Dark of the Moon

by John Sandford

  The streets were still dry, but the lightning was close, off to the west, and the moon passed in and out of ragged fingers of cloud.

  He was at Stryker’s by one o’clock, a cool breeze slipping down the streets, the leaves on the trees beginning to stir. He parked in the street, and saw Stryker moving behind a dark picture window at the front of his house. A moment later, his garage door started up. Virgil got the shotgun and his pistol, a bottle of water, two Snickers bars, a pocket flashlight, his rain suit, and a couple of Ziploc bags full of extra shells.

  Stryker backed into the street and Virgil climbed into the passenger seat, and they were halfway up the street before Stryker turned on his headlights and asked, “You bring a rain suit?”

  “Yup. You awake?”

  “I’m fine.” He flicked a finger at the lightning to the west. “Probably won’t need the water bottles.”

  “Looked pretty interesting on the radar,” Virgil said. “You know where we’re going?”

  “Right down to the foot. We’ll be walking in from three-quarters of a mile out. Gonna be darker’n a bitch, but we’ll be mostly on the road.”

  “Lightning will help,” Virgil said.

  “As long as we’re not hit.” They were clearing the town, the last few lights fading behind them as they took the road north toward the Stryker farm, then turned west toward Feur’s. Coming in from the back.

  GOOD THING ABOUT rolling out in the night, Virgil thought with a tight smile, was that he could put some talk and time between the afternoon at the dell, and the next time he had to look Stryker in the eyes, in daylight. If he’d had to do that, first thing, Stryker would have known that something had happened, he’d have seen it in Virgil’s eyes. He was a good enough cop that he might have figured it out…

  Stryker said, “After we split up this afternoon, I walked over to the ag extension service to look at their photo set for the county. The photography was six years old, but Feur hasn’t built anything new out there. There’s the house, where you’ve been, there’s a big garage and shop in the side yard, that would have been on your left as you drove in.”

  “I saw that Quonset hut. It was in pretty good shape.”

  “Yes. Then there’s the barn out back, that was remodeled into a meeting room, and people who’ve been inside say it’s pretty open. They have meetings on Wednesday and Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, fifty, sixty people, come from a hundred miles around. The sheds next to the barn don’t look like much. They must be eighty years old.”

  “So the places to look are the Quonset hut, the barn, and the house. I’ve been in the house, one room, anyway, didn’t look like much.”

  “I’ve been in that. There’s a basement…haven’t seen it. The shed is what I’d like to get a peek at. If they’re moving drugs through, in bulk, that’s dangerous stuff. They might want to keep it outside the house.”

  “Are you thinking about going in?” Virgil asked.

  “I’m more thinking about watching for a few hours. See if anything isn’t right. Look for dogs. See if there’s any security stuff. See if we can smell anything. Look for any precursors.”

  “Didn’t see any dogs when I was out there,” Virgil said.

  “That’s good; that’s the best thing. Most people don’t know it, but dogs can see almost as well at night as they can in daylight. Burglar alarm won’t hunt you down, like a dog will.”

  THE DARKNESS DEEPENED as they got away from the lights of town, and as the clouds spread overhead; then they crossed the top of a low hill and Stryker slowed and killed the lights. They were on gravel, creeping along, the lightning nearly overhead, with Stryker staring at a GPS screen. Then he said, quietly, “We’re there.”

  “Can’t see a damn thing,” Virgil said.

  “I left a rock out here,” Stryker said. He’d put a couple of strips of black gaffer tape over the interior and door lights, and he said, “Be right back.” He shifted into Park, climbed out of the truck, and using a penlight, walked down the road. He was back in fifteen seconds, climbed back in the truck. “We’re right there…”

  He shifted into Drive, rolled forward thirty feet, then hooked through the ditch and powered blindly up a low rise, and then down the other side. He stopped once, got out, walked, flicked the light a couple more times, then pulled ahead and again turned blindly to the left, drove another thirty feet. In the illumination of a lightning stroke, Virgil saw that they were about to plow a stand of sumac. “This is it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Used to be a farmhouse. The Miller place. Abandoned and dangerous. The fire department came out a couple of years ago and burned it down for training, filled in the hole where the root cellar was. But there’re still the windbreak trees that used to be around the house. We’re back in what used to be the side yard, so there won’t be any reflections off the car, if somebody comes down the road.”

