“We can keep that date,” Gomez said. He patted the case that contained the bags of meth.
“Let me take it,” Virgil said. “I really do need to see the man about a dog.”
—
A SEARCH WAS always interesting, especially when dealing with assholes like Zorn and Sharf, and it was nearly noon before Virgil got out of the house. Jenkins and Shrake were playing golf at Trippton National, so Virgil called Johnson, who’d picked up the video surveillance equipment in Rochester the night before, and arranged to meet him for lunch at Ma & Pa’s Kettle.
Johnson was more than pleased by the discovery of the dog note. “I’ll get the posse together, see if anybody knows where this thing is.”
“It’s gonna be more complicated than that, Johnson,” Virgil said around his cheeseburger. “For one thing, the dog sale itself isn’t illegal, and the ownership of the dogs will probably be contentious. And—”
“Hey, no need to harelip the Pope. We’ll just get the boys together and hammer the place flat. You cops can pick up the pieces.”
—
THEY LINGERED OVER LUNCH, because Virgil had nothing to do until it was time to meet Bacon, the school janitor. When they left the Kettle, it was almost two o’clock. Johnson gave him the bag with the video camera, an integral telescopic mike, a remote control, a battery charger, a set of earphones, and a roll of dull black gaffer’s tape. Virgil went back to the cabin, checked the approach road for unknown parked cars, and found none. At the cabin he made sure he knew how to operate the camera and that the batteries were charged, then took a nap.
—
AT FIVE O’CLOCK he hurried across the school’s parking lot to the back door, where Will Bacon was waiting. “There are still a few people around, but we can go in through the stage entrance to the little auditorium, and that comes off the gym, and there’s nobody in there, because I checked,” Bacon said. “You got the camera?”
Virgil: “Here,” and he patted the bag.
“Let’s go. Stay close, listen for voices.”
They were at the back of the school, walking past metal- and wood-shop classrooms and then hesitated outside the gym while Bacon poked his head in. “Let’s go,” he said, waving Virgil through the door.
They crossed the gym, went through a double door into a long narrow hallway with closed, knobless doors all along the way. “These are the emergency exits from the shops and the little auditorium,” Bacon said. He used a key on his key ring to open the door at the end of the hall, and peeked inside. “All clear.”
The auditorium was small—no more than a hundred or so seats arranged in eight curved rows, each row eight inches or so higher than the one in front of it.
Bacon had left a ladder in the auditorium earlier in the day. Together, they extended it up to a light rack along the ceiling. “Got tape?”
“Yeah.” Virgil threw the bag over his shoulder and climbed to the rack. There were lots of crossbars—the rack was made to hold lights and other equipment—and he turned the camera on, adjusted the volume to “8,” placed it on a crossbar, aimed it toward the stage, and checked the monitor. When he had it aimed right, he started taping, and when he was satisfied, turned the camera off and on with the remote. Everything worked.
“Go on down to the stage and say something,” Virgil said to Bacon.
Bacon went down to the stage, looked up, and said, “Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
“Forrest Gump,” Virgil said.
“My favorite movie,” Bacon said. “Is that enough?”
Virgil plugged in the earphones, listened to the recording. Good and clear. He turned the camera off and backed down the ladder.
“We’re good,” he said. “Let me show you how the remote works. When you turn it on, you’ll see just a tiny green LED come on. . . .”
Virgil gave him a demonstration, and Bacon was sure he could handle it.
“Just be careful you don’t re-push it. Just push it once, and look for the light,” Virgil said. “We’ve got four hours of recording time, which should be plenty.”
Bacon nodded: “I’ll call you when everybody’s cleared out.”
“Do not take any chances,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a killer on our hands.”
—
VIRGIL HELPED HIM get the ladder down. He’d put it in a storage area behind the stage, he said. Then he frowned, and cocked his head, and Virgil asked, “What?”
“There’s somebody else in the school. . . . Can you feel that?”
Virgil couldn’t feel anything. “What?”
“It’s like a vibration . . . people make it when they walk . . .”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“Shhh . . .”
They listened for another minute, then Bacon said, “Gone now. Listen, there’s somebody around. I’m going to stash the ladder, make a little noise doing it. You go on out that hallway, and at the main hall, turn left instead of right. That’ll take you to the door that goes out to the baseball diamond. You’ll have to walk around the school to your right to get back to your car. You won’t be in the school so much that way.”
“You be careful,” Virgil said.
“You, too,” Bacon said.
Virgil was out of the school in a minute, stayed close to the outer wall as he walked around the building, beneath the windows that looked out over the playing fields. He saw nobody as he crossed the parking lot to his car, and drove away. He’d turned off his phone to go into the school, and when he turned it back on, he found a message from Johnson: “I got your dog posse. We’re ready to roll.”
Was that good? Virgil wasn’t sure.
17
THE SCHOOL BOARD meeting didn’t start until seven o’clock, so Virgil had a few hours to kill, and not much to do. He didn’t want to put further pressure on anyone, because they might call off the board meeting—and the after-meeting.
