Deadline (3 page)

After another moment, Johnson asked, “You smell that shit?”

“The acetone, yeah,” Virgil said. “Not right away—I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Wasn’t close.”

“Well, it’s cool down here and hotter up above. Cold air flows down . . . so probably up on the valley wall, somewhere.”

“The sheriff heard that Zorn might be cooking some meth. We’re quite a way from Zorn’s.”

“Nothing to keep him from hiding his cooker up the hill, like an old-timey still,” Johnson said. He looked around at the overgrown valley walls hanging over them. “Virgie? Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

They got the fuck out of there.

—

“
N
OW WHAT DO
we do?” Johnson asked, when they bounced back on Highway 26.

“I want to look at some aerial photography of the place. See if there’s any other way in or out.”

Johnson nodded and said, “You know who’s got the best pictures? The ag service.” He looked at his watch. “Gonna be too late today, though. I’d recommend a run up the river, instead. We can look at the pictures first thing tomorrow.”

On the way back to Johnson’s cabin, Davenport returned Virgil’s call from that morning. Virgil saw his name flash on the phone screen, and said to Johnson, “Keep your mouth shut. This is the boss. I’ll put him on the speaker.”

“What’s up?” Davenport asked, when Virgil answered.

“Man, I hate to ask this, with Shaffer dead and you working the Black Hole. But you know my friend Johnson Johnson?”

“Yeah, I know him,” Davenport said. “There’s a goddamn accident waiting to happen.”

“Actually, it’s happened several times already. Anyway, Johnson needs some help on, mmm . . . a non-priority mission,” Flowers said. “I’m not doing anything heavy, and nobody’s called me for the Black Hole group, so I’d like to run over to Trippton. It’s down south of La Crescent.”

“You’re not telling me what it’s about,” Davenport said.

“No, but if Johnson is telling the truth, and I make a couple of busts, it’ll bring great credit upon the BCA.”

Johnson nodded sagely, from the passenger seat.

“We don’t need credit,” Davenport said. “The legislature’s already adjourned. But, go ahead, on your best judgment. From the way you’re talking, I don’t want to know what it is. If it blows up in your face, it’s your problem.”

“Got it. I just wanted you to know where I was,” Virgil said.

“You taking your boat?” Lucas asked.

Long pause, while Virgil sorted out the possibilities. He decided to go with the semi-truth. “Maybe.”

“Let me know if you get in trouble,” Davenport said. “But otherwise . . .”

“You don’t want to know.”

“That’s right.”

—

“
Y
OU’RE GOOD,”
Johnson said, when Virgil had rung off. “Got the backing of the big guy himself. Let’s get out on the river.”

“I’m not going catfishing,” Virgil said.

“Nah. Get your fly rod out. I know where there’s a whole bunch of smallmouth, and they do like their Wooly Buggers.”

So they did that.

On his first night in Buchanan County, Virgil went to sleep in Johnson’s cabin with the feeling he hadn’t gotten much done.

But he’d gotten some heavy vibes—and the vibes were bad.

A
BOUT THE TIME
that night that Virgil hooked into a two-pound smally, the Buchanan County Consolidated School Board finished the public portion of the monthly meeting. The last speaker had demanded to know what the board was going to do about buying better helmets for the football team.

“I been reading about how blows to the head turn the boys into a bunch of dummies when they grow up. Murph Roetting’s kid’s still not right after he got took out last season. . . . I don’t want to think we’re paying a million and a half dollars for a sports complex so we can raise a bunch of brain-damaged dummies.”

The board talked about that in an orderly fashion, each in his or her turn: the five board members, the superintendent, the financial officer. Because school was not in session, they were all dressed in Minnesota informal: button-up short-sleeved shirts and blouses,
Dockers slacks for both men and women, loafers and low heels. All their haircuts, ranging from maple-blond to butternut-brown, were gender-appropriately short. They were neat, ironed, and certainly not assertive.

When everybody had his or her turn on the football issue, the board voted to ask community doctors to look into it and prepare a report.

