days on the DNA,” Lucas said. “I’ll be happy with a good set of prints, right now.”
