Storm Front

by John Sandford

  “Virgil—”

  “Do you know where the stone is?”

  She looked straight at him: “No. I don’t.”

  He looked over at Jones, then thought, Screw it, and walked out. Jones called, “Hey! Hey!” but Virgil kept walking. As he headed down the hall, it occurred to him that Jones was on the edge of death, and so somebody else had to know where the stone was . . . or how to find it. Jones could no longer rely on his own ability to recover the thing.

  He believed Ellen when she said she didn’t know—he didn’t think she could lie without flinching. He wondered about the son in San Diego. Was it possible that he was out there somewhere? He suspected, though, that the answer was closer by: that Jones hadn’t told Ellen where the stone was, but he would. She didn’t know now, but she would. When he got to the truck, he checked the tracker tablet and found that Awad’s car was in the apartment parking lot, five minutes away. He drove over, pried the unit free, drove it back to the hospital, and attached the tracker to Ellen’s car. He felt a little bad doing it, because she seemed like a nice woman, but, in the end, he didn’t feel all that bad.

  —

  HE WAS THINKING about going home when he got a call from the woman who ran the BCA crime-scene team. “We found a clue,” she said.

  “No shit,” Virgil said. “That’s gotta be a first.”

  “Hey.”

  “Just kiddin’, Bea. What is it?”

  “It’s a note. Written with a ballpoint pen. What happened was, Jones was shot and thought he was dying, so he started writing a note to his daughter. You probably ought to come take a look at it.”

  “Can’t you just read it?”

  “Yeah, but you oughta see it,” she said.

  “All right. Give me twenty minutes.”

  When Virgil got back to the hunting shack, the place had been lit up with work lights run off a gas-powered generator. The generator was also driving a Dell computer with a couple Logitech speakers, currently playing the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” which Virgil recalled from his childhood; a song about right for Bea Sawyer’s teenybopper days, and, when he thought about it, appropriate for the current investigation.

  Sawyer was crumpling up a pair of disposable Tyvek pants in which she’d been crawling around the cabin. When she saw Virgil, she said, “The note,” and pointed to the table where the computer sat.

  The note was in a transparent plastic evidence bag. Virgil sat down and peered at it, and Sawyer said, “You can see it better with a flashlight,” and passed him an LED flashlight.

  The note was on a piece of paper torn from a notebook, and was heavily creased. “It was a paper wad when I found it,” Sawyer said. “When you showed up and saved his ass, he wadded it up and threw it in the corner, hoping we wouldn’t find it.”

  “Wonder why he didn’t eat it?” Virgil asked, peering at the note. The handwriting was cramped, and nearly illegible.

  “Probably no spit,” Sawyer said.

  “What?”

  “When you get shot at, your mouth tends to go dry. Can’t eat paper with a dry mouth.”

  “Huh,” Virgil said. Sounded like bullshit. He flattened the note out and struggled through it. He got this:

  Ellen: I’m not going to make it this time. So far there are three bidders for the stone. You have to recover it; the buyers will come to you, but it might take them a while. Be careful. I put it where the sun comes through. You know I’ve always loved you and Danny, and the greatest pain is knowing I won’t see your faces anymore. I always hoped . . .

  The note ended and Virgil said, “The sun comes through?”

  “Comes through what?” Sawyer asked.

  “I don’t know. The drapes, the attic window, the branches on the old oak tree or down the well . . .”

  “The well?”

  “Probably not the well,” Virgil conceded. “How in the hell would I know? It’s some kind of reference that his daughter would understand.”

  “You gonna brace her?”

  “I need to think about it for a while.”

  Sawyer snorted. “Good luck with that.”

  —

  IN BED THAT NIGHT, reanalyzing his moves, Virgil decided that he had to confront Ellen about the note. If he could just get his hands on the goddamned stone, all the maneuverings would collapse.

