Storm Front (7 page)

“Lookout, not outlook,” Virgil said. “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. Which means the real turnoff is somewhere between here and the driveway we turned down. That’s helpful.”

“She won’t be going there now.”

“No. And Jones’s place ought to be about a half-mile up the road.”

—

J
ONES
’
S PLACE WAS
just what Virgil had expected from Crawford’s tax-roll information. The house was old, and in poor shape: an early twentieth-century frame farmhouse in need of new paint, new roof, new windows.

New everything.

A garage at the end of the driveway had a hayloft and was in the same shape; a machine shed farther down the drive was falling apart, and a head-high stone foundation was all that remained of what had once been a barn. All of it stood on what looked like ten acres, most of it covered with lumpy fescue and knee-high weeds. A cluster of old, arthritic apple trees stood to one side of the house, while overgrown bridal wreath and lilac bushes lined the driveway. A “For Sale” sign, with a “Reduced” card fixed to the top, faced the highway, and looked as though it had been there for a while.

A black ragtop Jeep sat in the driveway.

“Here we go,” Virgil said. He pulled in behind the Jeep, to within inches of its back bumpers, pinning it between two lilacs. If anyone managed to get to it, to flee, they’d have to go forward and then across the front yard to get out. Virgil popped the door, got his pistol out of the back, and stuck it in his belt at the small of his back.

Yael was pointing at the front door like a Weimaraner. Virgil said, “There’ll be a side door. That’s where you go in.”

She said, “Yes?”

She and Virgil walked down the driveway and as they did, a slender dark-haired woman with green eyes walked out of the side door and asked, “Can I help you?”

Virgil took her in. She was pretty in a reserved way, and when their eyes met, they went “clank,” like eyes sometimes do. She would not be a candidate for marriage. “We’re looking for Elijah Jones.”

“Dad’s not here,” she said. “He lives in town.”

“We’ve been there,” Virgil said. “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We have a warrant for Reverend Jones’s arrest.”

“His arrest?” Her hand went to her throat. “What for?”

“On a hold request, for theft, from the nation of Israel, and for failure to declare the importation of an artwork or artifact of value more than eight hundred dollars, which is a federal offense,” Virgil said.

“My God, what’d he do?” she asked. But Virgil saw the flicker in her eyes, and Yael glanced at Virgil to see if he’d picked it up. He nodded his head a quarter of an inch. Not only was the woman not telling the truth, but that kind of pickup put Yael distinctly with the Mossad.

“You’re his daughter who works with the DOT?” Virgil asked. He dug around in his memory and came up with, “Ellen?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“We tried to get in touch with you, but were told you were on your way to Alaska,” Virgil said.

“That was a joke about getting away from my ex,” she said. “But about Dad . . . You can’t find him? I’m sure he never smuggled anything, or stole anything, that’s crazy talk. He’s very ill. We tried to talk him out of going to Israel this summer. We were supposed to meet out here this morning, to see if there’s anything anybody might want in the house before they burn it down—”

“You’re going to burn it?”

Ellen looked back at the place and nodded. “I’m afraid so. It was my great-grandparents’ place, but I can hardly ever remember even coming here. My grandfather was a preacher, and then Dad. The land was all sold off, the house can’t be fixed . . . the land’s more valuable with the house gone. We’ll burn it, then clear it with a bulldozer, fill in the basement, and then maybe Chuck Miller will add it to his farm.”

Virgil said, “Nice to have apple trees . . . and asparagus.” He could see the feathery bush-tops of asparagus growing down the far fence line.

“The apple trees are pretty much shot. Mostly good for firewood, now.”

Virgil came back to the case: “We went to your father’s house this morning. He wasn’t there, but he was last night. We haven’t been able to locate him, but we did find a spot of blood on the floor.”

“I just can’t help you,” she said. “I’ve tried calling his cell, but it goes right over to the answering service, so it’s probably turned off.”

Virgil said, “He’s not in the house. This house.”

“No, of course not. You think I’m lying?”

Virgil said, “No, I just have to ask—because if I ask, and if it turns out that you
are
lying, then you’ve committed a crime, and I can come back to you on that. I mean, you can refuse to talk to me, but you can’t lie to me to cover up a crime or hide a criminal.”

