Deadline

13

At five o’clock in the morning, Virgil crept up to Johnson’s truck and pulled in behind it. Johnson was asleep, but Bill got out, shoulders hunched against the early morning damp and cool. He scuffed dirt off the shoulder onto the empty road and said, “Nothing much. Empty pickups and a couple cars. No dogs. Didn’t see Sharf, either coming or going. God knows where he is by this time.”

“See any movement up on the hill?”

“Not a thing. Darrell’s up there now, listening. Johnson was up there for a couple hours, before he came down to catch some rack time.”

Virgil said, “Okay. Call Darrell down, and you guys can take off anytime. Get the boat back, so the day shift can take over.”

“If they know we’re there…”

“Yeah. We’ll talk this afternoon,” Virgil said. “Might be time to call off the watch. At least for now.”

“Need those goddamn dogs, Virgil. This is as mad as anyone’s been — if they beat us this time, they’ll just keep coming back.”

“We’ll get them, Bill. Swear to God.”

Virgil got back in his truck and drove up Orly’s Creek Road, all the way to the end, and then up the Ruffs’ driveway. He parked in front of the house, and as he turned off the engine, saw a light come on in what he thought was probably a bedroom. As he walked up to the porch, the motion-sensing porch light snapped on, and Julius Ruff looked out the window at him, then met him at the door.

“What happened?” He was wearing a white knit Henley bed shirt and blue boxer shorts.

“Nothing, so far. I’d like to talk to Muddy for a minute if I could.”

“He’s—”

“I’m up,” Muddy said from the darkened back of the house. He came to the door, barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

Julius pushed open the door, and Virgil and Julius and Muddy gathered around the kitchen table, and Muddy sketched out the best route up the hill and down the bluffs to the dog pen, where Virgil planned to wait.

“You can’t leave from here, in our driveway,” Julius Ruff said. “You gotta start down the road. I don’t want the assholes to know we’re talking to you.”

“Neither do I,” Virgil said.

Muddy said, “Okay. If you go down the road, maybe a two-minute walk, you’ll see this mailbox with a big wooden rooster cutout on top.”

“I’ve seen that,” Virgil said.

“Then a little ways further, there’s a turnout where you can park, and there’s a trail along the creek there. Follow down the creek about, mmm, a little ways, and there’s a place where the creek breaks between some rocks. You can walk dry across the rocks, and there’s a little trail that goes up the hill from there, and hooks up with the trail under the bluffs.”

“Thank you,” Virgil said. “If I use a flash for part of that, is somebody going to see me?”

“Probably not, if you don’t use it too much. And that turnout is where some trout fishermen park. So… you could be a fisherman.”

Virgil said to Julius, “Don’t let Muddy out of the house until eight o’clock or so. I don’t want somebody up there that I don’t know about. I’ll be carrying a shotgun.”

“He’ll be here,” Julius said. To Muddy: “We’ll work on your theory for an hour, and then do some licks from Guitar Techniques.”

“I’d just like to get some more sleep,” Muddy said.

“That’s because you think I don’t know about you sneaking out the window. I want you where I can see you,” Julius said. To Virgil, he said, “Good luck.”

Virgil found the turnout two hundred yards back down the road, fifty yards past the rooster mailbox. His watch said that it was 5:30, and though sunrise was more than a half hour away, there was enough light to see the hole in the brush that led to Orly’s Creek. He wouldn’t need the flash.

He got the shotgun out of the back, loaded it with buckshot, put some extra shells in his jacket pocket, along with a squeeze bottle of DEET. Stopped and listened, and heard nothing but birds announcing with the dawn.

The transition from darkness to full light comes suddenly in the woods. Virgil walked down the creek, where the rocks were barely visible, poking up through the black water. He crossed carefully and began climbing the hill, and by the time he got to the trail along the bluff, he could see a hundred yards through the heavy brush and trees. He moved slowly, no hurry, stopping to look and listen.

With his slow movement, he took more than a half hour to make it to the dog pen. No dogs. He found a downed tree, back in the brush, and sat down behind it. Listened.

The sun showed up on schedule — which, when he thought about it, was a relief, given the alternative. If the dog feeders showed up at 7:30, as they usually did, he’d have another hour to wait. A mosquito buzzed past his ear.…

At eight o’clock, he was still waiting. He could see squirrels running up and down the oak trees, all the way down to the road, which meant nobody was creeping up on him. He waited a while longer, but was about to give up when he noticed a growing silence behind his position. He settled back, and ten minutes later, saw Muddy Ruff easing from one tree to the next, his rifle under his arm.