He went back to Johnson’s cabin and found Jenkins’s Crown Vic parked at the most visible spot in the driveway. Jenkins and Shrake were sitting on the glider drinking gin and tonics.
“The key thing,” Shrake said, “is to keep Kerns away from here when we’re not ready for him. Hence, we park in the driveway, and if he’s watching, he’ll see us driving away.”
“Leaving you alone, ripe for the picking,” Jenkins said.
Shrake added, “It wouldn’t work, except we found a back way in. Fortunately, I’m driving a Crown Vic, which can handle it. If it’d been a Prius, we’d of had to let him shoot you.”
They sat around and talked about Davenport’s Black Hole case, in which a BCA agent had been killed; and about Del Capslock, another agent, who’d been seriously wounded by old people, gunrunners, in Texas.
“Not been a good month for the BCA,” Jenkins said. “I recommend that we all keep our asses down.”
At seven o’clock, while it was still light, Jenkins and Shrake left, and Virgil bumped out after them. Virgil would call them before he came back, and give the two of them time to set up behind the cabin again.
—
VIRGIL WANDERED AROUND town for a while, parked by the turnout over the river, and called Frankie, who told him how lonely she was, and he said he was lonely himself; went to the only store in town that had magazines and bought one on the upcoming deer season; went to a diner and got a grilled cheese sandwich and read the magazine, and kept looking at his watch.
Bacon called at nine o’clock, talking in a hushed voice. “They’re all gone. They had the extra meeting, too. The whole bunch of them. Kerns kicked everybody else out and went sneaking around the hallways making sure everything was clear.”
“And the camera was rolling?”
“The green light was on. Had to look to see it, but it was,” Bacon said.
??
?You take it down yet?” Virgil asked.
“Nope. I was afraid I’d push the wrong button and erase everything.”
“Won’t happen. Anyway, doesn’t make any difference. I can be there in five minutes.”
“Might want to bring a flashlight, so we don’t have to turn the hall lights on. Come in the same door as yesterday—I’ll go down right now and stick a newspaper in the door so it won’t lock. And I’ll go ahead and take the camera down.”
“Five minutes,” Virgil said.
It took him ten. When he got to the school parking lot, he went to the side door and found it locked. Thinking that he might have misunderstood, he walked around the school to the back entrance by the baseball field and found that was locked as well.
There were no visible lights in the school. Now worried, he called the phone Bacon had used, and after four rings was switched to the answering machine. He hung up, then banged on the door with a fist, then seeing no light and getting no answer, began kicking the door.
Still no answer.
—
NOW VERY WORRIED, he thought about calling the sheriff’s office, but if Bacon were really in trouble, there’d be no time—and not knowing what officer would respond, or his level of competence . . . he didn’t want to go into a dark school with a scared guy with a weapon.
He jogged back around to his truck, unlocked it, got his pistol and a heavy, fourteen-inch-long nut wrench that he used to tighten the trailer ball on the truck. He hustled back to the door, pounded a few more times. There was a small window in the door, maybe six-by-eight inches, with chicken wire embedded in the glass.
Between the window and the wrench, it was no contest. Having carefully knocked out all the glass, Virgil reached inside and pushed down on the door’s lock bar, and it popped open. Just inside, he found a rolled-up newspaper, like an old-time newspaper delivery boy might have done it. It was pinched in the middle, as though it had been used to jam the door open, and then had been pulled out. He dropped the wrench by the newspaper—clang—and hurried down the hall to the back entrance to the little auditorium, but he had to go through the gym to get there, and the gym door was locked. No window here: the doors were solid, thick yellow oak.
He turned back, trying to figure out where the main entrance to the auditorium might be, following the light from his flash. He took another two minutes to find it, and again, the doors were closed, but there were windows. He no longer had the wrench, but the butt of the small flashlight worked nearly as well, and he knocked the window out, went through the door.
There was a light switch right at the door, and he flicked it on. The ladder was standing in the middle of the auditorium, up to the spot where the camera had been.
Bacon was nowhere around—and the camera was gone. Virgil could see a few bands of tape hanging down, as though Bacon had cut the camera free, but hadn’t bothered to peel the gaffer’s tape off the light rack.
That didn’t seem like him.
He went back to the hall and shouted, “Bacon! Will Bacon! Where are you?”
No answer.
—
AFTER A FAST RUN through the auditorium, just to be sure Bacon hadn’t fallen, and crawled someplace, he went back to the main hall looking for stairs that would take him up to the third floor.
He jogged past the scorched front hall outside the district offices, and just past the offices, found a flight of stairs going up. At the third floor, not knowing quite where to find the janitor’s room that would lead him to the attic, he dashed along the halls in the light of the flash, turned a corner, then another one, felt like he might have missed it, and found it on the third side of the square.
The door was metal, and was locked, but the lock was fitted into an oak frame. He’d never done anything like it before, but Virgil pulled his pistol and fired three careful shots into the wood next to the lock. The sound was thunderous down the hard empty hallways: the third shot did it, breaking enough of the wood frame that Virgil was able to pry the door open.
