Deadline (9 page)

Which it was, at times. Knowing that his job wasn’t a burden on her lifted a burden off him; left him free to feel the rush.

—

W
HEN HE GOT
to the bridge on Highway NN, he was last in the line of five SUVs. He got a vest, gun, and camo jacket out of the back and hustled down to the bridge, where he found three DEA agents waiting for him. Gomez was not one of them. The three were dressed in black-and-tan night camo and were wearing vests and helmets with night-vision glasses, and had M16s dangling from their hands. They also had headsets with earbuds and microphones.

“Where’s Gomez?”

“He’s already up the hill,” said the shortest of the three. “We’ve got four guys spaced around the place already, in case we get runners. Four more are going in now, with Gomez and Jackson behind them. We’re the backstop. You got night-vision gear?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Gomez thought you might not. We don’t have a spare set, but I’ve got some glow tape. I’ll stick a couple inches on the back of my helmet—stay close and you shouldn’t bump into any trees. If there’s trouble, I’ll pull the tape off, and you get behind something solid, and wait. We’ve got an audio link for you, so you can hear what’s happening, and talk to us if you have to. There shouldn’t be too much trouble. We expect to be right on top of them before they can
move. After we leave here, try not to talk unless you have to. Voices carry in the night.”

“I’ve got a Godzilla-rated flashlight in the truck,” Virgil said.

“You might want to get it. Just make sure you don’t accidentally turn it on.”

Virgil went back and got a 2800-lumen flashlight, of the kind that poachers used to jacklight deer; in fact, he’d gotten it from a game warden. He slung the carry bag over his shoulder and went back to the DEA guys. One of them gave Virgil an earbud and a microphone that attached around his neck, with a microphone that looked like a stick and pointed at his mouth. It was hand-activated by a button set at the base of his throat. When he’d figured it out, which took about eighteen seconds, they set off across the first field, and Virgil wondered,
What if the assholes have a lookout up on that ridge?
Of course, if they did, they’d have already started running.

—

S
TAYING WITH THE GUY
with the glow tape wasn’t a problem, and while there wasn’t much moon, there was enough to light up the overall landscape. The biggest problem was stepping into holes or onto bumps, and he stumbled a few times as they crossed the field.

The leader stopped at the far fence, held the top strands of barbed wire as Virgil climbed over it, and then they were in the trees and climbing. The climbing was actually easier than walking through the field, because it was slower, and he was only a couple feet behind the guy in front of him, and could sense what the other man was doing. The biggest sensory input was olfactory: he could smell
the damp earth beneath the matted oak leaves, and the brush they were passing through, and thought of Tricia and the poison ivy. . . .

At the crest of the hill they turned down the game path to the notch in the bluff. A voice in his ear said, “I’m going to give you the rope. You’ve been down here once before, so you know—just use the rope to keep your balance. Don’t try to hang from it, or anything. Stick your hand out.”

Virgil did, and a nearly invisible shape put a rope in his hand. He turned and backed down through the notch in the bluff, feeling his way. At the bottom, a man’s hand clapped him on the back and whispered, “You’re good.”

—

T
WO MINUTES LATER
a new voice, which might have been Gomez, spoke through the earbud. “We’re cocked. Everybody set? We go in five. Four. Three . . .”

At “Go!” a half-dozen lights exploded through the forest and the screaming started and then a calm Gomez said, “We’ve got two runners. Danny, one of them’s coming right at you. The other one’s coming right at Raleigh.”

Another new voice: “Raleigh here. He’s gone up the hill. You guys in the notch, spread out, I’m looking for him.”

A brilliant light down to their right swiveled toward them and burst through the trees like a flight of arrows. Virgil put a hand up to protect his eyes. Gomez said, “Mike, watch the guy by the door, he’s got his hand low, watch his hand, watch his hand . . .”

Somebody started screaming about hands, and Virgil, able to see again, began drifting down the hillside. The three DEA agents with
him were moving forward, to his right, and a voice in his ear said, “Virgil, the trail’s right below you, twenty feet. Stay back and if I tell you, use that flash of yours to illuminate it. You got all that?”

