Deadline

by John Sandford

  “Crime scene,” Gomez said. “The bureaucracy begins.”

  Virgil hung around for a while, as the bureaucracy got going. Gomez asked, “You remember Matt Travers, the regional guy out of Washington?”

  “I met him.”

  “He said to tell you we’ve still got a job, if you want it.”

  “Man, I appreciate it, but I like it here,” Virgil said.

  “You could get a whole fuckin’ state if you came with us. Get some guys working for you . . . It’s kinda fun, if you like that kind of fun.”

  “I’ll think about it . . . but I’m just being polite. You guys are the most interesting feds, no doubt about it, but like I said . . .”

  “You like it here.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  9

  VIRGIL CAUGHT A RIDE to his truck with one of the DEA agents, and on the way back to Johnson’s cabin, called Frankie and told her about the raid.

  “Goddamnit, I wish I’d been there.”

  “Maybe you ought to be a cop,” Virgil suggested.

  After a moment of silence she said, “Nah. I’d feel too sorry for most of the people I arrested. But I would like to run around screaming and yelling and chasing through the woods.”

  “Well, shoot, we could do that at your place,” Virgil said. “Naked.”

  “Aw, Virgie . . .”

  —

  VIRGIL CALLED JOHNSON: it was well past midnight, but Johnson had called him at three o’clock in the morning about rescuing some dogs. Johnson answered the phone: he didn’t sound sleepy, he sounded interrupted.

  “What?”

  “We cleaned out the meth labs. We need to get the posse together tomorrow. We’re going after the dogs.”

  “You called me at one o’clock in the morning about some dogs?”

  Virgil could hear Clarice laughing in the background. Satisfied, Virgil hung up, and when he got to the cabin, fell into bed.

  —

  THE POSSE MET the next day at high noon, at Shanker’s: nine guys and a woman in various pieces of camo, plus a sheriff’s deputy named Boyce, but who everyone called “Bongo,” which caused Virgil to worry. Only he and Bongo would be armed, he told everybody, and he caught a quick flash of eyes between some of the men, which meant that a few of them probably had sidearms tucked into their belts.

  “Listen, I’m serious now, if anybody other than myself and Bongo is carrying a gun, I’m telling you, leave it in your truck,” Virgil said. “If I see one up on that hill, I’ll send you home.”

  Communications would be through a whole bunch of hunter’s walkie-talkies, since phones didn’t always work up in the deep valleys. One guy suggested that the slower climbers—“You know who you are”—stay behind to look after the vehicles. “These hillbillies, if they thought they were gonna lose the dogs, they’d come down and slash our tires, or worse.”

  “Whatever happens to the vehicles, don’t go shooting anybody,” he said. “If you’re watching the trucks, and anybody gives you trouble, you yell for help and we’ll come running.”

  Virgil explained how the process would work: “This is basically just a search of public property. Before last night’s meth lab raid, the federal agents did quite a bit of research, in an effort to find out who would be legally responsible for the meth lab—who the landowner would be. As it turns out, the privately owned land involves fairly compact tracts bordering on the road, and going no more than a couple hundred yards back. The forest land along most of the top and sides of the valley is state forest. So we’ll be on public land. We’ll spread out across from it, with me in the center and Bongo at the top near the bluffs, and Johnson Johnson at the bottom, along the edge of the privately owned land. We’ll climb up from the shoulder of the highway, so we never cross private land. And, by doing it that way, we might surprise somebody. That’s gonna be a tough climb though, so if any of you people have heart problems . . .”

  —

  WHEN ALL WAS said and done, two of the guys opted to stay with the cars. The rest were prepared to climb. With that all settled, they loaded into their pickups and SUVs and trucked on up Highway 26 in a caravan.

  Virgil led them to the shoulder of the road, and after the car-watchers were subtracted, nine of them began climbing the steep hill just south of the entrance to the valley. The hill was roughly as high as the Washington Monument, climbing through weeds and sumac and, higher up, scrubby oaks and then full-sized oaks. When they got into the tree line, Virgil called for a rest, and they sat on the hill and looked out over the Mississippi, and didn’t talk much. Virgil gave them ten full minutes, and then they resumed the climb. They stopped once more, for another ten minutes, talking via the walkie-talkies to the trucks below.

