Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  Then they beat the hell out of him.

  He couldn’t hear much, except a soprano voice squeaking—“You fucker, you fucker, you fucker”—keeping time with the blows.

  They didn’t exactly know what they were doing, and his ribs did have some padding from his parka, or they would have hurt him much worse, but, as it was, they hurt him badly enough.

  He kept trying to roll so he could get to his knees, but they kept hitting him in the face and knocking him flat on his back. He got in a couple of short punches, but the heavy parkas on the women soaked up the impact.

  The woman in a blue parka did most of the hitting, with her big, hamlike fists, while the other three kept him pinned, one of them struggling to her feet and starting to kick him in the hip and legs. The woman in the blue parka broke his nose, and blood went everywhere all over his face, and one woman actually squealed at the sight.

  Nearly blind now, he got his hand inside one of the hoods and grabbed some hair and yanked it out of the woman’s scalp, and the woman screamed and rolled away from him, but Ham Fist hit him in the forehead, and someone kicked him some more, and finally a woman with a nice soprano voice said, “Stay away from Jesse, you prick.”

  The weight suddenly lifted, leaving him lying on a dirty crush of snow and ice, trying to catch his breath. The women ran back to the truck, one of them saying, “He yanked my hair out, I’m bleeding,” and then the four doors slammed shut. The truck started crunching across the gravel lot, but he couldn’t see it because of the blood in his eyes, and he was afraid they were going to run him over, so he blindly rolled toward the building until his back was against the concrete-block wall. He was low enough that the bumper couldn’t get him, close enough the wheels couldn’t get him . . . he hoped.

  If he’d had a gun, he might have tried to shoot at the truck, but he didn’t have a gun. A few seconds later, the truck was gone.

  Virgil wiped the blood from one eye, ran his tongue along his teeth. None seemed broken or loose, though he could taste blood. He found with some probing that his lower lip was cut, apparently on his own teeth.

  He managed to get to his knees and crawl to the back door of the bar but couldn’t reach high enough to get hold of the handle. He scratched at the edge of the door until he got his fingers around an edge and pulled it open—smeared blood on the glass, found both hands were bleeding from the gravel in the parking lot. He crawled into the back hallway, where he fell flat again.

  A man came out of the men’s room and stepped over him and said, “Hey, buddy, you had a little too much there . . . Oh, holy cats.” And the man started shouting, “Shanker! Shanker!”

  A minute later, the bar owner was there, and he looked at Virgil and said to somebody Virgil couldn’t see, “This is Virgil Flowers. Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance . . .”

  Everybody in town knows me, Virgil thought vaguely, and, safe for the moment, he let himself relax and let other people take care of him.

  —

  He was aware of the transfer to the ambulance, although he felt himself to be some distance from that event. Once in the ambulance, he tried to sit up but found that he was held down by a safety harness. A man’s face loomed over him and said, “Easy, there. Stay down.”

  A minute later, they were at the Trippton Clinic, not his first visit. When they rolled the gurney inside, a familiar doc looked down at his face and said, “Virgil fuckin’ Flowers. How are those stitches holding in your scalp?”

  Virgil said, “Aw, jeez . . .”

  The doc said, “Good. You’re talking. I’m going to wash your face here.”

  He did, and Virgil could see from both eyes, and again tried to sit up, but the doc put a hand on his chest and said, “Count backward from ninety-five by sevens.”

  “I couldn’t do that unhurt or sober,” Virgil said.

  “Okay, good, you’re not too concussed . . . But you’re going to have amazing black eyes. I’ve got to do something about your nose . . . Do you hurt anywhere else?”

  “Hip.” Virgil had one hand free enough that he could pat his right hip.

  The doc said to somebody Virgil couldn’t see, “Let’s get his clothes off,” and to Virgil, “We’re going to give you something to relax you. You’ll feel a little sting . . .”

  —

  When Virgil woke up, he was in a small room with a lot of electronic equipment, some of which was attached to him. He had a needle at the crook of his elbow, and a tube that led back to a bag on a rolling rack. A nurse stuck her head in the door and said, “You’re awake.”

