Storm Front

by John Sandford

  In the distance, they could hear a siren.

  “Now we are in a hurry,” the smaller Turk said.

  —

  VIRGIL WAS just finishing the pancakes and had asked the waitress for one last cup of coffee, when the phone rang again. Ellen—Jones’s daughter. He said to Yael, “Jones’s daughter. Could be something.”

  He said, “Hello?”

  Ellen started screaming at him.

  Virgil couldn’t make out what she was screaming but pinned the phone to his shoulder with his ear and stood up and dug out a twenty and threw it at the table and headed for the door with Yael trotting behind, and on the sidewalk he started shouting, “Slow down, I can’t understand you, slow down—”

  “My father,” she screamed. “Somebody’s trying to shoot my father. I’m going there, I’m going there—”

  “Where is he? Where is he?” Virgil piled into the 4Runner and fired it up, barely noticed Yael belting herself into the passenger seat.

  “A cabin—he’s in a cabin off County Road 18, West Elysian Lake Road, north of Janesville.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Virgil groaned. The cabin that Sugarman had told him about, that he’d spotted the night before. “I know exactly where it is,” he shouted into the phone, as he swung through a U-turn. “I’m on my way. Where are you?”

  “I’m still west of town, I’m coming, but I’m way behind you. My dad just called three minutes ago, said somebody was shooting at him, he’s shooting back. He doesn’t think he can hold out.”

  “I’m going,” Virgil shouted, and clicked the phone off and hit the truck’s sirens and flashers. When they’d made the big turn on Highway 14 and were rolling, he called 911 and told the dispatcher where they were and what was happening. “Are there any sheriff’s cars in the area?”

  “Let me check, Virgil,” the dispatcher shouted at him. “Goldarnit, this is more exciting than string-cheese night at Lambeau Field.”

  “What?”

  “We got Frank Martin is about, mmm, fifteen or twenty miles south of you, but he’s not in his car, can’t get there for a couple minutes. We got Fred Jackson. He’s over to the west.”

  “Get them started and anybody else you can find.”

  “On the way.”

  —

  VIRGIL HAD BEEN out to Elysian Lake a few times, caught a few bass and pike, and more carp than he’d admit to, so he knew the area: they were about twelve miles out. If Jones was being shot at, it had to be either the Turks or Yael, because he knew where Awad and Sewickey were.

  He just finished thinking that when Yael said, “I find it very suspicious that this Arab called you just before the shooting started. He said he was driving to the airport and the GPS says his car is going to the airport . . . so he has this alibi that you provide.”

  Virgil thought about that for a second, and said, “I couldn’t live with that kind of paranoia.”

  “This is because the Hezbollah is not trying to fly a missile into your window every minute.”

  “All right. I’ll put Awad back on the suspect list,” Virgil said.

  “I think this is a good idea.”

  “But I think it’s either Yael-1 or the Turks.”

  “Let us hope it’s this katsa, and not the Turks. I don’t think she would kill us. The Turks . . . I don’t know.”

  “Katsa? That’s her name? How—”

  “Not her name. It’s her type. Spy . . . or agent. I ask you this: Why do you use your bell? They will hear us.”

  “I hope so,” Virgil said. “We’re still eight or nine minutes away, that’s forever in a gunfight. Most gunfights last a few seconds. If he’s holed up inside this place, maybe it’ll take longer, maybe whoever is shooting will hear the siren and run.”

  “Good analysis,” she said. “We want the stone, not the shooters.”

  “I want the shooters, too,” Virgil said. “But mostly, I want to keep anybody from being killed.”

  —

  SEVEN OR EIGHT MINUTES after they left town, Virgil threw them off Highway 14 and onto 390th Street to West Elysian Lake Road, and then north, and then they were coming up on the side road that took them into the stand of timber that hid the cabin, and a couple of deer stands that overlooked a cornfield.