  VIRGIL GOT HIS SHOTGUN, and Stryker popped the back hatch of the truck and took out a long gun of some kind. In another flash of lightning, Virgil saw that it was an M-16-style rifle, and Stryker had loaded an extra-capacity magazine.

  “Is that semiauto? Or full?”

  Stryker racked a round into the chamber. “Semiauto’s for people who shoot prairie dogs.”

  USING THE PENLIGHT, they walked back out to the road, and then single file along it. There was enough lightning that they could navigate by the flashes, and Stryker’s GPS homed them in on the Feur place. They were making noise, Virgil thought, crunching along on the gravel, and with the zzzzziitttt sound of their nylon rain suits, as their legs crossed and their arms worked, but it was nothing in the wind.

  Four hundred yards out, they crossed the ditch again, and eased over an old barbed-wire fence. Stryker was talking quietly, almost muttering: “Go slow and watch your footing. There’s a lot of rock around. This used to be pasturage; the plowing land was on the other side of the road.”

  And they stumbled a few times, closing in. The wind was coming up, not howling, exactly, but strong, and gusting. There were lights at the house—night-lights, Virgil thought—and a bright sodium vapor light above the loft door on the barn, and another on a pole in front of the machine shed. The pole light shook and trembled in the wind. They found a spot, a hundred yards out, in a cluster of thistles, and sat and watched, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. Nothing changed in the houses or outbuildings.

  Then the rain came, spattering through the weeds, and they could hear the change in pitch when the main front hit the road in front of Feur’s place, another note when it hit the steel buildings, and a few seconds later, it was on them. A minute after that, a second-floor light came on in the farmhouse, and then another, the second one from a small window directly below the peak of the house. “Taking a leak,” Virgil said to Stryker. Another minute, and the bathroom light went out, then the other. Back in bed.

  The rain was beating on them now and they sat on their feet, heads down, hands in their side pockets, dry, but not especially warm. Another half hour, and then Stryker nudged Virgil and said, “Might not be a bad time to look at the machine shed.”

  “Lead the way.”

  They crawled and duckwalked in, moving quickly between lightning strikes, freezing with every flash. Five minutes after they left their watch post, they came up behind the machine shed. At the side door, Virgil tried the knob. Locked: no give at all. They put their heads together to block as much light as they could, waited for a lightning flash, and then Stryker hit the button on the penlight.

  And Virgil said, “Uh-oh.” Medeco locks, and almost new. “I didn’t even know you could get these things out here.”

  “What?”

  “Medecos. Look at this door,” Virgil said. “This thing has got some heft to it; steel, I think.”

  “We’re not getting in?”

  “We’re not getting in,” Virgil said.

  “So…”

  “So let’s go sit some more.”

  THEY MOVE
D BACK, slowly, a little of the stress leaking away; they couldn’t find their original spot, but found another just as wet. “So they got steel doors and great locks. That makes it a little more interesting,” Stryker said. Twenty minutes later, sputtering in the rain, he said, “I’m starting to feel like an asshole.”

  Another twenty minutes, and the main slab of thunderstorm had passed, and the wind had shifted, and they were able to sit with their backs to it.

  Stryker said, “We knew it’d probably be a waste of time.”

  “Yeah, but after you come out here…you kinda expect something to happen, because you made the effort.”

  “Don’t work that way, grasshopper,” Stryker said.

  “Sun comes up at five-thirty, more or less,” Virgil said.

  “We should be out of here twenty minutes before that.”

  Virgil looked at his watch: “Not yet three.”

  “So we sit for two hours. Maybe get some sleep.”

