Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  “Jenkins and Shrake?” Sandy asked.

  “Catrin Mattsson.”

  “She’s as good as Jenkins and Shrake—she’s sort of my new heroine. Virgil—be careful, huh? Both of you. Please?”

  “Got it covered,” Virgil said, as he hung up.

  33

  Virgil cruised the address Sandy had given him and it looked perfect as a tiger hideaway. The place was surrounded by tall trees, but he could see a light in a main house and a barn or an oversized garage in back, all down a long gravel driveway. Details were hard to pick out as the daylight diminished, but it was clear that if someone had wanted to unload tranquilized tigers, he could have done it privately.

  A mailbox said “Hall” with the house number under that, so he had the right place.

  When he’d seen as much as he could from the road, he drove out to the closest intersection of I-94 and parked off the road. Mattsson arrived five minutes later and pulled up behind him.

  “How does it look?” she asked, as they rendezvoused at Virgil’s front bumper.

  “I could see at least two buildings from the road. We’ll have to scout it before we go in. I’d suggest we park a couple hundred feet away from the driveway. . . . Let me get a legal pad.”

  He got a legal pad from his briefcase, and a pencil, and drew a quick schematic of the target address, showing what he’d been able to see of the house and the outbuilding, and shaded some areas that were heavily wooded.

  “The ditches are dry, so we’ll be able to walk through them. If we come in from this side, we’ll have to climb at least two fences, but from this point”—he tapped his sketch—“we should be able to walk all the way around the place without anyone seeing us.”

  “Any vehicles?”

  “Not that I could see,” Virgil said.

  “After we scout it, one of us should run back to the trucks and use one to plug the driveway before we go in,” Mattsson said. “If we’re on foot and they make a break for it, they could be gone before we could get to our own vehicles.”

  “Yes. You run, I’ve got these goddamn cowboy boots on and you’ve got sneakers, so you’ll be quicker.”

  “Getting dark: we better move.”

  —

  Virgil led the way to the parking area he’d spotted while scouting. They got out, quietly as they could, and Mattsson whispered, “Virgil: get your gun.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  He got his Glock out of the back, with the clip-on holster, and pressed his back against the truck door, so it closed with a click instead of a slam. He led the way down the road toward the target address and, fifty feet short of the driveway, through the roadside ditch and over a fence with a single barbed-wire strand on top, and into the trees. Another fence, old, in poor condition and barely visible, stopped them a few feet in, and they took a minute getting over it. Darkness was coming on fast now, but they had enough light to navigate.

  They moved slowly through the trees, stumbling over the occasional downed branch or hole in the ground, to where they could see the house and the building behind it. There were no open doors, nothing visible through the windows.

  “Driveway’s the only way in or out,” Mattsson said, next to Virgil’s ear. She slapped at her own face: they were in a swarm of mosquitoes.

  “Yeah.” Virgil led the way around the open lot, staying back in the trees, both of them swatting at mosquitoes as they walked. When they’d gone all the way around, they’d learned nothing more, other than only a single light was shining in the house, and it was possible that nobody was inside.

  When they got out to the ditch at the other side of the house, Virgil whispered, “I’ll go down to the driveway; you run to get your truck.”

  “Car coming,” she said, and pointed.

  The car had turned onto the road a half mile away and was coming toward them. They stepped back into the trees so they wouldn’t be caught in the headlights. The car slowed, turned into the driveway—they could see it was a Toyota Corolla or something like that—and pulled all the way past the house. Somebody, they couldn’t see who, got out of the car, and a moment later, a house door slammed.

  “Now there’s somebody home, if there wasn’t before,” Virgil said quietly.

  “Probably a woman,” Mattsson said.

  “Why?”

  “Because this far out, with a large lot and a barn or a toolshed, a guy would probably be driving a truck, not a small sedan,” she said.

  Virgil said, “Huh. Okay. That’s not necessarily good. I was thinking it’d be a place where they could kill the tigers and cut them up, not somebody’s home.”

  “We’ll see,” Mattsson said. “I’ll get the truck.”

  —

  She jogged off through the dark, and Virgil saw the lights go when she opened the truck door. At that same moment, another truck turned the corner, slowed as it passed Virgil’s and Mattsson’s vehicles, then came on, slowed again, turned down the driveway. Virgil heard the truck door slam and somebody go into the house.

  Mattsson followed a minute later, turned down the driveway, stopped her truck at the narrowest spot in the driveway, effectively blocking it.

  When she got out of the truck, Virgil asked, “What do you think?”

  “Well, you think the tiger thieves have murdered three people. We gotta be ready.”

  “Let’s knock,” Virgil said. “Get your gun out; keep it out of sight behind me. Don’t shoot me in the back.”

  —

  They walked up to the door in that odd formation, Mattsson behind him but very close, Virgil’s Glock loose in its holster, his hand resting on the stock—inconspicuously, he hoped.

  The interior door was open and Virgil heard a woman call, “Tom, I think somebody’s in the driveway.”

  Virgil reached out and pushed the doorbell and heard the ding-dong inside. Mattsson whispered, “You step eight inches left and I’ll have a clear shot inside.”

