Deadline

ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

Rules of Prey

Shadow Prey

Eyes of Prey

Silent Prey

Winter Prey

Night Prey

Mind Prey

Sudden Prey

The Night Crew

Secret Prey

Certain Prey

Easy Prey

Chosen Prey

Mortal Prey

Naked Prey

Hidden Prey

Broken Prey

Dead Watch

Invisible Prey

Phantom Prey

Wicked Prey

Storm Prey

Buried Prey

Stolen Prey

Silken Prey

Field of Prey

KIDD NOVELS

The Fool’s Run

The Empress File

The Devil’s Code

The Hanged Man’s Song

VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

Dark of the Moon

Heat Lightning

Rough Country

Bad Blood

Shock Wave

Mad River

Storm Front

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Copyright © 2014 by John Sandford

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sandford, John, date.

Deadline / John Sandford.

p. cm. — (A Virgil Flowers novel ; 8)

ISBN 978-1-101-59776-7

1. Flowers, Virgil (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Government investigators—Minnesota—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.A516D44 2014 2014026891

813'.54—dc23

International edition ISBN: 978-0-399-17268-7

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

D
ARK, MOONLESS NIGHT,
in the dog days of early August.

A funky warm drizzle kept the world quiet and wet and close.

D. Wayne Sharf slid across Winky Butterfield’s pasture like a greased weasel headed for a chicken house. He carried two heavy nylon leashes with choke-chain collars, two nylon muzzles with Velcro straps, and a center-cut pork chop.

The target was Butterfield’s kennel, a chain-link enclosure in the backyard, where Butterfield kept his two black Labs, one young, one older. The pork chop would be used to make friends.

D. Wayne was wearing camo, head to foot, which was no change: he always wore camo, head to foot. So did his children.

His ex-wife, Truly, whom he still occasionally visited, wore various pieces of camo, depending on daily fashion demands—more at Walmart, less at Target. She also had eight pairs of camo
underpants, size 4XL and 5XL, which she wore on a rotating basis: two each of Mossy Oak, Realtree, Legend, and God’s Country, which prompted D. Wayne to tell her one night, as he peeled them off, “This really is God’s country, know what I’m sayin’, honeybunch?”

His new, alternative honeybunch wore black cotton, which she called “panties,” and which didn’t do much for D. Wayne. Just something hot about camo.

A few thousand cells in the back of his brain were sifting through all of that as D. Wayne crossed a split-rail fence into Butterfield’s yard, and one of the dogs, the young one, barked twice. There were no lights in the house, and none came on. D. Wayne paused in his approach, watching, then slipped the pork chop out of its plastic bag. He sat for a couple of minutes, giving the dogs a chance to smell the meat; while he waited, his own odor caught up with him, a combination of sweat and whiskey-blend Copenhagen. If Butterfield had the nose of a deer or a wolf, he would have been worried.

But Butterfield didn’t, and D. Wayne started moving again. He got to the kennel, where the dogs were waiting, slobbering like hounds . . . because they were hounds. He turned on the hunter’s red, low-illumination LED lights mounted in his hat brim, ripped the pork chop in half, held the pieces three feet apart, and pushed them through the chain link. The dogs were all over the meat: and while they were choking it down, he flipped the latch on the kennel gate and duckwalked inside.

“Here you go, boys, good boys,” he muttered. The dogs came over to lick his face and look for more pork chop, the young dog prancing around him, and he slipped the choke collars over their
heads, one at a time. The young one took the muzzle okay—the muzzle was meant to prevent barking, not biting—but the older one resisted, growled, and then barked, twice, three times. A light came on in the back of the Butterfield house.

D. Wayne said, “Uh-oh,” dropped the big dog’s muzzle, and dragged the two dogs out of the kennel toward the fence. Again, the younger one came without much resistance at first, but the older one dug in. Another light came on, this one by the Butterfield side door, and D. Wayne said, “Shit,” and he picked up the bigger dog, two arms under its belly, and yanking the other one along on the leash, cleared the fence and headed across the pasture at an awkward trot.

The side door opened on Butterfield’s house, and D. Wayne, having forgotten about the red LEDs on his hat brim, made the mistake of looking back. Butterfield was standing under the porch light, and saw him. Butterfield shouted, “Hey! Hey!” and “Carol, somebody’s took the dogs,” and then, improbably, he went back inside the house and D. Wayne thought for seven or eight seconds that he’d caught a break. His truck was only forty yards or so away now, and he was moving as fast as he could while carrying the bigger dog, which must’ve weighed eighty pounds.

Then Butterfield reappeared and this time he was carrying a gun. He yelled again, “Hey! Hey!” and let off a half-dozen rounds, and D. Wayne said, “My gosh,” and threw the big dog through the back door of his truck topper and then hoisted the smaller dog up by his neck and threw him inside after the bigger one.