  “Not gonna sleep out here…”

  THE RAIN STOPPED, the wind dropped, and the lightning rolled away to the east. Virgil had given up hope of getting anything useful when he saw headlights bouncing up the road to the south. As far as he knew, Feur’s was the only place out this way. He nudged Stryker, who was head down, and maybe sleeping. Stryker’s head popped up. He saw the lights and said, “Who’s this?”

  “Early riser,” Virgil said.

  They were both stiff, and they stood up, their bodies obscured by weeds even if somebody had night-vision goggles, and stretched, and watched as a pickup truck slowed, pulled into Feur’s yard, and then slowly backed up to the machine shed.

  The driver got out and walked over to the house, skirting a puddle in the middle of the drive, and then stood on the porch, waiting. Lights came up, and a minute later, the driver was let into the house. “Let’s go see who it is,” Stryker said.

  Back through the weeds, on their knees, and duckwalking, down to the back of the machine shed, then up along the side. The driver had parked only a couple of feet from the main door.

  “Take a chance?” Virgil asked.

  “The lights are on the other side of the house…I think they’d be paying attention over there.”

  “Cover me, then.”

  Stryker snuggled down with the machine gun, and Virgil crawled along the ground next to the door, behind the truck. Missouri plates. He heard a rattling, and froze. Nothing. He fumbled in his pocket, found a pen, wrote the number in the palm of his hand, and then again on his forearm.

  He was about to start back when a thought occurred to him. He’d just rewired the lights on his trailer connection, and if this Dodge was anything like his truck…

  He groped around for a minute, then risked a quick flash with his light, well under the truck bed. Spotted the wires, got a grip on them, and hung on them, all of his weight, yanking until something came free. He risked another flash—hell, the first one had worked—and saw raw copper on two wires.

  That should do it, he thought.

  Then the dog barked. Once.

  A FUCKIN’ DOG in the truck. And not a small one.

  He said aloud, “I’m coming,” and he scuttled back across the face of the building into the dark beside Stryker, and the dog barked again, several times.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Stryker whispered, as they duckwalked away. The dog started barking again, but the sound was muffled by the truck cab, and nobody came out of the house. Fifty yards out, they were on their feet, hunched over, and then a hundred yards out, they were upright and moving away. They found their nest, and settled into it.

  “Wires,” Virgil said. “Whenever we find out who this guy is…why, I’m afraid he’ll have a moving violation. If we need it.”

  “A moving violation?” Stryker asked.

  “I yanked the wires on a taillight,” Virgil said.

  “That’ll go on his permanent record,” Stryker said.

  “Yes, it will.”

  “When that dog…You owe me money for a laundry bill.”

  NOTHING MORE HAPPENED at the house for half an hour, when the door opened, and three men, one of them Feur, came out, looked around, and then crossed the yard to the machine shed. They were inside for ten minutes, then came out carrying four five-gallon metal gas cans. They loaded them carefully in the truck’s camper, moved some things around in the interior of the camper, went back inside the shed, got four more cans. They closed the doors on the camper, talked for a few minutes, and then the driver got back in the truck, waved, and pulled out. The left rear taillight was out.

  “Let’s go,” Stryker said.

  They eased away in the dark, and two hundred yards out, tried to cross to the road. Stryker got tangled in the fence and ripped his coat, said, “Damnit, I just bought it this spring,” and then they were on the road, jogging. The moon, on its way down, broke through the ragged clouds on the back edge of the squall line, and helped them along.

  “We’re there,” Stryker said, his face a pale oval in the light from his GPS. They cut across the ditch back into the dark, risked a couple of flashes, got the truck, pulled around in a circle, and bumped back onto the road.

  “Let’s go talk to the computer,” he said. “See where this guy is coming from.”

  “Two possibilities,” Virgil said. “The gas cans have something in them besides gas. Maybe, in addition to gas. Get some plastic chemistry flasks, slip them down in there, fill it the rest of the way with gasoline.”

  “The other possibility…” Stryker reached overhead and started pulling gaffer tapes off the internal lights.

  “The other possibility is that there really is gas in the cans, but our guy couldn’t stop because he couldn’t risk being seen. A guy on the run, or being really careful.”