She put her fists on her hips: “That’s a mean thing to say.”

“I try not to be mean,” Virgil said. “But this is a serious matter, Ellen, and you should not be fooling around with it, thinking otherwise. Your involvement in this, if you’re involved, could jeopardize your whole career.”

Yael chipped in: “He is trying to sell this artifact he stole. The people he is trying to sell it to are extremely dangerous. People who might kill him, if they need to, to get the stone.”

Virgil added, “Hezbollah, among others.”

Yael added, “And Texans.”

Ellen nodded. “I will keep trying to get in touch. I’ll go into town and look for him. I’ll leave messages. I’ll do everything I can.”

“Don’t get too close,” Virgil said. “Like Yael said, these people could be dangerous. There’s a lot of money involved.”

“I promise: I’ll tell you the minute I find him.”

They exchanged cell phone numbers, and Virgil got her father’s phone number, and then, like an afterthought, she asked, “Before you go, do you want to look inside? To see that I’m telling the truth?”

Yael said quickly, “I would.”

Virgil said, “Go ahead. But old houses can be dangerous—Ellen should go with you. I’ll take a look at the machine shed and garage.”

—

T
HE TWO WOMEN WENT INSIDE
,
and Virgil headed toward the garage. He stepped inside, saw nothing, then checked to make sure the two women were out of sight in the house. They were; he hurried back to the truck, got inside, and dug into Yael’s handbag.

She carried a small clutch purse inside, with a snap, which he unsnapped. In one of the credit card slots he found two key cards for the Downtown Inn. Like most seasoned travelers, she’d gotten two, so she wouldn’t lock herself out on a quick trip to the Coke machine. He took one of them, and put the purse back in the bag.

He got out of the truck, eased the door shut, walked quickly behind the row of lilacs, to the end of the driveway, into the machine shed. Nothing there, either, except one piece of an old hay rake, a rusting fifty-five-gallon drum full of ashes, with two ancient yellow Pennzoil cans sitting on top. They were empty as they always are, with two triangular punch-holes in each of them.

He looked at the weathered boards, then stepped outside, looked in his directory, and called Ma Nobles.

She answered by saying, “Were you following me, Virgie?”

“No, I wasn’t,” Virgil said. “I was actually on my way out to an abandoned farm owned by a guy I’m investigating, which is about a mile on down the highway from where you saw me. On the south side. Got an Edina Realty sign on it. They’re about to burn it down. I was looking at it, and realized the whole thing is made out of the kind of lumber you’re selling.”

“In good shape?”

“Authentic antique shape, but a lot of the boards look solid, like they could be cut and reused. Anyway, I could talk to the owner about giving it to you, free, or almost free, if you’d tell me where I might find a bunch of lumber at the bottom of the river . . . and how to get it out of there.”

After a long silence, Ma said, “Free, huh?”

“They don’t want to burn it,” Virgil said.

“I’ll take a look at it, and call you,” Ma said.

“I’ll tell you, Ma,” Virgil said. “We got a couple people looking at you real hard. This would be a good way to keep your ass out of jail. And your boy’s, too.”

“I’ll take a look,” she said again, and hung up.

—

V
IRGIL WAS WALKING
back up the driveway when the two women came out of the house. Yael shook her head: nothing inside. Virgil told Ellen about Ma Nobles.

“Well, sure, she can have it if she wants it,” Ellen said. “Maybe . . . for a few dollars.”

“You’d have to work that out with her,” Virgil said, looking up at the house. “But you know, it’s just sort of old and neat. I’d hate to see it go up in flames.”

Virgil gave her Ma Nobles’s phone number, and he and Yael got in his truck. As they backed toward the highway, Yael said, “She knows where her father is.”

“Yeah, I know. The blood.”

Yael nodded: “You told her there was blood on the floor of the house, and she never asked about it. She knows he’s not injured badly, and that he was bleeding in his house. And she did not ask about the artifact.”

“Mmm. I’d hate to put her in jail, though,” Virgil said. “Probably doesn’t want to betray her father, which I can understand.”

