John Sandford - Escape Clause

He pulled the refrigerator to the empty garage space. He had an ice chipper leaning against the wall, a six-foot steel rod with a point on one end and a one-inch blade on the other. He used it to punch a dozen holes in the refrigerator: he didn’t want decomposition gas to float it.

–

When he was sure Simonian was dead, he turned on the garage light, dragged the refrigerator around to the back of the Tahoe, and opened the hatch. The refrigerator wouldn’t fit upright, so he laid it on its side, with the door opening down. Then he dragged Simonian around to the back of the truck, removed his iPhone and wallet, and tried to stuff the body into the refrigerator. Didn’t fit. There was space, but like a wrong piece in a jigsaw puzzle, one lump or another always stuck out-either an arm stuck out, or a knee did.

As an actual medical doctor, Peck had never been queasy about other people’s blood. He got a meat cleaver from the kitchen and cut off Simonian’s left arm at the shoulder joint. That took a while, but there really wasn’t much blood because Simonian’s heart wasn’t beating anymore, and what blood there was, he managed to contain on a garbage bag. When the arm came off, still wrapped in a shirt sleeve, he tucked it behind the body, and tried to slam the refrigerator door. Still didn’t fit, though there was empty space inside.

“Goddamnit, these guys…” Hamlet remained an uncooperative pain in the ass.

He cut off Simonian’s other arm, and by rearranging all the parts, managed to get the body to fit. The door kept popping open, though, and he wound up using a half roll of duct tape, wrapped around the length of the refrigerator, to keep it shut.

Now for the scary part, he thought. The garage had been private: now he’d be transporting a murdered body on the public roads. If somebody rear-ended him, he’d be spending his life in Stillwater prison.

–

He ran the garage door up, backed the Tahoe out of the driveway past Simonian’s Buick, and began sweating heavily: fear sweat, the worst kind. He drove out to I-94, then east, turned north on I-35, drove precisely at the speed limit to Highway 97, took it east to Highway 95 along the St. Croix River, and turned north again to the Osceola bridge to Wisconsin. He was familiar with the bridge from winter ski trips. There was never much traffic across it, even in daylight hours. At two o’clock in the morning, there was nothing.

Unlike his brother, Hamlet Simonian hadn’t been a large man-probably a hundred and sixty pounds. The refrigerator added fifty or sixty. Normally, it might have killed Peck to lift more than two hundred pounds out of the truck, but all he had to do was swivel it over the railing of the bridge, and let go… and he was so pumped with fear and adrenaline that he hardly noticed the weight. He pulled, lifted, turned, and dropped.

He heard it splash and, one minute later, did a U-turn on the bridge and headed back to the Minnesota side. Waited for the blue lights to come up. None did. He allowed himself to begin breathing again.

What he would do, he thought, was drive Simonian’s car to the basement level of a downtown parking garage, where people often left their cars for extended periods. From there, he could take a cab home. By the time Simonian’s car was found, and Hayk Simonian realized his brother was dead, Hayk Simonian would also be dead. No other choice, at this point.

He left the car in the parking garage, threw Simonian’s wallet into a sewer, after taking out $106 and all the IDs. The IDs would go through a shredder and into the garbage.

But the iPhone…

Early the next morning, he drove over to a FedEx store and sent the phone to a Jack in the Box in Glendale, California, by FedEx Ground.

And he was done, he thought, with Hamlet Simonian.

With the break on Hamlet Simonian, Virgil called Frankie and said he wouldn’t be making it home that night. “Something could happen up here-we’ve got this guy’s face on every TV set in the state.”

“I know, I saw him. Anyway, go ahead and stay,” she said. “Me ’n’ Sparkle and Father Bill and Rolf are playing canasta. You be careful.” Rolf was her oldest son.

“I will. See you tomorrow, probably.” He didn’t mention the afternoon chase with Maxine Knowles and Toby Strait.

Virgil bagged out at the Radisson Hotel at the Mall of America, and a few minutes after midnight, he’d been asleep long enough to be deeply annoyed when his phone rang.

The BCA duty officer: “Landlord over on West Seventh says he’s got a renter who he’s pretty sure is Simonian. He says it’s ninety-nine percent.”

“Jenkins and Shrake still out?” Virgil asked.

“Probably. It’s early for those guys.”

“Roll them over there, if you can find them,” Virgil said. “Call St. Paul, tell them to wake up the judge and get a warrant. I’ll be there in half an hour: give me the address.”

–

Shrake called him twenty minutes later, as Virgil was passing the airport. “Me and Jenkins are over on West Seventh. I hope your suspect is a dirtbag.”

“He shows all the signs,” Virgil said. “Why?”

“His apartment’s above one of those twenty-four-hour car washes. I don’t know how in the hell anybody could sleep up there. No lights on, that I can see. Anyway, it’s the kind of place only a dirtbag would wind up.”

“Where are you guys?”

“Parked on Snelling right at the bottom of the hill. We’re talking to St. Paul, they woke up Van Dyke and got him to sign the warrant, and they got a key from the landlord. They’re sending a car over.”

“Good. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

–

Jenkins and Shrake were sitting in Jenkins’s aging Crown Vic. Virgil drove up the hill, did a U-turn, and pulled in behind them. He crawled into the Crown Vic’s backseat and Shrake said, “Good thing that St. Paul cop isn’t here, he would have ticketed your rural butt for the U-turn.”

“Already been through that today,” Virgil said. He looked through the front window at the car wash. “What do you see over there?”

Jenkins pointed at a line of barred windows above the wash and said, “Nothing. No movement. The plan is, I pull the car into the car wash, which starts the noise up, to cover the approach. Then you and Shrake and Bowers go up the side stairs, kick the door, and bust Simoleon.”

“Simonian,” Virgil said. “A ‘simoleon’ is money, in obsolete British slang.”

“Whatever,” Jenkins said. “If you guys don’t fuck this up, I get a clean car on the company’s nickel and we’re heroes because we bust the tiger thief. If you do fuck it up, I should be available for backup, right after the no-spot rinse.”

“The side stairs are what? Metal? Concrete? Wood?”

“Concrete. We did a quick turnaround in the parking lot to check it out. Everything over there is concrete-it’s one solid concrete-block building. There are two apartments, front and back. He’s in Apartment One, which is at the front.”

The St. Paul cop called a minute later and said he was on his way, the warrant in hand. The landlord, he said, rented the place furnished, by the week, and Simonian had been there for three weeks. He’d told the landlord that his name was Gus Smith. “I mean, hey, somebody’s gotta be named Smith.”

–

Jenkins and Shrake were both large men, in overly sharp suits and nylon neckties. Both had thin webs of scars beneath their eyes, from being punched; both had fluorescent teeth, having had their real teeth knocked out while still young.