Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  Ten minutes after making the turn down Highway 169, the chemical remnants of the Xanax came back to bite him in the ass and he found the driver’s-side tires running off the left edge of the highway. The bumping shook him awake and he jerked the car back into its own lane. The sudden change of direction knocked the jar of gasoline over. The seal wasn’t quite tight, and gas started leaking into the car’s backseat carpet.

  As soon as Peck smelled it, he reached behind the seat and managed to get it upright, but the fumes were added to the residual stink of whatever was contaminating the air conditioner. He began to gag and finally turned the air conditioner off and rolled the windows down again. He drove stupidly into the night, and farther on, he wasn’t sure how much, he crossed the Minnesota River, and about fifty large yellow-gutted insects splatted across the windshield, and a few whizzed past his ear into the backseat, where they spattered on the inside of the back windows.

  Hunched over the steering wheel, barely able to see, Peck muttered, “A nightmare. A fuckin’ nightmare.”

  The drive seemed to go on forever, but didn’t. He pulled into an all-night gas station in St. Peter, wiped off the windshield, and sped away without going inside; being able to see made things better. An hour and a half after he left the barn, he drove slowly and quietly into Mankato.

  The Xanax-free space in the back of his head began hinting that his whole plan was insane, but the Xanax-saturated part ignored it.

  Peck had drawn a quick sketch of the location of Flowers’s house on a legal pad before he left his own home, but in the dark, he missed a few turns and had to go back a couple of times—and once saw a Mankato patrol car cross a street ahead of him.

  “Not good for morale, Winston,” he muttered. “Not good.”

  —

  When he finally got onto Flowers’s street, he found it to be narrow and moon-shadowed by trees arcing over the blacktop. Pretty in the daytime, dark as tar in the night. A lot of the houses either had no numbers, or no numbers that could be seen in the dark. One white house had a bright yellow porch light on outside, and he could see that the idiot owners had painted the house numbers white. How could anybody see them?

  The first set of numbers he could see suggested he was two blocks from Flowers’s place. He idled on down that way, through two stop signs, saw a number that suggested he’d passed Flowers’s, went on another block, did a careful U-turn, and came back. He had a choice of three houses: one of them had to be Flowers’s, but they were all dark.

  The first house looked to be too high on the numbers list. The middle one had an attached garage and he remembered from the firebomb newspaper story that Flowers’s garage had been the target of the bomber. The next house down the street had a detached garage, and why would anyone bomb a detached garage if they were targeting the owner?

  Logic had spoken: had to be the middle one.

  Peck was sweating even more heavily now, fear adding pressure to the heat, all of it still ameliorated by the residual Xanax in his brain. Do it, or not?

  The residual Xanax won.

  He fumbled the jar out of the backseat, unscrewed the top enough to leak some gasoline onto the apron rag, made sure he had his Bic lighter, left the car running, got out, ran across the yard to the side of the house—ran so he wouldn’t have a chance to change his mind—fired the Bic lighter into the rag, which ignited with a low-running yellow flame, and heaved the jar through a side window.

  There was an instantaneous mushroom of fire inside the house and he ran back to the car and took off, turning the first corner he came to.

  Now he was exultant. “Did it, did it,” he said aloud. “People sometimes meet guys like Winston Peck the Sixth, and they say, ‘I didn’t think he could do it, I guess I just didn’t know.’ Yeah, you just didn’t know, you asshole. . . .”

  An hour and a half later, still talking to himself about the bombing, and after another encounter with the yellow-gutted bugs crossing back over the Minnesota River, he found a parking spot six blocks from his house in St. Paul, and did a reentry that was exactly the opposite of his exit.

  Once in the house, he peeled off the ski mask and went into the bathroom to wash his face. There, he caught sight of himself in the mirror: he’d never seen anything like it. Winston Peck the doctor had been replaced by Winston Peck the terrorist-attack survivor.

