Deadline

by John Sandford

Jenkins’s voice went calm and cold, as it tended to when he was tense and angry: “That’s on the main drag, right? Two minutes. We’re in town, you’ll hear us coming.”

  And he did. Virgil had a good first aid kit in the back of the truck, got it open, pulled out the thickest bandage he had, pressed it to the wound, not too hard, because with the splinter in his scalp, the harder he pressed, the more it hurt.

  Then he called the sheriff. The duty officer answered. Virgil filled him in, and the duty officer said he’d call the sheriff himself and send the patrol car around as fast as it could get there.

  Jenkins and Shrake arrived in the next moment, in a dazzling display of LED emergency lights from the front of the Crown Vic, and they both hopped out as the car rolled to a stop and jogged over to the truck.

  Shrake took one look and snapped at Jenkins, “Roll an ambulance.”

  Virgil: “Nah, nah, nah. It’s all blood, I got a cut in my scalp. I’m afraid there’s a dead man inside, but maybe he’s not dead. We need to get inside—”

  “You need to get to the hospital,” Shrake said, adding to Jenkins, “Fuck him. Roll an ambulance.” And to Virgil, “Sit right there or I’ll coldcock you, I swear to God. Then you will need the bus.”

  —

  THE SHERIFF’S PATROL CAR rolled in a few seconds later, as Jenkins was shouting on his phone at the EMS service. A deputy got out, and Virgil, still holding the now-blood-soaked pad to his head, and with blood running down his face, pushed his way past Shrake, and when Jenkins got off the phone, told the two agents and the deputy what had happened.

  “The big thing is this: it was our killer, he’s firing bursts of three, I’m afraid he might have done something to the janitor who was helping me, so we’ve got to go through the school and look at every possible hiding spot. I don’t think the shooter is in there, but I’m sure, one way or another, that Bacon is. I just hope he’s locked up. . . .”

  He told them about the attic room, but added that there was nobody up there. “Stay out of there. There’s blood there that’s not mine—it’s the killer’s. I don’t think I hit him bad, because there’s not much, but there’s enough to get DNA. Wait till I get back to identify it.”

  They said they would, and they’d start pulling the school apart. The deputy said he’d roust the rest of the force and have them all there in twenty minutes or so, and that the sheriff was on the way.

  “We need to find Randall Kerns—it’s ninety percent that he’s the killer,” Virgil said. “That he’s the shooter. But you gotta be careful. . . .”

  Virgil was still talking when an EMT pushed him to the ambulance, and they started down the main drag.

  —

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE doc on duty at the clinic, and he was trying to remove a fishbone from the throat of a young girl. He stopped doing that for a moment to look at Virgil’s wound, and said, “It’s either not bad at all, or it’s terrible, but either way, it won’t make any difference if I take the bone out of this kid’s throat first.”

  Virgil said, “Yeah, go ahead,” and the doc spent two minutes extracting the bone. The girl’s worried father walked back and forth in front of the bay where the work was going on, and every time he passed Virgil, he said, “I’m sorry about this, I’m sorry about this.”

  When the bone was out, the doc gave it to the kid as a trophy, and a nurse took them away to get the insurance information, and the doc put Virgil in another bay, said, “Shoot, I thought I might get to do some brain surgery. I guess not.”

  “I love medical humor,” Virgil said.

  The doc got a needle and some anesthetic, killed the nerves around the wound, made a couple minor skin snips with a pair of surgical scissors, and picked the splinter out, all the time questioning Virgil about the shoot-out. When the wound was clean, the doc killed three bleeders with a cautery, which smelled like wet burning chicken feathers, and sewed him up. “Fourteen stitches, and very skillfully done for a small-town hospital,” he said. “Who’s gonna pay?”

  Virgil called Shrake for a ride back to the school, and was told Bacon hadn’t shown up, either dead or alive, but the school was a nightmare of nooks and crannies. “This could take all night.”

  “Then we take all night,” Virgil said.

  “Uh, by the way, somebody might have mentioned this to Frankie.”

