Deadline

by John Sandford

  Henry Hetfield and Del Cray were calm enough: they’d known since the night before what was coming, and since Virgil had arrested them and stuck them in the Buchanan County jail, they’d had time to think about it. Both of their houses were raided for evidence. Cray’s wife and two children were gone, and so were quite a few things in the house, including the memory foam cover on the king-sized bed. A neighbor said they’d rolled out of their driveway the evening before, towing a large U-Haul trailer behind the newer of the Crays’ two trucks.

  With a little speed to keep her going, she could be in Canada or Alabama or Montana or Pennsylvania. Dave said they’d look for her.

  Jennifer Houser was simply gone.

  —

  DAVENPORT CALLED and said, “You still on vacation? Or are you ready to go back to work?”

  “I will be on Monday,” Virgil said. “I got one more thing to do on Saturday.” And, “How’s Del?”

  “Messed up. He might need another op, there were some bone splinters from his pelvic bone that bounced all over the place.”

  “Maybe he’ll retire.”

  “His wife wants him to,” Davenport said. “We’ll see. I can’t believe he could get through life without hanging out on the street, talking to assholes.”

  “It’s like a curse,” Virgil said.

  “Listen, do what you’re gonna do on Saturday, but don’t get hurt, and don’t get anybody else hurt. Then on Monday, a kind of peculiar thing has come up out in Windom. . . . “

  28

  SATURDAY MORNING DAWNED bright but humid; there’d been just enough rain overnight to create a few muddy spots outside the cabin door. The river was looking as dark as it usually did, snaking along toward New Orleans, but the sun was coming up orange over the rain clouds, which were drifting across to Wisconsin.

  Virgil was up at seven, and at seven-thirty, met Johnson Johnson at Shanker’s for breakfast, which they shared with four couples and a bald old man who’d be following them over to Dillard’s farm. The farm was twenty-odd miles directly west, as the crow flies. If the crow was driving a 4Runner, the distance was around thirty-six miles, right on the border of Buchanan and Fillmore counties.

  Noting that as they worked out a route on a paper map, Johnson said, “Two of the worst presidents in the history of the United States, Buchanan and Fillmore.”

  Virgil said, “I didn’t know you read history, Johnson.”

  Johnson said, “Well, that was in the ‘local information’ in the old Buchanan County Yellow Pages. But, you know, I’m not a complete ignoramus.”

  “I told somebody that, recently, but she disagreed, and eventually talked me around.”

  “Thanks, old buddy,” Johnson said. He yawned, stretched, and said, “I probably lost five pounds this past couple of weeks, running around with you. Maybe I ought to write a diet book: The Virgil Flowers Weight-Loss Plan. Start by leaving your gun in the truck. . . .”

  Virgil leaned across the table and asked, in a near-whisper, “When you said a posse was coming with us, you meant four couples in four trucks, and one old guy with a missing tooth?”

  “Maybe somebody else will show up,” Johnson said. His eyes slid sideways, and Virgil detected a likely prevarication.

  “You lying motherfucker, Johnson, what have you done?”

  “Not a fuckin’ thing,” he said. “I’m completely innocent.”

  “Your mom told me that you were a difficult baby,” Virgil said. “You haven’t been innocent since you were a half hour old.”

  “Fuck you. And Mom,” Johnson said. “She always liked Mercury better.”

  —

  THE WORD WAS that the dog roundup was scheduled to start at eight o’clock, when bunchers from Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota would open for business at Dillard’s farm, which also held occasional farm equipment auctions. Johnson had learned that to prevent disputes, no dogs would be sold even a minute before nine o’clock, although the dogs would be available for survey before then. Dillard was expecting upwards of three hundred dogs. A few would be sold as hunting dogs, most as lab dogs, and “trash” would be handled by Dillard.

  “That’s what he called them,” Johnson Johnson said. “Trash. Is that anything to call a dog? They’re man’s best friend. And when he said ‘handling them,’ you know what he’s gonna do? He’s gonna shoot them, is what I think.”

