Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  He didn’t take the time to worry about that, but grabbed the Beretta and crawled out the passenger-side door, which was away from the road, and a burst of gunfire rattled through the sides and top of the truck. Strait peeked around past the grille, saw Knowles standing on the side of the road near the back of the Subaru. A couple more shots rattled off the top of the truck and through the side windows, shattering them, and he took a chance, poked the Beretta around the front of the truck, and unloaded all fifteen rounds in the general direction of the Subaru and Knowles.

  —

  Virgil couldn’t get Strait on the phone, but he heard the gunfire and with no other way to call the cop behind him, thumbed through his directory for the New Ulm police department, called it, and yelled at the cop on the other end. “Me and one of your guys are in pursuit of a woman we think is trying to shoot a guy.”

  “Yeah, we heard. We’re talking to Ross; he says he’s right behind you.”

  “He is, but I can’t talk to him. Tell him we’ve got gunfire up ahead; he’s got to be careful. I don’t know what happened, but I’m hooked up to the victim and he says the attacker is shooting up his truck and now I’m hearing what sounds like him shooting back . . . Tell your guy to be careful.”

  “We’re telling him; we got a couple sheriff’s cars headed your way, and two more from us, but we’re all way back.”

  “Gotta go . . .” Virgil said, and he made the turn onto Highway 27, and far ahead, saw the gray car stopped on the side of the road, and a person—he couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman—standing behind the car.

  With a gun, he saw, as he got closer, firing into the ditch. Strait had run off the road. If that was Knowles, she had a rifle, and all he had was a weak-ass nine, and not only that, the nine was locked in the safe behind the seat.

  Given all that, Virgil got as close as he dared, which was perhaps fifty yards, close enough to recognize Knowles. She paid no attention to him, his siren or his flashing lights, or to the cop car behind him, but slapped another long magazine into her rifle and kept shooting into the ditch.

  —

  Strait realized that Knowles was focused on the truck and was punching a hundred holes in it, and he slipped backward and got behind a tree, and then another one, always keeping a tree trunk between himself and the other gun. When he was behind the second tree, he stretched out on the ground, reloaded his gun—his second and last magazine—and waited to see if she’d try to sneak around his truck.

  He’d been so focused on staying down, out of the line of fire, that he hadn’t heard the police sirens. He heard them now, and they were close.

  —

  Virgil got the 4Runner sideways on the highway, kicked open his door, opened the back door, and got his gun and two magazines out of the safe.

  As he did that, the New Ulm cop ran up beside him, carrying a shotgun.

  “Want me to nail her?”

  “Let me yell at her first,” Virgil said. He shouted, loud as he could, “Maxine! Stop!”

  She heard him, because she turned her face toward him and then she stepped behind the Subaru, apparently kneeling out of sight, and kept firing. Then an older man slipped out of the Subaru, lifted his hands over his head, and wobbled into the ditch on the other side of the road and sat down in the weeds.

  The cop said, “I could take out her window glass.”

  “Yeah, maybe you better do that,” Virgil said. The cop popped up and fired the twelve gauge four times. As far as they could tell, nothing happened—the buckshot either bounced off the car, or the deputy had missed it.

  “I can guarantee I didn’t miss,” he said.

  “See if you could bounce a shot under her back tire,” Virgil suggested.

  The cop stood up and fired a couple of quick shots at the back of the Subaru, low, and forward of the back tire. No response.

  “I’ve got to reload,” the cop said.

  Then, suddenly, there was no more noise. No more shooting. A few seconds later, Maxine was waving her gun over her head and shouting, “I give up. I give up.”

  Must have run out of ammo, Virgil thought. He shouted, “Throw your gun into the road and come out in the open with your hands up.” The rifle landed on the blacktop and then she came out with her hands up. Strait wasn’t shooting and Virgil shouted, “Toby—she quit. Don’t shoot, but stay where you are until we check her.”

  There was no reply and Virgil said to the New Ulm cop, “Let’s go. Keep the shotgun on her and if she pulls another gun when we get close, blow her up. Can you do that?”

  “Yup.”

  “Good man. I gotta check the other guy, make sure she didn’t kill him.”

  They moved out from behind Virgil’s truck, Virgil around the front, the New Ulm cop around the back with the shotgun mounted to his shoulder, and they stayed that way as they jogged down the road toward Knowles.

  Virgil hadn’t felt much during the chase except stress and intense concentration, but now the anger was coming on. He’d been chumped and because of that, he’d led a bona fide crazy woman to her victim—forget about the fact that the victim was a notorious asshole, Virgil had still been chumped and that had resulted in two people trying to shoot each other to death.

  When they were close, Virgil shouted at the man in the ditch, “Up! Up! Hands in the air. Up on the road!”

  “I don’t have a gun!” The old man stood up, hands overhead, and stumbled up to the road. Virgil recognized him as one of the men from Knowles’s farm, dressed in faded overalls and a tattered Vikings hat.

  Virgil said to Knowles, “Get down on the ground.”

  “Uh-uh,” she said, “I don’t bow down for anybody.”

