Escape Clause

by John Sandford

“I’ll wait,” he said.

  Drug secure again, he wandered off to the magazine rack, popped the last Xanax in his pill tube, and started paging through People. The magazine confused him: Who were all these celebrities? A few of the names were vaguely familiar, but most were not. One prominently displayed woman seemed to have an enormous ass and was famous for it. This was an ass that should have been on a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Yet, as awkward and obscure as they were, all these people seemed to have media skills, either smiling directly into the camera lens or hiding bruised eye sockets behind dark glasses. Or showing off their asses.

  These people, both the smiling ones and the bruised ones, needed to take more Xanax, he thought.

  He noticed that his left foot was tapping frenetically on the floor and stopped it. He got down another, cheaper celebrity magazine and was sucked into an apparently imaginary story about Jen. Jen’s last name was never mentioned, and he had no idea who she was, although he thought he might have remembered her from some TV show a long time ago. That was confirmed when he got to the last paragraph of the story: the show was Friends, and it had ended eleven years earlier.

  Eleven years: Peck would give everything to have had those eleven years back. For one thing, he wouldn’t have messed around with those women in Indianapolis. If he’d gotten a regular doctor job, he’d be driving the big bucks now, fixing everything from Aarskog syndrome to Zika virus.

  Mostly with Xanax.

  Done with the magazines, he started pacing the aisles, trying not to look impatient or worried. Trying to look cool. He went by a cosmetic counter and caught an image of himself in a mirror. Even with the calming drug flowing around his brain, he knew why he’d gotten the odd look from the clerk: he was wearing a green golf shirt, but it was on backward, the collar up so it looked like a turtleneck.

  He wandered some more, purposefully now, until he saw a sign for the restrooms. There was only one, a unisex, but it was open. He went inside, locked the door, turned the shirt around, splashed some water on his face, checked his fly, smiled at himself, and went back out.

  —

  Five minutes later, he got his new tube of Xanax with no further comment or looks from the pharmacy clerk, and he went out to the parking lot and spent fifteen minutes searching for his car. He eventually remembered that it had a remote panic alarm on the key fob, and he set it off, found the car, and crawled into the driver’s seat, where he went to sleep, still clutching the paper sack that contained the new tube of pills.

  He woke sometime later, with a woman rapping on the partially rolled-down driver’s-side window. He looked at her and she stepped back and asked, “Are you okay?”

  “A little sleepy,” he said. His mouth tasted like chickenshit smelled. “I’m fine.”

  She went away and he muttered after her, “Mind your own business, you old bitch.” He smacked his lips, realized the temperature inside the car was near the boiling point—would have killed a dog, he thought—and he started the car, put the AC on high, and wheeled out of the parking lot. The sun was much lower in the sky than it had been when he went into the Walgreens. How long had he been asleep? He looked at his watch and was surprised to see a mole on his wrist, but no watch. Must have forgotten to put it on. And where was he going? He had some other mission besides the pills. . . .

  He sat at the stop sign and had to think a moment. He knew it was close by, and so it must . . .

  Ah! Walmart. He needed a meat grinder. Hayk Simonian had not yet picked one up, at the time of his unfortunate accident.

  He drove over to Walmart, a trip of five minutes or so, and when he got there, sat in the parking lot, trying to remember why he was there. Remembering was tough. He tried running through the alphabet, thinking of things he might need starting with an A, then a B. . . .

  He’d gone all the way through to Z and was still sitting stupefied in his car, when he remembered: meat grinder. Before getting out of the truck, he automatically touched his pocket, checking to make sure he had his medication. He could feel it on his leg: he pulled the amber-colored tube out and almost panicked when he found it was empty.

  But he distinctly remembered Walgreens and looked at the passenger seat, where he saw the white paper bag with the new prescription. A surge of relief. Drug secure again. But the old tube, the date . . . the date on the tube was two days earlier. Could that be right? He took out his cell phone and checked the date, and it was right. He’d taken thirty Xanax tabs in two and a half days? Jesus: he might have a problem here.

