Bad Blood

by John Sandford

  JENKINS HAD RIDDEN along in the caravan with another cop, and Virgil got him and the other cop to follow as they went down the road to the Flood place.

  As with the Einstadt house, there were lights: they drove up the driveway and found a pickup sitting next to the side door. They stopped, and Virgil said, “Run it,” and Jenkins got out of his truck and pointed his M16 at the house.

  Schickel was talking to the comm center about the truck’s tags, and the name came back thirty seconds later.

  “It’s Emmett Einstadt’s truck,” Schickel said. “You lucked out. You got the old man after all.”

  Jenkins shouted, “We got movement.”

  The side door was opening, and a few seconds later, a young girl called, “Don’t shoot me.”

  Virgil called, “Take it easy, everybody.” And, “Is that you, Edna?”

  “Is that you, Virgil Flowers?”

  Virgil called back, “Yes. It’s me. Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. My mom wants you to come in. Only you. If anybody else comes in . . . she’s got a gun.”

  “What about your grandpa?” Virgil called.

  “He’s here, sitting in his chair. Rooney’s here, too.”

  Virgil looked at Schickel, and shrugged. “Give me the radio,” he said.

  “You’re really going in?”

  “Yeah.” He called back to Edna, “I’ll be there in just a minute. I’ve got to get my men spaced around. I’ll be right there.”

  He climbed back in the truck, with Schickel’s radio, got a roll of duct tape out of his console, and taped the broadcast button down. “I’ll leave the radio on, much as I can. You guys listen close; I don’t know how much you hear. If you hear a shot, come in and get me.”

  He stepped away from his truck and Jenkins called, “You got your gun?”

  That made him smile, and he called back, “Yeah, this time.”

  And he called to Edna, “I’m coming in, honey.”

  23

  Virgil didn’t know what to expect when he went in, but he went in behind the muzzle of his pistol. At the top of the entry stairs, he saw Edna looking at him from the doorway to the living room. She was dressed from head to foot in a dress that was either dark blue or dark gray, and fell in one line from her neck. She said, “There’s nobody to shoot.”

  Virgil said, “Why don’t you come around behind me?”

  She shook her head and said, “No, we’re all in here,” and she stepped away into the living room. Virgil expected something weird, in keeping with the rest of the night. Instead of following, he edged backward across the kitchen to the mudroom, made sure there was nobody there, who’d be behind him.

  Edna came to the doorway again and watched him as he crossed the kitchen—somebody had been frying chicken, but a while ago, without cleaning up, and he could smell the cold grease. He paused at the dining room door, then stepped through: it was empty, but another arch at the end of the dining room led into the living room. With a last glance at the girl in the doorway, he stepped into the dining room, and she said, to somebody he couldn’t see, “He’s coming. He’s checking the dining room.”

  A woman’s voice—Alma Flood’s, Virgil thought—said, “Pull that other chair around for him.” He moved forward slowly, got to the arch, did a quick peek into the living room, then moved into it, still behind the muzzle of his gun.

  The room was lit by two lamps and a television that had been muted; it had been tuned to either a religious channel or a history channel, because the show involved a tour of Jerusalem.

  Virgil was somewhat behind Alma Flood, who was sitting in her platform rocker, facing Wally Rooney and Emmett Einstadt, who sat in two recliners, which had been dragged around to face her. Both men were leaning back with their feet up. The two girls, Edna and Helen, sat to one side, on dining room chairs. And an empty chair sat next to them.

  FLOOD WAS LOOKING at Einstadt and Rooney, but when she heard Virgil’s boots on the floor, she glanced at him and said, “Put the gun down, Virgil. Take a seat.”

  “I really don’t have a lot of time for conversation—” Virgil began.

  Einstadt snapped, “Sit down, goddamnit, she’s got a shotgun pointed at me.”

  Alma was left-handed, Virgil noted, which explained why he hadn’t seen the long gun. She had the butt braced against the back of the chair, under her arm, with her trigger hand by her side, her other hand on the forestock. Not a pump; the gun was a Remington semiauto twelve-gauge. The muzzle was about six feet from Einstadt’s belly. That also explained why the men were sitting the way they were. With their feet up, higher than their hips, they couldn’t move quickly. If Alma really wanted to shoot them, she could.

