Deadline

by John Sandford

  Johnson grumbled a bit, but he was worried about the other boat. He put them ashore two hundred yards down from where Laughton had landed, and said, “Just angle in right toward the beer sign. The track is straight as an arrow. Don’t get shot, it’s a long ride back to the clinic.”

  —

  SHRAKE AND VIRGIL climbed ten or twelve feet up the bank, found the end of the track. Virgil turned off the spotlight, which was way too bright, and they started following the track toward the clubhouse, staying ten or fifteen yards apart, moving slowly. They came to a circle of trees around a green, and Virgil said, “Find a place to take cover. I’m going to yell at him.”

  They squatted behind separate tree trunks, and Virgil shouted, “Vike! There’s no point! The Wisconsin cops are on the way! There’s no way out, we know all about the house in Tucson, you can’t go there. Give it up before you get killed—”

  Boom!

  Laughton, who’d been waiting by the corner of the clubhouse, fired in their direction, and Virgil thought he might have heard buckshot tearing through the trees twenty or thirty yards to his left.

  He heard Shrake move, and move fast, jogging hard to come in at the clubhouse from the back. Virgil went left thirty yards, found another tree, and shouted again. No response this time.

  He moved forward: there was an overhead pole light at the clubhouse, in addition to the beer sign, enough light to see by. He moved forward another thirty yards: at this range, if Laughton showed himself, Virgil could reach him with the shotgun. His phone dinged, and he slid down on his side and pulled it out of his pocket: a note from Shrake: “Now what?”

  Virgil texted back: “Wait just a bit, and I’ll start yelling again.”

  He never had the chance.

  —

  TEN SECONDS LATER, there was another Boom! but from some distance away. Virgil shouted, “Shrake, don’t shoot me, I’m coming in.”

  He started running toward the clubhouse, and saw Shrake come in out of the dark and peek around the corner. Down toward what appeared to be the entrance road, under another pole light, they could see a yellow corrugated metal shed.

  “Must be a maintenance—” Shrake began.

  A moment later, Laughton rolled under the light, and then out the exit driveway, away from them, driving a golf cart.

  “You gotta be shittin’ me,” Shrake said.

  They both began running after the golf cart, which had two tiny taillights. They saw the lights make a turn to the left, apparently out at the road, and Virgil shouted, “You follow, I’m going to try to cut across and see if I can catch him that way.”

  Shrake grunted and Virgil broke away, running left as hard as he could, up a fairway distinguishable by starlight. The fairway was lined by trees and, Virgil suspected, a fence to separate it from the road. Before he got to the fence, he saw Laughton coming down the road—Virgil wasn’t close enough to stop him, but he hit Laughton in the face with the jacklight and saw him swerve to the far side of the road, blinded, putting a hand up against the light. Laughton passed in front of him, and on down the road, and Virgil kept him pinned in the light, watching for Laughton’s shotgun, and chased after him with no hope of catching up.

  He went through the tree line, found the fence, clambered over, went down into a ditch and up the other side in time to see Shrake coming, in another golf cart.

  Virgil shouted at him, and Shrake slowed just enough to get Virgil onboard, and Shrake said, “Get your gun out, we’re faster than he is. We’re catching him.”

  They were running alongside the golf course, which stretched between the river and the road. Virgil could see the taillights on Laughton’s vehicle no more than a hundred and fifty yards ahead.

  “Shoot one up beside him,” Shrake suggested.

  The golf cart had a Plexiglas windshield, but Shrake poked it a couple times with the heel of his hand and it folded down, and Virgil aimed unsteadily off to one side of the other golf cart and fired.

  They saw the tiny taillights swerve, maybe off the road, because it bumped hard a couple times, and they gained another thirty yards, and Shrake said, “Try that again. See if you can bounce it off the road behind him.”

  Virgil fired again, and this time the other golf cart swerved hard left and went down into the ditch.

  “Got him,” Shrake said.

  “He’s got that shotgun,” Virgil said, and they pulled off sideways and got out, and Virgil shouted, “Vike, give it up.”

