Storm Front (12 page)

“Yeah, but he’s hurt,” Virgil said.

She ran inside after the ambulance guys, and Yael, Virgil, and the deputy followed. Inside, a paramedic was wrapping a big white bandage across the wound, as Jones told them about his cancer, and he said, “You gotta pick me up really careful, ’cause I’m like a big sack of loose guts. It could all fall apart.”

“Aw, Dad,” Ellen cried, and patted his arm.

“Take it easy, kid,” Jones said.

When the wound was wrapped, the paramedic and the ambulance driver talked about the best way to half-roll, half-lift him onto the gurney. They did that, with Jones gritting his teeth, and then Jones, his face covered with sweat, said to Virgil, “Hand me that red bag over there, Flowers. That’s got my pills. Say hello to your dad for me.”

Virgil got the bag and the paramedic put it on Jones’s chest, and they carried him to the door, dropped the legs, and began rolling him down the track to the ambulance.

Virgil said to Ellen, “You better follow them in. When you’ve got the time, you can come back here with a friend and get the car. He wants you to turn it back in to the rental agency.”

Virgil told the deputy to follow her out: that Jones was under arrest, and should be restrained after treatment. The deputy left behind Ellen.

Yael said, “Now . . .”

“Now we take the cabin apart,” Virgil said. “See if that goddamned stone is here. We’ll get a crime-scene crew out here later, to look at the place. If they can figure out where the gunfire was coming from, maybe they can locate some brass. If God is smiling on us, we could get a fingerprint.”

“I’m not sure God would smile on anything to do with all this,” Yael said.

“Unless it’s all a joke to begin with,” Virgil said. He opened the oven. “Okay. Not in the oven.”

V
irgil spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon cleaning up the aftermath of the shooting, including reports for two different law enforcement agencies; that part was never as swift as anybody would like it to be. He also spent an hour with Yael walking around in the woods behind the cabin, following game trails and peering into gullies, hoping to find a fresh patch of earth where the stone might be buried.

They found nothing.

He checked the GPS tracker tablet a couple of times during the day. Awad’s car was at the airport for four hours, and then had been driven back to the campus. He had, he thought, put his one tracker on the wrong car.

When he’d finished all the reports, he drove to the hospital, asked where Jones was, and found him in a private room in the surgical area, with a drip of some kind plugged into his arm, another drip of a specific kind coming out from under the blanket and into a bag near the floor, and a massive bandage wrapped around one thigh and also anchored with a strip that went at an angle around his waist. There was a security cuff on one leg, which was attached to the bed frame with a steel chain.

Ellen was sitting in a visitor’s chair, reading a newspaper, and when Virgil came in, she said, “Oh my God, I’m so grateful that you got there in time.”

“Has he told you anything about the Solomon stone?”

Jones, who was awake, said, “Hey, I’m right here. I’ve got a lawyer. You’re not allowed to question me.”

“I’m not questioning you, I’m questioning her,” Virgil said, pointing at Ellen. “She’s a witness. Before you toddle off to the Great Hereafter, you might like to know that if she lies to me, I’ll put her in the women’s prison at Mankato, as a result of your moral and ethical failings.”

“You’re a vicious little rat,” Jones snarled.

“No,
you’re
the rat. I’m trying to keep people from being killed,” Virgil snarled back. “You’re trying to
get
them killed. If your daughter here ends up one of them, which seems possible since these people are willing, I hope you live long enough to see it. I’d want that blood on your head and I’d want you to know it.”

“Virgil!” Ellen said. “What a horrible thing to say.”

“Yeah, well, fuck him. He’s about to die, so he’s taking no risks messing around with these crazies. He’s all about the money, that’s all he is. But you’re not—you’ve still got a whole life to get cut short,” Virgil said. “I’m really tired of him.”

“Virgil—”

“Do you know where the stone is?”

She looked straight at him: “No. I don’t.”

He looked over at Jones, then thought,
Screw it
, and walked out. Jones called, “Hey! Hey!” but Virgil kept walking. As he headed down the hall, it occurred to him that Jones was on the edge of death, and so
somebody
else had to know where the stone was . . . or how to find it. Jones could no longer rely on his own ability to recover the thing.

He believed Ellen when she said she didn’t know—he didn’t think she could lie without flinching. He wondered about the son in San Diego. Was it possible that he was out there somewhere? He suspected, though, that the answer was closer by: that Jones hadn’t told Ellen where the stone was, but he
would.
She didn’t know now, but she
would
. When he got to the truck, he checked the tracker tablet and found that Awad’s car was in the apartment parking lot, five minutes away. He drove over, pried the unit free, drove it back to the hospital, and attached the tracker to Ellen’s car. He felt a little bad doing it, because she seemed like a nice woman, but, in the end, he didn’t feel all that bad.