He got downhill from Virgil, twenty yards away, following the trail toward the dog pen. Then he stopped, looked around and finally up the hill where Virgil was hidden. Virgil said, “I asked you to stay away from here.”

“Got to be eight o’clock, I was done with my lessons. We figured you’d be gone.”

“How’d you spot me?” Virgil asked, as he stood up.

“I could smell that insect stuff,” Muddy said.

“Okay.”

They walked over to the dog pen, and Muddy said, “I can smell the dogs. They were here, not long ago. I don’t know how long, maybe a couple of days, maybe a couple of hours.”

“Not a couple hours,” Virgil said. “Nobody was moving in the woods.”

A dog barked. Faintly, but not clearly. Muddy looked at Virgil: “You hear that?”

“Yeah. Where is it?”

“Didn’t sound like it was far away,” Muddy said. “Sounded like it was close, but the dog was gagged or something.”

They both looked at the pen, which looked the same as it did when Virgil was there the first time. Virgil said, “Weird place for a pen. Got to walk all the way up the hill every day, got to carry bags of dog food.”

The hurricane fencing was eight feet high, a semicircle stapled to 4×4 posts, with both ends of the fence pinned to the bluff. Part of the bluff was undercut, with a shallow cavity perhaps two feet high and two feet deep, where the dogs probably went to get out of the sun. They both walked over to the gate, and into the pen, and they both bent to look at the undercut: just an undercut. They could see both ends, and it was empty.

They’d backed off and were looking up at the bluff when they heard another bark.

They looked at each other, then Muddy handed Virgil his rifle and said, “Hold on to this.” He went over to the bluff, lay down, and looked up at the roof of the undercut.

“There’s a board here. Must be a cave.”

“What?”

Virgil stacked their guns against the bluff, took a look around, then got down on his back and looked up at what should have been the sandstone ceiling of the undercut. Instead he saw an eight-foot length of board, fourteen inches wide, two inches thick. The board had toggle bolts at one end, and hinges at the other.

“Keep an eye out,” Virgil said to the kid.

Muddy rolled out of the cavity, and Virgil humped over to the end of the board and twisted the toggle bolts. The board dropped down at one end, and a minute later a beagle hound ran down the board.

“Holy crap,” Muddy said.

More than a dozen dogs, including four beagles, a half-dozen Labrador retrievers — four black and two chocolate — a golden retriever, two Brittany spaniels, and two black-and-white dogs and one speckled brown one that Virgil couldn’t name, but looked like serious gun dogs, followed down the board and milled around, sniffing for food. They looked like they needed it. One of the beagles started baying at them — where’s the food?

Virgil picked up the shotgun, waved Muddy out of the pen, closed the gate, and said, as a couple other dogs joined in the howl, “Keep an eye out down the hill, in case the noise pulls somebody in.”

“Right.”

Virgil got on the phone to Johnson.

“You hear them?”

“We all can. Where the hell are you?”

“At the pen. Get up here. Don’t have to be subtle about it, park on the road and come on up.”

When he was off the phone, he said to Muddy, “I owe you one. I don’t think I would have seen that plank.”

Muddy nodded.

“You got any idea of who might’ve done this?”

“Roy Zorn is the one everybody thought did it. His best pal, his assistant, is D. Wayne Sharf — not Duane, but D, the initial, and Wayne, everybody calls him Dee-Wayne. He lives almost straight down the hill, and I’ve seen him up here in the spring, looking for mushrooms. He might’ve been the one who found the cave.”

“Okay. D. Wayne Sharf, we’re already looking for him,” Virgil said. “You go on home. I don’t want anyone to see you up here with me. You’ve got to live here.”

Muddy nodded again and said, “You should get some different insect stuff. I could smell you a mile away.”

And he was gone down the trail.

Johnson parked straight down the hill from the pen and started climbing. He was alone, and when he got to Virgil, gasping for breath, Virgil asked, “Where are the rest of the guys?”

“I called them, they’re coming. I told them to look for my truck and climb straight up from there.” He looked at the dogs. “Where were they?”

