VIRGIL CAUGHT STRYKER at ten o’clock, as he was talking to a slightly hungover carpenter with a bandage on his nail hand. The carpenter said that he’d ridden up to the fire with a friend named Dick Quinn. Stryker skated around a direct question of whether the carpenter knew how Jesse Laymon got there, but instead showed him a list of the names he had, and checked off who rode with whom, and who drove.
The carpenter had seen Jesse, but didn’t know how she got there. When they walked back out to Stryker’s truck, Virgil asked, “Anybody see her truck? Or give her a ride?”
Stryker said, “One guy saw her and thought her truck was at the end of the line. But nobody was looking at trucks, they were looking at the fire.”
“Want to know what I would do?” Virgil asked.
Stryker shook his head: “After yesterday, I’m not sure.”
“I’d have one of your deputies watch Williamson, get one to track Bill Judd, and one to watch Jesse. If two of them look like they’re about to collide…”
“If I stake them out, everybody in the county will know in fifteen minutes,” Stryker said. “Including them.”
“Better than piling up more dead people,” Virgil said.
“Virgil…let me finish this. I only have to find a couple more people. Then we’ll talk about a stakeout. Now—what’re you doing today?”
“Maybe push Williamson,” Virgil said. “Maybe push Jesse. Maybe talk to Judd some more. Somewhere in that triangle, there’s an answer.”
“You do that, and I’ll nail down this list. Then let’s talk.”
VIRGIL HAD JUST GOTTEN in his truck when his phone rang. He opened it: Pirelli.
“We’re getting together at the Holiday Inn, in Worthington,” Pirelli said. “There’s a rumor going around that we’re about to raid the meatpacking plant, looking for illegals. If you and Stryker want in, you need to be here.”
“When are you moving?” Virgil tapped his horn at Stryker, who looked back. Virgil waved him over.
“Around noon,” Pirelli said. “Feur is on his way back to his farm from Omaha. We’ve got a guy just loaded fifty gallons of gas into the back of his truck, up at the ethanol plant. He should be getting to the farm a little after Feur, unless one of them stops along the way.”
Virgil rolled down his truck window, put his finger over the mouthpiece, and said to Stryker, “Pirelli.”
Pirelli was saying, “…you need to get briefed, if you want to be in on it.”
“We’ll be there by eleven,” Virgil said. “You need more troops?”
“No. And we want to keep this off the air. We don’t want any curious deputies sticking their noses in. We don’t need strange guys with guns.”
“Give us an hour,” Virgil said. He closed the phone.
Stryker: “Today?”
“We’re leaving right now for Worthington,” Virgil said. “Pirelli wants to keep it off the air. You ought to check out, make up some kind of excuse, and we’re rolling.”
“Hot dog,” Stryker said.
THEY SLAMMED Virgil’s gear in the back of Stryker’s Ford, and Stryker called dispatch and told them he’d be out of touch for a while. The dispatcher said, after a pause, “Okay, there.” Stryker said to Virgil, “He thinks I’m going to Jesse’s for a nooner,” and he threw back his head and laughed.
Virgil said, “Not a bad idea.”
“Tough choice, fuckin’ or fightin’,” Stryker said. “In the long run, I prefer fuckin’, but at any given moment, fightin’ can while away the hours.”
THEY MADE the run to Worthington in half an hour. The feds had taken over the end of one wing of the Holiday Inn, and Virgil and Stryker were stopped by agents when they tried to walk back. One of the agents spoke into a radio, then nodded at them, and said, “Last room on the right.”
THEY FOUND PIRELLI in a meeting room with twenty other agents, all in jeans, short-sleeved shirts, and ball caps. Pirelli was standing next to a pull-down projection screen, and the agents were on folding chairs, facing it, like a kindergarten class with guns. In the middle of them, a computer was sitting on a stand with a PowerPoint projector.
Pirelli said, over the heads of the agents, “You’re just in time for the movies,” and to the agents, “This is Jim Stryker, sheriff of Stark County, the man with the hat, and Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, with…what kind of T-shirt, Virgil?”
Virgil pulled opened his coat to show off the Arcade Fire shirt.