“It seems to me, after some discussion and observation, that you do not wish to put anyone in jail.”

“Not true,” Virgil said. “I know about nine people right now that I’d like to put in jail, and who deserve it. Just not anyone you’ve met.”

She asked, “Now what?”

T
he Reverend Elijah Jones, sweating like a pig in Miami, walked down the hillside through the trees toward the picnic tables, carrying the bowling bag in his left hand, his right hand in his pants pocket, pressed against the right side of his groin.

He was not hurting, but only because he’d taken so much oxycodone that he wouldn’t have felt anything less than an amputation. Yet something down there, in his groin, something vital felt like it was coming loose. Without the pills, he thought, he’d have felt like he’d just dropped his balls into a bear trap.

Walking two hundred yards down the hill hadn’t helped. He didn’t have much time left, he thought, before he’d be so clouded that he’d be incapable of pulling off any kind of deal, much less one with a Hezbollah agent, two Turks, or a famous TV star.

He got to the bottom of the hill, walked across a patch of scrubby grass to the concrete table, had to lift the bowling bag to its surface, groaned as he did it.

Not a groan of pain, but of incipient death. How much longer, Oh Lord? Two weeks? The docs had told him that the cancer in his brain would kill his ability to breathe, before it got to his reasoning faculties. He’d get to enjoy every minute of his own death.

A hundred yards away, two men, remarkably out of place in the bucolic park, were watching him carefully. He’d told them to wait there, when they arrived, so he could be sure that they were alone, that there wasn’t a troop of Turkish cavalry over the hill. Now they were looking at him, a black-bearded man in a black suit and ministerial collar, and he lifted a hand and waved them over.

They walked up, peering around as they came. The park had two softball diamonds down at the far end, where fifty kids and forty parents and coaches were either playing or watching two separate games. Closer to the picnic area, a half-dozen teenagers were kicking a soccer ball around, and at the other end of the picnic area, three stoners, two male and one female, were playing Hacky Sack. Poorly, and passing a joint.

The stoners glanced at the Turks as they came up, then turned away. The two gave off a specific vibe: they didn’t want to be looked at, so you’d best not do it. They were both broad men in silvery suits, with wide pale shimmery neckties, like the sides of king salmon. The broader of the two had a gray Stalin mustache. The other one was wearing round sunglasses as black as welding goggles, which made him look like a malevolent Mr. Mole. He was carrying a briefcase, and Jones felt a quick spark of hope: maybe it would happen.

The broader man led, came up, stopped ten feet away, and asked, “Reverend Jones. Good to see you again. You seem better.”

“The bleeding stopped,” Jones said. “That’s always good. You have the money?”

“Do you have the stone?”

“I do.”

“May we see it?”

“You may,” Jones said. He fumbled with the zipper on the bowling bag, got it open, reached inside with both hands, and with some effort, pulled out the rock and placed it in the center of the table, where it seemed to soak up most available sunlight; the atmosphere around it literally seemed to grow dimmer, and the two Turks looked around uneasily. Jones looked into the sky and saw that a bass-boat-sized cloud had momentarily covered the sun.

The sun came back and the bigger Turk stepped forward and seemed about to reach toward the stone, when Jones put his arm around it and pulled it toward himself. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Not until I see the money.”

The Turk straightened. “We don’t have the money, here, exactly, because we thought it unwise to walk about with five million dollars in a briefcase.”

“Then where is it?” Jones asked. The spark of hope was dying.

“At our hotel.”

“You left five million dollars in cash in your hotel room, where fifty minimum-wage workers have keys to your room? You can’t possibly be that dumb, so I can’t possibly believe you.” Jones pulled the stone closer, and again fumbled with the bowling bag, to put it away.

“Don’t do that,” the big Turk said. “We will take it with us.”

“I don’t think so,” Jones said. He lifted a hand overhead. He said, “I have a friend in the woods with a deer rifle. If you try to take the stone, he will shoot you dead. All I have to do is drop my hand.”

The big Turk said, “This is, mmm . . .” He turned to his smaller partner. “The American idiom. The one we spoke of.”

The smaller man—who was not small—said, “Shit from the cow.”

