John Sandford
Deadline
1
Dark, moonless night, in the dog days of early August.
A funky warm drizzle kept the world quiet and wet and close.
D. Wayne Sharf slid across Winky Butterfield’s pasture like a greased weasel headed for a chicken house. He carried two heavy nylon leashes with choke-chain collars, two nylon muzzles with Velcro straps, and a center-cut pork chop.
The target was Butterfield’s kennel, a chain-link enclosure in the backyard, where Butterfield kept his two black Labs, one young, one older. The pork chop would be used to make friends.
D. Wayne was wearing camo, head to foot, which was no change: he always wore camo, head to foot. So did his children.
His ex-wife, Truly, whom he still occasionally visited, wore various pieces of camo, depending on daily fashion demands — more at Walmart, less at Target. She also had eight pairs of camo underpants, size 4XL and 5XL, which she wore on a rotating basis: two each of Mossy Oak, Realtree, Legend, and God’s Country, which prompted D. Wayne to tell her one night, as he peeled them off, “This really is God’s country, know what I’m sayin’, honeybunch?”
His new, alternative honeybunch wore black cotton, which she called “panties,” and which didn’t do much for D. Wayne. Just something hot about camo.
A few thousand cells in the back of his brain were sifting through all of that as D. Wayne crossed a split-rail fence into Butterfield’s yard, and one of the dogs, the young one, barked twice. There were no lights in the house, and none came on. D. Wayne paused in his approach, watching, then slipped the pork chop out of its plastic bag. He sat for a couple of minutes, giving the dogs a chance to smell the meat; while he waited, his own odor caught up with him, a combination of sweat and whiskey-blend Copenhagen. If Butterfield had the nose of a deer or a wolf, he would have been worried.
But Butterfield didn’t, and D. Wayne started moving again. He got to the kennel, where the dogs were waiting, slobbering like hounds… because they were hounds. He turned on the hunter’s red, low-illumination LED lights mounted in his hat brim, ripped the pork chop in half, held the pieces three feet apart, and pushed them through the chain link. The dogs were all over the meat: and while they were choking it down, he flipped the latch on the kennel gate and duckwalked inside.
“Here you go, boys, good boys,” he muttered. The dogs came over to lick his face and look for more pork chop, the young dog prancing around him, and he slipped the choke collars over their heads, one at a time. The young one took the muzzle okay — the muzzle was meant to prevent barking, not biting — but the older one resisted, growled, and then barked, twice, three times. A light came on in the back of the Butterfield house.
D. Wayne said, “Uh-oh,” dropped the big dog’s muzzle, and dragged the two dogs out of the kennel toward the fence. Again, the younger one came without much resistance at first, but the older one dug in. Another light came on, this one by the Butterfield side door, and D. Wayne said, “Shit,” and he picked up the bigger dog, two arms under its belly, and yanking the other one along on the leash, cleared the fence and headed across the pasture at an awkward trot.
The side door opened on Butterfield’s house, and D. Wayne, having forgotten about the red LEDs on his hat brim, made the mistake of looking back. Butterfield was standing under the porch light, and saw him. Butterfield shouted, “Hey! Hey!” and “Carol, somebody’s took the dogs,” and then, improbably, he went back inside the house and D. Wayne thought for seven or eight seconds that he’d caught a break. His truck was only forty yards or so away now, and he was moving as fast as he could while carrying the bigger dog, which must’ve weighed eighty pounds.
Then Butterfield reappeared and this time he was carrying a gun. He yelled again, “Hey! Hey!” and let off a half-dozen rounds, and D. Wayne said, “My gosh,” and threw the big dog through the back door of his truck topper and then hoisted the smaller dog up by his neck and threw him inside after the bigger one.
Another volley of bullets cracked overhead, making a truly unpleasant whip-snap sound, but well off to one side. D. Wayne realized that Butterfield couldn’t actually see the truck in the dark of the night, and through the mist. Since D. Wayne was a semi-pro dog snatcher, he had the truck’s interior and taillights on a cut-off switch, and when he got in and fired that mother up, none of the lights came on.
There was still the rumble of the truck, though, and Butterfield fired another volley, and then D. Wayne was gone up the nearly, but not quite, invisible road. A half-mile along, he turned on his lights and accelerated away, and at the top of the hill that overlooked the Butterfield place, he looked back and saw headlights.
Butterfield was coming.
D. Wayne dropped the hammer. The chase was short, because D. Wayne had made provisions. At the Paxton place, over the crest of the third low hill in a roller-coaster stretch of seven hills, he swerved off the road, down the drive, and around behind the Paxton kids’ bus shack, where the kids waited for the school bus on wintry days.
Butterfield went past at a hundred miles an hour, and fifteen seconds later D. Wayne was going the other way.
A clean getaway, but D. Wayne had about peed himself when Butterfield started working that gun. Had to be a better way to make a living, he thought, as he took a left on a winding road back toward home.
Not that he could easily think of one. There was stealing dogs, cooking meth, and stripping copper wire and pipes out of unoccupied summer cabins.
That was about it, in D. Wayne’s world.
2
Virgil Flowers nearly fell off the bed when the phone began to vibrate. The bed was narrow and Frankie Nobles was using up the middle and the other side. Virgil had to crawl over her naked body to get to the phone, not an entirely unpleasant process, and she muttered, “What? Again?”
“Phone,” Virgil said. He groaned and added, “Can’t be anything good.”
He looked at the face of the phone and said, “Johnson Johnson.” At that moment the phone stopped ringing.
Frankie was up on her elbows, where she could see the clock, and said, “At three in the morning? The dumbass has been arrested for something.”
“He wouldn’t call for that,” Virgil said. “And he’s not dumb.”
“There’s two kinds of dumb,” Frankie said. “Actual and deliberate. Johnson’s the most deliberate dumbass I ever met. That whole live-chicken-toss contest—”
“Yeah, yeah, it was for a good cause.” Virgil touched the call-back tab, and Johnson picked up on the first ring.
“Virgil, Jesus, we got big trouble, man. You remember Winky Butterfield?” Johnson sounded wide awake.
“No, I don’t believe so.”
After a moment of silence Johnson said, “Maybe I didn’t introduce you, come to think of it. Maybe it was somebody else.”
“Good. Can I go back to sleep?”
“Virgil, this is serious shit. Somebody dognapped Winky’s black Labs. You gotta get your ass over here, man, while the trail is fresh.”
“Jesus, Johnson… dogs? You called me at three in the morning about dogs?”
“They’re family, man… you gotta do something.”
At ten o’clock the next morning, Virgil kissed Frankie good-bye and walked out to his truck, which was parked at the curb with the boat already hooked up. Virgil was recently back from New Mexico, where he’d caught and released every tiger musky in what he suspected was the remotest musky lake in North America. Nice fish, too, the biggest a finger-width short of fifty inches. He could still smell them as he walked past the boat and climbed into the cab of his 4Runner.