—

H
E WAS THINKING
about going home when he got a call from the woman who ran the BCA crime-scene team. “We found a clue,” she said.

“No shit,” Virgil said. “That’s gotta be a first.”

“Hey.”

“Just kiddin’, Bea. What is it?”

“It’s a note. Written with a ballpoint pen. What happened was, Jones was shot and thought he was dying, so he started writing a note to his daughter. You probably ought to come take a look at it.”

“Can’t you just read it?”

“Yeah, but you oughta see it,” she said.

“All right. Give me twenty minutes.”

When Virgil got back to the hunting shack, the place had been lit up with work lights run off a gas-powered generator. The generator was also driving a Dell computer with a couple Logitech speakers, currently playing the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” which Virgil recalled from his childhood; a song about right for Bea Sawyer’s teenybopper days, and, when he thought about it, appropriate for the current investigation.

Sawyer was crumpling up a pair of disposable Tyvek pants in which she’d been crawling around the cabin. When she saw Virgil, she said, “The note,” and pointed to the table where the computer sat.

The note was in a transparent plastic evidence bag. Virgil sat down and peered at it, and Sawyer said, “You can see it better with a flashlight,” and passed him an LED flashlight.

The note was on a piece of paper torn from a notebook, and was heavily creased. “It was a paper wad when I found it,” Sawyer said. “When you showed up and saved his ass, he wadded it up and threw it in the corner, hoping we wouldn’t find it.”

“Wonder why he didn’t eat it?” Virgil asked, peering at the note. The handwriting was cramped, and nearly illegible.

“Probably no spit,” Sawyer said.

“What?”

“When you get shot at, your mouth tends to go dry. Can’t eat paper with a dry mouth.”

“Huh,” Virgil said. Sounded like bullshit. He flattened the note out and struggled through it. He got this:

Ellen: I’m not going to make it this time. So far there are three bidders for the stone. You have to recover it; the buyers will come to you, but it might take them a while. Be careful. I put it where the sun comes through. You know I’ve always loved you and Danny, and the greatest pain is knowing I won’t see your faces anymore. I always hoped . . .

The note ended and Virgil said, “The sun comes through?”

“Comes through what?” Sawyer asked.

“I don’t know. The drapes, the attic window, the branches on the old oak tree or down the well . . .”

“The well?”

“Probably not the well,” Virgil conceded. “How in the hell would I know? It’s some kind of reference that his daughter would understand.”

“You gonna brace her?”

“I need to think about it for a while.”

Sawyer snorted. “Good luck with that.”

—

I
N BED THAT NIGHT
,
reanalyzing his moves, Virgil decided that he had to confront Ellen about the note. If he could just get his hands on the goddamned stone, all the maneuverings would collapse.

He spent some time wondering about the “three bidders.” The Israelis supposedly weren’t bidders, Sewickey said he didn’t have any money, and Jones knew that. So the bidders were the Turks, if they were still involved—after the park shooting, they might be less interested—and the Hezbollah agent. Who was the third bidder?

He had no answer to that.

Then he thought about God for a while, and wondered why He would allow one of His preachers to drift so far from the paths of righteousness, especially on his, Virgil’s, time. The only answer, he decided, had to lie within Jones’s personal psychology. Some twist, some juke, some repository of wrong chemicals. You saw it often enough in preachers who taught hate, bigotry, intolerance, or who preyed on their own flocks.

Which led him to another thought. Did the Jesuits really have commando teams? The concept was oddly attractive.

And he thought for a few moments about Ellen. When he met attractive single women, he tended to assess their potential personal compatibility; he didn’t think he was unique in this—in fact, he thought everybody did it, automatically. There was never any mystery when somebody found somebody else attractive, or unattractive; the mystery came when somebody was obviously attractive, obviously right down the centerline of his taste in females . . . and there wasn’t even a flicker of response in his own self. Ellen was like that: she was very good-looking, had eyes like emeralds, was most of what he looked at in women. And yet he felt almost nothing. It was almost like a sisterly response. He could like her very much, but there’d never be a sexual urge involved. He sensed that she reacted to him in the same way. Strange.

Then he went to sleep . . . for a short time.

—

M
A
N
OBLES
had eavesdropped on the conversation between Ellen Case and Virgil Flowers, and had been deeply impressed by two things: first, the money they were talking about, which apparently could involve millions of dollars; and second, that they were talking about Case’s father, the Reverend Elijah Jones.

