The day was warm, and promising hot. The sun was doing its job out in front of the truck, but the sky had a sullen gray look about it. There’d been a quarter-inch of rain over the past twenty-four hours, and as he rolled out of Mankato, Minnesota, the countryside looked notably damp. But it was August, the best time of the year, and he was on the road, operating, elbow out the window, pheasants running across the road in front of him… nothing to complain about.
As Virgil rode along, he thought about Frankie. He’d known her as Ma Nobles before he’d fallen into bed with her, because she had about a hundred children; or, at least, it felt that way. She was a compelling armful, and Virgil’s thoughts had drifted again to marriage, as they had three times before. The first three had been disasters, because, he thought, he had poor taste in women. He reconsidered: no, that wasn’t quite right. His three wives had all been pretty decent women, but, he thought, he was simply a poor judge of the prospects for compatibility.
He and Frankie did not have that problem; they just got along.
And Virgil thought about Lucas Davenport for a while — Davenport was his boss at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and not a bad guy, though a trifle intense. There was a distinct possibility that he would not be pleased with the idea of Virgil working a dognapping case. Especially since the shit had hit the fan up north, where a couple of high school kids had tripped over an abandoned farm cistern full of dead bodies.
But Johnson Johnson was a hard man to turn down. Virgil thought he might be able to sneak in a couple good working days before Davenport even found out what he was doing. A dognapping, he thought, shouldn’t take too much time, one way or the other. The dogs might already be in Texas, chasing armadillos, or whatever it was they chased in Texas.
Dognapping. He’d had calls on it before, though he’d never investigated one, and they’d always been during hunting season, or shortly before. Didn’t usually see one this early in the year.
Johnson Johnson ran a lumber mill, specializing in hardwood timber — three varieties of oak, bird’s-eye maple, butternut, hickory, and some walnut and cherry — for flooring and cabinetry, with a side business of providing specialty cuts for sculptors. He and Virgil had met at the University of Minnesota, where they were studying women and baseball. Virgil had been a fair third baseman for a couple years, while Johnson was a better-than-fair catcher. He might even have caught onto the bottom edge of the pros, if baseball hadn’t bored him so badly. Johnson’s mill was a mile outside Trippton, Minnesota, in Buchanan County, in the Driftless Area along the Mississippi River.
The Driftless Area had always interested Virgil, who had taken a degree in ecological science. Basically, the Driftless Area was a chunk of territory in Minnesota, Wisconsin, northern Iowa, and Illinois that had escaped the last glaciation — the glaciers had simply flowed around it, joining up again to the south, leaving the Driftless Area as an island in an ocean of ice. When the glaciers melted, they usually left behind loose dirt and rock, which was called drift. Not in the Driftless Area…
Physically, the land was cut by steep valleys, up to six hundred feet deep, running down to the Mississippi River. Compared to the farmlands all around it, the Driftless Area was less fertile, and covered with hardwood forests. Towns were small and far between, set mostly along the river. The whole area was reminiscent of the Appalachians.
Road time from Virgil’s home, in Mankato, to Trippton, on the river, was two and a half hours.
For most of it Virgil put both the truck and his brain on cruise control. He’d driven the route a few dozen times, and there was not a lot to look at that he hadn’t seen before. Trippton was at the bottom of a long hill, on a sandspit that stuck out into the Mississippi; it was a religious town, with almost as many churches as bars. Virgil arrived at lunchtime, got caught in a minor traffic jam between the town’s three stoplights, and eventually wedged into a boat-sized double-length parking lane behind Shanker’s Bar and Grill.
Johnson Johnson came rambling out the back door as Virgil pulled in. Johnson Johnson’s father, Big Johnson, had been an outboard-motor enthusiast who fairly well lived on the Mississippi. He’d named his sons after outboard motors, and while Mercury Johnson had gotten off fairly easy, Johnson Johnson had been stuck with the odd double name. He was a large man, like his father, and well tattooed.
“I can smell them fuckin’ muskies from here,” he said, as Virgil climbed out of the truck. He leaned into the boat and said, “I hope you brought something besides those fuckin’ phone poles,” by which he meant musky gear.
“Yeah, yeah, I got some of everything,” Virgil said. “What about these dogs? You find them yet?”
“Not yet,” Johnson said. He was uncharacteristically grim. “Come on inside. I got a whole bunch of ol’ boys and girls for you to talk to.”
“We’re having a meeting?”
“We’re having a lynch mob,” Johnson said.
Virgil followed him in. One of the trucks he passed in the parking lot had a bumper sticker that asked, “Got Hollow Points?” Another said: “Heavily Armed… and easily pissed.” A third one: “Point and Click… means you’re out of ammo.”
“Aw, jeez,” Virgil said.
Virgil was a tall man, made taller by his cowboy boots. He wore his blond hair too long for a cop — but country-long like Waylon Jennings, not sculptural long, like some New Jersey douche bag, so he got along okay.
He dressed in jeans and band T-shirts, in this case, a rare pirated “Dogs Die in Hot Cars” shirt, which he hoped the local ’necks would take for a sign of solidarity. To his usual ensemble, he added a black sport coat when he needed to hide a gun, which wasn’t often. Most times, he left the guns in the truck.
He sometimes wore a straw cowboy hat, on hot days out in the sun; at other times, a ball cap, his current favorite a black-on-black Iowa Hawkeyes hat, given to him by a devout Iowegian.
Johnson led the way through the parking lot door, down a beer-smelling corridor past the restrooms, which had signs that said “Pointers” and “Setters,” to the back end of the bar, where twenty or so large outdoorsy-looking men and women hunched over rickety plastic tables, drinking beer and eating a variety of fried everything, with link sausages on the side.
When Virgil caught up with him, Johnson said, in a loud voice, without any sign of levity, “Okay, boys and girls. This here’s the cop I was talking about, so put away your fuckin’ weed and methamphetamine, those that has them, and pay attention. Virgil?”
Virgil said, “For those of you with meth, I’d like to speak to you for a minute out back.…”
There were a few chuckles, and Virgil said, “I mostly came to listen. What’s going on with these dogs? Somebody stand up so we all can hear you, and tell us.”
A heavyset man heaved himself to his feet and said, “Well, I thought Johnson would have told you, but somebody’s snatching our dogs.”
A drunk at the front of the bar, who’d turned around on his barstool to watch the meeting, called, “Better’n having your snatch dogged.”
The heavyset man shouted back, “Shut up, Eddy, or we’ll kick your ass out of here.”
“Just trying to be human,” Eddy said, but he turned back to the bar.
“All right,” Virgil said. “Somebody’s taking dogs. You know who it is?”
“Yeah, we got our suspicions,” the big man said. “There’re some hillbillies up at Orly’s Crick, all along the valley, and you can hear the dogs howling at night. Dogs, not coyotes. Dozens of them. But when you go up there, there’s only one dog per yard. You’d have to sneak up on ’em, to find the ones that are howling. Problem is, there’s only one little road going in, and they can see you coming, and they move the dogs before you can get there. I tried to come down from on top, but you can’t get down them bluffs without breaking your neck.”