“Five by five,” Virgil said. He pulled the flash out of its bag. It was made of plastic, but was heavy, with an oversized rechargeable battery down in the handle.

Somebody else said, quietly, “Here he comes,” and then somebody else said, “Shit, he’s turned down, I think he saw us—”

“No, no, no . . . He’s on the trail. He’s on the trail—”

“No, no, there are two of them, two of them, goddamnit . . .”

Virgil felt the trail underfoot, and now could see well down to his right; to his left he could make out the opening in the overhead above the path, a lighter streak in the dark woods, and somebody said, “Virgil, one of them’s coming at you. The other one’s going sideways down the hill. Stay low. If anybody uses a gun, I’m going to light him up.”

He didn’t mean with a flashlight; he meant with a machine gun.

Virgil crouched by the trail, making himself into a stump, and heard footfalls coming fast. Virgil said into the microphone, “Virgil here. Anybody running up the trail?”

“No, just the one guy. I’m trying to get in front of him, but I don’t think I’m gonna make it, I’m— Ah, shit!” The voice in his ear stopped but the same voice, shouting in the clear, “I fell, I’m down, I fell . . .”

The man running up the trail was close now. Virgil waited until he thought he could see motion against the background, then hit the runner in the face with all 2800 lumens. The man shouted something unintelligible, and he was right there, right on top of Virgil,
about to go by, and Virgil stuck out a leg and the man tripped over it and went down, hard, grunted, tried to get back to his feet just as Virgil was trying to stand up, and their legs got tangled and they went down again, and the man hit Virgil in the shoulder with what felt like a gun—fuck that, it was a gun—and Virgil smashed him in the face with the end of the flashlight.

The man dropped and stopped moving, and Virgil pointed the flash at him. He was on his back with a wicked cut across his forehead, his eyes full of blood; but he was breathing, and Virgil didn’t see any brains leaking out.

A gun lay by his side, and Virgil used the toe of his boot to edge it off the trail. Somebody was screaming in the clear about somebody running down the hill, and Virgil turned the thermonuclear flash that way, the light smashing between the tree trunks. He picked up a thin figure, moving fast, and what might have been a hint of red hair, and then the man was gone.

Virgil pressed the button at his throat and said, “I got one down here, he was armed, another’s heading out toward the mouth of the valley. I think it might be Zorn. Watch for guns . . .”

One of the DEA agents ran into the lighted area of the trail and called, “Where?” and Virgil pointed with the flash, and the agent went crashing off through the brush, and a few seconds later, was followed by a second man.

The man with Virgil groaned and tried to sit up, but Virgil pushed him back down. Virgil said, “Lay back. You’re hurt. We need to get you to a doctor.”

“What happened?” the man asked. “Did I wreck the truck?”

“More like assault with battery,” Virgil said.

One of the DEA agents came up, looked at the man, and asked, “How bad?”

“Might have a concussion. I hit him with the flashlight. Gun’s right there by the side of the trail.”

“Okay. Let’s get some cuffs on him. We got an ambulance one minute out.”

“That was quick,” Virgil said.

“No, we had it waiting, just in case. It’s on its way up the valley now.”

—

W
HEN
V
IRGIL GOT DOWN
to the sheds, five men were sitting on the ground, hands cuffed behind them, looking like prisoners of war. “We lost one of them,” Gomez said. “We saw two runners, but there were three. Bricks and Mortar are down at Zorn’s place, his old lady says he’s up in the Cities. We said, ‘So what’s his cell phone number, we need to call him.’ She said he doesn’t have one. We said, ‘Everybody has a cell phone.’ She pulls out a wooden kitchen match, scratches it on the screen door, fires up a Camel, and says, ‘Fuck you.’”

“That’s a high-class hillbilly, right there,” Virgil said.

“Yes, it is. Anyway, we got the crew, we got the sheds, we got the makings. We’ll make a movie of it all, and package it up for the U.S. Attorney. He’ll find the weak sister, and get him to talk about Zorn. Good job all the way around.”

“What about the drone?”

“Ah, it broke.”

“It broke?”

