John Sandford - Escape Clause

Mattsson knelt next to Reeves’s head and started the routine: “You have the right to remain silent…”

–

What happened there?” Virgil asked, when she finished. “Why’d he go down like that?”

“Slapped him with mother’s little helper,” Mattsson said. She slipped a hand in her pocket and pulled out a flat leather-covered sap, nine inches long and an inch and a half wide. Virgil hadn’t seen one like it since his days as an army MP captain. “Don’t tell.”

Virgil nodded. “Get him on his feet.”

They got him up and Virgil asked him, “Where did you last see Blankenship?”

“He dropped me off,” Reeves said. “Don’t know where he went. Probably down to the Waterhole. Don’t put me in jail.”

“You think he only got two hundred?”

“That’s what he said,” Reeves said. “C’mon, I’ll talk to you. Don’t put me in jail. I didn’t hit nobody.”

“Gonna have to put you in jail for a while, but if you’re good, and you tell the truth about what happened, it might not be too long,” Mattsson said.

The old woman came walking around the corner of the house, carrying a can of beer. “You taking him?”

“Yeah,” Virgil said.

“Come and bail me out, Grandma,” Reeves said.

“Yeah, with what?” the woman asked. To Mattsson and Virgil she said, “He don’t get along so well in jail. You gotta tell the jail people that. If you leave him a belt, he’ll hang himself.”

“We’ll tell them,” Mattsson said.

“Come get me, Grandma,” Reeves said. He began to cry and shake, tipped his head up to the sky and wailed, “Don’t put me in jail…”

“Shouldn’t go beating up women,” Mattsson said.

–

They locked Reeves to a steel ring that was welded to the floor of Virgil’s truck, then got together outside, where Reeves couldn’t hear, and Mattsson said, “I cruised that Waterhole place. Not a good spot to make a bust. Gonna be a few guns in there.”

“So we take Reeves back to Mankato, let him look at the lockup, and interview him. I think we can squeeze him for whatever we need. Then we go over to Blankenship’s and bust him there. You know where he lives?”

“Yeah, I got an address.” She thought a moment, and then said, “That all sounds pretty good. Let’s see what we get from Reeves.”

“We need to ask him about Frankie, too.”

“Yup.”

–

They hauled Reeves into the Blue Earth County jail, stopping at Virgil’s to get his BCA-approved recorder. After they booked Reeves in, they took him to an interview room, read him his rights with the recorder running and the jail video turned on, and suggested that he spill his guts, which he did.

“Don’t put me in jail…”

He said that he’d worked with Blankenship doing security work at concerts and bars, and that Blankenship had told him that some dirty Mexicans had been sneaking left-wing union organizers into the Castro plant, and that somebody at the Castro plant-he didn’t think it was old man Castro himself-wanted to teach them a lesson.

They’d only spanked a couple of people, he said, one of the left-wingers at a Kwik Trip and then the Mexican earlier that night. Blankenship told him that they were protected, and there was no chance that the cops would even look into it.

“He said all the cops around here were on Castro’s payroll,” Reeves said.

“He was lying to you,” Virgil said.

“Why would he lie to me?”

“Because he wanted a chump to go along and watch his back while he beat up people,” Mattsson said.

“He didn’t really beat them up; he slapped them,” Reeves said.

“And kicked them a few times,” Virgil added.

Reeves turned away and muttered, “Yeah, Brad does that when he gets excited.”

When they’d wrung him out, a couple of jailers led him away to a cell. He was shaking uncontrollably as they led him away, and one of the jailers assured him he’d be alone in the lockup.

“Hope he doesn’t hurt himself,” Virgil said.

Mattsson: “At some point, even dumb people have to take responsibility for what they do. He wore a mask: he knew what they were doing was wrong.”

“Yeah, I know, but…”

“Stop being an asshole,” Mattsson said. “Let’s find Blankenship.”

–

They didn’t, that night. Blankenship wasn’t at home. Virgil walked into the Waterhole five minutes before closing time, asked around, but nobody had seen him. With the bars closed, they sat outside his house for a while, but he never showed.

“Maybe he’s got a girlfriend,” Virgil suggested.

“I’ll get him tomorrow,” Mattsson said. “I can get a sheriff’s deputy to back me up, if you can’t make it.”

“I gotta stay with the tigers,” Virgil said. “Jon would be pissed if he knew I was out here with you. There’s not much I can do with the tigers except wait for a break, but still: they want me up there staring at the telephones.”

“You go ahead and stare,” Mattsson said. “I’ll take care of Blankenship.”

“Deal,” Virgil said.

Virgil went back to his house and bagged out, Honus at the foot of the bed; he spent a few minutes thinking about Mattsson and decided, before he went to sleep, that a prudent man would stay on her right side. Mattsson could wind up running the BCA someday, he thought, unless she decided to go into politics, in which case, she could wind up running the whole state. Frankie was already one of her fans, and Frankie wasn’t that easy to impress.

The next morning he took Honus for a run, fed him, dropped him at the farm, and left for the Twin Cities with six hours of sleep, groggy but functioning. Frankie called and said Sparkle would take her home, whenever the docs let her out of the hospital.

On his way north, he started working the phones, called Barry King’s girlfriend, who said she hadn’t heard from him since he dropped her off the morning before, and that his phone was off-line.

There were no further tips on the BCA tip line, and Virgil was feeling stuck, when the Simonians called: “This is Levon. Is it true?”

“About Hayk? I’m afraid it is.”

There was a collective moan on the other end of the phone line, and Virgil asked, “How did you know about Barry King?”

“Hamlet told the name to his mom,” Simonian said. “She wrote it down.”

“You don’t have King now, do you?”

“No, he didn’t want to go with us anymore, so we let him go. I mean, you know, we dropped him off.”

“Well, we can’t find him. I hope you didn’t do anything else, like murder him.”

“No, we didn’t,” Simonian said, although, from his tone of voice, Virgil understood that murder was among the range of acceptable possibilities. “We haven’t seen him since we dropped him off. He didn’t know anything about the tigers.”

“You sure?”

“No. We talked to him for a pretty long time, though, and in the end… we believed him.”

Virgil interrupted. “Did Hamlet’s mom mention anyone else besides King?”

Simonian covered the microphone on his cell phone, although enough noise leaked through that Virgil understood that an argument was going on. Then Simonian came back and said, “Hamlet’s mom, you know, she doesn’t speak the English so good. She tells us that Hamlet says the name Larry King who works at the zoo. We look at the zoo, there is no Larry King, but there is a Barry King. We tell ourselves, this is the man. Hamlet’s mom, she used to watch Larry King every night on TV, she makes this mistake. We think. But we’re not sure. This is why we didn’t talk to him longer.”