When she mentioned to Virgil that she’d known Jones, she’d choked back an impulse to be effusive about it, and had let it go with the comment that she’d known him long ago, when she was a child.

That wasn’t the whole story; that wasn’t even much of it.

—

J
ONES HAD
long ago been called to preach at a dying Lutheran church out in the countryside. He’d agreed to do it out of charity—he was already a full professor at Gustavus Adolphus, and didn’t need the small amount that he’d be paid at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church of Bizby, Minnesota, pop. 321.

In fact, his church salary barely covered gas and an afternoon cheeseburger at Carl’s Diner & Fuel, Bizby’s only business. Jones had done it not because he’d been called by the Good Shepherd Church, but because he’d been called by God.

In any case, it was at Bizby where he’d encountered Florence McClane before she became Ma Nobles. She’d been nine years old at the time, the youngest of three children of Helen McClane, part-time and later no-time wife of Hank McClane, who left for anywhere else when Florence was seven.

After Sunday services, Jones had a children’s class, and had noticed that Florence and her brothers never brought lunch. They were supposed to tell Jones that they always ate lunch at the table with their mom, but Florence confided to him privately that, on most days, there was no lunch—perhaps an early sign of her ability to manipulate the world around her.

So Jones, true minister that he was, went back to a youth group at Gustavus and got them to pledge a hundred dollars a week to help out the McClane family until Helen McClane could find something permanent. The hundred dollars a week got the family through the bitterest summer of the young girl’s life. She would never again eat lemon Jell-O with little marshmallows and sliced onions. . . .

In the fall, Jones found Helen McClane a meat-cutting job at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, and the family said good-bye to the trailer in Bizby.

Life in Austin hadn’t exactly been a bowl of cherries, with a single mother on the night shift, and three growing children, but it was approximately fourteen thousand light-years better than Bizby. Austin had libraries and movies and local TV stations, and kids her own age. Right up to the time when Florence got knocked up in ninth grade, she’d been a happy girl; even after that first kid arrived, things had been okay. She’d managed to graduate from high school, and get a couple years in at the community college, before she got knocked up again and had to get a job.

She got a spot in the same plant where her mother worked. When her mother began suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome—meat-cutting did that to you—Florence, who was already called “Ma” by her friends, decided to take the latest offer of marriage, to a man called Rick Nobles. She knew going in that the marriage wouldn’t last, but it would carry her through to another job.

Nobles had his own towing company, which actually picked up with Ma doing the books and calling around for business, but he couldn’t keep his hands off the customers. When he got one of them pregnant, three months before Ma would produce yet another son, she called it off.

Nobles was decent about it, and Ma got out with a three-year-old Ford F-150 and fifteen thousand in cash. From there, it was a series of office jobs, and a second marriage to a man who had a small farm, a part-time salvage business, and a big hunger for Wendy’s Baconators. One Baconator too many, a failed Heimlich maneuver, and Ma was on her own again.

She’d felt bad when he died—cried off and on for a month—but then had gotten on with it.

—

W
HEN
M
A
realized the minister that Case and Flowers were talking about was her very own Reverend Jones of the big beard, big teeth, and wide red suspenders, she nearly spoke up in praise of the man. But some instinct made her keep her mouth shut—possibly because of the money they were also talking about.

She couldn’t help wondering if Jones might need . . . an assistant?

There was no way she could contact him to ask that question, until she heard about the shoot-out at the hunting camp—and that Jones was on the surgical floor at the hospital in Mankato.

She was familiar with the surgical floor.

Two of her sons had been there: Mateo, after jumping out of a hayloft with a bedsheet for a parachute, which had resulted in two badly broken legs; and young Sam, who’d gotten pissed off when Ma handed him a spading fork and told him to get busy in the garden, digging potatoes, and he’d hurled the fork down in disgust. Unfortunately for Sam, before the fork got to the ground, two tines had gone through the tops of his Nikes, through his feet, and most of the way through the soles of his shoes. He’d been standing outside the chicken house when he did it, and some chicken shit had penetrated the wound. They had taken him to the hospital for the necessary repairs, which had been complicated.

Jones’s arrest had been all over the news, along with the fact that he was listed in good condition. Ma figured that she at least owed him a visit.

When her boys had been hurt, she hadn’t had a lot of money—she still didn’t, though things had gotten considerably better since the family got back in the salvage business. Anyway, when the boys had gotten hurt, a woman from the cashier’s office had pursued her through the halls of the hospital like a hound from hell. Ma had eventually worked out a way she could visit them without bothering with the front entrance.