Deadline

21

Virgil found the Ruff phone number on his cell phone’s “recents” list, punched it up, and Muddy picked up on the first ring. “Dad’s over in La Crosse with Dog Butt, and I was sort of out walking around, and guess what? D. Wayne Sharf is back.”

“Where?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t know exactly what’s going on, because I was inside practicing when he got back, but now he and somebody else, a woman, are sneaking in and out of his house. I think they’re taking stuff out.”

The house had been sealed by the DEA, but “sealed by the DEA” meant that there was some tape on the doors. Everything Sharf owned, aside from a few pounds of methamphetamine, was still inside.

Virgil said, “Okay — Muddy, you stay there at your house. Don’t go fooling around with this guy. We’ve been looking for him, federal agents are looking for him. He could be seriously dangerous.”

“I’ll tell you, he doesn’t seem to have a car with him. He’s either sneaking over the hills, or somebody’s going to come pick him up. If you go crashing in there, he’ll take off in the night, and you won’t see him again.”

“Right. Tell you what, we’ll come up to your house and walk down. It’s an old car, not a truck. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Jenkins: “What happened?”

“We gotta get back to your car. You guys are gonna need to get out of those suits, and we gotta do it in a hurry.”

They made a flying stop at Johnson’s cabin. On the way, Virgil explained the dog situation and the DEA interest in the case, and Sharf’s fugitive status. After a quick change of clothes, Virgil got two flashlights from his truck, including the jacklight, and Jenkins got his six-cell Maglite, and then Jenkins drove far too fast north up Highway 26, slowing only when they were a mile south of Orly’s Creek. At that point, Virgil and Shrake slumped over in their seats, so only Jenkins was visible at the wheel, and they took the turn on Orly’s Creek Road.

“Rough road,” Jenkins said, as they bounced past the first trailer, the one Johnson had called the lookout. “Good thing we took a well-sprung car.”

“Good thing we’re driving a piece of shit, so we don’t have to worry about breaking it,” Virgil said from the backseat.

As they came to the end of the road, Jenkins said, “I haven’t seen a single soul. Hope the guy didn’t split.”

They made the Ruffs’ house in a little over twenty minutes, rather than the fifteen that Virgil had promised. Muddy was sitting on the porch, in the dark; the only light was from the back of the house, through a window onto the porch.

“Virgil,” Muddy said.

Virgil introduced everybody and asked, “You see any cars?”

“Nothing. D. Wayne is about as lazy as a man can get, so there’s no way that he’s going to walk if he can ride. He’s still there.”

Shrake looked back down the valley and said, “Dark out there. I’m more of a snatch-him-off-the-barstool type.”

“I’ll take you down,” Muddy said. And quickly, to Virgil: “I’ll get you there and then I’ll come right back here. Promise.”

Virgil said, “All right. You just get us close.”

Instead of taking the road, they went through the woods. Virgil passed around the insect repellent before they went in — Muddy said, “This stuff still stinks”—and then they followed Muddy along a game trail that paralleled the creek, on the opposite side from the road. The going was slow, with Muddy whispering warnings at two shallow ravines and a fallen tree trunk, and ten minutes after they left Muddy’s house, they were behind Sharf’s place, looking down the hill.

There were at least two people inside, because they could see the light from at least two flashlights, one on the bottom floor, one in the upstairs bedroom. Virgil sent Muddy back home, and after he disappeared, he, Jenkins, and Shrake began easing down the hill.

They were fifty yards away when somebody came out of the house. Whoever it was had turned off his flashlight before leaving the house, but turned it on briefly, two or three times, as he crossed the bridge to the road. They could see that he was carrying a bundle, which he left by the road. Then he hurried back to the house, and Jenkins, leaning close to Virgil, said, “That looked like a woman.”

Shrake: “Yeah. If your Sharf guy is in there, he’s the one upstairs.”

As they closed on Sharf’s cabin, they could hear what sounded like a dresser drawer opening and closing, and then a man’s voice calling: “Get the TV.”