  Virgil asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Sit down,” Alma Flood said.

  “I don’t want to shoot you, Ms. Flood,” Virgil said. “There’s been enough shooting tonight.”

  “Maybe and maybe not,” she said. “But I’ve got this trigger about half pulled, and if you move that gun toward me, I’ll pull it the rest of the way. You’ll be killing two Einstadts with one shot.”

  “Sit down, please, sit down,” Rooney whined. Rooney was sweating hard, though the room was cool.

  Virgil sat. He kept the gun in his hand, resting on his right leg, and put the radio down between his legs, with the microphone up, and hoped that Schickel and Jenkins and the others could hear it. “What happened here?” he asked.

  “From what I hear, you know most of it,” Alma said. “We’re talking about that.”

  “We’re having a trial,” Helen said. “Because of Rooney, mostly, but then maybe for Grandfather, too.”

  “What’d Rooney do?”

  The shotgun barrel swung to Rooney, the muzzle moving a short four or five inches, not nearly enough time for Virgil to do anything even if he’d been prepared. Alma said, “In the World of Spirit, nothing too serious. He took his women, just like the rules say he can. That being me, and then the girls. But as I understand it, under most laws, and maybe even normal Bible laws, we were raped.”

  “If you didn’t consent, then it’s rape. If he had sexual relations with the girls, it’s rape whether or not they consented, because they’re too young to give consent,” Virgil said.

  “I was taught it was the right thing, from the time I was a boy,” Rooney said, a pleading note in his voice.

  Edna said, “We were begging you not to.”

  “We was always taught girls need to be broke in,” Rooney said. “It’s not my fault we was always taught that.”

  Virgil said to Alma, “Let the law take care of this. If you shoot him, you’re going to go to prison. After what you’ve been through, that hardly seems right.”

  “What do you think I’ve been in, for forty-three years?” Alma asked.

  Helen said to Virgil, “He took me upstairs and he was so ready, he was like a bull; he pulled all my clothes off and he ripped my blouse, not on the seam, but right across the fabric so I can’t fix it, and it’ll always have a rip in it.”

  She was fingering her dress; Virgil said, “That’s not such a big deal anymore, even if it was—”

  “We’re only allowed two dresses,” Edna said. “More than that would be vanity.”

  Alma said, “What’d he do after he pushed you on the bed?”

  “He made me suck on him and then he serviced me, and then he made Edna suck on him and he serviced her, and then he made both of us suck on him, and then he went into me the dirty way.”

  Alma asked, “Tell Mr. Flowers how often he did that.”

  “Almost every day. He’d hit me, slap me, really hard....” The girl’s voice was rising, as though she were reliving it.

  Virgil jumped in and said, “Miz Flood, maybe you shouldn’t be putting the girls through this. They need treatment.”

  “I think they do, and I’m sure they’ll get it, that you’ll see to it if I can’t,” Alma said. “But that’s not the question here. The question is Rooney. Now,
I’m an old crow, and these men don’t like me as much as they used to, and I won’t tell you what Rooney did to me, but I’ll tell you that he had to work harder to get himself excited than he did with the fresh ones. Didn’t you, Wally?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry if you didn’t like it. I thought you liked it,” Rooney said.

  Alma got angry. “Don’t you go saying that. Don’t you go saying that I liked it. I told you I didn’t like it, I screamed at you that I didn’t like it, and the last time, there was blood, and how in the hell can somebody be bleeding like that, how can you think they’re having a good time?”

  “Jake used to do it; I seen him,” Rooney said.

  “That’s all you got to say? Jake used to do it? I’ll tell you, Wally, if Jake was here, he’d be sitting right next to you, all three of you like birds on a wire.”

  “Don’t shoot me, Alma. Please don’t shoot me. I never meant you any harm,” Rooney said.

  The muzzle of the gun never moved, but Alma said to her father, “What do you have to say for him?”