  Another ten minutes saw them to the top of the hill at the end of the valley; there would be more hill to climb later, but at the moment they walked single file, bunched too close for a combat patrol, over the edge to the downhill slope of the south valley wall.

  Virgil spread them out down the hill, with Johnson on the bottom and Bongo at the top. Virgil was in the middle, and they began walking west. They’d walked perhaps a quarter-mile when Bongo called and said, “Hey, we got something up here. Looks like a pen. Another twenty-five yards, right under that yellow bluff.”

  Virgil got on his radio and said, “Okay, guys, let’s climb up to the bluff.”

  They all began clumping up the hill, and could smell the cage before they got to it. When they got to the bluff, they found Bongo and the four guys who’d been above Virgil looking at a chain-link fence, a semicircle with the bluff forming the back side. Inside the wire was a lot of raw dirt, a lot of dog shit, and three beaten-up dogs who wobbled to their feet when they saw the men walking up to the fence. Scattered inside the fence were a bunch of plastic tubs; most were empty, the others contained some water.

  Bongo said, “Looks like they moved them.”

  One of the men said, “Those dogs . . . don’t know those dogs, but they look like they’re starving.”

  The fence had a gate, but no lock. Virgil flipped the latch and they all filed inside. Two of the dogs tried to get away from them, backing away to the far edge of the fence, tails between their legs. The third one sidled toward them, licking his muzzle nervously, head down, tail between his legs. They were dogs of no identifiable breed: mutts. All three of them were about knee-high.

  “We waited too long, we moved too slow,” somebody said.

  “How’d they get them out? Looks like there were a lot of dogs here, and nobody’s gone out of here in the last week, with a truck big enough for a lot of dogs.”

  “Took them out one or two at a time . . . people coming and going all the time. Somebody must’ve tipped them off that we were watching,” Bongo said.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Virgil said. “They knew somebody was watching, but a whole crew of professional meth dealers goes in anyway, and has no clue?”

  “I want to know where they went, the dogs,” one of the men said. “What we need to do, is figure out who had them up here, and then beat the information out of him.”

  Johnson said, “We know they were here. I say we send one guy back to the trucks with the three dogs we got, and then the rest of us walk back to the end of the valley. Maybe there’s more than one place.”

  They decided to do that. The three dogs they found were leashed up and taken back down the hill, while the rest of them spread out over the hillside again and began walking. An hour later, tired, hot, and mosquito-bit, they walked down the hill to the spring.

  Virgil said, “I’ll tell you what, boys. The feds heard the dogs up there yesterday afternoon, so I don’t know exactly how we missed them. But I’ll be working the road down here, starting today. I’ll find out what happened. I promise you. Pisses me off.”

  “We’ll ask some questions around,” one of
the posse members said. “See what we can find out. Maybe they took them over the top, and out some other way. Maybe the meth raid scared them.”

  “We’ll find out,” Virgil said.

  —

  THE PEOPLE at the trucks brought two trucks up to haul the posse back to the parked caravan. There wasn’t quite enough room for everybody, so Johnson went to get the truck, and Virgil sat on a rock at the edge of the pool and watched the water, and after a couple of moments saw a dimple of the kind made by trout. He pulled a long stem of grass out of a clump next to the rock and chewed on it for a moment, thinking about the dogs, and then a boy’s voice said, “Find them?”

  Virgil turned and saw the kid they’d met the first day they’d come up the valley. He was standing on the other side of the fence, with his rifle slung across his shoulder, holding it in place with one hand. “No, no, we didn’t,” Virgil said. “Well, we found three dogs in a big pen up next to the bluff, looking pretty beat up, but not the big bunch of them we were looking for. You know where the rest of them went?”