At that moment, a dog started barking. Not a big dog, a small, yappy dog, starting inside, and then, from the sound of it, moving out on the side stoop. They couldn’t see it, but it sounded like it was barking right at them, and a woman called, “Wayne! There’s somebody out there. Wayne!”

“That’s our guy,” Virgil said. “Let’s go.”

Virgil turned on his jacklight, illuminating the entire cabin and a good piece of the woods around it. Jenkins went right, and Shrake went forward, as Virgil shouted, “Police! Police! D. Wayne Sharf — you’re under arrest!”

Shrake, who’d run ahead, called, “I’ve got the front door, watch the side door, Virg—”

A woman screamed, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! We give up.”

Jenkins came in from the dark, into the lighted circle, gun out, to the side door, where a Chihuahua was jumping up and down and barking its tiny heart out. Jenkins peeked in the door and shouted, “Come out of there, keep your hands over your head. Come out of there!”

The woman shouted, “I’m coming, I’m coming, don’t shoot me. Don’t hurt my dog.”

The dog was still yapping and the woman appeared at the screen door, hands over her head. She was a large woman, with shoulder-length brown hair, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved man’s shirt. Behind her, they heard a POP! and she half-turned and screamed, “Wayne! Wayne! Come out of there.”

From the front, Shrake shouted, “Fire! There’s a fire!”

Virgil saw the flickering lights of a fire, and the woman bolted out on the porch, stumbled off the side, and fell flat on her face, screaming for her dog. Her hands were empty, and Jenkins grabbed her by the collar of her shirt, and the small dog launched itself at Jenkins’s ankle. Jenkins shook it off and the woman screamed, “Don’t hurt the dog, don’t hurt the dog…” and wrenched free and crawled toward the dog, trying to catch it. The dog eluded her and went after Jenkins again.

Jenkins shook it off again and the woman scooped it up as Virgil pushed through the screen door and shouted, “Sharf. Where are you? Sharf?”

From the front of the house, Shrake was yelling, “Get out of there! Virgil, get out of there.”

Virgil took one more step, holding his shirt to his nose and mouth against the smoke, and saw that the living room had become a furnace, six-foot-high flames eating through the old knotty-pine walls. Both Shrake and Jenkins were screaming at him, and he backed up, decided that running was better than walking, and ran out of the place.

The woman was shouting, “Get Wayne, help Wayne, get Wayne.”

She’d moved to the edge of the yard and was peering in horror at the tiny one-room upper floor, and windows began popping around the house. No sign of D. Wayne Sharf. Shrake ran around to the far side of the house, and a second later, shouted, “Virgil! Virgil! Here!”

Virgil ran that way. The upper floor had a window in it, which was open, and dangling from the window was a thick bright-yellow nylon rope, the kind sold to apartment dwellers as fire escapes.

“He set it on purpose,” Shrake yelled.

Jenkins shouted, “Give me some light,” and dashed into the woods, to the east of the cabin. Virgil still had his jacklight and lit the place up again, and at the farthest extreme of the light’s penetration, saw the back of D. Wayne Sharf rapidly fading into the trees. Virgil ran after Jenkins, hoping to give him enough light to keep up the chase. Jenkins was a fast and nimble runner, and was pulling away from the light when he suddenly broke left, toward the creek, and Virgil pivoted that way. Then Jenkins burst through some trees and fell into the creek, with an impact like that of a breaching whale.

Farther down the road a set of headlights swung off the highway and accelerated toward them, suddenly braked, swerved, and did a three-point turn. Virgil had a clear-enough sight line to see D. Wayne Sharf break from the tree line, run alongside the car for a few steps, yank open the door, and throw himself inside.

The car accelerated away, turned left on the highway, away from Trippton, and was gone.

Shrake had run down to the creek and shouted at Jenkins, “Backstroke, backstroke!”

Jenkins stood up in knee-deep water and said, “Fuck you,” and, “Somebody’s got to call the fire department.”

Virgil turned to look at Sharf’s cabin, which looked like a burning haystack, flames shooting up into the sky. He fished out his phone, but failed to get a signal. They were three hundred yards from the mouth of the valley, and he said, “You guys go collect that woman. I’m going to run down to the highway and see if I can get a signal.”

