Storm Front (13 page)

Her latest trip to the hospital began with a phone call:

“This is Mable Diarylide with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I am calling for Agent Flowers. We have a crime-scene crew that needs to speak with Reverend Elijah Jones. We need the room number.”

That got her the room number.

—

W
HEN HER KIDS
had been hospitalized, the visiting hours had gone until 8:30 p.m. She’d usually gone in late, to avoid the harridan from the cashier’s office, and because the kids had been young, she had been allowed to stay later than was normally permitted.

Good training.

She went in that night through the emergency room, her hair covered with a babushka. She took a circuitous route to a back stairway and went up one flight. The nursing station was down to her right, so she could push the door open just a crack and see if anyone was there. For the first few minutes, there was. The last time, she pushed open the door just in time to see the nurse pick up a clipboard and exit, stage right.

Ma was across the hall in five seconds, and into Jones’s room. Jones was asleep, but not very.

She touched his arm, and he opened his eyes: “What?”

“Do you remember me?” she whispered. “I’m Florence McClane.”

He looked at her for a long time, in the dim light, and then shook his head. “No.”

She told him about being a little girl in Bizby, and even then, he wasn’t sure: “I remember Bizby. . . . I do remember
something
about your family. Didn’t your father get hurt in an industrial accident, or something?”

“Not unless he cut himself on a pull-tab,” she said. Ma was disappointed. He was a major character in her life, and she apparently wasn’t even a minor one in his. Oh, well.

“I feel like I owe you,” she said. “I feel like I’ve always owed you. Now you seem like you need some help.”

“What? You came up here to bust me out?” He tried to laugh, and wound up coughing. “You think you can take the bed with you?”

He rattled his good leg, which was chained to the bed at the ankle.

Ma said, “I brought a bolt cutter, just in case,” and pulled it out of her bag to show him.

She’d caught his interest. “Maybe you do owe me,” he said. “But even if I could walk, I wouldn’t get far.”

“If you could get down one flight of stairs, I could pick you up in my truck,” she said.

“I could do that,” he said, pushing himself up. “I couldn’t run, but I could hobble that far. I think.”

“I can’t take you home. That state cop, Virgil Flowers, is all over me. On another matter, not about you, but he’s how I found out where you were. Do you have a place where you could go?”

“Yes. If you can get me there.”

They heard the nurse coming down the hall, and Jones pointed across the room and whispered, “That door—it goes into the bathroom.”

She slipped inside just in time. And then thought, getting caught in the bathroom wouldn’t be good. The bathroom was shared: she tried the door on the other side, and it was unlocked. On the other side, she found a sleeping man. A pair of crutches leaned against one corner.

—

L
ATER
,
WHEN SHE
cut Jones free from the bed, he said, “I’m not sure how I feel about stealing a man’s crutches.”

“They’re hospital crutches,” she said. “They’ll give him new ones—and you can always send them back when you’re done with them.”

“My clothes are in the locker.” He pushed himself up, and groaned. “I’m so damaged. . . . Young lady, you are definitely a godsend, but I tell you, I am a very damaged old man.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. She got him his clothes, and looked at her watch. “They’ll be checking you in six or seven minutes, and then not for another half hour. Put your clothes under your pillow, and put them on before you come down. I’m going now. You have to fake being asleep when they check you, but then, as soon as they leave, come down. The door is down to your right, and across the hall.”

“God bless you,” he said.

—

S
OMEWHAT TO
M
A
’
S SURPRISE
,
it worked out. The reverend, flailing with the crutches, appeared outside the stairway door, and looked both ways. She flashed her lights at him, and he turned toward her as she pulled through the parking lot, bumped over the curb onto the grass, and rolled up to the side of the building. She jumped out, ran around the truck cab, and helped boost him into the passenger seat.

“I don’t mean to be a complainer,” he said, as she got back behind the wheel. “But I hurt, and I’m going to have to take a pill. They make me a little woozy. I understand what’s going on, but my reactions aren’t so good. Before I do that, I need to tell you where we’re going.”

So he told her, and as they pulled away into the night, she asked, “Will this involve a burglary?”

“No, no, I have a key.”

“Are you bleeding?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t hurt that bad, I guess,” he said, rubbing his forearm, where he’d pulled out a catheter. “They weren’t really giving me any treatment in the hospital—after they patched me up, it was just pain medication and observation. But you will have to help me into the house.”

“I can do that,” Ma said. She watched as he gobbled down a couple of pills, and then asked, “How long before they take effect?”