  A little after eight, they were in their trucks. Virgil was alone in his, because Johnson wanted to take his own truck in case he had to haul some dogs back, and Virgil, with any luck, would have D. Wayne Sharf handcuffed to the steel ring in the backseat of the 4Runner. The little caravan stretched out over a half-mile, with Virgil in the lead.

  The drive was pleasant enough, rolling along the back highways, none of them straight, listening to country music on satellite radio. They were still in the Driftless Area, with heavily wooded hills overhanging small farms and narrow farm fields that twisted up the hillsides, the small farmhouses neat and usually white, with gardens and fruit trees and older cars parked in side yards.

  They arrived at Dillard’s farm at eight forty-five. There were three larger trucks and a dozen pickups, some with trailers, already parked in a field that stretched along the gravel road, between the road and a dry creek a hundred yards downslope. Except for the barking of several hundred dogs, it might have been the beginning of some low-rent hippie music festival.

  A few pickups and SUVs were parked on the shoulder of the road. Virgil pulled off behind them, and his caravan pulled off with him. He’d already asked them not to get out of their trucks until he’d spotted D. Wayne Sharf, just in case Sharf should recognize any of them. They’d all agreed, with a little bitching from the Bald Old Man with One Tooth, who, Virgil had been told, was looking for a stolen dachshund named Dixie.

  Virgil had asked Johnson, “Is he sure it was stolen? Maybe it was eaten by coyotes.”

  “Coyotes don’t eat dachshunds,” Johnson said. “Dachshunds were bred to go down badger tunnels and drag the badgers out by their ass. A good-sized dachshund could weigh thirty pounds and has jaws like a crocodile. Old Dixie would straight-out fuck up a coyote.”

  “Didn’t know that,” Virgil said.

  —

  WHEN VIRGIL HAD PARKED, he looked over the trucks parked in the field. D. Wayne Sharf’s wasn’t there, unless Sharf had changed vehicles, which was possible. Virgil knew what he looked like, and so climbed out of his 4Runner, wandered over to the driveway and down to the sales field. Fifteen or twenty guys were standing beside their vehicles, drinking from Big Gulp cups or steel coffee cups, and talking with each other, country-looking guys in jeans and boots and long-sleeved shirts.

  Most of the trucks and trailers were small, but three larger trucks, pulling larger trailers, showed stacks of empty cages with hard floors and wire sides: they were the bunchers, Virgil guessed. A red-faced older man in jeans, a rodeo belt, and cowboy boots and hat was talking to the men by the bunchers’ trucks. He had a sheaf of papers in his hands, and Virgil thought he was probably Dillard, the farm owner.

  Virgil wandered down the line of trucks, looking at the men and peering through windows. He didn’t find Sharf, but he got a bad impression about the handling of the dogs: a lot of the pens had three or four animals stuffed inside, so they could hardly move. He saw one dog he thought was either sick or dead.

  He’d just finished his initial survey when a couple more trucks arrived, both pulling trailers. One trailer was covered, but the other was open, stacked with wooden and fiberglass pens full of dogs, like chickens being hauled away for slaughter. The truck with the open trailer, an aging red GMC, rolled down the line of early arrivals and wedged itself into an opening in the line. It was not D. Wayne Sharf’s truck, but it was D. Wayne Sharf who got out of the passenger side.

  The driver was a young, thin man, who might’ve been Roy Zorn’s younge
r brother: same red hair and freckles, a nose that somebody had pushed out of line, aviator sunglasses. Sharf was dressed like everybody else, with cowboy boots, got out and yawned and walked down the side of the trailer, looking up at the dogs. The freckled guy joined him, and pointed at something at the top of the pile of cages: they were talking about unloading.

  Virgil ambled toward them; he didn’t want to startle Sharf. He’d closed the gap to twenty yards when he noticed that his caravan was rolling down the driveway into the parking area. Actually, he thought, they were blocking the driveway. Johnson got out of the lead truck, and Virgil saw that he was talking on a cell phone—but he wasn’t talking to Virgil.

  Whatever . . .

  Virgil started walking toward Sharf again, when somebody asked, “What the heck is this?”

