John Sandford - Escape Clause

Catrin looked at them all, and then said, “You know, you’re an odd bunch of people.”

–

Virgil slapped his thighs, stood up, kissed Frankie, and said to Mattsson, “Let’s get this guy.”

They were on the first floor, heading out the gate, when Sparkle shouted at them: “Wait! Virgil, Catrin! Wait!”

She was wearing flip-flops and ran flapping down the hall clutching her cell phone. She came up, grabbed Virgil’s arm, and said, “My friend Ramona. My friend who got me into the factory. Some guys beat her up. Tonight, a little while ago. Her husband called. An ambulance is on the way here. Virgil, they beat her up! They beat her up bad.”

They waited in the emergency room for the ambulance to arrive. Alvarez had lived in an informal trailer park north of Mankato and well to the west, a long ride into town. A doc in the emergency room had spoken to the paramedics in the ambulance and relayed their account: “She was battered, knocked out; she’s still only semiconscious. When she went down, they kicked her; probably has broken ribs, could have some internal injuries, depending on where they kicked her and how hard.”

“Frankie all over again,” Sparkle said. “Same goddamn criminals. Same men.”

Virgil went back up to Frankie’s room to tell her about it, but she already knew about the attack. Sparkle had still been sitting with her when the call came in, and she told Frankie about it before running off to stop Virgil and Mattsson.

“Sounds worse than I got it,” Frankie said, after Virgil described Alvarez’s injuries.

“Can’t tell yet. I gotta get back downstairs. The ambulance is rolling fast. If she’s conscious when she gets here, maybe I can have a few words with her.”

“Go,” Frankie said.

–

When he got back to the emergency room, he found that Father Bill had arrived, expecting to pick up Sparkle. Bill was in his bartending outfit of jeans, open-necked white shirt, and red vest with a small gold crucifix hanging around his neck from a gold chain.

When he saw Virgil, he walked over and said, “It’s my fault. I was supposed to sit on Sparkle. She got away from me and Ramona helped her sneak into the pickle plant. It’s my fault.”

“I wouldn’t get weird about it,” Virgil said. “It’s really the fault of the guys who beat up Alvarez and Frankie. That’s the fact of the matter. You didn’t do anything wrong or immoral, and neither did Sparkle. They did. They will be sorry.”

“I certainly hope so,” Bill said. “If there’s anything I can do…”

“Catrin and I’ll take care of it.”

Bill turned toward the door, where Sparkle and Mattsson were looking out at the driveway that came up to the emergency room doors. He said, “Listen, Virgil-I can tell you that I wouldn’t want to cross that young woman, Catrin. She has controlled the anger about what happened to her, but it’s still down there in her gut. It burns particularly hard when it comes to men hurting women.”

Virgil looked over at Mattsson. There had always been an aura of control about her. Even when she smiled, which she’d done a few times when they were sitting in Frankie’s hospital room, the smile seemed constrained by a permanent internal tension.

“You’re telling me to be careful,” Virgil said.

“I’m telling you to be careful for her ,” Bill said. “There’s a violence inside her that might be looking for a way to get out.”

“That’s true of a lot of cops,” Virgil said. “It might even be necessary.”

–

They heard the ambulance before they saw it, and a moment later it was in the driveway, lights flashing and siren wailing into the night, and the doctor and three nurses were going through the doors, led by an orderly pushing a gurney. The lights and siren quit and then an ancient Nissan huffed in behind the ambulance as the back doors on the ambulance popped open and they began moving Ramona Alvarez onto the gurney. An oxygen mask covered the bottom of her face and a gauze pad covered her forehead. A saline line was plugged into her arm.

Sparkle had run out into the driveway and when Alvarez was lifted onto the gurney she could see the other woman’s face and she pressed her hands to the side of her own face and moaned, and Bill put her arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight.

One of the paramedics was talking fast to the doctor, saying, “She drifted off, partway back, she comes and goes…”

A burly Latino in a cotton plaid shirt and jeans had gotten out of the Nissan and was hurrying toward the gurney, and Virgil had time to think, Husband , when the man stepped past the gurney without looking at it, up to Sparkle, and with no warning, hit Sparkle in the face. She went down in a heap and Virgil went that way fast, with Mattsson a step behind, but Bill was behind the man and wrapped him up and lifted him off his feet and walked him away from Sparkle.

As he did that, Bill turned his head to Virgil and said, “I got him, help Sparkle.”

The Latino was a big guy, and he struggled, but Bill had clamped two heavy arms around him and carried him away. When they’d been skinny-dipping, Virgil noticed that Bill had some serious muscles. Now that was working for him, and nothing that the big man did got him loose.

Sparkle tried to get to her hands and knees, but Mattsson knelt next to her and said, “Stay down, just turn over, let me look…”

A nurse had come over and Virgil squatted and they all looked, and Sparkle’s eye was already starting to close and she sputtered, “It hurts…”

The nurse pressed a cold compress against her forehead and cheekbone and said, “If you can stand up, we can get you inside…”

The three of them helped Sparkle get to her feet and the nurse helped her get inside and Sparkle looked back at Virgil and Mattsson and said, “Don’t do anything to Leandro. Don’t do anything to him.”

Bill had pushed the man into an inside corner of a wall, blocking his way out: he was talking to him quickly but quietly, and as Virgil and Mattsson walked up, the man reached out and touched Bill’s crucifix and Bill patted him on the shoulder and said something in Spanish.

“We okay?” Virgil asked.

“We are,” Bill said. “This is Leandro Cortez, Ramona’s husband. He told her not to take Sparkle into the plant, but she did anyway. He doesn’t know how the Castro people found out about Ramona, but they did, obviously. He thinks he’ll probably be fired tomorrow.”

“No, he won’t,” Mattsson said. To Cortez: “What time do you go to work?”

“Seven o’clock,” the man said, in heavily accented English.

“I will see you there,” she said. And, “We should charge you with assault, which would get you thrown out of the country and probably banned for good, but Sparkle doesn’t want to do that. If she’s hurt bad, we’ll do it anyway. If she’s only got a black eye, we’ll probably let it go.”

The man looked at Bill, who translated, and he nodded.

“That woman, she says to Ramona nothing would happen…” Cortez looked close to crying, and Bill patted him on the shoulder again.

“I’m sure this will work out,” Bill said. He said something more in Spanish, and the man nodded, and Bill said in English, “Let’s go see about Ramona.”

–

Inside, a nurse told them that Ramona’s vitals were being reviewed by the doctor, and then she’d be off to get a full-body scan. Bill explained that to Cortez in Spanish, and Mattsson asked Cortez exactly what had happened.

With Bill translating, Cortez told them that they lived in an informal trailer park hidden away on a farm that supplied the Castro plant. Cortez had been watching a Cubs baseball game with a couple of friends in one trailer, while Alvarez was visiting with two other women at the other end of the park at a picnic table. The women were sitting outside, because the night was hot and most of the trailers didn’t have air-conditioning. The one where the men were watching the ball game did have air-conditioning, and the windows were closed.