  He spent some time wondering about the “three bidders.” The Israelis supposedly weren’t bidders, Sewickey said he didn’t have any money, and Jones knew that. So the bidders were the Turks, if they were still involved—after the park shooting, they might be less interested—and the Hezbollah agent. Who was the third bidder?

  He had no answer to that.

  Then he thought about God for a while, and wondered why He would allow one of His preachers to drift so far from the paths of righteousness, especially on his, Virgil’s, time. The only answer, he decided, had to lie within Jones’s personal psychology. Some twist, some juke, some repository of wrong chemicals. You saw it often enough in preachers who taught hate, bigotry, intolerance, or who preyed on their own flocks.

  Which led him to another thought. Did the Jesuits really have commando teams? The concept was oddly attractive.

  And he thought for a few moments about Ellen. When he met attractive single women, he tended to assess their potential personal compatibility; he didn’t think he was unique in this—in fact, he thought everybody did it, automatically. There was never any mystery when somebody found somebody else attractive, or unattractive; the mystery came when somebody was obviously attractive, obviously right down the centerline of his taste in females . . . and there wasn’t even a flicker of response in his own self. Ellen was like that: she was very good-looking, had eyes like emeralds, was most of what he looked at in women. And yet he felt almost nothing. It was almost like a sisterly response. He could like her very much, but there’d never be a sexual urge involved. He sensed that she reacted to him in the same way. Strange.

  Then he went to sleep . . . for a short time.

  —

  MA NOBLES had eavesdropped on the conversation between Ellen Case and Virgil Flowers, and had been deeply impressed by two things: first, the money they were talking about, which apparently could involve millions of dollars; and second, that they were talking about Case’s father, the Reverend Elijah Jones.

  When she mentioned to Virgil that she’d known Jones, she’d choked back an impulse to be effusive about it, and had let it go with the comment that she’d known him long ago, when she was a child.

  That wasn’t the whole story; that wasn’t even much of it.

  —

  JONES HAD long ago been called to preach at a dying Lutheran church out in the countryside. He’d agreed to do it out of charity—he was already a full professor at Gustavus Adolphus, and didn’t need the small amount that he’d be paid at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church of Bizby, Minnesota, pop. 321.

  In fact, his church salary barely covered gas and an afternoon cheeseburger at Carl’s Diner & Fuel, Bizby’s only business. Jones had done it not because he’d been called by the Good Shepherd Church, but because he’d been called by God.

  In any case, it was at Bizby where he’d encountered Florence McClane before she became Ma Nobles. She’d been nine years old at the time, the youngest of three children of Helen McClane, part-time and later no-time wife of Hank McClane, who left for anywhere else when Florence was seven.

  After Sunday services, Jones had a children’s class, and had noticed that Florence and her brothers never brought lunch. They were supposed to tell Jones that they always ate lunch at the table with their mom, but Florence confided to him privately that, on most days, there was no lunch—perhaps an early sign of her ability to manipulate the world around her.

  So Jones, true minister that he was, went back to a youth group at Gustavus and got them to pledge a
hundred dollars a week to help out the McClane family until Helen McClane could find something permanent. The hundred dollars a week got the family through the bitterest summer of the young girl’s life. She would never again eat lemon Jell-O with little marshmallows and sliced onions. . . .

  In the fall, Jones found Helen McClane a meat-cutting job at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, and the family said good-bye to the trailer in Bizby.

  Life in Austin hadn’t exactly been a bowl of cherries, with a single mother on the night shift, and three growing children, but it was approximately fourteen thousand light-years better than Bizby. Austin had libraries and movies and local TV stations, and kids her own age. Right up to the time when Florence got knocked up in ninth grade, she’d been a happy girl; even after that first kid arrived, things had been okay. She’d managed to graduate from high school, and get a couple years in at the community college, before she got knocked up again and had to get a job.

  She got a spot in the same plant where her mother worked. When her mother began suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome—meat-cutting did that to you—Florence, who was already called “Ma” by her friends, decided to take the latest offer of marriage, to a man called Rick Nobles. She knew going in that the marriage wouldn’t last, but it would carry her through to another job.