  Virgil looked where he was looking—and saw another caravan of cars, probably thirty or forty of them, rolling over the hill. He looked toward Johnson, and Johnson was looking at them, too, and still talking on the cell phone.

  Now everybody was looking, and the caravan pulled to the side of the road, further blocking exit from the farm field.

  Somebody nearby said, “They aren’t here to sell dogs.”

  “Hey, those are TV trucks.”

  Two white trucks with television call signs swerved off the road, and cameramen got out, already hoisting cameras to their shoulders.

  Somebody else started shouting, “Hey, Arnie? Arnie Dillard? You better come look at this.”

  Virgil knew that Dillard’s first name was Arnie, but he wasn’t sure that Arnie could fix whatever was about to happen. People, lots of them, probably eighty or ninety, were climbing out of the cars and trucks. Most of them were empty-handed, but right in the middle of the caravan, twelve or fifteen women got out of five or six SUVs. They were dressed identically, in black jeans, black shirts, and black bicycle or motorcycle helmets, some with face plates. Some wore knee pads or football shoulder pads. Most of them carried aluminum baseball bats; two or three carried iron bars that looked like spears.

  Another voice, close by: “Oh, shit.”

  Virgil turned and asked, “What?”

  “It’s the Auntie Vivians.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The Minnesota Women’s Anti-Vivisection League. I’m gettin’ the fuck outa here.” And the guy started running. He turned back just long enough to blurt, “Save yourself.”

  —

  VIRGIL WASN’T SURE what movie it was, but he remembered a scene in which a medieval Scottish army attacked an English army, the Scots sweeping down a long grassy hillside with swords, axes, hammers, spears, and apparently whatever else they had in their barns. This was sort of like that. The people got out of the trucks and looked back and forth, calling to each other, spreading out, and some of them were shouting down the hill to where Virgil and the dog sellers were. The women in the helmets moved to the front of the long line, a wedge of them, and then one of them screamed, and then all of them screamed, and suddenly the line broke and the whole crowd charged down the hill, led by the women with aluminum baseball bats.

  Virgil thought of running out in front of the wedge with his arms raised, and his ID in his hand, but only for a split second: somebody would hit him with a baseball bat, and that would be that. He also thought about pulling his pistol and firing a shot in the air, but his pistol, as usual, was locked in the truck’s gun safe.

  In the end, he ran around behind the truck he was standing next to, then down the line of trucks to where he’d seen D. Wayne Sharf a few seconds before the charge. Truck engines were coming alive when he ran around the nose of a Ford Super Duty pulling a twenty-foot trailer stacked with animal crates, just in time to see D. Wayne jump in the passenger seat of the truck he’d come in.

  Virgil ran up and yanked open the door and said, “D. Wayne, you’re under arrest—”

  That was as far as he got before D. Wayne hit him on the forehead with a half-empty two-liter plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper. Virgil went down, and D. Wayne slammed the door and Virgil rolled away, staggered to his feet, and jumped on the fender over the trailer’s double wheels, and held on to two of the stacked crates. Inside one of the crates, a half-dozen small dogs were rolling around on the hard plastic crate floor as the truck driver wheeled around the end of the line of trucks; in the other crate, a big yellow dog with floppy ears looked out at him with interest.

  About then, the driver found out that there was no place to go. He went anyway, bouncing over what had been a fairly decent alfalfa field, trying to stay away from the crowd that was spreading out over the pasture.

  The dog sellers looked like a tough bunch, and there were certainly a few guns in the various vehicles, but they were outnumbered four or five to one, and as Virgil clung to the dog crate, he saw a woman run alongside a fleeing truck and spear the back tire with one of the long iron rods.

  The tire blew, and the back of the truck sagged; farther down the field, the driver of one of the trucks had been pulled out into the alfalfa, and part of the crowd swarmed over his trailer, unloading the dog crates onto the ground, opening the doors and freeing the dogs, which ran in excited circles, howling and barking.

  One truck driver tried to break through the fence, but the fence hadn’t been made in Hollywood. He dragged a few fence posts loose, but the fence didn’t break and the truck wound up nose-down in the border ditch, where it was swarmed by attackers.