  With the siren still wailing, Virgil took the truck to within a hundred yards of the trees, then stopped, killed the siren, jumped out of the truck, shouted at Yael to “stay there!”, got his vest and his M16 out of the lockbox in the back, slapped a magazine into the gun and put another under his belt line, ran into the roadside ditch and then started running through the weeds toward the trees.

  The ditch was wet, so he moved left, and ran along the slope of it. He heard no shooting, nothing but the siren still wailing behind him.

  Fifty yards from the tree line, he slowed down, looking for any kind of movement; saw nothing. He dropped into a crouch and moved forward, stopping, listening, although his hearing hadn’t yet recovered from the screaming siren.

  Twenty-five yards out, he knelt and crawled for a way through the thick weeds, then sat and listened some more. Nothing but silence, and the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes.

  He waited another half-minute, then started the slow approach. At the tree line, he crossed the fence he’d been crawling parallel to and stepped back into the woods. The aerial photos he’d looked at the night before had shown the cabin perhaps a hundred yards ahead, but he could see almost nothing in the tangle of trees and brush.

  He waited, then moved, slowly, still hunting—avoided a nasty-looking patch of shiny green poison ivy—the muzzle of the M16 leading the way. Fifty yards into the trees, he’d seen or heard nothing at all.

  Another ten yards and the road twisted to the left, and as he rounded the turn on the inside of the track, he saw the cabin; the visible windows were shattered.

  He stopped, listened for another few seconds, then shouted, “Anybody there? Police. Anybody there?”

  He heard, in reply, a weak, “Help . . .”

  “Who is that?” he shouted.

  He heard, “Me. Jones. They’re gone. I heard them go.”

  All right. Virgil thought he understood that. Still, it could be a trap.

  “Are you okay?” he shouted. He’d wait for backup, if he could.

  “I’ve been shot.”

  “I’m coming,” Virgil shouted back. “But I’m coming slow. I have a machine gun. If you or anybody else tries to shoot me, if I see a gun, I’ll mow down the whole goddamn forest.”

  “I got an empty gun, but that’s all,” the man’s voice said.

  Virgil moved in, tree by tree, always looking for something from another direction, listening. When he got close to the cabin, he could see that the front door was closed but the windows were all shattered, and he could see what looked like fresh broken wood across the front wall of the place.

  Bullet holes.

  The cabin was surrounded by a small open space, half grass, half dirt. A Toyota Corolla sat at the far end of the opening. Virgil had to make a move sooner or later: he called, “My backup will be here in a minute. We’re cutting off this whole field. You’ll have to wait another couple of minutes.”

  “Don’t make me wait too long or I’ll be dead,” the man said. “I’m bleeding pretty good.”

  Virgil made his move, bolting from the cover of the tree, across ten or twelve yards of the clearing, and up onto the porch.

  The man inside laughed. “You were lying about waiting. You might as well come on in. Door’s unlocked. I got nothing left.”

  Virgil risked a peek at the window to the left of the front door and saw the top two-thirds of Jones’s body protruding from behind a heavy kitchen table, which had been overturned to provide some protection. Jones was lying on his side, more facedown than faceup. Virgil could see his hands, and his hands were empt
y.

  “I’m pointing an M16 at you. If you show a gun, you’re gonna find out what a real hosing is all about.”

  “Are you gonna come in here and help me, or are you going to stand there and bullshit?” Jones asked.

  Virgil went inside. Jones showed a trail of blood on the floor behind him, and as Virgil stepped through the door, he pushed a revolver across the floorboards toward Virgil’s feet. “Nothing left in it,” he said, “So I hope you really are the police.”

  “I am,” Virgil said. “Don’t move.”

  He patted Jones down, picked up some blood off his pants, wiped it on the back of Jones’s jacket. “Do you know where you’re hit?”

  “In the hip. On the side. The hip that’s up in the air.”

  Virgil asked, “Do you have a knife?”

  “There’re a couple of kitchen knives on the counter.”

