Deadline (26 page)

V
IRGIL CALLED
D
AVENPORT
from the hospital: “We’re all back in Minnesota. We might have a little legal whoop-de-do, because we had the guy, and we were gonna hold him for the Wisconsin authorities, but he claimed he was having a heart attack, so we evacuated him to the nearest clinic . . . which was back across the river, here in Minnesota.”

“Did he have a heart attack?” Davenport asked.

“They’re not sure, but they think not,” Virgil said. “At the end of the chase, he fell in a golf course sand trap. I think he was mostly embarrassed.” Virgil gave him a succinct summation of the shoot-out and chase.

“Let the legal guys sort it out. Maybe we’ll have to drive him back over, then extradite him. Who cares? I talked to Jenkins, on the way up to the Mayo. He’s pissed.”

“I hope his leg’s not bad.”

“It’s not. He’ll be off his feet for a day or two. Weather says anytime you’ve got a bullet-like object penetrating into a muscle, it’s not something you want to take lightly.”

“Especially if it’s your heart muscle,” Virgil said. “I’ll stop and see him on the way home. We got a mountain of paperwork to do, and he can do that sitting down. Right now, I’ve got to look at a movie.”

“You found the chip?”

“Yup. Will Bacon left it where I could find it. Couldn’t believe it,” Virgil said. “He must’ve been up on that ladder when Kerns walked in—he knew what was going to happen, and instead of freezing up, he kept thinking.”

“Good for him. Goddamnit, makes you proud.”

“Yes, it does.”

—

P
URDY SHOWED UP
at the clinic, and Virgil outlined what had happened, and said he’d be down to the sheriff’s office in the morning to make a full statement. Purdy said they’d chain Laughton to his bed: “That boy ain’t goin’ nowhere. We’ll truss him up like an Easter ham.”

Virgil, Johnson, and Shrake stopped at Tony’s for a six-pack of Leinenkugel’s and an everything pizza, then drove back to Johnson’s cabin, where Johnson bitched and moaned about the boat until he had a mouthful of pizza, and Virgil fired up his laptop and plugged in the memory card.

The sound was tinny—it’d get better with decent speakers—but
the picture was very clear, and about the time Jennifer Barns, she of the butt wound, said, “I think we’re in the clear—I talked to the fire chief, and he said there’d be no way to recover the records. I made out like it was a disaster, but told him we’d figure out a way to live through it,” they had them.

“As long as that fuckin’ Flowers moves along,” Kerns said, as they watched.

“Flowers can think anything he wants, but if he doesn’t have the records to prove it, we should be fine,” Barns said. “Just keep our heads down and our mouths shut.”

“Unless they catch Buster,” said Jennifer Gedney. “He knew where the money was coming from. I mean, I didn’t tell him, but he knew.”

Kerns said, “If we have to, we handle Buster the same way we handled Conley. The same way we handle anyone who talks.”

“I think we’ve done enough killing,” said Henry Hetfield. “More killing will just get more attention.”

—

“
W
HEN WAS THE LAST TIME
you saw something like that?” Shrake asked. “I mean, like, never?”

The camera had been movement- and voice-activated, and at the end of the recording, the camera shook and then a man’s voice said, “Bacon. Get down out of there!”

Bacon: “Randy. What’s up?”

Kerns: “That’s a camera, right? Get down out of there, you asshole. Bring the camera.”

Bacon: “I . . . I . . . sure . . . Just a minute, I have to unwrap the
tape. The camera belongs to Virgil Flowers, Randy. He’s on his way here, he’ll be here in the next minute or so. He’s gonna be really pissed—”

Kerns: “Get down that fuckin’ ladder and bring that fuckin’ camera, or I swear to God I’ll blow your legs off.”

Bacon muttered, almost under his breath, but loud enough to be heard by the recorder: “Hurry, Virgil. Hurry.”

What may have been a hand crossed close in front of the lens, and then there was a flash of electronic noise—the card being unplugged—and the video ended.

“Oh, Jesus,” Shrake said.

Virgil sat frozen. “I killed that guy.”

Johnson said, “No, you didn’t. Randy Kerns did. Don’t go taking on any extra blame, if you don’t have to. You can go crazy doing that.”

Virgil said, “I hurried, but I was just too far away. I should have told him to wait for me.”

“When you got out of the truck, to go in the school, did you have your gun with you? I mean, before you had to break that window out?” Shrake asked.

“No, I had to go back for the gun.”