That done, the board ran everybody off, except one fat man, with the excuse that they had to deal with personnel matters, which was almost true.

When the last of the public had gone, they sent Randolph Kerns, the school security officer, to flush out the hallways, including the bathrooms, to make sure everybody had really gone away. He found the school janitor polishing brass, and told him to knock it off and go home. The janitor went.

“We’re clean,” he said, when he came back, locking the meeting room door behind himself.

Jennifer Barns, the big-haired chairwoman and one of three Jennifers on the five-person board, said, “I guess you all know what’s going on. The fact is, if something’s not done, we’re all headed for disgrace and prison. Anybody disagree?”

Jennifer Houser said, “Clancy came around to see me this afternoon. He was threatening me. He said if I didn’t talk to him, he’d put me right down with the rest of you. He seems to think that . . . I’m a little more honest than the rest of you.”

The other four board members, the school superintendent, the financial officer, the security chief, and the fat man all chuckled; Houser was crooked as a sidewinder rattlesnake.

“So what are we going to do?” Bob Owens asked. He was the senior board member, and one of the founders of the retirement-now scheme.

“We all know what’s got to be done. The question is, can we sustain it?” the third Jennifer (Gedney) said. “I’d rather go to prison for embezzlement than first-degree murder.”

They all went hum and hah, and wished she hadn’t put it quite so starkly. She persisted: “We know what we’re talking about here. Randy?”

“Yeah, we know,” Kerns said. “We could do it right now. Tonight. But you’re right: once we do it, we can’t go back.”

“How would you do it?” Barns asked.

“Been scouting him. He runs right after dark, when it starts to get cool. I’ll come up behind him, shoot him in the back. He won’t suffer.”

“What about his trailer?” Owens asked. “We never did develop a consensus on that.”

“I been thinking about it,” Kerns said. “I know some of you think we should burn it, but that worries me. If they find his body in a ditch, it might have been some crazy kid with a gun. A random killing. If we kill him, and burn his trailer . . . then it’s obviously covering up something.”

“What if he’s told somebody about us?” Houser asked.

“He hasn’t,” said the ninth man in the room, the fat man, the only one who wasn’t directly involved with the schools. “I told him to hold the whole thing close to his chest. Not to tell a soul—and he doesn’t have any close friends. No: the biggest problem would be if he’s written a lot of it down. What I’d suggest is, Randy takes care
of him, in the dark. He won’t be found right away, and I could say I got worried and went up to his trailer looking for him. Give me a chance to go through the place, and clean it out.”

“But what if he is found right away?” asked Larry Parsons, the fifth board member.

“Tell you what,” the fat man said. “I’ll get up on top of the hill about first light, and watch. And at eight o’clock, I’ll go on into his trailer. I got a key.”

Kerns said, “That’ll work. If there’s nobody around, I’ll get him right at the bottom of that last hill before he goes back up to his place. The ditch is deep and all full of cattails. Nobody’ll see him down there.”

Barns, the chairman, looked around the room and said, “Okay. We can do this. Let’s see a show of hands. It’s unanimous, or it’s prison. Do we kill Clancy Conley?”

They all looked around at each other, each of them reluctant to go first. Then the fat man raised his hand, and then Kerns, and then the rest of them.

“It’s unanimous,” Barns said. She unconsciously picked up her gavel and rapped it once against her desk.

—

C
LANCY
C
ONLEY WAS
a human train wreck. He hadn’t started out that way, but he’d discovered speed halfway through journalism school, and that started his slow slide to hell, if hell can be defined as being a reporter/photographer/paste-up man on a small-town weekly newspaper.

In his twenties, he’d moved around, going from the
Cape
Girardeau Southeast Missourian
to the
Cedar Rapids Gazette
, peaking at the
Omaha World-Herald
, where, after a three-day run on the really fine pharmaceutical Dexedrine, he got in a violent one-sided argument with the city editor. One-sided because the city editor didn’t understand a word he was saying.

“He sounds like a chicken. He thinks he’s using words, but he’s just going puck-puck-puck-puck puck,” he told the executive editor, as they both peered through the blinds on the executive editor’s office. Conley was flapping his wings around the city desk.

