John Sandford - Escape Clause

Frankie said, “Hmm.” And a moment later, “What if it’s the people who stole the tigers? Trying to make you go away?”

“That occurred to me,” Virgil said.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Virgil said. “It could even have been aimed at the Wilsons. But there have been two murders tied to the tigers. Winston Peck? It’s possible, but I really don’t know. I will know, though. Sooner or later, I’ll know.”

Jenkins could barely remember what it was like doing surveillance before he got his phone-linked iPad, but he could remember the feeling: it was brutal. An overnight watch could still be deeply boring, but now he could prop the iPad on the steering wheel and browse the ’net while still keeping an eye on the target, and, in the end, get the BCA to pay for his Verizon text charges.

Until four o’clock in the morning, the target had been pretty quiet. After he’d stepped out on his porch to look for surveillance, Peck had gone back inside and hadn’t stuck his head out since. The television had gone off before two o’clock, though there was still a light in the living room. Then that went off, and a light in the back of the house had come on-bathroom or bedroom, Jenkins thought-and then that one went off, too.

Jenkins read a couple of investment forums, a news forum, a forum that specialized in Chuck Norris jokes (“What do you get when you play Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backward? The sound of Chuck Norris banging your mom.”), and a gun forum and was browsing men’s Purple Label suits on the Ralph Lauren website when things began to pick up.

A few minutes after four, as Jenkins was checking out a white silk gabardine suit for $4,995, an RV pulled up outside Peck’s house and six heavyset men spilled out into the street.

Jenkins said, “Oh, shit,” and picked up the phone and called Virgil.

Virgil groaned when the phone went off, groped for it on the windowsill next to the bed, and asked, “What?”

Jenkins said, “The Simonians just arrived in their RV. They’re going up to Peck’s house. What do I do if they kidnap him?”

Virgil took a second to pull his head together, and said, “Ah, man-Jenkins, you gotta get over there and break it up.”

“You know, if they beat on him a little bit, it might encourage…”

“No! Daisy knows you’re sitting there. She’d know that you let them take Peck,” Virgil said.

“Ah, shit, you’re right. I’m going,” Jenkins said.

“Try not to shoot anyone.”

“Gotta go, they’re beating his door down.”

“Call me back!”

–

Frankie said, “Now what?”

Virgil said, “Tell you later” and fell facedown on his pillow and was almost instantly asleep. Peck, at that same moment, was knocked out of bed by what sounded like an earthquake. With the two Xanax holding him down, he didn’t notice that he was naked, and not only naked but sporting a substantial erection. He lurched out of the bedroom to the front door, which he yanked open. A crowd of men stood on his porch, and all seemed to step back when they spotted his hard-on pointing at them, then one of them tried to yank open the locked aluminum door and, when that didn’t happen, punched a fist directly through the screen.

Peck almost lost his balance and tried to turn to run, but then a siren bleeped in the street and an unmarked car pulled to the curb showing police flashers, and a large man jumped out of the car and shouted, “Get out of there. Simonians-get out of there.”

Peck slammed the door and stood in the hallway for a moment, wondering what he was doing standing naked in the hallway with an erection. Maybe he’d been masturbating? He didn’t think so. He stumbled back to bed and fell asleep.

On the porch, the Simonians confronted Jenkins, who said, “I oughta arrest every fuckin’ one of you guys. You can’t go driving around town kidnapping people, for Christ’s sakes…”

“He cut the arms off Hamlet and the legs off Hayk,” said Levon Simonian, their spokesman. “We gonna cut off his pecker and make him eat it.”

“That’s a worthwhile thought, but not here,” Jenkins said. “It’d cause all kinds of trouble. You guys get back in your RV and get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to see you back here again. If I do, I’ll kick your ass.”

“You think you can take all of us?” the youngest of the Simonians asked.

Jenkins did a quick survey-except for the youngest one, they were all middle-aged and fat, though they showed signs of having done a few million bench presses-and said, “Yes.”

They spent a few seconds in a stare-down and then Levon Simonian said, “We should complain to the police force in St. Paul that this man walks around free, while Hamlet has no arms and Hayk has no legs.”

“You do that,” Jenkins said. “First thing tomorrow morning. Right now, let me tell you about Mickey’s Diner…”

Five minutes later, he had the RV on its way to Mickey’s, and Jenkins called Virgil.

“What?”

“I ran them off. You want me to sit here some more? Peck saw me,” Jenkins said.

“No. Go home. Sleep. Don’t call me again,” Virgil said.

“You sound a little snappish.”

Click.

“And very un-Virgil-like,” Jenkins said to the dead phone.

He went home.

–

At seven-thirty in the morning, Virgil was getting into his second round of REM sleep when the phone rang again and he vaulted out of bed, grabbed it, and shouted, “What?”

After a couple of seconds of silence on the other end, a man’s voice said, “This is Rudd. I’m the highway patrol guy who helped you follow that Zhang Ferrari into Minneapolis?”

“What?” Confused now, and quieter.

“I thought I should call and tell you, in case you hadn’t heard, the Minneapolis cops just pulled old man Zhang’s body out from behind a Dumpster at a strip club.”

“What?”

Rudd had gotten the news by monitoring his radio, and finally by a call to the Minneapolis cops because of his involvement with tracking the Ferrari. When he was told that Zhang was dead, he thought to call Virgil.

“Thank you,” Virgil said. “This is a big deal-this is the third murder in the tiger hunt.”

–

Frankie was awake now and she groaned and said, “Bad night.”

“I gotta go,” Virgil said.

“You okay?”

“I feel like somebody hit me on the head with a phone book.”

He stood in the shower for five minutes, switching between hot and cold, shaved, got back in the shower, and dressed. Frankie had eased out of bed while he was cleaning up and gave him a thirty-ounce Yeti Rambler container of coffee to take with him. Forty-five minutes after Rudd’s call, he was headed back north to the Cities; he’d had maybe four hours of sleep after a whole series of sleep-deprived nights and was feeling it. The coffee helped.

–

On the way north, he called the Minneapolis cops and talked to a homicide detective named Anderson Huber. “A garbage guy found him about five o’clock this morning when they were moving a Dumpster. Missing his wallet, a five-carat diamond pinky ring, and a watch that his kid says is worth a hundred grand, though that’s a little hard to believe. He said it was a Filipino something-or-other. My partner wrote it down, if you’re interested. Anyway, he’d been dead for several hours, but a good time of death might be hard to come up with because his body was superheated…”

“How’s that?” Virgil asked.

“He was behind the strip club, that’s the Swedish Bikini Bar, and they got a stove vent that comes out of a wall right above the Dumpster. Warm enough that you get bums sleeping back there in the winter. Last night, might have been a hundred and fifty degrees back there, so… he was superheated. On the upside, he smells like a whole lot of expensive cheeseburgers.”