“Which means that if Bacon had waited for you, and you’d gone right in . . . Kerns would have killed both of you, instead of just killing Bacon. You didn’t fuck up, Virgil: you just got crazy unlucky with the timing.”

—

T
HEY WERE STILL
talking it over when headlights flashed in the side yard. Shrake and Virgil got their shotguns, and Johnson unlocked
and raised a side window and shouted through the screen, “Who’s there?”

A man called back, “Henry Hetfield and Del Cray. We’re looking for Agent Flowers.”

“What do you want?”

“We have some information we think he needs. About the school board,” Hetfield shouted back.

Johnson looked at Virgil, who shrugged. Johnson shouted back, “Too late, dickhead.”

“Wait, this is important. We gotta talk.”

Virgil shouted back, “Oh, all right. Come on in. But we’ve got two shotguns and a .45, and at this short distance, they’d take off your heads. You understand that?”

“Please don’t shoot us. . . .”

—

T
HE
NEXT MORNING,
Virgil met Dave the lawyer at Ma and Pa’s Kettle, gave him some headphones and plugged him into the video of the school board meeting. Dave ate bacon and French toast, and drank Bloody Marys, and watched, fascinated, as it all came out.

“Not gonna wait,” he said, when the video ended and he’d pulled off the earphones. “We’re gonna bust them all. Now, today.”

“We’ve also got a couple of direct witnesses for you,” Virgil said, and he told him about Henry Hetfield and Del Cray from the night before.

“What’d you promise them?”

“Not a goddamn thing,” Virgil said. “I’ve got it on a voice
recorder, me not promising them anything. I told them that I’d mention it to the judge, that they’d made a voluntary statement to me. That’s all on a flash drive,” Virgil said. He slid the flash drive across the table.

“This almost takes the fun out of it,” Dave grumbled. “We don’t have to negotiate, we don’t have to argue with anyone, we don’t have to do any real serious lawyer shit. A law student could convict them.”

Virgil told him about their hasty export of Vike Laughton from Wisconsin to Minnesota. “Well, that’s something,” Dave said, brightening a bit. “Those Cheeseheads can get a little testy about such things. Gonna have to look up the precise Latin phrase that means ‘Fuck off.’”

—

T
HE ROUNDUP STARTED
at one o’clock. Dave had spent some time talking to the attorney general, who’d sent down a stack of warrants specifying a list of crimes that included murder, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder (the ambush at the cabin), a variety of charges involving assault on police officers and conspiracy to do the same, embezzlement, and a bunch of other stuff, including, as a garnish, charges of misprision of a felony against everybody. “That’ll get them an extra two weeks on top of the thirty years,” Dave said with satisfaction. “We’ll go for consecutive sentences.”

Jennifer Gedney wept. “I don’t have any money, I don’t have any money. How can you say I took money, when I don’t have any money. . . . Is that a TV camera?”

Bob Owens also wept, and kept saying, “Everything I worked for. Everything I worked for. Who’ll take care of the kids?”

“You were stealing from the kids, you miserable ratfucker,” said Shrake, who was putting on the cuffs. “Excuse me—I mean, you miserable ratfucker, sir.”

Larry Parsons shouted at them, ran back through his house, and tried to squeeze out the bedroom window, but a couple of deputies got him by the feet and pulled him back in, so Virgil could arrest him. Shrake had gone with a couple more deputies to serve the arrest warrants on Jennifer Barns, at the hospital in Rochester, who screamed, “You can’t do this, I’m wounded. I’ll sue everybody. Those criminals shot me last night. I’ll sue!”

Vike Laughton hadn’t said anything. He’d just waved his free hand at them, from his hospital bed, and turned his face away, the cuff on his other hand rattling against the bedframe. He had a bad case of sand-burn on his face, and especially his nose.

Henry Hetfield and Del Cray were calm enough: they’d known since the night before what was coming, and since Virgil had arrested them and stuck them in the Buchanan County jail, they’d had time to think about it. Both of their houses were raided for evidence. Cray’s wife and two children were gone, and so were quite a few things in the house, including the memory foam cover on the king-sized bed. A neighbor said they’d rolled out of their driveway the evening before, towing a large U-Haul trailer behind the newer of the Crays’ two trucks.

With a little speed to keep her going, she could be in Canada or Alabama or Montana or Pennsylvania. Dave said they’d look for her.

Jennifer Houser was simply gone.

—

D
AVENPORT CALLED
and
said, “You still on vacation? Or are you ready to go back to work?”

