Deadline

by John Sandford

  One of the men, white-faced, scared but angry, said, “If you’re a cop, go arrest them.”

  Everybody stopped and looked at him, and Virgil looked back down the field, where dozens of people were either freeing dogs or beating the hell out of the trucks. One of the big trucks, the buncher truck, went over on its side, and the other was rocking.

  He turned back to the group and said, “Tell me what to do. Huh? What the hell am I supposed to do? You guys stay here. Sooner or later, you’ll get back to your trucks. Some of those people, you saw it yourself, weren’t afraid of your gun. They’re willing to be martyrs, if you’re willing to go to prison for murder. And, tell the truth, I’d hate to think of what they’d do to you guys if you shot one of them. So calm down and stay here, and I’ll try to get everybody I can out of here alive.”

  —

  VIRGIL JOGGED AWAY from them. People were still beating up the trucks, but four of them had brought down a roll of fencing and a dozen tall stakes, and were setting up an impromptu pen in the center of the field. Virgil had to walk close to them, so he swerved over and asked, “Who are you guys?”

  “Buchanan County Humane Society. We’re all legal here, we’re just seizing distressed and stolen dogs, the ones we can get inside the fence.”

  “God bless you,” Virgil said.

  —

  VIRGIL CONTINUED WALKING toward the last of the trucks that were still being unloaded. As the attackers finished the unloading process, they’d unhitch the trailers and turn both the trucks and trailers over on their sides. Virtually everybody was now wearing bandannas over their faces, and the TV camerawomen and a couple of Big Hairs were interviewing the raiders.

  Johnson Johnson, who would have been unmistakable for his tattooed arms even if he hadn’t been wearing a black bandanna, came jogging up and said, “I hope you’re not pissed.”

  “Get away from me, fuckhead.”

  Johnson veered away.

  The yellow dog, the same one that Virgil had seen in the crate, came loping up and sniffed his knee, and then fell in beside him. Virgil said, “Go away. Shoo.”

  The dog looked up at him and stuck its tongue out, and hung next to his knee as Virgil got into the heart of the crowd and shouted, “Hey! Everybody! You’ve made the point. These dogs are gonna die out here if they run off and hide and we don’t find them. So start herding them up to the Humane Society pen while we’ve still got them here.”

  That got the crowd interested in something besides wrecking the trucks, although one more truck went over onto its side, and then ten or twelve people cooperated in rolling it over onto its roof. The roof flattened a bit, and oil and other fluids began dripping out from under the upside-down hood.

  “Did you just have to do that one more?” Virgil asked. “Did you just have to do that?”

  “Yeah, we did,” said a man behind a red cowboy mask.

  Virgil asked, “Winky? Did you get your dogs back?”

  Winky said, “Yup. I owe you big, Virgil. Carol wants to have you over for dinner.”

  —

  A WOMAN’S SMALL HAND slipped into Virgil’s back pocket, and Virgil turned and found Daisy Jones smiling up at him. “Virgil Flowers. My, my, my. Did you organize this shindig all by your little ol’ self?”

  “I would arrest everybody here, including you, if I could,” Virgil said.

  Virgil and Jones had known each other for years: she was a smart, good-looking if slightly tattered TV reporter from the Twin Cities. She gave the yellow dog a scratch on the forehead and, “Nice dog you got there.”

  “Not mine,” Virgil said.

  “Have you arrested anybody?” she asked.

  “Yes, I have,” Virgil said. “I’ve arrested D. Wayne Sharf, on a variety of state and federal charges. He is now handcuffed to that fence over there.”

  “Guarded by the lady with the baseball bat?”

  “Yes. Somebody had to guard him, while I tried to stop the shooting,” Virgil said.

  “That was very brave of you, Virgil. It makes me feel all funny inside.”

  “Daisy, a machine screw makes you feel all funny inside.”

  “That’s rude.”

  “Yes. It is. I apologize. Now. For your TV station, if you want it, you can say I arrested D. Wayne Sharf. You can say that many of the dogs here were stolen, and that the actions of the crowd were illegal, but sorting it out here, by myself, with no help, was simply impractical. I will be turning this investigation over to the Buchanan County attorney’s office for possible criminal prosecutions. That’s all I got.”