From there it was Sioux Falls, South Dakota, then Worthington, Minnesota, then through a run of smaller and smaller rural towns, finally landing, at forty-five, at the
Trippton Republican-River
, which was mostly supermarket advertisements, with a smattering of school board news, sheriff’s news, county commission news, city council news, and paid obituaries.

Then, in Trippton, Conley had inadvertently discovered that the school board was stealing the school system blind, taking out nearly a million dollars a year from a budget of thirty-nine million. It was all hard to see—for example, who really knew if the school buses got ten miles per gallon or eight, or exactly where they got the stuff that went into school lunches?—but it added up.

Conley got the first tip from a school bus driver who knew how much diesel her Blue Bird used, and how much the school said she used. The same driver suggested that he talk to a lady who worked in the high school cafeteria, about food costs. The anecdotal information had been confusing, but suggestive. Then Conley stole a confidential school budget document that made it all perfectly clear.

He was thinking about the document as he puffed along
Highway A, going west out of Trippton, the night after the school board meeting. He’d started running every night, because it was one thing he’d once done well. He was now twenty pounds overweight, but had been forty pounds overweight at his forty-fifth birthday. The discovery of the school board embezzlement had stirred some of the original journalistic vinegar in Conley’s veins. He’d stopped drinking, mostly, and didn’t do speed more than twice a week. His weight was down, his brain was clearer.

He was even thinking that after he broke the school story, and moved to a bigger paper, he might actually start looking for something with tits. So his life was changing for the better. His biggest current problem would be explaining how he got the detailed budgetary information.

He didn’t cover the school board himself; the paper’s editor, Viking Laughton, did that. And the bare fact was, he’d broken into the school finance office on several weekend nights, cracked the finance officer’s computer, and had taken photographs of the computer screens over fifteen nerve-racking hours.

It had taken him the best part of six months, and two more break-ins, to winkle out all the details. He’d then confided the findings to Viking “Vike” Laughton, the fat man who owned the newspaper.

Vike had been astonished: “I never saw it in them. They must be taking out a hundred thousand dollars a year, each of them.”

“Something like that,” Conley agreed.

Vike told him to keep it all top secret. “This here’s a Pulitzer Prize, boy, if we play it just right,” he said, slapping his hands on printouts of the budget documents.

Vike suggested Jennifer Houser as the one likeliest to turn on the others—he’d been covering the school board himself, for years, and was familiar with all the members.

Conley had finally gotten to Houser just that afternoon.

“This is going in the paper next week, Jen,” he’d told her. “Everybody’s going down, but when the police arrive, I’ll tell them that you were the person who cracked the case. I’m sure, if you cooperate, they’ll take it easy on you. You might have to do a little jail time, but you ask anybody who’s been to jail, and they’ll tell you—a little is way, way better than a lot. Way better.”

She’d started crying, and asked for a couple of days to think it over. Conley had just put the paper to bed for that week, and had time, so he’d agreed: “Two days is fine, Jen. Take three, if you need it. But . . . it’s going in the paper one way or another, next week. I’ve already cleared it with Vike.”

She’d crack, Conley thought. He was coming to the bottom of the hill, by the cattail swamp, just before the last hard climb back up to his trailer, his running shoes flapping on the warm blacktop. A truck came up in front of him, slowing as it went by, and Conley moved over to the shoulder. Wasn’t sure, but it looked like Randy Kerns behind the wheel.

He turned his head to look back, but the next thing he knew, he was lying in the cattails, the cold water soaking through his shirt and shorts.

Before he died, which was only a few seconds later, it occurred to him that he wasn’t too surprised. . . .

Vike was really, really close to the school board.

T
HE ALARM ON
Virgil’s cell phone went off at eight o’clock. He rolled out, remade the bed, more or less, got cleaned up, and took a call from Johnson Johnson.

“You up?” Johnson asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m in my truck. I’ll meet you at the Gourd.”

“Ten minutes,” Virgil said.