“I will be on Monday,” Virgil said. “I got one more thing to do on Saturday.” And, “How’s Del?”

“Messed up. He might need another op, there were some bone splinters from his pelvic bone that bounced all over the place.”

“Maybe he’ll retire.”

“His wife wants him to,” Davenport said. “We’ll see. I can’t believe he could get through life without hanging out on the street, talking to assholes.”

“It’s like a curse,” Virgil said.

“Listen, do what you’re gonna do on Saturday, but don’t get hurt, and don’t get anybody else hurt. Then on Monday, a kind of peculiar thing has come up out in Windom. . . . “

S
ATURDAY MORNING DAWNED
bright but humid; there’d been just enough rain overnight to create a few muddy spots outside the cabin door. The river was looking as dark as it usually did, snaking along toward New Orleans, but the sun was coming up orange over the rain clouds, which were drifting across to Wisconsin.

Virgil was up at seven, and at seven-thirty, met Johnson Johnson at Shanker’s for breakfast, which they shared with four couples and a bald old man who’d be following them over to Dillard’s farm. The farm was twenty-odd miles directly west, as the crow flies. If the crow was driving a 4Runner, the distance was around thirty-six miles, right on the border of Buchanan and Fillmore counties.

Noting that as they worked out a route on a paper map, Johnson said, “Two of the worst presidents in the history of the United States, Buchanan and Fillmore.”

Virgil said, “I didn’t know you read history, Johnson.”

Johnson said, “Well, that was in the ‘local information’ in the old Buchanan County Yellow Pages. But, you know, I’m not a complete ignoramus.”

“I told somebody that, recently, but she disagreed, and eventually talked me around.”

“Thanks, old buddy,” Johnson said. He yawned, stretched, and said, “I probably lost five pounds this past couple of weeks, running around with you. Maybe I ought to write a diet book:
The Virgil Flowers Weight-Loss Plan
. Start by leaving your gun in the truck. . . .”

Virgil leaned across the table and asked, in a near-whisper, “When you said a posse was coming with us, you meant four couples in four trucks, and one old guy with a missing tooth?”

“Maybe somebody else will show up,” Johnson said. His eyes slid sideways, and Virgil detected a likely prevarication.

“You lying motherfucker, Johnson, what have you done?”

“Not a fuckin’ thing,” he said. “I’m completely innocent.”

“Your mom told me that you were a difficult baby,” Virgil said. “You haven’t been innocent since you were a half hour old.”

“Fuck you. And Mom,” Johnson said. “She always liked Mercury better.”

—

T
HE WORD WAS
that the dog roundup was scheduled to start at eight o’clock, when bunchers from Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota would open for business at Dillard’s farm, which also held occasional farm equipment auctions. Johnson had learned that to prevent disputes, no dogs would be sold even a minute before nine
o’clock, although the dogs would be available for survey before then. Dillard was expecting upwards of three hundred dogs. A few would be sold as hunting dogs, most as lab dogs, and “trash” would be handled by Dillard.

“That’s what he called them,” Johnson Johnson said. “Trash. Is that anything to call a dog? They’re man’s best friend. And when he said ‘handling them,’ you know what he’s gonna do? He’s gonna shoot them, is what I think.”

A little after eight, they were in their trucks. Virgil was alone in his, because Johnson wanted to take his own truck in case he had to haul some dogs back, and Virgil, with any luck, would have D. Wayne Sharf handcuffed to the steel ring in the backseat of the 4Runner. The little caravan stretched out over a half-mile, with Virgil in the lead.

The drive was pleasant enough, rolling along the back highways, none of them straight, listening to country music on satellite radio. They were still in the Driftless Area, with heavily wooded hills overhanging small farms and narrow farm fields that twisted up the hillsides, the small farmhouses neat and usually white, with gardens and fruit trees and older cars parked in side yards.

They arrived at Dillard’s farm at eight forty-five. There were three larger trucks and a dozen pickups, some with trailers, already parked in a field that stretched along the gravel road, between the road and a dry creek a hundred yards downslope. Except for the barking of several hundred dogs, it might have been the beginning of some low-rent hippie music festival.

A few pickups and SUVs were parked on the shoulder of the road. Virgil pulled off behind them, and his caravan pulled off with
him. He’d already asked them not to get out of their trucks until he’d spotted D. Wayne Sharf, just in case Sharf should recognize any of them. They’d all agreed, with a little bitching from the Bald Old Man with One Tooth, who, Virgil had been told, was looking for a stolen dachshund named Dixie.

