John Sandford - Escape Clause

Somebody else said, “Buddy does drink a little. You could ask down at York’s.”

York’s, it turned out, was the only bar in Lakeland. Virgil drove down to Lakeland, parked at the bar, went inside, and asked the bartender about Gates. The bartender introduced him to a woman named Judy, who told him that Gates lived in kind of a hard place to identify, but she’d be glad to show him the way.

Virgil followed her down the highway a few hundred yards, then back into a neighborhood of 1960s ranch houses and pointed out her window at a house with lots of lights in the windows.

Virgil waved at her, and she headed back to York’s. Gates was home, smelling strongly of marijuana, and when Virgil told him what he wanted, he said, “I wondered what those dudes were up to.”

–

Gates led the way to the back of his house, where a woman with glossy blond hair was sitting in a La-Z-Boy with her feet up, watching The Vampire Diaries . Gates said, “Gotta help a cop find the tigers,” and she said, “Shhh…”

Gates turned on his computer, brought up a Google map, switched to a satellite view, found the spot.

“Here’s where you was,” he said. He touched the screen with a pencil. “That’s the Halls’ house, right there. And here’s where these guys was.”

He touched the screen again, where Virgil could see the roofs of a house and barn. The structures were on the other side of the Halls’ back woods, probably no more than a hundred and fifty yards away.

“The reason the Halls didn’t know about them was, they’re on a completely different road and the two roads don’t hook up with a crossroad for almost a half mile either way,” Gates said. “No reason for anybody on either road to go onto the other one. The reason it didn’t come up on the telephone was, it’s not an official address anymore. This guy from out of state bought about five places over there, as investments, and merged them into one new subdivision. The closest official address is the Halls’.”

Virgil showed him the pictures of Hamlet and Hayk Simonian, and Gates said, “I’m not completely sure, but this one”-he touched the Hayk photo-“I think I talked to him just a day or two ago.”

The woman in the chair said, “Would you guys shut up?”

Virgil went back to the front door, where Gates filled him in on the countryside around the house and barn where he’d seen Hayk. Virgil thanked him, and as he was leaving, said, “I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you invite a cop inside, when you’ve been smoking dope.”

“It’s medicinal,” Gates said. “Besides, does anybody really care anymore?”

–

Virgil thanked him again, went out to his truck, and called Mattsson. The phone rang, but she didn’t answer. He left a message on her voice mail and tried Jenkins. Jenkins answered, but he and Shrake were in St. Cloud, which had to be the best part of a hundred miles away.

Virgil decided to wait for Mattsson, but until she called, he’d go scout the house that Gates had identified. He drove back through the rat’s nest of roads to the Halls’ house, then past it, a half mile down, over another quarter of a mile, then back toward the target address.

He found the driveway and eased on past, but could see nothing down the driveway except one dim light in the house; he couldn’t see the barn at all, which Gates had described as “dirt-colored.”

Virgil left his car a hundred yards down the road, on the side away from I-94. If Peck was in the house and decided to drive out, he’d probably be going out toward the interstate.

On foot now, Virgil snuck back to the driveway, crouched at the entrance, listening, then walked down toward the house, staying as much as he could in the brush along the side of the drive. Took his time: no rush now.

As he got closer, he could see the thinnest rime of light in a rectangular shape, out past the house. A door, he thought. He kept moving, slowly, slowly, listening all the time, his pistol in his hand now.

Went past the house, stepped on something, dropped his hand to it: an electric cord, snaking off toward the barn. Another few steps, something else. A hose.

Took his time, listening. No sound at all from the house, no sign of a vehicle. He thought about that, wondered if Peck had gone somewhere else. The light in the house was nothing you’d read by…

Another minute and he was next to the barn door. The door opened inward. He thought about it for a moment, listened some more, then pushed on it. The light inside was bright and cut a pencil-thin shaft across his jeans. He pushed a bit more and now could see inside.

And he could smell what was in there, and it was awful: a combination of spoiled meat and rotten blood and maybe tiger shit, he thought. Nobody there-then something moved at the back and two lamp-like eyes turned toward him from behind a chain-link fence.

A goddamn tiger, he thought. He’d found them. Or one of them.

He caught the door with his fingernails, pulled it closed again, and turned to the house. As he did it, the phone in his pocket began to vibrate. He didn’t answer, but slipped around the corner of the barn and walked down the side of it until he was nearly to the back.

Shielding the phone screen from the house, he looked at it: Mattsson.

Called her back and she picked up on the first ring. “I was in the shower… Missed your call.”

“I found them,” Virgil said. “They’re in a barn at a house right behind the Halls’, but on a different road, a road that’s parallel to the one the Halls are on. You can see them both on the Google satellite. One tiger’s alive. There’s nobody in the barn, except the tiger, but may be somebody in the house.”

“You got your gun with you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on the way,” Mattsson said.

Peck had been asleep in the farmhouse. There was no furniture in the place, but Hayk Simonian had brought in a foam pad, and Peck passed out on it, partly from exhaustion and partly from the drugs. He awoke in the dark and was disoriented: the first thing he recognized was the smell of the place, mostly dry rot, rodent shit, and dust, with a lingering stink from the tiny bathroom.

None of the plumbing worked, but Simonian had used the toilet anyway. He’d later tried to flush it with a bucket of water, but the pipes were screwed up and he was only partially successful. The electricity still worked, but since they didn’t use the house for much, Hamlet Simonian had installed only one lightbulb, in the kitchen, leaving his fingerprints all over it, Peck assumed.

Peck had dragged the foam pad into the mudroom, which still had functioning screens, because the house was too hot and the cross-ventilation from the open windows kept the Hayk Simonian stink at bay. In the dim light of the sixty-watt bulb, he pushed himself up, popped a Xanax, opened the door, took a step down, unzipped, and peed off the side of the back stoop.

As he was doing that, he saw a crack of light to his left, at the barn. And a figure in the light: that fuckin’ Flowers, no question about it.

Caught in midstream, he tried to get back inside the house without peeing on himself, and succeeded, mostly, except for one hand, but did pee all over the foam pad and in the doorway to the main part of the house. At that point, figuring he was near the end anyway, he finished peeing on the kitchen floor, wiped his hands on his pants, and got the rifle.

Getting as close to the kitchen lightbulb as he could, without throwing shadows that might give him away, he carefully extracted the magazine from the bottom of the rifle, cursing himself for not loading it earlier, and began to fumble cartridges into the magazine. He didn’t know exactly how many rounds the magazine would hold, but he managed to press in eight or nine before he knocked the cartridge box off the kitchen counter, and the metallic cartridges hit the floor like a rain of steel bolts.