But at that moment a man and a woman ran into the road from the opposite side of the valley, saw the three of them, and yelled, “We called the fire department, they’re on the way.”

The three of them jogged past the neighbors, and Virgil said, “Call the sheriff, tell them that Virgil Flowers said we have a situation here.”

“You sure do,” the woman said, and, “You’re a police officer?”

“Yes. Tell him we need a couple of cars.”

When Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake got back to the cabin, the Chihuahua was gone, and so was the woman.

“They’re on foot, so they’ve gotta be around here someplace,” Shrake said.

Jenkins had taken his wallet out of his pants pocket and was pulling out damp pieces of paper, spreading them on a rock next to a weed garden. “Goddamn job, I’m gonna quit. That fuckin’ dog bit me twice. I’m putting in for disability leave, or maybe retirement.”

“If you do that, you won’t be able to beat up people,” Shrake said.

Jenkins said, “Oh… yeah.”

Virgil looked past them, down at the road, where a dozen neighbors had gathered to witness the festivities, and as a lone fire truck turned the corner at the end of the valley, saw Muddy ambling along, looking up at them.

“Talk to the fire guys,” Virgil told the other two. Then he stared at Muddy until he was sure Muddy was looking back at him, and tilted his head toward the woods. Muddy nodded, and drifted back up the road where he’d come from.

The fire truck arrived, and another one turned the corner at the end of the valley, and a fireman ran up the hill, and Jenkins and Shrake went to meet him. The cabin was more than fully involved — the fire was actually beginning to slow, from lack of anything more to burn, and smoke, and the stink of burning insulation, suffused the air.

Virgil nodded at Shrake and backed away from the fire into the woods, until he was out of sight of the road, then hurried deeper in. A hundred feet from the cabin, Muddy stepped out of the dark, and Virgil said, “There was a woman with Sharf. When the cabin caught fire, she must’ve run into the woods. I’d like to find her.”

Muddy said, “All right. You think she went deeper into the valley, or out toward the highway?”

Virgil had to think about it for a moment, then said, “If she’s like everybody else, she’s got a cell phone, and once she can get some damn reception, she’ll be calling somebody to come get her. I expect she’d either go higher, or toward the highway. She was a pretty big woman, and didn’t look like she was in that good of shape.”

“So she probably walked up a ways, to get around the cabin.…”

Muddy knew the trails around the place, took them up a hundred feet or so, behind the cabin, and then along the valley wall. The light wind was in their faces, and after they were clear of the cabin, they were also clear of the smoke. They moved slowly, stopping to listen, and eventually were out of range of the voices around the burning house, but not out of range of the sound of the heavy engines on the fire trucks.

Four hundred yards down the valley, and maybe two hundred from the highway, Muddy stopped so abruptly that Virgil nearly bumped into him. They stood for a moment, then Muddy whispered, “Smell it?”

Virgil closed his eyes and smelled, very faintly, an odor somewhere between roses and violets. Perfume. He whispered, “Yes.”

Muddy moved on another twenty or thirty feet, and then stopped again and whispered, “We’re close now.”

Virgil cleared his throat and said, in a normal speaking voice, “I’ve got a gun, and I don’t want to shoot you, but I can see you, and I’m not sure if you have a gun or not, so if you move suddenly, I’m going to have to use my gun.”

Two or three seconds later, the woman said, “Don’t shoot me.”

“Then come out of there.”

She’d been huddled behind a tree, clutching the dog, which yapped once at Virgil and then shut up. Virgil turned on the jacklight, aimed over her head, but still lighting her up: she put up a hand to shade her eyes, and Virgil whispered to Muddy, “Better take off.”

The boy slipped away, and Virgil said to the woman, “What’s your name?”

“Judy. Burk.”

“Let’s go down to the road, Judy. We need to talk this over.”

Virgil walked Judy and the dog down to the road, where an elderly white-haired man named John seemed to be having some kind of seizure. Somebody said something to him as Virgil and Judy came up, and he spun around, saw Virgil, and asked, “Are you the man in charge of this disaster?”

“I’m with the BCA,” Virgil said.

“You burned down my house! You owe me for a house!”

