The cop was gone. She could still see the multicolored red-and-blue flashers back through the trees but she kept going, and when she couldn’t see them anymore, stopped long enough to get the phone off the floor and call Poole, and started driving again.
When Poole answered, she cried, “They’re all over me. The cops are all over me. I’m running through the trees...”
“What? What?”
“They must know the truck. I wasn’t speeding, I was in the slow lane, and the cop saw me and he came right after me,” she said. “I got off the highway into the woods, I’m running through the woods, I’ve lost them now, but I can’t go back on the roads...”
“Listen,” Poole said. “Now listen. How far away are they?”
“I don’t know, I’ve lost them. I’m lost, I’m off-road, I’m back in all these trees.”
“Keep going. See if you can spot a house, or anything that you’d recognize later. Anything. Then get the money and gold out and stick it under a tree or somewhere people can’t see it. You gotta hide it. If you hide the money, they got nothing on you, babe. They got nothing.”
The truck bounded over a hump of dirt and onto another dusty track. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she was moving away from the cop car, the sun still at her back. Up ahead, she saw the corner of a metal building, and she said into the phone, “Okay, I see this building up ahead. Just the corner of the roof, it’s silver. Okay, and off to the side, I can see the interstate through a hole in the trees. I must have come back to the interstate. I’m going to turn down that way.”
She followed a line of dirt, not even quite a track, past the edge of a pond, and rolled up to a fence and said, “There’s a fence, I can’t get across it...”
Poole, calm: “Can you stop there?”
She couldn’t see anything in the rearview mirror. “Maybe. I’ll stop.”
She stopped the truck, got out. She could still hear the cop’s siren, but it must have been several hundred yards away. One of the low scrubby trees, ten yards inside the fence line, had branches that dropped all the way to the ground. She popped open the back doors on the truck, got the two black cases with the gold and the cash, hauled them over to the tree, and pushed them back through the knee-high weeds to the tree trunk. She stepped back, to check: the briefcases were invisible.
She walked back to the truck and said, “I put the gold and the money under a tree, in high grass. You can’t see it, the branches come right down to the ground. I’m going to the tree...”
She went to the tree and paced off the distance to the fence.
“...It’s ten long steps from the fence. Probably ten yards, and I’m right across from the entrance to a road on the other side of the interstate. I’m only a little way west from the exit to Gordon, Texas. North side of the interstate, west of the exit. Gordon, Texas. G-O-R-D-O-N. From where I am, I’m looking right past the pond to the silver roof.”
“Got it all,” Poole said. “Get yourself out of there. Try staying on the back roads, see if you can find a place to hide until dark.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work, babe,” Box said.
“If it doesn’t, don’t say anything to the cops,” Poole said. “Not a word, except, ‘I want a lawyer.’ You’ve heard me talk about this. You want a lawyer.”
“I’ve still got the gun.”
Long silence, then, “You’ve never used one before. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I could ditch the truck and walk over to these buildings, see if I might catch somebody there.”
“I don’t think so. You don’t have time to clean up the truck, get rid of prints and all that... You shoot somebody, kidnap somebody, then you’re in the shit. I think you better throw the gun away. Sturgill is saying the same thing.”
“Okay. I’ll do that,” Box said.
“Listen. Do you have that orange blouse with you? The one I bought in Dallas and you don’t wear?”
“Yes, in my suitcase.”
“If you have time, get it out of the suitcase and rip a piece out of it and tie it to the bottom of the fence like ten yards from the tree where the money is. Make it easier to find when we come back for it.”
“If we come back.”
“We will, babe. We will,” Poole said.
“I’m hanging up now. Oh, God, Gar... I’m hanging up.”
—