He found the lights, went up the stairs into the attic. There was a lock on Bacon’s apartment door, but Virgil simply kicked it. Nobody home.
He was about to head back out when he felt the vibration: somebody was in the attic.
“Bacon?”
No answer. But somebody, he thought, was out there, and he was trapped. He moved to the far back wall, not because it was any more protective than any of the other thin walls of the makeshift apartment, but because he’d remembered that at the end of the wall there was a stack of boxes full of algebra texts. Boxes of books would be tough to shoot through, even with a rifle.
“Bacon? Bacon, is that you?”
No answer, but he did hear a shuffling from out in the attic. Rats? Sounded too heavy. He touched his jeans pocket, where he usually carried his cell phone, and got the instant mental feedback of the phone plugged into the charger in the truck.
He squatted, hoping that he was behind the algebra texts, and said, quietly but loud enough to be heard in the silent attic, “This is Virgil Flowers. I’m at the high school, and there’s somebody here with a gun. I need a couple cars in a big hurry.”
He had no chance to elaborate, because a burst of three gunshots broke the silence from the attic, the cracking explosion of a .223, unlike the boom of a shotgun, or the deeper report of a .30-06. Splinters smashed across the room. The shooter had made one mistake—he was shooting at what he could see, rather than where Virgil might be. Then another three cracks, and more splinters like shrapnel, and Virgil, scared to death, had the feeling that the shooter might be about to rush the room. If he did, he’d probably come in low. . . .
Virgil was a good shot with a rifle, an excellent shot with a 12-gauge, but couldn’t hit a barn with a pistol, even if he was inside it. He didn’t like pistols, and thought of them as generally useless. If you’re going to shoot somebody, he thought, take the proper equipment. Like a 12-gauge. And he had one . . . out in the truck.
Another three rounds from the .223, sending splinters of dry wood whipping across the room. Virgil did a quick calculation: if the shooter had a standard military magazine, that would mean . . . only twenty-one more rounds? Great.
With the last sequence of three shots, Virgil could see that the shots were coming through at an angle, hitting the far wall of the room closer to him than the shots coming through the inner wall. He decided that the shooter was near the door, but probably still a few feet back from it, getting his guts up for a rush. He got to his knees and fired three quick shots at the wall four feet from the door, at an angle, and was rewarded with a “Goddamnit . . .” and then the other twenty-one rounds, hosing down the room. Virgil was flat on the floor, as close as he could get to the wall with the protective book boxes on the far side, his hands stretched toward the door, his gun ready for anyone coming through.
Then he heard a magazine clatter to the floor of the attic, and the metallic ratcheting of another magazine going in, nine or twelve more rounds flaying the room, in fast bursts of three, and a vicious burning pain in his scalp. He looked sideways, figuring the angle of the incoming rounds, and fired three more shots at the wall.
The other man ran away—Virgil was certain it was the killer, because of the three-bursts, and was equally convinced it was Randall Kerns. Virgil heard him pounding down the attic, then heard him on the stairs. He waited for just a second, realized that his scalp was on fire, put his hand to his head and came away with blood. He felt again, and found the splinter under the skin, and let it alone.
He’d need a doc to pull it out and make the necessary repairs, he thought. He didn’t seem to have any bigger holes, but scalp wounds bleed like crazy. He got to his knees, then into a crouch, and moved to the door, then slowly, carefully followed his pistol to the stairs . . . and saw blood that wasn’t his.
A smear, then several drops farther down. He feared th
at Kerns might be on the other side of the door, waiting for him to come down. Framed in the narrow doorway, Virgil would be almost impossible to miss.
On the other hand, he was sure that the shooter had heard the phony call to the sheriff’s office, and didn’t everybody carry a cell phone at all times? The sheriff’s cars should be arriving any minute. . . .
—
HE LISTENED, and listened, and imagined things, and finally, with his heart in his mouth, eased down the last few steps to the door and peeked around the doorjamb. The outer door stood open. He listened for another minute, his patience reinforced by the fact that his life depended on it.
Then moving slowly, he again peeked at the outer door. As far as he could tell, the hallway was empty.
He was wearing boots. He stepped back, listening, sat down, his gun right by his hand, and pulled the boots off. On his feet again, he peeked: nobody. He took a chance and ran, nearly soundless in his stocking feet, boots in one hand, gun in the other, around to the front of the building and down the same stairs he’d come up. At the bottom he listened again, heard nothing—but the shooter could be planning an ambush—and took the chance and dashed to the side door where he’d come in.
He forgot about the glass on the floor until the last second. He hadn’t been shot at, so he skidded to a stop, walked carefully around it, looked out at the parking lot. His was the only truck.
One final break: he ran across the lot to the truck, a distance of perhaps twenty yards, then dropped to the ground next to a tire, aiming his pistol at the side door. Nothing.
He gave it a full thirty seconds, then popped the door on his truck, climbed inside.
—
JENKINS ANSWERED on the first ring: “We can be there in ten minutes.”
“Forget it, man, there’s been a shoot-out at the school, I’m bleeding like a water hose, I need you guys down here now.”