“Don’t think anybody’s home,” he said. The car wash suddenly went silent, and Virgil said into the sudden silence, “Let’s clear it.”
They did. The apartment door opened directly on the living room, and Shrake led the way in, both he and Bowers pointing their weapons at the hallway to the back. Shrake found a light switch that turned on the hall light; the hallway led to a small bedroom and a motel-style bathroom, tight and cheap, and both empty.
Jenkins had come up the stairs to join them, and now said, “Look at that fuckin’ TV set.”
They all looked at it.
“Lucky guy,” Shrake said. “Having an appliance like that. Football season coming up.”
The TV occupied most of the middle of the living room and must have been seventy inches across, perched on two metal folding chairs with a cable leading to a cable box that sat on the terrazzo floor under the chairs.
Bowers, who’d been wandering around the apartment, said, “Here you go.” Without touching it, he pointed at a paper map of the Minnesota Zoo, sitting on the breakfast counter.
“Okay, he’s the right guy,” Virgil said. “Wonder if he took off?”
“If he’s got any brains, he did,” Jenkins said. “Shrake and I were sittin’ in a bar…”
“No…”
“We must’ve seen his face twenty times between nine o’clock and the news. If he was here, watching that thing”-Jenkins waved at the giant TV-“he couldn’t have missed seeing himself.”
Virgil looked around at the bleak little apartment, the dirt-stiff ten-year-old chintz curtains, the dusty, rugless terrazzo floors, the few pieces of furniture, the near total absence of dinnerware: two cups that he could see, a glass, a couple of spoons, one knife, and a fork in the sink. “Let’s take the place apart. We need any kind of hint we can find about where he hid the tigers. Anything.”
–
What they found was an apartment that was little lived in. Almost everything looked like it came with the apartment, except the television, a few pieces of clothing hung in the single bedroom closet, and some underwear and socks packed into the single chest of drawers. A pair of new, unworn pointed-toe black dress shoes, with white sidewalls, lounged next to the chest.
“Guy must like to boogie,” Shrake said.
A green plywood box sat at the end of the bed, with a Master padlock fastened through a simple latch.
“It’s an old army footlocker,” Virgil said, touching it with his toe.
“I got a bolt cutter in the car,” Bowers said. “I’ll run and get it.”
He did, and they cut the padlock off.
–
Inside, they found a lot of junk-earphones; an old Apple iPod filled with music of a style Virgil was unable to identify; a short-barreled Smith & Wesson.38 that looked to be a hundred years old, though loaded with fresh cartridges; a short stack of printed porn, plus some car magazines; and at the bottom, a thin address book that contained no addresses, but did contain a list of what appeared to be passwords.
“This could be useful,” Virgil said. “If we can find his computer. If he had a computer.”
“I don’t see anything like a router,” Bowers said.
“I don’t think he lived here and I don’t think he expected to stay long,” Shrake said. “Looks like he came here for the job and planned to go back home when it was done.”
“Should have left sooner,” Bowers said.
13
Two-thirty in the morning on the St. Croix, the river air cool and redolent with the odors of beached fish and automobile exhaust. The sheetrocking Yoder brothers, Curt and Hank, known to their friends as the Yos, were expecting some serious channel-catfish action; they’d be fishing right up to daybreak, barring thunderstorms and zombie outbreaks.
The Yos had stopped at an all-night convenience store for a six-pack of Miller Lite, a tin of Copenhagen Wintergreen for Curt, and a couple of Fudgsicles before heading down to the water.
Once off the road, they sat licking the Fudgsicles and drinking the first of their beers, while Dwight Yoakam finished singing “Long White Cadillac” on Outlaw Country. When the song, Fudgsicles, and beers were finished, Curt stuck a plug of Copenhagen under his tongue and said, “Let’s get ’er done.”
Curt got his gear from the truck bed and headed upstream from the bridge, while Hank believed that there were major catfish holes below the bridge piers, so he went that way.
Both men were wearing LED headlights, the better to bait their hooks and unhook any catfish. Hank turned his light on to more easily mold some stink bait on a treble hook-he had his own homemade formula, concocted of chopped chicken liver, diced night crawlers, nacho cheese, canned corn, and cornmeal, thoroughly mixed in his girlfriend’s Waring blender when she wasn’t around, and suitably aged in the hot sunlight on his back porch-and threw his first cast out next to a pier.
A big slab of gray stone shelved out of the river below the bridge, and while the bait sank into the hole, he walked back and forth, looking for a place to sit and smoke, where his line wouldn’t drag over the rock. He was doing that when he saw, in his headlight, a corner of the safe about a foot down in the water.
For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, then he called, “Hey, Curt! Curt! C’mere. Quick.”
Curt caught the tone in his brother’s voice, so he reeled in, turned on his headlight, walked down under the bridge, and asked, “What?”
Hank pointed to the water under the bridge. “Am I nuckin’ futs or is that a safe?”
Curt peered into the water, asked, “Where?” and then, before Hank could reply, “Holy shit. I see it. That’s a safe all right.”
Hank: “What do you think?”
“I think somebody couldn’t open the sonofabitch and threw it off the bridge,” Curt said. He was so excited he inadvertently hawked his whole plug of tobacco into the river.
Hank: “Like it’s stolen?”
“Of course it’s stolen, bonehead. If you owned a safe and wanted to get rid of it, you could sell it on Craigslist or even take it to a junkyard,” Curt said. “You wouldn’t throw it off a fuckin’ bridge. I bet there’s a million bucks in there.”
“What do you think we ought to do?”
Curt scratched his forehead for a moment, mulling it over, then said, “I think we fish that bitch out of there and get it back to your place. You know what? Maybe the people who stole it couldn’t open it, but Jerry Pratt could.”
Jerry Pratt was an unemployed machinist, with metal-cutting skills.
“You think we could lift it?”
“Somebody had to lift it over the bridge railing, so yeah-I think we could lift it,” Curt said.
“I wonder why he threw it in the shallows?”
“Probably didn’t know any better, or maybe he did it at night,” Curt said. He walked back to the shadow of the bridge, sat down, and started untying his boots. “Get your pants off.”
Hank looked around: nothing to see but brush, and not even that, if they turned off their LED headlights. An occasional car drove over the bridge, out of sight. “What if somebody sees us?”
“You ain’t got that much to see,” Curt said.
“That’s not what I’m talking about. What if somebody sees us with the safe?”
“We’ll tell them… that we thought it was an old refrigerator and we were taking it out for, you know, cleaning-up-the-river reasons. We’re, like, tree huggers or some fuckin’ thing.”
That sounded good. Hank nodded and said, “Better leave our shoes on. Lots of hooks been broke off in there.”
Five minutes later the naked brothers were chest deep in the river, trying to get a hold on the safe. “Fuckin’ heavy,” Hank said.
“Yeah… but… it’s movin’,” Curt said.
With more grunting and a few groans they got it out of the water and up on the rock, where Hank said, “Fuck. You know, it looks more like a refrigerator than a safe.”