“Yeah, it broke. Don’t mention it, okay? I mean, if anybody asks. We’ve got some bugs to work out.”

—

V
IRGIL LOOKED
at the group of sitting men and asked, “You mind if I talk to the POWs?”

“They’ve all asked for attorneys, so you won’t get anything usable.”

“I don’t need it for a court. I just need some information.”

Gomez shrugged: “Go ahead.”

Virgil walked over to the prisoners, who were sitting in a shallow semicircle, all dressed in jeans and boots and work shirts, looking more like lumberjacks than dope manufacturers. He squatted down and said, “You all get attorneys, and you don’t have to answer any questions at all, but I’ve got one that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

They all glanced at each other, then one of them said, “We’re not talking.”

Virgil: “You all look like country people to me, and some of you probably got dogs, and like dogs. Some asshole up this valley has been stealing dogs, including some pretty good hunting dogs. We know what they’re going to do with them—they’re going to sell them off to medical laboratories for experiments. Now, I know you wouldn’t want that to happen to your dogs. . . . So, you know anything at all about these stolen dogs? Where they might be? We know you don’t have them, but somebody up this valley does.”

After a few seconds one of the men said, “We didn’t have nothing to do with no dogs.”

“I’m not claiming that anybody did,” Virgil said. “You had other business up here. But I’m not DEA, I’m not a fed—I’m just trying to get these dogs back to their owners.”

“There’s some dogs on the other side of the valley, I don’t know where at,” one of the men said.

“Shut up, Eddy,” said another one of them. “You know we’re not supposed to say anything.”

“Fuck you, Dick,” Eddy said. “The man’s asking about dogs. Nothing to do with us.” He turned back to Virgil and said, “They sound like they’re close to the front end of the valley, high up on the other side.”

A third man volunteered, “Something weird about it, though. You won’t hear nothin’ at all, then you’ll hear a lot of dogs, all of a sudden, but the volume is down low, like they’re a long ways off. Then the volume gets turned up, and that goes on for a while, and then it gets turned down. The barking keeps going, but the volume gets turned down, until you can’t hear them at all. It’s like they’re on an amp.”

“That is a strange fuckin’ thing,” Eddy said. “I heard that myself. The barking just fades away, like when you’re listening to an AM radio out on the prairie, in your car, and the radio signal starts to fade out.”

“Huh. Lots of dogs?”

“Lot of them,” said the man called Dick, who’d told Eddy to shut up. “I wondered what the hell was going on over there.”

“Anybody know what a beagle sounds like?”

“They got beagles, I think,” Eddy said. “That’s a sorrowful sound, when an unhappy beagle gets going. Could be bassets, though.”

“Thanks, guys,” Virgil said. He patted Eddy on the shoulder as he stood up.

He walked back to Gomez, who said, “You got a very strange job, Virgil.”

—

T
HE AMBULANCE HAD SHOWN UP
on the road below them, and the paramedics had carried a stretcher up the hill. They loaded up the man Virgil had hit, and then a van showed up down below and a couple of feds got out and looked up at them.

“Crime scene,” Gomez said. “The bureaucracy begins.”

Virgil hung around for a while, as the bureaucracy got going. Gomez asked, “You remember Matt Travers, the regional guy out of Washington?”

“I met him.”

“He said to tell you we’ve still got a job, if you want it.”

“Man, I appreciate it, but I like it here,” Virgil said.

“You could get a whole fuckin’ state if you came with us. Get some guys working for you . . . It’s kinda fun, if you like that kind of fun.”

“I’ll think about it . . . but I’m just being polite. You guys are the most interesting feds, no doubt about it, but like I said . . .”

“You like it here.”

“Yes, I do.”

V
IRGIL CAUGHT A RIDE
to his truck with one of the DEA agents, and on the way back to Johnson’s cabin, called Frankie and told her about the raid.

“Goddamnit, I wish I’d been there.”

“Maybe you ought to be a cop,” Virgil suggested.

After a moment of silence she said, “Nah. I’d feel too sorry for most of the people I arrested. But I would like to run around screaming and yelling and chasing through the woods.”

“Well, shoot, we could do that at your place,” Virgil said. “Naked.”

