Dark of the Moon

by John Sandford

  ANOTHER AGENT HAD PUT on gloves, and was clearing debris from the other side of the house, walking carefully on an exposed piece of floor. “Hey, you in there? Hey?”

  To Gomez: “Looks like another body, or pieces of one.”

  Moved more lumber, but they’d need the Bobcat, Virgil decided. He called Feur on the cell phone. No answer.

  “Maybe hurt,” Gomez said. Moved a bit more lumber. “I gotta go into town, see my guys…” Gomez might be going into shock, Virgil thought.

  More rotten eggs.

  Virgil sniffed, sniffed again, then said quietly and urgently to the agent on the house, moving lumber, “Get off there. Don’t ask me any questions, just get off, right now.” And to the agent on the other side—“Quiet. Get off there…get back, get those guys out of the sandbags, you guys get back…”

  He was talking quietly as he could, backing away. Gomez: “What, what?”

  Virgil said, “That’s propane. That’s the rotten-egg smell.” He looked around, saw the tank next to the barn. “They’re filling the place up with propane. They’re gonna blow it up.”

  “Propane…” Gomez was quick. He backed away, turned away, said quietly into his radio, “Guys, everybody get back, keep it quiet, but get the hell back, there’s gas, they may be getting ready to blow it…”

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Virgil was feeling a little stupid, sitting in the ditch across the road. An agent suggested that he run up next to the barn, and turn the propane off, but the barn was too close to the house, too exposed if there was an explosion. “Give it another ten minutes,” Virgil said. “Maybe I’m full of shit.”

  ELEVEN MINUTES AFTER Virgil moved the agents off the house, the place blew. Not like a bomb, but with a hollow whump. Five tons of lumber went straight up in the air or sideways with a gout of smoke, curled at the top, like an atomic bomb. Virgil covered his head with his hands, and when nothing landed on him, peeked over the edge of the ditch. A ripple of fire was running through the wreckage: “Now, you need the fire department,” he said.

  “Holy mackerel,” Gomez said. “Holy fuck.” A few seconds later a helicopter showed up, and when it turned, they could see the Channel Five logo on the side.

  Virgil shook his head. “That’s what we needed. That’s exactly what we needed. Smile, Harry, you’re on TV.”

  Not done yet.

  Gomez made a call, said, “That oughta get rid of the chopper,” and with the helicopter still circling, they walked cautiously across the street, to the house. An agent ran out of the field behind the barn to the propane tank, pulled off the valve cover, and Virgil could see him spinning the valve.

  Gomez said, “Gonna be another one of them right-wing legends. Last stand at Reverend Feur’s.”

  “Anybody look in Franks’ truck yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  They went that way, yanked open the back panel on the camper, saw the row of gas cans. A couple of other agents drifted over. Gomez turned the cap on one, sniffed, said, “Gas,” tipped it into the sun, to see better, then walked away and carefully poured the gasoline into the dirt at the side of the yard. A gallon or so poured out, and then a glass tube fell out, and another. Gomez kept swirling the can until he had them all, twelve tall bottles that might once have contained spices, all full of powder.

  “It’s all true,” he said. To one of the agents: “What am I gonna tell Harmon’s wife?”

  The agent shook his head, and finally said, “That we killed all those motherfuckers who did it.”

  THE AGENTS UNLOADED the rest of the gas cans, and all carried glass bottles. They went through the shed, found five more cans, all with bottles. Feur and his friends had been moving meth twenty and thirty pounds at a time. “Been doing it for years,” Gomez said.

  They walked through the barn, knocked in the doors of the two old Quonset huts, without finding anything more. Looked into the house: the interior had been blown to flinders, and the fire was getting stronger.

  “Fire department’s coming,” one of the agents said. “Not that I care.”

  THE HELICOPTER WENT AWAY, the maddening thump leaving the place in the silence of insects and birds. Virgil, Stryker, and Gomez climbed into the barn’s loft to look at the house from a high point; amazing, Virgil thought, what gas could do.

  They were standing there when the fire truck arrived. The fireman put foam on the fire for three or four minutes, and the fire was gone.

