“I’m not claiming that anybody did,” Virgil said. “You had other business up here. But I’m not DEA, I’m not a fed — I’m just trying to get these dogs back to their owners.”
“There’s some dogs on the other side of the valley, I don’t know where at,” one of the men said.
“Shut up, Eddy,” said another one of them. “You know we’re not supposed to say anything.”
“Fuck you, Dick,” Eddy said. “The man’s asking about dogs. Nothing to do with us.” He turned back to Virgil and said, “They sound like they’re close to the front end of the valley, high up on the other side.”
A third man volunteered, “Something weird about it, though. You won’t hear nothin’ at all, then you’ll hear a lot of dogs, all of a sudden, but the volume is down low, like they’re a long ways off. Then the volume gets turned up, and that goes on for a while, and then it gets turned down. The barking keeps going, but the volume gets turned down, until you can’t hear them at all. It’s like they’re on an amp.”
“That is a strange fuckin’ thing,” Eddy said. “I heard that myself. The barking just fades away, like when you’re listening to an AM radio out on the prairie, in your car, and the radio signal starts to fade out.”
“Huh. Lots of dogs?”
“Lot of them,” said the man called Dick, who’d told Eddy to shut up. “I wondered what the hell was going on over there.”
“Anybody know what a beagle sounds like?”
“They got beagles, I think,” Eddy said. “That’s a sorrowful sound, when an unhappy beagle gets going. Could be bassets, though.”
“Thanks, guys,” Virgil said. He patted Eddy on the shoulder as he stood up.
He walked back to Gomez, who said, “You got a very strange job, Virgil.”
The ambulance had shown up on the road below them, and the paramedics had carried a stretcher up the hill. They loaded up the man Virgil had hit, and then a van showed up down below and a couple of feds got out and looked up at them.
“Crime scene,” Gomez said. “The bureaucracy begins.”
Virgil hung around for a while, as the bureaucracy got going. Gomez asked, “You remember Matt Travers, the regional guy out of Washington?”
“I met him.”
“He said to tell you we’ve still got a job, if you want it.”
“Man, I appreciate it, but I like it here,” Virgil said.
“You could get a whole fuckin’ state if you came with us. Get some guys working for you… It’s kinda fun, if you like that kind of fun.”
“I’ll think about it… but I’m just being polite. You guys are the most interesting feds, no doubt about it, but like I said…”
“You like it here.”
“Yes, I do.”
9
Virgil caught a ride to his truck with one of the DEA agents, and on the way back to Johnson’s cabin, called Frankie and told her about the raid.
“Goddamnit, I wish I’d been there.”
“Maybe you ought to be a cop,” Virgil suggested.
After a moment of silence she said, “Nah. I’d feel too sorry for most of the people I arrested. But I would like to run around screaming and yelling and chasing through the woods.”
“Well, shoot, we could do that at your place,” Virgil said. “Naked.”
“Aw, Virgie…”
Virgil called Johnson: it was well past midnight, but Johnson had called him at three o’clock in the morning about rescuing some dogs. Johnson answered the phone: he didn’t sound sleepy, he sounded interrupted.
“What?”
“We cleaned out the meth labs. We need to get the posse together tomorrow. We’re going after the dogs.”
“You called me at one o’clock in the morning about some dogs?”
Virgil could hear Clarice laughing in the background. Satisfied, Virgil hung up, and when he got to the cabin, fell into bed.
The posse met the next day at high noon, at Shanker’s: nine guys and a woman in various pieces of camo, plus a sheriff’s deputy named Boyce, but who everyone called “Bongo,” which caused Virgil to worry. Only he and Bongo would be armed, he told everybody, and he caught a quick flash of eyes between some of the men, which meant that a few of them probably had sidearms tucked into their belts.
“Listen, I’m serious now, if anybody other than myself and Bongo is carrying a gun, I’m telling you, leave it in your truck,” Virgil said. “If I see one up on that hill, I’ll send you home.”
Communications would be through a whole bunch of hunter’s walkie-talkies, since phones didn’t always work up in the deep valleys. One guy suggested that the slower climbers—“You know who you are”—stay behind to look after the vehicles. “These hillbillies, if they thought they were gonna lose the dogs, they’d come down and slash our tires, or worse.”
“Whatever happens to the vehicles, don’t go shooting anybody,” he said. “If you’re watching the trucks, and anybody gives you trouble, you yell for help and we’ll come running.”
Virgil explained how the process would work: “This is basically just a search of public property. Before last night’s meth lab raid, the federal agents did quite a bit of research, in an effort to find out who would be legally responsible for the meth lab — who the landowner would be. As it turns out, the privately owned land involves fairly compact tracts bordering on the road, and going no more than a couple hundred yards back. The forest land along most of the top and sides of the valley is state forest. So we’ll be on public land. We’ll spread out across from it, with me in the center and Bongo at the top near the bluffs, and Johnson Johnson at the bottom, along the edge of the privately owned land. We’ll climb up from the shoulder of the highway, so we never cross private land. And, by doing it that way, we might surprise somebody. That’s gonna be a tough climb though, so if any of you people have heart problems…”
When all was said and done, two of the guys opted to stay with the cars. The rest were prepared to climb. With that all settled, they loaded into their pickups and SUVs and trucked on up Highway 26 in a caravan.
Virgil led them to the shoulder of the road, and after the car-watchers were subtracted, nine of them began climbing the steep hill just south of the entrance to the valley. The hill was roughly as high as the Washington Monument, climbing through weeds and sumac and, higher up, scrubby oaks and then full-sized oaks. When they got into the tree line, Virgil called for a rest, and they sat on the hill and looked out over the Mississippi, and didn’t talk much. Virgil gave them ten full minutes, and then they resumed the climb. They stopped once more, for another ten minutes, talking via the walkie-talkies to the trucks below.
Another ten minutes saw them to the top of the hill at the end of the valley; there would be more hill to climb later, but at the moment they walked single file, bunched too close for a combat patrol, over the edge to the downhill slope of the south valley wall.
Virgil spread them out down the hill, with Johnson on the bottom and Bongo at the top. Virgil was in the middle, and they began walking west. They’d walked perhaps a quarter-mile when Bongo called and said, “Hey, we got something up here. Looks like a pen. Another twenty-five yards, right under that yellow bluff.”
Virgil got on his radio and said, “Okay, guys, let’s climb up to the bluff.”
They all began clumping up the hill, and could smell the cage before they got to it. When they got to the bluff, they found Bongo and the four guys who’d been above Virgil looking at a chain-link fence, a semicircle with the bluff forming the back side. Inside the wire was a lot of raw dirt, a lot of dog shit, and three beaten-up dogs who wobbled to their feet when they saw the men walking up to the fence. Scattered inside the fence were a bunch of plastic tubs; most were empty, the others contained some water.