Dark of the Moon

20

A DUCK-BILLED WRECKING machine plucked splintered lumber out of the wreckage of the farmhouse, like a steel velociraptor; the sun was rolling down below the horizon, the sky as orange as a bluebird's belly.

Virgil sat in the open door of the barn's hayloft, feet dangling, eating a bologna sandwich provided by the taxpayers, two other agents chewing along with him, talking about the fight, when Gomez walked up on the ground and called, "Let's go to town. TV is waiting."

"Fuck you," Virgil called back.

"I knew you'd say that. I talked to Davenport, and he says he wants to see your happy face on all channels, thanking the governor for this opportunity to take crime fighting into the sticks."

"Fuck Davenport," Virgil said.

"Get your ass down here. I'm too tired to fool around." Gomez walked away, stopped to talk to Stryker. Virgil stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, picked up a half-drunk bottle of Pepsi, and stepped toward the ladder.

One of the agents, the Latino-looking New Yorker who'd given Virgil a hard time about his T-shirt, said, "Virgil. We owe you. Puttin' those guys in the truck and taking them out of the yard. We pay. You ever need help on anything… you call us. No bullshit."

The other agent nodded, said through a mouthful of Wonder Bread and bologna, "Anything."

GOMEZ AND STRYKER rode to Bluestem with Virgil, in the shot-up Ford, trailed by two more agents in one of the north-crew trucks. They'd both been back and forth since the killing of Feur. The two badly wounded DEA agents were still alive. One would probably make it, the other probably not; two more, whom Virgil didn't know, were less seriously wounded, and almost everybody was scratched and pitted by rocks, dust, and pieces of metal.

Pirelli was screwed up, but not terminally. A slug had busted up his shoulder joint, and putting that back together would be tough. His broken arm was another problem, and would take a while to heal.

"AND JUDD," Stryker said. "Where is that asshole?"

A DEA arrest team had gone after Judd as the raid on the farm was taking place, but hadn't been able to find him. His car was at his office, the door was unlocked, but there was no sign of Judd.

"This bothers me," Virgil said. "Why would he be gone?"

"Tipped?" Gomez asked.

"By who? One of your guys? When Pirelli called me, Jim and I were together, and we were together every inch of the way. Neither one of us called anyone."

Stryker nodded; Gomez said, "Maybe…I don't know."

GOMEZ ASKED, "You got a better shirt than that?"

"And another jacket," Virgil said. "We can stop at the motel."

"Keep the jacket; I don't want you guys washed up," Gomez said. "I want you looking messed up, but the T-shirt is too much. Looks crazy, given all the dead people."

"I got a black AC/DC shirt that should be perfect," Virgil said.

"Virgil."

"I take care of myself," Virgil said. "Stop worrying about it."

They stopped for two minutes at the hotel, Virgil pulled on a plain olive-drab T-shirt that gave him a vaguely military look, and Gomez said, "Not bad."

Stryker said, "Hell of a day." He had three little pockmarks on his left cheek, showing blood. He wasn't cleaning that up, either.

A DEA INFORMATION specialist had flown in from the Twin Cities and set up the press conference at the courthouse, the same room where Virgil and Stryker had been after the killing of the Schmidts.

More media this time: a half-dozen trucks, including freelance network feeds going up from satellite trucks parked in the courthouse yard. Too late for the evening news, but the late news would get it, the cable channels, and the morning network shows.

Gomez led the way: gave a terse, five-minute briefing, using the satellite photo of the farm, an outline of the fight, starting with the attack of the dogs-compressed the time a bit between the first shots at the dogs, and the fire from the house-and ending with the shootings of Feur and the man they still called John. He showed off a gas can full of glass tubes of methamphetamine, and allowed the best-looking media lady to handle one of them, holding it up to the lights for the cameras.

While she was doing it, Virgil noticed Joan and Jesse at the back of the room, looking at him and Stryker with deep skepticism. They were standing next to Williamson, who turned repeatedly to Jesse, talking at her, teeth showing.

At the very end, Gomez pulled Virgil and Stryker in front of the cameras and said, "We'd particularly like to thank Sheriff James Stryker, who as you can see was mildly wounded while suppressing the fire from the farmhouse, and Virgil Flowers, of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who risked his own life to save the lives of two of our wounded men. Damnedest thing I ever saw, when Virgil backed that truck out of the yard. These are two good guys."

Virgil was genuinely embarrassed, but the media were happy, given local heroes in what otherwise might have been interpreted as a fuckup, with six or seven people dead, and five in the hospital.

After the briefing, the questions started, a few of them hostile, but Gomez was a pro. He turned the hostility back on the questioners, pointing out that they'd seized enough meth to save several hundred lives, "including that of young men and women; methamphetamine is one of the drugs of choice in our public schools."

Williamson had one question for Virgil: "Is this the end of the murder epidemic in Bluestem? Were the Gleasons, the Schmidts, Bill Judd Sr., were they all killed by Feur and his men? And what was the connection?"

"I'd like to answer that question, but I can't, because I don't know the answer," Virgil said. "As far as I'm concerned, the investigation continues."

