Escape Clause

27

Virgil was on his way home when Frankie called: “I was going to wait for you to get here, but I’m exhausted. I’ve got to get to sleep. Everything is okay at the farm, right?”

“Yeah, Sparkle said she talked to you…”

“Some kids out skinny-dipping.”

“Yup. I had to talk your boys out of going down there,” Virgil said. “If they’d gotten a good look at those girls, they’d have been locked in the bathroom for the rest of the summer.”

“But that wouldn’t apply to you?”

“Nah. I’m well taken care of.”

“Thank you. I’m taking a couple of painkillers and going to sleep. Try to be quiet when you come in.”

–

Virgil stopped at a convenience store and bought a bottle of orange juice, rolled his truck windows down-it was finally beginning to cool off-and put his elbow out and drank the juice.

With the windows down, he could hear the sudden blast of sirens from Mankato.

If it was cops, Virgil thought, there’s a riot going on. More likely the fire department. He rolled across the Highway 14 bridge into town and realized that the sirens seemed to be heading toward the general area of his house, which didn’t worry him much, until he got off at the North Riverfront exit and realized that the sirens, and now the flashing lights, were really close to his house, and when he turned onto his street and saw the lights straight ahead, and a cop blew past him with sirens screaming through his open windows, he thought, Holy shit, that IS my house.

He instantly thought of Frankie, who’d taken those painkillers to knock herself out, and he floored his truck and blew through a couple of stops signs until…

Wait. That’s not my house.

It was, in fact, the house next to his house. He couldn’t get all the way down to it, because of the fire trucks, and he had to park on the block behind his house. All the neighbors were out in the yards watching, and Virgil saw the couple who owned the house behind his, and he called, “Jack, hey, you guys-what happened?”

Jack’s wife, Emmy, said, “We thought it was a gas explosion or something, but when we ran out here, we could smell gasoline. Not natural gas, car gas.”

“Did the Wilsons get out?”

“Yeah, we talked to them. They said something blew up in their kitchen. I think they’re around in the front.”

Virgil trotted over to his house and let himself in through the back, and Frankie called, “Virgie?”

“Yeah. I was afraid it was here, and you’d be asleep.”

She was standing in the front room, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, looking out through the side windows. “The firemen came pounding on the doors, said I might have to leave, but they put the fire out and they came back and said I was okay. For ten minutes, it was like the end of the world around here.”

“You okay?”

“Not entirely. I gotta go back and lie down. I’m not sleepy anymore, but those pills got me feeling like the undead.”

Virgil took her back to the bedroom, tucked her in, and said, “I gotta get out there and find out what happened. Jack and Emmy made it sound a little strange.”

“Like how?”

“Like there was gasoline involved. I’m gonna talk to the fire guys.”

“Careful.”

–

A fire lieutenant named Carl Beard saw Virgil walking through the crowd of neighbors and came over and said, “You gotta quit this shit, Virgil.”

“What happened?”

“The Wilsons were sleeping and something blew up in their kitchen, and Kyle went running in there and found the whole place on fire. Janet called us and Kyle sprayed it with his fire extinguisher and knocked it down a little, and then the extinguisher ran out and they went outside and waited for us. We shut it down, but you could smell gasoline all over the place-and Kyle said there was no gasoline in the house.”

“It’s like when…”

“Yeah. Like when that preacher firebombed your garage. Same deal. After we put the fire out, I looked in the kitchen, which is pretty scorched, and the kitchen sink is full of broken glass and there’s a piece of burnt rag in there… It was a bomb.”

“Goddamnit. You think it was aimed at me?”

“Kyle sorta hinted at that. He said nobody’s mad at him, but a lot of people might be mad at you. You’ve been in the newspaper, a little bit, with your girlfriend.”

Wilson worked as the service manager at a car dealership and was generally known as a friendly guy. He had, on occasion, mown Virgil’s grass when Virgil had been out of town a few days too many, and they’d always been invited to each other’s barbeques.

“I better talk to him,” Virgil said.

“Maybe you better-but I’ll tell you, Virg, this wasn’t any prank or anything like that,” Beard said. “The dipshit who threw the bomb wanted to burn the place down and he didn’t care who got hurt.”

–

The Wilsons were standing on the other side of the fire trucks. Virgil went over and found them talking to their insurance agent, who was also Virgil’s agent and who lived in the neighborhood. When Kyle Wilson saw Virgil coming, he prodded his wife with his elbow and said, affably enough, “We were thinking about remodeling anyway.”

Virgil said, “Hey, Kyle, Janet. Uh… I kinda know what you might think. I hope it’s not true.”

Janet said, “Who knows? We can’t think of why anybody would do this to us. If it really was a firebomb.”

Kyle said, “We’re pretty sure it was a bomb. We actually heard it hit, we heard the window break and glass shatter, then whoosh.”

“Nobody upset about a car repair or anything?”

Kyle shook his head. “Wouldn’t be aimed at me, even if it was. I don’t do the customer contact and I don’t fix the cars-I supervise the mechanics and everything I do is in-house. You’d have to fish around to even find my name.”

Virgil nodded. “All right. I helped arrest a guy last night. He’s in jail, but he had an accomplice and he’s still out there. We’ll nail him down pretty quick, and I’ll find out whether he did this.”

The insurance agent said to Virgil, “Their policy covers all the damage, and we’ll get an adjuster on it tomorrow. It’d be helpful if you or the Mankato police could find out who did it, and let me know. There would be the possibility of some civil recovery from the perpetrator, if he has any assets at all.”

“I’ll call you,” Virgil said. He looked up at the house. “What a mess.”

–

Virgil got back to the house, took a quick shower, and got back in bed. Frankie, talking in the dark, asked, “You think it was you? Or us?”

Virgil rolled toward her, had to think about it for a moment, then said, “Probably. It’s hard to see the house numbers in the night and the guy that Catrin is looking for is no genius. I don’t know why he’d come after me, though.”

“Because he’s pissed off and he’s a mean redneck?”

“He’s gotta know by now that we’re looking for him and that we’re not going away,” Virgil said. “He’d know it’d be an aggravating circumstance if he was identified, and he’s no virgin. A couple of years in prison for assault is way different than an ag assault charge, or attempted murder, or even murder, if there’d been somebody standing in the kitchen, or even arson, for that matter. He could be doing a six-pack for throwing the bomb.”

Frankie said, “Hmm.” And a moment later, “What if it’s the people who stole the tigers? Trying to make you go away?”

“That occurred to me,” Virgil said.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Virgil said. “It could even have been aimed at the Wilsons. But there have been two murders tied to the tigers. Winston Peck? It’s possible, but I really don’t know. I will know, though. Sooner or later, I’ll know.”