  Nobles had his own towing company, which actually picked up with Ma doing the books and calling around for business, but he couldn’t keep his hands off the customers. When he got one of them pregnant, three months before Ma would produce yet another son, she called it off.

  Nobles was decent about it, and Ma got out with a three-year-old Ford F-150 and fifteen thousand in cash. From there, it was a series of office jobs, and a second marriage to a man who had a small farm, a part-time salvage business, and a big hunger for Wendy’s Baconators. One Baconator too many, a failed Heimlich maneuver, and Ma was on her own again.

  She’d felt bad when he died—cried off and on for a month—but then had gotten on with it.

  —

  WHEN MA realized the minister that Case and Flowers were talking about was her very own Reverend Jones of the big beard, big teeth, and wide red suspenders, she nearly spoke up in praise of the man. But some instinct made her keep her mouth shut—possibly because of the money they were also talking about.

  She couldn’t help wondering if Jones might need . . . an assistant?

  There was no way she could contact him to ask that question, until she heard about the shoot-out at the hunting camp—and that Jones was on the surgical floor at the hospital in Mankato.

  She was familiar with the surgical floor.

  Two of her sons had been there: Mateo, after jumping out of a hayloft with a bedsheet for a parachute, which had resulted in two badly broken legs; and young Sam, who’d gotten pissed off when Ma handed him a spading fork and told him to get busy in the garden, digging potatoes, and he’d hurled the fork down in disgust. Unfortunately for Sam, before the fork got to the ground, two tines had gone through the tops of his Nikes, through his feet, and most of the way through the soles of his shoes. He’d been standing outside the chicken house when he did it, and some chicken shit had penetrated the wound. They had taken him to the hospital for the necessary repairs, which had been complicated.

  Jones’s arrest had been all over the news, along with the fact that he was listed in good condition. Ma figured that she at least owed him a visit.

  When her boys had been hurt, she hadn’t had a lot of money—she still didn’t, though things had gotten considerably better since the family got back in the salvage business. Anyway, when the boys had gotten hurt, a woman from the cashier’s office had pursued her through the halls of the hospital like a hound from hell. Ma had eventually worked out a way she could visit them without bothering with the front entrance.

  Her latest trip to the hospital began with a phone call:

  “This is Mable Diarylide with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I am calling for Agent Flowers. We have a crime-scene crew that needs to speak with Reverend Elijah Jones. We need the room number.”

  That got her the room number.

  —

  WHEN HER KIDS had been hospitalized, the visiting hours had gone until 8:30 p.m. She’d usually gone in late, to avoid the harridan from the cashier’s office, and because the kids had been young, she had been allowed to stay later than was normally permitted.

  Good training.

  She went in that night through the emergency room, her hair covered with a babushka. She took a circuitous route to a back stairway and went up one flight. The nursing station was down to her right, so she could push the door open just a crack and see if anyone was there. For the first few minutes, there was. The last time, she pushed open the door just in time to see the nurse pick up a clipboard and exit, stage right.

  Ma was across the hall in five seconds, and into Jones’s room. Jones was asleep, but not very.

  She touched his arm, and he opened his eyes: “What?”

  “Do you remember me?” she whispered. “I’m Florence McClane.”

  He looked at her for a long time, in the dim light, and then shook his head. “No.”

  She told him about being a little girl in Bizby, and even then, he wasn’t sure: “I remember Bizby. . . . I do remember something about your family. Didn’t your father get hurt in an industrial accident, or something?”

  “Not unless he cut himself on a pull-tab,” she said. Ma was disappointed. He was a major character in her life, and she apparently wasn’t even a minor one in his. Oh, well.

  “I feel like I owe you,” she said. “I feel like I’ve always owed you. Now you seem like you need some help.”

