Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  “There’s some .308 brass on the bedroom floor up there, so I was in the right room, but I didn’t see any 9mm,” she said. “I’ll get a flashlight.”

  She got a Maglite from her truck and left Virgil sitting on a porch step, contemplating the quiet of the night, as she traced Peck’s route from the bedroom down to the barn. She came back and said, “Nothing in the barn. The tiger’s sitting there staring at Peck, what’s left of him, anyway. I don’t see a gun on his body. Really stinks in there.”

  Virgil thought for a moment, then said, “Look down the hole in the porch.”

  She did, shining the flashlight down it, and a second later said, “I see it. Can’t reach it, though.”

  “Embarrassing as hell,” Virgil said. “But if you’d been here . . .”

  Mattsson said, “Yeah,” and “Just a minute.” The porch had a skirt of weather-worn wooden slats, in no better condition than the rest of the porch. She kicked out a half-dozen slats, then crawled under the porch, got his gun, backed out, and handed it to him. She said, “Maybe we won’t have to mention the whole gun thing.”

  “Yeah, we will—because if we don’t, the whole rest of it doesn’t make any sense.” There was some tall uncut grass growing up next to the porch steps, and Virgil pulled out a blade and chewed on the stem, savoring the sweetness of it, and tried to forget the pain in his ankles.

  “You got a tiger back,” Mattsson said. “That’s a wonderful thing, Virgil.”

  “I suppose,” Virgil said. “But basically, it was just more crazy shit.”

  Mattsson cocked her head and asked, “Hear that?”

  Sirens. Several of them, still a long way out. “About time,” Virgil said.

  Mattsson sat on the porch next to him, looked out at the road. A greenish yellow light blinked in the weeds out along the road and she said, “Last firefly of the year.”

  Fireflies weren’t supposed to last this deep into the summer, Virgil knew. Maybe he was getting a signal from God, from one of God’s bugs. But what would a yellow light mean? Caution? A little late, huh?

  —

  Virgil’s ankles were on fire, but he couldn’t leave the scene until all the relevant crime-scene processing was under way. Mattsson met the first responders, a couple of Washington County sheriff’s deputies, and asked them to park in the road because most of the barnyard was a crime scene.

  Two BCA agents were next and they began taping off the scene. An ME’s investigator arrived, followed the BCA crime-scene crew, followed by Jon Duncan.

  “The zoo people are getting their stuff together; they’ll be here in a half hour or so. I talked to the TV stations; they all got something on the end of their newscasts. They’ll be sending out some trucks to get video for tomorrow.”

  “I’m kinda hurting here,” Virgil said. “Could you and Catrin talk to them?”

  Duncan and Mattsson could. The TV trucks got there before the zoo people; Virgil was making a recorded video statement on the porch of the farmhouse when the zoo people arrived with a truck and a man with a tranquilizer gun.

  There was some back-and-forth between the zookeepers and the crime-scene crew, but eventually one zoo guy was allowed inside the barn. He shot Katya, and he and two crime-scene crew members lifted the unconscious cat onto one of Peck’s dollies, and they rolled her out to a truck.

  The TV crews were allowed to stand on the shoulder of the road and film the transfer of the tiger to the zoo truck. A minute later, the hatch was closed and the sleeping Katya was on her way back to the zoo.

  “Hope she makes it,” Mattsson said, looking after the truck. “The zoo guy told me that tranquilizing them can be dangerous.”

  The ME’s investigator and the crime-scene people began consulting about the removal of Peck’s body. The investigator told Virgil, “She didn’t eat him much, but she did crush his head like an English walnut.”

  Jenkins and Shrake arrived way too late to do anything—in fact, they weren’t even supposed to be at the farm, but when they heard what happened, they’d driven out hoping to get in on the action. Instead, Duncan asked for a volunteer to drive Virgil first to a hospital for X-rays, and then home. Jenkins volunteered to drive him and Shrake would follow with Virgil’s truck.