  Virgil got a paring knife, came back and cut away the pants where the blood was showing through. The wound was a bloody channel through skin and fat on the outside of Jones’s hip. It was bleeding, but not pumping blood. “There’s some blood,” Virgil said. “We need to get an ambulance out here, but I don’t think we have to do anything radical. I’ll call for one. What about the shooters? How long have they been gone?”

  “Five or six minutes. I heard them crashing off towards the lake. I suspect they parked on another track over on the other side. They’ll be gone by now.”

  “You know who they were?”

  “No. I was too busy looking for cover,” Jones said. “They really shot the place up.”

  “Maybe because you shot them, in the park?”

  “The Turks? I doubt it. How’d they find me?”

  “Good question,” Virgil said. “To which I don’t have the answer.”

  “Ah, golly, that hurts,” Jones said. “That really hurts. I mean, a lot.”

  —

  VIRGIL STOOD, called 911, and got an ambulance started. The dispatcher told him a sheriff’s car should arrive in the next minute or so, and when Virgil hung up, he could hear a distant siren.

  He went back to Jones. “You didn’t make any arrangements to meet somebody here?”

  “No. Nobody knew I was here. I heard them coming. They were on foot, coming in from the back, then around to the side. They cut me off from my car. There was more than one—maybe two. I got my gun, and called out to them, and then they started shooting. Didn’t even say how-do-you-do? Just opened up. Good gosh, it was like a war. I got between the table and the cookstove, and called Ellen and she said she’d call you.”

  “She’s on the way,” Virgil said. “Where’s the stone?”

  “What stone?”

  “Reverend Jones, I’m about to arrest you for aggravated assault on a couple of Turks, so you won’t be peddling any stones for a minimum of six to ten years,” Virgil said. “You might as well tell us. It’s an ethical responsibility, a moral responsibility, as much as anything else.”

  “I’m not about to do anything for six to ten years. I’m not going to do anything for more than two to three weeks, at the outside. And I don’t need a cop to tell me where my moral and ethical responsibilities lie,” Jones snapped, and then he groaned again and said, “Don’t make me mad. It hurts when I shout.”

  Virgil said, “You’re a friend of my old man, Lewis Flowers from Marshall. I went to church every Sunday and Wednesday for eighteen years, and got lectures on ethics and morality twice a week. You can’t tell me that stealing a country’s national heritage, and using a gun to assault a couple of people, put the fear of death in them, is all that moral or ethical.”

  Jones just said, “Really? You’re Lewis’s kid? I think I’ve read about you.”

  “That’s really great,” Virgil said. “About the stone?”

  Jones groaned again and said, “Hey, Officer Flowers?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  —

  VIRGIL LEFT HIM on the floor and walked out to the truck. Yael was waiting at the front bumper, and as he came up to her, a sheriff’s patrol car turned off the road and onto the track and accelerated toward them.

  Virgil said to Yael, “He’s been shot, but he’ll live. For the time being, anyway. He says he doesn’t know anything about the stone. I’m gonna arrest him, and send him to the hospital, and then we’ll see.”

  Virgil climbed in the truck and killed the siren.

  In the deafening silence, Yael asked, “What happened with the assassins?”

  “I don’t know—they walked in, they probably had a car over on the other side of the woods, Jones said. They’re gone. I’ll get the sheriff’s people to see if anybody saw them.”

  The sheriff’s deputy came up, climbed out of the car, and called, “Do I need my shotgun?”

  “Don’t think so,” Virgil said. “We got one down, got an ambulance on the way. C’mon, I’ll show you the layout.”

  Yael and the deputy followed Virgil back down the track, and Virgil said, “We’re gonna take the cabin and his car apart. I can’t believe the stone is far away.”

  —

  JONES’S CAR WAS a rental, he said, and he asked Virgil to ask Ellen to turn it in for him. “Costing me a hundred bucks a day,” he said.

  Virgil got the keys, and he and the deputy and Yael worked through it, and concluded that unless Jones had sewn the rock into one of the car seats, it wasn’t in the car.