  Gomez said, “We’re gonna have to say something. Press conference up in Bluestem; we sort of had it set up for tonight. Still gonna have to do something…”

  “Call Pirelli. He was still talking when I saw him, maybe…”

  Gomez got on his phone, pushed a button. No answer.

  Stryker came over and said, “Get off the phone.”

  “What?”

  “Get off the phone. Look at this—look at this.” He led them to the loft door, looking down at the house.

  “FEUR WAS a mean, feral asshole,” Stryker said. “What’s he doing committing suicide? He’d want his day in court, if we’d had him cornered.”

  Gomez spread his hands: “What?”

  Stryker pointed up the hillside. “That satellite photo that you had in the motel. One of your guys was looking at a seam that comes down to the house, and he wondered if it was a ditch that we could crawl down. We didn’t know. But when we walked around the barn, right over it, I didn’t see a thing. Didn’t notice it. The only way you can see anything, is to get up high. Up here.”

  “Yeah?” Virgil looked at the hillside, still didn’t see much.

  “It’s that line of greener weeds,” Stryker said, pointing down and to the right. “See it? That’s what you get when you dig. New weeds. It’s a dead straight line. It looks to me like somebody put down a culvert.”

  “What?” Gomez, eyes wide. “That little line?”

  “All you’d need to do is get the pipe, rent a backhoe, run the line straight up the hill to that brush. Then if the cops ever caught you in the house, you get down the basement, light a candle, turn on the gas, and seal the tunnel. Regular old manhole cover with some plastic tape or foam. Then you crawl out the culvert…skin your knees up some…I keep thinking, he didn’t answer the cell phone the last time Virgil called.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Gomez said. They climbed down from the loft, and Gomez got on his radio. A half dozen agents came running.

  “THE LINE GOES right into that clump of trees,” Stryker said, pointing up the hill. “There’s like three clumps coming down the hill, and then the last clump on the bottom, it goes right into that clump.”

  “They might already be out,” Virgil said.

  Gomez told his guys, “Armor up. Fast. Let’s go, let’s go…”

  Eight of them crossed the field in a long skirmish line, while the two functioning north squad trucks ferried six more agents in an end run to block off the field to the south. The last hundred yards they did on hands and knees, moving two at a time, the DEA agents performing like well-trained infantry. Gomez was working the radio, had the north squad in position, and they tightened the noose on the end of the seam.

  And when they got there, they found a depression that had once been a farm dump, two rusted car bodies from the forties and fifties, corroded farm machinery, a half-buried cylindrical washing machine.

  One of the agents put his finger to his lips, and pointed urgently. There, on the side of the slope nearest the farmhouse, a piece of corrugated steel, like the kind used in silos, was too conveniently arranged on the slope. The agent eased up to it, listened, peered under the sheet, then put his finger to his lips again, and backed off.

  “That’s it,” he whispered to Gomez. Gomez waved back the troops. They moved back in a loose circle, and Gomez walked away with his radio. Fifty yards out, he stopped, clicked on the radio, and briefed the waiting agents, listening on their headsets.

  It’d be a hell of a crawl, Virgil thought, looking down to the farmhouse. The smallest culvert that woul
d take your hips and shoulders, pushing with your toes, bad air…Anything more than a two-foot culvert would take a hell of a lot of digging. The seam wasn’t that big…

  THEY WAITED an hour, then started working it in shifts. From the time they’d first jumped Franks, until the house went up, was little more than an hour. They’d figured out the seam a half hour later. Two hours after that, four of the DEA troops and Stryker were watching the sheet of steel, and Gomez was back at the house, watching two agents carefully probing into the basement.

  Then Gomez took a radio call: “They can hear them coming.”

  He and Virgil jogged up the hill, two more agents running along behind. When they got close, an agent near the culvert exit stood up and made a hands-down gesture: “Quiet.”

  The agents on duty had backed into a semicircle, on their stomachs, behind rocks, behind humps in the field, all zeroed in on the sheet steel. The lead agent at the site pointed them toward a red outcrop. They went that way, squatted down, peering through a clump of weeds, and Gomez drew his pistol. “Easy,” Virgil breathed.