Virgil showed him the undercut. Johnson took Virgil’s flashlight and stuck his head into the hole above the undercut, then stood up. Virgil was the tiniest bit claustrophobic, and said, “Careful, think about a cave-in.”

Johnson dropped back to his knees and crawled out of the undercut, handed the flashlight to Virgil. “Stinks like hell. Looks like a regular sandstone cave — they’re all over the place around here. Should have thought of it before. Could have hid a hundred dogs in there. Smells like dog shit and dead animals… probably ought to send somebody up there to look around.”

“Not me,” Virgil said.

“What if they killed somebody and stashed the body up there?” Johnson asked.

“Goddamnit, Johnson, why’d you go and ask that?”

“Because I’d rather have you up there, than me — and you’re skinnier, anyway, so you could walk right up that board, if you did it sideways.”

Virgil thought about it for a while, and Johnson saw him thinking about it, and said, to encourage him, “Try not to be too big a pussy, pussy.”

Eventually, Virgil agreed that he should at least do what Johnson did, which was get his feet on the bottom of the plank and stand up. Sweating a little, he did that. Using his flashlight, he could see the roof of a fairly roomy cave, maybe ten feet high and fifty across, with a floor that showed shovel marks. A pile of fallen rubble sat at one end. The cave got shallower as it went deeper into the bluff, and finally, twenty-five or thirty feet back, twisted out of sight. He couldn’t see much on the floor of the cave, because of the angle he was at.

He called, “How solid you think this plank is?”

“Felt pretty solid to me.”

Virgil edged up the plank until he could see into the cave in some detail. The doggy odor was so strong he could hardly breathe, but he could feel a thin draft of air from the back of the cave. There’s another hole going out, he thought, and maybe another room farther back. With the plank closed from below, the dogs must have been held in total darkness. He didn’t see any bodies.

Enough. He backed down the plank and crawled out of the undercut and Johnson asked, “Why didn’t you go up inside?”

“’Cause I’m not a stupid asshole,” Virgil said.

“You see anything?”

“Not much to see, except dog poop.”

“Bet you could find some old Indian stuff in there, if you dug it out,” Johnson said.

“Good luck with that,” Virgil said. And, “Here are some of the guys.”

A red Chevy pickup had pulled to the side of the road below, and two men got out and looked up the hill. Johnson shouted, “Manny. Winky. Right straight up.”

More trucks started arriving, and a line of climbers stretched down the hill. When the first two came up, one of them said, “I believe those are Dan’s beagles. That one was a rescue, and had fly-bitten ears, and there he is. Are there any more?”

“This is it,” Virgil said. “They had them up in a hidden cave, which is how they could hide them so fast.”

“Six Labs, but not mine,” Butterfield said. “Where’n the fuck are my Labs?”

“Goddamn Sharf took them out in that horse trailer,” the second man said. “Find him, we find the rest of them.”

Butterfield said, “These are all high-grade dogs. They supposedly were snatching some mutts, too. Where are those? Sharf take them, too?”

Johnson said, “I bet they were stealing the high-enders for resale, and the mutts were going to the dog bunchers.”

Butterfield said, “Dan is coming up the hill.” He turned and shouted, “Hey, Dan, might have some of your dogs up here.”

“Hope to Christ nobody has a heart attack climbing that hill,” Johnson said.

“Good thought,” said Virgil. He looked at the roiling swell of dogs. “Let’s see if we can get these dogs wired up or roped up and get them down the hill.”

After some more yelling down the hill, one of the younger men got a roll of twine from a truck and started up the hill.

In the meantime, Dan arrived, a big man in jeans and a cotton work shirt. He looked at the beagles and started to cry, and the beagles gathered around his knees, whimpering, trying to climb on him, and he gave Johnson a big hug, which made Johnson look seriously uncomfortable, and then Dan sat on the ground and the beagles gathered around and tried to lick him to death.

He was followed by the woman who’d been at the Shanker’s meeting, and had spoken about rescue dogs and ordinary mutts being stolen. She looked at the dogs still in the pen and said, “None of my dogs. My God, they could already be in the laboratories.”

The guy with the twine arrived, and while Dan took his dogs down the hill as a pack, they hooked the other dogs together with makeshift collars and the twine, and led them down the hill.