Virgil had asked Johnson, “Is he sure it was stolen? Maybe it was eaten by coyotes.”

“Coyotes don’t eat dachshunds,” Johnson said. “Dachshunds were bred to go down badger tunnels and drag the badgers out by their ass. A good-sized dachshund could weigh thirty pounds and has jaws like a crocodile. Old Dixie would straight-out fuck up a coyote.”

“Didn’t know that,” Virgil said.

—

W
HEN
V
IRGIL HAD PARKED,
he looked over the trucks parked in the field. D. Wayne Sharf’s wasn’t there, unless Sharf had changed vehicles, which was possible. Virgil knew what he looked like, and so climbed out of his 4Runner, wandered over to the driveway and down to the sales field. Fifteen or twenty guys were standing beside their vehicles, drinking from Big Gulp cups or steel coffee cups, and talking with each other, country-looking guys in jeans and boots and long-sleeved shirts.

Most of the trucks and trailers were small, but three larger trucks, pulling larger trailers, showed stacks of empty cages with hard floors and wire sides: they were the bunchers, Virgil guessed. A red-faced older man in jeans, a rodeo belt, and cowboy boots and hat was talking to the men by the bunchers’ trucks. He had a sheaf
of papers in his hands, and Virgil thought he was probably Dillard, the farm owner.

Virgil wandered down the line of trucks, looking at the men and peering through windows. He didn’t find Sharf, but he got a bad impression about the handling of the dogs: a lot of the pens had three or four animals stuffed inside, so they could hardly move. He saw one dog he thought was either sick or dead.

He’d just finished his initial survey when a couple more trucks arrived, both pulling trailers. One trailer was covered, but the other was open, stacked with wooden and fiberglass pens full of dogs, like chickens being hauled away for slaughter. The truck with the open trailer, an aging red GMC, rolled down the line of early arrivals and wedged itself into an opening in the line. It was not D. Wayne Sharf’s truck, but it was D. Wayne Sharf who got out of the passenger side.

The driver was a young, thin man, who might’ve been Roy Zorn’s younger brother: same red hair and freckles, a nose that somebody had pushed out of line, aviator sunglasses. Sharf was dressed like everybody else, with cowboy boots, got out and yawned and walked down the side of the trailer, looking up at the dogs. The freckled guy joined him, and pointed at something at the top of the pile of cages: they were talking about unloading.

Virgil ambled toward them; he didn’t want to startle Sharf. He’d closed the gap to twenty yards when he noticed that his caravan was rolling down the driveway into the parking area. Actually, he thought, they were blocking the driveway. Johnson got out of the lead truck, and Virgil saw that he was talking on a cell phone—but he wasn’t talking to Virgil.

Whatever . . .

Virgil started walking toward Sharf again, when somebody asked, “What the heck is this?”

Virgil looked where he was looking—and saw another caravan of cars, probably thirty or forty of them, rolling over the hill. He looked toward Johnson, and Johnson was looking at them, too, and still talking on the cell phone.

Now everybody was looking, and the caravan pulled to the side of the road, further blocking exit from the farm field.

Somebody nearby said, “They aren’t here to sell dogs.”

“Hey, those are TV trucks.”

Two white trucks with television call signs swerved off the road, and cameramen got out, already hoisting cameras to their shoulders.

Somebody else started shouting, “Hey, Arnie? Arnie Dillard? You better come look at this.”

Virgil knew that Dillard’s first name was Arnie, but he wasn’t sure that Arnie could fix whatever was about to happen. People, lots of them, probably eighty or ninety, were climbing out of the cars and trucks. Most of them were empty-handed, but right in the middle of the caravan, twelve or fifteen women got out of five or six SUVs. They were dressed identically, in black jeans, black shirts, and black bicycle or motorcycle helmets, some with face plates. Some wore knee pads or football shoulder pads. Most of them carried aluminum baseball bats; two or three carried iron bars that looked like spears.

Another voice, close by: “Oh, shit.”

Virgil turned and asked, “What?”

“It’s the Auntie Vivians.”

“Who’s that?”

“The Minnesota Women’s Anti-Vivisection League. I’m gettin’ the fuck outa here.” And the guy started running. He turned back just long enough to blurt, “Save yourself.”

