Deadline

by John Sandford

  Four hundred yards down the valley, and maybe two hundred from the highway, Muddy stopped so abruptly that Virgil nearly bumped into him. They stood for a moment, then Muddy whispered, “Smell it?”

  Virgil closed his eyes and smelled, very faintly, an odor somewhere between roses and violets. Perfume. He whispered, “Yes.”

  Muddy moved on another twenty or thirty feet, and then stopped again and whispered, “We’re close now.”

  Virgil cleared his throat and said, in a normal speaking voice, “I’ve got a gun, and I don’t want to shoot you, but I can see you, and I’m not sure if you have a gun or not, so if you move suddenly, I’m going to have to use my gun.”

  Two or three seconds later, the woman said, “Don’t shoot me.”

  “Then come out of there.”

  She’d been huddled behind a tree, clutching the dog, which yapped once at Virgil and then shut up. Virgil turned on the jacklight, aimed over her head, but still lighting her up: she put up a hand to shade her eyes, and Virgil whispered to Muddy, “Better take off.”

  The boy slipped away, and Virgil said to the woman, “What’s your name?”

  “Judy. Burk.”

  “Let’s go down to the road, Judy. We need to talk this over.”

  —

  VIRGIL WALKED JUDY and the dog down to the road, where an elderly white-haired man named John seemed to be having some kind of seizure. Somebody said something to him as Virgil and Judy came up, and he spun around, saw Virgil, and asked, “Are you the man in charge of this disaster?”

  “I’m with the BCA,” Virgil said.

  “You burned down my house! You owe me for a house!”

  Virgil said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t burn it down. D. Wayne Sharf did. I was standing outside when he set it on fire.”

  John spun in a crazed dervish-like circle, making gargling sounds as he did, and when he came out of it, wild-eyed, he said, “He wouldn’t have burned it down if you hadn’t been there.”

  Virgil said, “I’m sorry about the house—you said it was your house?”

  “Yes, it’s my house! It was worth . . .” He hesitated, the better to pump the price, Virgil thought. “At least a hundred and twenty thousand!”

  Several people in the crowd laughed, and a tough-looking guy in a T-shirt said, “Shit, John, if I’d known you’d shingled it with gold, I might have come over and stolen some shingles.”

  There was more laughter, which made the man angrier, and then Shrake came up behind him and patted him on the shoulder and said, “It’s not going to be worth anything to you if you have a heart attack and die. You’ve got to ease up a little.”

  John pulled himself together, then raised a finger at Virgil, but before he could say what he was going to say, Virgil asked, “Has the DEA been in touch with you, about the drugs?”

  The finger stopped in mid-shake. “What drugs?”

  “The basement was full of methamphetamine. Probably a half-million dollars’ worth. Was that yours? Or was it D. Wayne’s?”

  John slowed some more. “Well, it wasn’t mine. I rented the place.”

  A voice in the crowd asked, “Do you have to pay income taxes on drugs?”

  “If you sell them, you do,” Shrake said.

  “I don’t know about any drugs,” John said.

  “Why don’t you give me your name, address, and phone number,” Virgil said. “I’ll have the DEA guy get in touch.”

  John looked around and then said, “Give me your card. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  —

  RIGHT. Virgil gave him a card, and took his name, and John went away. Virgil, Shrake, and Judy walked up the valley wall to the clearing where the cabin once stood. Jenkins was chatting to one of the firemen, like two guys at a barbecue. A fire hose led up to the site from one of the trucks, but nothing was being sprayed on the fire.

  “So . . . couldn’t save it?” Virgil asked.

  The fireman shook his head: “It was gone before we got here. The problem is, half-burned houses attract people, and they get hurt. Once they’re that far gone, better to let them burn. You get a nice clean ash.”

  “We’re all gonna stink,” Jenkins said to Virgil. And to Judy, “Nice to see you again. Your dog bit me. Twice.”

  “He thought you were attacking me.”

  “I was standing on the porch, I—”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Virgil said. “The thing is, Judy, I don’t know, it looks like you might have been involved in a bunch of crimes. Theft, arson, harboring a fugitive, breaking the federal seals off the house. I mean, we’ve got some stuff to talk about.”

