All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 122

122

From the beat of late summer through the flames of fall, Saint tracked his movements like he was a pawn in a game he could not possibly understand.

She split her time between her sullen cubicle in Kansas, a decay of motels, and her navy sedan, now littered with wrappers and cans from a dozen meals eaten on the road. Nix told her to stay fit, so she woke at five each morning and ran wherever she was, through Wichita woodland that recalled Monta Clare; through iron streets in downtown Dodge, Hell on the Plains; her gun never left her side.

After the phone call, Patch disappeared entirely. Saint worked with Himes’s team, growing in skill and stature, her senses so sharp Himes pushed her onward.

She sat in an unmarked car outside a drab apartment block thirty miles outside the city. She’d tracked a Missouri man from Lee’s Summit through Kansas City and on to Odessa. Micky Hubert had walked into the Summit Ridge Credit Union, waved a Smith & Wesson 9 mm in the face of the teller, and walked out with a little over three thousand dollars. He dropped all but seven hundred as he climbed into a waiting minivan, whose license plate a lady in the salon across the street took note of. Five thousand dollars from the Central Bank of the Midwest, and two thousand from the Bank of Odessa.

She traced the plate to the apartment, spent a couple of days watching on rotation, and wondered if all her cases would be so simple as Hubert and another man climbing into the same minivan.

Her heart didn’t even kick as she watched a sedan head them off, drew her gun and directed Hubert out and onto his stomach. He wore a robe, and

in the pocket she found a stack of bait bills, their serial numbers logged.

Hubert was out on federal supervised release after a prior felony conviction for bank robbery.

“What the fuck else was he going to do?” Saint said to Himes, who shook his head at her French but nodded at the sentiment.

She worked background on a Southhaven man who robbed the bank he worked security for, missed the take because the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms grabbed the guy a day early in the parking lot of a 7- Eleven.

“Haven’t those motherfuckers got bootleggers to chase?” Saint said, as Himes tried to placate her with a croissant.

She drifted further from Monta Clare, from the life she was supposed to lead, from Jimmy. Sometimes they went days without speaking. Jimmy’s mother called her, told her she was worried about her son. Told her Jimmy had missed church, that he wasn’t used to failing at anything, and that maybe it was a little because of Saint, because he could not keep his focus while his wife was not living in the marital home. When she did return, he alternated between attentive and sullen, passionate and cold. She saw flashes of the boy who loved her, of the man growing tired of the woman she was still becoming.

She settled into the rhythm of the unit, slept with files at the foot of her bed, and took each case so personal it was as if every dollar had been stolen from her own checking account. She leaned on a pusher pulled in on the floor below, who gave her the name of seven others who were casing the Standard State Bank in Independence. She flexed muscle and budget, and under the eye of Himes set up two surveillance vans and bugged the back room of a bar on Southwest Boulevard. The night before it went down she did not sleep, in her stomach that cold pain she’d been searching for. All seven taken, she made page two of The Kansas City Star.

“Half a million bucks saved, and they gave the front page to

motherfucking golf,” Saint said.

“Closest since the tie in—”

Saint shot him a look.

Himes turned back to his burger.

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