  Stryker eased up next to them and said, whispering, “We could hear them talking. Must be really tight in there.”

  They waited twenty minutes; the lead agent said once, on the radio, to Gomez, “Patience, patience, they’re right there,” and Gomez repeated it to Virgil and Stryker.

  Twenty minutes, and then the sheet of metal twitched, and then a man’s head and shoulders pushed from beneath it. He pulled out a long weapon, looked like another M-16. He knelt for a moment, catching his breath, then turned and snaked up the bank that he’d just emerged from, looking down toward the farmstead. He watched for a second, then slipped back down the slope and pushed the sheet up, said something, and then Feur came out of the ground, sat up, gasping for air, looked around.

  The two talked for a few seconds, then Feur pointed up the hill, and they both stood, crouching, weapons hung low in their hands, and then the lead agent shouted, “Freeze. DEA. Put your hands over your head.”

  Both men froze, then Feur shouted, “Virgil?”

  Virgil yelled, “You’re good, George, just drop the weapons.”

  Feur spotted the direction of his voice, yanked the M-16 up. Stryker cut him down, and the rest of the DEA guns tore the two men to pieces. Beside him, Gomez had gotten to his knees, and emptied his pistol at the two.

  “Jesus,” Virgil said. “Oh, Jesus, stop, man…”

  THEY WALKED DOWN. Feur and the man he’d called John—Virgil supposed—were six feet outside the end of the culvert, lying on their backs. They’d been hit forty or fifty times. Their weapons were converted M-15s.

  Feur didn’t look peaceful; he looked like a dead weasel. John didn’t look like anything. His face was gone.

  One of the armored agents said to Gomez, “They resisted. It was straight up. We did it straight up.”

  Gomez nodded: “Straight up,” he said. “The motherfuckers.”

  20

  A DUCK-BILLED WRECKING machine plucked splintered lumber out of the wreckage of the farmhouse, like a steel velociraptor; the sun was rolling down below the horizon, the sky as orange as a bluebird’s belly.

  Virgil sat in the open door of the barn’s hayloft, feet dangling, eating a bologna sandwich provided by the taxpayers, two other agents chewing along with him, talking about the fight, when Gomez walked up on the ground and called, “Let’s go to town. TV is waiting.”

  “Fuck you,” Virgil called back.

  “I knew you’d say that. I talked to Davenport, and he says he wants to see your happy face on all channels, thanking the governor for this opportunity to take crime fighting into the sticks.”

  “Fuck Davenport,” Virgil said.

  “Get your ass down here. I’m too tired to fool around.” Gomez walked away, stopped to talk to Stryker. Virgil stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, picked up a half-drunk bottle of Pepsi, and stepped toward the ladder.

  One of the agents, the Latino-looking New Yorker who’d given Virgil a hard time about his T-shirt, said, “Virgil. We owe you. Puttin’ those guys in the truck and taking them out of the yard. We pay. You ever need help on anything… you call us. No bullshit.”

  The other agent nodded, said through a mouthful of Wonder Bread and bologna, “Anything.”

  GOMEZ AND STRYKER rode to Bluestem with Virgil, in the shot-up Ford, trailed by two more agents in one of the north-crew trucks. They’d both been back and forth since the killing of Feur. The two badly wounded DEA agents were still alive. One would probably make it, the other probably not; two more, whom Virgil didn’t know, were less seriously wounded, and almost everybody was scratched and pitted by rocks, dust, and pieces of metal.

  Pirelli was screwed up, but not terminally. A slug had busted up his shoulder joint, and putting that back together would be tough. His broken arm was another problem, and would take a while to heal.

  “AND JUDD,” Stryker said. “Where is that asshole?”

  A DEA arrest team had gone after Judd as the raid on the farm was taking place, but hadn’t been able to find him. His car was at his office, the door was unlocked, but there was no sign of Judd.

  “This bothers me,” Virgil said. “Why would he be gone?”

  “Tipped?” Gomez asked.

  “By who? One of your guys? When Pirelli called me, Jim and I were together, and we were together every inch of the way. Neither one of us called anyone.”