  “No, I don’t. I watched those federal agents pull off that raid last night, and I heard the dogs early this morning, but . . . if you couldn’t find them, I don’t know where they might’ve gone.”

  “You’ve seen that pen up there?”

  “No, my dad told me to stay away from there. Plenty of places to walk out west, and more interesting,” the kid said. “Funny thing was, I heard them this morning, and now you say, no dogs.”

  “Huh,” Virgil said. “When you say you watched the feds pull off that raid . . . you were up there?”

  “Oh, yeah. I saw the feds sneaking in there, every day, and then last night I saw the drug guys going in, so I figured the raid would be coming, and I went over to watch. Were you up there?”

  “Yeah. Sort of out on the end of things, down the road. Saw a guy running away, and we never did catch him.”

  “Yeah, that was probably Roy Zorn. I saw him take off as soon as the lights came on and you-all started yelling at them.”

  “You know for sure it was Zorn?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I couldn’t see his face, but he moved through the woods like Roy does.”

  “Okay.”

  Virgil stood up and dusted off his pants and asked, “Your folks up at the house?”

  “My dad is. My mom died.”

  “Sorry about that. Mind if I talk to your dad?”

  “He was asleep when I left.” He looked up at the sky and said, “Probably awake now, though.” Virgil thought, Holy shit, he looked up at the sky to see what time it is.

  The kid pointed out a driveway that came off the road down fifty yards or so. “You walk right up the drive, it’s a way, but it’s easy. Or you can drive up, when your buddy gets back.”

  “He oughta be here in a couple of minutes,” Virgil said. “We can wait.”

  “I’ll see you up there,” the kid said.

  “What’s your name?” Virgil called after him.

  “McKinley,” the kid called back, as he faded into the brush. “McKinley Ruff.”

  —

  JOHNSON JOHNSON SHOWED UP three or four minutes later, driving Virgil’s truck. Virgil took the wheel, and told Johnson about the kid as they bounced up the gravel driveway, past a mailbox that said “Ruff.” The driveway came off at right angles to the street, but then took a left turn and led straight west, past the pound, and four hundred yards deeper into the valley.

  At the end of the track was a rambling house with a brown-stained rough board siding, a wide covered front porch, and a low-pitched roof covered with cedar shingles. A garden spread off to one side, heavy with the vine plants—squash, cucumbers, watermelon—and a half-dozen fruit trees were spotted around the side yard. A metal shed, which would probably take four cars, was set well back from the house and partly obscured by trees.

  “Not bad,” Johnson said. “I could live here.”

  McKinley Ruff was waiting for them on the porch, his rifle still cradled in his arm. “Reminds me of myself, when I was his age,” Johnson said. “If it wasn’t a gun, it was a fishing rod. Three whole summers like that, and then I discovered women. Which was a lot more dangerous than any gun. As you would know.”

  “Not a bad-looking place, but speaking of peckerwoods, I have a feeling that the Ruffs could qualify.”

  “We’ll see,” Johnson said.

  They got out of the truck and walked up to the house and Virgil noticed that Johnson’s shirt was hanging loose, which meant that he was probably packing. Not a good time to object, Virgil thought.

  McKinley Ruff said, “Dad’s inside, transposing. He said you should come on in.”

  Virgil and Johnson glanced at each other: transposing?

  They followed McKinley through the screen door and the heavy front door behind it, where they found the elder Ruff sitting at a plank table with a pile of paper in front of him. Standing in ranks along one wall were eight or nine guitars on guitar stands, two keyboards, and an older upright piano, a bunch of amps and other electronic music equipment, including a drum machine.

  Ruff was a scruffy-looking man, a little overweight, wearing silver glasses. His hair fell almost to his shoulders, and he wore a short but poorly trimmed gray beard. When they came in, he looked up and said, “Hey, there. I understand Muddy’s been talking to you. You’re the cops, right?”

  “Right,” Virgil said. “You’re a musician?”

  Ruff’s eyebrows went up. He looked around the room for a few seconds and then said, “Jeez, I hope so, since I got thirty thousand dollars’ worth of guitars and fifty grand worth of other shit.”