  Virgil was still moving fairly quickly and he came up beside her, grabbed her by the back of the neck, and used his shin to kick her legs out from under her. She went down, yipping in surprise. Virgil broke the fall with his thigh, then let her slip onto the road, when he pinned her with a knee between her shoulder blades, caught her flailing wrists, and cuffed her, as she sputtered into the blacktop, then patted her down for a pistol.

  She didn’t have one. He pointed his gun at the old man and said to the New Ulm cop, “Cuff him and put him on the ground.”

  That took three seconds and then Virgil walked to the Subaru and shouted over it, “Toby, we got them on the ground. Where are you?”

  “Down behind the truck. I’m coming,” Strait shouted back.

  Strait came up from behind his truck with his gun in his hand and Virgil went down to meet him and asked, “You okay?”

  “No thanks to that bitch.”

  Virgil: “I gotta take the gun.”

  “Man . . .”

  “I know, but I gotta take it,” Virgil said.

  Strait reluctantly handed it over, then looked at his truck: “Shit. It’s ruined. It looks like the Nazis machine-gunned it or something. Then I hit a couple of trees.”

  There were, Virgil estimated, dozens and maybe a hundred bullet holes in the side and back of the truck. “You were lucky.”

  Strait bobbed his head and then said, “I got a whole load of snake hides in the back, all curled up in bundles. They soaked up the incoming when I was on the road. Then, when I ran off the road, she must’ve thought I’d stayed in the truck. She really hosed it down.”

  They walked together to the road and around the Subaru and Strait took three fast steps toward Knowles, who was still face-down on the road, and cocked a leg to kick her in the face.

  Before he could do that, Virgil caught him by the collar of his shirt and yanked him back. “Don’t do that,” he told Strait. “At this point, she’s going back to jail and won’t see daylight for fifteen years. You’ll complicate things if you kick her.”

  “I was only going to do it because I was overcome with emotion,” Strait said. He sounded like he was asking for
permission.

  Virgil said, “Uh-uh. Stay back.”

  —

  More cop cars were closing in on them, lights and sirens. The New Ulm cop said, “I can’t believe that nobody got hurt. There’re six empty magazines in that Subaru and on the ground. That’s, what, a hundred and twenty shots?” He looked at Strait and asked, “How many did you fire?”

  “Thirty,” Strait said.

  “I did six, with a shotgun,” the cop said. “A hundred and fifty-six shots and nobody got a scratch.”

  “I cut my lip on the steering wheel,” Strait said.

  “You’ll take that,” Virgil said.

  “I guess,” Strait said. He plucked at his lip. “Hurts, though.”

  Knowles looked up from the ground and snarled at Strait, “Sooner or later, your luck—”

  Virgil cut her off. “Shut the fuck up.” He was easily pissed off by gunfire.

  The first of the backup cops arrived in a cloud of dust and the New Ulm cop who’d followed Virgil out said, “There’s one really good thing about this whole situation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I got a total lock on ‘Officer of the Month.’”

  11

  The New Ulm cops said they’d handle the processing of the crime and the crime scene, which would be pretty straightforward. Given that, Virgil would be treated mainly as a principal witness, with the arrest going to New Ulm.

  Knowles and her companion would be taken to the Brown County jail, eventually to be charged with attempted murder, then Knowles would be transferred to Steele County district court, which had freed her on bail. Bail would no longer be a possibility.

  The elderly man began to sob as one of the New Ulm cops put a hand on his head and guided him into the back of a cop car. The cop said to him, “Look at the bright side. You’re going to get lifelong free health care.”

  —

  They were at the scene for more than an hour before Virgil could leave. He’d have to file reports with the BCA and the New Ulm cops, but not for a day or two.

  The chase and the shooting had left him feeling disoriented, and as he drove back toward New Ulm, the anger began to burn out and he started to get scared: all those bullets flying around like bees. He tried to put the thought aside and called Peck. Peck answered—Virgil could hear the sounds of dishes and silverware clinking in the background, so Peck was at dinner—and Virgil said, “A major problem came up. I’m going to be a little late . . . probably half an hour.”

  “I’ll still be around,” Peck said. He sounded impatient, though, put-upon.

  —

  Virgil called Duncan and told him about the chase and the arrests, and Duncan said, “Does this have anything to do with the tigers?”

  “Only peripherally—I was checking out a possibility, and one thing led to another.”

  “You gotta think tigers, man.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Jon.”

  “Hey, I’m not trying to be tiresome, but a lot of people are looking at us, and if something doesn’t happen soon, we could be headed for a pretty unhappy conclusion.”

  “I know, I’m out here pushing the boulder up the hill. We’ll get there.”

  —

  Virgil called Davenport and told him what happened; Strait was Davenport’s guy and he needed to know.

  “Did you have a gun with you?” Davenport asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t shoot it, did you?”

  “No.”

  “There’s the fuckin’ Flowers we all know and love,” Davenport said.

  “I was chumped,” Virgil said.

  “Happens to everybody, all the time,” Davenport said. “At least you got Maxine off the street. She was goofier than a fuckin’ Packers fan who’s lost his cheese.”

