Dark of the Moon

18

VIRGIL AWOKE to a tapping on the motel-room door. Light was pushing through the drapes, so it had to be morning. He crawled across the bed and looked at the clock: seven A.M. Another knock, more insistent this time.

"Hang on," he called. He got his pistol, checked it, stepped over to the door, not crossing in front of it, reached across, and rattled the chain.

No gunshots. "Who is it?"

"Joan," Her voice quiet.

Virgil popped the chain, opened the door, standing there in his shorts and gun. "What's going on?"

She was dressed in worn jeans and a T-shirt, and had a bandana wrapped around her head, covering her hair. "I was headed out to the farm, I saw Jim on the street, he says you're thinking Jesse. I'd like to hear about it."

"Come on in," Virgil said. She stepped inside and he closed the door and put the gun away, and said, "I might be onto something, but this goddamned town, I'm not telling anybody." He grinned at her, trying to soften it, make it a little jokey.

"Including me." She crossed her arms. Always a bad sign with a woman, Virgil thought. "That'll be a first," she said, "Virgil Flowers keeping his mouth shut."

Virgil said, "I'm gonna shave. You can watch." She trailed him to the bathroom, and Virgil splashed water on his face, and said, "When you come into a small town like this, on a dead case, you have to do something to get things moving again. I talk. It works."

She was skeptical: "You mean, you're a naturally reticent, quiet, bashful, introverted sort of guy, who'd never say anything about anybody, and it's all been a technique to mess with us Bluestemmers?"

Virgil was smearing shaving gel on his face. He stopped under his nose, looked at her in the mirror: "First time I ever heard 'reticent' or 'Bluestemmer' in a spoken sentence."

"So. Are you just fuckin' with me?"

"Joanie, you are a great woman and that's the truth," Virgil said, "but we've got at least five dead people and one psycho. I came here to get him. That's what I'm going to do."

She showed a smile. "So it's not Jesse. You said 'get him.'"

He rinsed the razor under the faucet and said, "That first night we went out, I mentioned that you were smarter than I thought. You just wormed an objective personal pronoun out of me…Want to wash my back?"

WHEN JOAN had gone, Virgil went online, checked his mail. Sandy, Davenport's researcher, had shipped him what she could find on Williamson, and it was all fairly routine. No arrests, three speeding tickets over two decades, three years in the Army, including Iraq in '90. Never married. Adoptive parents not listed in Minnesota directories, hadn't filed income taxes with Minnesota in at least ten years.

He didn't bother checking Jesse: he had Jesse's story.

Judd: he spent an hour crawling through the paper he had on Judd. The accountant, Olafson, had done the numbers, but he was hoping for a name, an event, an association…

And did no better than he had with Jesse.

He thought about the.357. Wondered how long he should wait. Sooner or later, he thought, there was a good chance that somebody would suggest searching Jesse's house. He wanted to see where the suggestion came from, but didn't want to wait too long.

VIRGIL CAUGHT STRYKER at ten o'clock, as he was talking to a slightly hungover carpenter with a bandage on his nail hand. The carpenter said that he'd ridden up to the fire with a friend named Dick Quinn. Stryker skated around a direct question of whether the carpenter knew how Jesse Laymon got there, but instead showed him a list of the names he had, and checked off who rode with whom, and who drove.

The carpenter had seen Jesse, but didn't know how she got there. When they walked back out to Stryker's truck, Virgil asked, "Anybody see her truck? Or give her a ride?"

Stryker said, "One guy saw her and thought her truck was at the end of the line. But nobody was looking at trucks, they were looking at the fire."

"Want to know what I would do?" Virgil asked.

Stryker shook his head: "After yesterday, I'm not sure."

"I'd have one of your deputies watch Williamson, get one to track Bill Judd, and one to watch Jesse. If two of them look like they're about to collide…"

"If I stake them out, everybody in the county will know in fifteen minutes," Stryker said. "Including them."

"Better than piling up more dead people," Virgil said.

"Virgil…let me finish this. I only have to find a couple more people. Then we'll talk about a stakeout. Now-what're you doing today?"