  Jenkins and Shrake helped Virgil out to Jenkins’s Crown Vic; the process was filmed by the TV crews, and Jenkins said, “We’re all gonna be famous.”

  “For tomorrow,” Virgil said. “The day after, not so much.”

  —

  At Regions Hospital, the ER was enjoying a low-key night, and Virgil got the X-rays done and examined in an hour: getting his cowboy boots pulled off hurt almost as much as the original fall. The doc said, “Nothing broken. You need some RICE.” Rest, ice, compression, and elevation; Virgil had been there before. The doc wrapped his ankles and gave him a supply of cold packs, then Virgil was driven home by Jenkins, with his tightly wrapped, freezing feet up on the Crown Vic’s dashboard.

  Virgil talked to Frankie as he and Jenkins drove south through the Cities, and she met them on Virgil’s porch. She’d already asked him how bad the ankles were, and now she asked, after kissing him, “You can’t walk?”

  “I can, but it hurts,” Virgil told her. He was carrying his cowboy boots.

  “He’s being a sissy,” Jenkins said. “I’ve been hurt a lot worse than this and still played basketball.”

  “Bullshit, Jenkins,” Frankie said. “I’ve seen you stung by a wasp and you cried like a baby. Anyway, get him inside. I won’t be able to help much. . . .”

  Shrake arrived, and they all got Virgil on the living room couch, with his feet up on a couple of cushions, and put the used cold packs in the freezer. Jenkins and Shrake left to go back to the Cities, and Frankie, who was a bit of a cop groupie, settled into a chair opposite him and said, “I’ve heard enough about your ankles. What I want to hear is, what happened when you figured out where he was? I want it minute by minute, with all the blood and spattered-out brains and stuff.”

  He told her, minute by minute; she flinched when he told her about being shot at in the upstairs bedroom, but was nothing but delighted when he told her about the walnut-crunch sound of the tiger crushing Peck’s head.

  “Deserved every bit of it,” she said. “Go, Katya.”

  —

  If anything, Virgil’s ankles hurt worse in the morning, a shooting pain when he moved that told him to stay off his feet. At ten o’clock, he got a call from Bea Sawyer, head of the crime-scene crew.

  “Can you talk?”

  “Yeah, it’s my ankles that hurt, not my tongue,” Virgil said.

  “Okay. Anyway, we found Peck’s cell phone on the barn floor, and guess what? It was another one of those fingerprint-password things. The tiger hadn’t eaten his fingers, and we still had the body, so we opened it up and changed the settings to eliminate the password. . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, and what?”

  “Roger went through his photos, to see if he’d documented all of this, and he found the most amazing documentary film. It shows a younger Asian man strangling an older Asian man in the front seat of Peck’s truck.”

  “Aw, man,” Virgil said. “You gotta call Howser at Minneapolis homicide.”

  “It’s done,” she said. “That Zhang guy was leaving for the airport when they snagged him.”

  “Bea: thank you.”

  “One more thing,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “That firebomb that was thrown through the window of your neighbor’s house? We’re thinking it came from Peck’s barn. A Ball jar was used to hold the gasoline in the firebomb, and the basement in the farmhouse is full of old Ball jars. There’s a piece missing from an apron in the barn, and it looks like the same fabric used on the bomb.”

  “Oh, boy. I’m going to have to do some patching up with the neighbors.”

 
—

  He watched the noon news and Shrake had been right: they were heroes for the moment. There was some question about whether Katya would have to be put down, since she’d killed a human being. On the other hand, Jon Duncan—did he have a tear in his eye?—told the story of Virgil using the tiger to defend himself against a mass murderer, so there was a solid argument that the killing had been justified.

  —

  As they’d sat waiting on the farmhouse porch for everybody to arrive, Mattsson told Virgil that Blankenship had bailed out of the Blue Earth County jail. “Freddie has already made a deal with the county attorney. He’s given them a statement saying that Blankenship was the person who did the beating in both assaults. They’ve already gotten a gum scrub from Blankenship for the DNA match, so that should nail it down. He’s going to jail, or maybe even prison, but he probably won’t get as much time as you want.”