Virgil said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t burn it down. D. Wayne Sharf did. I was standing outside when he set it on fire.”

John spun in a crazed dervish-like circle, making gargling sounds as he did, and when he came out of it, wild-eyed, he said, “He wouldn’t have burned it down if you hadn’t been there.”

Virgil said, “I’m sorry about the house — you said it was your house?”

“Yes, it’s my house! It was worth…” He hesitated, the better to pump the price, Virgil thought. “At least a hundred and twenty thousand!”

Several people in the crowd laughed, and a tough-looking guy in a T-shirt said, “Shit, John, if I’d known you’d shingled it with gold, I might have come over and stolen some shingles.”

There was more laughter, which made the man angrier, and then Shrake came up behind him and patted him on the shoulder and said, “It’s not going to be worth anything to you if you have a heart attack and die. You’ve got to ease up a little.”

John pulled himself together, then raised a finger at Virgil, but before he could say what he was going to say, Virgil asked, “Has the DEA been in touch with you, about the drugs?”

The finger stopped in mid-shake. “What drugs?”

“The basement was full of methamphetamine. Probably a half-million dollars’ worth. Was that yours? Or was it D. Wayne’s?”

John slowed some more. “Well, it wasn’t mine. I rented the place.”

A voice in the crowd asked, “Do you have to pay income taxes on drugs?”

“If you sell them, you do,” Shrake said.

“I don’t know about any drugs,” John said.

“Why don’t you give me your name, address, and phone number,” Virgil said. “I’ll have the DEA guy get in touch.”

John looked around and then said, “Give me your card. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Right. Virgil gave him a card, and took his name, and John went away. Virgil, Shrake, and Judy walked up the valley wall to the clearing where the cabin once stood. Jenkins was chatting to one of the firemen, like two guys at a barbecue. A fire hose led up to the site from one of the trucks, but nothing was being sprayed on the fire.

“So… couldn’t save it?” Virgil asked.

The fireman shook his head: “It was gone before we got here. The problem is, half-burned houses attract people, and they get hurt. Once they’re that far gone, better to let them burn. You get a nice clean ash.”

“We’re all gonna stink,” Jenkins said to Virgil. And to Judy, “Nice to see you again. Your dog bit me. Twice.”

“He thought you were attacking me.”

“I was standing on the porch, I—”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Virgil said. “The thing is, Judy, I don’t know, it looks like you might have been involved in a bunch of crimes. Theft, arson, harboring a fugitive, breaking the federal seals off the house. I mean, we’ve got some stuff to talk about.”

Judy began to weep, what appeared to be honest tears, and Shrake said, “Hey, Virgil, take it easy. She looks like a pretty nice lady.” He turned to Judy and said, “You know, you’re entitled to a lawyer, you don’t have to tell Virgil a single darn thing.”

Virgil said to Jenkins, “Read her rights to her, huh?”

Jenkins did the Miranda, and then Shrake said, in his most kindly voice, “Did you understand that? You don’t even have to pay for a lawyer.”

Jenkins said, “Jesus, Shrake, you trying to get a date? Let’s put the cuffs on her and haul her ass down to the Buchanan County jail, get her processed in, throw the mutt in the pound or whatever they’ve got down there, and get some sleep.”

Judy began to cry again, and Shrake said, “C’mon, I’ll walk you down to the road.” To Virgil: “Get the car, pick us up.”

They started down the hill, and when they were out of earshot, Virgil said, “Makes me feel bad.”

“’Cause you’re Mr. Softy,” Jenkins said. “Let Shrake empty her out, and then, you know… whatever.”

“Still makes me feel bad.”

“Not as bad as I feel. My ankle burns like fire. That dog has jaws like a fuckin’ alligator.”

“It’s a fuckin’ Chihuahua,” Virgil said. “It’s practically a fuckin’ hamster.”

“I don’t care if it’s a fuckin’ chickadee, it bit me on the fuckin’ leg.”

“Ah, fuck it,” Virgil said.

Jenkins and Virgil walked back up the valley to the Ruff house, and found Muddy inside, tootling on a black electric guitar, a complex version of Creedence’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” on which he was playing two separate guitar parts. “You gonna play in a band?” Virgil asked.