—

V
IRGIL WASN’T SURE
what movie it was, but he remembered a scene in which a medieval Scottish army attacked an English army, the Scots sweeping down a long grassy hillside with swords, axes, hammers, spears, and apparently whatever else they had in their barns. This was sort of like that. The people got out of the trucks and looked back and forth, calling to each other, spreading out, and some of them were shouting down the hill to where Virgil and the dog sellers were. The women in the helmets moved to the front of the long line, a wedge of them, and then one of them screamed, and then all of them screamed, and suddenly the line broke and the whole crowd charged down the hill, led by the women with aluminum baseball bats.

Virgil thought of running out in front of the wedge with his arms raised, and his ID in his hand, but only for a split second: somebody would hit him with a baseball bat, and that would be that. He also thought about pulling his pistol and firing a shot in the air, but his pistol, as usual, was locked in the truck’s gun safe.

In the end, he ran around behind the truck he was standing next to, then down the line of trucks to where he’d seen D. Wayne Sharf a few seconds before the charge. Truck engines were coming alive when he ran around the nose of a Ford Super Duty pulling a
twenty-foot trailer stacked with animal crates, just in time to see D. Wayne jump in the passenger seat of the truck he’d come in.

Virgil ran up and yanked open the door and said, “D. Wayne, you’re under arrest—”

That was as far as he got before D. Wayne hit him on the forehead with a half-empty two-liter plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper. Virgil went down, and D. Wayne slammed the door and Virgil rolled away, staggered to his feet, and jumped on the fender over the trailer’s double wheels, and held on to two of the stacked crates. Inside one of the crates, a half-dozen small dogs were rolling around on the hard plastic crate floor as the truck driver wheeled around the end of the line of trucks; in the other crate, a big yellow dog with floppy ears looked out at him with interest.

About then, the driver found out that there was no place to go. He went anyway, bouncing over what had been a fairly decent alfalfa field, trying to stay away from the crowd that was spreading out over the pasture.

The dog sellers looked like a tough bunch, and there were certainly a few guns in the various vehicles, but they were outnumbered four or five to one, and as Virgil clung to the dog crate, he saw a woman run alongside a fleeing truck and spear the back tire with one of the long iron rods.

The tire blew, and the back of the truck sagged; farther down the field, the driver of one of the trucks had been pulled out into the alfalfa, and part of the crowd swarmed over his trailer, unloading the dog crates onto the ground, opening the doors and freeing the dogs, which ran in excited circles, howling and barking.

One truck driver tried to break through the fence, but the fence
hadn’t been made in Hollywood. He dragged a few fence posts loose, but the fence didn’t break and the truck wound up nose-down in the border ditch, where it was swarmed by attackers.

Virgil thought about jumping off the trailer, fearing that it would roll on him, but the driver made a turn and then a woman in a motorcycle helmet was running alongside, and she speared one of the front truck wheels, and Virgil heard it go out with a POOF-WOP-WOP, and then she got the back one POOF-WOP-WOP-WOP, and the truck began to stall out and parts of the crowd began running toward it.

Virgil jumped off the fender and ran to the passenger-side door, but got there a few seconds late: a woman with an aluminum baseball bat knocked out the window, then took a swing at Virgil, who shouted, “I’m a cop, I’m a cop,” and she hesitated and asked, “Virgil?” and he shouted, “Yes,” and she ran away.

Behind the broken glass, D. Wayne Sharf was peering out at them, and Virgil shouted, “You’re under arrest. Open the fuckin’ door.”

“Fuck you,” Sharf shouted back. He turned toward the driver and looked like he might try to crawl over him, but Virgil reached through the shattered window and got him by the shirt collar and dragged him all the way back to the window and shouted, “Open the fuckin’ door or I’ll drag you right through the broken glass.”

Sharf twisted and turned and couldn’t get free, then cut himself on the window, and on the next pass, got blood on his hand and finally screamed, “Okay. Okay.”

Virgil heard a woman shouting, “That’s Virgil, that’s Virgil,” and the truck was rocking as the attackers crawled over it, breaking
every piece of glass they could find, breaking out headlights and taillights and knocking off mirrors, while others began unloading the dog crates and freeing the dogs.

There were a half-dozen dog brawls going on around the pasture, the dogs howling and barking with excitement, gathering in crowds to prance across the alfalfa, and stopping to mark various lumps and humps and truck tires.

Then D. Wayne popped the door locks and Virgil had him out of the truck and on the ground, and he rolled the other man on his back, dragged him fifteen or twenty feet to a perimeter fence post, and cuffed him and said, “You’re in a whole lot of trouble. Don’t make it worse by breaking out of these cuffs and trying to run.”