Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  That was the first sign of any sense of humor he’d gotten from Mattsson, Virgil thought, even if it was cop humor.

  To Sparkle, Mattsson said, “I heard part of that pickle plant story. What happened next?”

  Sparkle finished the story, the part about going out the window and running for her life. “I got it now—everything I need for my dissertation. I’d head back home to the Cities, except that I don’t want to disappoint Father Bill.”

  Catrin looked at them all, and then said, “You know, you’re an odd bunch of people.”

  —

  Virgil slapped his thighs, stood up, kissed Frankie, and said to Mattsson, “Let’s get this guy.”

  They were on the first floor, heading out the gate, when Sparkle shouted at them: “Wait! Virgil, Catrin! Wait!”

  She was wearing flip-flops and ran flapping down the hall clutching her cell phone. She came up, grabbed Virgil’s arm, and said, “My friend Ramona. My friend who got me into the factory. Some guys beat her up. Tonight, a little while ago. Her husband called. An ambulance is on the way here. Virgil, they beat her up! They beat her up bad.”

  20

  They waited in the emergency room for the ambulance to arrive. Alvarez had lived in an informal trailer park north of Mankato and well to the west, a long ride into town. A doc in the emergency room had spoken to the paramedics in the ambulance and relayed their account: “She was battered, knocked out; she’s still only semiconscious. When she went down, they kicked her; probably has broken ribs, could have some internal injuries, depending on where they kicked her and how hard.”

  “Frankie all over again,” Sparkle said. “Same goddamn criminals. Same men.”

  Virgil went back up to Frankie’s room to tell her about it, but she already knew about the attack. Sparkle had still been sitting with her when the call came in, and she told Frankie about it before running off to stop Virgil and Mattsson.

  “Sounds worse than I got it,” Frankie said, after Virgil described Alvarez’s injuries.

  “Can’t tell yet. I gotta get back downstairs. The ambulance is rolling fast. If she’s conscious when she gets here, maybe I can have a few words with her.”

  “Go,” Frankie said.

  —

  When he got back to the emergency room, he found that Father Bill had arrived, expecting to pick up Sparkle. Bill was in his bartending outfit of jeans, open-necked white shirt, and red vest with a small gold crucifix hanging around his neck from a gold chain.

  When he saw Virgil, he walked over and said, “It’s my fault. I was supposed to sit on Sparkle. She got away from me and Ramona helped her sneak into the pickle plant. It’s my fault.”

  “I wouldn’t get weird about it,” Virgil said. “It’s really the fault of the guys who beat up Alvarez and Frankie. That’s the fact of the matter. You didn’t do anything wrong or immoral, and neither did Sparkle. They did. They will be sorry.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Bill said. “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “Catrin and I’ll take care of it.”

  Bill turned toward the door, where Sparkle and Mattsson were looking out at the driveway that came up to the emergency room doors. He said, “Listen, Virgil—I can tell you that I wouldn’t want to cross that young woman, Catrin. She has controlled the anger about what happened to her, but it’s still down there in her gut. It burns particularly hard when it comes to men hurting women.”

  Virgil looked over at Mattsson. There had always been an aura of control about her. Even when she smiled, which she’d done a few times when they were sitting in Frankie’s hospital room, the smile seemed constrained by a permanent internal tension.

  “You’re telling me to be careful,” Virgil said.

  “I’m telling you to be careful for her,” Bill said. “There’s a violence inside her that might be looking for a way to get out.”

  “That’s true of a lot of cops,” Virgil said. “It might even be necessary.”

  —

  They heard the ambulance before they saw it, and a moment later it was in the driveway, lights flashing and siren wailing into the night, and the doctor and three nurses were going through the doors, led by an orderly pushing a gurney. The lights and siren quit and then an ancient Nissan huffed in behind the ambulance as the back doors on the ambulance popped open and they began moving Ramona Alvarez onto the gurney. An oxygen mask covered the bottom of her face and a gauze pad covered her forehead. A saline line was plugged into her arm.