  She leaned closer, so that he could smell the Chanel: “Could you tell me, is there any one person here who’d be best to interview?”

  Virgil pointed out Johnson, who was still wearing the stupid mask: “That’s the ringleader.”

  “Ooo. He has big muscles.”

  “He’s a simple country boy, Daisy. Go easy on him.”

  —

  A SHERIFF’S CAR rolled up on the road, and a single deputy got out. Virgil walked across the field toward him, the yellow dog right at his knee, and the deputy came to meet him and said, “Virgil. Uh, what’s up?”

  Virgil turned and looked at the field. The dognapper crowd and the bunchers were in a bunch at one end, and were a tough-looking, mmm . . . bunch. The raiders were at the other end, trying to herd loose dogs across the alfalfa. Scattered among them were a dozen overturned trucks and trailers, and a few more still on their wheels. Even those on their wheels had been pounded like brass ashtrays, and none of them showed glass or rearview mirrors.

  “Well . . . what can I say?” Virgil waved a hand at the field.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I’ve got a federal prisoner I’ve got to haul back to Trippton,” Virgil said. “As for these people . . . I think, well, hell, go ahead and arrest them.”

  “What?”

  “They busted up all these trucks.” He pointed to the circle of men at the far end of the field. “Arrest them, too. A lot of the dogs are stolen.”

  The deputy looked up and down the field and then said, “I would estimate—don’t hold me to this exactly—if I arrested these people, the sheriff would lose the next election by about ninety to ten.”

  “Do what you think is right,” Virgil said. “I’m going back to town.”

  The deputy looked at the yellow dog and said, “That’s a great dog. Wish I had one like that.”

  “Not mine,” Virgil said. “You ought to see if you could herd him back to the pen. If nobody claims him, maybe you could adopt him.”

  The deputy stepped toward the dog, which shied away and moved closer to Virgil. “I’ll let you handle it,” the deputy said. “But I think he’s your dog.”

  —

  VIRGIL GOT D. Wayne Sharf in the backseat of the 4Runner, thanked the woman with the aluminum bat, who said, “Maybe I should break his legs anyway,” and Virgil said, “No, that’s okay,” and cuffed Sharf to the ringbolt in the floor. Sharf said, “I’m gonna sue your ass for—”

  “Shut up, or I’ll turn you over to the Auntie Vivians,” Virgil said.

  The woman with the bat told Sharf, “You really wouldn’t want that.”

  Virgil walked around to the driver’s side, tagged by the yellow dog. Virgil looked at the dog, and the dog looked at Virgil. The dog had golden eyes, and it looked past Virgil into the empty passenger side of the truck.

  Virgil said, “All right,” and waved his hand, and the dog hopped up onto the driver’s seat, then crossed to the passenger seat and sat down. Virgil said to the dog, “With my lifestyle, I can’t have a dog.”

  The dog nodded, and looked out through the windshield, ready to roll.

  D. Wayne said from the backseat, “When I get you—”

  “Shut the fuck up.” And to the dog, “Really. I can�
�t. I’ll give you a lift back to Trippton.”

  The dog nodded again and smiled a dog smile.

  Virgil said, “Really.”

  29

  JOHNSON JOHNSON did the entire TV interview wearing his mask, which didn’t keep anyone in Buchanan County from knowing who he was. He got a death threat from one of the local dog-stealing morons, and being a moron, the moron hadn’t thought that his cell phone number would pop up on Johnson’s phone.

  Johnson being Johnson, he traced the number, using an Internet service, recognized both the name and the attitude that went with it, jumped in his truck, drove to the guy’s usual bar, and dragged him outside. After a humiliating confrontation in the parking lot, the other guy drove away in his truck, while the other bar patrons laughed at him and even threw a couple of rocks at his truck. Dognappers were not popular people in Trippton.

