19
There may have been faster runs between Wheatfield and Fairmont, but the driver would have been pushing a Porsche. The ten minutes to I-90 was done in six minutes, the fifteen minutes down I-90 to Fairmont was done in eleven. Virgil was steering with one hand and holding his phone, and shouting into it, with the other, and he almost lost it at the Wheatfield on-ramp to the Interstate. Shrake swayed in the seat, groaned, and said, “You’re gonna kill me. I don’t want to die in a car accident.”
Virgil, with the front grille lights and the siren going, was met by a highway patrolman at the Fairmont exit, who rolled them through town to the medical center in what onlookers agreed was probably another land speed record.
Three nurses were waiting with a gurney at the emergency room entrance, and Shrake was out of the Tahoe and gone in thirty seconds.
The patrolman asked Virgil, “How bad?”
“If they can get some blood in him, he’ll be okay, but it’s like somebody dragged a straight razor across his back.”
With nothing else to do, Virgil called Jenkins, who asked, “How’s Shrake?”
“Docs are looking at him. It’s the longest cut I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s got some meat on him, though, and I don’t think it hit his spine anywhere. He pumped a lot of blood. I’ll call you soon as I hear anything.”
“He’s not gonna die?”
“Jenkins . . . what do I know? He was still talking when they took him in, so I can’t believe . . . What happened with you?”
“We’ve got three deputies here now, we’re going bush to bush in these backyards, we got everybody turning on their lights, but he’s gone.”
“This is my fault,” Virgil said. “You all were right: it was stupid. I just thought . . .”
“It should have worked—though, you’re right, it was stupid,” Jenkins said. “Now we’re gonna have to listen to that fuckin’ Shrake bragging about getting shot with an arrow and how he gutted it out. Lunch is gonna be a total shitshow for the next six months.”
“Could be worse.”
“Yeah, it could be. By the way, we recovered both arrows. Maybe . . . Nah, there won’t be anything on them, except blood.”
An emergency room doc came out a half hour after Shrake was taken into an operating room and told Virgil that a surgeon had been called in to do the repairs. “There were no huge bleeders back there, and we zapped the bigger ones with a cautery. We’ve got some Ringer’s ready but haven’t had to hit him with it yet . . . Unless there’s something going on that we don’t know about, he’ll be okay. Though, his back will itch like fire for a few weeks.”
“I’ll take that,” Virgil said. “I need to call his best friend and tell him.”
Virgil passed the word to Jenkins, who said, “I never was very worried.”
And Virgil asked, “Then why’d you pee your pants?”
“I guess it’ll be a long recovery?”
“A few weeks, is what I hear so far,” Virgil said. “Cut into your golf season.”
“Wouldn’t you know it? Bright side is, he’s got that loose swing with his driver, maybe this’ll tighten him up.”
“I’ll give him the good news when I see him,” Virgil said.
“Keep calling me. We’ll wind things up here in the next little while, but I’ll still be up until I hear from you.”
A surgeon came out to talk to Virgil an hour later, and said, “He’s all stitched up. A wicked kind of wound; I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The blade was rotating when it went through, a spiral wound, almost like what you see when somebody gets run over by an outboard motor. We’ve got to worry about infection, is the biggest thing now. Let’s hope the shooter didn’t punch that arrow through a deer before he shot your friend.”
“How long will you keep him?” Virgil asked.
“Three days, four, depends on how it comes together. He’s asleep now; he’s gone for the night. You might as well take off.”
Virgil squeezed a few more details out of the surgeon, then called Jenkins and filled him in. “I’m coming back. You might as well get some sleep. We’ll run over here first thing tomorrow morning soon as we hear he’s awake.”
“About the motherfucker who shot him? I’m gonna kill him,” Jenkins said.
“You already said that.”
“I know. I’m reiterating. Don’t tell Shrake.”
On the way back to Wheatfield, Virgil thought about all the trips he’d made to hospitals, all the unhappiness he’d seen there. He’d been a few times himself and had the scars to show for it, but the worst trips were with cops he knew, or bad scenes he’d tumbled over when interviewing people in emergency rooms.