"Maybe push Williamson," Virgil said. "Maybe push Jesse. Maybe talk to Judd some more. Somewhere in that triangle, there's an answer."

"You do that, and I'll nail down this list. Then let's talk."

VIRGIL HAD JUST GOTTEN in his truck when his phone rang. He opened it: Pirelli.

"We're getting together at the Holiday Inn, in Worthington," Pirelli said. "There's a rumor going around that we're about to raid the meatpacking plant, looking for illegals. If you and Stryker want in, you need to be here."

"When are you moving?" Virgil tapped his horn at Stryker, who looked back. Virgil waved him over.

"Around noon," Pirelli said. "Feur is on his way back to his farm from Omaha. We've got a guy just loaded fifty gallons of gas into the back of his truck, up at the ethanol plant. He should be getting to the farm a little after Feur, unless one of them stops along the way."

Virgil rolled down his truck window, put his finger over the mouthpiece, and said to Stryker, "Pirelli."

Pirelli was saying, "…you need to get briefed, if you want to be in on it."

"We'll be there by eleven," Virgil said. "You need more troops?"

"No. And we want to keep this off the air. We don't want any curious deputies sticking their noses in. We don't need strange guys with guns."

"Give us an hour," Virgil said. He closed the phone.

Stryker: "Today?"

"We're leaving right now for Worthington," Virgil said. "Pirelli wants to keep it off the air. You ought to check out, make up some kind of excuse, and we're rolling."

"Hot dog," Stryker said.

THEY SLAMMED Virgil's gear in the back of Stryker's Ford, and Stryker called dispatch and told them he'd be out of touch for a while. The dispatcher said, after a pause, "Okay, there." Stryker said to Virgil, "He thinks I'm going to Jesse's for a nooner," and he threw back his head and laughed.

Virgil said, "Not a bad idea."

"Tough choice, fuckin' or fightin'," Stryker said. "In the long run, I prefer fuckin', but at any given moment, fightin' can while away the hours."

THEY MADE the run to Worthington in half an hour. The feds had taken over the end of one wing of the Holiday Inn, and Virgil and Stryker were stopped by agents when they tried to walk back. One of the agents spoke into a radio, then nodded at them, and said, "Last room on the right."

THEY FOUND PIRELLI in a meeting room with twenty other agents, all in jeans, short-sleeved shirts, and ball caps. Pirelli was standing next to a pull-down projection screen, and the agents were on folding chairs, facing it, like a kindergarten class with guns. In the middle of them, a computer was sitting on a stand with a PowerPoint projector.

Pirelli said, over the heads of the agents, "You're just in time for the movies," and to the agents, "This is Jim Stryker, sheriff of Stark County, the man with the hat, and Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, with…what kind of T-shirt, Virgil?"

Virgil pulled opened his coat to show off the Arcade Fire shirt.

"What the hell is Arcade Fire?" asked a Latino-looking dude with a New York accent.

"World's best hurdy-gurdy band," Virgil said.

PIRELLI SAID, "Guys, you've been briefed, I just want to talk about the territory a bit more, while we're waiting, and now that we have local people here. We've scouted it, we've flown it, we don't anticipate any huge trouble, but we gotta be ready. John Franks and Roger Kiley have long histories…" He paused, then said to Virgil and Stryker, "Franks is the guy bringing the stuff down from the ethanol plant; Kiley is at Feur's place now. He and a couple of other guys hang out there, patrolling around. We don't have IDs on the others."

"A guy named Trevor," Virgil said. "Last time I saw him, he had a Remington pump."

Pirelli stepped to the computer and projector, brought up an image on the screen, and did a search for "Trevor." A moment later, a "Trevor Rich" popped up, with a police ID photo from Wichita Falls, Texas.

"That's him," Virgil said, looking into Trevor's blank eyes.

Pirelli pulled up some text and read it for them: "Armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, terroristic threats. Ex-wife has been missing for four years; nobody knows where she went…he says California. If he goes back inside, he stays."

"He looked like such a nice boy," Virgil said.