  —

  JOHNSON DID NOT FARE so well with Clarice, who thought that he’d been entirely too friendly with Daisy Jones. “And right on camera. You had your hand on her ass, Johnson, I could see where your arm was going, I saw the way her eyes got wide. You had to give her cheek a squeeze, didn’t you? You think my girlfriends didn’t see that? How can I hold up my head?”

  Virgil said, “Give it to him, Clarice, he deserves every bit of it.”

  “Shut up, Mr. Big-Time Cop,” Clarice said, poking Virgil in the chest with her index finger, hard enough that it hurt. “Who did he go out there with? Who told this Daisy person who to talk to?”

  She wound down after a while, but Johnson was worried, and told Virgil, “I might have to propose again just to get right with her. Seems like a lot of trouble over a friendly gesture.”

  “By ‘friendly gesture,’ you mean squeezing Daisy’s ass while you were on the air.”

  “That’s an uninflected way of looking at it,” Johnson said. “I assumed you were more sophisticated than that.”

  —

  JOHNSON HAD a lot more to say about his shot-up jon boat. Virgil found an identical jon boat online for $565, and pointed out that Johnson had already gotten eighteen years’ use out of the old one, but Johnson sensed a chance to step up. It took several dozen calls over the next month, but he eventually convinced a claims clerk with the state government that the only similar and available jon boat was a $1,149 model from Bass Pro Shops. By late autumn, he’d launched it on the Mississippi.

  —

  ON THE DAY of the dog raid, Virgil delivered D. Wayne Sharf to the Buchanan County jail, where he was held on a federal warrant. The feds left him there for two days, then a marshal showed up and hauled him away to Chicago. Nobody in Trippton ever saw him again, and Virgil heard later that he’d been convicted of something, but never heard what happened after that.

  —

  THE ATTORNEY GENERAL at first denied knowledge of the dog raid, but when it became apparent that the pro-dog people outnumbered the anti-dog people by about 99.5 percent to 0.5 percent, he quickly shouldered his way into a number of TV interviews in which he implied that the dog raid was part and parcel of his investigation into the Buchanan County school board murders and embezzlement.

  That whole circus was good for several consecutive days of coverage. The governor’s race was a long way off, however, so the AG slow-walked the prosecution, squeezing as much juice out of it as he could. Since the school board members were accused of multiple murder-ones, he could hold them in jail as long as he wished, without bail, as long as the defense attorneys didn’t file for a speedy trial.

  The defense attorneys weren’t filing for speedy trials because they were all going to Mass on Sundays to pray for some kind of intervening information or event that would give their clients at least a chance for a reduced sentence. That didn’t work out.

  In the end, after six months of meticulous and media-saturated investigation, in which it was determined that the defendants had embezzled very close to eight million dollars from the Buchanan County schools, they were all convicted of murder and a variety of subsidiary crimes involving murder (conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, etc.) and embezzlement. They all received thirty-year terms, with no chance of parole.

  Viking Laughton tried to argue that he was a humble newspaper reporter with no knowledge of the crimes, which made the rest of the defendants so angry that they ratted him out on the Kerns murder, and he went down on all counts.

  Masilla, the auditor, ratted them all out, and since there was no evidence that he knew of the planned murders, and since his deal eliminated the possibility of charging him with felony murder (murders in the process of committing another felony, the embezzlement), he was convicted only of the various money crimes, and given ten years. Minnesota being a socialist state that allows prisoners to set up businesses inside the prison (they get to keep relatively little of what they earn, much of it going to the state or to a victims’ fund), Masilla was able to create an accounting business for the many convicts who had money or dope hidden on the outside. His reputation for probity quickly spread, and within a year or so he had a clientele that stretched from the Attica Correctional Facility in New York to Folsom State Prison in California.

  “You know what we didn’t get?” the assistant attorney general, Dave, asked Virgil. “Those bonds for the new school stadium. I know of the dealers on those, and I suspect the board and the dealers would have split up a cool three mil on that deal alone. The way they worked it, they’d have front-ended the payout. . . .”

  He went on for a while, but Virgil dozed off; bond amortization discussions did that to him.