They’d recovered sixteen dogs altogether, and eight of them were immediately identified by owners, either present or known. Johnson called the Humane Society, which sent a truck to collect the rest of them, where they’d be held until they were identified.

It was eleven o’clock before it was all settled, and Virgil went down the hill and called Davenport, and told him about the dogs.

“Are you pulling my leg?”

“No, no, I’m not,” Virgil said.

“Well, Christ, I hope nobody else finds out about it.”

“I’d like to put out a BOLO on Sharf’s truck and horse trailer. Can we at least do that?”

“You’re in the same place as that guy who was killed, right? That Corn guy?”

“Zorn. Yeah.”

“All right. Put your BOLO out, but say it’s in connection with the investigation into the murder of Corn.”

“Zorn.”

“Zorn. Whatever. That could almost be true.”

“When I think about it, it is true,” Virgil said. “That’s what I will do.”

A number of the dog owners were still hanging around, some with dogs, newly recovered, and some without — tears in a few eyes — and Virgil gathered them around and said, “One of the big shots in the BCA just okayed a be-on-the-lookout alert for Sharf’s truck and trailer. We’ll spread it all over southern Minnesota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin.”

“’Bout time,” somebody said.

Another guy said, “I got Bobby back, but I’ll go out after the rest of them, if you call me. We all oughta hang together, not just guys still looking for their mutts.”

They all agreed they’d do that.

And he said, “Virgil, you’re okay.”

They started breaking up, and Virgil got a ride with Johnson back to his truck.

“I’ll tell you something, Virgie. No matter what you do, you’re never gonna get people more grateful to you than these guys,” Johnson said. “You ever need to get somebody killed, all you gotta do is ask.”

“You got me all choked up, Johnson,” Virgil said. “I’ll make a note about it, you know, needing to kill somebody.”

“You never know,” Johnson said. He shook his head. “Never know.”

Virgil went back to the cabin to change clothes, shower, and shave. Standing in the shower, scrubbing off the DEET, he decided that the time had come to give Buster Gedney a deadline. Gedney, he was convinced, was a linchpin. If he could turn him, he could crack the whole case. Gedney could give him Kerns, the security guy who may have done the shooting — he could almost certainly get a search warrant based on Gedney’s testimony and Conley’s notes — and that would likely get him Kerns’s rifle.

From there, using the legal levers he’d have, involving plea bargains and reduced sentences, he could get the rest of them.

He was out of the cabin a little after noon, stopped at a McDonald’s for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, fries, and a strawberry shake, and drove over to Gedney’s place while he ate.

He’d finished the burger and almost with the fries when he arrived, and found Jennifer Gedney standing in the driveway, the fingers of one hand pinching at her chin, while she looked into the open garage.

So preoccupied that she didn’t see him coming, she turned when Virgil called, “Mrs. Gedney,” and dropped her hand and asked, “Where is he?”

“Where’s who?”

“Buster. I know you’ve got him.”

“I don’t have him. I came over to talk to him.” She stared at him, as if working through the possibilities, then nodded and turned back to the garage. Virgil asked, “You haven’t seen him today?”

“I saw him this morning, before I went to work. But when I came home for lunch, he wasn’t here, and he always is, and when I came out to look in the garage… I was kind of worried… I found this.”

Virgil peered into the garage: “What?”

“His lathe is gone. And a bunch of his tools. All the welding equipment is gone. And his truck.”

Virgil noticed the hole in the line of equipment. The milling machine was still there, but that would have been too big to move, anyway, without a truck and a serious hoist. “Goddamnit.”

She turned to him again: “You know where he went?”

“No, but I know why he went,” Virgil said. “He knew the net’s about to drop on the whole bunch of you, and he wanted out.”

“The net?”

“The police net.” Virgil turned back to his truck, took a few steps, then looked back at her. “If you kept your cut in cash or other valuables, you better check your safe-deposit box, or wherever you keep it. If Buster’s running, he’d need all the cash he could get.”

She was still standing in the driveway when Virgil pulled away from the house. He drove down the street, over a low rise, down in the dip that followed, up the next rise, then executed a technical law enforcement maneuver called a “U-turn.” Rolling back up the hill until he was just high enough to see the end of the Gedney driveway, but the bulk of his truck was still below the crest, he got a pair of binoculars out of the back and sat and waited.