  “Can’t know that yet,” Virgil said. “Frankie’s friends with every judge in Blue Earth and Nicollet counties. So . . .”

  That all became relevant as Virgil sat on the couch at home that afternoon, with his feet up in the air. Frankie was at her salvage shop at the farm. Sparkle called in a panic. “That Blankenship guy who beat up Frankie and Ramona—me and Bill were out on the road, getting mail, and he cruised us. I’m almost sure it was him. It was a red Ford truck and I got the license number. He was looking at us.”

  “Ah, man. All right, let’s get the sheriff on it,” Virgil said. “If the tag number checks out, he can have somebody go over and talk to him. Warn him off.”

  “Virgil, the guy’s not only mean, he’s insane.”

  “I’ll talk to the sheriff now.”

  —

  That evening, every news channel that Virgil saw reported that the population of Minnesota was in an uproar about the possibility that Katya might be put down. The possibility was evaporating.

  —

  By the second day, after a continuous regime of rest, ice, compression, and elevation, and a couple of long chats about life with Father Bill, Virgil started moving around the house with the help of crutches that Frankie got from a drugstore.

  He was alone in the house, headed back to the couch, when an RV pulled up to the curb. Virgil said to himself, “The fuckin’ Simonians. Exactly what I needed.”

  Sure enough, six of them got out and seemed to arrange themselves by age and size. Levon led the way up Virgil’s porch and pushed the doorbell. Virgil pulled the door open and said, “You might as well come in. I can’t move around so well.”

  The Simonians followed him into the living room. The youngest one asked, “You need anything? Painkillers, a little weed, some liquor, anything to make it easier?”

  “I’m fine,” Virgil said. “What’s up with you guys?”

  Levon said, “We will go back to Glendale, thank the Good Lord, as soon as we wind up our business here, the arrangements for Hayk and Hamlet.”

  “I’m sorry they were killed,” Virgil said. “We think Peck might have murdered another man as well, but there’s no body, and Peck, of course, can’t tell us one way or the other where he might be.”

  Levon said, “We see this on the television news. We have also researched this ‘Virgil Flowers’ on the Internet, because we have a large Simonian problem.”

  Virgil: “Which would be?”

  “This man Peck murders two of our Simonians. We wanted to deal with this ourselves, but that did not happen. Then we find out that our friend Virgil Flowers feeds Peck to a tiger, and this is better than anything we could think of.”

  “I didn’t exactly feed him . . . but anyway, uh, I don’t see a Simonian problem there.”

  Levon said, “We have a large debt to you. Our Simonian honor requires that the debt be paid, so we come here and ask, what does Virgil Flowers want?”

  “A little peace and quiet, that’s about all,” Virgil said.

  Levon pulled on his chin, glanced out to the street, as if checking for cops, and said, “I tell you, Virgil, coming from LA, you have here more peace and quiet than I could stand.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Virgil said. “But, guys, what happened was my job. I got paid for it. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “This is where you are wrong,” Levon said, and the other five Simonians all nodded. “Anyway, we tell you, we will pay this debt. We will be here, the medical examiner says, for another week, maybe ten days, but since the murderer is dead, and there will be no trial, they will not have to hold the bodies of our Simonians longer than that. We will find a way to pay.”

  Virgil said, “You don’t owe me. Get that through your heads. Anything you give me, I’d have to turn in to the state. I can’t take any kind of payment outside my job—that would be considered a bribe.”

  Levon nodded and said, “Stupid law. We will go around it.”

  They all filed out, each of them giving Virgil a slap on the back or an elbow nudge, and when the RV pulled away from the curb, Virgil collapsed on the couch, grateful for the thickness of his peace and quiet.

  —

  The sheriff talked to Blankenship and told Virgil, “He denied being out there, but he was lying. I told him that if he messed with Ms. Nobles or her sister or you or anybody else, or even looked at any of you, I’ll jerk his bail so fast his head will be spinning for a week.”