“Aw, Virgie . . .”

—

V
IRGIL CALLED
J
OHNSON:
it was well past midnight, but Johnson had called him at three o’clock in the morning about rescuing some
dogs. Johnson answered the phone: he didn’t sound sleepy, he sounded interrupted.

“What?”

“We cleaned out the meth labs. We need to get the posse together tomorrow. We’re going after the dogs.”

“You called me at one o’clock in the morning about some dogs?”

Virgil could hear Clarice laughing in the background. Satisfied, Virgil hung up, and when he got to the cabin, fell into bed.

—

T
HE POSSE MET
the next day at high noon, at Shanker’s: nine guys and a woman in various pieces of camo, plus a sheriff’s deputy named Boyce, but who everyone called “Bongo,” which caused Virgil to worry. Only he and Bongo would be armed, he told everybody, and he caught a quick flash of eyes between some of the men, which meant that a few of them probably had sidearms tucked into their belts.

“Listen, I’m serious now, if anybody other than myself and Bongo is carrying a gun, I’m telling you, leave it in your truck,” Virgil said. “If I see one up on that hill, I’ll send you home.”

Communications would be through a whole bunch of hunter’s walkie-talkies, since phones didn’t always work up in the deep valleys. One guy suggested that the slower climbers—“You know who you are”—stay behind to look after the vehicles. “These hillbillies, if they thought they were gonna lose the dogs, they’d come down and slash our tires, or worse.”

“Whatever happens to the vehicles, don’t go shooting anybody,”
he said. “If you’re watching the trucks, and anybody gives you trouble, you yell for help and we’ll come running.”

Virgil explained how the process would work: “This is basically just a search of public property. Before last night’s meth lab raid, the federal agents did quite a bit of research, in an effort to find out who would be legally responsible for the meth lab—who the landowner would be. As it turns out, the privately owned land involves fairly compact tracts bordering on the road, and going no more than a couple hundred yards back. The forest land along most of the top and sides of the valley is state forest. So we’ll be on public land. We’ll spread out across from it, with me in the center and Bongo at the top near the bluffs, and Johnson Johnson at the bottom, along the edge of the privately owned land. We’ll climb up from the shoulder of the highway, so we never cross private land. And, by doing it that way, we might surprise somebody. That’s gonna be a tough climb though, so if any of you people have heart problems . . .”

—

W
HEN ALL WAS
said and done, two of the guys opted to stay with the cars. The rest were prepared to climb. With that all settled, they loaded into their pickups and SUVs and trucked on up Highway 26 in a caravan.

Virgil led them to the shoulder of the road, and after the car-watchers were subtracted, nine of them began climbing the steep hill just south of the entrance to the valley. The hill was roughly as high as the Washington Monument, climbing through weeds and
sumac and, higher up, scrubby oaks and then full-sized oaks. When they got into the tree line, Virgil called for a rest, and they sat on the hill and looked out over the Mississippi, and didn’t talk much. Virgil gave them ten full minutes, and then they resumed the climb. They stopped once more, for another ten minutes, talking via the walkie-talkies to the trucks below.

Another ten minutes saw them to the top of the hill at the end of the valley; there would be more hill to climb later, but at the moment they walked single file, bunched too close for a combat patrol, over the edge to the downhill slope of the south valley wall.

Virgil spread them out down the hill, with Johnson on the bottom and Bongo at the top. Virgil was in the middle, and they began walking west. They’d walked perhaps a quarter-mile when Bongo called and said, “Hey, we got something up here. Looks like a pen. Another twenty-five yards, right under that yellow bluff.”

Virgil got on his radio and said, “Okay, guys, let’s climb up to the bluff.”

They all began clumping up the hill, and could smell the cage before they got to it. When they got to the bluff, they found Bongo and the four guys who’d been above Virgil looking at a chain-link fence, a semicircle with the bluff forming the back side. Inside the wire was a lot of raw dirt, a lot of dog shit, and three beaten-up dogs who wobbled to their feet when they saw the men walking up to the fence. Scattered inside the fence were a bunch of plastic tubs; most were empty, the others contained some water.