Jennifer Gedney pulled into the street three minutes later. She stopped at the end of the driveway and took a long look in both directions, then turned toward town. Virgil followed her in, watched her park at the Piggly Wiggly. He parked again, and waited, and five minutes later she came back out, hands empty, looked in both directions, got in her car, drove two blocks, and took a left. Virgil hurried after her and made the turn in time to see her turn into the Second National Bank parking lot.

Ten minutes later, she came back out, hands still empty. She got in her car, but the car didn’t move for five minutes. Virgil edged closer and looked at her with the binoculars. She had her head down on the steering wheel.

Weeping?

Hard to tell. He waited, and after a couple more minutes she started the car, and Virgil drove on past the bank and watched as she turned away from him and disappeared back around the corner toward her home.

When she was out of sight, Virgil turned around and followed her. Five minutes later she pulled back into her driveway, got out of the car, and went into the house. Virgil drove back to the bank, went inside, identified himself, and asked to see the manager.

The manager was a heavyset, blue-eyed man with white hair, named Marvin Hiners, who emerged from a small office carrying a sheaf of papers, and asked, “Mr. Flowers?”

Virgil followed him back into the office and said, “I’m investigating the two murders we’ve had here, Mr. Conley and Mr. Zorn. I need some information from you. I’m not asking for documents, I’m only interviewing you as a witness. I’m telling you this so that you know I don’t need a search warrant. If you wish, I’ll wait for you to get legal advice about answering my questions.”

Hiners leaned back in his chair, concern on his pale German face. “What… uh, I’ll reserve the right to talk to the bank’s legal counsel… but ask the questions, and I’ll figure out if I want to answer. I can tell you, I’ve had no part in any crime.”

“I doubt that you have. Here’s the first question. Did Mrs. Jennifer Gedney, who was just here, get access to a safe-deposit box?”

Hiners had taken a yellow pencil out of a pencil jar on his desk, and he twiddled it for a few seconds, then said, “Yes. Well, she went into the safe area, where Carol David may have given her access, although I didn’t see it. But that’s the only reason for going back there. To access your safe-deposit box.”

Virgil nodded. “Do you know if Buster Gedney came in here earlier today and accessed the same box?”

More twiddling, then, “Yes. I will also tell you that I approved a withdrawal of nine thousand dollars from their joint savings account, which was almost everything in it. There’s less than a thousand left. Buster said he needed the cash to buy some kind of machine for his machine shop, and the man who had it wanted cash. I warned him that such deals can involve stolen equipment, but he took the money.”

Virgil: “I want you to isolate and preserve all the documents that show this, both the entry into the safe-deposit boxes, and the withdrawal. I’ll be back with a subpoena.”

Hiners asked, “Did Buster kill those people?”

“I don’t believe so,” Virgil said. “But I do need to talk with him.”

Virgil went out to his truck, called the BCA duty officer, and said that he wanted to issue two BOLOs, one for Buster Gedney and the other for D. Wayne Sharf, in connection with the murder of Conley and Zorn. He gave the duty officer what details he had on their vehicles, then rang off and scratched his head.

Now what? He couldn’t just sit around and see if somebody caught Buster Gedney, but admitted to himself that he’d been leaning pretty hard on the idea that Gedney would talk.

He wound up driving over to Janice Anderson’s house, the woman who’d given him the copy of the school budget.

She was outside nipping the heads off expired coneflowers with a pair of side-cutters, and when she saw him coming, dropped the pliers in the pocket of a gardener’s apron, picked up her cane, and walked over toward him.

“Good day for gardening,” Virgil said.

“I don’t do small talk,” Anderson said. She pushed her glasses up her nose. “You want something?”

“Need to talk to you. Confidentially.”

“Good. I’m bored,” she said. “You want an iced tea?”

“Thank you anyway—”

“Lemonade?”

“I could take a lemonade,” Virgil said.

“Sit there,” she said, pointing him at a garden table. She hung her cane on the back of one of the garden chairs, went in the house, and came back carrying two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. She poured the glasses two-thirds full and pushed one toward Virgil.

He picked it up, took a drink. “Good,” he said. “Homemade?”

“Yes, inasmuch as I made it in my home, with a can of Birds Eye frozen lemonade.”

“Okay,” Virgil said. “I got a trustworthy vibration from you the other day, and I need to ask a somewhat, mmm, sensitive question.”

“Stop beating around the bush and ask the question.”