  —

  BUSTER GEDNEY GOT as far as Biloxi, Mississippi, where he rented a mobile home and got a half-time job as a welder and machinist working for a farm implement dealer, under the name Jefferson Jones. He could hardly make it on that money, so he began manufacturing three-shot burst kits for .223s, and sound suppressors. His first really good customer was a meth cooker who brought a DEA undercover agent to Buster’s first sales meeting.

  Buster delivered the equipment, right on schedule, and was arrested right on schedule, along with the meth cooker, and when his fingerprints delivered an immediate hit, was extradited to Minnesota to stand trial on the murder and embezzlement charges. He was so pathetic, blubbering on the witness stand, that the jury acquitted him of the most serious charges, and he drew a five-year sentence for misprision of a felony.

  —

  JENNIFER HOUSER, of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, bought a J/27 sailboat and hired a very attractive instructor to teach her how to sail. His instruction was comprehensive, and she’s still sailing. “And now I know why they call it the cockpit,” she told a similarly aged lady from New York. She also began taking piano lessons, and has that photo of her mother in a silver frame on top of the baby grand. Her Spanish, which had been quite good already, got even better, and she was often mistaken for a native. BCA follow-up investigators came to believe that she’d been murdered by Kerns and dropped in the river, though Virgil insisted that she was on the run.

  —

  AFTER DELIVERING D. Wayne Sharf to the county jail, Virgil took the yellow dog to the Buchanan County Humane Society. He had a little trouble getting the dog out of the truck, because the dog was large and didn’t want to get out. Virgil thought that the dog might even recognize the look of the Humane Society building, even though it had never been there, according to the young lady behind the counter.

  “I’ve been here for four years,” she said, “and I would have remembered him. Nope, never been here.”

  Virgil gave her a little history on the dog, who kept crowding closer and closer to his knee, and looking up at him with stricken eyes, and then the girl said, “Look, you gotta do what you gotta do, but that dog is your soul mate. You can tell by the way he’s already bonded to you. If you leave him with us, there’s probably a thirty percent chance he’ll eventually be put down.”

 
“Aw, man, I thought you guys place them all—”

  “Impossible. We’ve always got a lot more dogs than we have people to adopt them, and he’s a big dog, and he’s probably four or five years old,” she said. “People usually want a younger dog.”

  Back outside, Virgil said to the dog, “Get in the fuckin’ truck.”

  The dog jumped into the truck, settled into the passenger seat, and hung its tongue out.

  “I’m calling you That Fuckin’ Fido,” Virgil said, as he got in the driver’s seat.

  The dog didn’t say anything, but he might have nodded, figuring he could change his name later, when they’d gotten the hell away from the Humane Society.

  —

  VIRGIL WAS SCHEDULED to go home that night, but Johnson Johnson asked him to stop by Shanker’s for a Diet Coke, and when Virgil walked in, he found a hundred dog lovers crowded into the place, and they all sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” in his honor, backed by the band Dog Butt Plus Muddy, and Johnson hugged him three or four times, and Winky Butterfield gave him a gilded trophy with a dog on top of it and a blank plate under the dog.

  “We didn’t have time to get it engraved with your name, but Johnson’s going to get it done, and he’ll send it to you,” Butterfield said. Virgil was intensely embarrassed, but agreed to have a beer or two, and eat some of the wedding-style cake, and a couple of attractive dog lovers asked him to dance, and he did, and then he danced some more, and when Johnson finally poured him into bed, back at the cabin, it was one o’clock in the morning.

  “Don’t worry about a thing. I told Frankie what happened, and I did NOT mention your groupies,” Johnson said. “Lucky for you that you talked me out of being an alcoholic, or we’d both be drunk in a ditch somewhere.”

  —

  VIRGIL LEFT TOWN the next morning with a yellow dog and a hangover, and Virgil found that the dog was an attentive listener who panted in all the right spots. He stopped at a bookstore in Rochester and bought a book on how to care for dogs, and how much to feed them, and then stopped at a store and bought a dog food bowl, a sack of kibble, and two pounds of ground round, and fed the dog, and walked it around until it pooped, got back in the truck and said to the dog, “I really can’t have a dog.”