  His thinning hair, soaked with sweat and dirt, stood away from his head like the Cowardly Lion’s in The Wizard of Oz. His face was a fiery red, and a rash had broken out across his nose and cheeks. His mouth hung open, and he really couldn’t seem to keep it closed.

  He stood in a cool shower for five minutes, dried off, collapsed naked on his bed, but his mind was still screaming. He lay rigid for three minutes, maybe five minutes, his brain rerunning the gasoline explosion, then crawled out of bed and found the tube of Xanax.

  “Just one more,” he said to himself. He popped two, on second thought, and went back to the bed and was out before he had time to pull a sheet over himself.

  27

  Virgil was on his way home when Frankie called: “I was going to wait for you to get here, but I’m exhausted. I’ve got to get to sleep. Everything is okay at the farm, right?”

  “Yeah, Sparkle said she talked to you . . .”

  “Some kids out skinny-dipping.”

  “Yup. I had to talk your boys out of going down there,” Virgil said. “If they’d gotten a good look at those girls, they’d have been locked in the bathroom for the rest of the summer.”

  “But that wouldn’t apply to you?”

  “Nah. I’m well taken care of.”

  “Thank you. I’m taking a couple of painkillers and going to sleep. Try to be quiet when you come in.”

  —

  Virgil stopped at a convenience store and bought a bottle of orange juice, rolled his truck windows down—it was finally beginning to cool off—and put his elbow out and drank the juice.

  With the windows down, he could hear the sudden blast of sirens from Mankato.

  If it was cops, Virgil thought, there’s a riot going on. More likely the fire department. He rolled across the Highway 14 bridge into town and realized that the sirens seemed to be heading toward the general area of his house, which didn’t worry him much, until he got off at the North Riverfront exit and realized that the sirens, and now the flashing lights, were really close to his house, and when he turned onto his street and saw the lights straight ahead, and a cop blew past him with sirens screaming through his open windows, he thought, Holy shit, that IS my house.

  He instantly thought of Frankie, who’d taken those painkillers to knock herself out, and he floored his truck and blew through a couple of stops signs until . . .

  Wait. That’s not my house.

  It was, in fact, the house next to his house. He couldn’t get all the way down to it, because of the fire trucks, and he had to park on the block behind his house. All the neighbors were out in the yards watching, and Virgil saw the couple who owned the house behind his, and he called, “Jack, hey, you guys—what happened?”

  Jack’s wife, Emmy, said, “We thought it was a gas explosion or something, but when we ran out here, we could smell gasoline. Not natural gas, car gas.”

  “Did the Wilsons get out?”

  “Yeah, we talked to them. They said something blew up in their kitchen. I think they’re around in the front.”

  Virgil trotted over to his house and let himself in through the back, and Frankie called, “Virgie?”

  “Yeah. I was afraid it was here, and you’d be asleep.”

  She was standing in the front room, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, looking out through the side windows. “The firemen came pounding on the doors, said I might have to leave, but they put the fire out and they came back and said I was okay. For ten minutes, it was like the end of the world around here.”

  “
You okay?”

  “Not entirely. I gotta go back and lie down. I’m not sleepy anymore, but those pills got me feeling like the undead.”

  Virgil took her back to the bedroom, tucked her in, and said, “I gotta get out there and find out what happened. Jack and Emmy made it sound a little strange.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like there was gasoline involved. I’m gonna talk to the fire guys.”

  “Careful.”

  —

  A fire lieutenant named Carl Beard saw Virgil walking through the crowd of neighbors and came over and said, “You gotta quit this shit, Virgil.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Wilsons were sleeping and something blew up in their kitchen, and Kyle went running in there and found the whole place on fire. Janet called us and Kyle sprayed it with his fire extinguisher and knocked it down a little, and then the extinguisher ran out and they went outside and waited for us. We shut it down, but you could smell gasoline all over the place—and Kyle said there was no gasoline in the house.”

  “It’s like when . . .”