“It’s pretty quick,” he said. “Now. Tell me your story. When the pills kick in, I may look a little sleepy, but I do understand what people are saying.”

“What do you want to hear?” she asked.

“Your story—the whole story, from the time your mom got the job at Hormel, right up until now.”

So Ma told the story: and when she thought about it later, it was a pretty good story, with some nice high points, and the usual lows for a single mother with five fatherless boys.

“We were in trouble,” she said. “The people in Bizby were okay, but nobody around there had any money, except some of the farmers who lived out of town. We were on welfare, but we didn’t have any clothes. . . .”

By the time they got to Jones’s hideout—actually, a pleasant middle-class home—he looked like he was out of it. But when she parked, and walked around to help him out of the car, he looked up at her from the passenger seat and said, “That was one of the best stories I have ever heard, in my entire life, and I was there at the beginning. It’s one of the things that made my life worthwhile, and I’m grateful to you for telling it to me. I will think about it every day until I die, and rejoice a little.”

Later, driving away, she thought about his sincerity in saying that, and it made her cry.

V
irgil’s phone rang at 3:37. He knew that because his clock was the first thing he looked at when the phone began ringing; 3:37 phone calls were not usually lawn-furniture sales, and more often than not, left him fumbling for his pants in the dark.

He took his cell phone off his nightstand, looked at the caller ID and saw “Unknown,” which usually meant a cop. He answered: “Virgil Flowers.”

“Virgil, this is Shane Cobley over at Mankato. We just got a call from the hospital, and they said your guy Jones has taken a hike.”

“What?”

“They said—”

“I heard that. He was chained to the bed.”

“They say he cut the chain off. That’s about all I know. I called Don Scott, and he said he’d go over there, and he told me to call you.”

“I’m going,” Virgil said.

But he would not, he thought, fumble into his pants in the dark. He turned the lights on before he fumbled into his pants, and a clean T-shirt, and yesterday’s socks. He was out the door in five minutes, at the Mayo in ten.

—

S
COTT WAS STANDING
in the hallway talking to two nurses, one each male and female, and a young man in a white jacket, when Virgil arrived. The nurses’ names were Max and Jane, and the resident’s name was Mark.

“Don’t know what happened,” Jane said. “I checked on him every half hour, and at three o’clock he was sound asleep. At three-thirty, he was gone.”

Mark, the resident, said, “I was asleep in the physicians’ room, and Jane woke me up. We ran around looking, but there was no sign of him. His clothes are gone, so he’s probably outside somewhere.”

“Can he walk?” Virgil asked.

“He’s hurt, but he’s pretty bound up in bandages. We would have had him on his feet in the morning.”

“We got three patrol cars covering the area,” Scott said.

“What about the cuff on his leg?” Virgil asked.

“Take a look,” Scott said.

They went into Jones’s room. One of the two cuff bracelets was still attached to the bed, with a short length of chain hanging from it. Virgil squatted to look at it. “Bright metal. Cut with a real bolt cutter—this was no side-cutter. Snipped right through it.”

“There was nobody up here that I saw,” Jane said, and she then glanced sideways at the male nurse, Max.

Max said, “I just got out of an elevator and I saw a woman walk down the hall toward me, and then she went down the stairwell. I didn’t see where she was coming from, but she shouldn’t have been here. I thought maybe she was a nurse I didn’t know, but she was dressed in civilian clothes.”

“A dirndl,” Jane said.

Virgil: “She was wearing a dirndl?”

Max said, “That’s what Jane says it was. You know, a low-cut dress, cut square across the top. She went through the stairway door, and I thought it was odd, something odd about her, so I pushed open the door and looked down after her, but she was already going outside at the bottom.”

“Did you mention it to anyone?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. Jane. She’s the charge nurse tonight,” Max said. “That’s how I found out about the dirndl.”

“She was never around the station, I never saw her,” Jane said. “The thing is, the stairway door is only two rooms down from Reverend Jones’s. So . . . I wouldn’t have seen her, if she was just quick in-and-out.”

“What time was this?” Virgil asked.

“A few minutes before three, I guess,” Jane said. “Because a little while after I talked to Max, about this woman, I went and did my room checks, at three. Reverend Jones was asleep. Then . . . well, you know. I did the three-thirty check, and no Jones.”

“What did this woman look like?” Virgil asked Max.