  Sparkle had run out into the driveway and when Alvarez was lifted onto the gurney she could see the other woman’s face and she pressed her hands to the side of her own face and moaned, and Bill put her arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight.

  One of the paramedics was talking fast to the doctor, saying, “She drifted off, partway back, she comes and goes . . .”

  A burly Latino in a cotton plaid shirt and jeans had gotten out of the Nissan and was hurrying toward the gurney, and Virgil had time to think, Husband, when the man stepped past the gurney without looking at it, up to Sparkle, and with no warning, hit Sparkle in the face. She went down in a heap and Virgil went that way fast, with Mattsson a step behind, but Bill was behind the man and wrapped him up and lifted him off his feet and walked him away from Sparkle.

  As he did that, Bill turned his head to Virgil and said, “I got him, help Sparkle.”

  The Latino was a big guy, and he struggled, but Bill had clamped two heavy arms around him and carried him away. When they’d been skinny-dipping, Virgil noticed that Bill had some serious muscles. Now that was working for him, and nothing that the big man did got him loose.

  Sparkle tried to get to her hands and knees, but Mattsson knelt next to her and said, “Stay down, just turn over, let me look . . .”

  A nurse had come over and Virgil squatted and they all looked, and Sparkle’s eye was already starting to close and she sputtered, “It hurts . . .”

  The nurse pressed a cold compress against her forehead and cheekbone and said, “If you can stand up, we can get you inside . . .”

  The three of them helped Sparkle get to her feet and the nurse helped her get inside and Sparkle looked back at Virgil and Mattsson and said, “Don’t do anything to Leandro. Don’t do anything to him.”

  Bill had pushed the man into an inside corner of a wall, blocking his way out: he was talking to him quickly but quietly, and as Virgil and Mattsson walked up, the man reached out and touched Bill’s crucifix and Bill patted him on the shoulder and said something in Spanish.

  “We okay?” Virgil asked.

  “We are,” Bill said. “This is Leandro Cortez, Ramona’s husband. He told her not to take Sparkle into the plant, but she did anyway. He doesn’t know how the Castro people found out about Ramona, but they did, obviously. He thinks he’ll probably be fired tomorrow.”

  “No, he won’t,” Mattsson said. To Cortez: “What time do you go to work?”

  “Seven o’clock,” the man said, in heavily accented English.

  “I will see you there,” she said. And, “We should charge you with assault, which would get you thrown out of the country and probably banned for good, but Sparkle doesn’t want to do that. If she’s hurt bad, we’ll do it anyway. If she’s only got a black eye, we’ll probably let it go.”

  The man looked at Bill, who translated, and he nodded.

  “That woman, she says to Ramona nothing would happen . . .” Cortez looked close to crying, and Bill patted him on the shoulder again.

  “I’m sure this will work out,” Bill said. He said something more in Spanish, and the man nodded, and Bill said in English, “Let’s go see about Ramona.”

  —

  Inside, a nurse told them that Ramona’s vitals were being reviewed by the doctor, and then she’d be off to get a full-body scan. Bill explained that to Cortez in Spanish, and Mattsson a
sked Cortez exactly what had happened.

  With Bill translating, Cortez told them that they lived in an informal trailer park hidden away on a farm that supplied the Castro plant. Cortez had been watching a Cubs baseball game with a couple of friends in one trailer, while Alvarez was visiting with two other women at the other end of the park at a picnic table. The women were sitting outside, because the night was hot and most of the trailers didn’t have air-conditioning. The one where the men were watching the ball game did have air-conditioning, and the windows were closed.

  Which was why they didn’t immediately hear the women screaming, that and the ball game.

  According to Alvarez’s friends, a red pickup truck stopped a short distance away, maybe a hundred feet, and two men got out and walked into the park. That Alvarez should be sitting outside was an accident, but the men knew who they were looking for, recognized her, came directly to the table. Without a word, one of the men began hitting her, and then, when she was on the ground, kicking her. The other man faced off against Alvarez’s two female friends, blocking them from the assault.