Virgil nodded. “A brief preface. I had a guy who I was going to squeeze like a ball of Silly Putty. Buster Gedney. But early this morning Buster ran for it. Loaded a good part of his machine shop into his truck, apparently, and headed out. I’ve got people looking for him in four states, but he could be damn near to Missouri or Nebraska or Ohio by now, and if he drives all night, he could be anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies by tomorrow morning.”

“You might not find him, then.”

“Having spoken to Buster, I think we’ve got a chance,” Virgil said. “But you can’t tell, and I’ve got two dead people on my hands. I’ve got an idea of who might’ve done it, but no proof. Here’s my question: If you assume that a good part of the school board and school administration is in on this, who’d be most likely to crack under pressure?”

“Hmm.” She took a sip of the lemonade, grimaced, stared at the sky over the roof of the neighbor’s house, and finally said, “Wouldn’t be Jennifer Gedney, she’s a pretty tough nut. I guess I’d go after Henry Hetfield, he’s the school superintendent. He’d almost have to be in on it. He’s a fussy old woman, and the idea of prison would terrify him. In fact, you’d have to be careful. He could wind up jumping off his workbench with a rope around his neck, or choking down a bottle of sleeping pills.”

“Can’t have that,” Virgil said.

“Okay. Well, there’s the auditor, Fred Masilla. He’d have to be in on it, too, but he’s pretty soft-looking. Soft-talking.”

“Okay.”

“You know who could really answer this question, is Vike Laughton. He covers the school board.”

“That would not be a good idea,” Virgil said.

Her eyebrows went up. “Really. Vike?”

“I have no proof, but Conley thought so.”

She took another sip of lemonade, then said, “You want to know the thing about this part of Minnesota?”

“Sure.”

“We’re isolated. We’re out in the sticks. There’s no other big town anywhere near here. I mean, La Crosse, but that’s on the other side of the river, and it’s a good long drive over there. Caledonia’s a bit closer, but it’s still a long way. We’re down here by ourselves, and we get to thinking that we really are by ourselves. The people who are stealing this money from the schools, it probably never occurred to them that an outsider might take an interest in what they’re doing. And insiders, people who live here, can be managed — they can be ignored, like me, with my silly campaign for art and music classes, or they can be bought off. The schools spend a lot of money, millions of dollars, and most of it they spend right here. Nobody but an outsider would want to get crosswise with them. We’d never say that out loud, not even to each other, but that’s the fact.”

“Can’t have people getting shot in the back,” Virgil said.

“Of course not — but keep in mind that they were both outsiders. They don’t really count for so much.” They sat without speaking for a while, then she added, “You know how much a house costs here?”

“No idea.”

“You could get a very nice dry lot on the river, with a dock, three or four acres, big modern house, excellent condition… for maybe four hundred thousand. I saw one like that last spring. You could get a house in town, an ordinary house, for a hundred.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. The point is, whatever these people have been stealing has probably been making them rich in Trippton terms. In this town, two schoolteachers married to each other are rich… so the money won’t have to be big. Not in New York terms, or Minneapolis terms, anyway.”

“Henry Hetfield.”

“He’s the one I’d go after.” She looked at a small gold watch that she wore as a locket. “You’re a little late in the day — he’ll be gone. He only works until three o’clock, and sometimes not even that, in the summer.”

“Does he live here?”

“Yes, he does. I’ll get a pencil and paper and draw you a map of where he lives.”

When Virgil got back to his truck, he sat and thought about it for a minute, but in the end decided that Hetfield would have to wait until morning. He needed to do some research on him, talk to Johnson Johnson, look again at Conley’s notes, see where Hetfield fit in. He’d seen Hetfield’s name in the notes, now he wanted to nail down what Conley thought about him.

He put the car in gear and drove back to the cabin; on the way he called Johnson and told him they needed to hook up again, at least for a few minutes.

“I think I might have been an alcoholic,” Johnson told him, on the phone. “Two days without a drink and I feel like somebody put a vise on my neck. The thing is, when I was drinking, I was a hell of a nice guy — ask anyone. Now I’m not sure I’m so nice anymore.”

Virgil didn’t want to say it, because he really wanted Johnson to stop, but the opening was too tempting. “Don’t worry, Johnson. Everybody thought you were an asshole. The change is all in your mind.”