Bongo said, “Looks like they moved them.”

One of the men said, “Those dogs . . . don’t know those dogs, but they look like they’re starving.”

The fence had a gate, but no lock. Virgil flipped the latch and they all filed inside. Two of the dogs tried to get away from them, backing away to the far edge of the fence, tails between their legs. The third one sidled toward them, licking his muzzle nervously, head down, tail between his legs. They were dogs of no identifiable breed: mutts. All three of them were about knee-high.

“We waited too long, we moved too slow,” somebody said.

“How’d they get them out? Looks like there were a lot of dogs here, and nobody’s gone out of here in the last week, with a truck big enough for a lot of dogs.”

“Took them out one or two at a time . . . people coming and going all the time. Somebody must’ve tipped them off that we were watching,” Bongo said.

“That doesn’t sound right,” Virgil said. “They knew somebody was watching, but a whole crew of professional meth dealers goes in anyway, and has no clue?”

“I want to know where they went, the dogs,” one of the men said. “What we need to do, is figure out who had them up here, and then beat the information out of him.”

Johnson said, “We know they were here. I say we send one guy back to the trucks with the three dogs we got, and then the rest of us walk back to the end of the valley. Maybe there’s more than one place.”

They decided to do that. The three dogs they found were leashed up and taken back down the hill, while the rest of them spread out over the hillside again and began walking. An hour later, tired, hot, and mosquito-bit, they walked down the hill to the spring.

Virgil said, “I’ll tell you what, boys. The feds heard the dogs up
there yesterday afternoon, so I don’t know exactly how we missed them. But I’ll be working the road down here, starting today. I’ll find out what happened. I promise you. Pisses me off.”

“We’ll ask some questions around,” one of the posse members said. “See what we can find out. Maybe they took them over the top, and out some other way. Maybe the meth raid scared them.”

“We’ll find out,” Virgil said.

—

T
HE PEOPLE
at the trucks brought two trucks up to haul the posse back to the parked caravan. There wasn’t quite enough room for everybody, so Johnson went to get the truck, and Virgil sat on a rock at the edge of the pool and watched the water, and after a couple of moments saw a dimple of the kind made by trout. He pulled a long stem of grass out of a clump next to the rock and chewed on it for a moment, thinking about the dogs, and then a boy’s voice said, “Find them?”

Virgil turned and saw the kid they’d met the first day they’d come up the valley. He was standing on the other side of the fence, with his rifle slung across his shoulder, holding it in place with one hand. “No, no, we didn’t,” Virgil said. “Well, we found three dogs in a big pen up next to the bluff, looking pretty beat up, but not the big bunch of them we were looking for. You know where the rest of them went?”

“No, I don’t. I watched those federal agents pull off that raid last night, and I heard the dogs early this morning, but . . . if you couldn’t find them, I don’t know where they might’ve gone.”

“You’ve seen that pen up there?”

“No, my dad told me to stay away from there. Plenty of places to walk out west, and more interesting,” the kid said. “Funny thing was, I heard them this morning, and now you say, no dogs.”

“Huh,” Virgil said. “When you say you watched the feds pull off that raid . . . you were up there?”

“Oh, yeah. I saw the feds sneaking in there, every day, and then last night I saw the drug guys going in, so I figured the raid would be coming, and I went over to watch. Were you up there?”

“Yeah. Sort of out on the end of things, down the road. Saw a guy running away, and we never did catch him.”

“Yeah, that was probably Roy Zorn. I saw him take off as soon as the lights came on and you-all started yelling at them.”

“You know for sure it was Zorn?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I couldn’t see his face, but he moved through the woods like Roy does.”

“Okay.”

Virgil stood up and dusted off his pants and asked, “Your folks up at the house?”

“My dad is. My mom died.”

“Sorry about that. Mind if I talk to your dad?”

“He was asleep when I left.” He looked up at the sky and said, “Probably awake now, though.” Virgil thought,
Holy shit, he looked up at the sky to see what time it is.

The kid pointed out a driveway that came off the road down fifty yards or so. “You walk right up the drive, it’s a way, but it’s easy. Or you can drive up, when your buddy gets back.”