The big man shook his head and said, “No, no, no, this is one word, this . . . cowshit. No, bullshit.”

“Same thing,” said the smaller man.

“But this is not how you say it,” the big man said. He turned back to Jones. “This gunman, this is bullshit. Drop your hand, tell him to shoot me.”

“Ah, you’re right,” Jones said, and dropped his hand.

“The stone, please,” the Turk said.

“Nope.”

The Turk slipped his left hand into his jacket pocket and took out a switchblade. He squeezed once, and the blade flicked out. He kept it against his leg, so the stoners couldn’t see it, smiled to show his thick white teeth, and said, “We insist.”

Jones smiled back, showing slightly bucked but yellower teeth, and said, “There is another American idiom that you should know: ‘Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.’”

With the right hand, he pulled back the right side of his jacket, to display the stock of a handgun tucked under his belt buckle.

The Turk considered it for a moment, and then said, “I have some experience with the knife. Do you think you can withdraw the gun before I can reach you with the knife?”

Jones said, “You’re fifteen feet away. You’d have to jump over the picnic table to get to me. I don’t have to jump over the picnic table to get to you.”

The bigger man said, “We will take the stone.”

“No.”

The smaller man said to his companion, “Be very careful. I think he is tense.”

The bigger Turk said, with a quick backward glance, “He is a man of religion. He will not shoot us. We will take the stone.”

He took a step forward and Jones pulled the gun, a large frame revolver. One of the stoners said, “Holy shit,” and Jones sensed all three of them running away.

The Turk said, calmly, “You will not shoot.”

Jones said, “Well,” and looked down at the pistol, and then up at the Turk, and the Turk lifted a hand as if to say, “Wait,” but Jones shot him in the middle of the chest and he went down.

And he didn’t stop. The other Turk half-turned and Jones shot him in the neck, the gunshots echoing like thunderclaps off the amphitheater-type hills to the side of the park. The bigger Turk rolled and climbed back to his feet to run, and Jones shot him in the back, then turned to the other and fired two shots at him, into the back and the back of his head, then fired another shot into the big Turk’s back.

They were both half-running, half-stumbling away, and Jones lifted the stele and put it back in the bag. The stoners were halfway across the park, the two men far in the lead, the woman running frantically after them; and at the far end, parents were screaming for kids, and both parents and kids were running out of the park toward cars—balls, bats, and gloves forgotten.

Jones felt a moment of pride. He’d given thousands of sermons in his life, and had never before gotten a response so universal and enthusiastic.
Everyone
was running.

He had time for only that spark of pride. Then he took the bag and shambled back into the trees, and up the hill. He’d just gotten to his car when he heard the sirens, some way off, yet.

By the time they arrived, he’d gone around three corners and was accelerating away.

—

W
HEN
V
IRGIL AND
Y
AEL
got to the park, eight patrolmen and four detectives were walking the area, with two crime-scene people crawling around the picnic table, and three highway patrolmen parked on the street watching. Part of the turnout was the result of children being nearby, and the school-shooting scares. The other part was sheer excitement: this just didn’t happen much in Mankato.

The cops were basically looking for anything they could find, and had rounded up two stoners, a boy and a girl, and said that a third one had been with them, but he’d kept running and hadn’t yet been located.

“I called you because of that Reverend Jones thing,” said the lead detective on the scene, whose name was Don Scott. “We think this was Jones. Big guy, black beard, wearing a black suit with a ministerial collar.”

“Yeah, that’s him,” Virgil said. “You find anything that would point to him?”

“Well, we’re doing the crime-scene things, because he apparently wounded the two guys he was talking to. We haven’t found them yet, but we will—the witnesses said they were shot bad. Head, stomach, back wounds. One guy, who seemed like he knew what he was talking about, said they drove off in a Mercedes-Benz SUV. We got all the hospitals looking out for them, and we’re looking for the car. We found a switchblade where the two unknowns were, so Jones may have been threatened. We’ll get at least one good print off the knife, because I could see it, just looking at it. And we’re doing the usual—footprints and so on, got some blood from the ones that got shot.”

Virgil filled him in on what he’d found, and Scott said, “Well, if he’s dying, then he doesn’t have much to lose.”