  They heard him moving like a bear through the ditch. Virgil pinned him with the light again, as they ran forward, ready to shoot, but Laughton did a somersault over the fairway fence and they ran after him. Shrake said, “I think he lost the gun.”

  Then came a strangled shriek from the golf course, and silence.

  —

  THEY CROSSED the fence and spread apart, moving slowly now, up a mound . . .

  The mound was the top of a sand trap. In the brilliant illumination of Virgil’s jacklight, they found Laughton spread-eagled in the white sand below. He’d run right off the top of the sand trap, and had fallen in, maybe ten feet straight down, into fine white river sand.

  Virgil ran around the trap, keeping the muzzle of the gun out in front of him, and asked, “You alive in there?”

  “Heart attack. I’m having a heart attack,” Laughton groaned.

  “Really?” Virgil asked.

  “Oh, God, don’t let me suffer. Shoot me.”

  “Could happen,” Virgil said. “You’ve got two shotguns pointed at your head.” He moved quickly around to Shrake and whispered, “Cuff his hands in front of him. We’re going to run him back to the boats, evacuate him to the clinic.”

  Shrake whispered, “Why not just call an ambulance? He’s faking, anyway.”

  Virgil whispered, “Because then he’ll be in Minnesota. And what if he’s not faking?”

  So they climbed down into the trap, and Virgil said, “Think about the shotguns,” and he put his aside and helped Laughton roll over. Shrake stepped in with the cuffs, and Laughton groaned again, “It hurts so bad. This is the end.”

  Shrake ran the cuffs under Laughton’s belt, and Virgil got out of the trap and waved the light in a circle. “Johnson! Johnson! Over here!”

  Johnson shouted back, and, following the light, arrived a minute later, breathing hard, and asked, “What?”

  “We have to evacuate Vike to the clinic. He’s having a heart attack. You guys get his body, I’ll get his legs.”

  “Call an ambulance,” Laughton said.

  “Not enough time. Time is critical,” Virgil said.

  They picked Laughton up, and Johnson said, “Jesus, wide load, huh?” and they carried him three hundred yards, across two fairways and down the embankment where Johnson had tied up the boats. Laughton bitched every inch of the way: “It’s killing me. You’re killing me. Oh, God, I’m hurt . . .”

  Virgil was almost, but not quite, convinced when they lowered him into the boat. Johnson and Shrake got in the boat with him, and Virgil followed in the second boat, and Virgil called the sheriff’s department and asked that an ambulance meet them at the marina.

  Again, Virgil thought what a nice night it was, out on the river. The towboat passed in front of them, throwing out a healthy wake, which they rode up and over, and then they rolled on into the marina, where two paramedics were waiting. Shrake rode in the ambulance with them, so he could manage the handcuffs, and also shake Laughton down to make sure he had no more weapons.

  Virgil and Johnson tied off the two boats, and Johnson said he’d call their owners with an explanation. “What I want to know is, who’s going to pay for my boat?”

  “Your boat was a piece of shit,” Virgil said. “I do mean was. Right now it wouldn’t even make a good petunia planter. Had more holes in it than a fuckin’ colander. Looked like some kinda industrial sp
rinkler head. Looked—”

  “Okay, okay,” Johnson said. “But somebody’s gonna pay.”

  They walked back down the dark lane to the cabin, and Virgil went inside and washed his face and hands, while Johnson counted holes in his boat. “They picked it up and dragged it over here and used it as a fuckin’ armored duck blind,” Johnson said. “You were the duck.”

  —

  AT THE CLINIC, they found that both Jenkins and Jennifer 1 were on their way to Rochester, the nearest surgical hospital. The doc at the clinic told them that Jenkins had a buckshot lodged in his calf, and it might take a little surgery to remove it. Jennifer Barns needed to be cleaned up and repaired, and it would be some time before she’d be sitting up again.

  Laughton had probably faked the heart attack, although the doc said, “Sometimes stress can give you chest pains that aren’t related directly to the heart. I understand he was under quite a bit of stress lately.”

  Shrake said, “Not as much as he’s gonna be.”

  Johnson: “Not much of a Viking, was he? More like a, more like a, more like . . .”