Davenport called on Virgil's cell as he was shouldering his way out of the press conference: "You did good," Davenport said. "Now-when are you going to collect the nut job?"

JESSE AND JOAN were waiting on the sidewalk outside, along with Laura Stryker and a dozen people from the town. Joan said, "What the heck were you guys doing out there?"

Stryker snapped at her: "Our job. I'm the sheriff of this county. They didn't hire me to catch a bunch of dogs."

There was a murmur of approval from the crowd, and Joan said, fists on her hips, "So now there are dead people everywhere and you've got blood all over you…"

Jesse was as angry as Joan, and it occurred to Virgil that they'd make good sisters-in-law. Virgil said, "I've got to go," and he walked past them out to his truck, did a U-turn, and drove over to the hospital. A couple of sheriff's cars were still parked outside the emergency entrance, cops on the lookout for any further trouble. Inside, Pirelli was out of it, sound asleep, one arm and shoulder encased in fiberglass, one leg bandaged and elevated.

A DEA guy in the hall said, "Virgil," and Virgil asked, "How are they?"

"Hangin' in there. I think…Doug made it this far, I think he's going to hold on."

"Prayin' for them," Virgil said, though he wasn't, because he didn't think prayer would help. He went back to the motel.

JOAN WAS COMING down the hall from the direction of his room, saw him, and asked, "Are you pissed at me?"

"Mildly," he said. "I don't need to take any shit about what happened today. Either to Jim or me or even the dead guys. It just happened-it's nobody's fault but Feur's, and he paid for it."

"We were scared," she said.

"That's okay. I don't want to hear about it. Tomorrow, you can tell me all about being scared."

She touched his hair, with the matted blood. "I could wash your hair out for you. That's going to hurt."

"You could do that," he said.

THEY SNUGGLED UP on the bed, no sex, just snuggling, Virgil full of Aleve, his hair wet, and she said, "In the press conference, when you said you didn't know if the killing was all done…what you meant was, it isn't."

"I don't think so. In fact…"

"What?"

"We're looking for Bill Judd Junior. Got watches out for him, but he seems to be gone. The thing is, I think he might be dead."

She rolled up on her elbow. "You still think Williamson?"

"The Williamson thing freaks me out. When we braced him…I sort of bought it. He seemed as freaked out as I was, when I figured it out. He was screaming at us."

"So…?"

"So I don't know. If you pointed a gun at my head and told me to spit out a name, I'd spit out his. You think a guy, he's in the Cities, he's a newspaperman, wouldn't he know who his real mother was? Just do a search? He says he didn't, he didn't care who she was. And I guess even if he did, he wouldn't necessarily know that Judd was his father."

"If he'd ever gone for a birth certificate, to get a passport or something…"

Virgil rolled over on his back, felt the skin pulling around the cuts on his scalp and face. "I got to think about him…What was he talking to Jesse about? I saw you guys together in the back of the room."

"Well, he started out by shaking her hand, saying 'long-lost sister,' and then he started pushing her around. Where was she last week? When did she really find out she was Judd's daughter? Where was her mother?"

"Like he thought she might be involved?"

"He was unpleasant," Joan said, "But he's never been a real pleasant man."

"I keep trying to think, who else?"

SLEEP PULLED HIM UNDER. He woke up at two o'clock, and Joan was gone. Went to the bathroom, and then back to the bed, went under again, thinking…Who else? Nobody had said a thing about the.357…

Of course, Jesse wouldn't; but he didn't think that Jesse was the killer, because that would be aesthetically incongruent. She was just too good-looking.

He smiled, and mentally wrote his little story, in which the best-looking woman would never be the guilty one:

Homer shook his head. The shoot-out with Feur, the death of Feur, had blocked up a lot of potential information.

Brilliant, though, the way Stryker had picked up that seam in the hillside. Homer would never have seen it. And thank God for Stryker's reflexes: he cut Feur down before he had a chance to open up on Homer himself.

Mmmm…

Anyway:

ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND of Austria got his ass shot in Sarajevo in 1914, touching off World War I. His wife was killed at the same time. A little less than ninety years later, a bunch of guys in Scotland formed a band called Franz Ferdinand, which was why Virgil was pulling a Franz Ferdinand T-shirt over his head the next morning at seven o'clock.

Find out what happened to the DEA guys. He stopped at a gas station across the street from the motel and bought a MoonPie and a Coke: sugar, fat, and caffeine, the breakfast of champions.

Pirelli was awake in a standard room, Gomez asleep on a couch under a window. Virgil asked, "How're you doing?"

Pirelli said, "I'm hurting. Ah, God."

"How're your guys?"

"Both still alive." Pirelli reached out his good hand, and knocked on the wood-grained plastic of the bedside table. "I think, I hope…"

"What about Harmon?"

"I talked to his wife last night," Pirelli said. "She's coming out today."

"I don't want to be there," Virgil said.

"Neither do I."

They both looked into a corner for a moment, and then Virgil asked, "Was it worth it? If you'd had a good idea somebody was going to be killed…?"