"Kiley and Franks are the same deal: guns, trouble, and severely pissed off at the government," Pirelli said. "We've got to get right on top of them."

"How are you going to do that?" Virgil asked.

"That's a little complicated," Pirelli said.

THE COMPLICATION INVOLVED getting both Feur and the dope at the house at the same time. They had an observation plane overhead, watching the dope, along with two cars tracking it on the ground, and an electronic position finder planted on the truck itself.

"We want Feur on the premises. Then we grab the dope before they can do anything with it," Pirelli said. He went back to the computer keyboard and pulled up a satellite view of Feur's farm. "We don't know exactly where they'll move the stuff, but we think it's likely that they'll put it in this shed, rather than in the house," he said, touching the garage/shop with a red dot from a laser pointer. To Virgil and Stryker: "When we met in Mankato, you said that when Dale Donald Evans loaded gas cans, he backed up to the shed. We expect Franks to do the same thing, to unload.

"As soon as Franks is in the yard, we hit them," Pirelli continued, circling the yard with the laser dot. "We can time that right down to the minute, where we come off the interstate. Even if they see us coming over the top of the rise"-he touched a terrain feature on the satellite photo-"they'll have less than a minute of reaction time. If we can catch them in the yard, they're toast. We had a guy go by, take some high-res photos of that shed. It doesn't look like much. If they try to fight from it, we can take them out. The house is even shakier…"

"You don't want a massacre," Stryker said.

"Nope. We want to catch them in a helpless condition, so they quit," Pirelli said.

"Are you sure about the meth?" Stryker asked. "That they're bringing meth down from South Dakota?"

"Yes," Pirelli said flatly. "That lab at the ethanol plant; best meth lab any of us have ever seen in the States. They've got some as good down in Mexico, but nothing better."

Virgil piped up: "That shop might be a little harder than you think."

Pirelli raised an eyebrow: "Yeah?"

"It's got new Medeco locks and steel doors. Hardly any point, if the thing has cardboard walls."

"Have you been inside?" Pirelli asked.

"Of course not. That would be illegal, without a warrant," Virgil said.

"We got stuff that'd take down those doors like they were tissue paper," one of the agents said.

"Sure, when you decide to," Virgil said. "But if Franks has ten gas cans in his truck, with twenty gallons in gas and the rest in crank, and if he has time to unload the crank and stir it around in the gas, he could have a nice little campfire in there and run out with his hands over his head…Maybe you need to order up a fire truck."

Pirelli said, "We gotta be on top of them before he can unload. We will be less than a minute behind him, and he'll have no reason to hurry. With any luck, he'll want to take a leak before he unloads."

"I hope," Virgil said. "But it worries me."

"With these kinds of deals," Pirelli said, "there's always about a twenty-eight percent chance of a disaster. That's just the way it is. However we have to do it, these guys are worth eliminating." He looked at the satellite picture, then said to Virgil: "But you're right. It's worth worrying about."

THEY STOOD AROUND talking to the agents, then Virgil borrowed Pirelli's laser pointer, and Virgil and Stryker went over the ground around the house-a ditch here, a big rock there, where they could site long guns.

There was a long seam of darker grass extending from the barn area, up the hill, and into a clump of brush southeast of the farmstead. One of the agents asked if it were a ditch that could be used to approach the houses.

"Don't know," Stryker said. "We did our recon on the north side."

Pirelli was on the phone with somebody doing surveillance on the two target cars as they approached Feur's farm. One of them was working the math on a simultaneous arrival, and at twelve-forty, Pirelli said, "North side, take off."

Six agents got up, and walked out.

Pirelli said, "Five minutes, guys. We're on the road in ten. Drivers, fast, but no lights. Keep spaced out right until we're at the exit, then close up tight. You know all this, so let's remember it. Everybody: be careful. We don't want to lose anybody out there, and this is a tough bunch. Virgil, Jim, you hang back a little-not way back, but a little back. We've choreographed the entry, here."

Five minutes later, Pirelli said, "Let's mount up," and they streamed out of the room, no jokes, no talk.

Moving fast.