  Virgil said, “McKinley, uh, Muddy, uh, didn’t mention . . . You call him Muddy?”

  “Sure. We named him after Muddy Waters. Muddy’s real name was McKinley Morganfield,” Ruff said. “Anyway, what can we do for you? You’re looking for those dogs?”

  “Yeah, you know about them?”

  “Just what Muddy told me. And we can hear them howling in the mornings. That’s about it.”

  “But they’re gone now,” Johnson said.

  “They were howling this morning. They usually start around seven o’clock or so, at least on the mornings when I’m up then.”

  “Always about then,” McKinley said. “Lasts about ten or fifteen minutes, then they shut up again.”

  “Where are they at?” Johnson asked.

  “South side, I’d say down toward the far end. Pretty high up,” Ruff said.

  McKinley said, “That’s about right.”

  Ruff said, “I told Muddy to stay away from there. There’s a bad element out here, moved in over the past five or six years. Real white trash. I understand you busted some of them last night.”

  “A meth lab—nothing to do with dogs,” Virgil said.

  “Good riddance. But I saw Zorn down the road a while ago, so you didn’t get him.”

  “You think he’s involved?”

  “Of course he is,” Ruff said. “Although I wouldn’t be surprised if his old lady was the real brains behind the business. There’s a goddamned snake if you ever met one.”

  Ruff had no proof of anything, just rumors and gossip picked up from the neighbors. “Lotsa these places down here were cabins, there’s sort of a communal landing down under the bridge. Then the economy went to hell, and a lot of them got sold off cheap, and the trash moved in.”

  To pinpoint the dogs, Ruff suggested that they contact a neighbor called Ralph Huntington. “He’s a good ol’ boy, and he lives right down there. I wouldn’t go there in a car, though. That might cause him some trouble. Give him a call.”

  He had Huntington’s phone number, and Virgil wrote it down. “What’s your name?”

  “Julius. Ruff. R-U-F-F.”

  Johnson asked, “You play in a band, or something?”

&
nbsp; “I play in three or four of them, mostly over in La Crosse,” Ruff said. “Polka, country, big band jazz, and sometimes with the chamber orchestra up in St. Paul, when they need a competent guitar.” He looked closely at Johnson for a minute, then said, “The one you’d probably be familiar with is Dog Butt.”

  Johnson brightened. “Really? You play with Dog Butt?”

  “I am the man behind the sound,” Ruff said.

  “I like that song ‘Goose Gone Truckin’,’” Johnson said.

  Muddy said, “Dad wrote that.”

  “Are you kiddin’ me? Man alive, you got some serious talent. . . .”

  —

  BACK IN THE TRUCK Virgil said, “Jesus, I thought I’d stepped into old home week.”

  “Hey, Dog Butt is a good band,” Johnson said. “Tight. They got two lead singers, a man and a woman, taking turns, and honest to God, you can boogey your ass off. You take your woman to hear Dog Butt, and you don’t get laid that night, you got a problem.”

  “I will look into that,” Virgil said.

  “Fine. But what we really got to look into is the dogs,” Johnson said. “This morning’s hike did not go down smooth with the guys. I’m a little worried, really. I don’t know what would happen if Zorn stopped in at Shanker’s at the wrong time. I even started wondering if we have a spy in the group—I mean, everybody said that nothing came out of this valley big enough to carry a lot of dogs, and we know people have heard a lot of dogs up there, but when we look—there aren’t any.”

  “Only in the mornings, and then they shut up,” Virgil said, looking up at the hillside as they rolled out toward the end of the valley. “There’s something in that. It’s been mentioned a couple times: they bark, and then they shut up.”

  “Not up there now. We didn’t miss much, this morning.”

  “Not much, but maybe some small thing,” Virgil said.

  10

  VIRGIL DROPPED JOHNSON in town, back at his truck. “What are you gonna do next?” Johnson asked. “You gonna work on the dogs, or waste more time on that Conley thing?”