  “A sissy,” Shrake offered.

  “Yes,” Johnson said. “Like that.”

  27

  VIRGIL CALLED DAVENPORT from the hospital: “We’re all back in Minnesota. We might have a little legal whoop-de-do, because we had the guy, and we were gonna hold him for the Wisconsin authorities, but he claimed he was having a heart attack, so we evacuated him to the nearest clinic . . . which was back across the river, here in Minnesota.”

  “Did he have a heart attack?” Davenport asked.

  “They’re not sure, but they think not,” Virgil said. “At the end of the chase, he fell in a golf course sand trap. I think he was mostly embarrassed.” Virgil gave him a succinct summation of the shoot-out and chase.

  “Let the legal guys sort it out. Maybe we’ll have to drive him back over, then extradite him. Who cares? I talked to Jenkins, on the way up to the Mayo. He’s pissed.”

  “I hope his leg’s not bad.”

  “It’s not. He’ll be off his feet for a day or two. Weather says anytime you’ve got a bullet-like object penetrating into a muscle, it’s not something you want to take lightly.”

  “Especially if it’s your heart muscle,” Virgil said. “I’ll stop and see him on the way home. We got a mountain of paperwork to do, and he can do that sitting down. Right now, I’ve got to look at a movie.”

  “You found the chip?”

  “Yup. Will Bacon left it where I could find it. Couldn’t believe it,” Virgil said. “He must’ve been up on that ladder when Kerns walked in—he knew what was going to happen, and instead of freezing up, he kept thinking.”

  “Good for him. Goddamnit, makes you proud.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  —

  PURDY SHOWED UP at the clinic, and Virgil outlined what had happened, and said he’d be down to the sheriff’s office in the morning to make a full statement. Purdy said they’d chain Laughton to his bed: “That boy ain’t goin’ nowhere. We’ll truss him up like an Easter ham.”

  Virgil, Johnson, and Shrake stopped at Tony’s for a six-pack of Leinenkugel’s and an everything pizza, then drove back to Johnson’s cabin, where Johnson bitched and moaned about the boat until he had a mouthful of pizza, and Virgil fired up his laptop and plugged in the memory card.

  The sound was tinny—it’d get better with decent speakers—but the picture was very clear, and about the time Jennifer Barns, she of the butt wound, said, “I think we’re in the clear—I talked to the fire chief, and he said there’d be no way to recover the records. I made out like it was a disaster, but told him we’d figure out a way to live through it,” they had them.

  “As long as that fuckin’ Flowers moves along,” Kerns said, as they watched.

  “Flowers can think anything he wants, but if he doesn’t have the records to prove it, we should be fine,” Barns said. “Just keep our heads down and our mouths shut.”

  “Unless they catch Buster,” said Jennifer Gedney. “He knew where the money was coming from. I mean, I didn’t tell him, but he knew.”

  Kerns said, “If we have to, we handle Buster the same way we handled Conley. The same way we handle anyone who talks.”

  “I think we’ve done enough killing,” said Henry Hetfield. “More killing will just get more attention.”

  —

  “WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you saw something like that?” Shrake asked. “I mean, like, never?”

  The camera had been movement- and voice-activated, and at the end of the recording, the camera shook and then a man’s voice said, “Bacon. Get down out of there!”

  Bacon: “Randy. What’s up?”

  Kerns: “That’s a camera, right? Get down out of there, you asshole. Bring the camera.”

  Bacon: “I . . . I . . . sure . . . Just a minute, I have to unwrap the tape. The camera belongs to Virgil Flowers, Randy. He’s on his way here, he’ll be here in the next minute or so. He’s gonna be really pissed—”

  Kerns: “Get down that fuckin’ ladder and bring that fuckin’ camera, or I swear to God I’ll blow your legs off.”

  Bacon muttered, almost under his breath, but loud enough to be heard by the recorder: “Hurry, Virgil. Hurry.”

  What may have been a hand crossed close in front of the lens, and then there was a flash of electronic noise—the card being unplugged—and the video ended.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Shrake said.

  Virgil sat frozen. “I killed that guy.”