“What the hell is Arcade Fire?” asked a Latino-looking dude with a New York accent.
“World’s best hurdy-gurdy band,” Virgil said.
PIRELLI SAID, “Guys, you’ve been briefed, I just want to talk about the territory a bit more, while we’re waiting, and now that we have local people here. We’ve scouted it, we’ve flown it, we don’t anticipate any huge trouble, but we gotta be ready. John Franks and Roger Kiley have long histories…” He paused, then said to Virgil and Stryker, “Franks is the guy bringing the stuff down from the ethanol plant; Kiley is at Feur’s place now. He and a couple of other guys hang out there, patrolling around. We don’t have IDs on the others.”
“A guy named Trevor,” Virgil said. “Last time I saw him, he had a Remington pump.”
Pirelli stepped to the computer and projector, brought up an image on the screen, and did a search for “Trevor.” A moment later, a “Trevor Rich” popped up, with a police ID photo from Wichita Falls, Texas.
“That’s him,” Virgil said, looking into Trevor’s blank eyes.
Pirelli pulled up some text and read it for them: “Armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, terroristic threats. Ex-wife has been missing for four years; nobody knows where she went…he says California. If he goes back inside, he stays.”
“He looked like such a nice boy,” Virgil said.
“Kiley and Franks are the same deal: guns, trouble, and severely pissed off at the government,” Pirelli said. “We’ve got to get right on top of them.”
“How are you going to do that?” Virgil asked.
“That’s a little complicated,” Pirelli said.
THE COMPLICATION INVOLVED getting both Feur and the dope at the house at the same time. They had an observation plane overhead, watching the dope, along with two cars tracking it on the ground, and an electronic position finder planted on the truck itself.
“We want Feur on the premises. Then we grab the dope before they can do anything with it,” Pirelli said. He went back to the computer keyboard and pulled up a satellite view of Feur’s farm. “We don’t know exactly where they’ll move the stuff, but we think it’s likely that they’ll put it in this shed, rather than in the house,” he said, touching the garage/shop with a red dot from a laser pointer. To Virgil and Stryker: “When we met in Mankato, you said that when Dale Donald Evans loaded gas cans, he backed up to the shed. We expect Franks to do the same thing, to unload.
“As soon as Franks is in the yard, we hit them,” Pirelli continued, circling the yard with the laser dot. “We can time that right down to the minute, where we come off the interstate. Even if they see us coming over the top of the rise”—he touched a terrain feature on the satellite photo—“they’ll have less than a minute of reaction time. If we can catch them in the yard, they’re toast. We had a guy go by, take some high-res photos of that shed. It doesn’t look like much. If they try to fight from it, we can take them out. The house is even shakier…”
“You don’t want a massacre,” Stryker said.
“Nope. We want to catch them in a helpless condition, so they quit,” Pirelli said.
“Are you sure about the meth?” Stryker asked. “That they’re bringing meth down from South Dakota?”
“Yes,” Pirelli said flatly. “That lab at the ethanol plant; best meth lab any of us have ever seen in the States. They’ve got some as good down in Mexico, but nothing better.”
Virgil piped up: “That shop might be a little harder than you think.”
Pirelli raised an eyebrow
: “Yeah?”
“It’s got new Medeco locks and steel doors. Hardly any point, if the thing has cardboard walls.”
“Have you been inside?” Pirelli asked.
“Of course not. That would be illegal, without a warrant,” Virgil said.
“We got stuff that’d take down those doors like they were tissue paper,” one of the agents said.
“Sure, when you decide to,” Virgil said. “But if Franks has ten gas cans in his truck, with twenty gallons in gas and the rest in crank, and if he has time to unload the crank and stir it around in the gas, he could have a nice little campfire in there and run out with his hands over his head…Maybe you need to order up a fire truck.”
Pirelli said, “We gotta be on top of them before he can unload. We will be less than a minute behind him, and he’ll have no reason to hurry. With any luck, he’ll want to take a leak before he unloads.”
“I hope,” Virgil said. “But it worries me.”
“With these kinds of deals,” Pirelli said, “there’s always about a twenty-eight percent chance of a disaster. That’s just the way it is. However we have to do it, these guys are worth eliminating.” He looked at the satellite picture, then said to Virgil: “But you’re right. It’s worth worrying about.”