Another volley of bullets cracked overhead, making a truly
unpleasant whip-snap sound, but well off to one side. D. Wayne realized that Butterfield couldn’t actually see the truck in the dark of the night, and through the mist. Since D. Wayne was a semi-pro dog snatcher, he had the truck’s interior and taillights on a cut-off switch, and when he got in and fired that mother up, none of the lights came on.

There was still the rumble of the truck, though, and Butterfield fired another volley, and then D. Wayne was gone up the nearly, but not quite, invisible road. A half-mile along, he turned on his lights and accelerated away, and at the top of the hill that overlooked the Butterfield place, he looked back and saw headlights.

Butterfield was coming.

D. Wayne dropped the hammer. The chase was short, because D. Wayne had made provisions. At the Paxton place, over the crest of the third low hill in a roller-coaster stretch of seven hills, he swerved off the road, down the drive, and around behind the Paxton kids’ bus shack, where the kids waited for the school bus on wintry days.

Butterfield went past at a hundred miles an hour, and fifteen seconds later D. Wayne was going the other way.

A clean getaway, but D. Wayne had about peed himself when Butterfield started working that gun. Had to be a better way to make a living, he thought, as he took a left on a winding road back toward home.

Not that he could easily think of one. There was stealing dogs, cooking meth, and stripping copper wire and pipes out of unoccupied summer cabins.

That was about it, in D. Wayne’s world.

V
IRGIL
F
LOWERS NEARLY
fell off the bed when the phone began to vibrate. The bed was narrow and Frankie Nobles was using up the middle and the other side. Virgil had to crawl over her naked body to get to the phone, not an entirely unpleasant process, and she muttered, “What? Again?”

“Phone,” Virgil said. He groaned and added, “Can’t be anything good.”

He looked at the face of the phone and said, “Johnson Johnson.” At that moment the phone stopped ringing.

Frankie was up on her elbows, where she could see the clock, and said, “At three in the morning? The dumbass has been arrested for something.”

“He wouldn’t call for that,” Virgil said. “And he’s not dumb.”

“There’s two kinds of dumb,” Frankie said. “Actual and
deliberate. Johnson’s the most deliberate dumbass I ever met. That whole live-chicken-toss contest—”

“Yeah, yeah, it was for a good cause.” Virgil touched the call-back tab, and Johnson picked up on the first ring.

“Virgil, Jesus, we got big trouble, man. You remember Winky Butterfield?” Johnson sounded wide awake.

“No, I don’t believe so.”

After a moment of silence Johnson said, “Maybe I didn’t introduce you, come to think of it. Maybe it was somebody else.”

“Good. Can I go back to sleep?”

“Virgil, this is serious shit. Somebody dognapped Winky’s black Labs. You gotta get your ass over here, man, while the trail is fresh.”

“Jesus, Johnson . . . dogs? You called me at three in the morning about dogs?”

“They’re family, man . . . you gotta do something.”

—

A
T TEN O’CLOCK
the next morning, Virgil kissed Frankie good-bye and walked out to his truck, which was parked at the curb with the boat already hooked up. Virgil was recently back from New Mexico, where he’d caught and released every tiger musky in what he suspected was the remotest musky lake in North America. Nice fish, too, the biggest a finger-width short of fifty inches. He could still smell them as he walked past the boat and climbed into the cab of his 4Runner.

The day was warm, and promising hot. The sun was doing its job out in front of the truck, but the sky had a sullen gray look about it. There’d been a quarter-inch of rain over the past
twenty-four hours, and as he rolled out of Mankato, Minnesota, the countryside looked notably damp. But it was August, the best time of the year, and he was on the road, operating, elbow out the window, pheasants running across the road in front of him . . . nothing to complain about.

As Virgil rode along, he thought about Frankie. He’d known her as Ma Nobles before he’d fallen into bed with her, because she had about a hundred children; or, at least, it felt that way. She was a compelling armful, and Virgil’s thoughts had drifted again to marriage, as they had three times before. The first three had been disasters, because, he thought, he had poor taste in women. He reconsidered: no, that wasn’t quite right. His three wives had all been pretty decent women, but, he thought, he was simply a poor judge of the prospects for compatibility.

He and Frankie did not have that problem; they just got along.

—

A
ND
V
IRGIL THOUGHT
about Lucas Davenport for a while—Davenport was his boss at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and not a bad guy, though a trifle intense. There was a distinct possibility that he would not be pleased with the idea of Virgil working a dognapping case. Especially since the shit had hit the fan up north, where a couple of high school kids had tripped over an abandoned farm cistern full of dead bodies.

But Johnson Johnson was a hard man to turn down. Virgil thought he might be able to sneak in a couple good working days before Davenport even found out what he was doing. A dognapping, he thought, shouldn’t take too much time, one way or the
other. The dogs might already be in Texas, chasing armadillos, or whatever it was they chased in Texas.