  A few seconds later, a man in a brown UPS uniform trotted down some interior steps and looked at them through the screen door. “Can I help you?”

  Virgil held up his BCA identification and said, “We’re agents with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Are you Mr. Hall?”

  “Yes.” He pushed open the screen door to come out and Virgil and Mattsson took a step backward, still locked in the too-close formation to hide Mattsson’s weapon. “What can I do for you?”

  He was too . . . Virgil looked for the right word and came up with “querulous.” Hall was too questioning, too void of worry.

  Virgil half-turned his head to Mattsson and said, “I think we’re okay.”

  She said, “I do, too,” and Virgil felt her step back farther away.

  “What’s going on?” Hall asked.

  —

  Virgil gave him a brief explanation, and Hall’s wife, Alice, came to the door, carrying a towel, and said, “The man was here? His telephone was here?”

  She was disbelieving.

  “That’s what came up on the phone,” Virgil said. “This specific address.”

  “We’re gone during the day,” she said. “There hasn’t been any sign of anybody around. We don’t know anyone named Simonian.”

  Virgil went to his phone, called up the BCA website, and showed the Halls the mug shots of Hamlet and Hayk Simonian, and they both shook their heads. “I’ve never seen them,” Tom Hall said. “We would have noticed strangers hanging around.”

  Alice said, “Tom, take them out to the garage. Make them look in there, so they know there’s nothing out there. . . .” And to Virgil, she said, “We wouldn’t be skinning tigers in the house, would we?”

  Virgil had to smile. “Probably not.”

  “So go out and look in the garage.”

  Virgil knew it was pointless, but he and Mattsson went and looked, and found a b
unch of lawn equipment and a workshop. They thanked the Halls and left.

  —

  Wonder what happened?” Mattsson asked, at her truck.

  “Don’t know, but I can’t believe those guys knew anything,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to Sandy, see what she has to say.”

  Mattsson left, headed for home and a nap. Virgil watched her taillights as they disappeared around the corner and scuffed down to his truck.

  He called Sandy, who said, “I can’t believe the address could be that wrong. I’ll look at the numbers again, maybe I got something backward.” She looked at the house numbers again, but they were correct.

  “I can’t explain it,” she said. “Maybe . . . I don’t know . . . Maybe Hamlet was coming or going from somewhere else and he wouldn’t turn his phone on until he got to that address. You know, like he didn’t want to give away where he really was.”

  “I haven’t gotten the impression that Hamlet was a big thinker,” Virgil said.

  “Then I guess I can’t help,” Sandy said. “Actually, I don’t know exactly how the locator gizmo works. I’ll try looking it up on the ’net and get back to you if I find anything.”

  Virgil told her to hang on to Hamlet Simonian’s cell phone and everything else. “When do you get back?”

  “Tomorrow night, if nothing else comes up.”

  “Probably see you then,” Virgil said.

  —

  Virgil thought about driving around some more, but it was so dark that he wouldn’t be able to see much at all. Discouraged, he headed out to I-94, saw a convenience store on the other side of the highway, and across from that, Red’s County Bar & Grill. He pulled into the gas station and filled up, went inside to pay and to get some cheese crackers and a Diet Coke.

  Back in his truck, he opened the crackers and sat crunching on them, looked at the “Red’s” sign with its flashing neon red rooster. After a moment he said, “Huh,” and turned the truck that way.

  There were maybe twenty trucks and cars, mostly trucks, in the bar’s parking lot. There were no other bars in the neighborhood, as far as Virgil knew. He clumped inside in his cowboy boots: Not much going on, a lot of people in booths eating hamburgers and drinking beer, two or three more on bar stools, and a couple of guys in the back shooting pool at a coin-op table. Nobody paid any attention to him, and he walked over to the bar and the bartender put a napkin in front of him and asked, “What can I get you?”

  “Is the manager around?”

  The bartender was a square white-haired man with a tightly cut beard and rimless glasses sitting on a round nose; he might have been Santa Claus except for the boxing scars under his eyes. “We don’t rightly have a manager,” he said. “What we have is an owner, who is me.”

  Virgil pulled out his ID and explained his problem and how the bartender/owner might help him. “If you don’t mind . . .”

  “Well, it’s weird, but I guess I don’t mind,” the bartender said. “Give us something to talk about when you’re gone.”

  “Thanks,” Virgil said. He stepped to the middle of the bar and called out, loud enough to break through the chatter, “Hey, everybody! I’m a cop. I need your attention for a minute.”

  The chatter stopped, and the pool players backed away from the table, and everybody looked at him, and Virgil said, “I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and I’m looking for the stolen tigers. We think they might be in this neighborhood—well, on the other side of the highway, anyway. Someplace south of here. What I want to know is, have any of you seen anything even a little unusual in the area?”

  He described the Halls’ place as the most likely general location and waited. There was a buzz, but people were shaking their heads, then a woman said, “I don’t know, but I know who would.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Buddy Gates.”

  Somebody said, “Oh, hell yes.”

  “Who’s that?” Virgil asked.

  The woman said, “The rural route carrier out here. He knows every single house.”

  “Of course,” Virgil said.

