So Johnson agreed to go to Rochester—“Clarice can hit the Macy’s”—and Virgil finished dinner, and as he was walking out to the parking lot, Gomez, the DEA agent, called.
“One of the guys we arrested was more scared of going to jail than he was of talking, so he’s talking to us. He says Zorn once got drunk and told him that the Seed would never fuck with him, because he had the goods on them. We’ve got a search warrant for his house, and we’re going to hit it early tomorrow morning. Also, there’s another guy, D. Wayne—”
“Sharf.”
“Ah. You know him. We’re going to hit him, too,” Gomez said.
“We’re looking for him all over four states, on the Zorn shooting. We don’t think he did it, we want him for a different reason, but…”
“The dogs?”
“Well, basically, yeah. Anyway, he’s not home,” Virgil said.
“Okay by me. We’ll take the house apart, and leave him a note. Anyway, you’re invited. Be there, or be square.”
After a moment Virgil said, “I last heard that, ‘Be there or be square,’ when I was in high school. Seventeen years without it, and you ruined the run.”
“We’re going in at six.”
“I’ll be there,” Virgil said. “And I won’t be square.”
At seven, Virgil rolled down the dirt track to Johnson’s cabin and found Shrake and Jenkins on the deck, though there was no sign of their vehicle. “We parked at a neighbor’s, up the road,” Jenkins said. “We got a deer blind up on the bank behind the house.”
Virgil told them about the raids planned for the morning, and asked if he could cut an hour and a half off his share of the ambush. “Got to be up by five-thirty. If I can get to bed by ten…”
“Not a problem,” Shrake said. “I’ll take it until two, Jenkins will take it until six, and by then you’ll be gone.”
“What do you think the chances are?” Jenkins asked.
“Maybe twenty-five percent,” Virgil said. “The shooter’s nuts, and I’ve dropped enough hints that I’m on to them.”
“They might think it’s more dangerous to kill a cop than to let it go,” Shrake said.
“They might,” Virgil admitted. “But they’ve already murdered two people. If they go down for that, they’re all looking at life sentences anyway. Killing a cop won’t make any difference on that.”
“Still, they’d have to be panicked…”
“I’m doing my best to get them there,” Virgil said.
At seven-thirty, with the Wisconsin trees going pink across the water, Virgil took a flashlight, a 12-gauge shotgun, two bottles of water, and a peanut butter sandwich back to the deer blind and zipped himself in. Jenkins and Shrake had pulled all the blinds on the back and sides of the cabin, and would take care to move around one at a time. The foliage around the cabin was thick enough that the shooter would have to get in close for a shot.
The night was still and warm, and Virgil sat cross-legged for a half hour, then in a series of increasingly twisted forms for another hour, and then lay down and looked out over the edge of the screen, as the hands on his watch crept around the dial.
At ten, Jenkins whispered, “Go on down.”
“Nothing moving,” Virgil whispered back, as they traded places.
Nothing moved that night, until Virgil twitched at five-thirty, when his cell phone’s alarm began to vibrate.
He got cleaned up, waved toward Shrake’s hideout on the way past, and turned north toward Orly’s Creek.
Virgil had served a few dozen search warrants in his life. His favorite had been a raid on a set of burglars who’d been working the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul, during his first year as a St. Paul detective. For a bunch of dumbasses, they’d been remarkably hard to catch.
The burglars were two couples, involved in a sexually ambiguous foursome, working out of a rented home. They always hit in broad daylight, as far as Virgil had been able to tell. They were hard to catch because they didn’t dress like burglars. They dressed like tennis players, or like joggers, while they were scouting targets, and they scouted all the time.
When they picked out a target, they’d break a garage door or a back door, pull up in the alley — they always worked homes with alleys behind them — in a Toyota van with soccer-ball stickers in the back window.
That didn’t make them dumbasses; that actually made them smart. What made them dumbasses was what they stole.
When Virgil finally identified them, he tracked them, watched them break into a house, then followed them back to their hideout. When he and the SWAT team kicked the door two hours later, they found the entire house packed from floor to ceiling with the kind of plastic kids’ crap that you get at Walmart and Target — Big Wheels, play kitchens, wetting dolls, inflatable swimming pools, used croquet sets, ancient lawn darts — along with small TVs, DVD players, CD players, video games, stuff that would sell for ten dollars on the street. Literally, floor to ceiling — they’d had to walk sideways down narrow aisles cut in the piles of junk, just to get to the bong room, where they all slept, and the kitchen and bathroom.
It turned out that the women drove, and the men stole, but they couldn’t steal anything big, because they both had bad backs and couldn’t lift anything heavy.
When Virgil asked them, “Why’d you steal all this shit?” one of the men had answered, “I dunno. I guess ’cause it’s what they had.”
At six-twenty that morning, ten federals from the DEA, all armored up, led by Gomez, simultaneously hit Roy Zorn’s and D. Wayne Sharf’s homes, both off Orly’s Creek Road. Bunny Zorn was arrested, cuffed, read her rights, and put on a couch. Sharf’s place was unoccupied, but it appeared that Sharf was planning to come back, because all of his stuff was still in place, including four one-gallon Ziploc Double-Zipper freezer bags full of methamphetamine. The meth was cleverly hidden behind a loose board under the basement stairs, the second place the feds looked.
Virgil was more interested in Zorn’s computer than anything else, and so was Gomez. The five-year-old PC was password-protected, but one of the feds cut through the password in a few minutes and popped open the e-mail file. Zorn didn’t do much with e-mail, and none of the e-mails mentioned any names that Virgil recognized. When Virgil did a search for “Kerns,” “Randy,” “dog,” and “dogs,” he came up empty. A check of website history showed that Zorn mostly visited hunting, gun, and porn sites.
Sharf’s place was a long step down from Zorn’s in just about all ways, including odor and neatness. He hadn’t taken the garbage out before he left, and the non-air-conditioned one-bedroom shack smelled of old tomatoes and rotting meat. Like Zorn, he had a computer, and when Virgil looked for “dogs,” he found an e-mail from somebody named Con that said that he’d be bunching up dogs starting at eight o’clock sharp. The date was only three days away.
“Find something good?” Gomez asked, when Virgil began taking notes.
“Maybe. If D. Wayne Sharf doesn’t come back before then, he’s got a date to sell some dogs. I’ve been dealing with a lot of angry dog people — they might know where this sale’s gonna be.”
“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.