  Virgil thought about jumping off the trailer, fearing that it would roll on him, but the driver made a turn and then a woman in a motorcycle helmet was running alongside, and she speared one of the front truck wheels, and Virgil heard it go out with a POOF-WOP-WOP, and then she got the back one POOF-WOP-WOP-WOP, and the truck began to stall out and parts of the crowd began running toward it.

  Virgil jumped off the fender and ran to the passenger-side door, but got there a few seconds late: a woman with an aluminum baseball bat knocked out the window, then took a swing at Virgil, who shouted, “I’m a cop, I’m a cop,” and she hesitated and asked, “Virgil?” and he shouted, “Yes,” and she ran away.

  Behind the broken glass, D. Wayne Sharf was peering out at them, and Virgil shouted, “You’re under arrest. Open the fuckin’ door.”

  “Fuck you,” Sharf shouted back. He turned toward the driver and looked like he might try to crawl over him, but Virgil reached through the shattered window and got him by the shirt collar and dragged him all the way back to the window and shouted, “Open the fuckin’ door or I’ll drag you right through the broken glass.”

  Sharf twisted and turned and couldn’t get free, then cut himself on the window, and on the next pass, got blood on his hand and finally screamed, “Okay. Okay.”

  Virgil heard a woman shouting, “That’s Virgil, that’s Virgil,” and the truck was rocking as the attackers crawled over it, breaking every piece of glass they could find, breaking out headlights and taillights and knocking off mirrors, while others began unloading the dog crates and freeing the dogs.

  There were a half-dozen dog brawls going on around the pasture, the dogs howling and barking with excitement, gathering in crowds to prance across the alfalfa, and stopping to mark various lumps and humps and truck tires.

  Then D. Wayne popped the door locks and Virgil had him out of the truck and on the ground, and he rolled the other man on his back, dragged him fifteen or twenty feet to a perimeter fence post, and cuffed him and said, “You’re in a whole lot of trouble. Don’t make it worse by breaking out of these cuffs and trying to run.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” D. Wayne whined. The woman with the aluminum bat ran up and asked, “You got him?”

  “Yeah, this is the guy who stole all the dogs in Trippton. He’s going to try to get out of these cuffs. I’ve got to try to stop this mess.” Virgil waved at the field, where two pickups now lay on their sides, and a bunch of large men were standin
g in a circle, facing a crowd of attackers, and one of the men appeared to be holding a shotgun. Virgil said to the woman, “So if he tries to escape, use the bat and break his legs. Not his head, just his legs. Okay?”

  “I can do that,” she said. She waved the bat at D. Wayne, who shrank back into the fence.

  Virgil started running down toward the man with the gun, just about the time the man pointed the shotgun up in the air and fired a shot. BOOM! Twelve-gauge.

  In the sudden silence after the gunshot, Virgil was shouting, “Stop! Stop! Everybody stop!”

  One of the women in the crowd shouted, “That’s one! Two more shots and we put ropes around your necks. Somebody get the ropes.”

  One of the men in the circle broke out, running across the pasture, and nobody chased him, but the crowd pressed the circle tighter, and the two TV cameramen, who turned out to be camerawomen, were riding on the shoulders of two men, getting the cameras up in the air, and then Virgil got there, shouting, “State police. State police. Put the gun down, put the gun down.”

  The man with the gun, who had the muzzle still pointing in the air, shouted back, “They’re gonna lynch us—”

  Virgil shouted, “No, no, no . . . Move that way.” He pointed toward the far end of the field, and then, “Everybody else, everybody else, go that way.” He pointed the other way. “Take care of the dogs, take care of the dogs, the dogs are freaking out.”

  Most of the dogs seemed pretty happy: there were now dozens of them, even hundreds, of every color and size, racing around the field, in celebration.

  That got the dog rescuers looking away from the circle, and the two groups pulled apart, and when the circle of men, including the guy with the shotgun, were moving down the field, Virgil shouted to them, “Listen! Listen! We don’t want anybody to get killed. You’ve all got insurance on your trucks, you can get them fixed, these people . . . just let them go.”