John Sandford - Escape Clause

“You are a very smart woman,” Virgil said. “Thank you.”

–

Virgil called Sandy, the BCA researcher, and got her started on that, then called St. Paul’s gang guy, who said he had no idea about Chinese gangs, though there were a couple of Hmong gangs. “I can guarantee they’re not up to smuggling tiger parts, dried or not. These guys are hustling a little Mexican Mud and hillbilly heroin; they wouldn’t be involved in anything more sophisticated.”

He said he’d call a guy in San Francisco and ask who’d know about Chinese gangs. “If you’ve got this dead guy from Glendale, it seems like you’re looking at California. I don’t know if my guy would know anything about LA gangs, but he might know another guy who’d know.”

–

Virgil had just crossed into St. Paul when he took a call from another unknown number. “Virgil? Bob Roberts from Mankato PD.”

“Hey, Bob-Bob. You got my tigers?”

“Uh, no, man. Listen, I hate to be the guy to tell you this… but somebody beat up your girlfriend.”

Virgil nearly drove off the highway. “What! What!”

“Frankie. She’s hurt, man, she’s on her way to the hospital. A couple guys jumped her outside a Kwik Trip. Nobody knows why, there wasn’t any argument or anything. They didn’t even talk to her. They jumped her and beat her up and took off. Looks like it was a setup-one of the cops out there says they were wearing masks.”

“How bad? How bad is she?”

“Don’t know yet, but she got smacked around pretty good. That’s about all I know. I mean, she isn’t gonna die or anything, but she’s beat up.”

“I’m coming,” Virgil said.

Virgil got south in a hurry, cutting through traffic with his lights and siren. On his way, he called Jon Duncan to tell him what happened. Duncan asked if he had any idea who’d attacked Frankie, or why, and Virgil said that he didn’t.

“I’ve made a lot of people unhappy the last few years, but not many who’d know that I’ve been hanging out with Frankie,” Virgil said. “Or even if they knew, nobody who would go after her. Besides, nobody goes after a cop’s girlfriend; if they’re going to do anything, they go after the cop, and they don’t do that very often.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you what, Virgil-you go down there and do what you have to do, and take care of Frankie, and keep me informed,” Duncan said. “I don’t want you investigating this. I want you to stay away from it.”

“What? Jon, I’ve got to, this is…”

“You don’t investigate attacks that might be aimed at you,” Duncan said. “I’ll get Sands to pull somebody off another job to do it.”

Sands was the BCA director. “He doesn’t like me much,” Virgil said.

“Who cares? He’s about to get fired, and his boss, and his boss’s boss, both do like you. Even Sands can’t say that we don’t take care of our people, so… I’ll get somebody good,” Duncan said.

–

Frankie had been taken to the emergency room at the Mayo Clinic, an orange-brick building on Marsh Street. Virgil dumped his truck in the parking lot and hustled inside, where a nurse told him that Frankie was in the ICU. “That’s temporary until we get test results back,” she said.

“How bad?” Virgil asked. “How bad?”

“Don’t really know yet, but not so bad, I think. She apparently lost consciousness for a while, back where the attack took place. That’s what we were told, anyway. She was conscious when the ambulance got there, so she wasn’t out for long,” the nurse said. “She was having trouble breathing when the paramedics got to her. We put her through a CAT scan; she had cracked ribs and a partially collapsed lung. The docs put in a chest tube, and the lung’s reinflated. Didn’t see any brain damage, but she’s got a mild concussion.”

“Man, that sounds bad, that sounds bad, man,” Virgil said. He felt an urgent need to do something, anything, but there was nothing he could do.

“It’s never good,” the nurse said. He added, “There’s a lot worse comes through here every day, and they walk out a few days later.”

A cop was sitting in a plastic chair at the end of the emergency room and he got up and walked over when he saw Virgil. “Hey, Virg. I talked to Donnie Carlson a minute ago, and he said they don’t have any names yet, but Frankie took a piece out of the arm of one of the guys who jumped her. Bit out a piece the size of a quarter, so when we get a name, we’ll have DNA and he’s probably got a pretty good hole on his arm.”

Virgil nodded. “Hang here for a minute, Al, will you? I want to talk, but I want to go look at Frankie…”

“Sure.”

–

With the nurse on his heels, Virgil went into the ICU, where the nurse opened a crack in the curtains around Frankie’s bed. Frankie’s eyes were closed, but when he stepped in, she must have heard the heels on his cowboy boots, and she asked, “Is that you?”

“Got here as fast as I could. What the hell happened?” Virgil asked.

Now her eyes opened. “How shitty do I look?”

Virgil shook his head. “You look like somebody who got held down and sandpapered. No permanent damage, no big cuts or anything; you won’t have scars, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Her face was a massive bruise, and though her nose was straight and unsplinted, and so probably not broken, there was dried blood around her nostrils and at the corners of her mouth. He could see her bare arms and they were scraped as badly as her face. Both eyes would be blackened for a while.

“That’s what I was worried about,” she said. Then she asked, “You okay?”

“What? Of course…”

“I don’t want you killing anybody,” she said.

Virgil looked at her for a few seconds, then said, “I can’t make any promises.”

“Virgil!”

“Fuck you. I’m not making any promises.” Virgil started to tear up, looking at her, wiped the tears away with the heels of his hands. “Ah, Jesus, Frankie… We’ll find the guys who did this. Have you pissed anybody off lately? Bad enough to do this? Unless you know somebody, it’s gotta be aimed at me.”

“No, no. It wasn’t.” Her voice was quiet, almost rusty. “It’s Sparkle. She wanted to visit a migrant trailer park on a farm out west of here; it’s off a rutted dirt road. She borrowed my truck to get up there. I was driving her speck.”

Specks were cars that Frankie thought were too small to be useful. “They thought I was her,” she said.

“Ah, shit…”

“They kept saying, ‘You get your nose outa our business. Go home, bitch.’”

“There’s a cop out in the emergency room, Al Foreman. You know him?”

“I know Al…”

“He says you bit a chunk out of one of them and the cops picked it up,” Virgil said. The guy’s gonna have a hole in his arm and we can nail him with the DNA. We’ll get him, I swear to God.”

Frankie said, “That’s nice… I feel really sleepy…”

The nurse, who had trailed in behind Virgil, said, “You’re filled up with painkillers, honey. You’ll be sleeping a lot.”

They talked for a few more minutes, but Frankie was slipping into sleep, and when she was gone, Virgil kissed her on the forehead, backed out of the room, and found Foreman, the Mankato cop. “What do you know?”

“Nothing but what I heard from the guys. She went over to the Kwik Trip around three o’clock. She went inside and bought some groceries and when she came back out, she was jumped by two guys who caught her between her car and a truck that was parked beside her,” Foreman said. “Donnie can tell you how big they were and all that, but I can tell you that they parked in the street, so the cameras didn’t get the license plate number. A witness says the vehicle was a red Ford SuperCrew pickup. Probably a couple years old.”