  They were just finishing when the ambulance arrived, and two minutes later, Ellen Case. She got out and ran after the ambulance guys and their gurney, paused as she was passing Virgil, catching his arm: “Is he alive?”

  “Yeah, but he’s hurt,” Virgil said.

  She ran inside after the ambulance guys, and Yael, Virgil, and the deputy followed. Inside, a paramedic was wrapping a big white bandage across the wound, as Jones told them about his cancer, and he said, “You gotta pick me up really careful, ’cause I’m like a big sack of loose guts. It could all fall apart.”

  “Aw, Dad,” Ellen cried, and patted his arm.

  “Take it easy, kid,” Jones said.

  When the wound was wrapped, the paramedic and the ambulance driver talked about the best way to half-roll, half-lift him onto the gurney. They did that, with Jones gritting his teeth, and then Jones, his face covered with sweat, said to Virgil, “Hand me that red bag over there, Flowers. That’s got my pills. Say hello to your dad for me.”

  Virgil got the bag and the paramedic put it on Jones’s chest, and they carried him to the door, dropped the legs, and began rolling him down the track to the ambulance.

  Virgil said to Ellen, “You better follow them in. When you’ve got the time, you can come back here with a friend and get the car. He wants you to turn it back in to the rental agency.”

  Virgil told the deputy to follow her out: that Jones was under arrest, and should be restrained after treatment. The deputy left behind Ellen.

  Yael said, “Now . . .”

  “Now we take the cabin apart,” Virgil said. “See if that goddamned stone is here. We’ll get a crime-scene crew out here later, to look at the place. If they can figure out where the gunfire was coming from, maybe they can locate some brass. If God is smiling on us, we could get a fingerprint.”

  “I’m not sure God would smile on anything to do with all this,” Yael said.

  “Unless it’s all a joke to begin with,” Virgil said. He opened the oven. “Okay. Not in the oven.”

  11

  Virgil spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon cleaning up the aftermath of the shooting, including reports for two different law enforcement agencies; that part was never as swift as anybody would like it to be. He also spent an hour with Yael walking around in the woods behind the cabin, following game trails and peering into gullies, hoping to find a fresh patch of earth where t
he stone might be buried.

  They found nothing.

  He checked the GPS tracker tablet a couple of times during the day. Awad’s car was at the airport for four hours, and then had been driven back to the campus. He had, he thought, put his one tracker on the wrong car.

  When he’d finished all the reports, he drove to the hospital, asked where Jones was, and found him in a private room in the surgical area, with a drip of some kind plugged into his arm, another drip of a specific kind coming out from under the blanket and into a bag near the floor, and a massive bandage wrapped around one thigh and also anchored with a strip that went at an angle around his waist. There was a security cuff on one leg, which was attached to the bed frame with a steel chain.

  Ellen was sitting in a visitor’s chair, reading a newspaper, and when Virgil came in, she said, “Oh my God, I’m so grateful that you got there in time.”

  “Has he told you anything about the Solomon stone?”

  Jones, who was awake, said, “Hey, I’m right here. I’ve got a lawyer. You’re not allowed to question me.”

  “I’m not questioning you, I’m questioning her,” Virgil said, pointing at Ellen. “She’s a witness. Before you toddle off to the Great Hereafter, you might like to know that if she lies to me, I’ll put her in the women’s prison at Mankato, as a result of your moral and ethical failings.”

  “You’re a vicious little rat,” Jones snarled.

  “No, you’re the rat. I’m trying to keep people from being killed,” Virgil snarled back. “You’re trying to get them killed. If your daughter here ends up one of them, which seems possible since these people are willing, I hope you live long enough to see it. I’d want that blood on your head and I’d want you to know it.”

  “Virgil!” Ellen said. “What a horrible thing to say.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck him. He’s about to die, so he’s taking no risks messing around with these crazies. He’s all about the money, that’s all he is. But you’re not—you’ve still got a whole life to get cut short,” Virgil said. “I’m really tired of him.”