  “What? You came up here to bust me out?” He tried to laugh, and wound up coughing. “You think you can take the bed with you?”

  He rattled his good leg, which was chained to the bed at the ankle.

  Ma said, “I brought a bolt cutter, just in case,” and pulled it out of her bag to show him.

  She’d caught his interest. “Maybe you do owe me,” he said. “But even if I could walk, I wouldn’t get far.”

  “If you could get down one flight of stairs, I could pick you up in my truck,” she said.

  “I could do that,” he said, pushing himself up. “I couldn’t run, but I could hobble that far. I think.”

  “I can’t take you home. That state cop, Virgil Flowers, is all over me. On another matter, not about you, but he’s how I found out where you were. Do you have a place where you could go?”

  “Yes. If you can get me there.”

  They heard the nurse coming down the hall, and Jones pointed across the room and whispered, “That door—it goes into the bathroom.”

  She slipped inside just in time. And then thought, getting caught in the bathroom wouldn’t be good. The bathroom was shared: she tried the door on the other side, and it was unlocked. On the other side, she found a sleeping man. A pair of crutches leaned against one corner.

  —

  LATER, WHEN SHE cut Jones free from the bed, he said, “I’m not sure how I feel about stealing a man’s crutches.”

  “They’re hospital crutches,” she said. “They’ll give him new ones—and you can always send them back when you’re done with them.”

  “My clothes are in the locker.” He pushed himself up, and groaned. “I’m so damaged. . . . Young lady, you are definitely a godsend, but I tell you, I am a very damaged old man.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. She got him his clothes, and looked at her watch. “They’ll be checking you in six or seven minutes, and then not for another half hour. Put your clothes under your pillow, and put them on before you come down. I’m going now. You have to fake being asleep when they check you, but then, as soon as they leave, come down. The door is down to your right, and across the hall.”

  “God bless you,” h
e said.

  —

  SOMEWHAT TO MA’S SURPRISE, it worked out. The reverend, flailing with the crutches, appeared outside the stairway door, and looked both ways. She flashed her lights at him, and he turned toward her as she pulled through the parking lot, bumped over the curb onto the grass, and rolled up to the side of the building. She jumped out, ran around the truck cab, and helped boost him into the passenger seat.

  “I don’t mean to be a complainer,” he said, as she got back behind the wheel. “But I hurt, and I’m going to have to take a pill. They make me a little woozy. I understand what’s going on, but my reactions aren’t so good. Before I do that, I need to tell you where we’re going.”

  So he told her, and as they pulled away into the night, she asked, “Will this involve a burglary?”

  “No, no, I have a key.”

  “Are you bleeding?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t hurt that bad, I guess,” he said, rubbing his forearm, where he’d pulled out a catheter. “They weren’t really giving me any treatment in the hospital—after they patched me up, it was just pain medication and observation. But you will have to help me into the house.”

  “I can do that,” Ma said. She watched as he gobbled down a couple of pills, and then asked, “How long before they take effect?”

  “It’s pretty quick,” he said. “Now. Tell me your story. When the pills kick in, I may look a little sleepy, but I do understand what people are saying.”

  “What do you want to hear?” she asked.

  “Your story—the whole story, from the time your mom got the job at Hormel, right up until now.”

  So Ma told the story: and when she thought about it later, it was a pretty good story, with some nice high points, and the usual lows for a single mother with five fatherless boys.

  “We were in trouble,” she said. “The people in Bizby were okay, but nobody around there had any money, except some of the farmers who lived out of town. We were on welfare, but we didn’t have any clothes. . . .”

  By the time they got to Jones’s hideout—actually, a pleasant middle-class home—he looked like he was out of it. But when she parked, and walked around to help him out of the car, he looked up at her from the passenger seat and said, “That was one of the best stories I have ever heard, in my entire life, and I was there at the beginning. It’s one of the things that made my life worthwhile, and I’m grateful to you for telling it to me. I will think about it every day until I die, and rejoice a little.”