  “Goddamnit, Shrake—”

  “Hey, it wasn’t me who called her, but if Jenkins hadn’t, I would have—a guy gets shot, the old lady gets to know about it. I told her it didn’t look too bad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she showed up—”

  “Goddamnit, Shrake—”

  “He told her you’d been hit in the head. She said, ‘Thank God, if it’d been in his dick, it would have killed both of us.’”

  Virgil: “She did not.”

  “No, but it’s a good story and I plan to tell people she did,” Shrake said. “I’ll see you in five minutes, if I actually know where the clinic is. I think I do.”

  “Yeah, it has a big brightly lit sign on the front, and it says ‘Clinic.’ You can’t miss it.”

  18

  THE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY—the school board—called an emergency rump session at Jennifer 1’s house, attended by Randy Kerns, the three Jennifers, Vike Laughton, and Henry Hetfield, the school superintendent.

  They immediately fell into a screaming brawl.

  Kerns started it: “. . . so I know that fucking Bacon was up to something. He came into the meeting, which he never does, and he did something with his hand, which I didn’t know what it was, but I thought he might have took a picture or a remote control or something, I couldn’t tell what. Anyway, I hung around afterward, when everybody was gone, and he brings this ladder over and he climbs up into the lights and takes down a movie camera—I think he filmed the whole thing, the whole meeting after the meeting.”

  He was carrying a gym bag. He put it by his feet, dipped inside and came up with the camera. “I don’t know how to work it, but it’s got a tag that says, ‘Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’ on the side of it. That goddamned Flowers must have gotten Bacon to put it up there in the rafters. To do that, he had to get a warrant. To get a warrant, he had to have some evidence, and pretty good evidence, too.”

  “Well, what’d you do?” Jennifer Gedney asked. “If Will wants money, we could all chip in . . .”

  Kerns shook his head. “Couldn’t take the chance.”

  They all looked at him aghast. Jennifer 2 said, “You didn’t . . .”

  “I had to,” he said. “But that’s not the worst of it.”

  Vike had launched himself from his chair and shouted, “Well, Jesus Christ, what could be worse?”

  Kerns said, “The BCA guy, Virgil Flowers, showed up. I thought our only chance—”

  Henry Hetfield said, “Oh, no, no, no no . . . you didn’t kill a police officer.”

  Kerns said, “I tried, but the problem is, I didn’t. And if he doesn’t know who I am tonight, he will in a week.”

  He told them about following Flowers up into the school attic, to some kind of hideout. “I don’t know what’s up there, but there’s a room, and there are lights. I think Bacon built himself some kind of hidey-hole, or maybe even a whole private room up there, because Flowers went straight up there. We got in a gunfight. I couldn’t get at him, he was barricaded in, he’d called nine-one-one so I had to run for it. He never saw me, but . . .”

  He rolled up the sleeve of his long-sleeved shirt and showed a large bandage. “He shot through the walls and I got hit by a big splinter. The thing is, I was bleeding pretty hard, and I think I probably left some blood behind. If I did . . . they’ll get the DNA, and I’m cooked.”

  Vike had stumbled back into his chair, where he said, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus, Oh, Jesus . . .”

  Jennifer Barns recovered first: “What do you want from us?”<
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  Kerns said, “It takes time to do DNA—a few days, anyway. I’ve got cash stuck away in a safe-deposit box in the Cities, and I can get to that. I’ve got a few thousand in my truck. You all know I used most of the money to buy a place up on Lake of the Woods. I can make it across the border, all right, I’ve got a new name up there. But I gotta leave everything behind, even my truck. So what I want from you all is money. I know you all got cash, we talked about it. What I want is, I want fifty grand from every one of you. One of you can get it all together, next month, and I’ll meet you someplace up north and come get it.”

  Gedney asked, “You’re gonna leave tonight?”

  “I got to,” Kerns said. He rolled his sleeve down, fumbling with the cuff button. “I’m afraid they’re all looking for me right now. I can sneak up to the Cities, I think, back roads, get to the bank tomorrow morning, get the money, unless they already got me on TV. I’m going to have to leave the truck there, and go north in a fuckin’ bus. My problem is, they might have my blood, and they sure as hell know I’ve been cut up—and that would be enough to hold me until the DNA comes back. I gotta go. I gotta run.”