He’d once gone to a hospital to interview a woman who’d been shot by her boyfriend. She’d said it was an accident, and after Virgil checked the circumstances, he thought she was telling the truth. He was chatting with her doctor when a teenager was wheeled into the emergency room with an injured neck and no feeling in his limbs. His girlfriend was with him, and she told Virgil and the doc that the kid had jumped off a boat into the Minnesota River and apparently hit an underwater log with his head.
An X-ray was taken, and Virgil and the doc wandered back into the radiology department as the on-duty radiologist was bringing the images up on a video screen, and the first thing he said was, “Goddamnit . . . Goddamnit . . .”
He tapped the screen with a fingernail, and Virgil could see an abrupt shift in the narrow line of the kid’s spinal cord.
Virgil: “Is he . . . ?”
“Yeah. He’s a quad. He’s done.”
Virgil was leaving the emergency room when the kid’s parents arrived, worried, and they spotted the girlfriend, and asked, “Is he okay?”
“I think he just hit his head a little,” the girl said.
They didn’t know yet, but Virgil did, and he felt like crying that night, and into the next week, every time he thought about it.
He got back to Wheatfield at 2 o’clock in the morning and managed to get to sleep by 3. At 8, Jenkins called, and said, “I didn’t want to wake you up, but I’m heading over to Fairmont.”
“Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll pick you up,” Virgil said. “You got the arrows?”
“No, the sheriff’s got them. Carbon fiber, identical; three broadhead blades, sharp as razors. When we get the guy, maybe he’ll have a few more to match.”
When Virgil had bought his Tahoe, he’d negotiated to get premium seat covers thrown in the deal. They resembled the real leather seats beneath them but were actually a skillfully manufactured vinyl, because Virgil often transported untoward people and occasionally things like bait buckets. That had paid off, because when he went out to get in the truck, he found the passenger seat covered with dried blood.
He spent five minutes, and used most of a roll of paper towels and half a bottle of Formula 409, cleaning it up. When Jenkins got in the truck, he sniffed, and said, “Four-oh-nine . . . Original, not Lemon Fresh.”
“The policeman’s friend,” Virgil said.
At the Fairmont medical center, they found Shrake awake and in a bad mood—but a groggy bad mood, more pissy than violent: “They say I’m staying here for three or four days. If I keep running my mouth, they’ll keep me for a week.”
“Must have some smart people running the place to shut you up like that,” Jenkins said. “So, you gonna live?”
“I don’t feel like it right now, but they don’t seem to be concerned about how I feel,” Shrake grumbled.
“Still hurt?” Jenkins asked.
“It’s more annoying, than anything, and I expect I’ll be annoyed for several more weeks, from what they tell me.”
“Any good-looking nurses?”
“Yes. They already worship me.”
Jenkins suggested that the scar would tighten up Shrake’s wild golf drive, and Shrake advised him to go fuck himself. “Attaboy,” Virgil said. “You’re on the way back.”
Virgil apologized again for setting up the trap to catch the shooter, but Shrake waved him off. “We had nothing, and it coulda worked, shoulda worked. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, though, standing around in the night with a flashlight, looking for a guy in camo and carrying a bow. What’d I think was gonna happen if I found him?”
They talked for a few more minutes, said good-bye, and Virgil and Jenkins headed back to Wheatfield. When they got there, they found Zimmer and five deputies working the neighborhood where the shooter had been seen, going door-to-door. Virgil told Zimmer about Shrake’s condition, and Zimmer nodded, and said, “This guy’s local, and he’s a bow hunter and a shooter. There are going to be several dozen guys in town who fit that description, and a few hundred around the county.”
“What about Osborne?” Virgil asked. “Margery’s son. Is he a bow hunter?”
“I don’t know—I could ask. What’re you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that he lives up in that corner of town, where we last saw the shooter. And he’s directly connected to Margery.”
Zimmer said, “I’m not doing anything. Why don’t we go ask him?”