  —

  Virgil pulled into Peck’s driveway shortly after seven-thirty and climbed the steps to the front door, where Peck was waiting, smoking the butt end of a cigarette. He was wearing a knitted cardigan over a T-shirt, black jeans, and slippers.

  He pushed the screen door open, said, “Come in,” and led Virgil to the living room, where two beige couches, a faux-wood coffee table, and a blue reading chair made a conversation group. He stubbed out the cigarette, took the blue chair, pointed at a couch, and asked, “What can I do for you?”

  “We’re trying to track down the tigers taken from the zoo,” Virgil said, resisting the temptation to wave away the secondhand smoke. “We’re trying to figure out who in Minnesota, or close to here anyway, would have the knowledge and ability to process a dead tiger into traditional medications. We understand that you’re an expert in the area and might have some ideas about that.”

  Peck rubbed his forehead, thinking, halfway scowled, and said, “The compounders of traditional medications here in the Twin Cities area work with herbs and other vegetation. Roots and so on. Not with fauna. Well, there’s one exception that I’m aware of. . . .”

  “Toby Strait?”

  Peck frowned. “Is he still working? I heard he’d been shot by some animal rights nut.”

  “He was,” Virgil said. “He wasn’t killed and he’s up and around again. You weren’t thinking of him?”

  “No, I was thinking of Bobbie Patterson—Roberta Patterson. She processes roadkill, the carcasses of animals trapped for their fur, and bats.”

  “That’s . . . unusual.”

  “Not a profession I’d choose for myself. She was a biologist, failed to get tenure a couple of times, and decided to make some money,” Peck said. “She has an operation over in Wisconsin, east of Hudson somewhere. Always been legal, as far as I know.”

  “You have an address or number for her?”

  “No, but I think she’s called Patterson Biologic Resources or something close to that. She has a website.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Virgil said. “Exactly what kind of equipment would you need to process biologics?”

  Peck shrugged. “Not my area. I’m more interested in traditional medicine as an academic discipline. I publish books and papers in the field; I don’t engage in the production of herbal or animal compounds. And to tell you the truth, those that do, around here, are usually a bunch of shitkickers stumbling around in the woods, trying to get something for free. They’re not exactly high-end biologists. Bobbie Patterson is the exception there.”

  “But you do use some traditional medicines from time to time, right? Or at least buy some?”

  Peck nodded. “Sure. I have a small, select patient list. Some of these things have a long history of efficacy against certain kinds of illnesses. Rheumatism, for example, or gout. Karl Marx suffered from gout and so did Henry the Eighth.”

  “Didn’t know that,” Virgil said. “Do your medicines work?”

  “Like Western medicine, they work some of the time. Some of the time, they don’t,” Peck said. “But they do no harm.”

  “Hmm,” Virgil said. Then, “I don’t mean to offend you, but I have to ask a few questions. We’re asking these of everyone we speak to. Could you tell me where you were two nights ago?”

  “Well . . . here,” Peck said, waving toward a wall-mounted television. “Two nights ago, let me see, I was working here until midnight or so and watching some television—The Freshman was on, an old movie, but it always makes me laugh. Marlon Brando reprising The Godfather as a comedy. Anyway, I was making a few notes from a book, a catalog really, called Life in the Bengal, about primitive medicine in India, as it was preserved into the 1890s.”

  Virgil would check the movie time later. “Nobody here with you? No visitors?”

  “No . . . I did see my neighbor when I was pushing the garbage out to the curb. That’s Maxwell Broom, next house down the street. That was late, probably ten o’clock.”

  “I’ve been told that a fully processed tiger
would be worth quite a lot in terms of medicine, and again, not to be offensive, I understand that you ran into some financial difficulty recently.”

  “Been doing some research on me, huh? Well, it wasn’t a difficulty, it was a goddamned disaster,” Peck said. “Started out simple, made a little money with an iPhone app aimed at people who are hard of hearing. Most ringtones are high-pitched, see, and people suffering hearing loss can’t hear them, even when they’re loud. I had an idea: ringtones based on lower-frequency sounds. I hired a coder, put together the ringtones based on lower-frequency tones, bought advertisements in AARP Magazine, which were quite expensive, and made some money. Then this coder started pressing me with this idea for an emoji-type figure. He said it would go viral and make us millionaires. . . .”

  “Nipples,” Virgil said.

  “Don’t even say the word to me,” Peck said. “I must have been out of my mind. But: the Star Tribune article was wrong. I assume that’s where you got your information? I didn’t declare bankruptcy, the company did. I was the nominal head of the company.”

  “Said they took your car.”

  “They got it wrong. That was the company van,” Peck said. “Don’t ask me why we had one; my accountant suggested it. A tax thing. Anyway, I did have to sell it to pay off creditors, along with a couple computers and some office equipment. The company’s remaining assets, is what it was. I don’t deny that I was hurt, but . . . I still have considerable personal assets.”

  Peck was up-front and calm, yet his left leg bounced against his toes for the whole time of the interview. Nervousness, Virgil thought, brought rigidly under control in his voice and face, but tipped off by the leg. Not necessarily an indictment: most people were nervous when being interviewed by a cop.