Page 72 of Backtrack

CHAPTER 28

Gerald Moffit should have been exhausted after the killings. He’d kept Duvall and Pink moving with a couple of Black Beauties—biphetamine capsules—and then given them their marching orders. Moffit had some pills for himself but hadn’t needed them yet. The sun felt warmer against his skin; the air smelled crisper, fresher. At least until he walked into Holly Odom’s sandstone blockhouse on Zion Hill Road. He was sure it had been a nice place at one time. Ricky Pink’s aunt had an eye for style, but she’d obviously been gone for some time. Dust-laden cobwebs trailed from virtually every fixture and faded drape. Half the light bulbs in the house were toast. The living room rug was scarred with cigarette burns and stained with food spills. Something in the corner looked suspiciously like a desiccated squirrel.

Moffit hadn’t made his fortune by trusting people. He was a liar, so he naturally assumed everyone was a liar, too. No one yet had proven him wrong—especially the two morons he found himself working with at the moment.Trust but verify, or so the saying went. He preferred to verify, and then verify again. To that end, he’d sent his useful idiots on another errand. It wasn’t busy work—the job was bloody and needed to be done—but Moffit wanted them out of his hair long enough to check the house where they’d been staying before the job. If they followed him, he’d know they were hiding something. That would be a shame. The big kid showed promise. He was still a moron, but with the right teaching, he and Moffit could make a lot of money together.

A supervisor’s salary at TexSafe wasn’t near enough to afford a ranchette on Lake Breckenridge, let alone seven classic cars. He never told his neighbors what he did for a living, but an Air Force bumper sticker and a couple of decals depicting fighter jets on the rear window of his Chevy were enough for them to assume he was an engineer at General Dynamics. No one from work had ever taken the trouble to visit him at home.

His lack of scruples combined with his natural inclination to scheme was what made him the real money. Most shipments were well-documented and cataloged, but every few weeks someone on one end of a job or the other made a counting error. Moffit watched and waited, pouncing at each opportunity. People were lazy. There were lots of opportunities.

Moffit stepped one foot in the kitchen and then stopped. He’d save that for last. The smell of sour milk and something that might be rotting pork hit him like a gut punch, making him dry heave. He shuddered and held his breath until he was back in the front room. The dead squirrel didn’t smell as bad as whatever it was in that kitchen. The odor of mildew and stale cigarettes reminded him of a fleabag hotel he’d stayed at in Matamoros. He’d picked up a bad case of scabies there. The memory made his skin crawl.

He pulled a leather case of lock-picks from his pocket and used it to push items around on the table or slide open drawers, avoiding leaving fingerprints or inviting any bugs to burrow in and feast on his blood.

He grimaced at the thought, stifling the temptation to scratch the skin off his bones.

If these idiots had taken the diamonds, they would surely have moved on by now. Still, he had to be sure. He’d personally witnessed Hiram Dietrich lock the diamonds in the back of the TexSafe truck. Someone had taken them. But who? Moffit’s money was on Vince Millner, which meant one of the cops had lifted them, probably the same one who’d done the fancy shooting at the Interstate roadblock. That one was going to be interesting to deal with.

The front bedroom was next. It must have been the aunt’s, judging from the furnishings and the dusty Robert Penn Warren novelon the nightstand. The rumpled quilts and pile of girlie magazines told him it was now likely Duvall’s. There were plenty of girlie mags in the next room, too, but there was no bed, just a mattress on the floor. That would be the kid’s.

Moffit had just stepped into the room when he froze at a distant sound. Someone outside had shut a car door—not slammed it, but eased it shut as if they didn’t want to be heard.

Moffit’s hand dropped to the butt of the Hi-Power on his belt.

As any hunter knew, sneaking feet were the loudest feet of all.

CHAPTER 29

Wayne Cutter drove past Holly Odom’s house on Zion Hill Road twice, getting a lay of the land before he stopped. His time in Special Forces had given him a credo of sorts that he taught to the younger troops who worked with him in Berlin—never to go anywhere for the first time. That was, of course, impossible. What he could do was research a place he was unfamiliar with, talk to people, watch—and listen—from a distance until he had some familiarity with the place he wanted to visit. As his British mates liked to say,proper planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.

