Escape Clause

10

Virgil pulled out first, going a block down Seventh Street to Broadway, got caught at the light. A left turn on Broadway would get him home in a half hour or so. As with any kidnapping, time was crucial in finding the victims alive… if they weren’t already dead. At that very moment, though, he didn’t know what he could do in the Twin Cities that he couldn’t do in Mankato.

Still, he thought, he was probably on the wrong side of the Minnesota River, which didn’t have a heck of a lot of bridges. If he stayed on the south side, where he was, he’d wind up back in Mankato-but if he left New Ulm on the north side of the river, back across the bridge, he could tend down toward Mankato, but also leave open his option of returning to the Twin Cities by a much shorter route.

He could try to call Peck again, and check with the BCA tip line, the zoo director, and whoever else might help, before he had to make a decision whether to go south to home or north to the Cities. How had he survived in the job before cell phones?

In his rearview mirror, he saw Strait driving down Seventh in the opposite direction, then turn a corner, on Minnesota Street. Minnesota didn’t lead out of town, and Virgil wondered if Strait might be hiding in New Ulm itself.

The woman in the car in front of him was texting and didn’t pull out when the light went green, and Virgil waited patiently for one-half second before tapping the horn, and the woman looked up, saw the green light, gave him the finger, and drove on through. New Ulm was getting more like LA every single day, Virgil thought.

–

He took the turn, drove a block, then took another left, around the Walgreens block, and then another left, back to Seventh, and a right turn toward the bridge. He passed Minnesota, looked down the street and saw that Strait was four blocks down, still heading west. A small gray car nearly cut him off as it turned down Minnesota, and Virgil went on, considering himself lucky not to have gotten another finger from its elderly driver.

He punched up Peck’s cell phone, and somewhat to his surprise, Peck answered on the first ring, sounding sleepy. Virgil identified himself, mentioned the tiger investigation, and said, “You were recommended to me by a number of people as an expert on traditional medical practices in Minnesota. I need to come talk with you. I’ll be in St. Paul in an hour, if you’re at the same address as on your driver’s license.”

“Well, yes, I am,” Peck said. “I could accommodate you, I suppose, but maybe… Could we make it two hours? I’m a writer and I work early and late: I just got up from a nap and I need to run out for dinner. So… seven o’clock?”

“That’d be fine,” Virgil said.

–

Took him a minute before he thought, Wait. A small gray car? Kind of a small station-wagon-looking car? A Subaru? With an elderly driver?

Virgil was in traffic, with a concrete center divider between himself and the opposite lane, but he did a screeching U-turn anyway, bumped over the divider and headed back toward Minnesota Street-and a black New Ulm cop car was on him like holy on the Pope, both lights and siren. Virgil said, “Shit,” out loud, and hit his own flashers and pulled over, hopped out, jogged back to the New Ulm car.

The cop didn’t get out, but looked worried, and Virgil held up his hands to show that they were empty, then made a rolling “window-down” motion with his finger and the cop dropped the window and Virgil said, “I don’t have time to explain, but there could be a shooting about to happen. My name’s Virgil Flowers, I’m with the BCA…”

“I’ve heard of you-”

“Call in and tell them you’re following me and we might need more help. Could be a woman with a rifle and she’s supposedly a good shot. Follow me now.”

Virgil ran back to his truck and took off, hit the siren as he did it, made the turn on Minnesota, didn’t see either the gray car or Strait’s truck, said “Shit” again, thumbed through his phone’s contact list, got Strait’s number, and called it.

Strait came up and Virgil shouted, “Man, this is Virgil. You got a gray car behind you?”

A second later, Strait said, “There’s a car, but it’s quite a way back. I think it’s gray.”

“That might be Maxine.”

“What?!”

“She might have followed me. I’m coming after you with a New Ulm cop,” Virgil said. “Where are you?”

“I’m on North Broadway, going out west on 14.”

“All right, we’re coming after you. If that’s Maxine and she has a gun in the car, she’s going straight back to jail, and this time, she won’t get out.”

“She did follow you, you silly shit,” Strait said.