  “I could use some water,” Virgil said, his voice sounding like sandpaper on Sheetrock.

  “I’ll get the doctor.”

  Virgil didn’t know exactly how long it took before the doctor showed up, but it was long enough for him to realize that his nose hurt so bad that his upper teeth hurt as well. He wiggled his teeth with a finger, but everything felt solid. The doc came in with a bottle of water with a straw, held it while Virgil took a sip, and asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Hurt.”

  “You’ve got a displaced septum—not the nasal bones—the septum, the cartilage, which has been pushed off to the left. I can’t do much for you now except put a gel retainer on it to hold it in place until the swelling goes down. In two or three days we can take another look and come up with a permanent solution, which will probably involve wearing a brace for a while. In a few weeks, everything ought to be back to normal.”

  “Goddamn them,” Virgil said. He would have ground his teeth, but that would have hurt too much. He took the water bottle from the doc and swallowed another sip.

  “Yeah, whoever ‘them’ is. We’ve got a deputy hanging around waiting to speak to you.”

  “Bunch of women,” Virgil grunted.

  “Women?” The doctor’s voice had a query in it as though he suspected Virgil might have taken a harder hit to the head than he’d believed.

  Virgil took another pull of the water, added, “Four of them. Red pickup. Caught me behind Shanker’s. Could have hurt me a lot worse. Must’ve weighed six or seven hundred pounds . . . piled on.”

  “Ah, I see,” the doctor said, reassured by the detail. “One of them also spent some time kicking you in the right hip and leg. Your leg looks like somebody was hitting you with a baseball bat. No bones broken, but you’ll hurt for a while.”

  “Can I walk?”

  “Oh, sure. Want to take it easy at first, to make sure all the ligaments and tendons and so on are still hooked up where they’re supposed to be, but we did some X-rays and range-of-motion tests while you were asleep and I don’t see a problem. Wouldn’t want you using any aspirin or other blood thinners for a while.”

  When the doctor ran out of diagnoses, Virgil asked, “When can I leave?”

  “If you’re concussed, it’s not too bad. I’m told you never completely lost consciousness, although you got your bell rung pretty good. I want you to take it easy here the rest of the day and overnight.”

  Virgil didn’t protest because he really felt like he could use the rest. The doctor said, “I’ll check in on you every once in a while, but, right now, go to sleep.”

  “Gimme my cell phone,” Virgil said. “As long as my tongue isn’t crippled, I need to make some calls.”

  The doc said, “That’s the first thing everybody asks for when they wake up . . . Goddamn cell phones make me tired. Guy’s in cardiac arrest, he wants his phone . . . I’ll give it to you, but don’t use it any more than you have to—you really need the sleep.”

  Virgil got the phone, called Johnson Johnson, and told him what had happened. “I need you to get my truck out from behind Shanker’s. You know where the backup key is. There’s guns and other stuff in there, and I don’t want anyone breaking in. Don’t take it to the cabin—take it up to your place, where you and Clarice can keep an eye on it. Th
en, get my iPad out of the seat pocket and bring it down here.”

  Johnson: “Wait a minute. You say a bunch of women beat the shit out of you?”

  Virgil said, “Johnson, get the fuckin’ truck, okay?”

  When he had Johnson moving, he called Jon Duncan at the BCA and told him, and Duncan said, “Holy crap, Virgil. What are you into now?”

  “It’s that goddamn Barbie doll thing you put me on,” Virgil said. “Doesn’t have anything to do with the murder. I’ll be moving again tomorrow. Do not tell Frankie about this or she’ll jump in her truck and come running over here, all worried. We don’t need that.”

  “You need Jenkins and Shrake?” Jenkins and Shrake were the BCA house thugs.

  “No. Not yet anyway. What I need is some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow morning and tell you where I’m at.”

  “Take it easy, Virgil. Don’t push it. Do what the doctors tell you. If you need more time to recover, take it.”

  “Yeah. Call you tomorrow.”

