Deadline

27

Virgil called Davenport from the hospital: “We’re all back in Minnesota. We might have a little legal whoop-de-do, because we had the guy, and we were gonna hold him for the Wisconsin authorities, but he claimed he was having a heart attack, so we evacuated him to the nearest clinic… which was back across the river, here in Minnesota.”

“Did he have a heart attack?” Davenport asked.

“They’re not sure, but they think not,” Virgil said. “At the end of the chase, he fell in a golf course sand trap. I think he was mostly embarrassed.” Virgil gave him a succinct summation of the shoot-out and chase.

“Let the legal guys sort it out. Maybe we’ll have to drive him back over, then extradite him. Who cares? I talked to Jenkins, on the way up to the Mayo. He’s pissed.”

“I hope his leg’s not bad.”

“It’s not. He’ll be off his feet for a day or two. Weather says anytime you’ve got a bullet-like object penetrating into a muscle, it’s not something you want to take lightly.”

“Especially if it’s your heart muscle,” Virgil said. “I’ll stop and see him on the way home. We got a mountain of paperwork to do, and he can do that sitting down. Right now, I’ve got to look at a movie.”

“You found the chip?”

“Yup. Will Bacon left it where I could find it. Couldn’t believe it,” Virgil said. “He must’ve been up on that ladder when Kerns walked in — he knew what was going to happen, and instead of freezing up, he kept thinking.”

“Good for him. Goddamnit, makes you proud.”

“Yes, it does.”

Purdy showed up at the clinic, and Virgil outlined what had happened, and said he’d be down to the sheriff’s office in the morning to make a full statement. Purdy said they’d chain Laughton to his bed: “That boy ain’t goin’ nowhere. We’ll truss him up like an Easter ham.”

Virgil, Johnson, and Shrake stopped at Tony’s for a six-pack of Leinenkugel’s and an everything pizza, then drove back to Johnson’s cabin, where Johnson bitched and moaned about the boat until he had a mouthful of pizza, and Virgil fired up his laptop and plugged in the memory card.

The sound was tinny — it’d get better with decent speakers — but the picture was very clear, and about the time Jennifer Barns, she of the butt wound, said, “I think we’re in the clear — I talked to the fire chief, and he said there’d be no way to recover the records. I made out like it was a disaster, but told him we’d figure out a way to live through it,” they had them.

“As long as that fuckin’ Flowers moves along,” Kerns said, as they watched.

“Flowers can think anything he wants, but if he doesn’t have the records to prove it, we should be fine,” Barns said. “Just keep our heads down and our mouths shut.”

“Unless they catch Buster,” said Jennifer Gedney. “He knew where the money was coming from. I mean, I didn’t tell him, but he knew.”

Kerns said, “If we have to, we handle Buster the same way we handled Conley. The same way we handle anyone who talks.”

“I think we’ve done enough killing,” said Henry Hetfield. “More killing will just get more attention.”

“When was the last time you saw something like that?” Shrake asked. “I mean, like, never?”

The camera had been movement- and voice-activated, and at the end of the recording, the camera shook and then a man’s voice said, “Bacon. Get down out of there!”

Bacon: “Randy. What’s up?”

Kerns: “That’s a camera, right? Get down out of there, you asshole. Bring the camera.”

Bacon: “I… I… sure… Just a minute, I have to unwrap the tape. The camera belongs to Virgil Flowers, Randy. He’s on his way here, he’ll be here in the next minute or so. He’s gonna be really pissed—”

Kerns: “Get down that fuckin’ ladder and bring that fuckin’ camera, or I swear to God I’ll blow your legs off.”

Bacon muttered, almost under his breath, but loud enough to be heard by the recorder: “Hurry, Virgil. Hurry.”

What may have been a hand crossed close in front of the lens, and then there was a flash of electronic noise — the card being unplugged — and the video ended.

“Oh, Jesus,” Shrake said.

Virgil sat frozen. “I killed that guy.”

Johnson said, “No, you didn’t. Randy Kerns did. Don’t go taking on any extra blame, if you don’t have to. You can go crazy doing that.”

Virgil said, “I hurried, but I was just too far away. I should have told him to wait for me.”

“When you got out of the truck, to go in the school, did you have your gun with you? I mean, before you had to break that window out?” Shrake asked.

“No, I had to go back for the gun.”

“Which means that if Bacon had waited for you, and you’d gone right in… Kerns would have killed both of you, instead of just killing Bacon. You didn’t fuck up, Virgil: you just got crazy unlucky with the timing.”

They were still talking it over when headlights flashed in the side yard. Shrake and Virgil got their shotguns, and Johnson unlocked and raised a side window and shouted through the screen, “Who’s there?”