  One of the women went running to get the men, and the two attackers jogged away, jumped into the truck, and tore off. By the time the men had run to the other end of the trailer park, the truck was gone. The attack had lasted maybe fifteen seconds.

  The two attackers, one of Alvarez’s friends told Cortez, wore Halloween masks, a man’s face. Nobody knew whose face.

  That was all he knew.

  —

  Mattsson said to Virgil, “Same guys. Wish I’d moved sooner.”

  “You needed the backup,” Virgil said. “You think we ought to check the trailer park first, see if we can get more details?”

  She shook her head: “We ought to move on this guy. Nail him down now.”

  “You’re leading on this,” Virgil said. “We’ll do it your way.”

  Mattsson nodded and said, “Let’s check on Sparkle. Make sure she’s okay.”

  Sparkle had taken a good shot to the eye, but no bones were broken. She’d have a shiner for a while, a nurse told them, but there wasn’t much to be done except to keep the cold compress on. “Me ’n’ Frankie sort of match now,” Sparkle said, looking into a mirror.

  Virgil nodded and said to Mattsson, “You ready?”

  “Yeah. Get your gun on,” Mattsson said.

  “Such a fascist impulse,” Virgil said. “But okay.”

  —

  Their first target for the night was Frederick Reeves, aka Slow Freddie.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s the blocker, not the hitter,” Mattsson told Virgil, as they left the hospital parking lot in Virgil’s truck. “Everybody says he’s a really big guy. Fat. The other guy, Blankenship, is built more like you. Tall and wiry, strong and mean.”

  The idea, they agreed, would be to get Reeves to roll over on his partner. “We know he’s scared of the lockup, like claustrophobia. We’re gonna have to lock him up for a while, but if he thinks we might lock him up for years, maybe he’ll talk about Blankenship. And maybe Castro.”

  “It’s Blankenship that we could get on DNA from the bite on the arm,” Virgil said.

  “Right. But we need a reason to serve a warrant on him. If we can even get Reeves to mention his name, we got him. That’s why we need to whisper in Reeves’s ear.”

  —

  Reeves lived in the town of St. Peter, a few miles north of Mankato, in a neighborhood of manufactured homes, which were exactly like single-wide trailers but with foundation skirts instead of wheels. The houses were all set end-on to the streets.

  The neighborhood was neatly kept, with lawn sheds outside many of the homes and a boat parked here and there. At one of the homes, a half-dozen people were sitting at a picnic table with a woman playing a guitar. Virgil’s window was open, and when they passed, they could hear the group singing what Virgil recognized as “Ablaze,” a Lutheran religious song. The darkness is deepest where there is no light. . . .

  “They sing that in my old man’s church, the youth group,” Virgil said.

  “Neat to hear it passing by,” Mattsson said. “You don’t hear much outside music anymore, except in malls. Elevator music.”

  —

  Reeves lived with his grandmother, Mattsson said. When they arrived at the address she had, they found a trailer that looked black in the night, but turned out to be navy blue when their headlights panned across it. There were lights on inside. A white pickup sat on the parking pad beside it, and Mattsson grunted, “Good. That’s his truck.”

  Virgil pulled in behind the truck, blocking it. With the end of the house just in front of it, there’d be no way for the truck to get out.

  “I’ll knock, if you want to stay back a bit,” Mattsson said. “Be more likely to open up for a woman.”

  “Okay.”

  The house had a two-step concrete stoop. Mattsson climbed the stoop and banged on the aluminum screen door; Virgil could hear TV voices inside. A moment later an elderly woman looked out through a hand-sized, diamond-shaped window, and the door rattled as she pulled it open, then cocked her head at Mattsson. “What?”

  “State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Mattsson said. “We need to talk to Fred Reeves.”

  The old woman was dressed from head to toe in black—a loose black sweatshirt and sweatpants and fleece-lined slippers. She had a cigarette hanging from her lower lip. She looked off to her right and said, “Fred! Cops want to talk to you. Get over here.”

  They heard some movement, then another door banged and Mattsson shouted at Virgil, “He’s gone out the back.”

