“No. I found another meth lab. A big one.”
“Ah, shit. Why do you keep doing this, Virgil? It causes a lot of trouble for everyone. Couldn’t you just shoot the cook and call it a day?”
“That would be unethical,” Virgil said. He explained how they’d found the sheds, and about the dogs. “Anyway, they’ve got three fifteen-foot metal sheds hid out in the woods, along with an ATV trail to haul the stuff out. It’s nothing like the first one we hit, but it’s substantial.”
“All right. They cooking right now?”
“Not at this very minute, but they were at it not long ago. I could smell it yesterday.…”
Virgil told him about the layout, and Gomez said that he’d move in a six-man team to do surveillance, and then fire off the raid when the cooking began again.
“When do you want to start?” Virgil asked.
“The team can be there tomorrow morning. They’ll go in like you did, from the top. We can stash them up in Winona, so nobody’ll know. You stay out of there until we do this: don’t go chasing the dogs through there.”
“All right. Tell your guys to call, and we’ll hook up.”
“We’ll bring maps… and, Virgil? Thank you. Really. We could use a good one. The budget’s being parceled out and most of it’s going down south.”
“Thank me after no one gets killed,” Virgil said.
When he’d rung off, Johnson asked, “What about the dogs?”
“They’re gonna have to wait,” Virgil said. “The DEA is going to swat that place in the next few days, and they don’t want a lot of cops running through there beforehand.”
“Well, Jesus, Virgil, the dogs could be gone before that happens.”
“Johnson—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a big operation. But you know what, Virgil? You’re never going to stop it. Meth’s too easy to make, and there’s too much money involved. But the dogs… we could get the dogs back, and change some lives.”
“You know what we’re gonna do?” Virgil asked. “We’re gonna organize a posse.”
Johnson was confused: “What?”
“You got all those hunters with their dogs, let’s stick a few of them in the trees on the other side of the highway, watching everything that comes out of Orly’s Creek — twenty-four hours a day, until the DEA raids the place. I’ll be on standby, right here in the cabin, and if anybody sees more than two dogs in a car coming out of there, I’ll pull them over. That good enough?”
“Oh, a posse.” Johnson thought about it for a minute, rubbed a lip and said, “Yeah… I guess. I’m sure I can get a few of the boys to be the watchers. Need to scout out a place for them to watch from.”
“We can do that,” Virgil said. “You start calling the best guys, and we’ll go find a lookout, and a way to get in there.”
“Come in by water,” Johnson said.
“See? You’re already thinking,” Virgil said. “This’ll be a snap.”
As it turned out, not quite a snap. People were willing, but had to work, too, and they had more volunteers for overnight watches than for daytime. Because the watcher would be close to the river, and the mosquitoes would be bad, they found a volunteer who had a deer blind with shoot-through mesh that would be inconspicuous. Another of the volunteers had an expensive pair of second-generation night-vision hunting binoculars that he could lend to the effort.
Virgiclass="underline" “Why would anyone have a pair of night-vision hunting binoculars?”
Johnson: “Let’s not ask that question.”
Virgiclass="underline" “By the time it was dark enough to use them, it’d be too dark to shoot anything.”
Johnson: “Let’s not ask that question.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Oh.”
It wouldn’t be too dark to shoot, say, a trophy buck — not if you were wearing night-vision glasses.
They spent the rest of the afternoon setting it up: hauling the blind up the Mississippi River bank, hiding it in the brush, then cutting a trail up from the river; and organizing the watches.
Gomez called at seven o’clock and said his team was on the way.
“Two guys’ll meet you by that bridge tomorrow, right at first light. You can show them the site, and we’ll be five by five.”
Virgil said, “Good. Okay. I’ll be there,” though he didn’t know what five by five meant. He looked it up later, in Wikipedia: “Five by five is the best of twenty-five subjective responses used to describe the quality of communications, specifically the signal-to-noise ratio.”
Five by five — he’d have to use it next time he talked to Davenport.
That evening, just before sundown, they ferried the first shift of watchers up to the blind, with binoculars, sandwiches, bottles of water, and a few beers to cut the taste of all the water. On the way back down the river, Johnson said, “We’ll be running right over a nice little walleye hole, behind that wing dam.”
“Be a crime not to take advantage of that,” Virgil said.
So they did; and sat, anchored, off the wing dam, and watched the towboats going to and fro, and the night fishermen going out, and the pleasure cruisers running for home, the white, red, and green lights winking across the river, the tip-tops of the Wisconsin trees going pink as the sun disappeared below the Minnesota horizon.
“Don’t get much better than this,” Johnson said, his voice low in the quiet of the night.
“No, it doesn’t,” Virgil said. “I could do this for a thousand years.”
They were still sitting there, in the growing darkness, when Clancy Conley got shot in the back.
5
Overnight, they heard nothing from the lookouts by the river. At first light, Johnson ran two more guys up the river, and retrieved the ones who’d spent the night in the blind. They were surprisingly pleased with themselves, though they’d seen nothing relevant. Like back in National Guard days, they said.
While Johnson was managing the watch, Virgil was heading north. The morning was cool, but promising more hotness. He turned off 26 onto NN. A black Suburban, the kind that members of the Ruffed Grouse Society tended to drive, was parked near the bridge; Virgil pulled up behind it, got out, and met two cowboy-looking guys with guns.
“Virgil,” said Gomez, touching the brim of his ball cap.
“I thought you were too high up to do this yourself,” Virgil said.
“I am, but I like to spend some time with my underlings, to demonstrate that I’m just like one of them, the salt of the earth, though far more important,” Gomez said. He bent a thumb at his underling. “George Blume.”
Blume said, “His salt-in-the-wound thing don’t always work,” as they shook hands. He looked up at the ridge: “We’d be heading for that notch up there? About…” He read a bunch of numbers off a piece of paper.
“I can show you, but I’m no damn good with a GPS,” Virgil said.
“Anybody see you going in yesterday?” Gomez asked.
“No, but I’m sure quite a few people saw my truck,” Virgil said.
“I don’t think this’ll work, but we paid money for them, might as well use them,” Gomez said. He popped the back of the Suburban and took out two magnetic door signs that said: “U.S. Geological Survey.” He stuck them to the doors of the Suburban.
“Probably cause more trouble than if you just had a sign that said ‘Feds,’” Virgil said. “Anyway, I got a rope and some water.… You gonna stay up there awhile, or just look?”
“Today, just look,” Gomez said. “Be back in an hour, if we don’t get shot.”
They didn’t get shot. They went in the same way that Virgil and Johnson had, taking care not to leave tracks or disturb foliage. When they got to the sheds, Gomez put his nose in the air and sniffed and said, “Yeah… this is the real thing.”