Johnson and his girlfriend lived west of town, in a sprawling ranch-style house with a barn out back, for the horses, which his girlfriend trained and endurance-raced. Johnson’s sawmill was a mile back behind the house, on the other edge of his twelve hundred and eighty acres of hardwood forest.

Johnson was hunched over a cup of coffee, reading the
Wall
Street Journal
, when Virgil walked into the Golden Gourd. “Don’t know what I’m going to do about insurance,” he said. “Gotta have it—I got six employees, and it’s rough work, but Jesus, it costs an arm and a leg.”

“You need to work for the government,” Virgil said. “Insurance is free.”

“Free for you, not for the rest of us,” Johnson said. He put the paper down and waved at a waitress. They got breakfast, argued about insurance, and talked about what they’d be doing that day.

“We need to find a way to come down from the top,” Virgil said. “There’s gotta be one—there’s probably a whole bunch of ways. If you have to go in on that road, everybody in the valley knows you’re coming.”

“The south side of the valley is steeper, and not so many houses over there,” Johnson said. “If they’re hiding dogs, they’re probably on the north side.”

“Ought to look at a plat map, see who owns what,” Virgil said.

“Do that at the courthouse,” Johnson said.

“Might be handy to have a rope to come down off that bluff line,” Virgil said.

“Get that over at Fleet Farm,” Johnson said.

When they finished eating, Johnson looked at his watch and said, “Ag office oughta be open.”

They left their cars in the street and walked two blocks over to the Buchanan County Soil and Water Conservation District, where they talked to a clerk who pulled out large-scale, high-resolution aerial photos of the land around Orly’s Creek.

The clerk left them, and they bent over the photos, tracing Orly’s Creek Road up to the spring. The cleft of the valley was clear on the photos: the land up on top was the dark green of heavy forest, cut by the lighter green of the valleys, from which most of the trees had been cleared.

Virgil tapped County Road NN, which ran west a half-mile north of Orly’s Creek. “If we leave my truck at this bridge”—he looked at the scale—“which is about three-quarters of a mile from 26, we could walk along the edge of this field and into woods, up the hill and down the other side. No houses close by . . . and it looks like there’s a gap in the bluff line . . . here . . . and here.”

“Still gonna be pretty goddamned steep,” Johnson said.

“That’s why we take some rope.”

“We could probably get down, but we won’t be able to get out in a hurry,” Johnson said. “If we have to run for it, we might best go all the way down to the road. Tell you something else—might be tough calling for help. In those deep valleys, the cell phone service is kinda iffy.”

Virgil said, “We’ll take it slow.” He tapped the map, a line that ran near the top of the valley, just below the bluffs. “See this line? It looks too heavy to be a game trail, and it comes up to this flat patch. It looks like something built is in there.”

“Kennels?”

“Looks like something. If we can come over the bluff line . . . here . . . we could move right along the trail, and it’s not more than a couple hundred yards.”

“Worth a look,” Johnson said.

—

V
IRGIL GOT THE CLERK
to make a Xerox copy of the photo, paid for it, and they continued down the street to the county courthouse, where they looked at plat maps. The man Virgil had talked to the day before, Zorn, owned the land from the road up to his house, and perhaps fifty yards on either side of it, and behind it—not more than two acres or so, a relatively small patch compared to some of the other holdings. The largest plot was at the end of the valley, on the north side. A hundred and twenty acres of woods, and what looked like a small house, showing no mowed fields or outbuildings, under the name of Deland.

“Don’t know any Delands,” Johnson said. A quick check with the tax records showed a mailing address in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan.

“Could be a hunting cabin,” Virgil said. “That kid must have come down from here.” He touched the image of a house on the south side, on twenty acres, showing a large garden to one side, and what appeared to be a small orchard, judging from the way the trees were spaced. The tax records said the bill went to a Julius Ruff. After a last review, he said, “Let’s get some rope and go on out there.”