  Johnson said, “No, you didn’t. Randy Kerns did. Don’t go taking on any extra blame, if you don’t have to. You can go crazy doing that.”

  Virgil said, “I hurried, but I was just too far away. I should have told him to wait for me.”

  “When you got out of the truck, to go in the school, did you have your gun with you? I mean, before you had to break that window out?” Shrake asked.

  “No, I had to go back for the gun.”

  “Which means that if Bacon had waited for you, and you’d gone right in . . . Kerns would have killed both of you, instead of just killing Bacon. You didn’t fuck up, Virgil: you just got crazy unlucky with the timing.”

  —

  THEY WERE STILL talking it over when headlights flashed in the side yard. Shrake and Virgil got their shotguns, and Johnson unlocked and raised a side window and shouted through the screen, “Who’s there?”

  A man called back, “Henry Hetfield and Del Cray. We’re looking for Agent Flowers.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We have some information we think he needs. About the school board,” Hetfield shouted back.

  Johnson looked at Virgil, who shrugged. Johnson shouted back, “Too late, dickhead.”

  “Wait, this is important. We gotta talk.”

  Virgil shouted back, “Oh, all right. Come on in. But we’ve got two shotguns and a .45, and at this short distance, they’d take off your heads. You understand that?”

  “Please don’t shoot us. . . .”

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, Virgil met Dave the lawyer at Ma and Pa’s Kettle, gave him some headphones and plugged him into the video of the school board meeting. Dave ate bacon and French toast, and drank Bloody Marys, and watched, fascinated, as it all came out.

  “Not gonna wait,” he said, when the video ended and he’d pulled off the earphones. “We’re gonna bust them all. Now, today.”

  “We’ve also got a couple of direct witnesses for you,” Virgil said, and he told him about Henry Hetfield and Del Cray from the night before.

  “What’d you promise them?”

  “Not a goddamn thing,” Virgil said. “I’ve got it on a voice recorder, me not promising them anything. I told them that I’d mention it to the judge, that they’d made a voluntary statement to
me. That’s all on a flash drive,” Virgil said. He slid the flash drive across the table.

  “This almost takes the fun out of it,” Dave grumbled. “We don’t have to negotiate, we don’t have to argue with anyone, we don’t have to do any real serious lawyer shit. A law student could convict them.”

  Virgil told him about their hasty export of Vike Laughton from Wisconsin to Minnesota. “Well, that’s something,” Dave said, brightening a bit. “Those Cheeseheads can get a little testy about such things. Gonna have to look up the precise Latin phrase that means ‘Fuck off.’”

  —

  THE ROUNDUP STARTED at one o’clock. Dave had spent some time talking to the attorney general, who’d sent down a stack of warrants specifying a list of crimes that included murder, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder (the ambush at the cabin), a variety of charges involving assault on police officers and conspiracy to do the same, embezzlement, and a bunch of other stuff, including, as a garnish, charges of misprision of a felony against everybody. “That’ll get them an extra two weeks on top of the thirty years,” Dave said with satisfaction. “We’ll go for consecutive sentences.”

  Jennifer Gedney wept. “I don’t have any money, I don’t have any money. How can you say I took money, when I don’t have any money. . . . Is that a TV camera?”

  Bob Owens also wept, and kept saying, “Everything I worked for. Everything I worked for. Who’ll take care of the kids?”

  “You were stealing from the kids, you miserable ratfucker,” said Shrake, who was putting on the cuffs. “Excuse me—I mean, you miserable ratfucker, sir.”

  Larry Parsons shouted at them, ran back through his house, and tried to squeeze out the bedroom window, but a couple of deputies got him by the feet and pulled him back in, so Virgil could arrest him. Shrake had gone with a couple more deputies to serve the arrest warrants on Jennifer Barns, at the hospital in Rochester, who screamed, “You can’t do this, I’m wounded. I’ll sue everybody. Those criminals shot me last night. I’ll sue!”

  Vike Laughton hadn’t said anything. He’d just waved his free hand at them, from his hospital bed, and turned his face away, the cuff on his other hand rattling against the bedframe. He had a bad case of sand-burn on his face, and especially his nose.