“He oughta be here in a couple of minutes,” Virgil said. “We can wait.”

“I’ll see you up there,” the kid said.

“What’s your name?” Virgil called after him.

“McKinley,” the kid called back, as he faded into the brush. “McKinley Ruff.”

—

J
OHNSON
J
OHNSON SHOWED UP
three or four minutes later, driving Virgil’s truck. Virgil took the wheel, and told Johnson about the kid as they bounced up the gravel driveway, past a mailbox that said “Ruff.” The driveway came off at right angles to the street, but then took a left turn and led straight west, past the pound, and four hundred yards deeper into the valley.

At the end of the track was a rambling house with a brown-stained rough board siding, a wide covered front porch, and a low-pitched roof covered with cedar shingles. A garden spread off to one side, heavy with the vine plants—squash, cucumbers, watermelon—and a half-dozen fruit trees were spotted around the side yard. A metal shed, which would probably take four cars, was set well back from the house and partly obscured by trees.

“Not bad,” Johnson said. “I could live here.”

McKinley Ruff was waiting for them on the porch, his rifle still cradled in his arm. “Reminds me of myself, when I was his age,” Johnson said. “If it wasn’t a gun, it was a fishing rod. Three whole summers like that, and then I discovered women. Which was a lot more dangerous than any gun. As you would know.”

“Not a bad-looking place, but speaking of peckerwoods, I have a feeling that the Ruffs could qualify.”

“We’ll see,” Johnson said.

They got out of the truck and walked up to the house and Virgil noticed that Johnson’s shirt was hanging loose, which meant that he was probably packing. Not a good time to object, Virgil thought.

McKinley Ruff said, “Dad’s inside, transposing. He said you should come on in.”

Virgil and Johnson glanced at each other: transposing?

They followed McKinley through the screen door and the heavy front door behind it, where they found the elder Ruff sitting at a plank table with a pile of paper in front of him. Standing in ranks along one wall were eight or nine guitars on guitar stands, two keyboards, and an older upright piano, a bunch of amps and other electronic music equipment, including a drum machine.

Ruff was a scruffy-looking man, a little overweight, wearing silver glasses. His hair fell almost to his shoulders, and he wore a short but poorly trimmed gray beard. When they came in, he looked up and said, “Hey, there. I understand Muddy’s been talking to you. You’re the cops, right?”

“Right,” Virgil said. “You’re a musician?”

Ruff’s eyebrows went up. He looked around the room for a few seconds and then said, “Jeez, I hope so, since I got thirty thousand dollars’ worth of guitars and fifty grand worth of other shit.”

Virgil said, “McKinley, uh, Muddy, uh, didn’t mention . . . You call him Muddy?”

“Sure. We named him after Muddy Waters. Muddy’s real name was McKinley Morganfield,” Ruff said. “Anyway, what can we do for you? You’re looking for those dogs?”

“Yeah, you know about them?”

“Just what Muddy told me. And we can hear them howling in the mornings. That’s about it.”

“But they’re gone now,” Johnson said.

“They were howling this morning. They usually start around seven o’clock or so, at least on the mornings when I’m up then.”

“Always about then,” McKinley said. “Lasts about ten or fifteen minutes, then they shut up again.”

“Where are they at?” Johnson asked.

“South side, I’d say down toward the far end. Pretty high up,” Ruff said.

McKinley said, “That’s about right.”

Ruff said, “I told Muddy to stay away from there. There’s a bad element out here, moved in over the past five or six years. Real white trash. I understand you busted some of them last night.”

“A meth lab—nothing to do with dogs,” Virgil said.

“Good riddance. But I saw Zorn down the road a while ago, so you didn’t get him.”

“You think he’s involved?”

“Of course he is,” Ruff said. “Although I wouldn’t be surprised if his old lady was the real brains behind the business. There’s a goddamned snake if you ever met one.”

Ruff had no proof of anything, just rumors and gossip picked up from the neighbors. “Lotsa these places down here were cabins, there’s sort of a communal landing down under the bridge. Then the economy went to hell, and a lot of them got sold off cheap, and the trash moved in.”