Virgil had asked Johnson, “Is he sure it was stolen? Maybe it was eaten by coyotes.”
“Coyotes don’t eat dachshunds,” Johnson said. “Dachshunds were bred to go down badger tunnels and drag the badgers out by their ass. A good-sized dachshund could weigh thirty pounds and has jaws like a crocodile. Old Dixie would straight-out fuck up a coyote.”
“Didn’t know that,” Virgil said.
When Virgil had parked, he looked over the trucks parked in the field. D. Wayne Sharf’s wasn’t there, unless Sharf had changed vehicles, which was possible. Virgil knew what he looked like, and so climbed out of his 4Runner, wandered over to the driveway and down to the sales field. Fifteen or twenty guys were standing beside their vehicles, drinking from Big Gulp cups or steel coffee cups, and talking with each other, country-looking guys in jeans and boots and long-sleeved shirts.
Most of the trucks and trailers were small, but three larger trucks, pulling larger trailers, showed stacks of empty cages with hard floors and wire sides: they were the bunchers, Virgil guessed. A red-faced older man in jeans, a rodeo belt, and cowboy boots and hat was talking to the men by the bunchers’ trucks. He had a sheaf of papers in his hands, and Virgil thought he was probably Dillard, the farm owner.
Virgil wandered down the line of trucks, looking at the men and peering through windows. He didn’t find Sharf, but he got a bad impression about the handling of the dogs: a lot of the pens had three or four animals stuffed inside, so they could hardly move. He saw one dog he thought was either sick or dead.
He’d just finished his initial survey when a couple more trucks arrived, both pulling trailers. One trailer was covered, but the other was open, stacked with wooden and fiberglass pens full of dogs, like chickens being hauled away for slaughter. The truck with the open trailer, an aging red GMC, rolled down the line of early arrivals and wedged itself into an opening in the line. It was not D. Wayne Sharf’s truck, but it was D. Wayne Sharf who got out of the passenger side.
The driver was a young, thin man, who might’ve been Roy Zorn’s younger brother: same red hair and freckles, a nose that somebody had pushed out of line, aviator sunglasses. Sharf was dressed like everybody else, with cowboy boots, got out and yawned and walked down the side of the trailer, looking up at the dogs. The freckled guy joined him, and pointed at something at the top of the pile of cages: they were talking about unloading.
Virgil ambled toward them; he didn’t want to startle Sharf. He’d closed the gap to twenty yards when he noticed that his caravan was rolling down the driveway into the parking area. Actually, he thought, they were blocking the driveway. Johnson got out of the lead truck, and Virgil saw that he was talking on a cell phone — but he wasn’t talking to Virgil.
Whatever…
Virgil started walking toward Sharf again, when somebody asked, “What the heck is this?”
Virgil looked where he was looking — and saw another caravan of cars, probably thirty or forty of them, rolling over the hill. He looked toward Johnson, and Johnson was looking at them, too, and still talking on the cell phone.
Now everybody was looking, and the caravan pulled to the side of the road, further blocking exit from the farm field.
Somebody nearby said, “They aren’t here to sell dogs.”
“Hey, those are TV trucks.”
Two white trucks with television call signs swerved off the road, and cameramen got out, already hoisting cameras to their shoulders.
Somebody else started shouting, “Hey, Arnie? Arnie Dillard? You better come look at this.”
Virgil knew that Dillard’s first name was Arnie, but he wasn’t sure that Arnie could fix whatever was about to happen. People, lots of them, probably eighty or ninety, were climbing out of the cars and trucks. Most of them were empty-handed, but right in the middle of the caravan, twelve or fifteen women got out of five or six SUVs. They were dressed identically, in black jeans, black shirts, and black bicycle or motorcycle helmets, some with face plates. Some wore knee pads or football shoulder pads. Most of them carried aluminum baseball bats; two or three carried iron bars that looked like spears.
Another voice, close by: “Oh, shit.”
Virgil turned and asked, “What?”
“It’s the Auntie Vivians.”
“Who’s that?”
“The Minnesota Women’s Anti-Vivisection League. I’m gettin’ the fuck outa here.” And the guy started running. He turned back just long enough to blurt, “Save yourself.”
Virgil wasn’t sure what movie it was, but he remembered a scene in which a medieval Scottish army attacked an English army, the Scots sweeping down a long grassy hillside with swords, axes, hammers, spears, and apparently whatever else they had in their barns. This was sort of like that. The people got out of the trucks and looked back and forth, calling to each other, spreading out, and some of them were shouting down the hill to where Virgil and the dog sellers were. The women in the helmets moved to the front of the long line, a wedge of them, and then one of them screamed, and then all of them screamed, and suddenly the line broke and the whole crowd charged down the hill, led by the women with aluminum baseball bats.
Virgil thought of running out in front of the wedge with his arms raised, and his ID in his hand, but only for a split second: somebody would hit him with a baseball bat, and that would be that. He also thought about pulling his pistol and firing a shot in the air, but his pistol, as usual, was locked in the truck’s gun safe.
In the end, he ran around behind the truck he was standing next to, then down the line of trucks to where he’d seen D. Wayne Sharf a few seconds before the charge. Truck engines were coming alive when he ran around the nose of a Ford Super Duty pulling a twenty-foot trailer stacked with animal crates, just in time to see D. Wayne jump in the passenger seat of the truck he’d come in.
Virgil ran up and yanked open the door and said, “D. Wayne, you’re under arrest—”
That was as far as he got before D. Wayne hit him on the forehead with a half-empty two-liter plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper. Virgil went down, and D. Wayne slammed the door and Virgil rolled away, staggered to his feet, and jumped on the fender over the trailer’s double wheels, and held on to two of the stacked crates. Inside one of the crates, a half-dozen small dogs were rolling around on the hard plastic crate floor as the truck driver wheeled around the end of the line of trucks; in the other crate, a big yellow dog with floppy ears looked out at him with interest.
About then, the driver found out that there was no place to go. He went anyway, bouncing over what had been a fairly decent alfalfa field, trying to stay away from the crowd that was spreading out over the pasture.
The dog sellers looked like a tough bunch, and there were certainly a few guns in the various vehicles, but they were outnumbered four or five to one, and as Virgil clung to the dog crate, he saw a woman run alongside a fleeing truck and spear the back tire with one of the long iron rods.
The tire blew, and the back of the truck sagged; farther down the field, the driver of one of the trucks had been pulled out into the alfalfa, and part of the crowd swarmed over his trailer, unloading the dog crates onto the ground, opening the doors and freeing the dogs, which ran in excited circles, howling and barking.
One truck driver tried to break through the fence, but the fence hadn’t been made in Hollywood. He dragged a few fence posts loose, but the fence didn’t break and the truck wound up nose-down in the border ditch, where it was swarmed by attackers.