Deadline

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Johnson Johnson did the entire TV interview wearing his mask, which didn’t keep anyone in Buchanan County from knowing who he was. He got a death threat from one of the local dog-stealing morons, and being a moron, the moron hadn’t thought that his cell phone number would pop up on Johnson’s phone.

Johnson being Johnson, he traced the number, using an Internet service, recognized both the name and the attitude that went with it, jumped in his truck, drove to the guy’s usual bar, and dragged him outside. After a humiliating confrontation in the parking lot, the other guy drove away in his truck, while the other bar patrons laughed at him and even threw a couple of rocks at his truck. Dognappers were not popular people in Trippton.

Johnson did not fare so well with Clarice, who thought that he’d been entirely too friendly with Daisy Jones. “And right on camera. You had your hand on her ass, Johnson, I could see where your arm was going, I saw the way her eyes got wide. You had to give her cheek a squeeze, didn’t you? You think my girlfriends didn’t see that? How can I hold up my head?”

Virgil said, “Give it to him, Clarice, he deserves every bit of it.”

“Shut up, Mr. Big-Time Cop,” Clarice said, poking Virgil in the chest with her index finger, hard enough that it hurt. “Who did he go out there with? Who told this Daisy person who to talk to?”

She wound down after a while, but Johnson was worried, and told Virgil, “I might have to propose again just to get right with her. Seems like a lot of trouble over a friendly gesture.”

“By ‘friendly gesture,’ you mean squeezing Daisy’s ass while you were on the air.”

“That’s an uninflected way of looking at it,” Johnson said. “I assumed you were more sophisticated than that.”

Johnson had a lot more to say about his shot-up jon boat. Virgil found an identical jon boat online for $565, and pointed out that Johnson had already gotten eighteen years’ use out of the old one, but Johnson sensed a chance to step up. It took several dozen calls over the next month, but he eventually convinced a claims clerk with the state government that the only similar and available jon boat was a $1,149 model from Bass Pro Shops. By late autumn, he’d launched it on the Mississippi.

On the day of the dog raid, Virgil delivered D. Wayne Sharf to the Buchanan County jail, where he was held on a federal warrant. The feds left him there for two days, then a marshal showed up and hauled him away to Chicago. Nobody in Trippton ever saw him again, and Virgil heard later that he’d been convicted of something, but never heard what happened after that.

The attorney general at first denied knowledge of the dog raid, but when it became apparent that the pro-dog people outnumbered the anti-dog people by about 99.5 percent to 0.5 percent, he quickly shouldered his way into a number of TV interviews in which he implied that the dog raid was part and parcel of his investigation into the Buchanan County school board murders and embezzlement.

That whole circus was good for several consecutive days of coverage. The governor’s race was a long way off, however, so the AG slow-walked the prosecution, squeezing as much juice out of it as he could. Since the school board members were accused of multiple murder-ones, he could hold them in jail as long as he wished, without bail, as long as the defense attorneys didn’t file for a speedy trial.

The defense attorneys weren’t filing for speedy trials because they were all going to Mass on Sundays to pray for some kind of intervening information or event that would give their clients at least a chance for a reduced sentence. That didn’t work out.

In the end, after six months of meticulous and media-saturated investigation, in which it was determined that the defendants had embezzled very close to eight million dollars from the Buchanan County schools, they were all convicted of murder and a variety of subsidiary crimes involving murder (conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, etc.) and embezzlement. They all received thirty-year terms, with no chance of parole.

Viking Laughton tried to argue that he was a humble newspaper reporter with no knowledge of the crimes, which made the rest of the defendants so angry that they ratted him out on the Kerns murder, and he went down on all counts.

Masilla, the auditor, ratted them all out, and since there was no evidence that he knew of the planned murders, and since his deal eliminated the possibility of charging him with felony murder (murders in the process of committing another felony, the embezzlement), he was convicted only of the various money crimes, and given ten years. Minnesota being a socialist state that allows prisoners to set up businesses inside the prison (they get to keep relatively little of what they earn, much of it going to the state or to a victims’ fund), Masilla was able to create an accounting business for the many convicts who had money or dope hidden on the outside. His reputation for probity quickly spread, and within a year or so he had a clientele that stretched from the Attica Correctional Facility in New York to Folsom State Prison in California.

“You know what we didn’t get?” the assistant attorney general, Dave, asked Virgil. “Those bonds for the new school stadium. I know of the dealers on those, and I suspect the board and the dealers would have split up a cool three mil on that deal alone. The way they worked it, they’d have front-ended the payout.…”

He went on for a while, but Virgil dozed off; bond amortization discussions did that to him.

Buster Gedney got as far as Biloxi, Mississippi, where he rented a mobile home and got a half-time job as a welder and machinist working for a farm implement dealer, under the name Jefferson Jones. He could hardly make it on that money, so he began manufacturing three-shot burst kits for .223s, and sound suppressors. His first really good customer was a meth cooker who brought a DEA undercover agent to Buster’s first sales meeting.

Buster delivered the equipment, right on schedule, and was arrested right on schedule, along with the meth cooker, and when his fingerprints delivered an immediate hit, was extradited to Minnesota to stand trial on the murder and embezzlement charges. He was so pathetic, blubbering on the witness stand, that the jury acquitted him of the most serious charges, and he drew a five-year sentence for misprision of a felony.

