Virgil and Jones had known each other for years: she was a smart, good-looking if slightly tattered TV reporter from the Twin Cities. She gave the yellow dog a scratch on the forehead and, “Nice dog you got there.”
“Not mine,” Virgil said.
“Have you arrested anybody?” she asked.
“Yes, I have,” Virgil said. “I’ve arrested D. Wayne Sharf, on a variety of state and federal charges. He is now handcuffed to that fence over there.”
“Guarded by the lady with the baseball bat?”
“Yes. Somebody had to guard him, while I tried to stop the shooting,” Virgil said.
“That was very brave of you, Virgil. It makes me feel all funny inside.”
“Daisy, a machine screw makes you feel all funny inside.”
“That’s rude.”
“Yes. It is. I apologize. Now. For your TV station, if you want it, you can say I arrested D. Wayne Sharf. You can say that many of the dogs here were stolen, and that the actions of the crowd were illegal, but sorting it out here, by myself, with no help, was simply impractical. I will be turning this investigation over to the Buchanan County attorney’s office for possible criminal prosecutions. That’s all I got.”
She leaned closer, so that he could smell the Chaneclass="underline" “Could you tell me, is there any one person here who’d be best to interview?”
Virgil pointed out Johnson, who was still wearing the stupid mask: “That’s the ringleader.”
“Ooo. He has big muscles.”
“He’s a simple country boy, Daisy. Go easy on him.”
A sheriff’s car rolled up on the road, and a single deputy got out. Virgil walked across the field toward him, the yellow dog right at his knee, and the deputy came to meet him and said, “Virgil. Uh, what’s up?”
Virgil turned and looked at the field. The dognapper crowd and the bunchers were in a bunch at one end, and were a tough-looking, mmm… bunch. The raiders were at the other end, trying to herd loose dogs across the alfalfa. Scattered among them were a dozen overturned trucks and trailers, and a few more still on their wheels. Even those on their wheels had been pounded like brass ashtrays, and none of them showed glass or rearview mirrors.
“Well… what can I say?” Virgil waved a hand at the field.
“What are we going to do?”
“I’ve got a federal prisoner I’ve got to haul back to Trippton,” Virgil said. “As for these people… I think, well, hell, go ahead and arrest them.”
“What?”
“They busted up all these trucks.” He pointed to the circle of men at the far end of the field. “Arrest them, too. A lot of the dogs are stolen.”
The deputy looked up and down the field and then said, “I would estimate — don’t hold me to this exactly — if I arrested these people, the sheriff would lose the next election by about ninety to ten.”
“Do what you think is right,” Virgil said. “I’m going back to town.”
The deputy looked at the yellow dog and said, “That’s a great dog. Wish I had one like that.”
“Not mine,” Virgil said. “You ought to see if you could herd him back to the pen. If nobody claims him, maybe you could adopt him.”
The deputy stepped toward the dog, which shied away and moved closer to Virgil. “I’ll let you handle it,” the deputy said. “But I think he’s your dog.”
Virgil got D. Wayne Sharf in the backseat of the 4Runner, thanked the woman with the aluminum bat, who said, “Maybe I should break his legs anyway,” and Virgil said, “No, that’s okay,” and cuffed Sharf to the ringbolt in the floor. Sharf said, “I’m gonna sue your ass for—”
“Shut up, or I’ll turn you over to the Auntie Vivians,” Virgil said.
The woman with the bat told Sharf, “You really wouldn’t want that.”
Virgil walked around to the driver’s side, tagged by the yellow dog. Virgil looked at the dog, and the dog looked at Virgil. The dog had golden eyes, and it looked past Virgil into the empty passenger side of the truck.
Virgil said, “All right,” and waved his hand, and the dog hopped up onto the driver’s seat, then crossed to the passenger seat and sat down. Virgil said to the dog, “With my lifestyle, I can’t have a dog.”
The dog nodded, and looked out through the windshield, ready to roll.
D. Wayne said from the backseat, “When I get you—”
“Shut the fuck up.” And to the dog, “Really. I can’t. I’ll give you a lift back to Trippton.”
The dog nodded again and smiled a dog smile.
Virgil said, “Really.”
29
Johnson Johnson did the entire TV interview wearing his mask, which didn’t keep anyone in Buchanan County from knowing who he was. He got a death threat from one of the local dog-stealing morons, and being a moron, the moron hadn’t thought that his cell phone number would pop up on Johnson’s phone.
Johnson being Johnson, he traced the number, using an Internet service, recognized both the name and the attitude that went with it, jumped in his truck, drove to the guy’s usual bar, and dragged him outside. After a humiliating confrontation in the parking lot, the other guy drove away in his truck, while the other bar patrons laughed at him and even threw a couple of rocks at his truck. Dognappers were not popular people in Trippton.
Johnson did not fare so well with Clarice, who thought that he’d been entirely too friendly with Daisy Jones. “And right on camera. You had your hand on her ass, Johnson, I could see where your arm was going, I saw the way her eyes got wide. You had to give her cheek a squeeze, didn’t you? You think my girlfriends didn’t see that? How can I hold up my head?”
Virgil said, “Give it to him, Clarice, he deserves every bit of it.”
“Shut up, Mr. Big-Time Cop,” Clarice said, poking Virgil in the chest with her index finger, hard enough that it hurt. “Who did he go out there with? Who told this Daisy person who to talk to?”
She wound down after a while, but Johnson was worried, and told Virgil, “I might have to propose again just to get right with her. Seems like a lot of trouble over a friendly gesture.”
“By ‘friendly gesture,’ you mean squeezing Daisy’s ass while you were on the air.”
“That’s an uninflected way of looking at it,” Johnson said. “I assumed you were more sophisticated than that.”
Johnson had a lot more to say about his shot-up jon boat. Virgil found an identical jon boat online for $565, and pointed out that Johnson had already gotten eighteen years’ use out of the old one, but Johnson sensed a chance to step up. It took several dozen calls over the next month, but he eventually convinced a claims clerk with the state government that the only similar and available jon boat was a $1,149 model from Bass Pro Shops. By late autumn, he’d launched it on the Mississippi.
On the day of the dog raid, Virgil delivered D. Wayne Sharf to the Buchanan County jail, where he was held on a federal warrant. The feds left him there for two days, then a marshal showed up and hauled him away to Chicago. Nobody in Trippton ever saw him again, and Virgil heard later that he’d been convicted of something, but never heard what happened after that.
The attorney general at first denied knowledge of the dog raid, but when it became apparent that the pro-dog people outnumbered the anti-dog people by about 99.5 percent to 0.5 percent, he quickly shouldered his way into a number of TV interviews in which he implied that the dog raid was part and parcel of his investigation into the Buchanan County school board murders and embezzlement.
That whole circus was good for several consecutive days of coverage. The governor’s race was a long way off, however, so the AG slow-walked the prosecution, squeezing as much juice out of it as he could. Since the school board members were accused of multiple murder-ones, he could hold them in jail as long as he wished, without bail, as long as the defense attorneys didn’t file for a speedy trial.