“I wasn’t that close to her . . . blond, maybe, very fair-skinned. I didn’t see her hair. She was short, she had . . . uh . . .” He’d unconsciously cupped his hands, then glanced at Jane, who crossed her arms, and he uncupped his hands and finished, “A pretty good figure.”

“Couldn’t see her hair?”

“No, she was wearing like a handkerchief over her hair.”

—

E
XAM TIME
.

Virgil asked himself, who did he know who was short, blond, would cause a witness to cup his hands, and who very likely would have instant access to a bolt cutter, and who knew about the stone and the search for it, and the money involved?

He said aloud, “Goddamnit, Ma.”

Scott: “Who?”

“Ah, that goddamned Ma Nobles. You know her?”

“Yeah. What’s she got to do with this?”

Virgil explained how she’d been around the edges of it. “She has a nose for money, and she probably gives every one of her kids a bolt cutter when they graduate from elementary school.”

“She lives out in the country, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll go on over there,” Virgil said. “But by this time, she’s ditched him someplace. Unless his daughter picked him up.”

He explained that, then excused himself, went down to his truck, pulled out the tracking tablet, and found that he’d lost Ellen—according to the map, she’d driven off the north edge of the tracking radius at nine o’clock, apparently heading back toward the Twin Cities. Possibly, he thought, because she was creating an alibi.

—

V
IRGIL PICKED UP
his cell phone and peered at it, reluctant to make the call, but he really had no choice.

Davenport said, “Goddamnit, Virgil.”

“Listen, one phone call, and you can go back to sleep. I need Jenkins and Shrake. Like now.”

Davenport wanted to know what had happened, and why Virgil was up at four o’clock in the morning.

“Jones took a walk,” Virgil explained. He finished with, “ . . . so I need somebody to keep an eye on her. Shrake has that pickup, that’d be good, but Jenkins sure as shit can’t come down in the Crown Vic. He oughta get a company car, I guess. The more dusty and beat-up, the better.”

Davenport said that he’d get them started. “What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to find a place where I can watch Ma’s driveway, see if anybody’s coming or going,” Virgil said. “Tell those guys to call me as soon as they get close. If Ma sees me, she’ll know I know.”

—

V
IRGIL STOPPED
back at his house, got an olive drab REI bivy bag, a couple of pillows, and two Dos Equis, threw them in the truck, and drove north out of Mankato. On the way out, Jenkins called, and Virgil had him pull up a map on his iPad, and spotted Ma’s house for him. Jenkins said they’d be there sooner or later, depending on traffic.

—

M
A LIVED
on what had been a run-down farm. She’d been rebuilding it since her second husband died in the epicurean tragedy at Wendy’s, and it had come a long way back—too small to be really successful as a farm, but with some of the better land leased out, and extensive subsistence gardens, some chickens and an annual calf, they did okay. Virgil looked at a satellite view before he went out: the place appeared to cover a half section, a near-perfect rectangle a mile long and a half-mile deep.

Two of the back forty-acre chunks were wooded, with the beginning of Ayer’s Creek running through them. Five of the remaining forties were covered with corn and soybeans, and the last forty included space for the house, barn, garage, machine sheds, a chicken house and pen, maybe ten acres of pasture. The satellite shot showed what appeared to be a corral with a trodden dirt circle inside, as though Ma might be training horses.

Virgil could see almost none of that on the ground, as he arrived in the faint predawn light. He checked the mailbox, and in his headlights saw “Nobles” painted on the side of it. A single mercury-vapor yard light hung from a pole at the end of the drive, and he could see the red pickup parked under the light. He went on by, to the first turnaround, then back past the house. He could see no lights, other than the yard light.

He continued up the road for a half-mile, to the remnants of a woodlot, turned in, found a spot where the local children probably came to screw, and parked. He walked back out to the road and then a half-mile down it, crossed the ditch into a soybean field, spread out the bivy bag, zipped himself inside, propped his head on the pillows, cracked one of the Dos Equis, and began the surveillance.

Nothing happened, and eventually, as the sun came up, he dozed.

A couple of trucks went by between six and seven, and then Jenkins called: “Where you at?”

“I’m laying in a bean field. Excuse me. I meant, I’m lying in a bean field.”

“We’re on the job. We’ve got her pickup and her plates and her picture, so we’re good.”

“She’ll be looking for you.”

“Like I said—we’re good. You can go on home.”

“Call me if she moves,” Virgil said. He gathered up his gear, put the empty beer bottles in his pockets, went home and went back to sleep. When his phone went off, he jerked awake and looked at the clock: it was after ten, and he picked up the phone.

