couldn’t get here in less than a couple hours and probably not less than four or five. I say we order up some pizza and beer, see if we can get a decent movie. . . . Clay’s got a Blu-ray.”
“Party on,” Jenkins said. “Goddamn, I like this kind of detectin’. You detect good, Flowers.”
THEY GOT the pizza and beer and soda and a Bruce Willis Die Hard movie about a computer genius; and Holley got a couple of the cooperating neighbors over, and it was a little like an old-fashioned Christmas.
While that was going on, Virgil took Shrake and Jenkins in the back bedroom and they sat on a bed with a bowl of chips and Virgil said, “If they come, and if they say or do something that we can pop them for, we’re going to go straight at them. Read them their rights, but roll right through that, threats, whatever it takes. If they ask for an attorney, we’ll tell them that we’re taking them up to Ramsey County, and they’ll get an attorney there. We ask no more questions, but we talk among ourselves, you know . . .”
“We know . . .”
“Right at the beginning, even before reading the rights, we break them apart. We’ve got two bedrooms, the kitchen and living room, the car, however many there are, we isolate them. I’ll come and talk to each of them, in turn. I’m looking for one good solid piece of information—”
“What?” Jenkins asked.
“I don’t know, but I’ll know it when I hear it,” Virgil said. “I’m looking for something I can use in a search warrant. If I get it, I’m going to take off, and you’ll be on your own for moving these people up north. I haven’t talked to the sheriff here, but we could probably get a car if we needed it.”
“We can work that out,” Jenkins said.
“I know it’s all sort of ramshackle, but I’m in a big hurry, and this is what I’ve got,” Virgil said.
TWO HOURS WENT BY, and they moved the cars around the block, scattering them. Jenkins and Virgil stayed in the house with Gordon, while Dennis Brown went to the house on one side of Holley’s, Shrake and Schickel to the house on the other side, and Holley went down to his girlfriend’s place. Everybody would be watching the street, linked with cell phones and radios.
Gordon started cleaning up after the party, and Jenkins set up a half-dozen wireless microphones, with recording equipment under the bed. Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake would have headphones to monitor the talk, although Shrake’s wouldn’t work until he was just outside the house.
AND THEY WAITED, watching TV.
They asked one question, two hundred times. “Do you think they looked up the phone number?”
Virgil found it hard to believe that they’d be too stupid to do that; that somebody wouldn’t do it.
“Our big problem is gonna be if they come hat in hand, are polite, say their piece, and leave,” Virgil said. “Even if there are some little threats buried in there . . . you know, ‘We’d sure be unhappy, Miz Lucy, to hear you were telling lies about us.’ If they go that way, we’ve got nothing.”
They got past three hours, and past four hours, but they didn’t get past five hours.
18
They came in a crew-cab pickup, three of them. The first word came from an elderly couple who lived at the end of the block, an excited woman on her cell to Virgil: “Big pickup, not from town, turning the corner like they’re lost, looking at house numbers.”
Virgil clocked his radio: “Incoming,” he said.
“We got them,” Dennis Brown said. “The guy in the driver’s seat is Emmett Einstadt Junior. They call him ‘Junior.’ There are two more, I think, but I can’t see who they are. Could be one in the back—that’d make four.”
The big Chevy crew cab stopped in front of Holley’s house, and a minute later three men climbed out, awkwardly, a little stiff from the ride, and regrouped on the sidewalk.
Jenkins hurried across the house and down the stairs into the basement, while Virgil crouched in the front bedroom, looking out through a hole in a venetian blind. Gordon stood behind him, in the doorway, twisting her hands nervously. They had wrapped a woman’s bulletproof vest around her, and covered it with a thick quilted housecoat. She still looked a little porky, but with her round face and fleshy hands, not unconvincing.