  “Careful about what?”

  “Say he’s the shooter,” Virgil said. “Coming in from someplace else—Kansas City, most likely, with the Missouri plates. You could get a pretty damn good shooter in Kansas City. So he fills it up just before he leaves town, drives up here, does the job, picks up an extra twenty gallons, and that’ll get him all the way back. Never stops at a gas station, nobody ever sees him. He’s not on any security tapes…How far could you go with a full tank and forty gallons?”

  They both thought awhile, and then Stryker said, “At least to Kansas City.”

  “But then,” Virgil asked, “why didn’t they just put it in the tank here? Fifteen gallons, anyway.”

  Stryker said, “There’s something else in the cans, Virgil.”

  “That would be my thought,” Virgil said.

  Another two miles: “Unless he’s just picking up some lawn mower gas,” Stryker said.

  THERE WAS LIGHT in the east when they pulled into the courthouse. Stryker led the way into the office, where a dispatcher lifted a hand inside his Plexiglas cage and Stryker got on a computer and ran the Missouri plates. They had a return in ten seconds: Dale Donald Evans of Birmingham, Missouri. Birmingham was just outside Kansas City. With his name and birth date, they ran Evans through the NCIC, and came up with six hits.

  “Burglary, burglary, burglary, assault, theft, assault. Done two, three, five years, total, all in Missouri,” Stryker said.

  “Thought they gave you the first three burglaries for free,” Virgil said.

  “Not in Missouri, apparently. Or maybe he stole something big.”

  “Or from somebody big.” Virgil tapped the screen. “You know what he is? He’s a trusted small-timer. Did his time, kept his mouth shut. So now, he’s a driver. Run up to Minnesota, pick up a load, a few beat-up cans of gas mixed up with some firewood and a chain saw and maybe a generator and some tools…nobody gives him a second look.”

  Stryker leaned back in his chair: “I could use some recommendations, about what to do about all of this.”

  “We need to take a meeting,” Virgil said.

  DAVENPORT GROANED into the phone: “Virgil, goddamnit…”

  “Get your big white a
ss out of bed and call the DEA,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to one of their serious guys, like right now.”

  “You got something?”

  “Biggest meth lab in the history of big meth labs,” Virgil said. “Maybe.”

  He could hear Davenport yawning. “Okay. I can call a guy. But is there some reason that you’re calling me at five-thirty in the morning?”

  “Yeah. About forty gallons of meth is driving down to Kansas City. We need to get somebody on it, and we figure the feds are as good as anyone.”

  A DEA AGENT called back twenty minutes later. With Stryker sitting across from him, Virgil gave the agent a précis of the investigation, the killings, the ethanol plant, and what they thought. The DEA man, whose name was Ronald Pirelli, and who said that he was in Chicago, said, “Sit there, at that telephone.”

  Ten minutes later another DEA man called and said, “Can you brief a team in Mankato in four hours?”

  “We could do that,” Virgil said. “Why Mankato?”

  “Because it’s almost halfway between here and there. Ten o’clock at the Days Inn.”

  “We could be there in two hours,” Virgil said.

  “Got the big guy flying in from Chicago,” the DEA man said. “He can’t make it before ten.”

  VIRGIL HUNG UP and said to Stryker, “We started a prairie fire, boy. You’re gonna be a hero.”

  “Either that, or I’ll be a farmer again,” Stryker said. But he looked happy enough. “Rather leave that to Joanie, tell you the truth.”

  Virgil retrieved his car from Stryker’s house, drove back to the Holiday Inn, tried to catch an hour’s sleep, and failed. Instead, he got caught in a recursive semiwaking dream involving dogs and running in the rain. At seven-thirty, he got up, found a good, clean, conservative Modest Mouse T-shirt, took a shower, and went and got Stryker.

  Stryker was wearing a necktie. He looked at Virgil’s shirt and said, “That’s nothing but cold, deliberate insolence.”

  On their way to Mankato, the accountant called on Virgil’s cell phone: “When can we get together?”