  —

  While he was talking to Johnson, a woman in a sheriff’s deputy’s uniform stepped through the door. They spent five minutes talking: he gave her what details he had on the attack, and she said she was sorry, they’d try to find the truck. And she went away.

  Virgil dropped back on the pillow, thinking about the women who’d attacked him, and about the mysterious Jesse McGovern. From the reactions he’d gotten from Trippton people, he’d begun to push McGovern further down his list of priorities.

  As an experienced cop, he was completely aware of the tragedies that sometimes followed a too-slavish application of the law. His own girlfriend had lived on the edge of the law for years, sometimes tiptoeing over the border. But she was a good mother, maybe a great mother, with five kids and no husband. If she hadn’t supported them, if she’d been trucked off to jail, her kids would have been screwed.

  What do you do about those situations?

  He’d nearly decided to let McGovern slide; the women who had beaten him had convinced him otherwise. If he could find the four of them, they’d be trundling off to the Shakopee women’s prison, and Jesse McGovern could suck on it.

  ELEVEN Johnson Johnson walked into the hospital room with Virgil’s truck keys, stopped, and said, “You got a blue squid on your face.”

  “Holding my nose together,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, well, the word’s out that you got beat up by a bunch of women, but I’m doing the best I can to squash it,” Johnson said. “I’m telling everybody you were once ranked third as a light-heavyweight fighter, and there’s no way . . .”

  “Well, it’s all true,” Virgil said. “All except the light-heavyweight part.”

  “You have your facts, I have mine,” Johnson said. “Virgil, I got to tell you, you look like a fuckin’ raccoon. A raccoon with a blue squid on its face.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Johnson said. “Anybody who’s worth a damn has had his nose broken at least once . . . Though, how many is this for you? Three? That’s bordering on too many. Does Frankie know about it?”

  “No, and she better not find out,” Virgil said. “In the meantime, I’m looking for somebody associated with Jesse McGovern, who drives a red double-cab pickup and has one of those family stickers in the back with a husband, wife, five kids, some dogs and a cat.”

  “Huh. Ford, Chevy, or Dodge?”

  “I don’t know. Could be a Toyota, as far as I know.”

  “Not in Trippton, it couldn’t be. I’ll tell you what. I don’t want you messin’ with Jesse, but this doesn’t sound like her,” Johnson said. “She’s a vegetarian, and vegetarians don’t go around beating people up. Probably one of her contractors. I’ll check around. What else can you tell me about them?”

  “They wear parkas.”

  “That’s a great fuckin’ clue right there,” Johnson said. “Too bad it’s not August, you could pick them right out.”

  “That’s all I got,” Virgil said.

  Johnson hung around for a while, and Virgil recounted his conversation with Justin Rhodes and Rob Knox about the Hemming murder, and concluded with his belief that Rhodes hadn’t done it but he wasn’t willing to make a judgment on Knox. Johnson agreed with that. “Justin’s not a bad guy, and he’s too mellow to hurt anyone. Besides, he’s got a contact for the best California pot you ever smoked. Knox, though, is an asshole. What’s next?”

  “Talk to the guy who’s running the bank now and then go on down the list,” Virgil said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure the killer is somebody you’d call a bad guy, not without knowing what he did. I might be looking for somebody you all consider a good guy.”

  “I’ll think about that,” Johnson said. He offered to smuggle in some pork chops and beer. Virgil declined, and Johnson went home. And Virgil went to sleep. He woke up a couple times during the night with an odd kind of headache: it didn’t actually throb, but his head felt hollow, and it was disconcerting. In the morning, he felt better: instead of the hollow-head feeling, his face hurt, his hip and leg hurt when he moved them, and he was stiff all over, but the pain was local, and nothing he hadn’t felt before.

  A nurse came in to check on him, and later to bring breakfast, and after he’d finished his Jell-O, he eased out of bed and took a few steps around the room. His balance was okay, the pain was tolerable.

  The doc showed up and checked him over and said he’d release him if he would take it easy for a few days. Virgil said he would. The doc gave him some Tylenol, and told him not to fight any more women. Said he’d do the paperwork, and somebody would sign him out.