“I’ll come along, in case I have to kill him,” Jenkins said.
Zimmer looked at him strangely, then said, “If you do, don’t hit me with the ricochet.”
“It’ll be one of those bare hands deals,” Jenkins said. “If he’s the guy, I plan to yank his lungs out.”
“Okay, then,” Zimmer said. “Meet you there.”
At Osborne’s house, Zimmer was leading the way to his front door when Virgil glanced at the van in the driveway, noted the logo on the side, hooked Zimmer’s arm, and asked, “‘Steam Punk’—that’s a rug-cleaning company?”
“That’s what it is.”
“When we went into Andorra’s house, there were two rolled-up rugs in the kitchen. You think he could have been waiting for . . . Osborne? Or maybe Osborne delivered them, and Andorra never had the chance to unroll them?”
They all looked at one another, and then Zimmer said, “Damn,” and Jenkins said, “I’ll rip his lungs out.”
Virgil said, “Wait, wait, wait . . . it’s not a sure thing. We need to look at Andorra’s checkbook, or his bank records, or his credit cards, and see if he paid Osborne and when . . .”
Osborne’s door popped open, and Osborne, dressed in jeans and a “Steam Punk” T-shirt, looked out at them, and called, “Are you coming here?”
Virgil said, “Yeah . . . we’re working our way through the neighborhood. We’re trying to figure out who’s a bow hunter and who isn’t.”
“Well, I’m not,” Osborne said. “I don’t hunt anything. Guns, bows, spears—nothing.”
Virgil was momentarily nonplussed. “Really?”
“Yeah, really,” Osborne said. “Bow hunting is barbaric. Bow hunters retrieve less than half the animals they shoot. The rest are left to die out in the woods and rot.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “I’m sorry we disturbed you. We’re asking around. Another question: was Glen Andorra a rug-cleaning client of yours?”
“Nope. Never was. I did know him, but not well. Why do you ask?”
Virgil considered not answering the question but, after a few seconds, said, “He had a couple of rolled-up rugs in his kitchen when he got killed. Like he didn’t have a chance to unroll them. Or maybe he was waiting for them to be picked up.”
“Okay. Well, you have to understand, I don’t haul rugs around with me. I steam them right in the client’s house, and it’s hardly ever rugs, it’s wall-to-wall carpet. If somebody has good rugs, like Persians, they’d take them to a specialty house. If they’re crappy rugs, they’ll clean them by themselves, with cleaner they get at the hardware store. It’s the wall-to-wall carpet they can’t clean by themselves, because you gotta have the machinery that’ll suck the cleaning fluid back up out of the rug. If you pour fluid on them and then try to soak it up with a mop or something, it’ll stink to high heaven for weeks.”
That was more than Virgil needed to know about the rug-cleaning business, and he thanked Osborne again, and said to Jenkins and Zimmer, “Time to move on.”
They sort of trotted back to their vehicles, and, when they got there, Zimmer asked, “What do you think?”
“I think he sounded real,” Virgil said, looking back at Osborne’s house. “I can tell you, the guy last night knew what he was doing. He had the gear, too—the camo. He shot Shrake in the dark at, what, twenty-five yards? If that arrow had been three inches farther forward, it would have gone through Shrake’s heart. And he hit me right in the heart.”
Jenkins chipped in. “I’m with Virgil. He sounded real to me, too.”
Zimmer asked, “Do you think he was right about recovering deer? I’ve been thinking about getting a bow.”
“I bow-hunt, and I’m eight for ten, so . . . what’s that? A twenty percent loss rate?” Virgil said. “I’m gonna have to think about it.”
“You a good shot?” Zimmer asked.
“Yeah, I am,” Virgil said. “Most bow hunters aren’t. There’s a tavern up where I hunt that has a shoot-out the night before the season opener. I’ve seen guys who couldn’t get an arrow inside a full-sized paper plate at twenty yards. These were guys who actually entered an archery contest.”