  Judy began to weep, what appeared to be honest tears, and Shrake said, “Hey, Virgil, take it easy. She looks like a pretty nice lady.” He turned to Judy and said, “You know, you’re entitled to a lawyer, you don’t have to tell Virgil a single darn thing.”

  Virgil said to Jenkins, “Read her rights to her, huh?”

  Jenkins did the Miranda, and then Shrake said, in his most kindly voice, “Did you understand that? You don’t even have to pay for a lawyer.”

  Jenkins said, “Jesus, Shrake, you trying to get a date? Let’s put the cuffs on her and haul her ass down to the Buchanan County jail, get her processed in, throw the mutt in the pound or whatever they’ve got down there, and get some sleep.”

  Judy began to cry again, and Shrake said, “C’mon, I’ll walk you down to the road.” To Virgil: “Get the car, pick us up.”

  They started down the hill, and when they were out of earshot, Virgil said, “Makes me feel bad.”

  “’Cause you’re Mr. Softy,” Jenkins said. “Let Shrake empty her out, and then, you know . . . whatever.”

  “Still makes me feel bad.”

  “Not as bad as I feel. My ankle burns like fire. That dog has jaws like a fuckin’ alligator.”

  “It’s a fuckin’ Chihuahua,” Virgil said. “It’s practically a fuckin’ hamster.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a fuckin’ chickadee, it bit me on the fuckin’ leg.”

  “Ah, fuck it,” Virgil said.

  —

  JENKINS AND VIRGIL walked back up the valley to the Ruff house, and found Muddy inside, tootling on a black electric guitar, a complex version of Creedence’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” on which he was playing two separate guitar parts. “You gonna play in a band?” Virgil asked.

  “Maybe. I’m good enough,” Muddy said. “But . . . my old man says it’s a tough way to make a living, if you’re not one in a million.”

  “Probably right about that,” Jenkins said. “On the other hand, you may be. If you are, it’d be a shame to miss out on it.”

  “Dad says if I get really good at it, the discipline will let me be good at anything.”

  “I wish my dad had told me that,” Jenkins said. “My old man told me to stay away from Lone Star beer. Which he was drinking at the time.”

  Virgil told Muddy to have his father call. “I need to talk to him about what happened tonight. I have a feeling he might be a little pissed.”

  “Probably. But it goes away pretty quick. He told me he thought you were a good guy, considering the T-shirt you had on.”

  Virgil nodded: “Good to know. But tell him to call.”

  —

  THEY TOOK THE CAR back to the fire scene, where Shrake was waiting with Judy Burk. When they came up, Shrake gave Virgil a wave, so Virgil parked at the side of the road and he and Jenkins got out into the lights of a dozen vehicles.

  “Judy is really torn up about all of this—she didn’t know what Sharf was up to,” Shrake said. “He told her that the landlord had kicked him out and was going to take all of his stuff, and she just came down here with him and another friend to help get his clothes. Then, all of this, and he wound up ditching her and Brutus.”

  Jenkins flinc
hed: “The dog is named Brutus? Why? Because he stabs people with his teeth?”

  Judy backed into Shrake, and Shrake said, “Hey, listen to what I’m telling you. She didn’t have anything to do with all this. I think we just give her a ride home—she lives in CarryTown, just on the other side of Trippton—it’s an extra two minutes for us.”

  “How do you know she didn’t have anything to do with this?” Virgil asked. “Looked to me like she was involved.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “How did that fire start? Looked like more than a match. Smelled like gasoline. Did D. Wayne carry a gas can in there?”

  Her lip trembled and she said, “No, no, he didn’t have a gas can.”

  “A bottle?”

  “He had a backpack . . . maybe there was a bottle in it.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I think I saw a bottle,” she admitted. “I didn’t know what was in it.”

  “Molotov cocktail,” Jenkins said to Virgil. “He went in knowing he was gonna torch the place. Probably afraid that the DEA was going to process the house and come up with about a million of his fingerprints.”