“Maybe. I’m good enough,” Muddy said. “But… my old man says it’s a tough way to make a living, if you’re not one in a million.”

“Probably right about that,” Jenkins said. “On the other hand, you may be. If you are, it’d be a shame to miss out on it.”

“Dad says if I get really good at it, the discipline will let me be good at anything.”

“I wish my dad had told me that,” Jenkins said. “My old man told me to stay away from Lone Star beer. Which he was drinking at the time.”

Virgil told Muddy to have his father call. “I need to talk to him about what happened tonight. I have a feeling he might be a little pissed.”

“Probably. But it goes away pretty quick. He told me he thought you were a good guy, considering the T-shirt you had on.”

Virgil nodded: “Good to know. But tell him to call.”

They took the car back to the fire scene, where Shrake was waiting with Judy Burk. When they came up, Shrake gave Virgil a wave, so Virgil parked at the side of the road and he and Jenkins got out into the lights of a dozen vehicles.

“Judy is really torn up about all of this — she didn’t know what Sharf was up to,” Shrake said. “He told her that the landlord had kicked him out and was going to take all of his stuff, and she just came down here with him and another friend to help get his clothes. Then, all of this, and he wound up ditching her and Brutus.”

Jenkins flinched: “The dog is named Brutus? Why? Because he stabs people with his teeth?”

Judy backed into Shrake, and Shrake said, “Hey, listen to what I’m telling you. She didn’t have anything to do with all this. I think we just give her a ride home — she lives in CarryTown, just on the other side of Trippton — it’s an extra two minutes for us.”

“How do you know she didn’t have anything to do with this?” Virgil asked. “Looked to me like she was involved.”

“I wasn’t—”

“How did that fire start? Looked like more than a match. Smelled like gasoline. Did D. Wayne carry a gas can in there?”

Her lip trembled and she said, “No, no, he didn’t have a gas can.”

“A bottle?”

“He had a backpack… maybe there was a bottle in it.”

“Maybe?”

“I think I saw a bottle,” she admitted. “I didn’t know what was in it.”

“Molotov cocktail,” Jenkins said to Virgil. “He went in knowing he was gonna torch the place. Probably afraid that the DEA was going to process the house and come up with about a million of his fingerprints.”

“Which they would have,” Virgil said. “In fact, I’ve got to call Gomez and tell him the house went to heaven.” He looked back at Judy, pursed his lips. “He might be interested in talking to Judy here.”

Judy choked a little, then said, “I’ll tell you anything you want.”

After a while, they loaded into the car, with Jenkins in the back with Judy and the dog, so he could lean on her, if necessary. Shrake was still friendly from the driver’s seat, and Judy told the whole thing: D. Wayne Sharf was a hanger-on, one of life’s losers who’d never been allowed to ride with the Seed. They wouldn’t even make him an associate member. But Roy Zorn used him to haul ingredients for his meth, and D. Wayne helped him cook it.

The dogs, she said, were D. Wayne’s own sideline, which she didn’t much care for, since she was a dog lover herself. At the moment, all of D. Wayne’s dogs were in a makeshift pen somewhere in western Buchanan County, she didn’t know exactly where. Wherever it was, she said, was where D. Wayne would be.

“The guy who drove us here, his name is Lee, I don’t know his last name, he and Wayne are gonna put the dogs in these crates and drive them over to this dog-trading sale.… The good ones go down south to hunt, the bad ones and the mutts and the puppies get sold off to these bunchers, they call them.”

“I know what bunchers are,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, well, they sell them to medical laboratories—”

“I know that,” Virgil said.

“In fact,” said Jenkins, leaning over her, “you really haven’t told us much that we didn’t already know.”

“I know one thing you don’t,” she said.

Jenkins: “Yeah? What’s that?”

“I know where the dog sale is gonna be, and when. And I know D. Wayne is gonna be there with all his dogs and his flatbed trailer — that’s what I know.”

Jenkins leaned away from her, taking off the pressure, and said, “Babe — you should have said something earlier.”