  Stryker nodded; Gomez said, “Maybe…I don’t know.”

  GOMEZ ASKED, “You got a better shirt than that?”

  “And another jacket,” Virgil said. “We can stop at the motel.”

  “Keep the jacket; I don’t want you guys washed up,” Gomez said. “I want you looking messed up, but the T-shirt is too much. Looks crazy, given all the dead people.”

  “I got a black AC/DC shirt that should be perfect,” Virgil said.

  “Virgil.”

  “I take care of myself,” Virgil said. “Stop worrying about it.”

  They stopped for two minutes at the hotel, Virgil pulled on a plain olive-drab T-shirt that gave him a vaguely military look, and Gomez said, “Not bad.”

  Stryker said, “Hell of a day.” He had three little pockmarks on his left cheek, showing blood. He wasn’t cleaning that up, either.

  A DEA INFORMATION specialist had flown in from the Twin Cities and set up the press conference at the courthouse, the same room where Virgil and Stryker had been after the killing of the Schmidts.

  More media this time: a half-dozen trucks, including freelance network feeds going up from satellite trucks parked in the courthouse yard. Too late for the evening news, but the late news would get it, the cable channels, and the morning network shows.

  Gomez led the way: gave a terse, five-minute briefing, using the satellite photo of the farm, an outline of the fight, starting with the attack of the dogs—compressed the time a bit between the first shots at the dogs, and the fire from the house—and ending with the shootings of Feur and the man they still called John. He showed off a gas can full of glass tubes of methamphetamine, and allowed the best-looking media lady to handle one of them, holding it up to the lights for the cameras.

  While she was doing it, Virgil noticed Joan and Jesse at the back of the room, looking at him and Stryker with deep skepticism. They were standing next to Williamson, who turned repeatedly to Jesse, talking at her, teeth showing.

  At the very end, Gomez pulled Virgil and Stryker in front of the cameras and said, “We’d particularly like to thank Sheriff James Stryker, who as you can see was mildly wounded while suppressing the fire from the farmhouse, and Virgil Flowers, of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who risked his own life to save the lives of two of our wounded men. Damnedest thing I ever saw, when Virgil backed that truck out of the yard. These are two good guys.”

  Virgil was genuinely embarrassed, but the media were happy, given local heroes in what otherwise might have been interpreted as a fuckup, with s
ix or seven people dead, and five in the hospital.

  After the briefing, the questions started, a few of them hostile, but Gomez was a pro. He turned the hostility back on the questioners, pointing out that they’d seized enough meth to save several hundred lives, “including that of young men and women; methamphetamine is one of the drugs of choice in our public schools.”

  Williamson had one question for Virgil: “Is this the end of the murder epidemic in Bluestem? Were the Gleasons, the Schmidts, Bill Judd Sr., were they all killed by Feur and his men? And what was the connection?”

  “I’d like to answer that question, but I can’t, because I don’t know the answer,” Virgil said. “As far as I’m concerned, the investigation continues.”

  Davenport called on Virgil’s cell as he was shouldering his way out of the press conference: “You did good,” Davenport said. “Now—when are you going to collect the nut job?”

  JESSE AND JOAN were waiting on the sidewalk outside, along with Laura Stryker and a dozen people from the town. Joan said, “What the heck were you guys doing out there?”

  Stryker snapped at her: “Our job. I’m the sheriff of this county. They didn’t hire me to catch a bunch of dogs.”

  There was a murmur of approval from the crowd, and Joan said, fists on her hips, “So now there are dead people everywhere and you’ve got blood all over you…”

  Jesse was as angry as Joan, and it occurred to Virgil that they’d make good sisters-in-law. Virgil said, “I’ve got to go,” and he walked past them out to his truck, did a U-turn, and drove over to the hospital. A couple of sheriff’s cars were still parked outside the emergency entrance, cops on the lookout for any further trouble. Inside, Pirelli was out of it, sound asleep, one arm and shoulder encased in fiberglass, one leg bandaged and elevated.

  A DEA guy in the hall said, “Virgil,” and Virgil asked, “How are they?”