“Yeah, yeah, we’re not sure that’s Maxine,” Virgil said. “Stay on 14, don’t let that car get too close. We’re coming…”

–

Up ahead, Strait dropped the hammer, unholstered his Beretta and stuck the barrel between the seat and back on the passenger side, so it wouldn’t slide off the seat if he had to hit the brakes hard. He cranked the speedometer up to a hundred, but backed off to ninety-five and then ninety because the highway couldn’t handle the truck’s weight and speed. He swooped around the wide turn where Broadway turned into Twentieth Street, past a couple of body shops, going out of town, the truck’s passenger-side tires running off the road at two spots, leaving his heart up in his throat.

Around the turn, past the cemetery and the liquor store, then a shallower turn took him into a straightaway and he ran it back up to a hundred and…

That piece-of-shit Subaru was gaining on him.

Up ahead of him, the highway narrowed from two lanes to one, and he picked up his phone and looked at the screen and punched up his most recent call and Virgil answered and Strait shouted, “It’s her: they’re chasing me. I’m doing a hundred and they’re still coming up on me and this truck don’t got no more.”

–

Virgil shouted back, “Keep going, we’re right behind you, got lights and sirens going, I’m hoping we can scare her off when she sees us in her rearview.”

He looked down at his speedometer: they were still in town and he was going seventy-five and scaring himself. If somebody poked out of a side street, he could kill them. He chickened out and slowed to sixty. That meant that Strait and Knowles were actually getting farther away by the second.

Virgil shouted into his phone, “Do you know the country out there?”

“A little bit,” Strait shouted back.

Even through the phone, Virgil could hear the wind noise ripping off Strait’s truck. “Is there any place where you could lead her around in a square, you know, take a right, take another right, take another right, and bring her back to us?”

“I already went by Highway 12, I got a left turn coming up pretty quick that I could take down to 27 and back to 12 and circle around past the airport and bring it back, but she’s gaining on me, man, she’s way faster through the corners…”

“Take the turn,” Virgil said. “Don’t let her pass you, it’s hard to shoot out of a moving car, take it back to 12. We’ll come down 12 the other way, so we’ll meet you.”

“Aw, shit, here I go…”

Strait must have dropped the phone or tossed it on the passenger seat, Virgil thought, because he could hear the bumping of the truck and what might have been a round of cursing from Strait, then the roaring sound of the truck engine being overstressed.

Virgil and the New Ulm cop car were coming up on Highway 12, and Virgil slowed and took the turn and headed on south, the cop car right on his tail. A minute later Strait was back on the phone. “We’re both on whatever this road is and they’re still closing up on me. I lost some yardage going around the corner.”

–

Maxine Knowles was in the Subaru, but she wasn’t driving it. What she was doing was crouching on the passenger seat, trying to get her rifle out the open sunroof without dropping it. She was using a cheap but accurate.223, with a twenty-round magazine. The first time she shot Strait, she’d done it with a Remington.243, and she much preferred that rifle and that caliber, but the cops had the gun.

Now she screamed down at the driver, “Get in the middle of the road where it’s smoother. Where it’s smoother. Smoother. This ride is rattling me around too much, I can’t get a decent sight picture.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying. I don’t see the cop,” the driver shouted back.

“Don’t worry about the cop. I’m going to try to stand up now. Stay in the middle…”

She was too thick to fit easily through the sunroof, but once up, the tight fit helped brace her upright. She lifted the rifle, clicked off the safety, and aimed at Strait’s truck, which was a hundred yards or so ahead of her and bouncing even more violently than her car.

The front gun sight wobbled wildly over the back of the truck, but she took a breath, softened her stance as much as she could to absorb the bumps, and opened fire. She worked through the first twenty rounds in ten seconds, pulled the mag, dropped it into the car, and the driver handed her a second magazine.

Up ahead, the back panel on Strait’s camper-top seemed to be showing some holes, but it was hard to tell: she was aiming at the window on the back, and what could be bullet holes could also be reflections and dust. Strait, in the meantime, had put his right tires onto the shoulder and was kicking up dust and gravel, which started hitting Knowles in the face. She squinted into the dust, slammed the second magazine into place, and emptied it at the fleeing truck.