Dognapping. He’d had calls on it before, though he’d never investigated one, and they’d always been during hunting season, or shortly before. Didn’t usually see one this early in the year.

—

J
OHNSON
J
OHNSON RAN
a lumber mill, specializing in hardwood timber—three varieties of oak, bird’s-eye maple, butternut, hickory, and some walnut and cherry—for flooring and cabinetry, with a side business of providing specialty cuts for sculptors. He and Virgil had met at the University of Minnesota, where they were studying women and baseball. Virgil had been a fair third baseman for a couple years, while Johnson was a better-than-fair catcher. He might even have caught onto the bottom edge of the pros, if baseball hadn’t bored him so badly. Johnson’s mill was a mile outside Trippton, Minnesota, in Buchanan County, in the Driftless Area along the Mississippi River.

The Driftless Area had always interested Virgil, who had taken a degree in ecological science. Basically, the Driftless Area was a chunk of territory in Minnesota, Wisconsin, northern Iowa, and Illinois that had escaped the last glaciation—the glaciers had simply flowed around it, joining up again to the south, leaving the Driftless Area as an island in an ocean of ice. When the glaciers melted, they usually left behind loose dirt and rock, which was called drift. Not in the Driftless Area . . .

Physically, the land was cut by steep valleys, up to six hundred feet deep, running down to the Mississippi River. Compared to the
farmlands all around it, the Driftless Area was less fertile, and covered with hardwood forests. Towns were small and far between, set mostly along the river. The whole area was reminiscent of the Appalachians.

Road time from Virgil’s home, in Mankato, to Trippton, on the river, was two and a half hours.

—

F
OR MOST OF
it Virgil put both the truck and his brain on cruise control. He’d driven the route a few dozen times, and there was not a lot to look at that he hadn’t seen before. Trippton was at the bottom of a long hill, on a sandspit that stuck out into the Mississippi; it was a religious town, with almost as many churches as bars. Virgil arrived at lunchtime, got caught in a minor traffic jam between the town’s three stoplights, and eventually wedged into a boat-sized double-length parking lane behind Shanker’s Bar and Grill.

Johnson Johnson came rambling out the back door as Virgil pulled in. Johnson Johnson’s father, Big Johnson, had been an outboard-motor enthusiast who fairly well lived on the Mississippi. He’d named his sons after outboard motors, and while Mercury Johnson had gotten off fairly easy, Johnson Johnson had been stuck with the odd double name. He was a large man, like his father, and well tattooed.

“I can smell them fuckin’ muskies from here,” he said, as Virgil climbed out of the truck. He leaned into the boat and said, “I hope you brought something besides those fuckin’ phone poles,” by which he meant musky gear.

“Yeah, yeah, I got some of everything,” Virgil said. “What about these dogs? You find them yet?”

“Not yet,” Johnson said. He was uncharacteristically grim. “Come on inside. I got a whole bunch of ol’ boys and girls for you to talk to.”

“We’re having a meeting?”

“We’re having a lynch mob,” Johnson said.

Virgil followed him in. One of the trucks he passed in the parking lot had a bumper sticker that asked, “Got Hollow Points?” Another said: “Heavily Armed . . . and easily pissed.” A third one: “Point and Click . . . means you’re out of ammo.”

“Aw, jeez,” Virgil said.

—

V
IRGIL WAS A
tall man, made taller by his cowboy boots. He wore his blond hair too long for a cop—but country-long like Waylon Jennings, not sculptural long, like some New Jersey douche bag, so he got along okay.

He dressed in jeans and band T-shirts, in this case, a rare pirated “Dogs Die in Hot Cars” shirt, which he hoped the local ’necks would take for a sign of solidarity. To his usual ensemble, he added a black sport coat when he needed to hide a gun, which wasn’t often. Most times, he left the guns in the truck.

He sometimes wore a straw cowboy hat, on hot days out in the sun; at other times, a ball cap, his current favorite a black-on-black Iowa Hawkeyes hat, given to him by a devout Iowegian.

Johnson led the way through the parking lot door, down a beer-smelling corridor past the restrooms, which had signs that said “Pointers” and “Setters,” to the back end of the bar, where twenty or so large outdoorsy-looking men and women hunched over
rickety plastic tables, drinking beer and eating a variety of fried everything, with link sausages on the side.

When Virgil caught up with him, Johnson said, in a loud voice, without any sign of levity, “Okay, boys and girls. This here’s the cop I was talking about, so put away your fuckin’ weed and methamphetamine, those that has them, and pay attention. Virgil?”

Virgil said, “For those of you with meth, I’d like to speak to you for a minute out back. . . .”

There were a few chuckles, and Virgil said, “I mostly came to listen. What’s going on with these dogs? Somebody stand up so we all can hear you, and tell us.”