  Had to slow down with that shit. Maybe . . . three a day. Okay, maybe four. No more than four, and only on bad days.

  —

  He went into Walmart, functioning better now, found a hand-operated meat grinder. As he was walking down the aisle toward the checkout counters, a woman, talking on a cell phone, accompanied by a clutch of children who appeared to be about seven, six, five, four, and three years of age, was approaching with an overloaded shopping cart. He tried to dodge but she crashed the cart into his legs, looked up, and said, “Hey, watch where you’re going, asshole.” As she walked away, he heard her say, “Some weirdo walked right into my cart.”

  The Xanax worked to keep his temper under control—he put it all down to a Walmart moment—and Peck continued to the checkout. He paid cash for the meat grinder, went back to the car, drove out to I-94, and turned east. He was ten miles from the farm, with a stack of tiger jerky to grind up and another cat to kill. He really didn’t want to do it anymore, the whole thing had spun out of control.

  But he needed the money. It had to be done and he had to do it by himself; nobody to help old Peck now. A tear gathered in his left eye, and he wiped it away. Nobody to help old Peck.

  —

  Five miles down I-94, Peck passed a Minnesota highway patrol car sitting in the median, running a speed trap. He reflexively tapped the brake and looked at his speedometer, found that he was only going fifty miles an hour. He hadn’t noticed that all the other cars were passing him, but they were. He sped up a bit, the patrolman looking at him as he went past. He kept an eye on his rearview mirror, but the patrolman never moved.

  The sight of the cop made him nervous, and when he got to the farm, he drove his car around behind the barn, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.

  In the barn, the cat stood up and hissed at him. She really hated him, he knew, and he found that amusing. He picked up the rifle, carried it close to the cage, and the cat pressed against the wire mesh. He aimed the rifle at her eyes.

  “Who’s the big dog now?” he asked her.

  He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He worked the bolt and looked down into the chamber. Nothing there, and nothing in the magazine. Fuck it.

  The temperature inside the barn must have been a hundred and thirty, he thought; one of the dryers was still running, and he walked over and turned it off, and then opened the door, which he propped open with a rock. The incoming air felt cool on his skin, compared to that inside the barn, but he knew the outside temperatures must still be in the nineties, after touching a hundred earlier in the day.

  He went back to the dryer, opened the door, and looked inside. The last of the tiger meat was more than crispy: it looked like bacon that had been hard-fried for ten minutes too many. He left the door open to cool the meat and went to the worktable, where he’d piled up three stacks of dried meat, each a foot high.

  He took the grinder out of its box, used the screw clamps on the bottom to clamp it to the worktable, and started grinding. After a while, the silence got to him, and he turned on Hayk Simonian’s radio, which Simonian had tuned to the public radio station, and listened to All Things Considered.

  Last thing up was a commentary on the missing tigers, with an interview with a state cop named Jon something.

  “I can tell you that we’re picking up more and more material, more and more evide
nce, to work with, and we’re going to solve this. I was talking to our lead investigator this morning, and he thinks we’ll have a break of some kind today or tomorrow. We’re keeping our fingers crossed: we hope the tigers haven’t been hurt, but we have to live with the possibility that they have been. I don’t want to upset anyone, but that’s the reality of the matter.”

  The interviewer said, “We’ve seen an intimidating list of crimes that the thieves could be charged with. Do you really think that the perpetrators could be charged with anything like what we’ve seen? Fifteen or twenty separate crimes, possibly even including murder?”

  “From what we know now,” the cop said, “we believe there have been at least two murders committed in the course of this crime—we’ve got the bodies of two brothers who we know were involved. Persons involved in this crime now fall under the felony murder statute, which means that they didn’t have to pull a trigger, or even know about the murders, if they were involved in the initial crime. When we catch them, they’re going to prison. Thirty years in Minnesota, no parole. There is, of course, the matter of prosecutorial discretion: if somebody involved were to come forward, to help us clear this matter up, a prosecutor could well decide to recommend leniency. That would have to happen soon, because I believe we’re going to solve this crime on our own, in the next day or so, and start rounding up the perpetrators.”