Yael said, “We have considered that, and you are correct. I think his behavior, from the time he stole the stele, is influenced by his illness. This is not an excuse for him, but a motive.”

Virgil asked, “You mind if we talk to the kids?”

“Go ahead. I think we wrung them out, though, and they don’t have much.”

“Just want to hear it, myself.” Virgil ambled over to the two stoners, who were perched on a picnic table, introduced himself and Yael, and said, “Tell me what you saw.”

They told the tale of the two men walking up to the reverend, about the stone coming out of the bowling bag, about some kind of dispute—they hadn’t been close enough to hear the words, but they could hear the tone of it. The discussion hadn’t turned into a screaming argument, but had been tense.

“I’ll tell you what,” the boy said, “that sucker opened up with that pistol, the first thing I thought was, he was gonna hit some of those kids for sure. They were lucky he didn’t, too. They were right in the line of fire.”

“That wasn’t the first thing you thought,” the girl said. She was way past a simple pout. “The first thing you thought,
asshole
, was,
Run
. You completely left me behind, you, you,
stupid
.”

“What was I gonna do, carry you?” the boy whined.

Virgil broke in: “Did this minister look sick? Or hurt?”

The girl shrugged. “We were playing Hacky Sack and didn’t pay too much attention until they started talking louder . . . but he seemed okay to me. After he started shooting, I didn’t see him. I just ran.”

“The two men who were shot—they didn’t get the black stone?”

“No. They just started running like everybody else,” the girl said.

Virgil got descriptions of the men who were shot, and looked at Yael, who said, “Turks. Two of them.”

“I think so. Let’s get some cops and go down to the Holiday.” He thanked the two kids and walked back to Scott and said, “If you could give us a couple of cops, we have an idea where the two wounded guys might be . . . if they haven’t checked into the hospital.”

“Here in town?”

“Holiday Inn downtown,” Virgil said.

“Well, hell, let’s go,” Scott said.

—

T
HE
H
OLIDAY
I
NN
was an older building downtown, left over from the sixties or seventies, slowly failing in place, with most potential patrons going to the Downtown Inn, where Yael was, or the City Center Hotel, or a newer Holiday Inn Express out on the edge of town.

On the way down, Yael said, “I don’t understand how they could flee . . . if they were shot so badly. Why didn’t they stay? Why aren’t they in a hospital?”

“Good question. Ellen Case said he’d never hurt anyone.”

“He’s gone crazy from the illness, or the pain, or the drugs.”

“Maybe,” Virgil said.

—

A
T THE
H
OLIDAY
I
NN
,
they all unloaded, Virgil, Yael, Scott, the other plainclothesman, and three patrolmen. One of the patrolmen said, “You see the ass end of that green SUV down there?” He pointed to the far end of the hotel parking lot. “That’s a Benz.”

Scott positioned the patrolmen around the parking lot and exits from the hotel, and he and the other detective, along with Virgil and Yael, walked down to the Mercedes and looked in the windows. Both the front seats were stained with what looked like blood, and Yael said so.

“Doesn’t
look
like blood, it
is
blood,” Scott said.

Scott told the other detective to sit on the car, but the cop said, “Bullshit, I’m coming with you,” so they got a patrolman to watch it, and the four of them walked down to the hotel office and explained the problem to the manager, who then summarized what they’d said: “They’re bleeding to death in my room?”

“That’s why we need the key,” Scott said.

They got the key and walked down to the Turks’ rooms—they had two rooms, as it happened, with a connecting door. Virgil listened at the first one, and heard two men talking. He listened at the second and heard nothing. So he pointed at the first one, and Scott knocked.

“Who knocks?”

“Mankato police. Open the door, sir,” Scott said, and he and the other detective pulled their pistols. Yael looked at Virgil, who said, “Back in the car,” and she rolled her eyes.

Scott pounded on the door again. “Mankato police. Open up.”

A chain rattled on the door, and a man looked out. He was bare-chested, had a bloody bandage on his ear and neck, and was holding a pair of tweezers.

Scott said, “Step back, please.”

The man stepped back. Inside, a larger man sat on a chair, also shirtless, with a bloody patch on his furry chest.