A heavyset man heaved himself to his feet and said, “Well, I thought Johnson would have told you, but somebody’s snatching our dogs.”

A drunk at the front of the bar, who’d turned around on his barstool to watch the meeting, called, “Better’n having your snatch dogged.”

The heavyset man shouted back, “Shut up, Eddy, or we’ll kick your ass out of here.”

“Just trying to be human,” Eddy said, but he turned back to the bar.

“All right,” Virgil said. “Somebody’s taking dogs. You know who it is?”

“Yeah, we got our suspicions,” the big man said. “There’re some hillbillies up at Orly’s Crick, all along the valley, and you can hear the dogs howling at night. Dogs, not coyotes. Dozens of them. But when you go up there, there’s only one dog per yard. You’d have to sneak up on ’em, to find the ones that are howling. Problem is,
there’s only one little road going in, and they can see you coming, and they move the dogs before you can get there. I tried to come down from on top, but you can’t get down them bluffs without breaking your neck.”

“And you could get your ass killed,” somebody added. “Fuckin’ peckerwoods are all carrying .223s. Pick you off like sittin’ ducks.”

Another big man stood up, and everybody turned to look; his face was red, and it appeared that he’d been weeping. He took off his camo cap and said, “I’m Winfred Butterfield. Winky. They took my two Labs last night. Right out of the kennel. My dogs’re gone, sir. Snatched right out of my yard. Knowed what they was doin’, too—left behind some pork chop bone and a cloth muzzle, used to keep them quiet.”

He told the story, until he got to the part where he “let off some shots in that direction.” He paused and then said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You hit anyone?” Virgil asked.

“Naw, I wasn’t trying. I mean, I wouldn’t mind shooting that miserable motherfucker, if I had a clear shot, but I was afraid I might hit one of the dogs.”

Somebody said, “You got that right.”

“Okay, just a note here. Let’s decide right now that we’re not going to shoot anybody over a dog,” Virgil said. “Let me handle this the legal way.”

The men all looked around, and then one of the women said, “Kinda afraid we can’t do that, Virgil.” And they all nodded.

“Well, goddamnit, people.”

“This is organized crime, Virgil,” she said. “If we don’t shut these people down, no dog will be safe.”

—

V
IRGIL WAS WORRIED.
Everyone at the meeting seemed stone-cold sober, and they talked about shooting the dognappers with the cool determination of people who might actually do that, given the chance. They didn’t seem anxious to do it, like a bunch of goofy gun nuts—they sounded more like farmers planning to eliminate a varmint that had been killing their geese.

Virgil asked them about the hillbillies on Orly’s Creek, and a dozen people gave him bits of information—sightings, rumors, incidents—that made him think they were quite possibly right.

One of the men said, “I saw this old gray truck going by Dan Busch’s place, two or three times over a week. Driving slow, looking around . . . Couple days later, Dan’s beagles got ripped off.”

“Four of them,” another man said, who added, “I’m Dan.”

The first man said, “Anyway, a couple weeks later I was driving up 26, and I see this old gray truck coming out of the Orly’s Crick Road. Same truck. Couldn’t prove it, but it was.”

Another man said, “There’s this guy called Roy, I think his last name is Zorn, he lives up there. Tall red-haired guy, skinny, got about nine million freckles on his face. They got his picture in all the animal shelters and humane societies, telling them NOT to give him any dogs or cats, because he was going around, getting them, and then he’d sell them off to animal bunchers.”

Virgil said, “Excuse me? What’s a buncher?”

“That’s guys who collect animals for the laboratories, for experiments. He’d go around and get these free animals, saying he was looking for a pet, and then he’d sell them off to the bunchers,” the big man said. “We know damn well, he’d get kittens that way, too. You know, somebody’d put an ad in the paper, saying, ‘Free Kittens,’ and he’d take as many as they’d give him, sayin’ he needed mousers for his barn. The animal people caught on, and somebody took his picture, and now he can’t go into those places.”

“I’ll go talk to him,” Virgil said. He turned to Butterfield and asked, “Winky—how much did you pay for those Labs?”

“These were top dogs, partially trained. I paid fifteen hundred for one, twelve hundred for the other,” Butterfield said. “But I don’t give a damn about the money—they’re my best friends.”

“The money makes stealing them a felony,” Virgil said. “It always helps to have a felony backing you up, when you talk to people.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said one of the women. “Most everybody here has had dogs stolen, which is why they are here. The rest of us are worried. If you took all the dogs stolen, they’d be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars, easy. Maybe even more.”

Virgil said he’d look into it: “I’ll be honest with you, this is not what I usually do. In fact, I’ve never done it before. I can see you’re serious folks, so I’ll take it on. No promises. I could get called off . . . but if I do, I’ll be back. You all take care, though. Don’t go out there with guns, I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”