  They argued about the necessity for flight, and Kerns convinced them: no other way out. He had a Canadian ID and passport with a different name, he said, so crossing the border wouldn’t be a problem. “I can ditch myself up in Kenora, grow a beard, stay close to the cabin, and in a year or so, sell out and go far away. But I need the money. I need the cash, until I can establish myself up there.”

  Henry Hetfield said, “Leaves the rest of us in the lurch.”

  “That depends,” Kerns said. “We burned all the records. You can afford good attorneys—and you can blame the killings all on me. I’m done anyway, if they’ve got that blood. And they will find Bacon’s body, sooner or later—if not right away, when he starts to . . . smell.”

  Jennifer Houser: “I can’t believe this. I can’t.”

  Kerns: “Where’d you put your money?”

  She shook her head: “I’d never tell you that. But it’s safe. And I’ll chip in fifty thousand, that’s not a problem.”

  “If any of you run, they’ll know for sure you’re guilty,” Kerns said.

  Another argument flared: Jennifer Houser and Kerns and they thought Del Cray, the finance officer, who wasn’t there, might be able to run. The others, for one reason or another, were anchored by their money. Couldn’t run with it, if it was all in stocks and bonds or real estate, but couldn’t run without it, either.

  “All they’ve got now is Randy,” Houser said. “The fire took out most of the other evidence. And Randy did most of the talking to outsiders, like that bus driver. We can still blame this all on him . . . that he set up a ring. But if I were you, I’d start cashing in stocks and bonds. If Flowers gets any closer, we might have to run ourselves.”

  To Kerns, she said, “I’m willing to pay you the money—but you’ve got to swear, right here, that you’ll take the blame for all these crazy killings if you do get caught. And the money, too. You won’t try to spread the blame around. You’ll get a half million dollars from us, and you’ll get a chance . . . but you can’t turn on us, if you get caught.”

  “If I get caught, there’s no profit in trying to spread the blame,” Kerns said. “You get me the cash, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  They argued about that some more, and Vike said he had twenty thousand stashed at his house, but he couldn’t get more for quite a while—“I put all the money in Tucson real estate after the bust.”

  Jennifer Houser said, “From what Randy says, this roof isn’t likely to fall in for at least a few days. That gives us some time. Let’s just stay calm, but prepare.”

  Kerns said that he would be in touch with all of them, in a week, to set up a meeting. “Your lives are hanging by my thread,” Kerns said. “If you get me that money, I’ve got a real good chance of getting away. If not, that cuts my chances way down. You don’t get it to me, and I get caught, I’ll drag every one of you motherfuckers into the shit with me.”

  They all swore they would.

  —

  JENNIFER HOUSER LOOKED UP at the sky as she walked out to her car, a clear night, lots of stars, a good night for driving. A thrill ran through her, raising goose bumps down her arms. The whole scheme was coming down around their ears. It had worked well, for a long time—longer than she had originally expected it to. But she had always known this day would come, and she was ready for it.

  Like Kerns, she had an alternative identity, one that had once belonged to her late sister-in-law. She could be in Chicago by early morning, in Belize City by midday.

  Belize was a good place for an American to hang out, because English was the official language, and for people with money, Belize was extremely slow to extradite. A logical place for her to go, if anyone managed to trace her that far.

  But the best thing was, it was a great red herring. Getting across the Mexican border from Belize was not a huge problem. She knew that, because she’d done it, on a practice run.

  After several tiring bus rides, Jennifer 2, in less than a week, would be settling into her apartment in Gringo Gulch in Puerto Vallarta, where everybody knew her as that nice middle-aged Lucy lady, from Virginia, who wore wide-brimmed straw hats and liked to sail and bicycle and get giddy on daiquiris and fuck younger Mexican men.

  Houser had some other ideas. Uneaten toast in a toaster, uneaten egg in a skillet, undrunk milk in a glass, a smear of her blood on the kitchen floor . . .

