“Give me the details,” she said.
“Can’t. I’m anonymous. You can call the Pierce County sheriff’s office and they’ll probably talk your ear off.”
“The tigers are dead, right?”
He thought about it for a second, and then said, “No. Probably not.”
“How do you know?”
“Masculine intuition,” Virgil said. “Now go away and report the news, like you’re supposed to. Your debt has now grown to huge proportions. Huge.”
“Then why do I have a feeling I’m doing you a favor by putting this on the air?” she asked.
“Because you’re a cynic, a terrible thing to see in a young person like yourself. I feel awful for you. Now go.”
“Thanks for saying I’m young…”
–
Virgil went to the Mayo Clinic to see Frankie, who’d been moved to a bed in a private room. Sparkle was sitting in a corner, reading the comics in a bent-up copy of the Mankato Free Press. “They’re letting me out of here tomorrow,” Frankie said. “It should be tonight, but the doc said he wanted somebody to watch me for a few more hours. That’s the good news.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“No sex for six months,” Frankie said.
Virgil sank into a chair and said, “I can understand that. A woman with a concussion wouldn’t want to be intimately exposed to a jackhammer.”
“How come,” Frankie asked, “every time I want to get a little ribald, you take it farther into the ditch than I ever intended to go?”
“Speaking of ditches,” Virgil said, “guess what we found in a ditch over in Wisconsin?”
–
He told them about Hayk Simonian, and the deputy’s guess that the missing legs were feeding a tiger.
“That’s gross,” Sparkle said. “There’s got to be some other reason.”
“Think of one,” Virgil said.
She thought for a moment, then, “I don’t want to think about it. The whole idea is gross.”
“But not entirely bad,” Virgil said. “Hayk didn’t need his legs anymore, because he was dead, and maybe the tigers are alive. You know, if they’re feeding them.”
“Gross,” Sparkle said.
–
He told them about Catrin Mattsson possibly locating the guys who assaulted Frankie, and the plan to roust one of them that very night.
Sparkle was telling them about sneaking into the pickle factory when Mattsson showed up, sipping from a cup of coffee. She was dressed in dark cotton permanent-press canvas slacks and a beige canvas hunting shirt, with a pistol on her hip under her right hand. She was wearing hiking boots. A combat uniform, Virgil thought.
“That coffee’s gonna make you all jittery,” Frankie said. “You sure you want to be messing around with guns when you’re jittery?”
“Jittery is always good,” Mattsson said. “If you’re holding a gun on somebody, and your hands are all shaking, that’ll scare them every time. They’ll lay right down for you.”
That was the first sign of any sense of humor he’d gotten from Mattsson, Virgil thought, even if it was cop humor.
To Sparkle, Mattsson said, “I heard part of that pickle plant story. What happened next?”
Sparkle finished the story, the part about going out the window and running for her life. “I got it now-everything I need for my dissertation. I’d head back home to the Cities, except that I don’t want to disappoint Father Bill.”
Catrin looked at them all, and then said, “You know, you’re an odd bunch of people.”
–
Virgil slapped his thighs, stood up, kissed Frankie, and said to Mattsson, “Let’s get this guy.”
They were on the first floor, heading out the gate, when Sparkle shouted at them: “Wait! Virgil, Catrin! Wait!”
She was wearing flip-flops and ran flapping down the hall clutching her cell phone. She came up, grabbed Virgil’s arm, and said, “My friend Ramona. My friend who got me into the factory. Some guys beat her up. Tonight, a little while ago. Her husband called. An ambulance is on the way here. Virgil, they beat her up! They beat her up bad.”
20
They waited in the emergency room for the ambulance to arrive. Alvarez had lived in an informal trailer park north of Mankato and well to the west, a long ride into town. A doc in the emergency room had spoken to the paramedics in the ambulance and relayed their account: “She was battered, knocked out; she’s still only semiconscious. When she went down, they kicked her; probably has broken ribs, could have some internal injuries, depending on where they kicked her and how hard.”
“Frankie all over again,” Sparkle said. “Same goddamn criminals. Same men.”
Virgil went back up to Frankie’s room to tell her about it, but she already knew about the attack. Sparkle had still been sitting with her when the call came in, and she told Frankie about it before running off to stop Virgil and Mattsson.
“Sounds worse than I got it,” Frankie said, after Virgil described Alvarez’s injuries.
“Can’t tell yet. I gotta get back downstairs. The ambulance is rolling fast. If she’s conscious when she gets here, maybe I can have a few words with her.”
“Go,” Frankie said.
–
When he got back to the emergency room, he found that Father Bill had arrived, expecting to pick up Sparkle. Bill was in his bartending outfit of jeans, open-necked white shirt, and red vest with a small gold crucifix hanging around his neck from a gold chain.
When he saw Virgil, he walked over and said, “It’s my fault. I was supposed to sit on Sparkle. She got away from me and Ramona helped her sneak into the pickle plant. It’s my fault.”
“I wouldn’t get weird about it,” Virgil said. “It’s really the fault of the guys who beat up Alvarez and Frankie. That’s the fact of the matter. You didn’t do anything wrong or immoral, and neither did Sparkle. They did. They will be sorry.”
“I certainly hope so,” Bill said. “If there’s anything I can do…”
“Catrin and I’ll take care of it.”
Bill turned toward the door, where Sparkle and Mattsson were looking out at the driveway that came up to the emergency room doors. He said, “Listen, Virgil-I can tell you that I wouldn’t want to cross that young woman, Catrin. She has controlled the anger about what happened to her, but it’s still down there in her gut. It burns particularly hard when it comes to men hurting women.”
Virgil looked over at Mattsson. There had always been an aura of control about her. Even when she smiled, which she’d done a few times when they were sitting in Frankie’s hospital room, the smile seemed constrained by a permanent internal tension.
“You’re telling me to be careful,” Virgil said.
“I’m telling you to be careful for her,” Bill said. “There’s a violence inside her that might be looking for a way to get out.”
“That’s true of a lot of cops,” Virgil said. “It might even be necessary.”
–
They heard the ambulance before they saw it, and a moment later it was in the driveway, lights flashing and siren wailing into the night, and the doctor and three nurses were going through the doors, led by an orderly pushing a gurney. The lights and siren quit and then an ancient Nissan huffed in behind the ambulance as the back doors on the ambulance popped open and they began moving Ramona Alvarez onto the gurney. An oxygen mask covered the bottom of her face and a gauze pad covered her forehead. A saline line was plugged into her arm.
Sparkle had run out into the driveway and when Alvarez was lifted onto the gurney she could see the other woman’s face and she pressed her hands to the side of her own face and moaned, and Bill put her arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight.
One of the paramedics was talking fast to the doctor, saying, “She drifted off, partway back, she comes and goes…”