  Peck changed to a classic rock station and continued grinding.

  When he was done, he had fifty or sixty pounds of rough-ground dry meat, which he packed into five plastic buckets from Home Depot. The meat would eventually be poured into plastic tubes the size of his pill containers, and sold for anything up to twenty-five dollars.

  He had, he thought, at least fifty thousand dollars’ worth of meat right there, and he hadn’t even gotten to the good stuff yet.

  The bones would have to be broken up with a hammer before they could be ground. Hayk Simonian had bought an anvil at an antique shop for that purpose, along with a heavy ball-peen hammer.

  Peck was too tired for that. Maybe dehydrated from the heat. He needed a quart of cold water and an icy margarita and a nap. Xanax for sure. He picked up the rifle and the box of cartridges and started for the door. Katya hissed again, and he turned and said, “When I come back, I’m gonna blow your brains out, kitty cat. Right after I take my nap. Look forward to it.”

  32

  Virgil spent part of the afternoon making phone calls, staying in touch with Minneapolis homicide about the younger Zhang, checking the tip line, talking to people at the zoo, avoiding calls from the media. Most of it was unpleasant, from his point of view.

  Brad Blankenship had been picked up by a Blue Earth County deputy and taken to the jail in Mankato, but Mattsson had called to tell him about a chat with the Blue Earth County attorney. “He’s going to try to push Blankenship into a corner, try to get him to deal up for Castro, but he doesn’t think it’s going to work. Blankenship made a call to an attorney from the jail here, and the county attorney tells me that that guy is also Castro’s attorney. If what happens is what I think is going to happen, Blankenship will be out on bail by tonight, on Castro’s money.”

  “Then he’s probably not going to deal up,” Virgil said.

  “Probably not.”

  “What if we said he was a danger to witnesses?”

  “The bail will probably get larger, but that’s all,” she said. “We’re still going to get the guy, but . . .”

  “It’s not exactly what we were hoping for. It’d be nice if we could deal up and get whoever paid him, but I want to see Blankenship doing time, too.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that, because that might be what we’re gonna get. If you’re happy, I’m happy, and I already talked to Frankie about it, and she’s okay with it. Alvarez . . . I think Alvarez and her husband are probably headed back to Mexico. Sparkle isn’t too happy about that, but Sparkle doesn’t have to go back to the pickle factory,” she said.

  “I don’t much care what Sparkle is happy about,” Virgil said.

  Mattsson said, “Okay, then. Listen, I’m up for the rest of the day—do you need help with the tigers?”

  “I don’t even have enough for myself to do,” Virgil said. “If I need help, I’ll call.”

  “Do that.”

  —

  Howser called from the Minneapolis homicide office and said they hadn’t gotten a warrant for Zhang’s shoes. “Got the wrong judge, in the wrong mood, and we were a little thin to begin with. Goddamn Zhang went out of here dragging his shoes on every carpet he saw.”

  “How about the Ferrari? It was titled to his old man.”

  “We’re all over that. Crime Scene’s down there with vacuums, looking for tiger hair.”

  —

  That was about it. No tips, no ideas from the zoo. Late in the afternoon, he went over to Peck’s house and pounded on the doors, but there was no answer, and the house felt empty. Should have left a round-the-clock stakeout on Peck, he thought. He was probably with the tigers.

  —

  With no place left to go, he looked at his watch: Sandy should be in Los Angeles, but she’d call if she actually got anything. Last gasp: he drove out to Washington County to the middle of the large circle on the older Zhang’s Chinese telephone and started driving around.