  “Yeah. Like when that preacher firebombed your garage. Same deal. After we put the fire out, I looked in the kitchen, which is pretty scorched, and the kitchen sink is full of broken glass and there’s a piece of burnt rag in there. . . . It was a bomb.”

  “Goddamnit. You think it was aimed at me?”

  “Kyle sorta hinted at that. He said nobody’s mad at him, but a lot of people might be mad at you. You’ve been in the newspaper, a little bit, with your girlfriend.”

  Wilson worked as the service manager at a car dealership and was generally known as a friendly guy. He had, on occasion, mown Virgil’s grass when Virgil had been out of town a few days too many, and they’d always been invited to each other’s barbeques.

  “I better talk to him,” Virgil said.

  “Maybe you better—but I’ll tell you, Virg, this wasn’t any prank or anything like that,” Beard said. “The dipshit who threw the bomb wanted to burn the place down and he didn’t care who got hurt.”

  —

  The Wilsons were standing on the other side of the fire trucks. Virgil went over and found them talking to their insurance agent, who was also Virgil’s agent and who lived in the neighborhood. When Kyle Wilson saw Virgil coming, he prodded his wife with his elbow and said, affably enough, “We were thinking about remodeling anyway.”

  Virgil said, “Hey, Kyle, Janet. Uh . . . I kinda know what you might think. I hope it’s not true.”

  Janet said, “Who knows? We can’t think of why anybody would do this to us. If it really was a firebomb.”

  Kyle said, “We’re pretty sure it was a bomb. We actually heard it hit, we heard the window break and glass shatter, then whoosh.”

  “Nobody upset about a car repair or anything?”

  Kyle shook his head. “Wouldn’t be aimed at me, even if it was. I don’t do the customer contact and I don’t fix the cars—I supervise the mechanics and everything I do is in-house. You’d have to fish around to even find my name.”

  Virgil nodded. “All right. I helped arrest a guy last night. He’s in jail, but he had an accomplice and he’s still out there. We’ll nail him down pretty quick, and I’ll find out whether he did this.”

  The insurance agent said to Virgil, “Their policy covers all the damage, and we’ll get an adjuster on it tomorrow. It’d be helpful if you or the Mankato police could find out who did it, and let me know. There would be the possibility of some civil recovery from the perpetrator, if he has any assets at all.”

  “I’ll call you,” Virgil said. He looked up at the house. “What a mess.”

  —

  Virgil got back to the house, took a quick shower, and got back in bed. Frankie, talking in the dark, asked, “You think it was you? Or us?”

  Virgil rolled toward her, had to think about it for a moment, then said, “Probably. It’s hard to see the house numbers in the night and the guy that Catrin is looking for is no genius. I don’t know why he’d come after me, though.”

  “Because he’s pissed off and he’s a mean redneck?”

  “He’s gotta know by now that we’re looking for him and that we’re not going away,” Virgil said. “He’d know it’d be an aggravating circumstance if he was identified, and he’s no virgin. A couple of years in prison for assault is way different than an ag assault charge, or attempted murder, or even murder, if there’d been somebody standing in the kitchen, or even arson, for that matter. He could be doing a six-pack for throwing the bomb.”

  Frankie said, “Hmm.” And a moment later, “What if it’s the people who stole the tigers? Trying to make you go away?”

  “That occurred to me,” Virgil said.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Virgil said. “It could even have been aimed at the Wilsons. But there have been two murders tied to the tigers. Winston Peck? It’s possible, but I really don’t know. I will know, though. Sooner or later, I’ll know.”

  28

  Jenkins could barely remember what it was like doing surveillance before he got his phone-linked iPad, but he could remember the feeling: it was brutal. An overnight watch could still be deeply boring, but now he could prop the iPad on the steering wheel and browse the ’net while still keeping an eye on the target, and, in the end, get the BCA to pay for his Verizon text charges.