Holly Odom’s place looked benign enough from a distance. Surrounded by post oak trees and piss elms, the nearest neighbor was a quarter-mile away. There were tracks in the driveway, but no visible vehicles. Someone could have been parked in the back, but at first glance, the place looked vacant.

Cutter had always loved the jigsaw gingerbread look of the old sandstone houses in Texas. They tended to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter. He’d thought to build one for Lucy on their property. That plan evaporated when she’d gotten sick. Cutter cursed under his breath. “Knock it off, Wayne!Get your head in the game. …”

He parked a couple of hundred feet down the road and killed the engine, satisfied for the time being that he wasn’t walking into an ambush. He eased open his door and sat still for a long moment, listening to his surroundings before venturing into the unknown.

He heard no voices, no dogs, just the metallic wobble of a spinning windmill and the rattling knock of the wooden pump shaft going up and down.

Eyes glued in the direction he needed to go, he grabbed the Motorola mic off the dash and let Dispatch know where he was. Lafayette Johnson’s voice came back almost immediately, incredibly loud against the near silence. Cutter bumped the volume down to a whisper, scanning the trees to see if the sound had alerted anyone.

“Cutter,” Johnson said. “Be advised, no answer from Mrs. F.” He spoke in veiled terms. Everyone and their dog had a RadioShack police scanner these days. “I called both the other two and get this, no one’s contacted them about any financial help.”

“Ten-four.” Cutter weighed the gravity of this new information. “Good work. Break. Dispatch, please send a unit to the address Johnson gives you to do a wellness check.”

“I have Garza en route at this time,” Nikki said.

Cutter thanked her and then let her know he’d be in the house on his handheld for a few minutes before replacing the mic on his dash. He grabbed the heavy five-D cell Kel-Lite and eased the door shut.

Rather than take the driveway up from the road, he made his way through the oaks and low scrub, revolver in one hand, flashlight in the other. Grasshoppers flitted out of his path at nearly every step, tick-tick-ticking away through the humid air. The sound reminded him of the noise Bodie’s bicycle made when he clipped playing cards to the spokes. He paused and listened twice more on his hundred-foot journey, finally coming up alongside a dusty curve that looked like a good track trap. He stepped out of the trees and stopped there, taking his eyes off the house long enough to stoop beside the tire tracks still clear in the dust. It had rained three days before, meaning the dually pickup had been there since then, probably leaving before the robbery. Another vehicle was here more recently, smaller wheelbase. A similar tread pattern to the one in Jack County. All six tires on the dually were old and worn. These were new, aggressive treading, maybe from a small truck like a Datsun or Toyota, or possibly a Jeep.

Cutter melted back into the woods and holstered his revolver. He wanted to get a look at the rear of the house and needed bothhands to bushwhack through the underbrush. He’d chased too many runners out back doors without knowing what kind of dog, clothesline, or swimming pool lay waiting for him. In this case, the sun-parched backyard looked clear. An old tire swing hung from an sickly pecan tree.

Cutter stopped by the swing. Scanning. According to the tracks, the dually had kept to the circular drive while the newer tire tracks ran alongside the house to disappear behind a ramshackle barn. A wall of trees and brambles rose up behind the barn. A creek bottom. One set of tracks went in. Whoever it was, they were still parked back there. It took a few seconds of scanning, but Cutter finally located footprints leading from the barn to the house through the scabby yard. Whoever it was, they were still inside.

Cutter stepped behind the pecan tree at the same time his hand dropped to the butt of his Smith & Wesson.

“I’m comin’ out!” a low, Southern voice called from inside. Cutter had an accent of course—hewasfrom Texas—but this one was syrupy, like honeyed whiskey. “You’ll have to excuse me, Sheriff, I—”

“Stop where you are,” Cutter barked.