  A nurse said the paperwork should be done “any minute,” but it wound up taking two hours. Virgil got dressed and lay back down on the bed to wait, and when the forms finally came in, he signed off and called the town taxi. The nurse insisted that she push him out to the parking lot in a wheelchair.

  The cold air hit him as soon as they got to the lot. Felt good. The taxi driver, another morose Tripptonite, said, “Bad night at the Bunker, huh?”

  The Bunker had a reputation as the worst bar in Trippton, but Virgil had never been in it. He said, “No, I fell down on my way into Shanker’s for a grilled cheese sandwich.”

  “I’m not sure the wife’ll believe that,” the cabbie said.

  “Fuck her if she can’t take a joke,” Virgil said. Ten minutes later, he was back at the cabin. He checked his watch: noon. He wanted to talk to Marvin Hiners, the VP at Second National, but the banker was probably at lunch, so Virgil decided to lie down and try to relax a bit. He did that, and when he woke up, he woke in darkness. He fumbled for the bedside lamp switch, turned it on, looked at his watch: ten minutes to six. He’d blown the whole day.

  He hurt when he sat up. His hip was the sorest, but he also had some pain in his right shoulder, his punching arm. His mouth tasted foul, and maybe a bit like blood and chicken feathers, so he brushed his teeth, set the shower to the volcanic setting, and spent fifteen minutes standing under the near-boiling water. He was pulling on his shirt when headlights swept across the cabin windows. Johnson and Clarice came in a moment later, carrying food.

  “Everything you like, as long as you like barbeque ribs and mac and cheese,” Clarice said. Virgil realized that he was starving. “We brought your truck back.”

  “I ran into that private detective down at the Kettle,” Johnson said. “I told her what happened. She was going to come by right away, but I told her to hold off a day or two.”

  “Thank you,” Virgil said.

  “So who killed Gina Hemming?” Clarice asked.

  “Not there yet. I didn’t have anything to think about before I got clobbered,” Virgil said. “She was found in the same dress that she wore to a meeting on Thursday night. I asked Rhodes about it and he said she was a fussy dresser: she would never wear the same outfit two days
in a row. That means she was killed between the time the meeting ended and before she had a chance to go to bed. The sheriff’s office didn’t do much of an investigation but did find out that she almost always got to the office before the bank opened and usually stopped at The Roasting Pig for a latte before she went to work. That all suggests that she was usually up and getting dressed before eight o’clock in the morning . . .”

  “No later than that,” Clarice said. “She always had good makeup; I never saw her without it. That takes a while. If she got to The Roasting Pig at eight-thirty, let’s say she left her house at eight-fifteen. I think no less than forty-five minutes to go to the bathroom, shower, do the makeup, get dressed . . . and that would be fast. Now you’re at seven-thirty for getting up. If she ate breakfast at home, checked the news on her laptop . . . she was getting up at seven o’clock. Or earlier.”

  “With that kind of routine, she was probably going to bed at eleven o’clock at night. Good chance that she was killed between nine o’clock and eleven o’clock,” Virgil said.

  “Unless she stayed up late to argue with somebody,” Johnson said.

  “Even so, she was probably talking to the killer before eleven o’clock,” Clarice said.

  Clarice had plates out on the cabin’s kitchen table and spooned out a helping of mac and cheese and dropped a half slab of ribs beside it, while Johnson Johnson opened a bottle of California Cabernet Sauvignon. “Thought you were totally off alcohol?” Virgil said.

  “That wasn’t working. I’m totally off all alcohol except wine, which I never get drunk on,” Johnson Johnson said. “Clarice says if I start going over the edge again, she’ll warn me off and I’ll quit the wine.”

  “Hope that works, but I gotta tell you, I’d be happier if you didn’t drink at all,” Virgil said.

  Johnson: “I would be, too, but that ain’t gonna happen yet. I can hold it to one drink, though.”

  Virgil let it go, something to worry about later. He spent a few minutes eating and thinking, then said, “Rhodes brought up the idea that somebody who owed money to the bank might have killed her.”