  “Which they would have,” Virgil said. “In fact, I’ve got to call Gomez and tell him the house went to heaven.” He looked back at Judy, pursed his lips. “He might be interested in talking to Judy here.”

  Judy choked a little, then said, “I’ll tell you anything you want.”

  —

  AFTER A WHILE, they loaded into the car, with Jenkins in the back with Judy and the dog, so he could lean on her, if necessary. Shrake was still friendly from the driver’s seat, and Judy told the whole thing: D. Wayne Sharf was a hanger-on, one of life’s losers who’d never been allowed to ride with the Seed. They wouldn’t even make him an associate member. But Roy Zorn used him to haul ingredients for his meth, and D. Wayne helped him cook it.

  The dogs, she said, were D. Wayne’s own sideline, which she didn’t much care for, since she was a dog lover herself. At the moment, all of D. Wayne’s dogs were in a makeshift pen somewhere in western Buchanan County, she didn’t know exactly where. Wherever it was, she said, was where D. Wayne would be.

  “The guy who drove us here, his name is Lee, I don’t know his last name, he and Wayne are gonna put the dogs in these crates and drive them over to this dog-trading sale. . . . The good ones go down south to hunt, the bad ones and the mutts and the puppies get sold off to these bunchers, they call them.”

  “I know what bunchers are,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, well, they sell them to medical laboratories—”

  “I know that,” Virgil said.

  “In fact,” said Jenkins, leaning over her, “you really haven’t told us much that we didn’t already know.”

  “I know one thing you don’t,” she said.

  Jenkins: “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “I know where the dog sale is gonna be, and when. And I know D. Wayne is gonna be there with all his dogs and his flatbed trailer—that’s what I know.”

  Jenkins leaned away from her, taking off the pressure, and said, “Babe—you should have said something earlier.”

  22

  THEY CONTINUED to push and pull on Burk, arguing among themselves, for her benefit, whether they should drop her in jail or take her home, and finally Virgil asked her, “Are you going to find D. Wayne Sharf again and tell him that we’ll be waiting for him Saturday?”

  “No. I will not. Cross my heart.” She pulled the Chihuahua off to one side so she could cross her heart with her index finger.

  “If you’re lying to us, we won’t be talking about jail—we’ll be talking about the women’s prison up in Shakopee. You stay away from him,” Virgil said. “If he calls, tell him you ran away in the woods and had to walk home. Or hitchhike. Yell at him a little.”

  “You don’t have to encourage me,” she said. “D. Wayne left me in a burning house and never looked back.”

  “Remember that, if he calls,” Virgil said.

  CarryTown turned out to be a cluster of aging mobile homes built in no particular place south of Trippton, around a convenience store called the Cash ’n Carry. Burk pointed out her trailer and Shrake pulled up next to it, and Burk said, “Let me ask you all something, before you blame me for hanging out with D. Wayne.”

  “Ask,” Virgil said.

  “When you were eighteen years old, wearing your blue graduation robe, sitting in a folding chair with your funny hat, listening to some old guy telling you about Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, did you ever think you’d wind up being forty-eight years old and living in a shithole like this one?”

  She got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked up to her concrete-block stoop, and Jenkins said, “Well, that sort of pisses on the evening’s festivities.”

  Shrake backed the Crown Vic in a circle, and they drove back to Trippton. On the way, Virgil asked Shrake, “How bad do you feel about punkin’ Judy Burk? Bein’ the good cop?”

  Shrake said, “Oh . . . you know. She was hanging out with a guy who sells crank to kids. She’s sort of sad on her own, but she knew what he was doing, and she helped him out. Maybe I’ll reincarnate as a termite, but I don’t feel that bad.”

  As they rolled through town, Virgil called Gomez, who said, “Honest to God, do you ever call anyone during business hours? You didn’t find another meth mill, did you?”

  “No. I just wanted to tell you that D. Wayne Sharf burned that house to the ground,” Virgil said. “You won’t have to come back for any further processing.”

  “Great. I assume you grabbed him?”