—

T
HEY BOUGHT
a hundred feet of three-quarter-inch nylon rope at Fleet Farm, stopped at Johnson’s cabin on the way north, so they both could change into running shoes, and took Highway 26 past Orly’s Creek Road for half a mile, took a left on NN, and drove to
the small bridge where they’d leave the truck. The creek below it was barely damp.

Virgil had weapons in the back, and after debating with himself about the options, put a “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension” sign on the dashboard, activated the car alarm, and locked everything up.

He did take his pistol with him, a standard-issue Glock 9mm, and though he didn’t ask, was sure that Johnson had his .45 in his military-style rucksack, along with a couple of cans of Budweiser and a GPS receiver that he’d bought for his boat. Before leaving the ag service, Johnson had found the GPS references for what looked like the easiest breaks in the bluff line above Orly’s Creek valley.

In his own pack, Virgil carried two bottles of water, the rope, a multi-tool and two extra magazines for the Glock, a Sony RX100 compact camera, and a homemade first aid kit.

They left the truck and crossed the roadside ditch, climbed one fence into an alfalfa field, and walked along another that stretched up to the woods at the top of the hill they were climbing. The woods would extend over the crest, down into the Orly’s Creek valley.

The day was hot, and they took it easy climbing the hill, breaking a light sweat that attracted mosquitoes when they crossed from the alfalfa field into the woods. The climb got steeper as they got deeper into the woods, and eventually they moved from one sapling to the next, hanging on to the brush to stay upright. Fifteen minutes after they left the truck, they reached the crest of the hill, which was punctuated with outcrops of soft yellow rock.

A game trail ran along the crest. Johnson shucked off his pack
and said, “We should replace some fluids while we have the time. Stay quiet, see what we can hear.”

Virgil took a few sips of water, while Johnson popped open a beer, and they listened: and heard the woods, but nothing out of place. When Johnson had finished the beer, they walked to their right along the game trail until Johnson, who was watching the GPS, said, “We’re about there. We need to go off this way. . . .”

He led the way downslope, into the Orly’s Creek valley. A few dozen yards into the trees, they found themselves paralleling a shallow dry gully, and Virgil said, “This probably goes down to the break in the bluff.”

Johnson nodded, and they followed it down; a minute later the gully got deeper, and the way was blocked by a shoulder of the yellow rock. They moved into the gully, which got steeper, but took them through the lip of the bluffs. At that point, the slope became even steeper, and they paused to assess. The ground beneath their feet was a combination of damp black earth and crumbled bits of the yellow rock.

“It’s doable, if we use the rope,” Johnson said. “But we couldn’t get back up unless we left the rope here.”

“Don’t want to do that,” Virgil said. “If we had to get out some other way, they’d know where we’re getting in.”

They decided to take a chance—they’d use the rope, doubled around a tree trunk, then they’d pull it down, and find another way out of the valley. Doing that, after the decision, took only a couple of minutes, with Virgil leading the way down. They pulled the rope down after them, repacked it, and walked down the valley wall to the trail they’d seen in the ag service photos.

It turned out to be six feet wide, and well packed, marked with ATV tracks. A few incipient gullies across the trail, caused by water draining from above, had been filled with broken rock.

“Some good work here,” Johnson said. He looked up and down the track. “But why would they build it?”

“Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “But it’d have to be an industrial operation to build a road like this.”

Johnson was looking up at the overhanging trees. “You know what? Half the trees here are sugar and black maple. They could be cooking syrup.”

“Thought that was all up north.”

“No, they got sugar bushes all the way down into Iowa,” Johnson said. “The wood makes damn good flooring, I can tell you.”

“I know about flooring, now. Frankie salvages it from old farmhouses.”

“Yeah, that’s a fashion,” Johnson said. They were both looking up and down the trail.

Virgil asked, “Which way?”

“Right. I think.”

They moved off down the trail, listening and watching. Virgil asked, “What is it with these trees?” He pointed to a young maple that had been girdled with an ax or hatchet, but left standing.

“They’re killing the tree, but leaving it standing to dry out. Making firewood,” Johnson said. A hundred yards farther on they came to the built spot that Virgil had seen on the photos, and it turned out to be a woodlot, with a few face cords of stacked wood set off to one side.