Jennifer Houser, of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, bought a J/27 sailboat and hired a very attractive instructor to teach her how to sail. His instruction was comprehensive, and she’s still sailing. “And now I know why they call it the cockpit,” she told a similarly aged lady from New York. She also began taking piano lessons, and has that photo of her mother in a silver frame on top of the baby grand. Her Spanish, which had been quite good already, got even better, and she was often mistaken for a native. BCA follow-up investigators came to believe that she’d been murdered by Kerns and dropped in the river, though Virgil insisted that she was on the run.

After delivering D. Wayne Sharf to the county jail, Virgil took the yellow dog to the Buchanan County Humane Society. He had a little trouble getting the dog out of the truck, because the dog was large and didn’t want to get out. Virgil thought that the dog might even recognize the look of the Humane Society building, even though it had never been there, according to the young lady behind the counter.

“I’ve been here for four years,” she said, “and I would have remembered him. Nope, never been here.”

Virgil gave her a little history on the dog, who kept crowding closer and closer to his knee, and looking up at him with stricken eyes, and then the girl said, “Look, you gotta do what you gotta do, but that dog is your soul mate. You can tell by the way he’s already bonded to you. If you leave him with us, there’s probably a thirty percent chance he’ll eventually be put down.”

“Aw, man, I thought you guys place them all—”

“Impossible. We’ve always got a lot more dogs than we have people to adopt them, and he’s a big dog, and he’s probably four or five years old,” she said. “People usually want a younger dog.”

Back outside, Virgil said to the dog, “Get in the fuckin’ truck.”

The dog jumped into the truck, settled into the passenger seat, and hung its tongue out.

“I’m calling you That Fuckin’ Fido,” Virgil said, as he got in the driver’s seat.

The dog didn’t say anything, but he might have nodded, figuring he could change his name later, when they’d gotten the hell away from the Humane Society.

Virgil was scheduled to go home that night, but Johnson Johnson asked him to stop by Shanker’s for a Diet Coke, and when Virgil walked in, he found a hundred dog lovers crowded into the place, and they all sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” in his honor, backed by the band Dog Butt Plus Muddy, and Johnson hugged him three or four times, and Winky Butterfield gave him a gilded trophy with a dog on top of it and a blank plate under the dog.

“We didn’t have time to get it engraved with your name, but Johnson’s going to get it done, and he’ll send it to you,” Butterfield said. Virgil was intensely embarrassed, but agreed to have a beer or two, and eat some of the wedding-style cake, and a couple of attractive dog lovers asked him to dance, and he did, and then he danced some more, and when Johnson finally poured him into bed, back at the cabin, it was one o’clock in the morning.

“Don’t worry about a thing. I told Frankie what happened, and I did NOT mention your groupies,” Johnson said. “Lucky for you that you talked me out of being an alcoholic, or we’d both be drunk in a ditch somewhere.”

Virgil left town the next morning with a yellow dog and a hangover, and Virgil found that the dog was an attentive listener who panted in all the right spots. He stopped at a bookstore in Rochester and bought a book on how to care for dogs, and how much to feed them, and then stopped at a store and bought a dog food bowl, a sack of kibble, and two pounds of ground round, and fed the dog, and walked it around until it pooped, got back in the truck and said to the dog, “I really can’t have a dog.”

The dog just nodded and hung its tongue out.

At home in Mankato, Virgil unhooked the boat and did a bit of cleanup, then went inside and cleaned up himself. Frankie was at home: “We figured you’d call about now,” she said. “The last of the hay just went in the barn.”

“I was hoping you’d hold off until I got there,” he lied. “Are you in any shape to receive visitors?”

“I suppose,” she said. “I’m all hot and sweaty, and I was thinking of going out to the creek.”

“I will be there in fifteen minutes,” Virgil said.

When Virgil got to the farm, Frankie’s youngest son, Sam, was working on the front porch with some two-by-two boards, a saw, and a hammer and nails. He was making stilts, Virgil realized, on his way to a Gold Arrow Point for his Cub Scouts Wolf Badge.

Virgil got out of the truck and Sam called, “You bring me anything?”

“Yeah, myself,” Virgil said.

“Big deal,” Sam said. Though he was only a second-grader, he said, “I can’t get these fuckin’ foot supports to hold. The nails keep pulling out, and when I use bigger nails, the wood splits.”

“You need to drill holes, and use screws and Gorilla glue,” Virgil said. “And don’t say ‘fuck’ or I’ll tell your mother, and she’ll kick your young ass.”

He walked around the truck and popped the passenger door, and the yellow dog jumped out and looked around. Sam, on the porch, stood up and gawked. “All right! We got us a dog?”

The dog loped up on the porch and gave Sam a sniff and a lick, and Sam shouted into the house: “Ma! Ma!”

“What!”

“We got us a dog!”

“What?”

“We got us a dog!”

He opened the door and ran into the house with the dog a step behind him, leaving Virgil in the driveway by himself.

From inside the house: “We got us a dog!”

“What?”

“We got us a dog,” Virgil said.