  “No, not exactly,” Virgil said. “But—I know where he’ll be on Saturday.”

  “Grab him, then. We’ll come and take him off your hands,” Gomez said.

  —

  JENKINS AND SHRAKE dropped Virgil at Johnson’s cabin, and went off to their motel, with plans to play golf in the morning, to make up for the evening’s overtime.

  Virgil got a good night’s sleep, and the next morning took a call from Dave at the attorney general’s office. “We’ve been conferencing on the Buchanan County matter, and I’m going down to Winona this morning, with my assistant, to talk to Masilla. I’m calling you more as a courtesy than anything—happy to have you, but it’s not required.”

  “I’ll hang down here,” Virgil said. “I got enough information from Masilla to go around and knock on some doors. I’ll stay in touch with what I get—you might want to plan to come down here tomorrow or the next day, depending on what breaks.”

  “Call me when life gets serious,” the lawyer said, and hung up.

  —

  VIRGIL ATE BREAKFAST, blocking out his day on a yellow pad. When he was done, he called the attorney back: “I’m going to interview a guy name Russell Ross, who runs a wholesale diesel business, then I’m going to see the guy who runs the school’s motor pool. His name is Dick Brown. If I’m found floating facedown in the river, he’ll be the one to talk to about it.”

  “If you’re found floating in the river, I’ll return to my comfortable middle-class home in St. Paul, barricade myself in the TV room, and let somebody else investigate. You take it easy down there.”

  TriPoint Fuel was named after the river landmark used by the old steamboats, when Trippton had been a refueling stop. Four well-used tank trucks were parked in the dirt lot when Virgil arrived, and another was just leaving. The place looked like an environmental nightmare, Virgil thought: it was backed against the levee and the ground was soaked with oil drippings.

  Rusty Ross—his name was on a slightly rusty plaque above the only office door in the building—looked like a golfer, wearing tan slacks and a red golf shirt, with a pencil pushed behind one ear. He wore aviator glasses of the kind that changed shades in sunlight, and that gave his brown eyes a vaguely overcast look.

  “What can I do y
ou for?” he asked Virgil, when Virgil stuck his head in the office.

  Virgil said, “I’m an investigator for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, out of St. Paul. I was wondering if you’ve been kicking money back to Dick Brown, for buying the school’s fuel from you.”

  Ross’s Adam’s apple bobbed once before he said, “Well . . . no.”

  Virgil tried to stay cheerful: “I hope you’re telling the truth there, Mr. Ross, because this has become a rather serious matter, involving murder.”

  Ross pointed at one of the two orange-plastic chairs that faced his desk, and Virgil nodded and took one.

  “I have never kicked anything back to Dick Brown—aside from a bottle of Jim Beam I pass out to my customers at Christmas—because I don’t have to. As far as the schools are concerned, I’m the only game in town.”

  “I don’t know much about your business,” Virgil confessed, “but I know that there are other fuel places around. Up in Winona, over in La Crosse . . .”

  “And sayin’ that proves you don’t know anything about my business,” Ross said. “You know what the number one, two, and three costs in this business are?”

  “No, I don’t,” Virgil said.

  “It’s trucks, drivers, and fuel.” Ross leaned forward, over his desk, his face interested and intent. “The stuff we sell, the diesel, is the same price for every wholesaler. That’s why the business is so good, if you’ve already got it—and why nobody else can get into it. To compete with me, somebody would have to buy at least a million dollars’ worth of trucks, and then hire a bunch of drivers who are making thirty thousand a year, and then . . . they couldn’t sell the fuel for a penny a gallon more than I do. Or say a guy already runs a business up in Winona, and he wants to compete with me. He has to drive the diesel down here, and put that mileage and wear and tear on his trucks to do it, and pay the drivers for their time, and keep a salesman down here. That pushes the cost of every gallon he sells. He can’t underbid me, because we pay exactly the same amount for the wholesale diesel. So you see, I’m the only game in town. And that won’t change. That means that I don’t have to kickback to anyone—they take my diesel, or they find some other fuel. And I already supply the gas to the cut-rate stations in town.”