John Sandford - Escape Clause

Briggs: “Where do you think the legs went?”

Virgil: “Oh… Oh, jeez.” Briggs, he thought, could be right.

A car was coming down the road toward them, saw all the red lights clogging up the roadway, paused, then pulled into a farmer’s field track, did a three-point turn, and disappeared back down the road.

Country people, Virgil thought, didn’t like even the concept of a traffic jam, temporary as it might be.

–

Winston Peck VI saw the cop cars and the flashers and thought, Uh-oh . He pulled into a farmer’s field track, did a three-point turn, and headed back the way he came. Barry King’s body was in the back of the truck. The place where he’d dumped Hayk Simonian had seemed like a good one, so he’d come back to make another deposit. Not a good idea, as it turned out.

As he headed away from the cop cars, he looked in the rearview mirror. A guy standing on the side of the road in civilian dress, tall, lanky, blond…

Was that Flowers?

Whoa! Skin of his teeth!

–

Late in the afternoon, back at the office.

Virgil had talked to an investigator with the Wisconsin DCI. They were sending an agent to the area, because of the two bodies found on the Wisconsin side of the line, but they expected Virgil to carry most of the weight.

“Wisconsin’s a dumping ground for something going on in Minnesota. If you get any indication that the tigers are on our side of the river, we’ll give you all the help we can,” the DCI guy said.

–

Catrin Mattsson called with the good news of the day: she thought she had identified the man who’d beaten up Frankie.

“It’s a guy named Brad Blankenship. Got it from a not-so-good friend of his who said that Blankenship is walking around in long-sleeve shirts when he never wears anything but T-shirts in the summer. He said that Blankenship was drinking at Waters’ Waterhole last night and his sleeve slipped up a couple of times and he could see a pretty good bandage under it. Blankenship has four previous arrests for fighting-worked as a bouncer at the Waterhole on Fridays and Saturdays when they have live music.”

“What do you want to do?” Virgil asked.

“Well, first thing, the not-so-good friend says if Blankenship did it, the other person with him was almost certainly Frederick Reeves, who they call Slow Freddie. You know that song, ‘If You’re Gonna Be Dumb, You Gotta Be Tough’?”

“Sure. Roger Alan Wade.”

“That’s apparently Slow Freddie’s life story. My source says he was in jail for theft a few years ago, and something really, really bad happened to him in there. I’m thinking rape, and it turned him mean. No smarter, but mean. It also gave him a permanent fear of being locked up, which means… we might be able to talk to him.”

“Either that, or he’ll shoot you,” Virgil said.

“I said ‘we.’ I’d appreciate some company for this talk,” Mattsson said.

“When?” Virgil asked.

“Now-as soon as you can get here.”

“All right. Things are moving like glue up here, but we’ve got a second confirmed murder,” Virgil said. “I’ll help out, but you’ve got to front the thing-I don’t want people saying I was down there working on a simple assault on my girlfriend and skipping out on a double murder.”

“I’ll front it,” she said. “Besides, by the time it gets to court, you’ll have the killers locked up, and nobody will remember the sequence of events.”

“See you in an hour and a half,” Virgil said. “Let’s meet at the hospital. I can check on Frankie and hook up with you at the same time.”

–

On the way to Mankato, Virgil decided that he really needed to get to the Simonians again. He needed to know where Hamlet Simonian’s phone might be going and how the Simonians knew to pick up Barry King. They had a source of information that was better than any he had.

Although they were no longer answering his calls, he still had one good way to contact them. He got on the phone to Daisy Jones, the TV reporter. “You’re going to owe me even more,” he said.

“Is it like Texas barbeque or leftover porridge?”

“Hamlet Simonian’s older brother, Hayk, that’s H-A-Y-K, was found murdered in a ditch over in Wisconsin. I mean, murdered and dumped in a ditch. We think he was murdered somewhere else, and that probably means here in Minnesota.”

“Give me the details,” she said.

“Can’t. I’m anonymous. You can call the Pierce County sheriff’s office and they’ll probably talk your ear off.”

“The tigers are dead, right?”

He thought about it for a second, and then said, “No. Probably not.”

“How do you know?”

“Masculine intuition,” Virgil said. “Now go away and report the news, like you’re supposed to. Your debt has now grown to huge proportions. Huge.”

“Then why do I have a feeling I’m doing you a favor by putting this on the air?” she asked.

“Because you’re a cynic, a terrible thing to see in a young person like yourself. I feel awful for you. Now go.”

“Thanks for saying I’m young…”

–

Virgil went to the Mayo Clinic to see Frankie, who’d been moved to a bed in a private room. Sparkle was sitting in a corner, reading the comics in a bent-up copy of the Mankato Free Press . “They’re letting me out of here tomorrow,” Frankie said. “It should be tonight, but the doc said he wanted somebody to watch me for a few more hours. That’s the good news.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“No sex for six months,” Frankie said.

Virgil sank into a chair and said, “I can understand that. A woman with a concussion wouldn’t want to be intimately exposed to a jackhammer.”

“How come,” Frankie asked, “every time I want to get a little ribald, you take it farther into the ditch than I ever intended to go?”

“Speaking of ditches,” Virgil said, “guess what we found in a ditch over in Wisconsin?”

–

He told them about Hayk Simonian, and the deputy’s guess that the missing legs were feeding a tiger.

“That’s gross,” Sparkle said. “There’s got to be some other reason.”

“Think of one,” Virgil said.

She thought for a moment, then, “I don’t want to think about it. The whole idea is gross.”

“But not entirely bad,” Virgil said. “Hayk didn’t need his legs anymore, because he was dead, and maybe the tigers are alive. You know, if they’re feeding them.”

“Gross,” Sparkle said.

–

He told them about Catrin Mattsson possibly locating the guys who assaulted Frankie, and the plan to roust one of them that very night.

Sparkle was telling them about sneaking into the pickle factory when Mattsson showed up, sipping from a cup of coffee. She was dressed in dark cotton permanent-press canvas slacks and a beige canvas hunting shirt, with a pistol on her hip under her right hand. She was wearing hiking boots. A combat uniform, Virgil thought.

“That coffee’s gonna make you all jittery,” Frankie said. “You sure you want to be messing around with guns when you’re jittery?”

“Jittery is always good,” Mattsson said. “If you’re holding a gun on somebody, and your hands are all shaking, that’ll scare them every time. They’ll lay right down for you.”

That was the first sign of any sense of humor he’d gotten from Mattsson, Virgil thought, even if it was cop humor.

To Sparkle, Mattsson said, “I heard part of that pickle plant story. What happened next?”

Sparkle finished the story, the part about going out the window and running for her life. “I got it now-everything I need for my dissertation. I’d head back home to the Cities, except that I don’t want to disappoint Father Bill.”