"Fuck no, it wasn't worth it." Pirelli shook his head. "Don't tell anybody I said that. If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have set up five hundred yards away and hosed down Franks and his trucks and the house and killed the whole bunch of them. But I didn't know."

"So what's next? For you?"

Pirelli shrugged: "Media, today. Docs say I'm gonna be out of work for six months or so. Then back to Chicago. Try to figure out why we're all of a sudden rolling in heroin down in Gary…same ol' same ol'."

"Nobody's pissed at you?"

Pirelli shook his head. "DEA guys get killed. It's not like the FBI."

STRYKER CAME IN. "Morning, bright eyes," he said to Pirelli. Gomez sat up on the couch, shaking his head, smacking his lips. Stryker said, "Talked to the doc one minute ago: things aren't looking too bad, but they're gonna move you all to Rochester today. Mayo."

"I don't think I need the Mayo…" Pirelli started.

"They say you're gonna need some reconstruction on that shoulder," Stryker said. "A couple of pins. Might as well get the best."

THEY TALKED FOR A WHILE. A DEA team was flying in from Washington to reconstruct the fight, and the house, and do an after-action report. The South Dakota ethanol plant had been taken down without a fight; most of the plant was legit. The lab was not: it was a clean, efficient, meth production line. There was a national stop-and-hold on Bill Judd Jr.

They were talking about that when Stryker took a call, listened for a minute, then said, "Five minutes."

And to Pirelli, Gomez, and Virgil: "Bill Judd. He's dead. Up at his old man's place."

STRYKER AND VIRGIL went together in a county truck. Gomez and another agent followed in one of the blacked-out DEA trucks, out to the main drag, out of town and up the hill to the Buffalo Ridge park entrance, through the park gate, and up the driveway to Judd's.

Four sheriff's cars were parked by the burned-out basement, one deputy leaning on his car, talking on his radio, four more deputies standing in the high grass, north of the house, near the crest of the hill. Virgil and Stryker hopped out of the truck and Stryker raised a hand to the deputy at the car, and then they led Gomez and the other agent through the grass up the hill.

"Hell of a thing," Big Curly said, as they came up.

"What happened to him?"

"The crows were here…but it looks like something cracked his skull open. His brains…take a look."

Judd was on his back, wearing a suit and dress shoes. He didn't have sightless eyes staring at the sun, because he no longer had any eyes. Crows. The top of his head was misshapen. Not as though he were shot, but more as though his skull had been crushed. Flattened.

"Piece of rebar over here," one of the deputies said. "We're waiting for Margo to come up, but it's got blood on it, and some hair."

Virgil and Stryker went over and looked: a piece of rusty steel that might have been picked out of the burned house. "That would have done it."

No gunshot wounds. "We know one thing," Little Curly said. "It wasn't suicide."

GOMEZ ASKED, "What do you think? Feur?"

"We need a time of death, but I don't think so. It's my other guy," Virgil said.

Gomez grimaced, did a slow three-sixty, looking at the prairie lands stretched out around him forever, said, "Interesting little culture you got going here."

"Gotta be Feur," Stryker said. "Gleasons, Schmidts, the Judds-it's a Feur cleanup operation. They were gonna get out, they weren't gonna leave anything behind."

"I don't know," Virgil said.

Another deputy's car pulled in below them, and Margo Carr got out, took a gear bag out of the trunk, and trudged up the hill. "Another one," she said, heavily.

"Last one, but maybe one," Virgil said.

"What does that mean?" Stryker asked.

Virgil shrugged.

Down the hill, another truck pulled in, and Todd Williamson got out. The deputy at the truck put out a hand to him, but Williamson jogged straight past him, beat the deputy to the edge of the heavy grass, and pulled away, the deputy still yelling at him.

Big Curly blocked him: "You can't be here."

"Screw that," Williamson said. He poked a finger at Virgil. "If the genius here is right, I'm next of kin. So what happened to my brother?"

VIRGIL HEADED BACK to the motel, with one stop at the accountant's office. Olafson had just gotten up. She raised the shade on her office door, cocked an eyebrow at Virgil, and opened the door.

Virgil stepped inside and asked, "If something happened to Bill Judd Jr., would that change what happens with his father's estate?"

"Is he dead?" she asked.

"Pretty much," Virgil said. He told her about it, and she shook her head and said, "May the Good Lord keep him."

"Estate?"

Olafson made a noise, then said, "I'd have to look up the law, and you might even have to get a special ruling. But you know what? I think it's possible that Jesse Laymon and Todd Williamson, if they can prove a blood connection to Senior, could stand to get a bigger piece of the estate."

The argument would be complicated, she said, and hung on what the IRS would do about Junior's debt, how it would be counted against the estate. "And with this nut cake running around killing everybody, I'm not sure I'd hang around to make the argument."

Virgil thanked her, and continued on to the hotel. Shut down his cell phone, took off his boots, put the chain on the door, stretched out on the bed. There'd been a thread running through this thing, he thought, right up to the firefight at Feur's place. If he could only find one end of it, and pull it…