  —

  Nobody knew how to get in touch with Buddy Gates, but somebody knew he worked out of the post office in Lakeland, which, of course, was closed. There was a general head-scratching until somebody said, “I think he does live in Lakeland. You could ask down there.”

  Somebody else said, “Buddy does drink a little. You could ask down at York’s.”

  York’s, it turned out, was the only bar in Lakeland. Virgil drove down to Lakeland, parked at the bar, went inside, and asked the bartender about Gates. The bartender introduced him to a woman named Judy, who told him that Gates lived in kind of a hard place to identify, but she’d be glad to show him the way.

  Virgil followed her down the highway a few hundred yards, then back into a neighborhood of 1960s ranch houses and pointed out her window at a house with lots of lights in the windows.

  Virgil waved at her, and she headed back to York’s. Gates was home, smelling strongly of marijuana, and when Virgil told him what he wanted, he said, “I wondered what those dudes were up to.”

  —

  Gates led the way to the back of his house, where a woman with glossy blond hair was sitting in a La-Z-Boy with her feet up, watching The Vampire Diaries. Gates said, “Gotta help a cop find the tigers,” and she said, “Shhh . . .”

  Gates turned on his computer, brought up a Google map, switched to a satellite view, found the spot.

  “Here’s where you was,” he said. He touched the screen with a pencil. “That’s the Halls’ house, right there. And here’s where these guys was.”

  He touched the screen again, where Virgil could see the roofs of a house and barn. The structures were on the other side of the Halls’ back woods, probably no more than a hundred and fifty yards away.

  “The reason the Halls didn’t know about them was, they’re on a completely different road and the two roads don’t hook up with a crossroad for almost a half mile either way,” Gates said. “No reason for anybody on either road to go onto the other one. The reason it didn’t come up on the telephone was, it’s not an official address anymore. This guy from out of state bought about five places over there, as investments, and merged them into one new subdivision. The closest official address is the Halls’.”

  Virgil showed him the pictures of Hamlet and Hayk Simonian, and Gates said, “I’m not completely sure, but this one”—he touched the Hayk photo—“I think I talked to him just a day or two ago.”

  The woman in the chair said, “Would you guys shut up?”

  Virgil went back to the front door, where Gates filled him in on the countryside around the house and barn where he’d seen Hayk. Virgil thanked him, and as he was leaving, said, “I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you invite a cop inside, when you’ve been smoking dope.”

  “It’s medicinal,” Gates said. “Besides, does anybody really care anymore?”

  —

  Virgil thanked him again, went out to his truck, and called Mattsson. The phone rang, but she didn’t answer. He left a message on her voice mail and tried Jenkins. Jenkins answered, but he and Shrake were in St. Cloud, which had to be the best part of a hundred miles away.

  Virgil decided to wait for Mattsson, but until she called, he’d go scout the house that Gates had identified. He drove back through the rat’s nest of roads to the Halls’ house, then past it, a half mile down, over another quarter of a mile, then back toward the target address.

  He found the driveway and eased on past, but could see nothing down the driveway except one dim light in the house; he couldn’t see the barn at all, which Gates had described as “dirt-colored.”

  Virgil left his car a hundred yards down the road, on the side away from I-94. If Peck was in the house and decided to drive out, he’d probably be going out toward the interstate.
/>
  On foot now, Virgil snuck back to the driveway, crouched at the entrance, listening, then walked down toward the house, staying as much as he could in the brush along the side of the drive. Took his time: no rush now.

  As he got closer, he could see the thinnest rime of light in a rectangular shape, out past the house. A door, he thought. He kept moving, slowly, slowly, listening all the time, his pistol in his hand now.

  Went past the house, stepped on something, dropped his hand to it: an electric cord, snaking off toward the barn. Another few steps, something else. A hose.

  Took his time, listening. No sound at all from the house, no sign of a vehicle. He thought about that, wondered if Peck had gone somewhere else. The light in the house was nothing you’d read by. . . .

  Another minute and he was next to the barn door. The door opened inward. He thought about it for a moment, listened some more, then pushed on it. The light inside was bright and cut a pencil-thin shaft across his jeans. He pushed a bit more and now could see inside.

  And he could smell what was in there, and it was awful: a combination of spoiled meat and rotten blood and maybe tiger shit, he thought. Nobody there—then something moved at the back and two lamp-like eyes turned toward him from behind a chain-link fence.

  A goddamn tiger, he thought. He’d found them. Or one of them.

  He caught the door with his fingernails, pulled it closed again, and turned to the house. As he did it, the phone in his pocket began to vibrate. He didn’t answer, but slipped around the corner of the barn and walked down the side of it until he was nearly to the back.

  Shielding the phone screen from the house, he looked at it: Mattsson.

  Called her back and she picked up on the first ring. “I was in the shower. . . . Missed your call.”

  “I found them,” Virgil said. “They’re in a barn at a house right behind the Halls’, but on a different road, a road that’s parallel to the one the Halls are on. You can see them both on the Google satellite. One tiger’s alive. There’s nobody in the barn, except the tiger, but may be somebody in the house.”

  “You got your gun with you?”