  Emmett Einstadt said, “Women are supposed to serve men. That’s why God put them on earth. Rooney might not be the best we got, but he tries hard enough. You’da got used to him if you’d gave him some time.”

  She shook her head and said, “I don’t believe I would have. I started out liking Jake, and ended up hating him; I started out hating Rooney. How you could ever give us to him, I’ll never understand. How many times did we say no?”

  “I didn’t even know that you said no,” Rooney said. “I’m sorry for what you think I’ve done, I didn’t mean any harm by it. But that’s just nature taking its way.”

  Virgil said, “Miz Flood, from what they’ve said, we can take both of them in, and I think I can promise you that they’ll be sent to the state prison forever. When word of this gets out, when a judge and jury hears about this, I mean, they’ll be out of your life. Just as clean as if you killed them; but at least you won’t have to pay for killing them.”

  “I’m not exactly getting an eye for an eye, though, am I?” she asked.

  VIRGIL’S CELL PHONE RANG. They all jumped, and a smile might have flickered over Alma Flood’s face. She said, “Well, answer it. Or the ringing will drive us crazy.”

  Virgil fished the cell phone out of his pocket with his free hand, and said, “Yeah?”

  “This is Gene. We can hear you. Jenkins is in that tree in the front yard, looking through the front window. He says he’s got a shot at her, but there’s two panes of glass between them and he can’t guarantee that nobody else would get hurt. He said you and the two girls are in his background. He thinks he can probably miss them, but maybe not. He wants you to say yes or no.”

  Virgil said, “No, not yet. Definitely no. I really don’t think that would be appropriate at all. I could probably get that done myself; but, I’m really busy here, so I’ll talk to you later. Okay? Yeah, she’s fine, they’re all fine. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll call you later.”

  He clicked off and put the phone back in his pocket.

  “That was ridiculous,” Alma Flood said.

  “Yes, it was,” Virgil said. “Miz Flood, I’ll tell you what...”

  She shook her head and said, “Let me finish something here. Girls. What do you think about Wally? Guilty, or not guilty?”

  “Don’t do that to the girls,” Virgil said.

  Alma asked, “You know what they say about girls out here, Mr. Flowers? They say, ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.’ And that’s what they do.” She turned to her older daughter and said, “Edna, what do you say?”

  “Guilty,” the girl said.

  Helen nodded, her face solemn, and she said, “Me, too. Guilty.”

  “Alma...” Rooney said.

  Alma said, “I vote guilty as charged,” and she pulled the trigger.

  THE BLAST in the small living room was deafening, and Virgil rocked back away from the flash, almost tipped off his chair, and by the time he recovered, the shotgun was pointing at Einstadt and Alma shouted at Virgil, “Don’t. Don’t move that gun.”

  Rooney had been knocked back when the blast hit him in the upper chest, throat, and face, but the recliner chair was tipped back so far that he didn’t slump forward; instead, he sat in the chair and bubbled to death, the last breath squeezed out of his lungs as a bloody foam.

  Virgil’s phone rang again and he opened it and said, “I’m okay. Miz Flood just shot and killed Wally Rooney. Everybody sit tight, we’re talking.”

  Helen said from her chair, about Rooney, “He looks awful.”

  “That’s because your mother just shot him in the face,” Einstadt said. “Look at that. That’s what she’s threatening to do to your grandpa. Shoot him just like a sick horse.”

  Edna said, “I like him better this way.”

  “He was sick. He was sick in the head,” Alma said. “He needed to be put down, just like you’d do with a sick dog. A dog that’s got rabies.”

  “You’ve got rabies,” Einstadt said. “Killing an old friend.”

  “It’s time to talk about you, Father,” Alma said. She looked over at Virgil. “I want to be fair, and since you’re the law around here, and you want to do everything proper, I appoint you the defense attorney. You can say what you want in his defense, and I will listen to every word. How’s that for fair?”

  “Hell, he wants me dead,” Einstadt said. He wiggled in his chair, and the shotgun muzzle, which had been an inch off line, came up.