  Mattsson came down to give a statement in the Blankenship case and stopped at Frankie’s farm on the way back home. They all had a nice chat and Virgil again didn’t know whether to hug her or shake hands when she left, as she stepped away and said, “See you around.”

  When she was gone, Sam, the youngest, said, “That chick is really hot.”

  They all looked at him, but he didn’t back off. When you’re right, you’re right.

  —

  On the third day, Maxine Knowles was charged with another count of attempted murder for her assault on Toby Strait, and her bail was pulled on the first count. A newspaper story said that the trial on the first count was scheduled to start in a month and a half. That was actually at the bottom of the news story: at the top was a long feature about a rich animal lover named Crewdson from Minnetonka who had donated a quarter-million dollars to Knowles’s animal refuge and its elderly caretakers.

  Virgil would never suggest that newspeople were cynical, but the story concluded with, “Questioned by a reporter, Crewdson agreed that the contribution, made to Knowles’s charitable organization, would be fully tax deductible.”

  That same day, Jon Duncan called and said that since Virgil had a job-related injury, he wouldn’t be required to qualify with his pistol until the following year. “We thought that would be best for everybody,” Duncan said.

  —

  By the eighth day after Peck’s death, Virgil was walking without crutches, though his ankles still hurt and felt wobbly. A doc told him that without the RICE, it might have taken him a month or more before he could jog. He thought Virgil might start jogging in another week. Virgil, he said, probably had a grade-one sprain, on the border of a grade two, whatever that meant.

  By that time, Katya the tiger’s future was not only assured, but the zoo had announced that they’d stored semen from her former mate, Artur, and she would be impregnated the next time she came in season, and she would be expected to produce three or four cubs. Robert McCall, the wealthy chairman of the zoo’s board of directors, announced that he had agreed to fund an animal psychologist, to be flown in from San Diego, to treat Katya for any psychological trauma she may have incurred during her imprisonment.

  —

  On the tenth day, Brad Blankenship rolled his red Ford pickup into the parking lot of Waters’ Waterhole, his favorite bar, and sat for a moment, waiting for the gravel dust to settle. Another hot day. The next day was supposed to be even worse, with a flood of humid air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. He picked up the seed co
rn hat from the passenger seat, put it on, and got out of the truck as a six-door white Mercedes-Benz stretch limo pulled up a few feet away.

  A wedding limo, Blankenship thought, exactly the kind rented by eight or ten horny young bridesmaids before they went out to a bar and got wasted and laid. He’d never seen one at the Waterhole, which was basically a rural dive, but nevertheless, it might be an opportunity; there was hardly anyone else around in the midafternoon, so he’d have the ladies to himself.

  He lingered near the front of the Benz, checking out the fat driver. Then the three doors on the far side of the limo popped open and several heavyset men climbed out into the parking lot. He’d never seen them before, but they were looking at him. He noticed that one of them was carrying a baseball bat; maybe they were a bar team.

  “What are you guys supposed to be?” he asked, curling a lip. “The New York fuckin’ Yankees?”

  Well, no.

  —

  Virgil’s ankles still hurt, but he could swing a baseball bat. He had three fielders spread out across the barnyard: young Sam, Father Bill, and Honus the dog. He smacked a grounder out toward Sam, who flinched as it popped up in his face, but he smothered the ball, picked it up, and threw it back.

  Virgil hit a sharper drive at Honus, who went to his right, snagged the ball on the second bounce, and ran it back to Virgil.

  He was about to send one out to Bill when his phone chirped. A text message from an unknown phone. The message said, “We’re all square.” It wasn’t signed. He contemplated the phone for a moment, then put it back in his pocket.

  He was still out there, hitting balls, when his phone went off again. The sheriff asked, “You got some witnesses where you’re at?”

  “I’m hitting baseballs at a young boy, a Catholic priest, and a dog named Honus, up at Frankie’s farm. I got witnesses all over the place.”

  “Well, good. Because about fifteen minutes ago, somebody caught Brad Blankenship out at the Waterhole and broke his arms and legs. All his arms and legs. And his fingers.”