"Anything I can do?"
"Well… you up for a plane ride?"
VIRGIL WENT BACK through town, stopped at a Subway for a BMT and a Coke, ate it on the way to the airport. He was chewing on the sandwich when Sig called. She asked, "What you doing?"
"We're trying to run down Slibe Junior…" He told her about the search, and about the credit card, about the upcoming plane ride.
She whistled and said, "Well, thank God. Be safe in the plane."
AT THE AIRPORT, he took a pair of binoculars out of his equipment bag, hooked up with a deputy named Frank Harris.
"Pilot's running late," Harris said. "He called and said his kid might have busted an arm in karate class. He'll be here as soon as he gets out of the emergency room."
"Ah, man…" Virgil didn't feel like waiting. He thought about Sig, sitting home alone, still unfulfilled. Looked at his watch. A half-hour passed, and then forty minutes, and Virgil decided if the pilot hadn't arrived by the end of an hour, he'd bail. He'd feel guilty about it, but he would.
The pilot, whose name was Hank Underwood, walked in five minutes later and said, "Sorry."
"Broken?" Harris asked.
"Yeah. Worse than we thought," Underwood said. He was a short, dark man about Virgil's age. "Not his arm, it's a wrist bone, the navicular. He could be in a cast for five months. He was supposed to start football practice in three weeks."
They were talking about it, walking out to Underwood's single-engine Cessna, and Virgil said the broken arm might be a blessing in disguise. "Maybe he'll turn out to be great at math and become a scientist."
"Rather play football," Underwood said. "All his pals will be… but you could be right." He sounded doubtful.
Underwood put Harris in the back, because he was shorter than Virgil, and as they took off into the darkness, the plane smelling of warm oil and cold air, said, "When we get up there, I'll roll a bit, to give you a view. We'll go up one side and down the other, using Deer River as our guide."
"How're we going to mark him?" Virgil asked.
"GPS," Underwood said. "We'll circle until we can get an azimuth that runs through him and some point in Deer River, and mark ourselves, and then do it again, from another angle. Won't be exact, but it'll be pretty damn close."
"As long as we've only got one fire," Harris said.
Underwood said, "Not many people camping in a swamp. It's usually dark as a coal sack along there. Our biggest problem will be if he's sleeping in his boat, and isn't cooking at all."
"Don't want to spook him," Virgil said.
"We'll be well off. We'll go up one side of the river, fool around for a while, then come back down the other," Underwood said. "If he's close enough to the highway, he might not even hear us."
THEY COULD SEE Deer River within a couple of minutes of taking off. "The place he's supposed to be is right down this way from the lights," Underwood said, gesturing. "See the line of lights? Now, ninety degrees towards us."
The river plain was pitch-black. They flew up the side, past the town, did a wide circle to the west, slowly, scanning the terrain, then came right back down the highway. On the second pass, Harris said, suddenly, "Got a fire."
"Where?" Virgil asked.
"About two-thirty… coming up on three… It flickers… lost it, goddamnit, got it, got it again…"
"Brush between us and it," Underwood said.
Virgil scanned down at the same angle as Harris, at three o'clock. "Got it," Virgil said. "I got it. It's small."
"No point in a barn fire to cook a weenie," Harris said.
UNDERWOOD TOOK THEM around the town, and they put azimuth lines from GPS markers through intersections of the highway, crossing at the fire. "Don't see another damn thing out there," Virgil said, scanning the darkness.
"There isn't anything else out there," Harris said. "You couldn't pay me five hundred dollars to camp out in there. No telling what you'd run into."
"Maybe even a crazy killer," Underwood said. "Friday the 13th, huh?"
"Never saw it," Harris said. "But that's the general idea."
THEY WERE ALL CRANKED when they landed. Virgil and Harris left Underwood to put the plane away, and after warning the pilot to keep his mouth shut, went roaring off to the sheriff 's office. The sheriff and a couple of deputies were waiting for them, with a USGS topo map, and Virgil and Harris used a yardstick to draw out their lines.
"Not bad," the sheriff said, his finger on the map where the lines crossed. "Man, that's not more'n a mile from where the kids thought they saw him. Gotta be him."
"What time are you putting the chopper up?" Virgil asked.
"Sunrise is just about six o'clock-so, about six o'clock." Sanders looked at his watch. "Seven hours. You'll want to be on the ground, up in Deer River, by five at the latest. We'll put you in a boat."
"Who's in the helicopter?" Virgil asked.
"Me and the pilot," the sheriff said. "I'm paying for it, so I get the ride."
"He'll probably shoot you down," Virgil said.
"You just want the ride," Sanders said; and he was right. And he clapped his hands, once, and said, "Hot damn. This is something. I mean, I hate to say it, but I'm having a pretty good time right now. Wasn't having a good time this morning." He turned to one of the deputies. "I'll call you up if we spot him, and you get on to Jim Young, get his ass up to Deer River. I'll put down on the track up there, and I want a picture of me getting out of the helicopter."
And he said to Virgiclass="underline" "Politics. He's the local newspaper guy."
"Gotcha," Virgil said.
THAT NIGHT VIRGIL THOUGHT about God some more, and about the Deuce, that lonely spark of fire out in the middle of a swamp, a single twisted soul believing itself safely wrapped in nature, with no idea of what was coming in the morning.
23
VIRGIL WENT BACK to the truck and got a black nylon emergency jacket. August in Minnesota-chilly in the morning this far north, and this early in the day.
A river rat named Earl, drafted by Sanders, had just backed his eighteen-foot Alumacraft jon boat down the boat ramp into the water. Virgil would be riding with him, and with a cop named Rod. Rod was messing nervously with his AR-15, and kept looking downriver, where they expected the helicopter to show up. Two more jon boats were already in the water, and there were more both upriver and down.
"You going with your handgun?" Rod asked Virgil.
"Haven't decided," Virgil said.
Rod asked because he could see Virgil didn't have a long gun, and assumed his pistol was under his jacket; actually, it was under the front seat of the truck. All the guns were making Virgil nervous: they were heading into a swamp, without much visibility in some places, and six boats full of cops with rifles, converging on a central point from three different directions. Sanders's chief deputy was as nervous as Virgil, and worked back and forth through the deputies, talking about fire discipline.
Virgil went back to the truck again, looked back down the ramp, at all the deputies, at four cop cars and three trucks with trailers, watched Earl park his trailer, and thought that maybe the best idea would be to lie low in the boat; though lying low in a jon boat would shake your bones to pieces. The low, flat-bottom craft were fine when moving slow in flat water, but were no damn good in heavy chop; or in a heavy firefight, for that matter.
He thought about it some more, and finally pulled out his pump twelve-gauge, loaded three shells, and put seven more in his jacket pocket. If that wasn't enough, fuck him.
WAITED SOME MORE, in the mild stink of mud and rotting fish. One of the deputies borrowed a paddle and fished a plastic bag out of the water and threw it in a trash can. Somebody looked south and asked, "Wonder what they're doing down there?"
Then the chief deputy called, "Saddle up. Sheriff's on the way."
They all bustled down to the boats, climbed aboard, and the guys on the motors fired them up, quiet four-strokes, and eased out onto the lake, looking south. A minute later they heard the chopper, and then saw it, fairly high, coming fast, then slowing. And the shoulder radios went off and Rod said, "They got him! He's right under the chopper."