Yael-2: “What are we doing today?”

“There’s been a problem,” Virgil said.

He explained the problem to her, and she said, “To use your American idiom, our grave is in the water.”

He had to think about that for a minute, came up with “dead in the water,” and said, “Yeah, pretty much. Have you made any inquiries about our Mossad agent?”

“Yes, I called my embassy and they told me that they know nothing. This is not true.”

“Is there anyone there who I can call?” Virgil asked.

“Mmm, I think this would cause trouble,” Yael said.

“Probably, but so what?”

“Mmm. If you wish to explore this direction, I think you should make the exploration yourself. To determine who to call.”

“I can do that,” Virgil said. “If you want to go off to the Sam’s Club, now would be a good time to do it. Just not much happening.”

“Okay. But be cautious in your phone call,” she said.

“What could they do to me?”

“To be honest, I worry not so much about you,” she said, and hung up.

—

S
O
V
IRGIL
looked up the embassy on the Internet, found that it had a “police and security” division, called it, identified himself, and wound up talking to a colonel, an “aluf mishne,” who was described by an underling as second in command.

“Good enough,” Virgil told the underling.

A moment later, a man said, “This is Colonel Ohad Shachar speaking. And who are you again?”

“I’m Virgil Flowers, I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’ve been assigned to help an Israeli investigator from your antiquities authority recover an artifact stolen from a dig there a couple of weeks ago.”

“I have heard of this,” Shachar said.

“Yes. Well, the problem is, while the real investigator was delayed by Dutch police in Amsterdam by what now seems to be a phony or spurious charge against her, another woman, who several people have suggested to me is a member of the Mossad, impersonated her in an effort to recover the stone.”

“This sounds very unlikely and unreasonable,” Shachar said.

“I think so, too. Now, the problem is, this person apparently tried to assassinate the holder of the stone, to recover it—this happened yesterday.”

“This sounds increasingly unlikely. The state of Israel does not conduct any such operations in the United States—”

“I’m sure you don’t, so you probably can’t help me much. But I thought I would call, and you could perhaps talk to your Mossad contact in the embassy. If there’s any small sliver of a possibility that the Mossad knows who this woman really is, and if they can reach her, they should tell her to surrender herself to law enforcement authorities. They should warn her that she is being sought for attempted murder, attempted robbery, aggravated assault, conspiracy to receive stolen goods, illegal entry into the United States, and reckless discharge of a firearm, as well as other state and federal felonies carrying a minimum prison sentence of one hundred and sixty-five years. Also, because of the assassination attempt yesterday, all police officials have been warned to treat her as armed and exceptionally dangerous. If I see her, I will deal with her with an M16.”

“This sounds very . . . bleak,” Shachar said.

“An excellent choice of words, Colonel.”

After some more back-and-forth bullshit, in which the colonel assured Virgil that no Israeli government employee would ever knowingly violate American laws and friendship, and Virgil assured him that he believed that, Virgil rang off and went to make breakfast.

—

S
HRAKE CALLED
while he was eating: Ma was in her pickup, driving toward town. Ten minutes later, Jenkins reported that she was at a Hardware Hank. Virgil took more calls as Ma headed west, and wound up at what Virgil recognized as Jones’s country place, where she met two young men. They walked around looking at the buildings, prying random boards off and examining them. Then Ellen showed up, and when Virgil checked, he found her back on his tracker tablet.

“That’s probably a couple of Ma’s kids,” Virgil told Jenkins. “They’re gonna tear those places down for the lumber.”

He told them to keep watching, and Jenkins said they’d have to keep the watch very loose, because there was no place to hide.

“I have full confidence in your professionalism,” Virgil said. He went to get cleaned up.

—

S
OMEWHERE
,
HE THOUGHT
as he smoothed the shaving cream on, Jones was hiding out. He had help, from someone. From Ma? From Ellen? He probably couldn’t walk very far. Was it possible that somebody had checked him into a motel?

This was the worst kind of police work, aimlessly looking for somebody who didn’t want to be found. Virgil had once spent two weeks looking for a hillbilly that everyone said was so insular, so repressed, that he was probably hiding in a culvert under a road. He was picked up six months later by Los Angeles cops, who busted him for trying to shoplift Maui Jim sunglasses from a Rodeo Drive accessories store.

His telephone went off. He picked it up and looked at the screen: Awad. He put him on the speaker. “Yo. How they hangin’, big guy?”