John Sandford - Escape Clause

Curt got his gear from the truck bed and headed upstream from the bridge, while Hank believed that there were major catfish holes below the bridge piers, so he went that way.

Both men were wearing LED headlights, the better to bait their hooks and unhook any catfish. Hank turned his light on to more easily mold some stink bait on a treble hook-he had his own homemade formula, concocted of chopped chicken liver, diced night crawlers, nacho cheese, canned corn, and cornmeal, thoroughly mixed in his girlfriend’s Waring blender when she wasn’t around, and suitably aged in the hot sunlight on his back porch-and threw his first cast out next to a pier.

A big slab of gray stone shelved out of the river below the bridge, and while the bait sank into the hole, he walked back and forth, looking for a place to sit and smoke, where his line wouldn’t drag over the rock. He was doing that when he saw, in his headlight, a corner of the safe about a foot down in the water.

For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, then he called, “Hey, Curt! Curt! C’mere. Quick.”

Curt caught the tone in his brother’s voice, so he reeled in, turned on his headlight, walked down under the bridge, and asked, “What?”

Hank pointed to the water under the bridge. “Am I nuckin’ futs or is that a safe?”

Curt peered into the water, asked, “Where?” and then, before Hank could reply, “Holy shit. I see it. That’s a safe all right.”

Hank: “What do you think?”

“I think somebody couldn’t open the sonofabitch and threw it off the bridge,” Curt said. He was so excited he inadvertently hawked his whole plug of tobacco into the river.

Hank: “Like it’s stolen?”

“Of course it’s stolen, bonehead. If you owned a safe and wanted to get rid of it, you could sell it on Craigslist or even take it to a junkyard,” Curt said. “You wouldn’t throw it off a fuckin’ bridge. I bet there’s a million bucks in there.”

“What do you think we ought to do?”

Curt scratched his forehead for a moment, mulling it over, then said, “I think we fish that bitch out of there and get it back to your place. You know what? Maybe the people who stole it couldn’t open it, but Jerry Pratt could.”

Jerry Pratt was an unemployed machinist, with metal-cutting skills.

“You think we could lift it?”

“Somebody had to lift it over the bridge railing, so yeah-I think we could lift it,” Curt said.

“I wonder why he threw it in the shallows?”

“Probably didn’t know any better, or maybe he did it at night,” Curt said. He walked back to the shadow of the bridge, sat down, and started untying his boots. “Get your pants off.”

Hank looked around: nothing to see but brush, and not even that, if they turned off their LED headlights. An occasional car drove over the bridge, out of sight. “What if somebody sees us?”

“You ain’t got that much to see,” Curt said.

“That’s not what I’m talking about. What if somebody sees us with the safe?”

“We’ll tell them… that we thought it was an old refrigerator and we were taking it out for, you know, cleaning-up-the-river reasons. We’re, like, tree huggers or some fuckin’ thing.”

That sounded good. Hank nodded and said, “Better leave our shoes on. Lots of hooks been broke off in there.”

Five minutes later the naked brothers were chest deep in the river, trying to get a hold on the safe. “Fuckin’ heavy,” Hank said.

“Yeah… but… it’s movin’,” Curt said.

With more grunting and a few groans they got it out of the water and up on the rock, where Hank said, “Fuck. You know, it looks more like a refrigerator than a safe.”

“Too heavy,” Curt said.

“It’s a fuckin’ refrigerator, man. Probably full of water.” The refrigerator was loosely wrapped with water-soaked duct tape to keep the door closed. Hank yanked the tape off, pulled open the door, and in the pooled light of their headlamps, Hamlet Simonian’s left arm flopped out on the rock.

“Jesus Christ!” Hank shouted, dancing away from the arm.

–

There was a brief discussion of possible choices-throw the refrigerator back in the river and then run and hide; call the cops anonymously then run and hide; or just run and hide. But their truck had probably been seen up on the road, and somebody might have seen them in the water, and there was a house not far away. In the end, for a lack of reasonable alternatives, they called the Polk County sheriff’s office and waited.

A deputy showed up ten minutes later, took a look, and said, “Now you boys wait right here,” and Curt asked, “We got any choice?” and the deputy said, “No.”

–

After that, the Yos found themselves deeper in bureaucracy than they’d ever been in the river, but nobody seemed to think they had anything to do with what was obviously a murder, and they were eventually told they were free to go. The Polk County medical examiner took one look at the body, still stuffed in the refrigerator, and moved it along to a better-equipped facility in St. Paul.

Not much got done in St. Paul, except that an assistant medical examiner took fingerprints from the hands on the severed arms and sent them off to the FBI.

–

Virgil had gone back to bed at the hotel and was sleeping soundly when the BCA’s duty officer called him at five a.m. Virgil crawled across the bed to the nightstand, where his phone was playing the first few bars of George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.”

“This is Virgil.”

“Hey, man, this is Clark, up at the office.”

“If I can find my pistol, I’m gonna kill you,” Virgil said.

“Pretty unlikely scenario, right there, you finding the gun. Anyway, I thought I better call. This Hamlet Simonian guy’s been found. We got a call from the FBI.”

Virgil sat up. “Terrific. Where is he?”

Clark said, “In the ME’s office, here in St. Paul.”

“What?”

“Somebody killed him-they don’t know how yet-and tried to stuff his body in a compact refrigerator. He didn’t fit, so they cut off his arms and squeezed them in around the body.”

“Cut off his arms?”

“Yeah. Of course, I’m assuming it wasn’t a suicide…”

“Hey, Clark…?”

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, the killer threw the refrigerator into the St. Croix, up by Osceola,” Clark said. “It landed in shallow water and a couple of fishermen spotted it. They thought it was a safe.”

Clark told the rest of the story, which he found amusing, and finished by saying, “Now you got a murder.”

“Aw, shit. Give me the ME’s number.”

As long as he had to be awake, Virgil thought the ME ought to be, as well. He got hold of an assistant, who said nothing would be done with the body until eight o’clock. “I had a look at it, while they were bringing it in. I don’t see any obvious trauma… other than the dismembered arms, of course.”

“No gunshot wounds? Nothing like that?”

“Nope.”

“Tell the doc that the murder is related to the tiger theft,” Virgil said. “I’ll be up there to talk to him, but soon as he gets in, ask if there’s some chemistry that would pick up the kind of sedative overdose you’d get if somebody shot you with a tranquilizer gun, the kind used on large animals.”

“Huh. I can tell you that kind of chemistry is routine, but I’ll be sure to mention it. Could get some results back pretty quick.”

“Great. I’ll be up.”

“Sounds like you’ve got an interesting case here,” the assistant said.

“Provocative, even,” Virgil said. He reset the alarm clock, rolled over, and before he went back to sleep, he asked himself, who’d cut off a dead man’s arms? Who would even think of it? A medical doctor, maybe?