  Kerns wouldn’t see a dime from her. She was gone.

  —

  KERNS LEFT. He looked up at the sky and the stars as he walked down the driveway and got in his truck. He had to take it slow going up to the Cities, he thought. Hide the truck in a parking ramp in St. Paul, get some sleep, get up in the morning, go to the bank, never look back. He had a bag in the back of the truck with everything he needed to travel: he was leaving behind a house with a mortgage and some decent equity that he’d never see, but he wouldn’t see it in Stillwater Prison, either.

  Vike walked out behind him, shook his hand. “You got enough cash?”

  “I got some, as long as I can get to the bank box tomorrow. Most of it’s up in Canada. If I can just get up there, get out to my island, I’m okay.”

  “I could give you a few thousand right now, if that would help.”

  “That would help. If they put me on TV tonight, I’ll just have to keep going north.”

  The others followed them out, at intervals of a half-minute or so. Nobody said good-bye to anyone else.

  Jennifer Barns and Henry Hetfield walked out separately and separately looked at the sky and asked themselves,

  “Is this the end?”

  19

  EVERY LIGHT IN the school was on when they got back. Shrake called ahead to say that Virgil had survived, and the sheriff was waiting in the school doorway where Virgil had broken in.

  “You sure Bacon’s in here?” he asked.

  “I talked to him on the phone. He said he’d jam the door open for me, and go pull a surveillance camera out of the little auditorium. That was maybe eight, ten minutes before I got here. When I got here, the door was locked, the paper he was gonna jam it with was by the door, and he and the camera were gone.”

  “Surveillance camera?”

  “Yeah. The school board here has been stealing the school system blind—that’s just between you and me and Shrake and Jenkins, for the time being.”

  The sheriff looked as though somebody had hit him between the eyes with a plank. “I know the board, I mean . . . How sure . . . ?”

  “I think their security guy is the one who shot Conley and Zorn—Zorn for no other reason than to pull me away from the schools. Conley had cracked the whole thing, and he was planning to publish it. I think he made the mistake of telling Vike Laughton about it.”

/>   “Vike . . .” The sheriff turned away and stared sightlessly across the parking lot. “Hate to say it, but I can believe Kerns and Vike. I’m having trouble with all the Jennifers. You think the fire . . . ?”

  “The fire was set to destroy the district’s financial records. I can guarantee they’re not up in a Cloud, somewhere. They were melted. But Conley got copies of enough of them to hang them all. Now, Sheriff, you’re an okay guy, but this ring has feelers all over town. You’d do best not to mention this to anyone, not until I figure out how to pull them in. Kerns is out there with a rifle, and he did his best to kill me tonight, and we can’t find Bacon. He won’t hesitate to shoot a deputy, or a sheriff.”

  “We gotta find that sucker.”

  “Yes, we do. But first we’ve got to find Bacon. I keep hoping that he’s locked up somewhere.”

  “We’re tearing the place apart.”

  “Let me look.”

  —

  THERE WERE EIGHT COPS walking the school. A sergeant who seemed to know what he was doing had them run all the obvious places in a hurry, which had taken twenty minutes or so, he told Virgil.

  Then they’d backtracked, and were doing the whole place inch by inch.

  “The shooter knows the building,” Virgil said. “He could have stuck him someplace weird.”

  With the deputies doing the search better than he could, Virgil took Jenkins, Shrake, and Alewort, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, up to the attic. Jenkins and Shrake had to bend their necks to walk down to Bacon’s apartment. Virgil spotted the shooter’s blood for Alewort, who began doing his crime-scene routine, and Virgil led Shrake and Jenkins into the apartment.

  “Holy shit,” Jenkins said. He was looking at the splintered walls. “You were in here? You’re living right, Virgil—brick walls on the outside, you should have been killed three times by ricochets.”

  “Or splintered to death,” Jenkins said. He tipped his finger at the side of one of Bacon’s bookcases, which had three six-inch splinters embedded in the wood, like straws in a telephone pole after a tornado.