Jenkins: “So what we’re looking for is a guy who probably isn’t primarily a gun hunter, because he had to steal the gun he’s using and he killed to do it. But he’s probably an expert shot with a bow, which takes practice.”
“Lots of practice,” Virgil said. “Let’s ask around.”
Virgil and Jenkins drove back to Skinner & Holland, where the back room had become their unofficial headquarters. Neither one of them had eaten breakfast, so they got potpies out of the freezer, carried them back to the microwave, and nuked them.
“We still haven’t figured out a motive,” Jenkins said. “We could get the names of every bow hunter in the county, but if we can’t figure out a motive, and we can’t prove where he was at the time of the killings . . . we’re toast.”
“You’re saying we need more information,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. The best information we have is, Andorra was worth a lot of money, even if it wasn’t visible to most people. You actually have to jump through some hoops to understand it. I mean, how many people driving past some old farmhouse, with a barn out back, a subsistence garden, and a goddamn clothesline, would reckon that the place might be worth four million bucks? I mean, why would you think somebody worth four million bucks would keep riding around backwoods Minnesota on a fuckin’ tractor when he could take the cash and move to Miami and buy a fuckin’ Ferrari?”
Virgil poked his fork at Jenkins. “Here’s another thing. We think Larry Van Den Berg figured out who the killer was. What did he have to go on? Money. Janet Fischer said he knew more about money than anyone in town—who has it, who wants it. Has to be money, one way or another. But, Osborne didn’t have any. So, why was she shot? Maybe she wasn’t the primary target? Did she step in front of someone?”
“Or, maybe the shooter is a random sniper, and is nuts,” Jenkins said. “I mean, they’re out there. Something like this religious apparition thing might be the kind of spark you need to set somebody off.”
“Which is completely backwards from what you were saying. You were saying we have to devote time to finding a motive; now you’re saying that there might not be one.”
“Being nuts is like a motive,” Jenkins said. “Have you thought about asking around town about who might be nuts? If somebody was treated? In a town this size, people would know.”
Virgil thought about that, then shouted, “Skinner!”
Skinner pushed through the curtain, and Virgil asked him if he had somebody to take over the cash register. “For a minute anyway,” Skinner said.
“So, who in town is certifiably nuts?” Virgil asked. “Not a little eccentric, but, you know . . . insane.”
Skinner shook his head. “Nobody I know of. There have been some . . . unsettled people here, but they usually get out. If people start avoiding you in a small town, all you get is silence all day long. So they move to Rochester, or up to the Cities.”
“Can you think of a crazy person who might be carrying a grudge, resenting Wheatfield ever since things started getting better for the town, so they would come back and try to upset the apple cart?” Virgil asked.
“No . . . And if there were, we would have seen him around town,” Skinner said. “Not much way you wouldn’t get seen.”
“Then the whole town is, mentally, above average?” Jenkins asked.
“I didn’t say that. We’ve got some unusual people. Daria McCain is eighty years old now, and when she was in her seventies, she decided she’d spent her whole life as a man when, in fact, she was really a woman in a man’s body. She got people to start calling her Daria—she used to be Darrell—and she wears a dress and everything. Other than that, though, she seems normal enough. Holland appointed her to the fire commission. I can promise you, Daria didn’t go running through any backyards. After the big change of mind, she didn’t bother to stay in shape. She’s really . . . soft and willowy.”
Jenkins said, “Did she . . .” He made a scissors-cutting motion with his fingers.
“No, she never got anything cut off, far as I know.”
“And that would be the . . . oddest . . . of the Wheatfield residents?” Virgil asked.
“We’ve got the usual collection of old men shouting at clouds, but nobody who’s obviously nuts,” Skinner said. “If I had to pick a name, I would have picked Larry Van Den Berg. He always struck me as over-tense, but he got along okay for a long time . . . You know, before . . .”
Jenkins said to Virgil, “Motive.”
“Gotta be money,” Virgil said.
“Didn’t I already say that about a hundred times?” Skinner asked.
Wardell Holland stepped through the curtain. He had a letter in his hand, and he said, “You guys won’t believe this.”