John Sandford - Escape Clause

Which was why they didn’t immediately hear the women screaming, that and the ball game.

According to Alvarez’s friends, a red pickup truck stopped a short distance away, maybe a hundred feet, and two men got out and walked into the park. That Alvarez should be sitting outside was an accident, but the men knew who they were looking for, recognized her, came directly to the table. Without a word, one of the men began hitting her, and then, when she was on the ground, kicking her. The other man faced off against Alvarez’s two female friends, blocking them from the assault.

One of the women went running to get the men, and the two attackers jogged away, jumped into the truck, and tore off. By the time the men had run to the other end of the trailer park, the truck was gone. The attack had lasted maybe fifteen seconds.

The two attackers, one of Alvarez’s friends told Cortez, wore Halloween masks, a man’s face. Nobody knew whose face.

That was all he knew.

–

Mattsson said to Virgil, “Same guys. Wish I’d moved sooner.”

“You needed the backup,” Virgil said. “You think we ought to check the trailer park first, see if we can get more details?”

She shook her head: “We ought to move on this guy. Nail him down now.”

“You’re leading on this,” Virgil said. “We’ll do it your way.”

Mattsson nodded and said, “Let’s check on Sparkle. Make sure she’s okay.”

Sparkle had taken a good shot to the eye, but no bones were broken. She’d have a shiner for a while, a nurse told them, but there wasn’t much to be done except to keep the cold compress on. “Me ’n’ Frankie sort of match now,” Sparkle said, looking into a mirror.

Virgil nodded and said to Mattsson, “You ready?”

“Yeah. Get your gun on,” Mattsson said.

“Such a fascist impulse,” Virgil said. “But okay.”

–

Their first target for the night was Frederick Reeves, aka Slow Freddie.

“I’m pretty sure he’s the blocker, not the hitter,” Mattsson told Virgil, as they left the hospital parking lot in Virgil’s truck. “Everybody says he’s a really big guy. Fat. The other guy, Blankenship, is built more like you. Tall and wiry, strong and mean.”

The idea, they agreed, would be to get Reeves to roll over on his partner. “We know he’s scared of the lockup, like claustrophobia. We’re gonna have to lock him up for a while, but if he thinks we might lock him up for years , maybe he’ll talk about Blankenship. And maybe Castro.”

“It’s Blankenship that we could get on DNA from the bite on the arm,” Virgil said.

“Right. But we need a reason to serve a warrant on him. If we can even get Reeves to mention his name, we got him. That’s why we need to whisper in Reeves’s ear.”

–

Reeves lived in the town of St. Peter, a few miles north of Mankato, in a neighborhood of manufactured homes, which were exactly like single-wide trailers but with foundation skirts instead of wheels. The houses were all set end-on to the streets.

The neighborhood was neatly kept, with lawn sheds outside many of the homes and a boat parked here and there. At one of the homes, a half-dozen people were sitting at a picnic table with a woman playing a guitar. Virgil’s window was open, and when they passed, they could hear the group singing what Virgil recognized as “Ablaze,” a Lutheran religious song. The darkness is deepest where there is no light…

“They sing that in my old man’s church, the youth group,” Virgil said.

“Neat to hear it passing by,” Mattsson said. “You don’t hear much outside music anymore, except in malls. Elevator music.”

–

Reeves lived with his grandmother, Mattsson said. When they arrived at the address she had, they found a trailer that looked black in the night, but turned out to be navy blue when their headlights panned across it. There were lights on inside. A white pickup sat on the parking pad beside it, and Mattsson grunted, “Good. That’s his truck.”

Virgil pulled in behind the truck, blocking it. With the end of the house just in front of it, there’d be no way for the truck to get out.

“I’ll knock, if you want to stay back a bit,” Mattsson said. “Be more likely to open up for a woman.”

“Okay.”

The house had a two-step concrete stoop. Mattsson climbed the stoop and banged on the aluminum screen door; Virgil could hear TV voices inside. A moment later an elderly woman looked out through a hand-sized, diamond-shaped window, and the door rattled as she pulled it open, then cocked her head at Mattsson. “What?”

“State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Mattsson said. “We need to talk to Fred Reeves.”

The old woman was dressed from head to toe in black-a loose black sweatshirt and sweatpants and fleece-lined slippers. She had a cigarette hanging from her lower lip. She looked off to her right and said, “Fred! Cops want to talk to you. Get over here.”

They heard some movement, then another door banged and Mattsson shouted at Virgil, “He’s gone out the back.”

Virgil was already running, down the side of the house and around the back corner. There, probably forty feet away, a very large man was running toward the back corner of the neighboring house. Running slowly, like a tub of Jell-O with legs, though pumping his arms like a sprinter.

Virgil caught him in five seconds between the neighboring house and the next one over, and employing a technique shown to him by Jenkins: instead of trying to stop the man, he simply ran slightly behind him, a couple of feet away, and spoke to him. “Not getting away, Fred. I run three miles every night; I can keep up with you running backward. Want to see me run backward and keep up? Look at this, Freddie, I’m running backward.”

Virgil didn’t really run backward, but Reeves turned to look and stumbled, and finally stopped, bent to catch his breath, hands on his thighs, which was as far as he could bend; his pants rode down and his T-shirt up, exposing six inches of butt crack. Mattsson came up and said, “You should never have beat that woman up at night, Fred. Should have waited until it was light outside.”

Reeves was breathing hard after his forty-yard sprint and gasped, “What?”

Mattsson said, “See, if it was during the day, you could see some daylight. Now it’s gonna be a long time before you see daylight again, Freddie. Gonna lock your ass up and throw away the key. That Alvarez woman, looks like she could die.”

“I never touched her,” Reeves said. “Honest to God, I was just standing there.”

“Yeah, but you were there, you had to be Brad’s buddy,” Mattsson said. To Virgil: “Put the cuffs on him, Virgil. Airmail his bubble butt to Stillwater prison.”

She went back to Reeves: “How much did Blankenship pay you, Fred? A hundred bucks? We hear old Castro gave him a grand to slap Ramona around. Did he give you half? Did you get your whole five hundred?”

Reeves’s breathing had slowed and he stood up straight and said, “He didn’t get no grand. Who told you he got a grand? He said two hundred.”

He was facing Mattsson and Virgil had stepped up close behind his shoulder with open cuffs in one hand. He caught Reeves’s left arm just above the elbow, but Reeves yanked it away and then snapped it back, with a lot more speed than Virgil had seen when he was running, and the quick heavy slap caught Virgil on the chin and Virgil staggered backward, caught a heel, and fell on his butt. Reeves went right at Mattsson with two canned-ham-sized fists, and as Virgil pushed himself awkwardly back to his feet, Mattsson sidestepped and slapped at Reeves and Reeves fell down shouting, “Oww! Oww! Oww!”

He was facedown in the dirt and Virgil sat on his back and with Mattsson’s help he bent his two arms together and cuffed them. Virgil caught one heavy arm and tried to help Reeves to his feet, but the huge man seemed disoriented and for a few seconds Virgil thought he might be having a heart attack or a stroke, but his eyes cleared and his mouth popped open and a thin stream of blood drizzled out.