  Until four o’clock in the morning, the target had been pretty quiet. After he’d stepped out on his porch to look for surveillance, Peck had gone back inside and hadn’t stuck his head out since. The television had gone off before two o’clock, though there was still a light in the living room. Then that went off, and a light in the back of the house had come on—bathroom or bedroom, Jenkins thought—and then that one went off, too.

  Jenkins read a couple of investment forums, a news forum, a forum that specialized in Chuck Norris jokes (“What do you get when you play Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backward? The sound of Chuck Norris banging your mom.”), and a gun forum and was browsing men’s Purple Label suits on the Ralph Lauren website when things began to pick up.

  A few minutes after four, as Jenkins was checking out a white silk gabardine suit for $4,995, an RV pulled up outside Peck’s house and six heavyset men spilled out into the street.

  Jenkins said, “Oh, shit,” and picked up the phone and called Virgil.

  Virgil groaned when the phone went off, groped for it on the windowsill next to the bed, and asked, “What?”

  Jenkins said, “The Simonians just arrived in their RV. They’re going up to Peck’s house. What do I do if they kidnap him?”

  Virgil took a second to pull his head together, and said, “Ah, man—Jenkins, you gotta get over there and break it up.”

  “You know, if they beat on him a little bit, it might encourage . . .”

  “No! Daisy knows you’re sitting there. She’d know that you let them take Peck,” Virgil said.

  “Ah, shit, you’re right. I’m going,” Jenkins said.

  “Try not to shoot anyone.”

  “Gotta go, they’re beating his door down.”

  “Call me back!”

  —

  Frankie said, “Now what?”

  Virgil said, “Tell you later” and fell facedown on his pillow and was almost instantly asleep. Peck, at that same moment, was knocked out of bed by what sounded like an earthquake. With the two Xanax holding him down, he didn’t notice that he was naked, and not only naked but sporting a substantial erection. He lurched out of the bedroom to the front door, which he yanked open. A crowd of men stood on his porch, and all seemed to step back when they spotted his hard-on pointing at them, then one of them tried to yank open the locked aluminum door and, when that didn’t happen, punched a fist directly through the screen.

  Peck alm
ost lost his balance and tried to turn to run, but then a siren bleeped in the street and an unmarked car pulled to the curb showing police flashers, and a large man jumped out of the car and shouted, “Get out of there. Simonians—get out of there.”

  Peck slammed the door and stood in the hallway for a moment, wondering what he was doing standing naked in the hallway with an erection. Maybe he’d been masturbating? He didn’t think so. He stumbled back to bed and fell asleep.

  On the porch, the Simonians confronted Jenkins, who said, “I oughta arrest every fuckin’ one of you guys. You can’t go driving around town kidnapping people, for Christ’s sakes. . . .”

  “He cut the arms off Hamlet and the legs off Hayk,” said Levon Simonian, their spokesman. “We gonna cut off his pecker and make him eat it.”

  “That’s a worthwhile thought, but not here,” Jenkins said. “It’d cause all kinds of trouble. You guys get back in your RV and get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to see you back here again. If I do, I’ll kick your ass.”

  “You think you can take all of us?” the youngest of the Simonians asked.

  Jenkins did a quick survey—except for the youngest one, they were all middle-aged and fat, though they showed signs of having done a few million bench presses—and said, “Yes.”

  They spent a few seconds in a stare-down and then Levon Simonian said, “We should complain to the police force in St. Paul that this man walks around free, while Hamlet has no arms and Hayk has no legs.”

  “You do that,” Jenkins said. “First thing tomorrow morning. Right now, let me tell you about Mickey’s Diner. . . .”

  Five minutes later, he had the RV on its way to Mickey’s, and Jenkins called Virgil.

  “What?”

  “I ran them off. You want me to sit here some more? Peck saw me,” Jenkins said.

  “No. Go home. Sleep. Don’t call me again,” Virgil said.

  “You sound a little snappish.”