  Virgil was already running, down the side of the house and around the back corner. There, probably forty feet away, a very large man was running toward the back corner of the neighboring house. Running slowly, like a tub of Jell-O with legs, though pumping his arms like a sprinter.

  Virgil caught him in five seconds between the neighboring house and the next one over, and employing a technique shown to him by Jenkins: instead of trying to stop the man, he simply ran slightly behind him, a couple of feet away, and spoke to him. “Not getting away, Fred. I run three miles every night; I can keep up with you running backward. Want to see me run backward and keep up? Look at this, Freddie, I’m running backward.”

  Virgil didn’t really run backward, but Reeves turned to look and stumbled, and finally stopped, bent to catch his breath, hands on his thighs, which was as far as he could bend; his pants rode down and his T-shirt up, exposing six inches of butt crack. Mattsson came up and said, “You should never have beat that woman up at night, Fred. Should have waited until it was light outside.”

  Reeves was breathing hard after his forty-yard sprint and gasped, “What?”

  Mattsson said, “See, if it was during the day, you could see some daylight. Now it’s gonna be a long time before you see daylight again, Freddie. Gonna lock your ass up and throw away the key. That Alvarez woman, looks like she could die.”

  “I never touched her,” Reeves said. “Honest to God, I was just standing there.”

  “Yeah, but you were there, you had to be Brad’s buddy,” Mattsson said. To Virgil: “Put the cuffs on him, Virgil. Airmail his bubble butt to Stillwater prison.”

  She went back to Reeves: “How much did Blankenship pay you, Fred? A hundred bucks? We hear old Castro gave him a grand to slap Ramona around. Did he give you half? Did you get your whole five hundred?”

  Reeves’s breathing had slowed and he stood up straight and said, “He didn’t get no grand. Who told you he got a grand? He said two hundred.”

  He was facing Mattsson and Virgil had stepped up close behind his shoulder with open cuffs in one hand. He caught Reeves’s left arm just above the elbow, but Reeves yanked it away and then snapped it back, with a lot more speed than Virgil had seen when he was running, and the quick heavy slap caught Virgil on the
chin and Virgil staggered backward, caught a heel, and fell on his butt. Reeves went right at Mattsson with two canned-ham-sized fists, and as Virgil pushed himself awkwardly back to his feet, Mattsson sidestepped and slapped at Reeves and Reeves fell down shouting, “Oww! Oww! Oww!”

  He was facedown in the dirt and Virgil sat on his back and with Mattsson’s help he bent his two arms together and cuffed them. Virgil caught one heavy arm and tried to help Reeves to his feet, but the huge man seemed disoriented and for a few seconds Virgil thought he might be having a heart attack or a stroke, but his eyes cleared and his mouth popped open and a thin stream of blood drizzled out.

  Mattsson knelt next to Reeves’s head and started the routine: “You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  —

  What happened there?” Virgil asked, when she finished. “Why’d he go down like that?”

  “Slapped him with mother’s little helper,” Mattsson said. She slipped a hand in her pocket and pulled out a flat leather-covered sap, nine inches long and an inch and a half wide. Virgil hadn’t seen one like it since his days as an army MP captain. “Don’t tell.”

  Virgil nodded. “Get him on his feet.”

  They got him up and Virgil asked him, “Where did you last see Blankenship?”

  “He dropped me off,” Reeves said. “Don’t know where he went. Probably down to the Waterhole. Don’t put me in jail.”

  “You think he only got two hundred?”

  “That’s what he said,” Reeves said. “C’mon, I’ll talk to you. Don’t put me in jail. I didn’t hit nobody.”

  “Gonna have to put you in jail for a while, but if you’re good, and you tell the truth about what happened, it might not be too long,” Mattsson said.

  The old woman came walking around the corner of the house, carrying a can of beer. “You taking him?”

  “Yeah,” Virgil said.

  “Come and bail me out, Grandma,” Reeves said.

  “Yeah, with what?” the woman asked. To Mattsson and Virgil she said, “He don’t get along so well in jail. You gotta tell the jail people that. If you leave him a belt, he’ll hang himself.”