–

Strait shouted into the phone, “She’s shooting at me, man, she’s shooting at me, I can hear the slugs hitting the back of the truck…”

“We’re on 12, we’re coming fast, stay ahead of her, get down in your seat as far as you can…”

Strait did that, which cramped up his right leg, and so he missed the brake when he tried to make the turn onto Highway 27, and he lost the road and crashed through a ditch and out the other side and tried to switch his foot over and sideswiped a tree, and then another one, and the steering wheel seemed to rise up and hit him in the lower lip, slicing his lip on his upper teeth, and then he was in a dense windbreak, rolling over brush, and then his car stopped, involuntarily: he was jammed up between trees and thought maybe he’d lost a tire.

He didn’t take the time to worry about that, but grabbed the Beretta and crawled out the passenger-side door, which was away from the road, and a burst of gunfire rattled through the sides and top of the truck. Strait peeked around past the grille, saw Knowles standing on the side of the road near the back of the Subaru. A couple more shots rattled off the top of the truck and through the side windows, shattering them, and he took a chance, poked the Beretta around the front of the truck, and unloaded all fifteen rounds in the general direction of the Subaru and Knowles.

–

Virgil couldn’t get Strait on the phone, but he heard the gunfire and with no other way to call the cop behind him, thumbed through his directory for the New Ulm police department, called it, and yelled at the cop on the other end. “Me and one of your guys are in pursuit of a woman we think is trying to shoot a guy.”

“Yeah, we heard. We’re talking to Ross; he says he’s right behind you.”

“He is, but I can’t talk to him. Tell him we’ve got gunfire up ahead; he’s got to be careful. I don’t know what happened, but I’m hooked up to the victim and he says the attacker is shooting up his truck and now I’m hearing what sounds like him shooting back… Tell your guy to be careful.”

“We’re telling him; we got a couple sheriff’s cars headed your way, and two more from us, but we’re all way back.”

“Gotta go…” Virgil said, and he made the turn onto Highway 27, and far ahead, saw the gray car stopped on the side of the road, and a person-he couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman-standing behind the car.

With a gun, he saw, as he got closer, firing into the ditch. Strait had run off the road. If that was Knowles, she had a rifle, and all he had was a weak-ass nine, and not only that, the nine was locked in the safe behind the seat.

Given all that, Virgil got as close as he dared, which was perhaps fifty yards, close enough to recognize Knowles. She paid no attention to him, his siren or his flashing lights, or to the cop car behind him, but slapped another long magazine into her rifle and kept shooting into the ditch.

–

Strait realized that Knowles was focused on the truck and was punching a hundred holes in it, and he slipped backward and got behind a tree, and then another one, always keeping a tree trunk between himself and the other gun. When he was behind the second tree, he stretched out on the ground, reloaded his gun-his second and last magazine-and waited to see if she’d try to sneak around his truck.

He’d been so focused on staying down, out of the line of fire, that he hadn’t heard the police sirens. He heard them now, and they were close.

–

Virgil got the 4Runner sideways on the highway, kicked open his door, opened the back door, and got his gun and two magazines out of the safe.

As he did that, the New Ulm cop ran up beside him, carrying a shotgun.

“Want me to nail her?”

“Let me yell at her first,” Virgil said. He shouted, loud as he could, “Maxine! Stop!”

She heard him, because she turned her face toward him and then she stepped behind the Subaru, apparently kneeling out of sight, and kept firing. Then an older man slipped out of the Subaru, lifted his hands over his head, and wobbled into the ditch on the other side of the road and sat down in the weeds.

The cop said, “I could take out her window glass.”

“Yeah, maybe you better do that,” Virgil said. The cop popped up and fired the twelve gauge four times. As far as they could tell, nothing happened-the buckshot either bounced off the car, or the deputy had missed it.

“I can guarantee I didn’t miss,” he said.

“See if you could bounce a shot under her back tire,” Virgil suggested.

The cop stood up and fired a couple of quick shots at the back of the Subaru, low, and forward of the back tire. No response.

“I’ve got to reload,” the cop said.

Then, suddenly, there was no more noise. No more shooting. A few seconds later, Maxine was waving her gun over her head and shouting, “I give up. I give up.”

Must have run out of ammo, Virgil thought. He shouted, “Throw your gun into the road and come out in the open with your hands up.” The rifle landed on the blacktop and then she came out with her hands up. Strait wasn’t shooting and Virgil shouted, “Toby-she quit. Don’t shoot, but stay where you are until we check her.”