A man called back, “Henry Hetfield and Del Cray. We’re looking for Agent Flowers.”

“What do you want?”

“We have some information we think he needs. About the school board,” Hetfield shouted back.

Johnson looked at Virgil, who shrugged. Johnson shouted back, “Too late, dickhead.”

“Wait, this is important. We gotta talk.”

Virgil shouted back, “Oh, all right. Come on in. But we’ve got two shotguns and a .45, and at this short distance, they’d take off your heads. You understand that?”

“Please don’t shoot us.…”

The next morning, Virgil met Dave the lawyer at Ma and Pa’s Kettle, gave him some headphones and plugged him into the video of the school board meeting. Dave ate bacon and French toast, and drank Bloody Marys, and watched, fascinated, as it all came out.

“Not gonna wait,” he said, when the video ended and he’d pulled off the earphones. “We’re gonna bust them all. Now, today.”

“We’ve also got a couple of direct witnesses for you,” Virgil said, and he told him about Henry Hetfield and Del Cray from the night before.

“What’d you promise them?”

“Not a goddamn thing,” Virgil said. “I’ve got it on a voice recorder, me not promising them anything. I told them that I’d mention it to the judge, that they’d made a voluntary statement to me. That’s all on a flash drive,” Virgil said. He slid the flash drive across the table.

“This almost takes the fun out of it,” Dave grumbled. “We don’t have to negotiate, we don’t have to argue with anyone, we don’t have to do any real serious lawyer shit. A law student could convict them.”

Virgil told him about their hasty export of Vike Laughton from Wisconsin to Minnesota. “Well, that’s something,” Dave said, brightening a bit. “Those Cheeseheads can get a little testy about such things. Gonna have to look up the precise Latin phrase that means ‘Fuck off.’”

The roundup started at one o’clock. Dave had spent some time talking to the attorney general, who’d sent down a stack of warrants specifying a list of crimes that included murder, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder (the ambush at the cabin), a variety of charges involving assault on police officers and conspiracy to do the same, embezzlement, and a bunch of other stuff, including, as a garnish, charges of misprision of a felony against everybody. “That’ll get them an extra two weeks on top of the thirty years,” Dave said with satisfaction. “We’ll go for consecutive sentences.”

Jennifer Gedney wept. “I don’t have any money, I don’t have any money. How can you say I took money, when I don’t have any money.… Is that a TV camera?”

Bob Owens also wept, and kept saying, “Everything I worked for. Everything I worked for. Who’ll take care of the kids?”

“You were stealing from the kids, you miserable ratfucker,” said Shrake, who was putting on the cuffs. “Excuse me — I mean, you miserable ratfucker, sir.”

Larry Parsons shouted at them, ran back through his house, and tried to squeeze out the bedroom window, but a couple of deputies got him by the feet and pulled him back in, so Virgil could arrest him. Shrake had gone with a couple more deputies to serve the arrest warrants on Jennifer Barns, at the hospital in Rochester, who screamed, “You can’t do this, I’m wounded. I’ll sue everybody. Those criminals shot me last night. I’ll sue!”

Vike Laughton hadn’t said anything. He’d just waved his free hand at them, from his hospital bed, and turned his face away, the cuff on his other hand rattling against the bedframe. He had a bad case of sand-burn on his face, and especially his nose.

Henry Hetfield and Del Cray were calm enough: they’d known since the night before what was coming, and since Virgil had arrested them and stuck them in the Buchanan County jail, they’d had time to think about it. Both of their houses were raided for evidence. Cray’s wife and two children were gone, and so were quite a few things in the house, including the memory foam cover on the king-sized bed. A neighbor said they’d rolled out of their driveway the evening before, towing a large U-Haul trailer behind the newer of the Crays’ two trucks.

With a little speed to keep her going, she could be in Canada or Alabama or Montana or Pennsylvania. Dave said they’d look for her.

Jennifer Houser was simply gone.

Davenport called and said, “You still on vacation? Or are you ready to go back to work?”

“I will be on Monday,” Virgil said. “I got one more thing to do on Saturday.” And, “How’s Del?”

“Messed up. He might need another op, there were some bone splinters from his pelvic bone that bounced all over the place.”

“Maybe he’ll retire.”

“His wife wants him to,” Davenport said. “We’ll see. I can’t believe he could get through life without hanging out on the street, talking to assholes.”

“It’s like a curse,” Virgil said.

“Listen, do what you’re gonna do on Saturday, but don’t get hurt, and don’t get anybody else hurt. Then on Monday, a kind of peculiar thing has come up out in Windom.… “