THEY STOOD AROUND talking to the agents, then Virgil borrowed Pirelli’s laser pointer, and Virgil and Stryker went over the ground around the house—a ditch here, a big rock there, where they could site long guns.
There was a long seam of darker grass extending from the barn area, up the hill, and into a clump of brush southeast of the farmstead. One of the agents asked if it were a ditch that could be used to approach the houses.
“Don’t know,” Stryker said. “We did our recon on the north side.”
Pirelli was on the phone with somebody doing surveillance on the two target cars as they approached Feur’s farm. One of them was working the math on a simultaneous arrival, and at twelve-forty, Pirelli said, “North side, take off.”
Six agents got up, and walked out.
Pirelli said, “Five minutes, guys. We’re on the road in ten. Drivers, fast, but no lights. Keep spaced out right until we’re at the exit, then close up tight. You know all this, so let’s remember it. Everybody: be careful. We don’t want to lose anybody out there, and this is a tough bunch. Virgil, Jim, you hang back a little—not way back, but a little back. We’ve choreographed the entry, here.”
Five minutes later, Pirelli said, “Let’s mount up,” and they streamed out of the room, no jokes, no talk.
Moving fast.
19
BEFORE THEY SETTLED in the trucks, Virgil and Stryker squeezed into standard-duty body armor. Though it wouldn’t stop any heavy loads, it’d be good against shotguns and pistols. Some of the DEA guys were wearing heavier stuff: they’d be the first in.
Stryker asked Virgil to drive: “I want to be able to work the radios to my guys—just in case.”
FROM THE WORTHINGTON on-ramp to the exit nearest Feur’s place was thirty-five minutes at legal interstate speeds, half an hour at the normal illegal driving pace. Pirelli, talking to his outside pacemaker, modulated the speed of the DEA trucks, seven of them, all blacked-out GMC Yukons.
“Keep spaced out, my happy ass,” Stryker said, watching the trucks ahead of them. “We look like a Shriner parade.”
“As long as Feur doesn’t have lookouts on the interstate, we’ll be okay,” Virgil said. A minute later, “Real purty day, ain’t it?”
“Sure is,” Stryker said cheerfully. He popped his safety belt, knelt on the seat, dug around in the back, and came up with the M-16. “If you see me firing this into a gopher hole, you just say to yourself, ‘Don’t bother about that—it’s just old Jim popping off a few rounds in an effort to get reelected.’”
“Gettin’ some smoke on your ass.”
“That’s right,” Stryker said.
“I still don’t think Feur did the Gleasons, Jimmy. I don’t think we’re out of the woods on that guy,” Virgil said.
“Whatever. I plan to take full credit on the meth lab, at least in the hometown papers,” Stryker said. He pulled the magazine out of the M-16, thumbed the cartridges a few times, said, “What have you got back there? Shotgun isn’t much use on a house.”
“Shotgun, Remington semiauto .30-06.”
“That’ll knock the corner off a brick,” Stryker said, with approval. “FMJs?”
“Yeah.”
“I got sixty rounds. Wish I had a couple more clips.”
“This is an arrest, not a war,” Virgil said.
“Whatever,” Stryker said. He slapped the mag back into the rifle, jacked a round into the chamber, clicked on the safety.
“I hope this thing works like Pirelli says,” Virgil said. “I can appreciate your needing to get reelected, but nailing that psycho is more important than keeping a few oil-field workers from taking their vitamin pills.”
Ahead, the GMCs slowed, and Virgil slowed with them, the speed dropping to fifty-five. We really do look like a Shriner parade, Virgil thought. Hope nobody’s watching.
As far as they ever found out, nobody was. They were four miles from the exit when the speed picked up, and Pirelli called Virgil on his cell: “Feur got home fifteen minutes ago. Franks is coming up to the exit. We’re going in. You guys hang back a bit.”
“Ten-ninety-six,” Virgil said, and shut his phone.
“What does that mean?” Stryker asked. “I never heard of a ten-ninety-six.”
“Means, ‘Fuck you,’” Virgil said. He closed on the GMCs.