  VIRGIL WAS LOOKING at Rooney, at the mess that used to be Rooney before Rooney left the building. He thought that he might do a tap dance, stalling for time, because the longer they sat looking at the dead man, the more oppressive the body would become. So he asked, looking at Alma, and then at Einstadt, “How did this happen? How did you get here? I can understand, a hundred years ago, it might be all right to marry off young girls, but even then, this wasn’t all right. What happened?”

  Alma said, “The church got taken over by perverts, including my own father. And grandfather. I don’t think it was like that before then.”

  Einstadt said, “No TV.”

  Virgil: “What?”

  “Sex was what they had before electricity out here until after World War Two. So every night was dark, or lit by lanterns, and there just wasn’t a hell of a lot to do. Hard to read. They were poor, didn’t have much in the way of musical instruments. In the wintertime, you just couldn’t get anywhere, and everybody in the church was really close. . . . I don’t know when it started, but it might have gone right back to the beginning, in Germany. Exchanging wives and some of the wives were young, like you said. Thirteen. Boys were men when they were fourteen, and set to work. Hell, some famous rock-and-roll star married a thirteen-year-old girl back in the sixties, because it was done even then, wasn’t no hundred years ago....”

  “But how did that fit with the idea of a church?” Virgil asked.

  “You can read the Bible any way you want, and they did,” Alma said.

  “No, no, no,” Einstadt said impatiently. “It’s all there, what they did, the patriarchs, and it went unpunished, because it wasn’t wrong. Look at Lot. It’s beautiful. The World of Law says it’s all right to go to Iraq and kill a hundred thousand people, but it’s wrong to have sex with people close to you? Does that sound even a little bit reasonable? What we did was all right—”

  “What you did was probably the most fucked-up crime in the history of the state of Minnesota,” Virgil said. “Pardon the language. And to tell the truth, I’m not all that happy with the war in Iraq, but there are arguments for and against it, greater evil versus lesser evil, and unless you’re a simpleminded moron, you can’t make the kind of comparison you just did.”

  “We didn’t live in your World of Law,” Einstadt said. “We lived in the World of Spirit, and it was better. It is better, and it’ll be better again. We’ll make some changes—”

  “You won’t be making any changes; you’re goin
g to be in prison,” Virgil said.

  “It’s a religion,” Einstadt said. “You’re going to persecute us because of our religion?”

  “Damn straight,” Virgil said.

  ALMA HAD BEEN STARING at her father, and now she turned to look at Virgil, her dark eyes glittering in the light from the muted television. She said, “Not everybody in the church were involved. Some pulled back, and some left the church entirely and moved away, so it’s not all the church. It’s people in the church.”

  Virgil said, “But if people knew what was going on, even if they didn’t take part, then they’re to blame, too. You have to go to the law.”

  “We went to the Spirit,” Einstadt said. “The Spirit says there’s nothing wrong with a proper sexual attachment between—”

  “We’re not talking about sex,” Virgil said. “There’s nothing wrong with sex, but this isn’t about sex. This is about slavery. The children don’t have a proper choice. They can’t say no. We’ve got photographs taken by Karl Rouse, hundreds of them, and they don’t show sex: they show humiliation, bondage, slavery, desperate children being used by old men for their own enjoyment. I honest-to-God want to get you into a proper court, but I don’t understand how human beings could do what you people did. You’re monsters in this day and age; throwbacks to the days of slavery, and the slaves were your own children. I’m disgusted just looking at you.”

  “Disgusted by physical love—”

  “Bullshit,” Virgil said. “I talked to one of the victims—Karl Rouse’s daughter. The language she uses isn’t love language, it’s language right out of a porno film. I’m a cop, I’ve seen some of everything, and she shocked the hell out of me. And she doesn’t even know—”

  Alma said to her father, picking up on Virgil: “You remember what you did the first time you took me up to the bedroom? You remember Mother down crying in the kitchen, and you hit her? How many times did you hit her, Father? She had blood in her mouth, and then you took me up to the bedroom. You remember what you made me do? I didn’t even understand. I didn’t know what happened. One day I get my monthlies, and as soon as they stop, you stopped being my father and started to be the man who came to rape me every week.”