“Could be the answer to the trail,” Johnson said. “Somebody’s harvesting firewood. You’d need an ATV to tow it out of here.”

“But this isn’t the end of it . . .”

Virgil led the way out of the woodlot. The trail had narrowed to a single-wide track, blocked by a pile of brush—the leftover ends of trees cut up for firewood. An ATV could get around it, but nothing wider. The trail eventually led to three metal sheds of the kind sold at lumberyards. They’d been painted with a green-on-black camouflage pattern, and all had tightly sealed doors, with padlocks. A half-dozen propane cylinders sat on the ground beside one of them.

“Smell it?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah.”

They could smell the acetone.

“Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “And not long ago.”

“They could use the same setup to cook syrup, the same setup I have,” Johnson said. “I wonder why that never occurred to me.”

“Because, despite your many enormous personal flaws, character weaknesses, and innate criminality, you’re too much of a gutless coward to cook meth,” Virgil said.

“I wondered about that,” Johnson said. “Thanks for the explanation.”

Virgil tested all the locks and found them solid. He took out his camera, made a few photos, and then saw, farther down the slope, a hump of raw dirt, like the fill from a double-long grave. When Virgil went to look, he found a dump: trashed containers that once contained the raw materials for methamphetamine. He took some
more photos, then put the camera away and walked back up the slope to Johnson. “Can you get a GPS reading here?”

“Maybe,” Johnson said, looking up at the canopy of maple leaves. He had one a minute later, and saved it to the receiver’s memory.

“Let’s go upslope and see if we can find a way out,” Virgil said.

“What about the dogs?”

“This operation is more important than the dogs,” Virgil said. “They could be taking a ton of meth out of here. Johnson: this is sort of a big deal.”

“I’ll give you that,” Johnson said. “I still want the dogs.”

“We’ll be back,” Virgil promised. The trail had ended at the shed, and following the points on the GPS, Johnson led them to another of the openings in the bluff line. When they got there, the slope was still too steep, and they moved along to the last one, two hundred yards farther along the valley. This one was steep, but had saplings growing all the way up, and by using the trees to pull themselves along, they managed to climb to the crest.

Twenty minutes later, they were back at the truck.

“Now what?” Johnson asked. He cracked his second Bud as they did a U-turn and headed back toward the river.

“Got to think about that,” Virgil said. “To tell the truth, I don’t entirely trust your trusty sheriff.”

“You’re more perceptive than you look,” Johnson said. “Not to say that he’s an outright criminal. He may accept a little help now and then.”

“Okay. I’m thinking DEA. I’ve got a good connection there.”

“It’s your call,” Johnson said. “I’m just in it for the dogs.”

—

V
IRGIL’S MAN WITH
the DEA was named Harry Gomez, and he was now working out of Chicago. He’d directed the biggest shoot-out Virgil had ever seen, and one of the biggest he’d ever heard of.

Back at the cabin, Virgil called Gomez, who was a modest-sized big shot, and had to talk his way through a protective secretary. “Just tell him who’s calling,” Virgil said. “He’ll take it. I’ve saved his life on many occasions.”

She didn’t believe him, but Gomez took the call. “Hey, Virg. Please, please don’t tell me you found another meth lab.”

“I was calling to shoot the shit for a while,” Virgil said. “I’m not doing much, and I was wondering, what’s Harry Gomez doing? I mean, other than blowing some higher-up—”

“Really?” Gomez sounded almost hopeful.

“No. I found another meth lab. A big one.”

“Ah, shit. Why do you keep doing this, Virgil? It causes a lot of trouble for everyone. Couldn’t you just shoot the cook and call it a day?”

“That would be unethical,” Virgil said. He explained how they’d found the sheds, and about the dogs. “Anyway, they’ve got three fifteen-foot metal sheds hid out in the woods, along with an ATV trail to haul the stuff out. It’s nothing like the first one we hit, but it’s substantial.”

“All right. They cooking right now?”

“Not at this very minute, but they were at it not long ago. I could smell it yesterday. . . .”