Stryker said, “I’m gonna try to crawl in the backseat. Stupid we’re both sitting up front.” He pulled the headrest out, tossed it in the back, and crawled awkwardly over the seat. “You want me to uncase the Remington?” he asked.
“Might as well,” Virgil said. “Hope to hell we don’t need it. There’re two magazines in the side sleeve, all set.”
FOR THE FIRST MINUTE or so north of the interstate, Virgil thought, it was unlikely that anyone ahead would notice them. Then they hit the gravel road and a plume of dust exploded from under the trucks’ wheels, along with a roaring sound, like a nearby train, and everybody behind the first two trucks slowed down. The interval grew, and drivers began to move into the left lane, one truck fishtailing, and Stryker shouted, “Watch that, watch that…”
“He can’t hear you,” Virgil shouted back.
“I can’t see a thing…” Stryker was holding on to the passenger seat, peering out from the back, into the thickening cloud of road dust.
THEY TOPPED the rise south of Feur’s place, and if nobody had seen them yet, they would pretty soon; but they were also less than a minute out, closing fast, and when Virgil moved right to get out of the funnel of road dust, Stryker shouted, “Franks’ truck is in the yard, it’s in the yard…”
THE FIRST TWO DEA trucks hit the yard, and the agents were out, shouting at Franks, who’d just gotten out of his truck. Franks may have said something, and a dog rocketed out of the truck and jumped one of the agents, who went down, rolling with the dog.
The third truck went past the driveway turnoff and set up on the road. The fourth stopped across the driveway, and the fifth stopped short, the agents out in the road. Virgil swerved around the back truck and put the Explorer in the ditch opposite the end of the driveway, and shouted, “Out the left side, left side,” and they both got under cover, saw running agents on the road, and then the gunfire.
There were two dogs out, one of them on an agent’s face, the other wheeling in the dirt in a fight around Franks’ truck, and then the screaming agent, dog on his face, managed to throw it off and another agent shot at it, missed, and the dog went for him, and another agent fired.
Four or five of them were in the yard when a machine gun stuttered from the house and one of the agents went down and the others started screaming and firing at the house, little pecks of paint and dust and wood popping off the front of the house, windows shat
tering. Franks, who’d been standing hands-over-head, turned toward the shed and hit the front door. The door popped open—unlocked—and Franks disappeared, and two agents were down.
Stryker was on the ground in the ditch, the M-16 to his shoulder, and he opened up on the top row of windows in the house, blowing out most of a magazine in a single hose job.
Virgil scrambled across the street, into the ditch on the far side, keeping a truck between himself and the house, and when he heard another machine gun open behind him, lurched out of the ditch, running toward the first truck in the yard. An agent was on the ground six feet from the truck and Virgil hooked him and dragged him behind it, the agent’s M-16 bumping along under his arm, hung on a sling.
The truck had fifty bullet holes in it, broken glass spraying all over, two tires gone. The agent was still alive, but his legs were torn to pieces, and he was fading. A brown-and-white dog, that might have been a pit bull, bleeding from its sides and head, scrambled around the truck, pulling with his front legs, back apparently broken, fixing on Virgil. Virgil loved dogs, but he didn’t even think about it and yanked his pistol and shot the dog twice.
HEARD SOMEBODY SCREAMING. Another agent, behind the other entry truck, was shouting at him, and Virgil saw a bloody patch in the dust behind him, but the agent was still operating and he pointed out between the trucks and Virgil saw a third agent down and he shouted back, and the other agent screamed, “You get him, I’ll unload on the house, I can’t move, I’m hit…”
Virgil shouted, “Do it,” and the agent rolled and opened up with his M-16, tearing across the windows, and Virgil kicked out from behind the truck’s wheel, grabbed the downed agent, and dragged him back, behind a tire. Another dog was coming for them, tongue out, bleeding, picked the agent with the gun, who was reloading, hit him just as he slapped the magazine in. But the dog got a piece of armor, not an arm, and tore at it and the agent found a pistol and put it at the dog’s head and fired. The dog lurched and turned and looked at Virgil, a doggy smile on its bloody face, and then it toppled over.