  The countryside was lush with the end of summer coming up, the tall grasses showing gold on the edges, a few yellow leaves popping out in the aspens, birches, and soybean fields. His favorite time of year, but south Washington County was not becoming his favorite place.

  The roads ran all over the place, and many of the houses were set so far back from the road, or so deep behind sheltering trees, that he could see almost nothing—and he suspected that wherever the tigers were being kept, that place would be hard to see. With nothing else to do, he kept driving, up one road and down the next, gravel to blacktop and back to gravel, redwing blackbirds perched on cattails, rabbits warming their feet on the gravel shoulders, what might have been a mink making a dash for a culvert: and the sun slowly sank down to the horizon.

  The fair-weather clouds were showing orange crinkles from the setting sun when Sandy called. “This place is a nightmare,” she said. “It took an hour and five minutes to drive from LAX to Pasadena. Thirty miles.”

  “I don’t have a real tight grip on where Pasadena is,” Virgil said. “You have a reason for going there?”

  “Yes. The FedEx packages have been dropped at a place here, and the phone is in this building. I’m going to start calling it, and we’ll have a bunch of people listening for it. There are about a million packages and I’m hoping he hasn’t turned the ringer off. Anyway, I just got here, I’m dealing with the manager, I’ll call back when we get something. If we get something.”

  —

  Virgil called Mattsson: “You still free?”

  “Sure, for a while, anyway. I’m starting to get a little off-center. I’ve been up since five o’clock.”

  He told her where he was, and she said she’d drive out.

  Fifteen minutes later, Sandy called back: “We got it. The ringer was turned off, but he had the vibration thing turned on, and we can feel the box vibrating when I call it. It’s addressed to a Jack in the Box. I don’t know what that’s all about, but the manager says as long as I give him a written statement that the owner is dead and this is for a police investigation, we can open it here.”

  “Then do it. Now,” Virgil said.

  “I’m doing it,” she said. “The box is right here and I’m typing out this statement. I hope it doesn’t get us in trouble.”

  “Hamlet’s dead, Sandy. Who’s going to complain?”

  “Hang on . . .” As he hung on, he dug in his briefcase and found Hamlet Simonian’s password book. Sandy came back and said, “Got it. It wants a password, four numbers. You got a four-number password?”
/>   He looked. “I do. I’ve got three of them, unidentified.”

  “Give them to me.”

  —

  They hit it on the second one and Sandy said, “It’s opening up—that’s it, Virgil. Okay, I’m paging through here. Location services are on . . . Oh my God.”

  “Oh my God, what?”

  “He was at the zoo three times,” Sandy said. “He was at the zoo the night the tigers were stolen, it’s all right here, it actually says the Minnesota Zoo and has the time.”

  “Aww . . . kiss yourself for me. On the lips. What else? I mean, where else?”

  “A few places in St. Paul . . .”

  She read off the addresses and Virgil said, “That’s Peck’s place . . . that’s his apartment . . . that’s the place over in Frogtown, where they sent the dryers. Don’t know what the other ones are. . . . What about Washington County?”

  “Doesn’t say Washington County but there’s a place out east of St. Paul, must be it. He’s been seven times.”

  “That’s it. Where is it?”

  She read off the address. Virgil wrote it down and said, “We need to keep that phone secure. We need a list of witnesses who saw you open the FedEx box, and who saw you put the password numbers in and who saw you open up the phone. We need names and addresses for all of them. Be sure to save the box and any documentation that comes with it, and make friends with the witnesses.”

  “I can do that. The manager here asked me what I was doing later tonight . . .”

  “Jesus, Sandy . . .”

  “Messing with you, Virgil. I will do that, I’ll document everything. I haven’t touched the phone except to put in the password numbers, and I did that with a stylus so I wouldn’t put my own fingerprints on it. Simonian’s should be all over it. Maybe Peck’s, if he’s the one who shipped it.”

  “You are so good,” Virgil said.

  “Are you going to his place in Washington County?”

  “Soon as the backup gets here,” Virgil said.