There was no reply and Virgil said to the New Ulm cop, “Let’s go. Keep the shotgun on her and if she pulls another gun when we get close, blow her up. Can you do that?”

“Yup.”

“Good man. I gotta check the other guy, make sure she didn’t kill him.”

They moved out from behind Virgil’s truck, Virgil around the front, the New Ulm cop around the back with the shotgun mounted to his shoulder, and they stayed that way as they jogged down the road toward Knowles.

Virgil hadn’t felt much during the chase except stress and intense concentration, but now the anger was coming on. He’d been chumped and because of that, he’d led a bona fide crazy woman to her victim-forget about the fact that the victim was a notorious asshole, Virgil had still been chumped and that had resulted in two people trying to shoot each other to death.

When they were close, Virgil shouted at the man in the ditch, “Up! Up! Hands in the air. Up on the road!”

“I don’t have a gun!” The old man stood up, hands overhead, and stumbled up to the road. Virgil recognized him as one of the men from Knowles’s farm, dressed in faded overalls and a tattered Vikings hat.

Virgil said to Knowles, “Get down on the ground.”

“Uh-uh,” she said, “I don’t bow down for anybody.”

Virgil was still moving fairly quickly and he came up beside her, grabbed her by the back of the neck, and used his shin to kick her legs out from under her. She went down, yipping in surprise. Virgil broke the fall with his thigh, then let her slip onto the road, when he pinned her with a knee between her shoulder blades, caught her flailing wrists, and cuffed her, as she sputtered into the blacktop, then patted her down for a pistol.

She didn’t have one. He pointed his gun at the old man and said to the New Ulm cop, “Cuff him and put him on the ground.”

That took three seconds and then Virgil walked to the Subaru and shouted over it, “Toby, we got them on the ground. Where are you?”

“Down behind the truck. I’m coming,” Strait shouted back.

Strait came up from behind his truck with his gun in his hand and Virgil went down to meet him and asked, “You okay?”

“No thanks to that bitch.”

Virgil: “I gotta take the gun.”

“Man…”

“I know, but I gotta take it,” Virgil said.

Strait reluctantly handed it over, then looked at his truck: “Shit. It’s ruined. It looks like the Nazis machine-gunned it or something. Then I hit a couple of trees.”

There were, Virgil estimated, dozens and maybe a hundred bullet holes in the side and back of the truck. “You were lucky.”

Strait bobbed his head and then said, “I got a whole load of snake hides in the back, all curled up in bundles. They soaked up the incoming when I was on the road. Then, when I ran off the road, she must’ve thought I’d stayed in the truck. She really hosed it down.”

They walked together to the road and around the Subaru and Strait took three fast steps toward Knowles, who was still face-down on the road, and cocked a leg to kick her in the face.

Before he could do that, Virgil caught him by the collar of his shirt and yanked him back. “Don’t do that,” he told Strait. “At this point, she’s going back to jail and won’t see daylight for fifteen years. You’ll complicate things if you kick her.”

“I was only going to do it because I was overcome with emotion,” Strait said. He sounded like he was asking for permission.

Virgil said, “Uh-uh. Stay back.”

–

More cop cars were closing in on them, lights and sirens. The New Ulm cop said, “I can’t believe that nobody got hurt. There’re six empty magazines in that Subaru and on the ground. That’s, what, a hundred and twenty shots?” He looked at Strait and asked, “How many did you fire?”

“Thirty,” Strait said.

“I did six, with a shotgun,” the cop said. “A hundred and fifty-six shots and nobody got a scratch.”

“I cut my lip on the steering wheel,” Strait said.

“You’ll take that,” Virgil said.

“I guess,” Strait said. He plucked at his lip. “Hurts, though.”

Knowles looked up from the ground and snarled at Strait, “Sooner or later, your luck-”

Virgil cut her off. “Shut the fuck up.” He was easily pissed off by gunfire.

The first of the backup cops arrived in a cloud of dust and the New Ulm cop who’d followed Virgil out said, “There’s one really good thing about this whole situation.”

“What’s that?”

“I got a total lock on ‘Officer of the Month.’”